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Heroes of the Skies

Page 16

by Michael Veitch


  After what sounds like the time of his life sailing to America, then being paid to do nothing in Boston for three months save visit jazz clubs (even on one occasion meeting Louis Armstrong) and wait for a ship, Joe eventually sailed as part of a fifty-vessel convoy on the Australian cargo vessel Esperance Bay. On his second night out, they were attacked by U-boats and diverted to the north of Iceland, in winter, taking a full two weeks to arrive in wartime Britain.

  Soon after his arrival, Joe received another reminder that what he was on was no holiday. In May 1943, while waiting along with many other young Australian airmen to receive their postings at the RAAF’s Personnel Dispatch and Receiving Centre in Bournemouth, Joe and a couple of mates decided one sunny Sunday morning to pass a couple of hours chatting on canvas deckchairs overlooking the sea in what was, before the war, one of England’s most popular seaside resort towns. ‘Let’s have a beer before we go up to the mess for lunch,’ said one of the young airmen. Joe still doesn’t know why, but his reply was, ‘No, I’ll go straight on up. I’ll see you there,’ and his two friends headed off towards the Central Hotel. ‘A few minutes later,’ says Joe, ‘there was a direct hit on that hotel and they were both killed.’

  On this May morning, possibly the blackest in Bourne­mouth’s history, twenty-six Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter-bombers had taken off from their bases around Caen, just a few minutes away across the Channel, and hit the town in a sudden raid which lasted barely a minute, but which killed 131 people, including the friends Joe had just been sitting with, and nine other Australian airmen. Bombs were dropped over the centre of the town, hitting hotels, garages, children’s hospitals and churches, strewing bodies and body parts everywhere, and just for good measure, the fighters decided to strafe the town’s Pleasure Gardens, killing more civilians, on the way home. It’s been speculated that this lightning attack, Bournemouth’s last for the war, was in retaliation for the Dambuster raid of a few weeks previously, but in any event, the Germans’ logic was simple and brutal: kill as many Commonwealth airmen as possible on the ground before they can get into the air.

  ‘That night,’ says Joe, ‘I was helping blokes pull rubble out of the hotel to find my mates, but I never did. That was my first experience of losing someone in wartime.’

  Finally, the forty or so pilots in Joe’s course received their postings, and with his twin-engine training, he prepared to proceed to his Operational Training Unit to fly Wellingtons. However, when the postings appeared, Joe’s name was conspicuously absent, and his CO called him aside and explained why. The problem wasn’t Joe’s flying, it seemed, but his height. The RAF had apparently decided that it was too difficult for pilots of ‘a certain stature’ to hold the rudder bar of a twin-engine aeroplane flying on one motor. Joe was taken aback, but was then made an offer. ‘You can have day fighters, night fighters, army cooperation, or you can return to Australia,’ said his boss.

  Joe didn’t have to think too hard. ‘Well, I’ve come this far, I’m not going back home now. Day fighters.’

  In a short time, Joe found himself converting to single-engine Miles Masters, before being posted to an Operational Training Unit in the Middle East to train on the somewhat rickety Battle of Britain veteran Spitfire Mark Is at a spot in the sand near Cairo named Abu Sueir. In June 1944 he moved to the Australian No. 451 Squadron in Corsica. When he arrived, however, the mood was sombre. The very night before, he learned, twenty-five Junkers Ju 88s had struck with fragmentation bombs, damaging all but two of the squadron’s aircraft and killing eight people, including two pilots, who had pitched tents too close to the runway under attack. It turned out Joe even knew the father of one of the pilots, Barney Sneddon. ‘He had a shop around the corner from me in Clovelly,’ he says. ‘I used to go in there to buy cigarettes. I remember him telling me he had a son in the air force. But he was killed the night before I arrived and I never got to meet him.’ The CO of the squadron at the time was considered partly responsible for the loss of life, due to his placement of the tents, and replaced.

  In a matter of days, Joe’s name appeared on the ‘gaggle board’, and he was ‘on’. ‘I’ll always remember my first operation,’ he tells me, and for good reason. Flying from their base in Poretta, Corsica, Joe was equipped with long-range drop-tanks to reach his operating area in northern Italy, and was told they would provide him with exactly one hour of fuel, at which point he was to drop them and switch onto his main tank. Flying as number two to the squadron wing commander, Joe flew north over Italy, keeping a careful eye on his watch, counting off the minutes, fifty-four . . . fifty-five . . . fifty-six . . .

