Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  George Smith

  Cliff Sullivan

  Cy Borscht

  Ed Crabtree

  David Morland

  Stan Pascoe

  John Crago

  Jeff Perry

  Murray Adams

  George Clissold

  Cyril Burcher

  Joe Barrington

  Stuart ‘Snow’ Davis

  Ron Benson

  John Allen

  Laurie Larmer

  Nat Gould

  Rex Kimlin

  Sid Handsaker

  Dick Dakeyne

  Post Script

  About the Author

  Actor, writer and broadcaster Michael Veitch began his career in television comedy programs before freelancing as a columnist and arts reviewer for newspapers and magazines. For four years he presented Sunday Arts, the national arts show on ABC television, and has broadcast regularly across Australia on ABC radio. He has produced two books indulging his life-long interest in the aircraft and airmen of the Second World War, Flak and Fly as well as The Forgotten Islands in which he explores the little-known islands of Bass Strait. In 2015, he began touring a one-man stage version of Flak nationally.

  PREFACE

  Looking back at it now, I remember – at least I think I remember – in the moment before it happened, that I was laughing.

  Surely not.

  Laughing?

  Yet that’s how I recall it, in as much as I recall anything of that day with any clarity.

  The images, after all, are blurred; the timeline unclear. A year later, the whole thing now seems distant, remote; a series of images sealed inside their own dream-scape, but inchoate, like paragraphs rearranged by a toddler, or a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. But which pieces?

  The harder I close my eyes and try to coerce my sluggish memory back to that cold, clear early winter’s afternoon amid the tall trees and the bluish light, the more the moments scatter before me like moths. And after doing what I can to bend them into some kind of order, I am simply left, once again, to contemplate the strange and disconnected pictures of that memorable but unremembered day.

  Yet, is this perhaps what memory is? No convenient metronomic timeline, but moments, flashing vividly for an instant in the brain’s electric palette, connected, ultimately, to nothing but themselves?

  * * *

  After several years interviewing men who fought in the air during the Second World War, I have developed a pattern in my self-appointed task of recording their experiences. The start is always the same: an exchange of pleasantries, the settling-in to a living room or retirement unit; accepting the cup of tea which is almost always offered. Then I begin. ‘Tell me, where were you born?’ Always the same question. Let them know it’s all about them, that I am there to listen, and hungry to learn.

  He doesn’t suspect it, yet, but I’m searching him out. Sifting for his story, gambling on how much of it he is prepared to share with me. Will I be given a dispassionate narrative of facts and dates, or will this former pilot, bomb aimer or flying boat navigator take me back seventy years to the maw of war?

  Sometimes, I will be privy to memories that have not stirred for decades, long-dormant terrors that will break both of us into a sweat. Some of the men I speak to become reluctant and elusive; others open up like time machines transporting my imagination with a phrase or a recollection. Perhaps it’s the description of a colour, or the nuances of a conversation brought back to life after seven decades. Or even a smell, as in the case of one former bomber pilot who speaks of his aircraft being hit by lightning one night over Holland. It left, he says, ‘a strange, tingling, stale milk kind of smell’.

  Sometimes I must gently cajole, drag the record needle back to the part he seemed to skip, or hide. At other times I will push it forward a little when the timeline wanders. Many times I will check the recorder lest – God forbid – I should lose a moment of what I am hearing.

  It seems I have been indulging in other people’s memories all my life. Certainly, at least, since before the writing, when the hidden purpose of a lifetime’s obsession – for years clumsy and unformed – finally showed itself. As a kid, I would forgo normal childhood interests, preferring instead to engage in conversation with some of the tens of thousands of men, then barely out of middle age, who had taken part in the Second World War. Particularly the airmen. I would appear to them, this strange child, solemn and inquisitive, boldly intruding into the violent events of their youth, eager to extract some flavour of their war. Perhaps my age to them was a little disarming, but they spoke to me, and I learned to ask the right questions.

