by Peter Rees
On the evening of 7 May, Rollo was surprised when Alan McCormack phoned him from London. Somehow he had hitched a ride back to England. He told Rollo that Peter and many other liberated POWs were congregated at an airfield near Rheine, in western Germany. The next day, VE Day, Rollo borrowed a Lancaster, filled it with a scratch crew and took off. The Rheine airfield was a mess, with bomb craters everywhere and only one of the two runways useable. There seemed to be hundreds of RAF, RAAF and other air force POWs milling around on the ground but despite searching, Rollo could not find his brother anywhere. ‘I waited as long as I could, but as I was occupying one of only three or four aircraft parking spaces I had to load up with POWs and get out. It was not fair to delay too long so I went without him.’ But Rollo was certain that one of the rescue aircraft would pick Peter up.
With many of the POWs sick and in need of urgent medical attention, he jammed twenty-four of the worst-off into the aircraft, sitting on the floor and on each other’s laps, and flew to Dunsfold aerodrome, Surrey, where special facilities had been set up to look after the POWs. They had been living rough in appalling conditions, foraging for food, sleeping in fields and barns for the previous four or five months. It was clear to Rollo that many were seriously ill. ‘One little bloke got in the aircraft, a RAF flight lieutenant, who had been a POW since 1939. He had been shot down and he was a poor miserable thing. I sat him up the front of the aircraft so he’d be the first to see the coast of England. He saw his own White Cliffs of Dover as we flew to England, it was daylight by the time we got there.’
Somehow or other, Peter Kingsford-Smith got back that same day. He and Alan McCormack immediately began celebrating their release. ‘They went into London, went to a hotel and drank and ate too much,’ Rollo recalled. ‘They had been starving for years, and had had no alcohol for years.’ Ten days later, Rollo arranged for them to come and stay with him at his Woodhall Spa quarters. He picked them up and noted in his diary: ‘Collected Peter and McCormack at station this evening. Wonderful to see them again. Spent evening talking over the odd beer. Both appear rather well but Peter is a trifle thin.’
The war in Europe might have been over, but in the Pacific it was still to be won. This was where Bomber Command’s attention was now turned. Australian airmen watched with interest.
Aware that its clout in South-East Asia and the Far East had been greatly undermined by its absence from the war against Japan in the Pacific since the fall of Singapore, the British government sought to deal itself back in as a military player. At the Quebec Conference in September 1944, Winston Churchill proposed the transfer of up to 1000 heavy bombers to the Pacific once Germany was defeated. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the offer, but the proposed force was soon scaled back to twenty-two Bomber Command squadrons.
By mid–1945 this had been halved to eleven squadrons, made up of RAF, RCAF, RAAF and RNZAF units and known as Tiger Force (their insignia featured a tiger’s head in the RAF circular logo). The bomber force, based on Okinawa, would use the Lancaster, its successor, the Avro Lincoln, and the American B-24 Liberator. The bombers would be escorted by fighters of the Australian First Tactical Air Force, other Commonwealth units, and fighter units of the US Far East Air Force.
The Pathfinder role for Tiger Force would be filled by 627 Squadron’s Mosquitos. The RAF approached Rollo Kingsford-Smith, who had served in the Pacific earlier in the war, to be the squadron’s Commanding Officer. Rollo was in two minds about accepting the job. ‘To be in the lead of the most effective bombing force to attack Japan was attractive but at that time my plans were to get home quickly. He noted in his diary after this offer: ‘Very nice too but I think I would rather go home.’
Despite the conflicting pressures, Rollo eventually decided to take the job. He immediately got the squadron busy on navigation exercises over the Atlantic and making landfalls on the wilder parts of the Welsh coast, where navigators would have to read maps with the aid of natural features in the absence of roads or railway lines.
When Ted Pickerd finished his second tour after fifty operations with 463 Squadron, he had been posted to 467 Squadron at Waddington as the Squadron Analysis Officer. Two days after VE Day, he was appointed as Navigation Officer to 467 Squadron, and navigator to Wing Commander Ian Hay. The squadron was the RAAF’s contribution to Tiger Force. Like Rollo, Ted immediately began training flights, routing Lancasters over the sea to make up for the lack of land pinpoints in the Pacific area of operations.
