Interview with Suzanne Williams about her father John Andrew Cromie

Interview with Suzanne Williams about her father John Andrew Cromie

John Andrew Cromie volunteered for the RAF in Australia. He was posted to 460 Squadron. On his thirteenth operation he was shot down and became a prisoner of war. After the war he didn’t talk to his family about his experiences. Upon the death of her parents Suzanne received a wealth of personal documents, letters and diaries about her father’s experiences and she decided to follow in his footsteps across Europe and write a book about his service.

2025-08-26

01:03:09 Audio Recording

This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.

AWilliamsS250826

DE: This is an interview with Sue Cromie about her father Warrant Officer John Andrew Cromie who was an air gunner with 460 and 550 Squadrons. It is the 26th of August 2025. I’m in Lincoln at the University and it’s just gone 10 o’clock and Sue is in Australia and it is seven in —
SW: Melbourne. 7.
DE: Melbourne.
SW: 7 pm.
DE: 7 pm. Yeah.
SW: Yeah.
DE: Right. Wonderful.
SW: Yeah.
DE: So, Sue can you just tell me a little bit about your early life and when you first realised that your father had a story in there somewhere?
SW: Well, when, when I was younger dad really didn’t want his family to know about the war and what happened. He wanted to protect us. So when I was younger I knew he had been in a plane that had been shot down over Germany and that he’d been in a prisoner of war camp and that was about it. We weren’t really told anything else. And then when I was about ten a woman from England came out to visit us and her nickname was Dragon. She was known as Dragon. Her name was Joan Parsons and she was a feisty woman whose husband was one of the best horse trainers in the UK. Peter. Peter Parsons I think his name was and that was, dad went, she lived in Henley in Arden or near there and dad used to go to Henley in Arden on his leave and there’s a bit of a story about how he got there. But she came out when I was ten to see all her Aussie and New Zealand boys that she looked after. So dad said he would go, he would go to her place if he wanted a good time. There was another woman in the town, Kath Leake. The Leake family, and her husband was the managing director of the [SA] and she was like a mother to him. So if he wanted a quiet time or he was homesick he would go to her. So the Dragon comes out when I’m ten and we get to meet her. She’s a short little feisty woman. And so that was fine. We had heard about Dragon. And then when I was about thirteen I went to boarding school in Melbourne and there was a girl at boarding school whose family knew my dad’s family and she started telling me things about what happened to dad in the war that I didn’t know. So I rang my dad up and I said, ‘What’s the story? This girl is telling me all these things.’ So then he proceeded to tell me you know that he was shot down, his parachute was caught in a tree, he was injured. He didn’t remember opening his parachute. He wandered around and eventually handed himself in to a farmer who took him home to his wife. The wife fed him, called the police and the police came and then they called the Army or whatever and he was eventually taken in to a prisoner of war situation and eventually ended up in Stalag 4B. So he had a huge wound on his forehead which he must have hit his head as he went out. He fractured his nose. He fractured his coccyx bone in his bottom and yeah, and he was bruised all down one side. So you know he wasn’t in any state to sort of, and it was cold. It was snowing. It was December the 2nd. So basically that’s, that’s all we heard at that point. And then in about 1974 I went to England and dad gave me the name of the parents of one of the guys who was on his plane, Peter Lee and he gave me the name of Dot Bennett who was the wife of the only married member of the crew who was Bert Bennet. He was the bomb aimer and Peter Lee was the navigator and also of course Dragon’s name and Mrs Leake’s name. So, but I went overland through Africa and met my girlfriend in London and we started hitchhiking across Europe and I didn’t get to see these people at that point. And we got to Hammerfest in Norway and that was my, of course you didn’t have phones in those days it was our first postal mail drop. Heaps and heaps of letters and telegrams for me. My father had died seven weeks before at the age of fifty one which was just devastating. So we went back to the Youth Hostel and the guy in charge of the Youth Hostel could see that I had a problem so he called me in. He organised with the travel agent in the town who organised a flight for me down, down south in Norway and then I caught a train which took me on the ferry all the way across to England and I went back to London where my cousin lived and her mother was my father’s sister and she, and Jeannie had gone over when she was young and married an Englishman. So she lived there. Her mother happened to be visiting Jeannie at that time so when I arrived there I was there with my favourite aunt and with my cousin. So then I spent four weeks travelling around England and I visited Dragon and I visited Mrs Leake and I visited Dot Bennet and Peter Lee’s parents and everything and one of dad’s friends that he met in the prisoner of war camp who lives back here, who lived back here in Melbourne, was also visiting there as well. So I was able to meet up with Sandy and in fact a couple of those people, I can’t remember which ones I had to actually tell them that dad had died.
DE: Oh dear.
