Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  Now Cliff had to perform the roles of three aircrew: wireless operator, navigator and gunner. He takes me through the detailed layout of his work area, a small desk behind the pilot towards the tail, surrounded by the tools of his trade: wireless, camera and above him the single defensive machine-gun mounted in its clear Perspex dorsal blister. Cliff would now have to operate that too. They of course had parachutes, but at the heights at which they were operating there was not much point in using them. ‘You’d forget about them. I never worried about parachutes. Instead, we had our dinghy,’ he says. ‘If anything happened, we’d be ditching.’

  His logbook details operation after operation, some now remembered, others not. Certain brief entries – such as ‘turned from formation after heavy flak from destroyer. Results not observed’ – tantalise but remain unexplained. Others, though, draw from Cliff his distinctive chuckle of recognition, particularly one entry for August 1943. ‘Ah, yes, I remember that day very well,’ he says, then pauses. ‘Ten of us attacked a convoy of three Italian ships, plus their escorts, hugging the east coast of Corsica, which is mainly mountains so we had to come in from the east.’ Cliff’s Beaufighter was one of the escorts that day, with the unenviable job of drawing the ships’ highly concentrated defensive fire away from the torpedo carriers. On the approach, the weaving of his pilot, Ron Whitington, was violent enough to cause the substantial 10-kilogram Williamson F24 reconnaissance camera to bounce up and down in its holding position on the desk in front of him. ‘Every time he went down, the camera would go up. If it hit you it’d kill you!’ says Cliff.

  Bouncing cameras were the least of his worries. Flak tore into them, the shells from the ships tearing half a metre off the port wingtip and a shell piercing one of the propeller blades, the potentially fatal finger-width hole being discovered on their return. If the blade itself had been lost, the unbalanced engine could have easily shaken off its mounting before the pilot had a chance to feather it. ‘On the way back to Tunis,’ says Cliff, ‘we were flying with another aircraft – about as close as we are to the house next door – at three or four hundred feet above the water. All of a sudden his port motor went up in flames. He just turned over to the left and went down straight into the water. Both of them killed. They were two Englishmen. Bert Temple and Bill Ambrose. It happened so quickly and it could have been us.’

  Retribution was instantaneous. Sharp eyes had noticed from where the shots had come and Ron, incensed at the loss of two men he knew well, swung the aircraft down to the water and opened up with the full weight of four 20-millimetre cannons. ‘He knew those men well, which is why I think he did his block,’ says Cliff. Smoke and shattered debris was scattered across the water after their single pass. ‘I think we knocked them off. We got our own back there,’ says Cliff without a trace of squeamishness.

  I keep Cliff talking longer than I perhaps should. He is visibly tired by the end of our long afternoon. At no point, however, does he slacken off the pace, and he answers my long stream of questions in the same calm and measured tone, correcting my frequent mispronunciation of obscure desert outposts. His two years’ operational flying was intense, with the busiest and most dangerous time being mid-1943. ‘I’ve lost track of the number of ships I attacked,’ he tells me, as I turn another page in his logbook to read, ‘August 1943. North of Corsica. Target – one 6000-ton motor vessel, one small motor vessel, one destroyer. Large motor vessel sunk with two hits. All ships raked by cannon. Intense flak. All okay.’

  ‘It was quite a beautiful part of the world,’ he tells me. ‘The weather was good in the Mediterranean and it was a pleasure to fly just above the water.’

  But not always so. He reflects on coming back to his base at Misurata one time when a massive sandstorm obscured the airstrip completely. Daring to drop lower, the runway could just be made out and the pilot prepared to land. Then, barely a metre away, a Hawker Hurricane fighter emerged from the dun- coloured gloom and flashed by in a near-miss. Cliff shouted to his pilot, who had also seen it, but as Cliff points out with his characteristic matter-of-factness, ‘There wasn’t much we could have done anyway. There were all sorts of little things like that.’

  I turn another page towards the end of the album. One image shows a group of airmen seated in rows in front of a hangar. One of them is a fresh-faced Cliff. ‘That’s our OTU [Operational Training Unit] at Devon in England,’ he points out. Looking closer, I notice that of the thirty-seven figures, nineteen have been marked with a small cross. ‘Killed in action, or else in training,’ says Cliff. It is a terribly sobering moment, realising that more than half of these young faces did not survive the war. ‘Yes,’ says Cliff. ‘It was pretty dangerous.’

