Fly

by Michael Veitch

  On landing, however, he had strips torn off him, with his CO accusing him of deserting him in battle. A report was put in, and James had to front the Group Captain for another tongue-lashing. He feels his treatment was distinctly unfair, but ‘fairness’ has never been one of the military’s overriding considerations, especially in wartime. Later, though, he feels he was exonerated when this same officer was himself the subject of a complaint. After his logbook was inspected, it was found he’d hardly flown at all. He was sacked soon after, but James’s black mark remained.

  Most fighter pilots of the Battle of Britain were single and lived within the confines of their usually crowded base. James, however, was – and still is – married to the woman now preparing our lunch, the very elegant Cynthia. In 1940, they lived in a house a couple of miles away from Duxford in an ostensibly normal domestic arrangement. ‘Cynthia used to get me breakfast in bed,’ he tells me. ‘We’d say, “Bye-bye, darling, have a lovely day,” etc., and I’d drive to work like I was heading off to the office. Half an hour later I’d be up at 30 000 feet in the middle of a great battle. It was an extraordinary way to live.’

  James’s combat experience in the Battle of Britain was brief, but sensational. According to the records, 31 July was a relatively quiet day, with only three RAF pilots being shot down. Unfortunately for James, he was one of them.

  This cloudless morning, he was scrambled, and encountered the enemy close to Duxford. No. 19 was being led that day by a New Zealand officer, as their CO had been killed a couple of days before and his replacement was yet to arrive. ‘I saw them first,’ says James, ‘I had wonderful eyesight in those days’ – a formation of Dornier 215 bombers with a large escort of sixty-five Messerschmitt 110 and 109s above. James was ordered into a ‘number one’ attack – line astern, each aircraft forming up behind their respective bomber. He manoeuvred to attack just as the German fighters pounced from above. ‘I went turning round to take the chap on the far side and my number two pulled out,’ he says.

  No. 19 Squadron had just received the new Spitfire1b, the first to be armed with 20-millimetre cannons in the wings, and this engagement was one of their earliest tests in combat. Some of the bugs, it seems, had yet to be worked out. The black-crossed and splinter-green camouflage pattern of the German bomber filled James’s windscreen as he moved to within fifty yards and pressed the firing button. It clicked, and … nothing. His two cannons and four machine guns had jammed. Cursing, he pulled his now unarmed and useless aircraft away.

  The rapid-firing 7.9-millimetre gun in the hands of the Dornier’s rear gunner, however, functioned perfectly. Just as he turned, he felt what he describes as a ‘hard kick on the shin – like you’d get in a rugby scrum.’ He almost didn’t even look down, but when he did he was astonished to see his bare foot sitting on the rudder bar. Two bullets had ripped through both bones in James’s lower right leg, almost severing it. His flying boot had simply blown off.

  His elevator controls were also gone – ‘I pulled the controls back and nothing happened’ – his aircraft was plummeting straight down in a steep dive at 480 knots. ‘I didn’t have much time to think about things,’ he says. There was only one thought required: to get out. Unstrapping and releasing the hood at such high speed, he was almost sucked straight out of the cockpit, but became pinned as his parachute caught on the rear wall. ‘I was trapped there. My arms were thrown back by the slipstream, my gloves blew off and my foot, hanging by just some ligaments, was thrashing up against my knee.’ Then, like a ball out of a cannon, he was free, and tumbling head over heels in the air.

  His first thought was to fall to a lower height before opening the parachute, lest he be carried for miles, but the pain of the rushing wind twisting his leg was unbearable, and he pulled the ripcord at about 20000 feet.

  Then, all was peaceful. ‘Suddenly, there wasn’t a sound or a sight of an aircraft anywhere,’ he says. The pain had vanished as well, and James was completely alone in the sky. ‘It was a marvellous feeling. I could see this wonderful view of the Cambridgeshire countryside stretching for hundreds of miles.’

