Crewing up
Well when we were posted to squadron what happened was that lots of crews who had just finished their advanced operational training arrived in the squadron and on one day they were all put in a big room.
There were pilots and air gunners, and navigators and so on and they were told to form a crew. So you looked around and found someone, a pilot who would be the captain and then various other people would come along and say 'I'd like to be in your crew.'
That's how it was done. I was the only Australian in my crew. The rest were all Englishman.
We were flying Wellingtons. It had a crew of six, two pilots, a rear gunner and a front gunner and a navigator and a wireless operator.
Our flights over to Europe and back were usually about eight hours and we'd usually take off about 8 or 9 o'clock in the evening and get there at dark, of course, but they were very good aircraft, a very tough aircraft, easy to fly but they had one bad reputation and that is they usually, once they caught fire, they usually went up and that was that.
Shot down returning from Hamburg
I was shot down on my fourth mission. Our target was Hamburg, the Blohm and Voss aircraft works at Hamburg.
We bombed our target and were on the way when some flak hit our aircraft and it severed the hydraulic line to the rear gun so that our rear gunner had no control of his gun after that, unfortunately, it might have been a different story, but as well as immobilising his gun it started a fire in the rear turret and as soon as that happened a searchlight picked us up from the ground.
Shortly after that, just a matter of minutes after that, a night fighter appeared and put a burst into our aircraft which set off one of our flares inside the aircraft so things weren't very good.
But as well as setting off one of the flares, the machine gun burst which hit our aircraft also hit me. I took seven bullets in my body.
Also our navigator, Bill Legg, took two bullets straight through his stomach and out the other side. So the captain gave the order to abandon aircraft and the front gunner and the wireless operator and the captain did so but I was lying on the floor of the aircraft unconscious and so was the navigator, Bill Legg, beside me and in the rear gun turret, Dave Fraser, who was our rear gunner found that he could not turn his turret around and jettison it out of the way that he normally would and so he had to crawl back into the body of the aircraft.
He knew there was an escape hatch there and when he did so he saw me lying there and I'd managed to crawl along a bit along toward the escape hatch. So he clipped my parachute on and put my hand on the rip cord and he kicked me out and he said 'For God's sake pull it.' So fortunately I came to consciousness enough to get that message and I pulled the rip cord and then I lost consciousness again and I floated down until all of a sudden with a bang I hit the ground.
When I think about it, had the rear gunner not been forced to come into the body of the aircraft which he normally wouldn't do in abandoning it he wouldn't have seen me there, so that would have been that.
I met the German who shot me down
Fifty years, half a century after that happened I met the German who shot me down.
He told me a few things which answered a few questions in my mind that I'd had there for fifty years and similarly for him, we corresponded and used to send cards to one another, he said he didn't mind corresponding with members of the crew provided they didn't bear him a grudge.
I said 'Well look, you know, it was either you or us. If our turret had been working we might have killed you.'
So anyhow, the interesting thing that he told me or one of them, but the most interesting I think, was that it was his first attack on an aircraft.
He was a new chum. He went on to shoot down 42 aircraft. He became an ace, very highly decorated but this was his first and he told me that he was so excited he forgot to arm his cannon and the only thing that was armed was his machine gun and when he fired he only fired machine gun bullets and had he fired those cannon it would have blown us out of the sky. So I was very lucky from so many points of view.
I didn't have time to get scared
I was shot down on my fourth trip. I didn't have time to get scared about it or anything, it was only four trips.
I can understand that pilots who went on for 20, 30 trips could become very traumatised.
That didn't happen to me because I never had a chance to be really to be, I mean, you know, when you were over the target and there was flak going everywhere and you could smell the cordite and so on you became aware of the fact that there was danger there but that was about all and I never ever thought about being shot down or of being a prisoner.
I just had great luck
Well the Germans whisked me into an ambulance and drove me to the nearest prisoner of war hospital. It turned out to be a hospital solely for French prisoners of war. No one spoke any English.
I was lucky because I'd learnt French at modern school so I wasn't behind the eight ball but anyway they took me there and almost immediately I was lying on the operating table while the chief surgeon from there operated on me.
