101 Nights

by Ray Ollis

  Ray’s twentieth op was to the Nordstern synthetic oil factory in Gelsenkirchen, his twenty-first the oil refinery at Wanne Eickel. Heavy cloud obscured the target; Middlebrook and Everitt report the Master-Bomber directing ‘the force to bomb any built-up area’. Ray’s remarks are succinct: ‘Shamozzle!’.

  On Remembrance Day they flew to Dortmund’s Hoesch Benzin synthetic oil factory, a momentous occasion. Hyrinkiw had finished his tour, and their wireless operator his second; ‘thus busts a swell crew’.

  Two weeks later ‘New Crew. S/Ldr Warner … (Pilot, joined RAF 1937, on first op.)’. Squadron Leader Warner joined 101 in early September; it was two months before he made his first op: Freiburg. This Lancaster, PB 237, was five months old and, having endured numerous ops, would have been considered by operational standards either a lucky kite or a weary old cantankerous creature.

  Not only was this trip Warner’s first, it was Ray Ollis’s 22nd after which, Deighton explains, morale ‘sloped downwards without recovery’.

  Ray’s logbook; ‘first [op] with new crew. [A] quiet trip [to] Freiburg (population 135,000) wrecked, 30,000 killed.’

  Two nights later Warner’s crew found Neuss, at a quite unusual 4.30 am local time, to catch the fire-fighters unprepared. ‘Bright moon. Pilot aghast, but quiet for Ruhr.’

  Barely two weeks later, on 16 December the Germans launched a counter-offensive through the Ardennes forest, intending to split the Allied armies and reach Antwerp and Brussels. The Battle of the Bulge was deliberately launched in bad weather to hamper Allied air cover.

  The next day Warner’s boys helped destroy or damage truck factories and military barracks in Ulm. Ray comments, ‘Under “duty” for this op, I have entered “?” because pilot, given small alteration, refused to fly it. As my flight commander Warner was required to sign my monthly summary, he questioned my “?”. I explained it. He proceeded no further … just signed the summary.’

  The Germans’ advance through the freezing, cloud-covered Ardennes toward Allied fuel dumps could not be located until finally, on a frosty, foggy Boxing Day 290 aircraft bombed German troops near St Vith with considerable success.

  This, Ray Ollis’s 25th op, was the most significant in his career, and forms the most extraordinary story in 101 Nights.

  Chorley records ‘Homebound, forced-landed 1627 near Reims. F/S Jackson is buried at Clichy Northern Cemetery.’

  S/L Warner’s crew took off in their usual Lanc (SR-M, PB 237) from Ludford Magna at a quarter to one in the afternoon. Ray’s logbook says, ‘Ops St Vith. Hit and set on fire over St Hubert. R/Gunner killed—B/A baled out. Made successful forced landing at Rheims.’ There is a later emendation: ‘Pilot and W/Op awarded DFC’. They were in the air for three hours and forty minutes.

  Ray’s Extract is emphatic:

  Approaching St Hubert B.A. ordered ‘Dive port GO!’. Aircraft continued straight and level. Hit by three heavy flak shells, one engine stopped, both fins damaged, rear guns blown onto Rear Gunner’s legs and aircraft set on fire from main spar aft.

  Fell (from memory) 1,000 to 6,000 [feet]. Bomb-Aimer, looking UP, saw self and W/op with parachutes coming forward to bale out. He could not see pilot. I gave thumbs down and he jettisoned hatch and baled out. Pilot sent us back to fight fire. W/op returned to his set and did not budge. Flight Engineer and I fought the fire. Rear Gunner had lost one leg, the other trapped under the guns. He was on fire … hydraulic oil spraying over him and burning. I tried to remove him, couldn’t free leg. I killed him. With Flight Engineer I fought a bit of fire, returned to my log.

