by Ray Ollis
All the while Ray is writing. Three days before his ship, the Orontes17 sailed for Australia on 29 October he reveals:
The news about my play is not encouraging, I’m afraid. The agents say it’s clever and good theatre … but add that it’s definitely TOO HOT TO PRODUCE. I admit the theme is grim. So I put a lot of comedy into it to soften it a bit. They say the injection of incest into a ‘domestic comedy—almost a farce’ is not in good taste and would probably upset most theatre-goers … I hope to be able to write during this trip. I’ve never managed to get any writing down at sea before … either as passenger or crew … but this trip I hope I will … If I do, my next novel will be finished by the end of the voyage.
Neither the play nor his ‘next novel’ seem to have gained much interest; and his by-now established routine of travel, writing and ‘flips’ continue; in September 1961 Layton and he were ‘200 feet over Wilhelmshaven’, a place he last saw on 15 October 1944 after two raids on Duisburg inside 24 hours.
In Sydney in late 1961, Ray met Margaret ‘at a dinner party thrown for him by a friend of mine’. Margaret Hall (née Pearce) grew up in the village of Addington, near Biggin Hill RAF airfield. She and other girls would wave to the fighter boys as they scrambled off to meet the Germans. ‘I’ve been bombed more times than I can count,’ she states implacably.
There was a hill which led down to their house; one day a German bomber flew down the hill so close Margaret could see his leather flying helmet and chinstrap. Her mother stuffed her children under a hedge while the German went on to shoot up their greenhouse.
It wasn’t the first time that happened; like all the local women her mother was furious with the Germans. When they parachuted down the Home Guard had a tough time protecting the Germans from irate women armed with rolling pins—and worse.
I always knew what I wanted. I wanted to join Norman Hartnell18 and make dresses for the Queen. I’d been to college, but they didn’t want that, they wanted a clean sheet, straight from school, so they could mould you, so I just turned up every day, very polite, well-dressed, and asked for a job, every day for a year. They gave me a job because they were so sick of the sight of me.
Margaret had married Hall, a New Zealand mariner, but he died at 32 of a heart attack. Margaret was 26.
When Margaret met Ray ‘he was charismatic, talented, full of beans and knew what he wanted’, she remembers. ‘When I fell in love with him he was sensitive, caring man who’d been through a hell of a lot, never had it easy (although it wasn’t an easy time before the war)’.
‘He had to write, he was always writing, articles for newspapers and magazines, the Herald, Pix, People, and was always dashing off for some story. He didn’t earn that much, he wasn’t able to contribute much to the household.’
They married in 1964, honeymooning in New Guinea.
It was only in passing that Ray talked about the war. He would mention that they bombed a lot of carburettor factories—without a carburettor, of course, an engine won’t go. He had a lot of mates from all the squadrons. One night he came home from the pub, he’d met Thomas Kenneally, who’d asked him all sorts of questions about his service in Bomber Command.19
I think he was happy with his lot at Ludford, you were sent where you were needed and just got on with it. He told me about Ludford, and its mist, and that Ludford was so high that it was the last to go under into the fog, so they had everybody arrive.
He was particularly moved by the plight of the rear gunner, who, he said, had the worst and most dangerous job in the crew. He was very upset over the role of the rear gunner. They all would’ve wanted that [the mercy killing of rear gunner John Jackson] done to them if they were in the same circumstance.
Although Ray had been in several crashes at Ludford, he hated Boxing Day—that was the day he was burned, when he was obliged to dispatch the rear gunner, and of the crash which was caused by the pilot.
Ray was very badly burned, all his skin, especially on his back … his back was very scarred with graftings, it was all bright red. His hands were a bit peculiar, serviceable, and yes, possibly that was due to burn injuries. He was not good around a bonfire, he had a physical and emotional reaction to fire.’
Apparently their marriage encountered problems around 1966; one reason for this was Ray’s working hours (6 pm to 2 am), another his restlessness; one day in May 1968 he raced out to follow the Endeavour replica from Sydney to Mackay.
Six weeks later, Ray flew to London via Hong Kong, Teheran and Vienna, the trip taking four days. Whatever it was he was doing in London, he worked his passage for the return journey to Australia.
