Flak

by Michael Veitch

  Having picked up a new pilot, new wireless operator and a flight engineer, Gerald was now part of a full crew, ready to convert onto the Lancaster at Feltwell in Norfolk. Gerald hadn’t forgotten his first time in a Lanc, and the feeling that he was at last flying in a thoroughbred. The Wellingtons and Stirlings would, as he put it, ‘stagger off the ground. You’d say a prayer and hope you made it’. Sitting in the rear turret on that first flight, he heard the pilot say, ‘Full power to the engines’, in his headphones and immediately felt himself surge up off the ground. ‘This will do me,’ he thought.

  His stop-start period of training at last over, Gerald began operations with number 186 Squadron at Tuddenham in Suffolk. It was a brand new squadron and Gerald was one of the original crews, joining it just a week after it was formed.

  ‘It was dreadful,’ he said and laughed softly. Newly formed squadrons often operated out of newly formed bases, which usually meant inadequate accommodation.

  ‘We didn’t even have hot water, and this was November.’

  The crews protested loudly. It took a few weeks but eventually the hot showers arrived.

  A few days after arriving, Gerald was listed on the battle order for his first op. This time his pilot didn’t complete his ‘second dickie’ trip. Instead, it was the boss, the squadron’s wing commander who announced, ‘Right, I’m taking you lot today.’ Perhaps he’d heard about their earlier bad luck. It was only a three hour trip to Flushing on the Scheldt estuary, but Gerald could at last enter his first trip into his log book.

  Remembering his rather lonely, dangerous position in the rear turret, Gerald reflected that it was not the gunners’ job to go looking for trouble. The Lancaster was a bomber, not a fighter.

  ‘We didn’t really have the firepower to take the fighters on,’ he says. Gerald spotted German fighters but was never attacked. Occasionally, he would see one that hadn’t noticed him and would direct the pilot to quietly slip sideways out of harm’s way. In actual fact, by the time Gerald commenced operations in late 1944, the night fighter threat had diminished, but the German anti-aircraft defences remained fierce right up until the end of the war.

  ‘The flak was just as bad and in the daytime they could see you,’ he said.

  One raid on a synthetic oil plant in early December 1944, at Merseburg near Leipzig, Gerald was told to expect no less than 750 anti-aircraft guns. Over Gelsenkirchen, Gerald heard the voice of his mid-upper gunner over the intercom.

  ‘Hey Gerald, take a look at that starboard tail.’ Looking around, he saw a hole the size of a large beach ball had been made in the tailplane a few feet from his head. One another occasion, Gerald’s Lancaster was so badly damaged the amazed groundcrew counted nearly sixty holes in her. It was written off and never flew again.

  ‘Did you ever see another plane going down?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep. Some of the crew slept in the same hut as me. I didn’t like the pilot but I changed my mind about him when I saw what happened.’

  It was a daylight raid, somewhere in the Ruhr, and the Lancasters were flying close. The Americans flew exclusively in daylight in an intricate box formation, well rehearsed and rigidly adhered to, allowing the many guns of the formation to target any attacker. The Royal Air Force, flying at night, was much more laissez faire. It’s amazing there weren’t more collisions but the facts and figures are frightening. On any of the big raids, up to a thousand aircraft were scheduled to be over the target in a twenty minute bombing window, with no lights and all within an altitude of 18 to 20,000 feet. At night, you couldn’t see the proximity of the aircraft next to you, and that was probably a good thing. But in daylight, it was unavoidable.

  On this raid the Lancaster next to Gerald was hit and caught fire, burning fiercely from the front. He watched it gradually going down, flames pouring out as it accelerated into a dive. All of a sudden it levelled out, the pilot somehow managing to find a way of controlling it for a few moments inside the blazing cockpit. Five of the crew baled out in quick succession. As soon as the last one left the aircraft, down she went in a mass of flames.

  ‘There were other sights, too,’ Gerald told me.

  The 4,000 pound ‘Cookie’ had only a thin casing and if it was hit by flak, it simply blew up.

