The meteorologists had got it dreadfully wrong. The protective cloud cover did not eventuate, and the light of the half-moon was so bright, one pilot reported being able to clearly read the squadron identification letters on the Lancaster beside him. Clear white condensation trails caught the moonlight and acted as fingers pointing the way for the German pilots. An astonishing ninety-six bombers were shot down in the massacre and another ten crashed in England. A massive 745 aircrew were killed or wounded and nearly 160 taken prisoner. It was, and has been known since as, the blackest night in the history of the Royal Air Force.
Harry, sitting in his perspex capsule at the rear of his Lancaster, saw it all.
‘They got onto us as soon as we crossed over into France,’ he says. ‘You could see for miles. It was like daylight. You saw them when they opened fire with their tracers. I saw aircraft going down all over the place,’ he says. Nothing was spoken about it on the intercom to the rest of the crew. They watched the unfolding carnage around them in stunned silence.
Harry was not himself attacked that night, but what he saw shocked him to the core, and forged his attitude to the remainder of his tour. Not for him to simply sit and wait for catastrophe to come knocking. He instead made a few personal modifications to even up the odds. He had the armourer remove the tracer bullets from his ammunition so as not to give away his position, and in a trade of range for firepower, his four Browning machine guns were realigned to converge at just 300 yards. ‘That’s about as far as you could see in the dark anyway,’ he says. With the guns firing a combined eighty rounds a second, it was, he hoped, a deadly punch for anything that got in their way. He also liked to keep moving. ‘I spoke to some German pilots after the war,’ he tells me. ‘They told me if the turret wasn’t moving and active, they reckoned they were either asleep or not very interested so they’d attack them.’
But those guns still had to work. One of his most vivid memories (all Harry’s memories, I realise, are vivid) was of a Junkers 88 looming suddenly out of the dark immediately behind him. ‘About twice the distance from that wall behind us,’ he says, turning around and pointing. Just as the German looked about to fire, Harry yelled ‘Go’ to his pilot, who put the aircraft into a dive. ‘I fired my guns for about ten seconds. That’s a terrific time to have all of them firing.’ But then three of them jammed, and the other fired only erratically. The German pilot stuck his tail into the dive but backed off a little, no doubt intimidated by Harry’s initial aggression, and eventually broke away. He tells me he still sees the metal and perspex lattice nose of the Junkers pursuing him in the darkness. ‘We didn’t have to use the guns again that night, thank God,’ he says, then pauses. ‘Oh well, I’m still alive. Are you learning anything?’ I assure him I most certainly am.
He goes silent for quite a while, and I can tell that the memories are bubbling up inside.
‘I did one trip where my oxygen came undone. I don’t know how, Flak or something. I did the whole trip without oxygen at 20000 feet.’ From someone else, it would be almost hard to believe. ‘And searchlights. When you’re coned, you don’t know if you’re upside down; you don’t know which way you are,’ he says.
With all the men I speak to, I at least try to extract from them something of the atmosphere in which they fought and flew. I want to hear about the informalities, the asides, the distractions and the small forgotten scraps of conversation that brings it all to life. But he assures me an operational bomber was no place for chit-chat. ‘You don’t turn on your intercom unless you have something to say,’ he tells me in the vivid present tense. Occasionally members of the crew would forget to switch theirs off with the switch located on the oxygen mask. ‘You could hear them breathing,’ says Harry. ‘If anyone leaves one on, you say, “Turn that bloody mike off!” I can remember that.’ This for some reason sticks in my imagination for some time.
Unlike some bomber crews I had spoken to who flew near the war’s end, Harry served when the prospect of surviving the obligatory thirty trips was at its nadir. ‘Three weeks on, one week off. You lived from day to day. Every penny you had, you spent because you weren’t there tomorrow. That’s the way we lived,’ he tells me.
By this time, he has relaxed sufficiently to begin flirting with the waitress who’s young enough to be my daughter, let alone his. She’s tallish with short dark hair. ‘Where do you reckon she’s from?’ he asks. I guess France but he disagrees. ‘I don’t act like I’m in my eighties, do I?’ I just have to laugh at this one.