SW: Which was really distressing. So yeah. So then I decided to go home to Australia although my mum said no but I really felt the need to go home and to be with my mum to see what was going on with her. So, so I went home and my sister who had lived in Queensland at that time and she had come down and helped mum for the seven weeks I wasn’t there. So we met at Melbourne Airport and we stayed in the hotel overnight and I caught up with my sister and then my mother and I went home and then I ended up staying in Australia for a couple of years before I ventured out travelling again. So that, that was sort of my introduction to all of that. And then my mother, my mother [pause], I did various travelling. I travelled in America. Rode a pushbike across America. Did various other different things and my mother died in 1979 and that was five years after dad and she was, so dad was fifty one, she was fifty four when she died. So both really young but both of them were smoking related disease so you know that’s what happens. Anyway, so I got all of her paperwork and all that stuff and I ended up marrying my husband at the end of that year and we bought a house and life was really busy and I didn’t get a chance to go through all of his stuff and it really wasn’t until [pause] So that was 1979. So it really wasn’t until the early 2000s that I started going through the paperwork that my mother had left and by this time I had two kids and I was working really long hours. But I found a box. A Canadian Red Cross parcel for prisoners of war that came from Switzerland and inside that box was diaries, telegrams, letters, memorabilia all just shovelled in together and I couldn’t believe it. And I started looking through it and I found all this amazing stuff that, you know dad kept notes every time he went out on a flight. He wrote down what food he ate and what was said on the plane and it was quite, quite amazing and so I started looking at that. Then my son was at university in the 2000s and he was in Berlin so I organized a trip and I stopped off in Berlin with him and we hired a car and we went. So dad was, in the box were some photos and one of the mothers of one of the crew members Mrs Topham, Ted Topham was one of the people. He was a rear gunner or something I think. She had gone to Germany after the war, had taken photos, black and white. Very blurry photos. A picture of a farm building, “This is where John landed.” A picture of a field. Remains of the plane. The bodies here. The fuselage here. This here. And then a picture of a wooden cross and that’s where the local people had buried all and put a cross up which was quite amazing because I’ve been told that sometimes they were pretty awful about the people who came through. But they managed to, you know put them all in a grave and so she said that where dad landed was Meine, M E I N E and so John and I drove to Meine and my son was very, wanted to be very correct. He said, ‘Look, the Germans hated Bomber Command. Hated the bombs falling’. Which all the research I’ve done since has told me the same. And I had a friend who was Swiss and she had written for me, I wrote the story about my dad and when the plane came down and what happened and she wrote a little out for me in German and we got to the town of Meine and no one spoke English there. We went to the local council offices. They were closed and John said, ‘Mum you can’t go around asking people. You know, they don’t like you talking about it.’ And I really wished I had someone with me who spoke German because I certainly would have asked more. So then we drove around and looked at the countryside and everything. It turns out the plane came down near Wasbüttel which is sort of near Meine and the grave was in Wasbüttel. And I’ve since found out from 560 Squadron that all the bodies were removed and taken to the Hanover War Cemetery so that’s where they are now. So then John and I went to, where is it? We went [pause], dad drew a map in his, in his book about when he was released by the Russians from the prisoner of war camp. So we went to Trebsen in Germany which was where he was picked up by the Americans and taken to Halle when he was flown out to Belgium and then back to London. So we drove to Trebsen and then went to, hang on I’ve got a picture of it here. So we, we did his journey in reverse. So, I think we’ve got it here. [pause – pages turning] So basically they left the camp. They went into Mühlberg which was a town. He was in Stalag 4B. They went to Mühlberg and then they walked down the Elbe River I think it was and they got to Strehla. There was a passenger ferry. They walked across the passenger, they came across on the passenger ferry. They’d been in the camp for two weeks before the Russians, after the Russians released them. They then walked them down to Riesa where they were camped. Most of them were camped in a German camp there and then they just started, they were only just starting negotiations to release them to the Americans and the British so everybody started doing their own thing and walking off. So —
DE: Yeah.
SW: So dad went with three people and they walked to, from Riesa to Kalbitz and they were, they stayed with a German family overnight who washed their clothes and gave them lots of food and whatever and then they started walking towards Vurzen which is on the River Mulde, M U L D E and they were picked up by a Russian. And then on the way they picked up another Russian on the way. They got out at Vurzen, walked across the river, walked down to Trebsen and then were picked up in Trebsen by some Yanks and taken to Halle. They stayed in Halle overnight. Then they were transferred to Brussels. Spent the night there and then were transferred back to England. So —
DE: Yeah.
SW: My son, and when we got to Strehla we came, we came from Trebsen up to Vurzen and then along to Kalbitz. Then to Riesa and I got a bit confused. Dad swam in the swimming pool in Riesa. I thought it was the swimming pool at Mühlberg but anyway. I looked in Mühlberg and couldn’t find a swimming pool so that was that. And we went to Mühlberg and at Strehla there was a passenger ferry. So my son and I got into the passenger and drove backwards and forwards there and then we drove, by this time there is now a bridge on the western side of the river that actually goes into Mühlberg. So we went into Mühlberg, drove around a little bit because dad went into Mühlberg. From his diaries he went into Mühlberg a bit helping with the Red Cross parcels. So he would go in to there from the camp. Then we went to the camp and the camp, in the camp the, the Russians that were in the camp weren’t under the Geneva Convention so they were in a separate area of the camp. They were treated appallingly. So when the Russians came in and took over they put the Germans in the camp and treated them appallingly etcetera. So when we got to the camp the paths were all there. No buildings were left but there were the bases of the buildings.
DE: Yeah.
SW: And there was a pond and there were signs everywhere. There were seats you could sit on. There were signs everywhere with three levels so one was all in German but one was about when the Allied prisoners of war were there and it was about when the Germans were prisoners of war and then there was a bit of just general history about whatever. So we managed to walk around all that. So you know, so I did that and as I say I hadn’t really read through everything in the parcel properly so I missed the fact that the swimming pool he swam in was actually in Riesa and that the town where the grave was was in this other town. Yeah. So I missed an opportunity a little bit then but that’s ok.
DE: You’ve just muted yourself I think, Sue.
SW: Have I? Oh God. I didn’t mean to.
[pause]
SW: Hello, is that better? No.
DE: No.
SW: Hang on. There you go. Can you hear me now? No. [pause] I don’t know. Hang on.
DE: I don’t know what you did.
SW: Let me, let me just see. Oh hang on. Up here. Microphone up here. I think it might. Here we go. That’s done.
DE: That’s better. Yeah.
SW: That’s better. Sorry.
DE: That’s alright.
