Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  A 180 Squadron B-25 in France, showing the wear of battle, late 1944. George Smith flew a full tour of operations in one of these, all at low level. (Picture courtesy of George Smith)

  CLIFF SULLIVAN

  Role: Navigator

  Aircraft: Bristol Beaufort, Bristol Beaufighter

  Posting: 39 Squadron, 47 Squadron, RAF

  You could be called out at any time to attack ships or a convoy. And you had the shakes too.

  ‘What happened there?’ asks Cliff, waving towards the obvious evidence of my injury. He listens patiently as I explain then lets me in on what’s been happening in his world lately, medically speaking. ‘Yes,’ he says, casually glancing at his own foot as we settle in. ‘Been in hospital and rehab for the last ten months. Blister between the toe got infected, which poisoned the foot, then the entire leg. They were wanting to cut the whole thing off at one stage. What else? Oh yes, then a stroke, then a heart attack under the knife – I was clinically dead for eleven minutes – oh, and two months ago I had a seizure. On the mend now, though. Cup of tea?’ and springs up from his recliner to make me one.

  This obvious robustness, as well as his utter lucidity, belies his tale of woe and eases my concern for his immediate mortality. Not bad, I think, for a man enjoying his ninth decade of life. Obviously he was cut from the same cloth as his father, decorated in the First World War.

  ‘He was gassed in France, received the Military Medal and was Mentioned in Despatches. Lived to eighty-six,’ he tells me.

  Cliff has now well exceeded his father’s longevity, but on several occasions as a navigator in Beaufighters in the Mediterranean, he nearly didn’t make it out of his twenties.

  ‘I actually joined the army first,’ he tells me. ‘The old man had a motorbike and I thought I’d be a despatch rider. Then after a while I thought that was a bit stupid so I put my name down for the air-force reserve.’

  The night-school courses he took, getting to grips with Morse code and trigonometry while waiting to be called up, eventually gained Cliff entry into a very special group of airmen, the astonishingly multi-dimensional second crew member of the magnificent Bristol Beaufighter heavy fighter.

  Really a fighter-bomber, the Beaufighter was a hit right from the get-go, its robust twin-engine configuration and quiet sleeve-valve Hercules engines seeing it deployed all over the place: stalking German bombers over the night skies of Britain, tank-busting in the desert, torpedo-bombing in the Mediterranean, harassing Japanese shipping in the Pacific. There was hardly anything the Beaufighter couldn’t do. The engineers at Bristol stuffed it full of all sorts of weird and wonderful weapons and equipment – radar, electronic counter-measures, rockets, bombs, cannons, depth charges and, in Cliff’s case, torpedoes. It had more than a dozen marks and variants and was even built under licence in Australia at a time when, just a couple of years previously, we’d barely been making bicycles.

  And yet, the Beaufighter was meant to be only a stopgap, something for Britain’s Air Ministry to fight with until the glamorous and highly secret Westland Whirlwind fighter came on-line. In desperation for something, anything, to throw at the Germans during the Blitz, the Beaufighter was cobbled together out of bits and pieces from its far more ordinary stablemate, the Bristol Beaufort medium bomber. Grabbing a couple of incomplete Beaufort airframes off the production line, they bolted on a new fuselage, found some better engines, test-flew it, and presto, the Beaufighter was up and fighting in record time, just over a year from the flight of its first prototype in 1939. They didn’t even give it a proper name, simply taking the first part of the Beaufort’s moniker and sticking ‘fighter’ on the end of it. It was the Japanese who supposedly gave the Beaufighter its famous ‘Whispering Death’ epithet, on account of its quiet sleeve-valve engines, although the title was probably made up by imaginative British journalists; regardless, the name stuck and has become part of the Beaufighter folklore. This remarkable aircraft was still operating in the 1960s, far outliving both the machine that was supposed to replace it, the Whirlwind, which turned out to be a dud and was abandoned on account of its overly fussy Peregrine engines (which Rolls-Royce just couldn’t get right), and its mother, the Beaufort, which had plodded on, never exceeding average, and completely outclassed by war’s end.

