Around this time came another strange and seminal event. At home one night, instead of doing my homework, I was, as usual, working diligently on the Airfix 1/72 scale Avro Lancaster, the big black four engined backbone of Bomber Command and primary ravager of western European cities throughout the second half of the war. This particular kit came with the markings of a famous Australian aircraft known by its individual letter coding as ‘S for Sugar’, which flew with number 467 Squadron from its base at Waddington in Lincolnshire.
My mother had arranged to go to a theatre restaurant show and for some reason insisted on dragging me along. At our table sat an older bloke, vaguely connected to the party of drunken adults I was forced to endure. He was quiet, sober, and slightly aloof. Somehow we got chatting. I’ll never know how the subject came up, but he revealed he’d been in the air force during the war, flying in Lancasters.
He seemed happy to talk, apparently stimulated by my interest, and further questioning revealed that he had been the navigator on the very same aircraft I’d been constructing in model form a couple of hours earlier. I was thrilled, stunned and tried to impart my amazement to my mother. Then he offered to show me some of his memorabilia including, to my wide-eyed amazement, his Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal awarded solely to officers for extended or exceptional service in the face of the enemy (although some disgruntled sergeants I’ve met claim they were handed out like yo-yos).
I jumped at the chance to see one up close. My mother arranged the meeting. At school the next day I raved about the seemingly unbelievable coincidence of the night before, to be met with almost complete boredom by my school friends. But I pitied them. They weren’t going to see a DFC!
A couple of weeks later I spent most of a wet winter’s afternoon with my new, but old friend Arnold in his living room surrounded by old photographs, his log book and a real live Distinguished Flying Cross, still in its original presentation box. It was a magnificent liquid-looking silver cross struck in the shape of a propeller, mounted on a ribbon of diagonal purple and silver stripes and, to me, quite the loveliest thing I’d ever seen. He talked and I listened, listened like never before. I looked at his hands as he spoke about his tour flying into the night skies over Germany: the cold, the flak, the friendships, the loss and the fear. Despite the violent events he’d been a part of, he was a gentle man, and spoke quietly with a slight stammer, which I later learned was a legacy from the stress of flying. As he went on, he obviously found the dredging of the memories difficult and by the early evening when I was picked up, he seemed utterly drained. I shook his hand, and watched his eyes, those same eyes that had seen it all.
Cast-iron and life-long, my obsession had been set.
I seriously contemplated joining the air force myself, a laughable idea now, but at fourteen, one which I took very seriously. But to discover just how unsuited to such a career I in fact was, I would need to join up.
At the expensive private school to which my parents somehow found the resources to send me, some form of after-class physical activity was compulsory. I loathed the idea of stomping around an oval in badly fitting dungarees with the army cadets and my natural indolence left me pathologically terrified of sport. Then, at the nadir of my despair, an older boy told me of an antiquated clause in the school’s constitution (it was that kind of place) that allowed certain outside activities to be taken in lieu of their own. Upon further investigation, I discovered that one of those sanctioned was the air force cadets, the Air Training Corps.
I’d hit the jackpot. Or so I thought. Twice a week after school I donned my snappy dark blue uniform and headed off on the train. Rough boys on the platform sniggered but what did I care? The headquarters of number 14 Flight, ATC was a big, drafty wooden drill hall sandwiched between an industrial air conditioning factory and North Melbourne railway station. I naturally assumed that with my profound knowledge of the history and heritage of the air force, I’d be running the place within a few weeks.
I hated it from the very start, and it didn’t much like me either. The drill, the constant yelling of orders, having to address the smarmy part-time officers as ‘sir’ and attending lectures comprised of reading out slabs from textbooks all combined to alienate me. The officers sneered at anyone displaying any knowledge beyond their own and my attitude probably didn’t help. I was a smartarse, and the other boys, all from tough suburbs, pounced on my private school mannerisms immediately. The one and only camp (‘bivouac’) I attended was misery from start to finish: a cross between a southern chain gang and The Lord of the Flies.
