Fly

by Michael Veitch

  At last, trained up and ready to enter the European air war, Barney received his posting – to South-East Asia. His anguished diary entry – ‘How stupid can they be?’ – captures his impotent railing at the vagaries of military logic.

  A few weeks later, he was once again aboard ship, heading back almost to where he had started his long journey. Instead of fighting the Germans in the cool climates of France and Britain where he had trained, Barney would face the Japanese in the sweltering heat of India and Burma.

  No. 136 Squadron was formed in England early in the war, but was quickly sent out to help protect the Empire’s far-flung Indian jewel from the Japanese attacking from Burma. At first they went to Rangoon, then had to hightail it back to Calcutta when the Japanese overran the Burmese capital in early 1942.

  By the time Barney caught up with them in November, No. 136 Squadron was operating from what was then, and remains today, Calcutta’s main airport, Dum Dum. ‘Heard of Dum Dum bullets?’ he asks me. ‘That’s where they come from.’ Barney, I am discovering, loves a digression, and our tangential conversation takes us on all sorts of fascinating if unrelated journeys: paintings, shooting buffalo from a moving jeep, and parking his Hurricane in the protective bays of the local HMV factory, from where he purchased a portable gramophone player and some seventy-eight records, one of which – ‘a lovely Glenn Miller 10-inch’ – he can’t wait to play me. But I’m a hard taskmaster, and with one eye on the clock, I corral him back to the task at hand.

  The Burma campaign was a bloody, murky affair, full of heroism and brutality, now all but forgotten. It has been dubbed the Longest War, Lost War or even Forgotten War, and began with a catastrophic thousand-mile rout – the longest retreat in the long history of the British Army – a disaster, however, later forged into stunning victory by a publicity-shy travelling salesman’s son who had once worked as a schoolteacher to pay his way through military college. Though barely remembered today, William Slim arguably ranks as the finest Allied general of the war.

  It was fought in sickening heat and blinding monsoons over an ocean of jungle criss-crossed with rivers, deep gorges and dustbowls – the kind of war to throw up bizarre figures, such as the bearded, religiously deranged General Orde Wingate, who led his ‘Chindit’ guerrillas behind the Japanese lines with the messianic zeal of a crusade.

  Disease and starvation took a higher toll of men than the fighting, which was always savage and usually at close quarters. At one outpost on the India–Burma border, Kohima, the fighting was so close that bodies from both sides lay in piles at either end of the District Commissioner’s neatly manicured tennis court.

  By year’s end, No. 136 Squadron had been moved closer to the fighting, to the port city of Chittagong, in present-day Bangladesh, launching their Hurricanes off rough strips flattened out between rice paddies. ‘The dust was so thick we couldn’t see,’ says Barney. ‘Formation take-offs had to be abandoned.’

  Almost as soon as he arrived, Barney encountered the Japanese air force, in the form of one of its finest aircraft, the nimble, amazingly manoeuvrable and aptly named Nakajimi-43 ‘Peregrine Falcon’ Hayabusa – but to the Allies simply ‘Oscar’.

  ‘We were scrambled against 18 Betty bombers attacking the docks,’ says Barney of his first engagement. In squadron strength, the Hurricanes took off and were ‘vectored’ by the ground controller away from the battle area to gain height. ‘Buster! Buster!’ was the coded call that rang in the pilots’ ears – get high, and fast. Then, hopefully with the sun behind them, they steered back towards the fray until, ‘Tally-ho!’, the Flight Commander sighted the enemy and took over.

