Prior to the Defiant, Les was condemned to spend time in yet another dreadful old crate, the Bristol Blenheim, a twin-engined jalopy with a few machine-guns stuck in the front and laughingly classified as a ‘fighter-bomber’. The fact that it was never fast enough to catch anything didn’t seem to impact on its risible classification.
‘We called it the Widowmaker,’ said Les with a disconcertingly infectious chuckle, and on his first day in action, many widows were made indeed. At the start of the battle, the Germans had three air fleets stationed in France, Denmark and Norway, threatening Britain like the talons of a vast claw. On 15 August 1940, histrionically dubbed by the Germans ‘Eagle Day’, they unleashed all three in a simultaneous three-pronged aerial assault across the north, south and centre of the United Kingdom.
Just before midday, Les, along with the rest of 219 Squadron in their northern England base at Catterick were busy putting on their best uniforms for a squadron photo and a round of sandwiches, when the urgent clanging of a bell told them they were being scrambled.
‘Caused a terrible panic,’ said Les. ‘We were just about to go to lunch!’ Number 219 had been on convoy protection patrols, but not yet in the thick of it and certainly nothing like this. Fifty Junkers 88 bombers had appeared on the radar, sweeping in over the North Sea from their Danish base at Aalborg. Radar was a weapon unappreciated by the Germans at that time, and full warning was given to the defenders.
‘It was so big they needed backing up,’ he said, still with a slight note of amazement. Number 219 was sent in to join a Spitfire, Hurricane and Defiant squadron already engaging the astonished Germans. Assuming the RAF would have its hands full with the raids further south, the enemy bombers went in without fighter cover and were cut to pieces. The fifty broke into eight sections, panicked, dropped a couple of bombs here and there but mostly just high-tailed it back out to sea, chased by people such as Les, who met them over the seaside town of Bridlington, near York.
‘We don’t know if we hit anything but we expended all our ammunition,’ he said, well aware that had the Germans decided to bring along some fighters, it might have been a different story. As it was, thirty out of the fifty German bombers were shot down or damaged, a result so appalling that never again was an attempt made on Britain using their Scandinavian-based aircraft.
The Royal Air Force soon came to their senses and began relegating the early Blenheims to more appropriate uses such as training, target towing or just sitting on the ground and rusting.
Les meanwhile found himself transferred to 141 Squadron at the height of the Blitz, when towns and cities in southern England were being attacked on a nightly basis. Luckily for him, he was stationed at his home town, Gravesend.
‘It was marvellous,’ he said. ‘If there was nothing on, I’d get on a bike, go around the perimeter track, nip out the back and spend the night in my own room. They called me Lucky Les.’
‘Lucky’, however, would not exactly have been the word used by the crews to describe themselves upon learning they were to fly the Defiant.
‘The pilots hated them,’ said Les.
Dreadful by day, the Defiant had by this stage been adapted as a night fighter. Their brown and green camouflage was painted over black, making them look for all the world like enormous bats. Flying at night simply amplified its well-known handling vices. Underpowered and overweight, landing accidents were particularly common, obviating some of the cover afforded by the night. But as Les said, ‘At the time, we just didn’t have anything else.’
The crews had to be rotated: two days on convoy patrol, two days on nights, then two days off. The strain on the often inexperienced pilots was terrible.
‘We could only do it for an hour and a half. You could see it in the pilots. The stress. It really got them down.’
In his rotating turret of four machine-guns, Les flew behind his pilot, hoping to catch the bombers on their way in, or out. Radar, rudimentary as it was, would find a contact, and the voice of a fighter controller somewhere on the ground would guide the pilot as close as he could to the interception. Then it was eyes peeled, watching for the tell-tale glow of the exhaust stubs from the bombers’ engines. Down below, Les could see the fires of towns and cities burning.
One night, on a patrol near Canterbury, Les saw his own town of Gravesend being hit. He knew that his mother, father and brother were somewhere down there and all he could do was watch the fires and wonder at their fate. Exasperatingly, there was no sign of the planes that were dropping the bombs, despite peering desperately into the night.
‘The sky is a huge void, and one aircraft just a dot,’ he said.
He returned home, sick with worry and frustration. Nor was there relief back at the base, strictly closed as it was to outside communication. It was days before Les was to learn of his family’s safety. He had discovered the downside of being stationed so close to home.
For sixteen weeks, Les and his pilot patrolled the night skies of southern England, straining his eyes into the darkness, night after night. The Germans weren’t their only danger. Barrage balloons – big, gas-filled dirigibles tethered to the ground with a long steel cable presented their own particular obstacle. And then there were their very own, very trigger-happy antiaircraft gunners, famous for their inability to distinguish friend from foe.
Usually the underpowered Defiant was too slow to catch anything, but eventually, they reckoned, their luck had to turn.
