Ron never knew exactly what was contained in the panniers being parachuted from the aircraft to the men below, but assumed it was important enough not to be simply handed to the Germans. So when, on 21 September 1944, four days into the battle over his designated drop zone, he spotted a German anti-aircraft gun sitting in a field supposed to be held by the British, he and his pilot made what he calls their ‘fatal mistake’ and turned the Dakota around to look for some friendlier recipients for their delivery.
‘As we came out, we got caught between two anti-aircraft batteries,’ he recalled.
The Arnhem battlefield was so turgid and confused, that a matter of a few hundred yards could be vital. From his low altitude of 600 feet, Ron felt the impact of small arms and light anti-aircraft as soon as the Dakota made its turn. First, the starboard engine caught fire. The pilot switched on the internal fire extinguishers but to no effect.
‘It was burning like a bloody big glow-lamp,’ he said. On the other side of the aircraft, the petrol tank, holed by bullets, began trailing plumes of fuel. With one wing ablaze and the other streaming petrol, they were seconds away from an inferno.
The pilot headed for the nearest field, cheerily called out, ‘Hang on fellas, here we go,’ and hit the ground, ploughing through a hedge that sheared off the burning wing completely. After sliding for 100 yards that seemed like 10 miles, the Dakota came to a stop.
‘We thought it was going to blow up so we just got up, got out, and hid in a nearby ditch.’
After a minute or so, it became obvious that the aircraft was not in fact about to catch fire, so Ron went back into the fuselage to collect a first aid kit to assist a wounded crew member. Emerging, he was confronted with a sight he will never forget.
‘When I turned around to get out of the aircraft, there was a German standing there with his revolver pointed at me. Not being Errol Flynn, I decided to go quietly.’
After several hours with a gun shoved in his back, confinement at the local headquarters, and a day or two in solitary confinement, Ron and the rest of his crew were interrogated by another German. He was, ‘an officer, very pleasant, who spoke perfect English’. Although he was asking the questions it soon became apparent there was little the officer didn’t already know. Ron was blandly informed on which day he had arrived on squadron, its location, the name of his commanding officer and several other pieces of information, all accurate.
He could only think that one of the other crew must have talked, until he realised he was the first one in. Unable to resist, Ron asked the smooth-talking German how he came by such information.
‘The British intelligence is the finest in the world,’ he was told, ‘but the German is a very close second.’
Ron and the crew were sent to a POW camp on the Polish border and managed to keep a diary on scraps of paper. After four months at the camp, they were ordered onto the road with an hour’s notice on 25 January 1945. So move they did, on foot in mid-winter to another camp many miles away, just south of Berlin. On the way, in temperatures reaching thirty below, escorted by Germans soldiers with dogs on leads, many of his fellow prisoners stumbled, and dropped out of the line. What became of them, Ron was unsure.
On the march, he witnessed the bizarre landscape of a country in disintegration: lines of high tension cables flattened as if by a giant, cities of rubble and pine forests showered in golden strips of radar-blocking ‘window’, dropped by the bombers high above.
‘It made them look like Christmas trees,’ he remembered.
Ron’s liberation and repatriation to Australia came soon enough after the war. He had no desire to stick around. He has never joined a returned serviceman’s organisation, and is slightly contemptuous of the notion of sitting around endlessly reliving the past. He has marched but once on Anzac Day, and only under sufferance.
‘It’s something that is finished as far as I’m concerned,’ he said.
I suspect though, that sometimes the winter of 1945 is not quite finished with him.
23
Tom Trimble
Fighter pilot
That’s a photo of me the day we arrived. They have to
photograph you on the day you arrive because you
mightn’t live much longer.
Coming from a humble family and with only a high school Leaving Certificate under his belt, Tom didn’t really think he was much of a show to be selected for aircrew training, but nonetheless pestered his reluctant father into signing the forms allowing him to apply. As an eighteen-year-old he didn’t know much about aeroplanes, but from his home above Balmoral Beach in Sydney, he would witness the arrival of the great air races from England. Then there was Kingsford-Smith, the Australian National Airways, as well as Ford Trimotors making their regular service up to Brisbane in the years before the war. And what about that bloke who cut such a fine figure in his blue uniform walking into the hotel (he forgets the name) near the corner of Pitt and Bridge Streets? That, decided Tom, was the fella he wanted to be.