  ‘I was flying number two to a Welshman,’ says Barney. ‘The first thing I was aware of were fighters coming in very fast behind me.’ Calling out that they were under attack, Barney took evasive action and put the Hurricane down into a spin. ‘They didn’t follow me, but when I recovered, I could see the Jap bombers heading south.’ Endeavouring to catch up with them, Barney was attacked again. ‘I was pushing the aircraft too hard and my radiator temperature had gone off the clock. This chap ran absolute rings around me,’ he says of the experienced Japanese pilot who performed virtual aerobatics around Barney’s comparatively heavy Hurricane. Tough and robust, it was nonetheless no match for the lightweight Oscar in a dogfight, and the pilots had agreed not to be so foolish as to try and take one on. ‘I woke up to the fact that I wasn’t winning,’ says Barney drolly. In such cases, the prescribed method of breaking off was the ‘everything in one corner’ technique – ‘stick, rudder, the lot.’ Over and down went Barney and the lightweight Oscar was unable to follow. ‘It was all pretty sproggish,’ he says of his first, rather scrappy engagement. ‘None of us had done any of this before.’

  Parked back in the blast-pen at Chittagong, Barney walked around his Hurricane and counted 75 bullet holes. It was quite a debut.

  From their base on the outskirts of the large port city, Barney flew at low level down the Arakan Peninsula to the battle area, and back again. A landmark close to home was a rusting Bren carrier that was slowly sinking into the sand – the site of an earlier VC-winning skirmish. Passing it one day as usual over a white ribbon of beach, Barney noticed his rear-view mirror was slightly askew. Reaching up to adjust it, he was confronted with the image of a prop spinner and a large radial engine immediately behind him – an Oscar had snuck up unnoticed. Barney put the aircraft down, almost to the water level, hitting his rudder bar left and right to give the pursuing pilot the impression he was yawing sideways rather than moving forward. The ruse worked. ‘I flew as I’d never flown before. We had recently lost two fellows in that area that we thought were safe back over our lines,’ he says. ‘And I was nearly another one. The only reason I even saw him was because I was adjusting the mirror.’

  One hot tropical summer morning in February 1943, Barney was flying top cover to a group of Blenheim bombers attacking Akyab Island, the Japanese main coastal base above Rangoon. The effectiveness of the Blenheim’s jungle camouflage was such that to see them, Barney had to fly uncomfortably close, at a low 8000 feet. ‘That’s terribly dangerous. You really wanted to be at eighteen,’ he says.

  In the long list of virtues ascribed to the Hawker Hurricane, its radio set is notably absent. Pilots had been cursing the notoriously unreliable monoband TR9D ever since the Battle of Britain, when it was said to be good for little more than picking up dance music on the BBC. Barney’s set was always intermittent, but this day it wasn’t working at all. Had it been, he would have heard his fellow pilots call out the warnings of the Japanese ‘bandits’ they had just sighted closing from above.

  As it was, the first thing he knew about them was a ‘stench of explosives’ and the inside of his cockpit disintegrating around him. ‘My panel smashed and disappeared,’ he says, ‘the cockpit became filled with smoke, a gaping hole appeared in the emergency panel on my right, and the aircraft went into a violent spin.’ In a daze, the thought occurred to him, ‘This is the end of Barnett and his war.’

  But it was also a moment of clarity, and his brain calmly reminded him of the pilot’s maxim never to exit an aircraft on the outside of a spin. He unstrapped, and pushed himself out of the Hurricane.

  ‘People have often asked me what it’s like to bale out,’ he says. ‘I tell them it’s like the drowning man and the straw. You’re just so happy to have something to grab on to.’ But his happiness faded somewhat as he floated down in the thick tropical sky, contemplating his Hurricane, now a burning wreck a few hundred yards offshore, and hearing the fading sounds of engines as his fellow pilots headed away to the north. ‘People talk about being lonely, well, at that moment, I was lonely,’ he says.

  Barney came down in the mouth of the Mayu River, in sticky, swampy mangrove country. One of General Wingate’s men, a Major Bernard Ferguson, describes the area as, ‘nobody’s country. Perhaps the Almighty never made up his mind whether his creatures should regard it as land or sea … the whole pla
ce buzzes with mosquitoes, crawls with crocodiles and stinks.’ It was also in the hands of the Japanese.

  ‘I’m not a dedicated Christian, but I do believe there is some supreme entity in charge of us,’ Barney tells me earnestly. As the swampy water rushed up to meet him, he thought about how visible his parachute must be, as well as the very real prospect of being machine-gunned right there in his harness, and the unspeakable stories of brutality he had heard about Japanese treatment of prisoners. ‘My chances were remote,’ he says, always a master of the understatement.

