Joining the RAAF
My father didn't have enough money to send me to college that was right in the middle of the depression that was on then. So I had to go to State school for a while which I didn't like swapping over but, any rate, when I got to, I gradually sort of got in touch with the rest of the world when I was about nineteen and that was when I decided that I wanted to have a navy blue double air force uniform to win over a few girlfriends and so I joined the Air Force with three other people.
There's lots of photographs there of the four of us all standing, we signed on the same day, and one was killed and one lost an eye and the other two, we survived.
At any rate, we had to join the initial training school and I joined up as pilot only and the bloke signing us in he said, "Yeah, that'll be right" but when we got called up they had so many pilots and so most of us finished up wireless air gunners and so 2 Squadron had Lockheed Hudson's and they had two wireless operators and a pilot and a bomb aimer and we're supposed to do Laverton in Melbourne and we had to operate out of there and then without any warning at all the whole squadron, that's just the 12 Lockheed Hudson's, there's a picture of them, they have a turret on the back with twin .303 machine guns all covered in plastic and a control thing there, and the whole squadron was supposed to go to Darwin and then Darwin was a bit hot at that time, so we went to Koepang in New Guinea.
Early life and a lost love
I was born in Burnie in Tasmania and then we, the family moved to Launceston to follow my father's jobs and we had a house in Lime Avenue and my father didn't believe in owning houses, he always liked to rent them. So, we had a house in Lime Avenue and I remember when my father bought the first big music player, you know, came out an enormous big music recorder and I was sent to, he was a bit short of money, so I had to go to state school for a while and then after I'd been at state school for a while, they changed me over to Scotch College in Launceston and so I had the last two or three years there but I didn't like schools and I said to my father one day, I said, "I don't like school. Can I leave?" He said, "No, you can't leave till you get a job."
And so I got on my bike and I went down the street and met a mate who worked at Repco. I said, "Could you get me a job at Repco?" He said, "Yes." and so that's how I got out of school and into Repco and their boss at Repco was David McGrath who finished up Sir Charles McGrath and he was head of Repco for the whole world because they had branches in England and America and all over the place and it was pretty full life from there on and when I went back, they kept the job for me, Repco, and when they looked at it, yes, I went to work at Repco serving on the counter, because I didn't like the idea of selling 1929 Chev clutch plates for the rest of my life.
So, I said to Dave McGrath, "I'm gonna leave and go bush." and he says, "You can't leave." He said, "He's going to …", he was branch manager in Launceston but he was moving to Melbourne and taking on the job of managing director of the whole of Repco and so I missed out on a very good job but anyway, I kept in contact with Dave McGrath for many, many years because he and his wife when they came down to fish in Hobart, came fishing with us and I kept the contact because he was a fantastic bloke and he got a lot of awards and he had a holiday house on Phillip Island and he'd invite us.
Shirley and I, to have weekends at Phillip Island just to keep the contact life and any rate then life sort of, my love life started then because I'd had the same girlfriend I'd corresponded with for five years in the Air Force. About every two or three weeks we exchanged letters and she was a beautiful girl and when I discharged I only had 10 pounds in the bank. I didn't have a car, didn't have a house, hadn't had no sort of job and so one of the mistakes in my life I said, I said to Jen," I'm sorry, but I'm bowing out." And she, as I said it was one of the big mistakes in my life because she darted off and picked up a dental mechanic who,I forget his name now, but any rate, she married him, and they had four kids.
22nd Australian Light Horse Regiment and escaped horses
When I joined the Air Force they said you gotta get on the Reserve for two years or something or other you know until your turn comes around and so to fill in the time, a mate of mine was in the 22nd Light Horse based at Longford and I used to go on camping trips with them.
I couldn't ride a horse but they had had to have 20 utes to carry the food for the horses when they're, making up time and the drama always seemed to follow me all my life, sometimes I won and sometimes I lost and to fill in time we were in camp just near Ross. I had an old car at the time, and I decided to go into the Ross pub to have a beer and I was just having a beer the barman answered the phone and he said, "That's from the camp.
There's 400 Horses escaped from their handlers and they're heading your way, will you stop them?" and I was just on my own and the Ross bridge was the main, I had a big boxy Morris Oxbridge car and I parked it on the Ross bridge sideways to stop the horses and then rushed out and pulled up the first 20 or 30 horses but they all pushed back and they took all the door handles off my Morris as they pushed back on it and any rate, it took them six months to find all the horses after that.
No. 2 Squadron and the start of the war
I was appointed to 2 Squadron and 2 Squadron was part of the defensive, 2 and 13 were part of the defence of Darwin and I had no idea that the bombing of Darwin was going to happen although I just told you that the whole squadron moved from Laverton to Darwin and then went on to either be in New Guinea and the, I've lost it a bit. That's okay.
