sixtiesrelic

Friday May 15th 1942 NO WORD! In Melbourne. DCA is collecting all the relevant documents and responses in preparation for the investigation. Johnstone is busy and soon a team will be formed for the work of collecting, collating and investigating all possible avenues. Doreen files more paperwork in the ADY folder Not only do they want the maintenance release but a sworn statement that the aircraft was airworthy. More about Sno Schubert later...Remember the name. Note the MR was signed just 22 minutes before setting course.

May 14th 1942 Conversation in Adelaide ‘In 1937 Bernard O’Reilly decided that the missing Stinson could be in the Lamington Ranges rather than South of Coffs Harbour as ‘eye witnesses’ reported. Some even reckoned it went down ten minutes north of Sydney. O’Reilly set out eight days after the crash and found it in sheer mountainous country two days later. There were three survivors from that crash, hundreds of miles from where everybody thought it would be. Three out of seven. How many could survive in ADY? ‘ ‘They were civilians whereas Bill has bushcraft and the Americans probably are fit from training, so there is no reason why they aren’t alive somewhere”. ‘The country is not as mountainous. A moderately safe forced landing could be made if luck was on their side.’ ‘There was something wrong with their compass perhaps. They could be miles outside the search area.’ The ladies asked each other again, “What do you think they were thinking.” Ladies seem to naturally home in on this facet of mysteries. The men tried to point out, ‘You don’t think anything other than concentrating entirely on getting out of the mess you find yourself in. It’d the caveman coming out. When they were in a battle or hot on the heels of their food, they ignored everything happening around them to focus on dodging spears or navigating to killing distance of the animal. Women in cavemen days were able to discuss anything and everything while digging or collecting food. If Mildred got herself in the foot with her digging stick, everyone could stop and gather around giving advice like, “Oooh go and wash it in the stream or you better wrap a rag around it.” If Cedric kicked his big toenail half off in the middle of a battle, no one stopped to look and say, “Oooh nasty… does it hurt much?” They’d both land up full of arrows very quickly if they didn’t stay on the ball.’ The writer has asked three pilots who crashed aircraft, what went through their minds. They all said I was fighting to get/keep control all the time till the thump. The first was in a flat spin that he couldn’t get out of in a Tiger Moth (bad rigging). The second was not able to turn or get over rising ground after an engine failure in a twin. He was banking on ground effect probably saving him. The third turned back after an engine failure (carby icing) and clouted the ground very heavily and busted his Auster. This painting by L.C. Goodchild was one of my favourites in my father’s library of ‘war books’when I was a child. Older readers will remember them, big green books with titles like ‘As You Were’, RAAF log … ‘Stand Easy’. They were the collections of reminiscences of personnel from the war. The painting was in ‘As You Were 1948’.

It's interesting... while having a surf on the net to research more info for this story, I have discovered a few sites that have cut and pasted bits of this saga on theaussieaviator to go in their reports. I wonder if they have some sort of automatic net that scoops any info that comes up about ADY and flags it for them to peruse. At the moment I'm only about three days ahead of you with the writing.

