by Peter Rees
A month after that first Brunswick raid, on the night of 22 May, Bill was back there again, only to find that since his previous op the searchlights between Bremen and the Ruhr had been joined into one complete belt. Twice in the Ruhr valley, searchlights picked out his Lancaster, but Bill climbed to 30,000 feet to avoid the lights and guns. He waited until ‘some other poor sod was coned in a dozen lights, then put our nose down and cleared the area doing an initial 520 miles per hour’.
All the crew complained about the pain in their joints, which Bill speculated was the onset of the bends at such an altitude without pressurisation. In the event, the raid was a failure. The master bomber’s radio communications were partly blocked, and the target was obscured by cloud. The bombs from Bill Purdy’s and other Lancasters fell harmlessly in Brunswick’s surrounding countryside.
Bill’s raid was part of the build-up for OVERLORD, the long-planned Allied landings in Normandy. Bomber Command’s strategy was now focused on destroying the Germans’ transportation systems to hamper the movement of troops and armaments. OVERLORD would be the greatest sea invasion in history, and 460, 463 and 467 RAAF Squadrons would play crucial roles in the preliminary air offensive.
Planning for the invasion had begun in earnest in December 1943 when General Dwight Eisenhower was named Supreme Allied Commander. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was officially formed on 15 February 1944, with Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory as the Air Commander-in-Chief. Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Tedder was to coordinate the operations of tactical and strategic air elements during the build-up to OVERLORD. Sir Arthur Harris initially wanted Bomber Command to be independent of SHAEF, and disagreed with Eisenhower’s proposal of using bombers to cripple the French railway system, on which the Germans’ defence would depend. But when the British Chiefs of Staff agreed to put Bomber Command under SHAEF’s ultimate supervision and to adopt the ‘Transportation Plan’, Harris came around. The bulk of bomber operations shifted from Germany to France—with devastating effect. By D-Day, according to the historian Gordon Harrison, ‘the transportation system was on the point of total collapse’. That would be of inestimable value to the invading armies.
Bomber Command launched the first attack on railway communication and repair centres in France and Belgium in March 1944. The RAF had been allotted thirty-seven of the seventy-nine such centres that had been targeted. The rest were divided among the USAAF, which had been part of a combined bomber offensive since June 1943; the Allied Expeditionary Air Force; and some elements of the 15th Air Force, based in the Mediterranean.
Prewar Europe, particularly France, was well served by a highly efficient railway network that made up for the lack of high-speed roads. The Germans depended on this rail system to move their armoured units to trouble spots. Railway junctions were relatively easy to destroy by precision bombing, but they were also easy to defend and rebuild.
To minimise loss of French lives and damage to French property, attacks on rail and other transportation targets in France were made at low altitude and not begun until the target was correctly identified. Such was the intensity of operations over France and Belgium, as well as German industrial areas, that 463 and 467 Squadrons lost—killed in action or taken prisoner—nearly sixty per cent of their normal crew strengths in the three months before D-Day.
On the night of 3 May, Rollo Kingsford-Smith led 463 Squadron Lancasters on a raid that dropped 1500 tons of bombs on a German military camp in northern France, destroying thirty-seven tanks, blowing up ammunition dumps, and damaging 114 barracks buildings. Eight nights later, their target was a marshalling yard at Lille, in northern France. Rollo noted that only ninety-four aircraft had bombed when the controller ordered the raid abandoned because of dust and smoke.
As part of the build-up, on 9 May Rollo set off for Lille to destroy railway yards and a railway junction. Although their usual bombing altitude over Germany was about 20,000 feet, at Lille they went in at a much riskier 7000 feet to ensure accurate bombing. To Rollo’s surprise, anti-aircraft batteries and searchlights ringed the city, and there were more than the expected number of night fighters above and around the target. Soon shells were bursting so close he could smell the cordite. But—
We did not smell the one that hit us. Just at the moment our bombs were released the flight engineer called out, ‘Starboard outer engine on fire.’ Fire in the air was the happening that I feared the most. A Lancaster burned quickly and after a fire started it could only be a second or two before the fuel tanks exploded and of course if it still had bombs in the bomb bay the aircraft went up with a terrific explosion and none of the crew had time to get out.
