It was into the middle of this huge, dried-up puddle that Col Jones and Barry Martin arrived in the autumn of 1941, when the threat of German invasion had abated but the progress of the war was still against Britain. Their airbases were action stations from which Col flew three dozen bombing operations over enemy territory. But they also launched him on many exploratory visits throughout England on a journey of kinship that coloured his experience of war – his sense of what he was fighting for – just as strongly as trading destruction with the enemy. Col ranged widely across Suffolk and Norfolk on a bike bought with a £10 birthday gift from his mother, until it was stolen from his base. He wrote many letters home about the discoveries he made in the old villages and castle and abbey ruins, and almost as many describing the pubs and their quaint regulars visited along the way. I was curious to discover what remained of these bases more than 60 years later, to see what remnants of Col’s time there I might find, and whether any sense of ‘Fortress Britain’ he described so evocatively still lingered.
Long before Hereward the Wake, since at least the Iron Age, others had lived and fought in this area. In 1997, excavations for the foundations of a dormitory at the United States Air Force base of Lakenheath unearthed the intact remains of a Saxon horseman and his charge. Underneath what had been the most recent occupants’ softball pitch, careful sifting by archaeologists also freed the remains of some 270 Anglo-Saxon burials, contributing to a rich haul from that vicinity of weapons and jewellery dating from between the fifth and seventh centuries AD. Other finds revealed evidence of human settlement from prehistoric times, the Iron Age Celts around 300 BC, Roman occupation through to early medieval settlements during the sixth to ninth centuries AD.[1]
Col’s and Barry’s first two bases in Suffolk, Mildenhall and nearby Lakenheath, were smack in the middle not only of an historical treasure trove but also a growing hive of Allied airfields. By 1945 these numbered some 670 in Britain, of which 120 were Bomber Command airfields, almost all in the east. This was a springboard of staggering proportions for striking back at an enemy massed just across the water, but Col hardly seemed impressed when he wrote to his mother in April 1942 about Lakenheath:
Though Mildenhall was in the centre of an area of rich, black earth, this dump is pure sand. I had never realised that such a place could exist in England. When the wind blows there is a regular sand storm. I think it would be a good idea if someone were to come out clad in Arab clothes and riding on a camel. We are not sure whether we have been transported to Libya or to the Sahara. The sand gets everywhere, in the food, in clothing, in our sleeping quarters and living quarters – and in our noses and ears. We are miles from anywhere; but as we have little time, that does not matter so much.
To make matters worse, his new billet was a box-like prefabricated hut – a Spartan contrast to the comforts he had enjoyed during his first few months with 149 Squadron, before it transferred from Mildenhall in February 1942. When Col wrote to his mother in January from his lodgings in a mock-Tudor manor a few miles from Mildenhall, he was soaking up some unexpected luxuries, and the prospect of starting operations seemed far from his mind:
The other night another New Zealander on the station, one Barry Martin of Christchurch, turned on a rare treat – fried oysters. He scrounged some flour from the mess, made a batter from it and some other ingredients best not mentioned or known, and fried the oysters in batter in some rancid butter. Despite the sound, they tasted grand. They reminded me somewhat painfully of the days at home when we used to go into a grill room and have lovely steak and fried oysters and stacks of bread and butter.
(Wednesday) Last night we had a marvellous supper. Barry Martin had been sent a lot of tinned stuff from home and among the tins was one of tomato sauce and another of lambs’ tongues. In our room we have managed to secure a radiator and an electric hot water jug, both of them against regulations, but very handy just the same. About 9 o’clock, after we had been yarning for some two hours, the cry went round for supper. Barry Martin is something of a cook. In fact, we told him he would make a good wife some day. He heated the tomato sauce, or some of it, and into the sauce he put the tongues. Then he thickened the mixture with some flour which he had scrounged, and let it heat. Then we shared it and ate it out of cups. I have not tasted anything so delicious for a long time. Then when that was finished, we put on the hot water jug and while that was heating we made toast. I had pinched some bread from the mess, so all was well. We opened one of my tins of butter, and then in the fullness of time had hot buttered toast and cups of tea. It was very good.