I was six months in this French hospital but there again I was lucky because the chief surgeon in this hospital was a Frenchman. He was Rene Siemens (?) who was before the war, professor of surgery at Strasbourg University and a man of renown in Europe. He was a very skilled surgeon and so I was lucky to be taken to the place that he was being held a prisoner so some of the other doctors there figured that it was his skill that saved my life.
So I was lucky again. There are so many occasions on which I just had great luck, but I find it hard to credit.
Ten-day escape
I spent just about four years altogether. I was sent to a small stalag which was run by the army.
Subsequently I spent most of the time in a much larger camps which were run by the Luftwaffe and basically we preferred the Luftwaffe controlled camps to the army controlled camps.
In this army camp when I got there, which was in about November 1941, we were just starting to dig a tunnel and we completed a tunnel there that was completed in May 1942. It broke quite a few records we found out later. It was the longest tunnel in either WW1 or WW2 from which a successful escape had been made.
We broke out on the night of 10 May 1943, no 1942 and the interesting thing was that it was exactly one year to within about two or three hours from the time that I was shot down but anyhow we were out for a fair while.
I escaped with two others and we were out for about ten days, jumping in trains, pinching food, holing up during the day wherever we could and moving at night and eventually we were caught and taken back to our stalag and when we got back there we found that the Gestapo was in charge of the camp.
This escape had been so big, according to the Germans, that they had posters in all the police stations in Germany and our photographs and a description of everyone because they had all that information themselves and one by one they recaptured them. We were the 48th and 49th to be captured. Fifty two got out altogether. One was shot.
Escape and capture
On one occasion we jumped on a train and it didn't stop until too late.
We had to rely upon the train being on a slope to slow it down enough for us to jump off. We didn't want to break a leg or anything. On this occasion it was almost daylight before we could jump off the train.
So anyhow we then looked around and there weren't any really good hiding places and we eventually had to settle for a big sort of hole in a, you know, a big farm there and there were aircraft going everywhere.
We didn't realise they were still looking for us.
Anyhow I had decided that if we were caught we were going to pretend we were Frenchmen because at that stage after the 1000 plane raid on Cologne, German civilians were lynching pilots or aircrew that parachuted down into the wreckage of the city. So we said we were going to be French and this farmer turned up with a shotgun and he said 'Okay, out you come.'
I spoke French and nobody else said anything and I told him we were escaped French prisoners and he said 'Okay.'
March off and he marched us with his shotgun and what I didn't know and this was the luck again that we had, the night before some French soldiers had escaped from a stalag for French prisoners and it was only about a kilometre or two from where we were caught, so you know, obviously when I said we were escaped French prisoners, this fellow, this German, accepted that straight away.
We had said we would maintain that we were French right up until we were in official German hands so he took us to this French stalag and as soon as they took charge of us I tried to explain where we were from and he said 'We already know where you're from. There are posters all over Germany in the police stations giving your names and descriptions so I'll send you right back there now.' So that's what he did and that's when we found the Gestapo back home.
Typhoon attack and escape
We had been in an incident which became rather infamous.
We were marching along the road on this long march and I saw six Typhoons fly past. They were looking everywhere for shooting things on the ground etcetera. I watched them as they went past and I saw them turn around and come back again and I said to Herbie 'They're going to hit us' and I jumped into a ditch by the side of the road and by the time the Typhoons got to us I had about five other bodies on top of me and then they fired their rockets and the rockets made one Hell of a noise and created murder and mayhem.
There were body parts flying everywhere, the terrible noise of the aircraft engines and the screams of the people who were killed. They killed sixty of us from that column.
There were a hundred others were seriously injured but Herbie and I, with my usual luck, didn't get a scratch but I said 'I'm not staying here. I'm getting out and going to the west front.'
So Herbie joined me and we walked, we escaped from the column into the forest and then walked westward knowing that sooner or later we'd come to the Allied forces.
Passing German troops
On the way we met German soldiers going in the opposite direction. They didn't seem to be at all interested in fighting or anything and, in fact, on one occasion we had a dray, a big dray pulled by two draught horses, was full of Germans and they were going as fast as they could in the opposite direction and when they went past and saw who we were I called out to them in German, they throw out a couple of loaves of bread for us because I said we were a bit hungry. So they kept going.
