Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  In January 1944, at Nadzab, Ron commenced operations for real. Aviation enthusiasts sometimes decry the little Boomerang, but Ron will have none of it. ‘It was a beautiful aeroplane to fly,’ he says. ‘As fast as a Spitfire or a Mustang, incredibly manoeuv­rable, comfortable and with good range and visibility. But above 20 000 feet,’ he admits, ‘completely useless.’ It was ‘on the deck’ in the thick air of the tropics that the Boomerang came into its own.

  Ron’s neat and meticulous logbook illustrates his intense few months fighting in the jungle. Operating primarily on the north coast of New Guinea, he and his fellow pilots would have to negotiate the 15 000-foot Finisterre Mountains on an almost daily basis. ‘We’d have to take off in the morning before the clouds built up,’ he says. ‘Sometimes we’d be too late and we couldn’t get back over them, so we’d have to fly the long way, all around the coast.’

  The weather and terrain, he says, were as dangerous as the enemy. ‘In three years,’ he explains, ‘98 pilots went through 4 and 5 Squadrons and 33 were lost,’ largely, he believes, through bad weather and impossible terrain. ‘But you never thought it would happen to you,’ he says. ‘Everybody else might get it, but not us.’ One of those who did not come home was Ron’s tent-mate, Ken Linklater, a married man with two children. ‘He was on a strafing mission in New Britain,’ he says. ‘He got a little bit too enthusiastic and failed to pull up in time and went into the trees. After I got home, I went and visited his wife. She lived in Manly. We were sad about losing Ken,’ he adds, ‘but we couldn’t afford to lose any sleep over it.’

  Ron himself could easily have been counted among those missing after taking off alone one morning from Saidor on the north coast of New Guinea, heading back over the mountains to Nadzab. ‘It was clear when I took off,’ he says, ‘but the clouds soon built up around me and I got caught.’ At 12 000 feet, he attempted to fly through them, but emerged into a huge spherical pocket of clear air, as if inside a vast white cathedral of cloud.

  ‘I was surrounded,’ he says. ‘There was cloud all around me, and I knew there were mountains nearby at 15 000 so there was no way I was going to attempt to fly out of it not knowing what was on the other side.’ Flying around in ever-decreasing circles, Ron sensed the walls of cloud gradually closing in on him and his fuel was beginning to run low. ‘I shut my eyes and said a little prayer, “Please, show me the way home!”’ As he opened his eyes in a steep, banking turn, a hole in the cloud appeared directly below him. In the middle of that hole, miraculously, he saw a runway, and on the runway, an aeroplane. ‘I recognised it as a little strip I’d flown over a few days earlier,’ he says. Putting the Boomerang into a steep dive, Ron emerged from the cloud base, deciding not to land on this strip but hug the ground home to Nadzab and safety. ‘It was one of the times I knew I had a charmed life in the air force,’ he says.

  Ron flew operations on an almost daily basis, mainly as one of a pair. He and his number two would follow the terrain, often below the tree line at the army’s behest, directing artillery, finding and marking targets or conducting observations. The Japanese air force had been checked at this stage of the war, but they were there, usually way above them, thankfully being dealt with at high altitude by Australian Kittyhawks, or American Lightnings and Airacobras. Ron, below, would be privy to their chatter over the radio telephone. ‘I remember the call sign of one American squadron was “shit”,’ he says. The various aircraft of this squadron seemed to have expanded on this theme by adding the word ‘frighten’. ‘I can still hear it coming over the radio,’ says Ron. ‘“Shit-Frighten One, to Shit-Frighten Two . . .” etc.’ He laughs at it to this day.

  One of the Boomerang’s primary capabilities was ground attack, but with the dense jungle largely obscuring the enemy, Ron had to wait for his opportunities. ‘We’d regularly catch them in the open crossing some of the big river deltas,’ he says. He and his number two would swoop in, firing their six guns apiece into the wading ranks of Japanese, suddenly and hopelessly exposed and with nowhere to hide. ‘It happened about every third trip,’ he says. ‘I’m not proud of it, but one occasion we must have killed about a hundred of them. It was slaughter, really.’

