Under a Bomber's Moon: The true story of two airmen at war over Germany
Page 3
Whitney on BBC again:
When we were well out to sea and still coming down gradually I told the crew to take up dinghy positions and prepare to crash-land on the sea. The front gunner opened the escape hatch and threw out the ladder. Then he took up his position by the dinghy release handle. Just before we crashed we all grabbed hold tight. Everything the crew did worked wonderfully, and so did the drill. After we had hit the water we all got into the dinghy without getting any more than our feet wet. We started a log of the dinghy’s voyage. The navigator wrote down: 0315 landing, 0330 set course for base. We reckoned that with the wind and the drift we could get back to England in 60 hours if we weren’t picked up before.
Col:
Then we took our places for landing. Bob, Paddy and I got our backs against the draught-proof door and our feet against the rear main spar, Bob and I on the starboard side and Paddy on the port, where he could be near the dinghy release cable. Eric turned the kite back into the moon and used the path of the moon on the water as a flare path. After what seemed like an hour of waiting we landed. I remember thinking that the impact was much slighter than I had anticipated. I had imagined that the crash would be awful. Actually, it was pretty bad; but when I had a nasty feeling that this must be the end, it was over. Bob Shields fell on top of me and hurt his ankle; but that was all. When Eric was about to ditch, the machine had a bank of about 30 degrees to starboard. Just before impact, he managed to reduce the bank to some 5 degrees, so that the starboard wingtip struck first. The impact slewed the kite round through 180 deg; but the wing held. Only the extreme tip was broken.
As soon as we struck, water came in and swilled round our seats. Some came through the holes in the floor of the fuselage; but some cascaded from on top, I deduce from the top escape hatch. I think the nose must have gone down and under the water, letting the water come over along the top of the fuselage; but of that I’m not sure. As soon as the kite stopped jumping about we were on our feet and at the foot of the escape hatch ladder. Paddy, Bob and Geoff and I were there. I remember vividly that we all stood aside waiting for each other to go first. I forget who actually did, but I know someone out on top tried to help Geoff Cheek out. Poor old Geoff. I don’t think that anyone realised how bad he was until then. He tried to get up the ladder, but fell back, hitting the left side of his mouth on the side of the ladder, cutting it rather nastily.
We all helped him out, and I remember as I got out how nice the dinghy looked sitting there behind the wing, and how damn lucky we were that it had not been holed. Then I had an awful thought. Did not see Eric and thought he was unconscious in his seat. Dreaded the thought of going back to look for him but thought that someone should. Then saw him. He had got out of his own escape hatch. We all got in – but before that I looked along the fuselage and saw the wreck that had been an aeroplane, but still flew. Every 2ft 6” [76 centimetres] was a cannon shell hole and in-between were the marks of.303 bullets. I have said that the floor was nearly as much hole as whole and that is not an exaggeration.
We all got in and cast off. The first thing we did was to paddle round to the rear to see if we could see anything of poor old Keith. There was not a sign – no bloodstains, nothing. But I go too fast. We were in a hell of a hurry to abandon old ‘T’ Tommy, because the only other Stirling ditched had floated for 90 seconds. We were working on that basis. Why it floated longer I don’t know, because the fuselage was a mass of holes; but this much may be said: there was no rear turret thus lessening the weight aft and the tanks were nearly empty, giving added buoyancy to the area presenting the greatest surface to the sea. Anyway, we saw the old hull silhouetted against the moon track for two hours after we landed. The dinghy floated up over the trailing edge of the wing, which was submerged. We all clambered in; and I got my flying boots full of water. I was the last in and Paddy broke us adrift.
