Japan was a topic of conversation in those long lazy months before December 1941, but common belief, supported by government literature of the time, assured the men that the Japanese air force consisted of nothing but antiquated bi-planes, flown by pilots with bad eyesight and whose rice diet prevented them from flying higher than 10,000 feet. How this piece of absurd logic was reached was never apparently questioned. Soon enough though, Norman and his fellow airmen would get ‘the shock of our lives’.
When Pearl Harbor came Norman, somewhat anticlimactically, was in Melbourne on a shipping navigation course. But by January 1942 he was back in Morseby, no longer a dead end but a town in the front line of a new war that was going very badly indeed.
In his absence, the Catalina’s lack of speed had showed them unsuitable for daylight operations, so a decision was taken to paint them all black and send them up at night, as bombers. The very next night after returning to work, Norman was taking off on what could be considered his first serious operation of the war, a night attack on Japanese ships in their newly occupied harbour base of Rabaul on the island of New Britain.
This night, flying over Rabaul harbour, searchlights, as well as night fighters (a rarity in the Japanese air force) concentrated all their attention on an adjacent Catalina, giving Norman his chance to swoop in and make his run. At this stage still a second pilot, he doubled as bomb-aimer and crouching in the nose, lined up on the searchlight that was now illuminating them.
‘Where there’s a light, there’s got to be a ship underneath it,’ was his reasoning. Looking through the bombsight, about to release, the searchlight suddenly went out, blinding him and spoiling his aim. He asked the skipper to go around again.
‘This time, I thought I had a ship in the sight, but apparently I bombed a sandbank,’ he said.
It was a less than auspicious debut. As a testament to the Catalina’s durability, however, the aircraft that had taken all the attention of the Japanese defences limped back to New Guinea on one engine, riddled with 150 bullet holes and having been in the air for 7 hours.
With only a handful of aircraft during this desperate time, some ingenuity was needed to make the most of the small force.
‘We’d go over to Rabaul with five planes, drop half our bombs, go away and rest for an hour, then come back and deliver the other half, making the Japanese think we had twice the number of planes than we actually had.’
I’d heard of General Rommel doing something similar in the desert by driving his tanks around in a circle to increase the appearance of their numbers, but this was a revelation.
From here on, Norman and his 11 Squadron Calatinas became ‘lone wolves’, given free rein to attack the Japanese in whatever manner they saw fit. One suspects this was a reflection of the desperation felt in the face of a competent and grossly underestimated enemy, but if people like Norman reckoned they could get at the enemy, the air force was happy to let them have a go.
On one trip to Rabaul, Norman still wondered at his own success. On a night hampered by stratocumulus cloud and murky visibility at the designated bombing height of 6,000 feet, Norman and fellow pilot Terry Diugan decided to feign breaking off, then double back and descend through the cloud for a low-level attack, skirting around an extinct volcano for cover. The ruse worked perfectly, and Norman operating as bomb-aimer in the nose, lined up his sixteen 250-pound bombs in the sight.
‘Our first bombs hit the living quarters, then the workshops, then a fuel dump on one side of the airstrip. Across the strip was a line of nine fighters parked wing-tip to wingtip. The first one was well ablaze and the second catching alight.’
At first, he thought that the flashes and commotion coming up at him was the Japanese returning fire, but it was only the mayhem caused by his own bombs. The Japanese had been caught napping. His pilot was so excited he started to come around for a closer look, but Norman, not one to push his luck, performed a minor mutiny and wrested the controls away, steering the Catalina into the safety of the night. Seventy minutes later, they could look back and still see the orange flashes of explosions on the black horizon.
When the United States Fifth Air Force began to arrive in Townsville, Norman was sent down to guide the raw American B-17 pilots north to the battle zone.
‘Say guy, I don’t like this one little bit,’ protested the nervous American captain he was accompanying when flying into a thunderstorm on their way to Rabaul, feeling anything but comfortable in this new tropical theatre.
