No ifs for Bud
Actor Charles 'Bud' Tingwell saw action in WW2. Who better to narrate the definitive documentary of the Second World War?
Give us a Tingwell... The Legendary Bud
Lest we forget. It’s a phrase as heavy as a bloodied sod of battlefield in France and one we all feel the weight of on April 25 when Anzac Day comes around again. Lest we forget. Three words that ring like rifle fire through the soul of a nation and echo in reports of our serviceman’s bomb dodging in Iraq and beyond.
When Bud Tingwell says those words, Australia listens. The grandfather of Australian cinema, is a war veteran himself, having joined the Royal Australian Airforce in 1941 as a Spitfire and Mosquito pilot flying reconnaissance missions over the Middle East. Bud survived 75 missions. Plenty of his mates didn’t.
That’s why Bud – Coogee kid, war vet, film and TV legend – is a conscientious objector when it comes to Anzac Day. “I marched once and never did it again,” Bud confided to Time Out. “When I came back from the war, I resumed my radio job at 2CH on York Street – I’d been the youngest radio announcer in Australia before joining up – and one day in 1948 I was told a Mrs Magill wanted to see me.
“Teddy Magill had been my closest mate in the RAAF but he’d been shot down and killed on his second or third mission. Because his body had never been recovered he was declared MIA, but now I had his mother and sister looking me in the eye and saying: ‘I know he’s alive somewhere’
“What the hell could I say? It struck me how awful it must be for all those families to watch the mates of their sons and brothers and not them walking down George Street on Anzac Day. So from then on, I’ve sided with the dead – those that cannot march. I’ll go and get pissed with the marchers and I have my reunion lunch with my old squadron mates – there’s six of us left now – but that’s it for me on April 25.”
Not quite. Tingwell lends his venerable tones to a new DVD series of reportage and film shot by official war photographers during World War II. The 26 part series covers every major campaign the Anzacs were involved in during the war.
The nakedness of the footage is striking. No Saving Private Ryan special effects or Flags of our Fathers dramatics. “They’re the same Aussie faces I see on the streets today,” says Tingwell, “only I think we were a little more mad. There’s a swagger to the mobs that came home from Tobruk before heading to hell in Kokoda. It disguises the fact we were all certifiable – particularly the reporters and cameramen.”
For the first time since the footage aired in 1961, we see the human portraits of WWII: serpentine ribbons of drovers, clerks, grazier’s sons, students marching to Circular Quay and war (every one a volunteer). Vivid as ever is the roar of cannon fire, the battlefields, the dead and the living, laughing, terrified blokes descending into the maelstrom for the good of we who remain.
Almost 40,000 never came home. Those that did were changed forever. Tingwell included. “Watching this DVD it all came back. The extraordinary things we did: flying through barrages, the single shot that might’ve blown me to pieces if I’d been two inches to the left.”
Are you a hero? we ask. “Nah,” says Bud, “just a rough old Aussie.”
Anzac: Australians in World War II is out through EMI