Fly

by Michael Veitch

  The camp, as it turned out, comprised 800 young women undergoing intelligence training. ‘I was the only male,’ says Peter. ‘Walking to the dining room was torture.’ It doesn’t exactly sound like hardship though, particularly when he explains that ‘young Irma’ knocked quietly on his door later one night with a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses in her hand.

  It was only very gradually that Peter began to appreciate the nature of the regime for which he was fighting. As we talk, surreal and nightmarish anecdotes drop into his narrative which, he fully admits, he did not comprehend at the time. At an aerodrome outside Riga, he approached the extraordinary sight of a group of young women working on the runway with shovels, dressed in what appeared to be their Sunday best: high heels, some even wearing furs. Peter stood by, innocently suggesting they would be better off in work clothes. ‘We are Jews,’ one woman said in a strong Berlin accent. Probably fleeing with what wealth they could carry on them, the women had made it to Latvia, only to be picked up there when the Germans invaded. An SS guard approached and warned Peter not to talk to them, ‘For their sake,’ he said, ‘and yours.’

  Later, waiting to enter the main gate of the old citadel in Torgau, he was approached by an old man who ‘sort of saluted’ and spoke politely. ‘Herr Hauptmann, do you see that little string of bullets on the side of the wall?’ Peter remarked that it looked like machine-gun fire. ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘That is where they stood. Women, children and old men, mainly Jews.’ Uncomfortable, Peter told the man not to talk such nonsense. Then the man pointed across to a freshly dug field. ‘That is where they buried them. It looks like a potato field doesn’t it? But the potatoes are already out this time of year.’ And with that he was gone. ‘I thought about it,’ says Peter, ‘but it took me a long time to believe that he was right.’

  One day in March 1944, Peter found himself on a train heading south with a group of other officers, all of whom, like him, were already wearing the Knight’s Cross around their necks. At the station, they were picked up by two big black Mercedes and driven through ‘the most beautiful countryside in Germany’ to Berchtesgarten, then to the Berghof – the private residence of Adolf Hitler. ‘We could see SS guards all over the place,’ he tells me. ‘We were guided to a big hall where we were asked to salute Hitler, who was standing there with an army general.’

  Here, I have to draw breath. It’s not every day that you meet someone who has come face to face with the most infamous person in history, and I must have looked a little tongue-tied. ‘Did you … speak to him?’ I ask. ‘Oh yes,’ says Peter, quite casually. Standing in line, the officers one by one received their clasp of oak leaves and swords to their Knight’s Cross as well as the announcement of their new rank, straight from the mouth of der Führer. Peter at just twenty-three, was now ‘Major der Luftwaffe’.

  ‘He made a little speech about bravery and all that stuff,’ Peter tells me dismissively. There is another pause in our conversation. I remember reading accounts of people who had met Hitler and the extraordinary aura he was said to exude. ‘What was he, er, like?’ I venture, feeling a little foolish. ‘Nothing,’ he answers. ‘Just nothing. A little man. He shook my hand and made a speech. I thought he looked pale and he was twitching. That’s all. None of this … you know, power.’ So, I suggest, was he even a little … dull? ‘Dull! Yes, very dull,’ he says emphatically, like he’d been searching for the word. Then he pauses for a bit. ‘But Eva Braun was lovely!’

  Now I feel dizzy. Eva Braun? It seems the Führer made an excuse at the end of the brief ceremony and left to resume his work of devastating Europe and slaughtering its inhabitants. ‘Eva Braun will look after you,’ was the perfunctory announcement.

  ‘She really spoke our language,’ says Peter, and he, evidently, was not shy about speaking hers. What apparently followed had me gobsmacked, and were I able to think of a reason Peter had to invent it, I think I would have remained highly sceptical.

  There is some very famous colour footage of Hitler up at the Berghof (in fact being afraid of heights he disliked the place and seldom went there) on a large outdoor terrace overlooking the Alps towards his native Austria. Eva Braun can be seen, posing to the camera like any vacuous twenty-something. Guests and other uniformed Nazis mingle around self-consciously admiring the view. The whole place was bombed to bits on Anzac Day 1945 (many Australian airmen took part) and the remains were finally demolished in 1952. But one Spring afternoon eight years earlier, Peter Mehrtens sat there, helping himself to the buffet and flirting with Adolf Hitler’s mistress.

