Flak

by Michael Veitch

  ‘The Wirraway was an aircraft that had every vice in the world,’ he said flatly.

  The Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation built no less than 755 Wirraways between 1939 to 1946, and all of them were rubbish. Wirraway is apparently an Aboriginal word meaning ‘challenge’ and indeed, what a challenge this great lump was to all who flew in it. Much to the disgust of the British, the design was adapted from an American training aircraft, the Harvard. In 1936 it became the first project undertaken by the newly formed Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation (CAC), being duly given the designation CA-1 and built at Fishermans Bend in Melbourne.

  Because the Wirraway was not particularly good at anything, it was given the classification ‘general purpose aircraft’ and forced into a variety of ill-fitting roles including fighter, bomber, reconnaissance aircraft, army-co-operation and trainer. There was even a madcap plan to turn it into a dive bomber but common sense prevailed and this particular fantasy was abandoned. A moment’s lack of concentration by the pilot could result in a stall at just about any speed, then a series of virtually uncontrollable flicks onto its side and back. Landing could also be a problem as it tended to suddenly drop a wing if the angle of attack was marginally too high.

  They were inadequately armed with two .303 Vickers machine guns mounted in the cockpit right in front of the pilot, firing through the propeller with the aid of a synchronising device. Even so, said George, there were few Wirraways without a couple of holes in the prop where the synchroniser had failed, and he himself would hear the occasional ping as a bullet struck.

  The Wirraway’s most infamous hour occurred in 1942 when it was sent into combat against Japanese aircraft in New Guinea, and a more David and Goliath encounter never there was. They were massacred by the nimble Japanese fighters and suffered terrible losses. Once, and only once did a Wirraway manage to shoot down a Japanese plane when, on Boxing Day 1942 Pilot Officer J. Archer surprised a very unlucky Zero pilot near Buna on the northern coast of New Guinea, diving hard and sending him crashing into the sea. Archer’s award for his astonishing feat? Six bottles of beer.

  ‘They weren’t even well made,’ George recalled. One day at 8,000 feet after finishing some formation training, he was flying on his own when his engine blew a bearing, pouring choking smoke into the cockpit. This was it, he thought. He trimmed the aircraft and climbed out onto the wing, ready to jump. Then he noticed the smoke had cleared so, happy to save the government several thousand pounds, climbed back in and looked for the nearest open paddock. Being near Mildura, he didn’t have to look very far, and was even able to manually lower the undercarriage. The prop windmilled away and the Wirraway, its engine well and truly dead, glided down in one piece. But any thought that his thrift would endear him to the authorities was sadly mistaken. They were furious, preferring him to have written the plane off, rather than going to the expense of recovering and transporting it back to the airfield, with all the associated paperwork. (Public service attitudes, it seems, go back a long way.) They didn’t even send another plane to pick him up so, somewhat comically, George had to sit in the cockpit of his lame duck as it was towed the 30 miles back to Mildura down the highway behind a lorry.

  ‘A vicious, vicious thing,’ said George of the Wirraway shaking his head, and was glad to be rid of it. He then graduated onto the P-40 Kittyhawk, another aircraft which left much to be desired but a definite improvement nonetheless.

  As a single seater with no dual controls, the only way to fly a Kittyhawk was to do it yourself. So for a couple of days, George was made to sit in the cockpit familiarising himself with the instruments. Then one day, he taxied out to the edge of the runway and was signalled to take off.

  ‘It was one of the most frightening experiences I’ve ever had,’ he said.

  In the air the noise from the Kittyhawk’s Allison engine was deafening and with the cockpit open, the wind came in from the side and forced your head forwards. But he managed to pull his wheels up, then turn around and land. That was it for his first flight, but he’d got the feel of it.

  It was a modest debut, but being cocky didn’t do you much good either. A fellow Tasmanian who joined up with George had the temerity on his maiden flight to execute a slow roll over the airfield. The CO was not happy, and the entire unit was made to form a line behind the unfortunate young man and administer a kick in the pants next morning on parade.

