Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  The art of bailing out of an aircraft might appear simple enough – open the door or hood and simply jump. But in an aircraft such as the Typhoon, it was a more complicated procedure. ‘We were told that so many blokes had broken their back by hitting the tailplane,’ says George, ‘so we were trained to do something else.’ Instead of risking it with the Typhoon’s large tail, George and his fellow pilots were told to trim the aircraft into a steep dive (‘like that’, he says to me, holding his hand at an angle to explain), then to jettison the hood, throwing it clear with a solid punch. ‘Then we had to disconnect everything, release the harness, pull back on the stick then quickly push it forward,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t sound like it would work, but it did!’ From an altitude of 3000 feet, as if bucked from a horse, George was suddenly thrown up, head over heels and clear of the tail and the prop of his now flaming Typhoon. ‘And that’s how I got out of my plane,’ he tells me with a shake of the head.

  Being George’s first ever jump, he fumbled momentarily for the ripcord, but the sound of the parachute opening above him, he says, was ‘one of the most beautiful feelings of my life’. His relief was short-lived, however, as he realised he was being fired upon from the ground. ‘They shot at me all the way down,’ he says. Here, he pauses a moment. ‘You know it’s funny, people have often said to me, “Isn’t it terrible that people would shoot you while you’re in a parachute?” Well, why is it so bloody terrible? Five minutes before, I was shooting at them!’

  George had come down hard, just inside the German border, but his face was only slightly burned from the cockpit fire. His landing was rough, due mainly to inexperience, and he’d strained both knees, barely being able to make it to a nearby ditch. Not that escape was much of an option, as moments later, a half-dozen German soldiers had gathered around him, pointing weapons.

  Being familiar with the terrible stories of airmen who had bailed out over German cities and been lynched, kicked to death, or at the very least roughed up by furious civilians, I fully expected George’s treatment to be similar. However, instead of continuing the shooting practice they’d begun on his descent, the only thing the soldiers appeared to be interested in was George’s sidearm. ‘It really is the funniest thing under the sun,’ he says, laughing. ‘But all these soldiers wanted to do was take out my Webley & Scott .38 service revolver and see what they could hit with it!’ As George sat on the ground, rubbing his knees, his captors seemed content to amuse themselves with a little target practice. ‘They couldn’t hit a post,’ he says. ‘The Webley had a notorious kick. They weren’t used to it. It was the queerest thing.’

  George was taken to the nearby town of Ringenberg, just 7 miles from the Rhine, and due to fall any day to the advancing British. Here he was interrogated, his burns examined but not treated, and the next day taken to the town’s railway station where he joined a large group of fellow POWs. Looking at the large open wagons in front of them, all of them reasoned, glumly, that they were heading east.

  As the shuffling line of men climbed aboard the wagon in front of him, George noticed a series of painted symbols on the outside: ‘8 horses or 50 men’, it said, George taking it to refer to the capacity of the wagon. It was an odd thing to notice, he admits, but it made him pause before clambering up. There’s a lot more than fifty men in there, he thought to himself and slowed to let it fill ahead of him, with a mind perhaps of finding himself a less crowded wagon. Then a familiar sound drew his attention to the sky.

  ‘I looked up into the air and saw six Typhoons circling at about 5000 feet,’ he says. A cold feeling came over him. In a dreadful flash of prescience, George saw exactly what was about to happen. ‘It was exactly what I’d been doing these previous weeks,’ he says. ‘I knew those pilots were watching us, thinking we were embarking German soldiers, and were preparing to attack.’ George glanced around and, without regard for the consequences, broke away from the group and bolted under an adjacent platform. Hardly had the guard had time to unsling his rifle to challenge him when, as George says, ‘All hell broke loose.’ He was on the receiving end of a Typhoon attack.

  ‘They came in and strafed with cannon and rockets,’ he says. In seconds, the sounds of explosions, tearing of wood and screams turned the railway platform into a place of carnage. ‘It’s one of the most sickening things I’ve ever had to see,’ he says. When he emerged, bodies, and bits of bodies, were everywhere, and the train was in pieces. ‘It seemed I was about the only person left alive in the whole station,’ he says.