Perhaps if I’d stuck at it I would have eventually got near an aeroplane and maybe even some rudimentary instruction in flying, but it was not to be. In eight months, it was all over. I handed back the uniform – much to the joy of the other cadets – and tried tennis, at which I was also appalling.
My passion, however, was undiminished and as I got older, grew into an obsession with every aspect of the Second World War. I collected uniforms and medals and books and badges, totally oblivious to the passion-deadening effect it had on the opposite sex, explaining why my youth was spent in a state of extended sexual frustration.
About ten years ago, having exhausted all other means of throwing away my money, I had a go at learning to fly. Another disappointment. The flight manuals were incomprehensible and I was airsick every time I went up. But I persisted. To no avail. In a fitting end to the experiment, my instructor was involved in a non-fatal air crash, came under investigation by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority and the school went bankrupt. I hadn’t even learned to land. It did, however, equip me for my moment of glory.
On the redeye flight from Perth to Sydney one night to promote a less-than-successful sit-com in which I was given the poisoned chalice of the title role, I found myself seated at the front end of a Qantas A-300 Airbus.
The show, Bligh, a less-than-hilarious romp through early colonial New South Wales (fertile comic ground in anyone’s eyes) has since faded into TV oblivion. At the time, it was quite a big deal and Channel Seven had me criss-crossing the country on a two week publicity blitz before everyone cottoned onto the fact that the show was a dog. Half an hour into the long flight, the first officer emerged from the cockpit and sauntered aimlessly down the aisle, an activity no doubt riveting compared to his normal occupation of watching the plane fly itself and praying that chicken was not, yet again, on the menu. He was a genial fellow and catching sight of me, started to chat about comedy, a subject I usually find about as exciting as he does his own job.
It was pre 9-11, so a mention of flying lessons produced an instant invitation up to the cockpit. I did my best to charm the pilot (also a comedy fan) and gradually steered the conversation around to flying. What happened next still today makes me shudder to think about it. The first officer said something I couldn’t quite hear to the captain, which made him look a little uneasy. But then he nodded, turned to me and uttered the words, ‘Would you like to sit in?’
I looked at him blankly but suddenly his seat made a whirring sound and moved back on a motorised track. He got up and indicated I should take his place. Without thinking, I did just that. I sat there for a moment, motionless and a little stunned. The pilot meanwhile had lost his initial apprehension and chatted some more, pleased to be showing an interested observer the controls. What happened next is, I swear, true.
The first officer leaned over me and hit a button on the console, producing a tinny American-accented electronic voice that warned, ‘Auto-pilot disengaged’ to the accompaniment of a whooping siren.
‘Handing over,’ he said.
‘Er, t-taking over,’ I stuttered, giving the prescribed flying school response. Modern airliners have dispensed with a control column as such. Instead, the pilot steers the aircraft with his left hand clutching a small plastic grip. Gingerly I held it. I was now in complete control of a real live passenger aircraft, flying at night, somewhere over the West Australian desert with sixty or so unsuspecting
souls on board. A bead of perspiration emerged at my hairline. Just to see if I really did have control of the thing, I eased the stick a fraction to the left. Out the window, the port wing dipped ever so slightly. I corrected and did the same on the right. After about a minute, the nature of the situation began to dawn on me, and a voice in my head said something like, ‘Right, that’s enough. This is too weird’. I thanked the gentlemen for their hospitality and made my way back to my seat, not quite believing what had just happened. It was so odd I told no one about it for months.
A few years ago, an excellent Australian documentary series, Wings of the Storm, was screened, telling the story of the Australians in Bomber Command during World War Two and the losses they endured over Europe. One of the people featured was my navigator friend, Arnold, looking pale and nervous, an older, sicker version of the man I had spoken to several years earlier. Seeing him like this shocked me. He didn’t look like he had long to go, and in fact died soon after being interviewed for the program. It gave me the germ of an idea.
Many fellows completely clammed up after the war, and who can blame them? Returning servicemen believed the best way to get over their trauma was to shut up about it. This was after all, a generation born in the shadow of one mind-numbingly dreadful world conflict, only to have to grow up and fight the next, with an economic depression in between. People were traumatised even before it got started. It’s easy to see why boys were told not to cry – how would you ever get them to stop? People back home, weary after six years of grief, stress and deprivation, would not, indeed could not understand what their fighting men had been through.
