Fly

by Michael Veitch

  ‘I was born in Bendigo – a long time ago,’ he says. Dudley joined the air force in 1940 after four part-time years in the militia. In the meantime, he’d completed a degree in accounting and with his mother dead and father absent, lived with an older brother – surviving, as he puts it, ‘on my own resources’. He does not care to elaborate, and I suspect his was not the warmest of upbringings. He looks at me sagely. ‘At your age you could never comprehend the severity of the Great Depression.’

  At Initial Training School, Dudley was selected to be an observer, but after topping every subject his instructors could throw at him, he convinced them to re-muster him for pilot training – a rare occurrence indeed. It became apparent that the young Marrows was no ordinary student, and the powers-that-be began to think his talents might be better suited to more demanding roles. With the almost unheard-of distinction ‘exceptional’ stamped in his logbook, Dudley found himself on his way to South Africa to complete the highly specialised General Reconnaissance and Navigation Course, flying Harvards over the tourist sites of Victoria Falls and the Zambezi River.

  From his cockpit, he watched vast herds of wildlife scatter before the sound of his engine across the wide African plains. He’s keen, though, not to romanticise it. ‘Training was one of the most stressful periods of my life,’ he tells me. Accidents, as always, were common. Going over on the ship, the men had taken bets as to which among them would be the first to go solo. Dudley remembers the gifted young pilot who eventually won the distinction – as he was also the first to be killed. ‘A complete natural,’ he says. ‘That was his problem. He thought he was too good.’

  A few weeks later under a leaden sky, Dudley stepped off the old liner Empress of India into a bleak Scottish midwinter, as a newly commissioned Pilot Officer. In a sense, though, he would never really leave the water, because he had been earmarked to perform one of the most demanding and important jobs in the RAF – piloting the long-range flying boats deep into the Atlantic Ocean, protecting the very arteries of Britain’s war effort, her sea lanes.

  ‘The only thing that every really frightened me was the U-boat peril,’ wrote Churchill in his history of the Second World War. He had very good reason. The Battle of the Atlantic was fought on every single day of the six-year conflict – a brutal, terrifying cat-and-mouse struggle between ship, aircraft and submarine ranging over thousands of square miles of largely empty ocean. It was like a battle fought in slow motion, with countless hours of tedium spent on all sides, then moments sudden, violent and terribly cruel. I can envisage few deaths more ghastly than being trapped inside a sinking vessel or helplessly watching the surface of the great grey sea looming from the cockpit of a doomed aircraft.

  Britain was like a baby, needing to be spoon-fed just about everything for its very survival. Oil, steel, food, clothing and war mateirel were needed every day and by the ton. The only way in was via fleets of small merchant ships – up to sixty at a time – sailing in convoys from the Americas. If the Germans could cut the supply line they could starve Britain and win the war, and they knew it. One of the weapons used to counter this very real threat was, therefore, the long-range, depth-charge-armed flying-boat.

  Dudley remembers seeing a Sunderland for the first time, moored on the water. Compared to what he had flown before, it towered over him, a huge, camouflage-painted hybrid of ship and aeroplane.

  ‘When we first walked into them, with their twin-decks, proper toilet, sleeping and cooking facilities, we wondered how in the hell they could fly,’ he says.

  Part mariner, part aviator, the flying-boat captain too had to deal with the vagaries of currents, swells and wind. ‘When you hit a big wave,’ Dudley says, ‘it’s like hitting a brick wall.’ He also had to relearn some of the basics, such as landing on water. ‘It could be that rough that you could bash the hull in,’ he says. Smooth water also presented problems. When too calm on take-off, the sea would create its own suction, adhering to the hull, requiring the pilot to ‘rock’ the aircraft back and forth to break free. ‘Sometimes fully loaded, we could take well over a mile to get off,’ he tells me.

  In recognition of the importance of the struggle against the U-boats, the RAF established several new squadrons dedicated to the task. One of them, No. 461, was an all-Australian outfit. It came into existence on Anzac Day 1942, and hence was known as the ‘Anzac Squadron’. Dudley was one of its original members.

