‘I don’t know,’ was the reply. ‘We’re supposed to be over the sea!’
Flying carefully home, he checked the map and, to his horror, realised he’d flown low, straight and level over the extremely well-defended German island of Heligoland, a mini fortress not only bristling with guns but also well-equipped with barrage balloons tethered as high as 6000 feet. ‘I must have flown between the cables without knowing it,’ he recalls, realising that contact with any one of them would have sliced a wing off like a knife. ‘That shook me up a bit, actually,’ he says, and by the look on his face, I believe him.
He seems to have been shaken too by the visible effects of what he was doing, night after night, to German cities and their inhabitants, and gives an extraordinary insight into one of the most famous raids of the war, the one and only attack on Lübeck, the old Hanseatic League city on the Trave River on the Baltic coast, in March 1942. This was the turning point for the RAF, the first major success against a large German target, and the raid that would set the terrible pattern of area bombing for the next four years. On this clear night, for the first time, everything went right for the bomber crews, with nearly all 234 aircraft reporting successful hits on the aiming point, the altstadt – the very heart of the old medieval town. Lightly defended, the bombers ventured down to as low as 2000 feet above the city for greater accuracy. ‘We set the whole town on fire,’ remembers Jeff, who saw it all from his cockpit. ‘There were these bridges over the water on the western side. I remember seeing a whole stream of cars trying to get across them to escape the inferno. It was a traffic jam. For the first time, I felt sorry for them. I hadn’t felt a thing for them up till then, but this night I felt sorry for them down there.’
Jeff’s mood seems to change a little after this revelation. He pauses for a moment, then tells me that after his first trip, he’d conscientiously told the CO that he couldn’t be ‘absolutely certain’ of having hit the target dead centre. The senior officer was untroubled. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he replied matter-of-factly. ‘Even if you missed the target, you probably would have hit the buildings next to it where the workers lived and killed them.’
‘After that,’ says Jeff a little haltingly, ‘we’d always try to aim very carefully at the target.’
Having reached his tour’s designated thirty operations, Jeff expected to be stood down, but nobody said anything and his name appeared on the battle order for the next trip, and then the one after that. ‘Actually, I think they lost track of me,’ he says casually, as if discussing a misplaced rates notice. ‘I thought a lot about this afterwards. They could never find my records and such. I think it was because I trained as a fighter pilot then transferred to bombers. I don’t think I was in their system.’ Still he went on flying – thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five – and surviving, and still no word on when he might be done. ‘Finally, I said something to the adjutant who seemed surprised and looked something up. Then, after number thirty-seven, they told me that was enough.’
Jeff no doubt earned the Distinguished Flying Cross several times over – not least for his unofficially extended tour – but being on the wrong side of his old-school CO, who took umbrage at Jeff’s lack of concern for such military niceties as saluting and treating said CO with the respect to which he believed himself entitled (‘Actually, I used to wind him up a little,’ he admits), made certain that decoration was never going to come his way. After his tour, Jeff spent time as an instructor, and by war’s end, was back running his family’s property in western New South Wales, having been greeted on his return by the news that his father had been diagnosed with cancer and had not much time to live.
Flying during a period when his chances of survival were slim, did he think his number was going to come up? His answer surprises me.
‘I thought it might, but I knew I could handle a plane better than most other pilots. I thought perhaps some of them contributed to killing themselves.’ Jeff is of the firm opinion that many pilots and crews, through inexperience, simply ran out of skill: failing to recover from stalls and spins, miscalculating fuel or distances, or simply getting lost and disappearing without a trace. There was luck, certainly, he believes, but also the smallest of margins to make your own.
He says he can’t recall the faces of the many men who came and disappeared during his dramatic time on the squadron, but one stands out, and he tells me the sad story of Allan Weller, a fellow Australian pilot from Brisbane. Weller had been shot down over the North Sea but survived a raging storm to be picked up in his dinghy by a Norwegian vessel and soon found his way back to the squadron. ‘I shared a hut with him,’ says Jeff. ‘His nerves were shot to pieces. At night he’d yell and make noises, so I told the wing commander that I didn’t believe he was fit to fly.’ The news got back to Weller, who ‘went crook’ at Jeff in no uncertain terms. In any case, it made no difference. Weller kept flying. ‘The next trip they sent him on, he didn’t come back,’ says Jeff.
