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Victoria--Mount Martha
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Mount Martha [place]
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1041/11414/AMunroKW160522.2.mp3
b281050359604d4fa350d7a3b662ec59
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Title
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Munro, Kenneth William
K W Munro
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. An oral history interview with Kenneth Munro (Royal Air Force) and seven photographs. He flew operations as a night fighter navigator with 456 Squadron flying Mosquitos.
The collection was catalogued by Barry Hunter IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2016-05-23
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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.
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Munro, KW
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Transcription
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KM: I was not in Bomber Command. You know that of course.
AP: Well, you were, you were Mosquitoes.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: That’s close enough.
KM: Night fighters, is it? As Bob, he wasn’t, wasn’t the CO. He was next door to him. And the fellow Baz Howard, he came from Queensland and he, we were down at Bradwell Bay. Down Essex. Down there, and he said one day, we were all sitting down in the mess down there [coughs] and he said, I’m going up to see a friend up in Yorkshire.’ And Peter said, ‘Well, I’ll go with you in a Mosquito,’ and he said, ‘No. I’ll do it on my own.’ And he went up there and saw his mate and came back and he got just about back to Bradwell Bay and one of the motors conked out. And so just coming in and just landing it because they were putting all the things that went into the North Sea and taking them home and putting them in there and he, he went down and he said he couldn’t get in in a tight turn because one motor was gone. So he went around again and about just as he got over the, what’s it called, the Black Sea I think it is, and all of a sudden the other one went as well and he just sailed along. We could see him. He hit the water bumped his head on his forehead here and sank in about five feet of water. And we tried to get out because there was probably about sixty of us, probably a hundred guys from the [unclear] walk out to find him. But it was quite a big current was going like that and we couldn’t get out ourselves. Even if we turned the clocks off and walked and went out there but so he drowned in a Mosquito and just sank there. So it was a great shame but he was a very nice fellow too. But it just shows you. If you didn’t have to do the right thing and you didn’t get in the first landing, went around again. He should have just put it down.
AP: Regardless. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ll ask you about accidents and things later on I think. So, we may as well if you’re, we may as well kick off the proper interview.
KM: Yeah.
AP: And it’s recording now. I can see it jumping away there. So what I normally do I start with a little, a little spiel at the beginning. Just to sort of set the time and place.
KM: Yeah.
AP: And then I dive in. Ask a couple of questions. We’ll just have a chat.
KM: Yeah.
AP: For an hour, two hours. However long it takes.
KM: Yeah.
AP: Until you run out of stories.
KM: Yeah.
AP: Or one or the other of us begs for mercy. Right. So this interview for the International Bomber Command Centre is with Ken Munro who was a 456 Squadron Mosquito navigator during the Second World War. The interview is taking place at Ken’s place in Doncaster in Melbourne.
KM: Yeah. Applewood it’s called.
AP: Applewood it is called.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: That’s right. It is the 22nd of April err I’ll try again it’s the 22nd of May.
KM: Yeah.
AP: 2016. My name’s Adam Purcell. So Don, you’re not Don. You’re Ken. Sorry.
KM: Yeah.
AP: Ken, tell me something of your early life and what you were doing before the war.
KM: I got a job in nineteen, on the 24th of January 1938 in a chartered accountant’s called Wright and Roberts. Mr Wright died and it became MG Roberts. A well-known chartered accountant. And I stayed there until I got half way through the exams. Sort of half of the heart of it done and I was going to join the air force then. And he, Mr Roberts said why don’t you do your intermediate exam and then go? So I said ok. And by that time they didn’t want any more in the air force at that stage up in Russell Street and so I joined the Victorian Scottish. You know, you’ve probably seen my photograph over there. But I’ll show it to you later on but — so I was down there. Mount Martha was a beautiful spot down there in summertime. And after a while when the Yanks came in we had to go down to Back Beach at Ryde Down there. So we packed up. Went down there and we were there until about February I think it was. And then the word came around we were going to Fremantle and join the general who got out of Malaya. You know, when the Japs came. He got back to Australia. They didn’t like him doing that but he got there and we were to join up with him over there in the army at a place called Bushmead just out of Midland Junction there in Perth. They came around and there was a big van said, “Would you like to join the air force?” So I said, ‘Yes. I’d like to join the air force.’ So anyrate had to go, had to stay with the army. Went to Moura which is halfway to Geraldton. And at, finally they got in touch with me at Geraldton and said you can come down now to Busselton which is down near Bunbury. Down there. And so I was in the air force down there. And I was there probably for about probably about four or five weeks. I did a course down there.
AP: So that was your Initial Training School was it?
KM: Yeah. Then —
AP: Yeah.
KM: We went up to Pearce. You know, north of Perth. And we were there on guard you know. Still doing a job there. And there was Ralph White of course. Ralph White was the same thing. He was in the Victorian Scottish and so we got out. I came back to Somers in about [pause] September I think and then I did a course down there. Then Hubert Opperman, you know was our flight commander. He was, he was a teacher really. He was very good and he had another man called Ginger Markham, you know. And he came on top of the exercise we had to do and I was about second I think and he said. ‘We’re going to make you navigators.’ Which we didn’t want to be but [laughs] we sort of did well at arithmetic and that sort of thing. So anyrate, he said ‘Would you like to go to Canada?’ We both looked at one another. He said, ‘Well, if you’re not quite sure go to bed and sleep on it and come and tell me tomorrow.’ So we came back and said we’d like to go. So away we went and I went up to Bradwell, was it Bradwell Bay? Brad Park? Up there.
AP: Bradfield Park in Sydney.
KM: Yeah.
AP: Yeah.
KM: In to Sydney. And we were there. There for probably about three weeks and we were going on the Queen Elizabeth. And then somebody said there’s submarines outside there so they cancelled that and we had to stay back. Went across on the [pause] starting to forget things now. On an American very old steamer. What was it called? I’ve forgotten now. Anyway, we started from Sydney on, in March I think and it took us twenty eight days to get across the Pacific to — we were going to go to Vancouver but halfway across all of a sudden they could hear the throbbing of the motors going. Deathly quiet and the engines wouldn’t go and we were stuck there [laughs] about halfway across there. And anyway, they got them fixed up in about a day and we carried on. It took us twenty eight days to get us across the Pacific and they decided to go to San Francisco which, we had a day there. Bought a lot of chocolate and that sort of thing. People were very good there. The Yanks met us with cars and drove us all around ‘Frisco. And then we were only about a day and a half and then we got a train up to Vancouver which was marvellous. Beautiful scenery. And went to Vancouver and I think we stayed there a day or so and went out to Edmonton. That’s where I did my course there. So that was about all I think.
AP: Alright. Why did you want to be in the air force?
KM: Well, my father was in the barracks at St Kilda Road there and he knew the man who was the civil aviator. Sort of pilot you know. And he got this German three engine one with one there, one in the front sort of thing and he said, ‘Would any of your sons like to have a flight?’ I was about thirteen or fourteen and I said, ‘Yeah. I’d like to have a go at that.’ So a friend of mine who was, who was finally joined, [unclear] actually, he was a very clever bloke so he couldn’t join the forces because he was needed elsewhere. So, anyway we had all around Melbourne and he came back and he said to my father, he offered me to go down to Cerberus down there in the Mornington Peninsula as a cadet. I was about thirteen. I said, ‘No thanks. I don’t want to go to the Navy,’ so, ‘I want to go to the air force.’ So that was about how I got in the air force. And I did a course at Edmonton. I think it was about six months I think. And I was made an officer off course. And we went up to Halifax and got on the Aquitania and went to, to what’s that in the Clyde? What’s the name of it again? In the Clyde. That’s where we landed in there. I forget the name of the place but, and then had a train down to Brighton and that’s where we decided, want me to carry on?
AP: Yeah. Keep going.
KM: Yeah. Well —
AP: Keep going. I’ll come back and fill in the gaps later on.
KM: Yeah. Well. We got there. We got on the train. A little, little kid by the train line as you went to slide out to get out and he said in his Scots, ‘Have you got any gum mister?’ [laughs] And we said, ‘No. We haven’t got anything.’ So, anyway we went down to Brighton which was, we had a very nice hotel there. Just on the corner where the boulevard goes all along. Just around the corner down there. Near the Grand. You know, where Mrs Thatcher and they got — just away to the east from there. But it was very nice. We had a nice room there. And Focke Wulfs used to come across and shoot them up a bit occasionally. And at any raids that came we had to get down in to the, in to the bowels of the, of the hotel. And one day I I couldn’t be bothered. I thought I’d just stay in my room. And this Wing Commander Swan I think his name was, a bit of a nasty sort of fellow he came around, found me and he said, ‘I’ll let you off this time but you’ll be on a charge next time.’ Yeah. Anyway I went in to, in the, in the lounge one day and I sat down at a table like this. A man was reading a paper next door and he said, ‘Have you just arrived?’ and I said, ‘Yes. I just came in yesterday.’ And he said, in another two days he came and said, ‘I don’t know whether you know but I’m the posting officer from Brighton.’ And I said, ‘Oh. I think I’m going to Bomber Command.’ He said, ‘Well, they’ll probably take about three weeks before you can do that. But,’ he said, ‘There’s a new course.’ And I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ And he said, ‘Radar.’ I said, ‘I’ve never heard of it.’ He said, ‘Well, you have to do an exam.’ With another friend who came across so three other fellows came with me and we got, did the exam and got passed and so he said, ‘Well, you’re going up to Ouston which is up near Newcastle on Tyne.’ In there. ‘You’re going to learn all about radar.’ So, so anyway we waited about a week and away we went. And that’s when we, we — it was quite a nice station too. It was about October then I think and there was snow all around up there. And we started flying in Ansons you know. They had all the gubbins in there. And that’s how we learned how to operate radar and later on in [pause] first of all what did they call it? Radial engines. Oh God. Bomber. I’ll think of it later on. But it wasn’t a Mosquito, it was in. It was easier to sit back. The pilot’s up the front and I used to sit back there. Bomber —
AP: Beaufighter perhaps.
KM: Beaufighters. Beaufighters. I liked them. What did they call them? The creeping death, I think. You know.
AP: Whispering. Whispering death.
KM: Whispering death. Yeah.
AP: It took all the [unclear] sort of thing.
KM: They had plenty of power down below. I used to just sit back. There was a swivel chair. I used to face the back like that and then they put the power on and away it goes, and whirr like that. They were a very good aircraft. And down low they were very good indeed. But I did that for a while. And, I can’t remember. We had fellows that was going to do a camera thing, sort of thing and he got in one and went up and I was down the back and he, he did all sorts of things. Turned this and turned this and went over and back again. And I said, ‘How long are you going to be on this?’ And he said, ‘I won’t be that long.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m going to be sick in a moment.’ [laughs] and, which I was. And when I got down a WAAF came out and said, with a bucket and said, ‘You can clean it up yourself.’ [laughs] But so that was my and from then on we did mostly all sorts of things. It came behind an aircraft and it dropped down below them so they looked up and fired a bullet sort of thing. And then, then they had to do one, one coming straight to you and you had to go. You could see them coming. You had to do that left hand turn to come below. And if you could go, catch him again and again shoot him down sort of thing. So we learned all about that there. As a matter of fact Keith Miller was up there.
AP: Ah.
KM: Yeah. He was flying ones you know. Doing what we were. Trying to get behind him sort of thing but [pause] So, I think I was there ‘til about the beginning of February I think. And then we went down to Bedfordshire. At Cranfield. And that’s where I met my wife down there. And we did a lot of more work on, we used to get behind the [pause] I’m forgetting aircraft. Wellington. Yeah. We used to get behind them and do the same thing, sort of thing. And that went on for about in February ‘til late April I think. And then I was going to go to Bomber Command as an escort. And I had packed everything up and I was going to get the train down to London and go out to Coltishall. Out in Norfolk. And the signal came through from the air vice marshall from Australia — all people are going as night fighters. Going to 456 down in, in Arundel. Down south, And Arundel’s just near little, little Hampshire I think it was. Near Worthing. Down there. And so here we had to come back and finally get a train down there and that’s how I arrived at Ford which was a marvellous station.
AP: Sorry. Ford, did you say?
KM: Ford. F O R D.
AP: Yeah.
KM: But from Arundel we used to come down the road and over the railway line and a winding road down into the, into Ford which was a very good ‘drome, you know. And I think I finished up in B flight. B flight I think. There were two in the squadron And, and that was about it I think then. Do you want me to carry on?
AP: Please carry on. A whole story we want.
KM: Well, I met a wing commander. God, I forget things now. Big fellow and of course I think I’ve got, no I lent Bob Cowper book to a friend. Any rate the wing commander said, How do you do,’ and he told me what pilot I was going to be on and everything like that. And he, he was a good pilot but wasn’t very popular because he thought everybody, thought, he thought everybody was not up to his standard you know. So, but any rate I went down in the [unclear] I think it was and we had to do quite a few exercises at night, you know. And, and it was beautiful weather down at Ford down there because the summer was from, from June onwards. Right all the way to Christmas time. It was good weather down there so, so my first thing was to go up and shoot down the buzz bombs you know. And one day we had to go to — there were searchlights. S for Sugar and T for something else. T for Tear or something like that. And the ground control said to the wing commander, he said you need to go to — is it, what’s the name? Tearing or something like that. And he said to the wing commander you’ve got to go to tear west or something. He said, ‘I’m tearing west,’ he said. Which was a great big joke and he got the wrong thing altogether. But we went to S for Sugar and stayed there. And he could, he used to get up about, say about eight thousand feet you know. Angels height you know and look towards the French coast and you could see them coming because the fire out the back of them used to light up. And he said, ‘There’s one coming towards you.’ So up at eight thousand feet he said, ‘When it gets close enough you start to go down behind him.’ Like that. ‘Get right behind him and just press the trigger you know.’ And we were just about to do it on one thing and a Canadian fellow in a, in a single engine aircraft got in front of us and shot it down himself and he was put on a bad books. And the fellow was very cross about that but, but anyrate so we didn’t get any more from then. But, but one fellow in 85 Squadron, they were on Ford with us as well and Cat’s Eyes Cunningham was in 85, and his name was Mellish. And strangely enough I read in the paper one day and it had a thing about things in Great Britain. Quite a size. About that size in the paper and said he finished up a wing commander. He was, I think he was flight lieutenant then but he shot down eight when he was up for three hours. Eight of them. God. But he died probably about, oh about five years ago I think. But —
AP: Sorry. When you were shooting down, when you were chasing the buzz bombs.
KM: Yeah.
AP: You were in a Mosquito at this point?
KM: Yeah. In Mosquitoes. Yeah.
AP: And you were obviously talking to ground control.
KM: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: So they would, they would tell you that they could see one coming on the radar.
KM: Coming. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah.
AP: And just sort of, did they give you like vectors towards it? Or did they say it’s over —
KM: Yeah. Yeah. We — I think [pause] my memory’s going but yeah it’s one’s coming. Go to vector say to the right hand. Like that usually. So they, they would come down like that behind. Yeah. They go to a vector but it’s just forgotten. It was to the right. Usually to the right so we could do the left hand turn and come down. So we enjoyed all that. It was great so, and then what happened after that? [pause] Oh, we went down to B Flight and we used to get — they had a — what did they call it? On a slate or something. And they would be first say about 8 o’clock at night for three hours. And we’d go into France. Go into Le Touquet. There was a little inlet in there. There’s as I say Beachy Head about there. About here. Le Touquet’s across there. Used to go across and then go up to Lisle. Again, a man on the ground used to tell you what to do sort of thing. But did you know Fred Stevens at all? He, funny he’s got a friend down here I was talking to last night. He was one of the best pilots on 456 and the just natural to fly and, but my pilot was Karl McLennan. He was a very experienced pilot who [pause] he was 3 Course out of Australia and he did a lot of, as a to teach pupils you know. And finally came to, to Cranfield. I remember I was reading the paper one day and he came in. The bar was across there and he said, he looked around and he saw me with an Australian uniform on. He said, ‘Oh g’day. ‘G’day.’ He said, ‘Want to have a beer?’ I said, ‘I don’t drink.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, and after a while I was reading this and I thought I should do something and he said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want a drink?’ I said, ‘Oh ok. I’ll come over and have one.’ So that was my first beer.
AP: [unclear]
KM: So anyway, he said, ‘Are you going to crew up with anybody?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘What about me?’ and I said, ‘That’ll do me.’ He told me all about 3 Course. And I said, ‘You’re much more experienced then I am,’ you know but at any rate he said, ‘No. We’ll go together.’ So we did and he said, he talked to me, he said, he said, ‘Look, I’m what you’d call a live coward,’ he said, ‘So no fancy stuff. I’ll do exactly what I’m supposed to do,’ you know. Any rate he was a very good pilot you know. So we did, we did some cross countrys’ over as I say, over to Wales and back to High Wycombe. Up to Lincoln. Up there. And then back to, to Cranfield. And then there when we went down to Ford just before D-Day we were — I had, they had to show me as a navigator on Mark 10 radar which was a different sort of thing. So I had to go to Twinwood Farm which was a satellite of Cranfield for a month. So I missed out on Normandy. And [pause] but I learned all on how to work all the gubbins in a Mosquito. The pilot got in first across there. Quite small you know. He was rather chubby because he drank a lot [laughs] Mac. But, and I, I had the set there on a sort of a pulled out sort of thing and he sat there and I sat here. I used to pull it out when he got in. Pulled it out here and have it on the radio sort of thing which is with a dividing line down like that. That’s left or right sort of thing. And one for height sort of thing. Across like that. So it had a range of a hundred miles so if you, say you were coming back to England you just, and every aerodrome had a code you know. Say BA and AB or something like. And you wanted to go to that destination you knew what their code was and he just turned the aircraft around so it was dead in front of you like that. Whatever height you wanted to do. You either go up or down. And just sit there. And when you come to almost there you just knew exactly where you were and, and so when you got to say, Ford it was going beep beep beep and down you go. And that was great you know. Coming from say Germany there you just, just set it for where you want to go and a range a hundred miles so, you know —
AP: So this is Gee?
KM: Eh?
AP: Is this the Gee system?
KM: No. We had the Gee later on.
AP: Oh ok.
KM: Yeah. When we went for longer trips in Germany and you need that to — you had two. Two maps as a matter of fact. You had one that was going to certain distance about there. Then you’d get the other one would go further on. In fact one of our senior navigators he kept on using the first one and he [laughs] his pilot, Smithy said, ‘I don’t think we’re going the right way.’ And he said, ‘I’m in charge. I’ll tell you where you’re going.’ Anyway, he was going to Germany and, Smithy we called him, he was a pilot, he said, ‘I can see lights down there,’ he said, ‘It looks like Switzerland.’ Oh he got a black mark for that [laughs] But but he had to use his second one but they were very good.
AP: So the — sorry the first radar you were telling me about. That’s a navigational radar or an airborne like interception radar?
KM: In the aircraft yeah. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. It’s in the aircraft but —
KM: Yeah.
AP: Sorry. Was that for navigation or for finding fighters or something?
KM: Yes. Yes. Yes, a blip would come up.
AP: Yeah.
KM: A blip. Yeah. We were one, not that far from Berlin. We used to go over there until the petrol. Had to watch out that we had enough petrol to get back again. We used to circle the aerodrome. And it was a bright moonlight night. I remember that. And we were going around like that and I said to Mac, ‘I think we’d better go home in a moment because, you know the petrol is getting down a bit.’ So, you know, I just spoke to him. I just, like that, and I saw an aircraft about a hundred yards away sort of thing. I said, ‘There’s a German right there,’ and I said, I said, ‘Lose height. Left hand turn,’ which we used to do. Lose height. Went down like that. Ok. And then of course all of sudden they had the lights on the fellow. All the lights went out you know. And it came back and we couldn’t see too well then but we could see the runway and that sort of thing and it had all the, you know the, what do they call them? Sort of the pens where the aircraft went into and we went up and down the runway shooting all those things that we could see. We’re not quite sure whether we hit this aircraft. But at any rate the next one to start firing back at us so we did another run too and did all what we could about what we could see on the ground. And then we decided to go home after that because we were getting short on the petrol. So that was a bit of an unfortunate thing but just seeing that bloke but he just appeared. I can see him now just out there. But anyrate we went home again and we used to do that sort of thing, you know. Quite often. Circle the aerodrome and see what’s coming.
AP: So —
KM: They were getting short on their for petrol. The Germans. You know. And, but I’ll tell you about the last thing that we did. Bob Cowper picked us to go with him down to a place call Linz on the Danube. Way down. Almost to Budapest sort of thing. Down there. And the river came down like that and it went down like that down south a bit. About twelve miles down was an aerodrome and we were going to go. And we had a squadron leader from the, the, what are they called? It was all the big wigs down at Ford. And it was going to drop a napalm bomb on the aerodrome down there. Anyrate, he, it was a bright moonlight night and we went all the way. We went to Juvencourt, just out of Paris and we got more petrol and carried on down to, to Linz down there. And we had just arrived and I could see it in the moonlight. We got there right on ETA. I could see them in front of us. And then we had to go to the right hand side, down south and go to the aerodrome. Drop these bombs sort of thing. And anyrate this squadron said, ‘I’ll lead down,’ you know. And he went down then. About half way down he put a flare out and we said, ‘Oh, you’ve put it in the wrong place.’ You know. And all he could see was a farm, cows and everything else. And we said, you’re only halfway down there so he went on down there and he said, he went round an aerodrome and he said, ‘I’ll take the in charge. I’ll do the first run in now.’ And he went down then. He went down because they were ready for him I think. He said, ‘I’ve been hit already,’ he said, ‘I’m going home.’ So that was all he did all night. So, we said we, we were going down so we went down once. Did a left hand turn over the river there and came back again like that. And just as we got around to go down again on the aerodrome some tracer bullets came right past my ear. My hair went up like that. And it just missed us actually. And anyrate we, I mean say that that’s the river down there. We went down like that we came back like that. Came down. Did another run in again and that’s when the tracer bullets came across there. But we did it again and again they were ready for us again because somebody — I don’t know who did it, it must have been on the other side of the river there. It’s quite high up there because I can remember it seemed to be coming down like that you know. But anyrate, we did the same thing again you know, circled. They were ready for us again. But anyway came back and Bob Cowper said, ‘What a mess up that was,’ you know. Bob Cowper was going to do everything and did nothing you know [laughs] But strangely enough Bob Cowper went down to Ford one day and he went down to the intelligence and saw what this fella said. Said it was a great success. Which was [laughs] we were very upset about that but so that was about it and then back to Bradwell Bay and on May the 8th, you know, the Germans decided they’d had enough. And, and then on — Mac had been getting into the liquor all the time and he got, what do you call it? Like jaundice. Sort of thing. Had to go to hospital. And then they asked 456 and another Mosquito squadron to go to the Channel Islands where the Germans were going to fight on. And so they went. Three — two, two lots went down. Went down to quite low and first said if you don’t we’ll give you, we’ll shoot the whole lot of you, you know. So they finally decided. So the war finally finished on the 9th of May. So you know that was about it I think. But so we went, we were supposed to come — the rumours said we were probably going up to Burma, you know, when we get back. But we went back to Brighton again and stayed about a week I think. We had a little car. I’ve got a photograph of it over there as a matter of fact. And we had to drive up to post this out in the east end of London and we had to go across — was it Dartmoor or something? Where there’s a ferry used to go across and you go up the hill like that to this place where they had all, they got a whole new or old cars He came from nowhere. He was a [unclear] actually. We saw it. We went up there and he said well go back to that fella and see what he’ll give us for the car, you know. We bought it for thirty seven pound and went up there. He came around and he went all through it like this looking. And said, he said, ‘Eighty pound.’ So he said ok. We said, ‘Can we have for it about a week because we’re going to Brighton.’ He said ok. We came up here in a week’s time. He came up and John Darling who was a great mate of mine he was, he was driving and he came across this thing. This ferry or something. And as he came up the hill that. It was hard to get. I think I said, ‘Put your foot down.’ He said, ‘I am,’ he said. Going up the hill he said to me, ‘It’s just about gone. The engine.’ So anywhere we got that, this [unclear] came around. He went all over it. He looked up, he said, ‘Well, there’s a mark on the ceiling.’ And he said, ‘No. I won’t give you eighty. I’ll give you seventy five.’ So we said ok. We got our seventy five. Rushed like mad and got on a bus and went back and went to the very posh hotel. I can’t remember the name again. I was trying to remember it this morning. And we had a night there and spent the whole seventy five [laughs] Oh dear. But so that was the end of our story really but —
AP: So, I might go back and fill in a few gaps. You mentioned a few little bits and pieces that I’ve sort of —
KM: Yeah.
AP: I’ve grabbed hold of there.
KM: Yeah.
AP: You said you met your wife at Cranfield. Can you tell me that story?
