Flak

by Michael Veitch

  ‘My God,’ thought Bruce. ‘This is war.’

  Bruce and I spoke amiably for a long time about training and flying. He loved the talk and the satisfaction he derived in answering my questions concisely and with as much relevant detail as possible was palpable.

  His most serious incident was when training in the four-engined Stirling. While starting up for exercise, Bruce noticed one of the four rev counters not working properly and duly signalled the tower. A ground staff mechanic soon aboard began to remove the four screws which secured the recalcitrant instrument on the control. While doing this he fumbled and dropped the screws, managing to recover only two.

  ‘I’ll just put two back in and fix it up properly when you get back,’ he said.

  Bruce taxied to the end of the runway, then swung around onto the threshold for take-off. The throttles were open full bore, the tail was up, and they were tearing along at 85 miles (137 kilometres) per hour, his instructor next to him. The Stirling swung a little to the left with the torque as usual. This was nothing to worry about and needed just a touch of the rudder to correct it. Nothing happened. The rudder was rock hard, jammed solid with absolutely no give, and the aircraft was still wandering over to the side. The instructor had a go, but he too could not shift the rudder bar.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘Cut throttles, cut switches, cut fuel!’ One wheel was already off the runway, then another, and the big Stirling was at full power, heading straight for other aircraft dispersed around the perimeter track. At this speed, touching the brake was likely to lock one wheel, making the whole thing do a ground loop, digging the wingtip into the surface, wrecking the aircraft and endangering the crew. They decided to just hope for the best and let it run on. So 23 tons of aeroplane, completely out of control, bounced across the airfield until at last, it slowed quietly to a halt. A tender pulled up alongside and put the men immediately into another aircraft to complete the training exercise. Rather than let the nerves, or ‘ring twitch’ take a hold, the wartime rule was strictly ‘get back on the horse’.

  Later, enquiries would reveal that one of the two screws left on the floor of the aircraft by the mechanic had become jammed in a cogged wheel of the rudder control mechanism. Dangerous enough as this was, if it had become lodged in a slightly different part of the wheel, allowing them to become airborne but then preventing them from properly manoeuvring, it would have been catastrophic.

  By December 1944, Bruce had trained up on Lancasters and was preparing to take his first operational flight, the mandatory ‘second dickie’ trip as an observer pilot with an experienced crew. He was so nervous he couldn’t eat his preflight meal, then became so hungry he wolfed down his flight rations of barley sugar and chocolate, promptly making himself sick. Most of the flight, was spent vomiting in the toilet at the back. The pilot advised he’d better come up the front and actually see something or he’d most likely have to do it again. Bruce staggered up to the cockpit, his head a blur of nausea and humiliation, icicles of vomit freezing around his face and oxygen mask in the sub-zero temperatures. The pilot had the perfect solution. ‘Right, take over,’ he said, and vacated his seat. Within five minutes, Bruce had forgotten he was sick, and even took the Lancaster back to base. It was a memorable first trip.

  Bruce’s tour was made up of attacks on oil refineries, railway yards and a few trips for the benefit of the army such as to the Ardennes Forest in Belgium when absolute precision bombing was needed to hit the German positions which were themselves close to the Americans, during the Battle of the Bulge. As far as he knew, he didn’t make a mistake.

  As one of the younger pilots, he felt the invincibility of youth that much more keenly.

  ‘You just couldn’t get your mind around the fact that you were going to get killed. We used to give it to the older crews. “You won’t make it, your nerves won’t stand it” – that sort of thing.’

  Indeed, in twenty-eight trips, he was not once attacked by fighters, nor did he become trapped in searchlights, or have a close encounter with flak. Then came trip number twenty-nine.

  On a big raid there was always a brief window between your slot in the complicated take-off schedule and being scrubbed altogether. Depending on the target, late starters were given a certain amount of time, after which you were deemed too far behind the others to make up the distance. On the night of 8 February 1945, it was set at thirty minutes. Bruce and his crew of seven were on the second last trip of their tour.

