Searching for water, he came across a trio of Bedouin Arab tribesmen, for whom he promptly produced his ‘blood chit’, a printed card in Arabic issued to all Allied airmen in the desert, promising a reward in gold of one hundred guineas for the safe return of the bearer. He was put on a camel, fed, and native herbs were found to soothe his burns. That night he slept in a tent, a guest of the local chieftain who placed Tom on one side, his wife on the other and lay down in between them with a loaded rifle. It was hardly needed.
‘The last thing I remember before going to sleep was being bitten by fleas,’ he said.
After a few days, troops of the 7th Indian Division came from the west and Tom approached a British officer in a staff car.
After an almost surreal dinner that night on white tablecloths in the middle of the desert seated next to a general, Tom found his way back to 3 Squadron a week later, which by this time had moved to a new airfield at El Adem. His injuries properly attended to for the first time, Tom could hear the metallic ‘chink chink’ of the shell fragments falling into a steel basin as the orderlies washed his scalp and hair.
Yellow Fourteen, as Peter informed me as I drove him home, was the call sign of the German ace Hans-Joachim Marseille, the playboy Berliner with the French name who grew his hair long, listened to banned American jazz records, hated discipline and who once shot down seventeen Allied aircraft in a single day, contributing to his astonishing total of 158 aircraft.
Marseille was a true one-off, whose freakish flying and fighting ability had allowed him, by twenty-one, to have rewritten the book on aerial warfare.
‘There it is, you see,’ Tom points to the entry in a large book about Marseille’s short life, listing every one of his kills. And there is Tom. Not by name, but he’s definitely on the list, same date, time and location. He wears it as a mark of some pride, and I get the feeling he would liked to have met his nemesis, but it was not to be. Nine months later, Marseille was dead. Photographs of his young handsome face taken a few weeks before his death show him pale, his eyes sunken, evidence of the depression he is said to have experienced at the continual strain of fighting, and the recent death of yet another colleague.
Tom was repatriated back to Australia to fly Spitfires later in the war, but nothing was to match the drama of his last day in the desert.
24
Arch Dunne
Bomber pilot
The Japanese didn’t like coming near the Liberators
very much. They had guns sticking out all over them.
Sydney had turned on one of its brilliant afternoons the day I spoke with Arch Dunne. As I stood in his living room, overlooking one of those breathtaking vistas of sun-sparkled water the locals seem to take in their stride, Arch’s two adoring daughters, Mel and Trudy, prepared just a fraction of their dad’s extraordinary collection of photographs and memorabilia, including some prints of pre-war New Guinea that looked like they were taken yesterday. Pre-war, because Arch Dunne began his flying career not in the air force, but as an airline pilot in the late 1930s, flying the routes from Australia to sleepy New Guinea backwaters like Wau, Salamau and Port Moresby – places soon to be thrust onto the world’s stage as battle zones.
‘I had a licence to drive an aeroplane before I had one to drive a car,’ Arch told me, having graduated as a pilot from the Australian National Airways Flying School in Geelong in 1931 at the very young age of seventeen. Soon after he began co-piloting the elegant de Havilland 86 ‘Express’ four engine bi-plane for the now long-gone ANA.
Arch spent an idyllic few years flying in and out of the New Guinea goldfields, but in 1937, with world peace fast diminishing, the air force wrote to all qualified pilots enquiring as to their willingness to join up in the event of hostilities.
‘I had no ties, and figured it was a better offer to go in voluntarily, rather than be dragged in later on,’ said Arch, and so duly put up his hand for the RAAF Reserve. After standing in line at the recruiting depot, a surly officer gave him and his tally of hundreds of hours flown the once over, and offered curtly, ‘Yes, I think we might be able to use you.’
When war broke out, he was one of the first to receive his call-up papers but disappointed to be sent to Point Cook to train as an instructor. Such were the pitfalls of over-qualification, and definitely not how he had envisaged offering his services to his country in time of need. But Arch dutifully began life as an instructor at number 2 Elementary Flying Training School at Archerfield, Queensland, settling in for a long and most unexciting war.
