‘You know,’ says Nat with a slight note of exasperation, ‘people know about Kokoda, but they have no idea about Milne Bay.’ He’s probably right, but one suspects few could be as well acquainted with this dramatic August 1942 battle as Nat. He was, after all, right in the thick of it.
Milne Bay runs roughly east–west for 18 miles and about 6 across. The airstrip, recently established on its north-western end, was simply a 1-mile strip of mud bulldozed out of coconut trees and covered with steel matting. There were virtually no facilities, and the pilots lived five to a man in flimsy army tents.
‘Milne Bay was bloody awful,’ says Nat. ‘Never stopped raining. The mountains came straight up from the strip. When you landed it was an up and down ride. It was carved out of a coconut plantation, so if you went off the runway, which you did, you ran into a tree, which didn’t do the aircraft much good.’ But the Milne Bay strip was strategically important to the Japanese, and had been impacting on their plans to take Port Moresby, and therefore, New Guinea. So, in August 1942, they came to take it.
An amphibious invasion convoy carrying over a thousand experienced (mainly) naval soldiers, two cruisers, three destroyers and various transports was assembled, but spotted soon after its departure from Rabaul on 24 August. Japanese intelligence was also bad, their code had been broken, and the Australian forces defending Milne Bay were woefully underestimated.
As the invaders turned west into the long dead end of Milne Bay the next morning, the Kittyhawk pilots of 75 and 76 Squadrons were waiting for them.
‘American bombers couldn’t get in due to the weather,’ remembers Nat. ‘So we strapped two 300-pound bombs to our little Kittyhawks!’ Told to go primarily for the troop transports, Nat remembers attacking in atrocious weather with visibility down to 200 feet above the water. ‘The only thing you could do was skip-bomb,’ he says, describing the very tricky practice of attempting to bounce a bomb off the surface of the water into the side of a ship. ‘We were at nought feet and everything was firing up at us.’ It was a storm of fire. Everything in the convoy opened up on the Kittyhawks at close range. Even the cruisers, he says, were firing their main naval guns to send up splashes of water underneath them. ‘I was aiming at a bloody great troop ship,’ he says, ‘I came in, let them go and ducked back up into the clouds again.’ The flak, he says, was severe, but he was unscathed.
Back at the Milne Bay airstrip, Peter Turnbull, the CO of 76 Squadron, a legend of a man who would be killed in action just two days later, congratulated Nat profusely.
‘What for?’ Nat asked.
‘You sank that gunboat.’
Nat was perplexed. ‘Gunboat? I was aiming at a troop ship,’ he said.
‘Well you’re an awful bloody shot,’ said the boss. ‘You sank a gunboat!’
Nat had no idea he’d hit anything. ‘The gunboat must have been close to it,’ he says, ‘but I certainly wasn’t aiming at it.’
The battle lasted just under two weeks and was a close and vicious struggle fought at desperately close range in terrible conditions. 75 and 76 Squadrons have been freely credited by the army as being the ‘decisive factor’ in winning the engagement, particularly on that first day. The Japanese push towards the airfields was successful at first, but was then checked by the militia, and later Second AIF men, supported constantly by the flying artillery of the Kittyhawks.
‘We’d fly ten-minute sorties,’ says Nat. ‘So many that we didn’t even bother putting them in our logbook.’ Nat tells me the pilots would be firing their guns while virtually still over the runway. ‘On a couple of occasions, the Japs were just about at one end of the airstrip,’ he says. To support the ground soldiers, an enemy position was determined, then the Kittyhawks’ six half-inch machine guns would let loose, tearing through the jungle canopy into the unseen enemy underneath. ‘Then you’d go back and land and have a cigarette and a pee and take off again,’ says Nat.
Tracer was added to the last rounds of their ammunition trays, not to assist with firing, he tells me, but to indicate when they were running out. A system of flares and Very lights was used, fired by the soldiers on the ground to indicate the Japanese positions only several hundred metres ahead. ‘You couldn’t see them,’ he says. ‘Then at the next debriefing, the army would tell us that we’d killed hundreds of them.’
Nat would also attack barges, as well as Japanese troops on the beaches, who on one occasion stood waving, apparently in the belief they would not be seeing anything but their own aircraft.