Norman assured him it was standard procedure to go straight through it, but the pilot was unconvinced.
As it happened, this flight was one of the first attacks mounted by B-17s from the Australian mainland. Over the target, endeavouring to line up a row of ships, Norman looked down and saw the shapes of three Japanese fighters coming up to meet them. When he informed the edgy American, ‘the cigar dropped out of his mouth’. In a panic, the bombs were jettisoned in the jungle, throttles pushed up to 300 miles an hour, and according to Norman, ‘he just ran’.
Later, the entire crew went to sleep, leaving Norman to fly the B-17 back across New Guinea to Port Moresby. Over the base, the bleary-eyed captain emerged. ‘We’re here,’ Norman told him. ‘He took a look at the fuel gauges and saw they were on empty. He panicked and yet again got her down as quick as he could.’
As Norman tells me, one contingent of American B-26 Marauders were instructed to make their way to New Guinea by flying up the east coast, ‘keeping Australia on your left’. They followed their instructions to the letter, making their way up Cape York then, still with Australia on their left, they proceeded around the tip down the west side of the cape into the Gulf of Carpentaria, strangely oblivious to the fact that their compass read south instead of north. They arrived at Mornington Island, ditched the aircraft and headed out to sea in inflatable boats, believing themselves to be behind Japanese lines. By luck, a Catalina found them paddling madly out into the middle of nowhere, and picked them up.
I asked Norman if his opinion of Americans had cause to improve over the duration of the war. He took a long pause.
‘I’d have to think that one out. Let’s say we had a healthy disregard for them.’
For better or worse, the sense of having been saved by the Americans in our darkest hour is a sentiment singularly lacking in Norman’s recollection of the period.
Norman continued on night operations for the rest of the war. There was one trip, though, that he felt was a blot on his copy book.
The squadron had been told to be on the look-out for a huge, troop-carrying submarine the Japanese were using to re-supply Kokoda. One night, Norman spotted the solo, first on radar, then visually on the surface ‘going at a hell of a speed’ on its way to the north coast of New Guinea. He knew exactly what he was looking at, but any suspicious vessel had to be positively identified before the commencement of an attack. Norman dutifully radioed the signal for the letter of the day. He didn’t expect a reply, and none was received. The Japanese submarine, thus alerted, began to dive.
‘I quickly went straight in, made too hurried an attack, missed, then it dived and it was all over.’
Had he disobeyed instructions, he said, and made his usual stealthy approach, he might just have prevented 1,000 extra men landing at Kokoda.
I could see he still felt bad about it, but not nearly as bad, I would guess, had he mistakenly sunk a friendly submarine.
Norman and his 11 Squadron Catalinas became the nighttime specialist ‘black cats’. The Japanese, frustrated at these ‘hit and run’ tactics, complained loudly via their propaganda radio services that ‘American bombers’ had once again attacked Rabaul harbour (though the enemy claimed they had hit nothing). This, despite the nearest American bomber being 10,000 miles away. In a moment of mistaken patriotic fervour, the Air Minister and member for Maribyrnong, one Arthur S. Drakeford, stated publicly that these attacks were in fact being carried out by our own Australian flying boats from Port Moresby.
‘Uh-oh, it won’t be long now,’ was the reaction from Norman’s CO.
‘At nine o’clock the next morning, over they came’ – an entire squadron of high level Japanese bombers, escorted by five Zeros, which came in low over the harbour.
And, ‘At that stage, I think we had five Catalinas left. They got three, and the fourth was badly damaged.’
Not that Norman was witness to any of this, because his Catalina, number 5, had left on a patrol two hours before the attack and returned that evening. His was now the sole aircraft left in the squadron. He was told to fuel up immediately and head to Cairns.
‘It’s not safe here any more for Catalinas.’
Norman was happy not to argue the point and headed south.
Much of the astonishing total of over 3,000 operational hours flown by Norman was spent mine-laying in harbours between New Guinea and the China coast. Once, when mining Rabaul at night, Norman was so low he could see the Japanese soldiers loading the anti-aircraft shells in clips of six rounds.
