‘And he did,’ says Nevin. ‘I never heard another word about it.’
Obviously impressed with the young Australian’s zest for adventure, the Wing Commander oiled the wheels and saw Nevin transferred to the 2TAF communication squadron operating near Brussels. ‘I flew everything there: Austers, Magistars, Ansons. You name it, I flew it.’
Flying the small, lightly constructed Taylorcraft Auster was as radically different an experience from the B-25 as a pilot could get, but Nevin enjoyed his new job as a dispatch courier and ‘odd-job’ man, ferrying around orders and personnel from his aerodrome at Evere, codenamed B.56. Having previously carried several tons of bombs, Nevin’s only armament now was, he says, ‘a .45 and a flare pistol’.
B.56 was situated right near the present head office of NATO, which in 1944 was just one of hundreds of Allied aerodromes – some requisitioned, others newly constructed – beginning to dot the French and Belgian landscape as the Germans were pushed eastwards. Ironically, it was while flying the relatively tame Auster that Nevin came closest to killing himself.
He continued his habit of flying low, sometimes at a mere forty feet. This ruled out fighter attack from below, but gave itchy gunners – even ‘friendly’ ones – little time to identify you.
It all happened very quickly. On a trip one morning from Eindhoven to B.56, Nevin remembers flying alongside some trees next to a field, when suddenly his engine cut out. Later he found out that the fuel line had been severed, most likely by a bullet – exactly whose was never discovered, but he suspects it was not German. He did his best to quickly wash off some speed on the way down, but his wheels hit hard. Rather than tangle with a fence which he thought would flip him over, he chose to hit the trees at sixty knots.
When he woke up on a table in a farmhouse, someone was cleaning blood off his face. ‘A doctor came along and told me I’d broken my nose and teeth but not my back or neck,’ he says. His knees, wrists and skull were heavily bruised, and the aircraft was a wreck. Nevin’s clearing mind returned to the leather dispatch pouch which still had to be delivered. ‘They told me some Germans were still wandering about the place, cut off from their unit and making a nuisance of themselves,’ he says.
After explaining the urgency of his situation, some aviation petrol was siphoned from the Auster, mixed with some kerosene and poured into an old truck that was started up for the first time in ages. Later that night, looking like something out of the Old West, Nevin was put on the truck with some hay bales, and a posse of locals clutching shotguns provided a homemade escort to the front gate of the base. It was midnight by the time he arrived, and if he thought it had been bizarre up till now …
Sore, and slightly dazed, he wandered into what appeared to be a party, with everyone, as he says, ‘as full as a boot’. He asked what was the occasion, and someone blithely replied, ‘Old Filby got the chop today.’ Faces saw him, and the party stopped. Nevin Filby had walked into his very own wake.
‘Someone offered me a drink. I said, “No thanks, I’m going to bed.” ’ He was given an aspirin, spent the next day in bed and was flying again the one after that.
One wake is enough for anyone’s lifetime, and Nevin was determined not to be brought down again. In his unarmed Auster, avoiding a fight was the only sensible option. Just once did a Messerschmitt decide to pick on him, and Nevin displayed a highly original instinct for survival. Slowing down to 100 knots, he spotted a church steeple and circled it as tightly as he could fly, frustrating the German pilot’s aim. ‘He had a shot, then he went up and had another shot, and then he nicked off,’ he says. There were more shots to come.
On a very chilly New Year’s morning, 1945, Nevin drove out to check his Auster before a quick flight to Ghent. It was quiet, with some on the base still nursing sore heads from the celebrations the night before. It had been a big one, as everyone knew this would be their last wartime New Year’s Eve. This is just what the Germans had counted on.
‘Bodenplatte’ (Base Plate) was the Luftwaffe’s last throw of the dice: a massive surprise attack to regain the momentum of the Battle of the Bulge, now faltering in the Ardennes. Over a thousand fighters and fighter-bombers, many flown by barely trained pilots, were, that morning, thrown into the attack. Their targets: the Allied forward airfields of Holland and France.
Nevin had been up early. After an ugly episode in Canada when he had endangered himself and his crew when throwing up in the cockpit on take-off while hungover, he had vowed never, ever to drink the night before flying – including New Year’s Eve.
