Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  Rex doesn’t recall the details of all his many trips, but some stand out, such as his first long night op to Brunswick. ‘That’s when we lost our rear gunner,’ he tells me. Assuming him to have been killed by flak or night-fighter attack, I am surprised when Rex adds, ‘He went LMF,’ citing the ‘lack of moral fibre’ label thrown at those airmen whose nerves were simply not up to the stresses of operational flying. The story is extraordinary. ‘It was our first real “horror op”,’ he says. On the run-in to Brunswick from the Dutch coast, he recalls seeing ‘one great pyrotechnic display. Everything was up there: searchlights crisscrossing the sky, an occasional kite caught in the light, twisting and diving like a big moth; streams of tracer drifting up towards us, then going by as quick as lightning; every now and then a plane going down or exploding.’ German night fighters too were out in force, appearing to have guessed the bombers’ route to the target. ‘Fighter flares’ were dropped from above, exploding in brilliant magnesium iridescence, then drifting down, ghost-like, to illuminate the bomber stream, stripping away their dark concealing cloak of darkness.

  ‘One of the flares exploded just above the rear turret of our plane,’ says Rex. Instantly, Peter, the Australian rear gunner, yelled out over the intercom in a panicked voice, ‘I’m blind! I can’t see!’

  ‘Have you been hit?’ responded Buck, the pilot.

  Alan Helyar, the laconic mid-upper gunner (‘quite the opposite of Peter’, says Rex), came in with a droll, ‘I don’t think so. The silly bugger’s just been dazzled by the flare.’

  Concerned nonetheless, Buck asked the flight engineer to go back to see how Peter was faring. Making his way over the difficult main spar to the rear of the aircraft, the engineer, a Liver­pool Irishman named John ‘Bing’ Crosby, arrived at the rear turret just in time to see the gunner crawling out of it. ‘I’m not going back there! I’m not going back there!’ was all he could say in panic and he proceeded to lie down on the aircraft’s small medical stretcher, leaving the Lancaster’s tail undefended. Alan, the mid-upper, quickly went back to man it, while bomb aimer Steve Hawkins took up the mid-upper, until he had to return to his own post in the nose to get behind his bomb sight as they approached the target.

  They were lucky that night. Despite the furore, they bombed and made it safely back to Mildenhall, although the atmosphere on the trip home, says Rex, was to say the least, ‘very sober’. On landing, however, Peter made it easy. ‘That’s it, Buck,’ he said, approaching the pilot. ‘I’m not going back up there again, I’ve had it.’ The next day Peter and all his possessions had been removed, as if he’d never existed. ‘Nobody said much about it,’ says Rex. After a short spot of leave, they were given a replacement gunner, and Peter was barely mentioned again. Rex bore him no resentment. ‘I could sympathise with him,’ he reflects. ‘He’d been my roommate in the barracks, and we’d got on pretty well. But his nerves had just collapsed and that was that. I’ve often thought, There but for the grace of God go I.’

  Rex managed to assuage his own fear by keeping busy, and as a wireless operator, there was a great deal for him to do. Apart from receiving regular signals from base, he would monitor radar devices, such as the fighter early-warning system, ‘fishpond’, and interfere with the German night-fighter radio transmissions by broadcasting on their frequencies. Rex would jam the German pilots’ headphones with engine noise sourced from a microphone in one of the aircraft’s engine bays, or even random taps with his own Morse key. Over the target, he would stand in the astrodome and look out for fighters or off-course British bombers. ‘You saw aircraft just explode,’ he tells me, either from direct hits or collisions. He has often wondered, however, if some were the victims of lax smoking rules. ‘The interior of the Lancaster always smelled of petrol,’ he tells me. ‘Some pilots allowed smoking on board, which was bloody stupid.’

