(Photo credit (2001): SGT W.Guthrie RAAF Caption: Mr Jum Falkiner, from Moriac, takes a walk down memory lane; Jum was the first pilot to fly a Spitfire in an operational role. Transcript from Australia in the War of 1939-45 - The Australian War Memorial.) "In those days, at elementary flying we flew Tiger Moths at Mascot which was the civilian aerodrome of Sydney. We got fifty hours flying up and if you passed, we became LAC's then, before that we were the lowest form of Air Force life, an AC2. And then, the course was sort of split up and some were posted to service flying training schools in Australia, I think Wagga and various places. Some of us were posted to Canada and some went to Rhodesia for training. I was one of the ones who went to Canada. We went on the old 'Aorangi' to New Zealand, we left Sydney Harbour, it was all meant to be highly secret and I think every pleasure cruiser was out waving good-bye to us, as we left Sydney Heads and when we got to Auckland the band was there to meet us and Lord Haw–Haw the English-German broadcaster, he said, there was the ship,the Oranji was leaving New Zealand with New Zealand and Australian airmen and three million in gold and they most probably wouldn't get anywhere, 'cause there was a raider near the Cocos Islands. It was all meant highly secret, but when the band was there to greet us, I think everybody in New Zealand, and I suppose all the Germans and everybody else knew that we were leaving. We got to Vancouver, and I can remember it fairly well, it was very overcast and it was late evening and I think it was drizzling and very cold and we got straight onto a train and proceeded across the Rockies and we spent Christmas 1940 on the train. The train was nice and warm, but poke your nose outside...We dropped some of the boys off at Calgary and various places on the way and we went on to Camp Borden, which was a very old Canadian Air Force station, I think from the first world war, near the Great Lakes about seventy miles from Toronto. We started flying Harvards then, which were a more sophisticated aeroplane than the Tiger Moth. They had retractable under-carts and things like that and we also had to do night flying. When we were at Borden, we did get a few, mainly Englishmen who'd been flying during the Battle of Britain, came over and gave us lectures, we realized it wasn't a joke and that we had to be good and our flying was. The instructors were good and we all did everything as well as we could. The accidents at Borden were I think, mainly due to the bad weather. Because the day we arrived there we went in for a medical inspection, it was a nice sunny day and two hours later we came outside and there were twelve aeroplanes, Harvards of the course in front of us that, nobody knew where they were because it was snowing, there was this great snow storm on and you were told to fly down wind and do a ninety degree turn and you should fly out of it, but by that time you didn't know where you were. And there was this range of mountains, (Niagara Escarpment) that were about 2,000 feet higher than the aerodrome and fellows used to just fly into these mountains, which weren't far away, but I think most of the accidents would have been caused mainly through bad weather. We did a little bit of formation flying and you had to change your position flying and one fellow got a bit too close when he was moving under and he chopped the tail off the other aircraft and they both went in. I can remember going on cross-country with an instructor, you had to do so many cross-country's and to find out where you were, you'd fly down low and look at the railway line and find out if your map reading was right. I was not a very good navigator, I think that's possibly why I ended up as a fighter pilot. My instructor in Australia at elementary flying was magnificent fellow and I had no problems at all flying. And then when I first went to Canada, I had a sergeant pilot who was our instructor and he was very very good and he had to go – I think he went over to England to fly, to partake in the war – and I got another instructor, I think who had just come from an instructor's training course and the four of us who he was instructing, we all thought we wouldn't be able to fly, we just had no confidence in the instructor and we got very worried about our own flying, because I mean, we knew we could fly alright, but with this fellow we just lost our confidence. I went to our flight commander and said, "We're not happy with our instructor, we're losing our confidence it's not me, it's the four or five of us who have the same instructor" and he said "Boy, you come up for a fly with me and I'll soon tell you how you're going, if you're alright". And so I went up with him and he told me what to do and he said, "Sure you're doing fine" and so, he said, "Don't worry about your instructor, you'll be OK". So that gave us some confidence. But there were little things like that that were upsetting...you were young, and thought you'd hate to fail. We were starting night flying then too and I can remember going up with this fellow and it's quite scary the first time you go night flying by yourself...well not solo but even...because I thought this instructor, I could feel that he was frightened. It's not very nice and then you've got to go solo, at night. And your first time and if you haven't' got confidence it's not a very nice feeling, and particularly we were landing on snow all the time there, because they used to...and it's hard to judge your height, they used to put ashes across the packed snow so that you could gauge your height. I was twenty by the time I got to Canada and I ended up, I had my twenty first birthday in London, just a few weeks before I was shot down. We were ranked in Canada, we got our wings, and they had a wings parade there and some of us were then made sergeant pilots and some were made pilot officers and I don't know quite how they worked that one out. The ones who'd possibly misbehaved became sergeants and some of the ones had not misbehaved became pilot officers, but there was not very many commissioned then, most of us were sergeant pilots.
