by Ray Ollis
Anglophile Raymond Chandler’s bitter-on-the-outside character Phillip Marlowe stifled his inner romanticism. Drawing his character’s name firstly from Sir Phillip Sidney, one of Elizabeth I’s courtier-warrior knights, and from Christopher Marlowe, an Elizabethan playwright whose surface bitterness and butchery emphasises a profound morality, Chandler was a man out of place (if not time).
By contrast, Nevil Shute Norway was an engineer who wrote popular and significant novels, often drawing on his personal experience. Thomas Malory (Le Morte D’Arthur) was one of Shute’s—and ‘Dambuster’ Guy Gibson’s—favourite authors.
Born in Waratah, New South Wales on 4 February 1924, Raymond Bernard Ollis was the youngest of three sons.
If Ray had developed an interest in flying, it would have come from the huge publicity generated by the numerous long-distance flights and air-races from Britain to Australia, and such pioneers as Captain Ross Smith and Keith Smith, and later C.A.W. Scott and A.E. Clouston, and Great War heroes like Ball, McCudden and the fictional Biggles.
The characters of 101 Nights emerge from a British literary and social tradition stretching back centuries. In their childhood, these young men of Empire were encouraged to regard themselves as, if not born gentlemen, then part of a creed and philosophy which allowed them to become gentlemen. Thomas Arnold and his muscular decency had firmly influenced the public schools—and the working class boys who aspired to greater things—for sixty years. Thomas Hughes’ best-selling autobiographical novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Macmillan, 1869) was enthusiastically read and reread by ‘old boys’ of every age, as were magazines like The Magnet or The Boys Own Paper.1 The young men of Empire looked back towards an Old World on the far side of the ocean.
Excited about ideas and experiences, Ray was larger than life to those lucky enough to come into his orbit. He played the piano beautifully, had an excellent singing voice, and was well-read in what his widow Margaret calls ‘high-brow’ literature.
A connoisseur of art and music, and the old and rare, Ray delighted in scouring junkshops and bookshops. Ray’s love and pursuit of music, art and literature is principally responsible for our reading 101 Nights today, far more so than his experiences in Bomber Command.
Bombing cities from the skies had its infancy in the German Zeppelin raids on London in WW1. Hanson describes ‘the Fire Plan’, Germany’s ‘ secret strategy that was to be employed to bring England to its knees … England shall be destroyed by fire’. Air-dropped incendiary bombs would create firestorms engulfing entire districts of London, creating mass panic and popular unrest that would ‘render it doubtful that the war can continue’, and force the British Government to sue for peace’.
Delve quotes the 1920s Trenchard Doctrine; ‘the nation that would stand being bombed longest would win in the end … to win it will be necessary to pursue a relentless offensive by bombing the enemy’s country, destroying his sources of supply of aircraft and engines, and breaking the morale of his people’, but Trenchard was following the lead of Italian aviator General Giulio Douhet’s 1922 Command of the Air. The modern, machine-age warrior thought ahead.
When, in support of General Franco, the Luftwaffe deliberately bombed the town and people of Guernica in 1937 it caused worldwide revulsion—the bombing was cruel, unnecessary and brutal. Although the stated purpose was to assist the soldiers, ‘morale bombing’ was first practised by the Germans. Morale, to the military mind, is the will to resist, the will to fight. Another war seemed inevitable, that the bomber would be a key component, and that Europe’s cities would suffer grievously equally inevitable.
As former diplomat Harold Butler remarked, Hitler ‘calculated correctly on the spinelessness of the French Government and the complacency of the British Government, without whose active aid [Hitler’s] future victims in eastern Europe were at his mercy’.
Germany revelled not just in militarism, but in the destruction it could cause. The feeling in Europe was that Europe was modern, civilised, that The Great War had been a hideous mistake, and no-one in their right mind would again plunge Europe into war.
When considering the Germans’ invasion of other people’s countries we must also consider: on what grounds is this acceptable? At what point does the bombing and shelling of other peoples’ cities in the pursuit of expansionism become justifiable? What possible justification does an invading country have for enslaving the invaded country’s inhabitants?
