One day, after being chased back to England from a photo recce trip to Germany by four aircraft he initially believed to be German, but which turned out to be American Mustangs, Stuart was accused by this same CO of lacking sufficient ‘ticker’. His nerves already frayed, Stuart let him know, in no uncertain terms, what he and the rest of the pilots thought about his own ‘ticker’.
‘I told him I’d tested that plane he kept bringing back and there was nothing wrong with it.’ The other senior members of the squadron present could only gasp. ‘I told him he was a coward, or at least I strongly implied it.’ A week later, Stuart was told he would be transferred to another squadron. He was delighted. Now he would swap his unarmed Spitfire, an aeroplane for which he surprisingly expresses not a great deal of affection, for the American Mustang, flying ground-attack missions in support of the armies in France with 122 Squadron.
First, however, I feel I need to clarify his less-than-ebullient opinion of the legendary Spitfire, an attitude which in some circles would be regarded as something close to heresy. He is happy to explain: ‘The Poms were notorious for building a good aeroplane and then saying, “Shit, we need someone to fly it! Where are we going to put them?”’ he says. ‘The Yanks, on the other hand said, “Here’s a pilot, now let’s build an aeroplane around him.”’ The Mark II Spitfire he flew was so cramped, and the positioning of instruments such as fuel gauges so odd, that he could hardly read them, and the lever to switch over fuel tanks was virtually impossible to reach. The Mustang on the other hand, he says, was far more comfortable, roomier, armed with six half-inch machine guns and, even with the Mark III version he flew, extremely manoeuvrable at low levels.
Flying initially from their forward bases of Ford and Funtington in Sussex, Stuart began his tour just a few days after D-Day, on 10 June 1944, immediately becoming as embroiled in the fury of the Battle of Normandy as it was possible for a pilot to be.
‘We would go out with bombs to a target such as a bridge or a rail yard,’ he explains, ‘but once we got rid of them, it was “targets of opportunity”.’ This, in reality, meant anything that moved on the roads in France in mid-1944. ‘The French were told that they must not be on the road during daylight,’ he says. ‘If they were, they were subject to being shot up by us.’ He and his fellow pilots favoured getting rid of their bombs early, so they could ‘have a real good go’ at whatever German transport or armour they could find. They hunted, usually in flights of four, looking for a truck on the road, or a river barge, or a tank, disguised by its crew with branches, skulking under a tree. Radio silence, despite what you see in the movies, Stuart says, was strictly maintained until something was spotted and called in to the flight leader. ‘Alright, Black leader, send a pair down,’ would be the response.
It was a brutal and uncomplicated process. ‘You just came down close and at about 100 metres opened up,’ says Stuart. ‘Then you got out of the way as soon as you could. Strafing blokes on motorbikes was good fun,’ he adds, somewhat chillingly. ‘The dopey bastards never got out of the way. If they had any sense they would have thrown the motorcycle into a ditch but instead they just kept on going.’
His logbook tells the story of his own Normandy campaign:
Dropped bomb but missed out on strafing behind beach head.
Dropped one bomb. Off target.
29 June Heavy flak over Hun lines. Hit in starboard elevator.
Dive bombing – hell of a lot of flak, south-west of Caen. Bombed bridge.
Fighter sweep Chartres, Argentan.
Armed recce Alcon, Le Mans. Strafed truck, several flamers.
On 25 June, the squadron, now part of the three-squadron 122 Wing, crossed the Channel and based itself at a French airstrip near Bayeux known as B7. They would not remain there long. As the Normandy front pushed further inland, the forward bases would move with it. Between June and September, Stuart would move no less than six times, his logbook recording airstrips at Martragny, Ellon, St Andre de L’Eure, Beauvais, and then into Belgium on an aerodrome coded as B60 near Grimbergen.
In August, with the German army squeezed on three sides by the American and British armies into a long, oval-shaped pocket around the village of Falaise, air power was invited to go in and do its worst. It was a massacre, which no pilot I have met who witnessed it can ever forget. ‘At Falaise, they gave us one day to get into the slaughter,’ says Stuart, ‘and we took it.’ Flying over the condensed, chaotic ranks of retreating German soldiers, Stuart’s view was vivid and awful. The Falaise battlefield became a tangle of roads blocked with shattered vehicles and body-choked streams. Stuart was particularly appalled by the sight of dead and wounded horses. ‘They were everywhere,’ he remembers. ‘You could never forget what we saw there.’
