Flak

by Michael Veitch

  He made more of his second chance of escape when towards war’s end, the Americans bombed a nearby town and the men were made to shelter in a nearby forest. Walter and George wasted no time digging a hole, hiding themselves in it and covering it over with branches till the others had returned to the camp.

  With a nation collapsing in chaos around them, the two men began an odyssey that Walter relates in sometimes bizarre snatches. Travelling west towards the advancing Allies by night and sheltering by day, he once hid in a ditch by the side of a road as an entire German column made its way along the road a few feet away on the other side of some bushes. ‘Tanks, armoured cars, everything,’ he remembered. ‘It took about two hours to pass.’

  On one extraordinary occasion, the two men turned a corner to find a group of German soldiers resting in a laneway. To run would probably guarantee a bullet in the back, so with nerves of iron, they didn’t break step, strolled past, and gave a casual ‘Guten Tag’ and a smile. ‘Guten Morgen,’ came the reply from a German. Had he looked a little closer, he would have noticed the poorly doctored army uniforms the strangers were wearing.

  While I spoke with Walter about this event, his wife Jean stood stock still in the living room on her way to the kitchen, plate of cake in hand, as absorbed as I was in her husband’s story.

  ‘I’m going to have to ask you to start from the beginning,’ she said, ‘because I don’t know any of this.’

  One freezing morning, after sixteen days and nights on the run sleeping in barns, railwaymen’s huts and anywhere else they could find, Walter and George warily approached a distant figure holding a rifle on sentry duty. As they neared, their step quickened and they joyfully embraced the first non-captive American soldier they had seen in over a year.

  In April 1945, with the war all but over, a severely underweight Walter landed back on home soil at an RAF aerodrome in Surrey for the first time in two years, but it was not to be the joyful homecoming he had pictured during the many months of captivity. Returning to London, he decided to give his parents the surprise of their lives and dialled the number of his home. It would not connect. Several times he tried but each time could not get through. Perplexed, he telephoned a family friend who, upon hearing his voice, became profoundly distressed. Something, Walter sensed, was terribly wrong. Then he was given the awful news: six weeks previously, Walter’s mother had taken the traditional half-day Thursday afternoon off from work and had gone home after lunch. Ten minutes later, a German V2 rocket hit the house, destroying it completely. She was found in the rubble alive, but died soon after in the ambulance.

  ‘Here’s me looking forward to a wonderful homecoming and it all ended in disaster,’ he reflected.

  Walter had survived the ordeal of being shot down, nearly drowning in the ocean, being captured, then escaping and heading out in disguise across Germany under the noses of the enemy. His mother, supposedly safe in her living room had been killed just weeks before the end of the war. The awful irony still saddens him to this day.

  Taken in by neighbours however, his life took another turn in the form of a pretty young local girl who made him a cake he still remembers to this day. This same girl, now his wife of many years, removes the plates from an excellent lunch she has prepared for Walter and myself. Walter’s plate is, I notice, clean.

  ‘You could never throw food away,’ Jean told me. ‘Not after what he’d been through.’

  Postscript

  I drove away from my final interview, trying to understand just what it was I had achieved. I had spoken with more than two dozen former pilots, navigators, bomb-aimers, gunners and wireless operators who had flown in deserts, over cities and in the stifling jungles of the South-west Pacific. On each occasion, I was met with complete acceptance in allowing me to dredge up highly personal memories of fear, loss and trauma, often for the first time in decades.

  As we spoke, many men seemed to physically transform as the power of recollection worked its magic on their ageing bodies – raising voices, quickening pulses and rekindling fire into dulling eyes – until I felt I was speaking not with men in their eighties, but boys younger than myself who had lived through what they were describing just days, rather than decades, before.

  Each interview I conducted was completely different. Some were shy, some were blasé old hands, speaking as if at a dinner party. Some treated it like a stimulating game, becoming more animated and energetic as we went along. Others found it unsettling, and seemed haunted by the raised ghosts of long-dormant memories. As I said goodbye and turned from their front doorstep, some men wore a look I knew would linger long after my visit, despite the soothing efforts of wives and family members.

  Many were astonished by the strength of their own recollection, and more than once I was told that the memories were becoming more vivid as the years went by.

  The only common thread with every interview was that, by the end, we were all exhausted.

  I had been privileged to be invited as an intimate into a lost and private world, rich in drama and tragedy and in almost every case, the most formative and enduring experiences of a person’s life. What I had learned, what I had experienced, albeit vicariously, I cannot accurately measure nor fully appreciate.

  But what was it they wanted? I often asked myself. What do these men, these survivors, often bewildered by their own longevity wish above all else to be the legacy of their deeds, sixty years on from the cauldron of their youth? I put it to one pilot directly, and in the brief answer he gave, I felt he spoke for all.

  ‘To be remembered,’ he said. ‘That’s it. Just sometimes to be remembered.’

  Acknowledgements

  Writing this book was a pure labour of love, a fulfilment of an ambition of many years, which itself stemmed from a life-long obsession with the aircraft of the Second World War and the men who flew them. It took the encouragement of my friend, journalist and writer, Peter Wilmoth to spur me into action, over lunch one day when he was working on his own biography of Bud Tingwell. Peter had a small list of minor technical points he had asked me to clarify concerning Bud’s air force days flying photo reconnaissance Spitfires in the Mediterranean. After doing my best to oblige, he looked at me and said, ‘you know you should really do a book of your own’. For that one comment, I will be eternally grateful. Peter then introduced me to my publishers, Pan Macmillan, who have been a delight from the word go, and whose patience I have stretched to the limit with a series of elastic deadlines that not once elicited a harsh word.

  I must also thank Bud, not only for being part of the book, but for his very generous Foreword.

  For reasons of space, I was able to include just over half the number of interviews I conducted in several states over the course of a year. For those men I met, but who I was not able to include I am profoundly sorry. It is in no way a reflection of the time spent together or the value of your war services. In reality, I could have included yours, and a hundred more.

  Peter Forbes, fellow aircraft enthusiast and fighter expert was invaluable in helping me contact some of the fighter boys and accompanied me on several interviews offering insights and advice I found most helpful. Peter, I thank you.

  Many thanks to Brian Walley, not only for sharing his story with me but also for allowing me to reproduce extracts from the book Silk and Barbed Wire, available through Sage Pages (www.sagepages.com.au). Thanks also to the Royal Air Forces Ex-Prisoner of War Association, WA branch.

  Thank you also to Tom Hall who kindly allowed me to reproduce an extract from his book Typhoon Warfare – Reminiscences of a rocket-firing Typhoon pilot.

  The volunteer staff at the Aviation Heritage Museum of Western Australia at Bull Creek in Perth were wonderful to me, allowing me access to their extensive library, and also bending the rules to allow me to crawl around inside their magnificent Lancaster bomber as well as sit in the cockpit of their Spitfire to acquaint myself with the internal layout of both aircraft. I thank them, and highly recommend to anyone
with an interest in aircraft to visit this undiscovered gem.

  Finally, thank you to the wives and children who went to such great effort to track me down, set up times, give me precise directions and take time out from busy schedules to prepare lunches, make tea and cake and generally make me feel completely at home with their beloved father or husband.