Flak

by Michael Veitch

  Marching, drill and classes were all rather tedious. Then, in December, Bud was digging a slit trench when someone told him that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. ‘Then it was on for young and old.’ But all it meant for him was more delay as the government absorbed the shock. It was not until April 1942 that he finally had his first flight in a Tiger Moth at Narromine in central New South Wales.

  Having delayed Bud’s training by months, the air force then rushed him through it, and after just twelve days, he was going solo. He read from his log book as if it were a scene from a play in which he is a character: ‘Taxying – S and L’ he announced in a stentorian voice, though he’d forgotten exactly what S and L stood for.

  I asked him if he felt a natural aptitude for flying.

  ‘Never,’ he said, somewhat to my surprise. ‘It was just hard work’.

  In fact, he never really felt comfortable flying until much later when he was instructing on twin-engined Mosquitos. He could still hear the voice of his long-suffering instructor, a Sergeant Castle, and mimicked for me the weary, rising inflection of his endlessly repeated instructions. ‘Climb at sixty-six . . .’ followed by a pleading, exasperated sigh.

  Exasperated instructors notwithstanding, Bud, at the completion of his course, was selected for further training on single-engined aircraft in Canada. That is, if he survived the journey over.

  ‘We were sent on a condemned ship,’ he remembered. Up until Pearl Harbor, Australians travelling to Canada went in virtual luxury as passengers on liners, and would compare notes at the other end about the standards of service experienced. Not so after the Japanese attack when everything that floated became requisitioned to the war in the Pacific. So all that was left was the bottom of the barrel.

  One particular American bucket, the curiously named Tasker H. Bliss (after a senior US staff officer at the beginning of the twentieth century), was inspected, then duly rejected by the RAAF as below the required standard for the transportation of their precious volunteers. ‘Take it or leave it’, replied the Americans, and the RAAF backed down. So, like a US conscript, Bud travelled in the hold.

  It was an awful journey, not helped by the fact that it lasted not the scheduled three weeks, but seven, and the food ran out after three and a half.

  ‘We survived on tea, bread and jam,’ said Bud.

  There was even a minor mutiny on board during the ‘crossing the line’ equator ceremony when the American in charge (‘a genuine Captain Queeg’, said Bud) was locked in the brig and had the fire hoses turned on him.

  ‘The only reason we got away with it is because we kept laughing while we did it – it was a very Australian mutiny!’

  There is still an association for those who survived their journey on the Tasker H. Bliss. Possibly it’s a support group.

  Bud found the Canadians far more convivial, and never more so than when he almost wrote off a Harvard trainer. A strange characteristic of this aircraft was its tail wheel, which free-wheeled like a caster if the pilot applied more than 70 degrees rudder, a feature which improved manoeuvrability when taxying, but could make for a very nasty landing if an inexperienced pilot like Bud was too heavy on the rudder bar. On his very first flight in a Harvard, he touched down, over-corrected and the whole aircraft spun like a top, breaking the undercarriage and ploughing the propeller into the ground.

  The Canadian chief flying instructor raced over, asked what happened, then casually leaned over Bud and turned off the aircraft switches to prevent it blowing up.

  After his ground loop, Bud thought he would be scrubbed, but they were kind and kept him flying until December 1942, when he received his wings with the distinction, ‘high average’.

  After training he was sent back to England, this time on a neat 5,000 ton banana boat, complete with cabins, dining room and an attractive contingent of Canadian WAAFs who were also on their way to their new jobs. It all seemed too good to be true, and it was. A day out, the Atlantic weather turned the sea into a mountain range, threats of U-boats were the talk of the ship, and a gigantic wave broke over the bridge, damaging the vessel and sending water cascading down below, leading to a panic that they had been torpedoed. The sight of dreary, wartime Liverpool was, for Bud, a welcome one.