KM: Well, I went to Cranfield and that’s as I said where I met Margaret. My wife. And well, no we just, we just carried on with that was Cranfield. I’m forgetting things now but [pause] it was, is it the second one that was at Ouston. Number one. It was, what would you call it? The EFTS or something like that. There was a name for it and then you did all that and then you went to the squadron.
AP: Operational Training Unit perhaps.
KM: Yeah.
AP: OTU.
KM: The word. That’s right.
AP: Yeah.
KM: Yeah. But Cranfield was a lovely station. A peacetime station. And, and we had a beautiful cricket ground there and we had married quarters, you know. You used to go out two story ones and that’s how I met Margaret actually.
AP: Did you get married in the UK?
KM: No. No. She was still in the air force down in Benson near Oxford. And she was still in the air force but we’d gone then from Liverpool back home again. And no, she came out in September 1946. Yeah. And we were married on the 15th of, of November. So we’ll be seventy years married in November.
AP: Wow. Wow. So was she, she was in the WAAF?
KM: Yeah.
AP: What was she doing in the WAAF?
KM: She was one of the managers of the, of the officer’s mess.
AP: Ok. Cool.
KM: Margaret. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Margaret. Cool.
KM: Yeah.
AP: Lovely. You also mentioned something about when you, when you were young. When you were thirteen, I think.
KM: Yeah.
AP: That triplane.
KM: Yeah.
AP: Or the tri motor thing.
KM: Yeah.
AP: Tell me about that.
KM: Well, I don’t know why it came out here but this man was a very experienced pilot. He was a civilian sort of chief sort of thing but, no I always sort of wanted to go into the air force but but that flight it was a lovely day. Went all around the bay and that sort of thing, you know. That’ll do me, you know so, but at that stage was in Russell Street they had the air force sort of recruitment place. But they had enough at that stage and couldn’t take any more you know. In fact another thing. When I went on leave in England I think every six weeks you used to get a leave and that Lady Ryder’s Scheme that said do you want to go to the country or a town? Do you want to play golf or, you know. I said, ‘I want to go to Scotland and I want to play golf,’ and everything else. So anyrate I got up to Aberdeen and I got a train out to a place called Stewartville and I think I’ve got a map there. And I got out and we were with another fellow. This one from Somers, you know who was a navigator with me and there was a horse and cart there and where we were going. He took all the bags and he said, ‘I’ll drive you to the general’s place.’ He was the number one general in the UK at the beginning of the war. A very nice old man he was. And, anyrate, he had, I got it in my photographs in my album there. So, we went there and he welcomed us in. His wife and so forth. At about 5 o’clock or about half past five, it was summertime and he said, ‘Come down and we’ll have something to eat.’ So we had some cookies as they do. And we had to get them out of the cupboard sort of thing and I said to [unclear] ‘Is that all we get for dinner?’ You know [laughs] Never had — what do you call it? High tea. That’s right. High tea. I went upstairs and I wrote a letter to my mother, “This is a very nice place and I’ve got to know a leading general but we don’t have much of a dinner here.” [laughs] And all of a sudden there was a gong went and down we went down. We had jugged hare. I can remember it to this day. But he was a very nice bloke and he understood. He said, ‘Look I’m old and you’re young.’ He said, ‘You want to play golf go to Peterhead.’ He said, ‘You can have a game there.’ So we got on our bikes. And the wind we could hardly get past it. It was just blowing like one thing and we got there and then we were allowed most of the golf clubs that people from abroad would be allowed to play you know. So we got there and he came around and he said, ‘Yes. Well, you can go around here. he said this way we can go out here and I said, ‘I’m a left hand.’ ‘We haven’t got any left handed.’ Oh God [laughs] they’re like that, particularly in Scotland. They didn’t like left handers so we went all the way there and did nothing. So [laughs] but no, there was, in fact he had a brother I think it was. Sir Charles Burnett, I think. Down at Crathes Castle just on the way to Ballater out of Aberdeen. You know, along the river there. And a beautiful castle. We had a lot of pleasure whilst we were there. And he was the chief of the Gordon clan, you know. And in fact part of the castle that he had was used as a hospital for people in from the war. And we went down there. We had lunch down there. And he came [laughs] he had a, he bought a great big bulldog in one day and we were fooling around like this, ‘Come on here,’ and doing this. And he could see the dog wasn’t too pleased about it and Bob like, it bit him on his wrist. He wasn’t too pleased about that either but, but it was a lovely place. They had gardens. There was. They had like a purple one. A yellow one. Green one. Red one. One, two, three, four going down the hill sort of thing. It’s a lovely place. We’ve been back there quite a few times. Crathes Castle. I’ll show you where it is. Have you got a minute?
AP: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I’ll give you a hand if you want.
KM: Yeah. [unclear]
AP: Oh where am I going? Ok. I can go and get it if you want.
KM: In the bottom drawer. On the right hand side there. No. No. No. Back here. Over here. Right hand side on the bottom one. There’s a map there.
AP: “Road Atlas of Great Britain.”
KM: It’s, yeah, that’s right. That’s it. That’s it. Yeah [pause] probably need my bloody glasses.
AP: Where are they?
KM: There. Right on [ pause ]
AP: Here. These ones?
KM: No. That’ll do. Yeah.
AP: That’ll do.
KM: I’ve got one. Another one. When I’m here it’s always over there so I’ve got two of them. That story. There’s Aberdeen. We went up here to — I’d better get this one but there’s Peterhead there. That’s about there this. The [unclear] yeah. Going out from there but what’s that? ’83.
[Pause. Pages turning]
KM: It’s been a marvellous book this one. I’ve kept it all those years.
[pause]
KM: There.
AP: Ah yes.
KM: Aberdeen. Went up in a train. Up here I guess. Stewartville. There we are. We went from there in a horse and cart. About there. That’s where he lived. About there. So, and then we got on our bike. Went to Peterhead there but no, there isn’t a station there but no I know quite a bit about Scotland. I’ve been about seven times now.
AP: Lovely.
KM: I’ll show you where Ford is.
[pause]
AP: Oh yeah. There’s Beachy Head there. Yeah.
KM: Yeah. Beachy Head. There’s a marvellous spot there. And living about here I think [pages turning] [unclear] See there’s Brighton and, and you see that’s a lady down there. She was at, she lived at Carshalton which is up towards London and she was, we used to stay with her. She had two hundred and fifty seven colonials. Australian, Canadians and that sort of thing at her house during the war. She was a marvellous lady, and anyrate at Carshalton Beeches two storey place. And the buzz bombs used to come over and she was out putting clothes on the line, and had a big fig tree there near the clothes line and she could hear the buzz bomb brrrrrr like this and didn’t worry to peg the things out. All of a sudden the sound finished. So she went for her life towards her dugout down there with steps on it and just got to the top and bang it landed in the back yard and blew all the leaves off the tree. And blew her down to her dugout down there. And she was bruised and that sort of thing. But it moved the house about a foot you know. So they had to move out of that and went down to Seaford. Down here. But she was a marvellous woman because she took it all in her stride. I would say [pause] Littlehampton. [Pause. Pages turning] Here’s Brighton. Came down to Worthing. Little Hampton. Now there’s Arundel. That’s where the big castle is. Played the first game of cricket there. Inside that thing is a cricket ground in there. And we used to have dances in his dining room once every a month you know. Because he knew, he knew the queen as a matter of fact. He was a cousin or something. But, but we used to ride down here. We used to have a swim down there. And but there were barbed wire along there as well but and our ground station was at Angmering, that’s right Angmering, that’s it. About there. That’s our ground station there and Ford was just, you just crossed the railway line there and just about there. That’s where the aerodrome was. There. That’s it.
AP: Oh yeah. I can see it says Ford there. Yeah.
KM: Yeah. Yeah. But, and then, and then we had [laughs] used to play cricket down at Middleton Sports Club. There’s a cricket ground down there and 456 had a — I’ve got something about that over there. I’ll show you my book later on but we beat them down there. You probably don’t know about Charlie Kunz. A marvellous pianist. He was a Yank who came to Britain before the war and stayed on. He used to have a programme on the BBC. Playing the piano. It was called, “The Hot and the Cold.” He used to play softly and then louder. Softly and louder. Very nice. But he had a son who played in a team against us. He was only about seventeen I think and the fellow that opened the bowling was the captain of the other side. His name was, I’ve got it over there. He played for England actually and a medium fast bowler and I opened up with another fellow and he got three wickets or something straightaway but I stayed on. I made fifty. And I dropped one a bit short note went bang. Was almost six. This young kid stuck his hand out and caught it. He came in after the, after the match. Very nice clubhouse there. Two storey place with two squash courts there. And he said, he came and he said, ‘Would you boys,’ Don Darling and myself, ‘Would you like to go and see my father?’ And I said, ‘Who’s your father?’ He said, ‘He’s a pianist. He’s at the Hippodrome at Brighton.’ So he said, and he gave us the tickets and everything. So we went to see and that’s the first time I heard beautiful piece. Fairly old, you know. It was getting a bit grey. And at any rate the lead at the Hippodrome with Arthur Askey. Do you remember Arthur Askey? He was a comedian, you know. Little fellow. And he had a, he had on a stage. He was in front of it. Behind it I think a ladies toilet like that and he came on and he said, ‘I’ll now play for you, “By the waterfall,” you know [laughs] Oh dear. That was a good night. So anyrate we had we got quite friendly with his son and I went over there one day and I wrote a letter to him and he was back in London by that time. But he got an OBE because he — I think he might be dead now I think because he wasn’t too well the last time I got a card from him, you know. But yeah so that’s about the end of my story I think.
AP: I’m sure there’s more in it. What, what other things did you get up to while you were on leave in England?
KM: Well, it all came back and said, ‘If you want to go to this places. This is a beautiful spot,’ kind of thing. So this fellow by the name Luke. Luke I think. He came from Tasmania. He went, ‘Oh you ought to go. He’s got four cars. He’d got two squash courts, he said he’s got a cricket ground and he’s got a three storey house.’ I said, ‘Well we’ll go to that.’ I got one of my brothers to go there. Mr [unclear] — he had a brewery in the east of London. Mr — God, I’m forgetting names. Old fellow with a moustache, you know. And Mr [pause] he had a younger wife and he had gout and I said to him one day, ‘Do you mind if my brother,’ who was in the navy, ‘Comes up to see me?’ ‘Oh no. that’s ok. He can come up.’ So anyrate he came over and he stayed the night. And he had a butler as well. He used to come and say , ‘Your bath is ready, sir.’ You know [laughs] I forget his name. This was very posh this place. His wife was very nice. And one night we were having dinner one night and he used to sit at the top of the table there, I was here and she was over there and she said, ‘I’ll bring the grandchild in now to say goodnight to him. He came and said goodnight to him and when she went out of the room he went down and he had a whicker sort of thing. Almost to the table. Opened it up and he had a gin or something with like this [ laughs] pushed it back before his wife came in. But it was a lovely place. I stayed there about a week, you know. I don’t know whether you know about Bill Edrich . He was the opening bat for the English Test Team. Came out to Australia in 1946 I think. And he was a flight lieutenant in the air force and his father was the manager of the estate where this Mr what was his name? I can’t think of his name but anyway when he stayed at his estate he he had an aerodrome on one part of his estate. A Yank aerodrome. And across the road was a place called [unclear] I think it was. And the fella in there was, came from Lancashire and he was a sir something. Sir Humphrey. Sir Humphrey his name was and he owned quite a bit of Lancashire up there. I think the, the Yorkshire ground was one, was on his land as a matter of fact and [laughs] we had, we had a pheasant shoot down at the one I was staying at. And they had all the men in the estate going beating to the, to get the pheasant out you know. Going around like that. He had to get in turn. He said, shoot when I, when you want them to fly. Bang. Knock one down. At any rate we both knocked one down and Humphrey, you know, Sir Humphrey [unclear] and this this fella from Tasmania, ‘Come on Humphrey. Come on. Get one,’ you know. Took him about five shots to get one. We didn’t know he was Sir Humphrey. Whatever. And he was the one we stayed with. His wife said, ‘I’d like to introduce Sir Humphrey.’ So we found out he was Sir Humphrey. So, but yeah but that lady, Lady Ryder used to do it for everybody. You could go down to to Devon or, I went down to to Predannack. Right down at the end of England. Right down. Right down there. In fact 456 were going to go down there but they didn’t go. Somebody else took our place I think. So that’s how they came to Ford actually. From there. That’s about all I think.
AP: A couple more questions. A couple more questions. So you, we haven’t spoken that much about your operational side of things. What you actually did as a navigator and a radar operator. Did you have, in the — well first of all what sort of trips were you actually doing in the Mosquitoes?
KM: Intruder trips. We used to go usually quite often on a bright moonlight night you know and yeah, you’d go up and down their, what do you call their roads again. Not the freeways. Anyrate you could see them to go like that. Two or three of our fellas used to see a train, you know. You could see that when they opened it with the coke or something in there. And they were sitting ducks. They used to go down and knock them off. We didn’t see any of those but Ron Lytton who lives, used to live out near Essendon and — how long have you been out there Adam?
AP: Three years now.
KM: Oh no. He’s probably dead about ten. He was a, he was a plumber out there. And his, his and he’s still alive actually Geoff Reeves was his pilot. A very good pilot and he knocked over about two trains I think, you know. But we used to do those things. Anything we could see. And the Arnhem. You know the one bridge too far. We were on that day. It was foul night. God it was blowing like mad, you know. And we got on to there was one in front of us. I could see one and I said to Mac, ‘Turn left,’ you know,’ And drop height,’ and everything like that. And then as he went around and around and we were behind him going there there and there and he, Mac my pilot, he said, ‘I think he must be one of ours,’ he said because we could turn inside a JU88. You know, get in beside him. He said, what about it? He said what was our call sign [pause] oh God I’ve forgotten that but he called out, ‘Is that one of our crowd?’ He said, ‘Yeah B,’ he said [laughs] and he said, ‘I’ve been chasing you,’ he said. ‘No. You’ve got the wrong one.’ So, but, but on Arnhem the [pause] oh yeah. We had a fellow called Woodhouse or we called him Woody as a matter of fact who was a leading ground controller. And they ,they took him over and they were going to parachute him down and then and he had some, a glider or something there put down what he needed to contact us in the air. So anyway he got down there but the Germans were waiting for him. Grabbed him, you know. So, so we never got any call about the Germans at all in the air. But, but we went up to, to Arnhem. Now, what happened there? Oh that’s right. As I say terrible weather. So we were going along and got St Elmo’s Fire. Have you heard about that? All along the wings. What’s going on here? You know. Anyway, we got out of that. But anyroad we got off course and everything else. We didn’t do much about that but after doing that chasing that bloke and this thing I didn’t know exactly where I was. And going home to England Mac said, ‘Well, where are we now?’ I said, ‘Well, about the time we went home now I think.’ I said, ‘Just go to the west. We’ll get to England someway.’ So in fact we got up to The Wash, you know. And we were down at Ford you know. In fact we started our flight at Manston which is down, down in Kent. Down there. It’s a very big aerodrome. Three runways you know. So big aircraft down that one. The middle one was ok. Anyone in trouble be on the right hand one. But we got, when I got back we were at The Wash which was probably about a hundred miles up to the north. And we turned down. I said to Mac, ‘Turn down south again.’ We got down there and then the, the, what was it? He couldn’t get the wheels down or something. The hydraulics didn’t work. So I had to get down and I had to pump it myself. I finally got them out after about half an hour but so we landed back there. So, but that was quite a night actually. But I’ve seen that. We’ve seen that film about one bridge too far.
AP: I haven’t seen it but I am aware of it.
KM: It’s very good.
AP: [unclear] Yeah.
KM: How did I get it? I don’t know where I’ve got it. It was over there. It had all the well-known actors in that one. Sean Connery’s in it and a lot of them. It’s a very good film actually. But I went to see it too as a matter of fact. There’s a bridge over the, where the they stopped the Germans actually there. But I went over to Normandy with a friend of mine. A cousin of Margaret’s actually. And they’ve got a sort of a museum there as well but there’s— have you ever been to Normandy?
AP: I have.
KM: Yeah.
AP: I have yeah. I spent a few years over there so —
KM: We went together and was over. And that was good too.
AP: But you said you missed Normandy because you were in a training programme.
KM: Yeah [unclear] on that but —
AP: What did, what did you think of the Mosquito?
KM: Beautiful. Nothing wrong with it at all, you know. I said that Don McLennan said the Halifax went, loaded up went to the left and then the right, you know. This went straight down. A very good pilot Mac. Once we were going down I used to go, he would drop it down. H would just go [unclear] very good. He was a good pilot Mac. Poor old Mac. He died probably about twenty years ago. He had Parkinsons Disease you know. I think it might have been all the beer he drank.
AP: How did you find adjusting to civilian life after the war?
KM: Eh?
AP: How did you find adjusting to civilian life after the war?
KM: I didn’t mind it. I I went into work. I was still in uniform. I didn’t have a suit. And Malcolm Roberts said to me, ‘Do you want to come back to work?’ And I said, ‘Oh yes,’ you know. And he gave me five pounds worth of salary [laughs] per week. And so I went to a place in, in Flinders Lane. He was one of our clients and I went in there and strangely enough he was the son of the chief there. Wade. You know. Evan Wade. And Terry Wade is over here in Doncaster. He’s still alive as a matter of fact. His wife’s dead unfortunately. But anyway so I did work there and I went back and forth until about 1948. Then I became a chartered accountant then. I went to RMIT to finish my course and so after a while he said to me, ‘Do you want to come over and be the secretary up here?’ So I went home and said to my wife what about — I’m not quite sure about it but anyway decided to give it a go and I was there for twenty one years. So, well worth it. So was that about it?
AP: Any, any final thoughts on your air force service?
KM: Eh?
AP: Any final thoughts on your air force service?
KM: No. No.
AP: What you got out of it.
KM: No. I got the, I got the Legion of Honour over there.
AP: Oh excellent.
KM: Yeah. But that was, that came later on, you know.
AP: Of course.
KM: But it was mostly the intruder trips that are as I say we’ve got the lady up in Canberra and had them all put down where I went to and that sort of thing. And then I was surprised to get it but I’ve got it over there as a matter of fact. You see the one, the blue one there on the [unclear]
AP: This one here.
KM: Pop it on there. My sister did that for me. Take the top one. That one. Yeah.
AP: Oh yeah.
KM: That’s it.
[pause]
KM: Is that? Is that —
AP: Oh this is the presentation is it?
KM: Yeah.
AP: Yeah. Ok.
KM: That’s [unclear]
AP: Yeah. I see that.
KM: That’s the man who put them on. He gave you a big hug [laughs]
AP: Of course because he’s French. I see Gerald there as well.
KM: Yeah. Yeah. Gerald. Funny. He came in the same day as I. His son came out of Norway for it.
AP: Fantastic.
KM: But yeah. But — yeah.
AP: Alright. Well —
KM: Well —
AP: Well, I think we’re done. Thank you very much.
KM: Thanks Adam. It’s very good of you to come all this way.
AP: Oh it’s alright. I love it.
KM: [unclear]
AP: I really do. I’ll just turn the recording off.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Kenneth William Munro
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Purcell
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-05-22
Rights
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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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AMunroKW160522
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:25:28 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Austria
Austria--Linz
Canada
England--Bedfordshire
England--Northumberland
England--Sussex
France
Great Britain
Great Britain Miscellaneous Island Dependencies--Channel Islands
Netherlands
Netherlands--Arnhem
Victoria
Victoria--Mornington Peninsula
Victoria--Mount Martha
Western Australia
Western Australia--Bunbury
Western Australia--Busselton
Western Australia--Geraldton
Western Australia--Moora
Description
An account of the resource
Ken was a 456 Squadron Mosquito navigator. He initially joined the Army’s Victorian Scottish regiment but changed to the Royal Air force. He was selected to be a navigator and sailed to Canada. Ken did a course at Edmonton and was made an officer. He then sailed back to Scotland and went down to Brighton. After undertaking a new course on radar, he went to RAF Ouston to learn how to operate it. He flew in Ansons and Beaufighters before going to Cranfield to fly Wellingtons. Ken met his wife there, a Women's Auxiliary Air Force who managed the officers’ mess. He was due to join Bomber Command but eventually became night fighters aircrew and joined 456 Squadron. Ken was stationed at RAF Ford.
Ken describes how he met his pilot. They initially shot down V-1s flying Mosquitoes. They went to northern France and did cross countries. Ken missed D-Day as he was training on Mark 10 radar at RAF Twinwood Farm. They did intruder raids. He describes going to Linz and Linz and their encounters with fighters. His squadron, along with another Mosquito squadron, were sent to the Channel Islands and was instrumental in the surrender German forces stationed there on 9th May 1945.
Ken was a recipient of Lady Ryder’s Dominion and Allied Services Hospitality Scheme and describes some of the hospitality and leisure pursuits he experienced.
After the war, Ken received the Legion of Honour.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Sally Coulter
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945
456 Squadron
85 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
Beaufighter
love and romance
Mosquito
navigator
Pippo
radar
RAF Cranfield
RAF Ford
RAF Ouston
RAF Twinwood Farm
training
V-1
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/300/3457/PMcDonaldDA1501.1.jpg
24affe9a8e5b3c45763f7f0310a07306
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/300/3457/AMcDonaldD151013.1.mp3
1b0cb799bccd5b31e6022fb655bc6475
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
McDonald, Donald
Donald Alexander McDonald
Donald A McDonald
Donald McDonald
D A McDonald
D McDonald
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. One oral history interview with Donald Alexander McDonald (1920 - 2021, 410364 Royal Australian Air Force) as well as two letters, a concert programme and notes on his interview. He flew operations as a pilot with 466 and 578 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Donald McDonald and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-13
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McDonald, D
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AP: So this interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive is with Don McDonald who was a Halifax pilot during World War Two [DM coughs]. Interview’s taking place at Don’s home in Doncaster in Melbourne [DM coughs]. It’s the 13th of October. My name’s Adam Purcell [DM coughs]. Don, I thought we’d start from the beginning. Can you tell me something of your early life growing up [DM coughs], what you did before the war?
