by Peter Rees
A shop called Foodacco is open once a day, for exchange of goods—food and tobacco mostly. Values are quite different from the outside world; each article is worth a certain number of points; for example, a sixpenny cake of chocolate is worth forty points or one hundred cigarettes.
The inmates took up many different hobbies, and every few months an arts and crafts exhibition was held. Model aeroplanes and gliders were popular, and there was no lack of ingenuity. All news was closely followed, and a map room kept well up to date. A weekly paper, composed and typed by prisoners, was exhibited each Monday behind the canteen windows. There were at least two roll calls each day, when everybody was paraded in the sports area for counting.
When Stalag Luft III became too crowded, railway trucks shifted about 1000 POWs, including Chuck, to another camp, Oflag XXI-B, on Poland’s Baltic coast. While there, Chuck dropped and broke his glass eye. The commandant sent him to Berlin, accompanied by two guards, to have a new eye fitted. Chuck made use of the opportunity. ‘I was able to note details of camouflage, gun emplacements and even regimental numbers of German troops, and upon my return this information was relayed back to England. It was amusing to be constantly saluted by German soldiers or airmen whilst walking down the Unter den Linden and other streets.’
Conditions were bad at Oflag XXI-B, and Chuck breathed a sigh of relief a few months later when he was among POWs shifted back to Stalag Luft III, where new compounds had been built. At the end of November 1943, he was one of several POWs to take part in the first exchange of injured prisoners. Transported to Barcelona, they boarded a British hospital ship that took them to Egypt. After ‘a glorious month of freedom’, Chuck sailed home, to become one of the first POWs to be repatriated from Germany to Australia.
He arrived home not long before the so-called Great Escape occurred at Stalag Luft III. On 25 March 1944, seventy-six men escaped from the camp via a tunnel that had been fifteen months in the making, eight metres below the surface and 102 metres long. Among them were six Australian airmen. Twenty-two-year-old Squadron Leader James Catanach DFC, from Melbourne, was a member of 455 Squadron RAAF, where he flew Hampden bombers in Coastal Command. Flight Lieutenant Tom Leigh, twenty-five, from Sydney, was an air gunner with Bomber Command 76 Squadron RAF when his Halifax bomber was shot down in August 1941. Twenty-seven-year-old Pilot Officer Albert Hake, from Sydney, was piloting a Spitfire with 72 Squadron RAF when he was shot down over France in April 1942. The mastermind of the compass-making operation for the escape, he played a crucial part in preparations. The ingenious compasses were made from melted Bakelite phonograph records, slivers of magnetised razor blades, glass from broken windows and solder obtained from the seals of tin cans.
Twenty-nine-year-old Flying Officer Reginald ‘Rusty’ Kierath, from Narromine, New South Wales, was from 450 Squadron RAAF, which flew Kittyhawks in North Africa. At Stalag Luft III, he helped create fake walls to hide forged documents, Albert Hake’s compasses and other material vital to the breakout. Twenty-four-year-old Squadron Leader John ‘Willy’ Williams, from Sydney, was also a member of 450 Squadron when his Kittyhawk was shot down during a strafing raid in North Africa in October 1942. Willy, who took to the skies in baggy khaki shorts and shirt and leather sandals, earned a formidable reputation and a DFC. As digging went on for the Great Escape, he helped collect wooden slats from the bunks to shore up the tunnels. The final Australian was Paul Royle, a pilot with 53 Squadron RAF whose Bristol Blenheim bomber had been shot down over France in 1940. A prisoner of war for nearly four years, Paul had made several unsuccessful escape attempts. A mining engineer in civilian life, he always favoured tunnelling.
The tunnellers managed to excavate more than 200 tons of earth and reinforce the tunnel walls with 4000 bed boards taken from the prisoners’ bunks. When one tunnel was detected, they continued working on others. But the German guards discovered the breakout as it was happening. Only three of the seventy-six escapees made it safely back to England. All of the Australians were recaptured. Five were killed by the Gestapo on Hitler’s personal orders. Only Paul Royle survived. After interrogation, he was returned to Stalag Luft III.
Peter Kingsford-Smith was not involved in the escape operation. He would spend the rest of the war as a POW surviving on Red Cross food parcels.
