Brian Winspear - News of the attack on Pearl Harbor

Transcript

I was posted anyway to No. 2 Squadron, a Lockheed bomber squadron, light bomber squadron and they were based at Laverton in Melbourne and no one thought of war then.

I only joined because the Brits were having a battle on the other side of the world and it was the normal thing to do, to join the army or navy, air force or something and give them a hand and so it was rather unusual when it was decided to move 12 squadron, sorry 2 Squadron.

They've got twelve squadrons each and when they decided we had to move from Laverton to Darwin and we all packed our bags, and I just found my old army kit bag the other day, had to pack our bags and twelve planes all took off together to fly to Darwin and flying over Ayer's Rock I was bored and was on the radio.

I was fiddling with the radio to see what was going on and I heard the news that Pearl Harbor was bombed and that was on the 7th of December 1941, I reckon. All Hell broke loose when we got to Darwin because they weren't expecting to be on a war footing and instead of going to bed, we had to lace…put bullets in the machine-gun belts because they had nothing ready.