Lest we forget
Honouring our local veterans
LAURIE Price was looking for adventure when he left his comfortable job as a Geelong pastry chef and joined the Royal Australian Air Force. It was 1950.
Two years later he was an armament fitter in South Korea.
His job was to carefully screw together volatile, napalm-filled rockets and load them onto Aussie fighter planes.
It was a nerve-racking business, made more difficult when his fingers were frozen numb.
Almost 70 years later, Laurie can still feel that icecold Korean winter.
He remembers waking in the middle of the night to air raid sirens.
Laurie and his bleary-eyed mates would scurry for cover and dive for the frigid trenches while their nemesis “Bed Check Charlie” flew in dangerously low in his biplane, picking off targets.
One night “Charlie” scored three direct hits, taking out a popcorn machine, a fuel pipeline and a US aircraft.
The next time he attacked he was taken out by an Allied jet.
It should’ve been cause for jubilation, but it wasn’t because Laurie never found out what happened to the heroic jet pilot.
With the same uneasy look, Laurie remembers another pilot, Peter Chalmers.
Before serving in World War II, Sergeant Chalmers was a classmate of Laurie’s older sister at Geelong High
School. Years later he joined RAAF Squadron No 77, alongside Laurie.
But in March 1953 Sergeant Chalmers was sent on a Meteor jet attack from which he never returned.
“He’s buried in North Korea. The ground fire got him,” Laurie recalls. “He flew into a trap.
“A few of them fell down and were executed.
“When they didn’t come back it gave you a pretty sad time.
“All those pilots that we missed; there were 44 of them (in 77 Squadron) that never came home.
“We had three Roberstons killed. They were from different families but they all had the same surname. So, we stopped sending anyone called Robertson up after that. I suppose they thought there was a jinx there.”
With a glint in his eye, Laurie also remembers the fun times and camaraderie of his service.
“I had my 21st birthday in Japan. We got a bit pissed at the back of the barracks,” he recalls. “We had an attitude of ‘Let’s live it up because tomorrow we might not be here’.”
Laurie’s approach was inherited from a family steeped in service.
His father, Bill, was a lighthorseman at Gallipoli and northern Egypt in World
War I.
“I had two brothers and a sister that served in World War II, then I discovered I needed a bit of adventure,” he said.
“My old man said to me, ‘Don’t go to Korea because it’s the a----end of the world’, but I’d had enough of being a
We had an attitude of ‘Let’s live it up because tomorrow we might not be here’.”
LAURIE PRICE
pastry chef, so I joined the air force.
“I suppose it was just a bit of patriotism, which has really grown over the years.”
When Laurie finished up in the RAAF he returned to Geelong, working at two of the city’s biggest employers — first International Harvester, then a 26-year stint as a toolmaker at Ford — and devoted himself to helping injured veterans.
Meanwhile, his family’s commitment to service endured.
His younger brother followed his footsteps into the air force, as did his son John, who served for 18 years after being captivated by the career as a teenager. And Laurie has a niece now working for the RAAF.
He returned to South
Korea in 2006 with his wife on a tour funded by the local government, and said he was constantly reminded that his service mattered.
“There ain’t many of us left now from Korea. I think it was about 1000 out of the 17,500 (Australians who served there) last time I heard,” he said.
“The (South) Korean government has never stopped thanking us.
“They have annual ceremonies, and every year I get a card from a kid over there; their parents and grandparents make sure they know all about the war.
“They do it for every (Allied) country. They just say things like, ‘We love you’, and ‘We thank you because our country is now prosperous and safe, so thank you for the sacrifice you made’.”