  Taking an extra navigation course in Canada (in fact, a fruitless attempt to be posted back to Australia) Bud had put himself in that category of pilots eminently suited to flying photo reconnaissance. This idea was much to his liking, for the simple reason that the Operational Training Unit was at Dyce in Scotland, near his fiancée’s home town in Aberdeen. Also, two mates had recently been selected for Dyce and he was keen to join them. In the weeks spent in Bournemouth waiting to be transferred, he had been able to visit Aberdeen regularly and no-one seemed to mind too much if you were a day or two late. That is of course, provided you weren’t posted in your absence.

  Upon returning to Bournemouth, having overstayed his leave pass by a couple of days to attend a dance, Bud was told, ‘Don’t unpack, get up to the embarkation depot in Blackpool quick smart, you’ve been posted to the Middle East.’ He just made it.

  On to another ship, this time heading to South Africa to pick up another vessel going north in a roundabout but safer route to RAF Middle East Cairo, and then on to number 74 Operational Training Unit, Pethah Tiqva a few miles from Tel Aviv, in what was then the British mandate of Palestine.

  The war for Bud was slowly getting closer. But after being absent from the cockpit for so many months, he felt rusty. However, here he was, on an airfield in one of the Empire’s far-flung corners with some superseded mark V Spitfires in which he was expected to learn the fine art of aerial photography.

  I asked Bud what it was like flying a Spitfire for the first time. ‘Dangerous’, he said. The Spitfire, for all its wonderful handling characteristics, had some nasty features, one of which was the length of its engine. This extended way ahead of the cockpit, effectively obscuring much of the pilot’s view, not only when taxying on the ground but also in the air.

  ‘For us it was a real problem. If you came straight in to land, the nose obscured the runway.’

  The first thing Bud had to learn was a difficult curved landing approach in which the pilot had to turn onto the runway, then straighten up just before he touched down.

  ‘It was completely outside our range of experience. Every other time I’d landed was straight on, like an airline pilot.’

  Aerial photography was, in 1943, a very recent art, having been developed only in the late 1930s and in the face of much scepticism from the RAF establishment. But in 1939, the head of Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding, reluctantly allowed a couple of Spits to be earmarked for the purpose, and the early results spoke for themselves: clear pictures of the German defences around Aachen, and later, in May 1940, daily flights over the advancing German army revealed to an awestruck world the lightning-fast dismemberment of France. PRUs – Photo Reconnaissance Units – had come into their own, and in the Spitfire, had found the method to transform their art into a science.

  And not just any old Spitfires. These beauties were specially modified numbers, stripped of every ounce of excess weight – guns, armour-plate, radio – and fitted with a souped-up engine, retractable tail wheel and pointed fins for greater streamlining. They were then finished all over in a sleek, polished, powder blue to blend in with the high altitudes in which they would operate. They were quite a sight.

  But as Bud recounted, the early techniques of photo-rec were far from exact, and the only real training for a new pilot was trial and error.

  The pilot of a bomber was completely dependent on his crew, and even a conventional fighter pilot was rarely all alone, flying in formation and relying on his squadron for support and protection. The pilot of a photo-rec aircraft was, however, a true loner, operating entirely by himself, flying fighter aircraft but never required to fight. Bud, even now, is uncertain as to what made a good photo-rec pilot.

  ‘It would have been interest
ing to see how they selected our lot,’ he said. You’d need to be a good pilot, certainly. One who was an excellent navigator, definitely, but also a person who could be relied upon to carry out extremely dangerous tasks all on their own. The way Bud speaks about it, it seems he finds it hard to understand why he himself was chosen for the job.

  At one stage, the doorbell rang with a courier delivering the instructions for Bud’s upcoming appearance at the AFI awards. ‘Your sealed orders’, I remarked. ‘Yes’, he laughed, ‘to be opened only in times of emergency’.

  After months of delays and training, being posted to operations was indeed a good feeling. Bud found himself in Matariya on the outskirts of Cairo as part of 680 Squadron, which at that time was operating over the German-occupied islands of Greece as well as targets further north in the Aegean Sea and mainland Greece itself, including the particularly ‘hot’ target of Athens itself.