  We were flying in broken circles above the guns that had hit us! DR/C was out and the pilot was turning slow circles under influence of fire on metal skin circuit. These circles the pilot was slavishly following. I estimated a relative course to the sun for Juvincourt. I returned to fight fire. I returned to get orders re bombs. Skipper said ‘Jettison’. I descended into the bombing compartment (which had no floor), Flight Engineer with right arm through my parachute harness and left arm around cabin upright. I selected all bomb stations, pressed the tit, and though the arm rotated no bombs fell. The circuits were burnt away. I went aft and dropped the cookie (I had to trip the manual lever with my ruler; it was red hot). The 10 x 1000 pounders we had to ignore in the press of other business. We flew over Rheims airport. Warner asked ‘Is this Juvincourt?’. I knew it was Rheims but answered ‘Yes’. I knew we might fall out of control any instant. It took Warner 15 minutes to land; on impact the aircraft broke up from the mid-upper turret back. Warner said to me ‘Weston (the W/op) was the senior officer; he MUST have been charge aft’. Warner and Weston were awarded DFCs. The reports read: (Sunday Graphic) ‘Ablaze but they bombed target. With the rear gunner dead, two turrets blazing, and ammunition exploding, a Lancaster went on to its target at St Vith, bombed it, and returned home, the crew fighting the fire all the way. Flak smashed the intercom and bomb-release mechanism. Bombs had to be dropped by hand. For their great courage two of the crew, Squadron Leader Warner and Flight Officer David Weston have been awarded the DFC.’ (Big laugh: Warner had caused the loss and Dave had done nothing. We did NOT bomb the target and we did NOT ‘return home’). Another Sunday paper printed the same misrepresentation under the heading ‘Bombed by hand they get DFC’. Warner was shot down and captured shortly afterwards; Weston was killed.

  Ray must have made some official representation about the accuracy of Warner’s report of the St Vith raid (and, by implication, the circumstances under which Warner and Weston won their DFCs), because he was later Gazetted to receive the DFC on 7 December 1945.

  A later newspaper story:

  I had been shot down in Luxemburg, and … while passing through Rheims, [an] American soldier sold me the painting for 600 francs, [then] about £3/16/-. I bought the painting because it was obviously very good and was signed in the Van Dyck manner, AVD 1633. The painting had evidently been cut from its original frame and remounted. I gathered it had at one time been looted and could well be valuable.

  His head and hands in bandages and clutching his painting, Ray arrived back at Ludford, ‘4 days, one hour after original take-off!’.

  RAF records provided by David Champion reveal that F/S Colin ‘Col’ Dearnley Donohue, after evading capture in the forest for a little over two days, was taken prisoner by a resting German motorcyclist asking for his papers. Warner, Sgt W. Harthill, F/O D.W. Weston and Sgt E.C. Roberts survived and made their way to friendly lines.

  Ollis’s recuperative leave is short; on 15 January Ollis joins Warner’s crew for Merseburg; ‘two orbits. Heavy flak’; meaning the crew orbited the target, amid heavy flak, twice.

  With 26 ops completed, Ollis appears to be once more without a crew. On 10 February, Joe Lightfoot (Rear Gunner) is ‘posted N/F, sick, with 26 ops completed’.

  Two weeks later, Squadron Leader Warner took off for Duisberg. Over 360 Lancasters successfully bombed the town. Seven Lancasters were lost; three crashed in Allied territory.

  Warner, Sgt W. Harthill, P/O A. Jeffcoat, W/O J.A.M. Bird and Sgt E.C. Roberts survived to be taken prisoner; F/O G.L. Halsell (RCAF), F/O D.W. Weston DFC and Sgt S.J. Stephens were killed. Ray’s incorrect comment, ‘Since 20.2.45—Dortmund—I am the only one of Hrynkiw’s crew alive’ clearly reflects his isolation among the thousands at Ludford.

  On 5 March F/Lt Harrison’s crew and their new navigator Ray Ollis take off for Chemnitz. ‘Chamozzle! First with new “dice” crew. Quiet trip’.

  Part of Operation Thunderclap, these raids on far-east German cities were designed partly to hasten the Reich’s internal breakdown while appearing to help the Russians advance. The intent was actually to hamper the Russian advance by clogging the roads with refugees. This double bluff did not work; the Russians were careless of the refugees, and their presence seems not to have hindered them at all.

  At 27 ops, Bushby explains, ‘we had all reached that delightful state of being “flak-happy”. This manifested itself in
a feeling that since we had come so far along the road by which so many had failed what was to stop us going on to the end? … The self-deluding logic was unassailable.’