May 13th 1942 Family portrait taken about 1938 Old Mr. Gray was William Thomas the second and he’d named his son W.T. the third. Can you guess? Naturally the first grandson would be another William Thomas. Well! God wasn’t on the old boy’s side. His second son was first to produce a child, beating the favourite first born by some months and it was a BOY. The father had an axe to grind and refused to name his son what he and the child’s mother didn’t want, but went ahead and called him Bruce. Luckily there had been a Bruce somewhere back in the Gray line. To put a fly in the ointment, Ann wasn’t going to be called William Thomas and neither was Lyn in her turn. They were the next grandchildren. Old Mr Gray was somewhat placated more than ten years later, when his youngest son relinquished and called his first born Bill but stopped at Thomas as the second name; he used his own instead. Karma! I use Mr Gray, W.T. and Bill (the grandson) in the story so you know which of the three I’m talking about. When W.T came home from New Guinea at the end of his first two year stint, he openly drank alcohol in front of his father who told all and sundry it was OK, “It was to ward off malaria.” W.T. drank beer not Gin and tonic. Old Mr. Gray wasn’t quite so ready to accept Charlie’s hopping into the ‘drink’ when he opened a bottle in Adelaide while the old boy was visiting. The old Rechabite disapproved! He didn’t sanction it nearly as much as he did with W.T. Charlie and Tess had been on Quinine which they were probably still taking daily. He got into such a fury, three years later, when Charlie was visiting home with his two year old and allowed the little bloke to have a sip of beer, that old Mr Gray had to storm up and down the road outside the house in the dark for ten minutes, trying to cool down enough to only be apoplectic in his condemnation of 'the allowing of alcohol to pass the infant’s lips'. Old Mrs Gray weathered all his outbursts and told him to sit down. He had it all over everyone else except his tiny wife. Old Mrs Gray was loved by all. She patiently looked after everybody making them feel important, put up with her husband’s self-centredness and didn’t complain. The daughters–in–law did on her behalf, especially they heard the news of how she rang the old boy up at work and said she needed to get to the doctors. He didn’t have time to drive the five minutes home from ‘the works’ and cart her off to the doctors. He was doing the books. Poor Carrie suffered her appendicitis stoically while the old bugger went back to his book keeping. He wasn’t admired for that effort. There is the feeling amongst a couple of grandchildren that old Gray had been a scab in the 1917 railway workshop strikes, from little things that were and weren’t said about strikers that one read about in the newspapers especially around 1989. The previous Gray clan taken in 1901 Old Mr. Gray was the eldest of the children in his family. He was followed by three sisters and the first brother was ten years his junior. He had reigned supreme in his home as a youngster, being permitted to boss his sisters around, as was the male’s prerogative. Perhaps HE’D been the apple of HIS father’s eye One sister was earmarked, while a still child, as the carer of her parents in their old age and was somehow prevented from getting married, so she could do the job properly. Old Mr. Gray would drive his motor car over to the other side of Sydney to visit his kindly, maiden sister, in the years building up to the war, have tea and spend the evening with her, compaionably keeping her company before driving home at about eleven PM. What a kindly older brother. A family secret came out many years later and was shared amongst the wilder, more easygoing grandkids. W.T. wasn’t spending the whole evening, sitting and talking. He kept his Nazi uniform in a wardrobe over there and went to party meetings in it, then changed back into his ordinary clothes for his return home. (I checked there was a Nazi party in Sydney.) So there we have him … pillar of the church, business owner and worried parent, demanding to be on the spot in Darwin, to make sure everything is being done to find his son, while telling the inept experts, how to do their job. To give him his due, he was remembered by his granddaughter and one niece as a kindly man who played games with them, but being rejected by the Congregational church as a trainee minister, which had been his life’s desire as a youth, because of his hereditary hearing deficiency and the loss of his firstborn, possibly contributed to his latter demeanour.