(Photo: Course 16 Aussie pilot graduates at Camp Borden, March 17, 1941)
We went to this embarkation depot in Debert, Nova Scotia which was an aerodrome, that was being built and it was just when all the snow was thawing and it was so muddy because it was under construction, and all the buildings, we were sleeping the hangar, there were 2,000 of us in double decker bunks and there were six wash basins and six lavatories and six showers and this was for the 2,000 blokes. And the mess was built to serve about 200 people and there was this endless queue all day to get a meal and all on this duck boards, because the mud was about two or three feet deep, so some of my friends and I we took 'french leave' and we went back to Quebec and had ourselves a lovely two weeks there...enormous fun and the Canadians were very very good to us, we were some of the first Australians they had ever seen. We got back to Debert and found that we'd all been given leave because there was such a jam-up and the submarines were active in the Atlantic and the boats couldn't leave and we were given two week official leave then. We'd been AWOL for two weeks but nobody knew we'd been away from the place. And then we were given this two weeks leave but of course, we'd spent all our money so we were broke. One of the boys had a few dollars left so he lent it to us and so we all went on leave again. We left on the Georgic. The boat was very crowded but it was a big boat and very fast. We had no escort or anything 'cause it could go faster than the submarines. We all had to do watches and things like that, around the decks looking for submarines and periscopes and enemy aircraft. But, we arrived up in the north of England and we were straight on a troop train and we went to Uxbridge, which is really a suburb of London. We were just in time for some of the last air raids, night raids on London but there was still a lot of devastation. I'd lived in London for a bit, when I was over there pre-war. You'd look for somewhere and it was no longer there, it was all rather horrible. The civilians, they never talked about losing the war or anything like that, they were very wonderful people. We were all highly excited and we were keen and eager to be posted from Uxbridge. We were only there for about a week and keen to know where we were going. We were given our postings from there and I found that I was to go to No. 57 Operational Training Unit at Hawarden, near Chester, in North Wales, which was a Spitfire one, and so I was very pleased. One of the biggest surprises of my life was, when I found this beautiful beautiful Spitfire and found that it hadn't got an automatic under-cart, you had to manually operate the under-cart.You usually flew with your right hand, and your left hand on the throttle. You had to change...take your hand off the throttle and fly with your left hand and then you had to operate this gear lever thing to pump your under-cart up and you had to pump it solid, which took a little bit of time and then select, say 'up' to bring the under-cart up and then you had to pump about thirty times to get your wheels up and you'd see the blokes, until they got the knack of this, you'd see then going, Burrrp! Burrrp! Burrrp! across the aerodrome. I'll never forget that first solo as you were told to get up to 2,000 feet do a circuit and come in and land. By the time you got this under-cart up, I found I was 5,000 feet and everything was flat out and the engine was still flat out and I had my throttle back, I hadn't put the revs back, so by the time you got that sorted out, you were going very fast and you suddenly found you were so high, so you'd put your nose down and of course instead your speed went up at an incredible hurry and you looked around and you couldn't find the aerodrome. It was all a bit much. It was a lot easier to get the under-cart down