Nevin hails from Grenfell in New South Wales, birthplace of Henry Lawson, and former haunt of Australia’s second-most famous bushranger, the oddly revered Ben Hall. His is genuine pioneer stock, and when war came in 1939, it was only natural he would get involved.
Unlike most of the country at the time, Nevin had been carefully following the advance of the Japanese through China and Manchuria in the years before the war.
‘I don’t think I joined up for any great reasons of patriotism,’ he tells me plainly. ‘I could shoot, I’m strong, I can knock over a few Japs – I thought I might as well get in to do my part.’
By 1942, however, the closest he’d got to the Japanese, or any other enemy for that matter, was sitting under a 3.7-inch anti-aircraft gun behind Sydney’s Balmoral Beach. I can personally think of much worse places to spend a war, but Neville was far from happy.
‘My next-door neighbour was a lecturer at [RAAF Initial Training School] Bradfield Park. I told him that what I was doing was pretty bloody useless, and perhaps there was something more I could do in the air force.’
Nevin must have impressed the man. Straightaway he suggested he apply to be a pilot. But for Nevin, the mere word struck within him a deep chord of fear.
As a sixteen-year-old, he had watched one day as a barnstorming Gypsy Moth biplane arrived to put on a show. With his sister, he was looking forward to presenting his shilling and going up for a spin the very next day. That afternoon, however, over the town, the upper wing of the little aeroplane failed, and it ploughed into the main street, killing both passenger and pilot. ‘We all rode up on our bikes to see the crash,’ says Nevin. ‘I saw a man kick a dog who had grabbed a bit of meat – I thought it was an old cow. He replied, “That’s not a cow, son, that’s the pilot.” I vomited in the street. It’s a wonder I ever flew at all.’ So, unlike most boys of his day, Nevin grew up devoid of the usual fantasies about flying aeroplanes.
I wonder if, a few years later, he was struck by a certain irony as he strapped himself into the cockpit of a Lockheed Ventura in faraway Canada, about to graduate as a bomber pilot. Here again, at his chilly New Brunswick Operational Training Unit, he witnessed another omen that would have scuttled the ambitions of a lesser man, when he saw a twin-engine Ventura touch down at the end of the runway then cartwheel into the ground as an engine failed. Helplessly, everyone dashed to the scene, pathetically clutching fire extinguishers. ‘I saw the blokes still strapped into their seats through the perspex, and the fire licking around them. I saw them shrink from about six feet to three feet. Horrible, horrible.’ Again, he had leaned over the fence and vomited. ‘It should have put me off flying,’ he says, ‘but it didn’t.’
After arriving in England on the Queen Mary with thousands of American servicemen on their way to D-Day and the Normandy campaign, Nevin found his way to Brighton’s appropriately titled Grand Hotel, or to give it its wartime name, No. 11 (RAAF) Personnel Dispatch and Reception Centre. It’s nicely ironic that this symbol of Victorian-era opulence, for decades the haunt of English society’s most well heeled and powerful, was, during her darkest hour, the home to thousands of grubby colonial airmen from the farms and cities and suburbs of one of the Empire’s most far-flung possessions.
Nevin could rightly have expected, along with thousand like him, to be channelled into the heavy Lancasters or Halifaxes of Bomber Command. Instead, he joined No. 2 Group, which had recently become the bomber contingent of the Second Tactical Air Force. 2TAF had been formed out of the experience of North Africa, where it was seen that a quick-response, army cooperation air strike force was an extremely useful thing to have when fighting Germans.
Heading up 2TAF’s bombers was the very colourful Air Vice-Marshall Basil Embry, a man whose life reads like the pages of a Boy’s Own. Embry joined the RAF at nineteen, flew in Iraq, Turkey and India, rose meteorically through the staff officer ranks, then pleaded to be put onto operations when war came in 1939. It could have all ended for him over Dunkirk when he baled out behind the German lines from a burning Blenheim bomber and was taken prisoner. While being marched into captivity, he spotted a sign, ‘Embry … 3 km’, and took it as an omen. He rolled down a bank, escaped, was recaptured, escaped again, spent several weeks on the run having all sorts of adventures, and eventually found his way back to England, where he was given a few weeks ‘sick leave’ before plunging himself once more into the action.
Embry won just about every medal going, including the DSO an amazing four times, but could never quite keep his mouth shut, and this tended to hamper his career. He was passed over for command of the Path Finder Force, and was handed 2TAF instead. Still, he insisted on ducking away from the office from time to time to fly with his men under the highly imaginative pseudonym ‘Wing Commander Smith’.
