Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  Here is a tale of Georgie Lanc,

  Fast as the wind, sure as the bank,

  Quadruple power, octuple gun,

  Beautiful bomber to battle the Hun,

  And so it continues, page after page, following the progress of the anthropomorphised ‘Georgie’ as he takes his crew to the target and, worse for wear but safely, home again to England. I scan more pages in silence. Particularly memorable is Cy’s portrait of the camp commandant, complete with steel-rimmed glasses and Prussian demeanour, the fence of the camp in the background. ‘Pleese, gentlemen, not to sit on the varning vire!’ he hisses in sinister fashion. I have never seen anything like it, and Cy lets me photograph every page. I tell him it should be published separately as its own book, but he laughs at the suggestion.

  I have overstayed my welcome with Cy, having for hours wrenched his memories back from across the decades, but although tired, he bears me no ill-will. ‘Looking back at it from this distance,’ he tells me as I leave, ‘I feel like it’s amazing that it happened to me. I just shake my head in disbelief, truly. It’s amazing I’m ninety-two, isn’t it? I should have been dead long ago.’

  A young Cy Borscht on the eve of his eventful tour in Bomber Command. (Picture courtesy of Cy Borscht)

  ED CRABTREE

  Role: Pilot

  Aircraft: Consolidated B-24 Liberator

  Posting: 380th Bombardment Group, US 5th Air Force

  At the height we were bombing, seven or eight thousand feet, we didn’t really think much about using our parachutes.

  ‘You’re going to join the air force? Wonderful! I have a relation who does something in the air force. Langslow’s his name. I’ll see if I can arrange an interview.’ These were words the young Ed Crabtree was more than happy to hear from Mr Barry.

  Ed was making his way home from where he worked at his father’s grocery shop in the leafy Melbourne beachside suburb of Brighton. It was a sunny afternoon, right at the beginning of the war, and the rather well-to-do Mr Barry obviously liked the cut of the younger man’s jib. It’s not hard to see why. Somewhat older now, Ed is still a very likeable bloke.

  But when, in 1940, he fronted up to Victoria Barracks and innocently asked for a ‘Mr Langslow’, the sergeant at the desk exploded with indignation. ‘You mean Major Langslow!’ he bellowed, before marching him down a long corridor and standing him before none other than Major Melville Cecil Langslow, First World War hero, secretary to the Department of Air, and one of the most formidable public servants in Australia’s history. This was the man charged with the mammoth task of holding the purse strings of air-force expenditure in wartime. Tough, thorough and widely feared, Langslow would hold on to the job with an iron grip until 1951.

  ‘All right, what can I do for you?’ he asked of the lad before him. It was a good start. But despite such lofty connections, Ed’s path to becoming a four-engine bomber pilot would be a long one indeed. ‘Yes, all you young fellas want to be pilots,’ said the retired, dark-suited major. ‘Trouble is, we haven’t got any planes yet. Do you know anything about radios?’

  As it happened, Ed did, having spent a year or so building them after he left school. So, with a notion that he might become a wireless operator, Ed was given a Morse code test, which he failed spectacularly. Nothing if not determined, he then began to qualify himself for all sorts of air-force jobs, but none of them involving flying. He spent months learning how to become an aircraft rigger, a fitter, an aerial photographer and an instrument maker. In fact, he became so qualified he risked making himself too valuable for the air force to risk losing as a combat pilot. ‘Every month I put in my application for pilot training, and every month they said I was too valuable, tore it up and threw it in the bin,’ he says.

  So Ed carried on, month after month, reconstituting aircraft spark plugs, rebuilding Hawker Demons for the aircraft and gunnery school, even assembling Spitfires and Fairey Battles straight out of their crates from England. It was while doing this one day that his career nearly ended when the supporting cable of a Spitfire fuselage failed, catching Ed under it while he was helping fit the wings. Two men working alongside him managed to leap out of the way, but Ed caught it square in the middle of his back, causing permanent damage. ‘I used to have to sleep in the foetal position because of the pain, but didn’t tell anyone about it, or else I would have been scrubbed,’ he says.

