Interviewed  by  George  Dick  and  tape-recorded  at Newcastle  on  15th  November  1990

I was in 16th Regiment of the Light Horse for three years before the war — we were a machine-gun regiment, and although we were using trucks we still wore feathers in our hats and carried on with all the other paraphernalia of the Light Horse. When the war broke out, we were in camp at Armidale and about 60 of us put in to go away as a machine-gun unit with the first division that would be formed. We went through all the various procedures — attestation, medical, and so on, and all our papers were sent down to Sydney. We came home after the camp was finished, and we waited and waited for news about our call-up.

Then there was a call for aircrew, but they would only accept applicants with Intermediate Certificate, and as I didn't have that, I thought that was the end of my ideas for a life in the Air Force, and just waited for the Army call-up.

But later on the RAAF wanted wireless operators, and enlistment didn't depend on possession of the Intermediate Certificate so I put in for that and eventually went down to the Recruiting Centre in Woolloomooloo, but I was knocked back because I couldn't write fast enough. I came home, bought a copy book, practised writing like mad, and went back again, to be knocked back once more.

Not long after that the RAAF made a further call, and at that time they were talking about the Empire Air Training Scheme. So I went back to Sydney, but before I went out to the Recruiting Centre I dodged into a telephone box to get some last-minute writing practice so that I might pass the test this time. The Warrant Officer at the Centre expressed such surprise to see me back again that he didn't bother to give me a writing test, but sent me straight through for a medical check. The ludicrous part of all that was that when I did get in I always had to write signals out in individual capital letters, and that was much faster than 'running writing'.

In the morning mail about the middle of June 1940 I received the call-up papers from the RAAF, so I went into the Newcastle Centre and accepted that. However, in the afternoon mail I received the call-up papers for the Army, which of course, I discarded.

I went down to Richmond and completed a rookie course at RAAF Station Richmond, and from there I was posted to No 1 School of Technical Training in Melbourne. We were accommodated in a small school building in Little Lonsdale Street, where we slept on palliasses on the floor of what had been a classroom. Our barracks was not exactly in the most inviting part of Melbourne, and they had a little alley running down the side of the building where the Service Policemen kept check on our comings and goings. Towards the end of our time there, I teamed up with another fellow on the course by the name of Brennan and we rented a little flat on the other side of Victoria Gardens. We had to report to the Lonsdale Street barracks every morning, but our stay in that flat was like a breath of fresh air to us.

We marched to and from the Marconi Wireless School at the AWA Buildings in Queen Street where we had our Morse and radio training.

On 13th December 1940 we moved down to the RAAF Signals School at Point Cook, where we did more training on the ground and in the air, passing out as W/T Operators on 10th March 1941.

From Point Cook I was posted to No 1 Air Observer's School at Cootamundra on 10th March 1941 where I became a staff wireless operator, flying in the Ansons with trainee navigators. While I was out on one of the training exercises one day, a message came through which I took down as "Making for Sollandia", but when I asked the pilot where that was he didn't know either. But the fault was mine, because I had committed the cardinal sin of journalising; the real message was "Making forced landing".

I wasn't at all prepared to see the war out being a wireless operator with trainees, so I went to the Commanding Officer to find out if I could do a navigator's course. The powers that be decided that they would allow two graduates from each wireless operator's course to join a navigator's course. So I joined No 12 Course at Cootamundra, where the Chief Instructor was Squadron Leader Smibert.

Strangely enough, heights never worried me, so that when I opened the sliding hatch in the floor of the Avro Anson to take a three-course wind with the Course Setting Bomb Sight for the first time, I was little concerned by the sense of nothingness underneath me.

I finished that course on 24th July 1941 and went up to No 1 Bombing and Gunnery School at Evans Head where we flew on air exercises in Fairey Battles. Our time there was a real holiday and most interesting, too.

From the bombing & gunnery course I was posted as a sergeant navigator to No 4 Squadron which was being formed as an Army Co-op squadron at Canberra, under the command of Squadron Leader Dick Creswell. As much as the Wirraways had a bad reputation, I quite enjoyed flying in them, doing cross-countries and interceptions, as well as working with the Army by dropping 112 pound bombs to give the soldiers some idea of what a bomb attack might be like. In the main, however, we were doing communications work, spotting for the Army.