DM: I was born in Melbourne and at an age too young to remember, the family moved onto a dairy farm at Koo Wee Rup [?] which is about seventy k south-east of Melbourne. I was born in 1920 and my first recollection of the dairy farm was in early school years, six and a half, seven. It was a pretty tough life, tail end of depression, appallingly low prices for our produce and there was a family of seven children, three girls and four boys so it was a, a tough life [emphasis]. As the result of poor income, low income, low prices, I had to leave school at age fourteen and I was lucky enough to have a, get work in the local post office and general store which was very much a part of Victorian Australian life. My wage was ten bob, a dollar a week for a forty-seven hour week. After a couple of years of that, I entered for an examination for the Commonwealth Public service and, and passed the exam. The examination was held in the Wilson Hall, the old Wilson Hall at Melbourne University. When I say the old Wilson Hall, it was a beautiful building but it was subsequent, post World War Two it was burnt down in a fire which was quite tragic. There was about four-hundred entrants for this examination and there were about twenty positions available, typical of the depression era or immediate post depression, world war depression era. And I was lucky enough out of the four-hundred, I came in ninth, and I misread one question, otherwise I would have gotten third, and I was pretty up, up staged about that because having only got to grade eight in school I was pretty happy with that outcome. And then of course 1939 came World War Two. In about 1937, just after I’d passed the examination for the Public service, I had to move to Melbourne to take up the position and was staying with an aunt and her, and her family. By the time I paid fares plus board and lodging there was no money left for anything else, and another guy who’d paid the same exam as I had, also from the country and equally short of funds, suggested that we should join the 4th Division Signals, because if you attended a parade one night a week you got the princely sum of five shillings fifty cents and, but that was one heck of a lot of money to both of us in the situation which we were in, and so we joined the Signals and so I was in the part time Army. Bear in mind there was no war, there was no ‘your country needs you,’ no loyalty, call on loyalty, no drums banging or cymbals playing to get you to enlist, it was pure economic necessity [emphasis] that we joined the Signals. I was a terrible [emphasis] soldier, absolutely shocking [emphasis] soldier. I didn’t think much of the Army and I didn’t give the Army any reason to think much of me. We attended our once weekly parade round and learnt Morse code and then came the outbreak of war, and with the outbreak of war within a month [emphasis] of the outbreak of war, I found myself in camp at Mount Martha, a newly formed military camp in Victoria on Port Philip Bay. Everything was absolute rudimentary. They were just still building the camp and our tents, we were living in tents and some of those leaked because they’d been stored at a military depot out in Broad Meadows, a northern suburb of Melbourne since World War One, and so they were pretty daggy [?] believe you me. As mentioned I was a shocking [emphasis] solider, I couldn’t – if something could be messed up, I would mess it up, and I’d do right turn instead of left turn on the, out in the bullring, the parade ground. My Morse was okay, I didn’t have any trouble with that, but apart from that I could drop a rifle in the middle of present arms and God, if you wanted to send a sergeant major ballistic that’s a guaranteed way I can assure you. I, I didn’t, I detested [emphasis] the Army and applied for aircrew and was accepted, and of course having left school at grade eight I was really playing catch-up. Our first Air Force camp was at Somers, purely ground subjects, no flying whatsoever, and it was rather amazing. As I say, I was on catch-up but in the evening quite often a lot of us would go down to the lecture huts and instead of going down to a picture show or camp concert or something like that where all the gym [?] there was – and we would help each other out on different subjects, whatever our forte might be, we would help someone, and I got a lot of help and made the grade as a pilot. I’d been brought up in a very [emphasis] strong, very astute Protestant family, and any thought of dropping bombs on people would have been absolutely abhorrent in our home, yet wartime dictated that was how and where I would finish up. I, I – after Somers initial flying training school, elementary flying training school was at Western Junction, the civil airport for Launceston, Tasmania, where we flew the Tiger Moth. Said to be unprangable, however I failed [?] up that story on solo flight. I apparently came in just a shade low, clipped the post on the boundary fence and finished up in an ambulance and in hospital. When I was well enough that prang meant that I had to have a scrubber [?] test with the chief flying instructor. He gave me an incredible [emphasis] drilling, he found out exactly what I’d learnt hitherto in my Air Force training, but I think he also found out what I hadn’t [emphasis] learnt and that was the important. And got to the stage [?] – he was very fair, very fair, he got to the stage of flying test and I think I – ‘cause this was a scrubber [?] test. Any, any messing up on this and my days as a pilot were finished. We, he put me through a few exercises in the air and then said [?] ‘trip’ [?], said ‘take it in and land it.’ And I think I did probably the best [emphasis]landing of my career. I absolutely breezed [emphasis] it on, you hardly knew when we, whether we were airborne or whether we’d touched down. Years later when I would try and relate this story about the perfect touchdown to my crew on a squadron they would laugh like all hell [emphasis], because they couldn’t believe that I could ever have done a decent landing. I from there went onto Point Cook, flew the twin engine Air Speed Oxford and – which was renowned as having bad stalling habits but I never did have any trouble whatsoever with them. Life – speaking from the viewpoint of mere male, to me life in the Air Force is very like life in marriage. Best to do what you’re told most times, the quicker the better, and as I say, happened to do what I was told I ended up in Bomber Command in, in England. Flew the, flew the Oxford again for a few hours and then OTU and crewed up and flew the twin engine Whitely, which was outdated pre World War Two and yet some of our very early people in Bomber Command had to fly the jolly Whitley on operations. No wonder their life span was so short. Alright, carrying on?
AP: That’s a, that’s a very good start. Sorry I wasn’t sure if you were carrying on or not there. Alright we might, might go back a little bit. The enlistment process – so you’re in the Army at this stage and you’ve decided to join the Air Force, so you go and sign the papers, presumably that was Melbourne. Can you remember much of the process? Was there an interview involved, some sort of medical tests? What happened on that day?
DM: Yes the medical test for aircrew was very, very strict, very exhausting and I passed that, not that I was in any great physical specimen then or now, but I managed to pass it. There were several interviews, one heck of a lot of questions, some of which seemed totally irrelevant but they were, they were there and they had to be answered. And it was a result of passing those questions and what have you that I was accepted and went to Somers on initial training school.
AP: What sort of things happened at Somers?
DM: Somers was great. Quite an emphasis on physical fitness, a lot of PT, a lot of square bashing or we used to call them the bullring parade ground drill. I formed an opinion there and it might be a totally incorrect opinion but I still reckon that to be a good drill inspector, the two main or the main attributes are a loud voice and not necessarily much between the ears. That might be quite unfair on DIs because they’re very decent blokes really when you got them away from the program, from the parade ground but they could give you one hell [emphasis] of a time when you were on the parade ground.
AP: From your assistive [?], your service flying training, so your Oxfords in Point Cook, you then somehow got to the UK. How did you get to A to B?
DM: We passed out of Point Cook, got my wings at Point Cook which was quite a thrill. Somers where we posted as instructors around various schools, flying schools around Australia. Some were posted as staff pilots flying trainees around other trainees such as navigators and bomb aimers around, flying them around to give them experience in the air and experience of navigation. I was from Point Cook and this, as I say, we had no say in, in what, in what happened to you. I was posted to pre-embarkation depot which was at the Showgrounds which are in a suburb of Melbourne. We were there for some weeks, awaiting, awaiting a ship. Shipping was very limited, very, very secret due to avoiding enemy action, not giving any secrets away in case – there used to be the saying: ‘tittle tattle buggers battle’ and tittle tattle, you know, words, things said unintentionally, if they got into the wrong ears, you have to be in a pub or something like that, and there was a fifth columnist there, well he would relay the shipping movements and make you ready made for a submarine attack. We, we were at Showgrounds for about six to eight weeks and then one Saturday morning, I can remember it quite well, they said ‘pack up all your gear you’re on your way.’ And we had no idea what ‘on your way’ meant. We finished up at Station Pier Port, Melbourne, weighed anchor late afternoon. Down port full of boat [?] and of course there was a lot of conjecture, a lot of guess work, ‘where are we going?’ ‘Well we’re going to Canada’ because a lot of our fellows went to Canada to finish their training, or ‘we’re going to South Africa’ because quite a few went there to finish their training. We got outside the hedge and turned port, so it was pretty obvious that we wouldn’t be going to South Africa. We hit it off, it was into the dark by now and about three days later we came in sight of land, and it was the coast of New Zealand. We entered a harbour, somebody recognised it as Wellington. We docked there, took on a few Kiwis and headed off again, much conjesture, conjecture [emphasis] and guessing. We all reckoned we’d be going to Canada – would we go around the, the Cape of South America or would we perhaps go through the Panama Canal, and we were heading off in generally speaking a north-easterly direction and after a certain time we were calculating our direction by the watch, you know, point the twelve o’clock at the sun et cetera, et cetera. And after a certain time we reckoned ‘oh no we’re not going around the Cape, we’re too far north for that,’ and then after several more days now, well we reckoned we must be passed the Panama Canal by now, and so it was guesswork, ‘where the heck are we going?’ And one beautiful, bright, sunny Saturday morning we woke up, walked out on deck, and were under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Harbour. Oh we reckoned this would be pretty good, we’d be able to paint the town red that night and, and, and you know, thinking up things we were going to do and not going to do, and about four o’clock on the afternoon, they pulled us into a floating jetty, probably a couple of hundred metres long, and on each side of which, shoulder to shoulder, were big black American policemen with rifles, all with rifles so there was no hope of jumping, escaping, doing anything that we, we would like to do. We were marched up on this floating jetty, straight into a train and that night instead of painting San Francisco red we were heading off east across America. And we spent five days and four nights on the train and ultimately – I better finish this [AP laughs] – we had five days and four nights on the train trans-America, experienced some very kind and generous hospitality from ladies clubs and that sort of things at stations where we’d pull up to refuel with coal or top up the water on the steam engine train. Some extremely [emphasis] generous hospitality, and we ultimately arrived early in the morning at a place called Camp Myles Standish. It was a transitory camp just outside Boston, from memory about thirty miles outside Boston. The nearest town was a place called Providence. We were given – ah when we arrived at Myles Standish we were taken off the train onto trucks and then dumped inside the gates of the camp, and the Americans had a band there to welcome us and they played us into out billets to the tune, among others, of “Waltzing Matilda,” and that was pretty great, pretty special of them to do that. We were granted leave that night and we went into the local what they call Legions Club which is the equivalent of the Australian RSL, and we were made very welcome, given the VIP treatment. We had heard during our time at Showgrounds in Melbourne that it was worth collecting a few kangaroo pennies. Now penny was currency at the time, the second lowest denomination of Australia currency, and some of the nine, pennies in the 1930s were struck with a kangaroos on the back of them, on the reverse side, and we were told that these were in great demand, the kangaroo. And we were having a drink at the bar of the Legions Club and one of us produced a kangaroo penny. Well the Americans who were in the club at the same time went berserk [emphasis] for them, and most of us had kangaroo pennies, as I say we’d been given the mail [?] about them, and if you produced a kangaroo penny you couldn’t buy a beer for the rest of the night. There wasn’t a bloke who – the recipient wanted to shout it for the rest of the night, so that was pretty good fun. After about, I think about two and a half weeks in Myles Standish, there was nothing to do. A few of us shall we say got itchy feet, and five of us decided that we would go AWL down to New York. Fancy being within a few hours of, you know, the Big Apple and not getting there, the temptation was too great. So we sneaked out of camp undetected, got into Boston to the railway station, and thankfully, very, very thankfully bought return tickets. It was a bit over a four hour trip down to New York and we had a great [emphasis] time. The Americans, the Australian uniform, Air Force uniform stood out fairly well because it was known as Air Force blue and it had Australia on the shoulder pads and we, we had a great time. The one thing though which we did [emphasis] discover was that an Australian pound didn’t go very far in New York and a sergeants pay as we then were, a sergeants pay was not very great and after about I think it was fourth day the five of us were all stone motherless broke [emphasis]. We didn’t have two pennies to rub together, and so this, as I say, was the good thing about buying a return ticket. If we’d, if we’d bought a one way ticket we’d have been stranded in New York, so we, we thankfully as I say, had the return ticket. Went to the station about ten o’clock, caught a train about ten o’clock at night, got back into Myles Standish somewhere between two or three o’clock in the morning. Again undetected, and hadn’t been in bed long and we were shaken awake, ‘wakey, wakey, wakey, wakey, you’re on your way.’ Well as I say, the good – there is a wonderful [emphasis] virtues of being stone motherless broke, not having two pennies to rub together. The great virtue on this occasion was okay we were awoken as I say after a couple of hours in bed, on another train and we finished up in Canada, a place called Halifax, a port, and we were put on a ship on our way to England. Now, the beauty about having the return ticket was this: had we not been able to catch the train to New York back to Boston [emphasis], we would have missed the ship from Halifax to England, and would have been classed as deserters. Now, desertion is a very, very serious offence in the forces and instead of getting the ship to England, we’d have been put on a ship back to Australia and arrived in Australia in handcuffs and gone straight to jail, so don’t ever worry I suggest about being stone motherless broke, it can have its virtues [AP laughs]. The ship was the, the ship from Melbourne had been the New Amsterdam which in peacetime was a luxurious Dutch liner. It had been revittled [?] in South Africa and there was only about three hundred of us airmen and about another forty or fifty New Zealanders so it was a pretty comfortable [emphasis] life. We got onto the ship in Halifax, it was the Louis Pasteur which had been a luxury French trans-Atlantic liner pre-war converted to a, a troop ship. America was in the war by now, and there were fourteen thousand [emphasis] troops onboard the Louis Pasteur. It was just incredibly packed, we didn’t get anything, the bell would ring for mess and there was nothing that even resembled edible food. You couldn’t blame the cooks, trying to cook for fourteen thousand people, they didn’t have a hope [emphasis]. The ship, for the first couple of days out we had a Destroyer escort and they were incredible, the way they would charge around. You’d swear they were going to be cut in half, they’d just you know, clear the bow of the Louis Pasteur and the Louis Pasteur, bear in mind you’ve got some pretty big Atlantic seas once you get out of a little bit from the coast, big, big waves, and the Louis Pasteur changed course every seventh minute. Quite violent change of course, and the reason for it being every seven minutes was it took a German submarine eight minutes to line you up and shoot a torpedo at you, so by changing course every seven minutes you had the German subs pretty much at your, your mercy, but it was very violent change of course. That plus the mountainous Atlantic seas, you really were getting your money’s worth I can tell you, and at times fourteen thousand troops – there was no treatment for the sewage it was just pumped out, raw sewage pumped out, and with these violent waves plus the also violent change of course of our ship, it was quite possible at times to have waves break over the stern of the ship and you’re up, you’re standing there knee deep in raw, untreated sewage. Strangely enough we didn’t hear – there may have been but if there was any sickness, any outbreak of sickness it was kept a very, very clever secret because there was never any word of it or any indication of a, a sickness outbreak from this as I say, almost living in untreated sewage sometimes. But after, after about three days I think it was, three or four days, the Destroyer escort just disappeared and one day we saw a speck on the horizon and there was much conjecture, ‘is it one of ours or is it one of theirs?’ It was an aircraft in the distant horizon and it turned out it was a four engine RAF Sunderland flying about and it took over the escort until we got almost, almost into Liverpool and another Destroyer came out and met us, took us under its wings for the last few hours, and so we landed at Liverpool late in the afternoon. Most wharf areas that you go to are not terribly exciting. This far from being exciting was rather depressing because it had had its share of Jerry bombs dropped on it and there was devastation everywhere. It was a quite a depressing sight actually, yeah.
AP: So that’s probably one of your first impressions of, of wartime England, is the –
DM: That’s right –
AP: You know, bombing damage.
DM: Yeah.
AP: This is the first time you’ve gone overseas presumably.
DM: Yes, yes, yes.
AP: As a young Australian, what did you think of wartime England?
DM: It was interesting. We’d left here at the end of early, rather early March, early March at the end of a rather dry and harsh Australian summer, and we got on a train at, at Liverpool and the first hour or two was in daylight and the – having left the harshness, the brown harshness of an Australian summer – there of course it, in March, you’re into spring and the various shades of green on the trees, the far [?] leaves. There was such a contrast to what we’d left back here about six or eight weeks earlier, and if it was very, very impressive without a, without a doubt. Beautiful shades of, of green, it was very, very impressive. We went from Liverpool by train down to Bournemouth. There were a number of delays in the journey, and we got into Bournemouth getting on towards midnight and that was our, we were to have our, that was to be our first English meal, a meal of English rationed foods. Our mess there had been an indoor bowling green in peacetime. Bournemouth is on the south coast as you almost certainly know, one of the most popular holiday spots in England pre-war but it had been evacuated. All the women and children had been evacuated out to the country. It was almost like a service town. All the hotels which had been packed with tourists in peacetime were taken over and used as billets for the three services. We – that was actually on a Saturday night and we got up on the Sunday morning and there was a church parade. Those of you who have been in the services know what it was, the Catholics went one way, the Jews went another way, the Protestants went another way, off to your various denominational services. We came out of our church service – the Catholics had an earlier service than us and some of their guys had gone back to their hotel, got their ground sheets which were a waterproof sheet, multipurpose thing, and laid them out on the lawns and there were a lot of lawns in Bournemouth, and they were enjoying a bit of Sunday morning sun [emphasis], and we came back out of church a bit later than them, and all of a sudden there’s a clatter, clatter, clatter. Now we’d been in England just over twelve hours – clatter, clatter, clatter. It was machine gun fires and so we suddenly realised ‘boy oh boy, this is a warzone.’ And the clatter, clatter from machine guns was German, what they used to call ‘tip and run raids.’ They didn’t do a lot of damage [emphasis] as such but they did cause one hell of a lot of disruption, and they were German fighter planes which would come in low, low, low over the English channel. Low so that the radar couldn’t pick them up, and when they got into, when they got over land they’d up to about a hundred and fifty, couple of hundred feet and they were just shoot. I don’t, I think at times they weren’t shooting at anything, they were just opening up their guns and as I say, nuisance value rather than damage. But interestingly enough I was saying these fellows had come home and come back to the hotel and got their groundsheets. Two of them were lying on a groundsheet, probably not much more than a metre apart enjoying the morning sun and a cannon shell ripped the groundsheet in two but neither of the blokes were harmed, it was quite, quite an initiation to, to fire and to the fact that they were in a warzone. We were there for a while, and there’s nothing worse for morale than having a congregation of guys with nothing to do so the powers that be decided that they would send us to a battle course up just outside Newcastle, Whitley Bay, just outside Newcastle. Here we were to have our introduction to Pommy drill instructors. Now when they use the word Pommy, often it’s used as a sort of derisive type of word. Later on I was to have five Poms in my crew, and whenever I use the word Pom it’s not one of disrespect, it’s more likely to be one of admiration. And anyway, I might have mentioned earlier about the main qualifications to be a good drill instructor being a loud voice and not much between the ears – these Pommy drill instructors did nothing to change that opinion. Whitley Bay had concrete strips, concrete streets, and this was a battle course to harden us up. We were, you know, scaling fences, going into trenches, God knows what, and marching clip-clop along the concrete streets with Army boots which had steel toes and steel heels, and we just about drove the Pommy drill instructors nuts when it came too hot [emphasis]. They would sound like a machine gun, and they used to let us know this, instead of – hot, you know, everybody exactly the heel on the ground at the same time sounded like a machine gun, and they, the more – they would take it out on us, they would make us double, they would make us run with our rifle above our head, but then at night we’d get in the mess or one of the local pubs and have a beer together and laugh our heads off with the Pommy DIs knowing quite well it was going to be more of the same tomorrow. But it didn’t do us, do us any harm, and from there we weren’t back to Bournemouth and on to AFU, an advanced flying unit which was where we flew the Oxfords again. Got a few hours up, the flying conditions were just so [emphasis] different there from what they are back in Australia, though Pommy instructors, and they bet us that they could take us up in the air, fly us around for quarter of an hour and we would be lost [emphasis]. They won the bet. The conditions, particularly around, we were just outside Oxford, and there are railways lines going everywhere [emphasis]. In Melbourne, Point Cook, if you’ve struck a railway line, spotted a railway line going west it’s almost certainly going to go to Bellarat. If it’s going north it’s almost certainly going to Seymour. Here you had railway lines going everywhere, little paddocks about ten, fifteen acre paddocks, whereas here we used to paddocks of hundreds of acres, and the instructors, as I say, won the bet. We were hopelessly lost after a quarter of an hour in the air. Good fun, all good plain sport, we used to have some good laughs about it, and from there we went to OTU, operational training unit. This was where you crewed up, which was quite an interesting exercise. There were probably about twenty-five or thirty of us on the course, and so you were going to have a crew of five, so it meant you had about shall we say thirty pilots, thirty navigators, thirty bomb aimers, thirty wireless ops, thirty tail gunners, and we were put in a hangar together and told to, you know, see if you could pick out someone you liked, you thought you’d like to fly with, and I saw a bloke standing there and went over and spoke to him, and his name was Pat. He was a navigator and started off, mostly, most people started off as a navigator. Skippers, most skippers started off as a navigator, and I had a bit of a yarn with Pat and Pat was, as the name might suggest, an Irishman and he was a wild Irishman. He’d been in a mercenary in the Spanish civil war when they were overthrowing I think it was King Alfonso that was overthrown. Pat was pretty wild sort of a guy and we decided, had a bit of a yarn. ‘Okay well do you want to try, do you want to, do we want to have a go together?’ ‘Yep.’ So then we looked around and saw a few bomb aimers and walked over and had a bit of a chat, and ‘ah yes,’ same sort of thing. So by now we were a crew of three, and the three of us then looked, went over to where the wireless ops were assembled, talking around and what have you. Incidentally, as I mentioned, Pat was a wild Irishman, the bomb aimer was a Kiwi, a New Zealander, the wireless op was from, a Pom from Cheshire, it was culturally [?] often called Cheese, nicknamed Cheese, and, and the – so we were a crew of four by now, picked, like picking number out of a hat really, and then we went over and had a look at the gunners and picked up a fellow, Taz Mears, who was a Pom from Brighton, and so there was the five of us and we decided we would give it a go together. The only unfortunate thing that broke that crew up was Pat got pneumonia and the Bomber Command appetite for replacement crews was insatiable [emphasis] so we couldn’t wait, we weren’t allowed to wait for Pat to get back out of hospital and rejoin us. That might have put a week or two weeks delay on our availability at the squadron, and so the CGI, the chief ground instructor, got us together and asked us would we try another guy who had been separated from his crew. Well this other guy was very, very different from, almost the opposite to, to Pat. He was an ex-public, an Englishman, ex-public school, a bank clark, and our initial meeting was to say the best was quite cool, quite – and when I say cool, not cool the way kids use it today, it was cold, it was frigid. But anyway, we didn’t have much option but to give it a try and it turned out to be good, he turned out to be a top navigator. He, he was ten years my senior, I was twenty-two, he was thirty-two. There were times where he was a steadying influence on the whole crew due to that bit of extra maturity, and we finished up despite the frigidity of our initial meeting, we finished up great mates. We, I went to his mother and sister, the father was deceased. The mother and sister lived at Exmouth, just outside Exeter in Devon, and I went down to their place numbers of times on leave, and the way they treated me was embarrassing. The food rationing in England was extremely severe, like two ounces per person per week of meat, two ounces of either butter or margarine per person per week, one egg per person per week, and we used to say perhaps, but they would save some of these rations so that when Wally and I – his actual name was Philip, Philip Hammond, but the English opening bat test, cricket batsman at the time was Wally Hammond, so Wally, Philip became Wally Hammond as far as the crew was concerned. But we finished up as I say mother and sister would save a couple of pieces of meat so we could have a bit extra and it was embarrassing [emphasis]. They killed us, killed me with hospitality. From OTU we were flying the old Whitley aircraft, a twin engine thing that was out of date before the war started and yet in the very early stages of the war, airmen had to fly the things on operations over occupied Europe, and it is no [emphasis] wonder that the losses were so great. As I say, there were hopeless [emphasis] bleeding aircraft, heavy on the control, sluggish to respond, low air speed, nothing going for them really. But we finished OTU, had a couple of nasty incidents there, and then onto the four engine Halifax. We were stationed just outside York and here further crew selection went on. We had to get a mid upper gunner and a flight engineer, and the same thing as I mentioned at the OTU, you went and had a yarn with a couple of blokes and we finished up with a fellow Pom from Newcastle, his name was Bell, surname Bell. To this day I have not got a clue what his real Christian name was because from day one with the crew he was Dingle, Dingle Bell, and what his true name was, as I say, I hadn’t a clue. And the other was a just turned eighteen year old, in fact I think he might have put his age on a bit, Johnny Cowl, and Englishmen from Kent as our mid upper gunner, so we had our compliment of five for the, for the Halifax.
AP: You mentioned a couple of nasty incidents at OTU, can you expand a little bit?