  Finally, in March 1943, after much pleading and cajoling, Ed was at last allowed to begin his pilot training at Benalla on Tiger Moths and Oxfords. ‘My instructor reckoned I was his best pupil. The others must have been pretty bad, if that’s the case,’ he says, chuckling. Ed laughs a lot, the kind of man who seems to take very little too seriously.

  Being something of an old hand gave Ed a certain insider status as he trained to be a pilot alongside raw cadets. The instructors looked at him oddly, and seemed to know him. One lecturer teaching the subject of airframes – a topic Ed had come to know all too well over the past couple of years – gave him some unusual instructions. ‘Now listen,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t want you coming to my classes and asking me smart-arse questions I won’t know the answer to. Why don’t you just go to the library and read a book?’

  Even at Ed’s wings graduation, the CO couldn’t resist a final twist, leaving Ed’s name off the list of new pilots and their ranks, which were traditionally read out in public. Oh no, thought Ed, crestfallen, I’ve been scrubbed. To add to the humiliation, his mother was in the public stands watching the ceremony. It was only after a monumental pause that the CO finally added, with a grin, ‘Oh, and Pilot Officer Crabtree.’ The wait had been worth it. Out of the thirty graduates of Ed’s course, he was one of only five to be awarded an ‘on-course’ officer’s commission. It was also the moment he discovered just what he would be doing with the wings he now had to sew onto his blue tunic. Ed would be given the very rare privilege of flying the American Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber – not with his own RAAF but with the US 5th Air Force operating in northern Australia against the Japanese.

  ‘I’d put down that I wanted to fly four-engine aircraft,’ Ed says, ‘so I thought I’d be on my way to England. I never thought I’d get to fly them in Australia.’ England, however, would have seemed far more familiar to a boy from the suburbs of Melbourne than the desolate place he was headed for. For the next two years, Ed’s new home would be a patch of the outback between Darwin and Katherine called Fenton, home in the middle of 1943 to the US 380th Bombardment Group.

  On the advice of George Kenney, the American general in charge of the Allied Air Forces in the south-west Pacific, the RAAF were to receive a couple of hundred B-24 Liberators to relieve the pressure on the US 5th Air Force, which had begun operating them from Australia in 1943. They weren’t due to be received by Australian squadrons until the following year, so George Jones, the wartime RAAF boss (in one of the rare moments when he wasn’t devoting his energies to a long and very public feud with his subordinate, William Bostock), thought he’d get in early and sneak up a few locals to fly with the Americans and get a headstart. Ed, who had in fact completed his pilot’s course brilliantly, was chosen to be one of this lucky handful. But when he arrived at Fenton towards the end of 1943, the Yanks didn’t quite know what to make of him.

  ‘I arrived in my blue uniform, which was of course no good in the Top End,’ he remembers. ‘They wouldn’t let me fly in my tropical shorts because of their own in-flight fire regulations. So they gave me a pair of trousers and a few shirts and I’d wear my Australian-issue pith helmet. I looked quite a sight.’

  If Ed felt a little eccentric among these well turned-out and provided-for Americans, it didn’t take him long to appreciate their largess. ‘One of the first things they said to us was, “You’re well supplied with plenty of everything, it’s up to you fellas to use it. Don’t let it sit there.”’ And they weren’t kidding. On his first morning a sergeant pulled up outside his tent. ‘Hey, Crabtree,’ he said. ‘Get your arse down to tran
sportation and draw out your jeep.’

  ‘I dropped everything, screamed down and picked it up,’ says Ed. ‘My very own jeep!’ He was also the recipient of two .38 revolvers and a .45 pistol, which seems to have thrilled him no end, two of which he ended up bringing home after the war.