True to this spirit of high living, Mildenhall has a stately cachet to its name, in contrast to many other nearby airbases with such bogworthy names as Little Snoring, Sculthorpe or Strubby. Built in the early to mid-1930s, Mildenhall’s layout of well-proportioned brick buildings and spacious, tree-lined parade squares reflected the rising status of the RAF when military strategists regarded air power as a key element in the conflict many by then saw as inevitable. At a popular level, aviators were revered for making the world seem smaller through such adventures as the 18,000-kilometre Great Air Race to Melbourne, which started from Mildenhall in October 1934, and the record-breaking England to Australia flight by New Zealand woman aviator, Jean Batten, earlier that year. (Map 1)
Map 1: Suffolk and West Norfolk
When I visited in October 2007, I was astonished by the sheer scale of the US military presence there, which had largely replaced the British soon after the war. Today Mildenhall is home to US Air Force C-130 Hercules heavy lift transporters and KC-135R four-engined air tankers, but the core of original buildings from the 1930s and 1940s – the part that interested me most – remains much as it stood seven decades earlier, and with most still in use. One addition is noteworthy: the stained glass windows in the chapel, depicting the military history of the base. When I later attended the 149 Squadron reunion at Mildenhall, in May 2008, a highlight of the remembrance service was seeing the window dedicated to the Commonwealth airmen based there during the war. It features, below a moose, a green tiki and the Maori words ‘ake ake, kia kaha’ (for ever and ever, be strong). Here was a piece of our past, remembering not only individual ‘colonials’ like Col, who flew with RAF squadrons, but also 75 (NZ) Squadron, which operated from Mildenhall in 1940–1 and again for a few months in 1942. And in a jumble of photos pulled out for me in its archive I discovered a picture of RAF ground crew loading bombs aboard Col’s first Stirling, ‘N’ Nuts, in early 1942 – a precious find indeed.
During my first visit to Mildenhall, in 2007, I climbed its control tower to get a rough sense of what bomber crew saw as they came in to land. Despite the extent of the runways and tarmac areas, which cover an area bigger than Auckland or Christchurch airports, Mildenhall seemed just one patch in a pancake landscape. From my vantage point, the counties of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire merged into one under an awning of puffy, cumulus cloud, the horizon undisturbed by any feature to break its natural curvature. Although the flatness denied the bomber crews the navigational landmarks they so often needed, East Anglia provided the ideal landscape for such a concentration of British and American airbases.
At Lakenheath, some 10 minutes down the road by car, I toured a sprawling complex that extended well beyond workshops, hangars, administrative buildings and dormitories to encompass housing clusters, gymnasiums, schools, a hospital – all thoroughly American down to the greenbacks used in the small shopping centre and the catfish and fried chicken I was served in the cavernous canteen at lunch. Outside, a strike force of F-15 fighter-bombers was busy on exercises, thundering through the air.
When Col and Barry arrived there from the comforts of Mildenhall at Easter 1942, Lakenheath was far from complete – just one of scores of new airbases springing up to cater for the growing strength of Bomber Command. Lakenheath was initially intended purely as a decoy field to lure German bombers away from the fully operational bases of Mildenhall and nearby Feltwell. The German
s twigged to the ruse and dropped a wooden bomb there in response, but the joke backfired on the Luftwaffe when the RAF developed Lakenheath into one of the busiest airbases in the region. Towards the end of the war it even came under consideration as a site for London’s new airport, before Heathrow got the nod instead. Today Lakenheath is the biggest US military base in Britain, accommodating 12,000 personnel and families, plus 600 British personnel, and is unrecognisable as the sandblasted wartime airfield from which Col and Barry flew most of their first tours of 30 operations.