Then one night, a contact: a lone Heinkel 111 bomber, possibly hit already with anti-aircraft fire from the ground and flying slower than usual, thus giving the Defiant a sporting chance. By no means possessing a monopoly on substandard aeroplanes, the German He-111 was as atrocious as anything the worst examples of British industry could produce at the time, and as hated by its crews as it was by the bombed-out residents of the East End. A big, ugly twin-engined slug of a thing, it had done well in Poland and France where there was no opposition but was no match for the British fighters, even the Defiant. So lacking was it in adequate defensive armament, some Heinkel crews resorted to hurling tin boxes attached to reels of wire out the window in the hope of it catching in a fighter’s propeller. Les and his pilot, guided onto the contact by the voice in the dark, saw it barely illuminated in the fug of the night sky and, hearts pounding, quietly sidled up alongside. Les opened fire from about 700 yards, the four machine-guns tearing the big green fuselage open just behind the mainplane. It was all over in a flash. The Heinkel with its six crew fell to the ground somewhere far below.
Two nights later, it happened again. This time it was a Junkers 88, one of the German’s better aircraft. It had already dropped its bombs and was heading back over the coast, oblivious to being stalked by the Defiant. Les watched it. It seemed to him just a bit, well, overconfident.
‘It was just cruising along,’ he said.
He caught it over the coast and saw it go down in the sea. Les felt he was on a roll.
But that was it. Nothing else but the odd contact that materialised into nothing. By October 1940, Les’s patrols were being wound down, and the Defiant was at last put out to pasture.
With his characteristic chuckle, Les digresses for a moment. Until recently, Battle of Britain Race Day was held every year on September 15 at a prominent Melbourne race course. The host read out the names and service history of the guests who participated in the great event. When he came to Les, he paused, looked at his notes again, eyeballed Les and said with astonishment, ‘Les Smith. Defiants? How come you’re still alive?!’
Les chuckled. He’s proud of that one.
Then he shows me something on the wall, a large poster dedicated to his squadron during the Battle which takes up a relatively large space in his small unit. His name appears down the bottom and he points it out to me with considerable pride. He also hands me some photocopied pages, the brief extract from his record of service, complete with a passport-sized photo of himself in uniform, a rather cheeky-looking urchin face and wearin
g a cap.
Les, a bright bloke by anyone’s standards, decided to give the navigators’ course a go, found himself in South Africa, then on Wellingtons in the North African campaign supporting the army. He gives me a brief potted history of the next couple of years: training on an obscure aircraft called an Albemarle and towing gliders for D-Day. And Pegasus Bridge.
In the annals of British military history, Pegasus Bridge was one of the truly showcase moments, the first and most spectacular operation of D-Day. This particular bridge over the Orne River in Normandy had to be taken to prevent the Germans getting tanks up to the landing beaches, and then held to be used in turn by the British coming up from those same beaches and fanning out. One of those wonderful old British regiments, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, led by a former policeman, Major John Howard, landed in gliders and took it. In short, it was very heroic, brilliantly successful, took all of ten minutes with a cost of two dead and fourteen wounded and the Germans never re-took it. Les was in the navigating aircraft which towed the second glider.
A few months later, he was towing gliders again, this time in four-engined Halifaxes for the disastrous Arnhem landings in Holland. On the afternoon of the first day of the ten-day debacle, he towed part of the South Staffordshire Regiment. I asked him if he got to see the soldiers themselves, and what he observed of their demeanour.
‘There’s one of them living downstairs, you can ask him yourself.’
I could see he wanted to wind up the interview. He was virtually pushing me out the door. What else could he tell me? Just a sec. He thought for a moment. Crossing the Rhine in ’45 (he has kept his original flight plan) going into newly liberated Norway right at the end. He went back into his room to show me something, a long list inside a manila folder, which he handed to me with a quizzical expression.
‘Some Norwegian bloke sent me this list of every German aircraft captured in Norway at the end or the war.’ It went on for pages. Les looked at me, perhaps hoping to understand why someone would have done such a thing.
‘Pretty crazy, some of these buffs,’ I told him. He wasn’t reassured.
6
Gerald McPherson
Air-gunner
If you could see the colour in the flak, you knew it
was close.
Gerald had a go at being a pilot, failed and was scrubbed down to wireless/air-gunner. The wireless part just didn’t suit him. He hated fiddling around with radios so opted to be a ‘straight’ air-gunner instead. What you might call a specialist. A little bit later, on the boat going over, he was nevertheless grateful for the smattering of wireless knowledge he’d acquired. When at sea as part of an Atlantic convoy, he was able to interpret the morse signal being sent across the water from their rather famous escorting battleship, America’s first ‘Super Dreadnought’, the World War One vintage USS Texas: ‘If you do not immediately stop the smoke from your funnel, you will have to drop out of the convoy.’ As the crew of the Texas knew all too well, U-boats could spot the smoke from a ship’s funnel from over the horizon. ‘We nearly went and put it out ourselves,’ remembered Gerald.
Gerald’s brief but highly eventful career in Bomber Command could fill a book on its own, and my brief time with him over tea and biscuits could in no way do it justice. Talking to him was like being on a roller-coaster that hardly ever hit the flat. Like many former fliers, he seemed grateful for the chat, and happy not to have to explain too many of the basics to a novice. Nevertheless, at the end of our meeting, I was the one exhausted. His tone barely wavered from one of quiet, open, matter-of-factness, illustrated with many a soft chuckle and an understated sense of enduring amazement at what he saw, what he did, and how the hell he survived.
