Fly

by Michael Veitch

  ‘We all had a shot at that tank,’ Roy remembers, bringing the fragment of history to life. ‘It was painted yellow.’

  It was at Milne Bay that Roy, for the first time, properly encountered enemy fighters. Flying in their Zeroes from Lae and Rabaul, the Japanese desperately tried to gain control of the air and prevent the pitiless extermination of their people on the ground. For Roy, it was an exciting time, but a dark one.

  The simplicity and brutality of the war on the ground was in some ways mirrored in the air. Roy tells of ‘head-on’ encounters with Japanese aircraft, flying towards them at high speed, each daring the other to pull away in a grim game of ‘chicken’. On one of these occasions, he was number two to his close friend Stuart Munro. The two Queenslanders knew each other from home, Munro’s parents owning a cane property close to his own. ‘We’d both flown together in England, even both been hit over there,’ he says. Stuart had survived several such encounters, but this time, Roy saw him emerge, ‘trailing smoke, and he was shot down and killed’, he says.

  A little while later, Roy recognised the aircraft of the same Japanese pilot who had claimed his friend, and at 700 feet over the base, locked into another head-on charge. ‘Stuart was dead,’ says Roy. ‘He was my friend and I felt pretty strongly about it. We must have been closing at about 600 miles an hour. He was the more experienced pilot, so I just kept shooting.’ Perhaps the Japanese pilot sensed the resolve in the man he was approaching, perhaps it was the thought of the six guns in his wings.

  As the two aircraft closed, the Zero began to pull away. ‘Luckily, I didn’t,’ says Roy. ‘I lifted the nose a bit and blasted a great big hole in his starboard wing, and he went in.’

  I ask Roy whether there was a point that he himself was prepared to pull away. He ponders the question. ‘I don’t know,’ he says in a curiously abstract tone. ‘You get so engrossed in it, you see.’

  Later, people who had witnessed the overhead duel remarked to him in awe, ‘Jeez, we thought you were going to collide.’

  But the day was not over yet. His friend gone, and a bitter taste in his mouth, Roy looked around and hooked up with the squadron CO, Les Jackson, whose own number two was nowhere to be seen.

  At the end of the bay, a Japanese Zero was lying in clear, shallow water near the beach, a recent victim of the guns of an American B-26 Marauder. As they approached the scene, two companion Zeros were attempting to strafe the stricken aircraft of their leader and destroy it before it could be captured and evaluated.

  Les Jackson was only the squadron’s second Commanding Officer, having been handed the job when his legendary predecessor, a man whose qualities as a leader exemplified the spirit of No. 75’s small band of tenacious airmen, was killed over Port Moresby back in April. It was in his honour that No. 75’s aerodrome had been renamed Jackson Field. For Les, they were considerable shoes to fill, even more so as they belonged to those of his older brother, John. A more melancholy duty can hardly be imagined.

  But one thing the younger Jackson had learned was that their E model Kittyhawk, excellent gun platform though it was, was no match for the highly manoeuvrable Zero in a one-on-one fight. The one, indeed the only advantage that could be brought to bear was height, and, on this particular day, here they were poised above two unsuspecting Zeros.

  ‘Les and I were up at about 1500 feet,’ says Roy. ‘The Japanese were just above the water.’ The two pilots looked down, then swooped. ‘Les picked on one, I picked on the other.’ The Japanese, caught at the top of their climb, were hit from behind at 300 miles an hour. ‘They were so busy trying to demolish the plane below they didn’t see us. I hit him from about fifty yards, and he got the lot. They both went straight into the water. We were lucky.’ The nimble but badly protected Zeros crumpled under direct hits and crashed into the sea. ‘I’d been shot at myself over the last few days,’ says Roy. ‘I remember hitting the button and letting out a great yell of delight.’

  Two kills in one day. It had been an eventful one and the day he earned a name for himself in the squadron. Quite simply, ‘Shit Hot’.

  The air war became something of a strafing campaign. The Australians would attack the beaches and jungles; the Zeros would strafe their airstrips. If alerted early enough, the Kittyhawk pilots would attempt to climb above the Japanese before they appeared.

