Enlistment
I was in the kitchen at our home in Ascot, listening to the radio and I heard Bob Menzies' speech, saying that Germany had already invaded and war was ... Great Britain had declared war on Germany and Australia was now at war. I was sitting in the kitchen in our home at Ascot, when I heard that. Before I went to Ascot ... when I was very young, till the age of five, we lived at West End.
When I was five, my father was retrenched during the Great Depression. Our family split up. He went up to find work on the gold mining claim near Cooktown and my mother went into a residential housekeeping job and with my sister and brother, we went to live with my mother's parents at Kalinga. That's all detailed in the book. Until the end of 1936 and that's when we went to Ascot. That's when my father came back from Cooktown and we rented a house in Benison Street, Ascot. That was at the end of 1936.
I enlisted, well actually before the war but when I was in school, I was on the shooting team and I got an interest in rifle shooting and I joined the cadets, so I could go to the rifle range and that was before the war started. At the beginning of the war, I was in the Army cadets and then as well as an apprentice electrician. When the manpower came in, they made my work a reserved occupation and they dragged me out of the militia to keep on working as a civilian electrician apprentice. It was only about 1940, early '42, I think, that a group of us got permission to overcome the manpower restrictions and join the air force.
A Mobile Fighter Sector
Initially, the group of us from where I was working, at City Electric Light Co, we were all electrician apprentices. We went down to the training school, air force training school in Melbourne. We were camped at the Exhibition Buildings in Melbourne and we used to attend classes at the Melbourne Tech College.
When we finished training there, I was supposed to do a flying training school outside Bundaberg initially. I was working on the planes that they were using in the flying training school. From there, I was sent down to Sydney to join ... They were just forming a new unit. When the Spitfires first came out here, they formed a mobile fighter sector. I don't know if you know what that is? You've seen Battle of Britain, pictures where they have a big table, moving things about. Well that's a mobile fighter sector, was a smaller model of those mobiles. They had formed one of those to accompany the three Spitfire squadrons that went to Darwin. And I was doing maintenance, electrical work on the batteries that charged the radios that accompanied the fighter sectors, as they accompanied the Spitfires…
Well, after a couple of weeks in Darwin itself, they set up the fighter sector at a place called Coomalie Creek, which is about 100 miles south of Darwin. That's where the Beaufighter squadron, 31 Squadron was stationed. The fighter sector was alongside the 31 Squadron. Incidentally, my brother was a navigator in 31 Squadron, so I used to see him fairly often…I didn't have a lot of association directly with the aircraft. I was mainly just doing the work on the ... It was fairly tedious work, just charging batteries for the radio stations. We used to do it 24 hours a day in shifts…We had six-man tents. Everything was under canvas. I think the mess building might have been a solid building but the rest, all the accommodation was under canvas, yeah.
Mobile generators fitted in the back of trucks. I think it was 15kva alternators they were. They used to provide all the power. The fighter sector was in touch with radio stations at several different locations where they had the small radar sets. They were in radio communication with the fighter sector. We used to get their batteries too and charge them.
Most of the scrambling was done with the Spitfire fighters and they weren't out at Coomalie, they were in Darwin. They did most of the defensive work. The Beaufighters were mostly used on ground attack missions, so they were more suited to that sort of work. They were very, very heavily armed. I think they had six machine guns and four 20 mil canons and very well suited to doing ground attack work and that's what they did. They did a lot of work against shipping.
Casual uniform
It was nothing spectacular. We'd just get up, get dressed in shorts and boots. Sometimes we wore a shirt but not always but always a hat. In those early days, a lot of the fellows just wore shorts and boots and nothing else. Later on, when the army became more aware of protection against malaria and mosquitoes, that's when they started wearing long sleeves ...long trousers and long-sleeved shirts but up until the time I was there, we weren't wearing them. It was while I was engaged on that, that we got the notice on the board, that the air force was inviting invitations for transfer to training for air crew and I applied for that.
Navigation training
The interviews were done not far from where we were camped, there was about, I suppose, about 10 of us were interviewed. I think a couple of them were rejected and I don't know what happened to the others but there were two, myself and a fellow named, Alan Carmen. He was from 31 Squadron he knew my brother well and we met at the airfield in Batchelor waiting for the Douglas DC3 to take us south for training. That's where we first met, got to know each other and we spent the rest of the war together, became good friends. Where we did our aircraft training, was in South Australia.
We initially went to Adelaide and then to Victor Harbour, which was on the outskirts of Adelaide. We did our initial training there and at the end of the initial training, they break up into different groups of pilots, navigators, gunners and Alan and I both opted to go as navigators. We were hoping to go on to Beaufighters at the end of our training. We both succeeded in that and got sent to their navigation trainee school. Initially to Ballarat but we'd only been there a short time when the nav school was transferred from Ballarat down at Victoria, to Mount Gambier in South Australia and we did our nav training at Mount Gambier.