In fact, the engine was not on fire, though it was damaged. Shrapnel had burst a pipe in the coolant system and glycol was being pumped from the engine into the atmosphere, leaving a distinctive clear white vapour trail that reflected all the light from the action in the air and on the ground below. Rollo, thinking the windmilling propeller must be pumping fuel out onto the presumed flames, immediately ordered the engineer to feather the engine while he closed the throttle. By now at least five searchlights were trained on them, fixing the Lancaster in the centre of a cone of light. Then the anti-aircraft guns homed in.
Suddenly, Rollo noticed that in the excitement the engineer had feathered the wrong engine—the undamaged starboard inner engine. Now they were not only in the enemy’s sights, they had lost power from both starboard engines.
We had to get away from the searchlights and the guns and with only half our normal power and extra drag [from the windmilling propeller] I could only gain enough speed for the usual violent evasive action by trading away height. We dived. Almost to ground level, where the searchlights and flak lost us. At the same time the engineer got my message and stopped the engine, which was pumping out the vapour and unfeathered the engine stopped by mistake. As we dropped out of the sky the heavy flak no longer followed us. The light flak gunners, who were no doubt waiting for this opportunity, then started. Fortunately they were to one side of us, requiring a fair amount of deflection on their part, and their tracer rounds were well behind us. I could not see it but the rear gunner admired the show.
Restarting the feathered engine took time, ‘far too long’, in Rollo’s anxious view. Eventually it started, and they returned to base safely on three engines. In the briefing that followed, Rollo discovered that 463 Squadron had lost three of fourteen aircraft and twenty-one aircrew killed. The result was even worse for 467 Squadron, which had lost four of seventeen aircraft and twenty-eight men. Rollo reflected on his own near escape: ‘A few centimetres to one side the shrapnel would have missed. About 30 centimetres to the other it would have been in the fuel tank followed by the fire. About two seconds earlier and into the bomb bay before the bombs were released we could expect the massive blast, the ball of red flame and seven crew members immediately becoming lumps of charred flesh.’
On the night of 19 May, 5 Group attacked railway yards in the centre of Tours, causing considerable damage. Rollo noted that RAF Wing Commander James ‘Willie’ Tait, the 5 Group master bomber, kept the force waiting after each wave until he was satisfied that no damage was done to the residential part of the town.
Two nights later, Rollo was involved in a raid on a well-protected site at Duisburg, in the Ruhr heavy industrial area. The raid involved 510 Lancasters and twenty-two Mosquitos from 1, 3, 5 and 8 Groups. Considerable damage was caused in the southern part of the city, with 350 buildings destroyed and 665 badly damaged. Twenty-nine Lancasters were lost. ‘We lost two crews, all killed and I doubted during the operation whether my crew and I would survive that trip,’ Rollo said. As it was navigator Norm Kobelke’s and mid-upper gunner Dai Rees’s last trip of their second tour of operations, Rollo expected bad luck. ‘But we got back.’
As May drew to a close, 100 Lancasters and four Mosquitos successfully attacked the railway junction at Nantes. The first fifty aircraft dropped their bombs so acc
urately that the master bomber ordered the others to bring their payloads home.
With 5000 flying hours, Sam Balmer was a dynamic leader and one of Bomber Command’s best and most experienced pilots. In April, he was awarded the DFC for his skill, efficiency and devotion to duty, and early in May, he was made group captain. On the night of 11 May, the thirty-three-year-old commander of 467 Squadron led fourteen of his unit’s bombers to join 190 Lancasters and eleven marker Mosquitos on a raid to a large military camp at Leopoldsburg in Belgium. Sam’s Lancaster was carrying one 4000-pound ‘cookie’, six 1000-pound and eight 500-pound bombs. Only ninety-four aircraft had dropped their bomb loads when the master bomber ordered the raid abandoned because dust and smoke obscured the target and there was risk to the nearby civilian population.
