Flak

by Michael Veitch

  But not before the night of 7 November 1941 which saw a series of disastrous raids costing thirty-seven aircraft out of nearly 400 dispatched, including a particularly foolish attack on Berlin that achieved little materially, but changed the direction of British bombing policy for the rest of the war and ended Brian Walley’s brief wartime flying career.

  Brian’s first three trips were relatively uneventful: Stettin, Le Havre and Frankfurt. Stettin, on the Baltic in Germany’s far east, was a trip lasting 10 hours 40 minutes (he remembered the flying times off by heart) and at the absolute maximum endurance of the Whitley’s range. On his return, the ground crew looked at the fuel tanks and told them they’d have been lucky to do one more circuit of the aerodrome.

  Then, over Hamburg, he was given a taste of things to come when caught in the master beam and ‘lit up like a Christmas tree’ by a cone of searchlights. With the Whitley’s maximum speed a dismal 192 miles per hour, the anti-aircraft gunners on the ground could take their time. One engine was hit, but a corkscrewing dive to 8,000 feet shook them free and got them momentarily out of trouble. On the way home, the damaged engine blew up, but they made it back to England, landing at Driffield in East Yorkshire.

  The trip to Berlin was one that should never have taken place. Air Marshal Sir Richard Pierse has become the forgotten head of Bomber Command, and justifiably so. Having taken over the job in October 1940, he did little to remedy the situation of high casualties for little results, becoming a pollyanna insisting the current policies would eventually yield results, despite all evidence to the contrary. Eventually he was sacked and sent packing to South-east Asia, where he later brought his air force career to an abrupt end by eloping with the wife of General Claude Auchinlek!

  Frustrated by recent bad weather, Pierse was anxious to prove his critics wrong with a spectacular strike on the Nazi capital and other major centres with every plane he could get into the air. His aim was to set a new record for aircraft dispatched in a single night. This, despite persistent forecasts of atrocious weather: storms, hail and ice along the routes and over the targets. The commander of number 5 Group rebelled, refusing to send his squadrons all the way to Berlin, insisting they venture no further than Cologne. But number 4 Group was more compliant, and so on the evening of 7 November 1941 Brian, as second pilot in Whitley ‘F’ for Freddie, took off from Dishforth into the face of an ice storm.

  ‘It was one of the worse gales I’d ever taken off in,’ Brian recalled.

  They didn’t even get close to Berlin. Dreadful at take-off, the weather proceeded to get worse, although there was some talk of it improving for the return journey. Climbing through 15,000 feet of solid cloud, a 40-knot tailwind increased to 60 and began blowing them south of their track, directly over the heavily defended German port of Kiel. At least they were travelling fast, but in the wrong direction.

  ‘The enemy guns were on target,’ Brian wrote. A burst of flak set the port engine on fire. The extinguisher, thank goodness, worked and the pilot immediately jettisoned the bombs. ‘Retribution for such an unfriendly welcome.’

  All there was left to do was head for home. Brian had made it back on one engine before, perhaps he could again. Clinging to the hope of an improvement in the weather, they turned the Whitley around and headed for home over the North Sea. But instead of a lessening of the storm, it had swung around to the north and was now an 80-knot head wind blowing straight down from the Arctic.

  From 15,000 feet, a power glide on one engine would normally have got them home, but in the prevailing conditions with the risk of the wings icing up in the clouds, the pilot had no choice but to get below them, and quickly, eventually breaking cover at just 1,500 feet. It was time to jettison everything that was not bolted down. Making his way to the front turret, Brian opened the escape hatch and threw out everything he could get his hands on: equipment, ammunition trays, even the big gas-operated Vickers machine gun (a useless antique at the best of times), which he lifted off its mount and hurled through the hole in the floor. On the way through, it became entangled in the intercom cord dangling from his helmet and as he put it, ‘There but for the grace of God went I along with helmet and gun.’

  The wireless operator managed to contact base, inform them of their predicament and get a rough bearing before clamping down the morse key to relay their own position, somewhere in the middle of the ocean on a very inhospitable night.

