Flak

by Michael Veitch

  The only positive about operating the Manchester was that you had so much time off, entire squadrons being grounded at a time as the endless problems were rectified, usually unsuccessfully. As Derek told me, not a single person managed to complete a tour on Manchesters, ever. Their loss rate was appalling, up to 6 per cent per raid, compared to the 2.5 per cent of comparable types such as the Wellington.

  Then there was the Channel Dash, in February 1942, when two German cruisers broke out of the French port of Brest and raced up the English Channel to their home port of Kiel, one of the war’s most daring events. The alert that they would do just that had been on for days and Derek, now a flight commander, had got sick of waiting for anything to happen and had gone to the pictures. Barely had he sat down when a sign came up on the screen summoning him to return to base.

  ‘It was a complete panic,’ he remembered.

  Everything was thrown against these two ships but the German fighter cover was enormous. Even so, he managed to get near enough to bomb the Scharnhorst.

  ‘Did you hit it?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I claimed it,’ he answered. He came back with a hole in his wing.

  Derek also had a stint in the desert, so close to the enemy lines they often did two trips a night in Wellingtons.

  ‘We’d bomb, come back, bomb up and do it all over again.’

  On one of his early desert trips, he was advised to remove the ‘Australia’ flash from his shoulder.

  ‘If the Italians caught you, they’d cut your throat. Not many people know that.’

  I certainly didn’t, for one.

  Derek’s experience and reputation allowed him to become something of a free agent in the RAF, slipping in and out of a variety of jobs in some interesting places. But all he really wanted to do was get back to Australia. Hearing that a Wellington needed ferrying into India, he offered to take it down himself and found his way to Madras, something of a pleasant backwater, but a little closer to home. Finding himself with no further orders, he wandered into the RAF HQ in Delhi and asked if there was anything he could do.

  A senior officer told him that the squadron needed to move up to the North-West Frontier. Perhaps he could take a plane up there and scout about for a suitable route. Fine, thought Derek. Could he possibly have a map? ‘Sorry old boy,’ was the answer, so he went next door and bought an atlas from a newsagent and flew off north with it resting on his knees.

  Then one day he found himself in a Blenheim, by this time a wing commander, second in charge of an operation called ‘Ferry Wing India’, which required him to fly up the Nile to Khartoum and find another route from Cairo to India. He got as far as Luxor when one of his engines fell to bits. He put down in the Valley of the Kings and happily spent the next few days as a tourist before hitching a ride back. He also spent some time training Nepalese paratroops and operating out of an airfield 7,000 feet above sea level in Ethiopia.

  Derek’s wife, Barbara, was obviously immensely proud of her husband and his remarkable history. She showed me his medals, the Africa Star, Burma Star, Air Crew Europe Star and the DFC with an added bar.

  ‘How did you get it the second time?’ I asked.

  Derek looked puzzled, his amazing memory stumped for the first time. ‘I can’t honestly remember. Perhaps I bombed a ship?’ he offered.

  Later, he confessed that at one stage he was in line for the DSO but blotted his copybook when he disagreed with a squadron commander on his flight plan for the squadron. Perhaps he should go fly it himself, Derek suggested. Not the way to get ahead.

  Derek was away for six years and flew an amazing four and a half tours with five different squadrons, at one time or another piloting just about everything there was to fly, including a couple of trips in a single-engined Hurricane.

  ‘Any mug can fly one of them,’ he said with a scoff.

  It’s amazing how he beat the odds, especially in the early stages of the war in Europe. Did he ever think he wasn’t going to make it?

  ‘You just couldn’t think about it,’ he told me. ‘If you kept your eye constantly on making it to your last trip, you’d go mad.’

  But he recognised fear when he saw it. Derek could go into a briefing room and know whether it was going to be a tough one.

  ‘You could smell the fear,’ he said. ‘Like a strange, sour smell that hung in the room.’

