Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  For a third time in this deadly battle of wits, the night fighter attacked, and ‘that time he went above us’, says Laurie. It was a moonlit night, and they were up above the clouds, with visibility for both pilots good. But unlike the Lancaster, the Halifax lacked a front gun turret, and Laurie’s two gunners were unable to get a bead on the Owl. All they could do was keep calling out its position as it prowled, turned and attacked.

  With the German passing as close as fifty feet, Laurie could clearly make out the night fighter and its pilot. Eventually, the German, possibly low on fuel, perhaps realising he’d met his match in Laurie, broke off. ‘It seemed like an eternity, but it was probably only five or six minutes,’ he says. ‘It was absolutely stressful and completely exhausting.’ As he speaks, I can still sense in his voice an echo of the terror he must have felt that night.

  Laurie believes he was fortunate in having an excellent navigator who would be adamant about placing the aircraft over the target at precisely the right height and precisely the right time. ‘He’d been commended for his navigation,’ he says. ‘Sometimes he’d call me up and get me to adjust the heading a single degree port or starboard. A lot of them didn’t bother about that.’

  Some pilots, he says, were ‘selfish buggers’, who would give themselves more height over the target to avoid the prospect of being bombed by their own aircraft above. This itself was no rare occurrence. ‘I saw it happen once, on a daylight,’ Laurie remembers. He can no longer recall the target, but an aircraft lining up in front of him was directly hit by the full bomb load of another above. This time, there were no parachutes to be seen. ‘I don’t think anyone got out of that one,’ he says. ‘It was quite sickening. You didn’t know whether the next bombs were going to be falling on you. I didn’t tell the crew. No point in upsetting them.’

  Anzac Day 1945 marked 51 Squadron’s, and Laurie’s, final attack of the war, on the island of Wangerooge in the Frisians. On this day, nearly 500 heavy bombers sought to destroy the coastal batteries protecting the German ports of Bremen and Wilhelmshaven. On the way in, Laurie’s Halifax was hit by an anti-aircraft shell, knocking out his starboard outer engine. ‘It sent a shudder through the aircraft,’ he says, ‘and it sent a shudder through me.’ They decided to carry on to the target, but were unable to maintain their prescribed height of 20 000 feet. ‘We ended up bombing way below the others from just 8000,’ he says. ‘I remember my bomb aimer, Joe, saying to me, “Skipper, this is too low for me!”’

  As a lone straggler, Laurie knew he was in a highly dangerous position. ‘If there were fighters about that day, they probably would have got us,’ he says. Making it back over the sea and landing at an emergency aerodrome on the east coast of England, they were picked up by truck and taken back to Snaith. ‘By the time we got back, everyone had gone to bed,’ he says. It was a quiet way to end an eventful tour.

  It has always bewildered me as to where, in the face of such terrible certainty of mortal danger, the men of Bomber Command found the resolve to carry on to the magic number of thirty operations. But, as Laurie tells me, sometimes they didn’t. A story he relates from another squadron concerns a crew bombed up beside the runway and about to go, simply waiting for the signal to start up. ‘The nervous piss, we called it,’ he says. This was the time when the crews stood around outside their aircraft, making forced conversation, careful not to mention the target in front of the ground crew, awaiting the order to take their spot in the take-off queue. The story goes that the wireless operator of this particular aircraft just quietly walked over to his captain. ‘Sorry, Skip, I’m not going,’ he said.

  The pilot looked back blankly. ‘What do you mean you’re not going? We’re all ready.’

  ‘I know that, Skip, but I’m just not going.’ With no idea what to do, the pilot fetched the flight commander who was told exactly the same thing. The man was sorry, but simply refused to climb into the aircraft and fly the trip. Guards were called, the man was put under close arrest, and a spare wireless operator was found.

  Laurie tells me the man was court-martialled and sentenced to ten years in a military prison. ‘In reality,’ he says, ‘he would have been released soon after the war.’ The crew that took off that night, with their spare wireless operator, was shot down and killed. Perhaps the story is true, perhaps it is a myth, but the fear of being seen to be LMF – ‘lacking moral fibre’ in the brutal military parlance of the day – was real and dreaded by the airmen. Even more dreaded, perhaps, than the prospect of death itself.