  Knowing they were soon to be afloat on the North Sea, Brian had the wherewithal to stuff thermos flasks full of coffee and the crew’s sandwiches into a duffle bag, and leave it by the open rear hatch, to be thrown into the dinghy as soon as possible after impact. The last thing he remembers saying is, ‘Don’t forget the duffle bag.’

  Back in his position, strapped in the cockpit, he watched vast waves rise and fall like black foaming mountains illuminated in the Whitley’s landing lights as they approached the surface. ‘The sea,’ wrote Brian, ‘was in a malevolent mood.’ Then bang. As the aircraft hit a wave like it was a brick wall. It slid down a second, then crashed through a third. ‘The whole front of the fuselage disintegrated with most of it wrapped around my legs.’ Trapped in his seat, water surged up to Brian’s chest, forcing him to half-swim, half-scramble out of the canopy escape hatch above his head. Losing a flying boot and injuring his knee, he scrambled along the rapidly sinking fuselage and made for the dinghy, which rose above his head, then fell below on the surging sea. In shock, whimpering like a ‘whipped schoolboy’, Brian in that moment ‘grew up from a nineteen-year-old teenager to manhood’.

  He was the last into the dinghy, hauled in by the four crew before the Whitley sank. Twenty feet below them, they watched the still shining landing lights recede and disappear forever. ‘The sheer sense of desolation was terrifying,’ he said.

  For the next two days Brian endured a nightmare that can scarcely be comprehended. With a broken knee cap and lacerations to both thighs, he and his four crew faced the full force of a North Sea storm that for an entire day did not even begin to let up. The grey dawn that eventually broke the gloom revealed to Brian nothing but ‘a scene of utter desolation’. With the birth of the new day the storm increased.

  ‘We would rise slowly up the face of 20 foot waves, hang for a moment on the crest, then shoot down into the trough.’

  Sodden, exhausted, with freezing water sloshing around at their feet, violently seasick and nothing to relieve the thirst or hunger – in the rush to leave the aircraft, the duffle bag, with its potentially life-saving provisions had been left behind – they simply faced the day as best they could.

  ‘The skipper suggested we pray to God for succour. We did so most fervently, each quietly in his own way.’

  The rear-gunner and the wireless operator went first. Atop one peak, a savage gust tipped the tiny dinghy over, spilling them all into the sea, and washing away their few meagre rations. Brian never saw the two men again.

  ‘They just vanished beneath those great grey ugly breakers.’

  In the water, lacking the strength even to climb back in, Brian had a notion he could swim to safety, but after a few yards he says, the voice and prayers of his mother came to him across the water, making him turn back to the dinghy.

  Another night seemed to extinguish the possibility of rescue. The battered dinghy sprung a slow leak which had to be attended to with what little lung power the three men could muster. Still the storm refused to subside, and ice flecks formed on their clothing. In sublime understatement they faced, wrote Brian, ‘a doubtful future’.

  Then the navigator went. Showing signs of hysteria, he terrified them all by standing up, risking what in their condition would be a fatal capsizing. The other two settled the man down, got him off to sleep and he simply froze to death.

  Then, in the small hours of the night, they heard a plane. Brian and the skipper waved and shouted but never saw it, and soon its engines faded into the night. Afterwards, they remembered the distress flare, still lashed to the side o
f the dinghy and ‘we could have wept at our stupidity’.

  The dawn of the second day was as bleak as the first. The two remaining men were now in appalling shape. Brian, almost too weak to top the dinghy up with air, used his remaining flying boot to bail out water. In his exhaustion, his mind began to play cruel tricks on him, making him believe he could see land just over the wave crests. That afternoon the skipper went, leaving him all alone in the dinghy with the bodies of his two comrades, sensing his own end could not be far off. The storm was at last subsiding, and with it the pain in his numbed body. At dusk, as the night came on once again, he began to settle into a sleep he knew would be his last.

