Both Bill, 89, and Edna, 91, served Australia during the war, Bill as a maintenance and construction worker with the Royal Australian Air Force and Edna as a worker with the Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force.

The Blaydens were born on opposite sides of the Tasman Sea, Edna in Auckland in 1923 and Bill in Paddington, Sydney, in 1925.

Bill’s two brothers joined the Australian Army, and he joined the RAAF when he was 18.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said.

After training in Australia, he served at Morotai and Balikpapan (in today’s Indonesia) and experienced the danger and horror of war.

“We handled bombs on to the planes – you had to be careful,” he recalled.

“We had to crouch down and take cover when Japanese planes bombed us.

“They would bomb us after the American planes had taken off.”

He and his team worked on aircraft and built and repaired airstrips at Australian and US bases in difficult conditions.

“When planes came back shot up we would have to replace the perspex, help get the wounded and dead out of the plane and hose out blood, so that they could put someone else in who could take off in it,” he recalled.

“You could imagine what it was like at the time.”

He also lost friends in strafing attacks by Japanese aircraft.

“It was always hard,” he said.

Even when World War II had ended, it still had another unpleasant surprise for Bill.

He returned to Australia, but when in Townsville, he was turned around and sent to Japan to serve with the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces.

He was based in Hiroshima, which had just been devastated by the atomic bomb, for 13 months.

Nothing could have prepared him for the state of the city.

“It was rough; hard to take,” he said.

Even though she didn’t have to leave Australia’s shores, World War II was a challenging time for Edna, and not just because she had three brothers and her father serving in the army.

As a fabric worker, she worked on and looked all flying gear such as parachutes, seats and other trim aboard aircraft such as B-24 Liberators at the RAAF base at Tocumwal on the Murray River.

“It was a big base and as well as Australians there were Americans and Dutch there as well,” she recalled.

She had to work between 12 and 16 hours a day and if everything wasn’t put together and packed in the right order, especially parachutes, she and her fellow workers faced discipline.

“Everything went down in log books. If there was a plane crash everything was looked in to about who had worked on the equipment last. Luckily I never got into any trouble.

“It was pretty hectic. It was a good education. You couldn’t stop and talk for five minutes.”

When Bill finally got to come back to Australia on the troop ship HMAS Kanimbla, he was greeted by his sister, Edith, who had bought a friend – Edna.

“I had been friends with Edith since we were 15,” Edna recalled.

“I had seen Bill before, but never knew him.”

Things soon changed, and they were married in Neutral Bay in 1947 and had a daughter, Beth, and a son Keith, who lives in Batemans Bay.

Both left the forces after the war and lived in Sydney, Canberra and Queanbeyan before moving to Batemans Bay in 1986.