Number 460 Squadron was formed in November 1941 at Molesworth in Cambridgeshire, 466 in October at Driffield in Yorkshire in October 1942, and a re-formed 462 at the same airfield in 1944. A group of new Australian aviators, arriving at the sergeants’ mess in Driffield, heard a British officer remark, ‘Well, here come the black troops from the colonies.’ From Driffield these men were involved in Bomber Command’s chief Arthur Harris’s forty-two-squadron attack on Cologne. Of the 6500 casualties suffered by the RAAF in Europe, Bomber Command would account for nearly four thousand.
The bombers flew many missions throughout 1943 to Germany’s Ruhr Valley—Happy Valley, the crews called it. They had to face night fighters equipped with the Schräge Musik—a twenty-millimetre cannon mounted at an angle behind the cockpit to enable attacks on the heavy bombers from below. The searchlight and anti-aircraft artillery defences of the Ruhr were very heavy. To be caught in that terrifying searchlight beam was considered the prelude to death. During a raid on Wuppertal in Westphalia, Flight Sergeant V.O. Vaughan’s bomber was trapped in that deadly cone of blinding light, which left him naked to anti-aircraft fire. To escape it he went into a spin from which he managed to regain control of the bomber again only 350 metres above the ground.
Some commentators claim the Ruhr was not as essential to the economy and the war effort as was depicted. But the bombing of Essen in early 1943 was highly applauded, since the great Krupp armament works dominated the centre of town. Such total successes were not necessarily common for the young aircrews.
A device named Window, however—clouds of aluminium strips cut to suit the frequency of German radar, poured out of 200-pound (90-kilogram) packages by bomber crews—somehow made it appear that thousands of bombers were approaching, and utterly confused the searchlights, batteries of anti-aircraft guns, and fighter planes. It was first used on a massive bombing raid on Hamburg in July 1943. Meanwhile, H2S radar gave the bomber crews a picture of the countryside over which the aircraft was flying at night. In late October 1943, a force including bombers from two Australian squadrons flew to Berlin. Mosquito aircraft flew in low to mark the target for them with flares; marking was sometimes questionable since wind could cause markers’ aircraft to be up to eleven kilometres off target, but that night the result was considered fortunate in so far as industrial suburbs were marked. No cloud obscured the target, but neither did it the bombers, and twenty-eight British planes were destroyed, while twelve were abandoned as beyond repair on their return. The Australian 460 Squadron had a bad night, losing five of its Lancaster bombers. Its squadron leader, Eric Utz, a young grazier from New England in New South Wales, nonetheless took the positive view that it was the most effective raid that had been made on Berlin.
The Australian crews were boys from the bush and the suburbs; young men, mostly unmarried, some of them not knowing how to drive a car. They were engaged in a strategy that has been controversial ever since, some even lived long enough to question the propositions of the head of Bomber Command, the appropriately named Bomber Harris, about the carpet-bombing of cities, and about the necessity of the copious deaths of young personnel and those on the ground. Harris’s sincere belief was that he could beat Germany into submission before the Normandy landings by destroying German industry and morale. But we now know his campaign to achieve this was a failure in its own right, in that German cities were destroyed and civilians suffered in the untold ways the British had in the Blitz, but not German war industries. Ultimately all the deceptive measures devised by the air forces, Empire and American, were countered by the Germans in a way that imposed casualties and horrifying death on young flyers.
An example of the sad failure of some raids was a February 1943 mission against the ball-bearing factories of Schweinfurt in Bavaria, which the Americans had already hit that day. On one of the badly damaged Lancasters of 467 Squadron was a crew of Australian cinematographers documenting the mission. Back at their bases, the squadrons claimed the raids successful but they had in fact bombed two villages eight kilometres away from Schweinfurt. The following night there was a far more celebrated attack on Augsburg, where a company named MAN, the world’s largest manufacturer of marine diesel engines, was devastated. Sixty per cent of the town was destroyed by two waves of bombers, an Australian Halifax squadron in the second wave decanting their bombs straight into the fires already blazing.
