John McCredie and Lewis Hall were brothers-in-law and were delighted to talk, but not half as delighted as me. It had proved hard to track down men who had served in the Pacific, and I was lucky to catch Lewis as he was visiting from interstate. I was excited to learn that he had started operational flying in January 1942, in the very trough of Australia’s fortunes against the seemingly invincible Japanese tide running from the north. John, intriguingly, had flown in India.
One morning in Darwin in February 1942, Lewis Hall was going down the steps to the shower wrapped in nothing but a towel. He was tired, having just brought his 13 Squadron Hudson back from Timor with a load of exhausted evacuees; having avoided capture by the Japanese in the nick of time.
Outside, the noise of aeroplane engines could be heard circling the harbour. Nothing too unusual, thought Lewis, glad that some of his fellow pilots were getting in a bit of low level practice. Then he heard, and felt, a massive blast from the direction of the harbour and, as he puts it, ‘things rapidly changed’. He learned later that it was the explosives-laden merchant ship Neptuna blowing up 5 miles away in Darwin Harbour, taking forty-five crew with her and raining white hot pieces of metal over the town.
It was the morning of 19 February 1942, and the aircraft he had heard were Japanese conducting their first, and by far their biggest raid on Australian soil. Many were the same pilots who had taken part in the attack on Pearl Harbor six weeks earlier. As on that day they had taken off from aircraft carriers several hundred miles away. Some pilots were flying so low that in between strafing runs over the town, they could be clearly seen in their cockpits waving to people on the ground.
Lewis had already been posted to England and had just settled into his cabin on the boat, when ‘some clever person thought there might be a chance of Japan coming into the war’ and he was taken off it again. Although saved from the very gloomy prospect of flying in England in late 1941 (where, as he put it, ‘my expectations would not have been very great’), he was soon to find himself not in the least bit out of harm’s way.
In January 1942, Lewis arrived by plane on the island of Ambon to Australia’s north in the Dutch East Indies, just in time to be evacuated.
‘We were lifted out by flying boat in the morning, and the Japanese landed that same afternoon.’
Back in Darwin, he found himself helping others avoid a similar fate of death or capture in the face of the relentless Japanese advance into the south-west Pacific.
On February 18, his was one of six aircraft sent to Kupang in Dutch-controlled Timor to evacuate ground staff. The Japanese arrival was imminent, so they were told they would be taking off at first light. Then, realising the enemy was even more ‘imminent’ than previously thought, the flight time was brought forward to 2.30 am. In the middle of a warm tropical night, twenty-six people packed into Lewis’s cramped Lockheed Hudson bomber designed for a crew of four and took off for Darwin, 517 miles (830 kilometres) away.
‘[There was] no chance of falling over, because they were all packed in like sardines,’ he said.
The decision to go early saved them all. At first light, the Japanese landed at Kupang. Lewis had slipped the noose again.
A few hours later, early on the 19th, all six aircraft arrived safely back in Darwin. Lewis was debriefed, had some breakfast and then went to have a shower, just in time to witness the aircraft with big red circles appear over the town.
From a slit trench, still not properly dressed from his attempted ablutions, he counted three separate Japanese dive-bombers descending on three separate hangars.
They know exactly what they’re going for, thought Lewis and watched the bombs actually leave the aircraft.
Overall though, he thought the Australians hadn’t got off too badly as many of the fighters on the ground escaped damage in that first attack. After making himself a little more decent, Lewis went over to the mess to join a group of rather shaky looking officers standing around outside. Then someone rode up on a bike. ‘They’re coming over again!’ Lewis looked up and saw two perfectly formed high-level flights of twenty-seven Japanese bombers, which seemed to converge directly over the airfield. This second raid by land-based medium bombers occurred just before midday and pattern-bombed the aerodrome. Even so, Lewis still reckoned it could have been much worse.
‘The papers said the airfield was destroyed. [Yet] I can remember we ate in the mess that same night.’ I wonder what the dinner conversation was like that night.
