He also continued his run of eccentric instructors. At three a.m. one morning, he climbed into the two-seater Wirraway to commence his scheduled hour of night flying. ‘Circuits!’ was the perfunctorily grunted order from the back seat. Jock taxied, took off and landed again, thinking he must have done rather well for a change, judging by the silence from the rear. He did another circuit, then another after that, still without a word. At the end of the hour, he climbed out of the cockpit and went to bed. Later that morning, the instructor rushed into his hut looking a little bleary. ‘Did I fly with you last night?’ he asked anxiously. ‘I’ve got to fill in me logbook and I was as full as a bull!’ It seemed he’d been sound asleep the whole time.
Speaking with Jock in his suburban home, there’s still something of the fighter pilot sharpness about him. He chooses his words carefully and wastes not a single one. We proceed methodically through his logbook in sequence, and he politely lets me know when, in my rambling, style, I have repeated a question or missed a detail he’s already told me. It’s meeting men like Jock that brings home to me the fact that despite my childhood fantasies of doing what he did, I would have most likely never made the grade.
Jock, however, did make it. After 168 flying hours and a rigorous final air test, he stood to attention in front of an Air Commodore who happened to share his surname. A brief conversation concerning the semantics of genealogy later, the man with the big ring on his sleeve handed him his wings.
A few days later, departing from Port Melbourne at the height of summer, Jock froze his way across the icy waters below Tasmania – en route to South Africa then God knows where. In Durban, he and a mate were billeted for a few days in a private home, waited on by Zulu houseboys roughly their own age. ‘Both of us treated those boys as equals,’ he remembers. Such consideration did not go down well with their white hosts. ‘Look,’ they were told, ‘you can hit them over the head, you can kick them, you can do anything you like to them, but please don’t be civil to them.’ It’s an incident that left an indelible impression on the young man and Jock has retold the story many times. ‘As a nineteen-year-old it was the greatest awakening I could have had,’ he says.
After eventually landing in Scotland, Jock headed south by train. Passing through London, they were held up at Clapham Junction by an air raid. He and his mates peered out the carriage windows at the aircraft overhead as the wailing sirens signalled their introduction to the realities of war. At a Brighton hotel they were sorted out. ‘What do you want, son?’ asked the officer on the category selection board. ‘Fighters, sir!’ replied Jock with the standard answer, to which he received the standard response: ‘Well, you’re in luck. We have a nice line of four-engine night fighters: you can have a Lanc, a Halifax or a Stirling. Take your pick!’ In the months before D-Day, bomber pilots were in demand. And Jock was lucky not to be summoned into their ranks.
Instead, after some weeks waiting around, he was posted to an Advanced Flying Unit in the Midlands where he trained on single engine Miles Masters, then joined a convoy headed to the Middle East. At Fayid in Egypt, he flew over the Suez Canal’s Great Bitter Lake, cutting his teeth on some decrepit P40 Kittyhawks that had seen far better days in the desert, then on to Salerno in Italy to convert to the mighty Mustang.
‘It was like going from a Holden to a Rolls Royce,’ says Jock. ‘With the Kittyhawks, if there were trees at the end of the runway, we’d have to go over them, then put the nose down to get more speed. The Mustang could do a climbing turn off the deck, even with bombs on. It was a delight to fly.’ And Jock would fly them with a very special unit indeed: the all-famous, all-Australian 3 Squadron RAAF.
There is a photograph of No. 3 Squadron taken during its stint in the North African desert in 1942. It shows a group of smiling Australian airmen sitting on and under one of their Kittyhawks, wearing an array of clothing that may or may not be a military uniform. Some wear hats, others do not, some are in odd shirts or topless or in little other than a pair of shorts. They sit happily, draped over their aircraft as if in a living room, while behind them the moonscape of the desert stretches endlessly to the horizon. I have seen other images of airmen at play but it’s hard to imagine one quite so comfortable and unconstructed. There is a spirit to this photograph that’s hard to look at without smiling, a spirit in no way undermined by the knowledge that this happy-go-lucky bunch of young airmen accounted for no fewer than 217 enemy aircraft destroyed, making theirs the highest kill rate of any Royal Australian Air Force squadron in World War II.