  ‘Suddenly, at fifty-seven,’ he tells me, ‘the motor stopped, and I’m dropping out of formation, going down with a windmilling propeller, thinking, Am I going to get out or try and land?’ At 10 000 feet, he managed to switch over to the main tank and start the engine.

  When he rejoined the formation, the wing commander used his call sign. ‘Where’ve you been, Ab-duck 2?’

  ‘I, er, ran out of gas, sir,’ was all that Joe could reply. The response was nothing but a cold silence, and Joe vowed thereafter to always give himself a five-minute buffer for switching tanks.

  Joe’s journey to operational flying had been a long, and at times delayed, one, but he seemed to make up for lost time, flying escort and strafing missions against the retreating Germans in Italy on a daily basis. ‘I did fifty-something trips in a year and a half,’ he says, and his logbook tells the story.

  On one occasion his radio telephone (R/T) was set to the same frequency as the formation of American Liberators he was escorting below. After bombing, Joe saw one of the aircraft fall from the sky in flames. ‘Goddamn,’ said an American voice over the R/T, ‘there goes my roommate.’ At a designated point, Joe, with the squadron, turned and crossed the coast to head home, thinking he’d completed his trip.

  ‘Follow me, Ab-duck 2,’ came the wing commander’s voice over the air, ‘there are some ships in the harbour down there, we’ll go and see what we can do,’ and he peeled over into a dive from 10 000 feet. Following him down, Joe saw his target, a freighter laden with supplies for the Germans. ‘I knew I couldn’t sink them, so I selected both my cannon and machine guns and fired, just to make a mess of them,’ he says. He’s not sure what he hit but remembers the mast of a ship flying past, level with his head. ‘That’s how low I was. But I was happy. I’d fired my guns for the first time.’

  And he would get to fire them a good deal more, marking the parameters of Hitler’s shrinking empire as it retreated across southern Europe. Flying ground-hugging strafing missions became Joe’s speciality, and at those heights, there was very little he could not see from the cockpit of his Spitfire IX. ‘Any movement on the ground, I would attack,’ he says. Several instances stand out in his memory, such as once spotting a truck laden with German soldiers. As he dived towards it, he noticed all on board scrambling out and taking cover in a ditch by the side of the road. ‘All except one,’ he tells me. ‘This one man got right down beside the truck and as I came down, started firing at me. I think I blew him away because I had cannon and machine guns and he was right in the line of fire, but I thought, What guts he had to do that!’

  On the Aegean side of the European coast, Joe once came across a large Allied POW camp filled with recently surrendered German soldiers. ‘There were about 500 of them, all at the beach, standing in the water,’ he says. ‘It was my first sight of German soldiers so I got right down low to the water and flew right over the top of them. Every one of them dived under the water as I flew along, one after the other, all the way along.’ He seems to have enjoyed that one.

  For two whole days in August, Joe witnessed what he describes as ‘the largest armada I have ever seen’, as the assembled Allied invasion fleet made its way from North Africa to begin Operation Anvil, the amphibious assault on southern France, a vast but now little-known military operation quickly dubbed by the soldiers ‘the Champagne Campaign’.

 
; Following the Axis retreat, Joe, with 451 Squadron, moved to near Toulon in southern France, where, when not flying off for more strafing trips, he was in charge of taking a jeep and procuring alcohol for the squadron. On one occasion, he decided to duck over to briefly join the party in nearby Marseilles on the afternoon of its liberation. Amid the shouts of ‘Americain!’ (to which Joe cheerfully nodded and waved), he witnessed the sight of girls who had taken German boyfriends being spat on and marched down the middle of the street to have their heads humiliatingly shaved in public.

  In September 1944, the squadron was on the move once again, this time all the way back to England, where, from their new base at Matlaske in Norfolk, they were issued with brand-new Spitfire XVIs to specialise in dive-bombing German flying bomb and rocket sites.