Apart from the excitement these operations brought, leave was their release from this desert, and Col and Barry got away when they could. Early on, when they routinely spent most of these leave periods together, it was unusual for British fellow crew to invite them home on leave. As these English comrades headed off to their homes, Col felt the distance from his own family in New Zealand even more keenly. An organisation founded by Lady Frances Ryder to open the homes of Britain to ‘colonial’ servicemen helped to fill this gap. Col’s time with a variety of generous hosts strengthened an instinctive bond he felt with England, but also cast into sharper relief the altered profile of a New Zealander one generation distant from the land of his parents. Col commented on some of these differences in a letter to his mother, after a visit with Barry to Bude, on the west coast of Cornwall, in January 1942. This was a bleak time for the British Empire, which was about to be sent reeling yet again, this time by the fall of Singapore to the Japanese:
We had no idea where we were going, and when we arrived we found that we were the guests of the headmaster of Clifton College, Bristol, one of the great public schools of England. The college was evacuated from Bristol when the bombings were at their height there. We had a wonderful time. It was an experience to live in the intimacy of an English public school, and to see the life from the inside of both masters and pupils. As independent New Zealanders, we maintained a most independent view about English social customs, education and their conduct of the war. We said that we thought that England did not understand the meaning of democracy. We added that the standard of education of the masses was deplorable, infinitely lower than in NZ – which is incontrovertibly true. It was a bit of a shock to us to hear the headmaster agreeing with us. In fact, he is something of a social reformer. The opinion we formed after being at the place a week was that what England needs is not to drag down the standard and tradition of the great public schools, but to lift other schools up to that level. We found the same sympathetic view as to the need for lifting the educational standard expressed by the housemasters, to whom we talked just as freely. One housemaster spoke about the crushing bonds of tradition. All the worst aspects of that had to be broken down, he said, before England could rise. He thought that the war would do much to help, in the long run. His wife thought the same.
One night the headmaster had the school’s surgeon down as a guest. He was one of Bristol’s famous surgeons, Professor Short. He piled into us over our views of the Pacific situation. We told him what we thought about the falsity and paucity of the information given to Australia and NZ as to the situation in the Far East. He did not agree with us over some aspects which we presented. We told him that while none could disagree with the broad lines of Britain’s policy, we based our criticism on the fact that our countries had not been informed of the weakness of defence in the Far East. Then we had a really good argument. We said we did not think that England was getting down to the job of a war with her full potentialities.
Col had written about defence issues for the Auckland Star but now his criticism of the British military collapse in South East Asia also reflected a deep concern that his family in New Zealand suddenly stood in the path of the Japanese advance, while he was half a world away fighting Germany. The distance that separated them was brought home to him by frequent disruptions to mail, as each letter in either direction now had to cross a world at war. Many letters went missing or took months to arrive. Col wrote in frustration on 7 January 1942, a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and several other targets, including Wake Island, which up until then had been a transit port for ships carrying mail to New Zealand:
I have not started this letter for some few days, as I have been trying to find out whether the state of affairs in the Pacific has made any difference to the air mail, but so far I have been unable to find out anything definite. I have written to New Zealand House to ask them, but have not yet received any reply. By the time this letter is finished, though, a reply should have come. I suppose you are a little worried just now at the initial success of the little yellow men. We do not seem to have done much, do we? – and the same is true of the Americans. But in a little time, we’ll have them. You’ll see. It seems to me they have been hoping to provoke the American Navy into some rash retaliatory action; but the Yanks have been wise enough to realise the lure, and to have refrained from any such action. The position in the Philippines must be worrying for the Americans; but just at the minute they are wise to be content to lose a little for the sake of winning in the end. The same is true in Malaya, though there I reckon that the British should be kicked firmly in the pants. Mr [Robert] Menzies [Australia’s Prime Minister] was told by people there that Malaya was not prepared. Yet when he approached the Imperial Government, he was put off. The plain fact is that we were not prepared; and in my opinion the fact that we had to send munitions to Libya is not the complete answer. There is a considerable body of criticism over here about the position in Malaya, while what Australia thinks is plain for the world to see.
