“And the sister, in this case me and this other sister, would receive them into the plane in their litters. And that was highly organised because they had to go according to their injuries. In fact the fractures were on the upper litters so the fractured limb would be out of the way. And they came right down four litters either side so that’s eight, plus walkers and psychos and so on. And the ones most seriously ill would be right on the bottom litter and right up near the bulkhead so that the sister would be, on take-off and landing, sitting between the two seriously ill patients.

And then once we took off we then started to, on each pannier, which was the litter, was a little message about each patient so we knew exactly what was wrong with them and what they needed on the journey, which was three and a half hours. And if it was calm it was wonderful and if it wasn’t calm it wasn’t so wonderful particularly when we had to hop over the mountains. Of course we didn’t have, it wasn’t, we needed oxygen in the plane if we went above 10,000 feet and quite often we gave oxygen during the trip.

However when I actually graduated I did a couple [of trips] on my own, we were the only medical people on board of course. The pilot and the navigator and the whole crew were marvellous because they would ask what sort of patients we had on, and how we wanted them to fly and if they were colostomies, which would of course have a colostomy bag that needed attention and they needed to fly as low as they possibly could. If they had to go up really high we had to have oxygen cylinders ready, well I did because I was the only one there this particular flight.”

Find out more about the role of Australian nurses in the Korean War.

“We charged and we began to get shot down. I remember my good friend Gene Tunny on my right falling in the advance and then my big mate Rod Grey on my left, went down shot through the chest and the bullets were cracking, cracking, you can, as they go past you can hear them cracking, you know, because they sort of break the sound barrier. It’s louder than the crack of the weapon firing them. And it seemed to me that there were so many bullets coming that it was like walking or running into a very stiff breeze.

And I knew that most of the section had been knocked down and by this time I’m within ten foot of the Chinese trench when bang, something hit me and I didn’t know what it was you know. It absolutely blew the legs out from underneath me and I crashed to the ground carrying this bloody great Bren gun and all the ammunition in basic pouches and so on— I’m carrying about 80 pound of gear and equipment.

And I’m sprawled out on the ground and I know I’ve been hit and I don’t know where. And I can hear the Chinese talking to each other in the trench because the attack then had subsided. It was over as far as we were concerned and they were concerned. And I’m thinking what they are saying to each other is ‘will we shoot these guys in the head and make sure they are dead,’ because we’d be thinking the same thing. So the thought occurred to me that it might be a good move to try and get out of there. But I wasn’t sure if I could get up and I certainly wasn’t sure if I could walk or run. Anyhow when you’ve got battle gear on you’ve got a clip on your belt and everything is attached to the belt and you can just unsnap the belt and just shuck all the gear, everything will come off and fall away from you except the Bren gun which is on a sling across my neck, so with a great deal of speed and agility I slipped the Bren gun sling off my neck and unclipped the belt and jumped to my feet. Then I realised that where I had been shot was through the right thigh. So I sort of hopped and skipped and jumped and well, made my, retreated rapidly in that manner and fortunately after about 20 or 30 yards I was able to drive down behind a low mound. Meantime the inaccurate Chinese are having pot shots at me trying to stop me.

So here we are, most of the section blown away and we’ve had a close look at this trench and we can see that there’s about 70 or 80 Chinese in it, not the eight or ten that we expected. And we are pinned down because they’ve got covering fire from the hill we vacated the night before so nobody is moving. Everybody is pinned down and we are back to square one where we started from.

Anyhow after a short interval a whole platoon, Four Platoon, got organised and they put in a proper, systematic, well planned attack and they wiped out, they killed the 80 odd Chinese in the trenches. They lost a couple of lives in the action, but they wiped them out you know. And then the medics were able to come in and help our wounded. Rod had been shot through the chest, Gene Tunny had been also shot through the thigh. They were shooting low, I don’t know why. But nobody died in our attack, in our section attack, even though the whole section were wounded one way and another, they all got away with their lives.”

Find out more about the Battle of Kapyong.