  ‘Nothing even fell from the sky. Nothing. I saw that several times. It’s hard to imagine.’

  Another problem was hitting the turbulence from the other aircraft.

  ‘Once, it nearly made me bail out.’

  Approaching a target one night, he felt his aircraft start to go down.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he called over the intercom. No answer. Again, ‘What’s wrong?’ Still nothing.

  Fearing the worst, he grabbed his parachute, stowed just inside the fuselage. The moment before he removed his helmet with attached earphones, he heard the voice of the pilot.

  ‘Hold on.’

  The pilot had simply been occupied fighting to regain control of the aircraft in the turbulence. Another moment and Gerald would have been out of the aircraft, and on his way down to land alone in enemy territory.

  I turned another page in Gerald’s log book and stopped reading at the first entry. I’d been expecting to see it at some stage in these interviews and here it was, written in plain red ink: February 13/14 1945 – Dresden. Gerald’s voice lowered. Looking at it even gave me a slight shudder, like a door in an old house behind which you know some ghastly event has occurred in the distant past.

  Ironically, it was serial Holocaust denier David Irving who first brought the world’s attention to the number of civilians killed by the Allies in the Dresden raid in a book written in 1963. Since then, the controversy had raged on, fanned by historical perspective and a refusal to see the Second World War simply in terms of good and bad, black and white.

  When the Royal Air Force at last accepted the fact that it was almost impossible to bomb a specific target at night in a blacked-out city, they decided in March 1942 on the policy of ‘area bombing’. In other words if you can’t destroy the factory in the town, destroy the town itself. This indiscriminate method of destruction largely became the pattern for the next three years, and the speciality of the RAF, who dropped a whopping 45 per cent of their total tonnage of bombs on industrial city targets. The Americans, on the other hand, generally bombed by daylight, using the ‘precision bombing’ theory. For any city to suffer area bombing was terrible, but the full horror of Dresden can still barely be comprehended today. What cannot be denied is that at the very least, twenty-five thousand people perished in the firestorm that engulfed the beautiful medieval city after a particularly successful air attack by 796 Lancasters and nine Mosquitos.

  ‘Do you remember it?’

  ‘Yep,’ he answered definitely. ‘It was just like daylight.’ The light from the burning city was so bright it even illuminated the other bombers flying with him. On other trips, this would have been a hazard, but one of the salient features of the Dresden controversy is that the city was virtually undefended, with only eight Lancasters lost on the trip, and two of those over France on their way home. If such a target was so undefended, why was it worth obliterating, along with its population? This is just one of the questions that still rage around the subject of Dresden today, and haunting those who took part in it.

  ‘We didn’t question what we were told, we were just kids,’ said Gerald. And of course, they were.

  I asked Gerald whether he thought he’d get through his tour. ‘Not when my brother-in-law had got through. Too much luck in the one family.’

  I read another entry in Gerald’s log book: Aircraft severely damaged. All tanks holed except one. Port outer hit twice. 6 inch ×12 inch hole in elevator. 40 holes in aircraft. Another rough trip, but it could have been a lot rougher, as Gerald learned on returning. After inspecting the aircraft, the ground-crew saw something lodged inside the port wing. It was a shell, a German anti-aircraft incendiary of a type as yet unknown to the Air Ministry. It had lodged in the metal s
par that separated the two massive fuel tanks inside the wing, burning itself out without incident. A few inches either side and the aircraft would almost certainly have been set ablaze.

  Datteln, Recklinghausen – coking plant. Went to target on three engines read another entry.

  ‘Tell me about that one.’

  One of the engines had packed up soon after taking off. A quick conference between the pilot and flight engineer decided that it was still possible to make it to the target, a benzol plant, bomb on time and make it home in one piece. By cutting corners of the original flight plan, they reckoned they could do it, but of course they would have to risk being alone and unprotected for certain periods along the route. They did, and they made it back safely.

  Gerald’s log book gets busier and busier the longer the war goes on. In the last few weeks, he seemed to have been up almost every night. I picked another at random. The city of Munster.

  ‘Yeah, I remember that one. We had to dodge our own bombs.’

