Flak

by Michael Veitch

  Once, over Athens, Bud got a touch of stage fright. The usual method of approaching such a heavily defended target was to fly downwind, thereby adding anything up to 100 extra miles to the speed, but this afternoon he must have been a little lazy, and found himself flying against a powerful headwind to photograph the Greek capital at 28,000 feet. This was also the day the cockpit heater decided to pack it in, icing up the inside of the windshield ‘a bit like a misty car’. He scraped out a patch in the ice with his glove that was just big enough to see through, and was happy to leave it at that. Bill, the Scottish navigator, was down in the Mosquito’s nose guiding Bud onto the target, with the same ‘left, left, right a bit’ manner used by bomb aimers. Suddenly, Bud saw an enormous and extremely close burst of flak explode right in middle of the little viewing hole he’d just made for himself, but when he tried to say, ‘Gosh Bill, flak,’ all he could make was a low gurgling sound and a hollow ‘err . . . er’, as his vocal chords became immobilised by a rush of panic.

  ‘What? What are you saying?’ asked Bill, busily lining up in the nose.

  Eventually Bud managed to blurt out an astonished, ‘Gosh, flak!’

  ‘Well, do something about it!’ was Bill’s short reply.

  Obligingly, Bud made a sharp turn and was confronted with, as he puts it, ‘a bloody ocean of black puffs’. Unbeknownst to them both, they had been flying through a box barrage – multiple, closely-positioned guns ranged and firing simultaneously into the same coordinates. Lucky for both, they were falling slightly to the rear, out of sight and out of mind. When the photographs were later developed, big bursts could be clearly seen, mid frame.

  ‘No, they were never very pleased with us being over the harbour area of Athens,’ Bud said.

  A tour for a photo-rec pilot was measured not by individual trips, but 300 hours of operational flying time. According to his log book, Bud would sometimes be up more than once in a single day, ranging over the Greek islands to places such as Cos, Leros and Samos, making his war sound strangely like a modern European holiday destination. Towards the end of his tour, however, Bud’s squadron received a request from the army that made his blood run cold.

  What they wanted was a full photographic survey of the potential invasion beaches on Salonika, a large peninsula of the Greek mainland in the northern Aegean. It would be a long trip, taking the Mosquito to the edge of its range, and the run would have to be at low-level. Bud and Bill pored over the map, but the more they thought about it, the more their chances of surviving seemed to diminish. As photo-rec pilots, they knew where all the guns were situated. They also knew that the trip was important – one of those that could possibly shorten the war – and that to provide the army with the information they needed, they would have to make at least six runs over the beach area at different angles. Then they had a look at the forecast. The weather would be clear and perfect – for gunners.

  ‘We couldn’t work out how we could survive the first run,’ says Bud.

  Whichever way they looked at it, it was impossible to even get to the target area without coming within range of the fierce network of anti-aircraft guns that covered the beaches. The flight commander even seemed a little guilty in not insisting he go himself. But, says Bud, he was sticking to the rules, and you didn’t tamper with the low-level roster.

  ‘We really thought we had no hope of getting back. It was almost the time to write your last letter to the family before you took off.’

  On 29 October 1944, almost sixty years to the day he told me the story, he and Bill took off in their Mosquito from Cairo for the four and a quarter hour return trip to Salonica. They had a feeling in their stomachs that it would probably be their last. The route took them high over Crete and then swooped down to commence the first run at the prescribed operational height of just 300 feet (90 metres). Bud flew the Mosquito into position and braced for a hail of anti-aircraft fire. Then . . . nothing. Not a puff, not a shot, not a soldier visible on the ground. The first run completed, he commenced his second, and was again met by no resistance. Bud was stunned, but as he says, ‘it was quite exhilarating’. Bud and Bill, who were still friends until Bill died a few years ago, turned around and headed for home feeling like they’d won a reprieve. ‘What potentially was our most dangerous trip, turned out to be the safest,’ he said.