  Unlike those assigned a Bomber Command tour, whose duration was determined by individual operations, the Sunderland crews were indentured to fly no less than 800 operational hours: 800 hours flying low over the almost empty ocean escorting convoys, or tracing the lines of a vast grid on a map; 800 hours watching the featureless slate-green surface of the Atlantic pass beneath, all the time fighting the soporific lull of monotony, red-rimmed eyes constantly anticipating a dark shape on the horizon that might be the conning tower of a submarine, or the tiny yellow speck that signified the dinghy of a downed airman. ‘We saturated the Bay of Biscay, day and night, irrespective of weather,’ he says.

  Sightings of U-boats by flying-boat crews were in fact rare. It was, according to Dudley, ‘like hoping to find a needle in a haystack’. But their mere presence was often enough. As they were told when briefed, it was considered important merely to keep the U-boats under the water. A submarine in 1943 travelled fast on the surface – around seventeen knots – but this dropped back to around seven knots when submerged. At this slow speed, it was difficult for the U-boats to reach the convoy areas from their bases in France and they expended far more fuel in doing so. For the Admiralty, preventing them from causing havoc among the convoys was a tactical victory, and people like Dudley spending twelve hours at a stretch in the air had their part to play, as monotonous as it was.

  It was hoped to catch the German submarines close to their French bases of St Nazaire and La Rochelle, and the Bay of Biscay became a vast hunting ground. On three separate occasions, Dudley spotted U-boats on the surface, but by the time he reached them they had submerged. ‘You had to get there quick,’ he tells me. ‘Never had I got there quick enough.’

  Some days, though, you just get lucky. The day of 30 July 1943 began as a normal patrol: pick up the Scilly Isles, fly a straight course to Spain, crawl along the coast, then another straight line back to the Scillies, then home to their base at Mount Batten in Portsmouth. It was similar to the dozens of assignments Dudley and his crew had already carried out in nine months of operational flying, usually without incident. Peter Jensen, the wireless operator, has written his own account of the day’s events: ‘It was a beautiful day,’ he says. ‘Just outside the three-mile limit of Spain we could see people on the beaches; the water was sparkling and blue. How we envied them.’ Even in the aircraft it was warm. Jackets were off and Jensen was in shirtsleeves. Then, just before midday, he picked up a signal from another aircraft reporting a sighting: ‘Grid coordinates FKJE2020’ – it was nearby.

  They implemented the standard ‘square’ search but saw nothing. Then, another signal, directing them to another spot. Dudley started to get a creeping feeling that this day was not to be an ordinary one. ‘As we were approaching – I’ll always remember this – I heard my second pilot, Jimmy Leigh, say, “There’s some destroyers ahead.” ’ As they reached the scene, it became clear that the low, dark shapes in the water were not destroyers, but a formation of three U-boats running in a tight V formation on the surface.

  It was an amazing sight, ‘a circus’, says Dudley. Several aircraft were already on the scene providing the Germans with some company – two B-24 Liberators and a Coastal Command Halifax from No. 502 Squadron which were attempting (very ineffectually, according to Dudley) to bomb them from high altitude.

  The trio of German submarines, brazenly defying the accepted practice of diving at the first opportunity, were sailing at speed, electing to fight it out on the surface. Dudley didn’t know it, but this remarkable tactic was the result of a recent directive from the U
-boat commander, Admiral Doenitz. By mid-1943, the policy of slowing down U-boats had proven highly effective, and their attacks on convoys had begun to drop off. Doenitz insisted they now move at speed on the surface. For protection, he made them travel in groups, and armed them to the teeth. This last fact is one Dudley is keen to emphasise.

  ‘You’re not going in to sink a poor defenceless thing, you know,’ he says. The submarines he attacked had each been armed with twenty-seven anti-aircraft guns of various calibre including two or three batteries of 20-millimetre cannons. ‘They put up a firepower as fierce as any fortified position,’ says Dudley. He watched one Liberator go in for an attack, then break it off as if hitting a brick wall. A myriad thoughts ran through his mind: should he attack? If so, from which direction, and what were the intentions of the other aircraft?

  Further back in the Sunderland, Peter Jensen – with some apprehension – heard the sound of the klaxon ordering the depth charges to be run out onto their racks for dropping. Then, over the intercom came the voice of Dudley, discussing the situation with his number two. ‘Right, we’ll take the port one, Jimmy. Get ready to take over if I’m hit.’ Jimmy Leigh, the second pilot, apparently suggested they attempt a diagonal attack to try and take out the lot. ‘My God,’ thought Jensen. ‘We haven’t got one maniac on board, we’ve got two!’

