‘What if something happens while we’re there?’ they enquired.
‘Well, you’ll be able to watch it, won’t you?’ said Arch. Just in case, the press bought their movie cameras.
Intelligence had warned of a Japanese air raid at 2 pm, and the Japanese were very punctual. At precisely two o’clock, they appeared over Darwin, flying in perfect high-level formation of eighteen little white crosses standing out against the clear blue sky heading in from the east. From their vantage point, Arch directed the reporters, at one point urging one cameraman to lower his camera to capture the strike of bombs along the harbour. The result is a famous piece of footage familiar in many documentaries.
Soon he began to hit back, flying supply drops to those soldiers still harassing the Japanese from behind their lines. He also began bombing newly occupied islands including Timor, and his old home, Ambon. Arch knew just where to drop.
Eventually, Arch would fly again, training on the Beaufort, and then operationally with the B-24 Liberators. Big, heavy but reliable, he says. He would get to know the Liberator, and also the Americans he frequently flew in formation with.
‘They’re a funny lot, Americans,’ he said. ‘But then again, they thought we were funny.’ On one occasion, Arch was flying with an American squadron as the combined group of eighteen aircraft were returning to Darwin after a raid to the north. Arch’s navigator, John Jamieson was exceptionally talented and fazed by nothing. When the American formation began to prematurely turn left and break away on their own, Jamieson, sitting up with Arch, simply leaned across and opened the microphone, saying ‘So long, fellas’, then hung it up. After a pause, the American lead navigator replied warily, ‘Too soon, huh?’, and straightened up again to rejoin the formation.
Despite a slow start, Arch Dunne went on to a have a long and eventful war, becoming one of the youngest squadron leaders of the RAAF and earning the first Distinguished Flying Cross of the Pacific theatre. Post-war he resumed flying for the airlines, operating some of the great aircraft of post-war civil aviation such as the Constellation, DC-6 and perhaps the greatest propeller-driven airliner of them all the Lockheed Electra.
For sheer drama though, nothing would, or ever could come close to the day he flew out of Ambon for the last time, with the one lucky, eternally grateful extra passenger he managed to squeeze into the nose.
25
Walter Eacott
Beaufighter pilot
I called out to the wireless operator, ‘Dinghy, dinghy,
prepare for ditching!’ And then down we went, smack!
One day in the late 1960s, Walter Eacott opened the paper at his home in London and noticed an ad calling for experienced air force officers to make their way Down Under to join the RAAF.
‘Look at this, dear,’ he said to his wife, Jean. ‘They want old men for the air force in Australia. Let’s go!’
At age forty-five, Walter, with Jean in tow, said goodbye to England and boarded a ship to start a new life as an administration officer with the Royal Australian Air Force. They liked what they found, and settled here for good.
‘It’s taken thirty years,’ says Jean at their home near Melbourne, ‘But we’ve nearly been accepted.’
For Walter, this was the start of his second air force career. His first began a quarter of a century earlier in the backyard of his home in the village of Chingford in Essex, when as a seventeen-year-old, he had a first class view of the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz.
‘The glow in the sky the night they hit the docks was so red we thought the whole city was being destroyed,’ he remembers.
Not that this experience was needed to shape his already keen desire to fly. At sixteen, Walter had joined the Air Defence Cadet Corps, a kind of air force Boy Scouts, and completed a rather terrifying-sounding glider course.
‘It was completely primitive,’ he said. ‘We sat open to the elements in a tiny wooden glider which was launched when the other boys grabbed one end of a bungee rope and ran as hard as they could!’ The only instruction Walter can remember receiving was, ‘If you stop hearing the sound of the wind rushing past your ears, push the stick down, because it means you’re stalling!’
So, one Friday in December 1940, when Walter walked into the RAF recruiting office at the Air Ministry in the heart of London, the crusty old gentlemen on the interview board sensed they had a keen one. ‘We’re going to take you on as a trainee pilot,’ they told him. ‘Now, you can go home and wait for your course to be ready, or if you like you can join up straightaway.’
