The Flying Kangaroo

by Jim Eames

  After a searching DC-3 located the crew in their dinghy, Fox and Ralfe set out from Port Moresby, forced to climb to 14,000 feet to clear the cloud-covered Owen Stanley Range. Fox landed the Catalina alongside the dinghy and flew the injured Hibbert and his companions back to Port Moresby Hospital.

  The next day they were off on another emergency mission, this time after a massive cyclone ripped through the Woodlark Islands to the south-east of the mainland. Unable to land there with their cargo of timber, Fox made contact with a government trading vessel off Woodlark and landed beside it, transhipping their cargo while bobbing around in the open sea.

  While such dramatic events usually passed unremarked, some did attract wider attention. Several years later Qantas captain Marsh Burgess won a medal for landing in a swell up to 5 metres high to rescue round-the-world yachtsman Danny Weil after his yacht ran onto a reef in the Gulf of Papua.

  Beyond their normal scheduled activities, the Catalina crews filled a variety of roles, from locating government patrols engaged on survey work to identifying newly discovered native villages in the more remote parts of the country. Occasionally they flew in the long arm of the law.

  Author Jim Sinclair, in his excellent Balus: The aeroplane in Papua New Guinea tells of the Catalinas carrying Supreme Court judges on their circuits, often carrying out such functions during a short stopover. Villagers would bring out double-hulled canoes, occasionally with tables and starched white napery, and His Honour would conduct the business of law in the shade of the aircraft wing.

  Airdrops were commonplace—delivering everything from flour and rice to fresh meat, tinned fruit and torch batteries. Flight engineer Keith Gordon was in Catalinas that dropped eggs, and the essential bottles of beer, into jungle clearings, assuming that, if the eggs broke, at least they could be scraped up and scrambled. Fowls also made their way by air drops to outstations via various techniques to ensure they didn’t open their wings at too high a speed. Fred Fox’s crew wrapped them in overlapping pages of newspaper that slowed the ‘package’ down and disintegrated low to the ground so the bird could use its wings for the last few metres or so to earth. Keith Gordon stuffed them head first in sick bags and by the time they had kicked their way out they were low enough to fly.

  Although the Qantas Catalinas had earned a remarkable wartime record for reliability, as the years went by they began to show their age, often testing the ingenuity of their flight and ground engineers.

  Holes punched in the worn Catalina hulls, either by debris or human error, were a common problem. Flight engineer Tom Mitchell always carried extra pencils in his tool kit. He’d screw a pencil down the hole in the aircraft’s hull and break it off. That would get them home, where a new rivet would be inserted. Keith Gordon had his own remedy. He always carried packets of Wrigleys chewing gum to fill any holes in the leaking hull. At times, such running repairs required the native cabin crew member to dive over the side of the Catalina to find the offending hole. Most villagers relished the task, to the relief of the flight engineers.

  Flight engineers filled a variety of roles and were often the unsung heroes of Catalina missions. Sitting at their station in the cabane, or structure that joined the fuselage to the wing above and behind the pilots, they not only monitored engine performance in flight but acted as mechanics as well.

  Gordon remembers one afternoon when an out-of-control native canoe punched a large hole in one of his Catalina’s floats while it was moored off Kikori in the Gulf of Papua, west of Port Moresby. While they had a group of local villagers stand on the opposite wing to keep the damaged float out of the water, Gordon patched the hole using a sheet of aluminium alloy fabric heavily coated with dope and they flew for another three days before they returned to Port Moresby for repairs.

  Pilots flying Catalinas also had their moments of discomfort as the cockpits leaked profusely during rain squalls, prompting one captain’s suggestion to his first officer: ‘I think the only way we’re going to stay dry is if we turn this damn thing upside down.’

  Ground servicing too had its shortcomings. Beaching a Catalina for overhaul at Lae meant up to forty villagers dragging the aircraft up out of the open sea and onto an airfield that was well above the waterline. Relaunching required manoeuvring the Cat down a steep incline onto the road to the launch site. On at least one occasion, an aircraft broke away and crashed through nearby scrub, fortunately suffering only superficial damage.

