Heroes of the Skies

by Michael Veitch

  ‘I really don’t think I can describe what the damage was like,’ he tells me with a certain awe. ‘It changed my whole outlook on life.’ In bombed and battered England, Sid had been taught to hate ‘the Hun’, but found it difficult to do so once he saw ordinary people struggling in what was left of their country. Once when playing football on the frozen ground, he slipped and broke a bone, landing him a stint in hospital. ‘The German girls would come in to do the cleaning and you’d hear them harmonising as they sung,’ he says. ‘Just quietly so as not to wake us. It was the most beautiful thing.’ This capacity to sing when around them lay ruins left a deep impression on the young man from Newcastle. ‘At the airfield, there were hundreds of them working on it. At the end of the day, I’d sit in the window and listen to them singing perfectly as they went home.’

  At night, he would sometimes ride with his fellow pilots to a club or bar through the shattered Berlin suburbs in trucks. ‘On a clear night, you could ride through these streets and all you’d see were gaunt, burned-out walls of buildings with the moon shining through them,’ he tells me. Only very occasionally, the glow of a single kerosene lamp from a cellar would indicate evidence of life.

  ‘There were signs as you came into the city saying “No fraternisation”, but if you had chocolates or cigarettes,’ says Sid, ‘you were a millionaire.’ On the post-war black market, a single Lucky Strike cigarette could fetch about five marks. The Americans would give Sid cartons of them. ‘At the market you could give someone a carton and people would be fighting to give you money in these great wads of banknotes,’ he says. ‘I never counted it, but they were always scrupulously honest,’ he says. For those who wanted to take advantage of it, exploiting the defeated Germans was easy. Women greatly outnumbered the men, and few of them had very much of anything, let alone luxuries.

  ‘They didn’t even have things like soap,’ Sid tells me. ‘People think I probably took advantage of that, but I didn’t drink and I didn’t smoke and I was engaged back home to be married. I was probably a bit sanctimonious, I suppose.’

  Coming out of a club, the conquering airmen were always followed by small children, requesting treats, cigarettes, anything. ‘The smokers would throw a butt their way and there’d be a scramble for it,’ says Sid. ‘They’d open them up and make fresh cigarettes out of them. It was pitiful.’

  A moment that stays with Sid to this day is being discharged from hospital. On crutches, he hobbled towards a village which was under a foot of snow. As he made his way along the frozen pavement, he saw standing ahead of him a sole German private, in uniform, missing his right arm. As he passed, the German recognised Sid as an officer, stood to attention, and gave him a solemn left-arm salute. ‘I had to recover from the crutches to return his salute,’ he says. ‘I can’t tell you why but that really shook me.’ Reaching the village, he saw, perhaps for the first time, thin children, boys, girls, women, but very few men. Suddenly he saw his own family in their faces, his brothers and sisters; nieces and cousins. ‘These were the Germans, the people we were supposed to kill. It still gets me, thinking of it,’ he says. Sid couldn’t bring himself to enter the village, and turned back.

  Berlin, like the rest of Germany at war’s end, was divided into zones of jurisdiction under the four victorious Allied powers, as it would continue to be for decades. While there was little distinction between the French, British and American zones, the Russian sector was a different story. ‘I used to see them using oxen to pull carts down the streets of their zone,’ Sid tells me. It was also not a place, at the dawn of the Cold War, to find yourself uninvited. ‘You had to be careful taking off,’ he continues. ‘As soon as we pulled up our wheels we were over the Russian zone and they’d fire at you!’

  It took a while for Sid to break the habit of constantly scanning the skies for German fighters that were now confined to the ground, but he settled into a routine that was little more, he says, than ‘keeping our hand in’.

  Flying once or twice a week to show the flag to both the defeated populace and, increasingly, the Russians, Sid would do the odd bit of practice bombing or strafing, but it must have seemed an anticlimax after the stress of operations. But there was still the weather or accidents to claim you, even though the guns were now silent.

  Flying through cloud on one occasion, Sid did his best to stay in close formation to his section leader who had his eye on his instruments. Soon, however, all he could see was white. Knowing there was, somewhere in the area, a high mountain range, he climbed as high and as quickly as he could. At 10 000 feet, he was hopelessly lost. Then, beneath him, a break in the cloud. If he put his nose down and emerged from the bottom of it, he might get a clue as to where he was. Down and down Sid now went, watching his altimeter drop away rapidly. At an alarmingly low 1500 feet, he realised that the gap was far closer to the ground than he’d thought. ‘When I came out of the cloud base,’ he says, ‘I was so low I can remember making out the details of a single fern tree.’ Once again climbing, Sid did the sensible thing and radioed base for a bearing.