  Everyone had their own way of coping. Derek chewed chewing gum when flying, but when scared, his mouth went dry.

  Derek is still fighting, concerned about the way the world is going and in a more local sense, battling with the Canberra War Memorial to have the men he trained and flew with properly acknowledged on the honour roll of the dead. There’s definitely a fire still smouldering inside Derek French, but bitterness? I wasn’t quite sure. I asked him about his return home.

  ‘They treated us like shit,’ was the conclusion of the way many RAAF personnel were received by the authorities upon returning to Australia with a log book of operational flying under their belts.

  ‘They were jealous, you see,’ said Derek.

  One friend who had gone through Point Cook with Derek, Bob Bungey, flew Hurricanes with number 145 Squadron during the Battle of Britain, commanded the first Australian fighter squadron in Britain and rose to the rank of wing commander. Upon returning to Australia in 1942, he was told to remove his stripes and demoted three ranks to flying officer by jealous RAAF staff officers who hadn’t seen a shot fired in anger.

  ‘He went down to the beach and blew his brains out.’

  Another friend had served on three separate aircraft types, completed a tour and was awarded the DSO and DFC. The best job he could get was serving behind the counter at David Jones.

  ‘Actually, worse than shit.’

  15

  Pat Dwyer

  Wireless/air-gunner

  When we arrived at the station as a crew, we were

  given two weeks to survive.

  The first thing Pat showed me was a picture of himself as a skinny eighteen-year-old, taken at Luna Park in Melbourne, just one face among a group of similar looking eighteen-year-olds, all in rather baggy air force trainee uniforms.

  ‘I was 5 foot 6 and 8 stone 2. More like a fifteen-year-old.’

  They all look like a bunch of kids about to get on the Big Dipper. He pointed to one of the faces.

  ‘That bloke there, he got killed on Bomber Command; this one was in the army, then transferred to Bomber Command and was also killed. This one was a school mate. He got the chop over Germany.’

  Sitting in Pat’s lovely home with a nice view over the Swan River in Perth, well turned out in a jacket and shirt, you’d never guess that he’d been a bit of a stirrer, regularly getting himself into strife. In his words, he was ‘a bit young, and a bit dopey’. His first scrape was getting caught eating a pie on parade, being saved from a charge only by getting his orders to catch a ship for England. On ops, he once impersonated an officer at a party at a neighbouring base, then came back late and missed the briefing for an operation. He got strips torn off him, but that was about it.

  Pat remembered everything. Absolutely everything. Every name, every place, every tiny little detail in the big picture of his highly eventful tour as a wireless operator in Lancasters over Germany. His reminiscences were many and varied, some dramatic, some poignant, some simply hilarious. While training in Victoria, his pilot had for some silly reason drunk a big milkshake before taking off. It soon went from the bottom of his stomach to the bottom of the fuselage of the small Airspeed Oxford, with Pat having to dance about in the back to steer clear of the sloshing white regurgitation, all while trying to avoid throwing up himself, hit the gunnery target with his machine gun and try to stop laughing.

  The Fairey Battles were so rough that on one particular exercise, 90 per cent of the trainees lost their lunches. There was one fellow who had lost his two front teeth in a game of cricket who delicately removed his falsies, handed them to a fellow crew member f
or safe keeping and then heaved violently over the side.

  Pat remembers meeting his crew for the first time. He’d arrived at a station called Peplow in Shropshire to undergo training on Wellingtons. He was early, so dumped his gear in a Nissen hut and went to the otherwise empty mess. An English pilot came up.

  ‘Hello. Would you like to be in my crew?’

  Without hesitation Pat answered, ‘Yes, I’d love to.’

  Nothing complicated, just a question, a reply and the beginning of a life-long bond of affection that lasts to this day, not just for his former crew members but the RAF in general.

  ‘The Australian squadrons were full of bullshit,’ he said. It’s an opinion I’ve heard expressed before. Compared to the RAF who, from the word go, were in a shooting war on their own soil, the RAAF was small, provincial and often riddled with petty personal ambitions that thwarted the careers of many a deserving, but poorly connected airman.

