Fly

by Michael Veitch

  IAN ROBINSON

  Air Gunner, RAAF

  I soon cottoned on to the fact that Ian Robinson is a funny bloke. Not in the joke-telling, thigh-slapping sense, but with that particular Australian dryness that has all but disappeared. I think I would have enjoyed hearing Ian talk about almost anything, but I was lucky enough to be treated to his amazing account of being a mid-upper gunner on heavy bombers in Europe during one of Bomber Command’s grimmest periods.

  This was very much an interview of two halves. I knew little more than the basics when I approached Ian, and the first part of our talk was laced with entertaining stories of bureaucratic foibles, bad luck and a healthy Australian disrespect for authority. But when I sat down with him in his living room, reading the titles of the books about organic gardening that lined the shelf, I had no inkling of the jaw-dropping tale of survival that he would deliver in the same matter-of-fact tone. That made it all the more poignant.

  Ian, from Kew in Melbourne, wanted to be a pilot, wouldn’t have minded being a navigator, was willing to consider a career as an air gunner, but there was absolutely no way he was going to be a wireless operator. Yet, that’s the job the air force in their wisdom had in store for him. They were in for a fight.

  In actual fact, Ian reckons he would have made a pretty good wireless op. His morse code was up to twenty-one words a minute, and he had a reasonable handle on the theory too. It’s just that working a radio didn’t happen to fit in with his plans. In 1942, with the Japanese in the war, wireless operators were in short supply everywhere, and were being sent to sit behind desks at ground stations all over Australia. Patriotic young nineteen-year-old though he was, Ian wanted to fly.

  At Wireless Air Gunners School in Ballarat, the battle lines were drawn. ‘There was another bloke there, Sonny Thomas. He was old – twenty-eight,’ remembers Ian. Although too old to be a pilot, Sonny was as determined as Ian not to spend the war on the ground. Over a couple of beers, they concocted a plan.

  After four months, they were both required to sit a three-hour radio theory exam. They both failed. ‘We were brought before the Chief Ground Instructor. He gave us a burst on “England in her hour of need” and “bludgers like you” etc.’ They were ordered to re-sit, and told in no uncertain terms that they were expected to pass. They nodded deferentially and left the room. ‘I bet I can get less marks than you,’ said Sonny to Ian a little later. ‘You’re on,’ he replied, and waged ten bob on the result.

  An hour into the exam, Ian got up and left. ‘I handed in two sheets of foolscap with a bit of writing,’ he says. Sonny stayed for the whole three hours and submitted no fewer than fifteen sheets, double-sided with writing and diagrams. ‘I got 8 per cent, he got 4.’ Sonny was ten shillings richer.

  The two miscreants were again hauled before the furious instructor. ‘You deliberately failed!’ he thundered. ‘What have you got to say for yourselves?’

  ‘You’re getting the message, aren’t you, sir?’ was Ian’s laconic reply.

  Their recalcitrance, it seems, eventually paid off. Both of them got their wish and were sent to the air gunnery school at Sale, although their victory was not as sweet as they had hoped. ‘The whole thing was a complete disgrace,’ says Ian. As he fired coloured rounds at a drogue from a Battle bomber, the instructors would assess the accuracy of Ian’s shooting and mark it in his logbook. Some entries are indeed alarming: ‘200 rounds fired. Accuracy: nil.’ ‘Actually, nil wasn’t bad,’ he says. His logbook attests his unpreparedness for battle. After just three hours and ten minutes in the air, feeling he knew very little indeed, he was marked, ‘qualified’.

  Ian’s relationship with the air force on the whole seems to have been a fractious one. Bad luck played its part, too. ‘I’m a lucky sort of a bastard. If anything’s going to happen, it will happen to me,’ he says.

  He’d lost both his paybook and his hat on the voyage over to Europe, and coming down the ramp of the liner Queen Elizabeth when disembarking in Scotland, the sling on his kitbag broke sending all his worldly belongings to the bottom of the Atlantic.

  His ‘complete bloody idiot’ of a CO was less than cooperative. ‘I asked him for a chit to be re-kitted out. He told me to get out of his sight. Useless bastard!’ he mutters, still with a touch of vitriol. At least at his Operational Training Unit, he found sympathy with a more experienced officer. Inspecting Ian’s logbook, he too was aghast at his lack of training. ‘This is bloody disgraceful!’ he remarked. Ian concurred. ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ the officer asked sympathetically. ‘Well, I’d like a hat,’ he replied.