Concealed snipers proved a menace, having embedded themselves in the high fronds of the coconut trees. At almost dead level, the Kittyhawks would fire into the crowns, and as the official government history later described it, ‘palm fronds, bullets and dead Japanese snipers poured down with the rain’.
‘I watched one of our blokes get shot down,’ Nat tells me. ‘Right in front of me.’ When not flying, the pilots would take turns manning the Bofors anti-aircraft gun with the soldiers. ‘You had to, really,’ he says, ‘because they couldn’t tell a Zero from a Kittyhawk, they’d shoot at anything. We’d always be having to tell them, “Hang on, that’s one of ours!”’
On this occasion, Nat watched from a gun pit as a Kittyhawk came tearing across the aerodrome at about a thousand feet with, he says, ‘a Zero right up his backside’. The aircraft was on fire, and Nat watched the pilot, a sergeant who he knew, bail out. ‘We actually saw him hit the ground, his chute didn’t have time to open and he was killed right in front of us. That was Milne Bay.’
I ask Nat to give me his assessment of the Kittyhawk after his experience with Hurricanes. ‘We hated them at first,’ he tells me. ‘We called them “bulldozers with wings”, but we came to appreciate them.’ The Kittyhawk was by no means a perfect fighter, particularly up against the light and manoeuvrable Japanese aircraft, but it was tough, it could take punishment, and it could handle the conditions. ‘A Spitfire would have been completely useless there,’ he says. ‘They just didn’t have the endurance for one thing. They were like dainty ballerinas by comparison to the Kittyhawk.’
Flying an aircraft the pilots knew in many ways to be no match for the enemy, Nat tells me it was understood how to deal with them. ‘We were told that if you saw a bunch of Zeros above you, roll onto your back, dive and just get the hell out of there. If you’re above them, however, dive and shoot and keep on going. Don’t dogfight them, whatever you do, or he’ll be inside you before you do half a turn. If you wanted to survive, you had to let him go. You’d hear the yelling and the screaming going on in your headphones,’ he says. ‘It was quite intense.’
The harshness of the conditions at Milne Bay can hardly be overstated. Photographs of the land battle show a dank and gloomy battlefield of mud-choked jungle tracks patrolled by thin, hollow-eyed soldiers clutching .303 rifles, their rotting shirts discarded as they probe warily around the next bend or clump of green. ‘We all had malaria and dysentery – at the same time,’ says Nat. ‘At one stage we had a third of the squadron down with malaria. It was a very unpleasant place.’
The misery of illness to some extent even masked the fear. ‘Honestly,’ says Nat, ‘you just felt too awful to be scared. You’d take off your oxygen mask and vomit all over the cockpit and poop over everything, then go back and refuel and rearm and vomit on the tailplane and do it all again. I weighed eight stone at the end of it.’ There were no showers, and no decent food. ‘Just cans of baked beans and bully beef, really,’ he says.
At times the squadron’s doctor, Bill Deane-Butcher, would attempt to intervene to give the men a chance to rest and recover. ‘It was all very primitive,’ Nat tells me. ‘Once there were three or four of us lying in the “sick bay”, really just an ordinary army bush tent on stretchers a few inches off the mud. Bill ordered us not to get up.’ However, it was war, and the threat was real. Into the tent and past the doctor swept the 75 Squadron CO, Les Jackson, a difficult and controversial figure, deeply unpopular among the pilots. ‘Righto
, airborne,’ he ordered the pilots perfunctorily, to the doctor’s impotent protests.
‘We were pooping and vomiting,’ says Nat, ‘but there was no-one else to do the job. We had no reserve and there were no other pilots coming through at that time. That was just how it was.’
Milne Bay represented the first major land defeat of the Japanese and is regarded as a true turning point in the New Guinea campaign. The airfield – now renamed Turnbull Strip after the late 76 Squadron CO who congratulated Nat on his inadvertent sinking – was spared, and in February 1944, when the war had moved on, was abandoned once again to the jungle, which quickly reclaimed it.