  Barges, vehicles, armour, men, Ron would fire at anything that could be seen from the air. ‘Some of our pilots would strafe the local’s huts, thinking the Japanese might be using them,’ he confesses. ‘But I never did that, I thought that was stupid.’

  An unusual logbook entry, in faint pencil, can just be made out next to a record of one such low-level attack. It mentions the captured diary of one ‘Major Komori’. ‘A few weeks after we strafed them,’ Ron explains, ‘the army found the body of this Japanese officer and Intelligence translated his diary. It spoke about the attack we had made on them.’

  ‘A soldier broke his leg in the attack,’ the officer had written. ‘He had to be left behind.’

  Ron tells me that the greatest fear experienced by himself and his fellow pilots was of being captured. The stories of the fate of downed airmen at the hands of the Japanese were well known, but some of the highland people could not be relied upon either, he says. A Wirraway crew he knew who had bailed out had apparently been captured by some locals. ‘They beheaded the dark-haired observer, but treated the blond pilot as a god and let him go,’ he says. ‘They’d never seen a blond person before.’ Consequently, Ron always flew as prepared as he could be, wearing a .45 revolver with a hundred rounds of ammunition, carrying food, water-purifying tablets and a compass given to him by his father. Thankfully, he would not be required to use them.

  Having flown thirty-three operations in four months, Ron was brought back to Australia and suffered the relative ignominy of being made an instructor, back on Wirraways and Tiger Moths at Laverton air force base. ‘It was a comedown,’ he says, ‘and complaining didn’t do any good.’ Eventually, he was given a job as a ferry pilot, flying Spitfires and Mustangs, once again at low level, but in considerably less danger than in his Boomerang over the jungles to the north.

  After the war, Ron confesses to ‘not being happy’, but mainly because he seems to have missed his days in the cockpit, viewing his time in the air force as one of the great highlights of his life. ‘Just imagine,’ he tells me, with an air of wonderment, ‘flying just above the trees over the amazing scenery of New Guinea, and being paid to do so!’

  Simply the fact that he’d survived seems to have been a spur for him to get on with the rest of his life. Ron went on to study medicine and spent many happy years as a GP, his course paid for by the air force, eventually running a major repatriation hospital in Melbourne. His book-lined home attests to a long and interesting life. He is still an active man, writing and delivering papers on his favourite topic, genetics, and caring full-time for his disabled wife. ‘I met such wonderful people in the air force,’ he says. ‘Everyone gets counselling these days. Back then, we didn’t have any of it. And some of the people I knew needed it.’ But not, seemingly, Ron Benson.

  JOHN ALLEN

  Role: Fighter pilot

  Aircraft: Grumman Wildcat, Hellcat

  Posting: 804 Squadron, Fleet Air Arm

  I came out of that cloud and was virtually formating with two Japanese aircraft!

  John greets me warmly as I walk up to his door on a hot Melb­ourne afternoon.

  ‘How are you, John?’ I ask him.

  ‘I’ve just got out of hospital,’ he tells me cheerily. ‘Pleurisy, heart attack, pneumonia – apart from that, I’m fine!’ Before getting down to the business of telling me about his days with the Fleet Air Arm of the British Royal Navy flying American Grumman F6F Hellcat fighters in the Indian Ocean, he shows me a couple of wedding photos of him and his wife, Faye. ‘Bit better looking then, wasn’t I?’ he says. All things considered, however, John’s not doing too bad.

  I continue to look through his collection of brilliantly clear wartime photographs of life on board a Second World War aircraft carrier, perfectly preserved in their h
eavy, black leather album. ‘There was a professional photographer on board,’ he says. ‘They had to take a photograph of every landing in case something went wrong.’ And things did go wrong, a lot. One of his many images is of an American Grumman Wildcat fighter, its back broken, lying completely inverted on the deck of a carrier. Another shows a collision between two Hellcats, one of them virtually severed by the spinning prop of the other. ‘His arrester hook broke and he went straight through the barrier,’ John tells me. I let out a gasp. ‘That sort of thing was pretty common.’ He points to another. ‘This was the last day of ops in the Indian Ocean,’ he tells me. ‘I was trying to get a couple of Kamikaze suicide planes. Instead, they nearly got me.’ We’ll get to that one later.