  * * *

  Could I really have been laughing? Surely not. Yet, that’s how I remember it in the perfectly framed half-second before the fall of the tree, before the tall messmate – Eucalyptus obliqua – with all its springy kinetic energy and twenty metres of height, tilting on its severed base which I had cut – badly as it turned out – came crashing down on top of me.

  Perhaps not so much a laugh, but a moment of clarity. An instant in which I foresaw the whole thing: the mistake in hastily cutting the wrong tree, its fall, the ambulance, the hospital, the metal, the scars, the crutches and the rehabilitation. As if the whole thing had already played out from start to finish and I was there merely to observe, an audience to a macabre piece of theatre.

  The images, though disconnected, are clear: the trunk of the big tree passing me on its way to the ground a mere hand’s width from my face. Why so close? Why this odd angle? I still recall the exquisite details of the tree trunk – mottled grey spots with a touch of pink, framed in my vision like a photograph – just as it fell, catching my left thigh, pile-driving it into my bursting ankle, ramming my shattered tibia and fibula into the soil, and pinning me under its ton of weight.

  Of the actual break, however – I mean the moment of it – I have no memory at all. No thud, no sickening crack, certainly no shock of pain. Not yet anyway. I was simply on the ground, under a tree, wondering how on earth my boot had managed to come off my leg, before realising my foot was still inside it. Then, suddenly, I was very, very cold.

  It certainly doesn’t sound like much to laugh about. Perhaps in the hospital under the long and lingering bouts of anaesthetic, or the deranged morphine haze in which I remained, seemingly, for weeks, everything became warped, overcooked, like dreams in a fever.

  * * *

  The most physically traumatic event of my life took place barely a year ago, and already my memories of it are confused and fading. How then will I remember it should I be around in, say, another thirty years, or forty? If I live to be the age of Jeff Perry, a Wellington bomber pilot who survived his tour of thirty operations at a time when it was almost a statistical impossibility to do so, I will have carried the memories in my head for forty-eight years. How will I recall them then? Will the drama of my little injury, caused by nothing but my own foolish misadventure, diminish across the wider landscape of my life, or will it amplify, its colours more vivid?

  The quiet generation that fought the Second World War are, finally, heartbreakingly, leaving us, and taking their memories with them. As we farewelled – so recently it seems – the last living remnants of the First World War, so we will soon mourn those from the Second. It is a parting I have anticipated, and dreaded, all my life.

  They leave us at a time when the world has rarely seemed more uncertain or more neurotic, and we will soon be left to simply speculate on how much their courage, their modesty and their humour might have assuaged the runaway anxieties of early twenty-first-century life. We will soon – all of us – be orphans in their wake.

  But they are not gone yet. Not
quite. As the years 1939–45 continue to emerge from the cocoon of shock and silence that enveloped the early post-war decades, more and more books, television shows and films on the subject are voraciously consumed in the furnace of popular culture. The incomprehensible scale of the events themselves are slowly digested, but the remaining men who saw it with their own eyes are largely ignored. Perhaps it is assumed their stories have all been told, and it is now up to the scholars and film-makers to make sense of the catastrophe. But they have not all been told.

  Like a volcano exploding somewhere over the horizon, the booms of the Second World War continue to echo down the decades. If the French Revolution could prompt one historian, when asked to comment on its legacy two hundred years later, to reply, ‘Well, it’s a little early to tell,’ the reverberations of the Second World War are set to buffet us for a long time to come. And yet still today, we are fortunate enough to have a few of those who can tell us what it felt like, sounded like, smelled like.

  Now in their ninth decade, how do the extraordinary events of their youth stand out against the landscape of a long life? To those lucky ones who are, for the moment, beating the odds of time, and whose faculties have remained intact, have the memories become more vivid, or faded to a kind of sepia? How were these men’s lives shaped by the war? What did it mean?