  ‘One day,’ says Roy, ‘we were trying to get above them but couldn’t do so.’ Over their own airfield, he found himself in the highly dangerous position of being right in amongst the Zeros. ‘There were about ten of us. I was flying another bloke’s aircraft that day, and I knew it always swung strongly to the left. Above me I saw one Zero turn around and so I did what any law-abiding hero would do in a Kitty – I dived.’ But before he could get anywhere they were on his tail. Immediately, Roy felt thumps all over his aircraft and watched a line of cannon shells and bullets rip along his tail and left wing, amazingly, straddling either side of the full ammunition boxes. ‘If those had been hit I wouldn’t be chatting to you now,’ he says. ‘We lost four aircraft and pilots straightaway.’

  In one of those moments in which time slows to a stop, and casts itself indelibly on the memory, Roy recalls the strange smell as the Japanese shells hit his aircraft. ‘I was going down flat out at about four or five hundred miles an hour,’ he continues, ‘and noticed I was skidding through the air sideways to the left.’ His tailplane had also been hit, and a hinge on the rudder jammed, refusing to move to the right. ‘I could only turn left. The Japanese pilot must have felt very frustrated,’ he says.

  Staggering down towards the airfield, Roy managed to line up, put it down and pull up, continuing his tradition of surviving rough landings. ‘When I eventually landed, Les Winter, the man who usually flew the aircraft, came out of the flight tent. “Christ, Riddel,” he said. “Look what you’ve done to my plane!” I thought he might have been pleased to see me.’

  ‘How on earth did you manage to fly it?’ I ask with a certain incredulity. With that same air of bewilderment, he tells me he isn’t quite sure, but as he walked around the aircraft, pale-faced, inspecting the chaos of holes of varying sizes in wings and fuselage, he no doubt asked himself the same question.

  Milne Bay was a short, sharp and extremely nasty campaign, which brought home to the Australians the true nature of their enemy, as well as the type of war they were fighting. After Milne Bay, it is said, no quarter was given or expected from either side. Having lost the gamble, the Japanese were made to suffer the new humiliation of evacuating their remaining troops one night by sea, shooting their own wounded rather than allowing them to be captured.

  Roy clocked up 800 hours on Kittyhawks, then came home to do a stint as a test pilot. Here, without an enemy in sight, he came closest to his demise when his brakes, badly adjusted, flipped his aircraft over on landing, breaking his neck and sending him to hospital for five months. He has suffered for it ever since. ‘You can put a cigarette into my right leg and I can hardly feel it,’ he says today.

  He flew again later in the war, in Moratai, but by this time it was hard to see the point of harassing the already-defeated Japanese.

  ‘I could see the uselessness of it all. The things we were bombing and strafing were of no value at all – pockmarked airstrips that you couldn’t have landed anything on anyway. They were just getting rid of the ordnance. Blokes were dying from useless trips.’

  Apart from being one of the few pilots I had met who had engaged enemies on both sides of the world, Roy was unique in another way. He was the only pilot who refused to show me his logbook. It was there, next to him on the table, for the whole of our discussion, but remained closed. ‘It’s a very personal thing, a logbook,’ was the only reference to it he made, glancing at its cover. I ponder this afterwards. Roy could remember the name of every pilot he knew who had been killed both in Europe and the Pacific. Perhaps he was happy for some of the memories to remain locked within its pages. A stranger poring over it, pulling at something here, rattl
ing off a name there, was perhaps more than he was prepared to endure.

  Outside, as I re-entered the world of the present, the sweet air mixed headily with the smells of the sea. Almost as an aside before I go, there on the lush manicured grass he tells me one last story.

  After the war, he sought out the names of the two Zero pilots he and Les shot down that day over Milne Bay. ‘They were good pilots,’ he says. ‘One had twelve kills, the other fourteen.’ He also discovered the identity of the downed man whose aeroplane they were attempting to destroy. It belonged to another ace, one Petty Officer Second Class Enji Kakimoto of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service – a farmer’s son, twenty-two years old and already with five kills to his credit, two in a single day over Guadalcanal. Having ditched his Zero and swum to shore, he had watched in dismay from the shelter of the trees as his two flight companions first strafed his stricken aircraft, then fell to Roy’s and Les’s guns. For three days Kakimoto was cared for by Papuan natives who led him to believe they would reunite him with his own, before handing him over to a lone Australian signaller, who marched him into an astonished RAAF camp nearby. The notes from his interrogation state little other than that he was able to neatly print his name in English: E. KAKIMOTO.