Then I was moved to No 23 Squadron at Archerfield, then under the command of Squadron Leader Hampshire, and moved again to No 5 Operational Training Unit at Forest Hill to undergo No 6 Beaufighter Course, arriving there on 29th March 1943. Wing Commander David Colquhuon was the Chief Instructor at that time, and Col Butterworth was the Navigation Instructor. One of the instructors who took us for navigation training was a great big bloke, an ex-seaman, who may have been a civilian on the staff.

Some of our exercises took us down as far as Tasmania, on others we were required to do searches of all kinds — creeping line ahead search, parallel track search, or square search. We also had to keep a weather eye out for other aircraft — some of which had been sent out to fly in the vicinity of our track to test our observation/reporting prowess.

I crewed up with Len Hastwell during our time at Forest Hill. I believe that we just liked the cut of each other's jib and drifted together without any great drama. None of the students had any idea of the capabilities of the others; navigators didn't know whether particular pilots were good at their job, and vice versa.

It was a toss-up whether we went to No 31 Squadron at Darwin or to No 30 Squadron at Moresby, but my posting came through for the unit at Moresby at the end of the OTU course in June 1943. Len and I went to Townsville by train — an absolutely miserable trip, and spent a few days at No 1 Replenishment Personnel Pool, where we were accommodated for two days in little huts made out of tempered Masonite. I wondered at the time why the stuff didn't buckle in those hot and humid conditions.

We were flown from Townsville to Port Moresby in a three-engined Dornier flying boat. This aircraft had probably once belonged to the Dutch Air Force. I had seen a Dornier when I was with 23 Squadron. We were coming back from an anti-submarine patrol, damn near out of petrol, and just on dusk. As we approached Brisbane on our way out to Archerfield we saw this strange-looking aircraft coming in from the north, and our first reaction was that the Japs had arrived. I even cocked the Vickers Gas Operated gun in the back of the Wirraway, but when we got closer we saw that although it didn't have the Air Force roundel, it didn't have the Japanese insignia either.

Wing Commander Clarrie Glasscock was another passenger on the Dornier from Townsville as well as John Cain. We became very friendly and I got to know John quite well. He had very rosy cheeks, and I called him 'Apples'; he retaliated by calling me 'Herby'. I would often say "There's no doubt about you, Apples", to which he would reply "There's a lot of doubt about you, Herby". I really liked that man, and although I knew a lot of good blokes in the Squadron, he was probably the only good and true friend I had there. It's possible that he was a Canadian, and although he went in with Clarrie Glasscock, I believe that Ray Kelley was the CO's normal navigator.

The first trip Len and I did from Wards was in a Beaufighter flown by Bill Cosgrove, who took us up on a local familiarisation flight for about an hour and a half. To me, Bill was an experienced Beaufighter pilot, while I was a real rookie; so I looked up at him with a certain amount of awe. The tent that he and Bernie Le Griffon occupied was quite close to ours, and Bill would often drag his chair out at night, gaze into the sky, get stuck into a paw paw one of us had got from a nearby native village, and when the mood struck him, Bill would yell "Kill! Kill! Kill for the love of Khali!"

He was a showoff whose carelessness resulted in that fatality at Goodenough, and in the process killed his navigator as well. Bernie was a nice quiet fellow, but I didn't get to know him too well.

We went into Moresby to have a look around one afternoon and were nearly run down by an American negro driving a truck. I'm sure that he took us for white Americans, and was about to stage an 'accident', for it was pretty obvious to us that there was no love lost between the two races.

I was all eyes when I got to Wards Strip and the Squadron's camp at June Valley, for it was all so strange, it was in a war zone, and everything was totally foreign to your normal way of life. You were living in a different world and you tended to miss a lot of stuff that only became important later on.

Len and I flew down to Milne Bay in Beaufighter A19-106 and our first job from that place was to escort a convoy of barges going to the American Navy base at Woodlark Island. There were four P38s and our Beaufighter. We landed on the strip — which was right on the water's edge at Woodlark — and were taken up to the Officers' Club for lunch. We were only in shorts and flying boots but we were feted. Their stewards waited on us during the meal, there was crisp, white linen on the table, and polished silver flatware; the whole place was like a first class hotel. We went for a swim in the lagoon in which there were a number of brightly-coloured pontoons. We were treated like VIPs, and I thought to myself, if this is war.....