In December 1938, Ray Ollis passed his practical examination in pianoforte and won a scholarship to Sydney’s prestigious St Andrews College; his older brothers had gone to college in Newcastle. In 1939 Franco won the Spanish Civil War—with Germany’s help.
The British Empire had slowly concluded that the Germans were neither savoury nor honest. Their bombing of English civilians in the Great War still provoked anger. Their hateful treatment of Jews was well-known. To put it bluntly, the Germans had been behaving like cads. They were indecent, beastly. Chamberlain’s declaration of war, preceded by his guarantee of support for Poland, was made because he and his ministers believe that Hitler should be stopped.
In the mindset of the times the concept of English decency was that, regardless of the odds and opposition, the tyrant must be resisted, and that the chivalric knights must ride forth to slay the dragon. In 101 Nights, Vincent Farlow declares, ‘Decency is often more important than truth’, the core crusader belief.
The core German belief is for a titanic struggle in which the best one can hope for is a glorious death on the field of battle. Mistaking the English sense of decency and determination for their own beliefs, the Germans saw the English as brothers united in the pursuit of war. In 1920, Junger commented;
Of all the troops who were opposed to the Germans on the great battlefields the English were not only the most formidable but the manliest and the most chivalrous.
Hitler may have been portrayed as a Teutonic knight on propaganda posters, but the Nazis saw themselves as a new version of conquering Rome. ‘Nazi’ became synonymous with evil.
Britain became the only country in Europe that could fight for what was right, so her Empire’s young men hurried to fight for the Old Country and to repel the Nazis. The lure of the air was compelling for a generation of young men growing up with stories of the filth and mud of the trenches. Yet Delve quotes Ludlow Hewitt on the RAF: ‘Entirely unprepared for war, unable to operate except in fair weather and extremely vulnerable in the air and on the ground.’
The German bombing of Guernica, Rotterdam, Poland, Holland, France and England provoked significant rage. In November 1940 Ray Ollis’s second-oldest brother Ron turned 21 and enlisted in the Australian Army. New Prime Minister Churchill decided to bomb targets (oil facilities, train yards) in Germany, still cautioning the RAF not to hit civilians. The Battle of Britain had been won, but Britain’s cities were being bombed almost every night.
Serving with the 2/30 Battalion in Malaya in 1941, Ron and John Ollis were taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore.2
Service Number 423478
Ray Ollis’s first job was at the Herald Sun as a newspaper copy boy, journalist being the first step in a writer’s career (Quentin Reynolds and Ernest Hemingway being greatly admired). One imagines Ray, the compulsive diarist, following the Nazis’ progress across Europe, into the Mediterranean, Africa and Russia.
When the Luftwaffe bombed Coventry on 13 November 1940, it was ‘the first time ever [that] air power was massively applied against a city of small proportions with the object of ensuring its obliteration … in terms of its reputation as a centre of industrial excellence, the Germans viewed Coventry as a legitimate target in their attempts to break Britain’s economy’. John Ray also points out that any military intention could not help but be also intended to induce terror.
Hitler had made speeches threatening to destroy British cities for many years, remarking to his intimates that it would be enjoyable to burn London, and now he was doing just that.
Speer recalled that, had the Germans possessed heavier bombers with heavier, more destructive bomb-loads, they would not have hesitated to use them, any more than they would have hesitated to use an atomic bomb.
John Ray again; ‘For the Germans, the Coventry raid was hailed as a huge success … a German High Command communique referred to ‘the utmost devastation’. A new word entered both languages—koventrieren, or ‘to Coventrate’, meaning to devastate a place by aerial bombing. By what reasoning can such gloating in destroying the helpless be called justifiable?3
When WW2 began, German bombs were more effective; it was not until early 1941 that the British, copying the German’s example, introduced bombs with more explosive, thinner casings and better fuzes. The initial impact of Bomber Command was quite small; until early 1943, the tonnage and accuracy of RAF bombing was limited. When critics of Bomber Command point out that their bombing campaign caused far greater destruction and death than Germany, they miss the point. Most Germans acknowledge that ‘they started it’; and they were led by men not given to sense or surrender. Germany’s forces had killed thousands of civilians, terrorised millions more, and were convinced that this was only to be expected, the normal way of conquest.