Oh, yeah, that's right the whole squadron of planes flew from Darwin, from Laverton to Darwin and I was on the radio as we flew over Lake Eyre, I was fiddling with the radio and I heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed and so when we landed Alice Springs to refuel and I told the, all the rest of the other twelve pilots, I told them the war had come to us, we weren't going to war, and Pearl Harbor was bombed, so that was a good start to the, start of the war and that's when we were, the four Lockheed Hudson Squadron in Timor, West Timor, because 2/40th Tasmanian, well, you'd probably know bit about that the 2/40th Tasmanian, they had 10,000 Tasmanians stationed on the same area as we were and four Lockheed Hudson's were supposed to give air cover to 10,000 Tassies and in that Tassie a lot of school friends and a fiancé of my sister in law and I knew a lot and we did a lot of running, food runs from Timor to Darwin and I used to take, you know, beer and milk and all sorts of things from Darwin and their mail.
I used to do, and so used to see a lot of them but it was bloody terrible and the worst thing that happened in my life was when the Japs looked like bombing Darwin we were sent, all aircrew were sent from Timor back to Darwin and we left the 10,000 army just to look after themselves and some of them pinched horses and other people hid in the bush because there were a few American submarines were coming in there taking away a few of our people and a lot more taken prisoners and when they were taken prisoners they were put on a Japanese ship to go to Japan and on the way to Japan an American Super Fortress came along and it was a Japanese ship and they bombed the shit out of it and they killed another, you know, 40 or 50 of the 2/40th, you know, Tasmania, which is one of the sad stories of how they run the war these days.
Fate and a tragic accident
Half of two squadron went to Koepang, and the other half of 2 Squadron went to Ambon and Ambon was getting a thrashing from the Japs and also in the pile of papers over there is a story of what the Japs did to aircrew when they landed at Ambon, they were very shitty and the way they dealt with all the, had I gone to Ambon when my name was down, I would have finished up, the Japs lined up twelve blokes and gave them the choice of either getting their head chopped off, or stabbed in the heart and that would have been the end of my life had I not taken the place of John Battingham-Moore who particularly wanted to get away to Ambon because that's where the main hub of the war was and he pinched my spot and I went to the CO and I said, "This bugger's pinched my spot, what should I do?" And he said, "Well, what do you want to do?" and I said, "Well I've had the same pilot now for …", in the logbook there's about 10 pages of the pilot I was been flying, "I'd like to stay with him."
And also Battingham-Moore wanted to stay with his pilot. So, he just handed me his life on a silver platter and I had to watch he and 11 other blokes take off tail heavy rock at Merauke and I watched it just take off within 100 yards of where they were taken off and halfway down the down the track I said to myself, "They're in big trouble." because the tail was still on the ground and then three other situations like that, when I was sitting behind the pilot, I could see he was having trouble getting the tail off the ground, so I'd turn around and actually scream at the blokes.
We always had about, had to carry about eight or ten extra aircrew and I had to scream at them to come forward and only had two seconds to do that and they'd come forward and the tail'd come up and I learned, three times I did that but the fourth time when they took me off the loading and gave me a new pilot and he was one of the best pilots and in the Air Force at the time, he made a big mistake that he didn't check the loading at the airport because when you put 12 blokes in the plane, and they all carried a carton of grog and their bags and it was always chucked down the back end of the plane and, any rate, it was one of the worst situations I've ever seen, to see 12 blokes going straight up in the air and then flicking over to go down and those twelve blokes would only have about 10 or 12 or 15 seconds to say their prayers because obviously the end was the end.
But anyway, it was just a heap of bodies and the remains of a Lockheed Hudson and they all died on impact and they're all, in those days there's no funerals and there's no mourning and all they did was to get a backhoe to come in and chuck all the heap of bodies and aircraft on a truck and take it up to the local cemetery and dig a hole and then put the whole mess in the bottom of the hole and cover it up.
Spotting the Japanese fleet and the bombing of Darwin
One trip, we hit, we'd had the bombing of Darwin on February the 19th and they decided that we had to have one more run back but after the bombing of Darwin we only had one Lockheed Hudson out of twelve that was flyable and that was full of bullet holes and we were selected to fly back to Timor to get another load of ground staff and so we, at that stage we had no parachutes and no radio, no anything because it's all been bombed and gone and we, the biggest shock was when we got back to Timor to land and get another load of ground staff, we ran into the whole Japanese fleet that had just bombed Pearl Harbor.
There was three aircraft carriers and about eight or ten other ships and they were all bombing Timor and we're a single plane and we didn't have any ammo and no bombs and no anything. All we could do was to fly around as one aircraft full of holes and fly around, and because all their fighters were over doing over Timor at least they weren't, well, they would have made mincemeat out of us but anyway my pilot just got down to about eight feet off the water and then flew in between all the ships and just took note and the ships started shooting at us but being so low they weren't doing much good but when they were getting a bit too close with the bullets, the pilot said, "Well, we've got to get out of here."