Then, on 13 August 1940, a Lockheed Hudson medium bomber crashed into a hill 8 miles from Canberra airport, killing all ten people on board including three federal cabinet ministers and the newly appointed Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Brudenell White. The cause was determined to be a fatal stall on approach to land – simple pilot error. The air force had a quick rethink, and decided that experienced pilots like Arch could perhaps be more purposefully employed.
The RAAF had only recently taken delivery of the modern, powerful Hudson and compared to the aircraft most pilots at the time were used to flying it was, as Arch puts it, ‘very much a horse of another colour’. American-built, the Hudson was converted from a Lockheed airliner, the Type 14 Super Electra, commissioned by the Royal Air Force to replace their fleet of ageing fabric-covered Avro Ansons.
The Lockheed Hudson remains one of the truly unsung heroes of Second World War aviation. Nearly three thousand were built, nearly all finding their way into the RAF and Commonwealth air forces performing a variety of roles including bombing, air–sea rescue and maritime patrol. It was a squat, slightly comic-looking aeroplane, with a twin tail and a large, distended belly making it look like a porpoise about to give birth.
His qualifications reassessed, Arch was plucked out of instruction and put into active service with number 2 Squadron at Laverton, Victoria, flying the Hudson on maritime reconnaissance patrols into Bass Strait.
Combing the featureless expanse of the ocean for anything suspicious was usually uneventful, but on one memorable patrol, Arch spotted the silhouette of a large ship in the distance. Right on the edge of fuel range, he could afford to make just one pass to identify some of the features before heading back: approximately 45,000 tons, twin funnels, and steaming west towards Port Phillip Bay. He radioed in the details and a short time later received the reply, ‘attack – immediate’. But with his fuel low, all he could do was confirm the position and head home.
As Arch flew back to Laverton, the rest of the squadron passed him on their way out to attack the suspicious vessel. He had barely arrived back when an urgent recall was issued. ‘Squadron return – do not attack.’ After some frantic radio transmissions, the identity of the mystery ship was discovered to be the New Amsterdam which had left Wellington the previous day, but neglected to inform anyone of its intended passage through Bass Strait. Had Arch’s tanks been slightly fuller that day, he could well have been responsible for attacking a friendly, and very much unarmed passenger ship.
With the prospect of war in the Pacific looming, Arch was posted to number 13 Squadron and on the day before Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941, arrived at his new home at Laha airfield on the Dutch-controlled island of Ambon, two hours flying time from the Australian mainland. The army was also there in the form of ‘Gull Force’, an 1,100-strong bastion of men largely from Tasmania expected to halt the as yet unchecked Japanese. For all of them, the situation was entirely hopeless. Gull Force’s commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Roach saw what was coming and pleaded to be either reinforced or withdrawn. Instead he was sacked, withdrawn to Melbourne and drummed out of the AIF.
For fighter protection, 13 Squadron could rely only on two hopelessly inadequate Brewster Buffalos of the Dutch air force. The senior RAAF officer on Ambon, Wing Commander Scott, warned in a signal to the Melbourne war room that ‘with present equipment, Ambon could not resist for one day’. Arch’s war, so far relatively uneventful, was about to change dramatically.
‘Just a little strip with a little bay along the waterfront,’ is how he describes Laha. ‘Certainly nothing too big.’ From this tiny outpost, Arch and 13 Squadron’s dozen or so Hudson bombers set out on daily patrols to report the inexorable southward march of the Japanese to a stupefied world. On 10 December, he entered history, being part of the first attack by an Australian squadron in the Dutch East Indies in the Pacific war.
‘It was a little place out in the middle of absolutely nowhere called Tobi Island,’ he recalls. On the map, it’s barely a speck in the ocean north of the western tip of New Guinea, but the Japanese were using it as a base for their Kawanishi flying boats. Six aircraft were detailed to attack, led by 13’s recently arrived Commanding Officer, Wing Commander McDonald. ‘A nice fella,’ says Arch, ‘but without much experience on the Hudson’, having only just completed the conversion course. Arch was McDonald’s number 2, and he was worried about him from the beginning. ‘He really didn’t understand the differences between the old bi-planes and a modern aircraft like the Hudson.’
