Brian Winspear's veteran story

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.

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.