  He hit the water and nearly wrenched in half the little CO2 bottle that inflated his Mae West life jacket and dinghy before remembering the pin that held it in place. Instantly it appeared around him, bright and conspicuous yellow. The shore a few hundred yards to his right, he knew, was occupied. What was less certain was what side the locals were on. Barney’s own CO, Squadron Leader Ridler, had recently come down in these waters and been assisted back to safety by the inhabitants of the tiny Oyster Island. When the story got out, the Japanese beheaded all seventeen of them as punishment. Barney knew he could expect few favours, but he did have something of a plan.

  If by some miracle he was not captured immediately and tortured to death, and if he could somehow evade capture long enough to make his way slowly upstream and cross the mile-wide river, there was a chance he could make contact with British or Indian forces he knew to be currently fighting their way down the Mayu Peninsula. Nor did Barney find the idea of the mangroves too intimidating. He was, after all, a Queenslander, and knew how much cover they could afford. He did, however, wish he’d put on his sturdy flying boots that morning. The thin, crepe-soled shoes he was wearing were useless, sucked off by the mud in two steps, and he was forced to face the agony of millions of tough mangrove shoots in bare feet.

  He managed to hail down some ‘diffident’ natives in a canoe and, scuttling his dinghy, made it to shore. The natives soon left him and, climbing a tree to get his bearings, he consulted his almost useless 1:1 000 000 scale map and waited till nightfall. His route, he decided, would be north through the mangroves.

  Barney has previously written his own fine account of his ordeal. ‘I was reduced to moving in the mass of tidal waterways crisscrossing the mangrove-covered mud flats,’ he recorded. The black tropical night moved in quickly, black and incredibly still, his steps stirring up an eerie phosphorescence in the water that glowed as he moved through it, startling large fish which he could follow as they darted away. Above him, he gleaned some companionship from Orion’s three-star belt, the same one he’d gazed on so many times as a kid at his farm in Queensland. It now seemed a world away. At one stage, as he rested under some mangroves, he was startled by a man’s cough close by in the darkness, and the sounds of oars moving in rollicks. ‘About as far away as you’re sitting from me right now,’ he says, a boat glided past in the still water. It didn’t sound like a native craft, he says. ‘I’m quite sure they were Japanese.’ With only the light of the stars, they swished past him into the blackness.

  He continued on into the next day, facing a strong current with waves sloshing over his head, was pushed back by the tide beyond where he’d started, and had to begin again.

  I ask him if there was a moment he considered giving up. He shakes his head curiously, as if he’s asked himself the same question countless times, but is still amazed by the answer. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I had this surge of confidence that I would survive. I prayed to cope. Not to get back to our lines – that seemed impossible – but just to cope.’

  Another night came on, and again he came close to being discovered by natives hauling boatloads of supplies for the Japanese in the dark. He slept for a while in his buoyant, neck-supporting Mae West, and pushed on through the maze of creeks and mangroves in chest-high water, one clump to another. He was becoming exhausted, hungry and incredibly thirsty, and knew his energy was draining away.

  At a point where the river seemed a little narrower, he made a dash for the far bank. The sun came up behind him, and he clambered ashore. Staggering on, he found not the paddy fields he had expected, but, in front of him, another expanse of water. The ‘bank’ had merely been a small unmarked island with another massive stretch of river beyond it. After recovering what strength he could, Barney pressed on.

  This time he was spotted by some copper-skinned natives, foraging in what was left of rice paddies near the shore. ‘They came out and carried me from the water,’ he says. Risking cholera, he drank deeply from one of their water vessels and indicated he was ‘British’. To his amazement, their sign language signalled that they regarded themselves likewise, and that there were more of them inland. Through the haze of exhaustion, Barney vaguely remembers being bathed, stripped and wrapped in a sarong before being carried by the entire tribe of forty across the Laungchuung River to the other side of the peninsula and into the arms of a forward unit of the 14th Indian Infantry Division. Grateful beyond words, he began distributing some damp 10-rupee notes to his saviours from the wallet he’d somehow managed to keep with him, and was too far gone to remonstrate with the suspicious Punjabi guard who began snatching them back and shooing the natives away.