The 30 Squadron detachment at Milne Bay was accommodated with another RAAF unit stationed down there, and we shared their camp and other facilities until we went to Goodenough. That camp was right in the middle of a coconut plantation, and an American Army unit was right next to us, in fact, one of their tents was only a few yards away from mine. I was cleaning my .38 Smith & Wesson revolver at a rather late hour one night when I inadvertently fired off a round. The peace of the place was shattered by that noise and by a loud American voice demanding to know who had fired that shot.

But the Americans disturbed my peace too, for nearly every soldier in that camp seemed to be brewing jungle juice. I could hear bubbling noises night and day, and they seemed to be coming from everywhere around me. They weren't making the kind of jungle juice that our fellows made — they had stills and were making what would be called 'moonshine likker'.

Our operations from Milne were either up in the Lae area or across the water to New Britain. On many jobs the Beaufighters did the straffing at the target, the Bostons did the bombing, and the Kittyhawks did top cover work.

We were at Milne bay for about three weeks and then moved across to our new camp at Goodenough.

Initially, we were on short rations, for it seems that one of the barges bringing supplies to the Island was lost in transit, and all we had for breakfast for six weeks was asparagus and bully beef. Every morning, rain or shine, whether you were due to go out on a job or had a rest day, you'd sit down in the mess and they'd serve you with six sticks of asparagus sitting on a piece of dry toast, together with a slice or two of fried bully beef.

Even when the Army supply depot was restocked, our rations didn't improve a great deal.  Of course, everything was tinned — tinned bully beef, tinned M&V, tinned carrots, tinned potatoes, and worst of all, dried egg powder. Whenever we got something reasonably edible or tasteful you could bet that it had come from the Americans. Whenever an aircraft was coming up from the mainland, we'd all put in some cash so that the crew could buy fresh meat or fresh vegetables and bring it up for the messes. Anything fresh was like manna from heaven.

Bananas and paw paws from the native gardens were in good supply, but they became tiresome after a while, and in any case, the bananas seemed to have the smell of the betel-nut that the natives chewed, and this was a bit offputting.

Maurice Ball was my flight commander and I got on well with him. He was quite fair in his handling of things, he did his share of the work, and he was quite easy to get along with. He had the authority of a flight commander, but he never overdid it, and if he asked you to do something, you went ahead and did it. We went on a number of jobs in which he was the leader.

One of the shortcomings of Air Force life was that unless you actually had personal contact with others — like flying with them or living with them — they were just names. You didn't get to know them at all well, so that you knew very little about them and what they had done before. In any case, it was more than likely that you might never come across them at another unit later on, and they were in the unit for only a short time. The operational tour for aircrew in our Squadron was just six months — although we were the first crew to be given a nine month tour.

We were all upset when we heard that Joe Newman and Ron Binnie had ditched off the southern coast of New Britain after their Beaufighter A19-132 had been hit by enemy ack ack near Palmal on 9th September 1943. Other Beaufighters had stayed overhead, dropped dinghies, food and other supplies, but had to leave the area when it got dark.

I wasn't too impressed with the attitude of the Americans over that incident. They had a PT boat at the northern tip of Kiriwina, but they wouldn't go out on a search for Binnie and Newman because they had come down too close to the shore of

Japanese-held New Britain, and they thought a rescue attempt would be too dangerous.

Len and I were called to the Operations Room at Goodenough about ten o'clock that night and briefed to try and find Joe and Ron before dawn. We were to take A19-111, which had just come back from a job late that afternoon where it had fired its cannons, and there had not been time to swing the compass [a routine procedure because aircraft magnetism was drastically altered after the cannons were fired].

The idea was that we would fly to the last-known position of the missing Beaufighter, drop two parachute flares from 1500 feet, and then search the illuminated area. There wasn't so much as a single star to be seen that night, so it was a case of flying blind and hoping that accurate navigation had brought us to the right position. When we reckoned we were at the right spot, I opened the navigator's step/door in the floor of the aircraft (not an easy job, and one which knocked a couple of knots off the aircraft's speed), tied a cord to the activating mechanism of a flare as I had been told, and dropped it out through the hatch. Nothing happened. So I threw out the second, but it didn't light up either.

