Instead of bombs, the Pathfinders were required to drop coloured flares, or Target Indicators (TIs), and drop them with incredible accuracy. Pathfinder navigators bore the responsibility not just for their own crew finding the target, but the entire bombing force as well. In preparation for a raid, they would pore over the myriad photographic details of the target – the aiming point, the approaches – and took into account predicted wind directions and other meteorological concerns that would be brought to bear on the course they would ultimately tell their pilot to fly.
To command the Pathfinders, Harris selected one Donald Clifford Tyndall Bennett, a Queenslander, and one of those true freaks of command that war sometimes throws up. His career reads like an adventure book. A grazier’s son, Bennett had joined the RAAF as a twenty-year-old cadet in 1930 and transferred to the RAF the following year. His prodigious skill as a navigator was soon noticed and in almost no time at all he was instructing at a flying boat base. In 1934, he became only the seventh person ever to pass the extremely rare First Class Navigator’s licence and even began lecturing on the subject. He then seemed to tire of the air force, joined Imperial Airways and quickly became a sensation as a civil pilot, entering the Centenary Air Race from England to Melbourne, becoming a test pilot and breaking the record for an Atlantic crossing from east to west.
When war broke out, he rejoined and was quickly given a squadron of Halifaxes to command. In 1941, attacking the German battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord at 200 feet, he was shot down with a wing ablaze, baled out and, with his wireless operator, trekked across the Alps for three days to Sweden. A month later, with a new DSO ribbon sewed to his tunic, he was back in England again, flying. Not that he thought his exploits were anything out of the ordinary. His attitude was that if a downed pilot hadn’t escaped and been flying again inside a month, he wasn’t really trying.
His reputation within the RAF, particularly as a navigator, soared. It was said that he wrote the book on the subject in three parts: one for beginners, another for advanced students, and the last for himself – which he alone could understand. At thirty-two, he was, indeed still is, the youngest person in the British or Commonwealth air forces ever to have held the rank of Wing Commander. But the swashbuckling hero image was not a perfect fit. The highly intelligent Bennett was cold and aloof, and suffered fools not at all, particularly those of higher rank who tended to sneer at ‘colonials’ of any description, talented or otherwise. After the war, it was an attitude that seemed to cost him, when he became the only Group Commander to miss out on a knighthood. He entered politics briefly but quickly lost his seat and somewhat bitterly turned his back on it forever.
Harris, it is said, appointed Bennett with an eye to controlling him, only to discover that malleability was not one of his traits. Bennett thought nothing of tormenting his superiors, badgering constantly for new and better aircraft and striving continually for ways to avoid casualties among his airmen, who adored him. He would in time transform his handful of crews and mismatched, obsolete aircraft into a highly efficient, highly deadly force. Despite the unlikelihood of surviving a tour on Pathfinders, the greatest fear amongst its members remained being sacked from it and posted back to an ordinary unit.
But Fred Phillips didn’t know any of this when he volunteered for the air force in Melbourne, trained in Canada and Britain, and eventually found his way to a Heavy Conversion Unit at Stradishall in Suffolk, where he learned to fly Stirlings. Coming in to land after a night cross-country exercise, the war found him.
Fred was flying astern of his friend Ken Gilkes, both of them lining up with the runway a mile-and-a-half apart. ‘Just then my mid-upper gunner called out, “There’s a 190 just gone over the top of us!” ’ The Germans were known to make regular hit-and-run visits to RAF airfields, both training and operational, slipping in behind a returning bomber undetected, and shooting it down while coming in to land before vanishing into the night. ‘Actually,’ says Fred, ‘he was wrong. I think it was a Ju-88.’ For some reason Fred will never know, the German pilot selected Ken in the aircraft ahead of him, and not himself. ‘He overshot me and then straightaway began firing. I saw all the tracer going into Ken’s plane.’ Fred watched Ken’s Stirling crash, then break in half. Ken was thrown out of the cockpit into a pool of burning petrol, unconscious. ‘We had been together right through training. Even come over on the same ship. He was terribly, terribly burned.’