  Attacking railway yards and a viaduct in Munster, Gerald’s squadron was slated to lead the attack at a height of 21,000 feet. Suddenly, over the target, another squadron of Lancasters appeared, ahead of schedule, 500 feet above. Gerald and the mid-upper gunner watched with trepidation and then horror as the bomb doors opened and the 500-pounders began falling less than 100 feet away.

  ‘Left! Right!’ came the frantic shouts to the pilot to avoid the falling bombs.

  ‘[There was] nothing more terrifying than seeing [those] bombs coming down.’

  Then came their last trip. It was their worst, and one they later discovered they weren’t obliged to go on. By mid-March 1945, Gerald and his crew had completed thirty-eight, and were regarded as highly experienced. The battle order went up early at Stradishall in Cambridgeshire, where he was now based. Their names were on it for that night’s raid to Kiel. Unbeknown to Gerald, that same day a signal had come down from Bomber Command Headquarters, reducing the maximum amount of missions in a tour from forty to thirty-five. The CO of the squadron at the time was an Englishman and Gerald didn’t like him.

  ‘And he obviously didn’t like us,’ he reflected. He later heard that one of the flight commanders pointed out that Gerald and his crew had, according to the order, completed their tour and could be stood down. The commanding officer paused, then muttered, ‘They’re on the list. Let them go.’

  Over the target, Gerald was blinded by searing light as the aircraft was ‘coned’ – caught like a moth in the beams of between twenty and thirty German searchlights which beckoned every surrounding gunner to get a bearing and open fire.

  ‘It was like day,’ he remembered. The pilot threw the Lancaster around like a toy in the surf. Later, the flight engineer told Gerald that at one point, they were actually upside down.

  ‘Gosh . . .’ I heard myself exhale again.

  Through the pilot’s skill and experience, they eventually extricated themselves from the searchlights and even managed to bomb. But if they’d been attacked by fighters, Gerald, his eyes still blinded, would have been useless.

  Their return flight path took them back over the Danish coast, where the plan was to descend to 7,000 feet and come home across the North Sea. Shaken, Gerald and the crew were anxious to get home. As soon as the Danish coast had been reached, the pilot elected to seek the relative safety of the lower altitude sooner rather than later, and put the Lancaster’s nose down into a steep dive.

  Hurtling downwards, the flight engineer, sitting next to the pilot saw something loom up out of the blackness. It was another Lancaster directly in front. He didn’t have time to say a word. Instead, he hit the pilot across the chest and grabbed the control column himself. In the rear turret, Gerald felt the sudden surge of the G-force and startled, looked up to see this aircraft that has appeared out of the night, close enough for him to spot the faces of the two gunners in their turrets. For a moment, he was convinced of the imminent collision.

  ‘We skidded across the top,’ he said.

  I don’t quite know what he means and ask him again, but for a moment, I have lost Gerald and he was back out over the North Sea.

  ‘We just skidded over the top of them.’

  It was the middle of the night. The disappearance without trace of two aircraft and their crews was avoided by luck, and mere inches.

  Strangely, it was the image of a near-miss that still seemed to haunt him, the faces of the fellows in another aircraft whom he never met – his own mirror image in a picture of near-catastrophe. This time, it was his turn to let out a sigh. It was the only time I saw him rattled.

  ‘What a finale,’ I offered after a little while.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it was,’ he said.

  His amazing tour of operations was over. He had completed thirty-eight trips, thirty-one of them in daylight. He and his crew went down to London, and celebrated having survived. By the end of the war, in August, he was back in Australia working in a bank. And all this happened before his twenty-first birthday.

  Postscript: Gerald later made contact with Charlie’s surviving brother, now in his eighties and still living in Birmingham, explaining what he knew of Charlie’s death.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ he told Gerald. ‘If it had been his watch, he would have gone back for it just the same.’

  7

  Tom Hall

  Pilot

  I said to myself, this game is for keeps.

  One very cold afternoon, my mobile phone rang. I was in the car, in traffic, stationary, running late. The call was crackly. I could just make out a male voice saying something about flying.

