Anzac reflects on WWII action

Frank Mouritz is the last surviving member of his crew.

The now 91-year-old Busselton resident was only 18 when he joined the Royal Australian Air Force and made his way to Brighton, England, at the height of World War II.

It was then, as a fresh-faced young man in 1943, that Frank became a Lancaster bomber fighter pilot.

Frank spent time training at an advanced flying school, learning about European weather conditions before his crew of seven, including two Australians and five Englishmen, was formed and began training.

"We were going to drop bombs so we had to practise bombing," Frank said from his home in a Busselton retirement village.

"We also did four or five cross-countries with a navigator.

"We did mock combats with Spitfires in the air and then there'd be a session afterward where we'd watch the film of what we'd done."

In the middle of 1944 things took a step up for Frank, when he went on his first operational training trip with an experienced pilot. It was the next stage and the start of a wartime career which saw Frank drop about 250 tonnes of bombs on towns and on military and industrial targets throughout 33 operational trips.

"We knew we were killing people but the same thing was happening the other way around," he said.

"The scariest moment in my time was taking off with eight tonnes of bombs and 2000 gallons of high-octane fuel.

"You've only got to make one mistake and you're in trouble."

The survival rate of soldiers in bomber command at the time - who Frank said were not a very popular group of people because of their work - was only one in five, and Frank will tell you he was one of the lucky ones.

Of the 55,000 bomber command casualties, 5000 were Australian.

"Sixty or 70 per cent of the men were dead within their first six months," he said.

"We were the cream of the young blokes.

"We knew we were winning the war, we knew the Germans were going to be beaten eventually."

To Frank, war doesn't make much sense now and his career in the RAAF ended when he sailed in to Sydney Heads on a cruise ship in January 1945. The homecoming was set to be short-lived, before he and his crew headed off on their next operation to start bombing Japan.

But it was the historical dropping of atom bomb, code-named Little Boy, on Hiroshima in 1945 that fully closed the door on World War II for Frank.

"By the time I'd gotten home, they'd dropped the atom bomb," he said.

"We vaguely knew that something could be happening. And it was a relief to me, because I didn't fancy dropping bombs on Japan."

On his return home, Frank kept in touch with his crew, which got together on several occasion for reunions.

It wasn't only Frank's crew who he kept in touch with, however, there was also a girl.

"My English navigator took me home on leave one year and he had quite an attractive 18-year-old sister," he said.

"When I got home, we corresponded and at some stage during that time, somebody wrote saying we'd better get engaged."

Kath travelled to Australia by ship in December of 1947 with 40 other English fiancees, and the pair wed in January the next year.

Six children followed, 15 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

Frank went to university and retrained as an engineer, eventually retiring to Busselton with Kath 31 years ago.

Frank said he could still "feel the reaction" in his stomach even when he read the name of a German town on a map.

He added it was probably part of the post-traumatic stress he thought he was supposed to suffer from.