1941 was a year of dreadful set-back for Britain, with bombed cities, retreats in Africa, Greece and Crete and savage attrition in the Atlantic. In 1941 Bomber Command was the only weapon the RAF had which enabled the British to fight back.
USA was forced into the war by the Japanese, frustrated at the USA’s refusal to sell them more oil so they could expand their brutal conquest of China and Indo-China.
Churchill accurately represented the British Empire; ‘What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realise that we shall never cease to persevere against them, until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?’
Ray waited for his eighteenth birthday in February 1942 when he asked his parents for their consent to enlist. With John and Ron’s fates still unknown, the three week delay between Ray’s birthday and his enlistment was probably because Ray’s parents were not pleased about their last son also dashing off to war.
‘Going into the RAAF was a huge adventure. Ray couldn’t wait to get there; all the rest of his family were there. His mother must have had fits worrying about them’ (Margaret Ollis). Yet it would have been difficult to refuse Ray; the war was going badly and the Empire needed every man it could get to fight the aggressors.
With their deliberate intention of precisely bombing carefully-considered targets, the Americans (like the British at the beginning) had the right idea, the right targets in mind (oil, synthetic oil, and ball-bearing plants) but (again, like the British at the beginning) would find that they were unable to bomb effectively.
Appointed Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command the day before Ray Ollis joined the RAAF, Air Marshal Arthur ‘Bert’ Harris’ force had less than 70 heavy bombers, and ‘378 serviceable aircraft with crews’, 50 of which were light bombers. ‘In effect, this meant that we had an average force of 250 medium and 50 heavy bombers until such time as the Command really began to expand’ (Harris, Bomber).
Harris did not make the policy nor the decisions regarding area bombing, nor did he believe in ‘morale bombing’. As Probert comments, ‘the policy of area bombing was not conceived by Harris, as all too many critics have suggested. It was determined by the Air Ministry under Portal’s direction, with the support of the other Chiefs of Staff and the War Cabinet.’
By early 1942 too much had been invested for Bomber Command to be diverted from its purpose, and it gathered momentum. America and Britain needed to cement their new relationship with the newly formidable Russia; for if Russia took Europe, then Britain and America would be obliged to take Europe back—resulting in a much longer and unimaginably more costly war.
Harris’s first three major successes after he was appointed Commander in Chief of Bomber Command were Lübeck (a medieval port used to supply the German occupying forces in Norway), Rostock (a medieval town with a Heinkel factory) and Cologne—the latter the famous ‘1000 Bomber Raid’. All three targets burned and were extensively damaged; all three were on the list of targets Harris had been directed to bomb.
Perhaps if Hitler had not been Germany’s leader, the Germans might have sued for peace then; Germany did not need a potentially devastating war on two fronts. Instead, Hitler retaliated; between April and June 1942, the Germans bombed British cities noted for their history and cultural importance.
Harris used 1942 to reduce Bomber Command’s weaknesses, consolidate its strengths, improve its bombs and navigational equipment, and expand. Lighter, more vulnerable bombers were either shorn off or removed entirely while newer types were phased in.
To combat the German night-fighters and flak, Radio Countermeasures (RCM) and better radar navigational systems (such as Gee, H2S and Oboe) were introduced, as were the Pathfinder Force (PFF) and the bomber stream. Tactics shifted to combat the German defences. Allied night fighters were equipped with airborne radar.
The British public regarded themselves as having been pushed too far by a playground bully. The fight was on, regardless of its practicality, and they believed they would win, simply because they stood on the side of right and the Germans stood on the side of wrong.