  Not long after our final interview in 2014, Cliff’s son, Peter, contacted me to tell me that after a short illness, Cliff had passed away. The two men were close, and Peter talked freely about the hole his father’s passing has left in his life. I had neglected to ask Cliff about his return from the war and how he found the transition to civilian life. ‘It wasn’t too hard for him actually,’ says Peter. ‘I can’t really remember him ever suffering much in the way of trauma or nightmares.’ Cliff began a career in accountancy, married his life-long partner in 1948, and became president of the Australian College of Manufacturers. ‘He wasn’t like some of the men who simply didn’t want to talk about the war,’ says Peter. ‘He’d talk about it freely if we asked him, but perhaps we didn’t quite ask him enough.’

  Cliff Sullivan’s 47 Squadron Beaufighter strikes an Italian merchant ship off Tunis, July 1943. (Picture courtesy of Cliff Sullivan)

  Cliff Sullivan’s view from his Beaufighter of an Italian tanker ablaze in the Mediterranean after a torpedo attack, 1943. (Picture courtesy of Cliff Sullivan)

  A low-level Beaufighter attack over the Mediterranean, snapped by Cliff Sullivan. (Picture courtesy of Cliff Sullivan)

  CY  BORSCHT

  Role: Pilot

  Aircraft: Avro Lancaster

  Posting: 463 Squadron, RAAF

  Looking back at it from this distance, I feel like it’s amazing that it happened to me.

  Cy, being Jewish, understood perhaps better than most the nature of what he had joined up to fight. He had only to listen to his mother. ‘Mum was from Russia. She would tell horrific stories about hiding in cellars, stifling the cries of the babies, while the Cossacks rode through her town slaughtering whoever,’ he tells me in his far more tranquil home on a leafy bend of the Brisbane River one damp Queensland afternoon in early May.

  Surviving the pogroms, his father, a shoe salesman, took his opportunity to flee the persecutions of the Old World and boarded a boat in 1915. ‘He didn’t even know where he was going,’ says Cy, ‘he just got on and ended up in Australia. That’s how desperate they were then.’

  Saving every penny working as a navvy on Brisbane roads, Cy’s father eventually managed to bring his young wife and some other members of his family out to join him. When Cy came along, his parents raised him in an unfamiliar world of peace, although strictly within the faith. ‘Actually, I was a bit of a renegade,’ he tells me, knocking against his parents’ religious ethics as he grew into his teens.

  His parents were a picture of the self-made migrant family: his mother, a brilliant seamstress, made a business selling pyjamas, eventually building a factory which employed more than eighty people. ‘She was the main cutter,’ he says. ‘I remember her cutting layers of flannelette inches thick, with a razor-sharp knife by hand. She had forearms like a bullocky. And she was tough.’

  At the beginning of the war, seventeen-year-old Cy, now a draftsman with the Brisbane City Council, was busy converting street shelters to bomb shelters, but his ambitions ran higher. ‘My mother was the typical yiddisher momma,’ says Cy. ‘I was her only son and the apple of her eye. There was no way she was going to let me join the air force.’ But with the connivance of his sisters, who couldn’t bear the idea of their baby brother being called up into the army, he volunteer
ed for the RAAF in 1941 and, after a night of fierce arguing, managed to wrangle his mother’s signature on the dotted line of the form.

  Cy was inducted into Course 29 at No. 3 Initial Training School at Kingaroy, but the rigour of military discipline ‘didn’t sit very well’ with him, particularly when laced with old-fashioned anti-Semitism, as by their instructor in rifle drill, one particular sergeant. ‘He was a typical English sergeant-major,’ says Cy, ‘big build, moustache, shiny boots.’ When he discovered Cy was Jewish, he’d call him out to the front of the squad, using a typically derogatory term of the day, to demonstrate some aspect of rifle drill. ‘I had to take it, but I hated him with a pure hate,’ Cy remembers. Years later, upon his return from Europe, Cy, now an officer, encountered the same man again and exacted some revenge. ‘Do you remember me?’ he asked, throwing in the same term that had been used against him.