Taking off in darkness for Tobi Island, 13 Squadron were scheduled to arrive over the target at first light. McDonald proposed to lead off and then slow down to 120 knots to allow Arch and the rest of the squadron to catch up. ‘No, don’t do that, whatever you do!’ Arch warned his CO when told the plan just before take-off. ‘At 120 knots with a full load, these things just won’t stay in the air!’
But above the island a few minutes later, Arch peered into the night sky and saw the pre-arranged glow of an Aldis lamp being flashed from the turret of his CO’s aircraft ahead. He caught up quickly, then overtook McDonald who appeared to have almost stopped in mid-air. ‘Holy smoke, he’s going too slow!’ Arch said to his co-pilot, and then both witnessed a sudden swirling of lights, and a sheet of flame exploding on the ocean below. Like the similarly inexperienced pilot in Canberra the year before, Arch’s commanding officer had stalled the Hudson at low speed from an irrecoverable height. Another pilot in the squadron called up, breaking radio silence. ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘The CO’s gone in. I’m taking over,’ was Arch’s cursory reply. It had been his very first trip and they had been in the air barely 10 minutes.
Unwilling to return and attempt a landing back at the small island airstrip at night with a full bomb load, Arch led the squadron to the target, and bombed the area around a small jetty at dawn as planned. Arch noticed one poor fellow dash from the end of the jetty where he had been fishing into a nearby building which was then torn apart by a bomb. They hit what they were supposed to hit, but what that actually was they were never quite sure. ‘Let’s piss off out of here,’ Arch called up to the squadron and they headed home. The trip back was flown with a sour taste in their mouths.
A few nights later, it was the Japanese who, as Arch put it, ‘welcomed us to the war zone’, when three flying boats appeared over the airstrip, dropping fragmentation bombs. No-one was killed but bits of metal were sprayed everywhere, imbedding themselves into buildings and aircraft alike. It was to become the pattern for the next few weeks.
One night, Arch took a replacement Hudson from Darwin to neighbouring number 2 Squadron who were based at Namlea airfield on the nearby island of Buru. It was to be a quick stop, and a plan had been put in place whereby the island’s natives warned of Japanese aircraft coming from the north, but the pilots had been told to stay close by the aircraft when on the ground, just in case they needed to get off quickly.
This morning, upon arriving, Arch was greeted by a jeep and one of the 2 Squadron pilots, future BHP director Bob Law-Smith carrying a breakfast-laden tray. The five men sat under the wing in the tropical morning enjoying the service, but the distraction was short-lived. Mid-mouthful, Law-Smith paused.
‘I can hear aircraft,’ he said. Everybody was on their feet in an instant, looking for some kind of shelter. Desperately, the men threw themselves down into the lip of a newly-cut gravel road, trying as best they could to force their bodies into the ground. ‘Here they come!’ shouted a voice. Arch looked over his shoulder to see two Japanese Zeros roaring towards the end of the runway, 10 feet off the ground.
‘All I could feel was my bottom sticking into air,’ he said. ‘And Bob’s was even bigger!’ The strafing bullets sent flying gravel everywhere, and all were lucky to receive only cuts. The aircraft didn’t fare so well. Four out of the five Hudsons on the strip burned immediately, the survivor flew again but was so full of holes that the pilot who brought it back to Darwin felt the wind rushing past him all the way.
But 13 Squadron hit back when they could. Ambon, they knew, was soon to be invaded, but from which direction? With replacement aircraft, Arch was part of a formation sent to intercept a convoy that had been spotted to the north. Seeing smoke down below on the water, they assumed it was just a few ships. But emerging through a haze, was the panorama of a complete Japanese invasion fleet stretched across the ocean beneath them. ‘We didn’t know what we’d let ourselves in for,’ said Arch. ‘The whole damn fleet was there.’
Arch dived and dropping his bombs one after the other, came close to hitting something, but missed. Then the sky was full of black smoke. A whole clip of eight or ten shells exploded, each at the exact same place relative to the moving aircraft, right underneath the Hudson’s nose, just to the left. Arch has often thought about that Japanese ship’s gunner, just a fraction too eager traversing the anti-aircraft gun. ‘If he hadn’t been just a little too anxious, I wouldn’t be talking to you now,’ he said.
