An eyesight problem meant that John didn’t even get a chance at being a pilot so after Initial Training School at Brad-field Park in Sydney, he was marked down as ‘observer’ and put on a ship to Canada to undertake training in whatever occupation the air force saw fit.
‘Actually,’ he told me, ‘it was all done alphabetically. If your name started with “t”, you were a bomb-aimer.’ And so a bomb-aimer he became. I must have seemed sceptical at this arbitrary method of selection but he assured me it was true, even though, initially at least, he wasn’t very good at it.
‘If I wanted to hit Essen, I’d aim for Cologne,’ he joked.
The bomb-aimers were promised training in the warmth of Florida, but instead were put on a train north to icy Canada. First came a stint at Bombing and Gunnery School at Lethbridge in Alberta, flying very old Blenheims and shooting out the back of the aircraft at ground and air targets. In the tight turns, John found out just how strong a stomach he’d been blessed with as he watched his fellow students succumb to nausea.
‘Once there were three of us in the back of the plane, and I had to complete the firing practice for all of us,’ he said.
Australians had a reputation for harbouring a healthy disrespect for authority, so John was duly nominated as complaints spokesman for the course, a role he didn’t relish and which, he reckons, probably cost him an on-course officer’s commission.
In canvass-skinned Ansons, John began flying over the snowy Canadian wilderness on training exercises, where raw crews were expected to fly to a pinpoint position, a near impossible task in the endless expanse of white.
‘The only way we could work out where we were was to fly down very low and read the names on the silos. It was amazing how much our navigation improved after that.’
Amazing or not, it got them through, and John was sent to England. After a spell in Brighton’s Metropol Hotel, looking out over the uninviting beach cut off by mines and coils of barbed wire, followed by a train trip north, John arrived at a bitterly cold and dreary Advanced Flying Unit in West Freugh, Scotland.
Gradually, he got the sense that things were starting to progress. A little later, he found himself at an Operational Training Unit in Lichfield crewing up, or as John puts it, ‘wandering around a big room, trying to find your soulmate by the look in his eye’. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. ‘I like you,’ he said and John had met his pilot, Allan Baskerville, a fellow Queenslander. The rear-gunner, Jack McQueen, made three ‘banana benders’, and John already felt he was lucky.
It was spring. A time, John says, of ‘lambs gambolling in the fields, airmen gambling in the huts’ and flying Wellingtons on cross-country exercises over the fair face of England. John’s skills began to improve. Then came his first flight over enemy territory, a ‘stooge’ raid just before D-Day, dropping propaganda leaflets on the French, informing them their day of liberation was fast approaching. They were also intended to convince the Germans to get going while the going was good. They didn’t, and all John’s crew gained from it was a false sense of security. Soon they were to be posted to the squadron which suffered the highest casualties not only of any other Australian squadron, but of the entire Australian armed forces for the Second World War, number 460 Squadron, RAAF.
‘I can still hear the note of the Lancaster’s four synchronised engines,’ John remembered wistfully, as have many others who flew in them. Initially, however, he was unimpressed with the prospect of flying with four engines instead of two, training on a very rickety early mark Halifax. But the Lancaster was a different story.
‘It really was a wonderful aircraft,’ he said. ‘The sound of those engines . . . it was a very comforting feeling.’
Actually, I knew just what he meant. I’ve heard a Merlin engine and it really does have a special quality – smooth and rich, but somehow understating its immense power, and quite hypnotic.
Number 460 was an established Australian squadron with an enormous reputation. As the history book says, 460 ‘carried out the most bombing raids, flew the most sorties and suffered the most losses in Australian squadrons’. It also holds the record for most bombs dropped by any squadron throughout the whole of Bomber Command – a whopping 25,000 tons. In doing so it achieved another grisly record, over a thousand men killed in action, the highest for any World War Two Australian military unit. Into this formidable establishment came John and his crew of new boys.
‘It was just like being back at school,’ he said. In briefings he would sit at the back of the room, awed by the ‘easy nonchalance’ of the experienced crews.
John’s tour began quietly enough, at a time when, during the latter months of 1944, much of Bomber Command’s strength was taken off attacking the big German cities in favour of tactical raids in support of the armies in France. His first proper trip was again almost anti-climactic, a three and a half hour flight over to Le Havre. No fighters, hardly any flak and a quiet trip all round.
This easy introduction, however, was deceptive. The first few operations of a tour in Bomber Command were by far the most lethal. Hank Nelson’s superb book on Australians in Bomber Command, Chased by the Sun, details a survey of men killed in action in 460 Squadron, finding that ‘over 11 per cent died on their first operation’ and nearly half of all deaths occurred on the first six! After this, the ‘chop rate’ began to fall dramatically as men accrued the experience that would help keep them alive. Even so, John reckoned his was an outstanding crew.
‘Without doubt, I owe them my life and my undying gratitude.’
One of the bomb-aimer’s tasks would be to take over from the pilot in case of death or incapacitation. In preparation for this dreaded, though not unanticipated event, John practised in the Link trainer, an early form of flight simulator, as well as the odd stint flying straight and level on the way home.