  Ian’s not the sort of bloke you want to get on the wrong side of.

  The task of getting into the mid-upper turret of a four-engine bomber was a tricky one and, still in good health, Ian stands to give me a remarkable re-enactment of the procedure. Inside the aircraft, the gunner had to stand on the roof of the bomb bay underneath him, then put his left foot into the bottom of a small retractable step-ladder. A lunge was then required to grab the base of the turret and pull yourself into it from below. It was not an easy operation. His seat was a small padded board which clipped underneath his backside – after an eight-hour flight, it was extremely uncomfortable.

  As likewise for the rear gunner, there was no room for a parachute inside the turret, and the mid-upper’s was stowed on a rack on the fuselage. One night over Berlin, a seemingly innocuous decision would save his life.

  Ian became the sole Australian in a Lancaster with No. 207 Squadron RAF based at Spilsby in Lincolnshire. His crew sound like a perfect cross-section of the English class system. Gordon Milton-Barrett, his skipper (‘a superb pilot and a wonderful bloke’), was quite posh and somehow related to the Barretts of Wimpole Street. Once in training, Ian witnessed him standing up to a Wing Commander over a Wellington he thought unsafe to fly. ‘Well, if you think it’s so safe, sir, take the bloody thing up yourself,’ he said. Looking on, Ian thought to himself, ‘This bloke’ll do me.’

  He clashed initially with his bomb aimer who was ‘a bit up himself’ and to whom Ian was just a ‘bloody colonial’. His rear gunner, whose heart never seemed to be in the job, came from a family who worked the estate of some aristocrat or other and who, as Ian puts it, was something of ‘a shingle short’. Then there was the dour wireless operator from London who wore oversize footwear and who everyone referred to simply as ‘boots’. It sounds like the cast of a typical British sit-com.

  Ian’s tour began right at the start of Bomber Command’s bloodiest campaign, the so-called Battle of Berlin. Over the winter of 1943–44, bomber chief Arthur Harris was given a free hand to attack the ‘big city’ as he saw fit, famously declaring, ‘It will cost us between four and five hundred aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’ He was wrong on both counts. After losing 1000 aircraft and having 7000 airmen killed, he failed to deliver the promised knockout against Germany. It was a grim time. ‘Your chances of getting back to Australia were not high,’ says Ian. ‘About one in fifty.’

  And it was cold. Ian runs through what he had to wear to keep warm in his turret high in the dark winter sky: knee-length woollen underwear and woollen long johns worn under the standard battledress trousers, singlet, shirt, heavy woollen jumper, battledress, and covering this an electrically heated suit. Over all this was another canvas suit packed with buoyant kapok as there was no room for the standard Mae West life jacket. On his hands he wore four types of gloves: silk, chamois, electrically heated wool and leather. And still it didn’t keep out the cold. Ian remembers experiencing an incredible minus 47 degrees, the sort of temperatures experienced by Antarctic explorers. At this point you can barely blink your eyes.

  ‘How did you pee?’ I ask. He laughs grimly and explains that once he had to urinate in his suit, which promptly short-circuited the whole thing. Just one glove on one hand remained warm. ‘When we got back I couldn’t move. Three blokes had to pull me out of the turret. They just put me down on the runway to thaw out. I ha
d a few aches and pains after that, I can tell you.’

  The mid-upper gunner’s field of view required that he constantly patrol the sky rearwards from the trailing edge of the aircraft, wingtip to wingtip, looking down as far as he could see. He also needed to keep an eye on the front quarters as well. In my travels, I have spoken to a number of gunners, many of whom had experienced close encounters with flak but only the odd sighting of an enemy fighter. Ian came as close to them as you could get.

  He saw fighters on his very first op, a trip across the Alps to Genoa where the Italians came up to have a look but (as was their wont) chose to leave it at that. Further encounters would not be so benign.

  Most of Ian’s flying was done at night where visibility was sometimes limited to a few dozen yards. ‘At night, you wouldn’t actually see a fighter until it was about halfway across the road from here,’ he says, looking out into his quiet street. ‘So you developed a sixth sense. You’d get a feeling about one spot, a feeling that something was out there, then look back, and sure enough, that’s where something would be.’