12
FEUERSTURM
Genial and unassuming, Flight Lieutenant Bob Henderson was a handy cricketer, who had helped his club team win the 1939 Sydney competition before he enlisted in the RAAF. Later in the war he would be selected in the Australian Services side, along with players such as Lindsay Hassett, who had served with the Second AIF in the Middle East and New Guinea, and Keith Miller, a Mosquito pilot. Like his teammates, twenty-six-year-old Bob was in awe of Miller’s precocious batting and bowling talents—and of his cavalier, rebellious streak. ‘I was roomed with him quite frequently to try and keep him from going over the edge, but that was impossible, of course. He was [a] wild man, yes. He was a very fine fellow, nevertheless, Keith.’
In mid–1943 Bob was selected in the RAAF cricket team to play an English eleven, led by the legendary Wally Hammond and retired greats such as Maurice Leyland and George Duckworth, at Lords. The match coincided with operations of Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) in the Ruhr valley, and the major port city of Hamburg, in July and August 1943. Bob was a bomber pilot in 460 Squadron and he wanted to pull out of the cricket and take part in the raids. But Group Captain Hughie Edwards, commander of Binbrook station, which had not long before become 460 Squadron’s base, had other ideas. ‘I didn’t want to go down to play cricket but he insisted. “Oh, you’ve got to go”. So I went.’ Bob had a good game, being the last Australian batsman dismissed, but the England team won.
Bob’s buoyant mood collapsed when he returned to Binbrook. The squadron had just returned from the first Hamburg raid on the night of 24 July. ‘While I was away, a sprog crew was short a bomb aimer and a wireless operator for the first raid and my two boys volunteered to go. The one aircraft missing happened to be from our squadron. When I got back, the news of their loss confronted me.’
In that raid, a stream of 791 aircraft had dropped 2284 tons of bombs on Hamburg in fifty minutes. Many landmarks in the city of more than 1.5 million people were hit, and 1500 people were killed. Along with 460 Squadron, RAAF bomber squadrons 466 and 467 were also involved in the Hamburg attacks, code-named GOMORRAH, which were spread over ten days, from 24 July to 3 August 1943. These were the heaviest raids yet undertaken by Bomber Command and the damage was fearsome.
It was on the 24 July raid that WINDOW—the code name for small metallised strips like tin foil dropped in bundles from Bomber Command aircraft—was first used. British scientists had theorised that clouds of aluminium-foil-and-paper strips could swamp German radar with false echoes. Window was an immediate and spectacular success.
The idea was not new. Unknown to the Allied high command, Japanese naval aircraft had used a similar radar countermeasure—called giman-shi, or ‘deceiving paper’—during night attacks on Guadalcanal in May 1943. German scientists developed their own version, called Düppel, in Berlin and successfully tested it in October but the Germans were afraid it would fall into British hands and be used against them. Counter-productively, Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe, not only ordered all research on Düppel stopped but forbade development of a counter device.
Hamburg was still reeling from Bomber Command’s first attack when 122 American B-17 Flying Fortresses bombed the city the next day, setting off new blazes and testing the city’s firefighters to the limit. That night, while the main bomber force was at Essen, six Mosquitos made a further nuisance attack. Next day, fifty-one Flying Fortresses stirred up the fires once more.
The second Bomber Command raid came on the night of 27–28 July. Flying conditions were perfect as the 787 bombers, in a 320-kilometre-long stream, headed towards the city. Picking up the advancing British planes on its rada
r, the Luftwaffe sent up Messerschmitt ME 110 and Junkers JU-88 night fighters to intercept. In a cloudless sky, the Pathfinder crews had no difficulty in air-marking the targets over the city. Reaching their assembly point, the bomber crews first dropped 7000 bundles of Window. On the ground, radar stations that had been easily tracking them were flooded with false signals. German ground controllers were flummoxed. Just before 0100 hours, the lead Mosquitos opened their bomb-bay doors and dropped their target indicators, marking out a six-kilometre by five-kilometre rectangle over the city with enormous fireworks. Minutes later, the main force arrived.
The bombers dropped 2326 tons of bombs, starting fierce fires across the city. It was mid-summer and, with the temperature still high and the humidity low, the fires from the concentrated bombing linked up and spread in densely built-up residential areas.
