Les, originally from Bristol, now lived very much under the baking Australian sun at the Bull Creek Estate in Perth, where the streets and buildings bear the names of the aircraft once flown by many of the residents of this air force retirees’ village – Anson Court, Spitfire Street, Sunderland Road, Beaufort Crescent and so on. The poor buggers must feel they can never get away from the war, especially when someone like me shows up with a tape recorder, hell-bent on wrenching them right back into the middle of it.
Les was the head of the Bomber Command Union of former members, looked after the estate’s chapel, and seemed to know just about everyone.
Les joined the RAF at Lord’s cricket ground at the minimum acceptable age of seventeen and a half. ‘I was so keen to go to war,’ he said, shaking his head with disbelief at the enthusiasm of his youth. This, despite having already lost a brother – killed by a Japanese sniper while rescuing a fellow soldier in Burma – as well as a cousin shot down over Calais on his first trip. Even still, he never thought it would happen to him.
While pilot training on Tiger Moths in Carlisle, the numbers men looked down at their list of recruits and realised they had a glut. So, a line on the page was drawn, and an announcement made: ‘Those above the line will be pilots, those below, flight engineers or gunners’. His piloting days were over.
At the crewing-up stage, Les found himself in among a strange and unfamiliar tribe – New Zealanders – and was duly assigned to be a rear-gunner with 75 Squadron, Royal New Zealand Air Force at Mepal in Cambridgeshire. Being forced to fly with a bunch of antipodean colonials might have dampened the fervour of some Englishmen but, as Les soon realised, he’d joined the ‘A’ team.
Number 75 Squadron was the only dedicated New Zealand unit in Bomber Command, and a more impressive flying unit was there none. We Australians are never happier than when banging on about our proud-albeit-rugged military heritage, but when it comes to the warrior stakes, New Zealanders are second to nobody. It’s just that they go about it a little more quietly. (The bravery of the Second NZ Division at the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy is but one of many barely known feats of Kiwi valour.)
The medal tally for 75 Squadron – which took for its emblem a tiki, and a Maori inscription meaning ‘for ever and ever be strong’ – speaks for itself: one Victoria Cross, six Distinguished Service Orders, an astonishing eighty-eight Distinguished Flying Crosses, and over twenty bars and other decorations besides. A more sobering statistic is that 75 suffered the second highest loss rate of any Bomber Command squadron – 196 aircraft lost on operations – exceeded only by 115 Squadron with over 200 aircraft lost and which was, oddly enough, 75’s next door neighbour, at nearby Witchford. Les later found out that 75 was known as ‘the chop squadron’.
The four New Zealanders in Les’s crew had all topped their individual courses. The gunners had also proved themselves in battle. Later on operations, this was borne out by the decision to paint yellow stripes on the tail fin of their Lancaster, identifying their aircraft ‘G-H leader’, a vital role that involved leading the bombing in daylight for the entire formation. The moment they dropped – so would everyone else.
Les’s tour would see him operating largely in daylight in late 1944-45, often adopting the tight ‘box’ formation of the Flying Fortresses of the United States Eighth Army Air Force, instead of the much looser arrangement of Bomber Command which simply told an individual aircraft to be over a certain target at a certain height and time, and to try not to get in anyone’s way.
This particular strand of conversation leads us onto one of the great talking points among plane geeks like me: the respective merits of the two main Allied aerial weapons of the European bombing campaign, the B-17 Flying Fortress versus the Avro Lancaster, a contentious argument still, which I will attempt to summarise here.
Regrettably, I have never had the chance to meet a Fortress crew member, but those who flew the Lancaster are universal in their dismissal of their American counterpart for one particular reason: the B-17 could barely lift a cooked sausage. That’s untrue, of course, but such is the implication in their tone.
The lifting power of the Lancaster was, admittedly, extraordinary. Its four Merlin engines (the same ones that powered the Spitfire) allowed it to pull a whopping 14,000 pounds of bombs into the air, more than a third of the aircraft’s actual weight. The Fortress, on the other hand, jammed-packed as it was with extra crew (the ‘G’ version having five dedicated gunners to the Lancaster’s two), thirteen .5 Browning machine-guns (the Lanc had eight smaller .303s), extra turrets and all that heavy ammunition, could manage just 6,000 pounds, less than half the Lancaster’s payload, or the equivalent of just one RAF ‘Cookie’ plus two ordinary general purpose 1,000-pounders.