  ‘No, sir!’ stammered the somewhat trembling man, still in his shiny boots.

  While the majority of pilots I’ve spoken to tell of their easy aptitude for flying, Cy is still slightly bewildered how he managed to get through at all. ‘So many blokes around me were being scrubbed,’ he says. Cy even survived one particular encounter with his feared instructor Lionel Watters. ‘I was a bit hung-over from a few too many beers the night before,’ he says. When airborne in their Tiger Moth, Watters suddenly flipped the aircraft on its back and yelled, ‘You’ve got the controls!’

  ‘At this point I was hanging by my straps and my knuckles were just about coming through the skin,’ he says.

  Then Watters, in the front of the aircraft, pulled the securing pin out of his dual control joystick, removed the stick and started waving it at Cy. ‘If you ever bloody well come out on a Monday morning hung-over again, I’ll bloody well hit you with this!’ From that point on, Cy made sure never to give him the excuse.

  With ten hours and forty minutes flying time in his logbook, Cy went solo and the chief flying instructor, who he reckons must have liked him, marked him down as ‘average’.

  Going via ship to San Francisco then Canada for further training near Toronto, Cy flew Harvards, wearing heated suits in winter and nothing but shorts and boots in summer. After gaining his wings and taking the short trip across the Atlantic to England, Cy fully expected to be put onto single-engine fighters, but was forced to digest the news that the war direction had changed and it was now multi-engine pilots that were needed to take the fight into Germany with the bomber offensive.

  ‘The weather was lousy and the flying was minimal,’ he says of his conversion to Airspeed Oxfords in Gloucester. ‘I spent half my time playing table tennis and drinking beer with Keith Miller,’ he adds, having become pals with the famous test cricketer turned pilot, who would eventually be sent to a Mosquito night-intruder squadron before resuming his spectacular sporting career. ‘He was a great fella. Turned up to Lords to play cricket one morning, still in the dinner suit from the party the night before.’

  Cy moved from Oxfords to Wellingtons then to a Heavy Conversion Unit at Wigsley in Lincolnshire flying Stirlings, an aeroplane Cy describes as a ‘shocker’. At this stage he was forced to let go his flight engineer, who was saddled with the inconvenient habit of becoming violently ill the moment they were airborne. ‘I put up with it for two or three training trips,’ he says, ‘then decided we couldn’t really have this happening when we got onto operations.’

  Cy’s crewing-up process was highly unorthodox. Taking place, as was usual, at his Operational Training Unit, the airmen milled around – in this instance actually outside the hangar – on a fine English afternoon, observing each other cautiously, trying to catch some spark of confidence that might make it easier to risk putting your life in this stranger’s hands. Cy, slightly unsure how he had made it thus far anyway, felt anything but confident. ‘The smart pilots had already done their homework and worked out who the smart navigators were etc.,’ he says, ‘and I just stood there, looking around, short of stature and a not very prepossessing figure.’

  As he nervously surveyed the mob of airmen gradually forming themselves into crews, a tall and good-looking young man approached him.

  ‘Aren’t you Cy Borscht?’ said the stranger.

  ‘Er, yes,’ answered Cy.

  ‘I’m Glynn Cooper. You know my brother Noel. Hey, have you got any gunners?’ he enquired.

  ‘I haven’t got anyone yet,’ said Cy.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Glynn said and dashed off, to return in a minute with his mate, mid-upper gunner Tom Lonergan. Then navigator Brian ‘Snow’ O’Connell was plucked out, followed by wireless operator Max Staunton-Smith and an RAF bomb aimer from Newcastle, Tom Laing.

  ‘Bingo! All of a sudden I had a crew,’ says Cy.

  A little while later, however, as the new crews dispersed, Cy happened to be walking within earshot of a party of wireless operators, one of whom was his own newly acquired Max. ‘How’d you get on, Max?’ Cy heard one of his mates ask.

  ‘Buggered if I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve got this little bandy-legged fella. I hope to hell he can fly.’

  Later, after they’d been through ‘hell and back’, Cy took the opportunity to quietly reveal to Max that he’d overheard the remark, but by that stage, he’d well and truly banished any doubt about his capabilities.