than to pump it up, it came down quite quickly and these aeroplanes, these Mk-1 Spitfires, had been through the Battle of Britain and a lot of them had been shot up and you know, patched up and they really were pretty clapped-out old things and the wirelesses were absolutely shocking. I had trouble when I was coming in to land, you had ninety degrees flaps, which were worked with compressed air and I went to put my flaps down, you had the two flaps of ninety degrees and only one flap went down and I started to do a slow roll at about 700 feet, which is not very nice and luckily I managed to give it the gun and fly out of trouble but I couldn't get my wireless to work - because the instructor had told me to call up if anything was wrong – so I just carried on circling around and around the aerodrome until somebody realized, something was wrong with me. Because these Spitfires without any flaps, they'd float...just float and float and float and they were very hard to get onto the ground. So one of the flight commanders came up and made signs to me and said, "Formation" you know, "Formate on me " and we'd only about two or three hours formation flying in Canada so I managed to get the message and formated on him and he brought me in to land and we made it, but I thought we were never going to touch down, the thing it just went on floating. But if I tried to land on my own with no flaps I most probably would have pranged at the end of the runway, but he was an experienced flyer on the Spitfire and knew what to do. At OTU we did approximately fifty hours and then we were posted to our squadrons and they were forming 452 which was the First Australian `Spit' Squadron and the fellows in the course in front of me, `Bluey' Truscott and all those fellows who became pretty well known, they formed 452 and then some of us went on to English squadrons and then they formed 457 and the fellows in the latter part of the alphabet with names like Wright and Williams and things like that, they went on to 457 which formed in the Isle of Man and the 452 formed at Kirton-in-Lindsey which is in the Midlands of England.
(Photo: Group portrait of pilots of No. 452 Squadron RAAF. L to R: Flying Officer Keith Kipling Cox (400141), accidentally killed in the United Kingdom, 23 January 1944); possibly Archie Stuart; Flight Lieutenant (F/LT) Brendan Eamonn Fergus "Paddy" Finucane RAF, DSO, DFC & two Bars (killed during operations over Etaples, France, on 15 July 1942, aged 21 years); 407078 Ian Arthur Lace Milne ; 402120 Sgt James Neate Hanigan (killed on active service at Carlisle, England, on 7 September 1941, aged 24 years); 402129 Frederick Revis McCann; 402144 Squadron Leader (Sqn Ldr) Raymond Edward Thorold-Smith (killed during operations over the Timor Sea on 15 March 1943, aged 24 years); 257414 Sqn Ldr Robert Wilton Bungey DFC (killed in a ground accident in South Australia on 10 June 1943, aged 28 years); 400166 Flying Officer (FO) William Douglas Willis (killed during operations near Rouen, France, on 18 September 1941, aged 24 years); possibly 402007 Flt Lt Alex Roberts; 400148 FO Donald Edwin Lewis (accidentally killed over the English Channel on 21 January 1942, aged 19 years); possibly Flt Lt Dougas; 404086 Sgt Andrew Gordon Costello (killed during operations over the United Kingdom on 5 July 1941, aged 23 years); 400213 Sqn Ldr Keith William "Bluey" Truscott DFC & bar (killed in an accident near Exmouth Gulf, WA, on 28 March 1943); 402115 Sgt Richard George Gazzard (killed during operations over Belgium on 19 August 1941, aged 21 years). Absent: 404087 Pilot Officer Raife James Cowan, 408022 Justin O'Byrne (later POW); 402232 PO William Davies Eccleton (killed in action in France on 19 August 1941, aged 25 years); PO R T Holt. Cox, Holt, Eccleton, Willis and Lewis trained at Camp Borden with 'Bluey' Truscott as members of Course 14.)