  Then, from nowhere, an aircraft roared low overhead. Brian looked up. It was German, a Heinkel 59 seaplane with its front gun trained right on him. ‘No! No! No!’ he yelled, expecting at any moment a burst that would put him out of his misery. Instead, the big seaplane banked, circled and touched down on the water just yards away from the dinghy. One of the crew climbed down onto the port float and threw Brian a rope, which he secured to the side.

  ‘They hauled me on board, then the bodies of my crew and finally the dinghy.’

  Inside, he discarded his sodden, freezing clothes and was wrapped in a blanket. A couple of swigs from a Schnapps bottle and he was unconscious.

  It would be three and a half years before Brian would alight from another aeroplane at Westcott in Buckinghamshire in England, get down on his knees and pat the ground of his homeland, ‘giving thanks for my deliverance’.

  He was incarcerated in a number of POW camps around Germany, finally enduring a forced march in the winter of 1945 from Poland to the outskirts of Berlin as the Red Army neared. Among his experiences he had been part of a failed escape attempt and beaten up for his troubles, and had discovered a love for working with soil that would last him his life.

  When his liberation came, it was in the form of a Russian tank that crashed through one end of the camp and out the other. ‘They didn’t even stop to open the gate.’ But still he had to wait, as the Russians showed little interest in their repatriation. Eventually he took matters into his own hands and walked back to the American lines, passing through bombed-out cities where the rubble was piled up to the windowsills.

  For all his trials, Brian seemed to bear little ill-will towards the Germans. The air–sea rescue Heinkel that picked him up took him ashore at Norderney, an island just off the German coast near the Dutch border, and put him in hospital where, as he says, ‘they could not have taken more care of me had I been one of their own’. His two crew members were buried with full military honours and now lie side by side in the war graves cemetery in Sage in northern Germany.

  He was however, another one of those subjected to the line that was probably a cliché even then, when the commander of the air–sea rescue base stood at the foot of his hospital bed and told him, ‘For you the war is over.’

  In camp, he managed to befriend an Austrian guard, an elite alpine trooper convalescing after thrice being wounded on the Russian front and in dread of being sent back there. He and Brian were the same age, and ‘got on like a house on fire’. The Austrian’s only ambition was to join his friend, happily sitting out the war in style in Canada as a POW. Brian wondered if he survived the war.

  In his story, he related his disgust at witnessing an American GI urinating on the face of a dead German soldier, reflecting that ‘some mother had lost a son and no-one ever deserved such treatment’. Not a bad show of compassion from a bloke who spent over three years locked up by them.

  Half a century later, Brian sat down to dinner, a guest of ex-Hauptmann (Captain) Karl Born, the man who had told him his war was now over, and former commanding officer of the Luftwaffe air–sea rescue base at Norderney. He had been wary of the invitation at first, but his apprehension was soon eclipsed by a warmth born of a shared experience.

  His pilgrimage to Germany included a visit to the last resting place of his crew where he lay a single rose on each grave. He also stood on the same spot at Norderney where he was taken ashore half-dead on a stretcher.

  ‘There is nothing left of the seaplane base now, and the hospital where I languished is now a kindergarten.’

  He even managed a toast to the German air–sea rescue service without whom he would not be there.

  After the war, Brian flew again in the RAF Volunteer Reserve, had a go at farming in Western Australia and ended up with his own mining exploration company, spending much time in the outback. During our candid discussion, I discovered a distinctive sense of humour, albeit as dry as a bleached branch out in the opal country.

  It takes courage to reveal the most traumatic moment of one’s life to a stranger, even an interested stranger, but Brian did so calmly and unflinchingly, and I can only guess at the horrors still inside in his head.

  He told me those words ‘for you the war is over’ haunted him for many years until he once again faced the man who had first uttered them.

  Postscript: Brian fought a long battle with the British government to be awarded the air crew service medal, the coveted Air Crew Europe Star. Unbelievably, despite his travails, he was refused on the grounds that his time on active service fell short of the required minimum by two days. But Brian wasn’t the type of bloke to roll over to an underhanded piece of petty bureaucracy such as this. He fought them and won, receiving his medal fifty years after earning it.

