Flak

by Michael Veitch

  This strip of mud bulldozed out of the jungle the previous year was little more than a quagmire of black overlaid with perforated steel mesh. Even so, during the Battle of Milne Bay in August 1942, the Japanese tried desperately to take it as a base from which to attack Port Moresby. The fighting had been so close that the former footballer and famous Spitfire ace Keith ‘Blue’ Truscott and his 76 Squadron Kittyhawks took off and began strafing the Japanese in the surrounding jungle even before their wheels were retracted.

  Intelligence knew a convoy was coming, and a big one. Its eight merchant ships, eight escorting destroyers and several smaller ships had left Rabaul on 28 February, headed for Lae on the east coast of New Guinea to reinforce their under-supplied army. But to intercept them at the precise moment when maximum strength could be brought to bear, their exact location had to be determined, and this was proving difficult.

  The Americans had spotted them, then lost them again, and continual rain storms had, for a few days, thrown a cloak over their presence altogether. On 2 March, they were seen again and a high level attack was made by American B-17s. A Cairns-based 11 Squadron Catalina flying boat had been shadowing the convoy earlier in the night, and was told to continue to do so until it could guide the Beauforts in at first light. For a coordinated attack to proceed the next day, their exact location needed to be known.

  Someone had forgotten to wake Lewis Hall, and he wasn’t happy about it. During the early hours of 3 March, the rest of 100 Squadron had taken off with their torpedoes to find the Japanese convoy and attack it. Eventually someone noticed him, and shook him awake with an abrupt ‘Get up!’ He didn’t need further encouragement.

  The torpedo was actually too large for the Beaufort’s bomb bay and so, in the true spirit of wartime innovation was slung underneath the fuselage. Lewis had taken off at Nowra in such a configuration, but never from the small, muddy airstrip at Milne Bay and certainly never in darkness. ‘I didn’t think we were going to get off,’ he said.

  Earlier, the Catalina had dropped its four bombs, missed, decided that was enough, and headed back to Cairns. The Beauforts would have to find the convoy on their own.

  Just before 5 am, Lewis wobbled into the air with his heavily laden Beaufort, facing filthy but intermittent weather. He had been told, as far as was known, the approximate position of the convoy – somewhere between the western tip of New Britain and the New Guinea coast in the Vitiaz Strait.

  His CO, Squadron-Leader Smibert, was already up, dropping flares over the sea in the hope that other aircraft closer to the water would be able to make out the vessels’ silhouettes.

  ‘I was in rain and cloud nearly all the way,’ Lewis remembered.

  Then he caught sight of his CO’s flare in the distant sky, and realised he was in an entirely different position. Another flare went down, this time a different colour. The weather had started to clear, but it was the signal to break off the attack and head back to base nonetheless. No-one was finding anything in this tropical gloom.

  The first faint glimmers of a pink dawn began to edge out the blackness, ‘Piccaninny Dawn we used to call it,’ said Lewis. Having slept in and arrived late, he was in no mood to simply head home again, break-off flare or not. He thought to himself. I’ll just go and have a look.

  With the darkness behind him, Lewis swung the Beaufort around and came down low to the water. And there, outlined against the first pink blushes of the day, he saw the unmistakeable outlines of ships.

  ‘I could see every one of them, in three neat lines, all spread out and stationary,’ he said.

  Flying down the line of the assembled ships he thought to himself, all my birthdays have come at once, and selected the largest cargo ship he could find.

  ‘I aimed to put the torpedo under the bridge of the ship and break it in half.’

  He swung around into a turn, so low he needed to virtually leapfrog over the first line of vessels. It was a beautiful morning, calm and still. Then a small escort vessel opened up with a machine gun, and the eerie tranquillity was broken.

  ‘Everything that was around the place opened up,’ he said.

  With a torpedo attack, it was essential to fly straight, steady and slow. Lewis ignored, as best he could, the fire coming up at him, kept one eye on the ship and another on the airspeed indicator, which to make his attack needed to read 150 knots, making him a very tempting target.