  The entry in his log book described several long runs along the coast of Salonica, and assumes they took the German defenders by surprise. Today he guffaws at his own entry. ‘Taken by surprise? Bullshit!’ They later discovered that the German army had evacuated Salonica just one hour before their arrival.

  Two days before the end of the year, Bud completed his tour and came home for a stint as an instructor on Mosquitos at Williamtown in New South Wales, where he felt comfortable flying for the first time.

  Years later, Bud discovered that none other than Kurt Waldheim, the former UN head plagued by his shadowy Nazi past and lampooned for his ‘I wasn’t there’ mantra had been in charge of that Salonica garrison. Bud wouldn’t hear a word against the man!

  It’s six o’clock and I’ve kept Bud all afternoon. I thanked him but as I left, remembered something I’d meant to ask earlier. Did he ever catch up with the two mates who went on to train in Scotland, the ones he missed joining because he was late getting back from leave?

  ‘As it happened,’ he told me, ‘they were both lost over Berlin.’

  PRU flying was a dangerous business.

  13

  Dick Thomas

  Pilot

  Our job was to generally mess everybody up.

  On the night of 14 November 1940, Dick was lying in hospital in Cheltenham having his appendix out. Further north, in Coventry, the German air force was carrying out the most intensive air attack of World War Two thus far, sending 500 bombers to destroy the centre of the city, including the only cathedral Britain lost during the war, the fourteenth century built St Michael’s. It was also the first big-scale use of an electronic device to aid in bomb aiming and this night, it worked horribly well. The Germans called the operation Moonlight Sonata – the insult to Beethoven can hardly be imagined.

  Although miles away, Dick heard the raid, as he could the shrapnel from the virtually useless anti-aircraft guns raining down on the hospital roof. He determined then and there to join the air force.

  After several months of elementary training, Dick found himself on a ship, sailing across the Atlantic to Canada in the middle of winter. The ship had been in dry dock, the air was stale and the sea was rough. In a moment of insanity, he volunteered for cookhouse duties, and found the choice of cuisine, well, not conducive to a rough sea voyage. He is still scarred by the experience.

  ‘The main meal was something swimming in gravy, and then custard with prunes’ – just the thing for a stormy Atlantic crossing. As the sea got worse, more and more sailors and airmen left the foetid atmosphere of the mess in a hurry.

  ‘I was literally up to my knees in a mixture of gravy, tea, custard and prune juice,’ he remembered.

  As quickly as he could, Dick volunteered for submarine watch duties up on the icy deck, and stayed there. For the next fourteen days he survived on All-bran. Years after, he still couldn’t go near the stuff.

  Via an uncommon arrangement, Dick ended up training not in Canada, but way down south in sunny Florida with the Americans. He found flying pretty easy and ended up graduating with not one, but two sets of wings – the metal badge of the US Army Air Force, as well as the cloth of his own RAF. In fact, Dick was such a good pilot that the Yanks decided to hang on to him and train him up as an instructor, a job for which he had absolutely no relish. Protest he might, but instruct he did, for over six months, clocking up 900 hours before they let him go home. The journey this time was on the Queen Elizabeth and took just four days.

  In retrospect, the extra training probably saved his life. Most new pilots went into battle with a couple of hundred flying hours up their sleeve. Dick totalled 1,100, an advantage
in experience impossible to measure. However, this setback proved to be just the first in a series of unexpected events – some bureaucratic, others just bizarre – which delayed the beginning of his operational flying nearly until the end of the war.

  All those hours on single-engined aircraft naturally led Dick to expect a career in fighters, but cue bizarre event number one: during a medical examination, the needle of a syringe broke off in his arm. Very little could be done to retrieve it as it had gone deep inside the muscle, damaging both it, and his hopes of flying Spitfires. So now it was a conversion course onto multi-engined aircraft, namely Stirlings. Having had all his previous experience in small trainers, Dick was now taught to fly the biggest four-engined bomber in the RAF.

