FLY
MICHAEL VEITCH
VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2008
Copyright © Michael Veitch 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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ISBN: 978-1-74-228482-8
CONTENTS
Introduction
Peter Alexander Mehrtens
Nevin Filby
Arthur Cundall
Fred Phillips
Jock McAuley
Pat Kerrins & Nobby Clarke
Ralph Proctor
Stuart Thompson
Jeff McKay
Alistair Smith
Heinz (Henry) Hempel
Max Durham
Barney Barnett
Ian Robinson
David Roberts
Harvey Bawden
Roy Riddel
Harry
Bob Molesworth
James Coward
Dudley Marrows
Acknowledgements
Photography credits
INTRODUCTION
It came as something of a shock to learn there was a German in town. Not just any German, either, but a living, breathing, highly decorated one-time member of Hitler’s long-vanquished air force who, if the rumours were true, had flown an astonishing array of aircraft, had been shot down numerous times in various theatres, was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross – the famous ‘Ritterkreuz’ – had cut a considerable swathe through the female population of Nazi Germany and had even managed to squeeze in a close encounter with Adolf himself. I didn’t believe a word of it.
But here I was, standing once again outside a large and forbidding retirement complex, filled with gloomy thoughts of my own mortality, about to meet another octogenarian who I hoped would soon be revealing to me – a complete stranger – the terrible, traumatic, often exciting, but always compelling stories of the days of his youth spent in the cauldron of combat – flying in World War II.
With some trepidation – like visiting a relative for the first time since a dramatic incident – I stood at a big glass door, pressed a buzzer on a console and waited to be let inside. Beware: this is where an obsession can lead you.
I had spent the best part of a year tracking down men such as these and putting their stories into a book – the navigators, the pilots, the wireless operators and the gunners. The men – boys, really – who had flown the Lancaster and Wellington bombers into Germany; the fighter pilots in Spitfires and Hurricanes who had wheeled and turned and blacked themselves out in the skies over Britain and France and North Africa; the flying boat captains who had soared for countless hours over the glittering Pacific and grim grey Atlantic; the Dakota crews who dropped soldiers into the maw of battle and supplied voracious armies across warring continents.
Sometimes, when I look back over forty years, I’m bewildered as to where it came from, this companion that appeared at my side when I was a child, then stayed long past the time when such things usually wander off, or fade beneath the glare of everyday life. Instead, it accompanied me into adulthood, then middle age, and today sits with me still, just behind and slightly in the background, a permanent fixture, its origins as obscure now as the day it arrived. My own family’s military heritage offers no satisfactory explanation. My only two relatives who served in the armed forces – a grandfather and an uncle, both of whom I barely knew – took their places not in the air force at all but in the army and navy, and about their experiences uttered not a syllable.
Beyond some brief lip-service as a kid, I harboured no serious ambition to join their ranks myself, knowing full well my fundamental unsuitability to such a life. Truth be known, I’m not even particularly fond of flying.
Recently, I scored a trip in a beautifully restored DC-3 airliner which regularly criss-crosses the evening skies over Melbourne, treating its passengers to a chablis and a wondrous view of the late-summer sunset. I sat amid chatty tourists, cramped and irritated, wishing instead that I could watch its stately progress from the ground, thinking how magnificent it must look, catching the sun’s final glint as it banked, revealing its polished, seventy-year-old aluminium surface, accompanied by the fading throb of its twin Wright Cyclone engines.
Even as a kid, I preferred to be an observer. Model aeroplanes blocked out the isolation of being virtually an only child (my older siblings bolted the nest as soon as they could) as well as the racket of my parents’ largely dysfunctional marriage. The money from several after-school jobs went towards little other than Airfix and Revell boxed kits, and I joined a select group of serious, school-uniformed regulars who, several afternoons a week, would descend on one of the city’s several hobby shops as soon as the last bell had rung.
Sometimes it was a new model plane every week. I would bring it home – the tram ride spent savouring the dramatic illustration on the box – then excitedly show my father (who would feign interest for a moment) before breaking the seal and savouring the contents. Tiny bits of plastic, beautifully moulded to replicate rivets or canvas surfaces, and minute figures of the pilot and crew, complete with scarves and goggles, would tumble out of the box. Seated at a small table at one end of a draughty open-air landing, I went to work, surrounded by my glues and paints and brushes – a turpentine-soaked oasis. Light Tan for the leather helmet, Arctic White mixed with a drop of Aluminium for the glass goggles. In my hands the little aeroplanes took shape in glue and plastic, as in my head colours and sounds and stories exploded, carrying me deep into a world of knowledge where I felt secure, arming my early adolescent self with identity, teaching me a self-reliance that has equipped me to this day.
One by one, the planes took their place on my book shelf, or gathered in growing flocks on wires suspended above my head in my room. I went through mini love affairs with the different types – Hurricane, Mosquito, Wellington, Zero – devouring information on each of them in turn, until, sated, moving on to the next.
