Heroes of the Skies

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Heroes of the Skies Page 5

by Michael Veitch


  ‘Limping along’ on three engines well behind the main force, Cy arrived over the target long after the raid had finished. ‘It was surprise, surprise,’ he says, as his lone Lancaster suddenly appeared over the target, dropped its payload right on the aiming point then turned around and headed home without a shot being fired in protest.

  Returning to Waddington so late, however, meant that the aerodrome’s ‘Drem’ lights to assist landing had been turned off and basically everyone had gone to bed. Cy and his crew were already posted as ‘missing’. ‘Everybody was crook at us for keeping them up late,’ he says. But rather than being congratulated for ‘pressing on regardless’, Cy, extraordinarily, received a severe reprimand from the 463 group captain. Not merely had he ‘irresponsibly’ endangered his aircraft and crew by deciding to continue on alone, but he had also committed the unspeakable crime of inconveniencing the kitchen!

  ‘The group captain didn’t hold back on his language when dressing me down,’ remembers Cy. For doing exactly the same thing, he reminds me, other pilots had been awarded an immediate Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for bravery. Such were the vagaries of wartime.

  Only gradually, Cy tells me, did he and his crew begin to know and trust other, each slowly breaking away from the bonds formed during the long training with their fellow navigators, wireless operators and gunners to meld instead with each other. ‘You live and train with these fellas for months and in some cases a couple of years,’ he says, ‘whereas when you join a crew, you’re among a group of strangers. It wasn’t till you were well into your tour, after copious visits to the pub and talking together, that you’d finally find some rapport and become good friends.’

  The daylight operations of Cy’s tour gave him a rare chance to witness firsthand the terrible weapon into which Bomber Command had evolved by late 1944, with enormous concentrations of aircraft being sent into France and Germany on an almost daily basis. ‘We used to rendezvous over Reading. Don’t ask me why, but it was always Reading,’ he says. ‘Can you imagine a thousand bombers – Stirlings, Lancasters, Halifaxes, and the American Fortresses – formating en masse and turning as one towards the target? And above us was an umbrella of a thousand fighters as well. It was an incredible sight.’

  How these massive groups of aircraft came together still astounds Cy. The B-17s of the American 8th Air Force flew in strict, staggered ‘box’ formations, but Bomber Command’s night flying had seen their pilots evolve as individuals, foregoing formation flying to find their way to the target and back again, almost always alone. But in these daylight trips, skills needed to be improvised. ‘We used to fly in “gaggles”, which really only means that we had to have fifty feet of air between us and the next aircraft,’ he says. All that separated this untold mass of aircraft was fifty feet vertically and fifty feet horizontally. ‘Vertically, you could use your instruments, but sideways, you just had to look out. It was dicey. Very dicey.’

  Engine troubles seem to have been a regular feature of Cy’s tour, and on one occasion he lost not one but two of his Rolls-Royce Merlins in a short space of time. The target this day was the V-weapon storage site at Trossy St Maximin in France, but Cy’s troubles began at the rendezvous point over Reading when the exhaust on his port inner engine overheated and suddenly ‘blew apart’. Instructing his engineer to feather the motor, he decided to carry on to the target on three engines, as the bomb load for that trip was relatively light. ‘The next minute the starboard outer did the same thing,’ he says. ‘We were then no longer happily airborne.’

  Powering up as much as he could, his bomb load suddenly didn’t seem light at all, and the aircraft began to gradually fall from the sky. The trip, needless to say, was now aborted, but not before Cy dumped the bombs, which they could only do having reached the safety of the English Channel. ‘Luckily, Reading wasn’t too far from the sea so we headed out and ditched the bombs, then turned for home.’ Flying as low as fifty feet off the ground, Cy made his way back to Lincolnshire. Being on a plateau, Waddington’s runway was virtually level with the top of the twin spires of Lincoln’s thirteenth-century cathedral, and Cy needed to take care to avoid them as he approached.

  Lining up on the runway, Cy was once again presented with the sight of ambulances and other emergency vehicles waiting in anticipation of his fiery demise. ‘It didn’t seem they thought much of my flying,’ he says, but he proved them wrong with a safe two-engine landing. A servicing issue, it was later discovered, was the cause of the engine failures, a not uncommon consequence of the often-rushed maintenance of complex machines, which themselves pressed the margins of the technology of the day, in hurried wartime conditions.