DM: Yes, the, the worst incident was there were only five crews on this particular course at OTU all of whom had been selected at OTU the same way as I mentioned ours, and we were briefed one night to do a cross country. Now cross countries were meant to get you ready, really ready for ops, and they could last five, six hours and the weather forecast was absolutely shocking [emphasis], and take off was postponed several times due to the weather forecast, and then ultimately it was decided that we would go [emphasis]. And as I say, why it was decided I do not know, but anyway, five crews, one had a crooked motor and didn’t get off the ground, another one of the crew took sick and I don’t blame him in view of the forecast [laughs]. I wish I [laughing], almost wish I had decided that I was sick, so there was two that didn’t get off the ground. Three of us got off the ground, one of them hadn’t gone far when he had a faulty engine and had to return, so that left two of us to – and of course we didn’t know anything about the other three, what had happened to them, we just pressed on. And after a while the control started to get heavy and as I say, the aircraft ultimately [?] was slow to respond and, and this was making it a bit worse, and then we started hearing things hitting against the fuselage and we couldn’t make out what it was, and it turned out, it was decided after we’d gotten back after everything was analysed that it was bits of ice flying off the propellers and hitting side of the fuselage. Things got worse and I lost our air speed indictor. Now what had happened, the pitot head – in case you don’t know what that is, it’s a little narrow tube that protrudes, protrudes out under the wing and the pressure at which the air hits that is converted to the air speed indictor in the cabin, via which we flew. Now, we lost the air speed indictor, and it’s a pitch black night, pitch, pitch black and so how the hell do you judge the airspeed if you haven’t got an ASI? Well with one hell of a lot of good luck, is all I can say. But anyway, we finished the, the course and got back over the airfield. Navigator did a marvellous [emphasis] job, incredible job, and bear in mind we’re only trainee crew, and I call out and said to the flying control, and told them, you know, ‘we’ve got no airspeed indicator and the aircraft’s hard to handle due to the ice, the wings and everything being so iced up,’ and the, the fellow in chargr of flying for the night was a flight lieutenant who’d done a tour of ops and a good bloke, good bloke, and he took over from the airfield controller and said, ‘okay, come in high, come in fast.’ And, which was good [emphasis] advice, no doubting the wisdom at all of his advice but how the bloody hell do you know fast when you haven’t got an ASI? So we, I, by the greatness of God and one hell of a lot, managed to do that and touched down. And it was screaming along the runway because I had come in really [emphasis] fast, screaming along the runway, brakes starting to overheat, no reverse thrust of course in those days, and the human mind is a funny thing really, I believe. I had my hands really full trying to look after and control the situation and I must [emphasis] say, just diverting for a moment, I must say the crew were absolutely marvellous [emphasis]. There was never a beep out of any of them, they each did what they were asked whenever they were asked, they fed whatever information they could to me, and they were absolutely brilliant [emphasis]. But anyway, as I say, we’re charging along the runway, brakes starting to overheat and lose their effectiveness and the human mind, suddenly it dawned on me about the excavation at the end of this runway. I would imagine there had been excavation and they’d taken the stuff out to build the runway and the perimeter tracks and what have you, and so ‘oh my God’ [emphasis]. You couldn’t possibly think of going into that, so I jammed on hard, hard left rudder, going as I say quite fast, and we went into a magnificent bloody ground loop and ultimately shuddered to a, to a halt and you know, we were off the runway, up the middle of the patty [?], out the middle of the airfield somewhere. And we hardly stopped, hardly come to a standstill and this flying duty officer who I’d mentioned to you, who’d gave us the instruction, ‘come in hard, come in fast,’ he, he was out there and up in the aircraft beside me, and anyway he was saying, you know, ‘good show, good show’ et cetera, et cetera, and we went off and, and were debriefed and went to bed. And we got up the next morning and they took us, drove us out to the aircraft, drove the crew out to the aircraft, and there were some bloody great slabs of rubber which had been ripped off the tyre when we went into the vicious ground loop at speed, and we, you know, looked and thought what might have been, what could have been. But we were by no means the main topic of conversation because the other crew I mentioned, you know, three didn’t go, we were the fourth. The fifth aircraft, he lost control [emphasis]. He couldn’t control his aircraft any longer, undoubtedly due to the icing and plus he may have let his airspeed get a bit low and perhaps close to stall. But anyway, he couldn’t control the aircraft and he gave the order to abandon aircraft, jump [emphasis]. And his bomb aimer – it was the bomb aimer’s job, he was the nearest to the front hatch, that was the only exit in the Whitley was the hatch at the front. He, his job was to lift the hatch, jump, and the others in theory follow, that was the theory. He lifted the hatch and froze, he couldn’t jump, and worst still he was blocking the exit, and the skipper, you know, he gave the order again a couple of times, and nothing was happening so he jumped out, out of the pilot’s seat to the front hatch, virtually threw this bomb aimer bloke out of the way and said ‘follow me,’ and he jumped because he knew quite well how low they were getting, so he jumped. Another two jumped and got out, but the bomb aimer and probably the tail gunner went in [?] and were killed. And I, I fell foul of authority because this skipper of course, he was being castigated. You’re supposed, you know, skipper’s supposed to be the last man to leave the sinking ship type of thing. Well I had the greatest admiration for him, because I’ve said, and our crew was agreed, better two blokes killed than five blokes killed, and I was told that I had to give evidence at, at a subject court of, subsequent court of enquiry, and I was marched in with a corporal with a bloody rifle, almost as though I was a criminal [emphasis], and I got in front of the desk where the chairman of the enquiry and a couple of other blokes were seated, and saluted and was told I may sit. And the way, the way the chairman told me, I think put us at loggerheads straightaway, you know. We used to talk cattle dog on a farm [emphasis] nicer than the way he spoke to me, and when I sat down he said ‘you’re, you’re required to answer some questions,’ and I [laughs], ‘I’ll answer any questions you ask me provided I can first make a statement.’ Well, t’was not spaghetti what hit the fan I can tell you. He lectured me about insubordination and this and that and the king’s regulations and God knows what, stathan’s [?] standing orders, and when he’d finished I repeated what I said, ‘I’ll answer any question provided I can first make a statement’ [emphasis]. And he was about to light up again when one of the other fellows on the board of enquiry asked what, why was my attitude such as it was, and I said to him just what I’ve said to you, I, the, ‘the skipper of that aircraft should be congratulated not castigated in my book.’ And anyway, after that a bit of reason prevailed and I was able to make my statement and the questions came thick and fast, and so that was, that was a rather nasty experience at, at, on Whitelys at the OTU so that was what I referred to before. From, from there it was – oh yes I, from there it was onto four engineer aircraft, Halifaxes, at a place called Rufforth which is now a suburb of York, it was just outside York at that time, and I finished HCU, that was called the heavy conversion unit, conversion on the heavy engine aircraft, heavy four engine aircraft, and I was posted to the Middle East. 462, an Australian Halifax squadron in the Middle East, and I thought ‘crikey.’ Just digressing a bit, my father came from the north of Scotland and he still had a couple of sisters, and I still had a number of cousins up near Inverness, right up the north of Scotland, and I’d been up to visit them a couple of times on leave since I’d been in England, and so going to the Middle East I sort of reckoned ‘well, I’m not half way home, I’m a third of the way home from Middle East, so I’ll probably be posted back to Australia.’ So I thought I’d better do the right thing and went up and saw my two aunties and cousins up in Inverness. We had a fortnight’s leave and I, after about a week or so, life up there was a bit dull and the bright lights of Lomond beckoned, and so I said to my auntie, said that I was going to go back down to have a few days in London before I left and that was all a-okay. If you change your address while you’re on leave you had to notify the adjutant’s office back on the unit where you were, so I sent a signal, no email of course in those days, sent a signal notifying my address as chair [?] of the boomerang club in London. I got down to London okay and sort of figured there won’t be much to spend my money on out in the Middle East, might as well have a good time here so there was no show I couldn’t afford to go to, there was no pub I couldn’t afford to drink at. I had an absolute ball and ala New York, just like New York I was stone motherless broke and went back to Rufforth, the camp where I was, the station where I was, and there was a party on in the sergeants mess so I borrowed ten bob, a dollar off one of my mates so that I could afford a beer and I was just about to have the first sip out of this pint of beer, and the CGI, the chief ground instructor came up to me and said, ‘what are you doing here McDonald?’ I said ‘just back from leave sir,’ and he said ‘well, your crew’s been, Middle East’s been cancelled, your crew’s been posted, you’ve been, you and your crew’s been posted to a squadron. The crew have all been over at Burn for two or three hours, two or three days. Be at the front door here with all your gear at seven o’clock in the morning and you’ll be on your way over there too.’ So, what had happened, I’d sent my notice as I mentioned back to the adjutant’s office, but they, they hadn’t profiled it, progressed it, hadn’t put it through the system and so I didn’t, the rest of the crew were recalled. They’d gone, you know the five Poms had gone home and Murray [?] had given the key, we, I don’t know where he’d gone, but they all got recall notices whereas mine hadn’t been put through the mill, and my change of address hadn’t been put through the mill, and so – but that was a great streak of luck, I would say, because I got over to Burn. The, it was almost straight into the CO’s office and he told me to sit down. He proved to be the greatest leader of men I have ever met or am ever likely to meet. He, I was Mac from the moment he met me. ‘Sit down Mac, I know you’re late arriving. Your crew’s been here for two or three days, but I also know that you sent a notice back to the adjutant’s office, you did all the right things’ he said, ‘you’re not, you weren’t in anyways wrong. This is a new squadron,’ and I think we were, I think we were the fourteenth crew there out of squadron strength was normally about thirty, maybe about thirty-two if you were lucky. We were about the fourteenth crew, and among other things he said to me, he said ‘Mac’ – and he’d already done a full tour, and had been selected to form up this new squadron, and one of things he said to me, he said, ‘Mac, you won’t – the only thing we’ll ask of you here is that you give off your best, and you’ll know whether or not you’ve given off your best,’ and so, you know, ‘go and get the rest of your crew round so we can have a bit of a yarn.’ And as I say, he was the greatest leader of men that I’ve, I’ve ever met but very, very [emphasis] sadly, he finished his second tour, was selected due to his ability and compatibility and all his virtues, he was selected to head up a very special training school and went over there. He always wanted to know what was happening to the men under him, and he wanted to find out more about what was happening, what was the routine with these fellows at the special school when they got in the air, and so he said to the commanding officer at this station, ‘I want to go up with, with a crew and find out a bit more detail.’ And the command officer looked his – ‘well everybody’s booked out, they’re all full crews today,’ and he says ‘doesn’t matter I’ll go with somebody, I’ll sit on the floor.’ And that was the type of guy he was. Sat on the floor and the bloody aircraft pranged on takeoff and he was killed after he’d done two full tours of ops, and as I say, his leadership, ah, outstanding [emphasis].
AP: What was his name?
DM: David Wilkerson.
AP: Wilkerson.
DM: Yes, David Wilkerson.
AP: [Unclear] record –
DM: Won a DFC on his first tour and a DSO on the second tour when he was in charge of us. David Wilkerson DSO, DFC.
AP: So you’re, you’re at your squadron now. This is 578 Squadron, am I right?
DM: That’s right, yes.
AP: Where and how did you live on the squadron?
DM: Beg your pardon?
AP: Where and how did you live [emphasis] on the squadron?
DM: On the squadron – David Wilkerson I just mentioned, the greatest leader of men, one of the things he said very early in the piece, ‘don’t muck around with saluting and things insofar as I’m concerned, unless there’s a senior officer there with me. If there’s a senior officer there with me, well then salute because they’ll wonder why you don’t salute me as a wing commander.’ And life on a squadron, there was no bull dust [emphasis], there was no drill, you did what was required of you. There wasn’t, strangely enough, a lot of flying because the aircraft was wanted for ops. The only time you did non operational flying was to do an air test if the aircraft had been damaged and you as a skipper and a crew who were going to fly it were entitled to fly it after it had been repaired, so you’d do an air test. Might be half an hour, you might go on a cross country or something like that, but there wasn’t, very, very little non essential flying. As I mentioned, David Wilkerson didn’t want any saluting. He didn’t have to demand respect, he commanded it by his own example, by his own demeanour, as, as squadron commander. He had to seek permission before he could go on an operation, the reason for that being the losses were such, highly qualified blokes were pretty scarce [emphasis] and promotion on a squadron could come incredibly quick. I knew of one case where a fellow got his commission, was a pilot officer and six weeks later he was a squadron leader. In other words, he’d pilot officer, flying officer, flight lieutenant, squadron leader, everybody above him had been knocked off, hadn’t returned from ops, and so within six weeks from pilot officer to squadron leader. Impossible if it wasn’t for the chop rate, and now and we – life was, I wouldn’t say on the squadron, I wouldn’t say it was ill disciplined, but there was no bull dust, there was no parade ground, no square bashing. As I say, David Wilkerson didn’t want to be saluted unless a superior was there, so it, other than when you were flying, I suppose a bit lay back is the, would be a suitable word. A bit lay back. The aircrew, the close knittedness if that’s the correct word of aircrew I couldn’t describe and I don’t know that anybody could describe. You just relied on each other, you were part of a close knit team. As I mentioned in that icing incident, not a mumble or a grumble from any of the crew and they must have wondered what the bloody hell was going on at times, but very – and mutual respect and likewise [phone rings] the ground crew [phone rings], they would do anything [phone rings]. That’s it, you got it. Absolutely anything [emphasis] for their aircrew, and the close knittedness if that’s the word between aircrew and ground crew was so close to that between the aircrew that it didn’t matter. We were, we were issued pre takeoff with compasses and escape maps and that sort of thing, and also with a thermos of coffee, some glucose tablets for quick conversion to energy, molten milk tablets, and a, and some very, very [emphasis] dark chocolate, was almost back, terrible [emphasis] looking stuff, and we would always try, the aircrew, try and save a few bits of that for the ground crew because as I say they would do absolutely [emphasis] anything [emphasis] for us, absolutely anything. And one night, I mentioned Wally Hammond, the navigator, an Englishman. Wally had quite a large nose – now I’m the last one who should speak about a large nose but Wally put mine to shame [emphasis], and one night we were on our way home and, bear in mind that the aircraft thermometer went down to minus thirty-five degrees, the needle went down to minus thirty-five, and it would disappear right off the clock, minus fifty God knows what, and this night Wally wanted to blow his nose. He had a bit of a dew drop, and he pulled off his oxygen mask but before he could get his handkerchief to his nose, a big dew drop fell down onto his navigation chart and was immediately snap frozen. Now, as I say it was a big dew drop and as you would know, a dew drop is almost semi transparent, and as I say, when these, with these chocolate molten milk tablets and et cetera, we’d always try to save something for the ground crew, and some crews they’d, they’d hide them, they’d have the ground crew in and have them hide and seek. We never ever did that, we’d always try and have something for them, and this night, as I say, this giant [emphasis] dew drop, almost transparent, and one of the ground crew came up into the nose, the aircraft, the navigator’s area [?] and looking for his goodies, and Wally said ‘would you like a dewb [?] Jonny,’ because it looked a little bit like a clear, transparent clear dewb and [laughs] well, Jonny – and he’d almost got it into his mouth and Wally smacked his hand and knocked, knocked it out [laughs] and told him the origin of the dewb [?] [laughs].
AP: What, what happened in an officers mess in a squadron? What, what sort of things happened?
DM: Well I wasn’t commissioned until fairly late in my tour –
AP: The sergeants mess then [laughs].
DM: Sergeants mess, you can have some real [emphasis] good piss ups at times without a doubt, and the officers mess wasn’t any, the limited time that I was in there wasn’t any, any different. No, no formality as such as there is in the permanent Air Force mess. They could be very, very formal you know. The draw with the wine at the end of dinner was a port night, you would, the waiter would put a port glass down in front of everybody, and then the very strict rule was that the bottle didn’t touch the table until it was empty, you had to hand it on hand to hand to the bloke next to you, right to left, right to left and things like that. Very formal in the permanent mess, quite informal in the, in the wartime mess. Just on the subject of mess, I would reckon the best Christmas dinner I had – well okay, take the ones you can first remember, first Christmas you can remember, they’ve probably got to be your greatest. For those of us who have little kids, the next best Christmas you could have was when your little kids open their presents and sat up at the table. My third, my best Christmas other than those two and nothing can supplant them, my next best Christmas was when I was instructing after I’d finished my tour. We were at a place called Moreton-in-Marsh, in the Cotswold country of England. For those who don’t know the Cotswold country, on the corner of the Moreton airfield was the four shire stone, a stone denoting the joining of Gloucester, Oxford, Warwick and Worcestershire, the four shires all joined together there, and I was instructing there, and magically out of nowhere about two or three weeks before Christmas about six or eight geese appeared and it was much activity making an enclosure for them. We pinched bits of wire form everywhere and made an enclosure for them, and so the geese was the, there was no turkey but there were geese for Christmas dinner. This was Christmas 1944 and there were a lot of Australians on the station at Moreton-in-Marsh, and a couple of them gathered the rest of us together and suggested, ‘look, we can’t get home for Christmas. What about if we go to the CO, the commanding officer, and tell him that all the Aussies are prepared to stay on the station over Christmas and let the maximum number of Poms go home for Christmas dinner with their family.’ This was accepted and all we Aussies, I was commissioned by then, and we went to the airmens’ and the WAFs’ mess and waited on them for their Christmas dinner. Went and got the, the meal out of from the kitchen and took it and put it on the table for them, which was great and they appreciated that, and then the same thing happened with eh sergeants’ mess. We went over to the sergeants’ mess and waited on them which was absolutely great [emphasis]. It was absolutely marvellous and we got our own Christmas dinner I suppose at about four o’clock or something in the afternoon, but that was very, very, as I say, next to being a little kid and then having your own kids. That’s the, my most memorable Christmas, mm.
AP: Do any of your, your operations stand out in particular?
DM: I suppose whilst it was – we had a pretty easy trip, although we did lose our flight commander. D-Day was incredible. As skipper, you’re pretty preoccupied watching your instruments, flying your aircraft, looking up from time to time for other aircraft because there were bloody kites everywhere [emphasis], but the rest of the crew were – and we were a very strongly disciplined crew, very strongly disciplined in that we didn’t tolerate any unnecessary chatter, but the sight on D-Day was such that I take my eyes away from the instruments and other things from time to time and have a look out. But the rest of the crew, you know, the, the, the gunners and the navigator and bomb aimer down the nose of the aircraft, the engineer had a window beside him, as did the, the wireless op. They, you know, the sight, all [emphasis] those watercraft, God [emphasis] it was an unbelievable sight. As I say, we had a, a reasonably easy trip but we did lose our flight commander who was very experienced, he was on his second tour, and [phone rings] he unfortunately, as we used to call it, copped the chop [phone rings], mm. Now that would be one of the most memorable. Couple of the others weren’t as kind as that [laughs] was, but that was an incredible sight.
AP: Are they, are those other trips something that you’re – are you able to tell us something of some of the other trips?
DM: Er, yes. Our – Karlsruhe was very unpleasant, nasty weather, a lot of electrical storms. Very, very nasty and it was pretty hot over the target. They certainly gave us a, a warm welcome. We were lucky, only, only minor damage. Now look, yeah Karlsruhe was the most, probably one of the most – Essen, they certainly didn’t welcome you Essen, you know, the home of crops. Germany’s biggest armament manufacture, they, they let you know that you weren’t wanted. My – you, as a skipper you were sent with an experienced crew. You’d done everything in the way of training except being put under fire, and to try to give you some experience there, they would send the skipper to an operational squadron to do either one or two ops with an experienced crew. We, I took off with one of the flight commanders and we had an engine fault and had to return early. The target was Berlin and that was, that was, this was the first briefing of course that you’ve been to and you’ve got no idea what you’re in for. And when the squadron commander ripped the curtains back from the map on the wall and said, ‘there’s our target for the night, Berlin,’ there were groans, there were moans, there were some said ‘not again,’ others screamed out ‘the big city,’ and that was interesting for a first time. And as I say, we had to do an early return. Couple of nights later, experienced by then, I’d been to one briefing, so I’m into the second briefing, and it was Berlin again and indicative of how temporary life on an operational squadron could be is this example. There were two of us sent over to, to Driffield, the Australian Halifax squadron to do our second dicky trip with an experienced crew. The other fellow, Doug, Berlin the target again, was shot down just before they were to release their bombs, so his total experience on an operational squadron was about four hours, slightly less than four hours. Berlin was about a seven hour, roughly trip seven, depending on wind direction and whatever, and his total experience on an operational squadron, four hours as I say, it’s indicative of how brief it could be. The second time I took off with another, with a different crew and we – interesting, you know, you’re sitting there in the co-pilot’s seat in a Halifax, take it from me, no aircraft, no wartime aircraft in which I entered had any consideration of comfort for the crew, and indeed they seemed to have protrusions everywhere which, you know, as though they set traps for you to hit your head on or bump your shoulder against or some such, but as second dicky in a Halifax you pulled down a wooden seat from the side of the hall. It had no padding on the back of it, just timber, and precious little padding on the seat, and nowhere to rest your feet. You dangled your feet in midair a little bit like a very small kid in a church pew, just dangled his feet and that’s all you could do. And so, as I say, no thought of comfort and the guy with whom I was flying on this second attempt at Berlin was a fellow named Gus Stevens. Very experienced and very good pilot, and I can remember approaching or probably about half way there, ‘oh this doesn’t seem to be too bad,’ and bit further, ‘oh I’m getting close to the target. I’m not too sure this is all that good.’ Getting into the target area, ‘oh my God, there’s, there’s, I reckon there’s a few places where I’d rather be,’ and then over the target itself, ‘I know bloody well there’s a whole [emphasis] lot of places where I’d [laughing] rather be.’ And anyway, we got in and out of the target area okay and we’re stinting [?] along on our way home when all of a sudden a heap, a trace of bullets started flying everywhere and we had one of the inner engines were, were knocked out. The rear gunner didn’t spot him. Obviously if it was one of those German night-fighter aircraft where they had the upward pointing firing guns, which was a very [emphasis] bloody miserable trick in, in my book. God, talk about all’s fair in love and war, there’s nothing fair about, about that. Anyway, the – this was interesting, we’d done plenty of fighter affiliation at heavy conversion unit. They’d set up Spitfires and Hurricanes to, with us and the gunners both had camera guns so that we could, the aim could be assessed when they got back on the ground. But anyway, and with, you know, we’d thrown the aircraft round corkscrew port, corkscrew starboard et cetera, et cetera, and generally speaking the rougher and more violent your corkscrew, the more effective it was likely to be. Would you like a beer by the way, or anything like that?
AP: I’m alright thank you, but you’re happy to keep going? Carry on?
DM: No, no I hope I’m not boring you.
AP: Oh not at all.
DM: Anyway, the, one of the, I think it was the port inner engine got knocked out, but Gus Stevens, the pilot, the skipper told me to feather the engines so he could keep his both hands on the control column and put it into a steep dive. Well, there was almost like a deadly silence other than air swishing around, and Gus had, we worked it out later what he’d done, he’d put it into such an incredible [emphasis] dive, used such force that all the petrol, all the fuel was forced up centrifugal force off the bottom of the fuel tanks, and you had what was known as constant speed control on your, on your propellers, but the moment they were relived of any load [emphasis] they just went into runaway mode, and so, as I say, you had this short period when the fuel was off the bottom of the tanks and you just had air rushing by and then when he pulled it back in and the fuel went back onto the bottom of the tanks and entered the fuel allowance [?], entered the motors – the motors of course as I say, they had constant speed, like governors on them and, which governed the air, the air screw, the propeller speed to about three and a half thousand revs, but with this load moved, taken off them, I reckon they were probably at about four and a half thousand. And then when the petrol went back and into the – the bloody row [emphasis], the vibration of the – I didn’t realise what punishment a hellick [?] would take until that moment. You know, I thought I’d done some pretty rough and tough stuff on [phone rings] when we were doing [phone rings] our fighter affiliation in training, but nothing [emphasis] like [phone rings] this. Bloody vibration it shake [emphasis], I thought the thing would shake to pieces.
AP: I suppose that shows the value of the second dicky trip, going with an operational pilot [unclear] –
DM: That’s right, that’s right, yes, ah yes, yes, yes.
AP: It’s yeah, unreal.
DM: Yes, and interesting side line to that was back at the heavy conversion unit, the training unit again the next day, the CGI, chief ground instructor – there was a class in progress, I’ve forgotten what it was, and I was marched in and he said ‘I want you to tell your experience, your experience from last night.’ So I started, and he said ‘hold up Pilot McDonald, hold up. You don’t have to say any further. We’ve been in touch with the flight commander and the skipper concerned and we know almost as much about it as you do, so you can save your voice.’
AP: Very good [DM laughs]. Well I guess flying operations wouldn’t have been the most stress free existence. What sort of things did you do to relax?
DM: Give the grog a good nudge [laughs]. Yes, there was sports. You could have, there was tennis courts near the squadron and you could have a – we used to play a game that was a cross between AFL and rugby. There was you know, plenty of blokes from New South Wales and Queensland. They, they’d never heard of AFL at that time, and so we would, we’d have a game crossed between AFL and rugby. And of course the blokes, the rugby boys would tuck the ball under their arm and never think of bouncing it or anything like that, and that, that, that was a bit of good fun, and most, most messes would have table tennis facilities so you could have a game, and some would also have billiards or snooker to fill in time at night. And of course you’d have the odd game of cards here and there and those who liked to play poker could put their pay on the line.
AP: Can you – I gather you probably spent a fair bit of time at the local pub?
DM: Oh yes [emphasis], yes, yes.
AP: [Unclear].
DM: Yeah, not really funny thing, but the mid upper gunner of my second crew – when the war finished in Europe, I had just started a second tour. Indeed I only did one trip and the war in Europe ended. I – back at Moreton-in-Marsh, I, flying the twin engine Wellington which were a lovely, lovely kite to fly. As I say, twin engine. I’d had about three single engine, I’d had three single engine landings in about five weeks, and it wasn’t the fault of the ground staff. The motors were copped, cuffed out, they’d, they’d had it and no matter how good the ground staff had been, they would have had troubles keeping them airworthy. So I’d had about five single engine landings in about five weeks. The first two were highly successful. The last one, the third one, I was very lucky to walk away from. And the – sorry where were we up to when I digressed [?] –
AP: So we were – pubs.
DM: Ah yeah pubs. Yeah, and, and so we – I was very lucky to walk away from it. And on the sort of subject of pubs, as I say I was an instructor at this time, and I finished up in an ambulance and at lunchtime I was about to have a pint of beer because the flight commander had said, you know, ‘your flying’s finished for today.’ And so I thought I’d have a pint of beer at lunch and I was just about to have my first sip out of it when the MO, the doctor came up to me and said, ‘I think you can put that down, and, and you better come with me.’ And I didn’t realise but I had concussion, and he put me into hospital. Now, there’s two things outstanding about this. Some miserable sod got that pint of beer and drank it and never owned up to me, never paid me for it, never owned up to me for it, and so if I ever catch up with him I’ll, I’ll get my [AP laughs] money’s worth. The other thing was at night a couple of the other instructors, they were, we were all instructors at the OTU were ex-op fellows, and a couple of them decided they’d come down to the hospital, the sick quarters and see how I was, and they bought a couple of beers with them. So that was great, very good medicine, and the next night about four of them came down and finished up after three or four nights was about six or eight of them, and, and we were having a great old time grogging on in the station’s sick quarters, and lo and behold, who should come in but the doctor, and caught us all with our grog there. He ordered the other blokes out and said to me, ‘you’ll be in the flight office at eight o’clock tomorrow morning McDonald, and I’ll be there to make sure you’re there.’ And so that was the end of that medication, so that’s, you know. Looking back, looking back at him, I sometimes wonder and indeed think that possibly we were pretty much at the stage of eat, drink and be merry, tomorrow you may die, and I think that did tend to take over, yeah.