Jeff tells me that he has never spoken of his war in such depth to anyone, which humbles me. ‘I’m sure I’ve been affected by it,’ he says. ‘We didn’t have a name for it back then. Stress disorder they call it now, or something. I’m sure I must have had it. I smoked and I drank. Sometimes even now I wake up in the middle of the night and think of things that happened, what I could have done, what I should have done.’
We wind up our meeting – he was right about the rain, which bucketed down suddenly then vanished, leaving a strange, salty smell in the air as I emerge into a much cooler Dubbo. I ask him, just as I’m leaving, about the prophecy of the clairvoyant in Bournemouth about the fall from a short height. While erecting some electric lights at home, Jeff broke both his wrists when a ladder slipped. ‘So that old lady in Bournemouth was right after all.’
MURRAY ADAMS
Role: Fighter pilot
Aircraft: P-40 Tomahawk, Supermarine Spitfire, Hawker Tempest
Posting: 250 Squadron, RAF
It’s only now that fighter pilots like me are becoming an endangered species, that people like you are interested.
‘So, what are you going to join?’ asked Murray’s mate as they headed down the Hume Highway (as it was then named) towards Melbourne, driven by a fervent desire to answer their country’s call and get into this newly declared war quick smart. Beyond this vague patriotic notion, however, Murray hadn’t actually given it much thought. ‘The army . . . I suppose,’ he said uncertainly to his companion, who, despite working at Murray’s local bank in Mansfield, Murray had only just met – at a party the night before. But at least he had a car.
‘Don’t be a bloody idiot,’ the self-assured young man retorted. ‘You’ll be up to your navel in swamp water with a heavy pack on your back, without a dry bed to sleep in.’
‘Well what are you going to join then?’ asked Murray.
‘Air force,’ the lad replied. ‘At least you get a ride.’
This made eminent sense, and so the air force it would be. Not that he gave himself much of a hope of getting in. Apart from the fact that – unlike almost every other keen-eyed young man eager to join the ranks of the dark blue – Murray knew next to nothing about aeroplanes and cared about them even less, he’d also barely recovered from a nasty bout of double pneumonia and rated his chances of simply passing the medical as somewhere around nil. But, as with every fighter pilot the world over, luck would step in to play its part. Luck, and a smattering of cunning.
‘One of the things they got you to do was hold up a column of mercury with your lungs,’ says Murray. ‘Mine were shot at that stage from the pneumonia, but I managed to pinch the length of tubing against the edge of the bench when no-one was looking.’ The medical hurdle crossed, there was still the interview to get through, where he would be required to appear in front of a selection panel of officers, one of them a group captain.
‘I hadn’t so much as sat in an aeroplane, knew nothing about them and had no great interest in them,’ he says. ‘They asked
me about ten questions – all about flying aeroplanes – so I pretty much got nought out of ten.’
I ask him if he remembers what any of them were.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t have understood them anyway.’ The next stage of Murray’s flying career – being shown the door directly behind him – was looming when the leader of the panel, possibly just to fill the awkward silence, happened to ask, ‘What games do you play, Adams?’ to which Murray gave the answer that turned everything around.
‘Tennis and skiing, sir,’ he replied with sudden confidence.
At this, the officer paused. ‘Did you say skiing?’
As Murray explains, ‘There were only a handful of skiers in Victoria at that time, and he was one of them. He became quite excited.’ While young Murray and the group captain embarked on an animated conversation about the latest downhill techniques and other gossip around Victoria’s then nascent skiing community, the other officers kept silent. But when the subject at last returned to the business at hand, Murray was no less hapless.
‘So, what do you want to do in the air force?’ he was asked.
‘Well, what are my options?’ he said.
‘Well, you can be a pilot, an observer or an air gunner.’
Murray thought about this for a moment. ‘I think I’d like to drive the thing,’ he said innocently enough. And in the face of undoubted eye rolls from the rest of the selection panel, his newly found friend with the group captain’s rings on his sleeve announced, ‘Right, pilot it is.’
‘And that was that,’ says Murray.
To the surprise of everyone (not least himself), Murray found he in fact possessed something of a natural aptitude for flying and breezed through his course at Melbourne’s Essendon Aerodrome, despite running foul of his dreaded chief instructor. His crime? Unwittingly escorting the instructor’s ex-fiancée to a dance.
