As it turned out, the German bullet in his oil pump almost certainly saved his life, as the Tomahawk’s Allison engine, now drained of oil, suddenly seized, stopped and released the aircraft from its deadly torque grip, allowing it to spin out of its death roll completely on its own. And just in time.
‘As the oil ran off the Perspex I could see I was about 200 feet off the ground,’ says Murray. ‘So, naturally I put her down.’
‘How did she glide?’ something prompts me to ask.
‘Like a brick,’ he says. Nonetheless, Murray executed a smooth wheels-up landing and slid across the sand to a stop. Although covered in oil, he was intact and, amazingly, unhurt.
Now able to apply a hefty shoulder to the recalcitrant cockpit hood, Murray forced it back and was free. The cause of the jam, he now saw, was a single bullet which had struck the canopy’s metal rail, mere inches from his head.
He was, however, in the middle of nowhere, with neither water nor food, and what he estimated to be 150 miles of highly contested desert between himself and his base. In between was the endgame of a tank battle that had been raging for a week. So, doing what any downed fighter pilot would do, Murray started walking.
‘Did you know where you were going?’ I ask.
‘Well, I was in the boy scouts and knew how to use a clock as a compass. I unscrewed the aircraft’s clock with a nail file and took it with me.’
‘Brilliant!’ I spontaneously exclaim.
With the aircraft soon swallowed up in one of the endless desert chimeras somewhere behind him, Murray trudged north-west through the sand. Despite it being winter, when temperatures were not extreme, he knew his only hope lay in coming across a friendly vehicle, preferably laden with a good supply of drinkable water. Eventually, he spotted the unmistakable dust trails of a group of approaching trucks, and threw himself behind a pathetically small patch of camel thorn, camouflaged, however, by his oil-soaked khaki battle dress. ‘As they got closer, I could see they had black crosses on them,’ he says. Not yet willing to exchange his liberty for survival, he hugged the ground. Despite passing close by, the Germans failed to spot him.
By mid-afternoon, thirst was beginning to tell. ‘At this stage I would have taken a lift with the devil himself,’ Murray says, but that was not to prove necessary. Soon, a second plume of dust – this time from a single vehicle – approached, revealing itself, to Murray’s profound relief, as the friendly outline of a British Morris truck containing a British officer and his driver from the Northumberland Hussars. With no need to conceal himself, the sight of the bedraggled Murray ‘hitching’ beside a track in the middle of the desert must have seemed odd, but he affected nonchalance as best he could. The relief he felt in seeing the cans of water and food in the back was palpable. But when he enquired of his new escort about their whereabouts, the terribly proper major’s reply was, ‘Sorry, old chap, we’re lorst!’
‘These officers had come out from England the week before with no desert training and no desert equipment,’ Murray says, ‘so I pulled out the clock and told him I could use it as a compass. He had no idea that such a thing was possible and was very impressed.’ Murray was forthwith assigned the role of navigator and directed them back in the direction of – he hoped – the British lines.
After a cold night dining on water and bully beef and sleeping on the sand, the trio set off again the next day. ‘At about half past ten, through the shimmer of a mirage we saw a line of tents.’ Judging by his calculations, Murray assumed them to be British, but in the moving war of the desert, which at that time was not going well for his own side, things could change rapidly. An RAF Lysander then touched down in front of them, assuaging their fears. ‘We’d stumbled right into the 8th Army Advanced Field Headquarters,’ he says, still with a note of amazement.
The next day, Murray again hitchhiked back to his aerodrome from where he’d taken off two days previously. ‘When I got back to my tent, there was nothing in it,’ he says. Having last been seen spiralling helplessly towards the ground, he’d been assumed to have ‘gone for a Burton’s’ (slang for being killed in action) and was posted ‘missing believed killed’. Thus, in accordance with fighter-pilot tradition, his paltry personal effects had been divided among his remaining comrades. ‘I had to go around with a revolver and get it all back,’ he says. ‘Their attitude was when you’re dead, you’re supposed to stay dead! Well, I wasn’t prepared to stay dead.’