  By the late 1950s, the Catalinas were reaching their operational use-by date as delays mounted and maintenance became more difficult. Flight engineer Colin Lock records how Qantas Operations finally told the airline’s Board:

  These Catalinas bought second-hand have been in continuous service with the company since 1946 and are now obsolete. Being subject to rapid corrosion, they are very expensive to keep in repair. A conservative estimate of the cost of repairs in addition to normal maintenance to keep the aircraft going in 1958 is fifty thousand pounds per aircraft and they will be immobilised for at least two months each to do the necessary work.

  With spare parts often difficult to procure, the airline’s engineering department felt they could not be kept going much beyond the end of 1957. But they did make it through the first half of 1958 and, although by now based back in Australia, it fell to Keith Gordon to act as flight engineer on the last Qantas Catalina flight in PNG. Gordon’s experience gives some indication of the work ethic of those days.

  Arriving for duty at Sydney Operations one afternoon, Gordon was told there was a flight engineer shortage and he needed to fly to Port Moresby that night to crew a Catalina from Port Moresby to Lae the next day.

  After an all-night flight, he landed at Port Moresby early the following morning to be briefed that they needed to leave as soon as possible as the open sea at Lae was flat and ideal for a landing. They were soon airborne and flew the one-and-a-half-hour trip to Lae, arriving just in time for Gordon to get back on the same DC-4 he had come up from Australia on that morning, now about to depart Lae on its return to Sydney.

  ‘I think it was a 40-hour tour of duty. Not much out of the ordinary for me at that age.’

  Lae, on Huon Gulf, was to be the final resting place for the Catalinas. Each was stripped of engines, propellers, instruments and anything else of lasting value and the remainder sold for scrap, one of them bringing the sum total of £80.

  Even though their crews had been drenched by their leaking cockpits and at times accidentally pushed fingers through their ageing hulls, a small group of them watched sadly as the Catalinas were chopped up.

  Two years later Qantas too flew out of New Guinea skies as the airline’s routes and ground infrastructure were handed over to Trans-Australia Airlines, who, along with Ansett Mandated Airlines, would continue domestic operations until the eventual establishment of the country’s own national carrier Air Niugini in 1973.

  By then many of the Catalinas’ former captains, first officers and other New Guinea ‘old hands’ would be applying their hard-won experience to the airline’s international routes.

  5

  ‘SKIPPY SQUADRON’

  For the thousands lining Sydney’s George Street for the Anzac Day march in 2003, it was the first time they’d seen a group of men marching behind a bright red banner announcing, ‘Skippy Squadron’. Although there was no mention of the word ‘Qantas’, the flying kangaroo in the centre quickly identified who they were.

  Some among the marchers wore medals that showed they had served in World War II and other conflicts, including as diggers in the Vietnam War, but they were now marching for the first time under their own ‘company’ colours.

  ‘Skippy Squadron’, named after the well-known television marsupial of the 1960s, might have been part of a war still fresh in the memory of those watching the march that day, but the ‘squadron’ itself was in fact in the genes of an airline that had a long and impressive history of war service, often heroic, but just as often, largely unrecognised. Books by the
airline’s founder Hudson Fysh and others have chronicled Qantas’s participation in World War II but much of that involvement remains largely unknown to the general public.

  In fact the war would cost the airline nearly all of its flagship Empire flying boats, either through enemy action or wartime accidents. Qantas captain Bill Crowther’s Empire flying boat might have been the last civilian aircraft to leave Singapore as the Japanese approached the city early in the morning of 4 February 1942, but in the weeks preceding Singapore’s fall, Crowther and other crews of the large, vulnerable four-engine flying boats had been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Japanese as they kept the ever-fragile air route to Australia open.

  Not only was there the constant danger from Japanese fighters and reconnaissance aircraft patrolling the skies, but, warned of imminent Japanese air attacks on Singapore itself, they would be forced to divert to remote landing sites to wait for a radio message from Singapore telling them that the attack was over. One such frequently used site would become known as ‘Thomas’s funk hole’, named after one of the captains who had spotted a secluded river estuary on an island where the narrow waters and high jungle-covered sides provided temporary safe haven until Singapore gave the ‘all clear’.