  George’s training was nothing if not thorough. By the time he passed out, rated as ‘average’ (everyone was rated ‘average’ – the CO looked better that way) he had already clocked up 226 hours in the air on Wirraways and Kittyhawks. He had learned about strafing, formation flying, air combat tactics and had even learned to skip a bomb along the water to hit a ship. As fond as he had become of the Kittyhawk, it was time to say goodbye to it too, because George was off to join a brand new RAAF squadron, number 79, flying Spitfires.

  I’d noticed when discussing the Spitfire, that almost anyone with even the slightest interest in aeroplanes went into a kind of love-struck, reverential trance, spouting absurd anthropomorphising platitudes about this aeroplane’s ‘beauty’, ‘grace’, and even ‘mystery’. George, who actually flew them, didn’t much like them at all, and in the context of the enduring legend, it was one of the most refreshing, amusing – not to mention authoritative – views I’d ever heard.

  ‘Austere,’ is how he rated the Spitfire. ‘No creature comforts at all.’

  Compared to the roomy Kittyhawk, the Spitfire was cramped and uncomfortable. Your head hit the top of the canopy, your shoulders touched the sides and your feet had to be hung in straps on the rudder pedals to prevent the blood rushing down into your legs and blacking you out. In the cloying heat of the tropics, it would have been less than pleasant. To be sure, the British wartime economy was bare-boned and the government was churning out Spitfires as fast as it could but compared to the relatively luxurious American aircraft the Spitfire must have seemed miserly indeed.

  After picking up his Spitfire at Laverton in Victoria, George’s log book tells the story of 79’s long journey north to take part in the Pacific War. From Laverton to Richmond in New South Wales, Richmond to Amberley in Queensland, then onto Townsville, where the aircraft were tested and adjusted for the tropics before leaving Australia. Then to Horn Island off the tip of Cape York, Port Moresby (where the squadron became operational), Seven Mile Airstrip in New Guinea, Milne Bay, and then to tiny Goodenough Island, off the eastern tip of Papua, part of the small archipelago known as the Entrecasteauxs.

  As a Tasmanian, George found adjusting to life in the tropics challenging. Snakes, bugs, spiders the size of your hand, and rudimentary accommodation in tents with no relief from the unbearable humidity. To pass the time, the men would collect white coloured ants, put them in among black-coloured ones and, as George says, ‘watch the massacre. Terrible. The white ants would cop it the worst’.

  The isolation had its own dangers. Once when over the big Japanese base at Rabaul, on New Britain, a fellow pilot suffered engine failure at high altitude, so George decided to stick with him. Flying alongside, George watched as the pilot prepared to abandon the stricken Spitfire.

  ‘I expected him to do the normal thing: roll the aircraft onto its back and fall out.’

  Instead, he watched as the pilot trimmed the aircraft and pulled the stick back to fly straight and level, then suddenly let it go, causing the Spitfire to ‘bunt’, ejecting the man like a bucking brumby at a rodeo. The Spitfire proceeded to the bottom of the sea, and a Catalina flying boat was sent to rescue the pilot in the water. But his ordeal was not yet over. Rough seas swamped the Catalina’s motors, so it too had to be rescued and towed back to base the next day.

  The prospects of bailing out over Japanese-held territory was a sobering one, as the stories of abuse of POWs were already well-known.

  ‘We all wore officers’ ranks, even those of us that weren’t,’ George remembered. ‘We knew they treated the officers slightly better than
the men. We thought it might give you a little more time before they chopped your head off.’ And the Japanese were not the only danger to a downed airman.

  ‘To the north of New Britain were cannibals, and yes, we were told they would eat us.’

  In the tropical extremes, the Spitfire proved less suited than to its original task of short-range defensive fighter in the cool skies of northern Europe, and mechanical failures accounted for a disproportionately high number of casualties. Often, said George, airmen would simply vanish into the sea.

  ‘One disappeared north of Horn Island. Never saw him again.’

  A particular danger was the Spitfire’s oxygen system which, amazingly, had no indicators. The only way you knew you were running out of air was to keep looking at your fingernails.

  ‘If they were pink, you were getting oxygen. If they were white, you knew you were in trouble.’