  Bud’s first op, however, was less than successful. His brief was to photograph various installations at specific points along the coast and harbour of Rhodes, but all he could now remember was ‘seeing an enormous ocean of cloud and thinking, Turkey should be on my right’. He failed to find the target, so turned back empty-handed.

  The success or otherwise of photo-reconnaissance missions was fairly easy to quantify: either you got the pictures or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, either you or someone else would have to go back and try again. Failure left a sour taste in the mouth, particularly when another pilot had to go and take the shots you missed.

  PRU Spitfires carried two sets of cameras positioned behind the pilot, one to shoot vertically, the other on the oblique, aimed sideways but a few degrees below the horizontal for low-level passes. However, no effective aiming device had yet been developed, leaving the pilots effectively blind and needing to develop their own ‘sixth sense’. The technique was to drop a wing on approach to the target, then flatten out and ‘feel’ the precise moment to hit the camera button, trusting that what you were photographing was directly underneath you. Bud’s early trips sometimes caught only a chunk of the target, or else missed altogether. But he learned quickly.

  He also learned about the rosters, both high and low. It was a fair system, with every pilot getting his fair share of both the dangerous low-level trips and the safer (but by no means safe) high altitude ones. But it was the low altitude roster, the dicey jobs, that mattered most.

  He also had to deal with the new phenomenon of people shooting at him.

  ‘Were you fired at much?’ I asked.

  He guffawed loudly. ‘All the time, all the time!’

  Foolish question, really. Everyone, including the enemy, appreciated the importance of photo reconnaissance, knowing that the appearance of one lone blue-painted Spitfire high above, could mean the arrival of a squadron of bombers in the not-too-distant future. That was another hazard of photo-rec. ‘We would cop everything that was meant for an entire squadron.’ Bud was one of the few pilots I’d met who was aware of the different types of anti-aircraft fire directed against him, rattling off the difference between the famous 88-millimetre guns, which could fire a 10 kilogram shell up to 30,000 feet into the sky at the rate of 10 per minute, but also the nastier 105 high altitude stuff and the low-level ‘light’ stuff.

  I can well picture Bud coming in at high speed in his bright blue Spitfire over the harbour at Rhodes, because I have been there. It’s a busy place, crammed with tourists and rather hideous hotel blocks, and is also a large fishing port and ferry terminal servicing the many islands of the Dodecanese Archipelago. According to legend, the gigantic Colossus of Rhodes, an enormous statue and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, straddled the harbour entrance.

  Many years ago, I took a ferry from Rhodes out to a smaller island called Simi – a speck of a place which apart from two very ordinary restaurants and several pushy vendors flogging off the area’s few remaining natural sea sponges had very little to say for itself. When walking along a rocky shore at the back of the island however, I came across the barrel of a half submerged and very rusty German 105-millimetre antiaircraft gun, the ‘Krupp’ stamp and year, 1942, still visible on the breech block.

  In the more than ten years since visiting Simi, I have neither read nor heard a single word about the place, but there it was in Bud’s log book, listed as one of his early trips, making it a reasonably high possibility that he photographed the very same gun that fifty years later, I stumbled across on a quiet, rocky beach. I begin to tell him about this remarkable co-incidence (well, I thought it so), but the phone rings once again, and Bud is obliged to have a brief, genial phone conversation with an old mate who just happens to be a former CEO of the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

  On another trip, Bud was on a low-level, looking for a suspected German radar station on the north coast of Crete. He found a building that looked like a contender so made a run using his oblique cameras at about 300 feet (90 metres). He knew there were a few troops in the area, but could see no-one about save for a sole figure in a grey suit, looking skyward and doing something that looked very much like waving. With no-one shooting at him, Bud made another series of runs – five in all – the figure in grey remaining on the spot, waving all the while.

  ‘I nearly waved back at him,’ he said.

  Job done, pictures taken, Bud headed back to base in North Africa. Coming into land at the desert strip, he put the flaps down and . . . nothing. On a Spitfire, flaps and brakes were both activated by air pressure, so if your flaps weren’t working, you knew your brakes would be out of action too, and a Spitfire without brakes or flaps is in no hurry to slow down once it hits the ground. Checking out the end of the runway, Bud noticed the tents of the Arab laundry, used by the base to wash the men’s shirts, and decided that all in all, he would prefer not to hit it.