After the war, he got jack of it all, headed to, of all places, Western Australia and became a sheep farmer in a middle-of-nowhere place called Boyup Brook. Embry, like very few military commanders, imbued his organisation with his own maverick personality. It seems he never met a junior officer from New South Wales named Filby, but I’ve no doubt they would have hit it off famously. As I spoke to Nevin, more than a few similarities emerged.
Twelve squadrons of Mosquitos, Bostons and Mitchells comprised 2TAF’s bomber force, and prior to D-Day in mid-1944, Nevin joined one of them, 98, based at Dunsfold in Surrey. Called in at quick notice by the army fighting in Normandy, Nevin would fly not at the high altitudes of the heavies, but low, and often in broad daylight. ‘We could bomb accurately but we made ourselves a bloody easy target!’ he says.
I ask him if he remembers his first operation, ‘Yeah,’ he tells me. ‘I was scared stiff.’ At this point, something rather odd happens in my conversation with Nevin. Picking up some of the papers from a neat pile beside him he announces, ‘When I read your book, I found it rather bland,’ and, by way of contrast, proceeds to read from his own account of his flying. And it is certainly anything but ‘bland’.
‘On my third operation to the Hague, the flak was intense and very accurate,’ he recounts, reading slowly and with complete objectivity, like a man reading a statement in court. ‘The main starboard wing spar was virtually cut from a shell going through it without exploding. Other shell fragments had cut the rudder control wire. The wing was wobbling to the extent that I considered baling out …’ He continues like this for a while, the calmness in his voice belying the drama in his words. But, impressive or not, I’m not content to be read to from a prepared statement, and interrupt like a badgering child. ‘Tell me more about the damage to the aircraft!’ I demand.
He puts down his notes, picks up a blank sheet of paper and a pen and begins to draw. The long, thick steel and aluminium spar connected the wings through the fuselage. His sketch shows an enormous bite taken out, almost cutting it in half. As he flew home after the raid, he thought to himself, ‘How am I going to do this?’ Handling the aircraft as gingerly as possible, with no sudden turns that would put too much pressure on the wings, and with deft use of engines and flap, he made it back to Dunsfold. ‘People don’t believe me that you can control an aeroplane like that, but we got home,’ he says.
A week later, incredibly, it happened again. This time it was the other wing spar, again nearly severed by another miraculously non-exploding shell, which this time also took out the elevator control. Nevin’s going too fast and I have to sometimes gently wrestle him away from his manuscript. I’m glad I do. It was regarding one trip – to Bonnieres in France – that he elaborates on his one and only wound from operations, one that could so easily have killed him.
‘We’d just been given these American flak jackets and helmets, and I wouldn’t wear them,’ he says. ‘On this particular day, Keith, my navigator, went crook at me. “For God’s sake, Chief, put the bloody thing on!” And I did.’
So, looking like a soldier from a later war, rather than an airman from the Second, Nevin flew with an oversized helmet and flak jacket. It was only a pie
ce about the size of a thumb – but with the strength of a bullet, the hot steel fragment tore through the windscreen and into the big steel helmet that had only recently adorned his scone, hitting square above the temple. It hurt like hell, and he was stunned a bit, but that was all. ‘I’ve still got a little indentation on the left side of my temple,’ he says, and shows me to prove it. We agree that without his navigator’s commonsense, he would certainly have been killed. ‘That’s how lucky you can be. Thank God for Keith.’
But back to his recitation, and as for his literary critique of my work, I’m not out of the woods yet. ‘The feelings of aircrew who knowingly flew into dangerous barrages of flak with no option than to fly a straight and level course while their bomb aimer lined up the target’ were not, in his opinion, adequately dealt with in my initial literary effort, etc., etc.
Sufficiently humbled, I ask him if he would be so kind as to plug some of the gaps in my obviously inadequate narrative. He has already written his response, according to what he witnessed with his own eyes. ‘Red balls, black smoke and the pinging and clatter of bits of exploding shell hitting the aircraft fuselage. I couldn’t seem to shrink down small enough when I flew through it,’ he continues. I have to admit, it’s not bad. The point, though, that Nevin is at pains to convey is that he was scared, extremely so, and a good deal of the time. ‘Everyone was,’ he says. ‘You’d be mad not to be when you think of some of the things we had to do. We were all of us scared stiff – but hardly anyone talked about it.’