  Cy came close to finishing his tour of thirty operations, but in high drama, his twenty-eighth proved to be his last, and so nearly the last of him. The target was Walcheren Island on the seaward side of the large and complex Scheldt estuary in the south of Holland, where, in October 1944, Montgomery’s 21st Army Group were stalled on the southern bank of the Scheldt River by five massive gun emplacements that the Germans had installed around the town of Vlissingen (Flushing), and which com­manded everything that moved on the southern bank and its approaches. The stand-off had already dragged on for weeks when, in an atmosphere approaching desperation, Bomber Command was requested to go in and act as flying artillery to take the German positions out. ‘Our squadron got the job,’ says Cy.

  The Battle of the Scheldt was a drawn-out, controversial and bloody affair for which the 1st Canadian Army – and large numbers of Dutch civilians – were to pay a high price. The Germans had reinforced the entire area and were resisting fiercely despite a raid two weeks earlier, which had attempted to flood them out by breaching one side of the island’s sea walls. For Cy, however, the greater enemy for the moment was the weather. Five times he and his crew had been ready to go, and five times they were scrubbed at the last minute. ‘Finally, they got desperate and decided to send us anyway,’ he remembers. He took off on 23 October in a daylight attack and was told to expect heavy cloud cover over the target. The crews were instructed to bomb only if they could break base cloud at 4000 feet, otherwise they were once again to abort.

  Over a hundred 5 Group Lancasters were sent in, with 463 Squadron led that day by Cy’s friend Flying Officer John Dack DFC from Melbourne, who’d been given the honour because it was the last operation of his tour. It was to be a short trip, just an hour each way, and they were scheduled to bomb at exactly 1600 hours on a bleak and overcast afternoon.

  ‘I was the second aircraft flying next to John,’ says Cy. ‘He broke cloud at 4000, and I did the same almost directly beside him.’ Suddenly, the whole vista of partially flooded Walcheren Island, together with their target of the gun emplacements, lay before them. ‘Of course, the moment we broke cloud, the dozens of quick-firing Bofors guns the Germans had all over the island opened up on us,’ he says. Instantly, continuous streams of orange tracer fire started coming towards them in glowing lines, ‘just like someone pointing a hosepipe’. It was all over quickly. John Dack’s Lancaster was hit first and began going down, then Cy felt the vibrations of violent thuds everywhere. His inner port and outer starboard motors were hit, as was the bomb bay, the doors of which were already open for the attack.

  ‘My engineer, Eric Leigh, was standing beside me,’ says Cy. ‘A shell hit him directly. It blew a hole in his gut. It went right through him.’ Cy’s Lancaster was now on fire in two engines as well as the bomb bay, and he gave the order to abandon the aircraft. Trimming it as best he could, he managed to keep it level enough for the two gunners to make it to the side door and jump, quickly followed by the wireless operator. The navigator, stepping over Eric, went past Cy ‘like a shot’, down the few steps to the nose compartment and out through the bomb aimer’s hatch, leaving only Cy and the mortally wounded Eric on board. ‘We were going down fast and I knew he had to get out. Eric kept saying, “leave me, leave me”, but I couldn’t.’

  Hauling Eric down the n
arrow passage to the bomb aimer’s hatch, all Cy could do was put the ring of Eric’s chest-mounted parachute in his hand and hope he still had the strength to pull it. ‘I couldn’t pull it for him because the chute would have filled the aircraft,’ he says. ‘The worst part of it was that I had to stuff him out with my boot. I immediately followed him, naturally.’ Cy reckons he was at about 900 feet, and it was his first ever jump.

  With no time to adopt the standard practice of counting to ten, Cy pulled the cord as he was leaving the aircraft and immediately felt a violent jerk, which for a ghastly second he believed to be his silk parachute catching on the aircraft’s tailplane. He was momentarily relieved to find that this was simply the unfamiliar sensation of an opening parachute, but the view below was alarming. ‘Right underneath me were these terrible metal anti-invasion spikes on the beach,’ he says. Grabbing, by luck, the correct shroud, he yanked it furiously and managed to manoeuvre himself to land on the beach. ‘Running and falling, running and falling’, he gathered up his cumbersome, flowing silk chute and staggered off the sand, ‘looking around desperately for somewhere to hide’. Then he noticed, not more than a hundred yards in front of him, one of the great concrete gun emplacements. He was struck by the sudden and appalling realisation ‘that there were about a hundred aircraft above me about to hit this very position’.

