Remarkably, John tells me that on board his ship were a few ‘bright young Intelligence boys from Eton or somewhere’, who spoke fluent Japanese. Part of their job was to tune in to the frequencies of the Japanese radio. ‘They could hear the Jap pilots talking to their airfields,’ he says. The third kill that day was a twin-engine ‘Dinah’. According to the Intelligence officers, the last thing the pilot said was, ‘enemy fleet sighted, stand-by’, before another flight from John’s ship shot it into the water. ‘Three in one day was pretty good,’ he says.
In an attack on Port Blair in the Andaman Islands, he remembers the anti-aircraft fire as ‘vicious’. ‘You’d dive into it and kid yourself that by standing on the rudder and “skidding” from side to side, you were avoiding it,’ he says. ‘But more often than not it just made it more likely to hit you.’ Overflying a Japanese prison, John remembers, almost surreally, seeing people on the roof who had made out the word ‘welcome’ in stones. ‘I remember seeing that quite clearly,’ he says. Two Japanese ships which were loading troops to take back home, he says, were sunk.
In June, John took part in Operation Balsam, a series of naval and air strikes on Japanese forces on the island of Sumatra, in preparation for an eventual invasion. Three squadrons from three separate carriers were each allotted a Japanese airfield to attack, with 804 being given a large one in the town of Medan. Having proved himself as a superior strafing pilot both in training and combat, John’s task was to deliver his bombs on the airstrip, then attack a group of four Oscar fighters parked around the control tower.
Reconnaissance had shown there were also aircraft hidden in nearby jungle, as well as significant fixed anti-aircraft defences, which were to be tackled by a Grumman Avenger squadron. ‘We dropped our bombs right on the runway,’ John says. ‘It was beautiful bombing, but of course the next day the Japs could just take off from the grass. That’s why we had to hit the aircraft.’ He then lined up the Oscars and set them ablaze.
‘I had to do a particular circuit that took me below the rooftops,’ he says. Flying right down the main street of Medan, he knew the Japanese small calibre anti-aircraft fire was deadly accurate. ‘You had to be that low, otherwise the Japs would shoot your head off,’ he says. John made three runs and was hit on each of them. ‘They had a gun positioned right at one of the street intersections and it opened up on me as I flew past.’ He could hear the strikes of the armour-piercing bullets, one even hitting his petrol tank, at which point he had cause to thank the inventor of the self-sealing tank. He tells me he’s since wondered if the Japanese hadn’t planned the whole thing. ‘They’d been attacked there before, and I’ve often thought if those Oscars out in the open like that weren’t dummies,’ he says. ‘The way they had their guns ready for us right at the cross street, makes you think they knew exactly what we were going to do.’
The CO of another squadron, 808, flying with them that day was not so fortunate. ‘He’d come along for experience and was shot down,’ says John. ‘We thought he’d been killed but we later found out he was kept alive and beheaded on VJ Day.’
Next was Operation Livery in July 1945, a series of naval air strikes off the future Thai resort island of Phuket. John set off to attack a railway junction at a place called Thung Song. Soon after leaving the ship and forming up, however, he discovered a serious fault with his aircraft. ‘My number two called me up and when I went to answer him, I received an electric shock!’ he says. An electrical short meant that every time he pressed the transmit button on the control column, not only did it not function, but he was hit with voltage. ‘I didn’t like that much,’ John says. His radio useless, John decided nevertheless to carry on. But he was far from happy.
Swooping down over the target, John hit the bomb-release button on the stick, but his number two flying alongside began making urgent hand gestures towards the underside of John’s plane. He realised then the fault had also prevented his two 500-pound bombs from parting company with his aircraft and they were still hung up on their racks. ‘I had to fly back to the ship with them still there,’ he says. A tense half-hour was spent while the ship’s officers debated whether John should ditch or attempt to land. Eventually, it being decided that he was, after all, a good pilot, he was told to come in. As if a deck landing wasn’t dangerous enough, doing so with bombs attached was an emergency. ‘As I came in to land,’ he says, ‘the only people I could see were the batsman guiding me in and one solitary face on the bridge. Everyone else had taken shelter!’