  Being so experienced, his instructors let him go solo after only a few hours, but coming in for his first landing in the massive Stirling, Dick’s new crew could only hope their instructors’ confidence had been well placed. Concentrating hard on lining up with the runway, the tension in the aircraft was palpable. Then, just before touching down, the wireless operator broke in cheerily, ‘Hey, does anyone want to hear Diana Durbin singing “The Lights of Home”?’ Just the kind of guy you want with you flying into Germany in wartime. Dick laughed at it today, but I don’t suppose he was then, and was soon looking for new wireless operator.

  Dick’s story is, in some ways, a sad one. So eminently qualified, so under-utilised – a continual victim of changing wartime parameters. Having trained up on Stirlings to drop supplies to partisans in central Europe, the air force decreed that Stirlings were to be phased out for this role. So Dick retrained yet again on Halifaxes to operate in Italy. Then he was told to his amazement that his crew had been taken off transfer to Italy on account of his coloured Jamaican navigator, Viv Cooper. The Americans, he was told, would not be happy about dealing with black airmen, let alone an officer. Dick and the rest of the crew were disgusted, but from what he’d already seen of how blacks were treated in the Deep South, he reflected that it was probably for the best. Viv turned out to be a remarkable navigator and on one occasion, saved the entire crew. Dick could not be more proud to have served with him.

  So now they waited again, went on extended leave and visited family and friends while the air force decided where to slot them. After yet another spot of training, they were finally sent to an operational squadron. But how Dick and his crew found themselves posted there is another peculiar, almost comic, story.

  By late 1944, they had just about given up any hope of active service, so when they were issued a railway warrant to travel by train to Wells Next-the-Sea in Norfolk – somewhere, they felt, very close to the end of the earth – they resigned themselves to spending the rest of the war on yet another training or conversion course. Arriving late on New Year’s Eve at the little rural train station, they telephoned the aerodrome to arrange transport. A little later a WAAF turned up in a small lorry to take them to the nearby airfield at North Creake. Enquiring as to what sort of establishment they were being taken to, the girl blithely announced that it was a fully operational squadron, flying Halifaxes, and they were a new crew.

  Dick was gobsmacked.

  ‘I didn’t ask any more because I didn’t know what to ask,’ he said.

  Upon arrival, they announced themselves, were wished a happy new year and handed a drink.

  They discovered they had joined number 171 Squadron, part of 100 Group. These ‘bomber support’ squadrons did just that, assisting the main bombing force with all kinds of interesting and shadowy activities: mounting spoof raids that headed out as if to attack a certain target, then turning away to confuse the German defences, dropping ‘window’, and even carrying specialised radar equipment and German-speaking wireless operators on trips to verbally confuse the enemy night fighters and their controllers. They had an eclectic array of aircraft at their disposal. Apart from the Halifaxes, Dick saw several other types around the airfield, including an American B-17 and a couple of Mosquito fighter-bombers that would lurk around German night fighter bases to catch them as they returned. There were also bizarre ‘siren’ raids keeping an enemy population sleepless by flying low over a city in the middle of the night, blaring sirens. ‘Just generally messing everybody up,’ as Dick put it.

  But initially, it was Dick and his crew who felt they were being ‘messed up’. After a week of clearing snow from the runways and waiting to be posted to operations, he felt that old familiar feeling of having been sidelined. Finally, he approached the CO, who told him he couldn’t go on ops before he had done the mandatory ‘second dickie’ trip, sitting next to an experienced pilot.

  ‘Well, when can I do that?’ he asked despairingly.

  The CO considered. ‘Tonight, if you like.’

  And this is when it became really Python-esque. A few hours later at the briefing, the CO advised him, ‘You’d better have a look at the map.’ So Dick went and had a look. There was England, there was Germany, with a red ribbon showing the route in and out. It meant very little to him.

  ‘Do you still want to go?’ asked the CO.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dick.

  ‘But do you know where you’re going?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Go and have another look, then.’

  He looked again more closely. The route took them over to the Ruhr, ironically dubbed ‘happy valley’ and then back again. Dick gradually started to cotton on that this might actually be a little dangerous.