Fred and his crew paid a visit to Ken in hospital a couple of days later. ‘He was completely bandaged up in a saline bath with sprays going all over him,’ he says. ‘The only thing he could see was his fingers. They didn’t give him a mirror. Two of my crew fainted when they saw him.’
Ken spent the rest of the war in hospital, came home and married the girl who had stood by him. He is still alive and active today and he and Fred are still friends. But thinking back to that dreadful night of the crash, Fred knows it could very easily have been him. ‘We were pretty arsey,’ he says. I can but agree.
Unlike Ken, Fred continued his piloting career and was posted to RAF Mildenhall where he commenced operations on the now-obsolete Stirlings. ‘I was on the last bombing operation where they used them,’ he says. ‘We lost an engine and hit a warm front. I could barely keep her from stalling with the weight of the ice building up on the wings.’ Not many mourned the Stirling’s passing from operational bombing – losses were appalling. The Stirling’s abysmal ceiling meant that when attacking short-range targets such as in the Ruhr, it was impossible to climb to any significant altitude. ‘We’d be down about 9000 feet and they’d pump the 20- and 40-millimetre cannons up at you. It looked like someone holding a hose. Sometimes we’d get the incendiaries falling through the wings being dropped from the Lancs and Halifaxes at 20 000 feet above.’
Fred has prepared quite a bit of documentation for me to look at, including a small book he has written about his life which he intends to rewrite and expand upon. He speaks extremely softly but precisely, and I can sometimes find it hard to hear him above the whirring of the heater which, thankfully, is keeping me warm. Fred sits away from it and doesn’t seem to mind. He insists I finish up the sandwiches, which I do greedily, while he prepares tea. The way he speaks, the way he conducts himself tells me that it is no surprise that he was once part of an elite. There’s still something of it about him today.
Fred completed nine trips in Stirlings, four in Lancasters, every one a drama. ‘Some kind of disaster went on every time,’ he says. ‘We’d have holes in the wing tanks, we’d be running out of juice, we were shot at …’ But he knew he had a good crew, as well as an exceptionally good navigator. ‘I think they had us fingered from early on,’ he says.
Talent was a precious commodity in Bomber Command and gifted navigators stood out. After only a couple of trips, Fred’s navigator, Dave Goodwin, was being requested to report back the wind variations he was finding en route to the target, which were then forwarded to the other aircraft in the main force. So it came as little surprise when Fred and his crew were asked to join the Path Finder Force. I had imagined the request to be something dramatic – a secret meeting, a sealed envelope or a summons to Bennett himself – but in fact it was all rather unexciting. Just a quiet conversation and a request. ‘I had to put it to the crew that it meant doing fifty trips with Pathfinders, not including the ones we’d already completed. All of us agreed we’d do it.’
The Pathfinders had their own airfield at the appropriately named venue of Warboys in Cambridgeshire. Here, for a month, Fred and his crew went back to school. They were drilled in extra navigation courses, and bomb aimers in particular were taught to hone their skills. They were also introduced to the concept of dropping not bombs but the coloured flares that would mark the target for other aircraft. They were to be the first aircraft to arrive on target, and the last to leave. And they would have to do it night after night, fifty times. Their chances of surviving were negligible.
Fred was posted not fa
r away from Warboys to Oakington, flying Lancasters with No. 7 Squadron, one of the original four Pathfinder squadrons. As soon as he arrived on station, Fred knew just what he was in for. ‘There was a board with all the names of the crews written in chalk. They were rubbing out the buggers that hadn’t come back the previous night.’
The details of some of the many individual trips Fred carried out are a little sketchy, but he conveys to me the general sense of the work of the Pathfinder, not to mention the dangers.
At briefing, Fred’s bomb aimer was told the colour of the Target Indicators for that night, as it changed daily. From his bomb selector panel beside him he could choose which flares to drop, and keep dropping, as the target would need to remain visible for the duration of the raid. As well as the flares, they would also carry a load of bombs which they would drop after the target was marked.