  Despite its shortcomings, the Consolidated B-24 Liberator was one of the great success stories of the Second World War, and still holds the record as the most mass-produced American warplane of all time. More than 18 000 of them were churned out from gargantuan production lines across the United States, including the largest in the world at Willow Run in Michigan where, at its zenith, an entire aeroplane was being produced every hour, rolling out the doors in gleaming metallic silver at a cost to the American taxpayer of just over US$300 000 a piece, or $4 million in today’s money. The B-24 served in just about every theatre, from submarine hunting in the north Atlantic and attacking Germany from bases in England, to bombing the Japanese in the jungles of the Pacific. It had a long range, was fast for its size and carried a reasonably heavy bomb load, but was not generally thought of by the pilots as a pleasant aircraft to fly: it was complicated, heavy on the controls and had a high wing which made handling temperamental, particularly in formation. ‘“Flying Bricks” the Yanks used to call them,’ according to Ed, particularly the earlier models. It carried the less common ‘tricycle’ undercarriage, and due to the position of its fuel tanks, tended to catch fire a little too easily in battle. It was also extremely dangerous to ditch or belly-land, as the large, round fuselage tended to break apart. But it was undoubtedly famous, and Ed Crabtree, finally getting his hands on one after such a long apprenticeship, was delighted. His first flight, however, was somewhat farcical.

  The day after Ed arrived at Fenton, an American air-force general turned up, accompanied by Air Vice Marshal Adrian ‘King’ Cole, the boss of the RAAF for northern Australia, and one of the true legends of the RAAF. ‘He wanted to go over and take a look at the airstrip at Corunna Downs, which we also used,’ says Ed. ‘The general thought it’d be good if an Australian pilot took them, and that was me.’ Corunna Downs, the so-called secret airstrip, was set up near Marble Bar in the Pilbara as a close jump-off point to launch attacks on Japanese-occupied Java. Its existence was kept under wraps by the air force to prevent Japanese attacks, and flying some top brass into it should have been something of an honour for Ed.

  ‘Cole sat next to me in the cockpit “dickie seat”, and the general started giving me instructions: “Flaps down twenty degrees.” They were very complex aeroplanes with hundreds of switches and instruments and things.’ Ed hurriedly looked around for the flap control wheel. ‘Okay, take the revs up to fifteen-hundred,’ came another order from the general. Again, Ed searched around frantically. Where on earth was the throttle?

  Somehow they managed to get airborne, at which point the air vice marshal leaned over to him. ‘How is it you don’t know where anything is?’

  Ed gave the only answer he could. ‘I only got here yesterday and this is the first time I’ve ever been in one.’ The look on Cole’s face was one of astonishment.

  To the relief of all concerned, one of the engines suddenly registered a mag drop and they were obliged to turn around and go back to Fenton. Back on the ground, Cole took Ed aside. ‘Perhaps you might like to, er, go and learn a little more about this aeroplane?’ he asked sympathetically.

  Ed nodded in furious agreement, and gladly handed over to someone else to fly the bigwigs wherever they wanted to go.

  From Fenton’s remote outback airstrip, cut into the spinifex and low gums with barely three metres of red dirt on either side of the runway, Ed began, in March 1944, to do his part in taking the war to the Japanese. With the Liberator’s large crew of ten, Ed was to be co-pilot to the squadron commander, Captain Joe Cesario from Florida, a fine officer and excellent pilot according to Ed, with the two men remaining friends for life. ‘He was that good he ended up flying Air Force One,’ he tells me. Jim Wright, his navigator, also found fame, becoming Speaker of the US House of Representatives from 1987 to 1989. Their aircraft, the first example of the new J-series B-24, was given the name Dottie’s Double, with nose art depicting a glamorous young female, named after the captain’s wife, a charming lady, according to Ed, whom he would get to know later in life.

  From the beginning, Ed liked the Americans, and they liked him, although some things struck him as odd. ‘The officers and NCOs [non-commissioned officers] didn’t mix,’ he tells me. ‘In the RAAF it didn’t matter so much, but the Americans lived totally separately. Usually the only time you met a sergeant was out at the aircraft when you were about to fly on a mission with him.’

  Timor, New Caledonia, Borneo, Surabaya in Java, and a host of obscure, all-but-nameless places dotting the northern coast of New Guinea and beyond, all became targets listed in Ed’s expansive logbook. Flights were long, fifteen hours not being uncommon for a round trip to attack a jungle airstrip or headquarters, often at night over the featureless, inky black of the jungle or ocean.

  Ed prides himself on his memory, and as I speak with him, reading from his logbook, he doesn’t disappoint, remembering an array of names and places.

  ‘Nadzab–Wewak. Searchlights. Night fighters,’ I quote to him, reading one of his early missions. It brings on his distinctive chuckle.

