But they could hit back, and did. Regular radio messages from ‘Z Force’ commandos operating inside Japanese-occupied territories informed them of much of the enemy’s movements. ‘One day they radioed that they’d seen a large number of Japanese fighters travelling down from the north. They didn’t know where they were going, but if we were quick enough, we’d catch them as they refuelled at their base at Hollandia, just inside Dutch New Guinea,’ Ed recalls. That night the Liberators went out, and up to two hundred Japanese aircraft were caught and destroyed on the ground.
On one occasion, Dottie’s Double became a fighter herself, with the cryptic entry ‘Shot down a Nick’ listed in May 1944. My ears prick up as Ed unwraps the story. ‘We were coming back from Halmahera,’ he says. ‘Just cruising along, and suddenly we realised we were coming up behind three or four Jap aircraft, which hadn’t seen us. We identified them as Nicks.’
Actual Japanese aircraft names were deemed too difficult to remember for Allied personnel, so each was given an English moniker, the Kawasaki Ki-45 twin-engine fighter being designated ‘Nick’. ‘We opened up the throttles to put on speed and snuck behind till one of them was about 200 yards in front and slightly above. Our top gunner and front gunner opened up on it, and shot it down. We don’t know which gunner got it exactly but we were credited with the kill just the same. It just didn’t see us, we think. We tried to catch some of the others but they got away.’
Attacking the former Dutch Braat engineering works in Surabaya, Ed discovered he was over the target just slightly too late. ‘Tremendous big engineering works it was,’ he says, ‘about the size of Holden, but we had ack-ack and bad weather so it was very difficult to see what you were aiming at.’ Ed spotted the large industrial complex on the bank of a river slightly too late. ‘We missed it, Joe,’ he said to his captain.
‘Right,’ came the cool but somewhat unbelievable response, ‘we’ll go round again.’
Ed was horrified. ‘Jesus! I thought to myself.’ Making a second run at a target was often shorthand for suicide. ‘By the time you reappeared in the sights of the anti-aircraft gunners, they’d usually found your range and height. They plastered us on the way round,’ Ed says, but somehow they dodged major damage.
They were even luckier on a nearly twelve-hour trip to Langgoer when a burst of 75-millimetre flak erupted right over them. ‘We knew we’d been hit. I said, “Joe, look out behind!”’
‘Don’t want to see it!’ said his captain. ‘We’re still flying aren’t we?’ Back at Fenton, the crew chief was agog. ‘Jeez, what did you do to it?’ he said, getting up on a ladder and actually walking through the hole in the fuselage. ‘Once again, amazingly, it didn’t hit any of the control cables,’ says Ed.
Many Australian airmen I have spoken to openly disparage their American allies, criticising almost everything about them – their supposed trigger-happiness, their arrogance, their lack of training and navigational skills, and even on occasion questioning their courage in battle. Ed, who actually flew with them, will have none of it. ‘Yes, I’ve heard all that,’ he says, ‘but it’s unfair. We flew seventeen-hour trips to all sorts of places and never lost an aircraft due to bad navigation,’ he says. Some he recalls having been lost over New Guinea, but that was due, he says, to faulty maps. ‘The maps we were given at Port Moresby told us that there was nothing over 12 000 feet on the way up to Nadzab and Lae. I said, “Joe, that’s not right. The mountains go up to 15 000 up there.” So we went up higher, but some of the others didn’t and we never saw them again. They’re probably still up there in the jungle somewhere.’
Nor were the Americans shy in a fight, says Ed. ‘The 380th lost 75 per cent of its battle order over the course of the war. I think they were as brave as anyone.’ He also reminds me of his captain Joe Cesario’s decision to go around for a second run at the target over Surabaya. Not exactly the actions of a shrinking violet.
Ed recalls the losses, the sudden disappearance of a face that had become familiar, but doesn’t dwell on it. ‘It really wasn’t very personal,’ he says. ‘If one didn’t come back, they sold anything that couldn’t go back to the States and that was it.’
He also resists the claims of arrogance. In fact, one of the five initial Australian pilots to be sent to the 380th, along with Ed, was returned by the Americans almost immediately, and he sympathises with them. ‘He was a very brash egotistical character. The Yanks didn’t like him and sent him back!’