Over the last few years, however, to ‘He never spoke about it’ has often been added the rejoinder ‘until now’. It’s not hard to understand the reason. The youngest age a participant of the Second World War can be in the year 2006 is eighty years old. All of them have now seen most of their contemporaries pass on, often taking their experiences to the grave. They were witnesses to, and participants in, one of the most dramatic, darkest and most vitally important chapters in our history, at a time when the stakes have rarely been higher or less ambiguous. And as I discovered, most of the people I met were more than happy to discuss what they’d been through, provided they were being asked the right questions.
I found the best way to get a man of that generation to clam up was to ask ‘What was it like?’ or ‘How did you feel?’ So I’ve stuck to the facts to let the drama speak for itself.
A word of warning: I have never believed there to have been anything inherently special about the Second World War generation as a whole. The people who fought it were brave, certainly, and responded when their country was in need, but were never, and have never claimed to be, the breed of righteous demi-gods the mantra of resurgent jingoism would have us believe. All that Aussie Anzac legend stuff quite frankly bores me rigid. I have no reason to believe that either my own, my children’s or any other generation would not perform as well, or as badly, as they did given the circumstances, and most of the men I met during this project agreed. As far as they were concerned, they were ordinary people who, in extraordinary times were called upon to perform extraordinary actions. These they spoke of with frankness, humility, and in remarkable good humour. In this, perhaps, they are indeed special.
1
Gordon Dalton
Bomb-aimer
I’ve always been a lazy bugger. I like to go into
battle lying down.
Gordon was my first cab off the rank and in a way, my most memorable. It was one of Gordon’s neighbours who contacted me with a simple email: Call Gordon Dalton. I think he was in bombers and a phone number. Later that afternoon, I stared at the telephone like a teenager calling a girl for a first date, overwhelmed with an irrational bout of nerves that was to grip me whenever making a new contact. I put the receiver down several times before dialling, finding distractions in the garden or kitchen for hours at a time. Pulling weeds out of the cracks in between brick paving (the most fiddly and time consuming task I could find), various uncomfortable scenarios played in my head. What would these people say to me? What if they told me to get lost, to stop prying into their dim, distant and traumatic past? I heard a scratchy, irascible old voice lecturing me in my head: ‘Do you know what war is? Do you know the sorts of things that happen in war? The scars people carry with them? Do you have feelings?’ Now I came to think of it, I’d never known anyone in their eighties. What would they be like? Doddery? Deaf? What if they all had Alzheimer’s and thought I was their uncle Stan? How much would I have to explain? Wouldn’t my lefty, middle-class leanings clash with everything they stood for? What if, as usual, I was unable to keep my mouth shut and get asked to leave in a hurry?
At last, I dialled. A man sounding as if he were in his fifties answered. I fell into a chaotic tumbling explanation of who I was and what I was doing.
‘Someone gave me your number . . . I’m doing this book . . . thing . . . about aircrew . . . and . . . the planes . . .’ I sounded like an idiot. Why on earth was I so nervous? The voice on the other end was calm and patient. Was he a son? Perhaps a brother? I needed to speak to Gordon. Could he put me onto Gordon?
‘I’m Gordon,’ he said. ‘Come over tomorrow if you like. Two o’clock OK?’
Gordon was sharp. Just like he’d sounded on the phone. He lived in a stylish 1950s ground floor apartment-style house with his equally charming wife Jo, a woman of great style who punctuated much of what she had to say with a big, earthy laugh, emitted between lusty draws on a cigarette.
I walked into the living room and a beer was placed in my hand, the first of several for the afternoon. I glanced around briefly at the random objects that signify a long, shared life: pictures of children and grandchildren, exotic wall-hangings and small statuettes from what used to be called the Far East, some books on cricket and near the door, a large framed print of a Lancaster bomber in flight.
‘How long have you been married?’ I asked.
‘Fifty-seven years,’ guffawed Jo, ‘forever!’