  ‘Ah yes, that was a night attack on the Jap airstrip at Wewak. We went in first. Our job was to go in and mark the targets for the others, like a Pathfinder, I suppose.’ As the formation approached the target, Ed began to make out small pinpricks, ‘like lighted cigarettes’, flickering in the jungle below. Leaning over to look straight down through the Perspex cockpit windows, he was instantly blinded by dozens of radar-controlled searchlights fixing on him, quickly followed by bursts of flak. ‘I pulled my head back in and tried to readjust my eyesight,’ he recalls. ‘We knew we were pretty close.’ In the nose, the more experienced bombardier had come equipped with dark glasses. ‘I had no idea about the lights,’ says Ed. They placed their bombs right on the Japanese runway, then headed out to sea to observe the attack by the rest of the formation and, as Ed says, ‘amuse ourselves watching them get caught in the lights like we did. We’d see them get lit up and laugh our heads off!’ All frivolity ceased, however, when tracer bullets started to shoot past them in the dark. ‘We were being attacked by night fighters,’ says Ed, ‘so we thought it might be time to go home,’ and off they snuck into the darkness, unscathed. But the night wasn’t over yet.

  Halfway home, flying down through the Markham River valley, with the perilously steep mountains of the New Guinea highlands on either side, Ed’s captain, Joe Cesario, announced that he was going back to take a nap. Not long into Ed’s stint at the controls, however, the automatic pilot cut out. Not a major problem in itself, as he simply flew manually. ‘Then all the bloody instruments went,’ he says. ‘All that was left was the airspeed indicator.’ A fragment of flak, they later reckoned, had most likely damaged the wiring to the instruments and over the night-time jungle, they failed completely. ‘Joe, wake up, all the instruments have gone!’ Ed impressed upon his only recently unconscious captain. ‘He took over again and between us, somehow we managed to get back,’ he says. The relative safety of his tent and the shallow slit-trench carved into the dirt beside it was a welcome sight. Ed was learning fast.

  The Liberator was indeed known for having its bugs and gremlins, but how any of them were able to be maintained for flight in such a remote place as Fenton amazes me. Mechanical problems inevitably occurred. Once, en route to a target, one of Ed’s engines suddenly started revving at full bore. ‘I tried every­thing to bring it back under control,’ he says, ‘but in the end we had to turn back to Corunna Downs and land with a full bomb load. We couldn’t dump them because we didn’t know what was underneath us. There could have been an army base or something.’ Landing with a full bomb bay was one of the most perilous situations a B-24 pilot and crew ever had to face. No
t only was the aircraft loaded with tons of explosive, but the added weight made the aircraft extremely difficult to land and almost impossible to stop. ‘We came in about ten thousand pounds too heavy,’ says Ed. The Liberator touched down hard on the outback strip, and then kept going, and going, right off the end of the runway for about half a mile into the dirt. Their luck and, more amazingly, their tyres, held. ‘We just got out and left it where it was and waited to be picked up. And Marble Bar’s the hottest spot in Australia. Don’t ever go there. Terrible place,’ he mutters, then once again laughs quietly.

  I had always been under the impression that by the time Ed was operating in early 1944, the Japanese air force had been wrestled from the air and was not really a force to be reckoned with in the south-west Pacific. ‘No fear,’ he corrects me, recounting encounter after encounter with Japanese fighters, indicated by the word ‘interception’, which recurs ominously in his logbook.

  ‘We had a squadron chief executive officer who no-one liked, and who was always complaining about missing out on getting flight pay. So Joe said, “Okay, you can come on the next trip.” It was to be a reconnaissance flight, which didn’t sound too perilous, so he put his name down to go.’ The staff officer was to wish he hadn’t. The trip involved taking a look at the Japanese fighter airfield at Kamiri. ‘We were attacked by fifteen [Mitsubishi A6M] Zeros,’ says Ed. ‘His job was to cart the ammunition boxes to the various gunners. Now those boxes weighed about 130 pounds, and he was carrying them like feathers,’ laughs Ed. ‘At interrogation he was speechless, couldn’t say anything. Walking back to his hut, he just dropped his parachute on the ground. We didn’t see him for two days. He said later, “You can have your flight pay!” That shut him up. He was a miserable character anyway.’