  Laurie seems to have found the confines of life in an English squadron somewhat wearying. ‘They were much more class conscious,’ he says. ‘They would say to me things like, “We were so glad when you colonials came into the fight.” Colonials! That’s what they called us!’ The Australian lack of deference to rank irked the English as well, Laurie says, and despite being the only officer on his crew, it’s hard to imagine his friendly, easy manner fitting in with the stifling rigidity of the British military system. ‘Once a fortnight we used to take our ground crew down the pub for a drink,’ he says. ‘They thought we were great blokes, but the English crews would never have done it.’

  Applying to the airlines upon his return to Australia in December 1945, Laurie was told that he lacked sufficient flying hours to warrant consideration. ‘I’m happy for you to train me,’ he told them. ‘We don’t need to,’ they said. ‘The air force has trained everyone for us.’ Instead, he joined the motor-car industry and had a long career in sales. He remains an affable and cheery man, and his memory of the war is clear, at times vivid.

  We discuss the demise of the current Australian car industry, but he accepts it as an inevitability, probably much in the same way he accepted the drama and dangers of his tour. ‘We were young and life was different then,’ he says. ‘I don’t recall ever thinking I wasn’t going to survive.’

  Like many former airmen, he is perplexed by the sudden interest in his part in the war, an area of his life that remained in the shadows for decades. ‘My three daughters didn’t know anything about what I’d done, not for years,’ he says. ‘It took a bit of settling down, after the war, it really did. I didn’t talk about it. No-one did, really.’ Laurie remains somewhat proud of the fact that he never once used his military service to get jobs or even get ahead. ‘Oh, and just between you and me,’ he adds conspiratorially, as if about to divulge a great confidence, ‘I’m actually proud of the fact that I contributed, in some small way, to the end of the war and the awful regime we were fighting. And in a way, I’m also proud that I survived.’

  51 Squadron Halifax pilot Laurie Larmer’s route map to the Frisian island of Wangerooge, his final trip, flown on Anzac Day, 1945. Flak took out one of his engines, and he was lucky to make it home to their base in Yorkshire. (Picture courtesy of Laurie Larmer)

  NAT GOULD

  Role: Bomber pilot

  Aircraft: Hawker Hurricane, Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk

  Posting: 17 Squadron, RAF; 75 Squadron, RAAF

  Milne Bay was bloody awful.

  Arthur ‘Nat’ Gould’s war, indeed his life, would quite easily fill a book on its own. Happily, the writing of it would not be too difficult, as Nat’s memory, even into his nineties, is astounding. Nor does time seem to have dulled much of the fighter-pilot spirit which took him across the globe, flying almost the entire war in numerous theatres, including one of Australia’s most challenging battles.

  ‘Was your father in the First World War?’ It’s one of the questions I ask all the fellows I interview. I find it helps me gain a picture of their background. About half the time, the answer is yes, but Nat surprises me.

  ‘No,’ he answers as we settle into his small but fascinatingly cluttered study in his upper-north Sydney apartment. ‘But he was in the Boer War.’ Nat Senior, it seems, was something of an adventurer, born in London, joining up and going away to war at sixteen. He was invalided out, and found his way to the Indian Army where he broke horses, before becoming
a deckhand on ocean liners, jumping ship in Australia and working for the railways in Queensland.

  The apple, they say, falls close to the tree and Nat’s long and eventful career as a fighter pilot continued the adventurous traditions of his father including, amazingly, a stint flying for the Russians.

  You’d never guess now at Nat’s humble beginnings in Brisbane. ‘As a teenager I’d go around the paddocks collecting mushrooms and manure and sell them to the gardens,’ he tells me. ‘Whenever I had ten shillings I’d whip out to the aerodrome at Archerfield and get half an hour’s flying lesson.’ So enterprising was Nat that by war’s outbreak in 1939, he’d chalked up thirty hours on little Taylor Cub aeroplanes and held his civilian ‘A’ licence.