  One of the few Zero pilots to be taken prisoner, Kakimoto, in August 1943, threw a rope over a beam in his prison hut in Cowra and hanged himself on the night of the breakout.

  ‘I visited Cowra one time and found his brass plate,’ says Roy. ‘I put a bit of flowering gum on it,’ he says. ‘He was quite a warrior.’ From one warrior to another, it was some gesture.

  HARRY

  Air Gunner, RAAF

  ‘Who gave you this number?’ is the abrupt greeting I receive when I ring Harry for the first time. I am taken aback, but I suppose I should have been expecting it at some stage or other. Tracking down elderly people from just about every conceivable source, then ringing them out of the blue to pry into difficult events sixty years in their past, it was almost certain I was going to come up against one who wasn’t pleased as punch to hear from me.

  ‘Who gave you this number?’ he repeats with slightly more agitation. The truth is, I don’t actually know, and this just infuriates him further. It could have come from anyone. His was simply a name in a Spirex notepad I had jotted down sometime in the recent past. Organisation not being one of my more shining qualities, I had never quite managed to establish a central repository for the large number of names of former aircrew people had passed on to me at random. Friends, wives, acquaintances, old employees, neighbours and a variety of others with connections both strong and tenuous had telephoned, emailed and buttonholed me, thrusting scribbled names on the backs of business cards and torn diary pages, all of which formed part of an increasingly daunting pile in an out-tray on my desk. Occasionally I would manage to work my way to the bottom, but others would soon take their place. Once I pulled out a paper napkin, handed to me a few weeks previously by someone’s long-estranged daughter-in-law. Beside a name and number, ‘Air Force?’ had been written in smudged eyebrow pencil. When I rang, a cold female voice told me the man had died the year before. I made up a story about where I had found the number, apologised and rang off.

  It was what was written next to Harry’s name that made me perhaps a little more persistent than I would otherwise have been – ‘Nuremberg’. I looked at it for a while, intrigued. Most times I had at least managed to scribble the source on the back, but the identity of this contributor was a mystery. Certainly it was someone aware of the importance of the great medieval Bavarian city and its tragic twentieth century history, but who? I had no idea, and neither – much to his annoyance – does Harry.

  He is gruff and combative. ‘What do you want to know about all that stuff for?’ In my politest voice, I explain the nature of my enquiry but assure him that if he chooses not to participate, I will trouble him no further. At this, he makes a kind of a ‘humph’, which I hope might be a softening, so I fire a question to try and keep him a little off balance, and to let him know that I know my stuff. ‘So, you were in the Nuremberg raid?’

  This really gets him going. ‘How the hell do you know that?’ he barks again. I begin to sense I am going to get nowhere with the grumpy old coot and decide to cut my losses. Perhaps he hears the resignation in my voice. ‘Hang on, hang on. Yeah, I was on the Nuremberg raid. So what?’

  I had made it a rule never to conduct an interview over the phone and say so, but because he’s the only one I have met who was on the Nuremberg disaster, and recalling something about the bird in the bush, I ask him to tell me about it. There is a pause. Then, just as abruptly he says, ‘Alright, son, I’ll tell you over lunch. Naval and Military Club. Next Wednesday. One o’clock. Wear a tie and don’t be late,’ and hangs up.

  And so I find myself running down Little Collins Street six days later, a couple of books and my tape recorder thumping awkwardly around inside a bag, sweating under an unfamiliar collar and tie. A clock somewhere says 1:01. I see him about fifty metres off, looking anxiously at his watch and throwing glances up and down the street. He is a stocky man, wearing a reefer jacket and grey pressed trousers. Despite the heat of the November afternoon, not a drop adorns his brow. ‘You’re late,’ he tells me as I stand panting before him. Before an apology can be offered, he has turned on his heels and entered the building.