SW: Yeah. So, I then, then I didn’t really do a lot more about it. But Covid came along and in Covid I thought I really need to make a photo book of all of this and then I started doing, no actually before Covid I did a lot more research and I found that 460 Squadron was an Australian squadron within the RAF and there’s not much online about 460 Squadron. But because dad was in 550 Squadron for a matter of a week which he didn’t consider he was 550 Squadron. On ANZAC Day he would always go back to 460 Squadron. But I did find a lot of information and I found a link through to Tom Collier who was the only other Australian on the crew and he, in his description it talks about what time the plane took off, what height it was when it got hit, who actually shot him down and I actually looked up and I have found the man who shot him down. I’ve got a picture of him. I’ve got several stories of him. I then, I went back to England. This was before Covid. I went back to England again and I went to the, I’ve just got it written down here. I went to [pause - pages turning.] Hang on [pause] So yeah, in two thousand, it was about 2018 I went to, ah one of things I found in here was a letter from Siegfried Sassoon the World War One poet and dad had —
DE: Yeah. I was going to ask about that. Yeah.
SW: Yeah. Dad, according to his diaries had, had, he wrote to Siegfried and Siegfried wrote back to him although and there is no Siegfried books in the house. I’ve never seen a Siegfried book. Never knew this but the reason, what piqued my interest was there was a letter written in 1947 from dad, to dad from Siegfried Sassoon saying, ‘Thank you very much for the food parcel. I’m really glad you survived in, “The Weald of Youth,” which is the second part of his autobiography, is in the position, “In your position the parcel was very warm and welcome and we were very and we were in more of a mess this year than we were last year and everyone is blaming the government and probably they’re right and now I’m working on a book about George Meredith who was very well known back in 1909 —’ or whatever but now he isn’t, “And I’m finding it a little less taxing than my usual prose books.” And I was thinking wow this is really an amazing letter. So I did some research and found the largest Siegfried Sassoon Collection in the world is at Cambridge University Library. So I contacted them and the curator, John Wells got back to me and said what an amazing letter it was and so I said to him, because my son said to me, I said, ‘What do we do with it?’ And he said, ‘Oh, can’t we keep it?’ And I said, ‘No. It’ll go in somebody’s drawer or on one person's wall. It will get lost.’ I said, ‘This is really important.’ So I decided to donate it to this library. So in 2018 my cousin and I from London drove up and we were shown into a room and all Siegfried’s books were around and open and it was just amazing and so that letter is now there and I feel really good about that. I feel like it’s available for lots of people in the world.
DE: Yeah.
SW: And I had a trip before that. I had gone with my cousin and we’d gone to a [pause] there’s an Air Force, there’s an airport somewhere in Lincoln. Is it east somewhere where there is a Lancaster bomber you can get a ride on?
DE: East Kirkby.
SW: East Kirkby. Yeah. So, I did maybe, maybe 2015 or something maybe I was there. I went with Jeannie to there and had a look at their display about Bomber Command. Didn’t get on the aeroplane because I didn’t know you could and you had to book a year or so in advance so I didn’t get that. And then in 2018 we actually went to the IBCC for the first time and my cousin took me there.
DE: Yes.
SW: So that was really good. I sent in all the jpegs there. I had done some research online and I had found a website called Pacific Victory Roll and there is this amazing piece all about dad and he was interviewed and he describes what happened to him. He stood up in the astrodome, saw the plane was in flames, took his helmet off, put his parachute on and called out of course to the people. Turned around and walked to the front of the plane. Lost consciousness. Two hours later he was on the ground with his parachute in a tree. Didn’t even remember pulling that. And so this amazing article and it had two different sections and it had the word, “more” and you had to click on it to go to the next section. Well, for some stupid reason I didn’t print the second part out which had a really important part of the story which I hadn’t heard anywhere else. Anyway, last year when I was doing the book I wrote to John Wells because I realised that I had sent that link to him and he had written back and said that he downloaded it and put it on the file. So I said, ‘Jim have you still got that?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ So he sent it. So that’s in the book now. So I’ve got that whole thing in the book. So it’s just, I just, and I went to the Air Museum. Oh where was it? [pause] I went to the Air Museum in London. One of the Air Museums in London. I can’t think which one it is and, I’ll find it in a minute when I’m going through. So, and they told me to go to the Archives, the National Archives in Twickenham. My cousin lives just near there so that was easy. I went there and I held in my hands the paperwork that dad filled out when he came back from being a prisoner of war. They hadn’t digitised it at that point so I actually had that. Held that in my hands.
DE: Yeah.
SW: So I took photos of that and that’s in the book as well. And then came Covid and that was when I really looked and really thought I should make a book. And then I found Hans Meissner who was the German who shot him down and I started making the book. And a very good friend of ours, he’s a procurer at the State Library of Victoria and he looked at the book and he said, ‘Wow, Sue,’ he said, ‘That’s just an amazing book. One of the best, you know amateur books that I’ve seen. We would take that into the Library.’ So I thought oh gosh. So then I sat down and I re-read everything and made sure everything was in order and that everything was in the book properly and got it a little bit more professional than what it was. It’s still not professional but its, its not bad and I did it mainly for my family but it became this big thing. And yeah so basically that’s what happened. And then I’ve told people about the book and I’ve been asked to talk. I’ve talked at the Air Force Museum in Ballarat where he trained to be a wireless operator. I’ve talked at the, my father was very important in the town of Minyip which is a little town two hundred miles northwest of Melbourne. I’ve talked to their Historical Society. I’ve talked at Minyip at the ANZAC Day and yeah it’s just sort of rocked and rolled from there.
DE: Yeah.
SW: Yeah. So you know. It’s been amazing.
DE: I think what’s really wonderful about the book is you let the sources, your father’s letters and diaries do all the work. It’s not, It’s not so much your voice its you’ve just made everything —
SW: Oh, I know.
DE: Very much available.