  With the ship’s hull looming in his windshield, Lewis hit the electric for the torpedo and heard a wire cable release its grip, but the torpedo didn’t drop. Then he tried a manual release – and still it stuck fast. Disbelieving that he could have been given such luck only to have it snatched away was almost too much. All he could do was open up with the two front machine guns for a belated strafing attack before flying away. The rear-gunner called up, ‘They’re trying to get a shell over us.’ One of the escorting naval vessels was attempting to fire over their heads to send up a wall of water in their path. Lewis, alone against the now alerted convoy with a torpedo that would not drop had no choice but to ‘up and off’.

  ‘It was a perfect opportunity but nothing came of it.’

  Back at base, he taxied in and informed his armourers who quickly placed a cradle under the belly and examined the weapon. One of the men put a screwdriver up to the release mechanism and the torpedo instantly fell into the cradle. A small stabilising pin, designed to stop the thing from rolling in flight, had been incorrectly machined. For Lewis, it would simply have to go down as the one that got away.

  ‘We were all pretty dejected,’ he remembered. The CO came up and asked why the long faces. They told him, and he offered his condolences. ‘A jolly good try,’ he said cheerily. It was little consolation.

  But, as he said, ‘I was unlucky and I was lucky.’ Although he missed the ship, he was able to report the exact location of the convoy, and a few hours later, roughly 100 aircraft assembled over Cape Ward Hunt on New Guinea’s north eastern shoreline and proceeded to tear it to pieces.

  At around 10 am, the 30 Squadron Beaufighters went in, armed to the teeth with 4 cannon in the nose and 4½-inch machine guns in the wings. The Japanese thought they were torpedo planes and made the mistake of turning their ships head-on to present less of a target. The Beaufighter pilots couldn’t believe their luck. Roaring in at mast-height, they raked the ships from stern to stern. Cargo, decks, gun platforms and even superstructures were splintered, the officers on the bridge instantly decapitated.

  Then the A-20 Havocs arrived, skip bombing from zero feet and tearing out the hulls, and the Americans attacked from high above. The Japanese put up fighter cover, but they were kept busy by the American P-38 Lightnings above. It was a massacre. All eight cargo ships were sent to the bottom, as well as four of the eight destroyers. Out of the nearly 7,000 Japanese troops desperately needed in New Guinea, a pitiful 800 made it ashore to Lae. Estimates vary, but over 3,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors are believed to have lost their lives.

  Then, to make assurance doubly sure, orders went over the next few days to strafe the rafts and the lifeboats, crammed with the survivors of the initial carnage. Many pilots were nauseated at having to do it, but carried out this grim task nonetheless.

  Bismarck Sea finished the Japanese as far as New Guinea was concerned. Generals Kenny and MacArthur were delighted, of course, despite exaggerating the extent of the victory and leaving the Australian participation out of their official reports. Even today, American histories of the engagement give the RAAF scant regard for their efforts.

  19

  Marcel Fakhry

  Spitfire pilot

  I’m so anti-war these days, it’s just unreal. And I think

  most of us who have been through a war are.

  With a name like Marcel Fakhry (pronounced ‘fayk-ree’), you’re almost obliged to be a little larger than life and Marcel didn’t disappoint. He was a big man with a big personality and a round, rollicking voice to match. Meeting him at his country property j
ust outside Melbourne, I kept thinking I was in the presence of a well-known actor, or perhaps a barrister. He had a big laugh and seemed as amazed as I was that he had flown Spitfires in Africa, Malta and Italy during the Second World War.

  The name, he told me, originated in Lebanon, ‘way back in the dim dark ages’, when his grandfather made the trip to Australia in 1888. ‘Why he came out here I’ve no bloody idea.’

  As with a number of the airmen I’d met, Marcel started off in the army, or more precisely the militia, and when war was declared in 1939 expected to be offered a commission in the regular AIF. He waited and waited, and nothing happened. So, almost in a fit of pique, he simply joined the RAAF, hoping to realise his long-cherished ambition of flying. His CO in the militia was not happy, and an almost comical conversation ensued.