  ‘What I was trying to do was a nose-up landing with a lot of power, coming in as slow as possible just above stalling speed,’ but he was tired after his second trip of the day and his skills deserted him. The tyres hit the ground, but without brakes or flaps to arrest the speed, the aircraft just kept on going. He slid the throttle forward, powered up, took off and came around again.

  On his second go the Spitfire once again refused to slow down and the tents of the laundry loomed up fast at the end of the runway. Once more, he took off. By this time the rest of the squadron, knowing Bud had come back from a low-level, had come out to watch, pray and cross their fingers.

  ‘I could see myself running over the tents at the end, so I had to do something dramatic,’ he said and so he did.

  On his fourth attempt to land, he touched down and kicked the rudder bar over hard to force the aircraft off the runway onto the sandy ground on either side, a terrible risk both to himself and the machine and one he was worried would not pay off.

  The Spitfire bounced roughly along the sandy, uneven ground. Even on strips that were as smooth as billiard tables, the chances of tipping were high as the Spitfire’s extended under-carriage was notoriously narrow.

  ‘I thought it would go up on its nose, sure as eggs.’

  It began to tip up, but then bounced back down again safely and came to a stop.

  ‘It was pretty bad flying and I was lucky. Really lucky,’ Bud remembered.

  The ground staff chief, a big Cockney, came up to Bud, who was still in his aircraft, and gently enquired, ‘Did you cop any shit, sir?’

  Unaware of having been hit by anything, Bud replied innocently, ‘Er, no’, which prompted the flight sergeant to let loose, as only Cockney sergeants can, even to a superior officer.

  ‘You stupid bastard, Bud! You nearly wrecked the best aircraft we have!’

  Bud even remembered the serial number of the machine he nearly sent to an early grave, EN 845, the squadron’s prize Spitfire and in perfect nick.

  Upon examining the aircraft, Bud to his amazement found a bullet hole in the tailplane, and then put the puzzle together. The figure he had seen in grey (a grey unifo
rm, he later realised) had indeed been doing something very like waving. He had been firing a pistol. Bud never discovered whether the bullet had ruptured the air pressure mechanism because, feeling foolish at having been nearly brought down by a single individual with a Luger, he never reported it, excusing the hole as a stone thrown up by the rough landing. He told me it was an incident he’s re-lived many times.

  The Spitfire was fine for medium range photography, but for targets further afield, Bud soon began to convert to the ‘wooden wonder’ itself, the De Havilland 98 Mosquito. Apart from being a marvellous aeroplane to fly, the Mosquito made Bud’s job that much easier, as it allowed a navigator to sit in the nose and take the guesswork out of the exercise by taking the pictures himself.

  No-one has ever had a bad word to say about this remarkable machine, least of all the people that flew it. It started life simply as the De Havilland 98 and was a superstar from the very beginning, surpassing its manufacturer’s expectations on its first test flight in January 1941. Built as a medium bomber, they soon realised it could do just about anything and ended up performing almost every combat role in every theatre from photo reconnaissance to fighter-bomber and everything in between. It remains even today one of the most attractive aircraft ever built. Even, understated lines, an almost feminine sleekness with a long tapered fuselage, high noble tail fin and two prop hubs protruding slightly past the tip of the nose, a pillar of aviation aesthetic.

  However, its most remarkable feature is not what it looked like but what it was made from. Early in the war, as Britain’s industries geared up to war manufacture, it was realised that the skills and materials of certain trades had not been sufficiently utilised. And so it was decided the furniture industry would contribute its very own aircraft. Hence, the Mosquito was made entirely of plywood and glue. This helped account for it’s remarkable speed, manoeuvrability and smooth, rivet-free surface but also gave an army of carpenters and joiners a sense that they were contributing in a serious way to the war effort.