SW: Yeah. I didn’t want my voice there. I wanted it to be my father’s voice and then when I started giving the book to family members in 2023 they went, ‘Oh my God. What does he say here? I can’t read this.’ So I thought oh ok. Each, if you had said to me at the beginning I had to transcribe everything I would have gone oh no that’s [laughs] but it was, it sort of grew on me and so I decided yeah I’ve really got to transcribe this. So I ended up transcribing all of his writing. All of the letters.
DE: Yeah.
SW: And so I’ve got a transcription and that was really interesting. There were things and when I transcribed it I let it speak in his voice. He wasn’t a very good speller. He, you know, he wrote a little bit in code sometimes. I basically transcribed it so you could read how he wrote it but I, Laurie my friend from the Library said, ‘If you’re going to add something to it you’ve got to put square brackets.’ So I put square brackets in blue and he said, ‘Oh, you don’t have to do blue.’ I said, ‘It’s not librarians who are going to read this Laurie.’ [laughs] I said, ‘It’s going to be normal people.’ And I wrote at the top of the page in blue, “Everything in the square blue brackets is either interpreted or an addition by Sue Williams.” So that people —
DE: Yeah.
SW: Could see. So for instance dad had a girlfriend, Marjorie Ball before he left and in the first year he trained in Australia for a year and he would say, “I went to the Ball’s last night.” Well, so at the beginning when dad said that I wrote in brackets Marjorie Ball was his girlfriend. So that people reading that would then know every time he said something like that he was actually going to a person’s place.
DE: Yes.
SW: Rather than going out to a dance or going to, you know [laughs] sport or something. You know.
DE: Yeah.
SW: Like that. And so there’s only I managed to look up a lot of, a lot of the names like he called a Wimpie which is a Wellington fighter isn’t it? Something like that.
DE: Wellington. Yeah.
SW: Yeah. So I, I tried to interpret a lot of stuff like that. Like for instance my nieces and nephews who are in their forties said, ‘Mucked? What does mucked mean?’ Because dad would say, “Mucked in the morning.” And I said he just mucked around. Did odd jobs here or read a book or did, he just mucked around. ‘Oh,’ they go. They had no idea what mucked meant and I didn’t even think to put that, an explanation for that. But anyway, so, so but the two things that I looked up and for some reason my search engine wouldn’t look up for was he said he dobied in the morning. This was in the prisoner of war camp. And so I contacted Canberra, the big place in Canberra, the big War Memorial in Canberra, got to their Research Centre and they said that a doby wallah was, in India a doby wallah was an Indian who did the washing for the Army. So he was obviously doing his washing in the morning when he dobied. I didn’t know that.
DE: Yeah.
SW: And then talked about an invalid or an invalid. Now, he was, he was very involved in sorting the Red Cross boxes and he would go into the town and help bring them back and all that and he’d say, “An invalid load came in today.” So they must have had these small little trucks that used to be originally were designed to carry invalids in hospitals from place to place but they were using them to transport the boxes. So you know they were the two words that tripped me. I had a bit of a guess with the invalid, a doby I just wasn’t sure at all. So it made sense when —
DE: Yeah.
SW: They said that. So, you know. And when I read it through now there’s still some mistakes that I made and there’s still probably a couple of things that I should have explained about but you know it is what it is.
DE: Yeah but it’s complete and it’s finished.
SW: Yes.
DE: And if you strive for perfection you never finish anything do you?
SW: No. And I did glaringly. He landed in Glasgow when he went by boat to England and I spelt it Glascow instead of gow [laughs] and I didn’t pick that one up. Never mind.
DE: Oh well. That happens.
SW: Yeah.
DE: It’s always after you’ve pressed send as well that you spot the mistakes. Yeah.
SW: So basically that was my journey and it all, it all came bits and bobs and bits and bobs and then Covid was an instigator to doing something for my family and I thought well I’ll do that first for all of the family and, and it just, you know. Then Laurie saw it and then it snowballed. Oh, and the other thing that I did too because dad hid a lot of what happened to him in the prisoner of war camp in his letters home. I’ve read all his letters. They are very bland. They are very much about what letters he’s received, that he played hockey or that he went to a play because there was quite an active social life in that place in the camp. But he didn’t talk about a lot and he talked, he was transported between, between a couple of camps in the beginning. He didn’t describe how or why that was done. And I’ve got there’s three people, three people that he was in the prisoner of war camp with who have written books about their experiences and one, one of them was Geoff Taylor who’s an author and he’s written a book called, “A piece of cake.” There’s a couple of other people and then I found a book called, “Survival at Stalag IVB,” which is by Tony Vercoe and reading those books gave me the back story to a lot of what happened to dad that he didn’t want to tell his family. He wrote more in his diaries than he did —
DE: You’ve muted yourself again.
SW: Oh golly. Have I really? Sorry. Put that out of the way. Yeah. So, so yeah. So I’ve got a lot of that. So for instance when he was moved from place to place he was moved like the Jews. In cattle cars. That was standing up like for eighteen hours. Twenty four hours. Thirty six hours. Though they were given some, a Red Cross box while they were doing that but he didn’t mention that and he mentions that when they got to the camp that he was deloused and all of that. Well, all of these other people say that when they were deloused their heads were shaved. Now, dad didn’t mention his head was shaved but the [pause] but what happened was that when the Germans left and the Russians came dad and his friends went into the offices and rescued their photos so they’d got all their forms and their photos and in all of those photos dad has still got his hair. So maybe he didn’t get his. I have so many questions for my father. So anyway you know you can only —
DE: It sounds like you’ve done a fantastic job filling in a lot of the blanks and answering a lot of the questions for yourself though so —
SW: Yeah. Well, it’s really interesting. My ten year old grandson is autistic and he just adores the stories of my grandfather and he, I gave each of my grandchildren a copy of the book and he reads it quite frequently and when he came down from Brisbane last year my daughter said to him, ‘What do you want to do when you’re down in Melbourne?’ And on the back of the book you can see that when my, my dad worked in an office for two years before he left school early because his dad made him. Worked in an office. Hated every single minute. Went to war. Decided when he was there that he wanted to go on a farm because his father had been on a farm. His grandfather had been on a farm but his father hated it and it affected his health. He didn’t want to be on the farm. Dad wanted to be and his father didn’t want to help him get on the farm because he didn’t like the life and dad decided while he was a prisoner of war that’s what he wanted to do. So he ended up in a small town called Minyip which was right near where my grandfather had a farm and he worked on the farm of a friend of my grandfathers and that’s where he met my mother. He ended up staying in that small town. Became a leading light in the town. He was on every committee and, and he was really keen on swimming. He swam a lot and he wanted me to swim a lot and my sister and we only had an old [unclear] swimming pool and he worked very hard and got a proper swimming pool. When he died they named the swimming pool after him posthumously. And so when my grandson was coming down he said the one thing he wanted to do was swim in his grandfather’s pool. So we had —
DE: Oh wonderful.