I sat in a large comfortable armchair on a parquetry floor. Instead of the judgemental patriarch I had anticipated, I found myself sitting opposite a man so laid back that I was completely thrown. His tone was quiet, low-key and terribly, terribly dry. I pulled out the tape recorder. ‘OK if I switch this on?’
‘Go for your life,’ he said.
When it came to the business end of a bombing raid, it all came down to the bomb-aimer. Lying on his stomach in the cramped nose compartment of the aircraft, it was the bombaimer who identified the target (or coloured target indicator flares), called ‘bomb doors open’ over the intercom, then lined it up along an illuminated ‘sword’ in the Mark VII bombsight, guiding the pilot over the intercom with precise directions of ‘left, left a bit . . . steady’ etc. The rest of the crew could only listen to this seemingly interminable exchange as the big bomber flew straight and level into the cauldron of the target, through flak and, at night, searchlights. (Gordon’s navigator, the only fellow Australian on his crew, would often interject with an exasperated ‘Just drop the bloody things!’) At the right moment, when the target crossed the hilt of the sword, the bomb-aimer pressed a button or ‘tit’ on the end of an electric lead clutched in his hand, called ‘bombs gone’, and several tons of explosives fell away from the aircraft, making it surge upwards as if gasping with relief. Then it was ‘Bomb doors closed – let’s get the hell out of here!’ But not until the photoflash, a flare timed to go off at the moment of impact to visually record the accuracy (or otherwise) of the drop. It must have seemed the longest 20 seconds of their lives.
While the bomb-aimer’s job was crucial, out of all the crew, he usually had the least to do. While the pilot was busy flying, the navigator constantly working out where they were and where they had to get to, the gunners on vigilant look-out for fighters, the bomb-aimer often had to find things to occupy himself. Occasionally he was required to drop bundles of cut aluminium stri
ps, known as ‘window’, out of a small chute in the nose to confuse the German radar, or man the rarely used front gun turret, but on a long trip, he could sometimes go to sleep (the padding on the bomb-aimer’s mat was, after all, relatively comfortable). But on the run up to the target, it was time for the bomb-aimer to remind the rest of the crew why they were there.
After joining up, Gordon had a go at being a pilot but was scrubbed early and trained as a navigator and wireless operator instead.
‘A flying arsehole,’ he said in a dry drawl, referring to the winged ‘O’ for Observer he wore on his tunic. He hated it. ‘Too much work.’ So, when arriving in England as part of the bombing offensive over Europe, and an opportunity arose to volunteer as a bomb-aimer, his hand shot up the highest.
Gordon did his entire tour of thirty operations in Lancasters, and most of those in daylight with 622 Heavy Bomber Squadron operating out of Mildenhall in Suffolk. Along with the rest of the crew of seven, the bomb-aimer would undergo the pre-flight ritual, that dramatic moment when, in the briefing room, a curtain was drawn back and the target revealed on a big map of western Europe covered in spidery coloured lines of tape indicating routes to and from the target, searchlight and flak batteries and known enemy fighter stations along the way.
He would be issued with a green canvass bag containing maps and information about the target, and an escape kit containing a silk map and currency of the countries overflown in the event of being shot down and lucky enough to survive. Just before take-off, in a wonderful piece of English bureaucratic absurdity, he would be required to sign a form taking possession of the several thousand pounds of bombs he was about to deliver, as if flogging them off somewhere en route was a possibility.
Gordon’s first operation was in some ways his most memorable, a trip (all bomber crews called operations ‘trips’) to Walcheren Island, a chunk of Dutch marshland reclaimed from the sea opposite the Scheldt estuary, remarkable only for its proximity to the Belgian port of Antwerp. Antwerp was desperately needed to enable supplies to reach the Allied armies pushing into Europe, and to shorten the ever lengthening supply route which wound its way up from the original D-Day beaches 300 miles (nearly 500 kilometres) away in Normandy. The port itself had been captured largely intact in a lightning thrust by the British and Canadian armies, but the approaches were defended from the sea by the Germans manning the guns of Walcheren.
Flak Page 2