German authorities recorded that within the first half hour the districts where the raid was concentrated were transformed into a lake of fire. Within fifteen minutes, most fires were blazing unchecked. As the fires linked and expanded, they consumed more and more oxygen, at the same time heating the air to temperatures that in some places approached 1000°C. A vast vacuum was created, sucking scorching-hot air through the streets with immense force, along with flames and sparks, timber and roof beams. People heard a shrill howling, a noise that had never before been recorded. The Germans called the hellish tornado a Feuersturm, or firestorm.
As the fireballs spread further, searing winds raging at more than 200 kilometres per hour snapped big trees like matchsticks or uprooted them and hurled them through the air. People were tossed like straw or catapulted alive into the flames. Panic-stricken, the survivors did not know where to turn. Flames drove them from air-raid shelters, but high-explosive bombs and more flames sent them back again. Once inside, many were asphyxiated by oxygen-less air before their bodies were reduced to ashes.
Most of Hamburg’s fire vehicles were in the city’s western areas, damping down fires that still burned from the Bomber Command raid three nights earlier. Firefighters struggled to reach the new targets but could not get through the flames or the wreckage. The firestorm destroyed 16,000 apartment blocks and obliterated more than 250,000 houses. Approximately 42,000 people were killed and another 40,000 injured. Immediately after the bombing, 1.2 million people fled Hamburg in fear of further raids.
Wing Commander Reg Bailey, CO of 466 Squadron RAAF, saw an ‘incredible column of smoke, resembling a cumulo-nimbus cloud’ which rose to 22,000 feet and obscured the target-indicator bombs. Against weak defences and an already blazing target, however, crews found little difficulty in hitting their marks, although some, like Pilot Officer David Symonds, a twenty-one-year-old Tasmanian, preferred to dive 6000 feet to see clearly on the bombing run. Black, sooty specks covered the windscreens and turrets of many aircraft, and fires in Hamburg could be seen for more than 300 kilometres on the return journey.
Sergeant Bill Lamb, a 460 Squadron navigator, was staggered by the ‘awesome and amazing spectacle’:
As far as I could see was one mass of fire. ‘A sea of flame’ has been the description and that’s an understatement. It was so bright that I could read the target maps and adjust the bombsight as there was no definite aiming point and I cannot remember giving the pilot any directions. The only aircraft I could see were a Stirling or two, well below, skittering across the flames almost, it seemed, at ground level.
Bill’s pilot was Reg Wellham. Reg, from Toronto near Newcastle and just a few weeks shy of his twenty-third birthday, had been on the previous trip to Hamburg as a ‘second dickie’ pilot—going on an operation with an experienced crew—before taking his own crew on this operation, the first for the rest of his crew. All were in their early twenties, apart from thirty-three-year-old Coonabarabran Flight Lieutenant Noel Knight.
They reached the target without any mishap, but just as they dropped their bomb load and were about to turn for home a massive explosion rocked the plane, turning it on its back and sending it plummeting towards the ground. Ted Groom, the crew’s flight engineer, was at the back of the bomber dropping bundles of Window down the flare chute when he suddenly found himself floating in the air, surrounded by foil strips from burst Window packets.
It all happened so quickly, in a matter of seconds. I didn’t know where I was—I was just rolling around amongst all these bundles. My first thought was to get a plug in somewhere. I knew where all the intercom plugs were, right through the aircraft. I stumbled around in the pitch black, got hold of the lead, and plugged myself back into the intercom. Reg the skipper was shouting out for me to get up to the front as quickly as possible. By that time we were right way up. I went past the wireless operator, I went past the navigator, who’d lost everything off his desk and was trying to find all his stuff in the semi-darkness. Everyone was crying out, ‘What the hell’s happening?!’ I eventually got up to the front and Reg said, ‘Get this sorted out!’
Ted synchronised the engines at a normal climbing rate of about 2850 revs a minute, plus a boost. After checking all the gauges, he was shocked when he looked at the altimeter: they had lost 9000 feet and were now at 10,000 feet. He looked at Reg and pointed at the altimeter, signalling to him not to speak and alert the others over the intercom that the Lancaster had dropped so much in just a few seconds. A minute more and they would have crashed into the fires below.