‘One clip went over the wing, the other went under.’
The Japanese were completely baffled by the magnetic/acoustic mines that could be detonated by the vibrations of a ship’s propeller, and their only recourse was to stop sending ships over 1,000 tons to resupply their armies. This was considered a very reasonable outcome.
His other major activity was supply dropping to army units operating behind Japanese lines. On one occasion, after making such a drop, he proceeded to the nearest occupied town and dropped a couple of bombs, just to make a nuisance of himself. He had no idea what he had hit until six months later, at Young and Jackson’s Hotel in Melbourne, he met some soldiers just out of Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital, recovering from myriad tropical illnesses after a long stint in the jungle.
‘You know what you did when you dropped those bombs?’ he was asked rhetorically by a group of mates in khaki who all eagerly shook his hand as Norman could not possibly have any idea. ‘You hit the dog kennels!’
The story told to him was that the Japanese had just imported a pack of hounds to flush out the remaining men from the jungle. ‘Apparently I cleaned up the lot,’ said Norman.
Another story is not quite as cheery and, I suspect, one that still haunted him. A radio signal had been received from a coast watcher operating behind the lines. The Japanese were closing in, and a supply of tobacco to coerce the natives, as well as some pistols were urgently needed.
‘I was given the job and left in the dead of night.’
Norman’s instructions were to watch for three separate fires burning on the beach, which would be the drop zone. When he arrived, engines plugged back and flying as quietly as he could, no beach fires could be seen. Knowing the Japanese were close, he surmised that the men had headed inland for their own safety, a theory supported by the sighting of three small fires in some nearby hills. He came in and made the drop. Heading home, he flew back over the beach and the gut-wrenching sight of three large, blazing fires came into view. He immediately realised his error: the fires he had seen were simply native fires up in the hills. To make matters worse, the crew had missed seeing one of the packages in the darkened fuselage – the one containing the guns. It remained unnoticed until their return to Cairns.
The next day, Norman’s squadron commander made a trip in broad daylight to try and pick them up. As he got there, a Japanese ship was leaving the island. They had found the coast watcher, and he was executed soon afterwards.
‘With no charts, it would have been suicidal to try and land to pick the fellow up in the dark, but it did cross your mind.’ It was an understandable mistake, but it still bothered him. ‘It puts a sour thing in your mouth.’
Norman saw more of the war in the Pacific than anyone I had met. Despite many near-misses, he finished the war intact, but not without several doses of malaria and dengi fever.
I left Norman as I had found him, happily in his chair on the porch surrounded by the beauty of the birds in his garden. His daughter Heather shows me the large vegetable farm behind the house and gives me a generous bag of produce to take away. I thank a now tired-looking Norman, and make my way to my car, receiving a warning. ‘We had a snake over on the path there yesterday. I think he’s still there. When you hear the blue wrens twittering, you know he’s around.’ I vow to tread carefully.
22
Ron English
Navigator, Dakotas
Transport Command, we thought. That doesn’t
sound too risky!
Coming down through the cloud towards the surface of the Mediterranean, Ron English lay flat on his belly in the nose of a Hudson bomber, listening intently to the wireless operator calling the range of the contact he had picked up on the cathode ray oscilloscope of his radar set. ‘Half a mile . . . quarter mile . . .’ In fact, all the w/o could see was a sliver of green light, indicating an object of indeterminate size on the surface of the water ahead. What it actually was could be anyone’s guess: battleship, submarine, fishing boat. ‘Two hundred yards . . .’. Ron peered through the perspex but the cloud was unbroken. Then, feeling he must be right on top of whatever it was, there came a break in the overcast. Then he spotted a dark shape below. He hit his intercom button.
‘It’s a bloody whale!’
Sadly – for the whale – the anxious pilot didn’t quite get the end of the sentence. On the word ‘bloody’ two depth charges were released from underneath the aircraft. The automatic stereoscopic cameras later confirmed the accuracy of the attack.