Harry no longer has his logbook, so some of the details he gives me are imprecise. He reckons it must have around his twentieth trip when he received a minor leg wound from a piece of flak. Hospitalised for a short time for a minor reason, he was given a brief spell on the ground while his crew carried on their tour with a substitute gunner. One day he was summoned by the CO. ‘What have I done wrong now?’ he thought to himself as he walked into the big office. But as he stood before him, the officer’s mood was conciliatory. ‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m alright. Well, I will be when I get back to the boys,’ said Harry. The CO looked at him and said directly, ‘They didn’t come back last night.’ Harry says he simply turned his head in the other direction. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it. You were so close to your crew. You did everything together.’ He becomes silent again at this point and finishes his meal.
Their fate was never discovered. ‘They were mine-laying in the Kattegatt and just disappeared,’ he says.
The air force didn’t like to give you too much time to reflect. Two days later, he was tagged up with a new crew and flying again. They were Canadians, and, still green, looked to Harry as an old hand. ‘They were always asking my advice. “What do you think of this, what do you think of that?” ’
At this point he takes some papers out of a bag beside his chair. He slides across the slightly yellowing photocopied pages of some documents. I begin to read. It is a citation for the awarding of the Distinguished Flying Medal, something about scoring hits on an enemy aircraft. I look at Harry and detect just the slightest of smirks. This was one he’d been keeping from me. He ignores me as I read and returns to the waitress who, inured by countless afternoons of being chatted up by old men, is surprisingly charming. ‘Now where are you from?’ he asks. ‘France,’ she replies. ‘Hmm,’ he says to me a little miffed, ‘you were right.’
Highly respected but rarely awarded, the Distinguished Flying Medal was the ‘other ranks’ equivalent of the Distinguished Flying Cross. But whereas nearly 20 000 RAF and Commonwealth air force officers were awarded the DFC for acts of bravery in the face of the enemy during World War II, the sergeant-only recipients of the DFM numbered fewer than 7000. Ordinary airmen, it seems, needed to be three times as brave to win a medal. Harry was full of surprises.
He recounts the incident. ‘There’s a Lanc up there,’ he heard the mid-upper gunner say over the intercom. ‘That’s no bloody Lanc,’ he replied peering up from his turret. The aircraft, probably a Messerschmitt 110, swooped down in a curve towards them. ‘They get in and get their nose ahead of you and make you fly into their cannon fire,’ says Harry. ‘He was only two or three hundred yards away.’ Harry saw the German drop his starboard wing slightly, and knew he was about to open up. ‘I got a burst into him and he dropped away.’ I hadn’t finished reading the citation before I asked him to tell it to me in his own words. I’d assumed I was reading about him simply damaging an enemy aircraft. ‘You mean, you shot him down?’ I ask, rather stupidly. ‘Yeah, of course I shot him down!’ he retorts. The other members of the crew saw the aircraft trailing to the ground, and Harry was officially credited with a kill, as well as a Distinguished Flying Medal.
‘Look, why are you interested in all this?’ he asks me again, resuming his old line of enquiry. It’s not the conversation I feel like having and I push the topic back onto himself.
‘Do I act like I’m eighty?’ he asks me again. This time I assure
him he most certainly does not, although what exactly an eighty-year-old is supposed to act like I don’t really know anymore. ‘I don’t believe in any religion. Mum was a Methodist, but I think it’s the greatest bullshit there is. I’ve never prayed. If anyone should’ve prayed it’s me.’ Surely, I suggest, there must have been times in his turret over a burning city with tracer bullets firing towards him out of the darkness when he must have come close. ‘Nah,’ he says dismissively. ‘Never thought about it. Never had the time. You had to think straight, you see, or you were dead.’ I ask him if he thought he was going to survive his tour. ‘No,’ he repeats calmly. ‘We lived day to day. Three weeks on, one week off.’ Then he reflects a little more on his own luck. ‘I didn’t give a bugger about anything. Been married four times. Did I tell you that? My fault. I just could never settle down.’