The course was called navigator wireless. The reason for that is, we were trained in navigation and also in radio communication. That was to prepare to go on a two-man aircraft, where one man did the radio communication and the nav. At the end of the course, Allen and I were both given the commissions and our first posting was initially we did about three of four weeks, on commando training, using infantry weapons while we were waiting for a posting to be available. They taught us how to use rifles and Tommy guns and hand grenades, everything that you wouldn't want when you were in a plane.
Section 22
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.
Flying with the Americans
We were living with the Americans. Allen and I were living in a tent and the Americans tent in amongst all of them. When we were going on a mission, we'd always get ready before dawn and they'd have somebody detailed to come and wake up all of the crew who were flying that day. They'd come around and wake us up. We'd get our gear and go up to the mess and have breakfast. Then go to the briefing room and get last minute briefing. Get driven down to the airstrip, into the plane. There'd be a big bag of clothes on them because where the aircraft was sitting out on the tarmac in the sun, they'd just heat up like an oven and when you got up there, it was cold.
We used to carry warm gear in a bag with us, put it on as we got up. Our flying day could be 12, 13 hour trip, round trip. We'd take tea sandwiches. They'd always taste like petrol. The radar gear in some of the Liberators ... We used to fly ... We didn't always fly with the same crew or with the same aircraft. Americans had their planes in a pool, and they were allocated to individual crews as they went each strip. This applied to the radar gear, which happened to be in whatever plane there.
We'd be going on this trip, probably with a crew we hadn't met before and some of the planes, the radar gear was situated above the bomb bay and some of them, it was in the nose of the plane. I didn't like the ones above the bomb bay much because when they opened the bomb doors, it was like sitting in a wind tunnel. I used to prefer operating the ones where all the gear was in the nose of the plane, you could see what was going on there too.
Most of the trips I did were group formation of four squadrons, so that's 32 Libs going. The four squadrons had been grouped together but not all bunched together. It was like four separate groups. We never flew directly to the target. They'd generally fly near the target but wouldn't fly directly at it, until the last possible moment. The reason for that was, that the Japs had an aircraft guns that they could move quickly, and we didn't want them to know where to move it to, until the last minute.
Before going in to do the raid, they'd change the course, the air speed and the height and that's when we'd switch on the jamming gear. I didn't explain about the jamming gear yet. It was a little transmitter ... radar consists of a signal which is transmitted and then bounced off the target and back to the transmitter. We were being the target, when we received this signal and we had gear, we could recognise what sort of a transmission we were receiving, and we could tell if it was a ... one of these high frequency radar signals, we could tell that we were receiving them and if so, we'd tune in another transmitter to that frequency but not turn it on.
Then before we did the actual bomb raid, we'd change course, speed and height and then we'd turn on the transmitter at the last minute. The reason for that was that, we didn't know whether they had a second set up on a different frequency, ready to switch on. We didn't know if they had that. We found that the ... It must have been pretty effective because they never shot us down.
One day, my friend Alan was supposed to go on a trip, and they didn't wake him up, so he didn't go. When the squadron came back, where Alan would have been sitting, there was a big hole in his seat. We congratulated him on his good luck, having survived, and he said, "Well, if I had been flying with my gear on, they might not have shot us and they might not have been able to get us." We didn't know.
528 & 529 Squadrons
Non-commissioned ranks and the commissioned ranks lived separately, and I was the only commissioned Australian who was in the 528th. I got permission to live with Alan and Johnny Carroll in the 529th lines. The three of us shared a tent in the 529th lines. I had to get special permission for that, so the 528 bloke who woke up the crew in the morning, knew where to find me.
One memorable mission I had was due to go very early in the morning. Went to bed early at night. I woke up and the lights were on in the mess. I thought, "Gee, they've forgotten to wake us up." I went out, raced over and I woke up Johnny and Allen, "Come on." We went up to the mess and it was still the previous night. I had to go back to bed again. They didn't thank me for waking them up.
American tea drinker
I only ever met one American who liked tea and he was a fellow named, Bill Bennett, he'd married an Australian girl and he probably acquired a taste for it. Our tent amongst the American lines was fairly popular. We came by some tinned goodies from the group mess. We never did find out how we came to get them, but we had tinned peaches and that sort of stuff. Some of the Yanks who knew we had them, they used to come down and join us.
Mud crab fishing
We used to spend the time doing physical things, going for a run, playing sport. The RAF had some sort of a hut down at the beach and they with the rest of us, some of the officers to go down and stay there and they'd do a bit of fishing. Take it in turn. My turn never arrived.
We had a party in the mess one night, invited some of the officers from surrounding units and Allen and I, we got hold of a little boat made out of Masonite and we took it up Rapid Creek. Made some homemade crab nets and caught some lovely big mud crabs and had them for the party.
The Atomic Bomb
We used to listen to the news in the mess at night. We'd just heard that the bomb had been dropped and what a terrific totally big thing it was and what an effect it was and when the war was finished, we went sort of delirious and everybody drank as much as ... you know.
Then we waited to be sent home and nothing happened, we stayed there. I think it was a month or so before we got home. We were just told it was an atomic bomb. Just accepted that it was something bigger than anybody could imagine.