The British plan, as outlined in a conference at Tiger Force Headquarters on 9 August 1945, was to have five squadrons operating from Okinawa in February 1946, another five in March and the remaining squadron in April. The planning was well advanced for infrastructure to support the force, but the British were playing catch-up. Three days earlier the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb, on Hiroshima, and on the same day of the Tiger conference, they dropped the second, on Nagasaki. Japan capitulated. The war was over and there was no need for Tiger Force. Ted and Rollo and their fellow Australians could come home.
44
AN AIR FORCE DIVIDED
When Jim Rowland’s ship arrived at Woolloomooloo pier at the end of August 1945, there was no fuss, no crowds, no official welcome, no bands or parades, no politicians or fanfares, just families to meet the returning POWs and take them home, using their own transport and their own rationed petrol. Jim noted that this was probably the moment when he first grasped how shifty politicians’ priorities could be.
As we were all ex-prisoners of war who had been through a good deal, we thought we might have merited a wee bit more than that, but then with the hysterical Yank-worship that seemed to have replaced our old sense of independence at home, I suppose there were no votes to be screwed out of our arrival. But it was absolutely wonderful to be home, so good that we gave officialdom only a rather contemptuous thought in passing.
Jim also had other things on his mind—including just how lucky he had been in the final stages of the war, when he was a POW at Moosburg. Free he may have been, but he continued to suffer for his time in captivity. His stomach had begun to play up during the march south, causing a week of racking pains, but there were no doctors and nothing could be done about it. Back home, his stomach played up again. When doctors at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital removed his appendix they found that it had burst and stuck to his intestine. It was a miracle he had not developed septicaemia, which would have killed him.
Unsure of their futures, for a time Jim Rowland and some mates met in the afternoons at the Long Bar, at Sydney’s Hotel Australia. He joined the RSL in Double Bay, but found its other members were still discussing World War I and ‘were quite suspicious of Johnny-come-latelies like me’. Jim and his mates found that most people at home had little idea of the intensity of their air war in Europe.
Those who had fought in New Guinea and the islands—excepting those who had fought in the Middle East—would tell us with bated breath of attacks by sixty or seventy aircraft on targets defended by fifty guns, or even more, and maybe even a Japanese fighter or two. They were uncomprehending or openly disbelieving when we spoke of the Ruhr flak belt, where the area defended by a thousand or more heavy flak guns of 88 and 105mm calibre stretched over an area sixty or seventy miles by twenty-five. They simply had no conception of a bomber stream of a thousand or even twelve hundred aircraft passing over a target in forty minutes, nor of the deadliness of the German night fighter force, nor of the extent of the casualties that we had regularly accepted. I got a faint impression that they felt the Americans had by-passed them and left them on a sideline of the war, and they had a complex about it, which of course turned out to be true, though we didn’t know about it and didn’t understand it. So soon we gave up, listened with half an ear to their tales of derring do, and kept our war to ourselves. This was just as well as nobody was interested anyway.
Even though the battle-seasoned veterans had great experience on their return from Europe, it did
not seem to be utilised to best advantage or, indeed, appreciated in the postwar RAAF. Back in Australia following his service in 100 Squadron RAF, Angus Cameron studied science at Sydney University under the postwar reconstruction scheme. After graduating in 1950, he rejoined the RAAF and was commissioned.
The first night in the mess I proudly fronted up in my brand new issued uniform with my pilot officer stripes and my European ribbons and straight away the first bloke went, ‘Hiding over in England while we were doing it tough,’ so I knew straight away. That was really the first time I had struck it and then I struck it quite a bit consequently. I was taken aside when I was showing off in the mess one night and told by a chap who had both European and Pacific combat, had come back early, he sort of warned me, ‘Be very careful what you say to those fellows they’ve got their eye on you. You weren’t in the real war.’