Back at Binbrook, they were unofficially told that their aircraft had been directly above another British bomber when a German fighter attacked it. As the British plane had not yet dropped its bombs, it had exploded with such force that it blew their Lancaster onto its back. Mid-upper gunner John Egan, a nineteen-year-old from Sydney, had no doubt that Reg Wellham, ‘by sheer guts and determination’, had saved the Lancaster in the potentially fatal dive.
Squadron Leader Ted Eagleton, who was also with 460 Squadron, took part in all four Hamburg raids and thought the first three were reasonably easy thanks to the introduction of Window. However, the fourth raid, on the night of 2 August, ‘was a shocker’ because of a massive thunderstorm, the worst many pilots had ever experienced. As the stream of 400 bombers neared the target, they ran into cumulonimbus clouds. Lightning soon was running up and down the guns of Ted Eagleton’s bomber.
My rear gunner, Barney McCosker, came up on the mike and said ‘Hey Ted! If this lightning doesn’t stop playing round the turret I’m getting out. There’s not room for two of us in here.’ Having got through that bank of cloud we came into a clear patch on the turning point to go into the target and, of course, that’s where the fighter boys were hovering round. Fortunately for me, slap-bang into another cu-nimb we went again, so we really bombed blind on Hamburg. We were attacked again by a fighter coming out of the target but by corkscrewing I managed to throw the fighter off and returned to base with a clear run.
Bob Henderson flew on the final Hamburg raid, finding the noise fantastic as they flew through the thick, freezing-cold cloud at 25,000 feet. Everything metal in the cockpit glowed from St Elmo’s Fire—an eerily beautiful effect of atmospheric electricity that often appears in thunderstorms around aircraft wings, masts and church spires. ‘The throttles and that sort of thing, the metal heading around the window was dancing with light and in the centre was a tiny area of clear space—just left of the frame of the window. Everything else was dancing with wretched lights.’ Amid the noise of thunder, one engine started to splutter and then another. He realised they were in dire trouble.
We were losing height pretty rapidly from 21,000 feet to 11,000 feet but, as luck would have it, we came out over Hamburg at 11,000 feet. The cloud base had risen clear of 11,000 feet because fires from the three nights were burning and the heat generated had raised the cloud to that point. We were very lucky and bombed exactly on target and with that heat the two motors which were spluttering due to icing and had been pretty well useless, gradually came back into action. Until then we were ready to jump and although the boys were ready to go I hadn�
�t actually ordered them to do so. It did look as though we had no chance of coming out of it.
Such experiences put trying to contain Keith Miller’s excesses into perspective.
For a time, the vital contribution to the German war effort made by Hamburg’s shipbuilding yards and large armaments factories was brought to a standstill. Nearly 200 of more than 500 large factories in the city were destroyed, along with more than 4000 smaller factories. Local transport systems were disrupted. Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and War Production, later expressed the view that had Bomber Command persisted with ‘fire bombing’ on a similar scale to the Hamburg raids, Germany would quickly have sued for peace.
Many local eyewitnesses to the bombings were unable to report what they had seen without breaking down and weeping. Panicked survivors, including workers defying orders to remain, poured out of the city. Arrangements to feed and shelter the homeless and displaced functioned for three days only after the first attack, before failing completely. In early August, official appeals were published in local newspapers ordering fugitive policemen, railwaymen, local government officials and other civil servants to report at once to their posts.
The Germans deplored the raids as ‘terror attacks’ and labelled the British and American airmen terrorfliegers whose bombs killed women and children, and destroyed hospitals and churches. The Germans’ own bombing of civilians in Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry, Belfast and Belgrade was forgotten.
13
WAAFS AND OTHER GIRLFRIENDS
Perc Rodda was twenty-two, married and a newly qualified accountant when he applied to join the RAAF in late 1940 in Adelaide. The medical examination was going fine until the doctor opened a book with coloured spots and asked Perc what he saw. ‘Stiff cheese, old lad,’ he later told Perc, ‘you can’t go into aircrew because you’re as colour blind as they come.’ Having already been rejected by the navy because of his colour blindness, Perc worried that he would not be able to serve at all. But his accountancy skills were urgently needed. Perc enlisted in the RAAF as a paymaster in January 1941.