  ‘We were the only people ever to see a V-2 rocket in flight,’ he tells me. This remarkable sight was witnessed on one of his regular 45-minute trips across from Norfolk to the coast of Holland, sometimes flying several missions a day. ‘I was one of six aircraft, and as we approached the coast, up comes a rocket, right in front of us,’ he says. ‘We were too far away to fire at it, but the slipstream threw us all over the place. I can still see it,’ he adds, pausing. ‘The sun glinting on it as it went past us. I can never forget it.’ His logbook entry for 23 March 1945 records the details, penned on the day: ‘First trip with 1000-pound bombs. Squadron bombed launching site which was well plastered then strafed same. Landed in Belgium. On way saw rocket which threw kite around and returned to bomb and strafe target nearby.’

  With a single 500-pound bomb carried under the fuselage, and two 250s beneath the wings, Joe would descend on his target from near 90-degree angles, and would need to be very, very careful. ‘The “g-effect” would make you pass out,’ he says. ‘If you’d had a good sleep, it’d be only momentarily, but if you’d been drinking the night before, you’d stay out for longer.’ One V-2 launching site had been situated by the Germans in the grandstand of a racecourse in The Hague. ‘They told us it was more effective to bomb the railway line leading to it,’ he says. ‘We’d bomb it one day, and the next it’d been repaired and we’d have to come back and do it again.’

  At war’s end, Joe could have expected the squadron to be disbanded and him sent home, but instead 451 found itself earmarked for three months to be part of the occupation forces in Germany, stationed first at Wunstorf near Hanover, and later close to Berlin. ‘We were given lectures in how to behave as conquerors,’ he tells me. ‘“If you’re walking down the road, do not step aside for a German.” That’s the sort of stuff I had to listen to!’

  Taking a tour of some of the cities destroyed by years of bombing, Joe would drive through entire cities that were little more than the sides of buildings. ‘There was a strict policy of “no fraternisation” but it only lasted six months,’ he says. A rampant black market evolved whereby American cigarettes became the only real currency. ‘You could buy anything with them,’ he says. ‘I know people who bought diamonds with Lucky Strike cigarettes.’

  I ask did he himself ever mix with any of the vanquished enemy?

  ‘No, and I didn’t want to,’ he says, with a touch of bitterness that somehow surprises me. Looking back, however, he ranks his time as a Spitfire pilot as the unquestioned highlight of his life, although he qualifies it by telling me of the difficulty of his homecoming.

  Readjusting was, he says, ‘Terribly hard, terribly hard. I’d been twenty-one when I left and was twenty-five when I returned, and I’d lost all my friendships.’ His tremors were so bad, he couldn’t pick up a cup. ‘I’d been flying every day and drinking at night. When I got home, it all caught up with me.’ Friends advised him to see a psychiatrist. ‘I don’t know that he did anything,’ he says, ‘but he did advise me to change jobs.’ So, Joe left the wool industry for which he’d trained so hard, and began what was to become a very successful career in finance and insurance. ‘No-one was interested in what we’d done after the war and I didn’t want to talk about it,’ he says. ‘But now it comes back to me, and often, such as when I talk about it to people like you. These days, suddenly, people are interested.’

  As I’m leaving his lovely home, he apologises – unnecessarily – for some of the noise and the comings and goings of people during our talk, and explains that this coming weekend big plans are afoot with the celebration of his sixtieth wedding anniversary. Then he tells me something I’m certain he hadn’t intended.

  ‘After the war, I went to the concentration camp at Belsen,’ he says softly. ‘I’m Jewish, you see.’ His voice becomes almost inaudible as he continues, as if what he witnessed of this ghastly chapter of humanity doesn’t bear articulation. ‘I was fumigated when I went in, and then when I went out. They’d burned the huts, all except one, but the ovens were still there. They’d forced the inhabitants of the local town to come in and see it, then bury all the bodies. I remember a huge pile of shoes, much higher than this ceiling. Just shoes. They didn’t know what to do with them. But every shoe was a person. It was an absolutely searing experience. That’s why I didn’t want to fraternise with the Germans after the war.’

  STUART ‘SNOW’ DAVIS

  Role: Fighter pilot

  Aircraft: P-51 Mustang

  Posting: 122 Squadron, RAF

  You could never forget what we saw there.