Within weeks of arriving in England, he had witnessed two horrific air crashes and had lost both his pilot and his wireless operator, all before starting operational flying.
The worst day in the history of the British Army is 1 July 1916, the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, when twenty thousand soldiers were killed going over the top in a single day. The equivalent catastrophe for the Royal Air Force is undoubtedly 30/31 March 1944, the night of an infamous raid on the German city of Nuremberg. On this brilliantly moonlit night, when everything that could go wrong, did, German fighters pounced on the nearly eight hundred-strong bomber stream and shot down a staggering ninety-six four-engined bombers, almost all on the way in to the target. One squadron, 51, lost six out of the seventeen Halifaxes dispatched.
Gerald, who was based at Silverstone, which straddles Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire, remembered the night well. Although not yet operational, he recalled one Lancaster, battle-damaged and limping along on three engines coming into Silverstone for an emergency landing but failing to line up properly with the runway. At the last minute the pilot radioed, ‘I’ll try to come round again. I’ll try . . .’, then his wing clipped the fire section roof. The bomber keeled over and crashed, tumbling through playing fields for 200 yards, killing all the crew except the tail gunner. For the new trainees on station who hadn’t even formed into crews yet, it was a sobering sight.
Later, at a Heavy Conversion Unit, where the new crews got their hands on a four-engined aircraft for the first time, Gerald witnessed another horror. One night, as the crews were practising landings and take-offs in Stirlings, a German intruder aircraft got among them, following one in and shooting it down before vanishing into the night. The bomber careered to the ground, narrowly missing the control tower but ploughed into a hanger, wiping out another couple of aircraft inside. Gerald saw the aftermath the next morning. ‘Terrible mess. Terrible,’ he said.
Living through such precarious times, some people set great store by lucky charms or treasured possessions. Gerald told me about one of his pilots, Jim Houghton, a New Zealander from Christchurch. Every pilot was required to fly one operation as a ‘second dickie’ or spare pilot with an experienced crew immediately prior to beginning operations with their own. It was a way of giving the most important crew member, the pilot, some idea of what to expect on a real trip. Jim had actually attempted this introductory trip with this same crew the night before, but their rear gunner had started having convulsions and the aircraft had turned back. So the next night, they had to do it all again. That’s when he lost his lucky charm, a New Zealand tiki. He was edgy before take-off and Gerald helped him to look for it, knowing how important it was to Jim. It was a warm night and Gerald remembers frantically going through lockers and kit bags to find the little green talisman, but to no avail.
By the time he had to go to the briefing, Jim still hadn’t found it. ‘He was in a lather of perspiration,’ Gerald told me. ‘I think he had a premonition . . .’ The crew he was with were all on the last trip of their tour. They flew to Stuttgart, and never returned.
The next morning, a wing commander called them into his office. After delivering the news, he proposed making this now incomplete crew ‘spares’, for the rest of the squadron, on call to fill the place of a sick gunner or navigator at the last minute. Gerald and his crew, having trained and been through so much together already, would have none of it. Besides, being ‘odd man in’ with people you’d never flown with before was regarded as a virtual death sentence. In the face of vociferous protests, the officer relented and instead, they picked up another pilot and went back into training.
Another memory Gerald had of a small but significant object concerned his wireless operator and a watch. Despite having known each other for only a month, Gerald and Charlie Smallwood, from Birmingham, had become good friends. One day while still in training, Charlie was asked by another crew to fly with them on a gunnery exercise over the Wash. At the last minute, Charlie came racing up.
‘Gerald,’ he said, ‘I need a watch. Can I borrow yours?’
As wireless op, Charlie would be required to send signals at precise times. It was a nice watch, a farewell gift from his family a few months before, but Gerald had no qualms in lending it
to his friend.
That afternoon, Gerald heard that the plane, a Wellington, had made a forced landing in the sea. All the crew got out – except the wireless operator. Later, Gerald asked one of the gunners what had happened.
‘I can’t understand it,’ the man said. ‘We were told to take up our ditching positions but just before we hit the water, he got up and raced back to his wireless station.’
Soon after the Wellington hit the water it began to sink. It was too late for Charlie to get out.
‘I’ve always had the feeling his death was caused by going back for my watch,’ Gerald told me. Although Gerald wasn’t visibly upset, I imagine it’s a burden he’s carried for over sixty years, and, I sensed, as painful now as the day it happened.
Gerald tried to reconstruct the tragedy in his mind a thousand times. Wireless operators frequently placed their watch beside them on the table rather than on their wrist for easier reference. Not braced for impact, Charlie was probably knocked unconscious as he tried to retrieve it, mindful of its value to his mate. But he’ll never know for sure. As the Wellington was sinking, the Australian gunner dived down to try and find Charlie, but to no avail.
‘We’d been out for a drink together in the local town the night before. Next day he was gone.’
I exhaled slowly and made a rather impotent sounding exclamation. ‘Gee . . .’ There’s very little else I could say.
Flak Page 6