‘You’ll pay for this, Adams,’ said the instructor menacingly in a somewhat ugly confrontation in a lavatory just off the dance floor. And he was very nearly true to his word.
‘On my final test, the bastard did everything he could think of to scrub me,’ says Murray, remembering the morning well. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said to the dark-faced instructor as they approached the Tiger Moth.
‘Get in the cockpit,’ was the curt reply. For the next hour, he put Murray through the wringer, looking for any excuse to fail him. But Murray’s talent shone through, and, reluctantly, the instructor had no choice but to pass him, and he was even selected for the coveted prize of single-engine fighter pilot training – the dream of just about every young man at the time. Except, of course, if you happened to be Murray Adams.
On his final day of training at Wagga, with a pair of brand-new pilots wings on his tunic, Murray decided to make a parting gesture to his home town, and ‘beat up’ the centre of Mansfield in his Wirraway. It was market day, and everyone, he knew, would be out and about as he roared down the main street at rooftop level. This type of shenanigans was, of course, not in the least bit tolerated, so just in case someone happened to be quick enough to read the number on his aircraft and report him, Murray had a contingency plan. ‘The day before, I’d made up a little parachute with a handkerchief and a rock wrapped in a note.’ After buzzing the town, he flew out to the family farm, spotted his father on his horse, and threw it over the side. ‘Get to the police station quickly before anyone can report me,’ read his father as he dismounted. As he was on good terms with the local constabulary, nothing more was heard of the incident.
I ask him how low he went down that main street.
He ponders for a moment. ‘Well, the barmaid reckons I flew below her window,’ he says, smiling, ‘but I don’t think that’s true.’
Sailing in what must have surely been one of the most spectacular convoys ever to have put to sea, Murray steamed out of Sydney Heads in mid-1941 on board the mighty liner Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by her sister, Queen Mary, and the great but ageing Aquitania. Horrendous seas battered their Australian cruiser escort into early retirement at Fremantle, leaving the big ships to steam across the Indian Ocean unaccompanied to the Middle East. Murray would be joining the ranks of Air Vice Marshal Arthur Coningham’s Desert Air Force, supporting the British 8th Army in its seesawing struggle against Rommel’s Afrika Korps, currently ranging back and forth across the sands of the wadis of North Africa.
Arriving in Egypt during a relative interlude, however, Murray discovered there were no vacancies for new pilots, so was forced to cool his heels. Taking in some sights and doing his best to acclimatise, in October 1941, he found himself on a featureless patch of clay 20 miles south of the Egyptian coast simply called ‘LG [landing ground] 013’. Murray was the newest addition to No. 250 Squadron, an RAF unit, where his flight commander, one Clive Caldwell, was well on his way to becoming Australia’s greatest fighter ace. ‘A wonderful man,’ Murray says, ‘once you got to know him.’
This desolate spot scraped out of the sand and the camel thorn would be Murray’s new home. ‘Our mission was to achieve aerial superiority over the battlefields,’ he says, ‘which was a hopeless task as we were completely outperformed by the enemy.’ Indeed, their American P-40E Tomahawk fighters were slower than the Messerschmitt Bf 109Es they were facing, possessing about half their rate of climb, and their 28-litre, liquid-cooled Allison engines were prone to unreliability.
The Tomahawk had in fact never been intended for use by the RAF, a batch of them having been ordered by the French Air Force, but failing to arrive from the US before France’s capitulation to Hitler in 1940. The British then took hold of them but deemed them inferior to equivalent German aircraft and so relegated them to the relative backwater of the desert campaign. The relief the RAF pilots in England no doubt felt at not having to fly such under-performing machines as these was probably of little comfort to men like Murray.
‘We didn’t have the right aircraft and most of us, like me, were not particularly well trained,’ he says. But the Tomahawks did have a couple of advantages. As heavy as they were, they had a wonderful rate of turn, which spooked the German pilots, who avoided mixing it with them in a dogfight. ‘They would always be above us and come screaming down in a dive – one at a time,’ says Murray. ‘And if you kicked over the rudder bar at the right moment, they’d go tearing past and you could sometimes get a shot at them.’