  ‘I think I deserved it,’ he said.

  17

  Ken Fox

  Spitfire pilot

  I saved his bloody life, actually, which he was

  very grateful for.

  Ken Fox loved flying and happened to be very good at it, a natural, in fact, which is what you had to be to achieve the dream of nearly every trainee pilot – selection for training on single engined aircraft to become a fighter pilot. Ken joined up in Sydney at the height of the Battle of Britain, went through initial training at Bradfield Park and earned his wings at Amberley in Queensland. His parsimonious instructors gave him their highest accolade, ‘above average’. So far, so good.

  I met Ken through Peter Forbes, a World War Two aviation nut who had heard about my project and came along with me to the interview.

  At the end of training, bored but tense young airmen would wait inside the sealed embarkation camp for the ship that would take them overseas. Often they would try their luck at gaining a final, brief couple hours on the outside. Usually, the excuse was something like, ‘my grandmother died’. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Then one day, Ken’s grandmother died. For real. The adjutant was sceptical but gave him two hours to see Grandma off to the next world. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be following her too closely.

  Ken’s next temporary escape was on the very day of his departure, at Circular Quay. The boat was ready and sailing time was an hour or two away. A wire mesh fence running down the wharf separated the departing airmen from their families and loved ones but Ken’s fiancée, Joan, was nowhere in sight. Laid up with a broken ankle, the unhappy girl was being looked after by an aunt in nearby Elizabeth Bay, as her beloved boy in blue prepared to sail. A friend of Ken’s on the outside had an idea.

  ‘If you can talk your way past one of the guards, I’ll run you up there to say goodbye.’

  Ken talked his best talk, and promised to be back in half an hour. The mate had the car ready, and a few minutes later he was at his fiancée’s front door, giving her the surprise of her life.

  ‘It was a romantic touch – she thought I’d already gone.’

  Ken sailed to Europe in a massive convoy of over a hundred ships. Orange flashes on the horizon at night dampened the excitement of the new recruits as U-boats picked off their unlucky victims. The convoy at least offered protection but as everyone knew, if any one ship got into trouble and lagged behind, they would be left on their own.

  At Brighton in England, Ken was given just about the best news a pilot could ever hope to hear. He was to become a Spitfire pilot.
I asked Ken how he felt.

  ‘Magnificent!’ he said, as if the news come just yesterday. ‘Best thing that could have happened to me!’

  I am quite certain that there is absolutely nothing left to say about the Vickers-Supermarine Spitfire, and yet the books still roll out, the documentaries continue to be made, and this remarkable little aeroplane continues to make people swoon the world over, and I confess I’m one of them. Considering some of the rubbish that was rolling off British production lines at the time, it’s a wonder something as brilliant as the Spitfire ever managed to be made, but made it was and in amazing numbers. Over 20,000 were produced, and it was just about the only aircraft on the production line on the very first, as well as the very last day of the war. This, despite its many intervening transformations, leaving it almost unrecognisable from Reg Mitchell’s original design.

  As he was soon to discover at his Operational Training Unit at Hawarden, near Chester on the Welsh border, the Spitfire’s greatest attribute was that it was amazingly easy to fly. Its equally iconic adversary, Germany’s Messerschmitt 109, was a thoroughbred also, but a forgiving aeroplane for a pilot it was not. As has often been said by those who flew them, ‘Anyone can fly a Spitfire.’

  The English weather was, however, anything but easy and as many Australians found, the difference between training over the open expanses of the outback and the close-knit fields of England was all the difference in the world. From horizon to horizon, Ken was presented with every conceivable permutation of the colour grey.

  ‘By the time you’d taken off and bumped your undercarriage up, the only way to find your way back to the aerodrome was to do an immediate 180 degree turn and land again.’

  Then there were new hazards such as the dozens of barrage balloons that floated above every English city (a protection against low-flying enemy aircraft) and the thick steel cables that tethered them to the ground. In bad weather, you had to know where you were, or you risked shearing off a wing.