Flak

by Michael Veitch

  But, as Marcel found out a couple of weeks later, luck, both bad and good, comes in threes.

  On a shipping reconnaissance over an Italian harbour, flying number 2 to his CO, Marcel broke through a thick overcast base at 1,500 feet, not a wise move, as the German gunners would often find their range by firing on the cloud base and simply wait for an aircraft to pop out. He was hit, once again, right in the engine, by 88-mm anti-aircraft fire. In a now familiar scenario, smoke and glycol began to pour into the cockpit, the oil pressure dropped, the engine temperature rose and ‘everything else just went off the dial’.

  He knew he had to bail out and was preparing to do so when ‘a voice in my head said, no, stay there, Marce. Put the bloody thing down.’

  Hitting the silk this close to the Germans would mean becoming a prisoner of war, so he headed south. Marcel didn’t remember how far he got in his crippled Spitfire, as its engine began to seize, but he remembered his amazement, and frustration, at not being able to find anywhere to land. All he could see were hills. He had no engine and no power and was gliding close to the ground, about to bring it down at the point where it wanted to go when, still flying, he blacked out. He remembers nothing except waking up in an army casualty clearing station behind the lines.

  The skipper who’d followed him down and seen the crash thought there was no hope for Marcel. He’d watched the Spitfire hit the ground, then skid along for 100 yards or so before hitting a tree. This sheared off one wing and flipped the aircraft upside down. It continued to skid until a second tree was struck, which turned the Spitfire right side up again. I asked how badly hurt he was.

  ‘I had a broken bloody this and a broken bloody that and a God knows what else!’

  Not surprisingly, Marcel was posted ‘missing, believed killed’, only to come back from the dead, rejoining his squadron with a hero’s welcome after three weeks in hospital.

  ‘You know,’ he told me as I was about to leave, ‘the whole game was ludicrous. You’re fighting these Germans and Italians that obviously love flying as much as you do. Bloody good blokes – same as us – the type of blokes you’d like to make friends with, and there you are trying to kill each other. War is stupid. Stupid and sad.’

  20

  Trevor Trask

  Bomber pilot

  It wasn’t like a car ride. Every trip was

  different from every other trip.

  Having lost my tape recorder, I’d resorted a very old dictaphone with sticky tape around the bit where the batteries go and the ‘play and record’ button missing, operable only by sticking a biro into the slot, and holding it there to record my conversation with Trevor Trask, 514 Squadron Lancaster pilot.

  After the break-up of his family Trevor’s early life was spent at a boarding school. Although a prominent establishment, it doesn’t sound like a pretty place. ‘If you can survive that, you can survive anything’. It gave him a toughness which, he said, prepared him for life in the services.

  With a pedigree that included a father having flown in the Australian Flying Corps in World War One, there was never any doubt he would join the air force. However, the taxation office, his employers at the time, had other ideas. Apparently, separating working citizens from their hard-earned cash was even then considered an essential ‘Reserved Occupation’ and his bosses refused to let him go. So, in the true spirit of the public service, one morning he just didn’t turn up. Instead, Trevor had joined number 31 Course at Bradfield Park Initial Training School, RAAF.

  Did he possess any natural ability for flying? Absolutely not, he said adamantly. ‘There was no logic whatsoever to the way they chose us, except if you went to a private school you had a better chance of being a pilot’ – something to thank his nasty old private boarding school for after all.

  We spent a lot of time talking about his training, both in Australia and England. Trevor remembered it as being nearly as dangerous as operations. Once, when waiting to catch a bus at Banff aerodrome in Scotland to join his OTU he stood with a group of fellow trainees to watch a Wellington take off along the long runway. Starting seemingly on the horizon, it took the entire length to get airborne, its outline rushing nearer before taking to the air.

  ‘We all stood and watched. It got to about 500 feet, then just turned over on one wing and crashed. Five people killed. As easy as that’.

  Later, hurtling in a similar fashion down the runway himself in a Wellington on his first ever night circuit and landing flight, Trevor had reached flying speed when one of his tyres burst. Instinctively, he pulled the stick back and they were airborne. ‘However,’ as he put it, ‘my main aim in life was to be on the ground.’ Landing a large aircraft like the Wellington with a burst tyre was a virtual impossibility. In an impressive feat of memory, he remembers the ensuing conversation with the tower.