“One day, just after we went on patrol I happened to be sitting at breakfast with a young man with a slightly burnt face from bailing out of a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, afterwards he had joined the RAN. Should be sitting beside me and in a very relaxed style he conversed with me which I found rather interesting because I was a Midshipman, you were the dirt of the earth of course. And we had a little conversation, he had his breakfast and he went off.

And I was in the operations room a little while later to hear him being shot down, and that was the end of him. He was our first casualty, Lieutenant Clarkson.”

Find out about the operations of the HMAS Sydney in the Korean War.

“I looked at his grave, it had a cross, that they had there, it was just a sort of a wooden cross with his name on it and that sort of thing, serial number. And I couldn’t, I didn’t have the guts to talk to him then.

When we went back in ’93 we walked around the graves, lot of the fellows that we knew who had been killed, I mean a lot of blokes lost a lot of mates. And I went and had a look at his grave, the headstone. I placed a card there... on which I had written to him asking his forgiveness for not going to his funeral...I’ll have to have a drink of water I think...

I knew he could read it but I printed it so he could read it because my writing is shocking, but I told him too. So we had a bit of a talk. He said, ‘How are you going Smithy?’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it mate’.”

Find out more about casualties in the Korean War.

“On the day in question I was flying one of 16 aircraft from 77 Squadron and we were operating in the general area of Pyongyang which is the North Korean capital. At the time there were probably 30 or 40 US airforce Sabres engaging probably an equal number of MiG-15s.

Our formation was flying probably several thousand feet below the Americans and the first indication I had of any real danger was when I observed three distinct lines of tracer ammunition going over my left wing. Instinctively I pulled away from these bullets by simply going into a hard right turn. I’d hardly begun the turn when I observed a MiG-15 fly straight underneath me. My immediate impression was that this was too good an opportunity to miss so I reversed and started to follow him and I accelerated at the same time. When he was probably a couple of hundred yards in front I started firing and although I was still accelerating he was moving away from me. Finally some of the bullets obviously hit his aircraft because there was a large plume of smoke was emitted from around the fuselage area. And the next thing I saw was his aircraft pitch up, obviously out of control, and as I was aware that there were other MiGs in the area I rolled to the left, into a hard turn just to ensure that there was nobody behind me. And as I went into the turn the flight leader observed the pilot of the MiG to bail out. He ejected, the parachute deployed and presumably he landed safely. Meanwhile we, our section of four aircraft, regrouped and we continued flying there for another 10 or 15 minutes before we redeployed, flew back to base.

The whole thing took maybe 30 seconds but that’s the nature of air combat these days. Long, sort of drawn out dogfighting, that was relegated to World War Two really. With jet aircraft using so much fuel you’ve got to get into it and out of it in a hurry otherwise you won’t have enough fuel to get home.”

Find out more about 77 Squadron and MiGs v Meteors.

“We used to bombard all night and sleep all day, just to keep them awake and upset them. And we done this for weeks and we had two JMLs there with us, they were Japanese motor launches, they were gunboats. With a 40mm gun and a couple of Oerlikons sitting each side. And they were [manned by South] Koreans. And they used to go in along the shore and they’d machine gun and all that, and then come back out. And they made it where we could [find] a passageway around the basin of the river. We were in the basin of the river and there was a passageway, like a gully right round where you could go right round but you had to drop your anchor, wait for the tide to turn so you could turn around, because you never had enough room to turn around with engines, and then come back out again.

And we had done this three or four times and that was good, but this day we went in and they were waiting for us. And we hadn’t turned, we were going up towards the turn, and the lookout looked over, we were at action stations, and the lookout looked over and he said to the captain, ‘Sir those haystacks are moving.’ And the skipper, looking at them with binoculars, [saw that] they were moving, they had anti-tank guns behind them, they were tanks, moving. And they waited until we stopped, and that’s when we had to turn and that’s when they hit us. And they threw all this at us and of course we threw a lot back too. And that’s when they put all the holes in her [HMAS Murchison], as we turned, because we could only train one turret on them.”

Find out more about the role of the HMAS Murchison in the Han River operation.