  With his new crew, all English, he trained on clapped-out Wellingtons. One night they nearly came to grief on take-off. At 85 miles an hour, a strong wind kicked the aircraft out of line with the runway. Rather than run off completely, the pilot, Les Landells, gently applied the brakes as a counter measure, but this just threw the machine into a series of uncontrollable ground loops, spinning around under its own centrifugal force. Pat had just checked the fuel tanks and knew them to be full.

  ‘It was like being thrown about in a dark car from side to side.’

  When it stopped, Pat bolted for the nose where the bombaimer had just pulled up the escape hatch.

  ‘I just leaped straight through it,’ he says.

  A fire tender, ambulance and the commanding officer were soon on the scene. The pilot was yelled at for damaging a ‘perfectly good’ aeroplane, and this was the beginning of a series of black marks and a bad reputation that would dog Pat and his crew throughout their tour.

  Next up was a conversion course on Halifaxes at Sandtoft in Lincolnshire.

  ‘We called it Prang-toft,’ said Pat. ‘Some people said it didn’t deserve that name, but gee, the people who flew there did.’ On a long cross-country flight one night, Pat woke up to find his oxygen mask dangling off his face. Startled, he checked his watch and log book and realised he’d been out cold for an hour. He told no-one, and simply clipped the mask back on. On landing, he buttonholed another wireless op, and simply copied the radio log for the missing hour from his log book. No-one ever discovered his serious indiscretion.

  Still under training, Pat’s first flights over enemy territory were ‘Bullseyes’, diversion flights into France and Germany designed to lure German night fighters away from the main force, but not hang around long enough for them to actually find you. It was a risky business. The early Halifaxes had a bad reputation, but Pat enjoyed flying in them.

  ‘They were much more comfortable than the Lancaster,’ he said.

  Except for the unfortunate seating configuration in the nose where the wireless op effectively sat under the pilot.

  ‘When he used a can to have a pee, he’d sometimes miss and hit me instead,’ he remembered. ‘So I really was being pissed on from a great height!’

  ‘This is my squadron badge,’ said Pat. ‘I put it on today especially.’ On his lapel is the 626 Squadron emblem, an ancient sailing ship above the motto: To strive and not to yield. There was nothing particularly remarkable about 626 Squadron. It had no famous personalities, no moments of drama, no celebrities that made it stand out from most of the other hundred or so squadrons under Bomber Command. But for people like Pat, it was the scene of the starkest and most vivid moments of their lives.

  Number 626 spent all of its brief two-year life at Wickenby, a temporary wartime base carved out of requisitioned Lincolnshire farmlands in 1941. It followed the standard RAF pattern: three concrete runways, three large T2-type steel hangers, technical, administration and accommodation blocks and a long narrow road leading to the bomb dump, which was constructed in a natural depression away from the buildings. It was close to a brace of villages with names such as Rand, Fulnetby and Holton-cum-Beckering, whose publicans, when the air force arrived, must have thought their dreams had come true.

  Wickenby was home to another squadron, number 12, which suffered one of the highest loss rates in Bomber Command, a factor which contributed to that station’s grim distinction of being the first to lose 1,000 aircrew, all in just 32 months of operations.

  ‘At one stage, they cut the tour from thirty to twenty-five, just to give people a chance to get through,’ remembered Pat.

  As wireless operator in a Lancaster, Pat sat at the rear of the large perspex ‘glasshouse’ under the round astrodome with his back up against the main wing spar, that connected the two wings through the fuselage. In front of him was a big Marconi 1154/55 wireless set with its distinctive red, blue and yellow tuning wheels, a morse key and, at varying times during the war, one or more of the array of radar and night fighter warning equipment sporting code names such as Monica, Village Inn and H2S (so named after ‘rotten egg’ gas, hydrogen sulphide, by an air ministry official who supposedly declared of the project, ‘It stinks!’).

