“Dad told me to always wear two pair of socks and, if I was gassed, to pee on one pair and place them over my mouth,” Mr Lowe said.

“When I was taken to Dachau and placed in the gas chamber after going through the showers, I did that, and woke up on a pile of bodies.”

Mr Lowe found himself in Dachau after his Lancaster bomber ‘Queenie’ was shot down during a raid over Germany.

At the time the rear gunner was on his 39th bombing mission, quite an achievement considering a rear gunner had arguably the highest-risk occupation in the RAF, with a life expectancy measured in weeks.

“You didn’t have many friends when you were in air crew,” he said.

Mr Lowe was a 21-year-old apprentice baker/pastrycook when war broke out.

“I travelled to Sydney to enlist as a cook,” he said.

“But I discovered the cooks were being shot at, so I decided that if anyone was going to shoot at me, I was going to shoot back!”

Mr Lowe decided to join the Royal Air Force but, having left school at the age of 13, he was told he would need to complete the Leaving Certificate ... in just six weeks.

He rose to that challenge ... the first of many to come.

Joining 3 Squadron and en route to the Middle East, he got as far as Singapore, just in time to see it fall to the Japanese.

“We were evacuated back to Australia and I then went to bomber/gunnery school at Port Pirie and undertook a wireless operator/airgunners course at Parkes,” he said.

Mr Lowe eventually made it to England, via New Zealand, San Francisco then overland to New York, before embarking on the Queen Mary for the trans-Atlantic journey.

His first bombing raid was a baptism of fire.

“We bombed a German experimental station,” he said. “We were hit by anti-aircraft fire and my pilot, Alf Vidler from Blayney, was killed.”

Mr Lowe was involved in bombing raids on the Ruhr Valley and the famous Dambuster raids, before his bomber was shot down on the border of Belgium, Holland and Germany during a raid on Berlin at one minute to midnight on New Year’s Eve 1943.

“I was blown out of the plane at 19,000 feet and my gun hit me in the face, knocking out my teeth and badly damaging my mouth and gums,” he said.

“I threw my teeth away on the way down and landed in a tree ... by geez I was glad it was there!

“The Germans got me and I was taken to an interrogation centre in Frankfurt.”

Mr Lowe describes his experience in the interrogation centre as “not very nice”.

“A Swiss doctor put me back together and used newspaper and tea bags to treat the third degree burns I had suffered.

“I couldn’t talk properly because of the damage to my mouth and the Germans thought I was a Jew, so they sent me to the gas chambers at Dachau.”

After surviving the gassing at Dachau, Mr Lowe was sent to a prisoner of war camp.

“We were fed three boiled potatoes and two slices of black bread, made out of sawdust and rye, each day,” he said.

“If you had a cigarette you could ‘buy’ anything.

“One day I was outside the camp looking for food and when I was walking back in with some small potatoes, a bloke traded me his coat for the potatoes.

“The Germans discovered the potatoes and killed him.”

During his time in the POW camp, Mr Lowe was involved in two failed escape bids, the second of which landed him back in Dachau.

Summing up the experience, he says he was “a bit sick, I didn’t know the score for a while”.

Liberation came in the unlikely guise of the 1st Ukrainian army, who arrived at Dachau on horseback. “They were lovely fellas,” Mr Lowe said.

Did he ever doubt he would survive?

“At one stage I was a bit bloody dubious,” he said.

After he returned to England, Mr Lowe was able to use the new transatlantic cable to get word to his family that he was still alive.

“Until then, all they knew was that I was missing in action,” he said.

“When I got home, I discovered my mother had spent all my money, thinking I was dead.”

Before he returned to Australia, Mr Lowe was part of a group of ex-servicemen who went to Bucking-

ham Palace to receive their medals.

“You could walk in the front gate, but you had to go down the back to get out via Needles Hotel.

“There was an old sheila there who wanted to know all about our medals, and what the King had said.

“She asked us to pin them on her, then she nicked off and we never saw our medals again.”

In 1946 Mr Lowe returned to Australia and married Peggy Patricia Miskell.

“I had asked her to marry me before I went away and she said she would wait for me,” he said.

The couple settled in Bathurst.

Mr Lowe had been told he would not be able to have children but, defying the odds once again, he and his wife raised a family of 10 children.

“I worked three jobs – milkman, boiler attendant, and barman and greenkeeper at the RSL Bowling Club, which was located on the site of the police station,” he said.

Mr Lowe completed the two-year greenkeeper’s course in six months, scoring the top mark in the state.

He was a regular at Anzac Day services in Bathurst until he was no longer able to walk properly, accompanied by his son, Gordon, who served in the navy, and a number of his other children, who were members of the RSL brass band.

In more recent years, Mr Lowe’s son, Ray, has marched for him.

Mr Lowe now lives with his sons, Wayne and David, and plans to spend Anzac Day watching the march and service on television and enjoying a couple of beers before putting his medals on and going to the St Patrick’s Sporting Club.