The 795-bomber raid on Nuremberg on 30 March 1944 was a bloody night for bomber crews. The bombers flew indirect, dog-leg routes, one wave going by way of Frankfurt, the other by way of Bonn. The weather reconnaissance reported a lack of cloud on the way there but the mission went ahead, and in brilliant moonlight the bombers were intercepted by German night fighters long before they had reached either of these turning points. Ninety-five aircraft were shot down. Four Australian squadrons were involved and twenty of their aircraft were ‘lost’, a term covering a multitude of horrors. Amongst those killed was the veteran squadron leader Eric Utz, who was nearly at the end of his second tour of duty. Totally new crews commanded by flight sergeants C.H. Hargreaves and P.R. Anderson were also shot down that night. Flight Lieutenant M.F. Smith, a 467 Squadron pilot, formerly a Queensland farmer, reported the sighting of thirty burning aircraft around him as he flew between Aachen and Nuremberg. This was not to be his own last night, however; an aircraft accident would kill him in June. By now, British factories found it hard to replace the loss of aircraft, but eager young crews kept arriving by way of the Empire Air Training Scheme and from training organisations in Britain.
And so it went. In the lead-up to the Normandy landings in June 1944, 460 Squadron lost three crews during the Friedrichshafen raid on the night of 27 April. Flight Lieutenant R.G. Peter, an Australian serving with 35 Squadron RAF, was the captain of a Pathfinder Halifax that was attacked by a German night fighter. With the rear of Peter’s Halifax alight and his plane spinning in night air, two crew members managed to bail out. But two gunners had suffered severe burns and fire had destroyed their parachutes, and the wireless operator had lost his through an escape hatch. Peter managed to land the Halifax on Lake Constance on the Swiss–German border, and paddled the aircraft’s dinghy, with his injured gunners and wireless operator, southwards and in darkness (except for the flames of Friedrichshafen to the north), across the lake to Switzerland. Again, as there had been in 1941 during the Blitz, there were spectacular escapes but far more death and injury and capture. The private agonies within a stricken bomber, however, are impossible to convey. Flight Sergeant Rawdon Middleton was flying for 149 Squadron when it attacked Turin in northern Italy. A shell splinter lodged in the right side of his face, destroying his right eye and exposing the bones over his other eye. It is likely he was also wounded in the body and legs. He struggled to control his damaged aircraft as it flew across the Alps and Occupied France to England. Off the English coast Middleton ordered the surviving crew members to bail out. He flew his bomber parallel to the coast to enable five of them to escape. Two who stayed behind to help Middleton jumped too late and were drowned. Middleton’s body was washed up at Shakespeare Beach at Dover. The honours that followed were public and of consolation to his family, and placed a skin of martial piety over the intimate terror of that barely controlled plane, full of frantic and valiant youths.
During March and April 1944, the Australian squadrons’ campaign was to destroy the French transport system. On the night of 3 May, three Australian squadrons contributed 10 per cent of the heavy bombers that raided the tank depot at Mailly-le-Camp in north-central France. To ensure the bombing was accurate, the force was despatched on a bright moonlit night, and the Luftwaffe were able to destroy forty-two bombers, seven of which were Australian. On the night of 10 May, six crews from 463 and 467 squadrons were shot down, and on 2 June, 466 Squadron lost two crews to night fighters. Thus the attrition continued.
During the night before the D-Day landing, Australian heavy bombers combined with other Bomber Command units to attack the shore
batteries along the Normandy coast. Wing Commander Rollo Kingsford-Smith led twenty-eight Lancaster bombers from the two Australian squadrons to bomb the great gun emplacements at Maisy behind Pointe du Hoc, in the heights above Omaha Beach, but though the bomber crew felt they had neutralised the site, because of poor visibility and the density of the concrete casements, the battery there was not silenced and would cause much mayhem against the land troops the next day. Australian squadrons would fly in support of the Normandy landings, the only Australians to see anything of that epochal day.
Gunners aboard bombers were at enhanced risk, and a horrifying novel on the subject by John Bede Cusack, a gunner, is entitled They Hosed Them Out. Bomber Harris estimated the chance of bomber crews achieving a full tour at one in three. But for the tail gunners, mid-upper gunners and flight engineers, the odds were steeper still. Worst of all was the chance a rear turret would be sheared off by falling bombers and fighters.