  But being the genuine fighter-bomber hybrid it was, the Beaufighter had particular requirements when it came to its crew. Having to perform multiple roles, it probably could have done with a dedicated navigator, air gunner and wireless operator, as in a conventional aircraft of its size, but in the Beaufighter’s sleek configuration, there just wasn’t the room. That meant the second crewman had to do everything the pilot couldn’t. In fact, Beaufighter navigators / wireless operators / gunners were probably the most highly trained, multi-skilled aircrew in the British and Commonwealth air forces, and were usually not permitted to fly any other aircraft type, not even when a Beaufighter squadron was re-equipped with another aircraft type. Hence, people like Cliff were pretty special. Not that he had any idea of this when, after a six-month wait, he was finally called up into the RAAF to start his training, in December 1940.

  Unusually for most young men eager to take to the air at the time, Cliff sensed early that the role of pilot was not one suited to his quiet and thoughtful temperament, and so nominated instead to be a navigator, a role described by just about anyone who flew at this time as the true ‘brains’ of any operational aircraft. Although the role was one requiring mastery of trigonometry, calculation and map-reading, all under extraordinary pressure, with the lives of others depending on your accuracy, Cliff is characteristically modest about what it all entailed. ‘Just using instruments to plot a course to fly and telling the pilot what to do. It’s not hard once you learn it,’ he says.

  Cliff’s nine months’ training was nothing if not extensive, involving initial training at Somers in Victoria, then a move to New South Wales for three months of navigation at Cootamundra, a stint in air gunnery at Evans Head and a crash course in how to find your way home using nothing but the stars and a sextant at No. 1 Astro-navigation School at Parkes. Finally, with a hundred or so other young men in blue uniform, and sporting a half-wing brevet on his tunic, Cliff boarded the very fast American liner Mariposa in Sydney just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor.

  Via America and Canada, and after an Atlantic crossing in the middle of a storm with snow, ice and 60-foot waves, Cliff arrived in the United Kingdom in mid-winter 1942 to begin training, not on the Beaufighter yet, but its sturdy and less glamorous stablemate, the Bristol Beaufort. ‘It wasn’t good,’ he tells me. ‘We lost so many guys due to bad weather and accidents. Learning to fly in outback New South Wales was ideal compared to what it was like in England. Sometimes aircraft would head out on a training flight and simply disappear.’ He and his crew survived, however, and, remarkably, were given a choice in joining either Coastal or Bomber Commands. In the end, they would serve with neither. Besides, all Cliff wanted to do was get back home.

  ‘It was a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, and I thought knowing how to attack ships would give us a better chance of being sent back to Australia, which is where we felt we should be with the Japanese in the war.’ The RAF agreed wholeheartedly, and sent Cliff and his crew to Scotland to learn the fine art of dropping a torpedo from a plane. Expecting to be sent home soon to fight the Japs in the tropical islands north of Australia, Cliff instead received his papers to travel forthwith to the deserts of the Middle East.

  In a stripped-down Beaufort, Cliff made the highly risky seven-hour flight – way beyond the aircraft’s normal endurance – to Gibraltar. ‘The Germans were onto what was happening and sent out patrols. Some just never made it, including two Beaufighters. They just never arrived.’ Then he made another long flight at roof-height to Malta, avoiding the German and Italian radar stations which dotted the North African coast, for an overnight stop en route to Cairo.

  ‘Malta was under siege day and night at this time. It was considered
so dangerous that we had to spend the night in a cave. A bomb dropped just outside the entrance in the middle of the night. It frightened the daylights out of me,’ Cliff remembers. The next morning they discovered the huts they were to have stayed in had been blown to pieces by German bombs. ‘If we’d been in them, we’d have been killed,’ he says. After this sobering introduction to war, and a dawn stint holding brooms to clear the runway of pieces of anti-aircraft shells in order for them to take off without destroying their own tyres, they headed for Cairo to join No. 39 Squadron, RAF.

  Having been based in the Far East, then the Middle East since before the war, 39 was close to its nadir at the time Cliff and his crew joined them in early 1942, suffering terrible losses in attacking German and Italian shipping in the fast-moving Mediterranean campaign. But in a stroke of what can only be called luck, Cliff came down with a bad bout of appendicitis soon after beginning operations, laying him up in a Cairo hospital for six weeks. ‘During that time,’ he says, ‘half the guys I knew were sent to operate from Malta and killed.’