When the 467 Squadron aircraft returned to Waddington, one was missing. It was Sam Balmer’s. The Melbourne Argus reported the loss:
GRP-CAPT BALMER MISSING
Grp-Capt John Raeburn Balmer, OBE, DFC, of Bendigo, commander of a RAAF Lancaster squadron in the UK and formerly commander of a famous Beaufort torpedo squadron in New Guinea, has been reported missing in air operations over Europe. In June, 1942, Grp-Capt Balmer led the Beauforts on their first strike in the SW Pacific, a mission which resulted in the sinking of the Japanese freighter Tonyo Maru off the end of the airstrip at Lae. Before joining the RAAF as a cadet in 1932 he studied law at Melbourne University, and as a racing motorist was noted for his record-breaking trip from Darwin to Adelaide in July, 1936, when he took nine hours off the existing record.
After the war, it was established that his Lancaster was shot up by a night fighter on its bombing run and crashed in flames near Herenthout, Belgium. There were no survivors.
The Operations Record Book of 467 Squadron conveyed the unit’s sorrow, referring to an operation the previous night when 463 and 467 had lost six aircraft and their crews attacking the rail yards at Lille:
As bad as yesterday if not worse, for we lost our squadron commander and included in the crew the gunnery leader, both on their last trip. It is understood that the squadron commander went missing as a group captain and this was to be his last trip before assuming his new position . . . The loss of such a capable crew and of such a dynamic CO shock the squadron considerably.
Rollo Kingsford-Smith had begged Sam not to fly, especially since he had just been promoted. But Sam decided to make one more trip as commander so his crew could complete the final, twentieth op of their second tour. Rollo was shocked.
To fly when it was not your duty, when you had doubly discharged your duties was challenging fate too much and his aircraft was the only one shot down of the hundred or so that flew on that target. I felt his death more than any others. From 1940 he had taught me so much about flying, he was the perfect wartime pilot although a rascal on the ground. I missed his phone calls in the middle of the night: ‘Smithy, jam at such and such a place and I have a few problems, could you come and get me.’
Bill Brill was named as Sam Balmer’s replacement as squadron commander. Despite Air Vice-Marshal Wrigley’s doubts about Group Captain Bonham-Carter’s abilities, he would remain station CO until the following April.
Among those in the crew who died with Sam Balmer was RAF air gunner Norden-Hare, who had fallen out with Ted Pickerd three days earlier over a fruitcake. Like Sam Balmer, it was to be his last trip.
24
GOOD LUCK, BOYS
As the nation’s wartime leader, Prime Minister John Curtin had undergone a transformation. Before the war he had often made clear that the Labor Party was opposed to Australian involvement in another European war. After Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced on 3 September 1939 that Australia was at war with Germany, Labor had reiterated its objection to sending forces overseas. When the government decided to send the Second AIF’s 6th Division to the Middle East in early 1940, Labor once again registered its disagreement.
However, Curtin changed his mind in February 1940 when, with an election looming, he announced that a Labor government would reinforce the Second AIF, implicitly endorsing Australia’s involvement in the war in Europe and North Africa. His main focus, though, remained the Pacific. Until the federal election in August 1943, Curtin rejected all proposals that he should travel overseas, including those from President Franklin Roosevelt urging him to visit Washington. In 1944, however, he decided to visit the United States and Canada en route to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London.
Curtin was scheduled to visit Waddington during his forthcoming trip, but not 460 Squadron at Binbrook. As a fellow Western Australian, Commander Hughie Edwards was keen for the Prime Minister to visit his station, but he understood Overseas Headquarters was decidedly cool on the idea because of the recent incident in which Stanley Bruce had been insulted. Hughie assured the hierarchy that such a thing would not happen again, and Binbrook was added to the Prime Minister’s itinerary.
