Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  John would survive another nine operations, flown during the endgame of the war in Europe: Stuttgart, Essen and twice to Cologne, flying a day and a night in succession. His last, at war’s end, was flown on 22 April 1945 as part of a force of over 700 bombers attacking Bremen. The raid destroyed the south-western suburbs of the city, where the waiting British Army was poised to attack. Several thousand houses were destroyed, along with 176 civilians, 26 of those perishing in a concrete air-raid shelter, which collapsed after a close hit by a 500-pound general-purpose bomb. Five days later, the city fell to the advancing British.

  After VE Day, John was still flying, this time repatriating British POWs, some of whom had not seen home for four years. ‘Some were sick and all of them were skinny,’ he says, ‘but they were very happy to be out of Germany.’

  Arriving home to Western Australia in late 1945, John settled back into the relative mundanity of civilian life, becoming a junior clerk in the public service. He is quite sure he suffered what would now be termed post-traumatic stress disorder, but such terms did not exist in 1945. ‘Actually, I think I suffered it from the time of the jump,’ he says.

  Even late in the war when John flew, the casualty statistics in Bomber Command were heavy. ‘We lost five aircraft in the first month I was on the squadron,’ he tells me. ‘That’s thirty-five men, just gone.’ Some, he says, were unable to stand the strain, such as his first rear gunner, an Irishman. ‘He went home on leave after three trips, and came back and told them he wanted to be taken off operations,’ he says. ‘There was no argument. You were treated as if you were dead, and spirited away. We all knew of the chances of getting killed but we didn’t talk about it much.’

  One incident haunts him still. The only other member of John’s crew to be put back onto operations after their return to England was one of his gunners, a Scotsman, Jock McRae, with whom John formed a strong bond. ‘I was on my own when I came back to the squadron because the crews would stick together. They didn’t want to have much to do with “odd bods” like myself,’ he says. Jock had injured his hand when jettisoning his gun from the stricken Lancaster, so was sent on a period of sick and other accumulated leave. But after his return to the squadron, he and John palled up. ‘We shared a billet and did everything together,’ John says. A short time after John completed his return trip to Koblenz, Jock was scheduled to fly on a ‘gardening’ or sea-mining operation to Danzig Bay, a long trip to the German–Polish border on the Baltic in January 1945.

  In the small hours of the following morning, John was awoken by a bang on his billet door and the sudden appearance of people in the room, moving about with torches. ‘I didn’t know who they were,’ he says. In fact they were members of the chillingly titled Committee of Adjustment, sent to collect and remove an airman’s belongings as soon as he was posted missing. When someone failed to return from an operation, no time was lost in erasing his memory from the squadron, lest his sudden absence serve as too vivid a reminder to the airmen of the awful numbers game stacked against them. ‘It was the first I’d learned that Jock was missing,’ says John. ‘They arrived in the middle of the night, collected all his gear and quietly took it away. That really shook me up quite a bit.’

  For a while, there was talk of Jock having landed in neutral Sweden and being interned, or having ended up a POW, but no trace either of him or his crew was ever found. His name is on the RAF Runnymede memorial in Surrey, built to commemorate the more than 20 000 British and Commonwealth airmen of the Second World War who left England, never to return, and who have no known grave.

  John spoke to me about his war in a way typical of many of the men I met who flew in Bomber Command: openly, modestly, completely lacking in any self-righteousness, and as quietly amazed by the raw events of his youth as was I. The stress of his tour, he says, lingered with him long after his return. ‘I found it affected my confidence, things like that. But there wouldn’t be too many people who went through a tour without some effect on them.’ For a short time, he enrolled in the RSL, but wasn’t really interested. ‘It was practically all army men,’ he says, ‘talking army things.’ He found more relevance with the RAAF Association, which he joined in 1980, remaining an active member for years.

  Today, he still puts in a regular appearance as a volunteer at the nearby Bull Creek air-force museum, showing visitors over the great black-liveried Lancaster, the interior of which he knew only too well, and which stands as a magnificent centrepiece. But John’s war remains with him. ‘You always think of it,’ he says. ‘It never goes away, it’s always there somewhere at the back of your mind, but you just get on with things.’