  A trip flown on the last day of August 1944 is one Rex will remember simply for its audacity of scale, a ‘bobby-dazzler’, as he says in his own book of memoirs, penned recently for friends and family, titled How Lucky I Was. Assembled in the briefing room a few hours before take-off, every airman speculated on what the map behind the little curtain in front of them would reveal. The CO walked in and everybody stood. ‘Sit, please,’ he said, as usual. Then the curtain was drawn and Rex can still hear the audible groan that engulfed the room. The map revealed red lines of tape stretching right across Europe from their base at Mildenhall, over the North Sea, continuing across Denmark, Norway and Sweden, then a sharp swing south to the German coast. ‘Well, chaps, tonight’s target is Stettin,’ said the boss. This long route of ten hours’ flying time had been chosen to avoid as much occupied territory as possible, but the Lancasters would be flying at their capacity, their gigantic wing-tanks almost overflowing with 100-octane fuel. ‘We were told that after bombing, we would have to continue to fly straight on into Germany for another 50 miles before turning and following almost the identical route back,’ says Rex. It was to be a gruelling trip, flown into the face of 150 miles-per-hour headwinds. The Lancasters would need every drop of fuel they could carry.

  On this trip also, a new navigational technique was tried, where in place of the standard practice of each aircraft individually navigating its way to the target, selected crews would take regular wind and speed readings, and relay them back to England where the average was calculated and then re-broadcast to the bomber stream. John Varey, Rex’s ‘exceptional’ navigator, was one of those chosen, with Rex himself required, terrifyingly, to transmit the information by Morse, potentially exposing their position to German radar.

  ‘Normally, the Morse key wasn’t touched except in an emergency, as the Germans were listening out for your signal,’ he tells me. ‘On this trip I had to broadcast eleven times, all the while expecting to be blown out of the sky.’

  This attack on Stettin was regarded as a success by Bomber Command, destroying residential and industrial parts of the old port and town which had escaped previous attacks. It destroyed 1569 houses and killed 1033 people, with the same number reported as wounded. Twenty-three Lancasters, or nearly 6 per cent of the force of 402, were lost, many, according to Rex, simply running out of fuel and ditching in the North Sea.

  Rex very nearly ‘bought it’ on a daylight trip to Gelsen­kirchen in the heart of the Ruhr valley in late November 1944. Becoming bolder as the war went on, particularly with the waning of the German fighter force, Bomber Command began to make forays into the industrial heart of Germany by day. On the run-in to the target, a red warning light indicating anti-aircraft radar had locked onto them lit up on Rex’s panel. He advised Buck to expect flak at any moment as they flew on, straight and level, to the target. How their Lancaster, D-Dog, survived, is hard to imagine.

  Moments after having released their bomb load, they were ringed by four accurate, simultaneous explosions. ‘It was like being punched by a series of large fists,’ says Rex. The pilot’s windshield was blown out, and showers of Perspex and shell casings flew through the aircraft, followed by an icy-cold wind. Buck the pilot and John ‘Bing’ Crosby suffered cuts and had Perspex chips blown into their eyes; the bomb aimer, lying prone in the nose, received a chunk of flak to the metal release mechanism of his harness, which was bent out of shape, but probably saved his life; the two gunners had the windows of their turrets blown away and their faces blackened by the explosions, and in front of Rex, John the navigator collapsed on the floor. A piece of flak had struck him too, but his leather flying helmet had taken the glancing blow, leaving him with only a lump on the head. ‘I was the only one who didn’t have a scratch,’ says Rex.

  D-Dog, it seems, had also, miraculously, escaped serious damage, and Buck, in great pain staring into the face of the freezing slipstream, nursed them back to Mildenhall. One of the holes in the fuselage near the door was nearly 2 feet in diameter. ‘When we landed, we all decided to crawl out through it,’ says Rex.

  The next day, they inspected their shattered aircraft in the
maintenance hangar and, stunned, counted 130 holes. Buck was awarded an immediate Distinguished Flying Cross. ‘It’s for all of you,’ he told his crew. ‘Not just for me.’

  Rex and his crew had only one encounter with a fighter, and were lucky it was not a closer one. Over Wilhelmshaven one night, mid-upper gunner Alan Helyar, in typical style, simply called ‘fighter, port quarter above us’ over the intercom, identifying it straight away as a heavily armed Messerschmitt Me 410.

  ‘Does he look like attacking?’ asked Buck. But the German for the moment seemed happy flying parallel to the bomber stream, just out of range, waiting perhaps for radio or visual confirmation of a target. ‘He stooged along with us at the same height for a while,’ says Rex. ‘Buck just said, “Keep an eye on him.”’