  It is somewhere close to midnight of the day when the men of the Second World War will still be with us. I have met just a few of them, and the following are just a few of their stories, snatched from the darkness in the nick of time. Often, having closed up for decades, they spoke to me with a sense of urgency, as if keen to unburden themselves of the responsibility of history, lest these adventures and these tragedies be lost to future generations of enquiring minds.

  On more than one occasion, some of these brave, remarkable and modest men would themselves seem amazed at the memories rising up like ghosts from their past, uttering, with a shaking of the head, ‘It’s hard to believe I actually went through all that’ – but they most certainly did.

  GEORGE SMITH

  Role: Wireless operator / air gunner

  Aircraft: North American B-25 Mitchell

  Posting: 180 Squadron, 2nd Tactical Air Force, RAF

  You’d look back and think, Good God, have we just come through that?

  George has always appreciated the value of a good education. Perhaps that’s what happens when you grow up with not much of it – nor anything else – to go around. ‘I grew up in Collingwood,’ he says. ‘When I was a kid, our backyard was as big as this room. No bathroom – once a week Mum would put us in a copper and wash us on the kitchen floor.’ It’s a far cry from those days as we sit in the elegant, sun-filled front room of his modern unit, surrounded by frames, prints and a small but interesting library.

  George sets the scene by telling me about his father – originally an entertainer who enlisted for the First World War and served in France. ‘I’ve never smoked,’ George announces – an early decision brought on by his disgust at having to roll his dad’s cigarettes from the wads of moist, cloying tobacco shoved into his hands. ‘The smell of it was revolting. The only way my mother could get rid of it was to rub a tablespoon of dripping and sugar into them.’ Enough, surely, to put you off the fags for life.

  When war came, George was drafted not into the air force but the army and enjoyed a brief career as ‘Trooper Smith’, which, to his surprise, he rather liked. But all young George had ever really wanted to do was hang around aeroplanes, so when the RAAF offered him a ground job as a guard at Laverton, with hints of it evolving into aircrew training, he didn’t need to think twice. It was here one afternoon that the importance of a good education was again driven home to him when a US Flying Fortress made an impromptu landing and taxied up to a hangar. A hand slid open the big bomber’s side cockpit window and the face of a young officer appeared.

  ‘Say, guys, is this East Sale?’ he enquired in an accented drawl.

  George gave his chief flight sergeant a glance.

  ‘Close that window and come down here,’ said the chief. ‘You’ve only missed it by 200 miles!’

  I’ve known George for some time. As co-founder of the delightfully named Odd Bods Association for those Australian airmen who served with RAF units and who therefore found themselves detached from their squadron associations, George has introduced me to many former flyers, but I’ve known very little of his own career until now. Sharp, engaging and with an almost youthful outlook, he also possesses a baritone voice that could easily have furnished him with a successful career in radio. It’s perfect for painting me a picture of operating as a B-25 Mitchell wireless operator / air gunner in the 2nd Tactical Air Force (2TAF) during the Battle of Normandy.

  ‘We had a porter,’ he recalls of a morning stopped at a rail siding on a train loaded with fellow cadets on their way to wireless and gunnery school in wintry Canada. ‘An absolutely delightful man.’ Pulling back the curtain next to his bunk, George was amazed at the very new sight of snow. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ the porter announced, ‘we’re waiting here for a train to come through. Permission has been given to get off if you wish.’

  ‘So there we were,’ George says, ‘all these young men from Australia, running around like four-year-olds having snowball fights and carrying on like ratbags; none of us had seen snow in our lives.’ The question of just how many of those young men would return home hovers unanswered.

  He tells me of a crew lost on a night-training flight in England. ‘The pilot’s name was Monty,’ he says, ‘from around Tatura in central Victoria. Flew into a hill in Yorkshire. He was one of those men we’d glorify today as a typical Australian man: tall, good looking, just a delightful chap.’ In the old church in Tatura, he tells me, you can still see the stained-glass window put up as his memorial. ‘They reckon the window’s worth more than the church,’ he says.