‘The one place where no one wanted to be was in the target area,’ says Fred. Every bomber pilot would shudder for that two minutes when he would have to hold the aircraft steady for the bomb aimer to line up the target below with a little illuminated cross on the bombsight, press the release button, then wait an interminable thirty seconds for the photo flash which would take the verifying aiming point photo. ‘Then they’d tear off as quickly as they could to get away.’ No such luxury could be afforded the Pathfinders. The target flares would burn out, be destroyed, or become obscured by smoke, and Fred would need to go in again to drop another. ‘Sometimes we’d make three separate runs at the target,’ he says.
Remaining in the target area for so long – sometimes up to twenty minutes – magnified the dangers tenfold. There were searchlights – ‘We had more than our fair share of being “coned” ’ – night fighters and, flying against the flow of the main stream, the ever-present risk of collision.
Even natural elements conspired against their chances of survival. Fred came to hate the aurora borealis, or northern lights, as it would silhouette his aircraft against the night sky.
In a typical Pathfinder-led raid, the so-called Master Bomber would, like an orchestra conductor, fly in wide circles deciding whether the aiming point had been accurately marked, then, over the radio, direct and correct the often hundreds of aircraft and their bombing patterns as a grim dialogue ensued between them. ‘Slipping back from target – correct aiming point is two widths to the west – ignore yellow TIs – bomb on the green – dropping green TIs to reposition aiming point …’
‘It was a pretty high chop rate among Master Bombers. You can imagine – sticking around the target like that. Quite often we’d appreciate anti-aircraft shells coming up because at least you knew that the night fighters weren’t moving in.’ Fred’s crew took over from their New Zealander Master Bomber, Fraser Baron. In a single night both he and his deputy were shot down over the target by night fighters.
But the longer one survived, the more one learned. Fred was given the job of Deputy Master, and eventually Master Bomber himself, carrying out no fewer than seventeen operations just ‘hanging around the target, telling them where to drop the bombs. You could hear the anti-aircraft fire rattling on the sides of the aircraft like hail. After one trip, our Flight Engineer counted 320 holes from the shrapnel. They called us the “lucky crew”.’
I ask him whether he thought he’d make it through alive. ‘No. Not at all,’ he says quite matter-of-factly, as if the very idea was an absurdity. It all came down to luck, he says. ‘You could be flying along coming home at night. You’d see a tiny little spark moving along in the distance. Then it would burst into full flame. Somebody had been shot down. It could have been you.’
They coped, says Fred, by playing hard. Alcohol was the universal remedy administered by most aircrew to deal with levels of stress almost impossible to comprehend. How any of them survived a day without cracking up is completely beyond me. It has often been said that it was the strange, disjointed nature of bomber flying that made the job so difficult. In the army, one was able to adjust to the reality of the situation over a period of time. In Bomber Command, it was far more schizophrenic. In the morning, an airman would wake up between clean sheets, shave, have breakfast, watch the rabbits gambolling amongst the hedgerows in the pretty English countryside, all the while knowing that this very night, you would be flying into a hell on earth where there was a high prospect of being shot at and killed.
On nights off, the crews would frequent the many pubs and dancehalls of the university town of Cambridge and its surrounds, an area they shared with the United States Eighth Army Air Force. ‘We were a fairly wild bunch. You needed to be to get through it psychologically,’ says Fred. The greater the losses and the more of their friends who simply didn’t turn up the next day, the harder the partying. The Americans, though, had a different approach. ‘When they’d had a bad day, there wouldn’t be one in town. Didn’t make any difference to our mob. We’d be there regardless,’ he says.
After the beginning of the Normandy campaign, Bomber Command, much to Harris’s disgust, was taken off the attacks on German cities and industrial centres and used as a tactical strike force for the army. Fred suddenly found himself operating in daylight, and it was a shock.