  As he tells it, she was sick of the war and wanted it to end. ‘This bloody war! I’ve talked to Hitler and told him he should just finish it up,’ she apparently said. Just like that. ‘Yes, I liked her,’ Peter tells me. They seemed to have hit it off. ‘I had a long chat with her.’ What on earth about, I ask him, and he smiles a little sheepishly. ‘Well, I said to her, “How on earth can you get into bed with a guy like Hitler?” ’

  ‘You said what?’ I almost shout out loud. He repeats the claim. ‘Peter,’ I ask him, ‘what on earth made you say that?’

  ‘It just came to me, you know. I was feeling a little bold, I suppose.’ And her reply? ‘She just laughed and said something like, “Ah well, you know, he’s just a guy like anybody else.” ’ The really frightening thing is that were it not for the fact these two kids were discussing the greatest mass-murderer in history, they could have passed for any pair of gossiping teenagers. At the end of the day, he thanked Eva for being ‘such a lovely girl’, and went back to the war. It’s at this point I need a break and go and look for a cup of tea. First, I use his small bathroom to splash my face with water.

  The cushy courier job didn’t last, and Peter was sent back into action. He was shot down and wounded for a fifth time when attacking American positions at Arnhem, this time in a Junkers 88. Again, it was his right engine which caught fire and he put the plane down in a paddock between German and American positions. Having to clamber out over the burning engine to avoid the American fire, he swam across a canal to reach the safety of his own lines, collecting another bullet – in the backside – in the process.

  Then in late 1944, Peter, now in command of a group, was ordered to report to a hotel room in Hamburg for an important meeting with some high-ranking officers, including a general. There they sat making small talk and smoking in big leather armchairs, when the bombshell was dropped. With Peter’s experience, he was told, it was decided that he would be perfect to lead an attack on shipping in Glasgow harbour – a mission they wanted carried out the very next day. Appalled, Peter jumped out of his seat. ‘I told them that such an attack was barely possible back in ’41, but to attempt it now was suicide.’ To placate him, they promised him two squadrons of escorting fighters. Not that he really had a choice. He was told to pick twelve of his best crews for the job.

  The next afternoon, with a heavy heart, Peter sat on the runway, about to lead his formation to Scotland. Perhaps, he thought, if the fighters protect us and if we can get in and out quickly via the quiet west coast, it may just work. He took off, but at the appointed rendezvous, the promised Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitt 110s failed to appear. ‘I got on the radio and asked where all our fighters were. “Please let me know where we stand!” But I soon realised that what they had told me was all lies.’

  It started well. The run in to Glasgow went smoothly, ‘like in peacetime’, without a shot being fired. Peter’s formation, in two close groups of six, made a sharp dive from 6500 metres to just under a thousand and bombed. He thinks he hit some of the ships but isn’t quite sure. Gaining altitude to rejoin the rest of the formation, then heading out to sea, Peter was attacked by American P-47 Thunderbolts. One sharp loop got him out of the firing line, but then, quite surreally, he saw openings – ‘like razor slashes’ – appear in his flying suit, just above the knee.

  Two Thunderbolts appeared either side of him and his starboard engine burst into flames. Then h
e felt the pain. ‘It was unbelievable. I think I was screaming,’ he says. He has no idea how he managed to put the Junkers down, but remembers coming in over a field of sheep ‘way too fast’. Then, the tail caught some powerlines, and was ripped clean away, but this washed off enough speed to get them down in one piece. ‘Lotar and Heinz, my co-pilot and radioman, grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me out onto the wing. I was half dead.’ A minute or so later, from bushes twenty metres away, the men heard the aircraft catch fire and explode. Peter had three bullets in his leg and his broken bones were clearly visible. He clutched his trousers to stop the bleeding and asked if anyone had anything to stem the pain. They didn’t.