  After their take-off meal, they sat in the briefing, listening with more intensity than they had ever listened to anything in their lives, to the information about the target, the weather and the expected defences. They had donned their flight equipment, parachute, life jacket, flying suit and boarded the crew bus out to their aircraft, Avro Lancaster PV382, with the identity code I-Item. They tested the equipment, the gunners working the turrets, the pilot and engineer starting the engines and the flight systems. Then they shut everything down, climbed out and waited for their turn to start up and go. This was the waiting time, the time of the ‘nervous pees’ when you usually felt terrified but bored, sick with apprehension but nothing to do but think and a permanent urge to urinate. Usually, you couldn’t, but the mere effort would alleviate some of the tension. Then at last the signal came. The Germans were already listening to the airwaves so it was always visual. The crew climbed back in and Bruce pushed to starter button. Number two, the inner starboard, was dead, not even a hint of turning over. A signal to the tower and in a few minutes ground staff put up portable scaffolding around the engine and the cowling was removed. All they could do was wait while the rest of the squadron took off in front of them.

  Then a thumbs up, the cowling was replaced and the scaffolding removed. The inner starboard motor started immediately and they were cleared to go. It was the twenty-eight minute mark. Two more minutes and their mission would have been cancelled.

  Their target was the synthetic oil plant at Politz, near Stettin, not far from Berlin on the Baltic coast. They were now flying alone over the North Sea with the rest of the bomber force of 485 Lancasters and seven Mosquitos 28 minutes ahead of them. Quickly, the navigator made a new course to cut two 14-minute blocks off the prescribed route, taking them over central Denmark, then down the Kattegat, the stretch of sea separating Sweden and Denmark, to re-join the stream. They would then ease back into the formation and swing south into northern Germany.

  Near the rendezvous point the navigator, watching the second hand on his watch, gave the instruction to the pilot: ‘Skipper, approaching change of course to 162.’ It would be a turn to starboard so Bruce alerted the gunners to look out for other aircraft to avoid collision. ‘All clear starboard, Skip,’ came back from the gunners. Then from the navigator, ‘Turn onto 162 . . . now.’ They would be the last words Bruce heard him speak. He turned the Lancaster around to complete the delicate mid-air merge with the main force.

  They had been over Sweden before. For them, it was an astonishing sight. As a neutral country it was at peace so instead of the black-out, its cities were illuminated as in peacetime. But it also defended its neutrality. High above the city of Helsingborg, Bruce could clearly see the lights of the city 10,000 feet (3,050 metres) below. Slowly, eight of those lights began to move, gradually at first then speeding up rapidly and rushing towards them. Perhaps if he’d maintained a straight and level course they would have exploded behind him. But instead he made a fateful, shallow dive.

  Sitting across from me, Bruce made four loud rapping noises on the table, thump, thump, thump, thump! The hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end. Four shells hit the belly of his Lancaster, I-Item. Pulling back from the dive, Bruce felt the control column go limp. In that instant, he knew the control cables were severed and the aircraft doomed.

  ‘Jump, jump, jump, jump!’ he yelled into the intercom but hears nothing back in his ears. It too is dead. Unable to communicate verbally, he gave his engineer a thump and pointed downwards. As pilot, Bruce
was already sitting on his parachute pack, folded to fit into a scoop in his seat. The bomb-aimer was sitting behind him with the navigator, his chute on an adjacent shelf. Bruce distinctly remembered disconnecting his intercom, oxygen, seat harness and getting out of the seat, his priority in that instant to communicate to the rest of the crew to get out. Then, nothing.

  Just a bright light, white and intense, and a clear, simple thought in his head, ‘Hell, I’m dead! Mum’s going to be upset’. There was no wind, no sound, no pain. ‘It’s funny how you remember these things,’ he mused. Then, darkness.

  I reached for the glass of water at my side but it was empty.

  A shape appeared in front of him. The light faded slightly. It was moving. It was thin and dark and it seemed to be turning. At first he thought it was one of the crew, but watching it a little longer, he realised what it was. ‘A cowling! It’s only a bloody cowling!’ Falling with a piece of his aircraft’s engine cover seemed to restart some logical sequence in his brain: ‘If that’s a piece of the aircraft, it means it’s probably disintegrated ergo I’m most likely in the air with it. Now, therefore, might be a good time to pull open the parachute.’ He tugged on the rip cord, jolted upwards briefly and then descended through cloud.