  With Singapore’s fall and the subsequent retreat down through the Netherlands East Indies archipelago, it fell to the Empire flying boat crews to shuttle military personnel into the islands and bring civilians back to the safety of Australia. It was here that the mystery of what happened to flying boat Circe had its origins, at Tjilatjap, Java, on 28 February 1942 when, with four crew and sixteen passengers, it left for the relative safety of Broome. Two flying boats left Tjilatjap that morning and, as the crew of Corinthian climbed away, they saw Circe taxiing for take-off. Circe never arrived in Broome but what happened to the twenty aboard would remain unanswered for more than 70 years.

  While researching the history of the Qantas flying boats in 2014, Melbourne air traffic controller and historian Phil Vabre found interesting Japanese records. These revealed that a Japanese bomber commanded by Flight Petty Officer First Class Sadayoshi Yamamoto, operating out of Bali, had sighted a four-engine flying boat at a position that matched Vabre’s calculations of where Circe would have been on the morning of 28 February 1942. Yamamoto had shot Circe down. There is little doubt it would have been Circe as the only other flying boat in the area was Corinthian, which had probably escaped a similar fate by only a few minutes.

  Circe’s loss and the fate of another Empire boat shot down off Koepang, Timor a few months earlier, along with two more destroyed during an air attack on Broome in March, underline the dangers the unarmed boats faced in those early days of the war. And as the war quickly began to close Australia off from its north, other examples of loss and exceptional courage would be added to the Qantas wartime story, including the daring rescue of civilians from Mount Hagen in the New Guinea Highlands.

  It is impossible to tell the whole story of the Qantas Mount Hagen rescue without describing the part played by a Catholic priest, Father John Glover. Glover, born in Albury, New South Wales, was a flying missionary in New Guinea at the outbreak of the war in the Pacific and had already helped to evacuate people from Wau to Port Moresby in his two-seater Spartan aeroplane. When this became too dangerous, he flew the Spartan to Kainantu, up the Markham Valley inland from Lae, where he hid the aircraft in the jungle at the Seventh Day Adventist Mission.

  With the fall of Rabaul in early 1942, as civilians and military personnel fled the island of New Britain and the northern shores of New Guinea in advance of the Japanese, Glover set out on a nine-day trek overland from Kainantu to reach Sek Island off the northern New Guinea coast where he knew the Catholic Mission had a four-seater Moth he could add to his ‘fleet’.

  At Sek, Glover and his Hungarian-born engineer, Karl Nagy, constructed a raft out of empty fuel drums and floated the Moth 25 kilometres along the coast to Madang where, in between frequent Japanese air attacks, they worked to get it airworthy and then flew it back to Kainantu.

  There they hammered a spare fuel tank out of sheets of galvanised iron to achieve Glover’s grand plan: to give the Moth sufficient range to reach Thursday Island, which he would use as a base for the rescue of those now gathering at Mount Hagen.

  In between working on the modifications for the Moth, Glover used the Spartan in an attempt to fly several ill civilians to Mount Hagen, only to find the Spartan wasn’t powerful enough to clear the mountains in between. Forced to turn back, he crashed while attempting to land. Although no one was hurt, the Spartan was now out of action. Turning to the Moth, Glover reached Mount Hagen on his second attempt. While those still at Kainantu started walking towards Hagen to join those already there, Glover and Nagy set off for Thursday Island and Cairns with the aim of alerting authorities to the predicament of those gathering at Mount Hagen.

  They managed to make it to Papua’s south coast until a combination of poor weather and lack of fuel forced them to land on a beach west of Daru. With the help of friendly villagers in a canoe, then a lugger to Thursday Island, Glover continued on, finally reaching Melbourne where he pleaded for help. Qantas was alerted and within days Orme Denny and his team were underway.

