by Peter Rees
At last the men of Bomber Command felt they were being welcomed in from the cold. For much of the war, Bomber Command had been the Allies’ main strike weapon against Nazi Germany. In the wake of the ignominious Dunkirk evacuation in June 1940, when no Allied troops were left on the continent of Europe, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw the Air Force, and Bomber Command in particular, as the only way to continue the struggle. ‘The Fighters are our salvation,’ he said, ‘but the Bombers alone provide the means of victory. In no other way at present visible can we hope to overcome the immense military power of Germany.’ That was in September 1940.
But in 1945, in the immediate aftermath of victory, the deeds of Bomber Command were seen very differently in light of the awful destructiveness that area bombing had wrought. Despite being eligible for the Air Crew Europe Star and the France and Germany Star, Bomber Command’s crews were denied a separate campaign medal. Bomber Command’s leader, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, known to his detractors as ‘Butcher’ Harris, protested at this snub to his men and refused to accept a peerage, the sole commander-in-chief not made a peer in 1946. In 1953, Churchill, now prime minister again, insisted that Harris accept a baronetcy and this time he accepted.
Over the decades, the veterans of Bomber Command have felt the snub keenly. In December 2012 a report to the United Kingdom government concluded that Bomber Command crews had been treated ‘inconsistently’ with those who served with Fighter Command, where the Battle of Britain clasp was awarded. Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, immediately announced that bomber aircrews would be awarded a Bomber Command clasp. While veterans welcomed the acknowledgement, as their thinned ranks at Green Park showed, there are few left to receive the belated recognition.
The lengthy failure to recognise the bomber crews’ contribution—despite their overall forty-five per cent death toll—arose from public and political unease about Bomber Command’s area bombing raids. In 1942 the War Cabinet gave its support to area bombing, and it was this policy that Harris set about implementing. But it was Harris’s preference for area bombing rather than precision bombing in the last year of the war that was controversial. However, Harris remained committed to post-D-Day orders to progressively destroy and dislocate Germany’s military, industrial and economic systems. He believed that this was best achieved by area bombing.
Estimates for the number of people killed in the area bombing of German cities range between 400,000 and 600,000. The symbol of the destruction, and the moral quandaries that area bombing poses, is the city of Dresden. This grand Baroque city was destroyed in a bombing-induced firestorm on the night of 13 February 1945.
In the heart of Dresden’s Old Town stands the beautiful Frauenkirche. Finally rebuilt in 2005, this masterpiece of Baroque architecture, with its ninety-six-metre-high dome, was reduced to rubble, like so much of Dresden, in the events of that horrific night. Evidence of the ferocity of the fire is still visible in the original sandstone blocks that have been re-used in the church’s walls. On Bruhl’s Terrace, overlooking the Elbe river, blackened walls also testify to the reach of the firestorm. Many buildings, such as the imposing Hofkirche Catholic church, the ornate Semperoper opera house and the grand Zwinger Palace, with its many pavilions, have been rebuilt, and the imposing Dresden Castle is near completion. In all cases the original stones, incorporated where possible, show the same dark evidence of fire. Dresdeners’ commitment to rebuilding much of the city as it was, shows not only that they have not forgotten that night in February 1945 but that they want to remember it always.
There were Australians involved in the raids on Dresden. They too will never forget that night, nor their mates who did not come back from the war. They had nothing personal against the city. When they had enlisted, Dresden—if they had heard of it at all—was just another old city in eastern Germany. Their service in Bomber Command would change all that. It would change their lives and their view of the world, of war, of peace. It would demand all their skill, ingenuity, courage and endurance. This book is their story.
PRELUDE
Seven men stood wordlessly under the Lancaster bomber’s giant wing, each awaiting his turn in a ritual they had come to know well. Ted Pickerd was their navigator and the holder of the talisman, a rabbit’s foot that had not taken long to lose its fur, and whose skin was now parched to leather. Ted rubbed the rabbit’s foot on his bottom and gave it a kiss before passing it to the flight sergeant, who then gave it to the other six crew members. Each in turn followed Ted’s lead. When they had all finished, the sergeant took the rabbit’s foot for safe keeping. Then, before the Lancaster’s four huge Merlin engines shattered the evening quiet, each of the men walked to the tail of the plane and pissed on the rear wheel. They were now ready for the raid.