  A few hours later, and without a word to his crew, Dick embarked on his first operational mission. Next morning they caught up with him.

  ‘Where did you get to last night?’ they asked, and he told them what had happened.

  Only two aircraft had gone out on a radar-jamming mission. Without bombs, their only task was to drop the bundles of ‘window’ from the chute and switch on the electronic devices to confuse the German gun-aiming radar. Dick in his passenger seat saw very little except a raid in the distance. At one stage he asked the pilot about the small cone of searchlights on the horizon. ‘Amsterdam, perhaps’ was his guess. As it turned out, it was the RAF’s own emergency landing aerodrome in Essex and the night was so clear it was visible from well within Germany.

  ‘Well, Thomas, what do you think of the Ruhr?’ asked the wing commander at the de-briefing back at North Creake.

  ‘Well, disappointing, sir,’ replied Dick, enjoying the standard mug of coffee with a large tot of rum.

  The senior officer looked perplexed. ‘Disappointing?’

  ‘Well, we didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Didn’t see anything, eh?’

  ‘No, sir. Bit disappointed.’

  The CO looked at him for a moment. ‘Well, the other aircraft has been shot down.’

  Dick couldn’t remember what his reaction was, but told me that the other Halifax would have been either just ahead or just behind his own aircraft. So much for his first, uneventful trip.

  Then there was another delay as the weather closed in, blanketing the runways in snow for a month. Training, though, was still on the agenda and Dick’s crew were put onto some high-level cross-country navigation exercises. It was on one of these that Dick came closest to killing himself.

  After completing the circuit which took them along the route ‘base-Spalding-York-Shrewsbury-Hereford-base’ at night at 20,000 feet, Dick came in to land. However, the wind direction had changed in the meantime so they were now landing into a dangerous crosswind. Sure enough, just as the wheels were about to touch the runway, a strong gust tilted up a wing of the big Halifax. Dick’s experience probably saved them at that instant. The aircraft bounced, then Dick instinctively shoved the throttles forward to increase power, take off and come around again.

  A four-engined bomber has, naturally, four throttles, moulded to fit within the palm of the pilot’s hand. On the Halifax, they could be clamped into a set position once the desired power to the engines had been reached but if not, they had a natural tendency to creep back
when released. This is where the flight engineer came in. One of his jobs was to hold the throttles open, hard up against the stops, giving the engines full power on take-off. This particular night, Dick’s bomb-aimer was absent, having scored a lift down to London, and the flight engineer was seeing what life was like from his position in the nose. Dick, in the cockpit, was on his own.

  After powering up after the aborted landing, the Halifax once again lumbered into the air. Dick raised the flaps and retracted the wheels but could feel that something wasn’t right. His airspeed indicator began to fall. To compensate, he put the nose down to gain speed. Then, in a dreadful flash of realisation, he looked down at the throttles. Without the flight engineer pushing them forward, they had crept back to almost zero and were nearly closed, starving fuel to the engines. The aircraft was on the verge of stalling at low speed, which would have meant crashing into trees and killing the lot of them. It happened all the time.

  Dick threw open the throttles and the engines surged. Airspeed increased and the nose came up. He doesn’t quite know how close he came to going in, but it was certainly a matter of seconds.

  ‘I literally flew round for a quarter of an hour before my knees stopped shaking,’ he said. ‘We were near as anything to going into those trees.’

  On 14 February 1945, Dick and his crew had their first operation, to Dresden. Quite a debut, but instead of bombs, Dick’s payload was not one but three wireless operators and an array of early warning jamming devices. Flying what was called ‘the racecourse’ – a staggered route across the direction of the main bomber force – Dick changed direction every six minutes, allowing the electronic moles within his aircraft to do their work. In his voluminous and immaculate log book it was described as ‘special operations’. Fourteen hundred aircraft were in the air that night and flying his staggered course, Dick felt the buffeting from the hundreds of invisible slipstreams all around at various altitudes, but eerily, saw nothing of the aircraft themselves.