  He operated the flare pistol in emergencies, sent and received morse signals from the edible rice paper code book – a completely new one for each trip – and kept an eye on the electrical systems. His position had one distinct advantage – he was next to the warm air outlet and was often sweating even when other members of the crew froze.

  Pat’s first trip in a Lancaster was an easy one, but as far as he was concerned, it was not an aircraft built for comfort. Compared to the Halifax, it was small and cramped. The seats were hard, small and uncomfortable and on a long flight, were literally a pain in the backside. Here Pat’s amazing memory kicked in, and he took me on a sort of virtual tour of the aircraft interior, explaining the difficulties involved in moving through it.

  ‘The navigator’s seat was a piece of timber a foot across on two poles in the floor. To get past him you needed to squeeze yourself against the internal starboard side of the plane.’

  Sometimes, to get the blood back into his nether regions, he’d perform a little exercise, hoisting himself up onto the spar, then sliding across from starboard to port, sitting himself down on a small step, then repeating the operation in reverse. The discomfort also extended to the Elson toilet, which at 50 degrees below zero (–10°C) was a serious danger to sit on.

  ‘It was like the inside of a freezer,’ he told me. ‘Your backside could stick to the metal seat.’

  In all his flying career, Pat never took the risk of answering the call of nature mid-air.

  Trip number one in Pat’s log book was a milk run to attack German positions along the Dutch coast. No fighters, light flak, everyone home safe and sound. Enthused in a moment of relief and patriotic fervour, and thinking they’d all be like this, he immediately volunteered for a second tour – 55 operations in all. Then came his second trip. It was a medium-sized daylight raid of 340 Lancasters to Emmerich, right on the Dutch border. Three Lancasters were lost that day, and Pat was witness to the destruction of one of them.

  ‘I was looking out the astrodome. Everything seemed to be OK. Then the Lancaster directly behind us got hit by flak and just seemed to curl over and go down.’

  Pat saw an airman attempting to get out of the stricken aircraft but was unable to see what happened, because then it was their turn. Right over the target, about to drop with their bomb doors open, they suffered a direct hit from a flak burst in the open bomb bay. Thirty tons of aircraft lifted upwards in a massive surge, but stayed in one piece, protected, ironically, by the heavy iron casings of the 1,000 pound bombs themselves. The fact that the thinly cased 4,000 pound ‘Cookie’ didn’t explode was a miracle.

  ‘If we’d been hit after we dropped them, it would have been a different story,’ said Pat.

  Back at Wickenby, the crew inspected the damage. The shrapnel could clearly be seen to have passed through the bomb do
ors from the inside outwards. The report said Pat’s Lanc had been holed ‘from nose to tail’.

  Next was Duisburg in the Ruhr, another daylight trip. The group was ringed in a barrage of black explosions. They got through, but not everyone was so lucky.

  ‘I was watching ahead when I saw a massive flash of orange and yellow flame. It was a Lancaster blowing up right in front of us. Shocking sight.’

  Their aircraft had to fly through the debris of the stricken aeroplane.

  ‘The windscreen and the bomb-aimer’s section – splattered with blood.’

  Nothing was said about it over the intercom at the time. What could be said?

  ‘Some things were pretty demoralising. That was a nasty one.’

  Not all the dangers came from the enemy. Once on a very cold night trip, Pat checked the electrical systems and found a fault with the generators, one charging at 32 volts, the other at 34. This meant the batteries were being overcharged and were at risk of boiling and releasing inflammable acid fumes into the aircraft interior which could ignite on contact with a flame or spark. To avoid this, Pat switched the generators off, then restarted them when the battery charge had diminished almost to nothing, as registered by the dimming of a globe above his head. All well and good, except for Freddy, the rear-gunner, who relied on his electrically heated suit to keep warm in the minus 50 degree temperatures and protested vigorously.