May 12th 1942 Mr Gray Continued… Sorry not today though… other priorities! The missing blokes from the 49th. Their beds have been taken by someone else. Their ‘foot lockers’ packed and stored. How long since 'the night' till the families were advised that they were missing? I haven't found out. How much are they missed? Air crew appeared, flew, and often didn’t come back. That was expected. Ground staff were more settled. Sometimes they were bombed and sometimes they were transferred, you have time to contend with those things, but ten to go missing at once must have been a wack in the guts. The mates… they’re waiting in uncertainty. Do they get on with their lives and then suddenly the old mate turns up and finds he’s been sidelined by a new best friend? The officer in charge of the teletype section… What was he to do; send replacements to Brisbane? Where the hell is he going to find ten more suitable people when the unit is so short anyway? He ‘pulled the teletype course early’ because he was short handed. Twenty days … He’d have had to do something about a replacement course by now, because those boys weren’t going to be picked up out of the bush and bunged straight down in front of a desk anyway. The 49th is stationed at the thirty four mile. It was later called Livingston Field after the first pilot to be killed at the aerodrome. Lieutenant Livingstone probably got hit by friendly fire over Darwin and crashed at the thirty four mile while trying to land. It was ‘one of those things’. The story goes, that during a bombing raid, two Zeros had come in and strafed the airfield as they shot northward at low level. Not long after, one returned and a gunner spotted him and let him have it. The other gunners joined in to get the cheeky little bugger. It wasn’t the Japs , it was poor old John Livingstone Jr. in his Kittyhawk. I suppose we could say the gunners should have been more careful. They’d certainly have to be these days with OH&S wouldn’t they. Back then they’d had high altitude bombers that appeared as tiny silver dots way up in the sky, trying to kill them and the chances of hitting one of them would be awfully remote, so when some clown comes in low, everyone is going to be letting off steam and they’d be watching where he went… waiting for another crack at him. A fighter is spotted coming from that direction … What ? “Hold your fire boys till we’re absolutely sure it’s them again!” Not bloody likely. His bullets might get you if you don’t get him first. Have you been to Darwin? Hazy often enough and with the dust from the bombing you wouldn’t have much time to see a fighter let alone recognise what it was. Probably four to six seconds. One in each pair is a Zero and the other a P40. The arm chair detective might ask why the first to see him coming didn’t note the different engine sound. Well, ‘when your blood’s fairly up’ you don’t hear or see anything other than what you want to wack. Ask someone who finds an intruder in his home to describe what the bloke’s face looked like. The answer will be, “Dunnow … a target” Thanks to Bob Alford's collection and the War memorial for these images. Livingstone was a pretty basic camp. It was mainly tents out in the scrub. Many of the pilots had brought their beds from the hotel they stayed in Darwin, but most slept on pallaises … a sort of canvas bag filled with grass. Not too many ‘campers’ today could cop these conditions. We have TV shows like ‘Survivor’ where people live under these conditions with the carrot of a million bucks prize money as encouragement. Those young blokes volunteered to perhaps die for their country or get wounded, and made the best of what they had. They knew what could happen to them. They’d seen enough wrecks from ‘The Great War’ on crutches or wearing suit coats with an empty sleeve end pinned to its shoulder. Livingstone was a five thousand foot runway, a hundred feet wide with an extra ten to twenty feet of shoulder. It was made from a mixture of clay and gravel and coated with dieseline. The airfield was protected by the American 102nd coastal artillery battalion. The Northern Territory was populated by considerable mix of units from Oz and the USA. The 49th Pursuit Group was the first American unit to arrive in Australia as a complete unit, with all flying and support echelons fully manned and equipped. (Peter Dunn’s ozatwar.com … a must read if you are interested in just what happened all over Australia back then.)

May 11th 1942 A bit about old Mr. Gray gleaned from his grandchildren. None of the grandsons liked him. ‘Cranky old bugger!’ One granddaughter DID. She lived with him for some years while her mother and brother lived in the old home. “He was nice to me and often sharpened my pencils so I could draw him pictures”. None of his daughters-in-law liked him. He was complex like most of us. He was warm when courting his diminutive fiancée, writing her love poems, but after marriage the rot set in, where is selfishness ruled till in his dotage, he looked back on those courting days and was easy to get on with. In ‘his second childhood’ as dementia was often called, he did wander and kept returning to the first home they owned and scared the owners by banging on the door asking to be let in. They got used to him and rang the family to come and get him when he came. He was a pillar of the local Congregational church. Ceremonially and pompously said grace before meals, then officially carved the meat at the table. ‘Food was always bloody cold by the time he’d finished” … According to Tess later. He did this at the head of the table wearing his opened suit coat with gold watch chain across his vest. He wore a hearing aid. ”A large contraption, that looked like a pink set of hair clippers without the head. A pair of thin pink twisted wires emerged from it and the earhole shaped, chunky earpiece was on the end of them. There was a large volume knob on the front of the appliance. It sometimes started whistling when he had the volume too high and everyone would shout at him, ‘Turn your hearing aid down!’ We kids didn’t though, we were sitting up straight, being seen and not heard.” Tess didn’t feel too comfortable around him … had a feeling his hands could have roamed. Another daughter-in-law reckoned Tess wasn’t wrong. He was a staunch ‘tea-totaller’ and went off into righteous wraths over imbibing of ‘the demon drink.’ …Was up there ready to take part in any public rallies against it. He idolised his son Bill W.T. who could do no wrong. W.T. knew it and naturally played it to his own advantage against his brother, less than a year younger. The second son could do no right and having a bit of a paddy was quick to blow up, which after all ‘proved his guilt.’ The next child was a daughter who old Mr Gray was nice to … till she got to think for herself and didn’t do whatever her father reckoned he wanted of her. Charles was the last three boys who were mostly ignored by their father. The youngest son was always a bit disgruntled at his being uncared for by his father and the second son felt wronged. Darwin hasn’t been bombed for a fortnight… any day now… The pilots in Adelaide are in conference, utilizing Chaseling and Godsell’s discoveries that a plane was sighted over Mt Briggs at sunset and Port Keats just after dark and that the lights over East Point were flares. This makes sense with the weak radio reception.