At twenty, I travelled to London on my first trip overseas. As I looked out from the descending airliner, the green mosaic of England and its myriad towns and villages rolled out below, but my gaze was fixed firmly
on the sky, the same patch of blue and wispy-white where, I knew, the Battle of Britain had played out its twisting, monumental drama forty years earlier.
A few days later, I stopped short in front of a poster at Manor House tube station. In gaudy colours, painted images of First and Second World War aircraft wheeled around above the heads of the crowd. The annual summer ‘Warbirds’ airshow was barely a week away, a short train ride to the famous aerodrome at Biggin Hill in Kent. I could hardly believe my luck.
But, standing behind the crowd barrier in the tepid English sunshine as the PA system blared martial music and a commentator jazzed it up with one scripted cliché after another, it all felt strangely empty. Even the sight of the aircraft, restored to within an inch of their lives, varnished like aerial hot rods, left me disappointed. I’d had more of a thrill making them out of plastic as a ten-year-old, dirtying them up with simulated battle wear – stains along the cowling from the leaded petrol and scuff marks where the pilot’s boots had worn away the paint on the upper surface of the wings.
On the train ride back to London that afternoon, I realised, perhaps for the first time, that it was not the sight and sound of machines I had hankered for all these years, but a time, a time long gone, though not for the people who had lived it. And getting them to tell me all about it was always one of my favourite pastimes.
As a youth, at assorted functions and gatherings both public and private, I would quite happily forego the usual merriment to sit with the greying fellow in the corner with the distinctive badge on his lapel, drawing him out, slowly at first, allowing him to set the pace as he spoke – sometimes for the first time in years – about his time in the war. I sat, mesmerised, and I listened. Occasionally I got the brush-off, but only occasionally.
Now, there are just a few of these men left, each with a tale of extraordinary personal experience from a war fought long ago, and a time long gone, but still real, vivid and alive to them. Before they all passed away, I wanted to speak to as many as I could, to paint the picture of what they did, not out of any sense of duty or honour or deference to some legacy in an era of dubiously revived jingoism, but simply for me.
I’d met Englishmen, Australians and New Zealanders – all now in their eighties – men once reticent but now eager to expound on that most extraordinary chapter in their lives, prepared at last to give it up to an interested stranger rather than letting their tales be lost forever. I’d met men who had told me extraordinary things I shall never forget. But I’d never met a German.
It’s funny how it all came about. I’d told the story of Les Smith, a nuggety Englishman who had once been a turret gunner in the Royal Air Force, condemned to fly the truly appalling Boulton-Paul Defiant – a bizarre hybrid which saw a hydraulically powered turret shoved into the back of a single-engine fighter to scare the Germans with a radical new concept in aviation warfare. It didn’t work. With no compensatory boost in engine power, the Defiant was heavy and unwieldy, and once the Germans recovered from their initial surprise that, with this bird, the guns fired backwards, they varied their attack and tore them to pieces in the daylight skies of France and England.
But Les somehow survived to be a more-than-sprightly old chap, especially on Anzac Day where, under the RAF banner, he marches up to the Melbourne Shrine and still today fits perfectly into his immaculate royal blue RAF uniform.
I’d written about Les in my first book, and at a lunch held sometime after its publication, organised so that a few of the blokes could meet each other, we all got talking. As we tucked into the fine fare, Les casually dropped to me that a friend of his – living right here in Melbourne – had been in the Luftwaffe flying all sorts of things: Junkers, Heinkels etc. He’d even had a spell as a courier pilot flying around some of the top-ranking Nazis. ‘Nice chap, though,’ he said.
Oh, and now he comes to mention it, what about his mate the Spitfire pilot, shot down attacking a Dornier during the Battle of Britain? ‘Lives in Canberra. Did I mention him?’ I just stared at him for a few moments, aghast. How many other tales had I missed? ‘Good soup, this,’ he said bringing another spoonful of minestrone to his lips.
But as luck would have it, I’ve been asked to do it all again, and who better than an envoy from the Dark Side to kick me off?
PETER ALEXANDER MEHRTENS
Pilot, Luftwaffe
The phone rang only once. He sounded friendly. Perhaps Les had tipped him off to my calling, but no, Peter was simply an affable bloke expressing not the slightest hesitation about my wanting to come over and poke around in his past. ‘Yes, sure, anytime. Come, sure,’ he said keenly in an odd mixture of educated European corrupted with an Australian twang. I didn’t want to sound pushy but was, er, tomorrow morning too soon? ‘Yes, yes, of course, of course, tomorrow, anytime,’ he assured me.