Ambon itself was spared until the last day of January 1942, when another convoy of twenty-two ships was spotted to its immediate north by Arch’s mate from Laverton, Bill White. Arch first became aware of this startling fact when on the runway at Darwin about to return to Ambon, having just brought in a load of evacuees from Babo on New Guinea’s western tip. ‘I’ll bring you back another lot tomorrow,’ he radioed to the controller. ‘Well I hope you can, mate,’ came the reply. ‘The Japanese fleet’s just been spotted north of Ambon.’ Arch’s return flight to Laha was scheduled to include a wide reconnaissance arc to the island’s north. Instead, he went straight to the airfield.
Arriving at Laha in the dark, the squadron with its few remaining aircraft and its entire personnel were on the ground in an atmosphere of subdued desperation, evacuation plan in place, all expecting the Japanese to adhere to their usual pattern and arrive with the dawn, just a few hours away. ‘We knew we couldn’t take everybody,’ says Arch. The squadron’s Hudsons began loading up. ‘I had twenty-seven people on my aircraft which was built to carry four,’ he remembers. Everything not bolted down inside the aircraft was thrown out and the fuel tanks filled with just enough petrol to get to Darwin and no more.
One by one, the over-laden Hudsons took off. With not an inch to spare inside, Arch prepared to depart. Then he spotted the long face of a friend, the squadron intelligence officer. He was a big man, and Arch had no room for him, but reckoned he’d be able to get back for at least one more trip before the inevitable surrender. The officer was not so sure.
‘You know, I’m starting to think of my wife and three daughters,’ he said to Arch. ‘Any chance of getting on your aircraft?’
‘Sorry, I’m loaded to the hilt,’ said Arch, and the officer took it well. Then Arch remembered the small cavity of the bomb-aimer’s position right in the nose of the Hudson, occupied only on the run into the target. ‘Get yourself in there and don’t get in the way of anything,’ he said. A few minutes later, Arch Dunne’s Hudson lumbered into the air carrying twenty-seven passengers, plus one.
He can’t quite remember if he was third or fourth off the runway, but just behind him was Bill White, ready to go in his aircraft as soon as the squadron headquarters staff had made their way down to the airfield from the other side of the bay.
Considering its load, the Hudson handled pretty well. ‘I didn’t feel like making any steep turns, though,’ says Arch. Just after dawn, he arrived back in Darwin
, immediately unloaded everyone and frantically prepared to head back. ‘Just slow down, Arch,’ he was told. ‘It’s too late now. We’ve managed to get all the aircraft off, except one.’
Bill White’s was the last aircraft to be refuelled, and as the other Hudsons flew off, the petrol was pumped into his tanks, but simply poured straight out through the undercarriage and onto the ground. According to Arch, ‘Bill was the sort of bloke who had to have a crack at somebody.’ When he had spotted the Japanese fleet earlier that day, he couldn’t resist dropping his bombs on something, but in the process, must have collected some stray pieces of lead from the Japanese gunners. Nobody noticed the main fuel cock had been mortally damaged. Bill had made it back to Ambon, but his aircraft would never fly again.
Bill and the stranded party made their way up the coast, but were captured and beheaded by the Japanese a few days later. The airfield at Laha became a killing ground. Of the more than three hundred army and air force men who surrendered to the Japanese at Laha airfield, not one of them was to survive, butchered in four separate massacres over two weeks.
Of the 1159 men in Gull Force, only 302 would survive the war. Ambon saw one of the worst death rates of Allied prisoners in Japanese captivity.
‘Where were you when Darwin was bombed?’ asks his daughter, Mel. Arch grinned a little.
‘In Darwin,’ he said. The Japanese military code had been broken, he explained, a fact which was itself kept secret, lest the Japanese changed it. The press though, ever eager for a story, or any word on when Darwin would be attacked, began to badger Arch for anything he might be willing to divulge. ‘They probably thought I was the weak link in the chain,’ he said. He feigned ignorance but was in fact privy to a great deal more than he let on.
‘For goodness sakes, stop bothering me!’ he said to a group of reporters one day, and then proposed a picnic atop the platform of a water tank stand overlooking the city.
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