Nat’s combat flying was also, for the time being, over. If, however, he thought the casualties would cease, he was sadly mistaken, as he was then earmarked for an even more hazardous job, training. He even penned a song about No. 2 Operational Training Unit, Mildura, a hidden talent about which I had no idea:
At the Builders Club at 2 OTU Mildura,
The building’s run by types who think they know,
Your ears get bashed to tatters, by a gent who thinks he matters,
Come listen to the reams of bullshit flow.
Subsequent verses of the ditty, I’m assured, are far bawdier. ‘We hated it there,’ he tells me of the job he had in converting raw graduates to fighter pilots in six weeks. ‘We weren’t instructors,’ he says, ‘just “twitched up” fighter pilots who’d flown all over the world. The casualty rate was higher there than on any fighter squadron I was on, I can tell you.’ His logbook attests to the dreadful accident rate of all advanced wartime training facilities under the RAAF, with ‘crashed and killed’ entered on page after page beside the names of young pilots who did not even get to leave their own country or earn a battle honour. Deflection shooting, Nat says, was one of the biggest killers. ‘We’d train on a lake and they’d have to fire on their own shadow. Some just didn’t leave themselves room to pull out.’ The dive-bombing range, he says, was even worse. ‘They say we left more Kittyhawks there than bombs.’
Eventually, Nat had had enough, and pressed his famous friend, Clive Caldwell, also an instructor at Mildura, to arrange a transfer back to an operational squadron. ‘I’m going too,’ said Caldwell. ‘You can come with me if you like.’ So, for the final year of the war, Nat went on to fly Spitfires with 457 Squadron in the islands to Australia’s north but, as he says, ‘by that time, the war had really moved on’.
Nat’s career continued until well after the war. Taking up an offer from the British Pacific Fleet, he accepted a commission in the Royal Navy, travelled to England and flew off aircraft carriers before joining Australia’s nascent Fleet Air Arm. Briefly commanding a squadron in Korea, Nat eventually rose to the rank of commander, retiring only in 1965.
Nat seems at times curious about my interest in his past, and unsure whether I really want to hear all his ‘waffle’. ‘Look, we’re going to be here all day if we carry on like this,’ he says to me a number of times during our series of afternoon conversations. When I assure him there is nothing I would rather do than sit and listen, he seems flattered. ‘Oh, well, that’s fine then,’ he says. ‘But maybe we should have a drink before we keep going?’ Never was I unhappy to oblige.
The malaria he picked up in the jungle continued to dog Nat with regular attacks, he says, for fifteen years after the war. One senses, though, that a little of the jungle has remained with him.
While choosing not to be forthcoming about his adjustment to peacetime, the fact that Nat made the services his life for another twenty years suggests that he is a resilient character, perhaps able to throw off the lingering demons of battle more easily than others. I could not help notice, however, one or two tell-tale moments in our conversations when, describing the squalor, the sickness and the killing of Milne Bay, a deep, albeit brief weariness clouded his otherwise ebullient face. For all the impressive atmosphere of his study, surrounded by framed photographs, awards, medals and other accoutrements of a long and distinguished career in the services, there were times when his clear eyes would glaze for a moment, focusing on some best-forgotten memory of loss, comradeship, and battles long since fought and won.
REX KIMLIN
Role: Wireless operator
Aircraft: Avro Lancaster
Posting: 15 Squadron, RAF
I can’t remember a single target where there was no flak. Sometimes it was enormous.
When Rex made it known at his Initial Training School in Brisbane that he wanted to be a pilot, they simply laughed. ‘Sorry, son, you’ve got no hope, not with your expertise in Morse. You’re going to be a wireless operator.’ Such was the downside of being a telegraph boy with a good speed on the Morse code key. Truth be told, he hadn’t learned it for the air force at all, but simply to further his ambitions of becoming a telegraphist – in 1941 a coveted and well-paid position. In any case, like so many other boys of the era, Rex believed the war would be over before he was old enough to get involved. It didn’t take long, however, for the war to come to him.
‘As a telegraph boy,’ he tells me as we sit on the veranda of his lovely timber home on Queensland’s Stradbroke Island, ‘I used to have to deliver the telegrams.’ He can never forget the frozen stare on people’s faces as he walked up to their front door, the distinctive cream-coloured envelope clutched in his hand. ‘Sometimes they’d send a minister of religion to do it instead,’ he tells me.