‘I was eager and stupid and joined up straightaway’, he said. He signed on the dotted line and spent the next five months paying for his enthusiasm by filling sandbags in a gun pit on ‘ground defence duties’ until the trainee bottleneck had cleared and the RAF were ready to take him the following May.
With his training finally underway, Walter found his way to number 6 Initial Training Wing at Newquay in Cornwall, where he imbued himself in trigonometry, geometry, meteorology, and flying the Miles Magister, a smart little training aeroplane with spats covering the wheels and a 130 horsepower engine. From the start, he knew he was a natural.
‘I didn’t have any trouble with my flying at all,’ he said matter-of-factly, as if discussing riding a bike. His instructors obviously agreed, and selected him to fly the magnificent twin-engined Bristol Beaufighter.
‘There were two wonderful sensations in my flying career,’ Walter told me. ‘The first was going solo for the first time in the Magister, the second was flying the Beaufighter.’
In 1938, during the belated scramble to re-equip before the Second World War, the British government woke up one day to realise it possessed not one heavy fighter aircraft which could perform long-range interception or escorts. Enter the Bristol Aeroplane Company which quickly knocked up a proposal to adapt just such an aircraft from their Beaufort torpedo-bomber, then in the final stages of design and testing. The Air Ministry hastily approved the proposal, and the ‘Beau-fighter’ was born.
This new hybrid fighter took barely eight months from drawing board to first flight and was an amazing success story of wartime cooperation and expediency. It borrowed its wings, control surfaces, undercarriage, as well as half its name from the Beaufort, but the result was a far superior aircraft. Rugged, powerful, and with four 20 millimetre cannon in the nose as well as six machine guns in the wings, the Beaufighter was the most heavily armed Allied fighter of the war and a hit from the start.
Beaufighters flew as fighter, night fighter, strike and torpedo aircraft in all major theatres of the war and were adored by their two-man crews. It’s 14-cylinder ‘Hercules’ sleeve-valve engines – itself an invention of the Bristol company – made the Beaufighter not only powerful, but remarkably quiet. The RAAF liked them so much they built 365 of their own ‘Mark XXIs at the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation factories at Fishermans Bend in Victoria for use against the Japanese in the Pacific. Here they performed ground-attack and ship-strafing duties, coming to grisly fame in the Bismarck Sea battle.
One of the Beaufighter’s enduring legends was the name ‘Whispering Death’ supposedly attributed to it by the Japanese as they cowered from its raking fire in jungle or island bunkers and ships’ holds. But, as formidable a weapon as it was, the story, which remains firm in the minds of some today, was in fact a myth born of colourful wartime propaganda.
Taking off for the first time in a Beaufighter was an experience Walter has never forgotten. After the briefest of introductions from an experienced pilot, he sat in the cockpit on the runway threshold and received permission to take off. ‘I eased the throttle forward and felt this surge in my seat. I’ve never felt such power in my life,’ he says.
The Beaufighter began to come off Bristol’s production lines concurrently with the development of first airborne ‘AI’ radar, and so leant itself to becoming the first truly effective night fighter of the war. But all this was very ‘hush-hush’.
At his
OTU at Church Fenton in Yorkshire, Walter trained in an atmosphere of complete secrecy. ‘We were more or less threatened not to talk to anyone about what we were learning, and forbidden even to take notes in the classroom.’
In March 1942, Walter was posted to the famous Battle of Britain aerodrome at Tangmere on the south coast of England to number 219 Squadron to begin prowling the night skies of Britain, hunting for German raiders.
‘This was the time of the carrot nonsense,’ he tells me a little wearily. I’d always known about this famous wartime ploy – still folklore today – to disguise the advent of airborne radar by exaggerating the eyesight-enhancing properties of carrots. The Air Ministry insisted their night fighter pilots eat them by the bucket-load. ‘I’ve never liked them since,’ Walter tells me.