After struggling to get the step/door closed, we went down a little closer to the sea, turned on our landing lights, and flew up and down parallel to the coast in an effort to make a sighting of the dinghies. Perhaps the coastwatchers were keeping an eye on what we were doing because we got a radio message from Goodenough telling us to try further north. Which we did. But we saw nothing. We couldn't fly too close to the water, for that meant that the area lit up by our landing lights would be very narrow. Nor could we fly too high, for the landing lights weren't powerful enough to illuminate a small dinghy in the choppy water. We eventually had to give up when we reached the limit of our endurance, so we headed for Gasmata to establish a start point and use the astro compass to get a course back to Goodenough.

My estimated time of arrival was 0030 but when that time came, Len said that he saw no signs of the island at all; there wasn't a light to be seen. He said that if we didn't land soon we would run out of fuel and would have to ditch. After just coming from a search for two of my mates who had ditched, it wasn't a prospect that made me at all happy. However, I just caught a glimpse of a tiny light down below, and I guessed that it came from Goodenough, which had been blacked out because the duty pilot thought our aircraft might have been an enemy bomber. So I called the tower and gave the code-word 'Blackout', at which time the strip lights were turned on, and we landed at Vivigani without further incident.

That was by far the most disappointing trip I've ever made in an aeroplane, for I've often been distressed by the thought that those two friends might have been sitting in their dinghy just a few yards beyond our search area, frantically waving to us until they saw us head back for base. What must their thoughts have been at that time.

The day after that [11th September] we went out again and did a parallel track search in an area between Cape Ludke and Cape Cunningham. But the weather was crook and we made no sightings.

Just nine days later Len and I were involved in the search for Clarrie Glasscock, the Commanding Officer, who went in near Cape Hoskins. John Cain was his navigator in A19-133 on that trip. As I understand it, the pilot was heard to say to his navigator "Lad I've been hit. Come up".

Nothing further was heard from them or about them, despite the search efforts of the entire Squadron and planes from other units. I'm not surprised, for so many strange things happened. We took a crew up just east of Talasea and we were to do a barge sweep up the coast towards Rabaul. We got to our start point just after sun-up and there was a barge on the north side of Commodore Bay which we used to make a test-fire of cannon and machine guns. We went down, fired our test burst, did a slow climbing left-hand turn, at which time we passed a radio message to the other pilot to do the same. As we turned round, we were looking into the sun for a few seconds, but as we moved round in our turn, we got out of its glare. The other aircraft was nowhere to be seen. It was just as if a giant hand had plucked it out of the air. There wasn't a splash or any sign of disturbance on the water which was completely calm. The aircraft simply disappeared off the face of the earth. (? Flg Off Percival J Coates and Plt Off C H Chapple, at Ubili, 25 Nov 43, in A19-139?)

Towards the end of his tour Freddy Catt would get ill as soon as his aircraft approached the coast of New Britain. I mean physically ill. The build-up of tension just got to him, but once he was there he'd come good and do the job without any further worries.

Everybody in 30 Squadron was apprehensive while we sat in the briefing room at Kiriwina waiting for the entire squadron to take off for a strike against Rabaul. Its defences were well-known. The Beauforts were scheduled to attack shipping in the harbour with their torpedoes, while the Beaufighters were to fly at 10,000 feet and act as top cover for that squadron. I don't know who was the chairborne genius who dreamed up the idea of using our aircraft in the fighter role against a couple of hundred Zeros and the like. We'd just get chopped to pieces. All the aircrew on 30 Squadron sat around at Kiriwina for three days waiting; every time the phone rang everybody jumped and the tension in the place went up a hundred percent.

In her broadcasts, Tokyo Rose promised that if the Beaufighters of 30 Squadron went out against the Japanese, the waters would run red.

Whenever I went down to the Operations Room and found that my name was up on the board for a job, I had mixed feelings. I always hoped I'd come back, but I knew that there was a chance that I wouldn't. I accepted those circumstances. It probably affected different people in different ways. As far as I was concerned the Japanese were the enemy and we were out to defeat them, so it didn't worry me that what I was doing would mean their death.