‘At one stage I learned to see through camouflage,’ he tells me. ‘I was section leader and one day I reported I could see armour down in the timber underneath us,’ he says. The squadron leader took the formation around to spot them, but informed Stuart that no-one else in the squadron could see what he was talking about.
‘Well I can see them, they’re there!’ he protested.
‘Well take your number two and go down and show us they’re there,’ was the reply. Stuart peeled off and descended, firing into the trees. ‘We swooped down,’ he says, ‘and jeez, did we leave a stream of bloody fire!’ Seeing the mayhem, the rest of the formation, says Stuart, ‘came down like bees to a honeypot’.
The next day, he was given not two but four aircraft to command. ‘Come on, Snow,’ his fellow pilots teased, ‘show us the bloody way!’
And he did. ‘That went on for about a week. Jeez, we had a lot of fun then!’
In October, the squadron packed up and headed back to England to fly escort duties from airfields in East Anglia, protecting bombers making daylight sorties. For Stuart, it was to be a totally different experience from the low-level work he’d known. It was a two-handed system. Spitfires would leave their bases on the Continent to rendezvous with the bombers as they crossed the coast, then stay with them to the target, at which point they would hand over to the longer-range Mustangs, who had flown over from England and would see the bombers home again. Stuart remembers one particular encounter vividly.
‘We picked up some Lancasters and sat there covering them at 25 000 feet as they came up to the target,’ he remembers. Lagging behind the formation of several hundred aircraft was a straggler, obviously in some kind of trouble but pressing on to the target nonetheless. ‘He probably should have turned back,’ says Stuart, ‘but he didn’t.’ As he kept an eye on this aircraft, watching for German fighters, the Master Bomber of the formation also came down for a look. This second Lancaster made wide circles around the slower-flying aircraft, then for some reason dropped beneath it. Stuart watched as the bomb doors of the first Lancaster opened to disgorge its load. ‘I saw the bombs come down and knock a wing off that Master Bomber,’ he says. Like a falling leaf, the aircraft, to his horror, began to spiral its way towards the ground. Amazingly, a parachute emerged, then another and still a third . . . ‘I counted six of them,’ he remembers. The remarkable addendum to this story had to wait a decade before being played out on a veranda in rural New South Wales in August 1955.
By this time, Stuart had settled into his post-war career of wool-classing, at which he would excel for the remainder of a happy and productive working life. ‘One of the blokes I trained lived in Wagga,’ he tells me. ‘Bob Coveney was his name. I knew he’d been a wireless operator in the air force and been shot down, but nothing else. I used to go and stay with him when I was in Wagga. Our wives became friends.’
One evening at a country dinner-dance put on by the local RSL, Stuart and Bob sat on the porch, talking about the war. ‘So, when did you actually “buy it”?’ asked Stuart. As Bob spoke, Stuart sat in increasingly amazed silence as Bob proceeded to describe exactly the scenario he had witnessed from his cockpit one afternoon in 1944. One of those three parachutes he had seen lea
ping from the stricken Lancaster, he realised, belonged to the man he was now talking to.
‘I saw that,’ he at last revealed to Bob. ‘I was in the plane covering you.’ Bob’s crew, learned Stuart, were on their second tour, and for their experience had been chosen for the important Master Bomber role. He couldn’t remember why they were circling the aircraft at the time, but the pilot had attempted to hold the aircraft steady as the rest of his crew bailed out, and was killed. ‘It’s amazing any of them got out at all,’ he says. ‘Bob Coveney. Gee, he was a nice bloke.’
Stuart flew his last trip on New Year’s Day 1945. However, when his logbook was examined by his CO, four of his trips were disqualified for not having been strictly flown in the face of the enemy, reducing his tally to ninety-nine, one short of the obligatory hundred. The senior officer asked Stuart if he’d like to do one more the following day to complete his tour. His answer, once again, was forthright. ‘I told him, “No bloody way.” It was my birthday the next day, January 2, and I’ve always had a habit of doing nothing on my birthday. Besides, I’d seen too many blokes get killed by tempting fate one last time.’ The powers that be let Stuart’s ninety-nine operations stand as a full tour.