It was seriously put to me that it affected your promotion in the Air Force as to which Air Force you were in during the war. The Pacific ran the Air Force. A lot stayed down.
Peter Isaacson and his Pathfinder crew had picked up the mood when they returned to Australia earlier in the war. He had been awarded a DFM and subsequently, a DFC and AFC, but he found the reaction ‘disconcerting’. ‘The Pacific veterans resented that there had been more action in Europe and that more decorations were awarded to those who had served there. Promotion was faster in Europe and, despite the dangers, living conditions in England were very much better than they were for those who had served in the south west Pacific.’
It was clear to most returning aircrew that a sharp division had developed between the men who served in Europe and the Middle East, and those who served in the Pacific. Tom Fitzgerald, who would become an eminent economist and journalist, was a navigator with 547 Squadron RAF in Bomber Command. He recalled the contrast between his arrival in Quebec, Canada, on the way home, and his arrival in Australia. In Quebec, the Lord Mayor and other dignitaries welcomed the returning Canadians. A few weeks later, Tom and his comrades arrived in Melbourne on a Saturday afternoon.
There was a solitary waterside worker waiting at the wharf, to put onto the bollard of the wharf the rope thrown from the ship. The first throw from the ship, he missed, and he yelled out ‘Come on! Don’t you think I want to go home?’ And the boys, who’d been away for varying periods of years, gave him three cheers. And then an old covered wagon came up, to pick us all up and take us to the Melbourne Cricket Ground to sleep on the bare boards overnight before the train for Sydney. But, chalked up in huge letters on the canvas of the truck, were these words: ‘Jap dodgers return!’ A grateful nation!
Warrant Officer Tom Dally, a gunner who was posted to 460 Squadron in early May 1944, thought the airman returning from Europe were treated ‘as rats who left a sinking ship’ by the RAAF administration and by aircrew who had only served in Australia and the Pacific: ‘As with all volunteers, we had no option as to which area we served and considered the treatment completely uncalled for. Whilst on the squadron two Australians received letters from home with a white feather. If only the senders had known the true story.’ Another 460 Squadron veteran, Flying Officer George ‘Smokey’ Jarratt, a pilot, experienced a similar reaction when he was demobbed in July 1946. ‘I was really overwhelmed when after being discharged I went to RSL Headquarters in Sydney and was told by a member of the staff that I must have been “bludging” during the war to have taken so long to get out.’
Rollo Kingsford-Smith was also stunned to find just how much the anti-European-service mood had infected the RAAF. ‘The Air Force in general didn’t think much of the people who had “had it easy” in Europe,’ he recalled, adding that it was soon apparent that the Pacific-theatre people were getting the best positions.
I found that people who had served in the Pacific were given preference. That put me off for a while when the bureaucracy took over. We’d had ‘an easy war’, we ‘hadn’t coped with sleeping on the ground’, we’d ‘slept in beds’, we’d ‘eaten mainly in messes’. The fact that we had these fantastic losses was overlooked. The fact that always bugs me only two per cent of all Australians who served in World War Two flew in Bomber Command and we had twenty per cent of all losses.
Fed up with the RAAF’s postwar bureaucracy, Rollo quit and joined the de Havilland Aircraft Company in Sydney, where he would become managing director and chairman. He remained involved with Bomber Command veterans and shared their concern at the continuing negative perception of their role in the war. Proud of the part that 463 Squadron had played on D-Day, Rollo was angered by the account that the RAAF itself later published:
To my dismay the RAAF history of Australian Bomber Command Squadrons published in the 1990s states that 463 Squadron missed the target at Pointe du Hoc. The article was not checked with me before publication or with anyone else who flew that day. It completely ignored the copy of the Operation Order I had given to the War Memorial about two years previously. It seemed that the writer had not done his research and confused Pointe du Hoc with another gun battery about sixty kilometres away, which we were never supposed to attack and we did not. I complained loudly and have since received a personal written apology from the Chief of Air Staff.