Murray passes his logbook to me. It’s covered in a rather wonderful piece of embossed leather (goat skin, I’m told), redolent with character and adventure. I open it and start perusing his brief but potent entries for November 1941: ‘Patrol in the vicinity of Sheferzen, Ft. Madalena – terrific dust storm blowing on our return; cover for advancing troops – P/O Masters (N.Z.) killed on 21/11; bomber escort to Gambut area – saw Stukas bombing our troops and big cover of Me. 109s above, but unable to leave our own bombers. Later two 109s made attacks at P/O Ranger but missed’ etc.
And for December: ‘Vectored onto Ju.88 recco at 19 000 and damaged it in two attacks; played hide and seek with two 109s in broken cloud; chased Me110 until I lost it in cloud. Fired several bursts after it. Sgt Canty (RCAF) killed.’
‘Yes, we had our casualties,’ he says. ‘Some chaps you never got to know, they were shot down that quickly. But our morale was very good.’ One of the reasons this can be attributed to is an enlightened innovation introduced by the CO of No. 3 Squadron, RAAF, Peter Jeffrey. At a time when class consciousness was rife within the Commonwealth air forces and a virtual institution in the RAF, Jeffrey instigated the quietly revolutionary notion of the mixed-rank pilots mess. About half the Desert Air Force’s pilots were at that time sergeants, but it was experience, not rank, which commanded respect, and for the first time, under Jeffrey, pilots of all ranks were made to eat, sit and talk shop together about how to fight and survive in the desert skies. And it was open all hours. ‘Some of the old English officers didn’t like it much, having to rub shoulders with these grubby sergeants,’ says Murray. But so succ
essful was it that Coningham – another colonial from New Zealand – introduced it to all his squadrons. ‘If you’d survived for a while, you’d obviously had some experience, and now you could share it,’ Murray says.
I continue to read his logbook. Images of Murray come to mind, fountain pen in hand, hunched over this same volume in a canvas tent on the edge of a makeshift runway in the Egyptian desert seventy years ago. For December, he appears to have flown virtually every day in patrols lasting sometimes an hour, occasionally two. But it’s what he’s written for the very first day of that month that pulls me up: ‘Attacked by Me109s escorting Me.110s & Ju 88s. Cannon shell in oil tank forced me to land, wheels up at Taleb-el-Essem.’
He begins the story slowly. ‘Well, they always say, “The one that gets you is the one you don’t see,” and I didn’t see this one till it was too late.’ On an offensive patrol at 14 000 feet one morning, the first Murray knew of any danger was the sudden sight of German aircraft all round him. A section of Messerschmitt Me 109s, escorting a formation high above, had pounced on them in a classic ‘out of the sun’ manoeuvre, always the slower Tomahawks’ Achilles heel. ‘Our practice was not to use our mirrors,’ he says. ‘In a mirror you only got a small picture that can soon materialise into something bigger. You had to turn and look. That’s why we wore silk scarves – it wasn’t an affectation, it was a necessity – to prevent your neck chafing.’ When Murray turned and looked this morning, he saw a large German propeller hub firing its guns in his direction, followed by the sound of something hitting his aeroplane just behind his head.
With just seventeen hours of operational flying under his belt, Murray, at this stage of his still short flying career, felt ‘grossly under-trained’.
‘I was still learning to fly the thing,’ he says. ‘I tried to turn towards the German but it was too late and all I did was flick her into a very nasty inverted spin’ (another of the Tomahawk’s less pleasant flying characteristics). Down he went, caught in a vortex. The more Murray tried to pull the aircraft out by the standard method of powering on the throttle, the tighter the spin became. Added to this, an increasingly large volume of warm oil began sloshing around the cockpit, covering everything with a filthy black smear – his instruments, himself, and most alarmingly, his Perspex canopy. Blinded and heading towards the ground in an uncontrollable spin, Murray sensed his options rapidly diminishing. He reached up to pull back the hood and bail out, but it was jammed tight, and no effort of his could shift it. ‘I remember at this point thinking quite calmly, I don’t know where the ground is, but it must be getting close, and soon there’ll be a loud noise but I won’t hear it!’ He had been, he knew, up at 14 000 feet, but how much of that was left between him and, as he puts it, ‘the unyielding surface of the planet’, he had no idea.
Heroes of the Skies Page 12