Australia had sent several parliamentarians to wartime Europe, starting with Menzies’ ‘grand tour’ of the Middle East and England in early 1941. In March 1942, following Japan’s entry into the war and its southward thrust towards Australia, the Curtin government had dispatched Dr H.V. Evatt, the Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs, to Washington and London to state Australia’s needs, which included Spitfire fighters. In London, apparently by accident, Evatt discovered that Britain and the United States were committed to a ‘beat Hitler first’ strategy. Known for a prickly, abrasive style that had already ruffled feathers in both countries, Evatt contained his outrage and concentrated on building bridges with the British, winning a promise from Churchill to send three Spitfire squadrons to Australia.
While in London, Evatt showed a keen interest in the RAAF and what they were doing. Wrigley took him on several visits to RAAF stations, including to the Mount Batten station in Plymouth, where 10 Squadron RAAF, a maritime patrol unit, was based. Evatt asked Wrigley to arrange for the commanding officer ‘to get the lads together so that I can talk to them’. While most of the RAAF boys listened closely to Evatt’s address, Wrigley noticed two sergeants in the background ‘chatting away there and looking at Evatt and then at each other and a smile’. He quickly realised that they were up to something. When Evatt finished, he asked for questions. One of the sergeants asked a question that was purely political.
Evatt looked at him in a very fierce way and said, ‘Sergeant, I think that your rank, three stripes is a sergeant, isn’t it?’ And the reply was, ‘Yes, sir.’ Well, Evatt said, ‘I have come here as one Australian visiting a number of Australians engaged in very serious tasks. And I came here to say, ‘How do you do’ to you and to tell you something about what’s going on in Australia which you might be interested in but if you’re going to drag politics into this, then I’m leaving and I won’t come again.’ So that was Evatt’s attitude.
Army Minister Frank Forde followed Evatt, and Wrigley quickly saw that, unlike Evatt, he had politics uppermost in mind.
Forde made his visits a purely electioneering stunt. He had a secretary with him, he asked each man as he went along where he came from. And if he was a Queenslander [like Forde], he’d say, ‘Oh yes, your father’s alive? What does he do?’ And so on and so on. And, ‘Where do you live? Make a note of that will you.’ And he did—all except people from that state he just passed by. Took no notice. So I came to the conclusion that was purely electioneering. Although I couldn’t say so on the spot.
When Arthur Drakeford, Minister for the Air, came through, Wrigley expected him to take a keen interest in what the Australians were doing, especially after the minister asked him to arrange for a visit to one of the squadrons and organise transport there. Picked up after breakfast by Wrigley and another senior officer, Drakeford said he wanted to visit an optician. After a ninety-minute consultation, they set off for the squadron, where they were expected at 11 a.m. But on the way, Drakeford asked to do a spot of sightseeing, before deciding he wanted lunch, m
uch to Wrigley’s dismay.
I tried to restrain him from that but I couldn’t and he went to lunch. He had Air Marshal [Dickie] Williams with him. They wanted me in too but I said I was in the habit of doing without lunch. We arrived at the squadron at three o’clock in the afternoon. And it was a cold wintry day, a heavy mist right down onto the ground so that flying had been cancelled for the day. When that happened, the troops were usually given local leave for the day. They’d missed out on that and by the time the minister arrived, the heaters in the lecture hut had gone out and it was icy cold and they had to put up with a meandering talk from Drakeford which lasted for a good half hour. And then he departed and that was that.
Although he was not a Labor supporter, Rollo Kingsford-Smith had voted for Curtin in the 1943 election, when all Australians in England received ballot papers. Rollo reasoned that given the political squabbles between the United Australia Party and the Country Party, together with the attacks on Menzies by his own party, the conservative parties could not give Australia effective government. Their leader, whoever he might be, would therefore be unable to provide the leadership the country needed in the stress of war.
Curtin’s performance had impressed Rollo greatly. Although Australia was in peril from the Japanese, almost all the nation’s fighting forces were far away under Britain’s control, and Churchill was in no hurry to release them. It was clear to Rollo that neither Churchill nor his top military staff could understand Curtin’s preoccupation with Australia’s defence at a time when, in ‘their blinkered minds’, he should have been giving priority to global strategy. But Rollo had something closer to home to worry about—what was happening to the replacement crews.