1
THE SUGARLOAF
Jack Mitchell had a yen to climb the Sugarloaf one more time. As he made his way up the steep, scrubby hill with some boyhood mates, he carried a metre-long stick. On reaching the summit, he drove it into the ground and heaped stones around the base. ‘I wonder if this will be here when I come home,’ he said. Amid the banter and chiacking, one of the boys snapped a photo of Jack, laughing as he held on to the stick. He was just nineteen and on his final home leave before going off to England, 17,000 kilometres away.
The Sugarloaf, overlooking the Jordan Valley, in south-east Tasmania, was where Jack had always gone to gaze out on the river flats and dream. At age five, he had witnessed the famed aviator Bert Hinkler landing in a paddock close by after his record-breaking 1928 flight from England to Australia. Jack had never seen an aircraft before and was entranced. Thirteen years later he began training as a pilot with the Royal Australian Air Force. Australia was at war with Nazi Germany, and Jack was one of thousands of young Australian men who joined up. The dean of St David’s Cathedral in Hobart, who knew Jack well, described the former choirboy in a reference ‘as a thoroughly reliable lad, well behaved and straight forward’. Having enlisted in the RAAF in October 1941, Jack completed his training and sailed for England, destined for Bomber Command.
Three months before Jack enlisted, a nervous Noel Eliot sat before a selection panel at RAAF Station Pearce, near Perth, on the west coast of Australia. He knew his dream of becoming a pilot was hanging in the balance. The head of the panel asked the farm boy in front of him, ‘Can you ride a horse?’ Noel’s reply was quick: ‘Yes, sir.’ The panel chairman snapped back: ‘Pilot!’ He was in.
The path to the selection panel had not been easy for Noel. He had started work on the family farm at Tardun, a whistle-stop village in the vast Western Australian wheatbelt, during the Depression. Making a living was tough, and the experience left him with little enthusiasm for farming. Lacking formal education, Noel shadowed his older brother, Ivan Aubrey, or Bill as he was known, in his diesel engineering studies in Perth. As Bill finished a paper, he would send it to Noel to study. After Bill had been accepted into the RAAF, he suggested that Noel join him. Not fancying his chances because of the educational requirements, Noel met with the head education officer at the RAAF recruiting centre. When asked to explain Pythagoras’ theorem, Noel was ‘able to rattle it off’. The officer signed Noel’s application form there and then. He couldn’t believe his good fortune.
While Jack Mitchell and Noel Eliot enlisted through the newly established Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS), Rollo Kingsford-Smith was already in the RAAF. He had joined as a cadet in 1938. He remembered steeling himself as he walked into the mess of No. 1 Flying Training School at Point Cook, Victoria, for the first time. Given the significance of the name ‘Kingsford Smith’ in aviation, he was expecting to be given a hard time. Shouts from senior cadets greeted his arrival: ‘Here’s the great birdman,’ and ‘Stand up on the table, birdman, let’s see you.’ Rollo could only shrug it off. He had lived all his life in the shadow of his famous uncle, the aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, and had become used to such taunts. ‘Most ten-year-old boys are unco
mfortable being patronised,’ he later recalled. ‘I was no exception. In fact I hated it, and after several years I knew what I did not want. I did not want to be an aviator or be famous. I planned to do my own thing, study medicine and be a doctor.’ But the Depression put paid to that. The family could not afford university.
At the age of nineteen, the lure of a salary three times the pittance he earned as an office boy made it an easy decision to apply for the RAAF. Here was an escape from a dead-end job. The male Smiths all had Kingsford as their second name, but the RAAF gave Rollo and his two brothers, Peter and John, a hyphenated surname: from now on they were Kingsford-Smiths. There was no escaping the connection with their uncle now.
When war broke out, Ted Pickerd was working for the bicycle manufacturer Malvern Star in Melbourne. Ted had an aptitude for accounting and had been promoted to head the consignment stock section. He had grown up in the middle-class suburb of Windsor, but the Depression had hit his father’s electrical business hard. As the family struggled to put food on the table, in 1931 Ted’s father died suddenly, aged just forty-one. Ted and his brother Bill had to go to work to help make ends meet: ‘I used to do gardening, help Mum clean cinemas. I forsook pleasure in the interests of the family.’