AP: We’re getting, we’re getting close to the end of [both laugh] –
DM: No worries.
AP: We’ve been going for an hour and fifty-seven minutes.
DM: Truly? Oh my God.
AP: Believe it or not, flown by –
DM: Yeah.
AP: It’s been great [emphasis]. I guess, well yeah, coming back to Australia. How did you find readjusting to civilian life and what did you do after the war?
DM: I reckon for the – I had been in the Public service, as I mentioned, when I enlisted and when I got back I took twelve months leave from the Public service, leave without pay, with a view to hopefully [?] adjusting or readjusting myself. I went back to the bush, back on the farm, and I reckon for about the first three weeks I got up and helped with the milking in the morning and then spent most of the day sitting under a big pine tree. I’ve got no idea what I would have been thinking, and the, the owner of the local general store and post office said, ‘what about coming and working for me? I need someone.’ So it was a bit more than ten bob a week at that time of course, and I accepted his offer which suited me really because I was, meant I had to be meeting people, getting out amongst them, them coming into the store, me getting out amongst them, and I think that was a good move. At the end of twelve months I resigned altogether from the public service and got married and went into business on my own. First one was a little grocery store, a newsagents and post office out at Fawkner, northern suburbs of Melbourne, just near the Fawkner cemetery. I sold out of that and worked for another guy for a few months and then opened a grocery store in Hampton, a beach side southern suburb of Melbourne. That was when self service first started to come in. Prior to that when you went in to the grocer’s shop you asked the grocer what you wanted and he put it on the counter and gave you the bill and then self service came in. We had one of about the first twenty self service shops in Melbourne and then frozen foods came in, and we had one of I think it was about the first six [emphasis] deep freezers in Melbourne. After about six, seven or eight years in that business I sold out, worked around for a while and went into radio communications. The neighbours said, ‘look, we want someone – our company’s just going into radio communications. You know a bit about it from your Air Force experience.’ And the job was virtually painted [?] there on a platter for me so I worked in that, and I could see a need for some towers. It was roughly line of sight communication – radios such as in taxis and in trucks and plumbers and electricians et cetera, communications, mobile communications, and I could see that to increase the range we needed some towers, and the company with whom I was working wouldn’t listen to me, so I said to them ‘okay, you won’t provide them, let me provide them.’ And I did and we finished up with about six of these around Melbourne, and then I, I started renting a few radios. I could see a requirement for rental and people didn’t want to buy, and once again the company with whom I was working were disinterested so I started renting radios which I owned. And then later on I saw a need for little hand-held portable radios for security people and crowd control and parking et cetera, and actually I just sold out of the last one of them in the last twelve months. But we finished up with roughly a thousand of them little hand-held ones, and we, we do some, well I’m out of it now but we did some quite big jobs. Probably the biggest was the spring carnival at Flemington in Melbourne. The Melbourne Cup is a world famous race and a big requirement for these little hand-held radios, not worth them buying them because they only need them for about two weeks of the year. The rest of the year they would be on the shelf and be knocked off or the batteries would go flat and so there’s the, you know, just a little inside there, there’s the parking, there’s security, there is crowd control, catering. Imagine what it would be like if the bird cage or some of those quite exclusive enclosures at Flemington ran out of champagne, so you’ve got to be able to engineer, develop a system so that they can get down into the bowels of the earth as it were, under the big grandstands and everything so that we could control the flow of champagne up there to marquees and the likes spread around the ground. Quite, quite an interesting, quite a challenging exercise, and, and it was, as I say, I’m sold out of it now but it was financially fairly favourable, and no Lord Nuffield or Rockefeller or anything like that but enabled a quite good standard of living.
AP: Excellent. I guess the final, the final question, perhaps the most important one. From your personal perspective, how was Bomber Command remembered and what sort of legacy do you think it’s left?
DM: A good question. A lot of condemnation on Bomber Command. If Bomber Command hadn’t done the duties they were called upon to do, and likewise many other branches of the service, if they hadn’t done the things they were called upon to do, goodness knows how much longer the war might have gone on. The French government just this year, seventy years later after peace was declared, seventy years later gave, made some awards. Now, one of the qualifications was that you had to be involved on D-Day. D-Day for a lot of the French people and a lot of the people of occupied territories was the first time for five years that there was any light to be seen at the end of the tunnel. That D-Day signalled in my book, the beginning of the end and Bomber Command were well and truly involved in D-Day and they were involved subsequent to D-Day, stopping Germany getting their troops and their supplies up to the front line. The V1s and V2s, the Doodlebug, flying one, call it what you like, if Bomber Command hadn’t put down the launching pads for those V1s, almost all [emphasis] of London and southern England would have been laid waste in my book, there’s not any doubt about that. And of course the V2, terrible [emphasis] weapon. There was no combating the V2 once it was in the air, there was no ways [unclear], and so what did they do? They sent Bomber Command over to the launching pads and manufacturing plants in Scandinavia. Some of those aircraft were in the air fourteen hours. Now, as I mentioned, there was no thought of comfort for the crew in a bomber aircraft. Temperatures, as I mentioned, the thermometer went down to minus thirty-five and the needle used to go right off the clock, right [emphasis] off the clock. The gunners had electrically heated gloves, other crew members had three pairs of gloves on: silk next to the skin, woollen to try and keep the warmth in and then the big elbow length, fleecy lined leather gauntlet. Bomber Command [phone rings] didn’t get, did not [emphasis] get the credit [phone rings] for which it was due [phone rings]. Almost sixty thousand people killed [emphasis]. Young men in their prime, fit, you had to be fit to be an aircrew. Fit, young men in their prime, almost – now for Victorians or Australians, almost sixty thousand, that is the equivalent to every man, woman and child, the city the size of Bellarat. There were eight thousand killed on training – I mentioned the icing experience before, eight thousand killed on training. Now, for any Victorians, that’s the equivalent of a provincial city the size of Bellarat or the size of Colac. Every man, woman, child in that city, killed. So as I say, the legacy of Bomber Command, the ruddy war might still be going on. It did not get its true dues in, in, in my book, and as I say, it would have gone on a lot longer. Yes, we’re finished I think.
AP: I think we’re done.
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AMcDonaldD151013
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Interview with Donald McDonald
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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.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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02:10:05 audio recording
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Pending review
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Adam Purcell
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2015-10-13
Description
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Donald McDonald grew up in Australia and worked for a general store before he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force. He flew operations as a pilot with 466 and 578 Squadrons. He returned to Australia after the war where he became involved in radio communications.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--Yorkshire
Victoria
Victoria--Mount Martha
Victoria
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Katie Gilbert
466 Squadron
578 Squadron
aircrew
coping mechanism
crash
crewing up
entertainment
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
mess
military discipline
military living conditions
military service conditions
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
perception of bombing war
pilot
RAF Burn
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Rufforth
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/299/3456/PMcCredieJ1501.2.jpg
65b66e10d1346350936c2a2992ea9edb
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/299/3456/AMcCredieJ151012.1.mp3
9f439848621d77a4eaa9d17bf9ee984d
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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McCredie, John
John McCredie
J McCredie
Description
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Six items. An oral history interview with John McCredie (1921 - 2016, 418236 Royal Australian Air Force), his log book and documents. He flew two operations as a pilot over France during training and was later posted to India.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by John McCredie and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-10-12
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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.
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McCredie, J
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AP: So this interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive is with John McCredie who was a pilot during the Second World War. The interview is taking place at John’s home in Hawthorn in Victoria. My name is Adam Purcell and it is the 12th of October 2015. So John we might start from the beginning. Can you tell me something of your early life growing up? [unclear] That sort of thing.
JM: Well I was born in Princes Hill. I should say that my military career was a bit frustrated by having a mother whose brother had been shot. Had his face shot away in World War One. And she didn’t want me to have anything to do with the military. So I went through school being unable to join the cadets. But on my eighteenth birthday I took the liberty of enrolling in the militia. My piece of resistance. I joined the Melbourne University Rifles. War broke out three weeks later. I did my first military camp at Mount Martha with the MUR. I did another camp at Mount Martha with the MUR in which I was promoted to sergeant and was sent on to an officer’s training course in the militia in Seymour in June I think, 1941. It was there that I ran into these fellas back from the Middle East who had rather a scorn for chockos getting commissions and I thought my God what has happened now is if I take a commission I will not be allowed to join the AIF. I can’t, in any case I’d been pressing my parents to join the air force for a long while. So, on my eighteenth birth I wrote from Seymour and demanded that I be allowed to enrol in the air force which seemed my way of avoiding the inability to transfer. I also, I think it’s a bit of history that everyone in my generation was pretty influenced by Kingsford Smith, Hinkler, Amy Johnson, The Centenary Air Race and then the Battle of Britain.
AP: Of course.
JM: So that flying seemed to be very much the way to finish the war. I got my parent’s permission. Got on the air force reserve — I think in August ’41. Came the Japanese and all service transfers were put at a stop. You weren’t allowed to transfer from the militia. And so I had the good luck of having my old battalion commander Colonel Ralph in charge of — Colonel Balfour I should say. Being in charge of a unit called, Lines of Communication, which dealt with inter-service transfers. So I went along to see the colonel and we had a chat about old days. And then I explained my dilemma. That I had qualified for a commission. I didn’t want to take it because I wanted to get into a voluntary service and I wanted to join the air force. And he said, ‘Well, you’ve just done a commando course at Wilson’s Promontory.’ Which I had. He said, ‘We’re enrolling the 6th Independent Company next month,’ I think he said, ‘And I can have you commissioned in that.’ And this was a Friday and I said, ‘Do you mind if I think of it over the weekend, Colonel?’ He said, ‘No. My boy.’ So I thought of it over the weekend. I didn’t really need to think. I’d got the idea at Wilson’s Promontory that if you took a commission in the commandos it tended to be considered a one way ticket. And I’d like to think that I had a return ticket. The possibility of a return ticket at least. And so I came back on the Monday and confirmed to him that I wanted to go into the air force. And that’s how I got transferred. I not only got transferred I got an accelerator transfer. So that I got in ahead of an old school mate who had agreed that we’d both joined up together and then had gone in ahead of me. So that was rather satisfactory. Anyway, I did my training. We all probably wanted to be fighter pilots but you had to show that aptitude and I don’t think I quite had it as a flyer. So I was put on twins and I went through training in Australia. Temora, and Point Cook. From there half of our course at Point Cook was transferred to England because there was a shortage of, supposed shortage of air crew in England and a shortage of aircraft in Australia. So that was all. I got to England. Spent three months enjoying myself rather than [laughs] I should say rather than doing nothing we spent time in Bournemouth, Whitley Bay, Brighton and then I was sent to a place called South Cerney for familiarisation. Did this on Oxfords. The same aircraft I’d flown in Australia. Had the good fortune and this is the vital thing in war — to have good fortune. I had an instructor who saw the crash coming before I did and dived. We just missed a crash at night in midair and that was a lesson in alertness. We did a night flying course at a place called Cranage where I met up with a lot of interesting people. A chap who’d been in the French Foreign Legion. Two Dutchmen. And a couple of people. An American I think. A strange way that Americans somehow got into the RAF. Anyway, after that I went to Harwell which was the Heavy Conversion Unit. Sorry. Not Heavy Conversion Unit. The OTU. And at this time of the war Churchill and Roosevelt had met at Casablanca and there this other question of supply and need came up because Churchill obviously went well briefed on what aircrews were doing nothing in England. And Roosevelt went well briefed on what aircraft didn’t have crews to fly them in the Indian theatre. So Harwell was turned into an OTU. More or less for sending people to the Far East. And it was my good fortune to be sent there at that time of the war because it was close to a one way ticket on Bomber Command in early 1944. So that is roughly the story of my relationship with Bomber Command. On, if you want to ask questions about that.
AP: Yeah. That’s alright. Well, I think we will definitely. It’s a nice overview of everything. This happened in my last interview too. I asked one question and ten minutes later he said, ‘And that’s how I got on a boat to come home.’ Like, well, we’re finished. Anyway, so yeah a little bit more detail I suppose. You were accepted in to the air force. You were still in the militia at this stage.
JM: Yeah.
AP: I think. Was there a time difference between saying, ‘Yeah you’re in the air force,’ and actually showing up at the ITS? Was there? Like how long did that take?
JM: Well, what happened was you applied for the air force which I did, I think in about, well it was after my eighteenth birthday. After my twentieth birthday which was on the 13th of August. They put you through a few tests like holding your breath under water or something and then made you breathe in and out. And did a couple of other things. Touch your toes perhaps. And then said, ‘Oh, you were on the air force reserve so you’ve got to do —’ and I was working in the National Bank at that time. So after I finished the officer’s training course which went for about two months I went back to the bank and then there would be this business of going in to a place on Flinders Street and learning the Morse code. What else? Aircraft recognition. Perhaps we, we were given something on that. Did they have link trainers there? I didn’t think they did. No they can’t have.
AP: So just your basic. Your basic. So you did that at sort of night school, sort of, sort of thing.
JM: Yes. Yes.
AP: Rather than, rather than they sent you something and you worked through it at home.
JM: No. No. I frankly forget how often. I think it was once a week.
AP: Something like that.
JM: I trotted in there and then I was called up again in the militia on the 7th of [pause] No. Sometime in November. And the bank fought too.
AP: Oh really.
JM: They said, ‘This man’s on the air force reserve. You can’t have him in the militia.’ And the militia insisted on having me and so I went back into camp and that was an interesting time because the MUR at that time was a polyglot unit taking in chaps AIF people and all that sort of thing. And I found myself having refused a commission they made me a wing sergeant major which was very funny. I had a little man as my orderly room corporal who later became my boss in the Department of Foreign Affairs.
AP: Connections.
JM: Such is life.
AP: Yeah.
JM: The – so that was a funny episode in my life.
AP: What, what memories, if any, do you have of your Initial Training School. So we’re talking air force now.
JM: Well we did all these things that some of which were of interest and some weren’t. I think we got sorted out into the sheep and the goats. Whoever were the goats I don’t know. You did these aptitude tests of various sorts. They somehow decided some people ought to be pilots. Some people ought to be air gunners. Some people ought to be wireless operators. Some people ought to be navigators. The eggheads seemed to get the navigation job. The [pause] I think most hoped to be a pilot ‘cause it’s, being a pilot is like being the driver of a car.
AP: Very much so.
JM: You’re the person who doesn’t have to worry about other people. The way that passengers might have to worry at the way you drive.
AP: Certain, certain control, control freak, you could say. Yeah [laughs] I understand. Where was your ITS. Was that at Somers?
JM: I went from Somers.
AP: Yeah.
JM: I did the ITS there. Oppy incidentally was my flight commander. He took us for drill. Oppy wasn’t considered a good class master but he was a good drill master.
AP: Oppy being the cyclist.
JM: [Procurement?] officer.
AP: Yes. That’s right. That’s what I thought.
JM: Later became a minister in the government in Canberra.
AP: Yeah.
JM: Again the oddities of coincidence — I once sold a car to him in Canberra [laughs] when I was on posting to somewhere. I advertised the car and Oppy came along and ‘opped into it.
AP: Alright. So you’re, I forget what you said, you were at Point Cook which was Service Flying Training School.
JM: Yes.
AP: I think. The other one was — where did you do your initial training?
JM: Elementary Flying Training.
AP: Yes.
JM: Was at Temora?
AP: Temora, that’s right. Temora, ah yes. Ok. I have to ask every pilot. Tell me about your first solo.
JM: What’s that?
AP: Tell me about your first solo.
JM: It took a long while. It took me ten hours and fifty minutes if I remember and a couple of my mates, Chumley and Ingalls, did it in about six hours. That frustrated me a bit. But before I went I can tell you a story that I think is of interest. I had an instructor called Lionel Watters and he’d been a Broken Hill coal miner. Led miner I suppose. He was a rough diamond I think you could say. A huge man and he was a very good flyer. He’d been an amateur flyer before the war and had taken to instructing. He wanted you to do things. He told you how to do them and came down like a ton of bricks if you didn’t do them properly. So we were doing stall turns on one occasion and well that story is one I’ll leave for a non-recordable [laughs] I’ll tell you another story however. That we were practicing emergency landings. What you do in a Tiger Moth for an emergency landing is select a nice field. The instructor turns the petrol off and says, ‘Now you go and show me how you’d land it.’ And before doing that he had said, ‘Now when you descend in gliding fashion the engine cools and every five hundred feet you should warm the engine.’ And so we’re about three thousand feet and he tells me, ‘Ok. Land it in that field, McCredie.’ So I start gliding and I glide and I glide and I glide and he said, ‘It’s rather cold up here today don’t you think McCredie?’ I said, ‘Oh not too bad.’ He said, [stress] ‘No. But your bloody engine’s feeling the cold.’ And he rammed the throttle on and flew away. And I suppose I can safely tell this tale about that he had a girlfriend nearby living on a farm and every day he’d like to convey a message to them that he was flying around. And this time he dove to about five feet [laughs] and that was the end of my lesson for the day.
AP: Beautiful. That’s, yeah there’s a number of stories of that sort of shenanigans, shall we say, in Tiger Moths.
JM: Yes. So from there my friends Chumley and Ingalls went on to singles and I went on to twins at Point Cook.
AP: Point Cook. So you’re flying Oxfords at Point Cook.
JM: Pardon?
AP: You were flying Oxfords at Point Cook you said or Ansons.
JM: Oxfords. Airspeed Oxfords.
AP: Airspeed Oxfords.
JM: Yes.
AP: What did you think of those after the Tiger Moth? What did you think of those after the Tiger?
JM: Well, no fun at all. We did make fun. From, from Point Cook we flew at satellites. The first two months were at Werribee, the third month was at Lyra, I think and the fourth month was at Little River. Now by the time we got to Little River we had become bored with Oxfords but we were sent on cross countrys’ and it became the norm when you were sent on a cross country to try a bit of low flying. So this is strictly illegal.
AP: Of course.
JM: Having been influenced by Watters and his girlfriend I had found a little driveway near, I think, a place called Lethbridge. It was very nice to drive along and frighten the occupants. And I was not alone in doing this and I was lucky enough not to be the one who came home with a bit of a tree in his undercarriage. Sticking out of the fuselage or something. But that was [pause] so we had — it’s funny how those training memories are not as evident as later memories.
AP: [They might?]
JM: I carry, I had a, you flew with a pair and I had this fella who I think was more inept than me as a pilot as my pair. And some of his landings were quite hair raising. But that poor fellow was killed in training in Europe sometime later. In England sometime later. And one can say that without being surprised he probably should have been scrubbed.
AP: That was actually going to be my next question. With all of these. Particularly with all of these antics going on. Low flying and mucking around because let’s face it you were twenty years old and you’ve got an aeroplane so you’re going to go and fly it. Were there accidents and things that you saw?
JM: Well that one of the person hitting the tree at Point Cook it’s the only one I remember in training. In Harwell somebody came in and crashed on landing. But, and certainly at Harwell we had these ancient aircraft because we were going to India, or most of us, we had one of the last two units flying Wellington 1Cs. Those going on to ops in Europe had the, went through OTUs on Wellington 10s which were very much upgraded and could fly at the proper height. But the 1C could only — well in icing conditions I did two what are called, what the [pause] two little flights over France which were called training flights. And on the second one we iced up. The aircraft couldn’t climb above eight thousand feet. My navigator, bless his heart, took us back over a place called [unclear]. And [unclear] happened to be quite heavily defended so we had the sound, I don’t know if as a small boy you ever ran along a picket fence with a stick making a noise.
AP: Many times. Many times.
JM: Yeah. So you know that noise. Well that’s exactly what it’s like listening to the flak hitting a canvas covered aircraft like the Wellington. And we came home with a couple of holes but fortunately they didn’t hit or injure somebody. But I did have another incident at Harwell where again it was luck. Because I’d given some cheek to my flight commander which he got back to me in briefing when he decided he’d take people through fire drill. He said, ‘McCredie. You tell us what you’d do in fire drill.’ And McCredie got up and stuttered and stammered. Anyway, he made me repeat the words after him. And there was the luck of the game because about not very long later I did have a fire and that meant landing on, calling, ‘Darkie. Darkie. Darkie. Mayday. Mayday. Mayday.’ And finding Silverstone answer and having to go down there at night on one engine which was, you know, was something. I had to bail my crew out. The same navigator who took me over [unclear] I found crouching behind me when I landed.
AP: Oh really.
JM: So when I caught up with him again and we were forming crews on Liberators in India and he wanted to join up with me I said, ‘I’m sorry Tom.’ But, but that was, I had similar luck again in, when we were in India. Things were a bit dicey. The Japs had got right up to the border. The second Imphal line which was the border with Burma. The Indian National Army which comprised deserters from the British forces in Singapore were with the Japanese. There was this fear in India that things could erupt internally in spite of Ghandi’s passive resistance thing with the influence of the Indian National Army. And the four Liberator squadrons were sent on this around India show of force. In formation over Madras, Nagpur, Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta. Just to show the natives what they would be up against if we decided to have some sort of armed resistance. So on the first of these I had what was called a runaway prop.
AP: Oh dear.
JM: And with a runaway prop you just can’t go on flying. You know the, you know the problem?
AP: It’s the pitch. The pitch changes and yeah —
JM: Yeah. So I had to fly around with four hours on three engines but I’d noticed all the emergency things you do when you have anything like an engine misfunction. I had the, I suppose you could say good luck to survive an assault on an armed boat and so on. That was on the 1st of January 1945. We’d bombed the bridge in Burma. We’d been told Japanese were supplying their forces by sea and if you come across any shipping it’s likely to be doing this. Attack it. So we had a rendevous at a place called Kalegauk Island after the raid on the bridge. And so I saw someone going in on this boat and I went in and followed him. The first chap got shot down and I lost an engine but I had this totally new experience of losing an engine and it, well it was the luck of the game. We moved quickly enough to [pause] we had a fire. My boys reported the fire to me and I boldly told them to put it out.
AP: Do something.
JM: That’s right. [laughs] it’s funny in the way. The thing that’s reported they don’t put it out until they were told to [laughs]
AP: Initiative boys. Initiative. Alright.
JM: Anyway. I’m sorry if that’s —
AP: No. Listen, it’s all, it’s all part of your story and that’s still very valuable to get anyway. I can, I can assure you. I’m sitting here rapt. So getting to the UK. I suppose you finished at Point Cook. You have your wings ceremony at Point Cook so you’ve got your wings.
JM: Yeah.
AP: At that point. Then you go to the UK. How do you get from A to B?
JM: Yes. We got on the Nieuw Amsterdam on the 6th of March 1943. We crossed to San Francisco. The Nieuw Amsterdam was, had brought troops back from the Middle East before picking us up and I must say those troops didn’t do a favour by the wildlife they brought into the bedding.
AP: Oh dear.
JM: So I was travelling with my friend Ingalls who was on singles, I mentioned earlier but he was going to Europe too. Both of said enough is enough. We slept on deck for the rest of that voyage. We, we had a commander called [pause] a troop commander called Major Crennan. He was the son, I believe of Archbishop Crennan who was a catholic prelate somewhere. And Crennan later became part of the Royal Commission into Petrov. Part of the council for it. I think. Which was interesting. But he had no idea of discipline and he thought it would be a good idea if air force trips needed to be exercised so he would order us to march around the decks in military order and this sort of thing and there’s always a minstrel associated with military units and we had a minstrel on board who wrote a little verse. And what I remember of the verse went something like, in part, went something like, “Oh tell me quick what lunatic, what fiend of devilish notion, marched us thrice like bloody mice around the bloody ocean.” And this was distributed in a pamphlet that they’d brought out on board the ship which had some very witty things in it. And Crennan, I must say, to do him justice stopped behaving like a bloody lunatic [laughs]
AP: So you got to San Francisco.
JM: We got to San Francisco. We then had this devious crossing of America by train from Oakland to a place called [pause] oh dear. The name is going to elude me. But somewhere in Connecticut. And this was an American army base. And the trip across had taught us a few lessons I suppose. Such as don’t leave watches in your tunic pocket which you hang up in a Pullman carriage overnight because the Pullman porters seem to have very adhesive fingers. We got taken for Austrians and told what good English we spoke. People still do.