Ted Pickerd also felt strongly about the airmen’s treatment by their fellow Australians. ‘We went wherever we were told, we didn’t stay over there because of cowardice. The losses in the Pacific were nothing like the losses in Bomber Command.’ Ted decided, nonetheless, to remain in the RAAF. He met up with a young woman named Georgie whom he had known before he left Australia, and they married in 1947. Ted became an air commodore and, on his retirement, Administrator of Norfolk Island. To his DFC were later added an OBE, OAM and the French Légion D’honneur.
Alick Roberts, too, went into the permanent RAAF and retired as a wing commander in 1976. He then worked for some years as a guide at the Australian War Memorial. Noel Eliot retired from the RAAF as a flight lieutenant in 1956, ten years after marrying his ‘winsome lass’, Enid. They settled down on an orchard in Canberra and made several visits to France, where Noel had forged lasting friendships with the families who sheltered him from the Nazis.
Peter Isaacson was discharged from the RAAF in 1946 and the next year founded his own publishing company, Peter Isaacson Publications, from which he built an empire of sixty community newspapers and business and professional journals in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. He was made a life governor of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.
Pilot Gordon Stooke was one of many airmen who had lengthy battles with the Department of Defence after retirement. The issue for Gordon was a medal. He was twenty when he joined 460 Squadron in May 1943. The warrant officer flew several ops before he was shot down, on 24 June 1943. He had been on a raid over Wuppertal, in the Ruhr, when his Lancaster was felled by anti-aircraft fire. Gordon and the crew flew on for another hour before bailing out safely over Belgium. Just over a month later, on 27 July, the Gestapo captured him in Paris. After interrogation at Frankfurt, he joined Geoff Taylor as an inmate at Stalag IV-B, about fifty kilometres from Dresden. Along with thousands of other POWs, he was released when the Red Army liberated the camp on 23 April 1945.
Gordon believed he should have been awarded the Air Crew Europe Star for his RAAF service. The Air Crew Europe Star was awarded to RAAF members who, between 3 September 1939 and 5 June 1944, completed two months’ service in a unit engaged in operational flying from bases in the United Kingdom over Europe after completing the required two months’ qualifying service for the 1939–45 Star, a separate campaign award. He wrote to the Department of Defence in June 1988, forty-five years after he was shot down:
It is important from my point of view that it be recorded that I was captured by German forces on the 27/7/1943 and not the 24/6/1943 as shown. I was, for over a month, free in Belgium and France and not a Prisoner of War. During this time I was still under the command of the Air Ministry and I would suggest, the Commanding Officer of 460 Squadron. After all I was t
rying to get back to England to continue my duties with Bomber Command.
I was certainly not under the influence of the Germans.
I am also concerned as to why my Honours and Awards did not include the Air Crew Europe Star.
I was involved in 10 raids over German and German occupied territory as Captain of a Lancaster Bomber serving in Bomber Command from the 8/5/1944 to the 27/7/1944. This service and participation surely qualifies me for the Air Crew Europe Star.
The following month he received a curt response from Defence justifying its denial of the medal to him. The letter acknowledged that he had been reported as missing on operations on 24 June 1943 and later reported as being a Prisoner of War on 27 July 1943. It continued:
Time spent as a Prisoner of War is not counted towards the total period of four months qualifying service unless a member had completed the necessary two months service for the 1939–45 Star and had begun to qualify for the Aircrew Europe Star prior to being made a Prisoner of War. Escapers and evaders count their time as such providing that during that time they took an active part in operations against the enemy.
As your personal documents did not reveal any evidence of you taking part in active operations against the enemy between 24 June 1943 and 27 July 1943 such service is not regarded as being in accordance with the provisions detailed above and, as such, is not qualifying service for the Aircrew Europe Star.
As your service did not meet the above requirements you did not, therefore, qualify for the Aircrew Europe Star and your correct entitlement is as previously advised, i.e. 1939–45 Star, Defence Medal 1939–45, Australia Service Medal 1939–45 and the Returned from Active Service Badge.
