Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Enlistment celebration
At nineteen I put my name down and we were called up. Had to go into the reserve for about twelve months.
We had to learn a bit of Morse code and a few things like that and when we were called up, there were three other blokes in Hobart, and we were called up together and to sign the papers for the day.
So we decided to celebrate and caught the train to Wrest Point and got pretty sozzled there and caught a tram back and went to Melbourne the next day.
News of the attack on Pearl Harbor
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.
Acclimatisation
Coming from Tasmanian climate to Darwin in December, I didn't give a stuff for the Japs or the Russians, for who came. I just wanted a cold shower and even the cold showers were very warm.
It took a few weeks to get used to the humidity and everything.
Kupang Timor
Our main job was, because the 2/40th Battalion which was mostly Tasmanian, was based in Kupang in Timor to stop the Japanese getting to Australia, so we had to go there, move everything. Actually, half the squadron went to Kupang in Timor and the other half went up to another station up in Indonesia. I've forgotten the name now.
Our job was to keep the Japs away from Timor. Every day we had to go out on patrol and see if any of the enemy were coming and look for submarines and so on. It was pretty difficult living there because there was no good food. The only meat we had was water buffalo which was as black as the ace of spades and pretty tough and our vegetable was the green weeds, the weeds that grew in the ponds around the place.
A lot of the members were getting problems with malaria. They were getting signs. Some got malaria and some got…What was the other thing? That's right…at one stage thirty per cent of the personnel were on sick parade with sores, tropical sores and all those sorts of things. We were having a few accidents. One plane went out one day and got struck by lightning and disappeared.
A believer in fate
2 and 13 Squadron both travelled together. 2 Squadron was at Kupang and 13 Squadron was at…I'll think of the place in a minute, and the Japs were really giving them Hell and they'd wiped out half their squadron and they wanted some more aircrew. 2 Squadron had to send them three crews of four to make up for all the people they'd lost and so my name was on the board to go to, I'll think of the name in a minute.
My name was on the board to go so I packed up my bags, my kit bag etc and got all ready to go and the CO called me in, and he said, "I've got a problem. There's another wireless air-gunner who says he's senior to you and all his mates are going. He wants to go. Would you mind if he takes your place?"
Well, that suited me fine because it meant that I was in a crew at the time with Norm Lamb, it meant me getting used to a new crew and so on. I went back to my old job at the time. I was sitting, you know those very high radio masts that go into the clouds. I was up one of those radio masts with an Aldis lamp communicating with an American cruiser that was down in the bay about two or three Ks away and I was right on the edge of the strip and watched this plane take off with the twelve blokes in and about half way down the strip I said to myself, "They're in big bloody trouble" because the tail wheel was still on the ground and it should have been up flying and I said, "They're in big trouble".
They only got so far as the end of the strip and they went straight up 200 feet and straight down and the twelve blokes just cooked right in front of my eyes. And then I became quite a believer in fate because if I had have kicked against the system and said, "Bugger him, I want to go"
I would have been one of them. The irony of that is that every time when we were flying when I was sitting behind the pilot, behind the pilot was a radio desk and time and time again when we were taking off and I'd look around and the pilot would have the stick hard forward to try and get the tail up and I'd turn around and yell at the blokes, when we were carrying passengers, yell at the blokes, you know, down there, "For God's sake come up". I'd scream at them "Come up" and we'd survive.
The irony is if I had have gone and if I had have noticed the pilot was having trouble getting the tail up and I screamed to the blokes to come up it may not have happened. The worst part about it was that all the people had they not have died, that they would have died further up the line.
The Bombing of Darwin
The last week before December 19, which was the first raid on Darwin, we were flying very day looking for the Jap fleet which was supposed to be, you know, coming somewhere near Darwin. On the last trip, on February 19th we went to Kupang to take a load of the ground staff back to Darwin. We evacuated Kupang and left the 800 Tasmanians there on their own with no air cover because we couldn't have done anything against 1000 Japs when they came.
Anyway we took the load back and had only just landed at Darwin when the Japs arrived. The first arrivals were the Zeros and dive bombers and they arrived before the air raid went off because we had people on Bathurst Island to warn us they were coming but there were so many of them the people on Bathurst Island thought they were Americans coming so they didn't warn Darwin there was a raid coming. Anyway the Zeros and the dive bombers blew Hell out of Darwin.
We were in a trench away, about fifty yards from the hangars and you could see the Japanese in their cockpits, see their faces smiling and laughing. They had a ball because at the same time the Yanks had sent a Kittyhawk squadron to help us the day before and the Kittyhawks, they were supposed to go to Timor and bolster up the defences there but they got lost and they came back and they were just landing when the Japs arrived and so they were short of fuel and also, they weren't very good pilots, they'd just learnt to fly and of course the Zeros just butchered them all.
