Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Crewing up
I didn't want to be a pilot, I wanted to be a navigator and finished up as a ... which was a navigator bomb-aimer and I finished up doing the tour as a bomb-aimer.
Well, it was a real mixture, we're all in this one big room with people from all ... The gunners, the bomb-aimers and the pilots, and we just seemed to move around and we just picked, we were just lucky enough to just pick someone that we ... Or in our case that we were all so close together.
I don't know how it happened, but it was just one of those things. We finished up with two from the west and one from Melbourne, one from New South Wales, myself and we had an Englishman as an engineer.
POW Camp
It was all, when we left the camp at Bankau, the road was just like that with ice. You could hardly walk on it, we were just slipping. Then we started to walk through the snow and we had no overcoats.
We didn't have any more clothes than we had at the camp. We were freezing. At night they'd put us into barns, with cattle and that. Well that wasn't so bad, there was a little bit of heat in there.
Shot down
We were shot down on our thirty-second. At Cowes, we were on our way to Cowes. There were six of us survived, and one was killed. I don't know what happened to him, because I went out the front, and they ... The hatch in the front, and the others, apart from the engineer and the pilot went out the back of the plane, on the door at the back.
Well the hatch got caught as the plane jiggled around a bit, and I'd had to push like, put the hatch out, I had to kick it out actually, and as I went down through the hatch I must have hit my head on the front of it and going down I don't remember at all, but I remember seeing where the plane crashed, and then I eventually hit the ground, and that was near a little creek.
That was at night and then three nights after, or three day afterwards I got caught. I got down to the Rhine, and I was caught on the Rhine. We had a little compass, that was always in, like a button on the uniform, and then we had a parcel of very condensed food etcetera. I had chocolate and then we had a little water bag and little tablets to purify any water and also we had foreign money, money and silk maps.
I had a good idea where I was, with the map too, and these maps were made of silk, and if they went into water it would all go. It just vanished, it disappears.