‘That’s when we got to see just how many aeroplanes there were in the sky. It was amazing,’ he says. One day, he was taken by a staff driver to be briefed by the 8 Group commander, Air Vice-Marshall Bennett himself. ‘First of all I have to swear you to absolute secrecy,’ was Bennett’s rather sobering opener. ‘I want you to get over tonight and observe the shellfire of the Germans – then tomorrow go over again and control the raid. And make sure you really control it,’ he added emphatically.
Later that evening, Fred was flying over Normandy, observing the distinctive orange shellfire of the German guns. Twenty-four hours later, he returned, this time directing over a thousand aircraft at a very low 3000 feet to bomb a tiny restricted area of French countryside to prevent the surrounded Germans from escaping through the Falaise Gap. It was this he was detailed to hit. ‘It was a very, very precise piece of bombing,’ he says. A little less precise, and it could have meant killing his own troops. For his efforts, Fred became one of only nine Australians in World War II to be awarded the French Croix de Guerre, quite the thing to go with his DFC, of which he also became a worthy recipient, along with his entire crew.
Then, with an abrupt, ‘I think you’ve got enough now,’ my interview with Fred is concluded. Perhaps I have been prying a little too deep; perhaps there are memories in his head he is happy to have remain dormant; perhaps he is just sick of me. But the tape recorder is switched off and I thank him for his time and his hospitality. He then takes me on an extended tour of his lovely home. We talk about other things for a while, trees and books and birds and antiques, as well as his many happy years as a senior airline pilot for Qantas. He seems to cheer up, as if these happier, life-affirming subjects wash away the gloomy spectre of war and death. He tells me of the finches and fairy wrens that delight him as they dart about in the hedges of his garden and points out an unusual pine tree some distance off. Still fit and very active into his eighties, Fred shows me the old cellar under his house, and like two adventurous boys we clamber down some steps into the dank but exciting subterranean atmosphere.
A little later, refreshed by the cold outside air, I thank Fred and drive away, my head spinning – my first and only encounter with a Pathfinder.
JOCK McAULEY
Pilot, RAAF
I could soon tell that Jock McAuley is a man who prefers to waste neither time nor words. Over the course of our afternoon together in his suburban home, I had the impression that it was not he but myself under the spotlight. Arriving at the appointed time, I was greeted courteously and we sat down to talk in a rather formal front section of the house that I could see was reserved for guests. All very professional. Somewhere, the sounds of some other visitors enjoying a meal could be heard – family, perhaps, or friends – but Jock’s focus never wavered from the task I had set hi
m: to cast himself back more than half a century to his time spent flying one of the most famous aeroplanes of all time in the latter stages of the European war.
A few days after his eighteenth birthday, in January 1943, Jock and a mate boarded the train to Melbourne from his home in Horsham in western Victoria. Alighting at Spencer Street Station, they walked up the hill to the RAAF recruiting office in Russell Street. A year to the day later, he walked up a gangplank onto a ship that would take him to fight overseas. In the meantime, he had achieved every young air force recruit’s dream job – selection to be a fighter pilot.
Before all this, though, there had been basic training to contend with, and an instructor Jock found less than congenial. He was a bloke he’d known back in Horsham. The idea of being taught to fly by someone he knew was something Jock found a little unsettling, so in the first few weeks when still on ground duties, he did his best to avoid him. ‘It didn’t work,’ says Jock. ‘He found me.’ No concessions were made to familiarity either. ‘This bloke did everything he could to stir me up.’
‘Get that bloody stick back!’ was one of his favourite sayings, and Jock can still hear his voice, yelled loud enough to be heard on the ground by the other students when coming in to land in a Tiger Moth. ‘A child of two could fly an aircraft, providing they have a bit of commonsense, and I doubt whether you have any!’
He survived the humiliation, completed the course and progressed to Number 7 Service Flying Training School at Deniliquin for pilot training on Wirraways. ‘The Wirraway was a … self-respecting aircraft,’ says Jock cautiously. I’ve heard it called far worse. ‘One of its worst features,’ he says, ‘was that if you let the speed get down on landing, it would stall and flip. Just like that!’ He illustrates with a dramatic flick of the hand. ‘We had a number of pilots killed that way.’
Fly Page 7