The pedigree of No. 3 Squadron exceeds that of the RAAF itself, having been formed at Point Cook in 1916 when still part of the Australian Flying Corps. It distinguished itself on the Western Front flying RE8s till the end of World War I. In 1940 it sailed as a complete unit to the Western Desert to meet the Italians. They jumped around the Mediterranean from Africa to Malta, the Middle East, Sicily and Italy, then zigzagged up the Adriatic coast to Cervia, south of Venice where Jock McAuley joined them for the last few months of the war. By this time, No. 3 Squadron had re-equipped from Kittyhawks to the truly amazing North American P-51 Mustang.
The Mustang epitomises the gutsy, unconquerable all-American fighter aircraft of World War II and it’s no coincidence that there are more of them still flying today than any other type from the era. But it’s actually the English who were responsible for its conception. It began as a cry for help from the British whose industry by 1940 was already stretched to the limit. The logical step was to look to the limitless capacity of the United States. The British would have been happy to increase their order of P-40s and Airacobras, but in California, the North American Aviation Company, which until then had produced little more than trainer aircraft like the Harvard, had an idea for a new aeroplane the Brits might find more interesting. They were right. Despite it existing only on the drawing board, they took a punt, and just 102 days later, the first prototype, ‘NA-73X’, rolled out of the Inglewood factory into the Los Angeles sunshine. The sleek, powerful and disarmingly simple-looking new aeroplane would henceforth be known as ‘Mustang’.
Initially, however, the Americans themselves weren’t much interested in them, and were quite happy to see them all go to the RAF. It was a full year before they got wind of their performance, then started to make a few for themselves. With its Allison engine, the Mustang was a good aeroplane, but not a great one, especially at high altitude, where its performance dropped off considerably. Then one day, an English test pilot had the inspired notion of marrying the airframe to a Rolls Royce Merlin, the same engine that powered the Spitfire, and an aviation superstar was born.
The new Mustang was fast, robust, had an incredible range and was armed to the teeth with six half-inch machine guns in the wings. In the European air war, it accounted for nearly half of all American victories in the air and in ground strafing, and nearly 16 000 were produced. It could escort a bomber from England to Berlin and back and still have fuel enough for a couple of circuits of the airfield, the only impediment to its endurance being pilot exhaustion. It could carry bombs under the wings and was deadly in ground attack, and it was in this role that Jock McAuley would be privileged to fly them.
‘Dive-bombing and strafing’ is how he economically describes his few months flying Mustangs in combat in the northern Adriatic. It was an uncomplicated procedure. From their base at Cervia in Italy, No. 3 Squadron would wait to be called up by army units to clear a road junction or a river crossing which lay in the line of their advance. A spotter aircraft would sometimes fly with them, directing their fire onto pinpoint targets.
Jock’s extensive logbook is open across his knees and in a low monotone he reads a couple of extracts. ‘Six aircraft led by “Tubby” Shannon bombed first. Flak nil. All bombs fell on target area. Made strafing run. Army waiting to cross river after we finished.’ Or the next day, ‘Four aircraft led by Ken Richards bombed motor transport parked under the trees near a house. Excellent bombing. Started two big fires. Between
us accounted for two flamers, two smokers, four damaged. And a stampede of horses. Congratulatory message from the army.’ Like the horses, the Germans on the ground came to dread the Jagdbombers, or Jabos, but they could also hit back, and at low level Jock had to contend with all manner and all calibres of ground fire.
Once near Venice, he was flying number two behind another Mustang flown by a fellow pilot from Perth. All of a sudden, he noticed liquid stream out of his friend’s aircraft. ‘Don, your glycol’s gone!’ he radioed urgently to the unsuspecting pilot. ‘You’re going to have to get down.’ Small-arms fire from the ground had scored well, and without coolant, the 12-cylinder Merlin had about two minutes before it seized. His friend made a wheels-up landing on a beach. ‘I flew down and watched him emerge from the cockpit, then run like hell!’ Assuming he was now a prisoner, Jock after a day or two packed up his downed friend’s possessions. ‘On the third day, he came in and shouted, “Where the hell’s my gear?!” ’ Jock gives a dark chuckle.
