Meanwhile, on the ground, a colonel in a small car had seen Stan’s Blenheim approach, complete with its length of wooden mast, rope and chain hanging from its staved-in nose like some ghastly appendage. That doesn’t look right, he thought, and followed it as best he could to the field behind the beach where it made its impromptu landing, lending assistance soon after it had skidded to a halt.
Laurie, though unconscious, was still alive but, as Stan saw when they were at last able to retrieve him from the shattered mess of the nose, terribly hurt. ‘A large part of his face had been simply ripped apart,’ he remembers. ‘It was a terrible sight.’ Stan and Dennis were checked out by the medical officer at a nearby RAF station, given some sedatives and released the next day. Laurie was taken to the local hospital at Acklington but didn’t last the night, and was buried a few days later in a local cemetery.
Telephoning their CO back at Bodney, the old man seemed almost amused at their ordeal. ‘Ah,’ he remarked quite cheerily, ‘I thought you must have ditched!’ The next day they were back at the squadron, debriefed, sent on leave, and that, says Stan, was the end of the affair. While they were away, the squadron was again almost wiped out during another period of terrible losses.
‘I’ve had this extraordinary luck, you see,’ reflects Stan. ‘They could easily have had me flying again the next week and I probably would have been killed.’ In a sense too, the collision was a lucky one. Dead centre in the middle of the Blenheim’s nose is in all likelihood the one and only place the aircraft could have survived such an impact.
Stan returned to operations briefly, but was suddenly diagnosed with, of all things, tuberculosis, taken off operational flying for good, and sent back to finish the war right where he’d started it, at Manston in Kent at the School of Air Navigation, once more flying Avro Ansons with student navigators.
Dennis too survived the war, ending up with a Distinguished Service Order but, according to his children, whom Stan kept in touch with, always blamed himself for the tragedy. ‘He was actually a wonderful pilot,’ says Stan. ‘It was just an error of judgement.’
Stan’s post-war life was not an easy one, spent struggling to settle into several civilian jobs, until in the late 1940s he asked his wife how she’d feel about him going back into the RAF. ‘Whatever makes you happy,’ she replied, and Stan, this time with a commission, was back in, spending another twenty years in uniform, working primarily in photo intelligence, enjoying several overseas postings and, he says, loving it.
Since coming to Australia in the 1960s, Stan has made the odd trip back home, but it was not until 2011 that he visited the grave of his navigator, 916895 Sergeant Eric Laurence Cash – Laurie – in a small but immaculately kept Commonwealth war grave at Chevington, not far from the crash site. It was a difficult and moving experience for Stan, and the family members who accompanied him, standing back, heard him say, just audibly as he touched the headstone, ‘Seventy years, mate.’
Unusually for a man of his times, Stan has never felt the need to bottle up his war. ‘I was of the opinion that I should talk to people about what happened, whenever they’d listen. I wanted to get it off my chest. Think it’s been one of the reasons I’ve managed to cope with that period of my life,’ he says. His memory is remarkable and he remains a cheerful and generous man, still slightly bewildered by his long life and good fortune.
‘I’m approaching ninety-six years of age,’ he says as we emerge into the warm air after a long afternoon. ‘Why is it I have been allowed to live so long, when kids were dying?’
It’s a question no-one can answer, least of all me.
Relief on their faces, 82 Squadron observer Stan Pascoe (left) and his pilot Dennis Gibbs make it home to Bodney after the famous Cologne power station trip, August 12, 1941. Twelve other Blenheims failed to do so. (Picture courtesy of Stan Pascoe)
JOHN CRAGO
Role: Wireless operator / air gunner
Aircraft: Avro Lancaster
Posting: 622 Squadron, RAF
You always think of it, it never goes away, it’s always there somewhere at the back of your mind, but you just get on with things.
John’s reasons for joining the air force were straightforward enough. ‘I didn’t much like the army, and I didn’t know anything about boats,’ he says as we sit in his living room, where the Perth sun, even at nine-thirty in the morning, streams through in dazzling shards of yellow light.
