Becoming an air gunner
Well a boy of 16 has burning ambitions. I was an air cadet. The Air Force had formed an air training corps to provide future air crew personnel. So from the age 16 to 18, I was an air cadet, and come the day when you turn 18 you register straight away. Well, you go into an initial training school and I think that was six weeks if I recall and they belt Hell out of you.
A severe disciplinary training so that when someone gives a command you do what you done without dithering and wondering, and much intensive formal study and at that stage, they're a panel of experts who were trained to segregate.
They had what they called categorisation, and that's, we think you'll be a good navigator. You don't appear to be too hot on mathematics, so we'll make you a gunner, or whatever, you know, they had to stream you off in what they thought was going to be your future performance.
Well like most boys, you get horribly disappointed because you all want to fly. But you have that moment of truth when they say, we don't think you're going to make a particularly good flier. We note from your records that you're good at wireless, so we'll make you a wireless operator.
So it goes. Well they made me a wireless operator, gunner. I was sent to Ballarat in Victoria and Ballarat, Victoria decided that I was not very brilliant on radio after all, so they said well now we're going to make you a straight gunner. So then I went to gunnery school, where you have intensive gunnery training and I shone there.
Gunnery training
And our gunnery training was on the old Avro Anderson that was a twin engine training aircraft which had a gun turret up top that you stood in, and you had to fire upon a drogue. A drogue is a great long silk sausage that's towed behind an aircraft, which the half-witted trainees might shoot that aircraft, but the object is to go for the drogue.
All of the bullets that we used were dipped into semi-sticky paint. You might be green, he might be yellow, that one red and so forth so that according to your hits on this white silk drogue, they knew how you performed as a gunner.
Journey to the USA
Sydney to San Francisco took three weeks. We were in a disgusting little freighter which just had a single cannon mounted on the rear and we wove all over the Pacific, especially down Corral. We must have been going down the coast of South America because the Australian Red Cross had very thoughtfully had provided big sheepskin jackets to go over our uniform. Obviously they knew where we were going, but we didn't. Just to keep us warm.
But three weeks crossing the Pacific was a Hell of a long trip. And that was a revolting ship. 330 men packed into this tiny freighter. It was just not nice. The toilets were smack bang next to the eatery and all sorts of unpleasant things. Water was a scarce commodity. Most of us got disgusting internal disorders. That's a bitter memory of the war.
So from San Francisco, that was coming into a new Heaven, we saw America in all its glory. We were accommodated on a little island not far from Alcatraz, it was called Angel Island. The Yanks warned us, no one is to go roaming around the island, there's poison ivy everywhere. But we deduced later that the other side of Angel Island was a big Japanese Prisoner of War camp, so that's why we were debarred from going there.
But San Francisco was a charming city. From there they put us on a big train that went a devious route across to New York. I think it took us about a week to get across the USA by train. There were a couple of other lads that had gone into similar future course. Those that were of the more intelligent strata, the navigators and pilots, they were still in Australia involved in intense training to get them ready for the big future, which fortunately didn't come about.
The war gradually wound down and the powers that be decided that the Empire Air Training Scheme, EATS as it's known, it wasn't required and they didn't require these fellows to be fed through. So I was lucky in that regard, that I was made a gunner and got quick appointment overseas.
Journey to the UK
We went across the North Atlantic in a huge passenger ship called the Athlone Castle. Eight thousand men on that. On these troop ships where you have all these in between deck spaces that have about five, I think it was, bunk beds. Everybody had a bum in their face except the man under the ceiling, but everyone else had this great hump to look at. They really packed us in there, eight thousand men on one big troop carrier.
What a sitter that would've been for a German U-boat. Fortunately we didn't cop it. We landed at Liverpool. That was a site to behold because Liverpool had mostly been just smashed down in the bombing. It had attracted a great deal of bombing.
Yet recent docos I've seen on Liverpool were going to some of these spots, they have conserved a lot of the wonderful old buildings, where they were when I saw these horrors of the German bombing, I don't know. We were there for several weeks just biding our time, getting a lot of leave and making sure we reported back on a regular basis. Eventually I was called to the orderly room and said "You've been posted to 10 Squadron in South Devon". So that was it, I went to 10 Squadron.
Crewing up
Regarding bomber crews, this gave a bit of cohesion I think insofar as they used to have a session where they'd gather all these trained air crew together and they would sort of size one another up and say would you like to join us. You join and they would then go to an OTU, an Occupational Training Unit, or Operational Training Unit. And I think that was a better system, because they all started out at the beginning as one.