On 26 July, as the final preparations for the atomic bomb attacks which would end the war on Japan were underway, the battle nevertheless still raged in the Indian Ocean. John remembers it vividly. By this stage, the primary Japanese weapon against Allied ships was the Kamikaze suicide attack, and every vessel in the area was jumpy.
‘I was sent up to investigate radar “echoes” of what they thought could have been Kamikaze aircraft,’ he says. After searching the skies for two hours with his number two, he had found nothing but open sky and was recalled. Returning to the fleet, it appears that the great battleship HMS Nelson had in fact spotted two approaching Kamikazes but had failed to let anyone know, least of all John. Up above, circling the fleet with his own ship directly beneath him, John noticed a large cloud over to his right and eyed it with suspicion. Deciding to inspect the far side of it, he flew into it and emerged right beside two Japanese Kamikaze aircraft preparing to dive onto the ships below. Instantly, a storm of anti-aircraft fire erupted around him, and frantic orders came to him over the radio from the great ship below. ‘Get out of it, Red One! Circle! Circle!’ He didn’t need to be told twice and quickly pulled away.
‘I came out of that cloud and was virtually formating with two Japanese aircraft!’ he says. ‘But I didn’t actually see much of it. I was too busy trying to work out what was going on.’ He barely managed to avoid being destroyed by his own ship’s gunfire, but one of the Kamikazes then dived towards the Ameer. Extraordinarily, it was shot down with a single round from a Bofors gun, fired by an officer, he says. The other Kamikaze chose a nearby minesweeper and sunk it with heavy loss of life. John didn’t know it at the time, but it was the final day of operations in the Indian Ocean and the end of his brief but intense war. A few weeks later, he spent the night of VJ Day back in Trincomalee, where fireworks of a strictly friendly nature were enjoyed. Again, he has the photo to prove it.
On the way home, John watched with sadness as the Hellcats which had served himself and his fellow pilots so well were, under the terms of the Lend-Lease agreement, crated up and tossed into the sea.
Months later, John walked back into his office in Cambridge, enquiring after his former job. ‘I’d advise you not to come back,’ were the words of his old inspector. A flood of returning and better qualified men, it seemed, had beaten him to it. It was, however, a blessing in disguise. John once again answered an ad in the paper, this time for Shell Oil, and headed out to Trinidad to begin a new career in the oil industry. ‘I’d have found life very difficult if I’d just gone back to work in Cambridge,’ he says. The hard work and hard play of the oil game made his return to peacetime relatively easy. Eventually, he would spend a great deal of time back in the Far East, not far from some of the places he came to know from the cockpit of his Hellcat in 1945.
‘The only thing I was scared of was being captured,’ he says, echoing the sentiments of many of the men I have spoken to who flew against the Japanese. ‘We well knew what they would do to you if they caught you. And they wondered why we drank!’ John says he always carried a loaded pistol and six rounds with him on every flight. ‘Five for them and one for me. I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do that, but I would never have wanted to be captured.’
John Allen in front of his Fleet Air Arm Hellcat. (Picture courtesy of John Allen)
An 890 Squadron Fleet Air Arm Wildcat pilot fails to lower his arrestor hook and comes to grief on the deck of the escort carrier HMS Atheling in the India
n Ocean, 1945. The pilot, amazingly, walked away. (Picture courtesy of John Allen)
804 Squadron Hellcats in formation over the Indian Ocean. John Allen is closest to the camera. (Picture above and below courtesy of John Allen)
804 Squadron Hellcats pass close to HMS Ameer before forming up over the Indian Ocean, 1945. (Picture courtesy of John Allen)
LAURIE LARMER
Role: Pilot
Aircraft: Handley Page Halifax
Posting: 51 Squadron, RAF
It sent a shudder through the aircraft, and it sent a shudder through me.
As it happens, Laurie and I have quite a bit in common. It turns out he and I spent much of our childhood across the road from each other. The son of a publican, Laurie grew up in a suburban Melbourne hotel opposite a school I myself attended as a youngster. Admittedly, it was forty years later, but who’s counting? And besides, right from the get-go, Laurie and I seem to speak the same language. For some reason, I’ve always wanted to know the price of a pot of beer back in the 1930s. ‘Sixpence,’ he tells me straight up. ‘And a bottle was a shilling. I can remember the day they raised the price a halfpenny. Dad couldn’t cope.’