  Sid arrived back home in May 1946, after four years and one month in the air force. His adjustment, he says, was a difficult one. ‘I had an ulcer that I didn’t get rid of for twenty years, just from the stress. And I’d gotten used to the air force way of life. For four years they told you what to do, gave you your food, your clothes and you didn’t have to think for yourself.’ As almost all of the airmen I have met have told me, after the war, nobody wanted to know about what they had gone through. Few questions were asked and almost none were answered. People simply wanted to move on.

  Sid’s healing came much later, after nursing the demons of what he’d seen and felt in post-war Germany, when a re-injury of the ankle he’d broken while on the squadron proved a catalyst to recovery. As well as qualifying him for a war-related injury, his doctor suggested he tackle the depression which had visited him regularly since the war. ‘They told me I should see a psychiatrist,’ he tells me. ‘It was a bit like a red rag to a bull at first, but it turned out to be the best thing I ever did.’ The pride that had prevented him from contacting Veterans Affairs abated, and he came to see that he was in fact thoroughly deserving of the modest help a free and grateful society should offer men such as he.

  Recently, Sid was asked to talk to a professional group about his experiences flying Spitfires, and it proved to be a revelation. ‘They couldn’t get enough of me,’ he says. He’s now given a number of talks, all to fascinated responses, and the experience of doing so has been positive. A trip back to England in 2009 was less successful, rekindling the stress of war which for decades had, as is the case with so many of the men who flew, lain dormant in his memory.

  Spitfire pilot Sid Handsaker, in a newly-defeated Germany, 1945. Seeing the plight of the civilian population changed his attitude to war forever. (Picture courtesy of Sid Handsaker)

  DICK DAKEYNE

  Role: Wireless operator

  Aircraft: Consolidated B-24 Liberator

  Posting: 319 Squadron, US 5th Air Force

  I believed I was helping keep the Japanese out of Australia.

  As a young man, Dick had every intention of following in his father’s footsteps in joining the army, even bringing his dad along with him to the recruiting depot to join up in downtown Sydney, in January 1942. But when he told the officer behind the desk that he was ‘just eighteen’, the response was a patronising, ‘Well, son, of course we won’t be sending you anywhere until you’re nineteen.’ Affronted, Dick walked straight out and joined the air force, who were happy to take him immediately. ‘We were all that keen to get into the war, you see,’ he tells me today with some amazement.

  Dick is a lively and engaging man with a crystal clear memory which, thankfully, he’s keen to demonstrate. I look around his airy retirement unit in Coffs Harbour at an array of books and framed maps, accompanied by a somewhat incongruous collection of African tribal art. Books on geography stand next to gaudy carved stat
uettes of people with grotesquely enlarged mouths and faces. ‘I taught in Kenya after the war for nine years,’ he tells me, as I take it all in curiously.

  At No. 2 Initial Training School at Bradfield Park, Dick was disappointed not to be categorised as a pilot, but didn’t take it too personally. ‘At that stage of the war,’ he tells me, ‘the air force simply had enough pilots.’ Dick became instead a wireless / air gunner. Months later, in a gymnasium, an NCO made a sudden announcement to the hundred or so ‘WAGs’ assembled in front of him. ‘Right,’ he began, indicating one side of the big room. ‘We want fifty of you blokes over here to go to Canada.’ An immediate stampede of young men shook the building, spurred on by the idea of action and a free trip overseas.

  ‘I wasn’t quick enough,’ says Dick, ‘and missed out.’

  The sergeant, however, wasn’t quite finished. ‘Right, now I want fifty of you over here to go to Maryborough.’

  No. 3 Wireless Air Gunners School at Maryborough, Queensland, sounded nowhere near as exciting as Canada, but Dick turned to a friend. ‘I’ve never been out of New South Wales,’ he said.

  ‘Neither have I,’ his mate replied. ‘Let’s go!’