Margaret describes Ray as ‘an adventurer. What he’d seen could not compare to dull peace-time reality, he always wanted more, big experiences.’ The day to day life of peacetime just wasn’t exciting enough for him.
Margaret Ollis recalls, ‘He did have dark moods. There were times where I just picked up the boys and we stayed at a girlfriend’s place, just to remove them from his influence.’
It seems likely that Ray described his moods in 101 Nights:
Magnetic had never seen Vincent so depressed. Yet it was not a hang-dog depression: it was militant, aggressive … [Vincent] was not drinking for the pleasure it could give. He was not even drinking to forget; he was drinking, it seemed, to help him remember, to intensify the misery he felt.
Rowe describes ‘an idea which is central … that depression can be our response to the discovery that there is a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is.’
Rowe goes on to suggest ‘that depression and anxiety, and other mental disorders, are defences, not illness[es]’ and, quoting Gwyneth Lewis,
depression is a lie detector of last resort … it says the way you’ve been living is unbearable, it’s not for you … if you can … come through it without committing suicide—the disease’s most serious side-effect … it teaches you slowly how to live in a way that suits you infinitely better.
However, it is one thing to carry a shotgun under the car seat as one drives about Kenya during a militant uprising, and another to buy a sawn-off shotgun in peace-time 1960s Sydney.
Ray had tried to kill himself before. What part of Ray Ollis’s death was caused by illness and what part added to by his time in Bomber Command, we will never know.
Margaret now thinks that ‘the ones who survived weren’t as lucky as the ones who were lost. The ones who survived had so much more to cope with.’
Many soldiers would concur with Smiff’s reasoning: ‘I would thank a man for killing me if I were dying in agony. To shoot him now would be kindness.’ One wonders if Ray Ollis saw death as a solution to an unsolvable problem.
Certainly many felt guilty. Sir Arthur ‘Bert’ Harris (as quoted by Probert); ‘There was nothing to be ashamed of, except in the sense that everybody might be ashamed of the sort of thing that has to be done in every way, as of war itself.’
After Ray’s death, Margaret ‘didn’t have time to be upset, I had two children and a home to support—there was no help from the government in those days’.
Final debriefing
Jonathon and Timothy Ollis both have families. Ray Ollis would have been proud of Margaret’s achievements, proud of his two boys and their families.
‘Bomber Command lost more than twice as many aircrew on operations as did all the other RAF Commands put together’, its operational losses were 47,120, with a further non-operational 8,090, and 530 ground staff killed during World War II’ (Richards). This does not include those who died as POWs or were wounded while on duty—over 9,000—nor the losses of aircraft in Training Command, HCUs, EATS, Coastal Command, losses of aircrew at sea … nor civilians killed as a result of RAF crashes, the wives and girlfriends who committed suicide, nor Harris’s ‘old lags’ who committed suicide …
The price of war is heavy:
This fiend whose ghastly presence ever
Beside thee like thy shadow ha
ngs.
(Shelley)
It’s not about the numbers or statistics, but the loss of individuals who did their best against forces they could not always successfully combat.
Ray Ollis remains someone to remember. That he survived his illness long enough for his account of Bomber Command to be published is to our benefit.
Today, Margaret Ollis remembers Ray best as a fair man of slim build, talented, charismatic, handsome, walking around the room humming, beating time with a sheet of music, or playing the piano beautifully, his talent sparkling throughout the house. Margaret remembers a determined writer of articles, songs, musicals and plays, a book on the Mau-Mau uprising and a memorable Bomber Command novel.
We should remember a man who could have been anything and gone anywhere, but who died at a suburban railway station, fighting the temporary perception of himself, his unacceptable circumstances, in a moment of misguided impulse knowing he was unable to alter them.
I could lie down like a tired child
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea …’
Shelley, from Lines Written in Dejection near Naples
I am indebted to Margaret Ollis, Ray’s widow;
Jonathon and Timothy Ollis, Ray’s two sons;
and Marjorie Ollis, the family genealogist,
and Steve Oakley.