  The first person on the scene was a lone Scottish policeman. In their flying suits, their nationalities were not obvious, and as Lotar had studied at Oxford, he spoke perfect English. The bobby assumed them to be RAF. It was only when Peter undid his jacket and revealed his Knight’s Cross that the policeman went pale. ‘Are you … Germans?’ he asked nervously. Calmly, Lotar took out his pistol, offered it by the barrel and said in his perfect Oxbridge accent, ‘Yes, and if you want to shoot us, please feel free to use this.’ The policeman declined, disappeared, and returned soon after with a doctor.

  Peter was still in hospital at war’s end, but was repatriated back to his shattered country soon afterwards. ‘There was nothing to eat, nothing to wear, nothing at all.’ Then, on his first weekend home back with his parents in Bremen, he was arrested and charged as a war criminal. Apparently his time flying around the ‘big shot’ Nazis in his little Messerschmitt 108 connected him a little too closely with some of the top criminals of the regime. It took Peter years to shake the charge, but finally they believed his claims of being simply a driver, and in 1952, he turned his back on Europe forever to come to Australia.

  He indicates his wounds – eye, right leg, left leg, back, hand – and, chuckling, rolls up his trouser leg to show me the ghastly scar on his thigh, courtesy of the US Air Force. He also rummages around on a shelf and hands me a rectangular black box. Inside is his Ritterkreuz – the real thing, complete with swastika in the centre. It occurs to me also for the first time that I have actually shaken a hand that has been shaken by Adolf Hitler. It’s all a little disorienting.

  ‘Come back anytime. Anytime,’ says Peter, who seems to have recovered a little of his colour, and I believe he means it.

  It would take more than just a couple of meetings to answer some of the burning questions I still wanted to ask Peter, the only member of the Luftwaffe I had ever met. He makes no bones about admiring Hitler – at least to begin with. ‘We all hated him, but only after he was gone. In the beginning, we loved him,’ he says candidly.

  I believe Peter when he tells me he was never a Nazi, and the old photographs of him show no tell-tale party badges. At times, his poor health and the subtleties of language were obstacles to my gaining a deeper understanding of how he felt, but on reflection I was probably kidding myself that I could achieve that anyway.

  That Peter survived the war at all is truly astonishing. He flew hundreds of missions and was shot down an amazing six times. There was no concept of a ‘tour’ in the Luftwaffe. Pilots simply flew until killed or captured, and Peter beat the odds dozens of times. His life since, though, has been marred by the pain of wounds which would have broken the spirit of a lesser man years ago.

  Ironically, having nearly died several times for the Nazi regime, he discovered after the war that he was in fact part Jewish, on his mother’s side – a fact she had successfully concealed for many years.

  He told some amusing stories too: playing ping-pong with Adolf Galland, and a wartime affair he once had with Hanna Reisch, the famous, diminutive female aviator who became one of the Luftwaffe’s top test pilots. ‘Yes,’ says Peter smiling broadly. ‘She already had another fellow, but she was my girlfriend for three days. She was a tiger!’

  But the story he keeps coming back to is one of a little orphaned French girl who was found by the side of the road during the chaos of the invasion in 1940. Beside her was her dead mother, most likely strafed by pilots from Peter’s own air force. She was spotted by a small group of officers. ‘I think you should come with us,’ they said. ‘No, I will stay with my mother,’ the little girl replied. ‘No, it’s time to come with us,’ they said. And so she did.

  ‘Monica’, as she was known, became something like the squadron mascot for a time, living on the base at Vitry until being taken in by a local French family. ‘She became our interpreter and ran my office, telling everyone how to salute,’ says Peter. He kept in touch with her for a while, but lost contact eventually. For the girl’s sake, it was safer that way.

  In the end, Peter’s story was a strangely familiar one, that of a young man who wanted to fly, caught up in extraordinary times. Sadly, it was the similarities rather than the differences with the people he was fighting that stood out for me the most.

  NEVIN FILBY

  Pilot, RAAF

  I have never been one, sadly, for getting things finished. I blame my parents, because it’s easy, and besides, they’re not around anymore. Take music, for example. My mother came from a family that loved music, and she dreamed one day of having one of those families whose visitors would enquire about the sweet sound of, say, a cello wafting from behind closed doors in a distant part of the house. ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so,’ she would dearly love to have answered. ‘He/she has an audition next week for the Melbourne Symphony. I think his/her Bourrée is coming along rather nicely, don’t you?’ The reality was very different. My oldest brother dabbled with the guitar for a week or two, the other, to my father’s fury, screeched endless selections from The Beatles’ Double White album in the shower, and my sister seems to have been born tone deaf.