  He found himself standing in mud in a newly ploughed field. He stood up, half a mile away from the flaming wreckage of his aircraft. Ammunition was exploding and it was pitch dark, but Bruce began walking, ducking every time a bullet exploded from the wreckage. For some reason, he thought he was in Denmark. ‘Bugger it,’ he remembered thinking to himself. Soon he’d be picked up by the Germans.

  He came to a rise in the ground, and an oil pipeline, suspended by concrete supports. He followed it and over the rise was greeted by the sight of the blazing lights of a city, Helsingborg, still very much in neutral Sweden.

  I had been quiet for some time, mesmerised by this extraordinary tale. There was a pause. ‘What time was it?’ was all I could think to ask.

  ‘Eight o’clock at night.’

  ‘Were you in shock?’

  ‘No,’ Bruce answered calmly, ‘just happy to be alive and grateful not to be in an occupied country.’

  He couldn’t know it at the time, but the Lancaster had ploughed into a local electrical substation, blacking out the entire area. He wandered towards the shape of a building some way up ahead. It looked like a farmhouse. A dog barked. A comical thought came into his head. Having survived being blown out of an aeroplane, was his fate now to be mauled by a dog? He found some steps, and went up to bang on the door. It opened, and Bruce could make out five or six startled people inside. He picked out a rather frightened-looking woman to address. ‘Pilot. RAF,’ he said, pointing emphatically to his uniform. No response. Then ‘Australia’. This amazingly enough, seemed to spur them into action. They produced food – scones, bread and meat. Someone even removed and cleaned his muddied flying boots, and brought a basin with warm water to wash his face. No-one spoke English, but Bruce could tell questions were being asked. Ten minutes previously he had been blown out of a bomber at 10,000 feet. Now he was seated at a dinner table.

  Soon a boy appeared in what looked to be a home guard uniform complete with a rather oversized, ridiculous-looking helmet. Unarmed except for a bayonet which remained firmly in his belt, he just stood there, agog, until the police arrived.

  Bruce was arrested, put into prison with some local drunks, interrogated in the most gentle of fashions and marked for internment. At one o’clock that morning, he had the surreal experience of watching the formation returning home, roaring back overhead towards England at 4,000 feet (1,200 metres), their job at Politz done. The Helsingborg gunners again opened up and the shrapnel from the explosive shells rained metal splinters that tinkled on the roofs of the town.

  Neutral Sweden had achieved what the Germans had failed to do in nearly thirty operations. The four flak shells had torn into the belly of I-Item, starting a fire in the bomb bay that set off several of the 500-pound bombs, tearing off the port wing, splitting open the cockpit and blowing the unstrapped Bruce Clifton into the night sky. In anyone’s terms, it was a miracle of survival. Bruce’s only injury was a tiny cut on the bridge of his nose. He lifted up his glasses to show me. I could just make out the tiniest of scars. The rest of his crew perished. Sixty years on, he gave a slight shake of the head in amazement.

  The wing had landed about half a mile from the main wreckage. Not yet armed, the 4,000 pound Cookie failed to explode and rolled into a nearby orchard. The Swedish army asked if Bruce would consider disarming it. He politely declined.

  A week after the crash, Bruce was given permission to leave his rather luxurious internment camp (‘a bit like a holiday lodge in Daylesford’) at Faloon, near Stockholm and return to Helsingborg to attend the funeral of his six crew members. His escort, a member of the British Legation, enquired if he was in possession of a hat. ‘Can’t go to a funeral without a hat,’ he was told. In the town, they managed to borrow a Homburg hat for the afternoon from a fastidious shopkeeper who insisted on putting a sheet of paper inside it to keep it clean. Bruce showed me a photograph. There he is, a pale young man with a vacant look and a very odd, very new-looking Homburg, laying a wreath under a heavy sky on the fresh graves of six other young men without the benefit of Bruce’s freakish good luck. In his pocket was the leave pass he had shown me earlier in the afternoon, still in remarkably good condition.