  George’s vivid memory is, understandably, a little vague as to what exactly happened next. It seems that after the attack, he and the survivors were marched away from the station, but put on another train and taken several hundred miles to Stalag 357 at Fallingbostel, near Hanover. But with Germany collapsing around him, he would not be there long.

  ‘We were only there ten days,’ he says, ‘and then we were told we were going to be marched to the centre of Germany.’ This forced mass exodus, ordered by Hitler, of Allied POWs from their camps in eastern Germany to places further west, had begun the previous July. Now, as the most severe European winter in half a century took hold, it continued. Already undernourished, dysentery- and lice-ridden, thousands would perish from hypothermia or be shot by their guards attempting to escape. It remains one of the ugliest and least known chapters of the war in the west.

  George, in a party of several hundred POWs, had been on the road for a week, having befriended a couple of Australian soldiers who had been prisoners since the fall of Crete in 1941 and who at least knew how to scrounge off the land. But his knees, which he had hurt in the jump, were agonising, and during one ‘comfort stop’ along the road, he and an Englishman decided to chance it. ‘I went behind a tree and stayed there,’ he says. Amazingly, the column moved on without them.

  Hiding out in the Black Forest for a few days, they awoke under their bed of fir needles one morning to the sight of two men standing over them, having spotted their protruding boots! George’s dismay at being caught quickly brightened as the men turned out to be Polish farm labourers, who fed them and secreted them in an attic until the booming guns of the advancing Allies came close enough for one of them to venture out and wave down a British tank. ‘We were picked up, interrogated and given so much cake and rich food that we were sick,’ he says.

  Finding his way back to his squadron a month or so after being shot down, George found he was no longer permitted to fly combat missions, as the risk of him being caught again was too great. ‘They let me fly the little Auster instead,’ he says. Having flown spectacular ground-attack missions in the mighty Typhoon, George ended the war running errands for his CO in a light aeroplane. He didn’t complain.

  George was in London on VE Day, and in August 1945 was back in Sydney. The evening of VP Day, he met his girl, who he’d kept in touch with all through his tour (‘I still have some of her letters,’ he says), under the town hall clock, and married her a couple of days before Christmas.

  ‘No-one thought we were going to come out of the war on our squadron,’ he says. ‘No-one. I didn’t think for a second I was going to make it. You’d do the most stupid bloody things.’ Both during the war and after it, George counts himself lucky. His marriage and his discovery of carpentry, of which he made a life-long profession, helped him enormously, he says. ‘Everything was upside down towards the end of the war,’ he says. ‘I don’t even know what constituted a tour for us, no-one seemed to.’ Like many, he simply didn’t talk about it, to anyone, for years, and does me the honour of telling me that our afternoon meeting is the first time he’s spoken about his wartime ordeal to anyone in any detail. ‘You’d tell your kids some things but they didn’t really understand,’ he says. ‘Talking to you like this – it’s actually churned my guts up a bit.’

  Back in his home town of Kempsey, George was, for a while, destined to be enshrined by having a street named in his honour. ‘Then when they found I’d been a prisoner and was still alive, t
hey took my name off the list!’ he says.

  George has compiled a loose-leaf folder with some fragments of his story, as well as some of the background information of the events he witnessed. I begin to copy some of it by taking phone pictures, but he insists I take it away with me to read properly. ‘No, take it, you must take it,’ he says. ‘It’s the most harrowing thing I’ve ever been through,’ he adds as we part, ‘and hard to believe it happened, sometimes – but it happened.’

  George Clissold (left) with some delighted local Dutch children after their liberation, 1944. (Picture courtesy of George Clissold)

  245 Squadron RAF Typhoons – one of them George Clissold’s – line up at Volkel, Holland, to take off for an attack on German armour, 1944. (Picture courtesy of George Clissold)

  George Clissold stands beside his 245 Squadron rocket-firing Hawker Typhoon. Volkel, late 1944. (Picture courtesy of George Clissold)

  CYRIL BURCHER

  Role: Pilot

  Aircraft: Consolidated B-24 Liberator

  Posting: 86 Squadron, RAF

  It’s a terrible thing, but that’s what happens in war, you kill people.