  Seeing a large culvert, he threw himself into it, doing his best to burrow into the concrete, then suddenly, as he says, ‘it started to rain bloody dirt’, as the bombs of his own squadron began to fall around him. Cowering, hands over ears, he felt the thump of high explosive, and even managed to reflect on the irony. Don’t tell me after all this, he thought, I’m going to be killed by my own bloody bombs!

  After it finally stopped, Cy waited about twenty minutes before he slowly backed out from the culvert and heard a voice behind him, deep and threatening, ‘Für Sie ist der Krieg beendet’ (‘For you the war is over’) and found a German soldier standing behind him pointing a rifle. It’s always intrigued me that this phrase, far from being a cliché, was in fact used time and again, and was, for Cy, the first realisation that he was now a prisoner of war. ‘And that was it,’ he says.

  Marched to a barn, Cy was reunited with the four of his crew who had also been lucky enough to survive the jump, although Snow O’Connell, the navigator, was missing. It was later learned that he had been hidden by a Dutch farmer and two weeks later, when the Canadians finally arrived, he was handed over, ‘missing out’, says Cy, ‘on a free eight months’ vacation in deepest Germany’.

  The body of 38-year-old Eric Leigh, Cy’s English flight engineer, was later fished from the river, his parachute still unopened, Cy suspecting – hoping – that he was dead before he hit the water.

  Having recently had the pleasure of inspecting the inside of a superb example of a Lancaster in the Bull Creek museum in Perth, I tell Cy how surprised I was by the small confines of the cockpit. The access forward of the pilot to the bomb aimer’s compartment and escape hatch in the nose, I particularly noted, was narrow and tiny. Difficult enough to squeeze yourself into, I suggest, but dragging the prone body of a dying man must have been a mammoth task.

  Cy is reflective. ‘Well, we were young and lithe and fit,’ he says, ‘and it’s amazing what you can do when you’re saving your life.’

  John Dacks, Cy’s leader on the raid, shot down seconds before him, also survived, and his story is in no way less remarkable. Bailing out with seconds to spare in much the same manner as Cy, Dacks had in the panic only managed to secure one of the two parachute clips of his harness, and when it opened, the uneven jolt was enough to knock him out, also breaking his two sets of false teeth! Coming down in the water, Dacks was supported only by his inflated ‘Mae West’ life jacket, but was several hundred yards off the beach and drifting out to sea. His plight happened to be witnessed by a German corporal on the shore who, remarkably, requested permission from an officer to take a rowboat out and rescue him.

  The officer was dismissive. ‘Leave him to drown,’ he snarled in reply. The soldier nevertheless persisted, once again seeking permission to row out and save the man’s life. ‘Oh, do what you like,’ said the officer, walking off in disgust. So John Dacks was hauled out of the sea by the kind hand of an enemy, to join Cy Borscht as a POW for the remainder of the war. Sadly, however, four of his crew perished in the crash.

  I ask Cy to reflect on what he was feeling at the time, prisoner of the enemy, having survived being shot down and witnessing the awful death of a crewman. Was he, I ask, in shock? Terrified? In despair?

  He thinks carefully before answering. ‘I don’t think we were capable of feeling shock,’ he says. ‘We’d already seen so much, and this was just another bloody incident. It’s hard to pinpoint your attitudes in war because nothing is normal. Nothing.’

  Held in a barn overnight, four of Cy’s crew and a handful of other downed airmen were the next day marched to the middle of the island and locked in the basement of a deserted school. Glynn Cooper, the surprisingly tall gunner who had approached Cy during crewing-up, had injured himself during his landing, and the others took turns in carrying him. ‘He’d landed on the roof of a house and slid into a rainwater barrel, spraining his ankle,’ says Cy. ‘Tom Lonergan and I were the only ones uninjured and had to take turns in carrying him on our backs. But he was so much taller than me, his hurt foot would catch the ground and he’d complain bitterly. So I had to try and hoist him up a bit higher.’