  Denny had an impeccable background for the job. Joining the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) after service in World War I, he had flown with Qantas in its pioneering days in Queensland before moving to New Guinea with Guinea Airways. He rejoined Qantas in 1938 and was still flying in New Guinea when the Japanese invaded.

  Denny decided to use Horn Island, at the very tip of Cape York, as their base of operations. Two DH-86 aircraft were fitted with the long-range fuel tanks they would need to climb through the gaps in the 12,000-foot range surrounding Mount Hagen. There would be no intermediate stops and they would need to be constantly alert for the Japanese aircraft that now controlled the skies over New Guinea.

  The first two aircraft, one of them with John Glover on board, made it through on 13 May 1942 to a rousing welcome from the by-now 80 people anxiously waiting at Mount Hagen to be flown to safety. Among them was a group of eighteen who had made their way roughly 1600 kilometres across New Britain, across the Bismarck Sea by launch to Madang, then trekked through the Ramu and Wahgi valleys and into the Hagen highlands.

  Denny calculated six or seven could be lifted by each aircraft per flight and began shuttle flights but incessant rain soon began to take its toll on the grassy Mount Hagen airstrip. The softening ground began to make take-offs and landings extremely hazardous. Using his New Guinea know-how, Denny quickly came up with the solution.

  Marshalling the hundreds of local villagers who were gathering each day at the airfield to watch the activities, he organised a customary New Guinea ‘sing sing’ and soon around 2000 natives were enthusiastically dancing and stamping their feet, forming the surface into a firm landing ground.

  The flights took three hours each way, at times requiring a climb to 16,000 feet to ensure they cleared the mountains.

  In all, the DH-86s made eighteen flights between Horn Island and Mount Hagen, evacuating 78 people. It was mostly seat-of-the-pants flying: at one stage Mount Hagen offered to supply weather reports but Denny’s New Guinea flying background told him they could not be relied on due to the tendency of the weather to change rapidly over the route. Neither, for obvious reasons, did he want Mount Hagen on the radio any more than necessary.

  After it was all over Denny received the following telegram from the Department of Civil Aviation: ‘Congratulations to you and all members of your party on successful conclusion [of] your important and dangerous task. That it should have been completed without hitch demonstrates sound organization and high courage and ability of all personnel concerned.’

  It was a sentiment that could just as easily be applied to most of the airline’s role in war-torn Papua New Guinea but an achievement on an even greater scale was soon to follow 5000 kilometres away on the Indian Ocean. Known as the Double Sunrise
service, Qantas Catalina flying boats operating in secret through enemy airspace would keep the vital air route between Perth and Colombo, and therefore Australia and the United Kingdom, open during the most difficult period of the war.

  Flying only senior military personnel and diplomats, the nonstop flights would create their own records, at times exceeding 30 hours in the air and, in doing so, passengers and crew would see the sun rise twice on the journey. Operating in radio silence, crews navigated by taking star shots at night, switching on their radio for the briefest of moments to hear a scheduled weather report from their destination. Although unarmed, the fate of their crews and passengers would have been the same as those of any RAAF aircraft that might have been intercepted by enemy aircraft. Despite their vital role in keeping the air link open and the determined efforts of their leader Hudson Fysh, Qantas staff would receive no official recognition from the Australian government after the war.

  With the end of hostilities Qantas began to rebuild but it wasn’t long before it would find itself involved in other wars. The first was in Korea between 1950 and 1953. Qantas planes and crews carried troop reinforcements to Iwakuni air base in Japan and flew wounded Australian soldiers on the final stage of their journey home to Australia. First the wounded would be flown from South Korea to Japan in RAAF DC-3 transports. There they were transferred at Iwakuni to stretcher-equipped Qantas DC-4s, with army medical staff on board, for the remainder of their journey, with Darwin their first Australian landfall.

  Charles Spiteri, a cabin crew member in those days, admits one of the flights from Darwin to Sydney almost cost him his job. The final leg was a night flight out of Darwin timed to reach Sydney at around 7 a.m. Spiteri remembers one of the young soldiers on a stretcher, who had a series of plastic tubes and drips attached, asking him for a cold beer.