The Japanese only mounted one really heavy raid on Darwin, but continued to visit it on a daily basis for some time. Several weeks after that attack, a number of Zeros got into the habit of appearing over the end of the runway at Darwin aerodrome every afternoon and shooting up anything they saw, roaring along low at about 100 feet.
‘There wasn’t much opposition,’ said Lewis, ‘so these blokes were having the time of their lives.’
Then one day an army convoy appeared, fresh from the Middle East, sent straight from Adelaide without leave as soon as they got off the boat. At the intersection of the two runways, a Bofors anti-aircraft gun was set up and dug in overnight. Fresh from a couple of years’ experience shooting down Stukas, the two-man gun crew were no mugs.
The next day, they waited patiently for the Japanese to arrive. As usual, three Zeros appeared and the gunner calmly fired the big gun, distinctive with its deep woomph-woomph-woomph. One aircraft went straight into the ground. Then another, and then the third.
‘The Japs kept it up for about three days and after that, we never saw another one.’
Lewis stayed in Darwin until June, when 13 Squadron was brought south to re-equip on Beaufort bombers. These British-designed medium bombers were built under licence in Australia, at a time when it produced not so much as a bicycle on its own. Virtually overnight, from plans that arrived on microfilm, we began turning out highly complicated weapons of war like the twin-engined Beaufort. There’s a famous, horrific piece of wartime news footage of two Beauforts in a display for the cameras over Sydney Harbour. The wing of one clipped and sheared off the tail of the other. No-one from either crew survived the subsequent crash. I had always thought them to be a bit of a lemon, but Lewis would have none of it. He flew over 1,000 hours in them, he reckoned, and never had a problem.
‘I once flew in a tropical storm so severe it would have torn the wings off other aeroplanes,’ he told me in a tone that left little to doubt.
It was in a Beaufort that Lewis had his real moment of glory or, as he would put it, his moment of near-glory, during one of the most important (and today largely forgotten) air engagements of the war in the Pacific: the very dramatic, very bloody Battle of the Bismarck Sea.
Lewis’ brother-in-law, John wasn’t pulled off the boat to England, but ended up fighting the Japanese anyway. About the time he was completing his training at Point Cook, Messrs Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting in Casablanca. Very, very low down on the agenda was a request by President Roosevelt for Britain to kick in a few more airmen to man some of the hundreds of aeroplanes the Americans were churning out of their factories and sending to the Far East to attack the Japanese in Burma. It was a conversation that probably lasted two minutes, but it decided the course of John’s life for the next three years. First, though, he would have to survive training.
Flying in the crowded skies of wartime England was a very different experience to the open spaces of outback Australia. Instead of the flat open vastness and clear skies of their training areas, pilots now had to contend with the crowded patchwork of densely populated Britian. Everywhere they looked was another identical village, church steeple or neighbouring aerodrome. Many felt they had gone back to the drawing board. Concentrating hard on his instruments in a night landing, John’s instructor suddenly grabbed the controls and pulled the Wellington around. Another aircraft, probably from the adjacent aerodrome, was coming in on John’s beam. He’d completely missed seeing it and so nearly did the instructor. I ask him what was said.
‘Something profane,’ he told me.
On his first ever training flight in 1943, John delivered a Christmas message to the citizens of Paris in the form of leaflets assuring them their day of liberation was now a little closer. Unfortunately, the very much clapped-out Wellington 1Cs they were flying, barely capable of making 10,000 feet at the best of times, and now weighed down with thousands of paper leaflets and ice forming on wings and carburettors, refused to budge above a pitiful 8,000 feet in the freezing December sky. And then there was a problem with the navigator.
Officially a training flight, it was supposed to be an easy run. Paris, an open city, was left undefended and the route there and back was chosen to avoid the flak. The run-in was perfect and they reached their dropping zone 20 miles from the city and began tipping bundles of leaflets out of the aircraft to be carried by the wind to fill Parisian hearts and gutters alike. All they had to do now was make a quick exit across the quiet Normandy coast and home. The Germans, however, tended not to distinguish between Allied aircraft carrying bombs and leaflets and when John felt ‘a bit of a pitter-patter of the flak on the fuselage’, he knew something was not quite right.