  After his destiny being decided – somewhat bizarrely – by the drawing of his name out of a hat, George was sent to Pennfield Ridge in New Brunswick, Canada, from where he would eventually operate not in the ‘heavies’ of Bomber Command, but with Sir Basil Embry’s quick-striking army-­support aerial thunderbolt, 2TAF.

  ‘When we arrived at 180 Squadron based at Dunsfold in Surrey,’ George explains, ‘we were told we’d be operating in daylight, flying tight formation, concentrating on small targets at low level, and that we could expect to be doing more than one mission a day.’ Formed out of Bomber Command’s No. 2 Group in 1943, 2TAF was a far cry from the blunt, area-blasting instruments of the Lancasters and Handley Page Halifaxes of Bomber Command. George would instead be part of a precision instrument, where accuracy could never be over-stressed, surgically removing targets at the advancing army’s request. More soberingly, his tour with 2TAF would constitute fifty operations, not the thirty flown by Bomber Command. ‘At short notice we’d have to hit a concentration of tanks or a bridge or an ammo dump, and from never higher than 10 000 feet, so we’d cop both the light and heavy flak,’ says George. ‘Our trips were much shorter than the heavy bombers’ – one or two hours mostly – but much of their flying time was over friendly territory. We could be over the enemy in ten minutes.’

  The only Australian among his crew of four Englishmen – pilot Ted Burn, navigator / bomb aimer Dave Kirk and fellow air gunner Jim Freeman – George began his eventful tour in early August 1944, approaching the terrible crescendo of the Battle of Normandy, when the German armies were being gradually encircled, worn down and destroyed, prior to the breakout from north-west France. His logbook, written in black ink in an unusually large, almost bold hand, catalogues his trips, beginning with, ‘August 4, Ops 1 – Bombing. Marshalling yards at Montfort-sur-Risle; August 6, Ops 2 – Bombing. Ammunition dump at Livarot.’

  ‘We had some flak on those first two but it wasn’t terribly bad,’ he says. ‘When we came back from that second trip in the morning – it only lasted two hours – we were stood down. Then at around two, things started to liven
up again.’

  The warning that he might be called upon to fly twice in a day was already proving true, as an officer announced, ‘The following crews will be available for an operation this evening,’ and George’s was among them. ‘That third trip,’ and here he pauses, shaking his head with a low laugh, ‘well, it turned out to be our baptism of fire.’ The logbook records it: ‘August 6, Ops 3 – Bombing. Panzer Division in woods near Thury-Harcourt. Starboard motor hit by flak. Force landed at B1[temporary landing strip] in Normandy.’

  Intelligence from the French underground indicated a large number of German tanks, moved up from the south of France to join the Normandy battle, were being concealed in wooded country near the village of Thury-Harcourt, roughly equidistant between the two crucibles of the Normandy campaign, Caen and Falaise.

  ‘I think we took off at about six-thirty in the evening,’ remembers George, ‘but at that time of year it’s bright as day until about ten.’ Sitting in the Mitchell’s top turret on the approach to the target, George turned it around to see what he was flying into, and was confronted with the sight of hundreds of exploding puffs of dark, angry smoke, ‘black balls of smoke with a hard centre, we used to say’. He was about to get his first taste of the dreaded German ‘block barrage’.

  As the aircraft started the target run, it was knocked and buffeted by the explosions. George listened as the navigator began a crucial dialogue with skipper Ted Burn, calling up the target as it moved towards the centre of his bomb sight. ‘Left, left, steady . . .’ then to his horror, the words, ‘Sorry, skipper, round again!’

  Oh my God! was George’s silent reaction. ‘It was drilled into us, you see, that you had to be absolutely accurate, that there were no second chances.’ Not confident their bombs were exactly on the money, Ted wheeled the aircraft to port and around to the back of the six-aircraft box formation, for another crack at the target. This time, the German gunners had their range.