Despite his unexpected reappearance, Murray’s time with 250 Squadron was not to last – a falling-out with the CO after colliding with his boss’s aircraft in a landing accident in the middle of a dust storm saw him, probably unfairly, transferred away. But his flying and his war were far from over. After a year or so being ‘a bit of a dogsbody’, flying training and meteorological exercises, Murray bumped into one of his old flight commanders in a nightclub in Alexandria who happened to be about to take over a Spitfire squadron. ‘I’d always wanted to fly a Spitfire and I asked how I applied.’
‘You just have,’ said his friend. ‘And I’d love to have you.’
So it was another RAF squadron, 80, Murray now joined and with whom he remained for the rest of the war. In Italy, then later over Germany, he flew armed reconnaissance patrols, attacking trains, road transport and V-2 rocket sites as the German Reich disintegrated. From the Spitfire, he graduated to the mighty Hawker Tempest, a truly formidable aircraft for which superlatives abound, one of the greatest piston-engine fighter aircraft ever built.
Murray’s was a long and wide-ranging war. ‘In five years I had fifty-three addresses in ten different countries and flew fifteen different types of aircraft.’ At the end of it, however, he was nowhere near Europe. Having begun so early, he had been given a passage home, turning down a job at Hawker as a test pilot. Murray was ready to come back to the family farm. On the ship the captain announced, ‘The war is over. We have permission to splice the mainbrace!’
‘We got a tot of whisky,’ says Murray, ‘but realised there were a lot of teetotallers on board, so we got their ration too!’
His treatment on his return, however, somewhat soured his taste for the air force. ‘The old permanents who hadn’t flown thought the real war had been fought back here in the Pacific, and let us know it,’ he says. ‘I told people I’d been hearing about the war here, but I didn’t really know much about it. It hadn’t started when I left and it was all over when I got back.’
I ask him if he always felt he’d get through.
‘Buggered if I know. When you’re young you feel invulnerable. I immersed myself in work and public affairs, joined things, got on the local council. I think that’s why I didn’t really have any great difficulty readjusting.’
Murray stayed on his farm for another thirty years, farming wool and beef. He tells amusing stories about using gelignite to blow up dams and trees stumps and such things. Something of the larrikin remained in him then, and still does today. Not a man prone to introspection, I sense it was his time on the land that made his transition back to normal life a relatively smooth one.
‘Nobody was interested in what we did back then,’ he tells me. ‘It’s only now that fighter pilots like me are becoming an endangered species, that people like you are interested.’ He’s certainly right about that.
Fighter pilot Murray Adams with the goatskin log book cover he had made in the desert where he flew Tomahawks with 250 Squadron. He was shot down, but walked out of the desert to fly and fight again. (Picture courtesy of Murray Adams)
GEORGE CLISSOLD
Role: Fighter pilot
Aircraft: Hawker Typhoon
Posting: 245 Squadron, RAF
It’s the most harrowing thing I’ve ever been through. It’s hard to believe it happened, sometimes – but it happened.
George, from Kempsey on the northern New South Wales coast, had already had his fair share of drama before he signed up. One afternoon, age sixteen, he and a cousin decided to swim across the local Macleay River.
Upon reaching the far bank, George suddenly noticed he was alone. Dashing back, he found his cousin, unconscious and ‘quite blue’, entangled in the weeds on the edge of the riverbank just below the water. He hauled him to safety, quickly raised the alarm with a local farmer, and the boy was tended by an ambulance but remained in a coma for two or three days. ‘There was some talk of awarding me a bravery award,’ he says, ‘but nothing came of it. News didn’t travel very far in country towns in those days.’
When war came, George, with characteristic civic-mindedness, didn’t want to join the air force at all. It was in the ranks of the New South Wales Mounted Police that he saw his future. ‘I’d studied typing and accountancy and shorthand in order to join them,’ he says, ‘but it turned out I wasn’t heavy enough!’ The Mounties back then, it seems, needed men with brawn as well as brain.