After giving the aircraft the once-over, he went into the shed next to the main hangar to complete the pre-flight paperwork. ‘I was in there and heard a very loud, very close burst of automatic fire,’ he says. Rushing out, he was confronted with the sight of several Messerschmitt 109s tearing across the airfield at low level, lines of machine-gun bullets hitting the ground everywhere. He jumped into an already occupied slit-trench, his only armament being a Webley revolver. ‘Bullets were ricocheting all over the bloody place,’ he says. ‘I’ve still got chip fractures on my knees from them knocking together.’
Rather bravely, Nevin popped his head up and witnessed one of the most remarkable displays of flying he’d ever seen, and of which he still today speaks with awe. Just behind the hangar, a 109 was making a very steep turn, its port wing almost touching the ground.
‘We could see him,’ Nevin tells me. ‘He passed us and gave us a look. If he’d had time, he would have waved.’ The German flattened out and lined up on a row of conveniently parked Spitfires, tearing through them with his guns. Still amazed, Nevin watched as he then fired into the door of an open hangar, ‘fishtailing’ his aircraft with the rudder to spray his fire. ‘When you can do that and not kill yourself, you’re a bloody good flyer,’ he says. ‘If I’d taken off five minutes earlier I would have been shot down by him.’
‘Him’, it later transpired, was one of the Luftwaffe’s great aces, Oberleutnant Adolf ‘Addi’ Glunz who finished the war with seventy-one kills, the last of which he achieved that very morning. Nevin reckons that, but for a few minutes, he would have been number seventy-two.
It all lasted about a quarter of an hour. As impressive as it looked from the ground, ‘Bodenplatte’ was a pyrrhic victory for the Germans. Several hundred Allied aircraft had indeed been destroyed, but they were easily replaced, while the Luftwaffe endured their largest single-day loss of the war: over 250 pilots, many to their own anti-aircraft guns who had known nothing of the operation, such had been the level of secrecy.
After things had quietened down, Nevin spotted a single undamaged Auster and, with a corporal, went up for a look. ‘Smoke everywhere,’ he says. ‘Every airfield for thirty miles around had burning aircraft on it.’
VE Day found Nevin in the middle of the ocean on his way home. It was a strangely sombre affair with just one small bottle of scotch to share around. He had completed at least fifty-two official operations, and a few more unofficial ones besides. His individualism and lack of fear in expressing an opinion, still undiminished today, probably held him back in terms of promotion, not to mention a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), which a Group Captain once told him he thoroughly deserved.
However, not fitting in with the ways of the air force was something that, I suspect, bothered Nevin very little, even when it came to going on leave. ‘I couldn’t get out those gates fast enough,’ he says. But instead of hitting the bars and fleshpots of London, Nevin headed down to the same little farm in England’s southwest, found a couple of cartridges to shoot grouse, ate homemade cheese and went for walks through the green fields. Paradise.
Nevin is sharp, and likes to talk. As we wind up after interviews that extend over a couple of days, Nevin hands me some more of his handwritten thoughts and recollections, many of which I have quoted here. Writing, he tells me, is cathartic for him, even more so as he gets older. With some amazement he confides in me, ‘About month ago, I had a very vivid dream a
bout one of the ops I had from go to whoa. Sixty-four years after the event!’
Never though, he says, has he actually spoken to anyone about the war in such detail and, perhaps, with such honesty. He apologises for his bluntness in critiquing my own work earlier, but I assure him I’m truly grateful, and that it is his candour I’ve come to hear. Even now, it’s rare for me to meet a former flier so willing to talk about the fear that he and others underwent, a fear that I, with half a lifetime of obsessive imaginings, cannot even begin to comprehend. Then he pays me perhaps his greatest compliment.
‘I think it’s admirable what you’re doing. Most of us fellas are at the age now when we’re going to die fairly soon. After that, the real stories are gone forever. You were there to fight a war. You were there to kill as many people as you could. You were there to do as much damage as you could. You were there to do all the things that horrify you as you look back.’