The navigator was a lovely chap, but his inexperience had taken them off course and over the heavily defended town of Lisieux. Everything started coming up at them.
‘It was only two holes, but they sounded like a lot more.’
They got through it, and were over the English Channel into safety. The navigator set a course for home. A few minutes later, they were over their own coast, and then suddenly they were caught in a web of searchlights. Yet another dodgy route had taken them directly over the Royal Naval home base of Portsmouth, one of the most heavily defended targets in Britain, and as dangerous for friend and foe alike. After the second panic had subsided, John’s rear-gunner came in over the intercom in a timid voice.
‘Can I come out now, Skipper?’
Lewis, meanwhile, chuckled at this, then pitched in with his own story about taking off at 2 am for a regular first light appearance in New Guinea.
‘It was so cold I had to take a blanket off the bed,’ he remembered.
I loved this image: flying to war with a blanket over your knees.
The Beaufort had no heating and, amazingly, no oxygen even at heights of up to 20,000 feet (6,000 metres). Surely this was highly dangerous I asked, but Lewis assured me that’s how it was done. There was a limit, however, to just how much oxygen the brain can be deprived of, and by 1945, if he ventured even to 14,000 feet without oxygen, he was violently ill.
When John arrived at his Operational Training Unit, whatever glamour there had seemed to be in flying bombers over Germany had been evaporated by the blowtorch of statistical reality. Survival, said John, was ‘not the most likely of prospects’. But, unbeknown to him, he had already been earmarked to pack his things and head to Blackpool, then via ship to Bombay. I imagined it to be an exotic Far East journey, but the reality was somewhat starker. John was crammed onto a ‘mess deck’, directly under the two curve-shaped upper decks with overflowing latrines positioned at either end. This, combined with a very rough Mediterranean crossing, gave the word ‘mess’ a whole new meaning.
‘One was glad to be at the end of it,’ he said.
Feeling rather ludicrous in his enormous government-issue ‘Bombay Bloomer’ shorts, he was posted to number 355 Squadron, flying the second most famous American bomber of the war, the Consolidated B-24 Liberator. His job was to fly it from a place called Salbani in India’s east, near present-day Bangladesh but then known far more romantically as West Bengal. In late 1943, 355 began bombing Japanese targets behind the battle area in Burma and Thailand: airfields, harbour installations and also the infamous Thai–Burma railway. He also carried out air–sea rescue ops, criss-crossing endless stretches of ocean for hours at a time, dull but necessary work, especially if you happened to be the one bobbing up and down on the ocean in a life jacket. But as far as flying was concerned, it was ‘like mowing a lawn in the air’, said John.
‘We had an utter drongo as a CO,’ he told me in a way that suggested he was winding up to something important. In such a remote theatre of war as India, getting fuel to the big, thirsty Liberators was a constant supply headache, and all RAF squadrons were under pressure to reduce consumption.
Some 355 Squadron pilots had even landed at forward bases when their Liberator’s glass tube-type fuel gauges showed empty, and had been berated for it. ‘The fuel gauges are unreliable!’ was the angry response from the flight commander and John’s skipper, Joe Morphett, who instructed his pilots to henceforth fly ‘on the step’. This was a way of edging back the throttles to reduce power – akin to easing one’s foot off the accelerator on the highway to achieve the same end in a car. In an aeroplane, however, a reduction in power usually means a reduction in height, and one clear night on the way home from bombing Mandalay, John’s skipper almost paid for his efforts to reduce the petrol bill with his life.
As second pilot, John sat beside Joe as the Liberator made its way home from Burma, when suddenly ahead of them loomed an enormous black shape, blacker even than the black tropical night which surrounded it.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Joe, ‘we’re going to hit a mountain!’ Mount Victoria was 10,000 feet high, and flying ‘on the step’ had cost him the height he needed to get over it. What happened next sealed the aircraft’s fate. To quickly gain height, Joe pushed the throttles forward through an emergency ‘gate’ of copper wire, increasing boost from 48 pounds to 60 in a surge of power to the engines. They climbed fast and cleared the mountain, but the drain on the fuel was irreversible, and fatal.