  In July 1944, Cy and his fresh crew arrived on a plateau called Waddington, overlooking the pretty cathedral town of Lincoln, as the newest members of No. 463 Squadron, RAAF. This pretty patch of Lincolnshire countryside also catered for No. 467 Heavy Bomber Squadron, and should in reality be as indelible a part of Australia’s military heritage as Lone Pine, Fromelles or Kokoda. There was no welcoming committee for Cy and his crew, no speech, no introduction by the CO. They were just seven more faces, just like the hundreds who had already come and gone, subsumed as cogs in the machinery of an operational bomber unit.

  There was to be little time to settle in. Arriving in one of Bomber Command’s busiest periods, during which both the Battle of Normandy and the flying bomb offensives raged, Cy and his new crew were given a series of night cross-country flights to perform, making their way up to the Scottish highlands in atrocious weather. ‘One time we got into a terrific thunderstorm,’ he says. ‘I can remember hitting a particularly strong downdraft which we couldn’t get out of.’ Even with the throttles at full power, pushing through the ‘gate’ to extract extra boost and pulling back on the stick as hard as he could, Cy’s Lancaster continued to fall. ‘Fortunately we came through the other side before we got too low, but it gave us a hell of a fright. I remember thinking, Jeez, am I going to have to go through this every night?’

  Nearly two years since being called up for training, Cy was close to beginning his operational tour. First, though, he was sent aloft on his obligatory observational, or ‘second dickie’ trip, with an experienced pilot, Wing Commander Bill Forbes. This 26-year-old from Charters Towers was already on his second tour, and wore on his tunic the ribbons of both the Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Flying Cross. The target was Kiel and what Cy saw that night both impressed and concerned him. ‘I remember being amazed at the utter ease with which they carried out the operation,’ he says, ‘responding to any emergency with great skill and coordination. It was a tough trip, but they made it look easy.’ He also could not help reflecting on how his ‘rag-tag mob will never be able to do this’. He would soon find out, as a few nights later, his crew appeared on the morning battle order.

  In the briefing, they learned the target was to be Stuttgart, with Cy flying Lancaster G for George. Cy describes the long flight of nearly eight hours as ‘uneventful’, except for his throwing the aircraft into a violent ‘corkscrew’ manoeuvre on the return trip over Holland. This, he says, was purely a safety precaution after a full moon suddenly made them stand out to any marauding German night fighter like a giant moth in the moonlight. Cy kept up the manoeuvre all the way back to England, a task he found exhausting.

  His tour now evo
lved thick and fast with night and daylight trips, mixed in with attacks on special targets such as V-weapon launch sites, as Hitler’s flying bomb campaign against England reached its zenith. One such target was Siracourt, a flying bomb site in France. Three hours into the flight, the group received the signal to abort and return to base, but, most unusually, were given discretion to attempt to land with their bomb load rather than the usual practice of dumping them at a specified point in the English Channel. Cy tossed a coin and, feeling confident, decided to try it. Approaching the runway, however, he was greeted with the sobering sight of fire tenders and ambulances lining it on both sides. They apparently sensed the danger of what he was attempting, even if he didn’t.

  On many occasions, the jolt of the landing would be enough to shake an undelivered bomb free of its harness in the aircraft’s bomb bay and explode it. Cy, however, at least had his crew for support as he came in to touch down the extremely heavy aircraft on the runway. A chorus of voices from the crew counted his bounces down the intercom, ‘airborne . . . landing . . . airborne . . . landing . . .’ etc. But he managed to get them down in one piece, as well as having saved His Majesty’s government the cost of several thousand pounds in high explosives.

  One trip stands out as memorable, if only for one of those moments of wartime black comedy. After attacking, on consecutive nights, Bremerhaven and the twin towns of Mönchengladbach–Rheydt, Cy’s crew were once again put on the battle order for the next night, 23 September, the target being the aqueduct of the Dortmund–Ems canal. On the way out, however, Cy lost an engine and suggested to the crew they return to Waddington. Knowing that an aborted trip was not counted as part of the tour, his crew managed to persuade Cy to continue, since otherwise they would simply have to come back on another occasion to make up the trip. Anyway, the aircraft appeared to be flying well enough on three engines. ‘I was a consensus sort of bloke,’ says Cy, ‘so we decided to continue.’