  On the way to Berlin one night, Ian watched one Lancaster flying past the other way with all four engines on fire. Three Junkers 88s were lined up behind him. ‘I could see them firing into the rear of the fuselage and watched the cannon shells coming out the front,’ he says.

  One night a German followed him for forty minutes, sometimes so close that Ian could clearly see the pilot. ‘The tracer of his cannon went whizzing just past my turret. One shell burst the hydraulics,’ he says. ‘I don’t ever want to see fireworks again.’

  Sometimes Ian would get hits on the attacking fighters but would try to aim for the vulnerable canopy. ‘I’d see the bullets just bounce off,’ he says. And fighters weren’t his only worry.

  Over the target on one particularly dark night, Ian’s sixth sense made him look upwards, and into the gaping bomb bay of another Lancaster directly above, about to drop its bombs. ‘Turn port!’ he yelled down the intercom to the skipper. Nothing happened. Despite wiring made to endure constant extremes of temperature, intercom failure was common. He hit the failsafe – a button that illuminated a ‘turn port/starboard’ light on the pilot’s dashboard. The aircraft skewed left, just as two incendiaries crashed into the starboard wing from above. Ian had seen the power of these firebombs demonstrated on the ground, burning through three-inch armour plate in seconds. ‘They were just like a bloody great oxy torch,’ he says. He waited for the phosphorous ignition, which would cut through the wing like butter, but incredibly, their fusing pins were held in by the very wing into which they had been embedded, and the bombs remained safe. Back on the ground, they were found to be wedged right between the petrol tanks. It would have been an inferno, but Ian was lucky. Luck, though, has a habit of running out.

  Trip number sixteen – one of several he made to Berlin, Christmas Eve, 1943. Ian didn’t have a good feeling about it from the start. They were in a replacement aircraft which they’d not had time to test properly. Take-off, set for 8 p.m., was delayed continually due to bad weather. By the time they were in the queue, it was nearly midnight. ‘The crew,’ says Ian, ‘were in a state of acute nervous tension.’ In the dark, the pilot, Milton-Barrett, misjudged a turn and put one of the Lancaster’s wheels into the soft turf, bogging the aircraft and requiring it to be pulled out by a tanker, putting them further behind. ‘I remember a distinct feeling of not wanting to go,’ he says.

  The ill omens continued. Breaking through cloud into the moonlight at around two thousand feet, Ian watched another Lancaster emerge close by on the port side. ‘He was just hovering above the cloud when another aircraft came up through it directly underneath and hit him dead centre,’ he says. The two aircraft, two full bomb loads and fourteen airmen were instantly obliterated in a huge mushroom cloud. ‘It looked like an atom bomb.’

  And then Berlin. ‘We were never sure if they were Junkers 88s or Messerschmitt 410s,’ says Ian. Whatever they were, there were three of them and they came at him line astern, just before they reached the target city. ‘I could tell they were old hands. Two got either side of us, and the other right behind,’ says Ian. ‘Corkscrew starboard, go!’ he said to the pilot. The Lancaster turned violently, evaded them, then straightened up and bombed. ‘Just as we were beginning to think, “We’ve bloody well made it again”, we got hit.’ As Ian was facing forward, a burst of cannon shell ripped into his turret, exploding next to him, blowing the left-hand gun clean out of the aircraft and taking away half the perspex canopy as well. A piece of flak hit his arm. He shows me a scarred middle finger, the result of a phosphorous burn from the explosive round. ‘This took four months to heal,’ he says.

  Shells then struck the starboard wing, taking off several feet of the tip and peeling back the metal skin like a sardine tin. The petrol tank then ignited, throwing out a river of burning fuel which trailed past the tail. Then a confusion of voices and sensations. ‘Feather starboard inner!’ Ian heard the skipper yell. ‘It’s not the motor, it’s the bloody tank!’ responded the engineer. ‘The wing’s going!’ someone shouted. ‘Righto. Abracadabra – jump, jump!’ The code to abandon the aircraft. Ian sits telling me this like it happened yesterday.

  Climbing down to the fuselage floor from his turret, he instinctively went to the rack to retrieve his parachute. It was gone. There was no chute, no rack, just a ‘bloody great hole’ where the fuselage had been – torn open by the German cannon burst. It was here that a simple, inexplicable act took on extraordinary dimensions. Before take-off, for this night, and this night only, Ian had for some reason chosen not to stow his parachute on the rack as normal, but to hang it on the lower rung of the small retractable stepladder under the turret, and here it still swung. He still doesn’t know what made him do it.