SW: So we had to go up so he could swim in the swimming pool that was named after his grandfather. So —
DE: Yeah.
SW: Yeah.
DE: Lovely.
SW: Yeah. So that was really good.
DE: Yeah. I guess the swimming pool was named after him because of what he did in the community rather than what he did in Bomber Command.
SW: Nothing to do with the war because he never told anybody. And it’s interesting because when I went back on ANZAC Day this year I went back and gave the talk. Several people came up to me and they said, ‘We had no idea of your father’s war history. We had no idea he went through all of that.’ And a couple of them said you know when your, because my mother after dad died she about three years later she left the town. She was able to sell. They ran school buses and different things and the government agreed that she was allowed to sell the business. So she sold the business, moved to Melbourne and died a year later. But so they left within three years. The town was bereft of them and a couple of people said to me, ‘My God, this town has never recovered from the deaths of your parents.’ They were just on every committee. They were there for everybody you know. On call twenty four hours a day. So that’s why it was named after him. So —
DE: Why do you think he didn’t talk about it? About the war?
SW: Because he didn’t like the way human beings treated each other in the war and he hated it and he didn’t want us to be exposed to that. He didn’t want us to know about that. The horrors of war. Yeah. That’s basically what it was. When I asked him he said , ‘You don’t need to know that. It’s not worthwhile. It’s behind me. It’s gone now.’ Whereas one of his friends who’s written one of these books that I’ve got never stopped talking about it [laughs] He just talked non-stop, you know. But dad just didn’t. Just didn’t want to.
DE: I think that's to do with the different ways that different people deal with —
SW: Yeah.
DE: With that kind of, those kind of events. Yeah.
SW: Yeah. And he, yeah he really struggled. He really struggled in the prisoner of war camp from reading his diary. He, his parents were quite religious. They were Presbyterians and he had, he was involved with the church and the Youth Group and all of that back in Melbourne. And then he used to go to church a bit in England in the year he was training in England and then when he was in the camp he used to go to all those and in fact in the back of the diary that he had there he wrote a lot of the sermons and things out and he was actually quite depressing in the camp. He had a lot of ill health and that continued on after the war as well and yeah, so yeah, he just [pause] yeah. He just didn’t want us to know about the terrible things that happened. He was a kind and gentle man and he wouldn’t have hurt anybody and he didn’t like what people were doing. He did make some comment when the Germans had left they were able to go out into the countryside and get more food and they got some food and they brought back pork and he said that was a disaster. For one of the first meats you go back to eating properly is pork and he got very sick from that. But he said he didn’t like the way the Russians treated the German women and everything. That was as much as he said but you can surmise from that what, how the Russians treated the Germans.
DE: Sure.
SW: Yeah. So, yeah, and he had this girlfriend. This girlfriend that he had it’s really interesting for me, probably not for anyone else but reading his diaries and reading the comments in his letters that it was very up and down. Even in the year in Australia before he left it was, “Oh had a terrible fight. I think it’s over with Marj.” And then the next day, “Thank goodness it’s good now.” And that that proceeded all the way through his diaries and some of these letters. When he was in England and he kept on meeting these other women and about four of the five women he met were called Joan and that was my mother’s name. It’s really [laughs] he said, “Oh not another Joan.” He goes [laughs] So, you know. Yeah. So, so it was a bit of a rock and roll thing and the reason that he went to Henley in Arden is because my grandparents as I said lived on a farm in Rapunyup which is a little town near Minyip and there was a minister there in the first, and in the First World War a friend of theirs. In the First World War he went to England, was a minister to the troops there and then stayed after the war. When dad went to England they had kept a correspondence with him and he went. He met him within two weeks of arriving there in England and he took him to Henley in Arden, introduced him to Dragon who then introduced him to Mrs Leake and then he had a home away from home. So if he had twelve hours off he would go there.
DE: Yeah.
SW: He just, it was just his home away from home. He just, it was his solace to go there. Yeah. And what I really —
DE: Yeah. That would be really important.
SW: Yeah. From some of these other books a lot of the guys when they had their time off they would go as a group to a pub at a seaside town or something whereas dad would go to Henley. Although he did have a cousin in London. He went to her a couple of times as well, you know. Yeah.
DE: Yeah.
SW: So interesting.
DE: Yeah. I’m, sorry I’m just looking at my notes.
SW: That’s alright. And after, and once the plane went down his parents sent food parcels to the families of the other crew members throughout the war. They sent food parcels —
DE: Oh really?
SW: To them. Yeah. And then when dad got back to England he went and visited every, each of them. Yeah. So —
DE: Because he was the only survivor. Right.
SW: He was the only survivor. Yeah. So [pause] so it was, it’s been a really all-consuming interesting journey and getting deeper and deeper in layers. It’s like the peeling of an onion you know.