I'd forgotten about the two overwing emergency exits and the nine windows. As a comparrison, here's one of Uncle Chop Chop's great photos he took with his new camera. Eight windows and one exit.

The wait was long and difficult, specially with Old Mr. Gray, pacing like a caged lion reckoning not enough was being done. I'll give you more insight into him tomorrow. We see similar these days. People who aren't satisfied and push everyone... unreasonably, in many watcher's view.

May 10th 1942 Sunday; Old Mister Gray insisted on taking over and saying grace before the Sunday lunch in Tess and Charles’ home. Little Ann and Lyn learned the most important of life’s rules. “Children will be seen and not heard!” No news of ADY

Now? who checked up on Lofty's lottery ticket?? I got my money back on the 70 mill last night, so I can't complain. May 9th 1942 Saturday. Last night before she left work, Doreen filed more papers. They give us the example of the thoroughness of an investigation. Every stone will be unturned getting to the reason for a crash to stop it happening again. The thing here is, many of the pilots and DCA people were friends. These were the days when the industry was small. Most had come up the ladder together, but then many people in CASA are blokes I’ve known in airline days.

There are bits of one at the Caloundra Air Museum.

real men didn't wear uniforms.

May 8th 1942. Seventeen days … Can people survive seventeen days ? Ross Keith Stagg did for twenty four in similar country a month after ADY came down . Sixteen men lasted seventy- two days up in the snow of the Andes and all they had to eat was snow and their mates. The twelve who were in ADY had eleven rifles and ammo between them. The US soldiers carried all their gear with them rifles included. ADY had a rifle strapped to a bulk head along with first aid and emergency rations. TAA the real one, Trans Australian Airlines, had a .303 still strapped to the rear bulkhead of the Flying Doctor Dragons in the nineteen fifties. There would be food of sorts to eat. Crock’s, wallabies and even dogs were around the area. If you’re hungry you’d eat dog. Questions … why didn’t they go to the fires they were trying to land near? Did the rain put them out? Did they know where the fires were the next day? Had the pilots been killed and the live passengers didn’t know about the fires, so they remained near the wreckage as advised. Were there broken legs and back injuries that stopped someone from trying to find help. The country is rough and stony in the Darwin area. That would be difficult to drag yourself over. We wait!

Ah yes! that photo of the TAA Twotter. Why is the rest of the aeroplane cut out? The smell of fear... I know it. Smelt different when a bunch of indentured labourors were off to the unknown on a charter to coastal plantations for two years, compared with the seasoned air traveller on an ordinary flight We're off to Caloundra air museum to re-acquaint ourselves with a couple of aeroplanes we flew way back when.

PNM didn't have the human smell. It was the materials used on the interior.

I'll look, but Ididn't have a camera for a long while when I got to PNG, then about two days after I got one someone pinched it. It was well into my second year that i could afford a new camera ... then I went nuts but I was in Ansett PNG then.

PNM and PNB

Me cousin and iIwere talking ove dinner and DAK came up. He mentioned, "You've flown her... she was PNM. I have a couple of hundred hours in her in one of her earlier lifetimes. Papuan Airlines bought her from Phillipine Airlines and the chief pilot, another captain and the first indigenous first officer, Mincon Penni flew her to Moresby. She smelt different to other DC-3s and had more seats. Hard erect little buggers they were too. Built for Asians. She had an extra window up in part of the the luggage locker area, so another row could be fitted. We flew her for a few years and she was sold to Bushies (Bush Pilots Airways) and moved to Cairns. I have a photo of her somewhere when she came up to Mt Hagen for the show with a bunch of tourists from Cairns. She still had the funny smell in the cabin. I guess it was the seat material. I don't remember her being a freighter in Patair. We used to cart passengers and freight in PNA and PNB. Sometimes pure one or the other, but plenty of times there'd be a few rows of seats down the back and cargo tied down on the floor up the front. We learned how to tie down cargo well. No nets ... too much trouble. I'll try and find the photos I have of her in other liveries.