It was sitting in a chair outside the pub’s ladies’ lounge that Laurie, a sixteen-year-old, heard his country go to war, as Prime Minister Menzies’ sombre tones drawled out the famous words ‘. . . and as a result, Australia is also at war’.
‘Pretty big stuff,’ says Laurie. And he was right. Dreading the prospect of being drafted into the army, Laurie beat them to it by putting his name down for the RAAF. He still has no idea why, but after a couple of months at No. 1 Initial Training School at Somers in Victoria, his name was simply read out from a list. ‘The following will train as pilots . . .’ So without even requesting it, a pilot was what Laurie would be.
In England, at his crewing-up in a large hangar in Lichfield, Laurie stood around somewhat vacantly, not seeming to know any of the milling mass of airmen from which he was expected to select a six-man bomber crew. Then a ‘funny little fella’ approached him.
‘You seem like a decent sort of a bloke,’ he said. ‘I’ll be your bomb aimer.’ Bill Hudson was a used-car salesman from Sydney, and seemed to know how to close a deal. ‘Now, I know this great navigator,’ he said, and promptly went and fetched him. ‘Just a sec, we haven’t got any gunners,’ he continued. ‘Wait here . . .’ and in this manner proceeded to select the entire crew. Laurie didn’t have to do a thing.
‘It turned out that they were all pretty good too,’ he says.
Laurie’s tour began in the last few months of the war, and he is the only pilot I have met who flew the Handley Page Halifax, a great aircraft whose legacy has remained somewhat overshadowed by its more famous sibling, the Lancaster. Nevertheless, the ‘Halibag’ was a significant part of Bomber Command’s arsenal in the long and bloody air offensive against Germany.
Air Chief Marshal Harris hated the Halifax. In his view, its slightly smaller bomb-carrying capacity, particularly its inability to carry the 4000-pound ‘cookie’ blast bomb, rendered it a waste of time, and he gradually relegated them to less important commands and theatres. Nonetheless, 6000 Halifaxes – just a thousand fewer than the Lancaster – were built, and their crews swore by them. This is understandable, as the Halifax was generally regarded as more comfortable than the Lanc, as well as easier to get out of when in trouble.
In early 1945, Laurie and his crew were sent to Snaith in East Yorkshire, the only Australians flying with No. 51 Squadron, RAF. This well-established unit had been operating almost the entire war and had paid a high price in doing so. During an infamous attack on Nuremberg in March 1944, 51 lost almost the strength of an entire squadron, eight of its Halifaxes in a single night. Laurie and his crew’s arrival, in early 1945, was inauspicious. No welcome, no guided tour of the base or rundown of what they could expect, just an uninterested glance from his new flight commander, seated behind a desk. ‘Oh. Larmer,’ he said tiredly. ‘You’re the new crew are you? Well, there’s nothing doing today. That is all,’ and dismissed him.
Likewise ignored by the rest of the squadron, Laurie’s crew nonetheless were listed on the battle order a few days later for their first trip, a daylight raid to Dortmund. ‘They gave us a meal of bacon and eggs, which I thought was a big deal. You couldn’t get that sort of tucker in England during the war,’ he says. After a minimal briefing, Laurie handed over all personal items for safekeeping and prepared for his first trip.
‘Bloody hell!’ he remembers saying to himself when seeing flak for the first time, knowing he was expected to fly into it. ‘Once you got into the target area, though, you were too busy to notice it.’
A new pilot was usually required to perform a so-called second dickie trip, accompanying an experienced skipper to get the feeling of just what he could expect on operations himself. The fact that Laurie was sent on the daylight trip to Dortmund beforehand was an exception to the rule. A few nights later, however, he found himself seated beside a veteran to witness night bombing for the first time. The raid itself was uneventful, the return to Snaith anything but.