During an operation the navigator didn't have time to think about being shot down or things like that. He was too busy with his navigation, his radio watch, loading the drums on to the cannons, operating the camera, and keeping watch on what was happening with other aircraft — friend or foe. I have to say that I was never able to use the F24 camera when we were doing over a target which had ack ack guns — because I always had the thing stuck between my legs to give protection to my vital parts, and I didn't want to come back with a squeaky voice.

There were some unpleasant stories about the kind of treatment we might expect from the enemy if we were ever captured, and we were advised to keep the last shot in our revolver for ourselves. I suppose we accepted that as the right thing to do, but I'm not sure whether I'd have done it when it came down to tin tacks.

My idea was that if we ever got shot down and landed in an area where we could run, then I'd run. I thought that to be the best thing to do after seeing what the Commanding Officer of 22 Squadron did. It was another one of those joint operations with the Bostons of 22 Squadron and the Beaufighters of 30 Squadron, and the target that day was the Japanese installations at Gasmata — with special attention to the radar/radio installation at the seaward end of the strip. We were to do the straffing, the Bostons, led by Wing Commander Bill Townsend, were to do the bombing.

The Wing Commander must have got hit very early in the attack, and he ditched his Boston in the shallow water covering a reef close to the shore. We saw the two crew members get out and run like mad up to the beach and into the scrub. So as to prevent the Japanese recovering the Boston and using it as a decoy, we poured cannon and machine gun shells into it and made sure that it would never fly again. Wing Commander Townsend and his navigator were picked up in Commodore Bay by an allied submarine about two weeks later and brought back to New Guinea.

As I have said, I regarded the Japanese as the enemy, and accepted that since they would give us no quarter either in the air or on the ground, I would be like-minded. However, Len and I were in an accompanying Beaufighter when George Drury and Dave Beasley shot down a Dave not far from Gasmata. You could see the Japanese rear gunner firing off his little pea-shooter, which of course was no match for the four 20 mm cannons and 6 machine guns of the Beaufighter. The enemy aircraft was badly damaged, faltered in the air, tipped one of its wings, went straight into the side of a hill, and exploded. And I felt momentarily sorry for its crew, although only a few moments earlier when I had seen George's attack I had cheered. But when the aircraft burst into flames I just thought, well there goes somebody's father, or somebody's son. What chance did that poor bugger have. He was blown out of the sky. He might have been one of the few 'good' Japanese — and there must have been some of them, for not everyone was a vicious brute.

I was in our camp up on the side of the hill at Goodenough and looking down to Vivigani strip, watching one of 22 Squadron's Bostons take off. Its nosewheel apparently collapsed just before lift-off, tipped on its nose, and burst into flames. The rear gunner managed to get out but others were trapped and could be heard yelling out before the aircraft's full load of bombs went up.

Len Hastwell and I shared a tent at Goodenough, not too far away from the Aircrew Mess. The other tents were scattered around the hill slope, but you could only see the tops of the tents because of the high Kunai grass. We spent many hours in the Mess playing marbles — particularly the game of Poison Hole. Some newspaper reporter must have heard what we were doing, for I got a cable from my brother — a Wireless Air Gunner in the UK — congratulating me for being the best marble player in New Guinea.

Looking out to seawards and out over the strip, our swimming pool lay to the right, a little way behind the hill, and a bit farther down the slope. One of the pools there was never bottomed; I went down about 30 or 40 feet without finding the bottom.

The hill sloped away to the right and 22 Squadron's camp was towards the bottom of that slope. No 6 Squadron's camp was further on still, and not too far from the end of the strip. Our Squadron's Operations Building was alongside the strip towards the western end.

Harold Tapner and Bob Thomas were always complaining that on all the operations in which they took part, they always drew the job of being tail-end-Charlie. Bob was quite a funny bloke; he was a comic, taking everything as it came and not being at all fussed about it. He was a happy-go-lucky fellow and had an attitude that came in handy during an operational tour in New Guinea.

In addition to the little survival pouch strapped to my web-belt, I always took along the tin box of 'Emergency Rations' we could collect as we left the Briefing Room. This had a small can of tomato juice, a packet of biscuits, some chewing gum, a few sugary candies, and a block of high-energy chocolate. It was amazing the number of emergencies we encountered and were thus able to eat those rations with impunity. They were a special treat, and gave us a much better feed than we ever got back in the Mess.