  So Cy’s new journey as a prisoner of Nazi Germany began. After a couple of days they were moved to another part of the island, Dordrecht, then by barge to the coast, eventually crossing into Germany at Gronau. They were moved by train to Dortmund where they were abused by civilians and, ironically, forced to take shelter from an RAF air raid. From here he proceeded to the formidable ‘Dulag’ interrogation centre near Frankfurt, through which virtually every captured Allied airman passed. It was here that as much information as possible was gleaned before the airmen were assigned to permanent POW camps. While nothing like what occurred in the concentration camps, it was anything but pleasant, particularly if you happened to be Jewish.

  Placed in solitary confinement in a windowless 4 by 6 foot cell, Cy was for the next four days ‘interviewed’ by ‘a good-looking Luftwaffe oberfeldwebel who spoke perfect English and who was, at first, utterly charming’. Cy was astonished by how much this man seemed already to know about the squadron – location, personnel, raids etc. – and to be simply seeking affirmation. When Cy refused to divulge anything but the standard ‘name, rank and number’, his mood quickly turned. ‘Then he played the Jew card with me,’ Cy says. ‘He’d walk around behind me and hit me on the back of the head, gently at first, but harder and harder as he made his point. “You know what we do with Jews here, don’t you? All I have to do is pick up the phone and the Gestapo will be here in a flash. Now, let’s start again, shall we?” It was a harrowing four days,’ he says.

  Cy believes he was probably saved merely by the influx of new prisoners, and was simply moved on after his allotted time, before the next batch arrived, expired. Initially sent to Stalag Luft III at Sagan in Silesia – the scene in March that year of the famous Great Escape – Cy was, with the rest of the camp, trained and marched west ahead of the Soviet advance in freezing conditions and with little food into the vast holding camp of Luckenwalde near Berlin. Shuffling through the gate in pouring rain after an 80-mile winter’s march, he suddenly heard his name being yelled by men hanging on the wire inside the camp. ‘Borschy! Borschy! Cy!’ they cried, waving. Peering up, he was greeted by the sight of his crew, from whom, as an officer, he’d been separated. ‘It was just delightful,’ says Cy. ‘Like coming home.’

  After more adventures that would fill many more chapters, Cy was handed over at war’s end – now by the Russians – to the Americans, taken to a Dutch airfield, packed into a Lancaster with thirty other men and flown back to England. He recalls asking the very young-loo
king pilot how many hours he had on Lancasters. ‘About ten’ was the unsettling reply.

  Many months later, Cy was, naturally, made a fuss of on his return to Brisbane, picking up life where he’d left it before the war, moving back into the same little house and taking up the study of architecture, eventually becoming a draftsman. The turning point of his life, he says, was meeting his wife, with whom he spent many blissful decades. Post-war, he tells me, ‘was a strange era. People weren’t interested in talking about the war then. People didn’t ask questions, didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to tell them. The war was almost a taboo subject, and that lasted a long time.’

  Nor does Cy particularly share the rush of enthusiasm of the contemporary ‘revival’ of military heritage, as expressed in towns and cities around times such as Anzac Day. ‘I’ve marched twice,’ he says, ‘five or six years ago and I didn’t like it. All these people yelling, “good on you” and “well done”. That doesn’t do anything for me at all. But I’m happy to talk about it now to people who are interested. After all, I’ve got no other bloody thing to talk about!’ I tell him I don’t believe that for a second.

  I press Cy a little more, trying to get a sense of his experiences as a POW and his being a witness to such gigantic moments in history. He quietly hands me a small, old bound volume. As I turn the pages, I am mesmerised. It was issued to all prisoners, Cy tells me, by the Swedish Red Cross – a blank journal to be filled in at leisure to help pass some of the endless hours of incarceration. Cy, who I realise is a highly gifted artist, turned his into an extraordinary visual record of life in captivity under the Germans. Sketches, maps, brilliantly cartoonish characterisations of his fellow prisoners – even some of the Germans – recipes of bizarre and hilarious imagination and poignant comic poetry, such as his thirteen-stanza illustrated ‘Sonnet to a Steak’. But most delightful of all, on page after hand-drawn page, is the long-running tale of a Lancaster bomber, brought to life as Cy’s own aircraft – JO-G NF977 (G for George):

 

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