  John was born in Cambridge, England, one of three brothers, all of whom finished up as naval lieutenants serving on British aircraft carriers. ‘One was on a fleet carrier, one on a light fleet carrier and me on an escort carrier,’ he says. ‘My brother Eric stayed in the navy and ended up designing the Royal Yacht Britannia. He was a bright boy.’

  As a young post-office engineer, John was frequently called to visit some of the aerodromes of the Battle of Britain, servicing teleprinter machines to help keep open the vital lines of communication. Watching the Spitfires and Hurricanes take to the air planted in him a seed of interest in the air force, but it was a moment closer to home, in Cambridge, that sealed his ambition. ‘A German plane flew right past the window of the postal exchange,’ he says. ‘I was at work on the first floor. I can still see the face of the German pilot looking at me. I thought, I’m going to get him.’

  Answering an ad in the paper for ‘flying duties with the Fleet Air Arm’, John travelled to Gosport in southern England for an interview and was accepted for assessment for pilot training. ‘I loved it,’ he says. Passing through elementary instruction at Yeovilton, then on to the oddly named Royal Naval Air Station Twatt in the Orkney Islands, John joined No. 771 Squadron to properly learn how to fly a naval aeroplane. The ageing types he was given, however, left much to be desired, such as the Blackburn Skua, an example of British aviation best forgotten. This carrier-based dive bomber was an underpowered lemon even in its ‘heyday’ at the beginning of the war, but the clapped-out examples John was given to fly were particularly grim. ‘We had to do a lot of dive-bombing practice over the North Sea,’ he remembers. ‘The planes were so old that we had to fly with the hoods open or else they could cave and scalp you. Then after every dive I used to carefully have to put my hand around to the other side of the windshield and wipe away the oil that had leaked from the engine. You were lucky if you got to the end of the runway and it hadn’t lost all its hydraulic fluid.’

  Eventually, in January 1944, John was sent back to the south of England to convert to the rugged American Wildcat, which had already served well with United States forces in the earlier part of the Pacific war and was now also in use with the Fleet Air Arm. ‘They were a beautiful little aeroplane to fly,’ he says. ‘Awful in a cross wind, but perfect for the deck of an aircraft carrier.’

  Posted to 890 Squadron, John boarded the cruiser HMS London and steamed out to his area of operations, the Indian Ocean, referred to in those imperial days as the Far East, where his base would be the great harbour of Trincomalee in Ceylon. His ship was a small escort carrier, HMS Atheling. ‘We were met by Lord Mountbatten,’ he remembers. ‘He gathered us pilots around and said, “Well, chaps, we’ve got the little yellow bastards on the run now, and you’re the first fighter assault carrier out here to help.”’ John was now officially operational but, he says, ‘there were no operations for us to do’. Instead, they went back to training, and then, still more training. For many pilots, however, this was one of the most dangerous parts of their tour.

  ‘In about six months,’ he says, ‘they managed to kill about five Seafire pilots.’ Sharing the ship with another Fleet Air Arm squadron, 889, who were operating the carrier-based version of the famous Spitfire, John pitied the men who had to fly them. ‘The Seafires were wonderful in the air,’ he says, ‘but almost impossible to get them onto the deck. You couldn’t stall them, they just wanted to keep flying.’ On one occasion, a New Zealand pilot had crashed just prior to John himself landing. ‘He’d panicked,’ he says. ‘He was a small man, probably shouldn’t have been flying at all. He’d lost his nerve, missed the arrester wires and crashed through the barrier. He killed three other blokes as well as his best mate. As I got out, they were squeegeeing blood off the deck. Later I remember one kid crying as he tried to pack five of his mates’ kit bags.’

  Such accidents were understandably common. The concentration required to place an aircraft on the deck of a moving aircraft carrier can scarcely, I suggest, be imaginable.

  ‘When you see the carrier,’ says John by way of agreement, ‘it looks like a matchbox. Then when you get closer, it looks like a short plank.’ Applying high throttle but at just above stalling speed, the pilots would approach the deck in a tight curve, right foot hard on the rudder to counteract the prop torque, and keep an eye on the all-important batsman. ‘The feeling is that you’re going to end up on the front end of the plank,’ he says, ‘but the ship is moving away from you, so you end up on the rear. At least, that’s the idea.’ When practising circuits, he says, the strain on his right leg holding the rudder was immense. ‘Sometimes I’d get such a cramp in it, I’d just have to go around again and fly for a bit to get it out.’