‘When we were both bombing oil refineries and the like, our bombs did much more damage than theirs,’ Les asserted, as if discussing rival football teams. Of course, the Americans would argue that the Fortress didn’t need to carry so much because in daylight they could actually hit the target, unlike the British ‘area’ bombing policy (which hit everything and hopefully, the target as well), about which the Americans remained highly dubious until the end of the war.
Les began his tour late in November 1944, when the threat from fighters had moderated, but the flak, as well as the other hazards of flying in wartime, was still real and deadly.
First up was a daylight trip to the benzol plant at Osterfeld near Stuttgart in south-western Germany, and he had no idea what to expect. Another Lancaster was hit and he watched it fall out of the formation, slowly head towards the ground and explode. This was appalling, he thought. Was it usually like this? With nothing to measure the experience by, he nonchalantly asked some of the more battle-hardened crews upon returning, ‘So, er, what was that one like?’ Ashen-faced, they told him that it had indeed been extremely heavy. His had literally been a baptism of fire.
‘We used to like it when it was nice and cloudy – they couldn’t see you then. Once we got hit over Cologne and got two engines knocked out,’ he said, with a tinge of excitement. ‘Boom! First the port outer’ – this also hit the motor powering Les’s turret, rendering it useless – ‘Then, boom! the starboard outer went!’ Les became more animated, as if telling an adventure story.
Peppered with holes and with two out of four engines gone, they zoomed down low to escape the flak, but still had a full bomb load onboard. The bomb-aimer looked for a suitable target and announced casually over the intercom, ‘I’ll think I’ll get that farmhouse over there.’ The chorus of disapproval from the rest of the crew was, to say the least, overwhelming. As Les said, ‘If that farmer only knew how lucky he was. Public opinion saved his bacon that day!’ The bombs hit a field, ploughing it up from one end to the other. After the war, Les and his crew travelled back to inspect the damage first hand.
It is testament to the Lancaster’s strength that they made it home at all. They arrived two hours late on their two good engines at Mepal, where the rest of the squadron had turned out to greet them, including the CO. Relieved but unharmed, Les emerged to the welcoming entourage, then tripped head over heels on the ladder getting out of the aircraft, landing in a heap on the tarmac.
‘It was a brand new aeroplane on its first trip, and we brought it back full of holes.’ I asked whether his pilot received a decoration for his efforts and Les laughed. ‘They probably just gave him the repair bill!’
Sometimes the dangers were not from the enemy. On a daylight trip to Munster in March 1945, the senior navigational officer for the squadron was out with his timings by 4 minutes, resulting in a late arrival over the target. Les’s crew were supposed to be part of the lead formation that day, but instead found themselves right underneath another squadron of Lancasters, watching its bombs falling just a few yards from their tail fin. Added to this, the pilot was forced to dodge burning aircraft which had been hit and started drifting towards them.
‘Yes, it was all quite scary,’ he said in masterful
understatement. It was indeed another bad day for 75, whose three Lancasters lost comprised all the losses for the entire raid. On one occasion, the Pathfinders were late (Les has forgotten the target) and the whole formation, at night, had to circle the heavily defended aiming point while waiting for the coloured indicator flares to be dropped.
Les’s earlier enthusiasm soon transformed into a more practical philosophy based on doing the job as unobtrusively as possible, and surviving at the same time.
‘The bomber is not a fighter. You learn to leave well enough alone. You were very grateful not to have been seen.’
Although diminished, the German fighters were still out there, and Les had the odd encounter. Over Dessau in the Bundesland, Les’s Lancaster nearly collided with a Focke-Wulf 190 whose pilot happened to be looking the wrong way.
‘I just heard the mid-upper gunner say “ah . . .’’, and the German fighter cleared the top of the turret by 3 feet.’