Notes
PART ONE
One
101 Squadron (pronounced ‘one oh one’), then of Number 1 Group, Bomber Command, was one of several secretive, special Allied squadrons. Based south of the then-small villages of Ludford Magna and Ludford Parva, Ludford aerodrome was high up in the Lincolnshire Wolds (a series of low treeless hills on a chalk base). 101 Nights is set in a fictitious amalgam of 1942 and 1943, becoming more chronologically precise as the book progresses. From early 1942, the Lancaster became the premier English bomber during the Second World War, usually operating with a crew of seven. Of the many books, start with McKinstry.
‘Buckley’ is a black joke: to say someone ‘had Buckley’s’ was to say they had no chance: Ollis makes us think the new crew have ‘Buckley’s’ of surviving their first operation.
There were three aerials, the thickest being less than 6 inches at the base and about two inches at the tips; one behind the pilot’s cabin, another just behind the rear turret; the third projected out below the pilot’s cabin, giving the overall impression that the aircraft would have difficulty landing. Not all 101 Squadron aircraft were equipped with ABC aerials (‘XYZ’ in Ollis); and the Luftwaffe also developed their own ‘special duties’ squadrons—see P.W. Stahl, KG 200. The True Story (Jane’s Publishing Company, 1981).
Not true, they did. The evolving series of battles over occupied Europe, particularly from the end of 1942, is extraordinarily exciting; see Knoke, Gunston, or David P. Williams, Hunters of the Reich. Night Fighters (Tempus Publishing, 2001); Theo Boiten’s excellent The Night Fighter versus Bomber War over the Third Reich 1939–45 (Crowood Press, 1997), and Boiten and Michael Bowman’s Battles with the Nachtjagd … (Schiffer, 2006) tell the story from the German perspective.
‘Men of many nationalities with a mixture of qualifications, were required to speak German … some of them, known as Special Operators, are thought to have been Germans whom the Nazis expelled from Germany. Their task was to seek out, jam and confuse the enemy Wireless Transmitter and Radio Transmitter instructions, not to mention the broadcasting of false information to German fighters while imitating their controllers. Known as “Airborne Cigar” (ABC), this operation was an additional duty, as the Lancasters still carried a normal bomb load to the target’ (Alexander). The secrecy surrounding the ABC Lancasters was as much to protect the safety of the German-speaking Specials as the ABC equipment itself; being able to speak German was regarded by most British as not only suspicious, but probably traitorous. Without the secrecy, resentful rumours involving ‘local Germans’ would certainly have formed; the Specials were isolated from the Squadron at large, sleeping apart from their crews. ‘Ray always said that the Specials never deserted or baled out—they were part and parcel of their missions. It did upset them that they weren’t treated like members of the crew—but the crews knew this and tried to make them feel better about it’ (Margaret Ollis). ‘Airborne Cigar’ consisted of a receiver and three transmitters (the three aerials) … The jamming signal was an undulating, warbling, almost musical note; or, as Parke explains, the clatter of one of the Lanc’s engines. The receiver included a cathode ray tube which gave a visual indication of every signal within the waveband covered. As soon as a signal appeared, the special operator tuned his receiver to it, and, having identified it, one of the transmitters would be tuned to the same frequency and switched on. He would then continue to search the band for other signals. In the early days the SDOs transmitted in German but the Germans soon overcame this by broadcasting on several wavelengths … but after [this] was discontinued … the SDOs simply searched for—and jammed—the messages etc.’ From Mike Garbett and Brian Goulding’s The Lancaster at War (Ian Allen, 1971, the first in a series). See Appendix 1. Feast, over Nuremberg on 30/31 March 1944; ‘Every available [German] fighter was being thrown into the assault by means of the running commentary. The Germans were switching between nine different speech channels and two Morse channels; at the height of the battle the running commentary was being broadcast on five separate channels … the transmissions were so powerful, and so many frequencies being utilised, that his jamming had little effect … they had also lost three ABC aircraft, and were about to lose their fourth.’
