Interviewed  by  George  Dick  and  tape-recorded  at South  Chittaway  on  16th  April  1993.

My father had a small farm at Wamberal, a few miles out of Gosford, and this was later converted to a dairy farm. I was one of six children who grew up there, and our main claim to fame was that we were all able to support ourselves.  Nearly every day we would see Stinsons and other passengers fly over our farm on their way from Sydney to Newcastle or Brisbane and it became a dream of mine to become a pilot and fly one of those ‘planes. I was madly jealous of the men who were flying the machines going over our house.

During the Depression I went off to be a jackeroo in Queensland, and although I didn’t have a great deal of education, managed to complete a wool-classing course by correspondence. After that I got a job as a wool-classer with Frank Jackson in Manila, just out of Tamworth.

When the war came and we heard about the fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain and the need for Australians to man Air Force squadrons, I thought this was my big chance and that I could at last realise my dream. I took a train down to Sydney and there saw a Squadron Leader McIntyre who I had known when he was a civilian with a property at Willow Tree. He put a damper on any early prospect of becoming an aviator when he told me that I didn’t have the educational qualifications to join the Royal Australian Air Force for aircrew training.

However, he told me that the Air Force were giving some priority to men who were already serving in the RAAF, but he didn’t know how long that policy would last. So, with the hope that they might later move me on to a pilot training course, I joined up in Sydney on 8th January 1940, as a trainee technician.

They sent me out to the Air Force Station at Richmond to do my rookie training, where I was kitted, put in charge of a Drill Instructor who trained us in formation drill,  rifle drill and did the other things relevant to a raw recruit. After about a month they sent me in to Sydney where I went to the Technical College at Ultimo and was put in charge of a squad while I did my basic technical course. One of the instructors there, by the name of Lord, had a friend who was a blind solicitor and I was taken to meet him. He was a most charming fellow.

Victoria was the next place the Air Force chose to send me to. In fact I was posted to do the next phase of my technical training at No 1 Engineering School which was based out at Ascot Vale at that time. When I finished that I could have qualified as either a Fitter IIE or as a Fitter IIA. In the vent I elected to be a IIA.

Around about August 1941 I was posted to Rathmines, a lovely station, where to my great delight the airmen were provided with bed sheets and pillow slips. We also had a wire-spring mattress and a wooden bedstead instead of the straw palliasses and galvanised pipe bedframes with chain wire.

Most of my work at Rathmines has to do with the Walrus flying boat and they always seemed to be developing leaking holes in the aluminium fuselage. We repaired them by soldering and welding. Round the take-off step on the underside of the hull was where we had the most trouble. Corrosion attacked the metal hull and we worked hard to remove that, and then apply zinc chromate before re-painting the surface.

I had an enjoyable time at that place, but was subsequently sent across to Western Australia as the Navy wanted another flight rigger to look after the Walrus on HMAS Perth. As our convoy left Fremantle the sailors on shore yelled out that they would take good care of our girls while we were away. We ended up at Alexandria where I became one of the crew on board the Perth.

We called in at Suda Bay Harbour in Crete for a short stay and at one stage I was working on a small boat when the enemy made one of their many raids on the Island. We were tied up to another ship in the Harbour which contained bombs and other ammunition and as we didn’t want to be blown sky-high if the Italians attacked the ammunition stacked in our ‘mother-ship’ we grabbed the oars and rowed like mad to put maximum distance between the two vessels. In our haste to get away, we weren’t able to free our rope completely and so , no matter how hard we pulled on the oars we didn’t move an inch.

Later on I calculated that our vehement session on the oars had shifted Suda Bay Harbour some three-quarters of a mile!

After I disembarked from the Perth back in her home port, I was sent back to Rathmines but was only there for a short time when I was posted to No 2 Aircraft Depot at Richmond, where I again was involved in Walrus Maintenance.

I got very angry about the attitude of some of the men there because they acted as if they were still in the peace-time Air Force and there was no urgency to get anything done. I’d been directly involved in the war when I was in the Middle East and I knew how important it was for everybody to put their heart and soul into their work. The way some of those nine-to-five technical men at the Depot carried on made me very irate. Sneaking off to the toilet for a drag on a cigarette straight after roll call wasn’t my idea of getting on with the war.

On 9th March I received my posting to a flying unit which had formed at Richmond just a few days earlier, but because 30 Squadron didn’t have any Beaufighter aircraft on strength I stayed with the Depot. By that time I had been re-mustered as a Fitter IIA and had been promoted to Corporal rank.