  Attacking a ship from an aeroplane, he points out, was a particularly dangerous occupation. ‘It might sound easy, but usually they’re in convoy, and escorted by destroyers, or even cruisers. And that’s what you have to fly through to get at the ship you’re trying to attack. We had no fighter escort at this stage, none at all,’ he says. The pilot was expected to survey the target ship from around a thousand yards, approach at low level, then come up from wave-top height to a very visible three or four hundred feet above the water, before throttling back and carefully lining up the ship, giving the defending gunners a nice, fat, slow-moving target travelling towards them in a very convenient straight line, beautifully silhouetted against the open sea and sky. The bravery required defies comprehension.

  ‘That’s what we did,’ says Cliff. ‘Here, take a look,’ and he reaches beside his chair for a large, old-fashioned green photo album, worn but still in good condition. Opening it, he looks intently at the images on the page and, for a moment, falls silent. ‘Yes . . .’ he resumes eventually. ‘This is the end of a 6000-ton Italian ship.’ He turns the album around, revealing a series of amazing black-and-white photographs, taken from the air, showing a huge column of black and oily smoke billowing from a ship on a calm sea. ‘We hit it near the stern, and one of the other pilots hit it in the middle.’

  I take the album from him and turn the pages in amazement. Actual flight combat photographs from the Second World War are incredibly rare, as airmen were usually not permitted cameras, but for a time, Cliff bagged the role of official station photographer and these souvenirs were apparently perks of the job. Watching him, I sense he has not looked at them for some time, years perhaps, and the memories inside his head seem to stir. ‘Yes,’ he says quietly, looking at the burning vessel on the bloody wartime sea, ‘we did our job that day.’

  His first attack using torpedoes, in July 1942, was a memorable one. ‘We’d been told there was an Italian supply ship tied up near Mersa Matruh. Five of us went out. We found it easily enough and made our attack dropping our torpedoes successfully, but when we peeled away and waited for the explosions, nothing happened.’ As he explains it, their weapons had been set to run at a particular depth, impacting as low as possible on the ship’s hull to maximise the damage. What had not been accounted for, however, was the fact that the ship had already unloaded and so was now riding higher in the water. The bewildered Beaufort crews looked down as the torpedoes passed harmlessly under the hull. ‘No explosions, no nothing,’ says Cliff. Anticlimax, however, soon gave way to something far more dramatic. ‘As soon as we turned around and headed out to sea, we were attacked by nine fighters. Nine Italian Macchi fighters.’

  At a mere 20 feet above the sea, Cliff watched the formation of extremely nimble single-engine Macchi 202s from Mussolini’s Desert Air Force swarm above them, two of them latching on to Cliff’s aircraft, but hanging back menacingly. ‘I remember sitting next to the pilot, Abe Hanway, looking back out the Perspex window and seeing these two aircraft just sitting there above us and behind, waiting to pounce . . . which they did.’

  Down they came on the Beaufort’s stern. ‘Our turret gunner and side gunner were firing at them, all the while telling the pilot what was happening.’ All Cliff and Abe could see out the front were neat rows of splashes as the Macchis’ four machine guns – two each in the wings and nose – did their best to send the Beaufort into the sea. ‘I could see two lines churning up the water, either side of the aircraft right in front of us. First hitting the water on one side of the aircraft, and then the other.’ It was the aircraft’s two gunners who saved the day that afternoon, watching carefully for the puffs of smoke emerging from the Italian fighters’ guns, as they took turns to open fire. ‘Left, left’ or ‘right’ or ‘steady’ were the instructions, delivered coolly, allowing Abe to yaw the aircraft, just a fraction of a second ahead of the deadly crash of bullets.

  Although Abe’s frantic manoeuvring undoubtedly saved their lives, it was an incredibly risky strategy as a drop in speed could have brushed off what little height they had, and sent them crashing into the surface of the Mediterranean as if it were concrete.