Stuart believes that keeping himself busy was the key to an easy passage back to civilian life. During the war he had courted an English girl, but having seen his share of young widows left behind, often with young children, when their airman husbands were killed, he would not consider marrying her until it was all over. ‘There was no way I’d leave her in that position,’ he says. Upon his return home in late 1945, Stuart threw himself into the preparations for her passage to Australia, and took up the job he’d left with the great rural giant Dalgety, rising to the top of the organisation by his mid-thirties.
Having flown with an RAF unit, Stuart was an ‘Odd Bod’, and saw few from his old squadron. ‘I joined the RSL for a while,’ he says, ‘but it seemed to be filled with blokes who wanted to still fight the bloody war, so I left.’ Like so many, he never talked about any of it, simply opting to forget.
As we conclude our talks, some of the bravado wears off a little, and I ask him again what stands out in his tour, flying the mighty Mustangs with 122.
‘You can never forget what we saw at Falaise,’ he says, in the most reflective mode I’ve yet seen. ‘It was just terrible, just slaughter. Being a country-based bloke, to see those horses being wounded and killed, it was just awful. And you didn’t have to worry about those soldiers shooting back at you either. They were on the run, didn’t have any ammo. It was just slaughter.’
RON BENSON
Role: Fighter pilot
Aircraft: CAC Boomerang
Posting: 4 Squadron, RAAF
Just imagine, flying just above the trees over the amazing scenery of New Guinea, and being paid to do so!
‘Of course,’ says Ron, ‘you realise that in the Pacific theatre, aircrew serving above the Tropic of Capricorn were only allowed to do so for nine months before being brought back home.’ I didn’t realise, but talking to Ron in his elegant home in one of Melbourne’s oldest suburbs is to be an afternoon of firsts.
‘The conditions in the tropics were considered too harsh for us delicate little blue orchids!’ he says. There was nothing delicate, however, about the low-level, ground-attack operations Ron flew in New Guinea against the Japanese with 4 Squadron RAAF, nor the aircraft in which he flew them, the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation’s nuggety, all-Australian ‘Boomerang’. Ron is the first Boomerang pilot I have ever met.
Before the war, the Australian aircraft industry had barely managed to produce anything more complicated than a toaster. So the fact that by 1939 the ‘trainer and general purpose’ Wirraway was in production at Melbourne’s Fishermans Bend plant, followed two years later by the licence-built Beaufort medium bomber, was a feat of extraordinary industrial genius. The great gap in our air defence, however, was the lack of a fighter, and when Japan entered the war in late 1941, the gap opened to a chasm. The Wirraway was briefly, and foolishly, thrown up against the Japanese Zeros with awful losses, but with that hard lesson learned, Australia had nothing.
Luckily, the head of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, Lawrence Wackett, never one to let protocol stand in the way of a good idea, got wind of a recently arrived Austrian-Jewish aircraft designer with the unlikely name of Fred David, who had worked in Germany under Ernst Heinkel designing fighter aircraft. David was, and remains, an enigmatic figure, but legend has it that Heinkel, concerned for his safety when Hitler came to power, spirited him away to work on some of their Japanese contracts where he designed military aircraft for the Aichi company. When Germany and Japan became allies, David moved once again, arriving in Australia as, of all things, a refugee, where he was promptly interned as an enemy alien.
Snaffling him before he had time to unpack what little luggage he had, Wackett told David to start designing a fighter that could be manufactured in Australia, and to work fast. In what must surely rank as one of the great Australian bureaucratic ironies, David, despite being the chief designer of Australia’s only purpose-built defensive fighter aircraft, remained an enemy alien and was required to report to the police on a weekly basis.
A few days before Christmas 1941, just a fortnight after Pearl Harbor, the Boomerang’s initial design was drawn, says the legend, on the back of an envelope. Apocryphal or not, what is undisputed is that the first model began test flights in late May the following year – an astonishingly short amount of time, particularly given Australia’s lack of aircraft-manufacturing expertise. The RAAF put in an initial order for around 100.