His appetite undiminished, Harry calls the French girl over again and orders the bread and butter pudding. ‘It’s delicious. You have to have it,’ he tells me.
Harry completed an amazing fifty-six operational trips with Bomber Command, his second tour being flown with a Pathfinder squadron, once flying six trips in five days. ‘I was nineteen. Can you believe it? Would you give a gun turret in an aeroplane to a nineteen-year-old today? I wouldn’t give them a bike!’ he says. ‘Yeah, bit of a loner. Always have been. Suited me.’
During the course of our conversation, he alludes to several other instances but refuses to elaborate. He bombed on D-Day but soon after his Lancaster was shot down, he says, by American ‘friendly fire’ in Normandy. (Such incidents are becoming familiar to me.) He baled out and walked to the American lines, for the second time being the only one of his crew to survive. The experience gave him a dislike for Americans that endures to this day. Try as I may to get him to expand, though, he won’t budge. ‘Why do you want to know about all this? It was sixty years ago!’ he exclaims again.
Then, abruptly as it started, it’s over. ‘I’ve talked enough. I’ll shut up now,’ he says and drinks the extra-strong coffee he has ordered. When some chocolates arrive, he makes sure he gets his rightful share, and a few more.
We split the bill and talk about other things for a while. We discover that we follow the same football club and talk about meeting up at a game sometime. We walk outside and say goodbye. It’s still hot, and I immediately find a quiet spot in a nearby park, take out my recorder and record into it everything I can remember. His last words to me are, ‘Have I been any use to you?’ but I think he knows he has.
My meeting with Harry, who still didn’t want me to use his real name, stayed in my head for a long time afterwards. For all his initial gruffness, he opened up to me, not just in terms of his extraordinary war, but in revealing himself in ways that many men of his generation would be incapable of, even if it would occur to them to do so. In some ways, alarmingly, he reminded me a little of myself.
I found Harry a strangely timeless figure, neither young nor old, isolated but not lonely, a man who has run very much his own, slightly disconnected race, and an absolute one of a kind. The perfect rear gunner.
BOB MOLESWORTH
Pilot, RAAF
As beginnings to days go, it had not been a good one. It had been a slow morning to start with, and when I finally got into the car to leisurely open the map to check just where Bob Molesworth lived, I let out a short, sharp scream. Having contented myself that he resided somewhere vaguely on the edge of town, I suddenly realised I had a country drive ahead of me and that I was going to be late. Very late.
Still, a quick call to explain my predicament should suffice, and Bob, according to his son John, had no plans to go anywhere that day.
An hour or so later, hurtling out along the Western Highway in an old white Ford station wagon with a ravenous addiction to petrol (I had bought it in a hurry as an ‘in-between’ car; that was two years ago), I was beginning to enjoy the beautiful spring day and the comforting hum of the six big cylinders working away beneath the slightly dented bonnet. Then, my eyes flicked routinely down to the temperature gauge and I let out another short sharp scream. It was into the red. Actually, it was beyond the red, the needle having vanished beyond some threshold where temperature needles are never meant to go. Suddenly, everything started to shudder violently. I pulled off onto a side road, stopped abruptly and, cursing, waited an eternity for the needle to reappear. This, I thought, is definitely not the way to endear yourself to a ninety-four-year-old who piloted Bristol Blenheims in Europe and North Africa.
Another phone call to John. Country gent that he was, he offered to come to my rescue, or at least tow me to a wrecker. But after a long wait I opened the cap of the bone-dry radiator, filled up from a nearby garden tap, and to my amazement, managed to start it up. Perhaps I’d got away with it. After yet another phone call to clarify directions, I stopped, hours after my appointed time, at the beginning of an impressive dirt lane lined with sugar gums.
This was a driveway unlike any I had seen, long enough to warrant its own route number. I drove tentatively up through working paddocks and livestock, all well kept and, drought notwithstanding, surprisingly healthy. Everything had that well-ordered, rural blue-blood feel, the home of serious landed gentry. A modest house appeared in view, at which point I was intercepted by a man on a small motorbike who waved and indicated I should follow him to yet another part of the estate. At this point I noticed the car settle into a permanent, disturbed grating sound, like someone trying to saw their way out from under the bonnet. Whatever was causing it, it didn’t sound cheap.