The British Air Ministry’s official flying manual for pilots and flight engineers of Stirlings contained a detailed section on emergency procedures, in which it listed the items the crew should have found in the dinghy as they paddled off into the night: 28 tins of water, seven tins of emergency supply rations; one Very (flare) pistol – 1-inch bore, plus 18 tins of cartridges (these were missing from their dinghy); three fluorescine sea markers (dye to spread in the water); one first aid outfit; one sponge; two paddles; one mast aerial and flag; two tins of matches.[4] Col’s account continues:
We came down at 03.15 in the morning and we set a course by the pole star for England. I made a rough log, and the entries were: 0315 landed; 0330, set course for base. We steered north-west and we did not care a damn what part of England we were going to hit. The sea was warm and calm, so we were not very uncomfortable. We paddled hard to get away from the vicinity of the aircraft, because we thought she might just have been seen to come down. When we had put about two miles between it and us, we set about organising ourselves. Two of us paddled and three rested. Decided to paddle in 15-minute spells and to adhere to that. Eric put in the water purification tablets so that the water would be ready when needed. Then he rested. We also made Geoff rest because, though he protested, he was not fit. Eric went to sleep and Bob, Paddy and I paddled.
We steered NW by the Pole Star, making about 2 mph. We decided that the wind was more or less with us. Keeping up like that, we continued until9am, when we decided to halt for breakfast. We sang a little, but not until day came. We knew we were not far from the enemy coast, so we wanted to put as much distance between us and the coast as possible by daylight. The stars paled and gradually the sun came up. It was a lovely day and we reckoned that, since the wireless operator had sent over to our base our position when we landed, that we had a fair chance of being picked up. If we weren’t, we reckoned on making England in 60 hours.
We investigated the rations – hard biscuits, thirst-making and unpalatable food cubes. We munched a biscuit, but divided the rations on the assumption that we would be 60 hours in the dinghy, by which time we counted on being home. We had a cigarette – I had none, but the others did – though they were wet, how good they tasted. Then we started again, 15mins on; 15mins off. We concluded that we could not be rescued before noon, because it would take that long for base to get organized. We counted on Jock Watt [Col’s regular skipper] coming. To digress, actually he did – and that against orders. He was told he couldn’t so he said he was going air testing – and ordered his crew to wear Mae Wests [life jackets]!
In February 2008 the son of Stan Galloway, one of Col’s former crew-mates, sent me an excerpt from his father’s scrapbook. It recounts what happened that day in the words of Al Shoreman, one of Jock Watt’s other regular crew members, as they flew out in search of Eric Whitney’s missing crew. I had tracked down Shoreman and Galloway with the help of the 149 Squadron Association. In response to the letters I sent to the addresses the association provided, I received an email from the son, Gordon Galloway, in November 2007, explaining that his father had died just that week. Al Shoreman’s daughter, Jan Burke, however, phoned from England to say her father was still alive, though in 24-hour care and unable to recall events with any predictability. Col flew 13 operations with Shoreman, including the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne in May 1942, also with Jock Watt as skipper.
Recalling this aerial search many years later, Shoreman got Colwyn Jones’s name wrong, remembering him as ‘Colin Davies’. Shoreman’s logbook records a ‘navigational flying test’ in Stirling ‘V’ Victor, piloted by Watt, taking off from Lakenheath just after midday on 6 June – while Col’s dinghy was still adrift in the Channel. Shoreman’s account, written years later and pasted into Stan Galloway’s scrapbook, brought his part in this episode to life. Jumping on board their Stirling, Watt’s crew – supplemented by the crew’s mascot, a dog named ‘Section Officer Archibald’, that was invariably the first to welcome the crew on its return from operations – defied orders and headed out to sea:
On the night that Eric Whitney ditched, our aircraft
skippered by S/Ldr Jock Watt was the last home. Colin Davies, a New Zealand bomb aimer [and] the replacement on our crew, was flying in that aircraft. We were so fond of Colin that in no time we were so eager to go out again on a search and rescue mission. Geoffrey Cheek had radioed the position some 10 miles from the Dutch coast, so without waiting for permission and with two volunteers from dispersal [ground crew] the aircraft was refuelled. Up front and standing next to Jock Watt was Section Officer Archibald and as Jock was a law unto himself, authorisation didn’t exist as far as he was concerned, no record exists about this detail, and as log books were not sacrosanct in those days I have no record of when this operation was carried out. What I recall most vividly is commencing our search by overflying the Dutch coast then carrying out at zero feet our blanket search. Although we did not sight the dinghy a Sea Otter did. Eric Whitney and Colin Davies [Colwyn Jones] were awarded DFCs [Distinguished Flying Crosses] and Geoffrey Cheek the DFM.