After a nine-month tour with the 380th, Ed was sent to train other pilots coming through, completing the circle of his air-force career. His luck still held after the war, when he was accepted to keep flying, this time with airline TAA, chosen from the ocean of qualified ex–air force applicants that swamped the airlines at war’s end. He became a life-long friend of many of his crew, particularly his captain, Joe, having made many trips to the United States since the war. ‘The loveliest, friendliest people,’ as he describes them. ‘They always treated us so well.’
Of the many men I have spoken to who survived a combat tour, Ed Crabtree genuinely seems to be one of those not too adversely affected by the experience. And his tour was anything but a joyride. ‘I was scared stiff,’ he says towards the end of our conversation. ‘You couldn’t sleep the night before a mission, and then, in the air, for some reason you couldn’t use the toilet. The first thing that happened when you finally got back was you formed a queue for the toilet.’ And if anything went seriously wrong, there was no second chance. Unlike in Europe, bailing out over the featureless jungle was barely an option, even if evading the Japanese was possible. ‘At the height we were bombing,’ reflects Ed, still with that laugh, ‘seven or eight thousand feet, we didn’t really think much about using our parachutes.’
The anticlimactic return to the relative ordinariness of civilian life was aided, he says, by his five-year stint as a civil pilot. He claims never to have minded talking about his war, ‘It’s just that no-one back then was interested,’ he says.
Sometimes, it can all come down to attitude. No doubt it was his cheeriness, still evident today, which helped him through, both during and after, a quality which has sustained him all his life.
US B-24s head out in formation from Fenton to attack Japanese positions to Australia’s north. (Picture courtesy of Ed Crabtree)
Ed Crabtree, front left, poses with his American crew in front of ‘Dottie’s Double’ 38th Bomb Group, 530th Squadron, Fenton, 1944. (Picture courtesy of Ed Crabtree)
Flying from Fenton, south of Darwin, a US 530th Squadron B-24 attacks Japanese positions at Fak Fak, northwest New Guinea, 1944. A bomb explosion can clearly be seen in the water. (Picture courtesy of Ed Crabtree)
A remarkable reconnaissance shot of a Japanese anti-aircraft battery on Halmahera Island, west of New Guinea, 1944. (Picture courtesy of Ed Crabtree)
DAVID MORLAND
Role: Air gunner
Aircraft: Avro Lancaster
Posting: 467 Squadron, RAAF
All we could do was keep corkscrewing and hope to hell he misses.
I guess it was inevitable that I should eventually meet a former warrior of the air at an RSL club, in a subdued atmosphere of wood panelling and honour boards, medals and memorabilia of conflicts past. But I hadn’t quite banked on just how much today’s mega-RSLs have evolved from the quiet little suburban clubs I remember from my youth, especially in the place where everything seems larger than life anyway, Queensland. I anticipate a quiet afternoon in some cosy corner drinking a couple of schooners of the Sunshine State’s finest with former air gunner David Morland, but we are instead engaged in a running battle with noisy meat tray and raffle announcements, small children on the edge of heatstroke and red-cordial hysteria, and hordes of eager bingo players constantly moving us on like UN refugees, as game after game invades whichever nook of the Tewantin RSL we choose to secrete ourselves. Just as well the place is so gargantuan, as there is always another place to hide. Not that David seems to mind, and w
hy should he? After all, this big airy palace is his second home. And besides, the beer is cold and the steaks are big.
Hailing in fact from bayside Melbourne, David was at school kicking a footy with ten or so of his mates one afternoon when the principal put Prime Minister Menzies’ ‘melancholy duty’ speech over the school’s tannoy speakers, announcing the beginning of the Second World War. ‘We stood around and talked about it,’ David remembers. ‘We all thought it would be over by the time we turned eighteen. By the end of the war, there were only three of us left alive.’
At sixteen, David put himself into the Air Training Corps while working in the complaints department of a telephone exchange. ‘I devised quite an extensive code for people who complained at the slightest pretext,’ he remembers. ‘“PM” on the complaints card meant “perpetual moaner”. The mechanics found it very helpful.’