Col and Barry Martin spent another leave together in May 1942, in the lap of rural privilege north-west of Birmingham. Col described this interlude to his mother just days before his plane ditched in the English Channel:
We went to a little place in Shropshire called Mucklestone. We stayed on a farm and had a wonderfully enjoyable, quiet time. One evening, we went rook shooting. We both performed creditably with a .22 rifle, but not so well as our hostess who was a crack shot. One unfortunate incident rather spoiled the evening. Our host was shot through the leg by a small bore rifle. It was not a bad wound, and he was not greatly inconvenienced, though he had to stay in bed for a while. However, we spent the rest of the evening with the person on whose farm the wood was. We had a wonderful supper – forgive me if I seem to dwell on food, but it was so different from our mess – consisting of cheese and biscuits with plenty of butter, a home-made cake and some coffee. We enjoyed it and ate so much that I felt slightly ashamed. He had a lovely old home, which looked out over a shallow valley filled with all the greens of which spring is capable. Evening was just falling, and with the first of the shadows and the last of the sun, no greater scene of peace could have been imagined. The swallows have come. Aren’t they graceful? They seem to zig-zag through the air like a dart shot from a bow. I saw one chase and catch a large blowfly. It followed the fly through each desperate turn the fly made. Finally, there was an extra sharp turn, and the swallow was on its way home.
This was Col’s second trip to Shropshire that month. The first time he had arrived in a Stirling bomber – for a wedding.
The wedding was that of the navigator of the crew, whose place I have recently taken. He has finished his operational trips and has celebrated that happy event by getting married. The captain of the crew, a squadron leader, was his best man and he flew the entire crew (who had been invited to the wedding) over from our station to the little village of Church Stretton, just some 13 miles south of Shrewsbury. It was a perfect day for flying to begin with, but the really delightful part was the drive from the aerodrome to the village, a distance of some 25 miles. It led through some lovely lands, through Shrewsbury itself, past winding, lazy rivers and down some peaceful valleys. Shrewsbury, as much as I could see from the car windows as we passed, was full of old buildings, timber and plaster, and in heavy, weather-beaten stone, while winding through the middle of the city, crossed by many bridges, is a river. The day was perfec
t, not a cloud in the sky, not the littlest of wind, and as warm as a summer’s day at home. As we came near to Church Stretton, we passed between two lines of hills into the loveliest valley I have seen in England. To begin with, the hills made it seem more like home, and then the scattered hamlets, with their tiny fields and trim hedges, with their carefully tilled fields, gave the place an atmosphere of peace. The war was far, far away.
Everywhere were trees, freshly green, with the sun glinting through them, making their leaves more yellow than green. We came to the church, passing from the yellow glare of the sun, to the quiet and peace and dimness of the ancient, Saxon church, where the only light came through the stained glass windows beyond the chancel. The church itself was a mass of spring flowers and spring green, which threw into great effect the old oak pews and the 700-year-old oaken rafters, put there by Saxon or Norman workmen, when the world was young. It was a quiet wedding, utterly peaceful, with the organ music passing gently out of the open door to the equally peaceful village street outside. We went out to wait for a car to take us up to the bride’s parents’ home. We stood there in the sunlight watching the gnarled old trees in the churchyard. They were nearly as old as the church, yet the spring had made them as young as the smallest child in the congregation.
Then, past ancient church and ancient trees, down the winding village street lazed a flock of sheep. They passed by the church gates; they passed the doorway of a shop selling sweets and tobacco. They stopped to nibble the odd blade of grass which grew between footpath and road. A little cloud of dust rose after them, subsided, and as their bleating grew fainter, the softness of the organ crept out again into the village peace. I thought that in this place, as at Lake Waikaremoana, was to be found ‘that peace that passeth understanding’. I thought of the serenity, the happiness, the calm of such a village; and then I knew that this was something about the English life that Hitler could never break; and I knew, too, that the happiness of the couple who had just been married was what we were fighting for. I have not realised more forcibly before how much the fight was worthwhile. You would have loved it all. The serenity, the quietness, the peace. The war was not in the same world as this village, which dreamed in the afternoon’s content.
Under a Bomber's Moon: The true story of two airmen at war over Germany Page 5