‘If anything happens to Allan,’ John assured his crew, ‘don’t worry, I’ll get you home.’
They remained sceptical.
‘What you’ll actually do,’ they said pointedly, is take us over the airfield at 10,000 feet and we’ll bale out. After that, you can do what you like.’
As the war progressed satisfactorily on the ground, the bombers were put back on attacking the big industrial and population centres of Germany. On one occasion, over the fires of a burning city, John lined up the target below, his finger poised on the release button.
‘It was night, but in the fires below it was like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.’
Then the great shape of another Lancaster below began to drift sideways, cutting across the view through the bombsight. He couldn’t risk it, and told the pilot to go around again.
‘I wasn’t popular, but I wouldn’t have had that on my conscience for the world.’
It’s an astonishing image, turning around, at night, with no lights, flying directly into a stream of hundreds or more aircraft.
‘How did you manage it without collision?’ I asked.
‘Put your hands over your eyes,’ he told me, and did so, chortling darkly.
In the perspex nose of the Lancaster, John saw everything, and it was colourful. There were the target indicators dropped by the Pathfinder aircraft above, often a different colour each trip, the orange crump of exploding flak, the fires themselves and the coloured tracer winding its way up towards you, slowly at first, then passing by in a rush. He also witnessed the full effect of being ‘coned’ in a web of searchlights. On one occasion, they encountered the feared ‘master’ light, an enormously powerful beam with a distinctive cold and evil-looking blue hue. This monster would latch onto you, alerting both fighters and anti-aircraft gunners to your presence with naked illumination, and was hard to shake off. Once caught, and blinded by literally millions of watts of candlepower, it seemed the seconds to your imminent demise were counting down. But John was lucky enough to have an excellent pilot in Allan Baskerville. His quick and violent evasive ‘corkscrewing’ managed to shake the lights, and also keep the aero
plane in one piece.
On returning from Essen one night, the aircraft was again illuminated but this time by the hand of Nature. John feared the worst from a sudden flash, but the Lancaster had in fact been hit by lightning, and for a while the electric current made the aircraft glow with a strange, dancing blue iridescence.
Stuttgart – mid-upper turret holed I read aloud from the log book entry written in John’s neat hand. A big chunk of flak had missed the lucky gunner’s skull by about 3 inches (8 centimetres).
‘I was a bit lucky like that myself,’ he told me.
Over one target on the run-in, he had just vacated the nose position to briefly check the camera that would soon record the success (or otherwise) of his bomb aiming. Then bang! Normally, you could never hear the flak bursting above the throb of the engines. But when it was really close you not only heard it, you smelt it. A red hot chunk of iron tore through the thin perspex bubble right where John’s head had been seconds before. A lucky escape certainly, but something had hit him in the face nonetheless, and liquid was oozing from his mask.
‘Are you alright, Oliver?’ asked the pilot (they called him Oliver. Trist – Twist – Oliver Twist).
‘I – I think so,’ answered John feebly. After a moment of watching his life flash before him, he realised that he wasn’t all that damaged after all. A piece of the perspex had flown off and whacked him on the nose. The liquid was simply water from the condensation in his mask, and he was basically unharmed. He laughs now, but I don’t suppose he was then.
Immediately above the bomb-aimer’s position sat the rarely used front gun turret. A large part of John’s training had been as a gunner, so it seemed a shame to go through the entire tour without at least giving them a go in anger. One day, in late 1944, he got his chance when he spotted a small, unusual looking aircraft heading straight towards him. Unusual, in that it lacked propellers. In fact, it was the first jet John had ever encountered, the famous Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter. The closing speed of both aircraft would have been astronomical and it just wooshed past in a flash, but John at least had time to clamber up and get off a few satisfying, if ineffectual rounds.
Despite this, John was becoming comfortable in his ‘office’ and more confident with his skill as a bomb-aimer. He had learned a lot in a very short time: distinguishing the real from the dummy targets the Germans set fire to on the ground, learning to bomb on the right coloured target indicator markers and avoiding the tendency to ‘creepback’. This unfortunate but understandable phenomenon occurred when, directly over the cauldron of the target, the bomb-aimer would be in such a hurry to ‘just drop the bloody things’ and get out of there, that he would do so slightly short of the target. Thus, the target area would expand, or creep, often several kilometres back towards the direction of the oncoming aircraft, the fire engulfing whatever stood in its way, military or civilian.
John would make himself count a full second when directly on target, a decision often vindicated by his camera shots the next day. A set of five photographs were taken automatically after the bombs’ release and ideally, the target itself should be visible in frame number three. Otherwise, you had released too early.
Overall, John reckoned he preferred the daylight trips, and the satisfaction of seeing the results of the work he was doing. One such was Wanne-Eickel in the Ruhr Valley for which John’s log book reads Lots of explosions.
It was the site of a large synthetic oil and benzol plant and was hit hard by the RAF in mid-November 1944. It was one of the rare occasions John could actually see the damage his bombs were doing to an unequivocally industrial target, with large explosions ripping apart whole sections of the plant, ensuring the fuel it produced for the tanks and trucks and planes would never arrive. Daylight missions had their disadvantages, however. Once or twice he saw another Lancaster go down and was aghast at the carpet of black puffs of smoke that came from the wreckage. ‘How the hell are we going to get through this?’ he thought. At night, the danger was still there, of course, only less visible.