Les, for some reason, finds this brush with death terribly amusing, and his voice almost breaks up with laughing at it all.
‘He just zoomed over the top of us!’
Over Mersberg, on one of Les’s few night trips, he had another close call, this time with a twin-engined Junkers 88. Immediately after the Lancaster had dropped its bombs, he spotted it, like a cat in the night waiting to pounce, except that in moving into position, it was startlingly revealed in silhouette between Les’s guns and the fires of the burning city below. It turned and flicked away.
Les was lucky but several times witnessed others who were not. When a Lancaster exploded as a result of flak hitting the bomb load or the fuel, the residue of the petrol from the self-sealing tanks burned, leaving an eerie red orb hanging ghostlike in the air.
‘You just hoped the crews got out. Then you’d come back and lie down on your bed and think about it.’
By this stage in the war the rear-gunner’s chances of survival had been increased by the introduction of parachutes that could, pilot-style, be worn inside the turret, as part of the gunner’s seat. Previously, the rear-gunner needed to exit the turret, retrieve his ’chute from inside the fuselage and then clip it on before escaping the aircraft. Now, he had simply to swing the turret 90 degrees, then push back and fall out through the doors behind him. Flying in daylight revealed many gunners had survival on their minds. On difficult targets, Les would often look around and see the rear turrets of other Lancs already swung fully around just in case.
Then there was the trip to Potsdam, in April 1945, barely a month before the end of the war. Potsdam – the old seat of Prussian power, untouched and just a few miles from Berlin – had so far escaped the bombing, and when the sirens sounded, many of its residents assumed the target to be once again Berlin and failed to take cover, even emerging from their homes to watch the planes go over. The death toll for the Potsdam raid is still not known but it was high – somewhere in the thousands – and at the post-war conference held there in July, the place still reeked with the dead.
On Hitler’s birthday, 20 April 1945, Les made a seven and a half hour trip to Regensburg to attack oil facilities. It was an easy target, with only one aircraft lost out of the formation of 100. Afterwards, however, Les learned that they had hit a bridge over the Danube at the precise moment that a large group of Allied prisoners of war were crossing and that many had been killed. ‘I hope they weren’t our bombs. It was very impersonal up there.’
Les’s last trip was flown in perfect conditions, and the trouble came on the way home. Attacking the railway yards at Bad Oldesloe in Northern Germany on 24 April 1945, there was not a puff of flak over the target and after bombing, the individual aircraft raced each other home to base, even cutting a corner off the route to expedite the journey and be first to get to the de-briefing. This, however, took Les’s crew over one of the Dutch islands still being held by the Germans who duly opened up with their anti-aircraft guns. Big black puffs of smoke burst all around the aeroplane. The crew was caught off-guard. Things had been so relaxed that the pilot was not even at the controls, allowing the flight engineer to have a go. It was a reminder, said Les, that you could never be too careful.
The war was winding up, but Les’s flying career was not over. His last few trips, however, were missions of mercy. Holland, already denuded of food by the Germans endured one of the harshest winters on record in 1944. ‘Manna’ was the code word for a series of nearly a hundred emergency food and supply drops to the starving populace, delivered by the same aircraft that a few weeks earlier had been dropping TNT, Amatol and RDX. The Germans in Holland, no doubt hoping to curry favour after the war, agreed to hold their fire. The method of delivery was crude but effective. Sacks of food were simply stuffed into the bomb bays of the aircraft and away they went to their pre-designated drop zones. Les and his crew set a course for the racecourse at The Hague.
‘We didn’t know if the Germans were going to fire at us. Arrangements had been made but you never knew.’
Coming in low over the Channel, Les could see the water being disturbed by the aircraft’s slipstream.
‘We could see the civilians waving Dutch flags out of sight of the Germans, who were just leaning on their guns.’
Over the ‘target’ the bomb doors were opened and the ‘manna’ rained down.
‘We watched the people run from everywhere onto the racecourse to pick it all up.’
A little later, at war’s end, Les was over the Continent again, this time to pick up ex-prisoners of war. Never made to take passengers, every inch of the Lancaster’s interior was nevertheless crammed with relieved and disbelieving soldiers, sailors and airmen, on their way home after, in some cases, nearly five years in captivity. Les let them clamber into the turret and observe the Europe of their incarceration disappearing below them.