But by the time Watt, Shoreman and their crew returned to base around 1p.m. on 6 June, the five men in the inflatable dinghy had been given the first reliable hope that they might be rescued, as Col’s written account explains:
At 10.30 we stopped and took off our wet clothes, hanging them on the side to dry. Fortunately the day was hot and sunny, so we were not cold. Had another smoke and on again. We also heard heavy gunfire from the French coast. It afterwards transpired that there was a heavy sweep over France that morning, which personally I think accounted for no Jerry planes coming out. There was a good deal of haze about, so visibility was not too good. Then we all heard a sound. Yes! It was the sound of an aeroplane and coming from the English side. Gosh we were frightened to breathe. No luck. It did not see us and we never saw it either. Well, we just set to and kept paddling on. We heard planes three times that morning. One of us would hear one first, and I can still see the look of concentration on the faces of the others as we listened – and hoped. But they never saw us. By 12.30 we thought that they had searched for us and must have reported failure. It was not a very pleasant thought but we did not give up hope. We reckoned we could make it.
Anyway, when noon came and went we began to paddle with new earnestness, hoping to put as much distance between us and the enemy coast. I forgot to say that several times during the morning we tried to set off the distress signals, but they would not work. We forgot the Very pistol and cartridges. About this time, we hung the green stain stuff over the side so as to show where we were drifting if any plane happened to see the trail in the water. We had also had the sail up for some hours by this time. Then, at 1 pm, we heard another plane. The noise of the engines became louder – and louder. He saw us, and we him. We all waved like madmen. For a moment we wondered, feeling so damn small. Then he altered course. We knew we had been seen. Eric, who had been so capable up to that time, so confident, so calm, buried his head in his arms on the side of the dinghy and cried like a child – aftermath of strain.
The Beaufighter flew over us; the pilot waved. He made a wide turn, put down his wheels and flaps to lessen speed and ‘bombed’ us with a haversack of provisions. The bag broke open and out popped a small package within stretching distance of the dinghy. The package was a tin of 50 Gold Flake [cigarettes]. We knew we were saved and that our actual rescue was only a matter of time. We all had a good deep drink of water.
On the BBC almost two weeks later Whitney elaborated: ‘At one o’clock a Beaufighter spotted us and dropped supplies. The supplies came down so close that we were all splashed. The front gunner said “Very good bombing!” and it was, for all we had to do was to lean out and pick up the package. Then we just relaxed, because we knew we would be picked up.’
Col again:
The ‘Beau’ circled us for a while presumably to send our position back and then off he flew. I have never felt so happy in my life. We just sang and laughed at nothing at all, and talked the most ridiculous nonsense. We waited on and on, because we knew that he would send back our position to his base and that our rescue was assured. The only thing was that we thought that Jerry fighters might find us and use us as live bait target practice. Still, that did not happen.
After that we all relaxed and had a good sleep. Time went by, hour after hour, until I began to wonder what had happened. Then we heard engines. Out of the sun darted six Spitfires. They dived on us and waved to us and circled and kept circling until the rescue launch loomed out of the distance and we knew we were safe. Picked up at 4 pm; 13 hours in the dinghy.
Whitney:
At four o’clock we heard planes again and saw six Spitfires. Four of them circled around us and the other two went back to guide the air sea rescue people to us. Then, at ten past four, we saw a small spot on the horizon. It came nearer and turned into a cloud of fast-moving spray. In a moment or two the air sea rescue craft came alongside us and stopped. We all climbed in. They treated us very well. They were the kindest chaps imaginable and we were very glad to see them.... All the way back the Spitfires circled around us. Then we saw white cliffs ahead and we knew we were nearly home. When we landed no-one could do enough for us; they treated us like lords.