Others of the Fitter IIA mustering who were posted from the Depot to the Squadron on that day included Fred Hinks, Frank Forde, Andy Herron, Bill Schofields, Len Baich, Eric Hughes, Elton Marsden, Roy Meers and Cyril Mortimer.

 

But within a few short days I was on the move again and was sent back to Ascot Vale to do a hush-hush course on the brand-new fighter which the Australian Government had bought from Britain. The Beaufighters had not in fact arrived in Australia at that time, so our instructors at Ascot Vale were teaching us about the airframe from a book and weren’t able to give us any hands-on experience.

I managed to persuade Adjutant Wearne to give me some leave so that I could get up to Terrigal and  marry Erica Brooks in St Mark’s Church on Saturday 2nd May 1942. She came back south and we rented a little cottage at 118 Windsor Road, Richmond. I was given permission to live out and to draw one shilling and ninepence a day as ration allowance and a further eightpence a day as subsistence allowance. I rode a pushbike to and from work, using the main gate, which  on Windsor Road and  opposite the Clarendon railway station. I didn’t need a leave pass to get off the station after stand-down. The only meal I had on the Station was lunch, except when we had to work back on some rush job, when they gave us tea.

The English-built Beaufighters which our Government had ordered from Britain came out here in a partly-dismantled state on board a merchant trading vessel and nearly all of them were unloaded in Melbourne where they were assembled at Laverton by No 1 Aircraft Depot. However, two of them came on to Sydney by sea and were brought out to No 2 Aircraft Depot at Richmond. They were split into various components, the largest being the fuselage. At Richmond, we stripped the cocooning, removed the mothballs, cleaned them up, and put the pieces together. There were some Royal Air Force technicians who were familiar with the Beaufighter and they showed us what to do. It was quite exciting to realise that these were the brand-new machines we were going touse against the Japanese.

The Poms insisted on having pneumatic brakes, while anybody with a grain of sense knows that hydraulic brakes are so much better. The compressor system and the pneumatic brakes fitted in our Beaufighters caused a deal of trouble but we were always having trouble with the shoes slipping on the brake drums. Had the ‘planes been fitted with hydraulic brakes the pilots might not have had so much trouble with aircraft swing during take-off.

My impression at the time was that not too many of the groundstaff in 30 Squadron really understood what war was really about, and that in any case, we could lick the Japanese with one hand tied behind our back. The enemy planes were obviously cheap copies of some pretty useless design and everybody knew about the cheap and easily broken tin toys the Japanese had been turning out for years. So there didn’t seem to be the urgency or resolution to get stuck into the work that I expected to see after my experience of the war overseas. Of course, nearly all the men in the groundstaff were youngsters - nineteen-year olders not long out of school. Some of the pilots and navigators, of course, had a better appreciation of things, having already served in operations in Europe or in Darwin.

The Commanding Officer of Richmond was ‘Paddy’ Heffernan, who flew his own private plane around the place. I often saw him early in the morning doing circuits and bumps.  He held a big parade the day our Squadron marched, out of Richmond  with ‘Blackjack’ Walker leading. That was on 11th August.

The Air Force Band went with them as they marched across to Clarendon Railway Station where they boarded a special train which was to take them up to Brisbane. I was in the RAAF hospital at Richmond with the time being treated by ‘Doc’ Marsh for haemorrhoids.

The pilots were to fly the aircraft up north and each was to take two groundstaff with them. The Beaufighters were flown out of Richmond up to Bohle River on 17th August and I was put in charge of the remaining airmen with instructions to get ourselves on a train headed for Brisbane.

My rear party left Richmond at 4.15pm the next day and I managed to get seats for us all on the Brisbane Express which left Sydney Central at 8pm. We had breakfast at Kempsey and lunch at Casino, arriving at South Brisbane station at 6pm. We were taken down to Sandgate and spent a day or so with No 3 Embarkation Depot. They put us aboard one of the Queensland narrow-gauge trains at 7pm on 22nd August, from which we detrained in Townsville at 1.30pm.

Those who had come up by train in the main party were in a camp at a recently-built strip called Bohle River. They had arrived there on 16th August and the Beaufighters had arrived the next day. I settled in a tent with Roy Meers, George Dusting, and Alfie Feinberg. We slept on the ground that first night.