Then it was time for some grandstanding. To see at first hand the devastation they had wrought, many crews made tourist or ‘Baedeker’ flights (called after the famous European guidebooks) over the cities they had attacked. Many were shocked by the extent of the ruin: sometimes a seemingly endless sea of roofless houses and the charred, twisted beams of wrecked factories, docks and train lines. Les returned to the scene of his closest brush with oblivion, Cologne, sweeping in low and lifting a wing over the famous twin steeples of the Gothic cathedral. Unlike his earlier visit, this time no-one was shooting at him.
His wife, Molly, was, I discovered, worth an interview all on her own. As a kid, she had watched the Battle of Britain rage overhead and her family’s house was bombed out in Portsmouth. Later, she worked as a radio operator at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, providing pilots and navigators with the radar and electronic beams, that guided aircraft onto the target.
It was a bright blazing day in Perth, with the intense Western Australian sun obliterating my vision for a moment as I walk out into it with Les. It’s a far cry from the damp climate of his birthplace, or the freezing skies over Europe which made his tears turn to ice. Five pairs of gloves and an electrically heated suit only barely kept out the cold, he remembered.
The last story Les told me stayed with me for a long time. Les was just a boy of nineteen when he began operations. Taking off on his first ever night trip to Germany, he happened to pass right over his home, the little village of Aldbury in Hertfordshire. Down below in the gathering dusk, he could clearly make out the route of a walk he had often taken. There was the familiar landmark of the Bridgewater Memorial, as well as the grand estate of Ashridge itself, where his father, who himself had been badly wounded in the First World War, worked in the large stately home – transformed into an emergency hospital. Looking down, it must have seemed so familiar, but inside his small rear turret, flying away into the night and the furnace in the skies over Germany, very lonely indeed.
12
Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell
Photo-reconnaissance pilot
On most ops, I expected to be shot down.
Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell is a much-loved i
con of Australian stage and screen having spent over half a century acting in films, plays and television shows. His break came just after the war, when his mother told him someone was making a film about Charles Kingsford-Smith down the road, and that if he turned up in his air force uniform, he’d get a part. So, he was cast as a control tower operator speaking about two lines, and wearing his own uniform.
Late, panting and slightly panicky, I rolled up to his modest Melbourne house, apologising for my lack of punctuality. Bud not only makes no fuss but welcomes me in, past a small front garden at the end of a suburban court, and a dead white Triumph slowly decomposing on the front lawn.
Bud has played many parts: a doctor in a medical series, a policeman in the series Homicide, films with Chips Rafferty, and (this really impressed me) one of the voices on Thunderbirds. But, impressed by his long acting career, it’s what he did before it started that interested me. Because in 1944, Bud had one of the most specialised, unique and dangerous jobs in the air – flying photo-reconnaissance operations over enemy territory.
He’s done some digging about for my visit and has rediscovered his log book, dragged out a sheaf of yellowing documents and has even found some of the photos he took from his Spitfire. They’re in amazing condition.
‘These are some of the obliques from the Greek islands,’ he told me, and in crystal-clear monochrome I could almost make out the name of a ship in a harbour, and a rocky, Mediterranean hillside rising behind. Not bad for snaps taken from a passing aeroplane at 400 miles an hour more than sixty years ago.
‘What’s this one? Greece?’ I asked.
‘No. Sydney,’ he answered. Perhaps we’d better start at the beginning.
Oddly enough, Bud didn’t even want to join the air force, preferring to be with his mates who had signed up for the infantry. His father, however, having been through the carnage of the First World War, wouldn’t have a bar of it. ‘Too bloody dangerous,’ he said. As it turned out, Bud’s dad was wrong. In the Second World War, it was the air force which, statistically, gave you the smallest chance of coming home. It was, however, a good ploy to keep his boy safely in training for as long as possible, and it was not until September 1941 that he began in earnest, at number 2 Initial Training School at Brad-field Park in New South Wales.
Flak Page 12