At last I came to an old and elegant Victorian-era house, surrounded by ancient azaleas and established trees, the centrepiece of a 4000-acre property that has remained in the family since the 1850s. I was shown in and walked past cabinets full of Victorian cut glass and admired an old framed etching of a Viscount Molesworth that went back to the seventeenth century. The whole place dripped of pedigree.
Bob was wearing overalls and reading with his feet up in the library room, stacked to the ceiling with volumes ancient and modern of every conceivable size. He looked up vaguely and extended his hand. To reach it I had to step over an enormous labrador who had comfortably stretched out – as labradors do – in the most inconvenient place possible. Short of a forklift, this mutt wasn’t moving. ‘Hello, puppy,’ I said cheerily, trying not to sound ironic.
Bob is by far the oldest flyer I have spoken to. So much so that when he joined up in early 1941, he had to lower his age to get in. ‘All my friends in the Western District were going into the army, but I thought, “If I can get into the air force, I will,” ’ he says in a slow but very deliberate voice. ‘Twenty-eight was the limit. I was just on the borderline. I think it was an advantage being a little older. I had an excellent instructor – a Flying Doctor in fact.’
I settle into an elegant old couch in the elegant old book-lined study. I hand Bob my prized and indispensable Bomber Squadrons of the RAF. He takes it and begins reading quietly to himself. There is a long pause that stretches into an extended silence as he surveys the pages pertaining to his old squadron, No. 114. I sit there quietly as he turns the pages. Perhaps he’s forgotten I am in the room.
‘Yes,’ he says at last, pointing to a photograph. ‘This is after they brought in the long-nose Blenheims.’ Time, I realise, isn’t something to which Bob feels any particular deference, so I just relax. Besides, after today’s performance, I’m in no position to rush anybody.
He tells me about his training at Somers, learning to fly Tiger Moths at Essendon Airport and receiving his wings at Wagga, thereby avoiding a long and chilly sojourn in Canada. Embarking from Sydney, he set foot in a very battered England in October 1941.
It’s a slow, measured afternoon with Bob, not just on account of his age but, I suspect, the legacy of a life on the land. If I am to find gold in his story, I am going to have to dig for it.
The twin-engine Bristol Blenheim, never one of the most auspicious aircraft in the RAF’s arsenal,
had a crew of three.
‘We got together at the local pub,’ he tells me, describing the day he met his crew. It’s a complicated tale involving a missed train, a remark on a platform, and a conversation around pints of ale. At the end of it, he had found Bill Burberry, his cockney wireless/air gunner, and Tim Denny, his navigator who still resides in Tasmania.
Despite their poor reputation, Bob enjoyed flying the Blenheim, and his squadron was the first to be equipped with this somewhat ignominious type. ‘The trouble is, they were already outmoded,’ he says. Indeed the Bristol Blenheim, developed amazingly enough as a quick twin-motor fighter in the early thirties, was initially ahead of its time, arising out of a millionaire’s private venture and blessed with high speed and long range. But that was ten long years before the war, and by the time the shooting started, it had been well eclipsed by rapid developments in single-engine fighters. Initial losses were dreadful.
He remembers his first trip well – 8 March 1942. ‘They sent us over at night to bomb the docks at Ostend. Only two of us went.’ Then, as if remembering something important for the first time in years, ‘The other bloke didn’t come back. They never found out what happened to him.’
I scan the pages of his logbook and come across a curious list of early-war targets I have not seen before: Harlingen, Soesterberg and Schiphol aerodrome near Amsterdam, today the site of one of Europe’s largest airports. These operations were the beginning of the RAF’s ‘Intruder’ raids – small packets of aircraft attacking German bomber and fighter stations in occupied France and Holland. Sometimes they were effective, mostly they gave little more than nuisance value. But it was the genesis of a tactic the RAF would employ for the rest of the war.
Fly Page 24