DE: Sure.
SW: Yeah.
DE: Yeah. Yeah.
SW: And, and just saying that when, when Laurie said that the book would go to the State Library I said, ‘Well, I want to talk to the person.’ Because the State Library here is very interested in World War Two and I said, ‘I want to talk to the person in charge of the World War Two collection. I don’t want to just donate my book and off it goes.’ Blah blah, and Laurie said to me, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘We don’t let everyone talk to this guy.’ He said, ‘But if you want to you can write an email with why you want to talk to him.’ So I wrote a four page email with a list of all the stuff that I had and my son John said to me, ‘Oh, for God’s sake mum. He’s not going to want to meet you now.’ [laughs] And, and I said, ‘Well, Laurie thinks it’s a wonderful email.’ And then the guy said yes he wanted to meet me. It turns out this guy who was head of Collections, his dad was a wireless operator in a Lancaster bomber but in the Pacific arena and he wanted to write his own dad’s story so he was really keen to see me. So when he saw me at the end of the hour of me talking and going through the book he said, ‘What are you going to do with all this stuff?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. Someone said I shouldn’t send it to Canberra to the War Museum there. It will just get lost.’ And he said, ‘He was Victorian wasn’t he?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Well, ok. His home is here. If you want to we will curate it all.’ So we’ve now donated it all to them and it’s now curated and available for people to look at. So —
DE: Right. So the originals are there.
SW: The originals are there.
DE: And you sent, you sent the IBCC Digital Archive.
SW: Digital Archive.
DE: Digital copies.
SW: Yes. Yes.
DE: Which we will eventually make public.
SW: Yes, I know.
DE: Yeah. Yeah.
SW: Yeah. Yeah. So —
DE: So what, what do you feel about the way that the Second World War is remembered in Australia and in particular the way Bomber Command is remembered in Australia?
SW: Well, it was really interesting because in 2015 I actually discovered the, that new War Memorial in 2012 in Green Park. You know that War Memorial. And then I started looking into that and how Robin Gibb from the Bee Gees was involved and all the rest of it. And then I started reading different things and realised that Bomber Command was actually quite reviled after the war because of their carpet bombing and that they didn’t actually have a special medal. Is that correct? For them. And it wasn’t until I found this piece, I’ve got it somewhere in my records that was written about the story about in the early 2000s where a group of airmen got together and said enough is enough. We’ve got to remember these guys. They turned the tide of the war and they need to be remembered. So that was when they started the committee and that’s when Robin Gibb got involved in all of that. So, people here are unaware of that. Very unaware of that. When I give about a thirty minute talk on all these. I’ve done it three times and people are just totally unaware of Bomber Command and its role in the war and and what happened to them. So I say in my talk that they were reviled. Not, not dissimilar to the Vietnam vets because we had, you wouldn’t have Vietnam vets in the UK I don’t think but we do and they were very reviled in the US and here when they came back.
DE: Yeah.
SW: It was a very unpopular war and they were reviled when they came back and they, they had it really tough and so I say that in the talk. You know, not, and that gives people an idea of what the situation was. So I mean the Second World War we, we have ANZAC Day every year at, that’s where all the wars are remembered but particularly World War Two I think.
DE: Yeah.
SW: And a lot of people’s children and grandchildren are starting to march on ANZAC Day. So it’s still quite a huge event. Yeah. So —
DE: Yeah.
SW: You know, and there’s still ANZAC. There are still RSL Clubs and all that around the place so they have you can go and get a meal there and buy a drink and they have the poker machines there and all of that. So the RSL is still alive and going on. Yeah. So, yeah and as I say apparently the State Library are very big into World War Two and now the War Memorial in Canberra too. If you go there they have a huge section on all the wars including World War Two.
DE: Yeah. But with World War Two in Australia it’s mostly the war against the Japanese and the Pacific Campaign that’s remembered rather than Europe.
SW: That’s really, no I don’t necessarily think so. But then perhaps I’m coloured because my dad was in Europe. But a lot of my friends, their fathers, their fathers were in Europe as well. So I think there still is that but I mean I just, I just say all the time thank God he was in, dad was in a German prisoner of war camp rather than a Japanese one. He probably would have died.
DE: Yeah.
SW: That was pretty horrible —
DE: Sure.
SW: Camps.
DE: Do you know, do you know why he volunteered for the, for the Air Force?
SW: Well, it’s interesting because his sister wrote in her 90s a few pages about dad and she says [pause] here it is, it’s probably better in this thing here. I can read this better. So sometimes there are two different stories about things but [pause – pages turning] This letter. But she basically says that he actually wanted to join up with, oh here it is. So, she says and some people called him Jack. In Australia we love giving nicknames so people called John are often called Jack. So some people know him as Jack. So she says, “Jack was bitterly disappointed he could not join five other close friends who joined the Victorian Scottish Regiment on deadline 1942, 1st of January 1942 because he was not eighteen until the 14th of January 1942.” So he might not have actually even been in the Air Force. He, whatever the Victorian Scottish Regiment, sounds more like an Army thing to me. So he joined the RAF and doesn’t really say why. He never really said why he joined the RAF but that was another thing that people didn’t know in my talk and that I’ve since found out that you know all the people in Bomber Command were volunteers.
DE: Sure.
SW: Yeah. So you know so he volunteered and I don’t know I suppose he just came from a family who believed in community and he went to Scotch College and he was in the Cadets in Scotch College and [pause] yeah. He didn’t want to fly I don’t think. I don’t think he ever wanted to fly. He wouldn’t have been able to fly. I don’t think he passed the medical for flying as such but —
DE: As a pilot.
SW: As a pilot.
DE: Right.
SW: Yeah.
DE: Yeah.