On one occasion, he slowly ascended the high steps of a large, well-to-do house, watched by a nervous-looking middle-aged woman standing at the top. ‘I have a telegram for you,’ he said, before handing it to her and retreating back down.
‘Just a moment,’ the woman called after him. ‘There might be a reply.’
‘No,’ said Rex, without even turning around, ‘I don’t think there’ll be a reply.’ She opened it, read the news of a dead husband or son, and collapsed onto the steps. Not knowing what to do, Rex called her neighbour for help. ‘It was a tough job for a kid,’ he says.
Two years later, in May 1943 at the Melbourne embarkation depot, as he prepared to board a ship to England, Rex’s was one of forty-odd names read out and instructed to stay behind on parade after the others had headed off on trucks to the docks. Instead of journeying to England, Rex was now told he would be posted to the newly opened base at East Sale in Victoria, to train on Beaufort bombers for the New Guinea campaign. He was devastated, but had no choice other than to do as he was told. Fate, however, would intervene.
A serious and mysterious flaw in some of the early Australian-built Beauforts saw an alarmingly high accident rate, which prompted the pilots in Rex’s course to refuse to fly them until they were fixed. A stand-off ensued, and this very well hushed-up ‘mutiny’ was put down only when the pilots had their stripes ripped off them and were sent back to basic training to start their flying all over again. They were proven correct, however, when a problem with the Beaufort’s trim mechanism was discovered, causing them to become uncontrollable in the air. It was eventually rectified, but in the meantime, Rex was left without a pilot. Not knowing quite what to do with him, the air force decided to wash their hands of the problem by sending Rex once more back to the embarkation depot and putting him on a ship bound for England. This time, there was no last-minute hiccup, and after a long voyage, Rex arrived in wartime Britain, almost two years since signing on.
Several months later, and after a week of trying to get to know some of the myriad faces of his fellow airmen at No. 26 Operational Training Unit in Buckinghamshire, Rex was approached by a confident-looking young man with pilots wings on his tunic, Ivan Buchanan from Geelong. ‘We all called him “Buck”,’ says Rex. ‘He was already a big wheel in the Ford Motor Company in Geelong, and continued to be so after the war.’
‘You look a likely type,’ Buck said to Rex. ‘Would you like to be my wireless operator?’
Rex looked him up and down a bit and simply said, ‘Fine.’ Four more fellows were assembled, a mixtu
re of Australians and Englishmen, and Rex had his crew, minus their flight engineer, who, as standard practice, would come later at their conversion to four-engine aircraft. For now, all they had to do was survive the next two months flying across the United Kingdom in pensioned-off Wellington bombers, which, says Rex, ‘were so clapped-out that if you lost an engine at night, the rule was to bail out rather than try and land the things!’ This in fact happened to one pilot Rex knew, who, after parachuting from his lame Wellington, happened to land dead centre on the runway of an unknown RAF aerodrome!
More training time was spent on ‘big cumbersome old beasts’ of Stirlings, then a conversion course onto Lancasters. Rex was impressed with the Lanc from the beginning. In his first ever flight, the instructing pilot cut one motor, then, to Rex’s alarm, a second. ‘I heard the engines cutting out,’ he says, ‘and went onto the intercom, just in time to hear the instructing pilot’s voice saying to Buck, “Right. Now, feather engine number three.” They told us that with enough height, the Lancaster could fly back home from Germany on just one motor.’ During this impressive demonstration, Rex remembers watching from the astrodome as a Mosquito came up alongside, cut one of his own engines, and performed a loop right over the top of them. ‘Just to say, “Anything you can do, I can do better,”’ he says.
Finally, in late July 1944, Rex and his crew received their posting, to No. 15 Squadron, part of 3 Group, at RAF Mildenhall. To varying degrees, the rules and procedures differed between the several groups of Bomber Command, which normally consisted of about ten squadrons each. Rex tells me that in late 1944, it was decided that 3 Group crews would be required to complete an extra five trips on top of the standard tour of thirty. ‘After D-Day, we were doing a lot of shorter daylight trips to support the army, so they reckoned we deserved a few extra!’ he says. Shorter they may have been, but no less dangerous.
Heroes of the Skies Page 21