  Alan had a better suggestion. ‘I think it’ll be a good idea if we just put the nose down and get out of his road.’ In wholehearted agreement with his ‘avoiding a fight’ philosophy, Buck gently put the nose of the Lancaster down, the aircraft slowly descended, and the German was lost in darkness.

  Having survived a standard tour of thirty trips, Rex was now faced with five more, and wondered how much his luck would hold against the numbers game of operational flying. Finally trip number thirty-five arrived, on 27 November, an attack by 169 3-Group Lancasters on the Kalk Nord railway yards in Cologne, perhaps one of the ‘hottest’ targets in the Ruhr. They bombed using the city’s great cathedral as their aiming point (it still stands today – a testament less to God’s will than bad bomb aiming, says Rex) and received a few close bursts of flak, but were otherwise unharmed. The drama lasted, however, right up until the time their wheels touched down on the runway back at Mildenhall. With the crew just starting to allow themselves a slight sense of relief at having survived their tour, Buck put D-Dog into the last final approach he would ever make in operational flying.

  At this point, the practice was for the flight engineer to assist the pilot by lowering the undercarriage and flaps, as well as controlling the throttles, to allow the skipper to concentrate on the flying. For reasons that remain mysterious, Bing decided to cut the throttles early, when the Lanc was still 70 feet or so above the runway. Buck was nowhere near ready for this, and according to Rex, the whole aircraft ‘dropped like a stone’. Buck’s instincts, however, probably saved them all. He knocked Bing out of the way and slammed the throttles back open, through the ‘gate’, managing to lift the nose just as the wheels hit the tarmac, hard. ‘We bounced about fifty feet in the air, landed on one wheel, then on the other,’ says Rex. After coming to a stop in silence, then emerging from the aircraft ‘quite shaken up’, everyone wondered what the reaction of the pilot would be. ‘He grabbed Bing, turned him around and gave him a fair kick up the arse. “You stupid Irish prick, you nearly killed the lot of us!” He was only half in jest.’

  Why Bing chose to do this remained a mystery, apparently even to himself. ‘Just excited to finish, I suppose,’ reflects Rex. A little later, after the briefing, their chief ground engineer exclaimed, ‘You call that a bloody landing?’ Their tour, however, was over and the crew, after dusting themselves off, ‘felt euphoric, relieved, full of life’, says Rex, at just having survived.

  Rex went on leave, and while dropping in on a friend in a convalescent hospital, met the visiting King and Queen, who thanked him personally for his services in the air war. Then, he boarded a ship and came home. His was one of those apparently seamless returns to peacetime, and apart from one or two bad nights, he was not adversely affected by all that he’d seen on his tour of ops. ‘They talk a lot about war-related post-traumatic stress disorder today,’ he says, ‘but I just didn’t get affected by it.’ Some of these bomber boys, it seems, really were made of stern stuff.

  I’ve enjoyed meeting Rex on the balcony of his lovely island setting amid raucous friarbirds and honeyeaters. His wife of many years, Charm, has fed and watered me, and his daughter Penny ferried me the rather long distance back and forth from the ferry terminal to his home. I wish to linger, but time, tide and timetables dictate. Rex’s clarity of memory and mental alertness, I tell him, is astonishing. It seems there is a reason for this. A decade or so after the war, a chance encounter between a couple of members of his crew on a Brisbane street saw them vow to all get together, and to keep on doing so regularly. Stories were rescued from the fading abyss of memory, and preserved. Gradually, the men of his crew passed away, and today Rex finds himself the last man standing of Lancaster D-Dog.

  The title of his memoir, How Lucky I Was, could hardly be more apt.

  SID HANDSAKER

  Role: Pilot

  Aircraft: Supermarine Spitfire

  Posting: 451 Squadron, RAAF

  These were the Germans, the people we were supposed to kill. It still gets me.

  Flying your first solo in a Wirraway on your twenty-first birthday was, for Sid, one hell of a present. He was a complete natural, but a few weeks earlier hadn’t dared to dream of ever becoming a pilot, convinced his modest education standard wouldn’t even qualify him for the training. Instead, he put down for wireless operator / air gunner. His talent in the Tiger Moth, however, as well as his good work ethic, had not gone unnoticed. ‘One day,’ he tells me, ‘my teacher, a pilot officer, just walked up with my form and asked why I’d put in for wireless / air gunner. I told him, but he just said, “You can do better than that. What about pilot?” So he just crossed out “wireless / air gunner” and wrote “pilot” next it. So, a pilot is what I became.’ Sid is still amazed by it today.