  JEFF PERRY

  Role: Pilot

  Aircraft: Vickers Wellington

  Posting: 115 Squadron, RAF

  I’ve never spoken about it in this much detail.

  ‘I’m on my way, Jeff, see you in about half an hour.’ I can’t recall ever having been to Dubbo, and am taken aback by the size of it, with its low, confusing sprawl of seemingly identical shopping strips, truck and car yards, and outlets boasting a bewildering array of machines destined for various agricultural purposes: gargantuan tractors, wheeled and multi-armed harvesters and other contraptions a determined person might well convince me are actually surplus from the Soviet space program. That at least makes up part of the excuse I give myself when running late to meet Jeff Perry, who flew bombers in the early part of the war. But if he is put out by my tardiness, he doesn’t let on, instead giving me an errand. ‘Look, while you’re out,’ he says over the phone as I am on final approach, ‘can you pick me up some milk? And make it that low-fat stuff. I’m trying to lose a bit of weight.’ Jeff, I might add, is ninety-eight years old.

  I meet Jeff at his front door where he shakes my hand firmly and invites me into his modern unit on the main road. It’s December and the sun is white and blinding, and makes me think of insects I tortured under a magnifying glass as a kid. The relief of getting inside is overwhelming. Jeff pauses at the door. ‘Hmm, looks like rain,’ he says, glancing up at a clear sky.

  ‘Really?’ I say, expecting him to elaborate. He doesn’t.

  The first glance into a former airman’s home can be telling. Some are crammed with photographs, mementos, squadron emblems, often model aeroplanes of the type the airmen flew. Usually, there is at least something, but not a single item in Jeff’s abode in any way indicates his wartime life in the RAAF. He draws me into the kitchen. ‘My great-granddaughter’s just given me one of these coffee machines,’ he says, waving in the direction of a shiny new appliance taking up rather a lot of room on the kitchen bench. I’ve recently had a go at a similar-looking one, and quickly attempt to reacquaint myself with its function, anticipating soon being called to lend a hand. Jeff watches me patiently as I fiddle with the lever where the cartridges are inserted. ‘Would you like a cafe latte?’ he says finally. I step aside and Jeff proceeds to make me one, perfectly. I take that as my cue to sit down and jettison all remaining assumptions.

  It’s not surprising Jeff appears so at home on the western plains of New South Wales. His family have been out here since Europeans first began to hammer fences around the boundaries of sheep stations the size of minor principalities. ‘I was born about a hundred miles west of here,’ he tells me, throwing a hand somewhere in that direction. ‘There wasn’t really a town. The nearest railway station was called Mullengudgery.’ When later I look it up on the map, I see it’s still there but there’s no sign of a train station, tracks or anything much else for that matter. When giving me a brief history of his family’s long association with Merino sheep, he mentions events that took place in the ’80s. I shake my head slightly when I realise he’s talking not of the 1980s, but the 1880s.

  With an uncle who’d been in the trenches, Jeff wanted nothing to do with the army, so in April 1940, he made the long trip east to join the air force in Sydney. At No. 4 Elementary Flying School at Mascot, he took to flying easily and, to the delight of his ins
tructor, was the first pupil in his very early No. 7 Course to go solo in a Tiger Moth. His prowess earned him selection for single-engine fighter training. Being so close to Sydney, they were all given one very particular instruction: never, under any circumstances, fly under the Harbour Bridge!

  Almost as an aside, Jeff mentions a name that makes me stop in my tracks, one of his fellow student pilots whom he knew not only on the course but back home, a young man whose father ran a property close to his own. A quiet fellow, with whom Jeff regularly played tennis, but who didn’t have much to say for himself. ‘You’d hardly get to know him,’ he says of Rawdon Hume Middleton who, two years later, for a trip to Turin in a Short Stirling bomber, would win the Victoria Cross, posthumously. Shockingly wounded by anti-aircraft fire, Middleton would complete his bomb run on the Fiat aircraft factory, then, blinded in one eye, in agony and losing blood from lacerations all over his body, would deliver his crew back to England, ordering five of them to bail out once they’d crossed the English coast. He went down with his aircraft in the Channel, and his body was washed up a little later. ‘Played a good game of tennis, too,’ remembers Jeff.