Where he lived was a rabbit warren with several wings and complicated floor plans on boards. I asked a small Vietnamese woman clutching an enormous vacuum cleaner which of the many lifts and stairwells I should take to get to the third floor. She deciphered the address in my hand and sent me down a passageway. On the way I passesd items of strange Masonic regalia in glass cabinets as well as the latest efforts of the village knitting circle: colourful tea cosies and something in cream for a new grandchild.
I had no idea what to expect from talking to a German airman from World War II. I had never thought I should ever meet one. I had grown up obsessed with the victorious Allies, but my interest in the defeated Germans was comparatively small. I knew what they flew, of course, and at age seven could bore people senseless with long explanations of the differences between the Messerschmitt 109 ‘E’ and ‘G’ variants, or expound on such oddities as the Blohm und Voss 141 (as far as I know, the world’s only asymmetrical aeroplane). From time to time, I would even embark on minor love affairs with some of the German aircraft, such as the Luftwaffe’s stalwart early-war bomber, the Heinkel 111, revering its camouflaged splinter-green form in photographs and lovingly constructed model kits (although goodness knows why – this heavy, antiquated bus of a thing was one of the ugliest aeroplanes ever built). But all in all, I never had the same feeling for the ‘enemy’ as I did for the ‘good guys’. I suppose the poison of the Nazi regime had a lot to do with it, but I had little notion about how the men themselves felt about flying, fighting and, in their case, losing.
Peter’s door was open. I knocked and walked into a room that seemed to be full of people. It was a tiny space – functional with a small bathroom, space for a bed, a little desk and shelf and that was it. Cat-swinging definitely not recommended. I introduced myself to three people simultaneously. A cacophony ensued. ‘Yes, we know, seen you on the telly!’ announced a middle-aged woman to another man who kept insisting we had already met. ‘No, the telly, he’s been on the telly,’ she reiterated. The man was still unconvinced. ‘What’s he doing here?’ someone asked.
Peter, who I had come to see, sat a few feet away in a chair and chuckled quietly at the scene. ‘Goodonya, My-gel,’ he said in a friendly way, perspiring slightly and offering his hand like we were old friends. With my added presence in the little room, I began to recall the cabin scene from A Night at the Opera.
There was nowhere to sit other than on the bed alongside the others. ‘Sure we haven’t met?’ asked the man once again – Peter’s stepson Gary, as I later discovered. He and his wife eventually gave up trying to unscramble the incongruity of my presence, and it all became quite jolly.
Peter, I could soon tell, was a pleasant man, but not well. He looked already exhausted by the time I arrived and explained that his blood sugar levels had of late been high. ‘Way, way high,’ he said, lifting his hand for emphasis. Without another word he reached for a pile of books on a shelf and passed one over. It was a homemade work of eighty or so typed A4 pages slipped into plastic page protectors and bound by hand: Such is Life – the good times and the bad times – autobiography of Major Peter Alexander Mehrtens (retd). I thanked him and began f
lipping through his short autobiography as a conversation about family matters evolved around me.
The cover showed a series of pictures of various German aeroplane types, the stylish pilot’s badge, an Iron Cross, and in the centre, an image of an extremely handsome young man – beautiful almost – with large soft eyes and a high forehead, dressed in the uniform of a Luftwaffe officer: Peter, in his youth, over sixty years ago. Time, as they say, is a terrible thing.
Not to be trumped, I handed over a copy of my own book, a professional and slickly produced effort by comparison, then instantly regretted it, feeling like a show-off. I told him it was a gift. He glanced at it, a little awkward, then put it aside.
‘Gary started to rewrite it,’ said his wife, ‘but someone suggested we leave it the way it is to give it more character. Oh well, we’ll leave you to it,’ and they all stood suddenly, giving Peter an affectionate farewell. On his way out, Gary tapped the cover of Peter’s book. ‘Not a bad story either,’ he said. Peter gave a small chuckle. There was a moment’s silence as we two strangers sat and contemplated each other.
‘I’m not too hot at the moment, you know,’ he tells me, dropping the armour of good humour he had been holding up for his family. I offer to postpone the conversation but he will have none of it. I suggest a cup of tea or a glass of water but that too is waved away. ‘Forget it, forget it,’ he says in his affably mangled accent.
A few words of introduction about me, and then, to business. Let’s get the ball rolling with an easy one. ‘What part of Germany are you from?’ I ask.
‘Berlin!’ he announces with something like a flourish. ‘A Berlin boy – baptised with water from the Spree,’ and so he proceeds to tell me the fascinating story of his life.
Peter’s father was a major in World War I, wounded by shellfire at the front while serving in the Pioneer Corps. Exactly which front Peter is a little unsure. Then again, his memories of the old man don’t exactly ring with tenderness. ‘One of my sons will serve the Fatherland!’ was the paternal decree to his children, and the honour fell to Peter. ‘He was tough. He really was,’ he says. ‘One of the old Kaiser’s men.’
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