  Ivanhoe, New South Wales, is a long way from the Atlantic. Though to be fair, Ivanhoe is a long way from anywhere. ‘Most people haven’t heard of it,’ Cyril Burcher tells me of the town where he was born, and it’s not hard to understand why once you try to find it on the map. Get yourself to Orange, head west to Parkes, keep on going past Condobolin and, eventually, you’ll find Ivanhoe, teetering on the edge of the outback. There wasn’t much there in Cyril’s day, nor is there now, save for a railway line that goes over to Broken Hill, and a lot of room to grow sheep. Cyril’s forebears had been just about the first white people to arrive on these flat western plains, and by the time he came along, their station, poetically named ‘Irish Lords’, had grown to a 250 000-acre expanse of very little indeed. Fitting then, that, as a pilot with the RAF’s Coastal Command, Cyril’s job would be to patrol wide open space of a different sort, the endless slate-grey waters of the North Atlantic, hunting German U-boats.

  A little older than most of his fellow trainees, Cyril was twenty by the time war started in 1939, but had harboured a notion that he wanted to be a pilot ever since taking a joyride with Charles Kingsford Smith when he dropped in on Bega, all for the princely sum of ten shillings. So in 1941 Cyril left his steady job at the Commonwealth Bank and joined up.

  Cyril was selected for pilot training, found it almost embarrassingly easy, and being assessed ‘average’, was granted his wish and presented with his wings in Canada after learning to fly the twin-engine Cessna Crane, an aeroplane so diabolically awful, it was said that if you could fly a Crane, you could fly anything. His only disappointment – and at the time it was a major one – was being selected for multi-engine aircraft rather than the nimble Spitfires and Hurricanes, which virtually every brash young man in blue at that time longed to fly. ‘They chose us by age, you see,’ says Cyril, who was by that stage twenty-four. ‘They reckoned the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds made the better fighter pilots, and they were right too.’

  In England, Cyril came to grips with the far more friendly Airspeed Oxford at No. 11 Advanced Flying Unit at Shawbury in Shropshire before, in the middle of 1942, progressing to Hudsons, then moving to Thorney Island near Portsmouth. Here, he would begin to fly not the black-hued Lancasters of Bomber Command but American-built B-24 Liberators, with their all-white undersides, designed to merge with the clouds and mists and squalls of the Atlantic. For five years, this vast ocean stage became the scene of the longest battle of the Second World War, the hunting ground of Germany’s U-boat fleet, and their nemeses, the pilots and aircraft of RAF Coastal Command.

  Liberators served in almost every theatre of the war, including, from mid-1941, the North Atlantic, where the RAF saw their potential in operating against Germany’s crippling sub­marine fleet. No. 86 Squadron took delivery of their Liberators in February 1943, just in time, as it happened, to be joined also by Cyril Burcher.

  ‘They were a lovely, easy aeroplane to fly,’ he says of the famous and versatile B-24, itself a testament to the might of American wartime industry.

  The system for protecting the convoys from the air during the long Battle of the Atlantic was a three-part affair. The shorter-range Hudsons patrolled the first five hundred miles out from England, at which point the Sunderland flying boats took over for the next five hundred. Beyond this, at ranges of a thousand miles and more, deep into the heart of the Atlantic, it was the turn of the VLR – very long range – Liberators, flown by men like Cyril. These aircraft had been especially adapted for distance by having one of their two bomb bays refitted to carry extra fuel, making take-off particularly hazardous. Several crews were lost on Cyril’s squadron alone when aircraft simply failed to get airborne.

  ‘We’d fly five or six hours out to the convoy,’ he says, ‘another five or six flying around it, then five or six more back to base.’ This crucial development in the war at sea meant the so-called mid-Atlantic gap, or ‘killing zone’ as many of the weary merchant seamen dubbed it, was, for the first time, within range of air power. ‘At last we could cover it,’ Cyril tells me, ‘and with our long-range tanks, we’d cover it for up to four or five hours.’