We had fifty hours flying, which was around about six weeks and then I was posted to 72 Squadron near Newcastle-on-Tyne. We got the first Spitfire Mk-Vb's, which had two twenty millimeter cannons on them as well as four machine guns. Before that we just had machine guns as offensive fire power. We only had sixty rounds in each cannon and you had 360 odd rounds in your machine guns. You could fire the whole lot off at once if you wanted to or you could fire your cannons independently but it only lasted for thirteen and a half seconds, if you fire the whole lot together. You see these films of people flying around the sky, firing off guns - it's a whole lot of rot because you only had thirteen seconds fire-power. Usually if you got close to the German plane you'd give him the works, because it had to be quick, because nobody knew who was going to be firing at you from behind, you just couldn't waste any time, if you got to shoot him down in three seconds, well it was good shooting. A lot of the American planes the fighter planes they used to stall pretty easily and you could dip a wing when you were coming in to land, but the Spitfire was hard to even make it flip over on its back, they were beautiful, beautiful aeroplanes and Rolls Royce were a beautiful engine.
As soon as I got to the squadron, we used to have to do North Sea dawn and dusk patrols and things like that and these convoy patrols. They were all classed as operational flights. It was generally, at that time, fairly quiet. We were on readiness because every now and then odd German raiders used to come in from across the North Sea. I think I was very lucky because, I had that period of about six weeks where I got a chance to do a whole lot more flying with the squadron. When we were on dawn readiness, sometimes we'd see these fellows in the bombers who'd just come back and were limping home damaged. We'd go and escort them back in and sometimes they landed these old Wellingtons and they looked like a sieve, how they ever managed to fly, I don't know. The squadron morale was very good 'cause the squadron had shot a lot of Germans down during the Battle of Britain, I think we were about the third highest of the squadrons who were fighting down south. But we had a very bad time when we went to Biggin Hill to start with, we lost about ten fellows in the first month. In a fighter squadron you have say about thirty pilots, when lose use ten of them it's a big loss and most unpleasant. But you just had the feeling, well it's not going to happen to me and you went on flying and you hoped it didn't happen to you, until it did. We started off with three Australians on the squadron, I was the only one who survived, but then I was shot down and a prisoner of war otherwise I wouldn't be here, if I hadn't been a prisoner. We used to talk about 'getting the chop' and things like that and say, "It's your turn next" or something like that, "Let's have another drink". We used to weave all the time, you went along like a snake the whole lot of you because you were harder to hit and if you were on the outside and the whole squadron turned say, to the right and you were weaving to the left, all of a sudden, instead of thirty six of you all around you, you were on your own and it was a very frightening feeling because one minute you could have a whole lot of your own aircraft squadron and wing maybe thirty six of you or more and if you happen to weave in one direction, and the rest weaved in the opposite you were just left on your own and usually we were split into pairs, and there were two of you but you could easily get on your own and it was a terrifying thing because that's what the Germans waited for, for anyone who was on their own and they could just bang down on you from up above and if you managed to see them you were lucky, because they'd come out of the sun. It did happen to me on a few occasions, but I was 'Arse End Charlie', as we used to called it, we used to be in three sections of four, well somebody had to be the number four who was right at the back and as I said earlier that we'd lost ten blokes when we first went south and then we got replacements and some of them were pretty inexperienced, although I was not that experienced but I was one of the older members in the squadron and CRO used to say, "Well look old boy, you won't mind being 'Arse End Charlie' again today" and I'd say "I do mind" but that got to be...and I actually was in that nasty position a few times. When that happened suddenly you were on your own. You just watched out and said, "It's time to go home". And you could either dive straight, usually you were flying between 20,000 and 27,000 feet and you'd either go right down to the ground level and try and get home and hope that nobody would see you, you wouldn't run over across an anti-aircraft battery or something or you could just hope to catch up with the main force, you knew where they were going but if you'd lost any height you weren't in the race to catch them again. And I usually went down to the ground and flew home through the trees. You see the Messerschmitt-109's were a little bit faster than we were, but we could out turn them and if you were attacked you used to watch and try and judge and as soon as you saw them coming from behind and usually from above, you'd turn into them at the last