  Two days later Harrison’s crew headed for Dessau, 60 miles south-west of Berlin. Jules Roy had an engine failure and, rather than lose time and effort without notching up another op, decided ‘We’ll push on deep into Germany to be sure that we can drop our bombs there and then we’ll make for home.’

  On 11 March, Harrison’s boys climbed through the stratus into the bright blinding sky above where hundreds of fighters carved condensation trails and over a thousand bombers headed for Essen. ‘Ruhr, once “hot plus”, now almost undefended’. A cutting continues, ‘… Essen is tonight a city of fires and smoking ruins … The 450 square miles of the Ruhr contain not a single town of any industrial importance and not a single major factory of any value. It has been devastated beyond recognition.’ Ray comments, ‘compare with London Blitz’.

  This might be where in 101 Nights Ollis describes a 460 Squadron Lancaster unloading its bombs on an apparently non-military village.

  One of just over 250 aircraft, Harrison’s boys took off for an oil refinery at Lutzendorf. After returning from a diversion to Great Dunmow, Ray’s triumph was palpable: ‘That’s number 30! From here on in, it’s sheer zeal!’.

  On 9 April they were off to Kiel: ‘good prang, very pretty target, sunk Admiral Scheer … bags of light flak’. The U-boat yards, the Admiral Hipper and the Emden were also badly hit.

  On the 11th Ray added a comment: ‘Warner reported POW—hence Germany’s internal collapse?’.

  Five days later, Harrison took off at 6 pm on Ray’s 32nd and last raid, and Bomber Command’s last big raid: Berlin’s military barracks and rail yards, but many bombs fell into the city. Grimly, Ollis has written; ‘combat’. Only one aircraft was lost on this raid, to a night-fighter; the Luftwaffe could muster few fighters by now.

  When Ray adds ‘fitting climax to a chequered tour’ he was luckier than he knew.

  Feast observes that during WW2 there were 1,074 men killed while serving with 101 Squadron; 178 became POWs.

  Ray Ollis would never be the same again.

  Adelaidian Interlude

  We have become connoisseurs of ruin in this war. We have learned to distinguish between the bombed, the shelled, the burned, the blasted … a town that has the the sour stench of a rubbish heap from one end to another, and where the only sound is the drip of water from the broken roofs … One does not pity the people of the town, nor does one hate them. One says, ‘they did it to us’, but one is left just staring. … The terrible thing is that one has no feeling at all … One is stripped of every feeling, the humane and the inhumane …

  (V.S. Pritchett (New Statesman and Nation, 7 April 1945) via Knightley)

  In his despair at Britain’s victory, Pritchett seems to have forgotten the British motivating force: hatred at the German’s callous, brutal behaviour for more than a decade.

  Ray Ollis shared neither Britain’s bitter rage nor Pritchett’s despair. Ray went to war because he believed it to be the right thing to do, and it was an extraordinarily exciting adventure where he might reap rewards. Just as the tempest of war ends somewhat anticlimactically, 101 Nights ends with the survivors looking forward to the next party.

  The victory parties celebrated the living, but were also part of the unable-to-be-forgotten grief for the vast numbers of dead, maimed and missing. Just briefly the world was a tainted, wonderful place.

  Britain was stricken with rationing, shortages of food, jobs and housing, and a rampant black market. For all the later hand-wringing over the Allied bombing of Germany, we must remember that the Allies aided Germany to rebuild, to some extent against the wishes of the British public, when Britain also needed rebuilding.

  The late 1940s and early 1950s form an idealistic decade, riven with doubt and fear. The Second World War had left an enormous impression; for many years every minor war the former Allies became involved in was another potential world conflict. The Russians exploded an atomic bomb in 1949. The Korean War began in 1950. Many ex-servicemen felt that war with Russia was inevitable; ‘bombing Moscow’ was a succinct expression of how many people felt, the unspoken subtext was ‘bomb Moscow first’.

  Handsome, charismatic, talented, musical, ambitious Ray Ollis, 21, had the world at his feet. Having risen from schoolboy to adult, he had a rich experience of life, the sure confidence of extraordinary achievement and an independence of movement undreamt-of by his parents less than a decade ago. He had experienced extraordinary euphoria, and the pinnacle of his life so far was to witness the vast crusade to liberate the world, watching great, momentous events happen beneath him. In spite of all the shells, tracer and explosives aimed at him, Ray Ollis had survived. Many such men felt they were bulletproof.