  Listening to the outbreak of war over the wireless, Nat remembers his mother’s reaction. ‘She was pretty upset, but I was cheering. I thought now I’d get to fly and do some travelling.’ He was right about that. Joining up as soon as he could, Nat became part of the very first intake of the Empire Air Training Scheme, No. 1 Course at Archerfield in Queensland. ‘That first course was all kids like me with licences, so they knew we could fly, although not very well,’ he says. At Wagga, Nat was one of the first to jump from Tiger Moths to Wirraways, and it was decided he would be a single-engine pilot. ‘Age came into it a bit,’ he says. ‘They seemed to put the older blokes into bombers. The younger ones such as me who liked doing stupid things in planes went onto fighters. We weren’t supposed to be very bright!’

  At this early stage of the war, the extraordinarily efficient machine into which the Empire Air Training Scheme would evolve was still in its teething phase, and had, says Nat, a somewhat ad hoc feel to it. Syllabuses and courses had yet to be worked out, and even instructors were still being sourced. Some pre-war civilian types were clearly not prepared for the role, nor the modern aircraft with which they had to come to grips. ‘I had to teach my instructor how to do aerobatics in a Wirraway,’ he says. ‘He was terrified of the bloody things.’ Nat himself didn’t have much of an opinion of them either. ‘The Wirraway was a bugger of a thing, actually. Hard to fly, full of vices.’

  In December 1940, Nat sailed to England on a long, seven-week voyage, arriving at his Operational Training Unit at a rudimentary RAF training station close to The Wash called Sutton Bridge. With perpetual drizzle and low cloud, it was hardly the most pleasant place to spend a bleak British winter. With a cursory introduction to a clapped-out Battle of Britain–veteran Hurricane (‘A bloke stood on the wing and just told me what to push and pull,’ he says), Nat began training over the crowded, unfamiliar landscape of England. ‘In outback Australia,’ he says, ‘if you saw a railway line, it’d be the only one for a thousand miles. Here, there were dozens of them.’ He even had a different scale of map to deal with, every inch of which was crammed with towns and roads and rivers. ‘We were stuffed,’ he says bluntly.

  On his second or third solo trip in the Hurricane, Nat took off from Sutton Bridge and found himself in cloud virtually as soon as he put his wheels up. Climbing up through it, he attempted to complete the cross-country exercise but his radio didn’t work, and soon he had no idea where he was. Not too far off, however, he spotted an RAF Blenheim bomber. ‘I thought he probably knew where he was going, so I tried to formate on him so he could guide me to an airstrip somewhere,’ he says. But the closer he came to the British aircraft, the faster it seemed to speed up. ‘I tried to catch him but my clapped-out Hurricane couldn’t keep up with him,’ he says. Eventually, Nat peeled off and did the sensible thing by going out over the North Sea to re-orientate himself with the coast and find his way home. Upon landing, he was surprised to find himself being congratulated with claps and ‘well dones’ all round. Little did he realise that while he’d been up, the airfield had been bombed by a formation of Junkers Ju 88s and that he had been inadvertently chasing one out over the North Sea. ‘My aircraft recognition wasn’t all that good at that stage,’ he says. ‘They all thought I was so brave, chasing down a German on just my second solo! I had no idea.’

  Joining No. 17 Squadron, RAF, a famous Battle of Britain outfit, Nat’s days as an operational fighter pilot would start off relatively quietly. In July 1941, he learned that his flight had been earmarked for overseas. ‘We all thought we were going to the Middle East,’ he says. Instead, they would head north, to the freezing and desolate Kola Peninsula in the far north of the Soviet Union.

  Desperate to protect the warm-water port of Murmansk in the first few months following Hitler’s invasion of Russia, Churchill agreed to give Stalin two squadrons of Hurricanes, along with some pilots and ground crew to show them how to use them. After training the Russians in these modern machines (the Red Air Force’s own planes were, says Nat, somewhat ‘agricultural’), they would be handed over and the RAF pilots would come home. Two squadrons, 81 and Nat’s 17, were earmarked to form the new 151 Wing, under the command of the delightfully named Wing Commander HNG Ramsbottom-Isherwood, who for his devoted service to the defence of the Soviet socialist workers’ proletariat would be awarded the Order of Lenin!