And so that we turned round and tried to get back to Darwin and we didn't have enough fuel to do that. So we throttled back the engines as much is possible and then we just flew at very low speed and we ran out of petrol when we got to Bathurst Island where there was a grass landing strip so we landed there with no petrol and there was a Catholic, yes, Catholic school there and they gave us a tin of pineapple each which is the only food we had for two or three days and then we had to pump the, hand pump the petrol from the drum into the plane and then we took off again and landed at Darwin and then around about that time one of the Jap planes had been shot down and we were the first crew to take a prisoner of war and we all had to take turns to carry a Smith and Wesson gun then and I remember I was detailed to look after this Jap that had just come out of the water and, yeah, we had to take him back to Darwin and find somewhere to lock him up because we didn't have any POWs.
Anyway we kept on flying as much as possible and it was pretty scary because, you know, I had a mate who was a Western Australian and after the bombing, we were both right in the middle of the bombing but after the first lot of bombing, we decided to go bush out we went a couple 100 yards into the bush and then it was quiet so we came back and then we saw this big flight of a 100 odd Jap bombers coming from the south and heading towards the airport and we thought they were American reinforcements and so we didn't do anything, we were on the on the drome and then looking up at these planes and they'd all opened their bomb doors and it was just like confetti coming down but the big snag was all this confetti was dead straight overhead. So, we're heading into the nearest trench and bombs landed all the way around us and over two or three yards where, well I got a few splinters and things like that.
Anyway, their bombing had been fantastic. All the bombs landed inside the fence of the aerodrome but that was my, around about the same time the English were having a hell of a job with the German Air Force and we knew nothing about the war. Our war was just Darwin and the Japs could have walked straight into Darwin at that time if, you know, if we allowed, could let them in.
Batchelor and a flight to Melbourne
The nice things about Batchelor was that it had the beautest lovely warm creek to swim in and a a pub although we weren't allowed in the hotel because the Yanks got there first and they took over the hotel and we weren't allowed in Daly Waters or anything like that, the Americans took over the war but any rate, on our trip there the other day when we went to Darwin to have a look, we were given a free trip down to Batchelor and we met all the people there.
I don't know, but yeah, my war ended one day when we only had two Lockheed Hudsons left in Darwin and my pilot had the most hours up and was still alive so our crew got the job of ferrying the last Hudson that was full of holes and things, we had the job of ferrying it from Darwin to Laverton to get a new engine but everything broke down on the way down and we got stuck at Oodnadatta for three or four days waiting for a new magneto and we stayed at the hotel, which was heavenly sleeping in sheets and having steak and eggs after living on bully beef for months and months and months, and also plenty of beer but any rate we stopped at Oodnadatta and then Alice Springs and then Adelaide and then finally got to Melbourne and I went to my favourite restaurant in Melbourne and they wouldn't let me pay for the steak and eggs there because I was returned from the war.
Hiccups at the wharves
They formed a squadron called B 24. It was a sort of bastardised part Australian air crew when they didn't have enough American air crew to put them on. It was just a new system of getting used to, you know, four engines and at least none of them took off tail heavy and up like the Hudson's used to.
I told you the story about when we were getting, when we were waiting on boats to come into Darwin to bring our beer and our, the beer and all the spare parts for the radio and stuff, the Northern Territory stevedoring mob would just unload the beer and then knock off and they wouldn't touch the radio and if they did they'd drop it from about 50 feet up and stuff that up and so we had some Yanks was at the time so the Yanks said, "We're going to fix this."
So they set up a couple of machine guns facing the stevedoring blokes that were supposed to be unloading the boats. That was the way we got stuff off the boats, sticking a .303 gun down the mouth of the wharfies. That was just one of the hiccups we had.
Fixing radios
The war was just about over. We're finished and we're just on the north coast of New Guinea and by that time I was squadron signals officer and that's where, because I did a signals course, and I became a squadron signals officer and that's how I finished up with my squadron leader. I went another pip up and so I had 40 radio operators to look after and all the planes equipment and so on and I was always pretty slow because wherever we went, great big four engine American bombers would land and taxi up to me and say, "Would you fix our radio, will you? It's stuffed." and so I had to fix on a strange radio set and get it going.
Move to New Guinea
When the Vultee Vengeance, 12 Squadron goes to Darwin, they decided they want to move it to New Guinea and because I was the only one that had an officer's pip, they put me in charge of 40 ground staff, three or four trucks, tents and everything else to move the whole squadron from Darwin to Aitape, a dreadful place in New Guinea, and we had to get on board a liberty ship to go to Thursday Island.
And then we had to stay overnight on Thursday Island but there were no tents there, then get on a little coastal steamer and you go to Aitape and we ran ashore there, ran out of ground, and any rate, I was there for about 10 or 15 months with no background building experience but had to build an officers' mess and build roads and I had a dog called ‘Clockwork' and I had a Chev truck to drive around and I had a motorbike and sidecar to drive around in and my little ‘Clockwork' whenever I got in the truck it would jump up on the running boards and up on the bonnet and up on the cabin and sit there all day while I was going around my duty.