  ‘You can’t!’ said the CO.

  ‘Well I have!’ said Marcel.

  ‘Well you can’t!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you can’t resign your commission in wartime!’

  ‘Well, if you’d given me a commission in the AIF I wouldn’t have had to, would I?’

  ‘Well you still can’t!’

  And so it went on in circles for some time, until the CO became sick of the sight of him, decided in fact that he could and signed the necessary paperwork. So, in January 1941, Marcel swapped his officer’s khaki for the dark blue of a regular airman. But it was worth it, because he became a Spitfire pilot.

  Flying a Spitfire for the first time, even the old Mark I that Marcel trained in at his OTU in the north African desert, was, he said, a ‘wonderful, wonderful, adrenalin-pumping experience. All that power!’ He still seemed amazed by it.

  Marcel arrived in North Africa by ship via training in Rhodesia – ‘Now, sailing up the Red Sea on the Queen Elizabeth at 32 knots, that was fun!’ – and, landed a job with number 92 Squadron, RAF. This squadron had only wanted one Australian pilot, so Marcel and two mates were told to go and decide among themselves. Someone produced a deck of cards.

  ‘They drew nine of spades and eight of clubs. I drew eleven of diamonds. Goodbye fellas!’ he recounted.

  It all sounded very democratic. He was told to hitch a ride to Algiers on any army vehicle he could find, and get to a place called Ben Gardane, south of Tripoli. It took him two days to find it.

  Marcel joined 92 at the end of 1942 just after the Battle of El Alamein, on a makeshift aerodrome that kept moving as the advancing Eighth Army pushed the Germans westwards along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Everyone slept in tents, it was hot, there was little water and no facilities of any kind, and little distinction between officers and sergeants.

  ‘We all ate in the same mess. That would never have happened in England. The desert air force was not very big on discipline,’ he tells me. He’s not referring to the fighting spirit, but the spit and polish, the saluting and the highly structured, largely class-based regimens that characterised life in the RAF in England.

  The situation was often so fluid that they would take off from one spot in the morning and be told to land at their new location later that day.

  In November 1942 alone, Marcel moved no less than five times from one patch of the Egyptian desert to another, places with names such as Sidi Heneish, M’sus, El Nogra or simply ‘Landing Ground 21’.

  Marcel arrived thinking he knew just about all there was to know about flying a Spitfire. ‘I knew nothing! Just a bloody novice!’ he soon realised.

  Straightaway the skipper took him aloft to see whether the new boy could pass the basics. Ordered to stay as much as he could on his tail, Marcel started to realise it wasn’t as straightforward as he had thought. The skipper was a highly experienced veteran and did everything humanly possible to shake him. Marcel did as best he could. Then the order came, ‘OK, Red Two, back home.’ Back on the ground he wasn’t certain how he’d gone, and he’d even made a rotten landing.

  ‘Right,’ said the CO perfunctorily and to Marcel’s amazement, ‘first op tomorrow morning.’

  Marcel was one of those pilots who loved the flying but hated the fighting. I asked him to tell me what it was like flying into combat in a Spitfire. Your left hand was permanently on the throttle, he told me, your right on the stick. You made constant adjustments in speed and height, while at the same time, trying to see where you were, where you were heading and where everyone else was, friends and enemy.

  In the beginning, he was number two to a more experienced pilot and would weave in, around and slightly behind him to protect his tail from attack. Marcel initially found over-correction a problem.

  ‘If you weren’t careful, you’d suddenly find yourself leading when you were supposed to be following.’

  A dogfight would start when one group of aircraft spotted another and would turn in to face them. In theory, you were supposed to be looking after your number one but in a few seconds the system broke down.

  ‘You would start weaving and dodging and darting, and doing all kinds of strange things,’ Marcel said. Perhaps an enemy would cross over your sights and you’d get a shot at him, but more times not. They sound more like sudden, all-in brawls than any kind of strategic encounter and I asked him whether it was possible to think clearly when engaging the enemy. He assured me you could.