Eventually we came to the, what we considered was No Man's Land. The German exodus towards the east seemed to have dwindled and there was no one in front and we couldn't see the British troops, they were still further away.
A column of tanks stopped and the tank commander opened up his hatch to get some air I guess and I asked him in German where the British frontline was. He wasn't very happy but said they were about 50 kilometres away and coming fast. So he put down his hatch and on went the tanks.
Herbie and I kept going westward and after another day or so we came across a stream with a stone bridge over it.
We thought we better hole up under this bridge because if we go much further somebody is going to shoot us or something.
There was a lot of trigger happy people around the place. So we stopped there and eventually we heard tanks coming, so we had to decide whether we thought they were British tanks or German tanks. We had a good look at them in the distance and concluded that they were British tanks so we came out from under the bridge where we'd been hiding and we had a big white flag that we'd prepared and we waved this flag and the tanks came up.
It was a column of tanks and the leader popped up his hatch and said 'Well who are you?' So we established our identity.
We told him what we'd observed of German movements that we'd passed through. So he leant down and threw out a half bottle of schnapps and a packet of cigarettes and a couple of big bars of chocolate and he said 'Get on the right side of that' and off he went followed by a lot of little tanks. It was sort of like a mother duck with all the ducklings following.
Commandeering a Mayor's car
So we went to the nearest liberated, liberated, not for them, where there was a father and his wife and two daughters and we told him in no uncertain terms there were three things we wanted.
One, was a hot bath. Two, was a decent feed of bacon and eggs and three was a nice sleep in a bed between white sheets. Those three things we hadn't seen for about four years. He gladly complied and next morning after he'd this nice sleep we got up and went out.
We had a plan and we were looking for transport going to the front again and we saw this white truck come down, racing down, passing troops and we tried to wave it down and fortunately it stopped and we realised, again our luck, we realised that it was brigade headquarters and there was a young brigadier in there who had just come from a divisional conference and when we told him what we wanted he said 'Oh hop in and come with me.'
We sped off and rapidly got to the frontline and we wanted to get to a village that had just been overrun by the troops and the Brigadier pointed out 'We've just overrun this one so you can get out here boys.'
So we got out. I asked the first German I saw where the Mayor's house was and he pointed it out to me.
So Herbie and I went up and knocked on the door and I said to the Mayor, 'Do you have a car?' and he said 'Yes I do.' And I said, 'Well we're commandeering it for military purposes. Give me the key.' So he gave me the key and off we went.
Driving to Brussels
Our plan was to drive to Paris, sell the car and have a great time with the proceeds.
However by the time we'd got to Brussels we were not very well. We had dysentery, nausea. I think it was due to all the rich foods we had been eating for the last weeks or so as we were driving this Opel down towards Brussels.
Anyhow we, at that stage, we had to hole up in an American hospital for about four days to recover and we grew cold on the idea of going to Paris and home was looking better every minute so we said, well look, we'll go and see if we can find the air transport officer and get back to England pretty quickly.
Well we did find him, a young flight lieutenant but he said 'Look, sorry boys, it'll be weeks before you can get back. I've got a list this long of people who are to go back and they're urgent.'
So I drew him over to one side and we had a very serious talk and then about half an hour later Herbie and I mounted a Lancaster and took off straight away for England and as we got in and waved to the young flight lieutenant he dangled the keys and put them in his pocket with a big smile.
So that's what happened to our painting the town red in Paris.
VE Day in Brighton
Herbie and I were in hospital recovering but on VE Day we hopped out of our hospital bed and we went down.
This was in Brighton and our hospital was on the main street of Brighton and we went down there with all the nurses and we were dancing in the street and that was VE Day for us.
My objective was to stay in England as long as I could because I was being supported by the air force and also I went to London University to sit an exam in economics.
So, I stayed there for, I guess, about six months. I went to Oxford, to a special course there and I went to London to sit some exams and I went up to Scotland. I spent a lot of time travelling around there until in the end I got a letter from the air force saying if you're not on the next boat you can pay for it yourself. So, I was on the next boat.