ARTHUR CUNDALL
Navigator, RNAS
There were many ways airmen coped with the stresses of operational flying. The most common was alcohol, with every penny of their by-no-means meagre air-force pay frenziedly spent in pubs and clubs both near the base and in the larger cities on leave. Some sought gentler outlets, and found secret boltholes where they could soothe their nerves for a week or so in the tranquillity of the English countryside. Others were simply resigned to the statistics and considered themselves already dead. A few – amazingly few, really – reached their own private breaking point, declaring their refusal to fly and bringing the stigma of disgrace, humiliation and court martial crashing down upon their heads. Thousands more have, for decades, paid their own price in haunted night-time hours and terrifying visions, endlessly relived.
But for the vast majority, it was simply the fear – eclipsing that of death itself – of being seen to be letting down your friends that kept them going, bonding them with a strength seldom replicated in peacetime. That, to me, is one of the saddest aspects of war.
One of the things that helped Arthur Cundall survive a near-fatal crash and thirty-six operations against the Japanese was an unwavering faith in a higher power. Although now retired, Arthur still has something of the Baptist minister about him, a gentle aloofness, a slight wonderment at what he achieved and how he made it through a three-and-a-quarter years’ service career culminating in flying off the decks of aircraft carriers in the Fleet Air Arm.
On a cold day, Arthur invites me into his home – a little pool of England in a retirement estate on the outskirts of Melbourne. Despite the tall eucalypts, it reminds me of the Cotswolds, particularly on a chilly day such as this. Rows of azaleas line the front gardens, and a song thrush fossicks through the last of the fallen leaves.
Arthur is a unique find for me. Although he flew in aeroplanes, it was not the air force he joined at all, but the navy. It was, after all, something of a family tradition. Arthur’s father served in destroyers in World War I and was called up from the reserve at the beginning of the Second. In the Norwegian campaign in 1940, he happened to be on deck when a German torpedo struck the side of his destroyer, and he watched as the front half of his ship separated from the rear. He survived, but it’s an incident that might explain his son’s preference for aircraft.
Arthur’s childhood sounds like a ghastly one. Some years before the sinking, his father had absconded with the funds from a ship’s library, run off with another woman and left his family destitute. TB carried off his mother soon after and Arthur was left to be brought up by an archetypical wicked stepmother. As soon as he could get out of home he did so, at seventeen finding a protected job in the meteorological office of a RAF bomber station.
It was the stories of Japanese atrocities in the Far East that pricked his conscience and made him put his hand up for active service. This, Arthur decided, was the war he wanted to be a part of, and he wanted to fly. But the air force would be ages finding its way out there to wreak vengeance on the Japanese. Far better to travel with a mobile airfield, and so it was for the Royal Naval Air Service he volunteered, better known as the Fleet Air Arm.
Arthur had high hopes of being a pilot and faced his big test after just five-and-a-half hours of training. ‘I messed it up,’ he says. The Tiger Moth had a drift to the right on take-off that needed to be compensated for with a little left rudder. ‘I was pressing down on the left alright, but forgot to take my foot off the right.’ With that gentle, terribly English self-effacement that suddenly reminds me of John Le Mesurier, Arthur describes himself taking off in a ‘rather erratic line’. It was politely suggested he might instead like to try his hand at becoming a navigator. The good news was that he would get to do so in exotic, faraway Trinidad.
For a young man from Yorkshire, the contrast could hardly have been greater. Certainly, the weather was a far cry from a grey and miserable wartime Britain, but in fact Arthur nearly didn’t make it through alive. Over the sea one morning in a Supermarine Walrus – a superannuated biplane given such apt nicknames as ‘Shagbat’ or ‘Steam Pigeon’ by its wary crews – he gave up trying to contact base with his archaic radio set, reeled in the trailing aerial and strapped himself into the co-pilot’s seat to enjoy the rest of the flight. Just then he remembered the bar of chocolate he had stashed in a drawer in his little navigator’s desk and went aft to retrieve it. Returning to the cockpit, the sight that greeted him was a ghastly one: the pilot distracted and the sea rushing up alarmingly in the windshield.