  The rise and fall of the deck could be as much as fifty feet, which, combined with a corkscrew motion, could make a safe landing seem impossible. ‘I can remember trying to get down eight times before I got the lucky combination of rise and fall, when I didn’t either slam the aircraft into the deck or just bounce off again,’ says John. Eight steel arrester wires were in place on the deck for the hook at the rear of your tail to grab, and if you missed them, you might still be stopped by the barrier at the end of the deck.

  John recalls his first realisations of the dangers of deck landing. ‘We were in a small boat being taken out to the ship,’ he says. ‘There was a Wildcat hanging over the side, its nose almost submerged, the arrester wires stretched out to the water and the pilot scrambling up the wire back to the ship. Turns out it was the second time he’d been over the side that day! Many blokes went over the side. There was usually a destroyer following us to pick us up if we went in.’

  Flying back and forth between the ship and airstrips on Ceylon, John experienced the tropics in all its colour and movement. ‘Once a herd of wild elephants stampeded across the runway and put holes in the new bitumen so we couldn’t take off,’ he says. Another elephant, this time a tame one named Lulu, acted as a far better tower of aircraft than any tractor. ‘There were lots of Italian POWs there too,’ he tells me. ‘Happy as anything to be out of the war. Always immaculately dressed. One even asked me if I could take him up for a flight!’

  Ceylon, in reality a backwater of the Pacific war, ended up as the unenviable posting for many RAF Beaufighter and Mosquito crews who, John says, ‘were slowly going mad, having been out there a couple of years with nothing to do’. He could easily have fallen into the same category, but instead, in January 1945, he joined a new squadron, 804, on a new ship, HMS Ameer, a small American-built escort carrier of 8000 tons which had been transferred to the Royal Navy under the US Lend-Lease program. Most importantly, however, John would be given a new aircraft, one of the true stars of the Pacific air war, the Hellcat.

  Twelve thousand F6F Hellcats were built by Grumman during the Second World War, and their rugged and simple design accounted for the destruction of thousands of Japanese aircraft in the Pacific conflict. Hellcats were so well-suited to their jobs as carrier-based fighters, their design remained virtually unaltered throughout the entire conflict. The Royal Navy gratefully took possession of around 1200, putting them to very good use in the hands of men like John Allen. ‘They were wonderful to fly and wonderful to land,’ he says. ‘You could plonk them down righ
t where you wanted to.’

  John would also learn to fly the Hellcat very, very low. ‘In training, you could get to know when your propeller was about 6 feet off the ground.’ Over the water, John had a rule: when he could see in his rear-view mirror a spiral of spray being thrown up behind him by his prop, he was to go no lower!

  In the first month of the last year of the war, John’s fighting began in earnest. His logbook describes operations over Burma, Malaya, Thailand, Sumatra and the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, as the Japanese, step by step, were pushed out of the Indian Ocean. All-but-forgotten military operations with codenames such as Sanky, Bishop and Balsam took place in unknown colonial outstations, obscure ports or along sandy, tropical beaches. John’s roles varied between providing top cover for bombers, reconnaissance, covering island bombardments, strafing and generally attacking anything Japanese he could find.

  February 1945 saw Operation Stacey, a photo reconnaissance task conducted over northern Sumatra and the Isthmus of Kra in Thailand. On this occasion, John was part of an air-to-air engagement, rare at that stage of the war with the decline of the Japanese air force. ‘We got three Jap aircraft that day,’ he says. ‘The first was an “Oscar”. He didn’t even see us. All we had to do was get in line astern and attack. There was none of this dogfighting business.’ Two Japanese aircraft were shot down by John’s flight in a matter of moments. His flight commander went in for the first, and did most of the work. ‘He just about shot it to bits,’ says John. ‘By the time I got in after him, it was all coming apart anyway, so we gave the victory to him.’ John reckons he was only fifty feet behind the aircraft, and ‘the pilot’s body came out just as I got up to it. So just to make sure, I followed it down and gave it a few more squirts.’