  As the desert campaign began to dry up, 92 Squadron turned its activities toward the impending campaigns in Sicily and Italy, but not before a stint in Malta. Malta occupies a unique place in history as being the only country ever to be awarded a medal – the George Cross. In 1941 and 1942, this tiny place earned the distinction as ‘the most bombed island on earth’, when the Germans tried to eliminate it once and for all as a staging point for submarine and bombing attacks on their supply routes into Africa. This thorn in the Germans’ side was bombed for over 150 consecutive days and lost 1,500 of its civilians and thousands of buildings.

  An English pilot who was stationed on Malta once told me that on still mornings, he could actually hear the German bombers warming up their engines in the pre-dawn on their airfields 58 miles across the water in Sicily before taking off to attack. After the king awarded the medal to its battered, diseased and half-starved population, the decoration was ceremonially taken from village to village to be inspected by all. People who were young children at the time never forgot the occasion.

  Marcel was stationed in Luga, the airfield that had been all but obliterated a few months before.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ he was told, ‘don’t fly over the harbour.’

  If Malta was the most bombed place on earth, Valletta Harbour was the most defended, and its gunners would open up at any aircraft of any nationality that came anywhere near it. An astonishing 455 German aircraft (and quite a few Allied) fell to the gunners of Malta and every pilot made a point of giving the island a very wide berth as they came back and forth from their targets in Sicily.

  At that point in the war the German air force had been largely suppressed in the Mediterranean. With appearances by German fighters becoming more infrequent, 92 began to transfer to strafing and dive bombing roles. It was very crude, and not at all what the Spitfire was designed for but by slinging a couple of 250-pound bombs under the wings it became an extremely effective weapon: a dive bomber, then, once the bombs were released, a fighter.

  ‘You’d get over the target with your left wing and just drop straight down,’ Marcel said.

  For this purpose they’d been issued with a new type of Spitfire, or rather a new type of an old Spitfire. By ‘clipping’ 2 feet off each wingtip the aircraft became very manoeuvrable at low-level, although less efficient higher up.

  ‘You could spin them on a threepenny bit but above 15,000 feet they’d fall out of the sky.’

  Once again, Marcel followed the Eighth Army on its advance, this time north on its slow, tortuous climb through the mud and mountains of the Italian peninsula, bombing and strafing troops, flak concentrations and anything that moved that looked suspicious.

 
‘The firing button had three positions: top for machine-guns, bottom for cannon and what we called middle for diddle – the whole bloody lot!’

  It was in Italy that Marcel was shot down not once, but an amazing three times, and twice in two days. He still marvelled at his survival and even today is a little angry at the German gunners.

  ‘Twice in two days! Bloody unreal! I was called Flak Fakhry on the squadron. The German gunners seemed to like me. Bastards! Ha!’

  The first time he was hit by flak over the Anzio beachhead. This was the scene of the botched Anglo–American amphibious landing on the Italian coast in January 1944 that was doomed as much by squabbling between its commanders as it was by the Germans. Marcel came down for a rough landing in a paddock.

  ‘I thought I was behind our lines but wasn’t certain. As soon as I landed I hid behind a bloody bush!’

  Then he heard an unmistakeable American drawl.

  ‘Are you okay, British boy?’

  They’d watched him come down, gave him a lift to the Anzio airstrip and he was back with the squadron the same day.

  The next day, again at 15,000 feet over Anzio, he was hit a second time, again in the engine. Having seen enough of paddocks, Marcel thought he’d try and get down at the Anzio airstrip. With smoke pouring out of the aircraft, however, he presented a marvellous target for the 88-mm gun the Germans had ranged on the runway. Just as he came in, about to touch down, a shell landed on Marcel’s port side. The aircraft swung around violently but remained intact as it came to a stop on the runway.

  ‘So what did I do?’ he asked rhetorically, ‘I got out and hid in the shell hole, didn’t I?’

  The Germans kept up the shelling for an hour or so until he was rescued by an American jeep and put up for the night, rejoining his squadron the next day, but having to endure the nightly air raid on the airfield in-between.