The camp was about four or five miles out of town but was in pretty good shape for a short stay. We had  reasonable Mess, the toilet blocks were OK and the showers were well set up. We had been at Richmond during the winter so the change to the hot and sticky weather in the tropics was a little hard to take for some.

Because of censorship we weren’t allowed to say where we were or what we were doing so it became difficult for some of the young lads to find things to write in their letters to their mothers or girl friends. During our time at Bohle River someone caught a 6ft carpet snake there, a perfectly innocuous thing, and no danger to anybody. But everyone wrote home about a giant life-threatening reptile which the individual writer had disposed of at great peril to himself.  If someone had read the individual letters he would have been surprised to find that something like two hundred airmen had killed 200 poisonous snakes about 20 feet in length.

The Squadron had four flights - Headquarters Flight in charge of Adjutant Wearne, ‘A’ Flight under Ross Little, B’ Flight under Ron Uren, and Servicing Flight under Norm Fraser (after Flying Officer Lee was posted out). I had met Norm on the Roma Street Station when I was waiting to board the train from Brisbane to Townsville. He was a very knowledgeable fellow who got on with his men very well.

I was in Servicing Flight, where there was plenty of work to be done.

My first job was to get stuck into the 80-hourly inspection of Beaufighter A19-5, which had been allotted to the Squadron early in June and had been flown up from Richmond by Flight Lieutenant Peter Welsh. After finishing that I started in on the 40-hourly of A19-35, which had been flown up by Pilot Officer Bruce Stephens. We struck a problem with the hydraulics of that aircraft for the port undercarriage wasn’t functioning correctly. When we got that fixed I went up in it for an hour’s test-flight with Sergeant George Sayer.

I went into Townsville only once while we were in North Queensland and had a couple of drinks there and bought some tropical fruit. I didn’t like the place very much. It was full of Yanks.

Towards the end of the month all the men had to stand-to for the entire day as the authorities believed that a Japanese convoy was headed our way. But that turned out to be just one of the many rumours flying around. Whether it was too secret or whether the senior officers thought it was no business of the airmen to know what was going on or what was planned, we weren’t told about anything. So the rumours took hold. At one stage it was bruited about that we were to get a wet canteen.

Early in September I helped Len Vial get A19-13 ready for some big hush-hush job involving three of our machines. We later heard that Len had crashed during take-off at Milne Bay and had written off his aircraft and a parked Hudson. I’m sure that hydraulic brakes would have prevented that accident during the Squadron’s very first operation when the other two ‘planes attacked a Japanese destroyer.

I was one of those pulled rudely out of bed at 2.15am to go down to the wharf and help load our gear onto a Dutch ship, the Bontekoe. We worked like niggers till 1300 the next day, but for some reason the stuff had to be moved from that old vessel on to the more modern Taroona. Some conscripts were helping to load the ship and  when I warned one of them to take care with a box that held aircraft instruments he replied “O.K. sport” His officer told him that I was the NCO in-charge and should be referred to as ‘Sir’. To which the fellow replied “Oh yeah’ Since when has he been knighted by the King!”

We broke camp at Bohle River and spent the night of 11th September in Airmens’ quarters at Garbutt, being moved on board the Taroona about 6 o’clock the following evening. I was allotted Cabin 111 which I shared with two or three others. We sailed out of the Harbour about breakfast time the next morning and anchored off Cairns while HMAS Swan went off on a search for an enemy submarine.

The Taroona entered Moresby Harbour about 3.30 on the afternoon of Monday 14th September and after disembarking we were trucked out to a temporary camp at the end of Wards strip. We had to sleep on the ground because our bedding was still on board the Taroona; the mosquitoes were particularly bad and it was as hot as Hades.

Three days later I went out to the 7 Mile strip and, together with Sergeants Andy Herron and Jack Hammond (an instrument maker) boarded a DC5 which took us down to Milne Bay. It was believed that enemy soldiers were sniffing around Len Vial’s crashed Beaufighter and out job was to remove everything that was useable and then blow it up. In the event, the Repair and Salvage Unit took over the wreckage after we had taken what we wanted.

It wasn’t easy to get an aircraft out of Milne Bay, but eventually Andy and Jack got a lift to Moresby in an American B25 Mitchell bomber and I got a ride home in A19-15 which had come down on a local travel flight. When I got to Moresby I found that we had moved our camp up into June Valley.

My tent was somewhere near the Airmens’ Mess and the Sick Quarters. Others in the tent were Roy Meers and Alfie Fienberg.