So, on the last day before the application cut-off, Tom handed his in. It was 2 September 1939. The very next day, the Second World War started.
‘Geez, I wish I could withdraw that application,’ was his initial reaction. ‘This could be dangerous.’
Then one afternoon in mid-December, his sister appeared at his desk in the Queensland Insurance office building. ‘You’re in,’ she said, handing him a big, fat, official-looking envelope. ‘You have to be in Brisbane in a fortnight.’ He was soon on his way to number 2 Elementary Flying Training School at Archerfield, Queensland.
‘The worst aeroplane I have ever flown in my life!’ is how Tom forcefully describes the aircraft he went on to train in at Archerfield in Queensland, the legendary Tiger Moth. After hearing endless lyrical stories about the simple but sturdy virtues of this famous bi-plane, his passionate (albeit negative) opinion comes as refreshing. ‘Crude’ is the word that sums this little plane up for Tom – pure and simple. ‘An aeroplane made by a farmer, for farmers!’ Adding to the insult, the uniforms had at that stage yet to arrive and the trainee pilots had to make do with overalls and civilian hats and shoes. ‘We looked bloody terrible,’ says Tom. ‘Some of the lads learned to fly in socks!’
Tom passed the course and was selected for fighter pilot training at Pearce, Western Australia, although his career very nearly never made it past a small dirt aerodrome in Kalgoorlie. Ferrying his brand new Wirraway from the factory at Fishermans Bend to their home, Tom came in to refuel at Kalgoorlie. Taxying, he misjudged an outback fence post, collecting it with his right wing. With some sympathetic local help, he patched up the damage with butchered bits from another plane and a piece of timber, and took off the next day, not at all sure how his makeshift repair job would be received.
Hours later, taxying onto the bitumen at Pearce, his worst fears were realised as a flight commander jumped up on his wing with an urgent message. ‘You’re in trouble, Trimble. Black Jack [the squadron CO] has you up on a court-martial.’ Tom felt slightly sick, but the grin on the man’s face told him there was more. ‘But you’re lucky,’ he added. ‘At the same time a signal’s come in posting you to the Middle East!’
Shortly thereafter, on a Sydney Harbour crowded with boats of all description amid a poignantly carnival atmosphere, Tom boarded the gigantic four-funnel White Star liner Aquitania and sailed out of his home town on a warm Sunday morning. The next desert he would be looking at would be a dusty Egyptian airstrip as the newest member of 3 Squadron, RAAF.
By the time Tom arrived, 3 Squadron was already on its way to building its reputation as one of the toughest units in the desert air force. It had been the first RAAF squadron to leave Australia for the front, in July 1940, and since November had been operating from its base near Cairo as an army cooperation unit flying bi-planes. Solid and respectable, but biplanes nonetheless. These Gloster Gladiators – tough, well armed and highly manoeuvrable – were in fact one of the last and most advanced bi-plane fighte
rs ever built, but their lack of speed kept them well and truly locked into the previous generation of aerial warfare, closer to the Sopwith Camels of the trenches than the Spitfires and Messerschmitts of the 1940s.
But that’s what they flew and on 19 November 1940, 3 Squadron’s Gladiators went into action for the first time, engaged by nine Fiat CR42s (another bi-plane but much faster) of Mussolini’s air force, the Regia Aeronautica, and destroyed three of them for one loss of their own. A year later, still in the deserts of North Africa, the pilots of number 3 squadron would have amassed a total of 106 enemy aircraft destroyed, making themselves the first desert squadron to crack the ton, but not without considerable losses of their own, including their blackest day of 22 November, when five pilots were lost to the Germans and two captured.