I think that was one of the reasons that my brother was killed, he should not have been flying. Another brother and I pleaded with him, "For goodness sake, think of your wife and child a time. Don't go on for further flying." And he said, "I've gotta stick with the boys." So that's the end result.
But getting back to flying boats, we were constantly being changed as a navigator had reached the end of his tour of duty, they would take him out and put a new navigator in. Then you might get a new skipper. I had two skippers, I had flown fragmented trips with a couple of different ones, but the two principal ones I had were this Lorrie Clark that I mentioned, and Athol Riley was the other one.
Crews on bomber, they had just one skipper and they went right throughout the whole show. A new fellow would come on and you'd make him welcome and he would gradually meld into the crew. But I don't think you had the same cohesion as these other people would have by virtue of the fact that they all started out as a complete team and were training together.
Sunderland Flying Boat
Well it was a Sunderland flying boat which as I'd mentioned, it was a conversion from a pre-war luxury plane. I think they used to have about 12 passengers. The done thing in those days was to have water borne craft because there was plenty of safe lagoons and havens for water borne craft to land and take off. Air strips as we know them today were very low on the list.
But of course science has proved that an efficient ball bearing system, or a bearing system, probably a roller bearing system with wheels is heaps ahead of a flying boat, which has got this massive boat hull down in that heavy water. You've got to have tremendous power to lift that boat portion out of the water so that it can fly as a plane. It had four engines. They were not terribly powerful, they were called a Bristol Pegasus. If one of those engines went, for whatever reason, if it dropped out of its performance you had trouble.
We did run into one of these periods. We'd come in off a patrol, our own base at Plymouth was under very heavy snow and a lot of fog and we weren't able to land. The aircraft was limping along on these three surviving motors. Nowadays two out of four is wonderful, you can still keep the whole strength going with modern jets. But one of those Bristol Pegasus motors, if that died you were in danger.
So we were diverted to a place called Calshot, that's to the north of the Isle of Wight. At the west end of the Isle of Wight in the English Channel, those who are acquainted would know there's a profusion of big cliffs, white chalk cliffs called the Needles. We had dropped right down to a very low altitude. We'd thrown away all the bombs, the guns.
Everything but the men went over to enable these three surviving motors to get us in safely into that diversion base at Calshot. Suddenly the skipper, his name was Lorry Clark, Flight Lieutenant Clark, he said, "Oh Hell." Suddenly he had to veer away because we were heading these Needles. He got us down safely, into mountains of snow there at the diversion base and we had to stay there for a day or two I think, until our own base opened up and we were able to fly back to there to have this rotten motor repaired.
Life aboard a Sunderland
They were a good bunch of blokes. I mentioned there were three pilots, three gunners, and two engineers, two wireless gunners and the poor, unfortunate navigator, the man most to be admired, because the navigator, he's the man with all the brains. He gets you out there, brings you back safely. All navigation had to be done on dead reckoning, and going out into that dirty grey Atlantic, grey gooey sky, hideous, mountainous, grey gooey sea down there.
It was a wonderful combination to the navigators. He was one only, and all the others their jobs were duplicated so they could have a bit of time off. This big flying boat had what was referred to as the ward room, and there were bunks in there, they could go and have a good rest. Unlike most other service aircraft, you could walk around, they were incredibly big. They even had a proper toilet. The whole bowl was formed up out of aluminium, with just an ordinary, everyday aluminium door to go in.
That was somehow special, you could say that was a luxury because people on numerous other aircraft were absolutely cramped up. Two of the gunners had to be actively employed and the third one had to be the off-duty cook. This was a pre-war luxury flying vessel, aircraft, it had a galley with two of these old-fashioned kerosene fired primus burners where you pump the pressure up and get a good hot burner on top. We used to make toast and stews. The galley had a hatch up to the bridge where the flying operation was taking place and from time to time the hatch would open and a big hand would come down, "Feed me!"
Patrols
The pilots and the navigator, they would go to the briefing sessions, they were the people who were running the show and we'd get on board the small tinder boats that took us out. We'd receive our briefing on the way out in that little boat before we boarded the big flying boat. The skipper would usually say, "We're going there today on a box patrol." Or "We're doing a straight patrol".