  Flying out of airfields in Northern Ireland as close as possible to Britain’s Western Approaches sea lanes, Cyril’s days were long, with flight times lasting up to eighteen hours at a stretch. His expanded crew sounds like a fair representation of the Empire’s wartime air effort. ‘I had a New Zealander second pilot, an Australian observer,’ he tells me, ‘English air gunners and a Canadian wireless operator.’ But the spotting was largely the responsibility of the two pilots, who at the standard patrolling height of 3000 feet had superb visibility courtesy of the Liberator’s high wing design.

  From the beginning of 1943, Cyril’s primary job would be convoy escorts, flying to a pre-determined spot in the middle of the ocean, where, hopefully, beneath him he would spot the weather-battered masts and hulls of ships of all sizes, heading east towards the United Kingdom, laden with the essentials to enable a country with few resources of its own to make war: fuel, food, matériel, sulphur, steel, men. ‘Our job was to meet them and fly around the convoy and attack U-boats,’ he says simply of his role in the great drama. ‘There were quite a few of them at that stage of the Battle of the Atlantic.’

  It’s a fact that many airmen who served with Coastal Command hunting U-boats went the entire war without so much as glimpsing a single one, but in that there is no shame. The ocean is after all very big, and a submarine very small, and in any case, it was figured the next best thing to finding and sinking a U-boat, which was considered extremely difficult, was to keep them submerged as much as possible, thereby cutting their speed dramatically and forcing them to expend far more fuel. Simply the presence of Coastal Command’s aircraft in the skies over the Atlantic was considered a major factor in eventually winning the battle. Cyril’s tour, however, turned out to be considerably more dramatic than that, beginning with his very first operation, in February 1943.

  ‘We went out to do an anti-submarine patrol in the Bay of Biscay, looking for them coming out of France and heading for the Atlantic Ocean,’ he tells me. ‘Cloud cover was down to 100 feet. So, for nine hours, that was the height I had to stay at. It was a very trying experience, and even if we’d spotted a U-boat, we couldn’t have turned around to attack it.’ As the dusk set in at the end of this exhausting ordeal, Cyril received a wireless communication to land back at Thorney Island near Portsmouth as their normal base was clouded in. The approach and landing were uneventful, but as they were taxiing, Cyril noticed the squadron CO apparently waiting for them at the end of the runway. Thinking he was simply there to greet them, he was taken aback when he was told by the agitated man, ‘You and your crew are the luckiest people to be alive. Do you know what you just did?’

  Cyril looked perplexed.

  ‘You�
�ve just flown straight through the balloon barrage of Portsmouth!’

  The site, close to the primary base of the Royal Navy, was, understandably, one of the most heavily defended places in Britain, complete with masses of anti-aircraft guns and a forest of barrage balloons, each tethered by a steel cable designed to slice off the wings of any low-flying aircraft. ‘In a Liberator, well, you can imagine the size of it,’ he says, still bewildered as to how he blithely managed to avoid catastrophe. But avoiding catastrophe became something of a speciality during Cyril’s highly eventful tour, and he has his own theory as to why.

  As a child, Cyril was told by his grandmother that a guardian angel was watching over him, and after hearing the story of his war, full of near-misses that many times should have spelled his demise, I’m tempted to concur. Fittingly, Cyril has given the title On the Wings of an Angel to his own modestly small volume of the story of his life and wartime experiences, which I have used as a source here.

  Over the course of thirty-four operations, Cyril not only sighted but attacked nearly a dozen U-boats, sank at least three, survived storms, lightning strikes and deadly wing ‘icings-up’, and had several encounters with the great liner turned wartime troopship Queen Mary, possibly even, on one occasion, preventing the famous vessel’s sinking. In the process, he earned for himself the admiration of his crew and squadron, and a well-deserved Distinguished Flying Cross. Inevitably though, his most formidable enemy was the weather. It seems there was barely a trip in which Cyril did not encounter rain, sleet, monstrous seas and the gale-force winds of the North Atlantic. Often, his crew were sick to the point of incapacitation, but he always knew that no matter how bad it was for them in the sky, it was always worse for the men on the ships of the convoys below.