There are reports I have read of strafing pilots becoming strangely mesmerised by the sight of the ground rushing up towards them, and even in an aircraft as manoeuvrable as the Mustang, a second’s delay could be fatal. In dual-seat aircraft, the navigator would sometimes have to hit the pilot’s arm to remind him to pull up from the dive. Jock, all alone, needed all his wits about him.
Occasionally, he would adopt the very dangerous practice of duelling with a large gun as it was attempting to shoot him down. Like a deadly game of chicken, it was a question of who would blink first. Dive-bombing an 88-millimetre on one trip, it fired a couple of times and Jock watched it grow bigger in the windshield, his finger poised on the bomb release button on his control column. At the last instant, he watched the gun crew break and run for cover, then hit the switch. ‘It was amazing how accurate you could become by just aiming the aircraft at what you saw through the windshield,’ he says. Accurately placing a bomb at that speed was an art, and Jock had to be careful not to pull out too early, making it ‘skid’ over the target. It all sounds rather hair-raising, but in the short time Jock was operating, he dropped 16 000 pounds of bombs.
Anti-aircraft fire usually came up in a pattern of four, and the pilots would anxiously count the explosions around them. ‘If you saw one puff, you knew there were three more. If you saw three, you knew there was one more.’
In the final chaotic weeks of the war, the trapped German armies in Italy sought to escape north through the Alps into Austria. Here, the Allies believed – wrongly as it turned out – the Germans intended to regroup in the so-called National Redoubt, where they could hold out for years. This obsession with a Redoubt – for which the Germans had never seriously planned – is one of the more curious aspects of Allied policy during the war’s latter stages, and even led to the large diversion of forces which facilitated the Russian desire to take Berlin.
However, whilst they remained a threat – perceived or otherwise – it fell to Jock and others like him to stop them. Strafing runs would be conducted as low as fifty feet. The techniques were simple but effective. A mobile German column would be located and bridges either side would be knocked out, causing a massive traffic jam and turning two or three hundred vehicles into almost stationary targets. ‘That made it pretty easy,’ he says. First the Commanding Officer or flight commander would go in, and at intervals of just a few seconds – making sure the aircraft ahead of you was on the way up before you fired – half a dozen Mustangs with their six machine guns would wreak havoc.
Trains, motor vehicles, tanks – anything that moved was shot up. ‘You had to be very careful about hitting an ammunition truck. It could blow up in front of you,’ says Jock. It was grim work, and he doesn’t give too much away about what it must have looked like at low-level. He doesn’t have to. I’ve read enough reports on what he must have seen through the windshield as the deadly, decapitating storm ripped its way in lines through wood, steel and flesh. I press him a little on the detail, but he gently deflects my line of enquiry. I can’t really blame him.
We return to his logbook. I can see it’s been a while since he’s examined it closely. He’s on a journey of remembrance all his own. Long pauses develop where Jock is simply absorbed as the memories rush back. From his living room, the lunch guests emerge and say farewell. Doorbells ring and a yapping dog makes a ruckus. Jock barely notices.
There was obviously a tremendous pride in operating in an all-Australian fighter squadron in Europe. No. 3 distinguished itself by painting the stars of the Southern Cross on a blue background on the rudders of its aircraft, an emblem which still adorns its jet fighters today. With their uncamouflaged, all-metal finish, the Mustangs were quite a sight. Their aerodrome was in close proximity to the American 79th Fighter Group flying Thunderbolts. Occasionally, they would hear the Americans talking on their radio frequency, and it was often the cause of some amusement. ‘Hey, guys,’ they would hear an American pilot say to his formation. ‘I’ve only got twenty gallons left. I’m going home.’ At which the Australians, unable to resist some one-upmanship, would break in, ‘Yeah, well I’m showing empty and I’m staying!’
The Australians’ ways also differed from those of the RAF. ‘We had a pilots’ mess,’ says Jock, ‘irrespective of rank.’ The class-conscious English still adhered rigidly to the separation of officers and ‘other ranks’, despite them all performing the same job and often relying on each other for survival. ‘The RAF were disgusted,’ says Jock, with a distinct note of pride.
