My Dad was just a teenager when he signed up with 4 Sqn RAAF 74 years ago and I am lucky to be here. Just check this out. After initial training he was to fly to New Guinea but just missed out on the first flight . He was to find out later that that flight crashed on the way. While posted in Lae he was in a fox hole during a Japanese air raid when an unexploded shell landed next to him. And then on his way to Darwin to help with daily clean up from the air raids there he once again was allocated on a later flight only to find once again that the original flight crashed. As he had yet to meet my Mum I was indeed lucky to be here. His one wartime injury was an encounter with coral which resulted in it being embedded in his foot and took another twenty years to find its way to the surface of his sole. He was a typical teenager of that era and amongst his many “exploits” he got 168 hours detention for failing to respond to a call of “who goes there” and ask for the password. His excuse was he was doing a no 2. to which he was told he should have stayed where he was and done it there “but I didnt want to leave a mess here for someone like you to accidentally stand in in the night.” That didn’t go down well. There were always a number of “detainees” on hand to do some of the dirtier jobs around the place but that was soon done. And there was the undetected pilfering of aerial photos of Japanese positions from the camera hut which was poorly guarded which fortunately remained undetected. It is only now, in his 90’s after all of his wartime friend have passed away that he is opening up about his experiences and I have decided to start a biography to capture what I can of his life and those times from the 20’s 30’s and 40’s.