Once they were sent to attack a newly built Japanese airstrip, Langgoer, on an island just west of New Guinea. Dick recorded it in his logbook, with the note ‘hot interception by 25 aircraft’. ‘That was the hottest fight I was ever in,’ he tells me. ‘The Japanese were all over us, good pilots and all very keen.’ Their attack shot down at least one Liberator and knocked out engines in several more. One new American pilot on his first mission limped his aircraft back to Australia, but made the fatal error of attempting to get all the way back to Fenton. ‘He should have gone in at Darwin, and he didn’t,’ says Dick. Just a couple of miles short of the runway, he ran out of fuel and crashed, killing the entire crew. ‘Yes,’ he reflects, ‘that was a scary day.’
Whether fighters showed up or not, Japanese ack-ack could always be relied on to appear, particularly during the two-minute bomb run to the target when the aircraft was required to fly straight and level for the ‘bombardier’ (as the Americans termed their bomb aimer) to set his sights and press the release. Much of the fire was extremely accurate. After one trip Dick noticed two corresponding holes on both sides of the fuselage, just a metre or so in front of his position, and reflects that this was probably his closest call in the air. ‘I still don’t know if it was a bullet from a fighter, or anti-aircraft,’ he says. ‘It’s actually quite amazing how little we were hit.’ Some of his friends were not so lucky.
Operating one of the waist guns on a large mission to attack a major Japanese base at Penfui in Timor, Dick’s Liberator flew alongside that of his friend with whom he’d tossed a coin a few weeks earlier, Joe Holohan, flying just his second mission. ‘Over the target,’ Dick remembers, ‘Joe’s plane was hit by ack-ack and one of its engines started to smoke.’ The Japanese fighters, ‘and there were plenty of them’, says Dick, swarmed onto this ‘lame duck’. ‘The pilot tried to ditch, but she exploded just before hitting the water. There were no survivors.’
In August, the squadron attacked the oil-refining town of Balikpapan on Borneo on two nights in succession. Half the aircraft were ordered to target the town, the rest to ‘skip-bomb’ the ships in the harbour. ‘We were told to go for the biggest ship we could see,’ says Dick. However, having no previous experience of this technique in which the bombs are ‘skipped’ at low level like stones across a pond into the sides of the ships, Dick’s bombardier overshot and they missed everything.
A month later, a similar technique was attempted at Makassar on the island of Sulawesi. Dick was not on that trip, but his friend and tent neighbour Lieutenant Dave Lippincott, and his crew of Liberator The Red Ass, was. ‘That was a really tough one,’ says Dick. After counting all the Liberators home, everyone waited on the airstrip for the one missing ‘ship’. ‘I can remember we were all standing around waiting, saying, “They must be coming home, they must be coming home.” Then, you look at your watch and realise their petrol’s gone. It’s a terrible feeling.’ It was believed that Dave’s aircraft was hit by the explosion of its own bomb. There were four survivors, but they were picked up by the Japanese and beheaded.
‘You’re bringing all these memories back to me now, that have been out of my mind for so long,’ Dick tells me after a deep silence.
Dick made life-long friends with his American crew and kept in touch for years after the war. In an extraordinary coincidence, he even met, in the 1960s, on an academic tour of Japan, a former anti-aircraft gunner. ‘Where were you based?’ asked Dick.
‘Oh, a little out-of-the-way place you’ve never heard of on the northern tip of New Guinea called Manokwari.’
Dick certainly had heard of it, having bombed it on four occasions. ‘You were terrible shots,’ Dick told the gentleman good-naturedly through an interpreter. ‘Didn’t come anywhere near us.’
‘Well, you weren’t too crash hot yourself,’ the man replied. ‘After you’d dropped all your bombs in the bay, we’d send boats out to collect the dead fish for our dinner!’ The two men stayed in contact for years.