  He also saw that he was losing a lot of blood very quickly. ‘I was swinging on the end of the parachute and I could see blood pumping out of me in brilliant red blobs,’ he says. He was also soaked in petrol from the central fuel tank located immediately behind the instrument panel which had also been hit, and which fortunately had not ignited. He still had his helmet with the attached radio/telephone cord, so wound this around his shattered leg as a tourniquet, doing his best to tuck it under and stop the bleeding. The rest, surreally, seems to have been rather pleasant: a gentle journey back to earth. ‘I could hear cows mooing and dogs barking. It was quite marvellous,’ he says. ‘A couple of Spitfires heading home circled around me and gave me a wave.’

  Looking back, sixty-seven years later, it seems that he was in the air forever, but he reckons it would have been no more than about twenty minutes. ‘I finally came down with a thump in the middle of a stubbled field,’ he says.

  Close by, farm workers were stacking big sheaves of corn. James moved himself to keep his bloodied leg out of the dirt, when a couple of them came rushing up with pitchforks. ‘This made me absolutely furious,’ he says indignantly. ‘It had taken all that to get down in one piece and now some bloody fool wanted to stick a pitchfork in me!

  ‘Piss off and get me an ambulance!’ he barked at the men who had obviously taken him to be a German. ‘They sped off like startled hares.’

  He was in no pain at this stage, but his leg was numb. The first car the farmhand stopped was, amazingly, an army doctor on his way to Duxford for breakfast. Soon, James was in hospital in Cambridge. When he came to, his heavily pregnant wife was sitting beside him. ‘Our first born was due any minute,’ he says, and he knew how lucky he was to be around to see it.

  James’s leg was amputated below the knee, a prosthetic fitted, and his flying days were over. At least for a while.

  The funny stories are on hold as James relates his death-defying exit from his Spitfire, drenched in petrol with a shattered, bleeding leg. But they soon start up as he goes on to tell me about the rest of his very active war. For a while he was part of Winston Churchill’s personal staff, assessing the risk to the PM from air attack during the Blitz, and later flying again as an instructor, eventually commanding an Operational Training Unit in Scotland. Here, one day, a young Typhoon pilot came up to him. ‘Do you remember me, sir?’ James looked blankly at the young man. ‘I’m the one that found you when you were shot down,’ he resumed. It was the same lad who had rushed him with a pitchfork three years earlier. ‘Well, I hope you’re better at recognising the enemy these days,’ was James’s retort.

  James stayed in the RAF till well after the war, having a fine life flying some of the thoroughbreds of the early jet age such as the Hunter and the Meteor, then as air attaché in places like Norway and Australia, where he settled with Cynthia and their children, eventually reaching the lofty rank of Air Commodore.

  It could easily have been so very different. One of a dozen sets of circumstances could have conspired that day in the Cambridgeshire sky in 1940 to snuff out James’s young life, as it did with thousands of others, denying him these sixty-seven productive years.

  Cynthia, who lived through it all herself, actively contributes to James’s story. I look at them, and as the wine flows over lunch, I see what a dashing couple they still make. They talk of their skiing days, and I picture them instantly on the slopes of Grindelwald and Gstaad in the stylish fifties and sixties.

  We sit around the table enjoying the generous meal Cynthia has prepared. Unlike all of the wives of the other men I have spoken to, she was there with her husband, sharing much of the experience, and they sit recalling the names of the pilots they both knew – the ones who survived, and those who did not.

  They speak of Carl Withall, the only child of elderly parents in Canberra, and one of the first Australians Cynthia ever met. ‘He
was twenty-seven and the younger pilots called him “Granny”. They’d tease him – offer to carry his parachute and so on,’ she says. One afternoon in his Spitfire, he was attempting to chase down a fast-moving Junkers 88 at sea level off the Isle of Wight. ‘He was going flat out and got a bullet in the radiator and his engine suddenly seized,’ says James. He radioed that he was about to ditch, but he was unable to free himself in time, and went down in his aircraft.

  ‘When I was posted here in 1960,’ says James, ‘his father rang me up and asked me around. He wanted to know all about his son. There was so little I could tell him.’

  Then there was ‘Ace’ Pace (neither can now recall his actual name). Nineteen years old and the only Roman Catholic on the squadron, he was so badly disfigured by burns after being shot down that mirrors were kept out of his reach in hospital. When a visitor unintentionally left one by his bedside table, he tried to cut his throat with it after seeing his reflection. Eventually he flew again but was killed soon after.