  ‘. . . the book . . . would like to ...Tom ...Typhoons . . .’ he said and then dropped out.

  My heart bounced. I pulled over and checked my ‘received calls’ list. A private number. I hoped he would ring back soon because the Typhoon is my unequivocally favourite aircraft of all time.

  Just looking at a picture of one is enough to make me happy. Silly, I know. Nevertheless, the Hawker Typhoon is my unchallenged number one pin-up of Second World War aviation.

  And yet the Typhoon was a brute and had one of the dodgiest beginnings of any aeroplane. It was a great mother of a thing, like an aeroplane version of a V8 ute developed before the war as a single-engined fighter to succeed the famous Hurricane, but bigger and more powerful. Sadly, its construction was all too rushed. Its chief designer was Sydney Camm, a workaholic genius, already father to several famous military aircraft (as well as the man who gave his name to the camshaft). I imagined him saying to himself one day before the drawing board, ‘I’m going to make the biggest, scariest thing I can think of.’

  But initially, no-one was more scared of the Typhoon than the pilots who had to fly it. Fast tracked with wartime urgency from drawing board to production without realistic flight trials, the early Typhoons were plagued with faults. Small things really, such as the tendency of its tail to er, fall off. One of the Typhoon’s early debuts was the disastrous Dieppe raid in August 1942 where a squadron of them swooped out of the sun onto a formation of Focke-Wulf 190 fighters. Three of the Germans were damaged, but two of the Typhoons failed to pull out of the dive due to the tail section deciding to part company with the rest of the fuselage. This and other structural faults became almost endemic to the Typhoon. It wasn’t until well into its service that the rear fuselage was strengthened and this particular nasty rectified. And then there was the engine, a 1-ton, twenty-four-cylinder monster, the Napier Sabre. Immensely powerful, the early Sabres had some unpleasant habits as well, such as suddenly stopping, shattering its cylinders, spewing out oil and blinding the unfortunate pilot, or just blowing up. Then there was its tendency to leak carbon monoxide into the cockpit, quietly asphyxiating the pilot (this was never completely solved so Typhoon pilots used oxygen at all times, even at low level). But when they finally got it right, the Typhoon was magnificent. While it was found to be simply too cumbersome to be a successful fighter, as a ground-attack army support machin
e, it was to have no equal.

  It looked magnificent, with a big round nose spinner from which protruded three enormous propeller blades and a distinctive open ‘chin’ radiator that made it look like a gaping monster (though it has to be said, this same feature made it impossible to ditch safely in the sea). Its wings were thick and strong, balanced by the high, strengthened tail. Seven tons in weight, it could carry a big payload of bombs, and four 20-millimetre cannons protruded from the leading edge of its wings. But the weapon with which the Typhoon was to become synonymous, as the Germans in Normandy were to find out to their utter dismay, was the rocket.

  So I was looking forward to hearing from my unknown caller about Typhoons. But he didn’t ring back. I waited, and I waited. Weeks went by. Damn. I had never met a Typhoon pilot, and my project would not feel complete without doing so.

  A month or so went by. A colleague who knew someone who worked at a radio station mentioned to a mutual friend that someone had tried to contact me about ‘some old bloke who was a pilot’ and who had talked about it on the radio. I tracked down a name. Apparently a man by the name of Tom Hall had called up a few weeks earlier and had talked about flying Typhoons on D-Day.

  A week later I was standing in front of a modest suburban unit on another dismal, overcast day.

  ‘Have you read my book?’ was Tom’s opening remark.

  I hadn’t. He seemed unimpressed and a paperback was placed in my hands. Typhoon Warfare – Reminiscences of a rocket-firing Typhoon pilot. ‘Twenty dollars,’ he said.

  Over the past few years, Tom had become something of a celebrity as one of the last surviving Typhoon pilots of the Normandy campaign. In 2004, he was offered a trip to France by the government to take part in the D-Day fiftieth anniversary, an offer he declined. There were also tributes from the French embassy, radio appearances and, of course, his book.

  Tom came from Port Melbourne, an iconic working class suburb.