He could barely blurt an ineffectual ‘Look out!’ before the nose hit the water and his unstrapped body was hurled straight through the cabin roof. After this he remembers little except the gurgle of the sea around him, a gentle sense of oblivion, and an overriding desire to simply ‘let go’. Roused to semi-consciousness by intrusive voices that demanded to know if he was alright, Arthur muttered an ‘I think so,’ but really just wanted to be left alone. ‘Well you’d better come up here then,’ he heard them say urgently. ‘There are sharks around!’
That seemed to do the trick and up he clambered onto one of the capsized aeroplane’s floats, forcing it to tilt and releasing the trapped air within the fuselage with a noisy ‘glug’. The whole thing then immediately sank beneath them, leaving three crewmen bobbing in the water forty kilometres off Port of Spain.
The sharks stayed away long enough for them to be picked up, but Arthur had a large hole in his leg above the knee and burns to his abdomen after being exposed to the petrol and battery acid in the water. He had an agonising recovery and for years suffered nightmares in which the sea rose up to swallow him.
From the jalopy of the Walrus, Arthur graduated to a true thoroughbred – the magnificent Fairey Firefly. The Royal Navy looked long and hard to find a replacement for the slow and antiquated Swordfish biplanes, before choosing one that was even worse – the truly terrible Albacore. The less said about this disaster the better, but sadly it was just one in a long line of failures. There was, for example, the turret-armed and entirely useless Blackburn Roc, the slow and clunky Skua (a fighter-bomber in name only) and possibly the ugliest aeroplane ever built by anyone anywhere – the Fairey Barracuda. This high-winged monoplane monster was designed to carry torpedoes, but no one thought of giving it an engine that was up to the task. The only times it seemed to manage it was when posing for propaganda shots for the press, and in some of these the pilot can be seen looking distinctly nervous. Arthur trained on Barracudas and, like everyone who had anything to do with them, hated them. There was even a song about it sung, Arthur tells me, to the tune of ‘As Time Goes By’:
The Barracuda Two will be the death of you,
On that you can rely
No matter what their Lordships say
It still can’t fly.
The navy even tried a maritime version of the Spitfire, the Seafire, but its flying characteristics and narrow undercarriage made it extremely difficult to land on the pitching flight deck, and its accident rate was enormous.
Just when all hope seemed
lost, the Fairey Aviation Company, which had so far produced a string of aviation lemons, came through with a masterpiece in the Firefly. Although a piston-engine aircraft, the Firefly always looked ahead of its time, a fact borne out by its continued employment with the Royal Australian Navy until the mid-1960s. It was fast, powerful and armed to the teeth with four 20-millimetre cannons, and gutsy enough to carry both bombs and rockets. Their two-man crews adored them.
Arthur joined No. 1770 Squadron, Royal Naval Air Service. Its home: the 32 000-ton Implacable-class aircraft carrier HMS Indefatigable. In November 1944, he was granted his longstanding wish and steamed out of Portsmouth Harbour heading to the Far East.
Landing and taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier seems a near-impossible task at the best of times, but in rough seas with a rolling deck, it seems positively superhuman. With gentle patience in keeping with his more recent profession, Arthur explains to me the technique his pilot used: brakes on, full throttle then release, taking off with a ‘whoosh’, and hurtling at full speed towards the end of the very short-looking flight deck. Then, suddenly, you’re off the edge and over the sea, with the nose making a terrifying ‘dip’ before picking up enough speed to keep going. (‘I used to look up at the flight deck,’ he says). The pilot then makes a sudden ‘jink’ to the right, just in case the aircraft decides it wants to hit the water. This at least would spare you from being run over by 32 000 tons of ship, though not necessarily from drowning. ‘All quite fascinating really,’ muses Arthur. It’s not quite the word I would have used. I ask him if he said a little prayer every time he took off. He just laughs at that one.
0615 hours on the morning of 24 January 1945. Indefatigable, along with three other carriers of the British Pacific Fleet, turned into the wind to launch its aircraft. Its target was the largest enemy-held oil refinery in the South-West Pacific – Palembang in eastern Sumatra. At the briefing, Arthur was told it would be the most heavily defended target outside the Japanese homeland, protected by veteran pilots in four fighter squadrons, and over 400 heavy anti-aircraft guns. It was to be his first real combat operation.
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