  It became a waiting game, as the Italian pilots, frustrated at being denied their kill, were also running out of petrol. ‘The longer we headed out to sea, the shorter the Italian pilots had to follow us,’ says Cliff. Eventually, they broke off the attack and turned back towards the Libyan coast. ‘We continued out to sea for another ten minutes and then went home.’ It was now, when things had calmed down somewhat, that Abe remarked, ‘What’s wrong with your arm?’

  Cliff, for the first time, noticed blood streaming down it. ‘A bit of shrapnel had come up from the ship, we think, smashed through the front window and a bit of Perspex or metal became lodged in my right shoulder. I didn’t even know it had happened.’ Back at the aerodrome, the squadron doctor was philosophical. ‘Look, there’s no point in trying to dig it out, it’ll just make things worse. May as well just leave it in there.’ Cliff’s logbook tells me he was flying again the very next day.

  ‘And it’s still in there,’ he tells me. ‘About the size of my fingernail. It shows up on X-rays. It’s never given me any trouble. Well, once, soon after, I was swimming in the Suez Canal, and my whole arm seized up. But after a while it loosened up and it’s been all right ever since.’

  All five of the squadron’s Beauforts returned that day, but Cliff is under no illusions as to how lucky they were. It was the perfectly timed information of their air gunners that got them back, but the gunners also paid the biggest price. ‘As we taxied past another aircraft which had just landed, I could see one of their gunners, dead, hanging out over his turret which was all smashed to bits, and the man’s brains dripping out of his head. They really should have got us too. There were two of them, faster and better armed. Luck played a big part in all this.’

  I try to glean some of the atmosphere inside the aircraft during those extraordinary few minutes out over the sea under the gun sights of the two Italian fighter pilots. Surely it was terrifying? I try to put myself in such a situation, and cannot imagine being able to function. But, as is so often the case when talking to men such as Cliff about the white-hot edge of battle, his response is simply one of having a role to play, and an almost bland acceptance of the consequences. ‘No, you don’t get scared,’ he says. ‘It’s all part of the job. You just do what you have to do, which in my case at that moment was nothing but wait to see what was going to happen.’

  After a few months, 39 Squadron was split in two, one half being sent to suffer badly in Malta, the other, including Cliff, to become part of another veteran RAF unit of the desert, No. 47 Squadron, also flying the reliable but unremarkable Beaufort. From their various bases along the northern coast of Africa and eventually Tunis, 47’s role, from late 1942 to ’43, was to do battle with the vessels of the Italian navy supplying Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Cliff was also to fly with a new
, all-Australian crew piloted by Ron Whitington, with whom Cliff spent the remainder of his tour and whom he still speaks of glowingly.

  Life on the various desert airstrips of Cliff’s squadron, which followed the flow of the campaign, was frugal to say the least: tents, poor food and mile after countless mile of the great North African desert expanse. The local population, sparse in this part of the world at the best of times, made only fleeting appearances. Cliff, unusually for the time, was a non-smoker, and would sometimes swap his small issued packet of Capstans for examples of the local food, usually a solitary egg from a visiting Arab! ‘In our tents, we’d dig out about two feet of sand for the floor. That was the only way we could stand up in them. There were no towns nearby and we were hundreds of miles from places like Cairo. But the beaches were beautiful around Misurata, which is where we were based.’

  I wonder out loud at this odd life of flying and fighting in such an alien place, and marvel at the almost universally neglected feats of the squadron mechanics, whose job it was to keep these immensely complicated machines flying. How was it done, day after day? What about spare parts? How was battle damage repaired?

  ‘I wonder about that too,’ says Cliff. ‘Although we did have a lot of engine failures. Not us, but we were lucky. There were a lot of them.’

  For the latter half of Cliff’s operational tour of 200 flying hours, or thirty sorties, he was finally re-equipped with a comparative thoroughbred, the Beaufighter. (‘The Beauforts were all sold off to the Turks,’ he remembers with a note of curiosity.) This powerful aeroplane, with a crew of just two, impressed Cliff from the beginning. ‘We carried four cannons and two machine guns in the nose. They’d blow anything to bits. We used to go out in tens – five with torpedoes, five as escort. The escorts would go in first and draw the ship’s fire to give the Beaufighters carrying the torpedoes a bit of respite from the anti-aircraft fire. That’s the way we operated.’