All told, our camp was a pretty good one, and I take my hat off to the messing staff for what they were able to turn out. Mark you, it wasn’t real good tucker, but considering the awful rations they were given by the Army ration store, they managed to keep us alive, even if we weren’t all that happy about getting so much bully beef or tinned herrings in tomato sauce.

When I was getting down from the navigator’s compartment, I missed one of the steps in the ladder and landed on the ground rather heavily. This stirred up an old injury in my left ankle which became so painful that I had to go up and see ‘Doc’ Marsh. He told me that although I wouldn’t like what he said the best thing I could do was to keep my boot on and keep walking. It did hurt for a while, but it soon came good.

The heat and the humidity brought quite a severe rash to my forehead and I had to go on sick parade to have it treated. Lots of the other men attend the parades with a variety of rashes for which the nursing orderlies don’t have anything better than chamomile lotion.  Because so many of them have rashes under their chin caused by excessive sweating , and other rashes on their face caused by shaving in cold water, the word had come down that we may grow beards. I didn’t shave for a fortnight. Permission was withdrawn by some senior officer in the headquarters.

Everybody was supposed to take Atebrin tablets as a malaria suppressant, to wear pants and long-sleeved shirts after dusk, and to use mosquito nets. The whole place was alive with the anopheles mosquitoes. Quite a few fellows had to be sent home with bad attacks of malaria, particularly those who had been on detachment down at Milne Bay. Andy Herron and Fred Hicks went down with dengue fever (now known as Ross River Fever); they must have picked it up while we were at Bohle River, which was only a hops spit and jump from the Ross River. Andy’s attack must have been pretty serious because he was transferred out of our own Sick Quarters to the AIF hospital in Moresby.

I liked Andy. He was an Englishman, was married and lived in Wahroonga or thereabouts. He was easy to get on with  and turned out to be more knowledgeable than I had originally thought. Our machines weren’t fitted with the automatic pilot so I don’t know why it was that ‘Blackjack’ and Andy got into a discussion about that device. I heard what was being said and recognized that Andy had a complete understanding of its principles and operating. I was surprised and so was ‘Blackjack’.

The tropics gets to some people. There’s a fellow in No 6 Beaufort Squadron whose camp is on the other side of the hill at the rear of our camp who puts on a bit of a show most nights. He stands outside his tent and acts like he’s a Drill Instructor, yelling commands at the top of his voice. He may have gone ‘troppo’ and deserve to be sent south,or he may be putting on an act in the hope of being packed off home.

Initially, I was using a cut-throat razor but had to give that away in favour of a Gillette Safety. I couldn’t keep the edge on the cut-throat because fine particles of dust or sand got embedded in the leather strop and that nicked the fine edge of the razor. I used a pig’s-bristle shaving brush, an enamel shaving mug, and ordinary Lifebuoy soap if I couldn’t get a stick of proper shaving  soap

Because the Australian cigarettes stocked in our little canteen always seemed to be affected by mould, I doubt whether many of them were sold. American Lucky Strikes or Chesterfields were favoured by most of the men in the Squadron and they weren’t too difficult to come by. I rolled my own cigarettes, using Champion Ready Rubbed Tobacco and Zig Zag cigarette papers.

Erica and I corresponded about twice every week, but from my end, it wasn’t easy to find something to write about because of censorship. She sent me up a book which she knew I would enjoy; it was called ‘My Love Must Wait’ and the author was Ernestine Hill. She kept my letters until she found our children going through them. I burnt those that I got from her because one of the fellows in the tent had been reading them. Cramped tent life didn’t offer much by way of privacy.

I was very glad to get parcels from Erica, and particularly so when these were cakes that she had made. I shared these with some of my mates, and they did the same with the cakes they got from home. Newspapers were  always welcome for we were all hungry for stories about how things were going back in Australia. The papers, magazines and books were passed from hand to hand until they disintegrated.

During the day we wore just a pair of shorts, plus a shirt if you wanted to dress up. And of course after working on aircraft and sweating like a pig your clothes would get real dirty and on the nose. I used to dump my togs into a kerosine tin, fill it up with cold water and then toss in a handful of washing powder and leave them soak while I was at work. You’d be surprised at how clean they were at the end of the day.

We were never allowed to go barefooted anywhere in the tropics because of the likelihood of picking up some insect which bored into your foot and eventually infected your liver. We all wore Air Force issue black boots, and very few of the men working down at the strip wore sox or stockings. They were just too hot and uncomfortable.