The Squadron moved across to Kiriwina in November 1943, and we operated from the North Strip there — although in fact that had two parallel strips, one being meant for fighters and the other for bombers. Our camp was a mile or so inland from the strip and was reasonably comfortable, but nowhere near as attractive as the one we had at Goodenough.

The very first beer I ever had was given to me by Bob Maguire at Kiriwina. He sustained some injuries to his legs as a result of firing his cannons while flying one of the Squadron's Beaufighters. The story I heard was that the 20 mm cannon contained a male tube and a female tube and these had something to do with exhausting the gases from the breech block. In Bob's case they seemed to have been put in back to front and caused a premature explosion of one of the shells — some of the fragments being flung through the fuselage near the pilot, and peppering his legs with shrapnel.

Most of our jobs were against targets in New Britain, although we occasionally went up in the Nadzab area, for that was the time

when the 7th Division were pushing the Japanese back north and along the coast of New Guinea. The Beaufighters were often sent to Cape Gloucester and this was a bit of a pain in our side. That's where poor Harold Woodroffe was shot down by the 40mm Bofors gun -one of those which the Japanese had captured in Singapore. There were quite a few Bofors scattered around this target, and there was one in particular which was located on the side of a hill to the rear of the strip. Woodroffe made the mistake of making his run in the wrong direction, was hit, and crashed into the hill at the northern end of the strip.

We approached the target from the north — the customary direction — and around the hill to do our run across the strip. But they must have had an observation post out there for they were waiting for us, and as soon as we came round the hill they opened up with everything they had. There were bursts everywhere — black puffs that looked like mushrooms. They must have set their fuses correctly, for the shells were bursting just off our tail, and they kept tracking during our flight towards the strip and away from it. I was as scared as hell. I wasn't one bit pleasant to see a line of shell bursts just a few yards away from where I was sitting in my cupola — with the F24 camera between my legs.

We shot off from the strip, but Harold Woodroffe turned the other way — straight into the enemy fire. Flight Sergeant John Brooks was his navigator in A19-33 on 5th September 1943. September was a terrible month — we lost Woodroffe and Brooks, Newman and Binnie, Glasscock and Cain.

I was always grateful for the actions of a Kittyhawk pilot who probably saved us from being shot down during an attack on Gasmata.  The Bostons were bombing the place and the Beaufighters were doing the straffing. Our aircraft was at low level, between the radar/radio installation and the end of the strip, and one of the Japanese guns had fastened on to us, and I sat there watching his shells bursting ever closer and closer.  Now he would have got us as sure as God made little apples, but apparently the Kittyhawk pilot saw the gun flashes and dived at the emplacement with all guns blazing and put paid to that crew.

Although that was a pretty frightening experience, I believe that more damage was caused to our planes by small arms fire than by the larger ack ack guns.  Aircraft would often come back with small holes in them, and I'm sure that these were the result of rifle fire, machine gun fire, and even revolver fire.  And small arms such as those could be discharged by soldiers hiding in the jungle or under the coconut palms, and neither they nor their gun-flashes could be seen.  Nevertheless, all the aircrew reckoned that the Beaufighter was a beaut aircraft.  And so it was.

My operational tour with 30 Squadron in the South West Pacific finished on 28 March 1944, and I commenced flying duties with Test and Ferry Flight at Bankstown on 15th April that year.


PERSONAL  PARTICULARS

NAME    :   DONALD  HENRY  WEST
BORN ON    :   20th October 1918
BORN AT    :   Bangalow  NSW
FATHER    :   Herbert Cornelius  West
MOTHER    :   Ada Maude Pckett
EDUCATED AT    :   Taree High
MARRIED TO    :   Dorothy May Marriott
MARRIED ON    :   15th April 1945
MARRIED AT    :   Newcastle  NSW
CHILDREN    :   Geoffrey  Donald   
ENLISTED AT    :   Newcastle
ENLISTED ON    :   189th June 1940
ENLISTED AS        :   Trainee W/T Operator
COMMISSIONED ON :   1st October 1944
DISCHARGED AT    :   Sydney
DISCHARGED ON    :   14th September 1945
RANK on DISCHARGE  : Flying Officer 
OCCUPATION after DISCHARGE:    Gas Controller (BHP Newcastle)