Training at Point Cook, 1951
One night I sat down and opened the paper up and there was an advertisement, join the air force and learn to fly, and I said, 'That's me'. So I thought 'I might as well have a go at it' so I put my name down and the next thing I got a letter saying come down and have an interview and have a medical and do this and do that and finally I was accepted.
So it was February 1951 that I joined the air force at Point Cook at the flying training school and it was an eighteen-month course then so we got our wings in 1952, in July, and the Korean War had just started up and I was interested in that anyhow. So, I decided that, that's really what I wanted to do, was become a fighter pilot which, it was considered the top. If you could become a fighter pilot, that was it.
Culture shock of flying Meteors
It was a bit of a culture shock. One of the things that I thought of later on was that when we got our wings, we had 185 hours of flying. By the time we'd done our operational training we got ourselves another 50 plus odd hours. So we're sort of 250 hours which is aero club kids' stuff really and then the next thing we were hit with was this twin-engine so-called high performance jet fighter aeroplane and until that point the Mustang didn't have a dual trainer, the Vampire didn't have a dual trainer, so we were just thrown into those and told 'Here you go, just fly'.
Luckily the Meteor had a training aeroplane, so we were able to get some better instruction and it was a twin-engine aeroplane. So, it was the first time any of us had flown a twin-engine aeroplane which brought in other considerations in terms of flying technique and what happens if one engine fails and that sort of thing.
So we did a little bit of gunnery and air to air fighting in Japan to prepare us and then it was over to Korea and by the time we got to Korea we had something like 300 hours which was really very little flying experience to be doing what we subsequently did. We were all, you know, 21 years of age. So, it was a fairly steep learning curve initially but, yeah, that's the way it was.
Limitations of the Meteors
Initially the air force wanted Sabres but the Americans didn't have enough to release them and so the British came up with the Meteor and the original purpose of the Meteor was to engage in air to air fighting enough but at high altitude the aeroplane was not good and it had restrictions on its speed limit as well, what they call a critical mach number which is, because of the design of the aeroplane and design of the wings you can only get to a certain speed before you start encountering shock waves or you run up against what is effectively a sound barrier, you get a very sharp increase in drag and the aeroplane just won't go any faster and, in fact, its flight controls become affected and the aeroplane behaves badly.
So, you've got to maintain, with the Sabres and Migs, they could go through the sound barrier because of the particular design, particularly the swept wing which tends to increase your critical mach number. The Meteor that we had was the Mark 8 which was a short wing one which meant that at low altitude it was very manoeuvrable but at high altitude it didn't have good enough high-speed lift characteristics. At higher altitudes it was not a good aeroplane.
George Hale nose art
There was a fellow called George Hale and he's memorialised with the nose art on his aeroplane. He was a Tasmanian and he had a map of Tasmania on his aeroplane which he called Halestorm and that is on the nose art that appears on the Meteor at Temora. It's not the same Meteor but they've used his nose art and his number, 851.
Road reconnaissance
The other sort of operation we were doing was road reconnaissance. The idea there was to stop the supplies coming down from the North to the frontline and we got to the point with air superiority, they weren't game enough to travel during the daytime because we had total air superiority. So they used to sneak down at night and the idea then was to take off very early in the morning, take off before light and go up on the roads that you knew were being used so that, we couldn't attack at night because the terrain was so terrible we had to see where we were going but the idea was to catch stragglers.
If you got up there nice and early at altitude where you were safe above the ground, and as the sun came up you could see and catch people who were trying to get those last few kilometres before they had to go and hide for the next night and you would attack them and the same at the other end of the day you would get people who wanted to make an early start and so you'd probably be able to catch those as well but in the meantime you kept them off the roads and kept supplies from coming down.
Bomber escorts
We did do a few escorts of bomber streams and that was a horse's backside really because they were travelling at speed which wasn't consistent with our ability to cover them and so you were trying to slow down so that you stay with them. That was never terribly successful and the idea there was to frighten the Migs away because the Migs would come down and have a go at them.
So, early in the piece when the Meteor first was accepted it was accepted as an air to air fighter and that was such a stunning failure that they had to change their minds about that and then make the aeroplane into what it finished up as, a ground attack airplane.
The longest parachute fall
We had quite a few people shot down up there some were killed, and some taken prisoner of war. A friend of mine was shot down and at that stage I think he held the record for the longest parachute fall that had ever been recorded. It's since been broken but he was a POW for about two years but he was way up on the Yalu River when he was shot down so there was no way known he was going to float down into friendly territory. Just before the war finished my wing man was shot down.
The last I saw of him he was going down in a parachute and the troops just grabbed him straight away. He was lucky. He was only in there for a couple of months and then the war finished, and he was an exchange. He got out alright but some of the others were treated rather badly.
Ground fire
Part of the deal, and we knew where a lot of it was, the larger stuff, but a lot of the other stuff you didn't see. It was relatively small arms fire and we didn't know about that. It didn't sort of show up like typical anti-aircraft thing, you'd see a puff of smoke, you'd see tracer bullets come up. It was there all the time. You know, you'd have to expect it. You're trying to shoot them and they're trying to shoot you. That's the game.
Living quarters
We lived in tents. We had six to a tent and in the middle of the tent was an oil heater and outside was a 44-gallon drum of oil with a pipe coming into the oil heater so you used to fire that up and they used to get pretty hot. It was probably a bit of a fire hazard living in a tent with wooden sides, wooden floors but canvas tops and it's interesting, we had to virtually, we were just given a camp stretcher and a space and you had to use your own ingenuity as to how you furnished that space knowing you were going to be there for six months so some people became ingenious about, you know, making little cupboards and beds and things like that.
You could scavenge around for timber and stuff like that, so you had to make it your space and liveable. We had a bar, which was a concert hut, one of those, sort of, semi-circular things made out of galvanised iron and that was very popular. It was very popular with the Americans because they used to like to come over and have drinks with us and be entertained and then we used to go to the American mess to eat which brought up an interesting situation because when we graduated we all graduated as non-commissioned officers, we were sergeants and this was an officers mess so in order to get around that we were told to take our sergeant stripes off and just wear our wings and people would assume we were officers and that's what we did. When you went back to Japan, of course, you had to go back to the sergeants' mess there.
101 missions
I did just over 100 and then the war finished. The average was about 130. If you did a full tour and, you know, and the war hadn't finished but I got 101. Just made it over the 100 which was good, but they weren't all exciting. Some of them were a bit boring, you know, you just go up and do a road reconnaissance and you wouldn't see anything but I suppose what you were doing anyhow was useful in that you were keeping people off the roads and then others were a bit more exciting.