  My mother’s greatest disappointment, however, was reserved for me. Far from being a write-off from the start, I at least had good pitch, an early interest in classical music and a passable singing voice which, for a few years, served to shave a fraction off the school fees when I grudgingly agreed to be corralled into the school choir. What she really dreamed of, however, was a child who played the piano. Not to concert standard, mind, but at least passably. At considerable expense, she found the best teacher she could afford, bought a very nice German upright and, as an incentive to practise, placed it squarely next to the main door of my bedroom. It was all, of course, a complete waste of time and money, in a family where money, or the lack of it, was a constant, brooding presence.

  For years I thumped away on the damned thing, managed to learn the odd chord here or there, sometimes even a whole tune. But I was hopeless, and I knew it. (Years later, I learned my old piano teacher committed suicide. I still wonder whether I was a contributing factor.)

  I also tried the trumpet. After a year or two of bruising both my embouchure and the neighbours’ ears, I packed that in too. In more recent years, I bought myself – of all things – a banjo, which, after many fruitless lessons, was commandeered by my son William who, in about three minutes, was strumming the opening chords to ‘Old Joe Clark’.

  There were also my attempts to write a children’s book, a novel, a couple of film scripts and a play. All destined to die withering deaths in the bottom drawer of shame.

  So imagine how pleased I was when a courier delivered to my house a box filled with advance copies of my first book about the men who flew the aircraft of World War II. My initial feeling was one of relief, but it was a bittersweet victory. Even as my hands crunched down through the plastic foam packaging to extract the first sweet-smelling volumes, I thought of the pile of cassettes on my desk, full of rich and interesting stories which time and space had excluded, and the notebooks dotted with tantalising contacts from the sisters, wives, sons and neighbours of gunners, bomb aimers and navigators who I hadn’t even spoken to. Take Nevin’s case, for example.

  His was a name written cryptically on a piece of notepaper in strange handwriting and pinned to a manila folder: ‘
Nevin Filby. Pilot – Spitfires, Lancasters’. For weeks it tantalised me. Who on earth had written it? Where had it come from? And most intriguing of all, who on earth had managed to pilot both single-engined Spitfires and big Lancaster bombers? I couldn’t even think of a scenario whereby this could be possible but I was dying for the opportunity to find out.

  So, when the go-ahead came to proceed with the next project, Nevin’s was the first number I rang.

  What, I wanted to know, were the particular circumstances that led him to fly both fighters and bombers, and which had he spent more time on, Spitfires or Lancasters? The answer was simple: he hadn’t flown either. The note was one of those well-intentioned errors in communication via a well-meaning relative who had apparently buttonholed me at a function and shoved the note into my hand. I couldn’t remember a thing.

  But what did that matter? Because when Nevin told me what he had flown, and with whom, my heart soared. Nevin Filby, it transpired, had spent his war at the controls of a mighty North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, flying with the firemen, the quick-fix, dial-an-air-raid boys of the Second Tactical Air Force. He’d also had a go at much smaller aircraft. I couldn’t wait to meet him.

  ‘Now, what is it you want, exactly?’ Nevin asks pointedly as we sit down at his ‘office’, a large oak table in the living room piled with papers and books. After goodness knows how many interviews, I still find this a tough one. ‘Well …’ I stammer, ‘I would like to hear some of the … be very interested to learn … the experiences … of your, er, flying career.’

  It was enough for him. ‘Righto. That’s easy,’ he says in a firm, slightly gravelly voice, as his wife Mary places in front of me a cup of tea to accompany a tempting array of homemade goodies.

  I take a closer look at some of what constitutes Nevin’s office. Many of his books have pages marked with little coloured pieces of paper. I also notice a great deal of handwriting crammed into exercise books, on small notepads and in the margins of books and photocopied pages. Among it all I notice my own modest tome.