Phil Agnew - Section 22

Transcript

We were posted to a unit called Section 22. Section 22 was under the direct command of MacArthur's headquarters in Brisbane and it was a secret unit, and its primary cause, primary purpose was to combat enemy radar, was to locate the enemy radio stations, was their big task. They had a second task which was to combat enemy radar-controlled ack-ack guns. I found most of our effort went into the second one, against the ack-ack guns because when we were posted to American squadron, attacking Japanese targets in Formosa in Southeast China and they had a lot of radar-controlled ack-ack guns, which were very accurate.

Part of Section 22, was a unit called, Field Unit No. 6 and it comprised 10 Aussies. There were eight radar operators, a radio technician and a clerical orderly, a sergeant. There were four squadrons in the 3ADF American bomb group and each of the squadrons had two of the operators attached to it. Every time they went out on a mission, they'd be accompanied by the Australian operators and this technique was actually developed in Australia by the RAAF and then it was taken over by the Americans.