My bedstead was one of those made out of galvanised iron pipes with a pair of hinged legs which could be spread out; the contraption had chain-wire mesh stretched across it to support a mattress. Of course we didn’t have the luxury of a kapok mattress,m but had to do with a straw-filled palliasse. We didn’t have sheets, either, but had to do with the usual Army-style grey woollen blankets. A mosquito net was a necessity.

We were all sad to hear about our first operational fatality. George Sayer and his navigator, Archie Mairet, were shot down in A19-1 on 23rd September. They had been strafing enemy positions near Buna. A couple of days later Jack Sandford wrote off his aircraft when he had to make a belly landing at Wards strip. He and Arthur Jaggs were taking A19-39 down to Milne Bay on detachment when the aircraft’s starboard undercarriage struck the cabin of a truck parked at the side of the strip. He completed his take-off, but thought it better to land his damaged machine at the home base rather than Milne Bay. The machine was a write-off.

The aircrew in the Squadron were all good fellows and I had a high regard for all of them; some had been in operations before joining 30 Squadron but most of them were nothing more than youngsters who were given three stripes when they got their pilot’s wings. I particularly admired Mos Morgan and his navigator Fred Cassidy. I thought the world of them.

Normally, we had breakfast in the Airmens’ Mess at the camp before getting on the tenders to go down to the strip, and we had our evening meal in the Mess too. When we were working down at the strip our lunches were provided from a mobile kitchen down there and we ate the meal under the trees and some camouflage netting. Tom Mitchell was the cook down there and ‘Pappy’ Allum was his offsider.

On the first day of October we had an unusual incident when Bill Willard brought A19-11 back on one motor after an attack in the Salamau area. An enemy ack-ack shell hit the Beaufighter directly under the starboard engine and tore away the cowling and the heads of the two lower cylinders. But it was found that the shell was embedded in the engine and  was still live, for it hadn’t exploded on impact. The dud engine was still windmilling when he came in to land at Wards. Neither Bill Willard or his navigator Alfie Nelson were injured.

The Mobile Works Squadron had a big hand in constructing Wards strip and their camp was on the road between our camp and the strip itself. On 4th October I walked down to their camp to see a screening of ‘Seventh Heaven’. George Dusting, Don Angus, and Roy Meers were there, and Roy had the misfortune to fall into a slit trench when we were making our way home in the dark.

They were showing ‘Artists and Models’ there on 15th October and there was a really big crowd sitting on the side of a small hill, looking at the screen down below. During the show an American truck which had been parked near the top of the hill behind the projection cabin, and without its parking brake, began to roll down the hill. There was an almighty roar from the crowd and men scattered in every direction. They just panicked and the stampeded was worse than any cattle rush I’ve ever seen. Fortunately, nobody got hurt.

I didn’t have a great deal to deal with Ted Good, our Squadron Warrant Officer. I thought he was a pretty good bloke, all round. He seemed to look after the non-technical fellows in the unit - guards, clerks, messman, and so on. I thought he did a damned good job. The officer in charge of the guards was a very dark-skinned fellow known as ‘Boong’ Williams. He was giving a lecture about the Bren machine gun when it fired a live round and just missed the shoulder of  Sergeant Madden, the senior clerk in our orderly room. ‘Blackjack’ tore a hefty strip off that Ground Defence Officer, I can tell you.

For some reason the ammunition used in the Beaufighter’s 20mm cannons had been stored near our camp in June Valley rather than down near the strip. One Sunday lunch time about the middle of October some stupid airman fired an incendiary round out of his rifle and the damned thing landed in the ammunition dump and set it alight. I went over there with Adjutant Wearne to see what could be done but the wooden cases were well alight and as there was no way we could put the fire out and retrieve the stores, we just had to let it burn. The shells were exploding for hours.

A couple of days after that fire a swag of airmens’ promotions were announced but I was passed by Although I’ve been told that a special recommendation has gone in about me. Gwyn Davies and Andy Herron were made up to flight sergeants, Bill Schofields, Abe Warhurst, and Max Annetts got their third stripes, while Ken Morley, Charlie Metters and Tom Phelan became corporals.