When their mother remarried, Ted refused to attend the wedding. It was a decision he would come to regret. Brother Bill had joined the Army in March 1941, and shortly before he was sent to the Middle East, he married his sweetheart. ‘I opposed that too, on the grounds that I thought it was not the ethical thing to do to get married just before going overseas when there was always a chance of your not coming back,’ Ted recalled.
He knew it was inevitable that he too would join Australia’s war effort. He chose the RAAF as the ‘least less appealing’ of the three services. ‘I had thought about the Army but I don’t like guns, I thought about the Navy but I get seasick waving goodbye on the wharf, so I joined the Air Force.’
After seventeen-year-old Alick Roberts applied to enlist in the RAAF, a letter arrived at his home in West Wyalong, in central western New South Wales. Inside was his RAAF Reserve lapel badge, his first step to the war. The reason Alick joined up was simple: loyalty to ‘King and Country’. He felt ‘that the threat in Europe if not curtailed would eventually encompass Australia as well. By the time I entered for service the threat to home was serious indeed.’
While young men from all walks of life went into the Air Force, to become an aircrew member a certain level of education was required. Alick was not surprised when a heavy carton of text books, exercise books, graph books and note pads followed his lapel badge, along with instructions to attend the local school two nights a week for training and study. Two teachers conducted the classes in advanced maths, trigonometry, radio, theory of flight, elementary navigation, meteorology, and electricity and magnetism—a primitive version of electronics. He hoped to become a pilot.
In Melbourne, twenty-one-year-old Geoffrey Williams realised his level of education was far below the necessary standard when he quit his job as a floor walker at the Myer Emporium and went to enlist in October 1941. The son of a gas inspector, he was asked to produce his Leaving Certificate, or at least his Intermediate Certificate. ‘Using my initiative I simply said I had forgotten to bring them. An IQ test had to be passed, which luckily I managed,’ he recalled. Geoff was placed on reserve for some months pending entry into Initial Training School (ITS) and sent back to school to brush up on mathematics and other subjects, including learning Morse code at the local post office every Sunday.
After two months at Initial Training School at Somers, on the Mornington Peninsula, Geoff was categorised as a pilot, despite his lack of education. But his shaky maths found him out. ‘My ITS maths teacher could not understand why I could not cope with trigonometry. He would take me for a walk around Somers in the evening and enquire if I was having trouble at home or worrying about a girlfriend.’ But ‘it was simply a case of my not having sufficient understanding of mathematics. My pilot training was cut short.’
Geoff took the option to become an air gunner.
A month after Alick Roberts turned eighteen, in June 1942, he was called up. He reported to the RAAF Recruiting Centre in Woolloomooloo, Sydney, to be sworn in as an aircrew trainee. The bank where he had worked in West Wyalong farewelled him with a fountain pen to take with him on his service career. Alick would treasure it.
He began training at No. 2 Initial Training School (2ITS), Bradfield Park, on the northern shore of Sydney Harbour. He was among the youngest in his group of about 300 brand-new aircrew trainees, who wore a distinctive white flash—a strip of cloth tucked into the front fold of their caps. This earned them a nickname they detested. As another eighteen-year-old recruited that year, Keith Flitcroft, explained: ‘Once that white flash was in your cap you were a marked man, in fact we were referred to as “Kotex Kids”’ (a reference to a leading brand of female sanitary pads).
Two months before Alick was recruited, nineteen-year-old Jim Rowland was finally called up to start his pilot training. He too had developed an early fascination with flight and as a boy built model aircraft from balsa wood and tissue paper, powered by rubber bands.
At Sydney University, Jim studied aeronautical engineering. His college, St Paul’s, included in its 1940 Revue a skit based on British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 visit to Munich in a bid to appease Adolf Hitler and avoid war. Despite being one of the brawniest of the Freshers, Jim, whose nickname was ‘Tiny’, was in the corps de ballet. He described his performance as ‘elephantine’.