Another satisfying trip was St Vith, in the Ardennes forest on Boxing Day 1944, when the weather at last cleared enough to allow the RAF to intervene in the Battle of the Bulge. They attacked at low level, destroying an important rail head crammed with German tanks on flat cars waiting to be unloaded, on their way to join the battle.
‘Gee, it must have been frightening for them, though,’ John reflected.
Ten thousand feet is low enough to easily make out people on the ground, so their terror would have been clearly visible.
Then, quietly he said, ‘The one I regret is Ulm.’
Ulm sits on the left bank of the Danube in the south German state of Baden-Württemberg looking across at Neu (new) Ulm, its reflection on the other side of the river in Bavaria. Ulm itself goes back to the twelfth century, when it was a prosperous centre for the manufacture of linen. It was swept up in Martin Luther’s Reformation, becoming Protestant in 1530, and is dominated by a magnificent Gothic cathedral, founded in 1377, with one of the highest spires in the world.
By late 1944, Ulm had managed to come through the war completely unscathed until, on the night of 17 December 1944, Bomber Command made its one and only visit to the town, sending 523 bombers to attack it. In the nose of one of those aircraft was John Trist. Among Ulm’s industries at the time were two large lorry factories, a barracks and a depot, but John can’t now recall just what it was that he was supposed to be aiming at. He remembered approaching Ulm in moonlight and seeing a pretty medieval city on the banks of a big river.
‘It was just sitting there in the moonlight, and we plastered it. It looked so beautiful and . . . bang.’
Nearly 1,450 tons of high explosive were dropped on Ulm that night in a raid that lasted just 25 minutes. A large fire started in the centre of the town and crept back into open country, gutting an entire square kilometre, killing over 700 people, wounding 600 more and leaving 20,000 others bombed out of their homes. Eight bombers were lost.
In that part of his log book where details of the target are often recorded, he has simply written Ulm – city itself.
‘I’ve never been very proud of that,’ said John.
The attack on Ulm never engendered any controversy. It wasn’t a Caen, or a Dresden or a Hamburg. There was no talk of war crimes and history has largely forgotten it. When the war ended sixteen weeks later, it became just one of the hundreds of maimed European cities, the reasons for its destruction quickly forgotten.
John, however, has never forgotten, and the brief clouding of his sharp, lively eyes told me he is haunted by it still today.
He finished his tour, plus one extra trip. His wireless operator had been sick for one mission and was required to make it up after the rest of the crew had finished. Rather than make him go with a strange crew, they all of them volunteered to do one extra to finish together.
The wireless operator, however, received a word of warning.
‘Listen, Harry,’ said John before take-off, ‘if anything happens to us on this last trip, I’ll grab the aircraft axe and get you on the way down.’
All of them made it back to experience that wonderful feeling of completion and life suspended no longer.
‘I still can’t stand fireworks, though,’ said John. ‘Kids reckon they’re wonderful, but I hate them. Been there, done that.’
He had seen enough bright colours in the sky for a lifetime.
It was time to go, and as we went outside, I admired his enormous gum trees once again.
‘I planted them,’ he told me, proudly looking up at the crowns high above our heads, ‘just after the war. You might one day read about someone being crushed by a falling bough.’
I laughed, and he too was smiling.
‘But there you go,’ he said. ‘History is told by the survivors.’
10
George Gilbert
Spitfire pilot
The most dangerous part was flying those aeroplanes.
George, from Tasmania, began his training in the winter of 1942, and in the open cockpit of a Tiger Moth, it was bloody cold. He joined up in Hobart then did three stints of four months each at Somers in Victoria, back to Tassie at Western Junction, then Deniliquin in New South Wales, seeing a great deal of Australia in a very short time. Starting from scratch and learning to fly full-time was extremely stimulating, but extremely intense. It was too much for one fellow student, he remembered, who attempted to bail out of the dormitory window in the middle of the night. However, the feeling of collecting his flying gear and walking towards the aeroplane for his first solo was one he’ll never forget.
George was something of a natural pilot, quickly learning to command the aircraft while gaining experience from its individual foibles, much like learning to ride a horse. The Tiger Moth was a quaint-looking little biplane, but not actually easy to fly. Once, in a mock dog-fight, he attempted to pull the stick in one direction, but the aircraft insisted on going another. Looking around, he suddenly realised he was in a stall. Instinctively, he took his hands off the controls and let the aircraft do what it wanted. It recovered, and as he puts it, ‘flew off, sweet as a nut. They have a mind of their own, you see.’ His instructors spotted his talent and so marked him down to complete the final leg of training at number 2 Operational Training Unit in Mildura, then Australia’s premier school for fighter pilots.
Sitting in the cockpit of a 700 horsepower Wirraway was a step up from the 100 horsepower Tiger Moth but that’s where the glamour ended.
Flak Page 10