  ‘Hello Bluebottle, this is Rasher-Zebra. I’ve just blown a tyre on take-off!’ he called up to the tower in an excited voice.

  ‘Stand by, Rasher-Zebra, stand by,’ came the cool calm tones of the ‘little girl on the radio’. He stood by, and did a couple of circuits until the voice of the CO came on. He was ordered to attempt a belly landing, but any of the crew who wished to bail out could do so. There was a deathly silence until Bill, the rear gunner said dryly, ‘It’s fuckin’ dark down there, I think I’ll stay with you’, and all of them followed suit. Without the usual drag of the lowered wheels, Trevor’s first approach overshot, but on the second he eased it down onto the ground and ‘we just slid along’ to a stop. Rather proudly, he shows me a letter from a senior officer praising him for his careful handling of the aircraft and the minimal damage caused, enabling the aircraft to soon be airworthy again.

  Apart from his training, we discuss many things: his stint as an instructor after completing his tour and his preparations to become part of ‘Tiger Force’ – the proposed RAF plan to finish off the Japanese, rendered unnecessary by the dropping of the atomic bombs and Japan’s subsequent surrender.

  Finally, I open his log book, point to his first trip as the obligatory ‘second dickie’ pilot with an experienced crew and ask him to tell me about it.

  ‘Yes, I remember it,’ he tells me. ‘I had to stand all the way there, and all the way back. I was exhausted.’ There were no spare seats in a Lancaster for an extra bod and it was an uncomfortable ride. Trevor also remembers the briefing that night.

  ‘ “Well gentlemen, tonight is the night we visit Russelsheim: the Opel manufacturing works”, he mimics the clipped tones of his English CO. “The Opel manufacturing works make Flying Bombs. Flying Bombs can’t fly without wings!”.’ It’s a memory that makes Trevor chuckle just a little.

  This first attack on Russelsheim, near Frankfurt, on 12 August 1944, was not a success. Twenty out of the 297 aircraft despatched were lost, and the factory was barely damaged. It was not one of the Allied forces finest moments.

  ‘We arrived at the station on the Thursday. On the Saturday four of us flew our first trip as second pilots. By the Sunday, I was the only one of them left alive.’

  Trevor had joined number 514 Squadron based at Water-beach, a few miles out of Cambridge, but on this first trip, his aircraft landed at an emergency strip at Woodbridge because of hydraulic troubles. This, after becoming disorientated and flying on the reciprocal (or reverse) compass bearing over the North Sea in the wrong direction. He was the one who realised what was happening and got the message back to the navigator. ‘Everyone was just exhausted,’ he remembered. It was not an auspicious debut.

  We moved on from target to target: his first trip as captain of his own crew, a big raid on a German night fighter airfield at St Trond, in Belgium, then Kiel where, in co-ordinated attack, the Halifaxes came in low to drop mines to catch the ships as they fled their anchorages to be bombed by the Lancasters high above.

  His course home that night took him over the northern Germany island of Sylt. He remembered watching the gunners on the ground emerge from their bunkers and scatter li
ke ants in the still-blazing lights of their barracks.

  His account of his life on ops is candid and extremely interesting, revealing such things as the strain of operational flying on some of his own crew. ‘My navigator went ga-ga’, he told me somewhat matter-of-factly. I asked him to elaborate but he simply said that the fellow ‘went off his rocker and was taken away’.

  Then, one day when on leave after completing their first twelve trips, his rear gunner casually announced that he wouldn’t be flying with them any more. Slightly dumfounded, Trevor asked, ‘How are you going to arrange that?’ How he arranged it was by deliberately contracting venereal disease, an instant disqualification from flying and a way to avoid the dreaded stigma of cowardice, LMF – Lack of Moral Fibre. This was the classification meted out to those men who simply could not bear the tension of living under the shadow of probable annihilation. Trevor seems to bear him no ill-will.

  ‘Calais,’ I asked him and he shook his head and told me the story of fellow pilot, Len Arkless.