Wow Simon that C-82 package is awsome. Well done!

May 7th 1942 Captain Godsell landed at Tipparary station today and asked the owner if anyone had seen anything of ADY. He got the men together and one stockman said he’d seen a big plane with two engines fly over him at the Mt Briggs yards one afternoon. It spooked the horses as it flew low towards Wyndham which is in the direction that the sun was, as it set through the trees. Godsell and Buckley are busily trying to come up with independent theories to see how similar they are. The pilots are discounting Adam’s theory because of the bad radio reception indicating ADY was not close to Darwin. The pilots have maps up in the crew room showing all the tracks aircraft have made in the search. Each day they fly off track for a look on the way to and from Darwin. They are now making a grid at sixty degrees each side of the direct track for pilots to fly and record so there are no double ups. How often have you missed something on the ground flying in one direction and seen it easily from say ninety degrees to the original direction. Can someone be alive? It’s now sixteen days. Hell, a Super Electra is a pretty big aeroplane. WHY can’t anyone spot it. It had a 20 metre wing span and the airframe was thirteen and a half metres long. It’s not a thing that you can hide under a bush. They weren’t an aeroplane that always stayed together when they walloped the ground. Poor old ABI didn't mean to come down where she did, so she broke up badly. Other's forced landing did better, although the land was flat where they did. Below is ADY not long after she arrived in Adelaide, having broken Scott and black's time in the Mac Robertson air race of 1934 de Havilland Comet's record The pilots were reasonably high up in the airframe even if the gear collapsed. There was the known weakness of that nose however. It came off easily. It had huge fowler flaps. These must have lowered the stall speed to a slow one. Now, Here’s a thing! The Japs had Lockheed 14s before and during the war. They were called Tobys then later Thelmas. I wonder if the Ack-ack gunners in Darwin knew that. Wouldn’t that be a nice bit of bastardry to send Thelmas out on reconnaissance over the Darwin area where Hudsons were based.

Ann rummaged around in her memorabilia and found this. We are lucky that there are three families who have ‘kept bloody old rubbish that should go to the dump.’

well Darren, you'll have to pm me an address.

Man when Takeoff power is going the bloke in the jumpseat's ears are itching on the inside from the racket. Have all you DC-3 nutters been given our video of VH-CWS flight from Sydney to Perth in 2006? Let me know if you haven't and I can post you one.