Admittedly, the Boomerang was not much to look at. With its short fuselage of not quite 26 feet, stumpy wings and enormous-looking Twin Wasp radial engine, there’s always seemed to me something a little comical about its design. But the Boomerang was well armed with four Browning machine guns and two wing-mounted 20-millimetre cannons, which, as none of these actually existed in Australia at the time, had to be reverse-engineered from a captured example brought home from the Western Desert as a souvenir!
In the end, the Boomerang was not really needed as a fighter, as superior American types began to arrive in numbers in early 1942. This was probably just as well, as indications were that the Boomerang would have been no match for just about any Japanese fighter it was likely to come up against. And as its handling was particularly bad above 15 000 feet, it would probably have been unable to catch them in any case.
Closer to the ground, however, it was a different story, and with its robustness and versatility, the Boomerang found its niche as an extremely effective army-cooperation, ground-attack fighter.
With his father wounded, and an uncle killed in the First World War, Ron, when his turn came, decided on the air force. ‘At the time I was interested in cars and ships and girls,’ he says. ‘I’d never been in a plane, but after I joined the air force, I became interested in those too.’
Joining up just after Pearl Harbor as an eighteen-year-old, Ron took instantly to flying and became a star pupil, being selected for single-engine fighter training and awarded an officer’s commission while still on the course. One afternoon, after taking off from No. 2 Service Flying Training School in Deniliquin, however, it all nearly came to a fiery and premature end.
While flying on a cross-country exercise over the flat plains of central Victoria in a Wirraway, a fire broke out in the fuse box beside him in the cockpit, then proceeded to burn its way back along the fuselage towards the tail. ‘The normal procedure was to bail out,’ says Ron, ‘but it was burning slowly so I thought I’d be able to get her down.’ Landing wheels-up in one of the innumerable pancake-flat paddocks beneath him, he had failed to notice a shallow irrigation channel hurtling closer as he skidded along the dry ground. With a jolt, the aircraft’s nose went suddenly down, and the tail came suddenly up, teetering there for a dreadful moment, before righting itself. ‘If it had gone over,’ says Ron, ‘I couldn’t have
got out and would have been incinerated.’ As it was, he was able to retrieve an extinguisher from a rear compartment, put the fire out and walk to a local farmhouse to get help. (A few years ago, he went back to the farm, close to Benalla. Not much had changed.)
Graduating in June 1943, Ron could reasonably have expected to be put onto Spitfires or Kittyhawks. But, unlike almost all of his fellow young pilots, he had no desire to sail around the skies at 22 000 feet. ‘From the moment I went low-flying,’ he says, ‘I knew it was for me.’ So, when the word went out that General Thomas Blamey had called for the formation of two new dedicated army-cooperation squadrons to assist the men slogging away against the stubborn Japanese in the steaming jungles of New Guinea and New Britain, Ron was one of the first to put up his hand. ‘Also, my mother had told me, “You can join the air force, but only as long as you don’t go too fast or too high.” I decided to abide by her wishes,’ he says.
Initially joining No. 5 Squadron at Mareeba near Cairns, Ron began acquainting himself with the fine art of low-level combat flying. ‘We went out on exercises with the army,’ he remembers. ‘They’d have two sides and we’d have to report what they were doing, what equipment they were using, drop smoke bombs and practise a great deal of strafing,’ he says.
Flying from Townsville in a DC-3, Ron’s first impressions of the tropics remain with him still. ‘Magnificent scenery,’ he says, ‘mountains going up to 15 000 feet.’ Soon he would himself be flying over those formidable peaks of the Owen Stanley Range. In an attempt to cover some of the vast scale of the New Guinea campaign, 5 Squadron divided itself into two flights, one based at Nadzab in the Markham Valley, the other at an American-built airstrip, Gusap, in the Ramu Valley. Ron, eager to get into action in the Boomerang as he was, had to nevertheless content himself with going back to the old Wirraway. ‘New pilots had to spend a month flying the squadron courier service from HQ in Port Moresby,’ he says. ‘It was magnificent training for flying over those mountains.’
Heroes of the Skies Page 17