Dick describes his return to civilian life as a relatively untroubled one, taking advantage of the government’s offer of free university education to study, then teach geography. But he didn’t talk about the war. ‘From 1946 when I got out, till about 1989, I didn’t even think about the war,’ he tells me, nor were his children particularly interested. He believes his Christian faith, found not long before he began his training, became an enormous help in wartime. ‘I believed I was helping keep the Japanese out of Australia,’ he tells me. ‘I had a feeling that if I was killed, well, I’d be going to the right place.’
POST SCRIPT
I still recall sitting down for my very first interview with an airman, in his living room in a leafy suburb in my home city of Melbourne. I was aged about thirteen. I had no idea it was going to be an interview at the time of course, but that’s what it turned out to be. The man I had come to see was Arnold Easton, a former 467 Squadron navigator who had completed a full tour of operations on Lancasters during a period of horrendous losses for Bomber Command in 1943 and 1944. Arnold was a tall man, and striking, with pale, intelligent blue eyes and remains still in my memory as one of the quietest and most gentle men I have ever met. It occurred to me only recently, as I completed the final interview in this book, that Arnold would have then been, in the mid-1970s, roughly the same age I am now, somewhere in his early fifties.
We’d met by chance through a friend of my mother’s at a theatre function to which I was reluctantly dragged, but towards the end of the evening, the two of us struck up a brief conversation about his wartime flying. How the subject ever came up I have no idea. My parents, long inured to my obsession, no doubt rolled their eyes and left us to it. A week later, I presented myself at his doorstep, having accepted his invitation to talk further.
He was prepared for my visit, as his niece had recently completed a school project on her quiet airman uncle, and he had it out ready to show me. He probably thought our discussion would be similar to the one he had recently conducted with his niece: answering some general questions, explaining some technicalities, and giving a generalised overview of the great air war in which he had participated. But he was wrong. The school project was spread across a dining room table on several sheets of fine white cardboard, covered with tidy, spidery writing and cut out pictures of aeroplanes, annotated diagrams and tables of figures. As soon as I saw it, I was drawn instead to a small bunch of shiny metallic strips sticky taped to a corner. ‘Now I just want to tell you what this is,’ he began, but before he could finish the sentence I simply said, ‘window’, recognising instantly the aluminium foil strips dropped by the ton by the bombers to confuse German radar. He stopped and looked at me anew. ‘How did you know that?’ I shrugged my shoulders like a typical thirteen-year-old.
For some reason, Arnold ended up telling me more that day than he’d ever considered telling his niece. For me, it was a revelation, the first proper conversation with someone who had lived an obsession which, even then, I had carried in my head for years. Navigators were special. Highly intelligent, meticulous, sensitive. ‘The brains of the aircraft’, as many of their grateful crew described them. Their responsibility in guiding their bomber across a hostile, blacked-out continent to a pinpoint target and back again, using nothing but a map, a wristwatch and mental arithmetic was almost incomprehensible. I kept asking Arnold questions, endless questions. Some he ignored, or skirted around, so I would ask him again. I made him describe to me all he could remember about the Lancaster, the colour of its interior, and its smell. I forced him to recall faces, conversations, voices. We spoke about aeroplanes, the art of navigation, the men he knew and the base, at Waddington in Lincolnshire where he was stationed. ‘The strangest thing was flying into a battle, with aircraft going down around you, flak exploding, thinking every second you were about to die, then coming back and waking up in clean sheets in the middle of the English countryside with rabbits darting in and out of the hedgerows,’ he said.
As he spoke,
the quieter and the paler he became. Gradually I stopped asking, and just listened. Regrettably, I have now forgotten much of what he said, and in the end my presence was an irrelevance anyway. His eyes fixed on the centre of a table, he began, unprompted, to speak about the wrenching, unbearable stress of his tour, of watching faces he knew around him gradually disappear, and the nightmares that visited him still. He thought, he told me, about the bombing itself, about what was happening on the ground, underneath his Lancaster, as tons of high explosives cascaded onto factories, houses, hospitals, apartment blocks, God knows what.