As they were taxiing to dispersal amid other returning aircraft, Laurie heard a pilot over the radio announce, ‘U-Uncle, overshoot!’ and a Halifax, too high for a landing, came around again. The pilot of this aircraft was also taking along a newbie, but as they attempted their second approach, Laurie heard a tremendous explosion. ‘They crashed just off the runway,’ he says. ‘All of them were killed.’ The cause of the crash was not long in being pieced together. Without a co-pilot, RAF bombers relied on the bomb aimer to partially fill that role, particularly on landings and take-offs, when he would sit beside the pilot with his hands on the throttles, preventing their usual tendency to ‘creep’ back if not locked in place. On this occasion, however, it was the rookie seated next to the pilot, and bad communication saw the throttles left unchecked. The Halifax lost power on approach, stalled, hit the ground and killed them all. ‘That really shook everybody,’ says Laurie. ‘It was awful.’
The aftermath of this tragedy he found just as unnerving. ‘There was never a funeral, no lowered flags, and no discussion about it in the mess,’ he says. ‘Afterwards, I asked someone about it. They just looked at me and said, “Laurie, there was a war on.” That was just the way it was.’
Laurie’s crew commenced their ten-trip tour that included an attack on Wuppertal in the industrial Ruhr, a joint attack on Zweibrücken and Homberg near Frankfurt to interrupt German troops – and which also killed nearly 200 civilians sheltering in basements – a long trip to the south of Germany to deliver Bayreuth’s only air raid of the war, and on 18 April 1945, a visit to the German naval base of Heligoland in the North Sea. Laurie still has some of the post-raid photos of this trip, which show virtually nothing but a cratered, moon-like landscape. Another remarkable souvenir Laurie has hung onto for seventy years is his own maps for this trip, which rode all the way attached to his knee, the routes marked in still-vivid coloured lines of ink: green for the inbound leg, pink for the return. The target is clearly marked and Laurie’s notes and calculations in pencil are still visible in the margins. On this day, nearly a thousand aircraft attacked in twenty-minute waves to allow the smoke to clear for visibility. The only losses were three Halifaxes, and Laurie witnessed two of them.
‘One aircraft was directly below another,’ he says. ‘I watched it suddenly gain height and slam straight into the one above. The pilot or his gunners should have seen it, but they didn’t.’ From the awful tangle of falling aircraft, Laurie watched five parachutes emerge. Five survivors out of a combined crew of fourteen. ‘But they would have just come down in the North Sea,’ he says. ‘There was no-one there to rescue them. They would have frozen to death in ten minutes.’
Trip number five, flown on the night of 8 April, was a ‘diversionary raid’ to the northern city of Travemünde, and Laurie was expecting a quiet night. Overflying larger raids nearby, his rear gunner had a sup
erb view. ‘Hey, Skip, you oughta see the fires down there!’ he reported enthusiastically. Intercom chit-chat, however, was never encouraged.
‘Never mind about the fires, just keep a look out for fighters,’ Laurie rebuked him. Silence, then a minute or so later, Laurie’s blood ran cold as his gunner returned to the intercom. ‘Actually, Skip, I think there’s a fighter on our tail now.’
Suddenly, from the gloom, a ghostly grey twin-engine aircraft flashed past at close range. Laurie thinks it was the very fast and very deadly Heinkel 219 Uhu ‘Owl’. This highly advanced purpose-built German night fighter, one of the most sophisticated aeroplanes of the war, had in less than two years already accounted for a staggering number of British bombers in the blacked-out skies over Europe. The Owl was a hoodoo, secret and dreaded, said even to be capable of outclassing the otherwise invulnerable Mosquito. Some have suggested that had this machine been flown earlier, and in greater numbers, it may have had a significant impact on the RAF’s night-bombing campaign itself.
‘He went past us and then turned around and came in from the side,’ says Laurie. Without delay, he wrenched the Halifax into a sickeningly tight turn, straight into the path of the approaching fighter. Laurie knew that if the German was able to position himself for a side-on beam attack, he would rake the Halifax, stem to stern, with cannon and machine-gun fire. His only hope was to present him with the smallest possible front-on target, and ramp up the two aircrafts’ closing speed. ‘He fired off a couple of shots,’ he says. ‘I could see the tracer coming towards us – but he flew straight under us.’ The increased speed had the desired effect. ‘Because he was going so fast,’ says Laurie, ‘it took him a long time to come around again.’ But he did come around again, and with his gunners keeping track of the German’s position, Laurie once more pulled the aircraft around to face him. ‘This time he was actually too close to fire, and went under us again,’ he says.
Heroes of the Skies Page 19
