Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Target practice
Machine gun, light machine gun. We'd be in one aircraft, two or three of us, and there'd be a plane towing a drogue, which fortunately was way up in front, we couldn't hit it. But we had to fire at a dreg beam towed behind the other plane. I had a percentage hit, and mine was very low, I can assure you.
Christmas leave in America
It was strange but good, I remember we were there on Christmas day and American people were lining up outside to take us home for Christmas dinner. Amazing really. We went to a lot of dance halls and things, where they used to come pick us up and bring us home afterwards. They're amazing people, individually the Americans are far as we were concerned, we spoke funny as Australians, so...
Travelling across the Atlantic
Yeah, it's the same thing they called us out after we went to bed, and we got on the Île-de-France, the big cruise liner, and went across the Atlantic. Unescorted because the reason they gave us, we didn't need an escort was the ship could do, I don't know, 20 knots or something.
Yes, but we went this way and that way, every 18 or 20 minutes we changed course because it took a submarine 25 minutes to line up. First day out the toilets broke down, of course, which was interesting. We only got two meals, and we had to go down into the basement of the ship and pick it up and bring it back.
By the time we got back with one meal it was nearly time to go for the next one. A lot of American soldiers were on the boat as well. They weren't as good a sailors as we were because they were all being seasick above us. We had to put our tin hats up to catch the residue, which was interesting.
Forming a crew
Yeah well, once you got a crew that was it, you had to get on with it. What happened was they put us all in a big room, all pilots, air gunners, wireless operators, and you had to pick out who you thought you'd like to go with, which was a problem.
I happened to know a pilot who was from Sydney, so we joined up and tried to form a crew from there. We had what we thought was a good crew, but the pilot was a short bloke and he was too short for four-engine planes. So, we got lumbered with another one, who we saw it through, the seven of us.
Bombing Berchtesgaden and supply drops in Holland
The trips over Germany and France were, I was too young to really be scared, but we knew what was going on. On Anzac Day 45, which is pretty close to the end of the war, we bombed Berchtesgaden, which is where Hitler’s holiday home was. With the SS, whatever that stands for now, they had a barracks there and that was our target. Whether we hit it or not nobody knows.
But it was a magnificent trip, we flew around the Swiss Alps and they were covered in snow, really beautiful to look at. Then back home and that was the last trip we did. That was just before the war ended, and after that the food drops started over Holland. We did three of those, I think. We were flying at 1000 feet and the Armistices hadn't been signed, so it was, first one was a bit nerve-wracking, yeah, to drop the ...
We could see the Germans with their anti-aircraft guns and they had an arrangement, which fortunately they stuck to. They could have blown every one of us out of ... The best part of all, or the worst part of all, whichever way you look at it, we saw signs on the ground in Holland, thank you. Pretty amazing.
Running out of fuel
Well, once you got back to France it was, you'd relax a bit, but I don't know, you were glad to get home I remember. They only had half an hour of extra fuel on board, in other words, it would take you so long to go and come, plus half an hour’s fuel. I remember we ran out of fuel on the runway on one trip because of a misunderstanding between the pilot and the navigator. One said “He did”, and the other said “He didn't”, so that was interesting.
Supply drops
No, I went to three, we went to three places. Sort of villages, not the big cities, and dropped it there. Some of it when it landed, the bags broke, you'd see the kids running around picking up parcels and taking them home to their parents. It was a sight to see.
Going home
Well, first stop was Fremantle and then Port Adelaide and then Melbourne, where we got off and we went and stayed. They took us straight to the Melbourne Cricket Ground from when we got off the boat in Melbourne. We stayed there for a day and then they flew us home to the family.
Anzac Day
For me, I used to go to church at half past nine on Anzac Day and then go down and join in the march and back to the club, which was interesting. That last couple of years the kids have organized a car, and we drive in the parade which is pretty good. Seeing the crowd, the number of people about these days is unbelievable, on the march.
London poppy drop
30 other, 29 other blokes went to Sydney and then flew to England and when we got there we did a lot of trips in a fortnight, roundabout and the unveiling of the monument by the Queen happened and there were people everywhere and one of the things that I remember was that during that, a Lancaster bomber flew over and dropped, they say, a million poppies.
Whether there were that many or not, but there were a very lot of them, and I happened to have a granddaughter in London at the time, and she found a policeman with his hat full of poppies and grabbed some for me. That's not one of them incidentally.
1000 Bomber raids
But the thousand bomber raids, they were disastrous as far as the people on the ground were concerned. Because the thousand bombers drop a lot of bombs over a very large area, and it had to do more than flatten the city, it upset a lot of people’s lives. Killed many, injured them, of course, obviously.