To get his flying hours up, Tom was made to train on the Westland Lysander, a curious high-wing monoplane, developed in the mid-thirties as an army cooperation aircraft with several unusual features such as an extremely narrow overhead wing root to afford the pilot greater visibility, and an ability to fly at amazingly slow speeds as well as an impressively short takeoff and landing distance – a true STOL aircraft before its time. Its slowness, however, saw it decimated in France in 1940 but it later found fame as the ultimate cloak-and-dagger aeroplane. Painted black all over, it took off from England in the dead of night to drop off and pick up spies and agents from fields and roadsides across occupied Europe. ‘A magnificent aircraft, but bloody hard to fly,’ says Tom.
Ironically, 3 Squadron’s success at this stage of the desert war contributed to Tom spending a lot of time on the ground. ‘They’d only lost one person,’ he says, and flying against the lacklustre Italians morale was high. As a replacement, there was initially no-one for him to replace.
With his feet feeling extremely itchy, he was at last given a Gladiator, and made ‘weaver’, or squadron look-out. As such, he was not required to formate with the rest of the group into the V or ‘finger four’ formations, but swing in and out, looking for the enemy. ‘I was a free man, you might say,’ but not permitted to engage in combat. ‘I was once told off by the commanding officer, “Your job is to weave and look out. Don’t you dare come into a fight unless you’re called in!” He really had a go at me.’
Re-equipping with Hawker Hurricanes (‘my favourite aircraft,’ he says wistfully) and then in May 1941 the American built Tomahawks, Tom spent the bulk of 1941 on the move with number 3 as it moved with the ebb and flow of the desert campaign, patrolling over the sands of Syria, Libya and Egypt.
On one patrol he became caught in a terrifying ‘defensive circle’. Like wagons circled by marauding Indians, two squadrons of Tomahawks and Hurricanes formed a ‘cone’ as Messerschmitt 109s criss-crossed and attempted to break them up. The trouble with such a formation, said Tom is that it’s very hard to break out of it once established. ‘It was a stupid manoeuvre. The only reason it broke up was because the Germans ran out of fuel,’ he said still with a touch of exasperation.
Often with the fluid nature of the campaign, the pilots would take-off at one strip and land at another, the whole squadron having moved in the meantime, or run so low on fuel that their engines would stop while still taxying after landing.
Peter Forbes, my aeroplane enthusiast friend and the man who put me onto Tom, has been sitting quietly beside me, letting me get on with things, but then smiles slyly and asks a question.
‘Tell us about your little meeting with Yellow Fourteen, Tom.’ Tom gives a knowing laugh and Peter joins in. Tom then patiently begins to recount the most dramatic day of his life, 13 December 1941.
At its desert airstrip of Madalena in Egypt, 3 Squadron, short on pilots as well as aircraft, was no longer riding the high of a year before when Tom joined. ‘We were in a pretty parlous situation,’ he says. Having spent all day on the ground sitting in his cockpit with everything switched on and ready to be off in 2 minutes, Tom had been finally stood down and so after some lunch retired to his tent to write letters.
At about three o’clock, Bobby Gibbes, the 5 foot 4 flight commander and former salesman (as well as future squadron commander) appeared at the flap enquiring, in that wonderfully insouciant fighter pilot way, whether Tom would be interested in leading a section in a short patrol later that afternoon, provided they could scratch together the requisite number of aircraft. Nothing special, just a short patrol out to the German aerodrome at El Matuba to look after some returning bombers. They were not to go looking for a fight, and it was to be the last patrol of the day.
‘Oh . . . alright,’ was Tom’s non-committal reply.
They took off and flew out towards the west. Bobby had asked Tom to lead the left-hand section. Underneath them, Operation Crusader was in progress, one of the large set piece engagements of the to-and-fro motion of the desert campaign, this one having begun nearly a month earlier, an attempt to link up with the besieged garrison at Tobruk and force Rommel’s Africa Korps to the west. As usual, Rommel had an agenda of his own and, just to keep things interesting, counter-attacked into the British rear before being forced to retreat and re-group. All the German fighters, Tom had been told, had been withdrawn east to their centre at Benghazi and would present no trouble.