A box patrol was interesting, that was a navigator's nightmare, you had to keep going in boxes all the way so that you wouldn't miss anything. At the end of the war, the Germans had a clever thing, it was called a schnorkel. This enabled them to progress on the surface and hopefully go undetected. So there's the German periscope and the schnorkel, the sea is going over it, so the Germans conjectured that the air radar couldn't pick them up, and we couldn't, either. So they relied very much on our visual sighting. We were trained to look for any suspicious white cap. If there's an unusual looking white cap that does fit in with the general pattern, because we only flew at 1200 feet which is good visual sighting.
Battle of the Atlantic
The people who suffered most in the Battle of the Atlantic were those poor unfortunate wretches in the freighters. They were carrying vital supplies from America mostly, across to Britain. The German submarines were a very big vessel, they had the ability to go right across North Atlantic to the east coast of America.
There's a popular misconception nowadays that, well we know the modern submarine goes down and it stays there for as long as it wants, nine months or a year or whatever, because it's propelled by nuclear power, which converts all the requirements of fresh air, electricity and every other thing. But the World War II submarine, it was a ship. It was a surface vessel that had the ability to go under when it must, so that it could raise its periscope and sink the target that it was after.
That's where so many of these unfortunate people in the merchant marine, they were just downed over and over and over. It was our function to be the eyes and work liaison with the Royal Navy so that they knew exactly where everyone was placed. I recall seeing a British submarine in a convoy that we were escorting. As I mentioned, the submarine is a surface ship.
The waves were enormous things, they must've been about 20 metres, great troughs and here's these poor devils in this little submarine on the surface and being thrown and bashed around and trying to make headway amongst this throng of small supply shifts with the Royal Navy escorting roundabout. I wouldn't like to be in a submarine under those circumstances.
Death of a brother
One of my own dear brothers was in a Lancaster bomber and killed. That was a very tight thing. He unofficially took me one day on a trip, I wasn't supposed to be there. As I mentioned earlier, it was illegal for brothers to fly together. But he teed up with the captain and said, "Break the laws and let my young brother come!"
So I had that trip in a Lancaster. Went from England up to the far north of Scotland and back down again, it was quite interesting. I flew in the upper turret. Parents take unrealistic views, they were frantically sending cables to another brother and myself to get the facts but the facts were they were just blown to pieces. They found a bit of his uniform, which was a different colour and that proved he was the Australian.
Capture of a brother
One had four years as a prisoner of the Germans. He came back to England looking very emaciated and starved, but he had survived like most of them did, except those that were trying to break out and were shot down by the Germans.
But those that weathered it through, they just survived through their own ingenuity I suppose. Some of them used to have little vegetable garden plots to try and supplement the slosh that they were fed every day.
On leave in Ireland
We used to get leave every three months as air crew. All the air crew were entitled to have leave every three months because of the intensity of the work they were involved in. They'd give us a free pass on the railway and off we'd go, exploring.
There was a famous expression, it was publicised all over Britain, buses, trains, everything, "Is your journey really necessary?" So you'd get on to trains and you're all packed in like sardines, but the train got you there reliably from A to B wherever you were going. Oh I think, probably went to Ireland. We weren't allowed to go to Ireland in uniform. The Americans were, but British services no.
Ireland was a neutral country and we had to follow a strange procedure, we weren't allowed to go directly into Ireland, which would be at the southern end of Britain, we had to go right up to Scotland, to Stranraer I think it was, and then across to Belfast and there you would go to a pawn shop and pawn your service uniform, and you were decked out in civilian clothing. You had to pay the pawn master a carton of cigarettes to see that he attired you suitably, and then you got on the train at Belfast to Dublin.
That train was painfully, painfully slow. Ireland is a non-producer of coal, they didn't have any. They had lots of timber, so their steam trains were fired by wood fires, and wood fire cannot get up a decent head of steam. So it was a long, long journey to go from Belfast down to Dublin. But that was interesting, to go to a neutral country and to meet some of the people there and hear what their secret hopes were, that the Brits would win the war and they'd quickly get back to normal times.
VE Day
I was on leave in London and it was just a madhouse. People just packed and screaming with delight. At some stage we were swept to the gates of Buckingham Palace, how the Hell we wound up there, I don't know.
Our laws in those days prohibited drinking before 21, and I was a non-drinker, but somehow I got swept along by some of the AIF drunks I think. They were probably ex-POWs or some devils that were wanting to have a lot of fun. And at the gates of the Palace we saw the royal party come out and acknowledge the mass and the winner of the day. That was it.