  Without time to ponder his good fortune, Ian was standing with the rear gunner, attaching his parachute, when they were attacked again by the night fighters. The forward fuselage was aflame. Shells tore through the tubes protecting the aircraft control cables, and like a lame bird, the big aircraft began to flop around uselessly in the sky. It lurched upwards, stalled, then dived, repeating the action and throwing everything inside about. ‘We stalled and dived, stalled and dived,’ says Ian.

  The rear gunner was thrown into the fire. ‘I never saw him again.’ As the aircraft lurched downwards again, Ian climbed up the fuselage and hung onto the toilet with his legs swinging in the air. He somehow managed to reach the back door but it was jammed up with ice. He reached for the axe in the rack above the door, but it was missing, legacy of them not having had time to check their replacement aircraft. ‘You’ve had it now, Robbie,’ he thought to himself.

  Then, the aircraft exploded.

  He doesn’t know how long he was out, but coming to, he realised he was no longer in the air, but lying on the ground. ‘I could see the lines from my parachute stretched out, all burned up. My suit was smouldering,’ he says. It was 4.30 in the morning. For a moment, the thought struck him that he had come down in England. His knee hurt and his boots were missing. Looking around, he saw he was on the edge of a pine forest. He went into it, hid what he could of his pack then fell unconscious again, ‘I think for about two hours,’ he says. At first light, he could hear voices, and the note of an unfamiliar aircraft engine passing low overhead. Then he became aware of the pain, and could raise himself only with the help of a stick. ‘The voices were speaking German, and the aircraft was a Junkers 88 coming in to land at an aerodrome on the edge of the forest.’

  I pause here, just to take in what he has just told me. I ask him to explain what he thinks happened, and he tells me in a quiet tone, as if in the third person. ‘The aircraft blew up and I got blown out. Somehow my chute opened and I came down. You know as much about it as I do,’ he says, with a sense of bewilderment that has endured sixty years.

  At first light, and in bare feet, Ian followed a track around the perimeter of the aerodrome to the edge of a village. As he tried t
o read a sign, a policeman passed by on a bicycle and stopped. ‘He didn’t think it right that people should be wandering around in bare feet, so he picked me up.’

  This moment marked the start of Ian’s sixteen months in captivity. At this point he asks me a question, which I sense he has been wanting to ask me since we sat down. ‘Your name,’ he says cautiously. ‘Is it German?’ There’s a slight coldness in the way he asks it, and when I tell him it derives from Scotland with origins in France, he seems relieved.

  ‘I have certain … misgivings about Germans. I’ve overcome it to a certain degree, but I used to be quite neurotic about it,’ he says, and proceeds to explain why.

  The German policeman took him to a cafe in the village where a local crowd gathered, some clutching old shotguns. ‘They all had coffee. I didn’t get any.’ A phone call was made, ending with a ‘Heil Hitler!’ Ian began to think that he was very much in the wrong place. A pistol was placed on a table next to him by someone hoping he would make a run for it, providing the excuse for the locals to use their shotguns. ‘I declined the invitation,’ he says.

  Robbed of their satisfaction, they took Ian to a downstairs room at the local police station and made him sit on a small kitchen chair. Here, for what he remembers as a long period, ‘a huge bastard belted the piss out of me’. He was a big man in a soldier’s uniform and he bashed Ian continually until he passed out, breaking two of his teeth. Then he waited for him to revive, and bashed him again. And on it went.

  Next morning, Boxing Day 1943, Ian was taken away by some Luftwaffe men in a small VW to Templehof aerodrome through the battered streets of Berlin. Ian remembers the road cleared through the mountains of rubble, just wide enough for a car. ‘Seeing that pleased me at the time,’ he says.

  He was given a ‘quite passable’ stew with potatoes that he was in too much pain to eat and, to his amazement, reunited with his wireless operator, bomb aimer and flight engineer. With the exception of the rear gunner, all had managed safely to bale out of the aircraft before it exploded. Gordon, the pilot, was still on the run, but would not be for long. The emotion in the reunion must have been overwhelming. ‘I just hung around their shoulders and they carried me everywhere,’ he says.