Col:
Again hard to describe our relief and thankfulness. They gave us tea laced with rum. I went to bed. Landed Ramsgate; tea at the naval mess – boiled egg. Taken to Manston [airfield, Kent]; slept in the sick bay; wonderful treatment; corker food – eggs and bacon. Flight Wing-Co Charlton-Jones flew down the next day and took us home. Party in the mess; week’s leave. Boy o Boy!
No-one would believe us when we said we saw butterflies in the dinghy. Fact, though!
Whitney’s logbook is held by the RAF Museum in Hendon, northwest London. The pages relating to that escapade are sparse on detail: ‘Crew F/Sgt Jones. Operations Essen – 24x90x4 incendiaries. Hit by Wellington. Rear turret &gunner missing. Hit by flak inside aircraft. Attacked three times by night fighter. Landed in sea. 13 hours in dinghy. Picked up by high speed launch.’ Attached to the logbook is a photograph of the five crew pulling the dinghy alongside the launch. Prints of this same photo and one of Col boarding the rescue craft were sent home to New Zealand in Col’s photo album after his death.
As far as I could determine, Col was the only other crew member of ‘T’ Tommy that night who did not survive the war. The same scrapbook page that carried Al Shoreman’s recollection of Watt’s ‘illicit’ search for Col also has a brief note, undated but clearly some years after the war, from Eric Whitney in Warwick. The small item in the scrapbook conveys Whitney’s best wishes to a gathering of the Goldfish Club of former airmen who had also survived a crash landing in water. It says: ‘I was pilot and captain of ‘T’ Tommy, a Stirling of 149 Squadron Lakenheath and “ditched” 03.15 5/6th June 1942. We were picked up by an HSL (high speed launch) from Ramsgate at 16.05hrs. 6/6/42. The crew was under the command of F/Sgt Roberts and they did us proud. Thank them for my life, and I wish you all, all that you wish yourselves. Yours sincerely, ERIC WHITNEY, Bilton College, Oxhill, Warwick.’
The aircraft that sheared off ‘T’ Tommy’s rear turret, killing 21-year-old Sergeant Keith ‘Moonbeam’ Roderick, was not a Vickers Wellington bomber, as the crew had initially thought, but a Messerschmitt ME110 night fighter. Its pilot, Oberleutnant Petersen, and radio operator parachuted to safety.[5] Roderick’s body was later washed ashore on the French coast and is buried at Langemarck, Belgium. On the night he died his crew must have reflected, as they too were carried by the tide, how close they had come to joining him. I imagine them looking back in awe at ‘T’ Tommy’s huge silhouette against the moon’s path, amid the slap of paddles in a calm sea so eerily silent after the frenzy of just minutes before. Col had flown in ‘T’ Tommy on three previous bombing operations, never dreaming he would have its ‘seaworthiness’ to thank for his survival. He had left one island more than 18 months before to fight for another, and his journey to that point had been as much on the ocean as over it.
CHAPTER 3
LANDFALL
By November 1939, just three months before the centenary celebrations, only two of the six waka had been completed. Col’s narrative of this back-breaking, inspiring project was among the unexpected discoveries I made in 2007 as I sifted through the suitcase full of documents and photographs that contained the remnants of Col’s life. In his manuscript, Col noted the importance of the seven main canoes of the initial Polynesian migration to New Zealand centuries before: ‘The craft have been personified until the canoes rather than their crews are counted as ancestors. So intimately are these canoes interwoven with the legend, tradition and proven history of the people that, to a nomadic people, they have come to mean something the same as the Royal Navy to Britishers.’[2] With the canoes unfinished, the manuscript remained unpublished as he sailed back in the direction from which the waka of the original Great Migration had come. But Te Puea and Col had formed a bond during the waka project, which she acknowledged by giving him a greenstone tiki (neck pendant), with the words ‘This must return to the tribe’. This treasure, posted to Col in 1941 at his final training base in Scotland, sat unclaimed for weeks because the mail clerk there failed to tell him it had arrived. Col was probably wearing it the night he died, as it was not among his belongings returned to New Zealand.