But if the Mounties were out, the clean-cut image of the air force seemed to be the next best thing for a boy growing up in a strict teetotal family in 1942. So, a few days after turning eighteen, George put his name down at an RAAF recruiting office in Woolloomooloo in Sydney. ‘My father was actually a senior Rechabite,’ he tells me. George was, for a while, a ‘junior Rechabite’ himself, not touching a drop until he was overseas living the life of a fighter pilot. ‘At which point,’ he says, ‘well, let’s just say I lost the ability to be a non-drinker.’
George doesn’t claim to have found flying easy, but was nevertheless selected for pilot training, and earned his wings at No. 5 Service Flying Training School at Uranquinty, near Wagga Wagga, in October 1942. His unusually long sea passage took him through the Panama Canal to Liverpool. Having survived the journey living mainly on cheese on toast with Worcestershire sauce, his first priority was to make a beeline for the nearest decent restaurant. Choosing the unfamiliar-sounding ‘Welsh rarebit’ from the menu, George has never quite lived down the dismay of being handed, yet again, cheese on toast. ‘I was expecting a nice big piece of rabbit,’ he says.
After a long period spent being paid to do little more than go on leave and tow the occasional drogue in a Lysander, George was finally sent to the first of many Operational Training Units around the country. Learning to fly Spitfires and Hurricanes and entertaining the local girls, he was having the time of his life. The war, however, was getting closer.
‘We started training on low-level flying,’ he tells me. ‘And low means low.’ When training around the Salisbury area, George was instructed to fly no higher than the top of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. ‘You can imagine,’ he tells me, ‘we were flying all over these places where the girls of the Land Army were working. People would scatter, horses would bolt, things like that.’
While performing aerodrome circuits in Leicester one morning, he’d heard that the D-Day invasion armada had set sail, and decided, completely against the rules, to break away and go and take a look over the English Channel. ‘The sea was completely white with the wakes of thousands and thousands of ships,’ he says. ‘It’s a sight I’ll never forget.’ Finally, in October 1944, after what he considers the ‘curse’ of excessive training, George was taken in an Avro Anson to Brussels, then to a recently reclaimed German airfield called Volkel, near the Philips factory close to Eindhoven, Holland, to join the fully operational No. 245 Squadron, 11 Group, RAF. Here, he would be flying the formidable Hawker Typhoon ground-attack fighter. After a surfeit of training, George was finally, suddenly, in the war.
Glancing at his logbook, I can see George’s operational tour began with extraordinary intensity. No. 245 had been attached to the 2nd Tactical Air Force (2TAF) since the beginning of the previous year, and was moved onto the Continent to begin army cooperation sorties on 27 June, just three weeks after D-Day. Its losses, as in all the Typhoon squadrons during the Battle of Normandy, were heavy. Six pilots had been killed in August alone. By the time George began flying with them in October, they were already a battle-hardened mob, flying daily sorties of thirty to forty minutes in duration, and usually several in a day.
‘We’d attack everything,’ George tells me. ‘Rocket launching sites, trains, tanks, factories, railway stations. One day we were told there was a German fuel train crossing just south of the Zuiderzee – it was quite a formidable target.’ The squadron found their train, a line of rolling stock laden with both fuel and oil, interspersed with protective gun and flak wagons. ‘We went in as low as we could and clobbered it,’ he says. The fire was so enormous that the smoke was still visible on the ground well after the 245 pilots had landed back at their base at Volkel, over 40 miles away. ‘A few hours later in the mess, we were all thrilled to hear the BBC broadcast announcing the attack,’ says George. ‘It was a lesson in how fast information can travel.’