AP: They do.
JM: In America I’m told. Yes. We read books and I remember being introduced to Ogden Nash. Have you ever read Ogden Nash?
AP: I’ve never read Ogden Nash but the name rings a bell somewhere.
JM: Yeah. Well, you should look up on the internet a ballad of Ogden Nash’s called “Four prominent bastards are we.” “Your banker, your broker, your Washington Joker.” Four prominent bastards.
AP: Fair enough.
JM: Poor fellow who got taken down by them ended up saying he was a self appointed bastard and he was out to get it back. So that was part of my education.
AP: On your way across the US.
JM: On my way across. Apart from, no it was interesting to see America for the first time in its vastness and its variety.
AP: You didn’t have a chance to go on leave at all during that trip or it was straight across and get going?
JM: Well I had the misfortune to develop a carbuncle on the back of my neck so I spent the ten days we were at — Miles Standish was the name of the station.
AP: Rings a bell.
JM: At Miles Standish. I spent ten days in hospital there and had to fight to get out to join me fellows on the Louis Pasteur which we used to cross the Atlantic. And so apart from my first night there at which we attended the American mess and saw them doing all their modern antics which they were into. Not rock but whatever the dancing style of the time was. A bit ahead of us. So they had women in the mess and that sort of thing. So that was interesting insight. In hospital I had the interesting experience of having fellows who were very much against the Roosevelt government alongside me. They were southerners who felt that Roosevelt didn’t represent them. And —
AP: Fairly, fairly eye opening for a twenty year old I imagine.
JM: Yeah. And the interesting thing was I remember this fella saying, ‘And you’ve never had a hamburger?’ And I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘We eat meat pies in Australia.’ To which he replied, ‘What’s a [accent] meight pie?’ [laughs] So, so I had that experience of America that —
AP: Fair enough.
JM: Perhaps some of my fellows didn’t have. Then the crossing in the Pasteur was not luxury. Pasteur was shaped a bit like a canoe and it had latrines at each end. And the movement of the ship was like that. So that there would be an overflow from the latrines right through the mess decks. Mess deck comprising people in hammocks above tables. And our mess deck was right in the centre.
AP: That’s often the case.
JM: So we would be wading somewhat.
AP: So when was —
JM: And I won’t tell you what we were wading through.
AP: It was quite literally a mess deck.
JM: Yeah.
AP: Yeah. I suppose a fair few more people on there like more crowded conditions as well than crossing The Pacific.
JM: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: On that one as well.
JM: Yeah. So your hammocks your head lay between two pairs of feet. As people have probably told you.
AP: Lovely. And that took what a week or two weeks or something.
JM: Oh about five or six days.
AP: Five or six days.
JM: It was the height of the submarine campaign. Early ‘43. And we were on the alert and my friend Ingalls and I did regular eight hours on — four hours on, four hours off duty on the port. Rear port. Twelve pounder. So that was I thought I should have qualified for an Atlantic Star for it [laughs]
AP: That’s probably reasonable [laughs] What time of year was that?
JM: That was [pause] that was April.
AP: April. So that’s —
JM: Yeah.
AP: So it wasn’t too cold. It wasn’t like the middle of winter or anything so it wasn’t too —
JM: No. No.
AP: Too cold in the North Atlantic.
JM: No. But we saw a bit of the middle of winter in places like Utah. Yeah.
AP: Yeah. I imagine. Not much fun. So your ship would have come in Liverpool or Scotland or something like that.
JM: Liverpool.
AP: Liverpool.
JM: Yes. And then we did this trip to Bournemouth by train and I remember writing home to my parents. Remember I had just picked up the card I had sent a few days ago and I wrote and said when you make your post-war journey to England which they had planned or they’d hoped for I said do it in April because, “Oh to be in England now that April’s there.” Because a magnificent sight. You looked in wonder at scenes you’d never see in Australia of little villages tucked away behind green fields and church spires coming up. It was very exciting for a generation brought up on English literature.
AP: And that was, that funnily enough was going to be my next question. Your first impressions of England as a, presumably this is the first time you’d travelled overseas.
JM: Yes.
AP: So, so for a yeah a young bloke to be travelling.
JM: Yeah.
AP: In places that you’d only ever read about.
JM: No.
AP: That would have been —
JM: No. No.
AP: An experience, I imagine
JM: What I, my mother was a very keen reader and one of the books I had remembered reading was, “In Search of England,” by HV Morton if you’ve ever heard of it but that took you around all the memorable places in England. So, yeah. Brian Ingalls and I spent a lot time visiting some places on HV Morton’s recommendation.
AP: Excellent. So you were in Bournemouth for some time. I’ve heard, I’ve heard a fair bit about Bournemouth because pretty well every Australian went to either Bournemouth or Brighton.
JM: Yes.
AP: Depending on what time they went there. At some time that unit moved to Brighton.
JM: Yes.
AP: I can’t remember exactly when that was but impressions it sort of depends on when you arrived and how long you were there as to what happened but a lot of not much seems to have happened. It was a sort of holding point.
JM: Well yes you were wondering why you’d been sent to England. And we did odd parades. Church parades which one did one’s best to avoid. I remember we were put up at a place called Durley Dean which — strange memory but my first residence in England and Brian Ingalls and I, I remember from there visited Salisbury to see the cathedral. And we visited Oxford. And I can remember going to see the “Maid of the Mountains.” And a pianist called Solomon gave a concert which the only thing I remember about it was his name. But one, neither Brian nor I drank at that stage so we were more interested in — oh we went to a place called Poole. I remember that particularly because of our train trip home. We had two young girls in the train apartment with us and we’d got chatting with them on the way and the train, the train went into a tunnel. As we came out I looked at Ingalls doing exactly the thing that I was doing.
AP: Excellent. Subtle. No [laughs] Lovely. Did you, did you have any impression of wartime England? Like what was your first sort of thought?
JM: My favourite story is, again it was Ingalls, we were at Whitley Bay. We were spent to an RAF commando course and had a corporal trying to control these air crew. Australian aircrew. Which he wasn’t very, well he was cooperative. We would say, ‘Look corp, we’ll march in proper order of parade and you just take us to someplace where we won’t be seen and we’ll all have a smoke.’ And that was our commando course. But from Whitley Bay Ingalls and I went in to have a look at Newcastle. And I think it was a Sunday and we were looking in this window and there was a bun in the window. And it, we must have been looking longingly at it because this old lady came up to us and said, ‘You boys look hungry.’ We said, ‘You don’t do to well on air force ma’am.’ She said, ‘You come home with me.’ She took us home and boiled eggs for us and there was an egg rationing in England and she gave us her week’s ration of eggs. That’s a story I’ve never forgotten. So it, I also, we had family friends the sister of whom lived in a place called Cawsand in Cornwall and she ran a boarding house there. So when we had leave instead of joining the Ryder Scheme which a lot of people did I would go and visit her then. I’d get to know something of the Cornish people. Met this family that rejoiced in singing the [pause] what is it? The Cornish, Cornish Floral Dance. Is that it?
AP: Doesn’t ring a bell. I’ve been to Cornwall once but it was about —
JM: Yeah.
AP: About twenty years ago. So I was quite young.
JM: Cawsand was a delightful place. The bus doesn’t take you there. You have to walk across fields with your kit bag over your shoulder. To get there on one occasion I I had to stay in the Salvation Army place in Bristol and I have to say that was the most uncomfortable night I have ever had to stay in my life and that includes sleeping in bedbug chapoys in India. No. No. Very unpleasant.
AP: So you’ve, you’ve been sitting there at Bournemouth for a while. Travelling around.
JM: Yeah.
AP: Next step I guess, oh next step was —
JM: The next step we went to Whitley Bay.
AP: Whitley Bay. That’s right.
JM: And we were there when the Fokke Wolves shot up Bournemouth.
AP: Bournemouth.
JM: If you’ve heard about that tale.
AP: I’ve heard about it. I’m aware of it but if you know anything about it.
JM: Yes. Well —
AP: Sorry. You were at Bournemouth or you were at Whitley Bay? You were actually at Bournemouth did you say or were you at Whitley Bay?
JM: We were, we’d been sent from Bournemouth to Whitley Bay to do this commando course.
AP: Another one of those.
JM: We heard all about it when we got back.
AP: It’s another one of those lucky things
JM: Yes. So but from Whitley Bay we visited Edinburgh. That was lovely except it was still British double time. It was still daylight when you took the girl home —
AP: Yes [laughs]
JM: From the local dance.
AP: I have heard a number of people lamenting that fact. Yes.
JM: Yes. That must have been practically, we must have been there about June the 21st I think.
AP: The longest day. Yes.
JM: And then from Whitley Bay I don’t remember [pause] yes we did go back to Bournemouth because we learned about the air raid then. And then we were moved to Brighton and Brighton was a place that one was very easy to dodge church parade. We were put up at the Metropole Hotel which was right next to the Grand Hotel which was the hotel that Maggie Thatcher was in when the terrorists attack on it. And the Metropole was a sort of twin hotel. We were on the fifth floor and had to go up to five floors of stairs.
AP: Stairs [laughs]
JM: And it was a Victorian, a Victorian hotel without lifts if I remember rightly. But no, Bournemouth was an enjoyable experience because plenty of entertainment and I remember seeing, “No. No Nanette.” That’s the only thing. We got up to London on leave and I saw a lot of plays in London which were very [pause] of course and went to places that weren’t plays like seeing Phyllis Dixie who was the strip woman and who noticed it when you moved from the back row to the front rows after the interval. And then after that there was the — they were great, great times times in Brighton. One had got used to being in England by then and knew one’s way about. Church parade was easy to dodge because we marched from the Majestic to a church through with about seven changes of direction so every time the platoon or whatever it was, turned a corner, the last three would drop off and head for, head for somewhere to have a cup of awful wartime coffee. Which was preferable to listening to sermon.
AP: Excellent. Now acclimatisation I think you said was next.
JM: Hmmn?
AP: You said after, after you’d been to Brighton for a little while.
JM: Yes.
AP: Your next unit was Advanced Flying Unit I think.
JM: Well one took leave and I think we took leave in from Bournemouth and from Brighton because there was nothing to do. You might as well have a couple of days off.
AP: Any — apart from seeing plays and things in London what else did you, did you get up to there. General impressions of wartime London I think is what I’m interested in.
JM: Yes. Well I didn’t drink so I I was more interested in seeing what I could of the entertainment side. My friend, Newman, this was from OTU that Newman excelled himself. He went to a place called the Gremlin Club in London and they started playing a tune called, “You’ll never know.”Do you know the tune?
AP: I don’t know the tune. No.
JM: “You’ll never know just how much I love you. You’ll never know just how much I care.”
AP: Ah yes.
JM: And so on which Newman sang beautifully. And he got up and sang it at the Gremlin Club and sang it and was invited to come back anytime and perform for them [laughs] but I never had that distinction in my visits to London.
AP: Fair enough. Where was your next posting? Where was your next posting after?
JM: South Cerney, near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. And that was where I mentioned I had the good luck to have this New Zealand instructor who was so quick.
AP: Oh yes.
JM: That he saw what was coming in time. What else do I remember of that? We — I got into a bit of trouble for deciding to shoot up the flight club because the CO of the place had annoyed me once which was [laughs] I don’t know why I was so stupid when I was young but one does things. So I got put on a charge for that.
AP: But was that —
JM: It didn’t do me any good.
AP: So I imagine flying in wartime England there would have been aeroplanes everywhere.
JM: Well that was the problem, you see.
AP: Very congested. Yeah.
JM: South Cerney. Moreton in the Marsh. Other places all doing the same thing quite close to one another. All inexperienced pilots learning about the hazards of flying in England.
AP: It would have been a bit different as well when and I know from my own flying, you know, you’re doing navigation in Australia. You take off. There’s one town. And you, you know, you write that time down.
JM: Yeah.
AP: And then you fly and then the other town, the next town appears.
JM: Yeah.
AP: Whereas in England there’s a town there, and there’s one there and there’s one there and they all look the same.
JM: Yes.
AP: How was that to adjust too?
JM: Well, I [pause] yes I, you had your wireless contact of course which was only good when you were within five miles of base. It was not high frequency. So mostly you learned to identify the surroundings but the RAF had a wonderful TM. Have you heard about TM?
AP: I have heard of TM. Yes.
JM: So —
AP: Pilot Officer Prune.
JM: Every month it would come out and they would award the Most Highly Derogatory Order of the Irremovable Finger. The MHDO. If you’ve heard of that. I remember one of their stories of the CO of a training unit who was caught looking — had landed at the wrong airport and was caught looking at the notice board of the of the, in the officer’s mess to try and find out where it was. So he was awarded the MHDOIF.
AP: Yeah. It was not, not an unusual thing I imagine. Getting lost. I do —
JM: I don’t think I ever heard of anyone who did that. As I say I landed once at Silverstone purposefully.
AP: So you, when you went to OTU did you know before you got there that India was the ultimate destination or did it sort of happen after you got there?
JM: Well the funny thing is I, I went through life until five years ago when I read my letters home for the first time that I had written in May 1943 that we’d been given the option of volunteering to go to India and I had opted to do so. So I’d reassured my parents that being overseas didn’t mean I wasn’t going to fight the Japs. And I’d put my name down to do it. Now, for something like forty years they laboured under the illusion that I’d only found out when I got to Harwell. But that’s memory.
AP: So that, that letter was written before you got there.
JM: That letter was written in May 1943.
AP: And when did you —
JM: And I only read it about five years — my sister gave me my letters that I’d sent home.
AP: Fantastic. Ok and so then you went to OTU just after that was that. Was that the idea?
JM: I went to OTU in, I suppose, September ’43.
AP: Ok. So, so that, that was the process?
JM: Yeah.
AP: Ok. So you already knew when you got there.
JM: Yeah.
AP: So I suppose for you the OTU process for you would have been a bit different to the — let’s call it the standard.
JM: There was, there was no certainty.
AP: Of course not.
JM: That when you got to Harwell that one would go to, I think that was the point too. Because some of them were sent to a place called Melbourne, Yorkshire. On, I think, Halifaxes.
AP: Yorkshire probably was. Yes.
JM: From Harwell. Anyway, I went to India.
AP: How. What happened at OTU? What sort of training did you do on the ground? What sort of stuff?
JM: Well the flying was just getting familiar with operational flying conditions. Doing a lot night flying. Doing two nickels over France as I mentioned. Doing low level flying over water. Doing, I suppose, cross countrys’. I don’t just — but a lot of night flying. That was the emphasis. And then by this time I had found the delights of alcohol. So a typical night would be after supper we’d have a beer at the mess and then someone would say, ‘I think I’ll go along and see what is on at the New Inn.’ This was in Hampstead Norris which was a satellite of Harwell. So we’d trot along to the New Inn. And someone would say oh there’s a dance on so we’d find our way to a dance hall somewhere in the wilds of England. And so that, yeah I found myself deceived very badly by a beautiful English girl called Bridget Belinda Barnes. I remember it to this day because we had danced and I asked her for her name and she told me and I said, ‘That’s a mouthful.’ And she said, ‘Well my friends call me BB.’ I said, ‘Well do you mind if I just call you B?’ So we got on sportingly and then she got on a bus to go to Newbury where she lived. But she said, ‘You must come and see me tomorrow,’ and she gave me her address. And I thought this was terrific. To get to Newbury you had to bicycle so I got found of these English monstrosities that was, you know, to go push them on the level seemed like climbing a one in ten gradient. And the trip to Newbury is over the Berkshire downs. It was December. My gloves were quite inefficient so one would get down to the downhill business and put ones hands in ones pockets and go down. No hands. And then have to push up the next hill. So I got to Newbury which was about eight miles away and reported to the — and of all things Bridget Belinda Barnes had invited all her boyfriends to help in a bazaar [laughs]
AP: Very good. That was a long cold ride home.
JM: It was a long cold ride home. And I didn’t even go to the mess for a drink with my humiliation heart.
AP: Can’t trust them. So you said you started drinking by this stage. Was there anything particular that brought that on?
JM: I got sick of writing letters home, I thought, well someone told me that cider was a reasonable thing to drink if I didn’t like beer. And Gloucester is near Somerset. Full of Bulmer’s cider and so I went to the mess and drank cider. Pint of cider per pint of beer with my friends. And they wouldn’t come near me for days afterwards. It could have quite an explosive effect.
AP: Fair enough. Was that OTU?
JM: No that was at AFU.
AP: AFU. Right. Oh of course.
JM: Yeah. And so I I decided that beer couldn’t be as distasteful as that. And had no problems thereafter.
AP: It’s the English wartime beer. Did you, did you do the, I guess, familiar crewing up thing at OTU? Was that? How did that happen?
JM: I think, I think they were bestowed on us at OTU. In India we selected our crew and that’s where I came not to select my former navigator.
AP: That was. Yeah. So that’s I guess that’s a very significant difference from Bomber Command.
JM: Yeah.
AP: In a lot of cases. Obviously at OTU it’s I guess, you could say, it’s the tradition put you in a hangar and sort yourself out boys.
JM: Yeah.
AP: So ok but bestowed on you. That’s a bit different. Well we might as well go on to India while we’re here and enjoying having a chat. You’re at OTU. You finished the course. How did you get to India?
JM: Well we were sent to Blackpool awaiting a ship. And that was a piece of entertainment too. Yes. One used to go to the Blackpool tower of a night and you’d have a table there to which everyone had to supply a drink and by the time you became the last person probably propping the bar having to buy about a dozen drinks. But I hoped to meet some gorgeous woman there and don’t think I ever had any. No I never had any success that way but on my last night I decided I’d escort this damsel home and I suggested she might like to go into an air raid shelter with me and she said, ‘In there with you. You must be daft.’ [laughs] That was my last night in England [laughs]
AP: Fair enough.
JM: So the ship, this is where the ship to India. This is where my good friend Newman did the dirt on me. Because Newman at this time was a warrant officer and I was only a flight sergeant. And he should have been in charge of the mess deck but he somehow manoeuvred it so that I was put in charge of the mess deck. And the problem with that was that when you hit a storm in the Mediterranean if you were in charge of the mess deck you were responsible for its orderliness inspection time. And as half the occupants vomited during a storm in the Mediterranean I had the problem of ordering people to clean it up which nobody would accept my orders [laughs]
AP: Oh dear.
JM: No. No. But it did have its advantages. We travelled to India and there was a commando unit on the ship also which challenged us to a boxing match. And as nominations were being made for who’d represent the air force I was able to nominate my friend Clem Walker instead of me to undertake our appropriate weight. The opponent promptly laid Clem Walker out. So that was a bit bad. We got off the ship at Bombay. Learned that our air force issue uniforms — pipe stem trousers were just not worn by anyone in India so promptly re-equipped ourselves at our own expense. Found places like Worli where there’s wonderful swimming pools where we were allowed entry. And that was great fun. We were entertained, being non-commissioned by a very kindly group of people. I don’t know whether they were YWCA or who but they brought some little Anglo-Indian girls into the afternoon tea to meet us. This is one of these occasions of being unable to make contact. The shyness was on both sides I suppose. We’d have had this somewhat racial attitude. And the little girls would have been so hesitant and lacking in self confidence that it was just, just hopeless. But if you were officer class you had an opportunity I think to meet the upper class Indian women in a way that British non-commissioned people, British other ranks we were called, BORs, and you just never had the opportunity of meeting the more companionable I suppose, more self confident Indian females. So what else in Bombay did I see? There was a racecourse. I never went to the racecourse, but some of my friends would come home and say, ‘Oh you should have been.’ Edgar Britt just gave us a tip for all the races of these Australian jockeys. Edgar Britt and a fellow called Roberts. And another fellow called Scarlet there. All the races were fixed apparently because the jockeys knew who was going to win [laughs] yeah.
AP: So you flew Liberators operationally. Am I correct?
JM: Hmmn?
AP: You flew Liberators operationally.
JM: Yes. Well from Bombay we went across to Calcutta at the height of the Bengal famine. That was unbelievable. Stepping off the train in Worli. Step over bodies. There were beggars with Elephantiasis. Do you know what Elephantiasis is? Our mess was, in the open air and after things had been cleaned up you would see these old women come along picking through our rubbish picking bones. Just [pause] and India’s population then was about four million then. The population of the same subcontinent now is about a billion and a half. So imagine —
AP: My sister —
JM: What problems they have.
AP: My sister actually lives in India. She’s in New Delhi now.
JM: Who’s that?
AP: My sister.
JM: Yeah.
AP: And she, yeah, founded and runs an NGO to develop education in certain parts of India so yeah I hear stories like that quite, quite frequently. Yeah. I think it’s a very different world. So tell me what you first thought of the Liberator the first time you saw one.
JM: Well I first went on as a second pilot to a man called Joe Morphett who was a flight commander. It’s one thing that convinced me that I was lucky to be an NCO because when I got my own crew we all slept in the same basha together. We became absolutely a glued team. But Joe Morphett — I never saw him except when we flew. The same with the navigators of that crew. The navigator rather. And I think there was another officer in the crew. Never got to see them outside the aircraft and it just convinced me that NCO, all NCO crews were a good thing. But I did seven or eight ops with Joe. On the last one Joe had [pause] Joe was an interesting man. I learned afterwards researching things that he’d been a schoolteacher. He had a degree in engineering and he had given this — we had a CO on 355 Squadron a man called Dobson who was a no-hoper in my opinion. He was, again like Crannon, a man who liked to discipline people if they fell out of line. So he, we had two aircraft blow up on the squadron on landing and this was considered a shameful thing. We had a situation where he was only getting about four of the aircraft of the unit’s twelve aircraft — how many aircraft did we have on the squadron? We must have had sixteen aircraft I think. And twenty four crews. And we’d get about four or five up on an operation because the rest weren’t serviceable. And he decided to apply discipline. So this didn’t work. We had the squadron minstrel like the one on Crannon’s ship come out with a rhyme that went to the tune of “St Cecilia, the squadron is a shambles. There’s no ops any more. Eighteen NCO lined up outside the CO’s door. They’re handing out the 252s and reprimands galore. On 355 old Barney” and it went on. And Dobson disappeared for a while and Joe Morphett took over the squadron. And Joe got up and gave a pep talk to the whole squadron on what they should be doing. He said. ‘Your petrol consumption is dreadful. We are having aircraft land at other posts because they’ve run out of petrol on the way back. Now this is unacceptable. There are ways of flying when you come back from a target if you fly the right way you will use much less petrol. And the right way to fly is to fly on the step.’ And what, “On the step,” means is you start off at the target at ten thousand feet and you very gradually lose height at cruising speed so that by the time you are near home post you have minimised your fuel consumption at the appropriate cruising speed and are ready to land. And so that was that. The next op we fly out with Joe Morphett. We were flying. We were bombing a place called Maymyo which is a bit of a hill station on the Burma route. The Burma road route to Chonqing and on, in our briefing we’d been warned that Mount Victoria which I think is one of the higher peaks in Burma had to be avoided. Somehow, coming home, Joe said, ‘Jesus we’re going to fly in to a bloody mountain.’ And you have a thing called the gate on a Liberator. If you go through the gate you increase your flying speed and your power and Joe went through the gate to get over this place. So we get back over the Sundarbans which, the delta at the mouth of the Ganges Bhramaputra system and an engine goes. Quick as a flash I said, ‘Perhaps it’s a pump Joe,’ and I put on the emergency pump and the engine came good again. Then the rest of the engines went. I put on all the emergency posts. To cut a long story short Joe said, told the crew to abandon. Somewhere into Bengal by this time. And he said to me, ‘This goes for you too Mac.’ So I released myself and kept going. There I find a blockage. The wireless operator, my friend Ron Vine is there and there is someone in front of him who won’t move. So I went back to Joe and said, ‘Anything I can do to help, skip?’ He said, ‘Get out.’ [laughs] So I went back and by this time Vine had booted Melville, the flight engineer in the bum, and Melville had descended. Subsequently breaking his leg we learned. Vine and I got out at God knows what height because we were within very short walking distance of Joe’s crashed aircraft. The man who’d been so determined that people wouldn’t run out of [pause] it was one of those ironies that you. Anyway, that was, I did one more op at Phulbani and then was sent to HCU. Heavy Conversion Unit at Kolar which is near Bangalore. Lovely climate but not much else to recommend it. Bangalore’s an interesting town but, you know.
AP: So ok so you parachuted from an aircraft?
JM: Pardon?
AP: You jumped out of an aeroplane you said.
JM: Yes. Yes.
AP: Where did you land and how did you get back?