  Being forced to then spend a couple of years flying Fairey Battles at Evans Head Bombing and Gunnery School would have driven many a budding fighter pilot to despair, but Sid didn’t seem to mind a bit. He simply loved flying, and would have been happy remaining there for the duration. Eventually, however, the wheels of military bureaucracy turned and caught up with him, and with an uncommonly large number of flying hours under his belt, Sid boarded a ship and headed to England, stepping off the Queen Elizabeth in September 1943.

  Being introduced to the Spitfire was something Sid has never forgotten. It was an aeroplane, he says, you almost felt a part of. ‘With the Spitfire,’ he says, ‘it seemed as if you only had to think about what you were going to do and it would do it. If you thought about putting your left wing down, it went down. If you thought about doing a loop, it’d do a loop etc.’

  Sid began his brief tour late in the war, arriving at the all-Australian 451 Squadron at Matlaske in Norfolk in April 1945 and completing three operational sorties. He is, however, the only pilot I have met who remained in post-war Europe for an extended period and gained a firsthand, unique insight into Germany in the immediate wake of the Nazi regime. First though, brief as it was, there was his tour to get through, and among his three trips was one that he’ll always remember.

  I have spoken to several bomber men who took part in the famous raid on the German island of Heligoland on 18 April 1945, where the docks, submarine pens and town were all attacked by nearly a thousand Lancasters and Halifaxes, but have never met one of their fighter escorts. In fact, no less than twenty-two squadrons of Spitfires and Mustangs were also up that day, and one of those was 451. There was no enemy fighter activity to contend with, but the flak was, as ever, accurate.

  ‘We were sitting up at 25 000 feet, and the bombers were coming in between 10–15 000 feet,’ Sid tells me. He shows me in a book some ‘before and after’ photographs of this rocky outcrop in a corner of the North Sea which was once in fact a British possession. During the Second World War, the Germans built U-boat pens and significant anti-aircraft defences here, which in 1945 were deemed worthy of destruction by the RAF. The attack didn’t stop at the naval base or even the town. As Sid’s images show, the raid reduced this pleasant rocky island to little more than a cratered moonscape. The civilian population – safe at least in natural-rock bomb shelters – were evacuated the next day. Heligoland remained uninhabitable for nearly a decade after the war.
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br />   ‘The bombers were hitting the submarine pens and copping all the flak, then for some reason I copped a burst underneath me,’ he says. With a sickening jolt, Sid and his Spit were thrown upwards, ‘like someone had kicked the bottom of my chair’. Then the five blades of the propeller of his Spitfire XIV suddenly windmilled to a stop. ‘So there I was, no engine, 50 miles out from the coast with only ocean beneath me.’

  Instantly, however, Sid’s training kicked in. He closed down the throttle, then reached down to the awkwardly placed fuel cocks in the lower right-hand corner of the cockpit to switch off the 90-gallon drop-tanks and go onto the main. ‘Then I reset everything to start the motor, put throttle and revs at a certain setting, then I had to roll her over on her back and put her nose straight down.’ Sid had performed this somewhat terrifying emergency procedure countless times in practice, but never in battle, and never with a possibly damaged engine. The centrifugal force of the wind over the propeller blades would, like push-starting a car, throw the enormous Griffon engine into life. ‘Well, that’s what you hoped it would do, at least,’ adds Sid. Luckily, it fired, coughed back into life, and as Sid says, ‘bingo’.

  A few days later, his logbook records, ‘No more op trips. War has had it!’ Sid’s job, however, was far from over. Being a relatively late arrival, he was put down to accompany the squadron on its five-month stint in newly vanquished Germany as part of the British Air Forces of Occupation, where he would be based primarily at Gatow on the outskirts of Berlin. Flying over the airfields of the now defunct Luftwaffe, Sid remembers seeing ‘thousands and thousands of German aircraft, 109s and Focke-Wulfs etc., all lined up. I think they just got a bulldozer and went through the lot.’ He reckons he would quite like to have had a go at flying one, but one of the deepest impressions left on him was the scale of the destruction he saw.