SW: So yeah. So I don’t know. It doesn’t say anything in his diaries. I don’t recall him talking about why he chose to do that and how he got chosen to do what he was doing. Yeah. So —
DE: Yeah.
SW: As I say lots of questions dad. Wish you were here.
DE: Yeah.
SW: Yeah. So, but anyway —
DE: Yeah. I think I’ve got a page full of ticks so I think we’ve —
SW: You’ve covered everything pretty much.
DE: We’ve covered everything. Yeah. Is there anything else that you want to tell me that —
SW: No. Looking at my notes here. No. He [pause] he had some, he had opinions about all the different places that he went to. He went to about four different places in England. Different training places and you know he’d say, “Oh, this one is the pits. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re bloody useless.’ Stop it dad [laughs] but it’s in my transcription so I can’t remember exactly what it was.
DE: Sure. Yeah.
SW: Yeah. No, I’m just. I’m just trying to think [pause] No. I can’t. He was just a really lovely lovely man and when he died the whole town went into mourning and there were so many people at the funeral that they had to rig up some speakers for outside the church so that people could hear. And that was the other thing. My mother had recorded on a tape the funeral service and when I got back to England —
DE: Oh right.
SW: The tape was blank and there wasn’t a copy of it.
DE: Oh no.
SW: So I didn’t find out for seven weeks and by the time I got back to Australia it was eleven weeks because I had four weeks travelling around seeing different people and things. By eleven weeks it was all over Rover for everyone else and you know I was just devastated.
DE: Yeah.
SW: It’s taken me years and years and years really to get over that. So this —
DE: And —
SW: This has been really very cathartic for me I think. This has been how I’ve managed to overcome what happened.
DE: Yeah.
SW: Yeah. And mourn for him.
DE: Yeah.
SW: And, and do the right. I feel like I’ve told his story and, yeah.
DE: Yeah.
SW: So anyway —
DE: Make sure he is remembered. Yeah.
SW: Yes. Yeah. So I don’t know. I don’t know that there is anything else really but I mean he wasn’t, he didn’t he didn’t try and escape. He didn’t do any heroics or anything but he was always there for people. The one, actually the one thing that was really interesting and that’s what they guy at the State Library said was really interesting for historians were that he had twelve flights with 460 squadron and then the thirteenth was with 550 when the plane went down and for the twelve flights with 460 Squadron he wrote personal notes as well as his diary and I, they’re just you know really really quite interesting. For instance like the first one he says, “Gardening off Bordeaux.” That was where they were just dropping —
DE: Mines.
SW: Mines.
DE: Yeah.
SW: And he said, ‘Two thousand feet, six by fifteen hundred pound mines preparation all very rushed. Supper very good. Fried egg, chips, bacon and tomatoes.” Now, my father talks about food a lot in a lot of his writing and my son said to me, ‘Why does he talk about his food?’ And I said, ‘Because my father loved eating and of course in the war the food was crap, you know.’
DE: Yeah.
SW: And he would say in his letters, “Oh, I’m so looking forward to going home. I’m really jealous of all the fresh fruit and vegetables you were talking about that you’re growing in your gardens.” You know. Like he’d had two, two tomatoes in a year and you know stuff like that. It’s just whatever and he says, “Flying ration chocolate, Horlicks, glucose and gun. Gunners had new guns. “Ted’s remark, ‘I think they will work.’ Final briefing not very much. Out to the kite with everything by 21:45. Cs leader checked everything over with me. Had a smoke. Took off 22:40. Shaky do.” That was another thing my nephew said to me, ‘What does, “shaky do” mean?’ I said, ‘Use your imagination darling.’ Him and this plane and it takes off. It’s a bit wonky you know.
DE: Yeah.
SW: “Flew south to Selsey Bill and then cross Channel in France to Bay of B which I’m not sure what it is. Not at all exciting. Wakey W pills useless.” I presume he was saying wakey wakey pills. They must have given them something —
DE: Sure.
SW: To keep them awake. “Ran down the coast to pinpoint. Very clear. No flak at us. Easy trip back. Nothing to report. Very tired. Landed at Wickenby by mistake. 12 Squadron. Bed at Binbrook by 8:30.” So each flight he wrote stuff like that you know. Steak and chips. On one flight he didn’t get any food at all. He was quite upset about that.
DE: Oh crikey.
SW: Yeah. And one, one flight, his eighth flight he actually got a piece of shrapnel through his leg and had a week off so he says [pause] no his night flight they were going on a bombing raid to Hanover and he’d written the first part of this before. He said, “Everything seemed to start in a rush after lunch. “I went out to B2 with kit and found out that ‘T’ —’ in inverted commas, ‘Was at 14:30 and a briefing at 15:15. Briefed for two targets this eventually being the chosen one. Take off in broad daylight.” And then about an hour after he was hit he writes, “Rather quiet trip in. I was very busy on Tinsel.” Which is the transmission jamming stuff they called Windows I think but, “Came into astrodome for the target area. It was very light and I suddenly saw an SE.” I presume single engine fighter, “On our tail slightly to starboard. I shouted starboard quarter and saw tracer and felt a mule kick me on my left thigh. My leg doubled up and I watched the bastards swing around to port quarter and beaming away and then my right leg gave away. I felt at least one hole in my pants and I asked Peter for a dressing. It hurt like hell and I couldn’t put the dressing on. Frank helped. Later I changed the dressing and fixed it ok myself. Wrapped it in my white sweater and kept it as warm as possible. I felt a little weak and a little lost.” Right. Stuff like that. So —
DE: Yes, its —
SW: There was on one of them they were over a target and the bomb doors hadn’t been opened. The pilot said, ‘The bomb doors aren’t open.’ ‘Oh bugger.’ And he, and he opened it. So dad repeats that conversation you know and its really quite interesting to see all that.