As a kid, John had heard the stories from his father’s experiences in the trenches, and besides, his heroes, as so often with youngsters of the Depression era, were the great aviators: Bert Hinkler, Charles Kingsford Smith and Amy Johnson. John had ideas of being a pilot and would have been happy as a navigator, but in 1942, the best the RAAF could give him was guard duty, spending hour upon hour watching over bomb dumps and transmitters at the Pearce air-force base in Western Australia. ‘It was pretty woeful, actually,’ he confesses. Eventually, he got the call to front up to No. 5 Initial Training School at Clontarf. Standing before the three-man selection board, John reckons they’d already earmarked those they wanted to train as pilots and navigators and so stamped his form ‘wireless / air gunner’.
After being sent to three different states to complete both the gunnery and wireless-operating components of his training, John embarked for England via the United States on the extremely glamorous Dutch ocean liner New Amsterdam, then across the Atlantic on the even mightier Queen Elizabeth.
Even before he joined up, John had had the foresight to begin learning Morse code at night school, so at his Operational Training Unit, at the appropriately named Wing in Buckinghamshire, he passed his transmitting test by handling more than the required twenty words per minute with a rating of 100 per cent. At his crewing-up, a friendly young pilot from Shepparton named Frank Stephens asked him if he’d care to join his crew, and his future in Bomber Command was set.
In September 1944, after time on Wellingtons, then a conversion to Lancasters, John and his crew arrived at the permanent RAF base at Mildenhall in Suffolk to his new home, No. 622 Squadron, part of 3 Group, beginning operations a week or so later.
‘We did a good deal of daylight trips on Gee-H,’ he tells me. ‘So we could bomb within a few metres of the target.’ Gee-H, introduced in October 1943, was a radar navigation system evolved from the earlier systems of Gee and Oboe, and was at the forefront of technology for its time. It relied on the subtle interpretation of lines on a small cathode-ray oscilloscope carried on board the aircraft, enabling multiple aircraft to bomb with accuracy for the first time. John’s was one of many crews who thought it wise to limit the monitoring of the Gee-H screen to half an hour at a stretch, after which his dazzled eyes would be relieved by another wireless / air gunner.
Via his high-frequency 1154/55 Marconi wireless set, John provided the aircraft’s only means of communication to the world outside, to their base back in England, or over the target with circling Pathfinder aircraft issuing live instructions in open voice as the raid was progressing: ‘Ignore the red flares, bomb on the green,’ and so on.
Communication was almost always via the so-called Q signals, pre-determined sets of three-letter codes – always beginning with Q – designed to abbreviate otherwise long and complicated messages. ‘I can still remember a couple of the main ones,’ John tells me. ‘QDM meant, “What is the magnetic course I must steer to reach you?” ’ On the hour and again on the half, a letter code signal was sent by 3 Group, which had to be acknowledged by all aircraft and recorded in the wireless operator’s log, ‘But apart from that,’ says John, almost apologetically, ‘we didn’t do a great deal on operations at all.’
He could, however, listen over the aircraft’s intercom to the back and forth chatter of a bomber crew on an operation: the gunners reporting the position of an aircraft or a searchlight, the navigator giving course updates to the pilot, and the bomb aimer, up the front, often following a map, calling out features of the passing landscape below
, ‘I can see what looks like a river down there, Skip . . .’ etc.
In this manner, John completed a tour of twenty-three trips, as recorded in what I think is the most meticulously filled-in logbook I’ve ever seen, set down in the standard colour-coding of all RAF and Commonwealth aircrew: night trips written in red, green for mine-laying operations over the sea and, counter-intuitively, black for daylight ops. Then I notice something unusual beginning to happen after his fourteenth trip, a night operation to Koblenz flown in November. ‘Oh yes, on number fourteen we had a mishap,’ he tells me, chuckling slightly. The far left-hand column of an airman’s logbook required him to enter the name of his pilot for every single flight. The pilots themselves simply put down ‘self’, and for the crew, it was usually the same name repeated down the page. John, however, after a trip to Koblenz, has entered a different pilot’s name for every subsequent operation: ‘Sqn Ldr Brignall, Fl Off Albright, Fl Off Arkins, Flt Sgt Malcolm . . .’ etc., continuing to the end of his tour.