  Bruce’s wreath was not alone. The soldiers of the Swedish anti-aircraft battery that brought I-Item down, distressed at having caused the deaths of the six airmen, also sent one. Soon after, the Swedish parliament decided to desist firing at passing Allied aircraft altogether. His was the last aircraft brought down in Sweden for the entire war.

  I think Bruce is still in awe of the good luck that has given him an extra sixty years of productive life. He told me at the beginning of our meeting that though he was not a cold-hearted man – and I could see that he lacked nothing in intelligence and sensitivity – when it came down to it, he really hasn’t been too badly affected by it all. No guilt and remorse, no sleepless, screaming nights. Bruce was just one of those people with the ability to simply turn a corner and not look back. Lucky again.

  A month later, he was repatriated to England, courtesy of a BOAC DC-3 from Stockholm airport. Back home, he was checked out and given a few weeks’ ‘survivor’s leave’ and then posted back to his squadron. There was talk of him going back on the battle order to complete his last trip, but the war ended a few days later.

  Fifty years on, he returned to Helsingborg, sponsored by a Swedish bank and newspaper, now something of a local celebrity. He even met the woman who had given him a meal and bowl of water to wash his face that night.

  On the drive back home, my football team was playing on the radio somewhere interstate, but I couldn’t really concentrate. I thought about Bruce. He really was remarkably youthful for his age, as well as mentally and physically fit. Perhaps the drama of what happened that night had preserved in him an impervious joy at a long life happily lived on borrowed time.

  9

  John Trist

  Bomb-aimer

  I wasn’t very good to start with. If I wanted to hit

  Essen, I’d aim for Cologne.

  Originally a Queenslander, John began his war marching all over the Blue Mountains (or, as he called them, the ‘Black and Blue Mountains’), wearing not an air force uniform, but the scratchy, ill-fitting khaki of an army recruit, and he hated it. ‘I don’t want to walk. I’d rather be carried somewhere,’ he decided, so a career in the air force beckoned. The army however, were anything but happy when his transfer came through. ‘You’re running away!’ they said to him, attempting to apply some guilt-assisted leverage. It was never going to work. Sitting with him in his living room, surrounded by the library of an obviously erudite man, listening to recordings of great operas and sipping some excellent wine to accompany the three-course lunch that John had prepared, I can see wh
y the army was never for him. Nothing to do with his education at Brisbane Grammar, then Latin at Queensland University. He simply prefers the good life.

  The first time I met John was at the tail end of a long lunch in a suburban Melbourne pub, put on by the association of former members of ‘EATS’, the Empire Air Training Scheme. This remarkable, as well as remarkably efficient system of aircrew training was instigated at the beginning of the war and stretched over several continents in places such as Canada, South Africa, Rhodesia and, of course, Australia, and just about every aircrew who served in Europe went through it.

  From what I remember, it was a wonderful afternoon, despite being the youngest there by a measure of my own lifetime, a fact that in itself gave me some kind of odd celebrity, like the solitary young child that is fussed over at a grown-ups party. After drinks and lunch, speeches and a great many toasts (including of course the Queen), the volume level gradually rose to a cacophony as groups of men formed and reformed as acquaintances were renewed and memories revisited. Someone introduced me to John and mentioned my project. He immediately laughed loudly and put his number down in the notebook I was holding hopefully in my hand.

  I drove up to John’s place and immediately noticed his front garden dominated by two massive full-grown white gum trees. Such an odd sight in a small, suburban garden, I thought as I looked up at them towering over house and street. I liked the fact they were there, and that its owner had remained resistant to the warnings of falling boughs and damaged drains. The afternoon was cold and gloomy and it felt good to be inside John’s cosy living room. He shook my hand wearing an apron. A strong smell of cooking was in the air and a table was set, complete with an already decantered bottle of red. ‘Lunch won’t be long,’ he stated in an easy assumption of hospitality.