minute, just as they were going to open fire at you and if they followed you, you would turn, we could turn inside them and we could out turn them and we could get a shot at them, but if you mistimed it, you were in trouble because they could just break away and see what you're doing and do the same thing again, but if you could turn inside them, and you could get a shot at them. The main thing was to get your shot in quickly because so many times if there was somebody having a shot at you, you had to turn quickly and always stay with somebody, was the whole secret but it always couldn't be. If you got on to the tail of the German and fired your guns and hit him well, you were highly excited but usually by the time you got home, you were pretty wet, you know, you were sweating and it was highly emotional really. But...it's...I really couldn't explain the position, I was shot at more often than I had to shoot at the Germans and I mostly managed to avoid being shot down but, I was very badly shot up one day, and we had metal ailerons on the Spitfire Mk-5B's and I got a cannon shell in my aileron, in the wing and I was flying home and I turned in to the Germans and I'd run out ammunition and I was trying to get down to the deck but there were two of them still chasing me and I turned in to them and they thought I still had some ammunition I presume, and they'd break away and then I'd try and dodge to the English Channel and I managed to dive down watching this aileron thinking it was going to fall to pieces, and that'd be the end of me but it just stayed there and I got down, there was a haze over the Channel and these two German planes behind me, they both went straight into the sea behind me, so I was going very fast when I crossed the channel. Our endurance was only about two hours, and sometimes you'd get into trouble and your petrol was just about run out and you'd hear the fellows calling "Mayday"... "Mayday" giving a fix and then they'd bail out over the channel because they hadn't got enough petrol. We were told not to ever crash land in the sea, in the 'Spit' because you had that great big Rolls Royce engine in front of you, which just went down quicker than a stone. And you weren't allowed to land on the beaches anywhere along the south coast, because they were all mined and so if you couldn’t get past the beaches, you could crash land in a field or something. We had pretty good wireless in these later planes but we were told just to cut out, you'd listen to your squadron leader and people and there was very little unnecessary natter. In fighter command, there really wasn't a period (of duty), it was a matter really of the squadron and demand and the whole squadron'd be moved to a safer area where there wasn't as much operational flying, you'd be doing sort of dusk patrol but not much chance of meeting any enemy...but I did I think, thirty five operational flights and then I was shot down, but I was the oldest sergeant pilot on the squadron, not in years but in time. Biggin Hill is only twenty minutes drive from London. We used to catch the train up – and we used to get twenty four hours leave now and then and we'd shoot off up to London and we had various pubs and these funny little clubs that were all over London. I remember the 'Crackers Club' was a great Australian place and you could guarantee you'd meet somebody you knew there and there was 'Codger's' in just off Fleet Street which was a great pub for the Australians. The English people were absolutely wonderful, we were Australians a long way from home. You'd get your leave and you loved your leave but you know, it was good to get back to the squadron; but you had some nasty shocks sometimes when you got back from leave because two or three more had been 'disappeared'. But you know, we were all very young, which makes a big difference. Lisle, in the north of France, was one of the worse places because that was about the end of our endurance. We knew then that, if the bombers were two or three minutes late we'd be in trouble with our petrol returning and we weren't very keen on flights to Lisle but, it didn't effect everyone. Everyone just said, "Well I hope those bomber boys are on time." The bombers used to fly over say, at 12,000 feet and we'd just escort them and we'd have wings right up from the close escort and then you'd have squadrons on either side and then you'd have a high escort which was say, 27,000 feet. Then the bombers just flew along and dropped their bombs and every now and then the Germans used to make an attack on the bombers. They usually used to get through but, if they got high enough and went through practically vertically, we couldn't catch them, but they brought out these big Stirling Bombers, the four engined planes. The German's anti-aircraft fire was very good and effective but one of these Stirlings got a couple of engines knocked out and we could see it gradually lagging behind, but we were so short of petrol we couldn't stay and look after it and it would've been chopped but that's the way those things went. These sweeps were on because the Russians were in the war and our job was to try and keep as many German aeroplanes in France to stop them going over to the Russian front, who were taking a terrible beating at the time. Douglas Bader the pilot with tin legs, I was on the escort when