  The Calais attack was one of a series low-level sorties carried out in the latter part of 1944 on the French coastal town the Germans had yet to relinquish as the Allies pushed beyond them. It was an important port close to England and needed to be taken. On 20 September 1944, 646 aircraft attacked. Visibility was good and the bombing was accurate and concentrated. Only one Lancaster was lost.

  Trevor explained that ‘Len was the sort of Englishman that would end up running the MCC. He was good at everything. For several months, Trevor and Len had trained together, become friends and squash partners, even though Len usually won. He was that kind of bloke.’

  Trevor remembered that one Lancaster lost that day, as well as the warning the crews received at the briefing. ‘Whatever you do, turn to port after you bomb’. A right turn would bring the aircraft right on top of the heavier defences of the town.

  Trevor explained how ‘out of 1,000 aircraft, 999 dropped their bombs and turned to port. Len Arkless’ turned to starboard.’ The last Trevor saw of the aircraft, it was alight from one end to the other. ‘It was only small arms fire that got them, but it was deadly. They were probably the most competent crew that had come through Bomber Command,’ he said.

  On another occasion, the cloud base over a German town was down to 3,000 feet, with the raid being directed by the master bomber, a solitary aircraft with an experienced officer whose mission was to circle and direct the main force over the radio. ‘It’s quite safe down here,’ announced the guiding voice from under the cloud base. ‘You can come down below this and bomb from 1,200 feet.’

  At this height, there was a risk from being blown up by your own bombs – nevertheless down through the overcast the rest of the force went. ‘When we broke cloud,’ said Trevor, ‘there was just one crashed aircraft on the ground on fire, it was the master bomber.’

  Trevor was full of stories like those. He remembered how in a surreal moment on one trip, he watched a bomb that had just left his aircraft appear to follow the line of a small path that led up to a concrete pill-box on a ridge somewhere in France. ‘Like in slow-motion,’ he told me, the bomb slowly descended towards the pin-prick target then slammed into it, obliterating it in an instant. Trevor is still amazed at this chance moment of freakish precision.

  On 14 October 1944, Bomber Command chief Arthur Harris decided to try out a novel tactic on Duisburg, the port of the Ruhr River in the industrial Ruhr Valley. ‘You’ve heard of the Ruhr Valley?’ Trevor asked. The appropriately named ‘Operation Hurricane’ was an entire day and night of almost continual RAF raids, with 9,000 tons of high explosive being dropped on the unfortunate residents of Duisburg in just 48 hours. Trevor was on the first raid just after dawn, then went back to the same target for the night operation.

  The next day, his crew appeared on the battle order for Wilhelmshaven that night, but enough was enough. Whether it was his established skill as a pilot, or just his pluckiness that carried the day he wasn’t sure, but Trevor’s decree that he and his crew were all exhausted and would not therefore be taking part in the Wilhelmshaven trip was accepted by higher authorities. They would sit, or rather sleep this one out. I had never before heard of a bomber crew deciding to simply opt out of a trip without extremely serious consequences but Trevor reckons he did it, and I believe him.

  On the 29th and penultimate trip of Trevor’s tour, to Koblenz, one engine failed close to the target. Engine failure was always a legitimate excuse to abort a mission, but Trevor decided to carry on, not he insisted through any desire to hit the enemy but being so close to the end of his tour, he really just wanted to get the thing over with. Turning back would simply mean the trip was aborted, and he would have to do it again.

  A few months later, when instructing on an Operational Training Unit, Trevor received a rather important-looking letter. It was from Bomber Harris himself, and he had been awarded the DFC. Trevor had kept very quiet about this, and it was not until I found a copy of the citation among some other odds-and-ends documents he had dug out that I even realised he had one.

  21

  Norman Robertson

  Catalina pilot

  I never even bothered to put a parachute on.

  If you were shot down in the jungle 1,000 miles

  behind the Japanese lines, well, what were you

  supposed to do?

  ‘The best of air over the sea and over the bush,’ is the poetic way Norman Robertson described his country idyll, situated on the fringes of bush, bay and ocean in Victoria’s south. We sit, surrounded by birds, fruit trees and his very own organic vegetable and beef cattle farm, a picture of enlightened self-sufficiency.