JM: Well yes, that’s interesting because Vine and I, of course, landed within feet of [pause] this was about 4 o’clock in the morning. Vine and I landed within sight of one another. Must have been moonlight because Joe had seen the mountain and it was the 1st of April of all dates. And so we found our way to the village. It was the second village from where we — we went to the first village nearest. We knew roughly where the aircraft would be. The first village we woke everybody up and finally found someone who was able to direct us, who knew where the aircraft had crashed. So we walked over about another four or five hundred yards of paddy. We got to the next place and there found Joe had been taken out of the aircraft by the local people. Put under a tree. A mango tree. I couldn’t eat mangos for years after that but there was Joe with a great triangular piece rolled back across his scalp and a great chunk taken out of his thigh and after painkillers so we found the medical kit from the aircraft and tried to inject morphine without much success. Anyway, Joe said take it out and finally we persuaded someone to go and get help. And so we —eventually help came at about I suppose about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. And on April the 1st in Bengal. That’s not very — May the 1st it was. May the 1st and that was that’s a hot season in Bengal and if you’re inland in Bengal you get the worst of things because you get the humidity and you get the continental heat before the monsoon hits it the heat becomes absolutely unbearable. But there it was [pause] I suppose it was by 3 o’clock we got help. Someone came with a wheeled the [unclear] which Joe was put on to and the medico was able to give him an injection which helped. And so we wheeled to, the squadron transport had somehow been invoked in the meantime. Or some military transport had been invoked and it was waiting for us about two miles along this track that we walked, behind Joe. The medico had bought some supplies for us because Vine and I had not taken food or drink from them. We were afraid. When you arrived in India you were warned never to eat anything or drink water because dysentery and cholera were such a threat. So we were absolutely parched. And the medico, Indian medico had brought along water and he brought some boiled eggs. Well I wouldn’t take even his water. I tried to eat the boiled, hardboiled egg. And have you ever tried to eat anything when you have no saliva?
AP: Very difficult. Yes.
JM: Anyway, we got to the end of this trail. Joe was to be put into the ambulance or whatever it was. He turns to the medico and says, ‘Can I bale out now doc?’ which I think is one of the wonderful heroic remarks.
AP: Indeed.
JM: So Joe Morphett was his name. He got the DFC in the Middle East and he got a bar too. His DFC on that occasion. And Vine and I were put into hospital with heat exhaustion. We came out in a few days. We were, Vine was a wireless operator. He’d been my W/op in Harwell actually. So we came out of that and then I did one more op with a man called John or Johns. WO Johns and I learned more about flying Liberators from him. Sorry Joe but I did. Than I did in eight ops with you. Anyway, after that we were posted to, or a few of us and my friends by that stage, you change friendships in the air force. You move, made new friends and Clem Walker who I’d given the job of representing us in boxing on the ship, and Butch Smith, a Londoner with a cockney accent and I were sent to HCU at Kolar where were we converted on to Liberators as captains in our own right. And it was there we chose our crews but I was a bit slow in getting around to a crew because I had to find a navigator and dodge the one I didn’t want to find. And I landed up with this Australian. A real rough diamond. Old Greg. He was considerably older than I was. He’d been on Wellingtons on air sea rescue in Madras for a while. And Greg reckoned he should have been first pilot but he got lined up with me as first pilot. So that, that was a bit tricky to start off with but we managed to find a modus vivendi eventually. He was a rough diamond as they say. My last meeting with Greg was in Calcutta. I was having a forty eight hour leave and learned he was about to depart for Australia on a banana boat having finished his own tour and I went to see him off. And he paid me a compliment of saying, ‘McCredie if it had been any other bastard I wouldn’t have stuck it out.’ [laughs]
AP: Fair enough.
JM: That was a funny relationship with Greg.
AP: Do, do any of your subsequent ops stand out in your memory at all? Any of your —
JM: Hmmn?
AP: Do any of your subsequent operations stand out?
JM: Well, the time, the time I was shot up stands out of course. I mentioned that earlier so we did long operations. Fifteen hours and forty five minutes took place. Called [unclear] on the isthmus of [unclear] . Quite a long way down. The name eludes me for a moment.
AP: That’s, that’s a lot longer than most Bomber Command operations.
JM: Hmmn?
AP: That’s a lot longer than most Bomber Command operations.
JM: Yes. Well —
AP: Fifteen hours.
JM: The Liberator was designed for that. We carried six thousand pounds [coughs] Pardon me. I’d better have a drink [pause] We carried six thousand pounds to this place. The Lancaster for instance had a maximum bomb load of twenty thousand pounds. The Liberator’s maximum bomb load was twelve thousand pounds. But where we, when we flew at six thousand we could have two bomb bay tanks of fuel.
AP: Bomb bay tanks. Yeah.
JM: In place of the bombs so that would carry us comfortably for a sixteen hour flight. But if you went with no bombs as some people did on reconnaissance. My friend, my CO, Killarney later became a Pathfinder in South East Asia and he did one flight, I believe of twenty one hours in a Liberator.
AP: Nuts.
JM: A reconnaissance flight but —
AP: When you’re, when you’re flying as a pilot for fifteen odd hours you pretty much can’t leave your seat can you?
JM: Yes. Well you have a co-pilot.
AP: Of course.
JM: So it, it’s when you’re young it seemed to me, for instance my logbook inferred that within three— or two days or three days I I did two flights to Bangkok from from Bengal which were both over thirteen hours. Taking off on each occasion in daylight and landing in daylight. You made up for the sleep in the afternoons. Indeed the siesta was the common practice and then somehow about 5 o’clock you’d head, if you weren’t flying the next you’d head for the mess.
AP: Very good. What was, what was a tour? How long was a tour in India?
JM: Three hundred hours.
AP: Three hundred hours. So it’s an hour’s based thing.
JM: Three hundred hours or a year’s service. A year on the squadron active service.
AP: Yeah. Go on.
JM: So, what — my two nickels counted as operational service. The seventy odd hours I did at Phulbani counted as operation service. So by the time I reached three hundred my crew was not finished. So Clem Walker and I and Butch all said we’ll fly on. It was that stage of the war and we didn’t see much to stop us flying. And so I ended up with three hundred and seventy odd hours.
AP: Of operational flying.
JM: Yes.
AP: Wow. So what happened at the end of your tour? What’s next?
JM: I was sent on to Transport Squadron. Clem Walker and I were sent on transports to New Delhi where we, 232 Squadron — it was 99 Squadron in Dhubalia which was where I did the bulk of my ops. I don’t think I mentioned that squadron. 232 was the transport squadron I flew on for six months and we did milk runs to Bombay, Colombo, Calcutta. I went to Pegu in Burma on one occasion. Cocos Island and then I did one trip back to Australia as a second pilot. When I went to the transport squadron I was a second pilot for a couple of months. That’s when I did the trip home to Australia.
AP: What aircraft was this?
JM: Hmmn?
AP: What aircraft? What aircraft?
JM: Liberators.
AP: Liberators as well. Yeah. Ok.
JM: So managed to get home to see my parents. And [pause] but Cocos Island was the first time you had to fly there you wondered if the navigator was on the ball because there was a point of no return. But we did a few trips there and my old squadron, 99 Squadron was posted there after the end of the Jap war because it was participating in the Javanese campaign. We were helping the Dutch get back into Indonesia so when I visited Cocos Island I’d meet up with old mates from the squadron. That wasn’t very good for the passengers on the way back the next day [laughs] But Cocos Island was interesting. Huge crabs would come on shore at night. But transport flying was something that I must say never appealed to me. You felt like you had a purpose when you went on a bombing raid but and you got back to base if you were lucky but if you —
AP: Did you, did you fly at all after the war? No. Not at all.
JM: No I went back to — I took up the government’s offer of a university education and I’d worked out that Australia was going to need a Foreign Service. My sister had written to me and said Dr Everett had introduced this. ‘You should try and qualify for it.’ I managed to get myself into an honours arts degree at the university and applied for the cadet course in my first year. Didn’t even get an interview. Applied for it again in my second year. And then I had the thought I would go and talk to my professor who — Professor Crawford had worked in the Foreign Service. He’d been First Secretary in Moscow during the war. And I went along and saw him and said I’m just wondering if it was a better idea to write and tell them I’ll apply again when I finished my degree. He said, ‘That’s a very good idea.’ So I, I’d laid the foundation for his giving me a good recommendation the next year and managed to get into the Foreign Service which was an infant service in those days.
AP: I guess, summing it all up, what were your thoughts on your wartime service. How did it affect you? How did it affect your subsequent life?
JM: It well the first year at university was very difficult because I had all sorts of unfulfilled ambitions such as I wanted to play football again. And I managed to get into the university blues which were the B grade amateur team in those days and got myself injured in a way that upset my studies for a while. And it was a very much a party year. First year back so I had a bit of trouble settling down and it wasn’t until I saw myself being on the brink of being thrown off the course that I could really get down to, and apply myself, full time, to study.
AP: Sure.
JM: Which was essential.
AP: I suppose that’s, that’s pretty well the end of my list of questions. So we’ve been talking for an hour and three quarters now, believe it or not. And that’s absolutely fine.
JM: I hope your ears haven’t suffered too much from the bashing.
AP: Oh my ears. No. Not at all. I mean I have been watching the clock but it’s, yeah, it’s gone. Gone very quickly so thank you for very much. Really.
JM: Well I hope that’s helpful anyway.
AP: I think it will be.
JM: What are you going to do with all this?
[recording paused]
AP: We’ll be able to fix it later. Alright. Carry on.
JM: Yes. Well as an after, this shouldn’t be an afterthought because my squadron commander on 99 Squadron Lucian Killarney was an outstanding man by any classification. His idea of running a squadron was that everybody had to work together. The first thing he did was bring the ground crew together to explain that he understood perfectly the conditions which were very difficult in the Bengal climate. He understood there were problems with catering. We couldn’t always get what we wanted, ‘But what every squadron needed was to have serviceable aircraft and that’s on you people on which we all depend. We can’t do our job without you.’ Now I’d like to pay this compliment to Killarney as a leader as so distinct from the man Dobson on 355 squadron. Killarney managed to get twelve aircraft in the air on almost every operation and he did that by leadership. By explaining and getting the ground crew onside and it’s been my privilege to see something of him after the war and to know that he ran his furniture company with the same diligence and consideration and the quality of his furniture reflects that.
AP: Excellent. Excellent.
Dublin Core
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AMcCredieJ151012
Title
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Interview with John McCredie
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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.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:45:19 audio recording
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Creator
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Adam Purcell
Date
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2015-10-12
Description
An account of the resource
John McCredie grew up in Australia and served in the Militia before he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force. He flew two operations as a pilot over France during training and was later posted to India. He later returned to Australia to continue his university education and went on to join the Australian Foreign Service
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
Burma
Great Britain
India
India--Bengal
Victoria
Victoria--Mount Martha
Victoria
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
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1941
1943
1945
99 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
B-24
entertainment
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Harwell
RAF South Cerney
sanitation
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/244/3389/PCuttsE1514.1.jpg
e7a754fa5b912a34d876d5279e757670
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/244/3389/ACuttsE151001.1.mp3
20478f89b794259528d723e98160f089
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Cutts, Ernest
Ernest Cutts
Ernie Cutts
E Cutts
Description
An account of the resource
14 Items. One oral history interview with Ernest Cutts. Ernest Cutts enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force, and trained as an air gunner in Australia. He flew on 34 operations as a rear gunner with 466 Squadron from RAF Driffield, flying Halifaxes.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Ernest Cutts and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-01
Rights
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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.
Identifier
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Cutts, E
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AP: This interview for the Bomber Command the International Bomber Command Centre is with Mr. Ern Cutts who is a 466 and 467 Squadron rear gunner, the interview is taking place at Mr. Cutts’s home in Doncaster, Eastern Victoria on 1st October 2015. Ern we might start at the beginning tell me something about your early life growing up, farm, family that sort of thing?
EC: I was born in the Mallee in Victoria I was born in Birchip um very proud of that I’m a Mallee boy and um still very fond of the country up there. Then I went to school in Birchip and at the age of um be about fifteen there was an advertisement in the local paper for the, from the Postmaster General’s Department advertising for staff and for young people to sit for the Commonwealth Public Service Exam which I did. I passed the exam and was then posted um straight from the the Mallee in Birchip which is quite a cultural shock and the next thing I knew I was living in a boarding house in or just off Fitzroy Street, St. Kilda so I don’t know how I actually handled it but I suppose the resilience of youth, um and I had various postings then err military post office as a civilian. I was a junior postal officer, in other words a glorified telegram boy really, um my first posting was the telephone exchange in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne from there I went to the St. Kilda Post Office, from there I went to the Military Post Office in Rowville outside Dandenong and the Military Post Office in Mount Martha outside um Frankston. By this time of course I was starting to become of the age where I could sign up and like all young blokes I couldn’t wait to join one of the services, right from the start I had um I am the youngest or was and am the youngest of seven children um of my mother and father’s and of the seven children five of us all enlisted um and we enlisted across various services. Um two of us enlisted in the Air Force I was aircrew my brother Ron was ground crew or ground staff as they were known then, er one of my sisters was um an RAAF nursing sister, two of my brothers joined the AIF and the remaining two girls of the family were wireless service people so I had a fairly interesting service life. By this time of course I’d have been eighteen as I just mentioned before and I had already decided that I want to be in aircrew and aircrew after a lot of hassle with my father he didn’t want me to go aircrew because he felt that five out of the seven of his children were already occupied in the forces and he thought that I perhaps could go into something less less strenuous or whatever I wanted to join aircrew and I did it.
AP: Did you have any family history in the First World War perhaps, did you know of anyone who was in the First World War and had they?
EC: Well I know one of my uncles er my father’s brothers on my father’s side Aubrey, Aubrey Cutts I know he was in the war and another brother who lived in Sydney I can’t I’m not hundred per cent where Aubrey lived but I think he was um after the First World War I think he was a blockie in other words a farmer a soldier settler allocated a fruit growing block, um the other brother the only other one that I know of that was in the services was employed by the Sydney municipal council and he was um his name was Ray but I I really didn’t know either of them.
AP: So there wasn’t any sort of influencing you all joining up it was more, there’s another war let’s go?
EC: No no.
AP: Okay.
EC: My father was one of eleven or twelve children I think like they all were in those days and um by the time I came on the scene they were all well scattered all over the Commonwealth so I didn’t even know them except that one uncle, Uncle Ray in Sydney and the only reason I knew him was that um we embarked from Sydney on the troop ship New Amsterdam um to go overseas and of course he had me at his house and all that you know all that company and looking after me and all that business.
AP: You specifically chose the Air Force or were you open to any service?
EC: No I think now I can’t remember but looking back I think I wanted to be aircrew.
AP: Specifically aircrew well you got there.
EC: Specifically aircrew and I wanted to be aircrew and, and I was.
AP: Can you remember much of the actual enlistment process you know you go and you put your name down somewhere can you remember that that process where and how did that happen?
EC: I can’t remember, I can’t remember the actual, I can remember going to a big building on the corner of I think it was the Main Road and St. Kilda Road and that was commandeered I think would be the word it was taken over by the Air Force as their recruitment centre and it was called Kellow-Falkiner, any people of my age would know Kellow-Falkiner for it was a very big motor company selling motor cars, servicing motor cars and very big I think it was either on the corner of St. Kilda Road and the Main Road or St. Kilda Road and Commercial Road but I feel pretty sure it was the Main Road in fact I think the building is still there today.
AP: What happened when you went there?
EC: Well the rest is a bit of a blank it was I can’t really remember, I remember we had to go in and I suppose we were interviewed and I think we were given a quick medical and signed this piece of paper and then that was it and I think we went on our various ways home and all that sort of thing and waited to be called up.
AP: How long did it take from that until you were called up?
EC: I can’t remember.
AP: Oh right.
EC: I can’t remember I really can’t remember er um and during that time while I was waiting for my call up I just went back as a junior post office as a junior postal officer at St. Kilda Post Office.
AP: Did you already know Morse code out of interest doing that job?
EC: Yeah well sort but I was never as good at it as I would have liked er and I, I regretted that very very much because I should have been a wireless air gunner which was I wanted to be a wireless air gunner but I wasn’t good enough at Morse code.
AP: Despite the prior experience?
EC: Beg your pardon?
AP: Despite the prior experience?
EC: Yeah but I never, I didn’t really have enough experience.
AP: Fair enough.
EC: Some of those, those in the days of telegraphy some of those telegraphers were absolutely brilliant, brilliant you had to be you had to be brilliant to be a telegraphist.
AP: Fair enough. Your ITS training your initial training where was that and what did you do?
EC: One in that logbook here somewhere.
AP: There it is.
EC: Yeah over there well when I first ITC initial training see that would be initial training centre that won’t be in here.
AP: I don’t think you would have done any flying there.
EC: No, no you don’t that was the [looking through book] initial training ITC [pause] I just saw the photo a minute a go here but which side I was, there it is there. First posting was to Number 1 Recruit Training School at Summers, Victoria for six weeks. From Summers I proceeded to West Sale, Victoria with the 3 BAGS, which is bombing and gunnery school for three weeks, this is a part of the course thirty nine gunners at Sale and yours truly, yours truly is um somewhere there.
AP: Hopefully we will scan this photo later.
EC: Er just trying to see which is me . . . there!
AP: Back there, excellent. So at, at West Sale you were flying in Fairey Battles according to your logbook, what memories of that if any do you have?
EC: I don’t want memories of that.
AP: You don’t want memories of that [laughs].
EC: I don’t memories of that [background noise] that was the most, that was bloody hideous things they were, they were glycol-cooled engines, inline engines, Fairey Battles and I’ve never smelt glycol like that. They, they sort of make you sick before you took off, the smell of the hot glycol which was a cooling agent and um beside that they were old they were rickety there was only you and the pilot in them and to step out on the first day for your first time in your life of ever being airborne to step out of one of those Fairey Battles really was asking really asking too much. But that’s how they did the gunnery schools because they were very reliable aircraft, very reliable aircraft. They had to tow drogues which were really targets like a like an air sock on an airfield the drogue. One Fairey Battle would drag the drogue and then you would be in the other one and you’d practice all that you put into practice all that you’d learned in theory that day, but they were awful, it was awful I hated every minute of it, hated. Beside being violently airsick all the time which you were because the pilot had to do manoeuvring and they were er well we just weren’t prepared for it just not prepared for it. We were young blokes who’d who’d never even seen an aircraft before and um plonked in this awful aircraft the Fairey Battle then and er you just had to cope the best you could.
AP: And so after something like ten hours in your logbook your next step is embarkation depot and a boat presumably to er?
EC: No then.
AP: After BAGS.
EC: 3 BAGS, which is bomber and gunnery school oh and I see it will be initial training was learning to be a discipline, discipline you know that was here initial training and then 3 BAGS bomber, bombers and air gunners school, then I went to now in that one we flew Oxford aircraft which were comparatively luxurious I mean they had two engines for a start off that were pretty hard and clamped down but at least they had two engines and um you weren’t out in the elements like you were in the Fairey Battles I think I might have a photo of one.
AP: So in the Oxford you were bombing training or was that in gunnery?
EC: Gunnery.
AP: Gunnery training as well.
EC: Yes.
AP: How did they do that in an Oxford? Was there a turret or just a hole with a gun? Where did you do your– ?
EC: You had to know how to stand in the turret there it is there 3 BAGS, West Sale gunnery there it is there as I said yeah Oxford that one’s Fairey Battle, Fairey Battle, Fairey Battle [examining photographs].
AP: Ah so you flew both of them?
EC: Yeah Battle, Battle, Battle, but mostly it was um.
AP: Now we’re at Lichfield? So how did you get from West Sale to Lichfield?
EC: From West Sale to Lichfield, I can’t remember a great amount about it except that when we finished 3 BAGS we would have been sent on pre-embarkation leave and I think we perhaps had ten days perhaps three weeks of pre-embarkation leave and we were er towards the end of that we were in Brad I think it was the suburb of Bradfield or Bradfield Park in Sydney and it was there that I contacted the brother of my father’s Ray that’s how I came to know him and um I suppose we did whatever young blokes did while we were sitting in the embarkation you know perhaps went down for a few beers went out perhaps saw all the pretty girls and did all those things and um then that was time say for the embarkation actual embarkation and we were then bussed along with hundreds and hundreds of others down to the troop ship which was um commandeered by the British navy and was a liner, pre-war liner and it was the flagship of the Dutch merchant navy, the Royal Dutch Merchant Navy and it was the New Amsterdam and in those days it was not quite to the standard of the Queen Mary but going that way which to be the flagship of the Dutch merchant navy pre-war well it had to be it had to be a beautiful liner and then from there we went overseas.
AP: Can you remember which direction you went?
EC: Yes we went from um Sydney and one of the most one of the most beautiful sights I ever saw in my life was um we didn’t, we didn’t come down to Melbourne we left Sydney and but we came down in the Bass Strait and then across to Perth. One of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life was a late afternoon we passed um Wilsons Promontory and the sun was setting and this it was and I’ve never never, never ever forgot it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life, I was a young eighteen year old bloke very impressionable and um I’ve never forgotten that, then um we went direct then to Cape Town in South Africa. Now we were in Cape Town for a while I distinctly remember going ashore and with all the boys and we used to go down to the canteen and have a few beers and um I remember I remember distinctly Cape Town, and from there we went round to Freetown, which is the capital of Sierra Leone and is still the capital today er I’ve got an idea we went to another place not too sure and all this time of course if there were in the big shipping lanes all over the world and they didn’t like calling in and embarking and disembarking too much because the German submarines were really, really, on the ball and um it was better that you were at sea and under convoy protection and big liners like the New Amsterdam we didn’t we had protection but that was only to keep us with the rest of the convoy didn’t really need the protection because the New Amsterdam could outrun German submarines and so we went from Cape Town round to Freetown the capital of Sierra Leone oh yeah that’s right then we went up to the Gold the Gold Coast could it be called the Gold Coast?
AP: The Ivory Coast?
EC: The Ivory Coast yes that’s the next one up I think from Sierra Leone [pause] and from there we went we must have picked up I remember distinctly remember picking up hundreds of Italian prisoners of war and we learnt later that they were from the Italian cruiser the Bartolliomi Colomanie, Bartolomeo Colleoni, which had just been sunk over Sydney and they had all the prisoners, all the Italian naval prisoners of war and we loaded them they were loaded on pretty quickly and then we set sail and went straight up to um Firth of Forth, which is in Scotland, Grannick is it Grannick [?Greenock], all the Scotch [sic] people that’s all they ever talk about the Firth of Forth so that’s where they’ll know it, beautiful part of the world, from there like all Australians we were um we disembarked and joined the troop train which took us directly to Brighton, um in Sussex?
AP: England, over in England, South of England.
EC: Yes and so that’s my tale of how I got to England.
AP: Can you remember much of Brighton, were you there for long was there much to do did you see any enemy activity or anything like that?
EC: No there was not a lot to do and um it was and still is er where most English people spend some holiday sometime because you haven’t been anywhere as an English person if you hadn’t been to Brighton. Even today it’s, it’s um a mecca for those that come, it’s a beautiful place. We expected to see being on the sea like that we expected the sea and perhaps swim on nice beaches but there is no beaches there, it’s on the sea alright, but no beaches so we were quite disappointed [laughs] they just had all pebbles and they don’t sort of have beaches.
AP: Did you see much um sign of the war when you had just arrived in England?
EC: Yeah, yeah well we um Brighton itself wasn’t bombed much, least I don’t think it was and if it was it wasn’t when I was there it was never bombed while I was there, but London was still being bombed while I was there and um yeah and things were pretty crook, pretty crook um but we were treated like kings you know because the English people were so pleased any, anyone in Bomber Command were treated with the utmost respect, treated like kings because the only people in the war in those days, until D-Day was Bomber Command there was no other um and in the Middle East of course but in Europe there was no war on Europe it was only air war because it was only Bomber Command and going over every night and doing what we had to do it every night [phone ringing], but I remember something stuck in my mind I remember when I was a young a bloke at this time and I was pretty keen on a young English girl and I noticed I’d been invited to her home quite a few times and I noticed that she and I always got fed, Cassandra she was the only daughter so there was no one other than her mother and her and myself and mother said she and I always got fed but the mother never ate anything and I said to her one day and I questioned her about it one day she said ‘no, no, no, no, no’ she got very embarrassed and I said ‘why you know are, are you so embarrassed? Is it illegal food or something?’ she said ‘no it’s actually my mother’s ration she’s giving it to you’.
AP: Wow.
EC: Well that’s, that’s, that’s the English people you know they were really tops.
AP: Wow . . . all right we’ll move on a bit tell me how you met your crew, how did you meet the people that you flew with?