In the daylight hours, Walter and the Beaufighter crews would wear dark glasses to protect their vision, then take off in darkness to make standing patrols, flying large figure-of-eight circuits between radar beacons on the south coast of England. Being the most junior pilot on the squadron however, he never got to see much of the action. ‘As soon as a German was detected, we were recalled to the ground, and one of the aces was scrambled to fly up and deal with it.’
But just a few weeks after arriving at Tangmere, Walter’s night flying career was cut short. After all the months spent in night training, all 219’s fifteen aircrews were assembled and informed that they were being transferred to the Middle East as day fighter pilots. ‘Such a waste of money,’ thought Walter.
From his Mediterranean base in Misurata in Libya, Walter began a very different kind of war, protecting convoys (often the trigger-happy Royal Navy gunners were as dangerous as the enemy) and attacking German ships in harbour or at sea. With a photo reconnaissance picture of a Greek or Italian port, Walter would often fly for several hours skimming the wave-tops under the German radar at no more than 20 feet. Dangerous enough with any aircraft, this was particularly hazardous with the Beaufighter, as it had a tendency to undulate or ‘hunt’ slightly in level flight. At 20,000 feet, it didn’t matter, but at just 20, it could be deadly. Hands-off flying was therefore extremely dangerous. ‘We had a couple of quite experienced pilots who just hit the water. They were gone in a second,’ he said.
And then there was the German air force. As powerful as the Beaufighter was, it was never as nimble as a single-engined fighter, and pilots had to be very careful about who they tangled with.
‘We would go after the Junkers 52 transports and the twin-engined 88s, but we never had the speed to outrun a 109. I should know. That was my downfall,’ Walter said with a slight chuckle.
By late 1943, the Germans had been forced out of Africa and most of Walter’s squadron had completed their obligatory tour of 250 operational hours. Everyone was about to pack up and head home to England.
On what was supposed to be one of his last trips before the move home, Walter, flying with his wireless operator, Bob Pritchard (‘he was about eight years older than me,’ said Walter. ‘So I called him Grandad’), was detailed to escort a group of American torpedo-bombers attacking German supply ships near Rhodes. He made the rendezvous, met the Americans, and headed onto the target. Around the small convoy, two German Arado 196 seaplanes were circling.
‘One of them dived down towards me, firing, so I flew up to meet it,’ he said. Walter made a climbing turn heading straight for the German aircraft, firing short bursts from his cannon and machine guns. It was a case of who would pull away first and the German lost. Peeling away, the Arado passed over Walter’s head, giving him a view of the damage he had caused to its underside. ‘There were bits coming off it everywhere,’ he said. Turning again, he watched it hit the water. He then gave chase to the second Arado, fired a few shots but broke off to return to the convoy. Later, he learned that it too crashed.
Back at the airfield after the mission, he discovered that the Arado he had brought down had made a better account of itself than first realised. In the brief and one-sided skirmish, one of its bullets had severed an aileron cable in Walter’s Beaufighter, rendering it unserviceable.
The next day, 10 November 1943, Walter was sent to fly another trip, again a bomber escort, almost an exact re-run in fact, of the day before. Today though, things would be different: he would be flying an unfamiliar aircraft, and this time, the Germans would be waiting for him.
‘We were immediately jumped by a flight of Messer-schmitt 109s at the same spot as the previous day,’ he said. It was no contest so the Beaufighters immediately turned and headed for home. But when Walter applied full power he watched in horror as his comrades speed past him. ‘I was sitting there, banging away at the throttles wondering why this thing wouldn’t go any faster!’ he said. The engines on his replacement aircraft, a brand new machine, had not been properly tuned and the Beaufighter was underpowered, a lame duck in the middle of the Mediterranean surrounded by the enemy.
Walter knew immediately how it was going to end. ‘There were six of them and they just sat on my tail and used me for target practice,’ he said. He tried manoeuvring as much as he could, and Bob retaliated as best he could, firing the sole gas-operated rearward-firing machine gun from a blister positioned half way down the fuselage, but the fighters were not shaken. The chase went on for a seemingly endless 10 minutes, the German aircraft toying with him like a cat with a mouse.
