Transcript
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.