  Despite my lifelong obsession with things military, and being a former inmate of a school to which the Naval and Military Club is a virtual old boys’ association, I have never previously darkened its door. I am a little disappointed. I had expected something like a Mayfair Club: plenty of Chesterfields, wood panelling and an ageing retainer called Bernard who greets you by name at the front door. In truth, the retrofitted cafe where I had just been catching up with a friend and lost track of time fitted the bill far more than this airy, contemporary setting. A few framed portraits, a cabinet full of medals, a couple of old swords banged up on the wall, but apart from that, it could be one of dozens of modern-ish establishments within the same square kilometre. But I’m not here for the setting, or the food. I’m here to speak to Harry, and I suspect it isn’t going to be easy.

  As we sit at the table, we size each other up properly. His face is more youthful than I had expected, with pale sharp eyes that dart everywhere then fix you with a gaze. I put my small tape recorder on the table. ‘What’s that?’ he says suspiciously. I explain that I need to record him, but he will have none of it. ‘Turn it off. We’ll talk first.’ I pretend to fiddle around with it, pushing it to one side to hide the little plastic window where the tape goes around. ‘What’s that red light?’ he says, and I know I am foiled. With great reluctance, and a rising annoyance of my own, I switch it off and take out my notebook.

  As soon as the tape recorder is gone, he calls over a waitress and orders a bottle of red. Without looking at the menu, he asks for a steak – rare. I order the duck. He pours me a generous glass, but as I’m virtually incapable of drinking anything in the daytime, let alone red, without falling into a soporific heap, I sip daintily and watch Harry take to it with gusto. ‘Not bad eh?’ he says holding the glass. He is nuggetty, and highly alert. The perfect rear gunner.

  ‘So, what are you on about anyway?’ he asks. He remains suspicious at my claims of innocence as to the identity of his nominator, and runs through a list of suspects in his head, grumbling lowly to himself. ‘Well, anyway,’ he says at last, ‘we’re here now, I suppose.’ Then suddenly reversing his earlier reticence, he tells me he’s always been ‘a bit of a loner’.

  ‘Been married four times,’ he says. ‘You?’ I tell him that’s four more than I have. He then asks if I have children, and my answer quells a momentary look of alarm.

  ‘I’m from the bush,’ he tells me without revealing where. ‘I was always a good shot.’ He tells me that on his gunnery course, he was noted for his proficiency, as well as his enthusiasm. I can well believe it.

  Sent to an Operational Tr
aining Unit in England, he remembers one night flying low enough to smell the smoke from a chimney stack they had just over-flown. Then, there was a posting to an RAF squadron in Lincolnshire.

  Gradually, Harry starts to loosen up. Whatever suspicions he had seem to evaporate with the wine. The waitress, pretty and with an accent, arrives with the meals. Harry’s steak is so pink that I quip that the chef probably showed it the hotplate rather than placed it on it. He points to it with his fork. ‘Shush. He heard that.’ It’s the first funny thing he’s said, and I start to wonder whether all the gruffness has been a ruse. He looks at my duck curiously, not sure why anyone would want to eat such a thing.

  Within five days of arriving on base, Harry’s crew was posted on the battle order for their first trip, and a more dramatic debut cannot be imagined – 30 March 1944: Nuremberg. It was a distant target, and undertaken at a time when operations were usually suspended due to a bright moon. But an early meteorological report that day stated that a high layer of cloud would conceal the bomber stream and that the target would be clear.

  A terrible alignment of events brought disaster to the bombers that night. Because of the length of the trip, it was boldly decided to abandon the usual series of doglegs and fly an almost direct route to the target. This, it was hoped, would not only save fuel, but baffle the Germans with an unfamiliar tactic. The Luftwaffe night fighter controllers were not so easily duped. They correctly ignored the diversionary raids and assembled their 200-odd aircraft around two radio beacons code-named Ida and Otto, which in a terrible coincidence, lay directly across the bombers’ flight path. The German pilots couldn’t believe their luck. Instead of having to hunt for the 800 Lancasters and Halifaxes, they simply appeared around them, clogging their radar screens. The bomber crews fought a 750-mile running battle from the Belgian border to the target, with aircraft going down at the rate of one per minute. Pilots reported the ground below looking like a battlefield with the wrecks of flaming aircraft dotted all the way to Nuremberg.