  Initially slow on some of the basics such as Morse (‘I struggled to get the minimum twenty words a minute,’ he tells me), Dick was nevertheless regarded highly enough to be one of just eight men selected to undergo a special three-week training course to serve with the mysterious-sounding ‘Section 22 of General Headquarters’, a secret radio counter-measures unit known more simply (to those few who knew it at all) as Section 22. Set up in late 1943, this multi-national, multi-service organisation comprised specialised personnel from all branches of the US armed forces as well as British, New Zealand, Dutch and Australian wireless experts.

  ‘As well as carrying out bombing missions, my job was to help find out what the Japanese ground radar was all about,’ Dick says. ‘The frequencies they were using, the range at which they could pick us up, and most important, their location.’ Dick would operate the advanced American SCR-587 radio set, learning all he could about ultra high frequencies (UHF).

  A further surprise awaited Dick in Darwin when he learned that instead of applying his skills at an RAAF squadron, he and another sergeant, Joe Holohan, were to be sent to fly with the Americans, specifically the US 319th Squadron, currently based at lonely Fenton airstrip in the red dust and scrub near Katherine in the Northern Territory. Flying as a radio counter-measures operator was an exacting job, requiring hours of intense concentration, hunched over a radio receiver with a set of headphones, twiddling knobs in a cramped and awkward makeshift niche above the bomb bay. ‘They hadn’t provided anywhere in the aircraft for us radio counter-measures people to sit,’ he says, ‘so we had to improvise one.’ Even more vital than the ability to work in a confined space, however, was the need for absolutely perfect hearing – and in both ears.

  ‘We used two dipole antennas on either side of the aircraft,’ Dick tells me. ‘I had to continually switch from right to left on the receiver.’ When picked up by Japanese radar, Dick would hear the signal as stronger in one ear than the other. He would then instruct his pilot to ‘turn gently’ to the left or the right, into the line of bearing, which would be logged by the navigator. Using the code word ‘snark’, he would immediately transmit the latitudes, longitudes and frequencies of the Japanese position. Other aircraft would do the same, and the location of the Japanese radar could be reasonably triangulated. ‘Anything with the prefix “snark” was top secret,’ he tells me. It sounds somewhat rudimentary now, but these were the beginnings of electronic warfare.

  Straight away, Dick liked the Americans, and they in turn seemed to take a shine to him. Some Australian airmen I have met have little good to say about ‘the Yanks’ but Dick won’t hear of it, citing them as brave, well-trained and highly professional. Some minor cultural hurdles had to be negotiated, but once Dick had become inured to chilli con carne for dinner and pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast, everyone settled into their outback tent-camp home. Dick, however, managed a few surprises of his own. ‘They couldn’t believe that I didn’t know how to drive a car, or that at nineteen, I was still a virgin,’ he tells me.

  On 30 May 1943, Dick’s adapted B-24D was ready for operations, and he and Joe Holohan flipped a coin to see who would complete their first mission. Dick won the toss, and as luck would have it, on that first trip, he picked up a Japanese radar station in the vicinity of Surabaya, East Java. ‘As far as I know,’ he tells me, ‘this was the first bit of radio counter-measures intelligence in this part of the south-west Pacific theatre.’ Luck was with him too, when a lone Zero flew alongside them, at a distance of about 800 yards, just beyond the range of Dick’s guns, but for reasons that remain a mystery, chose not to attack. ‘I think he was just amazed to be seeing these great big Liberator bombers for the first time,’ he says.

  The first, and most deadly, Japanese air raid on Darwin of February 1942, in which nearly 600 people were either killed or wounded, is well known. Less so are the more than sixty subsequent air attacks on Australian territory, which continued until November 1943. One of these, number fifty-five, Dick remembers as the most dramatic moment of his war.

  In the middle of June, Dick was part of a group of enlisted men sent to Darwin to unload some of the newly arrived US 380th Bomb Group’s equipment, which had been delivered by ship. After a few days, the job was done, and at around ten o’clock on the morning of 20 June, Dick remembers contemplating his first stint behind the wheel of a truck to head the 80 or so miles back down to Fenton. ‘I’d only ever been in a car once or twice in my life,’ he tells me. ‘One of the American sergeants said to me, “Well, Aussie, you’ve gotta drive one of these home so get in there and learn!”’