Coming in to the Indian mainland over the Bay of Bengal, and only 20 miles from base, the first engine conked out over the Indian coastline. John switched on an emergency fuel pump and it came back to life. ‘Only a blockage,’ he thought. But he was wrong. Immediately, an agitated flight engineer appeared.
‘The fuel gauges are empty, Skip!’
The same fuel gauges the skipper had earlier deemed ‘unreliable’.
‘Jesus Christ!’ exploded the skipper again, just as all four engines began to die.
There was no choice for the crew but to bail out while the pilot held the spluttering Liberator as steady as he could. The flight engineer had to be pushed out of the bomb bay, and broke his leg in the process. John was last out, bar the pilot, who would have to take his chances in the crash-landing.
‘We all landed 50 yards apart,’ said John. Half a mile away from them, the Liberator went down. With no fuel left in the tanks there was, luckily, nothing to burn, so the chances of Joe surviving the crash were relatively good, provided they could get to him.
The men made their way in the dark to a small village, looking very out of place in their flying kit. There they used desperate hand signals to ask the bewildered inhabitants for a guide to take them to the crash site.
At four in the morning, they made it to the downed machine. The fuselage, they saw, was largely in one piece and Joe was alive, sitting dazed under a mango tree. His scalp was severely lacerated, and later a metal stake had to be removed from his right thigh and another from his left calf. He suffered an agonising day being pulled along in a bullock cart while his crew trudged beside him. Late in the afternoon, they reached a town where he was picked up by an ambulance and hospitalised.
John put in a report of the accident, but the essential reason for the crash was ignored. Joe was awarded a bar to his DFC and his citation stated simply that the engines had failed, and that he held the aircraft straight and level in order to assure the safety of his crew, at risk to his own life.
‘It’s obvious to anyone that four engines don’t fail for any other reason than running out of fuel,’ said John. For all that, Joe was still a hero, according to him. ‘A hero, in my opinion, was one who put themselves after the lives of other people. This is certainly what Joe Morphett did, and I tell his story as an example of true hero
ism.’
Lewis was also awarded the DFC but was a bit vague as to why.
By the beginning of 1943, the Japanese had been bloodied but not defeated in New Guinea and decided to make one last big effort to reinforce and retake areas lost along its northern coast, then regroup and take the rest of the island. Radio interceptions determined that a large convoy was planning to steam out of their New Britain base of Rabaul to the stronghold of Lae.
Convoys had been attacked before, but piecemeal, and the bulk of troops and reinforcements had made it ashore to make life hell for the Australian soldiers fighting in the jungles and mountains of New Guinea. As recently as January, one such convoy had made it through with relative ease. The new head of American air power in Australia, General George C. Kenny and Australia’s Group Captain William ‘Bull’ Garing determined that the next one would not.
Garing was one of those figures made for command in wartime. He was short, stocky, had nothing that bore much resemblance to a neck, his manner was blunt and his nickname entirely deserved. He was tough and determined, and hated the Japanese.
One of those rare individuals lacking any sense of physical fear, Garing had already earned a DFC in Europe, piloting Sunderland flying-boats with number 10 Squadron when he single-handedly broke up an attack on a ship by five Junkers 88s. Upon his return to Australia in mid-1941, he was convinced war with Japan was inevitable and helped organise the air defence system of northern Australia. He lived well into his nineties, dying in 2004.
Later, he convinced General Kenny that the only way to attack a convoy successfully was by large scale coordinated, multi-pronged attacks from many angles by different aircraft, and went about developing the means to do it. The Bismarck Sea would be his magnum opus.
Lewis Hall, the man who sat opposite me enjoying some fine cake baked by his sister, Allison, had been away from New Guinea, as far away in fact as Nowra in New South Wales, acquainting himself with the fine art of dropping a torpedo from an aeroplane. But by March 1943, he was back in the tropics, with number 100 Squadron at its base at Number 1 Strip, Milne Bay on the island’s eastern tip, otherwise known as Gurney Field.
Flak Page 20