The role of Chamberlain went to a student named Gough Whitlam. The future Labor Prime Minister demonstrated ‘his already considerable stage talent’ as, brandishing a roll of toilet paper [representing the newly signed agreement], ‘he debouched from the stage aircraft, proclaiming “Peace in our time. I have seen their Leader, and I have his reply!” With that he threw the roll into the audience.’ The roll landed in the lap of Mrs Jessie Street, an old Rowland family friend and prominent feminist, who had recently returned from Russia, where she had been greatly impressed by the achievements of the Communists. A month after Jim Rowland was called up, Gough Whitlam followed him into the RAAF; he would become a navigator–bomb aimer and serve in the Pacific.
The RAAF recruits went into a vast network of training schools and units established across Australia under the Empire Air Training Scheme. Schools of elementary flying, bombing and gunnery, and other specialist skills were established in capital and regional cities and in country towns such as Deniliquin, Uranquinty and Parkes in New South Wales, Geraldton in Western Australia, Bundaberg in Queensland, and Port Pirie in South Australia.
Rollo Kingsford-Smith had finished his training by the time the Empire Air Training Scheme began. Because of the Kingsford-Smith name, he kept a low profile, particularly in the mess. However, at morning parade no one could hide. Every detail, from the crease in one’s trousers and the shine on one’s shoes to the length of one’s hair had to be immaculate. Rifles carried at parade had to be in perfect working order, with the stock polished and the bore of the barrel shining. Punishment, as Rollo discovered, was quick. He found himself charged with ‘Conduct to the prejudice of good order and Air Force discipline: In that he appeared on parade with a dirty rifle.’ He was fined five shillings.
Rollo was cautious when the flying lessons started, not the cocky cadet the instructors expected. One noted in a confidential report that Rollo was ‘inclined to be timid’, complaining that he was too heavy on the rudder controls. Rollo remembered that:
His cockpit was in front of mine and my rudder pedals were just beneath his seat. So he dropped his hands down to rest on the pedals. My shoes were then pushing onto the hands. He said, ‘If you hurt me the slightest bit with your clumsiness you will regret it.’ He left his hands there for about fifteen minutes, when I found I could control the aircraft with the lightest and daintiest touch of my feet.
Rollo graduated as a
pilot officer in June 1939. Less than three months later, and still at Point Cook on a navigation course, he heard Prime Minister Robert Menzies announce on 3 September that, since England was at war with Germany, Australia was also at war. In the mess that night, celebrations broke out. ‘It seemed a good occasion to party late because few wanted to go to bed,’ Rollo said.
Posted to Richmond in New South Wales for flying duties with a Coastal Reconnaissance Squadron, Rollo experienced his first scent of war. A German raider had laid mines off the New Zealand coast and sunk two ships: ‘We went out looking for survivors or the German and in case we found him I carried two World War I bombs—112 pounds each. Long-range tanks had been hurriedly fitted by this time and I was searching for over six hours but saw neither survivors nor, thankfully, the German.’
The squadron was small, with just three flights, each of three aircraft. Flight Lieutenant John Balmer, known as Sam, arrived to command B Flight and was Rollo’s flight commander. Sam was almost too senior for the job. An instructor at Point Cook from 1935 to 1937, he achieved renown in Air Force circles when he reputedly parachuted out of a training aircraft to motivate his pupil to land on his own.
Promotion had been slow coming Sam’s way. A sardonic fellow, he did not like administration, and was intolerant of fools and of over-conservative authority. Unmarried and with a shock of wavy hair running back from his forehead, he was a loner with a confident smile, liked fast cars, women and flying, and was seldom seen in the mess. He came from a wealthy farming family near Bendigo, Victoria, and was a man of few words.
Sam Balmer was the first officer Rollo had ever met who firmly believed the RAAF should be an all-weather fighting force. He expected all pilots to be capable of flying in any weather conditions, be aware of the latest developments in aviation technology, and be operationally and mentally fit for war. Rollo was eager to finesse his flying skills with Sam, and they soon formed a strong friendship. In the midst of his ‘postgraduate’ flight training Rollo proposed to his vivacious girlfriend, Grace Prior, whose family owned the Bulletin magazine (which they sold to Frank Packer in 1960). She accepted, and the wedding was set for November 1940 in Sydney.