  After a quick lesson in double de-clutching, Dick and the convoy dispersed around the Winnellie football field, near the present-day Darwin Airport, waiting for the order to go. ‘It was a Sunday morning,’ he remembers. ‘We were standing around having a game of softball with some of the blokes from a camp across the road, and an alarm went off.’ The slow beep-beep was unfamiliar to everyone. ‘Just a yellow alert, don’t worry about it,’ someone said, and the game continued.

  ‘We were all as green as grass,’ Dick says, shaking his head. ‘None of us had had any experience with air raids at that stage.’ About a quarter of an hour later, a second alarm sounded, this time faster and more urgent. Dick looked to the sky and saw the pale undersides of a perfect formation of high-level Japanese ‘Sally’ bombers. This time, the game stopped. ‘That’s a red alert!’ someone shouted, and everyone scattered.

  Fortunately, some rudimentary slit trenches about 18 inches deep had been dug after a previous attack, and Dick and an American air gunner, ‘Stoney’ Markey, made for one of them. ‘It was a little L-shaped trench,’ he says. ‘I dived in one side, and Stoney jumped in the other.’ Moments later, there was a long, single, gigantic explosion, ‘one enormous sound, all together’, as Dick puts it. The Japanese formation of about twenty medium bombers had pattern-bombed the area with high explosive and anti-personnel bombs, spraying jagged pieces of shrapnel just above the ground. As green as he was, Dick had remembered the adage to always carry your tin hat, and had the sense to put it on his head. ‘If I hadn’t had that tin hat, I would have been killed,’ he says.

  As soon as the din had passed, Dick heard the urgent voice of Stoney. ‘Dick, Dick, my leg!’ Dick looked to see the man’s leg, all but severed by a piece of shrapnel, ‘just hanging on by a piece of skin’. Once again, Dick’s foresight paid off. In the eighteen months spent between signing on and being called up for training, he’d decided to complete a St John Ambulance first-aid course, and so when the time came, he knew immediately what to do. The amount of blood told him that the man’s femoral artery had been severed, and that in a minute or two he would most likely bleed to death. ‘I used my belt as a tourniquet, then found a rock to put pressure on the wound and st
op the bleeding,’ he says.

  As Dick was saving the man’s life, a parked truck began to catch fire a few feet away, raining flaming grass and other debris on top of them. Emerging from the trench, Dick dragged the wounded man along the ground to the shelter of some drums. ‘Pretty stupid,’ he tells me, ‘as they were most likely filled with petrol!’ Then, five minutes after the attack, it was the turn of the Japanese fighters to come in and strafe. ‘That really was scary,’ says Dick. ‘We were all out of our trenches by then and there was nothing we could do but lie down flat.’

  Three men were killed on this attack, and eleven wounded, including Dick himself. He shows me his hands, where scars are still evident. ‘I couldn’t understand it for a while, but I think I had my hands over my tin hat during the attack.’ He and Stoney were carted off to hospital, Dick with lacerations to his fingers, but considering himself lucky to still have them, Stoney losing his leg. ‘If we hadn’t been just that little bit below ground level, we’d have been all killed,’ Dick tells me. ‘We could have dived anywhere. I just happened to go to one side, and Stoney went to the other. How do you explain it?’

  Dick was off duty for six weeks. ‘In hospital, I couldn’t get my hands wet, so when I had a shower, the nurse at the hospital just told me to “hold them up!”’ he laughs. When he returned to Fenton, he wore his tin hat that had saved his life, complete with the dint at the front of it, with pride.

  As well as a specialised radio operator, Dick was also a gunner, and when not in his cramped radio compartment, he climbed down to man the Liberator’s right-hand 50-calibre waist gun. As his tour progressed, he found there would be a good deal to shoot at. While carrying out bombing attacks on Japanese-occupied islands in the Dutch East Indies, Dick’s Liberator was attacked by Japanese fighters on around twelve separate occasions. Some of his American crewmen would often yell excitedly down the intercom, ‘There’s one, coming in nine o’clock high!’ etc. Dick’s co-pilot, however, was always a picture of calm, simply telling the men to stay cool and get ready for them. Once, it was a Zero float plane which, Dick says, came up ‘low and from the front’. His was the only gun that could bear on it, and after firing, he noticed it begin to smoke, before going into ‘a bit of a spin’ and disappearing. However, as he didn’t actually see it crash or blow up, Dick modestly refrained from claiming it as a kill.