  Or Stevenson, another Australian, the son of an admiral. ‘He was in my flight,’ says James. ‘He’d been jackarooing in Western Australia – a really delightful character.’

  ‘It’s so sad,’ says Cynthia, the man’s face back in her mind. ‘He would have made a wonderful husband and father.’ He was last seen flying into the middle of a melee with a large number of German fighters in a high-altitude engagement over the south coast.

  My time with James and Cynthia has been for me the fulfilment of a decades-long wish. By the time the cab arrives to take me away, we are all exhausted. James was all and more than I’d expected from a Battle of Britain pilot: immensely charming, funny, and sharp as a tack. In a way he’s still fighting the battle – these days with the Australian War Memorial, whose lack of adequate recognition for the fourteen Australian pilots killed in the engagement still irks him, and for whom, he says, there is no fitting memorial. ‘One of them up there told me that the Battle of Britain wasn’t important, and that the Americans would have saved us anyway! Can you believe it?’ he fumes.

  He is, in his advanced years, still a man of enormous vigour and energy, and even as I am leaving, he still has volumes of anecdotes about Eton, the King of Norway and Lady Astor that have me chuckling in the taxi. It’s another long ride back to the airport and I try one out on the driver, but it falls flat and we continue to the airport in silence.

  Later that evening, I arrive back home in Melbourne. In true RAF style, I mix myself a very stiff gin and tonic. Glass in hand, I go to the bookshelf and pick out my old battered copy of The True Story of the Battle of Britain and turn to its much-thumbed index at the back. Now at last I can claim to have met a genuine Battle of Britain pilot. But in the end it’s not one but four names I underline carefully in lead pencil: ‘Withall, L. C. 152 Squadron. Australian. Killed’; ‘Pace, A. C. 19 Squadron. British. Killed’; ‘Stevenson, P. C. F. 19 Squadron. Australian. Killed’ and ‘Coward, J. B. 19 Squadron. British’ – survived.

  DUDLEY MARROWS

  Pilot, RAAF

  ‘I turned ninety the other day,’ Dudley tells me as we sit for a chat. ‘You’ve got to do it sometime or other.’ He seems a little bemused to have reached such a milestone, but I’m awfully glad he did, because it was Dudley upon whom I was relying to fill a significant blank in my quest. For this reason, I had travelled to the edge of the desert to meet a man who had flown – and fought – over the endless expanse of the ocean.

  His aircraft – the magnificent four-engine Sunderland flying boat – also happens to be the only type with which I can claim some kind of personal connection. Up until 1974, you could still see them, slipping free of the flat blue surface of Sydney Harbour and pulling into the air before wheeling to the left and heading out across the Pacific towards Lord Howe Island. Ansett Airlines of Australia were the last in the world to operate them. The vision of this enormous old aeroplane throbbing through the warm Sydney sky in its elegant airline livery remains one of the most memorable of my childhood, yet it was only by chance I even got to see it, thanks to one of my father’s failed business ventures.

  After a couple of uncharacteristically good years in the early 1970s, Dad convinced himself the world was ripe for the taking, and, against every bit of sound advice (which he never took anyway), decided to open up an office of his one-man PR company in Sydney. It was doomed from the start. A man with a big heart and big ideas, my father possessed not a skerrick of the panache needed to succeed in the fast lanes of the Emerald City.

  I remember the first trip I made up there, with my mother, as a thirteen-year-old, a few weeks into his foray to set it all up. As long as I could remember, Dad had always worked from home, staking out the front room of the house for his office. Late into the night I would hear from my adjacent bedroom the soft thudding of the keys of his antiquated typewriter as he sat in his dressing gown, bashing out the draft of a yet another brochure for the fencing industry or an annual report. Resentful as one is at that age of the eccentricities of one’s parents, I had always hankered for the respectability of a father who, like all other fathers I knew, went off to work every day in a suit with a briefcase. Although it was odd him not being around at this time, the house was decidedly more peaceful, and I remember the pride I felt as I pictured him striding into the foyer of a big Sydney skyscraper to start his day’s work.