EC: Well that was at 27 OTU and we were all um we’d have been taken there by by rail or road motor, would have been transported there from Brighton to Lichfield anyhow, somehow maybe by train um and then taken out to the station, out to Driffield and I think they gave us a couple of days to acclimatise and [coughs] wander round and see what was what and just sort of filled in to I don’t remember, all I remember is I met a guy his name was Gordon Dalton and he was born and bred in Nilma which is outside of Warragul and I think Gordon’s now dead but I remember he and I got along particularly well and he always looked for a mate so you had someone to talk to and I remember him saying to me one day ‘they’re looking for crews they want a gunner’ I said ‘yeah but we gotta get a pilot’ I said ‘it takes a week to find this’ he said ‘no we’ve got a half-filled now’ I think we only wanted a navigator and two gunners something like that and he said ‘now are you interested?’ I said ‘course I’m interested that’s what we are here for [phone ringing] let’s get into a crew and get this thing [unclear]’ that’s how it happened he said ‘OK I’ve got the pilot‘ Alan McKellem and the rest of the blokes from there on I don’t know, I don’t remember how we all gelled then [unclear].
AP: So it wasn’t like everyone in one big room and pick your room it sort of happened naturally?
EC: Naturally, yeah yeah.
AP: Suddenly you were flying?
EC: I was yes I mentioned that Gordon Dalton actually I made a mistake there, that’s how I was paired up on the second crew the first crew um I think it was the bomb aimer, Brian Seaton from Sydney, I think it was him that mentioned one day he said this ‘Cuttsy we are looking for a gunner if we get two gunners and a navigator’ or it might have been a flight engineer he was looking for but he said ‘we’ve got the crew mate will you be in ours?’ I said ‘yeah gotta be in [unclear] that’s what we are here for’ and that’s how that happened.
AP: What um what sort of things happened at OTU at Lichfield what were you actually doing in the aeroplanes and what were you doing on the ground?
EC: Operational Training Unit 27 OTU now at Lichfield. 27 OTU was at Lichfield Operational Training Unit that was switching over to what you called today medium bombers, in those days they were heavy bombers but they were Wellingtons, two engine radial cooled and we went across and we learnt cross country navigation, we practiced bombing, we practiced gunnery um that was all down there, cine camera gun exercise, a lot of that was gunners doing their training we had cine cameras attached to the um machine guns and when you fired they would sort of um show where you were going so they could check up on you the instructors could check up on you so there I’ve done about one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, nine flights [looking at his logbook] there all of them averaging um an hour and a half er and that was on cine camera gun exercise, now down here still in 27 OTU solo cross country that would have been the first time that our skipper would have flown with his crew at night, solo bombing runs, solo cross country, solo cross country, dual circuits and landing, dual circuits and landing.
AP: You even had gunners for circuits?
EC: So that the aircraft was fully loaded.
AP: Ah of course.
EC: And so that you got used to you know circuits and bumps we you used to call it circuits and landing.
AP: It would have been quite bumpy in rear turret I imagine?
EC: [Laughs] No actually the rear turret was quite okay um um but this was really for the skipper circuits and landing it’s all for the skipper here’s it well here [unclear] air test self-towed drogue in other words the aircraft that I was in had a towed drogue and we towed that, a number of rounds fired fifty two, cross country, all those things, so still still on Operational Training Unit, solo bombing, um simulated fighter attacks using your own fighter aircraft using Mosquitoes no it wouldn’t have been Mosquitoes um Spitfires or Hurricanes and they would come in and attack us no, no firing or anything but they would come in and attack us we would fire at them with the cine cameras and then they’d be taken away by the instructors if you weren’t hitting them they’d put you back to school [laughs].
AP: What sort of ground training was involved at OTU for you guys if any?
EC: Um aircraft recognition er there was never any, except for initial training, there was never any um training like the army those you know army drill and backpacks we didn’t have to be we all were particularly fit young blokes but we didn’t have to be super fit like the young infantry blokes because we never walked anywhere we were driven everywhere.
AP: Having someone say you sat down to go to war?
EC: Yeah well that’s right yeah I mean we were, well the aircraft were always parked out on the aprons of the airfields and they’d always be in those times say three quarters of a mile away well we’d all be bussed out there because you couldn’t go out there with your flying gear on and your and your parachute harness you just couldn’t do it and your Mae West you could hardly walk let alone go out there so we were always picked up and driven driven to the aircraft, we got out and the ground crew had the aircraft all ready for us the ladders would be in the position we’d climb up the ladders and get inside, the ground crews were absolutely fantastic blokes typical Australian servicemen you know really top blokes looked after us like spoiled us they did.
AP: What did you think of the Wellington as an aircraft?
EC: Well it was yeah it was all right but um it fitted the bill it was all right when it was being flown it really wasn’t a heavy bomber you know compared to the Halifax and the Lancaster they were good yeah the blokes that flew them did equally as good or better jobs as we did as we did with four engines the four engine Halifax and the Lancaster were superb aircraft you know so all the good things they learnt about Wellingtons they learned to drop them aside and all the good parts went into the Halifax, Handley Page Halifax and Avro Lancaster.
AP: Beautiful.
EC: It was like it was like using um it was like using a Holden or a Falcon against a Merc or a BMW both all of them beautiful cars but [telephone ringing in and slight disturbance in the background].
AP: What did you do to relax when you were in England when you weren’t on duty?
EC: Er um get on the grog [laughs].
AP: [Laughs]
EC: I hate to say.
AP: You have entered pubs a few times?
EC: I think we I think we drank more than the average young bloke um and I think we smoked more than the average young bloke none of us I’m quite sure none of us have ever touched them since because we realised that there was yeah I know what you mean [laughs].
AP: From my experience of aircrew mmm [laughs].
EC: But the smoking part anyhow we all realised that that that was no good and er I think that’s why when we go before the Appeals Board for the Department of Veterans Affairs and you mention like I did I did thirty four operations and went back as an instructor and what not, I think I knew straight away that that they’d you know that there was no that I was gonna have my appeal carried out and I was subsequently um my appeal was subsequently allowed, I appealed against my pension and then I was because they realised that aircrew was spent most of your life behind the enemy lines and um it was pretty tough going you know pretty tough I think aircrew has the highest per capita of death and injuries I think aircrew has I stand to be corrected but I’m sure that aircrew does have the highest so.
AP: So so dealing with that sort of stress you end up in the pub frequently [laughs]?
EC: More frequently than we should have.
AP: Can you -
EC: Being behind the enemy lines all the time nearly all the time you are behind except flying there and flying home but even then the German night fighters would follow you home all the time in fact at one stage of the game they had this marvellous idea and they were very very successful at it. That they didn’t attack us over the target they waited till we crossed the English Channel coming home as this is, they waited they’d be stationed in France and then take off when we passed overhead they just they wouldn’t take us they’d just wait till we got into England and then we started fanning out our squadrons to wherever you came from I you know we had to go up to Yorkshire, your grand uncle would be going down to Lincoln and that, and they’d attack then because half the aircraft were shot up and limping home I mention and half of them not flying too well and they that’s when they wait and they’d attack when we got home they fixed that up later on the R the RAF fixed that up later on they patrolled the aircraft near the aerodromes and they fixed that up but they took a lot of a hell of a beating before they really did fix it up.
AP: So when you were on squadron at um Driffield where and how did you live like what were your living arrangements?
EC: In those um I forget what they call them they still have them today those.
AP: Nissen huts.
EC: Nissen that’s the word, Nissen huts Nissen huts except on the old former RAF regular squadrons where they had proper administrative buildings you know brick buildings and all that sort of thing um but all the squadrons were Nissen huts.
AP: What was that like in the winter of 1944-45?
EC: [Laughs] Yeah it was pretty cold, bitterly cold I think I honestly can’t remember but a lot of the times we spent a lot of times in the mess or in the sergeants’ mess or the officers’ mess whichever you were in and they were all heated, I guess in those days it would have been heated but um kerosene I suppose or diesel or something I just can’t remember.
AP: Gas?
EC: Lot of that well some or most likely we kept pretty warm but we were very much looked after very much spoilt.
AP: [Laughs]. So do any of your operations stand out in your memory?
EC: The first one I ever did in my life was to Sterkrade I think which a day might have been oh there’s when I got to Driffield there’s 46 Squadron [examining logbook] see we even tried it when we got the squadron there’s mine but after Lichfield they all became 1652 Heavy Conversion Unit which was only converting us from two engine Wellingtons to four engine whatever in my case Halifaxes so that was HCU which is Heavy Conversion Unit and even then we practiced, um practiced and trained and trained but not a great amount because all we were doing all we did was change from twin engine to four engine everything else was pretty much the same you know the only person who really got the benefit out of it um Heavy Conversion Unit was the navigator and the pilot the rest of us watching one aircraft and the next except the pilots had four engines and an additional member of the crew because when it went from um two dual engine to four engine you gained an extra crew member you’d have the um flight engineer.
AP: So he had to get used to you guys as well I suppose, was the flight engineer sort of, did you choose him or was he here’s your flight engineer off you go just like that?
EC: Yeah ‘cos he was RAF all flight engineers are RAF I don’t know why that is but it is something I suppose Australia said look we you’ve asked us for say ten thousand men or something will try and train ten thousand gunners, navigators, bomb aimers and pilots and wireless operators but we we’re too small a country we just haven’t got the men to train as flight engineers so all your flight engineers were Poms.
AP: I’ve only ever met one he’s a Scotsman.
EC: Flight engineer?
AP: Yep yep flight engineer he was a Stirling flight engineer of all things he flew Stirlings on ops.
EC: Was he was he what nationality?
AP: Scottish.
EC: RAF?
AP: Yep yeah he came out to Australia in the 1950s.
EC: Stirlings.
AP: Did you ever fly in Stirlings?
EC: No I didn’t . . . thanks [laughs].
AP: Those who did, loved them.
EC: Yes.
AP: Tommy Toy loved them but um but those who didn’t probably way down there [unclear].
EC: I was bloody glad I never ‘cos I never liked the look of them I used to think I did, awful looking things. Here I am [unclear].
AP: Yes I think we were talking about your first operation we were going to get into that.
EC: Yes as soon as you get to the squadron you’re fighter affiliation that’s that would have been settling in, that’s the first thing you ever did.
AP: Number nine that’s further back.
EC: Yes that’s number nine op so we gotta go back oh here we are Sterkrade there you are prior to that we’d done bombing exercise, three bombing exercise, a fighter affiliation exercise, that was at night when they used to attack your own aircraft your own aircraft attack us at night so so that they test your eyes testing how you operate in the darkness you know there you are Sterkrade number one Sterkrade it was in the Ruhr valley synthetic oil and it was a day trip and took flying time was five hours so be two and a half to Sterkrade and two and a half home and I’ve never lived this down [laughs] I saw these black puffs in the air black things you know [background unassociated conversation] and I said to someone I said the crew ‘cos everyone was excited you know our first op and it was a daylight op which was good because they did try and give you a daylight give you a bit of an idea what you were going to do I said ‘what’s all those black things out there skipper what are all the black things?’ and everyone started laughing it was bloody anti-aircraft exploding that’s how raw and I by the time I got to the thirty fourth op I didn’t need to ask [laughs]. So there you are that was my first op Sterkrade and then another daylight Cologne then a night now see still look we’d done eight operations there, I went to Cologne again in the Ruhr valley six hours ten at night then the next day on the 31st we were out practising beam approach that’s the forerunner of um er you know the pilots flew on the beam.
AP: Instrument landing system is what it’s called now.
EC: It’s what?
AP: Instrument landing system ILS.
EC: That’s it yes, yes but–
AP: I see here –
EC: But you are out there doing your operations but it’s still training.
AP: Yes, yes. There’s an early return here can you remember much of that?
EC: Um early recall.
AP: Early return Essen on recall ok?
EC: Recall from Hannover that now because there’d be a few of them through here early recall from Hannover it would either be a fault in the aircraft, a fault with um pathfinders going in and couldn’t operate because it was ten tenths cloud so they’d say recall there’s no good carrying on, or um perhaps it was a wrong meteorological reading and they’ve given us two tenths cloud when we got there was ten tenths so they recalled ‘em you know, no good dropping ten thousand or two thousand tons of bombs on a city.
AP: It might not be there?
EC: Yes you can’t see it you know ‘cos all you do is spray bombs all over the countryside no one gets . . . [unclear]
AP: Um okay cool.
EC: Practice bombing detail there’s another one see in amongst all one minute I’m over Hannover and Essen both prize German things.
AP: Wondering what those black clouds are yeah.
EC: The next thing you’re gonna see one I’ve never really noticed that, number nine.
AP: With another early return as well?
EC: There’s another one there Bochum early return that was three hours forty five minutes which means we’d have been pretty close to Bochum then because Bochum’s in about um you know central Germany so it’s not it had been you know so I don’t know why we’d have been recalled then but a lot of it’s crook aircraft so not a lot of it but some of it is crook aircraft you know they’d say ’well return return’ the boys saying at the second time we’re already trying to turn round [laughs] and go back. I’m thinking [unclear]. See now started to do a lot of night ones here Duisburg, Cologne, and then after you’d done your month’s flying you had to put that in [a logbook monthly summary] and that was Noel Helpmann [?] who was a flight lieutenant um who was commanding the flight in other words that that means that that’s true we had a lot of blokes putting in things that they shouldn’t have put in.
AP: Extra ops? So I saw earlier there there’s a citation for your pilot looks like an immediate DFC?
EC: Yeah.
AP: Tell me about that trip from your perspective what do you remember of that trip?
EC: Oh no it’s not Flying Officer Alan Bircham recall the McKellam, South Lismore, New South Wales this officer [unclear] courage and determination. In November 1944 he was detailed to attack Gelsenkirchen when was that in November ‘44 there it is there the Ruhr valley, ten minutes before reaching the target the aircraft was attacked by heavy anti-aircraft fire target which wait a minute, which caused extensive damage Flying Officer McKellam flew on to the target which was attacked successfully his coolness, devotion to duty were worthy of the highest praise well um.
AP: What can you remember of that they are pretty terse words.
EC: No no a lot of these blokes, a lot of it you know I’m not saying that they the thing with the Distinguished Flying Cross what it says you know Distinguished Flying but it just happened to be on that Gelsenkirchen every pilot by the time he had done thirty four ops got a DFC I shouldn’t say it, a DFM is a different medal altogether you get ten DFCs and one DFM and that was what the DFM is I always thought if I ever get a medal I hope it’s a DFM because I wouldn’t get a DFM anyhow because I was only a sergeant when I say I was only a sergeant, I was a sergeant.
AP: So what you’re saying is there was nothing particularly different about that trip compared to other ones it just happened that they’ve got to put something?
EC: Otherwise I would have had it in.
AP: Yeah that’s a fair point it’s not in the logbook, yeah that’s a fair point it’s not in the logbook.
EC: Not in mine not for Gelsenkirchen, Ruhr valley I wasn’t recalled and I haven’t got up there return to base early um because we were shot up I sound as though I am detracting I’m not I’m just saying if you did thirty four ops doesn’t matter if you were recalled fifty not thirty times um you’d get the DFC.
AP: Fair enough [laughs].
EC: DFM though you’d be lucky if you got one [pause] where shall we go [pause]. Now the last of my flying things for days [looking through logbook] I’ll show you something in a minute still I can’t Cologne, Chemnitz, now there was one perhaps where he should have got a DFC Chemnitz we landed at Benson which was not our, it was an RAF um squadron station and we landed there because we couldn’t get home because the aircraft has because we had had an um been attacked heavily and um we were ordered to go, not ordered but we had to go there because we wouldn’t have made it back to Driffield so if he should have got the DFC that’s where he should have got it.
AP: How how were you attacked there what sort of damage to you remember that?
EC: Anti-aircraft fire.
AP: Was it over the target or on the way in or on the way out?
EC: Over the target, over the target I don’t remember I remember landing at Benson and I remember Chemnitz was a very [unclear] I’ll tell you another reason why we landed at Benson I reckon. Benson to base was only one hour so if we couldn’t have made one hour extra flying must have landed it must have been fuel perhaps we might have got hit in one of the tanks and lost all the fuel and the skipper said ‘claimed from control you’ve got to let me down you’ve got to put me down because I won’t make Driffield’ so they put us down um Benson.
AP: And then the next day you fly home?
EC: Then we flew home the next day on 6th March ‘44 on 7th March ‘44 we flew home.
AP: And your last trip?
EC: Number thirty four was Bottrop the last one thirty four was daylight that was five hours thirty minutes I’ll show you something now that I haven’t mentioned before now when I got to thirty four that was it you know they pulled us off then and we all went our different ways as instructors I think the wireless operator came home but that’s another story I think one of them came home and I went to 27 OTU as a um instructor, now we went, [examines logbook] here we are Berlin now when I told you about the CO at Lichfield at the time happened to be looking for a crew to go to group five [No. 5 Group] to learn to crew Lancasters which were going to be replaced by the super Lancaster which was the Lincoln and we were all picked crews and we were to come to Australia and instruct everyone here in Australia all the all [unclear] Australia on Lincoln aircraft and luckily [laughs] they dropped the atomic bomb so that we didn’t have to come, but whilst there at at um Metheringham which I am now um it’s a place er rear gunner Operation Spasm there’s Berlin there’s Berlin there’s er I don’t know what must have landed somewhere because it’s got returned by air safely.
AP: Operation Dodge?
EC: You’re going to say what were you doing flying over Berlin when the war’s finished.
AP: What was Operation Spasm? That’s what I’m interested in.
EC: Yeah I’m just going to show you where we all I don’t know why this hasn’t got Bari in there the first one we did was um Bari in Italy, [unclear] Spasm, Gatow, Gatow in Germany is equivalent to er er what’s the big one in London the big airport?
AP: Heathrow.
EC: Heathrow, Gatow is to Germany what Heathrow is to London, here we are Operation Dodge and Operation Spasm, Operation Spasm was Germany Gatau [spells it out] and Operation Dodge was Bari [spells it out] in Italy and you’ll notice um three hours it took us to fly to Berlin where in the bombers the actual bombers during the war that was a round trip of eight nine hours because they were loaded to absolutely loaded to the hilts.
AP: And you went the long way to, to try and– ?
EC: And went there and Bari took seven hours um there again both were non-stop I’m not sure what this one um the aircraft was stripped we stripped all the aircraft and we flew the English prisoners of war when they were released from the Middle East they went to Bari in Italy we flew them home and those that were captured in Europe they went to Berlin and we flew them home.
AP: That was Dodge and Spasm?
EC: Pretty marvellous really to fly those poor prisoners of war home and er but people said ‘well how did you do it so quick?’ but we never had we had no guns no ammunition no nothing because the war was over we just flew in in beautiful super aircraft like that how and how the others felt Lancaster picked them up and brought them home and they thought it was the most marvellous thing in the world, I think I’ve got a piece of newspaper, have we got that newspaper cutting there? Just the one about . . . that looks like it.
Other: Coming back in bombers?
EC: That’s right yeah give that to um thank you.
AP: Oh gold, I might scan that later too. Only fully trained crews many with one or two tours of thirty operations were picked for the job.
EC: You had to be experienced crews.
AP: So if they’ve got no guns in the aeroplane why did they have gunners?
EC: No this this now you are talking about going to.
AP: This one coming back when you are doing this operation when you are doing this Operation Dodge there are no guns.
EC: Dodge and Bari well I haven’t told you this [laughs] why did they didn’t have guns everything was stripped out of the aircraft it was filled all up with no seating because it was wartime just hundreds of pillows and blankets and anything sick POWs could use to collapse on you know and [laughs] believe it or not we were just air hostesses [laughs] someone had to, the ground crews would have all the ladders in position the ground crews helped them up when they got up the top there we’d take the poor bloke and say to them ‘well you sit there, you move up mate put someone else there’ and they used to almost fight over who got to sit in the mid upper turret and the rear turret and then there were those who kind of had never been in an aircraft before [laughs] flew like that all the way home to England you know had white knuckles so that’s why yeah.
AP: That’s why gunners were [laughs].
EC: So we came from, from glory to um nursemaid in a way [laughs].
AP: Someone had to do it.
EC: Well someone had do it yeah they were all crook you know and they’d just been taken out of prisoner of war and they’re thrust in one of these things they’d never ever been in an aircraft before they had no idea what was ahead of them.
AP: So after this is that the last flight in your logbook?
EC: Yeah Bari oh no here you are there’s one back to Waddington there.
AP: Waddington base and that’s the end of that so that’s where your logbook finishes on.
EC: Yeah.
AP: 21st September 1945. What happened next?
EC: Oh what?
AP: What happened after that?
EC: Like all RAAF aircrew went back to Brighton, everyone went back to Brighton every Australian whether ground crew, aircrew, whatever, they sail away if only all went through Brighton into England and out of England so Brighton was really an Australian town it was Brighton was just like we walking down the street in Melbourne and there would be a RAAF navy blue uniform of the war and to see any other uniform in Brighton was quite strange so we went back there and I don’t know how long I was in Brighton I can’t remember that clearly and I returned home on the um it was Athlone Castle and I can’t think what–
Other: Castle
EC: Yeah I know Athone Castle I’m just thinking it would be a commandeered liner again the Athlone Castle there was a big a big um oh line during the war and after the war and is still today such as Windsor Castle, the Athlone Castle, the Edinburgh Castle, they were all troop carriers but very top grade troop carriers not old cattle troop carriers like a lot of the poor people had to endure but none of them to the standard of the Athlone Castle very close to the standard of the Athlone Castle very close to the standard not the Athlone the New Amsterdam I mean the New Amsterdam was a beautiful ship as I said getting towards the Queen Mary stage, these Castle Lines were overseas liners but not quite as good so then we came home on the Athlone Castle and um stopped at um pulled in to Melbourne at Port Port Albert I think I might have a bill in there somewhere, so that’s about me talked out.
AP: Excellent. I still have one more question for you.
EC: Right.
AP: How do you think Bomber Command is remembered you know what sort of legacy has it left?
EC: Um I I think the British people um Churchill expressed it perfectly when he said first of all remember he said during the fighters that saved London ‘never have so many done so much for so few’ or whatever it was but then he also said of Bomber Command ‘that was the greatest force ever ever concentrated ever found’ because during all of our days right up till D-Day which was nearly all the war before D-Day um the only people active the only people affected by the enemy and affecting the enemy was Bomber Command there was no one else because all the armies were locked away I’m talking air force when I say all this not talking about the soldiers in the Middle East and all that they were still fighting their wars but when it came to Europe no one ranked with Bomber Command and I think they were respected and treated by the English people with the same admiration that they had for the um freedom fighters that’s not their name but the resistance the French resistance those French resistance behind the lines risking their lives all the time because when they were shot and found that was that was the worst thing that French and Belgian and all those other countries their resistance fighters could do was to rescue aircrew and bring them back through the underground ‘cause when they caught them if the Germans caught them they shot them straight away that was frightful so the freedom fighters so the resistance fighters not freedom fighters and the RAF the RAF call it the RAF because most of it was RAF I don’t think the English have got ever you mention we mention anyone today you know oh I go to RSL and blokes say ‘what did what were you in were you in the navy or army?’ I say ‘No I was in Bomber Command’ and if he was an English person ‘oh were you? Oh were you? Oh you blokes yeah‘, so makes you kind of feel very humble very proud and very humble.
AP: That’s a very nice note to finish on I think thank you very much.
EC: Okay, thanks Adam.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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ACuttsE151001
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Ernest Cutts
Rights
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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.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
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eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:16:59 audio recording
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adam Purcell
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-01
Description
An account of the resource
Ernest Cutts was born in Mallee in Victoria and at the age of fifteen he passed the Commonwealth Public Service Exam, joining the Military Post Office as a civilian junior postal officer. At eighteen he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force and went to 1 Recruit Training School at Summers and then to 3 Bombing and Gunnery School at West Sale, training as a rear gunner. He then sailed from Sydney to Great Britain, landing in Scotland and travelling to Brighton. He was posted to 27 Operational Training Unit and then to RAF Driffield, flying Halifax's. He took part in 34 operations over Germany. On one operation, his aircraft was so badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire that it was unable to return to its own station. In September 1945 he took part in Operation Spasm and Operation Dodge, repatriating prisoners of war from Europe and the Middle East. Subsequently he returned to Brighton en route for Australia. He remembers that the British people treated the personnel of Bomber Command very well and he felt proud to have been part of it.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Jackie Simpson
Brian May
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Germany
Great Britain
Scotland
England--Brighton
England--Yorkshire
New South Wales--Sydney
Victoria
Victoria--Mallee
Victoria
Victoria--Mount Martha
Victoria
New South Wales
England--Sussex
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944-03-06
1944-03-07
1944
1945
1652 HCU
27 OTU
466 Squadron
467 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
Battle
coping mechanism
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Driffield
RAF Lichfield
training
Wellington