  ‘He didn’t like the look of me either,’ says Barney. Resembling God knows what in his sarong, he was blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back, put into a small boat and taken across another river, where, at the end of his incredible odyssey, he distinctly remembers the sound of a very English voice saying, ‘That will be alright now, Subadar.’ He was, as he says, ‘back amongst my own’.

  I have no idea how many times Barney has told the incredible story of his survival, but I suspect the wonderment at just how he managed it has barely faded over the years, and has perhaps even grown a little. There was certainly no hint of tedium or weariness in the telling of this momentous event in his life.

  ‘It’s beyond my understanding,’ he tells me bravely. ‘I’m not a brave fellow, or even a particularly adventurous one, but I believe I experienced my own personal miracle.’ Barney later discovered that he met his saviours, a Punjabi regiment, at the southernmost extremity of their advance, and in a Japanese counterattack that crept over some seemingly impassable rivers, they were all but wiped out barely a week later.

  Hospitalised for a few days, then a 20-mile walk and a trip by steamer later, Barney found his way back to the squadron at Chittagong and began retrieving his possessions, which had already been distributed among his colleagues. Quite naturally, they had assumed he would no longer be needing them.

  As he found out, he was just one of four casualties the afternoon he was shot down. It had not been a good day for the squadron. When he returned, he found morale at rock bottom.

  In June, No. 136 Squadron was rested, and late in the year returned with Spitfire Vs. Barney flew again, was given a commission, and exacted a little revenge.

  Scrambled one day, he flew number two to his squadron commander, ‘a man unbelievable at playing jive on the piano, but not the most courageous of fighter pilots,’ he says. It was not customary to break off from your number one, but Barney’s CO quite clearly wanted nothing to do with the large formation of Japanese aircraft whirling around the target area, and hung back. Barney felt no such inhibitions. He went in and caught an Oscar from behind. ‘From a smoke point of view, I got a good strike,’ he says.

  The CO played his part, though, and for the record confirmed Barney’s kill. Still, he knows it was a lucky one. Even the Spitfire was outclassed by the manoeuvrability of the Japanese fighters. ‘The traditional First World War dogfighting didn’t enter our war at all,’ he says. ‘All we could do was just dive and shoot and climb – never stop. They could turn inside a Spitfire, easily.’

  I glance up at the object suspended from a bookcase that has intrigued me since I sat down. It is the spade-shaped ring grip from the steering column of a Spitfire. I have seen one countless times in books but never handled the real thing. Barney indicates for me to reach up
and grab it. It feels solid and heavy in my hands, still with the safety switch and brass gun button attached. I press it and it gives a solid, slightly exhilarating ‘click’.

  Barney seems to be cut from a different cloth to most of the former fighter pilots I have met and is far more thoughtful and reflective. Even in his late eighties, he’s in terrific shape. Still tall, he uses neither stick, glasses nor hearing aid and is resolutely cheery.

  He watches me playing with the relic with amusement. I ask him to show me how he held it when throwing his aircraft around the sultry skies of India and Burma, but he politely declines.

  Perhaps, though, it sparks something in him, because in his final words to me, I see a glimpse of the young pilot, the kid from the sticks who had overcome a difficult start in life to become a fighter pilot and, then, flying the world’s most magnificent aeroplanes, unable to believe his luck.

  ‘There are two lovely things I remember in my war,’ he tells me as we part. ‘One of them was taking off. Especially in the Spitfire. The feeling of being pressed in the back and the world rushing by, gaining speed and imperceptibly lifting off the ground. Then playing among the big isolated clouds 25 000 feet up. It’s a feeling out of this world,’ he says.

  I’m sure I’m getting just a fraction of this feeling gripping the control of his old Spitfire, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end, but for me, it’s enough.