A boy from Leichhardt, New South Wales, named Max Martin had been learning to fly Wirraways at Uranquinty in early 1943 when he got an infected carbuncle on one buttock. Due to the surgery and treatment needed, he missed graduating and was told he could line up to try again, or else become an air gunner and go more or less straight into the conflict. In the age-old fear of young men that they will miss the action, he chose to become a gunner. He was nineteen, and the great-grandson of immigrants and two Irish convicts. In training off Evans Head in New South Wales, he blew a few drogues (towed targets) out of the sky. In May 1943 he and others set out to join the conflict in the sky above Europe by way of the Empire Air Training Scheme in Canada.
On eventual arrival in England, Martin was crewed up with a pilot, Flight Sergeant Thomas, who came from Gippsland. From Lichfield in the Midlands the crew was involved in many flying exercises as they impatiently waited to join the mayhem. They became familiar with England from the air. There was further training at Marston Moor and at Leconfield in Yorkshire. By now members of 466 Squadron wanted to climb into Europe’s murderous air, to plummet through night in the flimsy tubes of obsolescent Blenheim, Hudson or Halifax bombers and later, if they lived, to fly in Lancasters, a somewhat better version of the winged tube.
Flight Sergeant Thomas and his crew, including Martin, flew their first operations in the spring of 1944 from Driffield against the gun emplacements and marshalling yards in France, all in preparation for the coming Normandy invasion. Operations on marshalling yards at places like Boulogne were regularly undertaken. On the third operation the crew beat off an attack by Junkers 88s, which could operate as both bombers and fighters. Not all crews came out of these encounters so well, and it would not have been statistically remarkable had they been brought down. In his log book Martin noted the bomb load and the flying time. For a raid on Boulogne the bomber could carry 18,000 pounds (over 8000 kilograms) of bombs. But for a much longer—more than eight-hour—raid on Berlin on 3 June, into a zone of very heavy flak, the bomb load was adjusted to 12,000 pounds (5400 kilograms). Their notes in their log book were brief—it was a matter of pride with Bomber Command that notes were laconic, and in the ninety missions Martin would fly, he would never mention what mental state damage to the bomber left him in.
On the night the invasion fleet made its way towards Normandy, 466 squadron attacked the huge guns at Maisy. Flight Sergeant Martin had a magnificent view of the dark ships crowding out the Channel and awaiting zero hour.
Within a week of the landing, Hitler’s unexpected weapons, a number of V1 rockets, were fired at London. They had an uncanny power to unnerve the British populace, since once their engine cut out it was a matter of good or bad luck for the people on the ground as to where they fell. Later the even more sophisticated V2 rockets were sent over from sites in northern France and Belgium. For 466 and other squadrons there was now a succession of raids against rocket depots. Just as at Maisy, a gulf often existed between what bomber crews reported at debriefings after return to their bases and what the reality continued to be on the ground. An operation against the French city of Caen, which was reduced to ruins, favoured resistance by the German army and made the city’s capture by the Allies harder. Bomber crews were told that the French had all fled the city, but two thousand French civilians would die in the Caen bombings.
The Halifax bomber in which Martin flew was heavily damaged over one of the rocket launch sites, but the speed at which planes could be repaired and sent up again was dazzling, and the night after the damage, at 7.40 in the evening, missions against Caen resumed. So the perilous operations continued according to the later-much-questioned philosophy of Bomber Command. Operations on Stuttgart, operations on oil refineries, operations once more against sites the French underground and the Allies wanted obliterated in France.
In mid-August 1944, one of Hitler’s as-yet-few jet fighters moved in to attack the now Pilot Officer Thomas’s plane and swept by Martin in the rear turret. In further operations in other squadrons, Martin recorded operations against Chemnitz, which kept them in the air for seven and a half hours, against Pforzheim (six and a half), and against the Politz oil refineries near Stettin (eight hours, ten minutes), while the raid on Dresden towards the war’s end would keep his aircraft in the air for eight hours and twenty minutes. In between operations the young crews visited pubs, and it was known that oxygen—which they had to take once they got to 10,000 feet (3048 metres)—was an excellent cure for hangovers.
