Chapter Two, Part Two: Enlistment

January 18, 2026January 18, 2026 ~ Adam Purcell

There was a family story I remembered hearing from someone that suggested that Uncle Jack wasn’t supposed to be able to become aircrew. As a young bloke, he had been involved in an accident of some sort that injured a leg. You could volunteer for aircrew from the age of eighteen, but until you turned 21 you still required a signature on your enlistment papers from your parents. Jack’s mother only signed the papers, the story went, in the belief that his leg injury would preclude him from active service.

The only evidence I found that could, maybe, support this story was a line on Jack’s service record describing some scars on his knee and legs. In any case, his mother’s belief was mistaken, and at his medical examination Jack was passed “Category A1B – fit full flying duties”. In October 1940 he was enrolled into the Royal Australian Air Force Reserve and, nearly nine months later, entered No. 2 Initial Training School at Bradfield Park, in what is now the Sydney suburb of West Lindfield.

I decided to find someone who could tell me about Bradfield Park and what life was like in Sydney during the war.

Before the war, Don Southwell lived in Burwood, and he enlisted as soon as he was allowed to, in 1942. Like so many, Bradfield Park was his first posting.

I knew Don through the 463-467 Squadrons Association in Sydney. He’d been part of the group for many many years, organising events and lunches and generally keeping in touch with everyone. Because he was always so involved in organising things, and because he knew everyone, he was always in high demand at the annual Anzac Day lunches. He could be hard to pin down for a proper chat.

If I was to hear about Don’s experiences at Bradfield Park, I’d have to plan ahead. So for Anzac Day one year I travelled to Sydney a day early, so I could visit Don and we could sit down somewhere comfortable, without distractions, for a few hours, just a voice recorder between us, to hear about his war.

It worked. The ‘somewhere comfortable’ turned out to be Don’s loungeroom, the front room in his house in a northern Sydney suburb that was usually described as ‘leafy’. He was 94 and pretty sprightly when I interviewed him, with white hair, glasses and a ready smile.

He also knew how to talk.

Cups of tea in hand, we settled into well-loved lounge chairs and I turned on the microphones.

I always started interviews with the same question: “Can you tell me something of your early life, growing up and what you were doing before the war?”

It was a pretty standard opener for an oral history interview. Everyone had an early life, right? And if there was one thing that everyone could talk about, it’s themselves. If it worked, I wouldn’t have to say another word for a while. I could just sit there listening as my subject grabbed the proverbial bit between their teeth and ran with it.

Don needed no such warming up. I asked my normal opening question, and he was off. In the transcript^[1], there were almost three and a half thousand words before I asked question number two, and by then Don is just arriving in England.

Yep, this man could talk.

Don told me that he was already a member of the Air Training Corps when war came. He remembered wearing an Air Raid Precautions armband and riding his bicycle around the nearby suburb of Ashfield to make sure people were complying with the blackout laws, and spending nights sitting on top of the Ashfield Town Hall watching for Japanese planes.

“We didn’t get any Japanese planes,” he said with a grin.

He volunteered for aircrew but in the meantime he turned 18, and as happened at that age, was drafted into the army. Air Force bureaucracy caught up with him three weeks into an infantry training camp in central New South Wales, so he was put on a train back to Sydney where the army discharged him and he was immediately taken on strength by the air force. After passing all the medical tests he spent several months guarding various wharves in Sydney until he was finally sent to Bradfield Park.

^[1] I interviewed Don as part of the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. The transcript is available at https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/3491

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series here, and an evolving list of contents here. (c) 2026 Adam Purcell

For King and Country?

February 18, 2013February 14, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell

There appear to have been as many reasons for joining the wartime Air Force as there were aircrew. The chance to learn to fly was of course a key motivation. Dennis Over gave me some of his reasons on the phone in June 2011: “Until the war, we were all going to be train drivers”, he said. But the Battle of Britain happened, and “then we were all going to be fighter pilots!” Too young to join up immediately, Dennis worked in a shipyard fitting out Air-Sea Rescue boats. Many of the crews of these boats were ex aircrew and he was also inspired by their tales of derring-do so when he became old enough he joined up, eventually serving as a rear gunner on 227 Squadron.

For some, it was more personal. Cliff Leach, a 150 Squadron Pilot/Flight Engineer, wrote that “our main aim… was to stop our relatives being killed and our homes being wrecked”. To back it up, he had a newspaper photograph of what was left of his mother’s house after a German air raid on Liverpool in 1941.

It’s easy to see how motivation to enlist in the Air Force could be stirred by seeing the effects of war first-hand – but until the Japanese entered the war Australia was not under direct threat of attack. So what might have attracted so many Australians to join the ranks of aircrew in those first few years of the war?

Hank Nelson collected a few ideas from different aircrew in Chased by the Sun:

Those who volunteered for aircrew were, Don Charlwood said, ‘children of the empire’. Nearly all had relatives in the British Isles. Most were also strongly conscious of their Australianness, but saw no contradiction in being both British and Australian […] Charlwood said that his swearing-in was the culmination of his upbringing, acceptance of authority and the ‘Call of the Homeland’. Wade Rogers’ mother said to him before he sailed, ‘Don’t miss seeing Scotland for me, son’ […] Although David Leicester’s father was born in Australia, he was ‘very pro-English’, and David grew up in a home where ‘fighting for England was really the thing to do’. (C07-039-009)

One of the most matter-of-fact descriptions that I’ve seen, and one that covers most of the key motivations for enlisting, was written by 467 Squadron skipper Phil Smith in an unpublished manuscript, some decades after the war (C03-004-004):

My motives for joining the forces were mixed:

a) The call of adventure

b) A feeling of duty

c) The need to be ‘in it’ with the mob

d) A question of patriotism

e) At 22 years I was the right age, and had no responsibilities.

The call of ‘King and Country’ managed to reach all the way to Australia much like it had a generation before, and it was heard by thousands of young men. The chance of adventure and the need to be ‘in it’ certainly played a big part – in many ways similar to that which attracted so many of the previous generation to arms in the First World War. It is clear that patriotism was perhaps the overriding reason for men to enlist in the armed forces in general – but there were other reasons for choosing the Air Force specifically, over the other two branches of the military. Stories of the horrors of that earlier conflict were well-known and so many were conscious of the need to stay out of the infantry. Frank Dixon was a 467 Squadron skipper, and picked the Air Force out of a desire to avoid what he called a “man to man, face to face, knee deep in mud confrontation with cold steel”, the thought of which horrified him (C06-070-005). The Air Force offered what Danny O’Leary, a Vultee Vengeance pilot, called “a way out: accept the risk of death for yourself, but volunteer for a technical arm like the Air Force or the Navy, where you will kill clinically, at a distance, where you won’t see ” the whites of his eyes”.

Phil Smith’s reason was perhaps more practical than many; he wrote that he decided on the Air Force because he thought that a pilot’s licence could be “a useful qualification” to have after the war (C03-004-004). As it happened after he was demobbed he never flew in command of an aeroplane again, but the sentiment remains.

But there was also a higher sense of duty. Danny O’Leary put it eloquently:

Deep down we all knew that this was a job which had to be done, and we young men of our generation, who had the fitness and schooling to do it, must step forward, for there was no one else […]It was our duty to stop this.

And stop it, they did.