  I was, of course, to be terribly disappointed. Ever the small-town man with little concept of false economy, Dad’s new ‘office’ turned out to be a cheap and rather ordinary flat he had found in a residential part of Double Bay with a desk in one room and a rollout bed in the other. Walking up the concrete stairs for the first time in silence with my mother, I still wince at the shame I felt at the sounds of kids’ television blaring through a flyscreen door and the smell of someone cooking their evening meal. Any potential clients would have fled in a minute.

  For most of that first trip, I sulked around, swearing to make it my last. Then, one afternoon with little else to do but watch my father’s rising consternation at his obstinately silent telephone, I set off down the street past gardens with their blazing jacarandas towards the sparkling water of Sydney Harbour. The unmistakable roar of big propeller engines somewhere ahead rose over the muffled sound of the traffic, riveting me to the spot. Then, looming over the rooftops, there appeared the tremendous sight of a four-motor flying boat, low and banking steeply, showing off its upper wing and fuselage.

  I watched it wheel around, slow and majestic, then vanish towards the east. I bolted back up the hill. Dad was on the phone and did not appreciate the interruption. ‘They’re the Sunderlands,’ he said, covering up the mouthpiece and waving me out. ‘They take off from Rose Bay. Go!’

  I headed back down to the harbour, determined to find this Rose Bay and its flying boats, and watched expectantly for the next one to appear.

  My father’s Sydney expedition lasted just a few months and cost him a packet. Inside half a year he was back home on familiar turf, still blithely unaware of the reasons for his failure, and already making plans to expand somewhere else. A stern word from my dour but realistic mother was enough to bury the dream forever. One of mine, though, had been planted.

  If the Sunderland wasn’t the finest flying boat of World War II, it was certainly the most famous. It was built by Short Brothers in Belfast, the same people who made the superbly engineered but compromised Stirling. The Sunderland, however, was permitted to fulfil the potential of its design. It arose out of the graceful ‘Empire’ flying boat, itself a staggering leap forward from the biplane and wire types Short had produced throughout the 1920s, and was built to cash in on the decision made by the British Postmaster General that all First Class overseas mail must henceforth be carried by air.

  From the mid-1930s, the sleek all-metal Empires ferried passengers and mail in indulgent comfort all around the globe. Poignantly, though, as the war approached, they came to symbolise the decline of the very empire from which they took their n
ame. The Sunderland was its military variant and, in the grey-green waters of the Bay of Biscay, came to represent the terrible, unbending struggle against the German U-boats that raged the entire war. It was in the midst of this effort that, on a July afternoon in 1943, Dudley Marrows played an extraordinary, history-making part.

  I visit Dudley and his wife Sylvia at a busy time. After many decades, they have recently moved from their large citrus property on the outskirts of Mildura into a modest unit in the middle of town. Large wood and leather chairs – unused to such confines – line up awkwardly in the living room, and boxes of documents wait in piles to be sorted – a task neither of them relish.

  Like the wives of many of the men I had spoken to, Sylvia proves as rich a source of information – and inspiration – as Dudley himself. ‘My ancestors are German,’ she tells me – a little proudly – as she takes my arm and directs me to a cabinet filled with family memorabilia. In her pale blue eyes, there’s still a trace of the film star good looks she sported as a young woman, and my indelicate gaze returns repeatedly to a framed photograph of her – a stunning blonde in an off-the-shoulder white satin creation – taken more years ago than she can probably bear to remember. Sylvia became a schoolteacher and speaks several languages. ‘I gave a lecture last week on Lutheranism,’ she tells me. ‘Just to keep my hand in.’

  Decades after the events, it was Sylvia’s skill in German that enabled her to her play her own part in a moving epilogue to Dudley’s war.

  Outside, even at nine in the morning, it’s hot. Dudley seems a little nervous to begin with, and wants to place some important facts on the table.

  ‘I’m going to try and get you into the picture as I see it after surveying it for sixty years or more,’ he says to me earnestly, as if addressing a youth he suspects in danger of going off the rails. ‘People think of an aircraft going down as just one entity, but with a Sunderland, it was twelve people who were lost. And the U-boats. When they sank, sixty-five men died. I don’t think people always realise that.’ If anyone’s qualified to make the observation, it is Dudley, as I will discover.