Night fighters could and did locate 101’s Lancasters by their radio transmissions; Chorlton: ‘after the war it was discovered that the Germans had developed an electronic countermeasure which enabled their fighters to home in on the ABC aircraft’s jamming transmissions’; more usually the Luftwaffe Nachjagd used then-sophisticated airborne radar able to isolate aircraft inside Window’s jamming; today, aircraft using the Marconi’s Zeus ECM have a radar warning receiver which can locate—and jam—over 1000 searching radar signals. Ward and Smith: ‘From October 1943 onwards a sprinkling of 101 Squadron Lancasters accompanied most major operations, whether or not 1 Group was on the order of battle, and as a result, 101 Squadron sustained the highest casualties of any heavy squadron.’ The ‘sprinkling’ was usually about six, sometimes one or two more. ‘By 1945 101 Squadron had flown 2,477 ABC sorties and lost 145 Lancasters (including 33 in crashes).’ Chorlton also states that 1,176 men from 101 Squadron were killed on operations during WW2—more than were killed at Pearl Harbor. Only 460, 103, 207 and 61 Squadrons lost more Lancasters on operations than 101 Squadron with 140, 135, 131 and 116 respectively. See also Price.
‘Trinket’ is a made-up surname; perhaps Ollis intended the name to imply that, to the British, Australians were all ‘trinkets’; cheap expendable jewellery. If the expression ‘Grog’s the shot!’ followed by the gulping of half a pint didn’t announce itself clearly enough, Trinket’s manner is distinctly Australian, and Australians of the day would have smiled in recognition of the ‘Australian in a strange land’. Lancaster LM 739, of 100 Squadron, wore a foaming tankard inscribed ‘Grog’s the Shot’. This Lancaster survived the end of the war and was immortalised in kit-form by Revell in 2012.
‘“O” wing’. Sometimes referred to as ‘the Flying Arsehole’, the Observer’s badge featured an ‘O’ surmounted with a wing. In March 1942 Bomber Command decreed that the title ‘observer’ be changed to ‘navigator’ (a flying ‘N’) and that a ‘bomb aimer’ (a flying bomb) be introduced so the navigator didn’t have to leave his post at a critical moment. Joe knows Farlow has been in (and survived) the RAF for some years, as opposed to the newer or sprog crews such as Buckley’s (who were told to ‘touch nothing’). Usually won on the ground
, the BEM, or British Empire Medal, was an unusual medal for an airman (usually being won on the ground), and would have drawn instant attention to Farlow in any RAF mess.
After several weeks of bombing and air-skirmishes, the Germans invaded Crete on 20 May 1941; the subsequent brutalising battle was over in twelve days. Casualties were high.
Krynkiwski is a fictitious surname, Ollis’s first 101 squadron pilot was Walter Hrynkiw DFC; ‘Krink’ may have been his nickname.
The cumulative effect of the strain of operations caused several types of aberrant nervous behaviour. ‘The operational word for nerves was “the twitch”. You could see it at the bar any time. Facial muscles would twitch involuntarily without the owner’s awareness. … Some would flutter an eye, some would stutter slightly as their mouths jumped around.’ (Harvey).
‘Hyde’ Parke is a double pun—Hyde Park is a famous public park in London; the darker pun implies ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, that Hyde has two personalities.
Two
Though the author represents 101 Squadron during 1943, Wing Commander R.I. Alexander DFC commanded 101 from January 1944 until after the war; Ollis did not know his predecessor.
Leipzig is deep in the German heartland toward Berlin, where the Saale and Elster rivers and numerous railway lines meet. Although partly a cultural centre, factories made and assembled aircraft, engines and aircraft components. It was farther to fly to Leipzig than Hamburg; Dresden is some 75 miles south-east.
‘The weather briefing … was eagerly awaited by all crews for the inane nonsense and tension relief it provided … in all our weather briefings I never heard one that was coherent …’ (Harvey). In RAF slang ‘cloudy’ came to mean ‘shady or unreliable’. Specials Leader ‘The Hon. Holbrook-Hardwicke’ is a fictitious, stylised hybrid name representing the son of a Lord, an old aristocratic family. Ollis is emphasising what is less obvious to us now: during the war the RAF mixed together people from all walks of life, including classes that would rarely if ever meet.