  Dudley tried a standard attack, but was instantly subjected to intense fire from all three U-boats. Shrapnel rattled against the hull, with the occasional loud bang as bigger pieces were picked up by the props and hurled against the fuselage. ‘It was too thick even for Dudley,’ says Jensen, and the skipper broke off to port.

  ‘Skip, we’re low on fuel,’ said the voice of his Irish engineer, Paddy Watson. Much had already been expended on the fruitless grid search earlier. Dudley knew he could only afford one more run.

  ‘You don’t have long to think,’ he says. But for Dudley – the strategist, the course dux – thinking was something he was very good at indeed. He looked down and considered the situation like a chessboard, and noticed the swell that rocked the submarines slightly from side to side as they pushed through the water. ‘I wanted that sub to be rolling a bit,’ he says, ‘to be side-on to the swell so its guns would be hard to aim!’

  Ahead of him, one of the Liberators made another run. Dudley saw his chance, and swung in behind the attacking bomber. It was soon hit, and began trailing smoke.

  This time, Dudley’s attack was low. So low that his hull skimmed the wave-tops. He approached from side on, gambling that the guns of only one U-boat could be brought to bear, the remaining two risking firing on each other. ‘As it was, we had enough coming up at us from just the one,’ he says.

  In the Sunderland’s nose, the front gunner, ‘Bubbles’ Pearce, watched the grey shapes enlarge in his gunsight, but hung off until just 400 yards before raking the deck of the nearest sub with every one of the hundred rounds from his single Vickers machine gun. Then, they flashed underneath.

  ‘I was so low,’ says Dudley, ‘I had to lift the aircraft up to clear the conning tower.’ Rarely was it an exact science. ‘Feeling’ the submarine beneath him, Dudley pushed a button on the dash, and seven 450-pound, Mark VII depth charges fell from the racks slung under the wings. His immediate concern was not for his enemy’s destruction, however, but his own safety. His aeroplane was now revealed to the other U-boats, and Dudley swung hard left to avoid their combined firepower.

  Here he pauses momentarily. ‘This part,’ he says, ‘will always stick in my memory.’ It was the voice of his navigator Jock Rolland saying calmly, quietly and ‘in a very odd voice, “You’ve got him.” ’ The way Dudley recounts it is almost eerie.

  Jock was hanging out a rear-facing hatch, holding on, reckons Dudley, ‘with his toes and fingernails’. He had a perfect view of the sub below, and even managed to take a photo. A series of massive plumes straddled the U-boat, ripping off the stern and throwing up towers of scummy, oily water. The Germans in the conning tower and on the deck were thrown – or leaped – into the water. Those inside were simply carried to the bottom, probably crushed to death by the weight of the water before they could drown.

  Still partially disbelieving of what had just occurred, Dudley turned the Sunderland around. Where there had just been three boats, now there were two. Any jubilation the crew may have felt, however, was soon dampened by the dismal sight that greeted them. ‘Here were these poor blokes, shaking their fists at us in the water.’ The intercom was silent. Then, Dudley made a snap decision, the implications of which would continue to echo down the decades of his long life. ‘I suppose it was on the spur of the moment. I dropped them a dinghy.’ Again, Dudley’s aim was on the money, and it landed right amongst them. A handful of German sailors managed to clamber onto it.

  In a coincidence that almost defies belief, Dudley’s aircraft – Sunderland ‘U’ of 461 Squadron – bore the exact same number of the submarine it had attacked and sunk – U-461 – and this boat had a story of its own.

  Korvettenkapitan Wolf-Harro Stiebler had taken command of the brand-new U-461 on 22 April 1942, just three days before the formation of the RAAF squadron that would eventually cause its demise. Stiebler was a career sailor, having started off as an apprentice on merchant ships that regularly rounded Cape Horn. U-461 was a type XIV ‘milk cow’ supply submarine servicing the hunter U-boats of the Wolf Packs. At a predetermined dot in the ocean, they would rendezvous and transfer vital diesel oil, food and water from their generous holds, enabling the hunters to continue their deadly work. Only ten of these ‘queen bee’ vessels were ever built by the Germans, and their destruction was greatly valued by the Royal Navy.