Walter reckons a couple of the German aircraft were actually out of ammunition, but used him to practice attack manoeuvres, coming up close on his tail, then changing place with another aircraft. One engine was hit and caught fire, and Walter hit the automatic extinguisher switch. It seemed to work for a while but then flames flared up again, licking all along the starboard wing. Smoke began billowing from the cockpit. ‘I called out to the wireless operator, “Dinghy, dinghy, prepare for ditching!” And then down we went, smack!’
Walter knew he had only a few seconds on the surface before the aircraft would start to sink. Water rose quickly around his feet. The aircraft had an automatic dinghy release and he could only hope it had deployed properly. Still strapped in the cockpit, he saw the light fade to green, then darkness as the aeroplane went under. He opened the escape hatch above his head but something held him in his seat. With every second seeing him deeper underwater, he frantically searched around with his hands. In the panic, he had forgotten to release his seat harness.
‘Once I remembered the harness, I popped out like a cork,’ he said.
On the surface, the dinghy had released, but it was upside down and only half inflated. ‘That’s when I thought I was going to drown,’ said Walter. He and his wireless operator struggled, but eventually righted it and forced what breath they could muster into the mouthpiece. Quietly, he thanked the time he had put in to the dinghy drills at the base.
It wasn’t cold, at first, but with the night the temperature dropped. Walter kept a lookout for the lights of Allied submarines, one of which had recently picked up a couple of downed airmen from the squadron in similar circumstances, but this night it was not to be. When the sun came up the next morning, the two men made a decision: they would paddle to neutral Turkey, just 60 miles away. They reckoned they could make it.
It was a short-lived ambition. Soon after, the unmistakeable shapes of two German Arado 196 seaplanes, the same type Walter had shot down the previous day, appeared overhead, circled and touched down on the water a short distance away. The German observer emerged and crawled out onto the wing.
‘How long you schwimm?’ he called out.
‘Since yesterday,’ replied an exhausted Walter.
‘Ah, for you the war is over!’ Walter has heard this cliché recounted by so many captured servicemen, he is convinced the Germans were trained to say it.
‘We were bitterly disappointed,’ he tells me. ‘I was sure we could have made it to Turkey.’
Walter was taken to Crete, fed a meal of spaghetti and flown out at 3 am on a Junkers 52 to Greece, then on a twelve-day trip by a very co
ld train to Germany.
Walter spent sixteen months as a prisoner of war at the large Stalag Luft 4B camp near Muhlberg in eastern Germany. From the beginning, his mind was set on escape. Airmen were notorious escapees, and so were put into a separate, and very secure barbed wire enclosure in the middle of the camp. ‘The soldiers seemed to accept their lot more readily,’ said Walter. ‘The air force fellows had a more restless spirit.’
A compound within a compound was no place from which to attempt escape, so Walter teamed up with a fellow ‘restless spirit’, navigator George Lloyd, who had been shot down over Europe some months before. The two men swapped identities with a couple of soldiers in order to be assigned onto the work parties, where opportunities for escape were more likely to present themselves.
Englishman Walter Eacott became Irishman Fusilier James Leslie and spent twelve hours a day outside the camp working on the German railways, repairing bomb damage, and waiting his chance to abscond. His first attempt was bungled. Four days after doing a runner, he was discovered sheltering in a disused air-raid shelter, recaptured, and put on bread and water in solitary confinement for seven days.
Walter settled down to incarceration with his fellow prisoners, a diverse mixture from every service and nationality. From what clandestine sources they could glean pieces of information, everyone followed the war’s progress as best they could.
Food was another obsession. As the war became more desperate for the Germans, the men noticed the vital Red Cross parcels, an essential supplement to their meagre diet, become scarcer. In the beginning they were given one per man, but by war’s end, a single parcel would be divided between up to a dozen men, if they turned up at all. Everyone became very thin. But as harsh as life was for Walter, it was nothing to how he saw the Russians being treated, he said. ‘They were kept like animals. It was terrible.’
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