  After various adventures on the long voyage to Britain, including a near-miss by a torpedo in the Pacific (which Jeff, on watch at the time, saw and initially thought to be a swordfish), and colliding with an iceberg in the Atlantic, Jeff arrived in the battered British Isles in early 1941. In Bournemouth, a fortune teller unnerved him by predicting he would fall, ‘but not from a great height’. Performing just a little too well on a night-vision test saw him transferred from fighters to night bombers. ‘Everyone was rated average or below average,’ he remembers. ‘I was apparently “exceptional”,’ so instead of the Hurricanes or Spitfires he’d had his heart set on, Jeff was soon off to the other end of Britain, Lossiemouth in northern Scotland, to transfer onto Wellington bombers.

  He enjoyed the Wellington and didn’t seem to mind too much his change of mount, but wasn’t ready to divest himself of his fighter pilot skills just yet. ‘First thing I thought I’d do when going solo in the Wellington was some aerobatics,’ he says, obviously noticing my look of bewilderment. ‘I thought I’d do a stall turn, and then if that worked okay, I’d do a loop.’

  ‘A loop?’ I exclaim. ‘In a Wellington?’

  ‘I couldn’t see why not,’ he says.

  So, somewhere over northern Scotland, Jeff put some speed on his heavy twin-engine Mark I Wellington bomber, pulled back the stick to make it climb straight up, stalled, kicked on some rudder and let the nose drift down towards the ground in a dive. So far, so good. But when he tried to pull the bomber out of it, the stick wouldn’t budge. ‘It was like trying to pull at a tree,’ he remembers. In a vertical dive with the speed increasing and unable to make the aircraft react, Jeff suddenly realised he might be in a spot of bother. ‘Shit! I thought to myself. The wing commander won’t be very pleased when I wreck his plane.’

  With the ground fast looming large in his windshield, this, one might have thought, would have been the least of his worries. But he didn’t panic. Instead, he decided to reach down and turn the elevator-trim control wheel at the bottom of his pilot’s seat. Replicating the movement seventy years on, Jeff unconsciously slides his hand down the side of his armchair and turns an imaginary wheel. With only a thousand feet between him and oblivion, the nose of the Wellington started to rise. Probably for the better, Jeff decided to give the loop a miss. But he’d learned something about the aircraft he was soon to be flying into battle. ‘I knew then that if I was ever attacked by fighters, I could put her into a dive and get out of it,’ he says. It was knowledge he would need to put to good use.

  Jeff joined No. 115 Squadron operating from Marham, in Norfolk on the edge of The Wash, a relatively comfortable pre-war brick-building base, as the captain of an all-English crew. (‘They were all from Lancashire and Cheshire,’ he says. ‘Their accents were so strong I could barely understand them.’) Jeff would complete an exceptionally long tour of thirty-seven operations, mostly to targets in the industrial Ruhr valley of northern Germany. Sadly, his logbook was lost in a bushfire in the 1950s (along with, he says, many photographs taken with a secreted camera from his cockpit while actually on operations – I wince at what could have been), so we are unable to go through his tour chronologically, but he certainly remembers a great deal.

  ‘I’m not sure of the target. It may have been Hamburg,’ he remembers of one operation. ‘An anti-aircraft shell exploded inside the plane. It shattered my instrument panel, wrecked the compass and most of the other instruments.’ He reckons the shell went off just behind his cockpit, which quickly filled with smoke. But one of the Wellington’s strengths was its ability to absorb punishment due to its unique latticed, or geodetic, skeleton of aluminium ribs, wrapped in doped, shrunken canvas. This allowed the shock of exploding shells to pass through the thin canvas wall rather than be absorbed by the crew. There are many instances of Wellingtons returning to base with so much of their outer covering missing they resembled see-through diagrams. So, with his controls intact, Jeff flew on.

  ‘Was anyone hurt?’ I ask him.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says, then after a pause, ‘although I still have some shrapnel in my leg.’ His definition of hurt obviously differs from mine.