In 1942 the mood in Britain remained determined, but an air of resignation had crept in. Noticing this, Shute wrote Most Secret ‘to perpetuate the mood of bitterness and hate which evolved in England in the latter stages of the War’ (Anderson).
‘Who could have guessed these Germans were not people like ourselves?’
‘We were told often enough,’ said Simon grimly. ‘All the world told us that the Germans were a murderous and an uncivilized people, without decent codes of conduct. But when they conquered us, we thought they would be people like ourselves.’
…
‘The Germans do that sort of thing. They do it for a policy, because they think it makes people afraid. And if we mean to win this war we must do horrible, beastly things to them. Torturing things, like they have done to us.’
Most Secret was intended to remind Shute’s readers of their anger and bitterness towards the Germans, who had hurt the British so much that they now didn’t care how badly they behaved as long as the Germans were hurt, mangled, crippled in return;
‘I would put on my best clothes and go to watch the young men tie the Germans up in bundles and pour petrol over them and light the petrol. That is the way to deal with lice,’ I said. ‘With a blow-lamp.’
When we read Most Secret from our own distant perspective we are tempted to align the writer’s intentions and feelings with our own. Yet Shute’s description of deliberately burning helpless Germans was not intended as a condemnatory metaphor to the burning of German cities, but as justified rage (or ‘the decency of hate’, to use Humfrey Jordan’s phrase4); ‘I don’t mind looking at that Jerry. I wouldn’t mind a hundred or so like him, all stretched out in rows and stinking.’
Most Secret’s bitter rage at the unjustifiable bombing of Britain and brutalisation of civilised Europe does not merely reflect the mood of the time; most of Britain wanted to strike back at the men Shute describes as ‘Satan and his messenger at Berchtesgaden’.
What we now call the Holocaust is all too familiar to us now, but in 1942 it was horrific, unimaginable, too awful to contemplate.
On 13 December 1942 Ed Murrow’s regular broadcast, This is London, reached across Britain to the USA; ‘What is happening is this: millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered … moral depravity unequalled in the history of the world. It is a horror beyond what imagination can grasp.’
To the aircrews, Hitler and the Nazis needed to be destroyed; knowledge of the Holocaust merely added fire to Britain’s ‘holy rage’, and the Americans’ determination to fight the evil of Germany.
Ray was training with an artiller
y unit when his call-up came several months later.
Musgrove, Braham and Grigg contend that in February 1943, when Roosevelt announced to newspapermen at the Casablanca Conference that the Allies were seeking nothing less than the ‘unconditional surrender’ of Germany, this made the Germans that much more determined not to surrender. From that moment, the war became an extended exercise in madness, butchery and mayhem.
In March 1943 several hundred servicemen sailed for Canada. If you were on a converted cruise liner you could be in a luxury cabin unaffordable in peace-time. This is where Ray got the taste of the travelling life. Even so, for most the troopship was to be endured; too cold or too hot, cramped, smelly and vomitous.5
Ray attended Number 2 Air Observer School at Edmonton; it was an intensive three months. Air navigation was the principal subject, map reading was crucial; once Ray could complete a simulated flight in the classroom using Dead Reckoning (DR) he was allowed up in an aircraft to apply what he’d learned. Once the aircraft’s position was located on the map, Ray was able to work out the aircraft’s groundspeed, wind direction, wind speed and compare this with the intended route. If the aircraft was off-course, the navigator had to give a correctly-timed correction to the pilot.
After obtaining an average of 75%, Ray qualified as an Air Navigator; the class then travelled by train across Canada to the port of Halifax before sailing to Britain, where he arrived at Gourock, Scotland in December.
Ray arrived in a country with a grim and determined past. Having withstood repeated German attacks and an attempted invasion Britain was beginning to repay the Germans for their unacceptable behaviour. Ray waited out the winter until a place came up in February 1944 at Halfpenny Green, No. 3 (Observer’s) Advanced Flying Unit, where his skills were tested in foggy, smoggy England with its four seasons in a day. Two weeks later his Chief Instructor passed this ‘keen and conscientious worker. Satisfactory …’