  Posted first to Brighton, Ray sailed back to Australia and a training school at Mallala, some 35 miles north of Adelaide.

  In this small and sleepy town in the South Australian wheatbelt Ray met ‘country girl’ Marjorie Adams, whom he married shortly afterwards.

  Although Ray was gazetted to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross it would have been a grim leave; by now the Ollises had been told of their oldest son’s death as a POW.

  Discharged shortly after his 22nd birthday in February 1946, Ray now had ‘an appalling stutter’ (Margaret Ollis). There is a well-founded theory that illnesses such as aphasia are linked to left-handedness and lesions on the brain. Ray’s stutter may have been linked to an injury incurred in childhood, or in one of his several crash-landings, or an emotional aftershock.

  A doctor advised Ray to force himself to talk publicly, so he got a job with Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) radio, and also sold Gestetner printers to offices. Talking cured the stutter. But Ray had another illness.

  The American Psychiatric Association describes Bi-Polar (called manic depression for many decades) as experiencing ‘dramatic mood swings—from high and feeling on top of the world, or uncomfortably irritable and “revved up”, to sad and hopeless, often with periods of normal moods in between. The periods of highs and lows are called episodes of mania and depression.’8

  People going through a manic phase experience euphoric states lasting days, weeks or even months where they are careless of objects, money and other people and their feelings. When their mood has died down, the enormity of their behaviour can hit home with devastating impact, not assisted by the illness’s other side, depression. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lines from Prince Athanase:

  My brain is wild, my breath comes quick—

  The blood is listening in my frame,

  And thronging shadows, fast and thick,

  Fall on my overflowing eyes.

  Rowe argues ‘that depression is not an illness or a mental disorder but a defence against pain and fear … an unwanted consequence of how we see ourselves and the world’; manic depression is a different matter. Mental illness itself used to be seen as demonic, and the sufferer’s illness ‘their demons’.

  Yet every manic depressive’s condition is different. Many creative people—even geniuses—have been manic-depressive; Ray’s son Timothy confided that ‘many parts of Ray were borderline genius’. Ray’s illness fuelled his frantic, restless creativity, and Ray seems to have considered his euphoric and creative states to be normal, and his ‘down’ states to be the illness.

  Hershman and Lieb suggest that

  manic-depressives have been a part of all of the accomplishments on which we as human beings pride ourselves—the arts, sciences, industry, scholarship, philosophy, religion—and also those which have brought more dubious benefits to humankind—war and politics.

  Partly as a result of Ray’s obvious good looks, talent and ability, his appearances in the newspapers and national competitions, it seems clear that Ray Ollis saw himself not as a survivor returning to civilian life, but a triumphant crusader knight; a man for whom things will inevitabl
y succeed.

  It might be argued that when the niggling realities intruded, overdue bills among them, that depression descended because, like Vincent Farlow, he was not who he believed or wanted himself to be. Also, it is significant that two of Farlow’s doomed skippers are a slight pun—Jackal, and Hyde are clearly intended to remind us of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous story Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

  Ray was either in denial of his symptoms or more likely not properly diagnosed. In the 1940s, there simply weren’t any generally available books on manic depression. Most doctors would not have recognised its symptoms; it was only when Ray’s behaviour became noticeably florid and erratic in later years that his condition became evident.

  By 1947, Ray and Marjorie lived in an Adelaide much smaller than today, little more than a large, charming country town with blocks of industrial metal sheds, surrounded by a moat-like parkland bordered by period mansions.

  While Adelaide maintained a strong, nationalistic clamour of intellectual dissent, waging war against the artistic hegemony of Melbourne and Sydney, Ray had a very different intellectual—and political—intent.

  Determined to make his living by writing, Ray also enrolled to study creative writing under Dr Biaggini at Adelaide University. When Ray’s logbook asks us to ‘see diary, volume 2, page 345’, we realise the seriousness of his ambition; that’s a lot of diary for someone under twenty-one.

  While the Jindyworobaks movement and the Mary Martin Bookshop had particular links to the Adelaide University, Ray was an Anglophile who yearned for the old Europe which he had fought for and helped destroy. Indeed, his main character in 101 Nights is based on himself, but he made Farlow an Englishman.