  With no compass, Jeff had no idea where to fly, so the instructions from his navigator to simply ‘head west’ were somewhat moot. It was, however, a clear night, and looking to his right, he saw the friendly white orb of Polaris, the north star. ‘So long as it was on my starboard side, I knew I’d reach England somewhere.’ Eventually, the coast did come up, but his troubles were not yet over. ‘Suddenly the anti-aircraft guns opened up on us,’ he says. ‘The British ones! And they didn’t miss by much, either.’

  He didn’t realise it at the time, but the explosion had also wrecked the IFF (identification friend or foe) device which would have marked him as friendly to the gunners below. Evading the friendly fire, he still had to find his way back home, which he did by checking the two-letter identity codes – flashed by all aerodromes – against the daily changing code list on his destroyable notepaper, the ‘flimsy’. Finally, and extremely low on fuel, he found his way back to Marham. ‘So, yes,’ he tells me, ‘that was a bit of an exciting one.’

  Jeff’s tour, in mid to late 1941, took place during the great nadir of Bomber Command when unsustainable losses were expended for little result. To counter the U-boat threat, the bomber crews had in March of that year been directed to concentrate their attacks on submarine pens along the French coast, but in July they were thrown back into the Ruhr, or ‘Happy Valley’ as the airmen came to dub the heavily defended industrial centre of Germany’s north. The RAF believed that with the bulk of the Luftwaffe now in Russia, the west would be relatively undefended. They were in for a shock. Between July and November, Bomber Command would lose a staggering 526 aircraft to enemy fire, the equivalent of its entire front-line strength in just four months. The chance of surviving a standard tour of thirty operations was at this time considerably less than 50 per cent. Added to this, it was realised that the crews, at night over a blackout continent, were barely even finding their targets, let alone hitting them. The sensational Butt Report of August 1941, derived from the analysis of over 4000 aerial target photographs, showed that barely one in four crews had dropped their bombs within 5 miles of the target.

  What part experience played in keeping a crew off the casualty list was demonstrated to Jeff on one of his early trips when, nearing the target, his rear gunner called up calmly, ‘Skip, there’s a plane flying behind us. Should I fire at it?’

  A split-second of incredulity gave way to Jeff yelling an emphatic, ‘Yes!’ down the intercom, then executing a violent turn to port. ‘At that moment,’ he says, ‘a whole stream of yellow and white tracer bullets poured over the top of my port wing.’ It was, he thinks, a Junkers Ju 88, which had snuck up behind them in the dark, making itself visible to the ine
xperienced young man in the rear turret only at the last second. ‘I had to tell him afterwards in no uncertain terms, “Don’t ask, just shoot!”’ There were more encounters with night fighters throughout his tour, but each time he evaded them, remembering the hard lesson he had learned in training over Scotland. His gunner never asked permission again.

  The trick with the elevator trim came in handy on another occasion when he was trapped or ‘coned’ by a series of powerful coordinated German searchlights. ‘I’d seen aircraft coned time and time again,’ he says, ‘and almost invariably they were shot down. And they got me too, once.’ When his turn came, he threw the Wellington into a twisting dive, evading the lights and the concentrated flak that invariably came with them, brought it out of the dive with the elevator trim, and got away with it.

  This period of soul-searching for Bomber Command – when it was poorly led by now forgotten commanders and its purpose, even its existence, was being questioned – combined with unreliable weather, meant Jeff’s tour spread out over many months. Days, sometimes weeks would pass without an operation, but his crew gradually became an experienced one, surviving at a time when so many did not. It was frequently a close shave, however.

  One trip, he tells me, still shakes him up to think about. The target was a city on the Baltic, and after a successful attack, Jeff was flying home over the North Sea. Feeling relatively safe, he engaged the automatic pilot, known as ‘George’, dropped down to the relative warmth of about 600 metres above sea level, and gave permission for the crew to break out their nightly complement of sandwiches and coffee. ‘Suddenly, all hell broke loose,’ he says, as a massive barrage of anti-aircraft fire exploded all around him. ‘What the hell was that?’ he said to the navigator, grabbing the wheel.