This turned out to be the most eventful day in Ron’s twelve-month career as navigator flying anti-submarine patrols with number 48 Squadron, Coastal Command. By February 1944, with the U-boat war largely in hand, the emphasis began to shift to the impending invasion of Europe, and 48 was incorporated into Transport Command. Ron was given the choice of becoming an instructor or training up on the military version of the legendary DC-3 passenger liner, the Dakota.
‘Transport Command?’ we thought. ‘That doesn’t sound too risky!’ Time would prove this a hasty assessment.
A staggering total of over 10,000 DC-3s were made between 1935 and 1946, with several military variants being utilised all over the globe in a wide variety of roles: airliner, cargo transport, glider tug, air ambulance, paratroop platform, etc. They were rugged, carried a huge load, were cheap to make and easy to fly: the perfect aircraft for hurriedly trained wartime pilots and crews. After 1945, hundreds of surplus Dakotas formed the basis of the international airline industry well into the 1950s and a few still fly today in exotic places like Haiti, Chad and Burkina Faso. Around the world, no aircraft museum worth its salt does not sport an example or two.
I am rummaging among the many pieces of memorabilia Ron has dug out for me: telegrams, letters, and some souvenir German currency from the pre-Hitler years such as a bank note for fifty million marks, not worth the paper it was printed on, and material evidence of the economic collapse that aided the rise of the Nazis. I start to ask him how he came by it, but my eye is caught by a photograph of an extremely attractive girl, taken during the war. I look up and Ron’s grinning at me from ear to ear.
‘I was down staying with her family in the south of England and got a message that I was needed back on the squadron. Immediately.’ It was a couple of days before D-Day, as it happens sixty-one years to the day we are talking in his and his wife Joy’s tidy suburban unit.
Upon returning to his base at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire, all the Dakotas in the squadron had been painted with large black and white ‘invasion’ stripes on the wings and under the fuselages applied to all Allied aircraft involved in the imminent invasion of Normandy to aid in identification.
Ron knew the invasion was coming. He’d been training in parachute dropping and glider towing for months. But on the day itself, Ron’s job was towing into battle one of the enormous wooden Hamilcar troop-carrying gliders.
‘We took off at a rate of three gliders every 20 seconds,’ he
said, the idea being to keep them as close as possible, providing a concentration of troops and equipment on the ground in a very short space of time.
Ron took off at night, the glider releasing at the appointed place over Caen just before dawn, and headed for home. The entry in his log book for the momentous day simply read three bullet holes in aircraft.
‘One of them came up through the bottom, passing between myself and the wireless operator, out the top of the aircraft and exploded. You could hear it quite clearly.’
Had it done so a nano-second earlier, he would certainly have been a goner. On the way home in the first light of D-Day, he was able to gorge his eyes on the amazing sight of a 5,000+ ship invasion fleet heading for France.
He had survived the big day unscathed. For Ron, the moment of truth was to come later, at Arnhem.
All in all, he decided, his earlier prediction was proving right, and flying transports was turning out not a bad way to spend the war. After D-Day, he became part of the supply build-up in Normandy, sometimes dropping into a different forward air base every day to unload the cargo needed to supply an army. It was not very glamorous, perhaps, but he enjoyed the company of his largely Canadian crew and casualties were light. At Arnhem, however, the fun stopped.
If you’ve seen the film A Bridge Too Far, you’ve got the general idea about Arnhem: Operation Market Garden was the ambitious plan to drop a couple of divisions behind the German lines in Holland, open up the bridges across the Rhine, hurl the Allied armies into the industrial heart of Germany and end the war by Christmas. It was the sort of immensely complex military operation requiring months of planning. Market Garden was thrown together in a week, and it all went badly wrong. The paratroops were landed too far from the objectives without the element of surprise, resistance proved stronger than anticipated, communication was lost and chaos and confusion ensued.
Flak Page 23