‘Yes, there’s a reason for that,’ he tells me. But I don’t want to get ahead of the story.
‘It was a night op,’ he tells me, an all–3 Group attack by 128 Lancasters flown on 6 November 1944. On crossing the German front line, a sudden, short but intense burst of flak rocked John’s aircraft momentarily. ‘It was just before a group broadcast at 7 p.m., so I went off the intercom,’ says John. The broadcast done and the requisite codes recorded, John switched it back on to hear the fragments of a tense conversation between the pilot and flight engineer.
‘Starboard outer’s u/s,’ the engineer was saying.
‘What shall we do, feather it?’ was the response from the pilot, Frank Stephens.
One of the starboard motors was on fire, John now realised, and the pilot and engineer were apparently struggling to put it out. ‘They tried to feather it, tried to extinguish it, all no good,’ he says. In the end all they could do was cut the petrol to both starboard motors, leaving the aircraft to fly, badly, on the two port motors. ‘Then the port outer started to overheat and Frank had to throttle back to nurse it, leaving us running on just one and a half,’ he says. There being insufficient power to maintain height let alone reach their target, Frank decided to turn back and make for Juvincourt in north-east France, where an emergency aerodrome had recently been established, recaptured from the Germans after four years.
Suddenly, John found himself having a great deal to do indeed – sending emergency signals, and perhaps more importantly, obtaining a radio ‘fix’ in order for his navigator to determine exactly where they were. ‘I was in a bit of a flap. The main aerial, I discovered, had been damaged, so I had to wind out the trailing aerial and eventually managed to contact base on low frequency.’ As the Lancaster began losing height, the rest of the crew tried desperately to buy some time by losing weight. The bombs had been dumped almost immediately, but then out went the guns, the ammunition and everything that was not bolted down and could fit through an open doorway or hatch.
Oblivious to this frantic activity, John, disconnected from the intercom, was holding down his Morse key to transmit, enabling the base operators in England to determine his position and broadcast it back to him. ‘Finally, they gave me a set of coordinates and I switched my intercom back on to tell the navigator,’ he says. Once again, he caught the tail-end of an alarming conversation.
‘Do you want me to jump now, Skipper?’ said the voice of his bomb aimer, who apparently then proceeded to do so.
It seems while John had been finding the aircraft’s position, most of the crew had decided to abandon it. ‘Only myself, the pilot and flight engineer were left on board,’ he says.
‘Do you want me to go too?’ John hurriedly asked his skipper who, realising his wireless operator was still at his station, replied with a note of surprise, ‘Er, yes, you’d better go too.’
Although the rear escape hatch provided an easier exit, it was further away from John’s position just aft of the cockpit, and involved a climb, in full kit, over the dreaded chest-height main wing spar. John instead made his way forward, past the cockpit to the bomb aimer’s escape hatch in the nose.
Approaching the gaping black hole, John briefly reflected that the only jump he’d made thus far was from a 15-foot platform into a sandpit in training. ‘I got to the escape hatch and knew I had to go head first but I remember saying to myself, “How the hell do I do that?”’
Eventually, he reasoned the best approach was to sit on the edge, dangle his feet into the violent slipstream and simply lean forward into the pitch-black night. ‘The next thing I knew was a rush of air, the aircraft floating away in the distance and me swinging on my parachute harness, thinking, If this keeps up I’ll be sick. Then, the next thing I knew, I hit the ground.’ John estimates that he must have jumped at a perilously low 1000 feet and was only moments in the air.
He was on the ground but, without having taken note of the position sent to him from England, had no idea where he was. ‘I couldn’t see a thing,’ he says. ‘It was completely black. I didn’t know whether I’d come down over France, Germany or Holland.’ In the ink, and against a stiff breeze, he did his best to hide his parachute and started walking.
A short time later, apparently in a large open field, John heard the sound of massed aircraft engines overhead. His own formation, he presumed, returning to base, as he knew their route home took them back the way they came. Lucky devils, he thought, They’re going to be in their own beds tonight. Meanwhile, on he trudged to heaven knew where.