we dropped his – he was shot down about six week before I was – and I was on the escort that dropped his tin legs on the aerodrome at St Omer and I was then in the same little hospital at St Omer where he was, but he'd been moved. Biggin Hill was sort of defence of London and if there were any people from overseas American high brass and generals and things, wanted to see something in the operation room, they used to ring up the Biggin Hill wing and say , put on a `ding', we've got a few of these 'Yankees' or whoever they were, who want to see it from the operations and that was the day I was shot down, I don't know who somebody wanted and we were only a fighter sweep, we really had...but there was a new squadron – a Canadian squadron – joined the wing and they broke RT silence which we used until we'd crossed the French coast – nobody spoke on the wireless because the Jerry's could pick it up – and somebody had engine trouble and called up and said he had an engine trouble and was going back and our controller then called us up, we were flying about 27,000 feet say there were fifty plus Germans waiting for us and don't go far in, and so we crossed the French coast near Calais and then we turned out and we didn't go too far in. I had new fellow flying behind me. He was my sort of No. 2 and it was his first trip and I told him, "Keep really close to me don't lag behind" and I don't know quite what happened whether he was, I'd learnt this from some people...the fellow who was shot down off the squadron, a couple of months afterwards, he had engine trouble too and he should have flown along side me and waggled his wings and I would've gone home with him but he didn't or forgot what procedure and he shot through and I'd just seen – as we were turning out towards the French coast from France – I saw these Germans down below and I cocked my wing up in the sun and had a good look and called up the rest of the squadron that I was going down to watch my tail and to this day, I wouldn't know whether I would've looked behind before I went down and whether this plane behind me – it was most probably a German – and I thought it was the fellow who should've been flying behind me you see, and I was just about to peel over and go down these Jerry's and the plane just blew up, I was just sitting in the middle of a bonfire as we had two petrol tanks right between us and the engine and I was hit from sort of slightly underneath and it was just sitting in the bonfire. I got my safety harness straps undone, but my canopy wouldn't open. All I remembered was "Get out of here!" I was trying to get out of the dammed thing and I couldn't, because I couldn't open the hood. I got my feet up on the dashboard and was trying open it in the normal way and I went unconscious. I think the plane must have exploded and blown me out because I woke up with this noise of rushing wind and I didn't know where I was. Then I thought "God, I should be flying" and it all came back, so I pulled my rip-cord and hit the ground and the cold air revived me. I had dropped I suppose, about 23,000 feet. When the parachute opened one arm somehow was caught up in the shroud of the parachute and I just had time to look down. These French peasants, they heard the pop of the parachute and my trousers and everything were still on fire and the parachute was also burning. After I landed a couple of Germans came across the field, I think there was an ack-ack battery or a search light battery and they said, "For you my friend the war is over". I was in the hospital in St Omer until Christmas '41. Then they moved me into Germany. A fighter squadron was a very close-knit crowd because there weren't very many of you and your ground crew, you more or less had your own aeroplane and your ground crew thought you were the best pilot in the squadron and theirs was the best aeroplane. There was not much difference between the officers and the sergeant pilots, we were all really just the same. There was the Officers' Mess but we had the Sergeants' Mess. We'd have an experienced sergeant pilot leading the squadron and there'd be Flight Lieutenants and people flying behind him. It was a pretty good sort of set up, I thought. The casualties were shocking, I mean, it was awful. But at the time you don't sort of realize these sort of things. They were there the casualties, they just whittled away. If you went on flying and if you survived, you went on flying … you're gonna cop it sooner or later. I think possibly this would be effected more so in bomber command where they had these great big long flights and it must've been a lot more tension really then. Two hours at a time was our longest flight. You speak to all the bomber boys, particularly in POW camps, how they were shot down and the escapes were quite incredible how people got out. Some of them did seventy, eighty-two tours and three tours. They'd all at some stage been badly shot up or wounded and they just managed to get home and it was really just luck. I mean there was my brother shot down and he got back through Turkey. I was shot and a POW and survived and I had two cousins and they were both in the air force and they were killed. So it was really a matter of luck. (Copyright - Australian War Memorial for the purposes of research and study)
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