By 24 August, Martin was able to send his mother in Leichhardt a telegram announcing he had completed his first tour of duty. By now he had moved with his pilot to 462 Squadron and was commissioned a pilot officer. His first award, a Distinguished Flying Cross, was handed him, and his parents got the telegram from the Air Ministry announcing the fact. Fearing, however, that it contained other, less positive news, they took some hours of reflection and foreboding before they opened it.
At the end of this tour of service, an elite Lancaster bomber group beckoned—a Pathfinder squadron of RAF bombers, first into the bombing area, and last out. Now Martin flew in the rear turret of a Lancaster belonging to 35 Squadron, based at Graveley in Cambridgeshire. The weather was often dismal and it could be arctic in the gun turret, and the better the visibility over the target, the more intense the resistance. He signed on for an almost unprecedented third tour. The most intensely rewarding raid of Martin’s career was the operation on Dresden in February 1945. His plane flying in low to the target, he felt the unprecedented heat from the building firestorm of the city penetrating the perspex and the gun slits. Years later he said that he knew something horrifying was happening down there. His last operation before the end of the third tour was against Mannheim.
By the age of twenty-one, Martin was a pilot officer with a Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar (the equivalent of winning it twice), the Distinguished Service Order and Bar, and memories that would have destroyed other men. He would say later that he never wanted to get close to the mid-upper gunner, since their casualty rate was high and since, if anything happened to the plane, he might have to encounter their corpse if he needed to get his parachute. If he had to bail out he needed to open the doors behind him that led into the interior of the plane, grab his chute, put it on, rotate the turret ninety degrees so that its doors faced open sky, and so release them and fall out into darkness.
There were other perils that were systemic: the oxygen supply to the tail gunners often failed, and they sometimes suffered burns from their electrically heated clothing. Any fire starting in the front of the plane was driven down the fuselage towards the gunner by Venturi effect. There were 2000 gallons (9000 litres) of fuel, miles of hydraulic oil pipelines for controls, flaps and turrets, and eight to ten tons of bombs between the rear gunner and the front of his plane.
German airpower would diminish so drastically during 1944 that 460 and 464 squadrons were selected to join ‘Tiger Force’, the strategic force to be deployed against Japan. The plan never came into operation, however, and as the war ende
d, planes of both these squadrons would take part in Operation Manna, after a winter of famine in Holland, dropping supplies and foodstuffs to Dutch civilians in The Hague, Rotterdam and Leiden. Transport pilots performed the same duty—in fact, 14 per cent of the Dakotas and Stirling transports were being flown by Australians.
Two Australian squadrons of two-man Mosquitoes operated over Europe. From June 1944, one of these squadrons was used exclusively to counter the incursion of the V1 rockets over southern England. The radar sites along the south-east coast of England were capable of detecting the incoming missiles at a range of 80 kilometres, which gave the intercepting fighters a six-minute window in which to do their work. Once a sighting was made, the Mosquito would dive on the rocket and fire at it at a range of 200 to 300 metres.
The Germans took to launching the rockets from Heinkel bombers, and the Australian Mosquitoes moved offshore to counter this. One of the Australian Mosquito squadrons was also, with British and New Zealand squadrons, assigned the task of breaching the prison wall and destroying the guards’ accommodation and part of the prison in the famous raid on Amiens Prison in northern France in February 1944, designed supposedly to allow 180 members of the French Resistance to escape, but sadly killing a number of them. On the way in, the group flew over the coast at fifteen metres and then picked up the poplar-lined Albert–Amiens Road so familiar to World War I Diggers.
An immensely popular Australian wing commander, Robert Iredale, a former Melbourne sales representative, was leading 464 Squadron that day and was shot down by a fighter, but managed to reach Allied lines, and survived the war. Squadron Leader A.J. McRitchie was also shot down that day, and was captured suffering from a paralysed right arm and temporary blindness. On 30 October 1944, an extraordinary mission was flown to attack German headquarters located in three of the colleges of Aarhus University in Denmark, which housed the personnel and records of the Gestapo. The twenty-six Mosquitoes were equipped not only with bombs but also with incendiaries, to ensure the Gestapo records would burn as a result of the attack. The low-level bombing was said to have been so precise that pilots saw missiles entering through the doors and windows of the building. But the ambiguity of such operations showed when a Mosquito hit a light tower and crashed into the Jeanne d’Arc School in Copenhagen, killing eighty-six children.
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam Page 43
