Mad keen on flying
I'd always been made keen on flying as a child and used to hop on my bike and go down to the local airfield and walk around there and actually, I was present at the first air pageant, as they were called then, at Launceston Airport, which was the first time Tasmania had ever had a traffic jam. Everybody in Launceston trying to go there, I think.
Crewing up
It was very haphazard procedure. We're all gathered together in a hangar, different aircraft musterings, and you sort of looked around and you'd been summing people up beforehand a bit, and I selected a navigator and a radio operator, a wireless operator as they were called then, and bomb aimer.
They were all Australians, and the navigator was actually a friend of my brothers, who was also a navigator. And bomb aimer knew two new Australian young people from Newcastle, so they became the two gunners. That was it.
Hit by flak
Yes, the 23rd operation was a daylight. Mostly they had been done at night but some were by day light, and this was to a city called Dortmund, which was in the Ruhr Valley and all went well 'til we were just got over the target when the aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire, flak, which fortunately didn't damage the aircraft much.
The engines kept going but all the perspex in the cockpit was blown out and some of the instruments, petrol tank's holed and so on, and having the perspex blown out was a good thing in one way because I was wounded in the hand, and knee and in the shoulder and had a fractured skull and the fresh air coming into the cockpit sort of kept me awake and so then it was just a question, we dropped our bombs and headed for home via a couple of emergency airfields which we could land on if necessary.
But the flight engineer sort of patched me up with bandages and things and managed to fly it back to the first one emergency airfield, which we decided we could go further than that and back to our base in Lincolnshire, and from there to hospital.
London during the war
Oh, very damaged, and a lot of buildings were just shells, and, of course, nothing was done in the way of repair at that time. Sometimes the remains were pulled down.
There were lot of emergency water tanks, which were big concrete tanks full of water. Hyde Park had a lot of anti-aircraft guns in it. All the parks had trenches and things, slit trenches, so, yes, it was, in a way, grim, but in other ways, not.
V1 & V2 flying bombs
Saw them. Heard them. They were all right when they were buzzing along overhead. It's when the motor cut that you wondered. The motor would cut, you see, and then just go down, you didn't know where it was going.
But the V2s, which were rockets, they were supersonic and they'd go up very high and you wouldn't hear them coming. You'd hear the explosion, then you'd hear the rumble of their flight afterwards, because of the sound being delayed.
On a couple of occasions, we saw V2s being launched in Europe back towards London. Not the actual rocket itself, but you could see the tail going up more or less vertically from the ground and then sort of zig-zagging as it was set on its course and then head off.
VE Day
Well, we were in Lincoln. Well, we were stationed outside of Lincoln, we moved into Lincoln and celebrated there with, outside Lincoln Cathedral, which is a magnificent building, you can see it for miles, and fireworks, that was unofficial fireworks that, fireworks which the air force used as signals and searchlights were turned on and they found all sorts of bunting, little Union Jacks and things, which I souvenired one and took it back to England six years ago and gave it to an aviation museum there, so, yes, there was a feeling of euphoria, obviously.