  At 40,000 feet (12,000 metres), George reckoned, you had about 8 seconds before your oxygen-starved brain lapsed into unconsciousness. One pilot, on his very first high altitude flight, suffered such a fate, slumping forward onto the stick and sending the aircraft straight into the ground at over 400 miles an hour.

  ‘He just left a little hole.’

  Another drawback was the Spitfire’s restricted range, limited by its relatively small 80-gallons in the main fuel tank, supplemented by another 80 in the drop-tank slung under the belly. Even with the engine operating nowhere near full power it only had a flying time of about 5 hours. The trouble with the drop tank, however, was that occasionally, you had to drop it.

  ‘If we needed height in a hurry, we’d let it go, and then we were very restricted,’ George explained. ‘Usually, we’d come home with only 2 or 3 gallons left in the tank.’

  For all its faults, the Kittyhawk’s range was superior, and later the Mustang could be in the air for as long as 8 hours at a stretch.

  Maintenance of these complicated machines in such climes was a truly Herculean task, carried out by dedicated groundcrews. George had a theory, though, that sometimes it was not just the elements and the Japanese working against them.

  ‘Some of the motors were sabotaged,’ he claimed.

  This was certainly a new one for me, and I pressed him on it. After every 80 hours of flying, a Spitfire required an engine change, and the changeover Rolls-Royce Merlin engines would arrive in big crates from England. Occasionally one would be missing a vital circlip off the little end, causing the pistons to slowly wear a hole in the cylinder sleeve. Whether it was sabotage or carelessness of the part of the weary English factory workers, once this occurred, white smoke would spew from the exhaust and the pilot would need to quickly cut the engine electrical switches to avoid a fire, and either bale out, or use the Spitfire’s excellent aerodynamics to glide its way in.

  Once, a fellow pilot radioed in saying he was in just this kind of trouble at 25,000 feet (7,600 metres). On the ground, George could see the tell-tale white vapour and watched him come all the way in on a long glide. Obviously thinking that he might be a little short of the end of the runway, he suffered a momentary mental lapse and switched on the engine electrics, hoping for a brief boost that would bring him safely down.

  ‘He just blew up. Right in front of us,’ remembered George. ‘Just like that. Boom, in a big flash. We lost a lot like that.’

  George’s nine month Pacific tour included shipping patrols, base patrols, weather patrols, reconnaissance patrols, night flying, searches for downed pilots in dinghys, ground strafing, and a great deal of other flying besides. Later, 79 moved a little further north to Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands, and would scramble to have a go at intercepting the Japanese bombers as they flew over to raid Port Morseby.

  At dawn every morning, a marauding ‘Tony’ – Japanese aircraft were all issued with anglicised names by the Allies to aid recognition – fighter bomber would drop one on 79’s airfield and speed off, until on 31 October 1943, Flight Sergeant I.H. ‘Kid’ Callister brought it down with a lucky piece of interception and cannon-fire. A week later, Callister was dead, killed in a take-off collision with another aircraft.

  ‘The other bloke ended up in hospital, completely burned, with just his eyes showing,’ remembered George.

  Then one night it was George’s turn to chase down a high-flying Japanese bomber. High above the island in darkness, the only way he could spot it was by looking for the glows of the engine exhaust stubs, but try as he might, the bomber remained elusive. Then, looking down, George spotted lights of a different nature. It was anti-aircraft fire being aimed in his direction.

  ‘The Yanks are having a go at me!’ he thought indignantly.

  Then a searchlight opened up. Thinking this was getting ‘bloody ridiculous’, he turned away in a wide arc out to sea, then came back to sneak onto the strip, aided only by the dim light of kerosene lamps.

  ‘They would just shoot at anything,’ he said.

  Having said that, he was grateful for the Americans’ generous supplies of cigarettes, chewing gum and toothpaste. The chewing tobacco was, however, politely declined.

  The mid-to-latter stages of the Pacific War were an odd time for the Australians, the bulk of the fighting having been taken over by the Americans. They were now travelling north, pushing the Japanese back towards their homeland. The Australians were restricted to the secondary, some have argued superfluous tasks of mopping up the remnants of the Japanese who, cut off and unsupplied, were going nowhere fast and possessed little or no offensive potential.

