South East Asia

Flying a plane is easier than driving a car and safer, I think. I’d went to a training camp in the north of England, near Liverpool. And having trained there, they were looking for people to go overseas. And since I was fancy free and no reason not to, and I thought, well, some of my friends had families in England, so I might as well go overseas and let them stay at home, which I did. So I ended up a month later in Singapore and was in a unit called No. 4 AACU (Anti-aircraft Co-operation Unit). And we towed targets for the air force and the navy and the army to shoot at. And when the Japanese finally attacked in 1937, after our training, I hit a formation of three out of a big lot of Japanese aircraft and knocked all three down, which we thought made our work worthwhile. And after the Japanese really got bombed in Singapore, I went to another airdrome, Tengah, T-E-N-G-A-H, where I became a flight commander in (inaudible) for bombing and that worked well until they got … they chased us out of Singapore itself. And I went down to Sumatra and did a few bombings on Northern Malaya until they sort of overcame us and they took over our airdrome at Palembang. They came down the road and we took a few shots at them and we went down to Java. And from there, we went up to India and we reformed with some deadbeat bands from the Middle East and New Delhi. And after getting crewed up and settled down in there, I was a flight commander in the 34th Squadron at that time. We went to a new airdrome north of Calcutta. After that, they decided we needed to teach the people of Afghanistan a lesson. That’s where the war is going on now, at the northwest frontier. So I got my people and aircraft and went to the northwest frontier, what’s the name of the place? I can’t think of it offhand. You’ll see it on a map anyway ... the northwest frontier of India into, the entry into Afghanistan. And we had a great respect for the people of Afghanistan. They had villages which they built out of mud and so on. But not only did they build up their own villages, if we knocked them down they made their own guns and were very effective at doing it. And they would go to war for most of the year except for when they were planting or harvesting crops. While we were there, I had a little bit of heart trouble, I suppose it was, and had a lump under my eye and they put me into a British hospital up in the hills. That is were I met my wife. She was a nurse there.