May 6th 1942 NO news on ADY. Chaseling told a reporter, “I haven’t given up hope yet, friendly blacks may be helping them.” Ann remembers talk about this piece in a news paper, but I haven’t been able to find it yet. To put this hope into perspective… Chaseling had flown over a fair bit of Australia and knew many aboriginals who refuel aeroplanes out in the boondocks as well as staff at hostels and aerodromes. It is seventy years ago that this story is happening for us and for them, it was eighty years since ‘The Burke and Wills expedition’. Burke and Wills died of exposure and starvation because Burke ‘would have nothing to do with the natives’. King, the only survivor, was looked after by the local Cooper Creek tribe. They helped people who needed it. King was a poor wreck of humanity and they wouldn’t let HIM starve. He was saved. Chaseling has discovered that someone... soldiers from out the 105 radar station way? or perhaps navy personnel? had fired off a red and a white flare out of hi-jinks and boredom on the evening of April 21. This explains the lights that aeradio reported to ADY implying they were seen from the ground. No one would say who had done it… just it had been seen to happen. There were showers occasionally passing that night. You couldn’t blame them if they did pop off a flare they found lying about after reading the following from Peter Dunn’s great site … http://www.ozatwar.com Peter has amassed a marvellous history of the war from an Aussie’s point of view. In March 1942 the RAAF decided that more RDF cover was required in the Darwin area. An SCR 268 radar (the Americans used the term RADAR) which had been modified for air warning was flown to Darwin. These units were known as a MAWD or Modified Air Warning Device. The equipment was dismantled on 24th March 1942 and packed onto two trailers, with a total weight of approximately twenty tons. The equipment arrived at Batchelor by the 6th April 1942. It was all assembled by 25 March 1942 and moved over 100 miles of bush county to Point Charles. The Mobile RDF Station was operating two days after it arrived on 20 April 1942. Warnings of the approach of enemy aircraft were passed by W/T circuits to No 5 Fighter Sector. These links were known as telling circuits. The RDF Station was named No. 105 RDF Station RAAF on 1 June 1942. Commanding Officer, P/O P.E. EVANS, Early assistance & relief by P/O RAY RYAN & P/O HAL PORTER. Early in April 1942, I left 31 RDF station at Dripstone to join with the POINT CHARLES crew, and to pick up the equipment from BATCHELOR. From there we departed for POINT CHARLES on the western side of DARWIN HARBOUR from where the Darwin lighthouse looked out over the open sea. Our route was approximately 100 miles through very rough country. There were no roads, and we had only a rough map and a compass. There were two eight wheel American Army trucks on loan, with each carrying around ten tons and a RAAF tender with about three tons, all with our gear, tucker, stores etc. I cannot remember the number of personnel perhaps there were eight or ten men. The trip took two weeks, and at times it was so slow we had to walk beside the big trucks, wielding axes to cut trees and branches to clear the way .We had load shifts, tyre blowouts, we had to ford streams, ditches and gullies, and of course we were bogged many times by one vehicle or another, We then had to use both front winches on the trucks to pull the other out, and sometimes we would be held up for hours, even at times with the hold up extending overnight. It was at one of these bogging hold ups that we had a frightening experience. The bogged truck had its cable attached to a tree and the other truck its cable attached to the bogged truck when the strain became so great the steel cable sang like a violin string. Suddenly the cable attached to the tree snapped. It snaked and whipped all around the place even cutting down small trees, luckily without striking any personnel, although we were spread all over the place. We were indeed very fortunate. It was a very good lesson. At night we just stopped where we were, ate hard rations, and slept on our groundsheets, then off again at first light. I remember having to hang a blanket from the tail-shaft under a truck, and use it as a hammock to get off the ground because of heavy rain. The water just flowed through and under my hammock. At last, after arriving at the site, our first priority was to unload the American trucks so they could return, then we began to set up the unit. It was "ON AIR " within a day or so, but our camp was a shambles. Actually I remember it was a week or more before we got our tents up and began to settle in. The NAVY delivered our fuel by dropping 44 gallon drums overboard, and we had to swim out to retrieve them, with a sentry always placed close by to watch for sharks and crocs. We walked the drums in to the beach, where they were manhandled up the cliffs with ropes to be stored. The NAVY boys made it quite clear they were not hanging around they got out in one hell of a hurry. They liked plenty of sea around them!!! Our food was bad, mosquitoes and sand flies drove us mad !! The first few weeks were very hard on all of us; but I believe the job was well done, with all of us including our C.O. doing anything and everything to keep the unit performing and it did perform well!!!! Medically and physically we all suffered. We had an up hill battle with the food rations and dysentery, then there were troubles with ulcers, sand fly poisoning, mosquito bites and Dengue fever. I had Dengue twice; the first time I kept going (just), but the second time I landed in hospital at BERRIMAH. They told me later I was taken out by boat. A few kilometers north of us along the beach was a deserted banana farm. We used to walk up there and bring back a stick of bananas and hang them from the ridge pole of the tent until the lower bananas became ripe, then we really enjoyed them At Point Charles, life for the men was obviously very basic...primitive almost. Food supplies wear of the tinned variety...and very little variety at that. There were few facilities other than those the men set up themselves, and recreation and entertainment also depended on what the men could think up. Swimming, fishing and walking were the obvious recreations, though there was a deserted banana farm not far from the camp which also provided a variation to the tinned food. If THIS was the early warning device the records of ADY mention, it’s not too hard to see why it was probably off the air, only having just arrived. Chaseling has also interviewed Sergeant Johnston and Corporal Killingsworth who were on duty in the DF hut, to see if he can find out any more than he read in the report. Killingsworth is still stressed by the experience.

WARNING: you have a longish wait, but I'll try to make it easier than those in adelaide seventy years ago