DE: Yeah.
SW: And then in his crew dad and Tom the pilot were the Aussie crew members and Tom turned twenty one a week before they crashed and dad was, dad turned twenty one after they crashed but Tom Collier, Collie was his name. I knew he was from Queensland. I’ve been working with a girl called [Merryn] Collier for years and last year I said, ‘Would you happen to have a relative who was a pilot in a Lancaster bomber in the war and he died?’ And she said, ‘Oh, Uncle Tom.’
DE: Yeah. That’s incredible.
SW: It’s bizarre isn’t it?
DE: Yeah.
SW: Just, so little things like that. Yeah.
DE: How does it make you feel reading those descriptions of the operations?
SW: I don’t know. I can’t believe that they, how scary it must have been and how cold they were. They did have some kind of warming because he said at one point he had to go and swap the glasses of one of the guys because they kept on fogging up because half the heating wasn’t working and I wasn’t sure if the plane was heated or if they were wearing something that was connected to a battery that heated them. I don’t know about that.
DE: It’s a bit of both. If you were the wireless operator and the navigator you were quite close to the heat vents. The gunners they had heated suits.
SW: Oh right. Ok. Yeah.
DE: Yeah.
SW: Well, yeah. I don’t know how they just got in the plane and went off because of the attrition rate. I mean it was forty percent or something wasn’t it who didn’t come back. It was a huge huge number wasn’t it that didn’t come back. So they would go out wondering whether it was their turn and I think it’s incredibly brave. Brave or stupid. I mean they didn’t really have any choice did they?
DE: No. No.
SW: Really amazing. So and they would go off together and its really interesting because in Binbrook, I’ve been in Binbrook. Now, where is it? There’s a, there’s a pub. When he was at Binbrook there was a pub that they used to go to which I can’t remember. One of the, one of the other guys who wrote this book, he lives near me, his father was Gordon [Stuke?] and he was in the camp with dad and there was a drinking hole that they used to all go to. One of the pubs. Now, dad never mentions that. When he goes into the local towns he goes to the movies, to the café, or swimming. Yet when he goes to Henley in Arden he goes to the pubs. He goes to the Bluebell and he goes to the Nags Head and he goes to the White House and all of that. But it seemed, and he was very pally with Peter Lee who was the navigator and they used to often, he ended up getting a bike and they used to often go and ride around these towns and they’d meet up with a girl in a café somewhere and all of that. So, it was, it was interesting to me that he didn’t go, he didn’t write about going to the pub much except they went in for Tom’s twenty first a week before and another night they went in. Yeah. So don’t know. Yes. I just think it’s quite amazing and when I look at my son and think about him when he was nineteen and twenty I cannot imagine him in that circumstance. I think in that day and age you grew up very quickly.
DE: Yeah. Yeah.
SW: It was just, yeah. Very scary. Yeah. I just couldn’t imagine my son doing that at that age.
DE: Yeah. It’s incredible isn’t it?
SW: But anyway and I do believe [pause] I’ll tell you a funny story. He did meet this girl Joan at Binbrook and when he got shot through the legs she came, she wrote him a letter and she sent him a photo and she came visiting and they used to go out to dancing and to the movies and go to church together and all of that. And when he got shot down she worked on the base and she must have let Mrs Leake know. Yes, in Henley in Arden and anyway she eventually wrote to dad’s mum and I heard from Auntie Edna, dad’s sister apparently grandma wrote back to her and told her in no uncertain terms that he had a girlfriend back in Australia and he was going home.
DE: Oh dear.
SW: Which was very funny. Dad never told us that but there was lots of to-ing and fro-ing about getting engaged and all of that sort of thing and he came home and he did get engaged to her but then two years later he’d been in Minyip for a year or a year and a half and I don’t think she wanted to go and farm. Her father owned a business. He wanted dad to work in the business and dad didn’t want to do that and by that time dad had met mum and —
DE: Right.
SW: He broke it off.
DE: Yeah.
SW: The families had a meeting at the local. One of the local pubs in Minyip [laughs] I’ve got that in the diary. So, yeah.
DE: Crikey.
SW: So —
DE: Yeah.
SW: All very interesting.
DE: Was it his time in the POW camp that made him decide that’s what he wanted to do for —
SW: Yes, he talked to a lot of people who had been on farms in Australia and there were a couple of books he managed to read. He just, he just wanted to get away from the city and lots of people and different things and just go on to the land. That’s what his heart was telling him whereas his friend Sandy who was the one who was in London when I went there in 1974 he, all he wanted to do was go back and become a doctor so he could help people. So you know each person came back with a different desire to do stuff. Yeah.
DE: Yeah.
SW: So dad never got to be on a farm because he ended up taking over my mother’s parent’s business because they, her father got sick and he got Parkinson’s and they ended up going to the US to try and find a cure for it and dad and mum were left there and they eventually took over the business so —
DE: Oh, ok.
SW: So he dealt a lot with farmers but he didn’t actually get on a farm.
DE: Yeah.
SW: Yeah. So [pause] yeah. He could have got funding from the government but for some reason he wasn’t keen to do that. He said ‘I don’t know that I really want government assistance. I’d like to see some other way of getting on to a farm.’ His dad probably could have helped him but didn’t want to.
DE: Yeah. Didn’t want to.
SW: Yeah.
DE: Yeah.
SW: So anyway that’s fine. He lived a good life for the time that he was with us so —
DE: Yeah and was greatly loved by all the people of Minyip.
SW: Yeah. By everyone. Yeah. They all loved him. So —
DE: That’s fantastic. I think unless there is anything else you can think of we’ll wind the, we’ll wind interview up now. If you want to press stop on your phone.
SW: I will. Hang on. I’ll do that.
DE: And I’ll do it on mine as well and then hopefully we’ve got it.