They picked them off one by one. Most of the pilots bailed out with parachutes but the Japs would have pot shots at them when they were floating down in their parachutes. Then after a bit of peace came, we, thinking they might come back again, two or three of us went bush for a while. I looked up and we saw the Jap bombers coming down from the South and we all thought they were, once again, Americans come to help us because they were coming from the South instead of the North.
We were just at the edge of the aerodrome and I looked up and the sun glinted on the bombs as they were falling and it was just like confetti. I thought it was time to slip in a trench and so we got down in the bottom with a tin hat and a cork in my mouth because they said you had to do to stop concussion. Bombs landed all around us anyway and I got bomb splinters in my hand and in my eye. At any rate once again we went bush to get out of it in case they came back again. We were in the bush for about a couple of hours, I guess. Another mate and myself went back to the drome and it was completely empty.
There was no … the fire trucks were empty, no one on them. There were fires burning everywhere. We lost eight Hudson bombers and they were burning like billio. The officers' mess was flattened. The main drill hall had bomb damage. In the drill hall they also had mail, the post office and as we walked past there were flames just starting to burn our mail so we got a bit of stuff together and put out the fire because we didn't want our mail burnt.
So we walked around on our own and went up to the crushed officer's mess and helped ourselves to a beer. After an hour or so another crew arrived and everybody, the boss of the drome, Scherger, Captain Scherger appeared. We'd checked out the aircraft and there was only one Lockheed Hudson that was flyable and he said, "You better go out and see if you can find the fleet from where all those planes came from".
There was only two crews there so we drew straws to see who would go out and our crew missed the…we got the long straw or whatever it was, we didn't have to go but the other crew went out and they didn't do any good…I didn't see any anti-aircraft guns going off anywhere, but you'd never know.
There was so many explosions going around with the bombs and things you'd never know who was doing what. The army, there was a few personnel with ack-acks and they did what they had to do. Their casualties were very high too.
Finding the Japanese fleet
Next day they said, "You better take that plane and go back to Kupang and get the rest. There's still a bunch of eight or ten ground staff there to come back. So you better go and get them".
So we popped off to Kupang and just coming into the back, Kupang is on the north side of Timor and we always used to come around the back and sort of swing around the hills to come into Kupang and we ran slap bang into the Japanese fleet. There was two aircraft carriers and eight ships altogether and luckily, they had just landed. They had about at least 1000 army there, they'd landed them on the beach there and all their planes were over bombing the hell out of Kupang.
So all we could do, we didn't have any bombs, we didn't have any radio batteries because they were all destroyed in the air raid and no parachutes, so all we could do was stooge around and count their ships and have a look at them. We flew at a very low level, but they still tried to have a few pot shots at us. At any rate, then we had to turn around and head back to Darwin.
Darwin evacuation
Everybody had to get used to getting bombed very quickly and the interesting by-product of that was that all the residents of Darwin decided it was too hot, they were going to go south and so did a lot of the ground staff in the aerodrome.
There were odd orders floating around that they should go south and go to such and such a point where they would set up camp to get away from the bombs, future bombings. Beside the aerodrome was the main rail line from Darwin... At any rate, the train was going south as far as it could go and it was absolutely loaded and loaded with people.
It was so heavily loaded that, there was a bit of a rise near the aerodrome, it couldn't go up there, the wheels just slipped. A lot of the blokes got off and, you know, pushed it. Took a bit of effort to get up there.
'A bit of Heaven'
Out of the blue our crew was appointed to take a US … a Lockheed Hudson that needed two new engines that were stuffed. We had to take it down to Laverton and they stripped everything off the plane that would stop it flying and it was in such poor shape that we had to land at pretty much every refuelling place on the way home to get some more oil in the engines.
So we went Alice Springs and then Oodnadatta. At Oodnadatta one of the engines packed up altogether at Oodnadatta so we had to stay at the Oodnadatta Hotel for two or three days. It was just a bit of heaven to have clean sheets and three decent meals a day and steak and eggs and stuff we hadn't had for three or four months.
So finally they flew up some parts from Laverton and got the engines going again. So then we went to Adelaide and stayed overnight there and then eventually back to Laverton. And in all our dirty gear we were unique in the hotel at Adelaide. They thought we'd come from Mars or somewhere because, you know, all your clothes were filthy and you're sunburnt and so on and then when we got back to Melbourne it was much the same there. Quite a few of the restaurants there wouldn't let us pay because we'd come back from the war which was nice.