  Initially, however, 17 Squadron’s destination was a secret very well-kept, even from its pilots. In Glasgow, boarding the almost ancient aircraft carrier HMS Argus, Nat and his mates still believed they were heading to the sands and deserts of North Africa. ‘Then when we sailed out the Clyde, instead of turning left to go to the Middle East, we turned right to go to the North Pole!’ he says.

  Their true destination revealed, Nat, still slightly disbelieving, endured dreadful weather as the ship ploughed north into the Arctic, knowing that he was eventually going to have to fly himself off this thing and land somewhere in Russia. ‘The Hurricanes had no hooks or anything,’ he says, ‘so we only had one chance to take off.’ Their pre-flight briefing was, at best, rudimentary. ‘We couldn’t use our compass up there because they all pointed north anyway,’ Nat explains. ‘So we were told to line the ship up with a nearby destroyer, keep on going till we hit land, turn right, look for an airfield next to a town next to a river and go down and land on it.’ Somehow, the whole squadron managed to do it, although some Hurricanes which had damaged their undercarriage on the carrier’s steep and unfamiliar take-off ramp were required to fly all the way with their wheels down.

  For the next two months, Nat flew standing patrols and escorts in the far north of Russia on an almost daily basis. It was ostensibly a training exercise for the Russians rather than an actual combat operation, but as Nat was discovering, that detail would be lost somewhere along the way.

  ‘Surreal’ is the word he uses to describe his Soviet sojourn at Vaenga, a rudimentary airfield near Murmansk. At his first breakfast, vodka and champagne were served; RAF guards were placed on every Hurricane, then the Russians placed their own guard on them. ‘It was all entirely secret, so not everyone knew what we were doing there,’ he says. With the RAF airmen virtually confined to the rundown aerodrome, it was not wise to walk around the place, Nat says, without keeping a hand close to your service revolver.

  Only 30-odd miles from the ground fighting of the German invasion, Nat could clearly hear the guns of the battles around Leningrad, and the aerodrome was regularly attacked by bombers. ‘The Russians had no radar or anything, so the first we knew of an air raid was bombs dropping on the airfield,’ he says. ‘We’d have to take off through the bursts.’

  In a wooden hut lacking baths or showers, Nat would occasionally dare to venture to the nearby village bath house to wash. It was not a place in which the RAF pilots felt comfortable, and the Russians in turn seemed uneasy about them. ‘Some of our chaps shot down some German aircraft,’ he says. ‘I think it was about sixteen in total, but the Russians were strange people. They were loath to give us any real success. We never quite understood why, but we think that it was a sort of national pride; they were the ones who were going to shoot down the German aeroplanes, not these bloody Englishmen.’

  On a sortie escorting a squadron of Red Air For
ce dive bombers, Nat would get an idea of just how strange these Russians could be. ‘It was a clear day and we could see for miles. As we watched, the Russians started to dive on one of their own destroyers, which then opened up and shot down the lead aircraft! We watched them as they bailed out, just sat in our cockpits and couldn’t believe what we were seeing. Honestly, the whole thing was quite bizarre,’ he says.

  After handing over their Hurricanes, Nat and his fellow pilots waited to hear what plans were in train to take them home. He soon realised there were none. Eventually, he and a couple of the other Australian pilots took matters into their own hands. ‘We just went down to the local wharf and waited,’ he says. Soon a British destroyer, HMS Intrepid, pulled up alongside.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Nat.

  ‘Back to Blighty,’ was the reply from an officer. ‘Hop in.’

  ‘So we just got on and went home,’ says Nat, bringing a fittingly peculiar end to his Russian interlude. On the way back to the naval base at Scapa Flow, almost a year to the day he had sailed from Brisbane, Nat heard the news about Pearl Harbor.

  From a Russian winter to the steam-bath, malaria-ridden jungles of New Guinea, Nat was transferred home to defend his own country in an entirely new war in the Pacific. Arriving back in his native Queensland in May 1942, Nat joined the already renowned 75 Squadron, a unit scratched together a few months before, and currently refitting in Kingaroy after its epic 44-day defence of Port Moresby. In this struggle, 75 had lost almost all their aircraft and many of their pilots. Soon, however, they would be heading back into action, and Nat would be joining them at their new home, a joint Australian and American base hacked from the jungle and plantations in the far-eastern tip of New Guinea, Milne Bay.