David didn’t get the chance to try out to be a pilot, but was happy enough to be put into the air gunner stream, firing at towed drogues from the back of a Fairey Battle at the air gunnery school at Port Pirie, South Australia, where his rating of ‘exceptional’ was achieved more by cunning than talent. ‘I’d just wait till the towing plane got a bit closer then I’d give it a bloody great burst,’ he says. ‘The pilot was yelling “open fire” in my headset but I’d just hang back a bit.’ The average number of hits the students achieved on the drogue was about four. David scored eleven.
‘But did they actually teach you how to shoot?’ I enquire.
‘The whole thing was a waste of time,’ he answers dismissively. ‘I couldn’t hit a bull in the backside with a bucket of wheat.’
As we’re speaking, David places a large folder on the table, bursting with letters, photographs, citations and, inside a clear plastic envelope, a superbly mounted row of medals, with the glistening silver cross and blue-and-white striped ribbon of the Distinguished Flying Medal (DFM) on the far left. I’ve never actually seen a DFM up close, and I give out an involuntary ‘ooh’ as I pick it up, making David chuckle a little. The DFM, awarded solely to non-commissioned officers, was handed out far less frequently than its officer-only equivalent, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and those humble sergeants or warrant officers who wore its striped blue ribbon on their tunics usually had to have done something pretty outstanding to have earned it. I’m slightly breathless to discover how David came by his.
In early 1944 David arrived at an Operational Training Unit at Lichfield in the English Midlands, where he made the conscious decision to do all in his power to become the very best gunner he could. ‘There were two things that mattered to me as a nineteen-year-old,’ he says. ‘Girls, and being thought of as an adult.’ The former, he assures me, were in no short supply in wartime Britain, but he decided that the respect of his peers and elders was a higher priority, and so set about earning it. ‘I suppose I looked at it as a continuation of my schooling,’ he says, ‘and if you wanted to be a good gunner, you had to study.’ While the other young trainee airmen, far from home and still with an air of the war being some kind of lark, spent their evenings at the pub pursuing the local ‘skirt’, David was in his hut poring over books of tables. ‘I learned about bullet drop, angles, what happens with a deflection shot of, say, 5 degrees at 230 miles an hour at 16 000 feet; I learned what happens when you’re in a corkscrew; what happens when you roll, etc.,’ he says. Then he adds after a pause, ‘Actually, I didn’t do too badly with the girls either.’
This maturity and determination extended even to time spent in a new type of training simulator, an ingenious-sounding device designed to replicate the experience of firing from a moving turret at night, with shaded Perspex and beams of light simulating attacks by approaching fighters, all contained within a specially constructed concrete dome. ‘The others didn’t like it and moaned about having to “go down to that bloody dome again”.’ Not so David, who happily volunteered to take their places. ‘One day I’d turn up as Smith, the next as Jones, and so on. We were only supposed to get about two hours a week on the thing. I was getting twelve.’
Eventually a flight lieutenant in charge got wise. ‘Who are you today, Morland?’ he said, confronting him.
‘Smith, sir,’ pleaded David, but the officer wasn’t buying it.
‘Listen, we know what you’re doing and it’s to stop now. These men need this training and you’re putting them in danger.’ It was the end of the ruse, but David’s keenness – for which he expected to be, though was not, punished – left him far better trained than most of his fellows. And later, in the night skies over Germany, he would need to be.
At the crew-up, where the pilots, gunners, wireless operators and navigators mingled as individuals before coalescing into six-man crews, David found himself among those who, like him, had hung back, watching, coolly assessing, politely deflecting approaches, but not committing. Eventually, they found they were the only ones left. Before they had even spoken a word to each other, an organising officer announced, ‘Right, you lot are to form the last crew,’ and that was that. Perhaps it was this common fastidiousness that saw the group of men bond closely and quickly, living, training and playing together: air gunner Frank Skuthorpe; Bob Faulkes, navigator; George Hopwood, flight engineer; Bill West, wireless operator; Bob Calov, bomb aimer; and pilot Gordon Stewart. ‘We lived together like a band of brothers,’ says David without a jot of sentimentality.