He showed me his Distinguished Flying Cross, still in its case, its liquid, silver arms fashioned poetically to resemble propeller blades under a ribbon of diagonal blue and white stripes. He was proud of it, but I remember also an awkwardness, as if he himself didn’t quite know what to make of it. I remember wanting to take it out of the box and handle it, but he said something and closed the lid, returning it to its home in the bottom drawer of a desk.
He then passed me an old blue cloth-bound book with a small RAF wing and crown embossed on the cover. ‘Air Navigation, Vol 1’, said the title, and on the inside cover ‘His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1941. For Official Use’. Its pages were creamy and smooth and filled with myriad intricate, diagrams, charts and tables. Its chapter headings included, ‘The Theory of Dead Reckoning Navigation’, ‘Astronomical Navigation’ and ‘Wireless Direction Finding’. This was, Arnold told me, his navigator’s text book, the bible from which all navigators learned the craft of getting an aeroplane from A to B. I was taken with it immediately and began asking him to explain some of the details, many of which he could still recall without hesitation, while others had been long forgotten. Something then tripped me up, a quote at the beginning of the first chapter, not, as one might expect from the king or some figure of influence concerning duty or responsibility, the first words young navigators read were, bizarrely, those of Lewis Carroll:
‘Of course the first thing to do was to make a grand survey of the country she was going to travel through. It’s something very like learning Geography, thought Alice.’
Alice Through the Looking Glass
‘Hang on to that if you like,’ Arnold told me, and I did.
At the end of our conversation, he was exhausted, and politely suggested it was probably time for me to leave. I caught a train home, and never saw him again, a regret I carry to this day. Arnold passed away many years ago, but I doubt if a month has gone by that I haven’t thought of him, or the book he gave me.
The people who fought in the great and dreadful conflict of the mid twentieth century are all but gone, a fact almost entirely lost amid the rigid hysteria of the Anzac centenary, a spectacle which the airmen I spoke to, almost to a man, found repellent. ‘Anzac Day used to be a day of mourning, a national ordeal,’ one of them told me. ‘But even then I didn’t march in the bloody thing.’ He was proud of it, too.
I am profoundly thankful to the many men who spoke to me about their war. I am thankful for their generosity, their dignity, their humour and their modesty. I am thankful for what they did, and their nobility amid the ghastly ignobility of war. And as I too close this long chapter of my own life, begun as a child talking to a middle aged former navigator about events before my time, I will miss them, all of them, beyond words.
The last of the many. The final of 700 DAP Australian-built Bristol Blenheim, A9-700, on show over Sydney, 1945. (Picture courtesy of Keith Webb)
463 Squadron Lancaster LM130, Nick the Nazi Neutralizer. This aircraft survived 82 operations, only to be lost, along with her entire crew, in a mid-air collision with a Hurricane over Lincolnshire in March, 1945. (Picture courtesy of David Morland)
The nuggety all-Australian ground-attack fighter, the Boomerang, as flown by 4 Squadron pilot Ron Benson, New Guinea, 1944. (Picture courtesy of Keith Webb)
Australian personnel at RAF Waddington turn out to see 467 Squadron Lancaster ‘P-Peter’ take off for a trip deep into Germany, late 1944. (Picture courtesy of Keith Webb)
An amazing image of a Japanese Nakajima ‘Tabby’ transport aircraft, shot down over New Guinea by B-24 gunners of Dick Dakeyne’s 319 Squadron, USAAF. (Picture courtesy of Keith Webb)
A Japanese destroyer under attack by RAAF Beauforts near Bougainville, 1943. (Picture courtesy of James Boddington)
Death of a bomber. A Lancaster with its full bomb load explodes over the target, snapped by wireless operator Ray Jones with a smuggled camera, late 1944. Five parachutes were observed, three of them on fire. (Picture courtesy of his daughter, Gwynne O’Heir)
VIKING
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This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2015
Copyright © Michael Veitch, 2015
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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Cover design by Alex Ross © Penguin Group (Australia)
Text design by Samantha Jayaweera © Penguin Group (Australia)
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ISBN: 978-1-74348-567-5
THE BEGINNING
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Heroes of the Skies Page 24