  Later, Kiriwina would play host to the Americans, who not only provided the ground defence but used 79’s airstrip as a base to attack Rabaul, and continue on to places further north. George would watch them fly in, their factory-fresh P-38 Lightning, twin-engined fighters finished all over in gleaming silver aluminium, and looking magnificent beside the drab camouflage of their well-worn Spitfires. ‘Why shouldn’t we have nice shiny aeroplanes too?’ thought George along with a couple of the pilots, and proceeded to strip the paint off some of their mounts. However, instead of shiny silver, all this revealed was an ugly patchwork of low-grade metal panels, each a slightly different, slightly dirty shade of grey. All the stories of Spitfires being made out of the donated pots and pans of patriotic British housewives seemed a little less apocryphal. The bare patches were painted over again. ‘At least we were better trained than they were,’ said George as consolation.

  He also did his fair share of ground strafing, although remains doubtful as to its efficacy.

  ‘We were told there were Japs in a plantation on an outlying island, so we flattened it but didn’t see anyone. Whether they were there or not, we didn’t really know.

  The tiny New Guinea island of Pitilu was clobbered by just about everyone.

  ‘The navy shelled it, we strafed it, the bombers bombed it and then the Yanks came to take it over. But the Japanese fired a mortar round into one of their landing craft, so we all had to do it all over again.’

  Later, George heard that there had been fourteen Japanese there at the beginning of this quick mini-campaign, and fourteen at the end, all secure in underground shelters.

  But strafing could be dangerous as well, and the Japanese had a particular fondness for laying traps. George was leading a flight of four Spitfires investigating a lone barge tied up on a beach on a remote island. Unable to detach his drop-tank, he remained at about 1,000 feet (300 metres) while the other three went in at tree-top level. Then all hell broke loose and big black puffs of smoke erupted right beside him and bullets streamed up in all directions from the jungle.

  ‘Let’s out of here!’ George yelled and swooped down to join the others, hightailing out of the trap. ‘None of us were hit, but we were very lucky.’

  On the Japanese airstrip on Gasmata on the south-west coast of New Britain, the Japanese planted dummy aircraft to lure the Australians into strafing attacks. This time it was not anti-aircraft fire that was waiting for them, but as George found out wh
en screaming in at zero feet, land mines buried in the runway and set off remotely. Luckily, but the Japs’ timing was out and they went off behind the Spitfires as they whooshed past.

  After his tour, he came home to a job at his old alma mater, number 2 Operational Training Unit in Mildura, where he was reintroduced to his old friend the Wirraway. This time, however, he was flying in the back seat as an instructor, continuing to do so until after the war.

  ‘What’s the most dramatic thing that happened to you?’ I asked as the meeting came to an end. I expected him to nominate the strafing or anti-aircraft episode and send me on my way, but instead he surprised me.

  One day the whole squadron of twelve Spitfires was in formation over the sea, on their way to intercept a formation of Japanese, when the CO’s voice announced, ‘Righto, we’ve got to get some height, drop your belly tanks,’ and away they fell into the sea. Then George’s engine started to lose power. The revs were there, but no boost, and he started to fall back. ‘Come on, George, pick up,’ said the CO, but his engine just wouldn’t respond. Eventually he was instructed, ‘George, go home,’ and peeled off, heading away from the formation.

  ‘And there I was, all by my little self,’ he said, in a tone making fun of himself slightly, but I could see he also meant it. It was a poignant image to end the interview – this young man way out over the endless sea all on his own in a small aeroplane, feeling extremely vulnerable.

  ‘All the boys had gone and left me on my own and were out of sight. That was my most worrying time.’

  11

  Les Gordon

  Air-gunner

  Ours was called the Chop Squadron.

  Les described himself as ‘a baby boomer of the First World War’, but could almost pass for one from the Second. What is it about the English? How is it possible that, even into their eighties, they can manage to look so uncannily young? Perhaps a lifetime not spent baking under the Australian sun might have something to do with it, but I reckon a lot of it simply comes down to attitude.