During their final training test, a leaflet or ‘nickel’ raid over France in a Wellington, an oxygen fault saw everyone save the pilot pass out when returning home over the English coast. ‘At 16 000 feet, we all quietly went to sleep and let the pilot fly us back,’ he says. Apparently none the worse for wear, they trained further on the Stirling – ‘a dog of an aircraft’, he says – then finally on the Lancaster, and in August 1944 at Waddington, Lincolnshire, joined No. 467 Squadron – one of the four dedicated Australian bomber squadrons which had been operating in Bomber Command since early in the war, as part of Sir Ralph Cochrane’s 5 Group. Only nominally an RAAF squadron when formed in late 1942, 467 gradually evolved into a dedicated Australian unit, with more than two-thirds of its nearly 300 personnel Aussies by war’s end.
As we speak and David warms up, I realise that every aspect of his tour is clear and vivid in his memory, and I’m gripped by his easy ability to recall detailed anecdotes and quote long passages of conversations, usually complete with times and dates. Some are priceless, such as the failure of his fellow gunner Frank Skuthorpe to turn up with the rest of the crew at Waddington after a few days’ leave to begin operations. The story goes that the unfortunate young man had been struck by a lorry when riding his girlfriend’s bicycle along a road in Lichfield. Waking up concussed in hospital, he found he could recall nothing save the warning he’d been given concerning English aircrew downed in Germany who, it was said, were placed in hospital alongside English-speaking Germans in order to fool them into thinking they were in England, and so were easily pliable for information. ‘He came out of his coma,’ says David, ‘remembered nothing, assumed he’d been shot down and was in German hands, and for two days refused to give away anything except his name, rank and serial number!’ It took the intervention of Australia House to sort out the man’s true identity. The squadron’s gunnery leader seemed to think David was somehow responsible for the mess and their relationship never recovered. ‘Well, I was also a bit lippy,’ he admits. ‘But I never did get to grips with him. He just didn’t like me, found every dirty job he could for me and stayed that way for the next couple of months. Then he went in,’ he says, using the dry colloquialism for being killed.
Even before his tour began in earnest, David sensed it was going to be an eventful one. In August, he was sent up as a spare rear gunner to the squadron commander, one of the most well-known and highly decorated RAAF personalities at the time, Wing Commander ‘Bill’ Brill, Distinguished Service Order, Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar, i.e. awarded twice. ‘It was a trip to Kaliningrad in Lithuania,’ re
members David. ‘I picked up a Messerschmitt 110 about a thousand yards away crossing our tail, but he didn’t attempt to attack us. Brilly spoke to me in this calm, steady voice, “I think he’s been on a North Sea patrol and is running short of petrol.” He was a fine leader.’ It was just the start.
By late 1944, the clumsy, inefficient instrument that was Bomber Command at the war’s beginning had evolved into a weapon of truly terrible destruction. With improved aircraft, navigational aids and more highly trained crews, the cities which had been barely pinpricked two years earlier could now be all but wiped out in a single night.
On the morning of 11 September 1944, in an office at 5 Group headquarters at Swinderby in Lincolnshire, a finger was run down a list of German cities chosen by various committees years before as places suitable for air attack. After a brief discussion by several high-ranking uniformed men, and a consultation with the meteorologists, a coded teleprinter message was prepared and sent out to the fifteen squadrons of 5 Group, all based at airfields around the city of Lincoln:
AC864 SECRET Action Sheet 11 September
Target: LUCE
8 Group to WHITEBAIT
MONICA not to be used at any time
AIM: to destroy an enemy industrial centre
2359 H Hour
Aircraft to attack between 12 500 and 16 000 feet
Main Force 1 x 4000 lb plus maximum 4 lb incendiary clusters
The ‘target for tonight’ was Darmstadt.
The accounts of what happened that night in Darmstadt are so terrible as to be almost unreadable. Just why this pretty provincial town was attacked in the first place is today hard to determine and will never be known. With no port and largely bypassed by the main rail system, it could hardly be termed an industrial centre – an American post-war bombing survey describing it as producing ‘less than two-tenths of 1 per cent of Reich total production, and only an infinitesimal amount of total war production’.
Heroes of the Skies Page 7