‘Was I now going to be a POW?’ he says he thought to himself. ‘Was I going to be shot? That’s the sort of stuff that goes through your head.’ Eventually, he came to a road at the end of a paddock, running in the same direction as the aircraft above him. At least they’re going the right way, he thought.
A short while later, a truck came onto the road ahead, but, unable to tell if it was one of his own or the enemy’s, John hid behind a tree. A little further on, he was challenged by what he thought was an American-sounding voice. Still unable to see a thing, he could only stammer out, ‘I’ve . . . just happened to . . . to bail out of an aircraft.’
Then, the brilliant beam of a flashlight and a pause. ‘Say, are you from those British bombers?’ the voice enquired as the light shone across John’s face. ‘And you wear a tie in combat?’
Heaving the longest sigh of relief of his life, John was led away by his American soldier ‘captor’ – still impressed with the standard RAF flying kit of battle dress, collar and tie – to a nearby medical officer. ‘He poured me half a cup of whisky. I think he thought I must have needed it,’ he says. John had come down in Belgium, liberated from the Germans just a few weeks previously.
The story of John’s Lancaster continues, however, although it would be weeks before he himself would hear how it had unfolded. ‘After I’d bailed out,’ he says, ‘my pilot and engineer were left flying the aircraft.’ It was pitch black, and they had no idea where they were. Managing to keep the aircraft in the air longer than they thought possible, they flew west, hoping their luck would hold long enough for them to arrive over friendly territory.
As they were searching the gloom for somewhere that might suffice as a landing ground, amazingly, the lights of a runway switched on directly in front and immediately below. The pilot, Frank, made a decision to land immediately. ‘They didn’t even have time to put their wheels down,’ recounts John. With no communication whatsoever with this mystery aerodrome, the Lancaster skidded to a safe crash landing adjacent to the runway. The Lancaster was a write-off, but Frank and his engineer were unhurt. ‘The aerodrome had apparently only turned the lights on because one of their own aircraft was coming back,’ says John. Without this extraordinary piece of luck, the Lancaster would most likely have had to come down, somewhere, anywhere, blind. ‘I’ve never gotten over that,’ says John. ‘I reckon they would have been goners. No question.’
The crew’s ordeal, however, was far from ov
er. The gunners and navigator who had bailed earlier had also survived their jump, and that night, all the crew were reunited at an RAF base and taken back to England. But not to their squadron. ‘They took us to a personnel depot near St John’s Wood in London, and treated us as evaders,’ says John. Interviewed and examined, John says their pilot’s motives for turning back were viewed with suspicion. ‘We more or less had to be readmitted back into the air force,’ he says. And in that, some were more successful than others.
‘I was asked how I was feeling about what I’d been through,’ says John. ‘I told them I felt fine, which was true.’ Although not directly accused of cowardice, John has always felt that the implication was there. ‘The rest of the crew except myself and one of the gunners were categorised “unfit to return to operational flying”,’ he says. How he escaped the same treatment remains something of a mystery, but he suspects it may have been his positive attitude in the interrogation. ‘I think some of the others said they were feeling a bit shaken up,’ he says.
Whatever the reason, John, halfway through his tour, suddenly found himself without a crew. ‘They didn’t know what to do with me when I got back to the squadron,’ he says. After floating around, performing routine tasks such as filling batteries, it was decided John would become the squadron ‘spare’. Whenever a wireless operator was for sickness or some other reason unable to fly, in John would be sent to fill the gap in the ranks. ‘That’s why I’ve put down a different pilot for every trip,’ he explains. ‘I hardly had the same crew twice.’
So, a little over a month since he had last flown, John’s name was back on the squadron battle order, flying with an entirely new crew. His first target, as luck would have it, was the very same one that had so nearly ended it all on trip fourteen, Koblenz. On this occasion, however, it was in daylight, and once again flak tore holes in the aircraft over the heavily defended target, but they made it back in one piece.
Heroes of the Skies Page 10