George found the mighty Typhoon, with its gargantuan Sabre engine, a ‘wonderful, sturdy’ aeroplane to fly, although at times unforgiving. Having been told never to get it into a spin – as it was nearly impossible to recover – he found himself one day as the number two to his flight commander on a reconnaissance trip. ‘We were gaining height and flying up through cloud,’ he says. ‘I think I was too close to his wingtip because he stalled, went into a spin, and I followed.’ The next seconds of George’s life are something of a blur, and he says he still doesn’t know how, but he managed to regain control of the aircraft and land, where the ground crew said he was ‘as white as a ghost. I climbed down from the cockpit and was immediately sick on the ground.’
Earlier trials of the Typhoon had resulted in serious structural failures, such as tails falling off in dives, and a recurring issue of exhaust fumes leaking into the cockpit (hence Typhoon pilots would usually always be on oxygen, even at low levels), but by the time George began operating, the Typhoon had been refined into a robust ground-attack aircraft, particularly when married with the weapon for which it would become famous, and which, in a way, marked the air war in Normandy, the rocket-fired projectile.
‘From the time you start going down for an attack,’ George tells me, ‘you fire your 20-millimetre cannons on your wings because they’re shooting back up at you. Then when you’re close enough, you fire off your rockets via a switch on the wheel. You can select to fire all eight at once, but really you never let more than two go at a time.’ The rocket was the most elementary of weapons, a simple 60-pound warhead attached to a pipe filled with cordite and a fin for basic stabilisation. They could not be steered, so needed to be aimed with the entire aircraft, lined up against a small illuminated target ring in the pilot’s windshield, and fired off. ‘When they left the aircraft, it was with a whoosh,’ says George. A terrible trap, particularly for new pilots, he tells me, was not pulling away fast enough and being caught by your own explosion. ‘I’m shuddering myself when I think of these things, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes,’ he says. George tells me the pilots talked about it constantly on the base, impressing upon everyone the need to fire off the rockets and bank away quickly. ‘The idea was to let them go at about 1500 feet, and then get away,’ he says, ‘but still some of them made the mistake of following the rockets in. I’ve seen so many of my mates following too closely and blowing themselves up.’
One clear afternoon in early 1945, George was part of a flight of six flying at around 400 miles per hour, when from behind, an aircraft unlike anything he’d ever seen flashed by, leaving them stunned in its wake. ‘This thing went by close,’ he says, ‘it just shot past us with a pwisshh!’ It was his first sight of the world’s first proper jet aircraft, the Messerschmitt Me 262. ‘I think it was on a reconnaissance trip because it didn’t fire at us,’ he says. ‘All us pilots agreed that if it’d been armed, we could have all been shot down. That’s when I realised how far behind the Germans we were.’
After an idyllic-sounding ten days’ leave, where George was flown to Lyon, taken by glass-roofed bus to Chamonix in the French Alps, put up in a five-star hotel and given skiing lessons – all on the RAF’s tab – it was time to return to the war, and by far the most dramatic chap
ter of his flying career.
The day of 24 March 1945 was a momentous one in Western Europe. After four and a half years of war, the Allied armies were on the doorstep of Germany itself. All that remained to begin the endgame was to cross the natural barrier of the River Rhine and plunge into the heart of the Reich. Operation Varsity was the largest one-day airborne operation in history, with 15 000 paratroopers and thousands of aircraft involved in getting them across the wide river. It was launched in conjunction with the amphibious Operation Plunder. This so excited Churchill that he commandeered a river launch and sailed across, spending half an hour on the German side of the river before his nervous minders insisted he return. It was also the day George Clissold got himself shot down.
‘I’d been flying at low level attacking half-tracks and tanks on the far side of the river,’ he says. ‘But instead of me shooting them down, they shot me!’ He believes it was anti-aircraft fire, but concedes it could even have been small arms. All George knew was a jolt before his engine started running rough, then sudden pain, then smoke and fire beginning to pour into the cockpit. The voice of Cookie, a South African pilot flying alongside, could be perceived, shouting in his ears over the radio telephone, ‘Cliss! Get out, Cliss! Get out, get out!’
Heroes of the Skies Page 13