  Stiebler had already completed six patrols, sailing out of the big concrete Keroman U-boat base at Lorient and stationing himself around the Azores. Up until now, he had been blessed with good luck, his crew suffering no casualties either from operations or accidents, and although attacked by Canadian Wellingtons in April, no real damage had been done. He had even shown mercy at sea when, the previous December, he had come across some lifeboats from the British cargo vessel Teesbank, torpedoed by a U-boat a few days before. In the spirit of the painted emblem of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus that adorned his conning tower, he took the captain prisoner and gave food to the rest. All sixty men were later picked up safely by the Americans.

  Out of all the services in all the fronts in all the armies of World War II, there was no more certain way of getting oneself killed than by volunteering for the U-boat service of the German Kriegsmarine. During the war, 743 boats were sunk killing an estimated 28 000 seamen and offering the truly pitiful survival rate of just one chance in four. The bravery of these young German sailors as they shut the hatches on their enormous grey metal monsters and set out from their bases in France on six-week patrols – knowing it was odds-on they would never be coming back – can scarcely be comprehended. It is a statistic of which Dudley is acutely aware.

  Just fifteen of Stiebler’s crew made it to Dudley’s life raft that day after their submarine had been blown out from under them, and were taken prisoner. The remaining fifty-three perished.

  The second boat in the group of three, U-504, dived, leaving U-462 to battle it out on the surface alone. With one depth charge left, Dudley thought he may as well put it to good use and turned to attack his second submarine for the day. As he approached, however, great splashes appeared in the water around it, announcing the arrival of none other than the most famous sub-hunter of all time, Captain F. J. ‘Johnny’ Walker of the Royal Navy. The story of this remarkable modest man, and how he developed the tactics of using small sloops to break up the Wolf Pack attacks, was devoured by schoolboys in the 1950s in the book, Walker, R.N. Half a century on, it remains a classic of the navy, and although the man himself died of exhaustion before war’s end, his image, in bronze, today looks out over Liverpool Harbour, the finishing line for so many of the ships he protected over three arduous years.

 
High above the battle, Peter Jensen watched as the guns from the little ships of Walker’s 2nd Support Group – HMS Kite, Woodpecker, Wren and Wild Goose – opened on U-462. Like a great crippled shark, Peter saw it begin to billow smoke and start sailing drunkenly in circles before sinking. The crew took to the water and, inflating their yellow one-man dinghies, they resembled ‘a mass of flowers bursting into bloom’. Over the radio, Dudley signalled there were German survivors in the water, and all but one were picked up and taken prisoner.

  The already submerged U-504 was not so lucky. Walker’s flotilla soon gave chase. A few hours later, the depth charges found and destroyed her – two years to the day after she was launched – with all fifty-three hands.

  With all three German submarines sunk, the day’s action passed into history as the biggest single engagement between submarine, ships and aircraft, and remains so to this day.

  And for Dudley, it was not yet over. Having fought the battle with his fuel mixture rich, he and his engineer did some quick calculations and realised there was not sufficient to get them back to base. As they discussed the alternatives on the way home, an excited voice called out in the intercom, ‘Skipper, there’s a submarine below us!’ And there it was, incredibly, the fourth U-boat of the day again travelling defiantly on the surface.

  Thinking quick, and hoping to catch it unawares, Dudley pushed the stick forward and went to attack, but this time, it was not to be. This one was waiting for him, and sent up a blast of fire. ‘By God it was frightening,’ he says today, a half-eaten Anzac biscuit in his hand, his focus fixed on a patch of floor that could be a mile away.

  In the dive, he’d unknowingly knocked the lever that engaged the automatic pilot, and the controls of the big aeroplane froze. ‘When I went to level out, I found I couldn’t,’ he says. He and Jimmy Leigh used all their strength to overcome the mechanism as the aircraft took several hits from the U-boat’s 20-millimetre cannon. ‘A fire started somewhere behind me and bits were coming off the spar,’ he says. A later inspection would reveal that a few inches higher and the shell would have ignited a petrol tank. An extinguisher doused the flames, but this round went squarely to the Germans. Dudley did not risk another.