  A wise man once said that you can tell the best year of a man’s life by his haircut. And by that measure, Stuart ‘Snow’ Davis’s would have been somewhere around 1943. Over the course of a long series of chats on his balcony overlooking Port Macquarie, during which much beer is consumed, jokes old and new shared, and a great many memories exhumed, I can never quite take my eyes off the man’s magnificent coiffure. His white but full head of hair, which he tells me has been the same since childhood, earning him his life-long moniker ‘Snow’, is, even in his nineties, flawlessly groomed. Combed into a series of perfect waves, it’s more like a rooster’s coxcomb or lion’s mane than just a simple head of hair. But even more impressive than its meticulous styling is the way it speaks of a very particular moment in time, when handsome young men everywhere wore their hair just so. If you knew nothing else about the man, his hair, loud and clear, tells you, ‘This man was a fighter pilot.’

  ‘Luck, just luck, time and time again, that’s what got me through,’ is how Stuart describes not only his tour in Europe flying Mustangs with an RAF squadron, but also the passage of a long and busy life. Luck, I would certainly agree, but add to that a great deal of charm and, even today, a little bravado. Stuart fits the bill for the archetypal Australian fighter pilot like few I have met: confident, charming, a killer with the ladies, showing a healthy disrespect for authority, and that dash of devil-may-care larrikinism that made them irresistible on the ground and formidable in the air.

  Stuart joined the air force for one reason only, to become a single-engine fighter pilot, and an officer at that. The notion that his lofty ambitions might not have been met exactly as he foresaw them simply never entered his head, and he was not disappointed. ‘There was just no way I could have gone onto multi-engine planes,’ he tells me. ‘I was just too quick, too sudden. I’ve always been like that,’ he adds. ‘If I decide to do something, I do it immediately and go for it.’

  I mention that a former bomber pilot who, in training, was devastated at being rejected for fighters was told by his instructor, ‘The trouble is, you think before you act. And a fighter pilot who thinks before he acts is a dead fighter pilot.’

  Stuart nearly jumps out of his seat in agreement. ‘Yes, that’s exactly it!’ he exclaims. ‘It was all just instinct.’

  However, as dashing a former knight of the air as he is, Stuart has no interest in sugar-coating war’s reality. ‘When I came out, all I wanted to do was forget about it,’ he says. ‘All the blokes I knew who were in the air force wanted to forget about it. I didn’t even start to talk about it until the late 1980s.’ Now, though, Stuart is happy to make up for los
t time, and he astounds me with a voluminous memory that has recorded the tiniest details: dates, place names, pilots he met but once, and such minutiae as the cost of renting a wireless from the Radio Rentals company in Sydney in 1941. ‘Ten shillings and six a week,’ he announces proudly.

  Not so confident, however, was the CO of Stuart’s first posting, 231 Squadron on England’s south coast, in early 1944. ‘I was waiting outside the CO’s office to go in and see him,’ Stuart recalls. ‘The adjutant went in to tell him I’d arrived. All I heard through the open door of his office was, “Not another bloody colonial! And an Australian at that!”’

  Standing before the officer, Stuart gave as good as he got. ‘Well, I didn’t ask to come here, sir.’ It was a bad start to a relationship that failed to improve, and would typify Stuart’s attitude to the obstinacy of British military authority, infuriating many a senior officer.

  Initially, instead of being a fighter pilot, Stuart would have to sit it out, literally, at 30 000 feet, flying photo reconnaissance missions in a Spitfire over France, Germany and Holland. ‘I bloody hated it,’ he tells me. ‘Flying all by yourself, for five hours at a stretch – no guns, no armour, and no heating.’ Even with three pairs of socks, two pairs of trousers and three sets of gloves, Stuart still needed to constantly bang his hands together to prevent them from freezing. ‘There was heating for the cameras,’ he tells me, ‘but none for the pilots!’

  And then there was his CO. ‘“Turn-back Tommy”, we called him,’ he says. ‘He was notorious for returning early from missions claiming there was something wrong with his aeroplane. I flew that aircraft a couple of times and I can tell you there was nothing wrong with it.’

 

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