But it had been raining, and when it rains in the North African desert, sand and dirt turn into a rich desert glue and very little moves in the quagmire.
‘I can see all of this in my mind’s eye.’
The day was dull and humid, just after rain. At about 4,000 feet, Tom crossed the Gulf of Bomba and started to run into broken cloud. Over the supposedly empty El Matuba aerodrome, Tom and his small formation turned to head home. But looking down, he could not believe his eyes. ‘I had never seen so many Me 109s in all my life.’ The scheduled German withdrawal to the west had been held up by the rain, and their aircraft were only now, beginning to take off, right into Tom and Bobby’s modest patrol in aircraft of an indisputedly inferior quality. ‘There were masses of these bloody things,’ he said.
The uneventful patrol suddenly became a mayhem of wheeling, dodging aeroplanes. Tom saw one Tomahawk with a German right behind it and fired, having no idea if he hit anything. Another two were so close together that he could not fire on one without risking hitting the other. Then he looked down. A single 109 was pulling up strongly towards him like an enraged, determined animal. Standing out in the humid, late afternoon gloom, Tom remembers ‘two beautiful silver streams’, emerge from the German’s wingtips. The were simply the Messerschmitt’s wingtip vortices standing out against the dull of the afternoon, but it’s an image forever frozen in his brain.
Like a spectator transfixed, he continued to watch as another stream of 20 millimetre cannon fire – this one gold in colour – emerged out of the German’s propeller hub. ‘You won’t get me,’ he thought to himself, strangely calm in the surreal moment of battle. Tom swung his head around to follow the German’s path as he flashed by, then placed a thumb over his gun button ready to fire on another target that had emerged out of the melee. It was then he felt the impact of cannon shells as they hit his plane.
Thump, by his left foot, then two more – thump, thump – and another one the port side under the tailplane. An explosive round hit under the thick armoured glass of the windshield and blew off the top of the canopy. Then, suddenly, in front of his face, flames.
‘I realised I had to get out,’ Tom tells us, his eyes shut. He undid his harness, oxygen tube and radio/telephone and blacked out, but not before one calm and uncomplicated thought. ‘I’ll be dead before I hit the ground.’
It only lasted a moment. Seconds later he woke up to find the aircraft in a spin. ‘Then I was dead scared,’ he said. The flesh of his eyelids, he could feel, were closed, having cooked in the heat. Once again the notion that he was about to die entered his brain, and this time he was not quite so sanguine about it.
The flames, however, were just about gone. As he has since deduced, the shell which had exploded near his foo
t had ruptured the fuel lines feeding the engine, and only that small amount in the lines had ignited, but quickly died back. The tanks themselves were undamaged. Through an extraordinary feat of flying, he managed to bring the aircraft out of its spin, and opening one eye ever so slightly, saw the waters of the Mediterranean on his left, and knew he was heading south, away from the German aerodrome.
At only 4,000 feet and in a dive, with no power to his engine, he expected at any second to plough into the ground. But having flown over the country previously, he knew it to be flat enough to at least attempt a landing. Sightless, he pulled the nose back and felt the speed fall away, then dropped the nose again. Repeating this undulated movement three times he felt the airscrew bite the ground and the Tomahawk skidded, then stopped.
‘I was really panicky now,’ he said, but eventually got out. Badly burned and in shock, standing next to his aircraft, Tom leant forward to peel off his helmet, and ‘a firehose’ of blood poured out the top of his head. One of the explosive shells had peppered him with metal fragments, some chipping his skull and lodging in his body. Some of them are still in him. ‘Veterans Affairs took X-rays of me a few years ago – they’re still there!’ he says, laughing about it.
He had landed a couple of miles to the south of the Germans at their airfield at Martuba, which, Tommy could see, was laden with 109s. But with the British army fast advancing on them, they had more important things to do than go chasing after a downed Australian airman. In a story reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia, Tom thought of two good reasons why he should walk east. Firstly, it was the direction from which the advancing British army would arrive, and secondly, the cool easterly breeze soothed his scorched and agonised face.
Flak Page 24