  Norman was a flying-boat pilot and had begun his tour in the Pacific early in the war. Just how early became apparent when I asked which of the thirty or so RAAF wartime training courses he had been assigned to.

  ‘Number one,’ he said. Hitherto, the earliest I had met was a fellow who went through course number six.

  ‘What was the organisation like at that early stage,’ I asked. I imagined it to be somewhat shambolic. To my surprise, Norman told me he felt part of a well-oiled machine, even when some of the wheels started to wobble a bit. At Point Cook, one unfortunate attempted to take off in an Anson without unlocking the flying controls.

  ‘He sped across the aerodrome, crashed through several fences, over some vegetable patches and finished up somewhere down near Werribee.’

  The CO, on loan from the RAF and extremely British, lined everyone up and dressed them down. ‘I would rather lose ten of you men than one aircraft!’ he told the chastened group of young men.

  Norman took the remark to heart, and ‘I spent the rest of the war trying not to lose my aeroplane’.

  Did he feel he was a natural pilot?

  ‘Yes,’ Norman answered emphatically. ‘When I was three, my aunt told me she would make me a suit of feathers so I could fly.’

  His youth was spent constructing flying model aeroplanes out of doped paper and balsa wood. At seventeen he entered a competition for ‘Freda Thompson’s Flying Scholarship’ at Essendon Airport, coming sixth out of a field of ninety. The next year he came third. The year after that came the war.

  Although its armies were fighting Italians in North Africa, its navy was active in the Mediterranean and some RAAF units had begun to arrive in England, the antipodes felt very much a backwater to a distant conflict. At the end of his training, and after a minor incident with a vindictive warrant officer that cost him an on-course officer’s commission, Norman was assessed as being ‘a good type in some respects but not amenable to discipline’. It was the beginning of 1941. Where else to send such a miscreant but to a backwater within a backwater? A sleepy hollow – ‘as far away from the war as they could possibly send us’ – Port Moresby. Nobody at that stage, however, had counted on the Empire of the Rising Sun.

  Far from being disappointed at being assigned to the less glamorous flying boats, Norman was delighted. The American-bu
ilt twin engined Catalinas were the RAAF’s only aircraft to be in service on both the first and last day of the war. It was enormously popular with its crews of nine, had incredible endurance of up to 20 hours in the air, a 3,000 mile range and was immensely robust. It was, however, terribly slow, with a cruising speed that hovered just above 100 miles (160 kilometres) an hour.

  Although they were safe to fly, you had to know what you were doing.

  ‘There were very very strict rules, and if you didn’t obey them, you were dead.’

  According to Norman, the secret to handling a flying boat was attitude. The attitude, that is, in the aviation sense, of the nose in relation to the water from which you were taking off or landing. Unless it was level, the aircraft could ‘porpoise’, becoming sucked down into the troughs and thrown up over the peaks eventually becoming overwhelmed.

  ‘We lost three aircraft this way as soon as we began operations,’ Norman told me.

  If in open water, the pilot would have to ride the swell like a surfer, avoiding the troughs in-between. If it was too rough for a normal landing, Norman would slow to the point of stall just above the surface and let the aircraft simply fall out of the sky.

  ‘It made a hell of a noise but we never broke one.’

  It all sounded extremely difficult and nefarious, a strange fusion of aviation and seamanship, subject to the laws of both sea and air.

  I enquire what Port Moresby was like in the year before the beginning of the Japanese war. ‘A hell hole,’ he replied instantly. He remembered iron huts, illnesses and herrings in tomato sauce in the heat of a tropical day. All in all, it was ‘no place for a white man to live in’. Life was nevertheless interesting. At that time it was not the Japanese but the Germans, who were sending armed merchant ships to patrol the sea lanes of the south-west Pacific and Indian oceans. In November 1941, one such raider, the Kormoran, sunk HMAS Sydney along with all its 645 hands in Australia’s most infamous naval engagement off the Western Australian coast. A few months before this, a Catalina in Norman’s squadron reckoned they had spotted the Kormoran but by the time permission came through to bomb, night was falling and the aircraft was forced to break off. ‘Who knows if they had managed to get a couple of hits on it,’ we both mused.