In the remaining weeks of 1942 I worked on quite a few of the Squadron’s Beaufighters. I did an 80 hourly on A19-33 (normally flown by ‘Torchy’ Uren), another on A19-49 (normally flown by Ted Jones), another on A19-36 (normally flown by Gwynne Hughes). During an attack on Lae late in November A19-36 was damaged by enemy ack-ack and when Gwynne landed at Wards, the aircraft swung to port, ran into the ditch alongside the strip and stood up on its nose. Gwynne wasn’t hurt, nor was his navigator, Bill Keller.In the remaining weeks of 1942 I worked on quite a few of the Squadron’s Beaufighters. I did an 80 hourly on A19-33 (normally flown by ‘Torchy’ Uren), another on A19-49 (normally flown by Ted Jones), another on A19-36 (normally flown by Gwynne Hughes). During an attack on Lae late in November A19-36 was damaged by enemy ack-ack and when Gwynne landed at Wards, the aircraft swung to port, ran into the ditch alongside the strip and stood up on its nose. Gwynne wasn’t hurt, nor was his navigator, Bill Keller.

I was involved in the inspections of A19-2 (which was in a very bad condition, A19-5 (which had got in the port nacelle during an attack on Lae, A19-28 (in which the navigator, Warrant Officer O’Connor, sustained an injury to his thigh as a result of an enemy shell),A19-30 (which had gone down to Milne Bay to take part in an attack on Kahili aerodrome on Goodenough, but was unable to take off)  and A19-38 (Which ‘Blackjack’ ditched on Pyramid Reef during a test flight).

Our working hours were dictated by the operational missions flown by the Beaufighters. There was no such thing as a ‘normal’ working day, as far as I was concerned for I believed that everybody should get on with the job of getting the maximum number of aircraft serviceable for operations. I got in a bit of strife for making my fellows work until late at night to get Beaufighters ready for sorties against the enemy and then telling them that they could take it easy the next morning and to miss the parade.

The air attacks that the Japanese made on Moresby during the latter half of 1942 were pretty insignificant compared to those I had seen in Crete and around the Mediterranean. When the alarm was given I got up, went outside my tent, and unless they were obviously heading in our direction, I went back to bed. They didn’t do much damage. There was one night late in October when the alarm went off three times during the night, but they  only dropped a few small bombs, doing no damage to installations of aircraft, but killing three Yanks.

News of my third stripe came through on 21st November, and while that was good news it turned out to be a Black Sunday.  Col Campbell took off in A19-10 for an attack on Lae but returned with mechanical trouble and made a crash landing. The recovery crew from No 15 Repair and Salvage Unit were pushing it along the taxiway when a passer-by decided to give them a hand. He must have pushed against the radius rod for the port undercarriage collapsed, killing the poor fellow. On the same day the undercarriage of A19-35 was wrecked when the Beaufighter swung on take-off and went into a ditch, and A19-36 tipped up onto its nose because its hydraulics had been shot away.

Two days later A19-5 landed with a flat tyre and finished up wrapped round a tree alongside Wards strip and A19-15 did a tail wheel. Hardly a week passed without an aircraft shearing a tail wheel pin.

Norm Fraser told me that my posting had come through but that because he wanted to valued my efforts and wanted to keep me in the Squadron,he was prepared to get the posting cancelled if I wasn’t going on to an aircrew training course. I was surprised to find out that the posting signal only sent me to a personnel pool in Townsville, and as I wasn’t really sure that I was going on to a pilot’s course, I considered turning it down.

However, I got my clearances from the unit and caught a flying boat to take me from Moresby to Townsville, and eventually arrived in Sydney, where I completed a course at the Initial Training School. From there I went to No 8 Elementary Flying Training School at Narranderra. I completed the course at No 1 Service Flying Training School at Point Cook and was awarded my pilot’s wings.

My childhood dream had come true at last.
     


PERSONAL  PARTICULARS


NAME         FRANCIS  ARTHUR  SAWTELL                
BORN ON     27th July 1914                   
BORN AT     Howell, NSW     
FATHER     John William Sawtell                                        
MOTHER         Fanny Eliza Norton Corpe
EDUCATED AT     Gosford High School
MARRIED T     Erica Brooks   
MARRIED ON         2nd May 1942
MARRIED AT         Terrigal
CHILDREN     Elizabeth; Rosemary; John Francis; Andrew;                Eric    
ENLISTED AT     Sydney
ENLISTED ON     8th January 1940
ENLISTED AS     Trainee Technician
RANK on DISCHARGE         Sergeant Pilot
OCCUPATION after DISCHARGE Clerk (Sydney Council)