At war’s end, the squadron found itself still flying, but often in ‘showing the flag’ patrols over the Balkans, which were already wracked by another regular episode of fratricidal bloodletting. Soon after VE Day, Jock received an unusual request from his Commanding Officer. ‘There’s a job to go to Klagenfurt. We’d better toss for this one.’ Klagenfurt was the location of a Luftwaffe base over the Alps inside Austria, a place Jock had ‘visited’ several times in the recent past. But with the Cold War already in play, it was the Russians who were now regarded as dangerous, and the map on the ops room wall was marked with red-lined ‘no go’ areas over their positions. The flight path had to be flown between the just-defeated Germans and the suspicious, trigger-happy Russians. It was a toss Jock would have been quite happy not to have won.
It was only a courier drop to pass on some documents, but as he says, ‘It was eerie landing on a German airstrip a couple of days after the war.’ He flew in and taxied. Across the tarmac, he could see lines of Luftwaffe aircraft, still in their black cross and swastika livery. He stayed in his aircraft, alone except for the silent gaze of hundreds of uniformed Germans. ‘I was scared stiff that one of them was going to do something. They’d seen a Mustang before, but not this close up.’ He chuckles and gives me one of those steely, fighter pilot looks. ‘Well, that’s about all I can give you. Is it enough?’ The interview, I realise, is over, and Jock rises. Job done, it is time to go, and I thank him.
PAT KERRINS & NOBBY CLARKE
Pilot, RAAF & Air Gunner, RAF
One wet 25 April many years ago, I stood as a soggy fourteen-year-old at the bottom of the wide expanse of concrete that leads up to Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance on Anzac Avenue, right where the annual parade has to make an awkward dogleg only to bottleneck as it contemplates the final leg up to the hallowed ground itself. Back then, there were still a handful of World War I blokes on show, looking grateful, if a little bewildered, and long past their marching days, waving weakly from inside an old black Bentley that looked like it was earmarked for a wedding later that afternoon.
As I watched the parade, the sole spectator for yards around, the air force fellows paused in front of me just as the heavens really opened up in sheets of water that made one former officer’s original 1940s blue service uniform (it still fitted him) turn suddenly black. He was holding up his old squadron banner and having trouble keeping it aloft. As it began to topple, I instinctively stepped forward, took one of the poles and attempted
to right the soggy depiction of a Lancaster, just as the march took off again.
‘You might have to stay with me, son,’ the man muttered. So, swept up with the inexorable momentum of several thousand ageing veterans eager to get to their reunions, I did just that.
These days every man and his dog seems to march on Anzac Day (sons of servicemen, widows, grandsons and daughters, neighbours, possibly – who knows who they are), but back then it was a strictly ‘participants only’ affair. I felt so awkward walking alongside the former pilots, navigators and gunners of 467 Squadron – past the row of cypress pines and scattered groups of old ladies enthusiastically applauding in their plastic raincoats – that all I could do was look straight down at the ground, or up at the wavering pole. We reached the end of the march a few minutes later, and my friend was immediately buttonholed by an old colleague and caught up in the crowd. I snuck off without a word. It was the first and, in all likelihood, last time I would ever march on Anzac Day.
Exactly thirty years later, in a rather depressing illustration of how little my youthful dreams of a life spent living in different parts of the globe have been realised, I found myself just a short march from that very same spot, outside the Victoria Hotel in Little Collins Street. On this day every year, it is filled to the brim with the men and their families who once again have travelled from places far and wide to rekindle the indelible friendships forged in the terrible conflagration of their youth.
This was one interview I was particularly looking forward to. I had met men who had trained together, flown in the same squadron, and the same type of aircraft, but never two men of the very same crew. As I walked up the stairs that led from the lobby to the mezzanine to meet Nobby Clarke and Pat Kerrins, that was going to change.
‘You’re writing a story about us old blokes, are you?’ asked Pat. ‘Why didn’t you get onto us fifty years ago when we could remember something?’
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