Indeed, approaching a heavily defended target must have been truly terrifying. Looking forward through the windscreen, the hundreds of puffs of bursting blackness – pricked for a deadly instant with a dark red heart – seem like a barrier that you have no choice but to crash through. You hold the column tight in your hands, fighting the instinct to turn aside. The only movements you make are the ones ordered by the voice of the bomb aimer in your ears – tiny incremental adjustments as he lines up the target in his sight. ‘Left, left … left a bit … steady …’ The calmness in his voice is infuriating. Rushes of adrenalin course hot and cold through your body making it tingle. You sweat and take quick, deep breaths, like you’re about to dive underwater, sucking in as much oxygen as possible to keep the senses alert, and suppress a rising wave of panic.
‘When we were low enough for the twenty- and forty-millimetre guns, the sight of the stream of projectiles was like a string of fireworks, terrifying but quite beautiful. And in between every one that you could see was another nine that you couldn’t,’ he says.
Occasionally, they’d have to go around a target again. Nevin tells me about 22 June 1944. The squadron was sent to attack the heavily defended steelworks at Colombelles near Caen, which had halted the progress of the 51st Highland Division, just 1000 yards away.
On the ground, the Scots of the Black Watch and Seaforth Highlanders had been told this was going to be the easy bit, but had instead become stuck in a bloody door-to-door struggle with a hardened enemy that had been fighting just such a war for three years in Russia. Now they faced a fortified factory, preventing access to Caen, the city which needed to be taken and around which the breakout was to pivot. It was close, bloody fighting. Any lack of accuracy in the placing of Nevin’s bombs, therefore, would have dire consequences.
Referring to his logbook, he tells me it was a small target on the edge of a large city. Some of the men in other aircraft had already been wounded by the flak, but to hit the target, and nothing but the target, they needed a closer look, so around they went again. ‘The German gun crews were very well prepared. The smoke from the bursts on our first run was still hanging in the sky when we came around for our second. It was one of those times we gritted our teeth a little bit harder and flew into the colourful, thick maelstrom,’ he reads, then looks up, abandoning his text. ‘You know, we never got the credit for that that we deserve.’ Later they discovered just what it was they were running into: seventy 88-millimetre and ten 120-millimetre anti-aircraft guns in an area the size of two house blocks. ‘We virtually had to put our landing lights on for that second run, it was so dark with the flak,’ he says.
Nevin’s first tour in Normandy was an eventful one. I can well imagine that the more unpredictable nature of the Tactical Air Force suited his individual temperament. ‘It was the closest thing you could get to being a fighter pilot, without actually flying one,’ he says. Early on, Nevin decided that being caught by a fighter from underneath was not a way he wanted to go, and so decided to fly low, sometimes under 1000 feet. The crew didn’t like it much to start off with. ‘For God’s sake, Skipper, get up a bit, we’re level with the tops of the bloody trees!’ said Joe Kerry, Nevin’s nervous top gunner one day. ‘It’s alright, Joe,’ he replied over the intercom, ‘we’re in a valley!’
As well as supporting the army, Nevin would do night-time flare drops, pinpointing targets for the fighter-bombers. On the way home from one such trip, having already been caught in searchlights and holed by flak, Joe called up again. ‘Hey, Skip, there’s a P-Plane coming up behind us.’ ‘P-Plane’ was one of the many names given to the infamous Fieseler Fi103, more commonly known in wartime parlance as ‘Buzz Bomb’, ‘Doodlebug’ or simply ‘V1’. The Nazis fired about 10 000 of these pilotless precursors to today’s guided missiles at southeast England, killing or injuring nearly 20 000 people and creating, for a few months in 1944, a second terrifying Blitz. The noise of them sounded like a car with a broken muffler, but more chilling was when it cut out – the point at which it fell to the ground detonating the near ton (1870 kilograms) of amatol in the nose.
‘Have a shot at the bastard,’ Nevin replied to his gunner as the small ramjet-powered craft came up alongside and began to overtake them at a mere seventy yards. Joe fired away with his two half-inch guns and tried to score some hits as it passed. ‘He should have bloody well hit it,’ says Nevin, chuckling, ‘but I’m glad he didn’t.’ Indeed. At that distance, had it exploded, it would certainly have taken Nevin and his crew with it.
Nevin seems to have used every one of his nine lives. Once, his was the only crew to locate a bridge the army wanted destroyed behind the German lines. They circled the night sky for a while, considering how to attack it, then dropped their thousand-pound bomb so low the explosion tore holes in their own wings and fuselage. ‘I thought it felt a bit sluggish on the way home,’ he says.
On another occasion, Nevin led a box of six Mitchells at night, flying wingtip to wingtip with no lights. He is still today aghast at the very notion of it. ‘Imagine it. Someone only had to sneeze and two aircraft would have gone in.’ At the debrief, his comment to the top brass was typically direct: ‘Well if you want to help the enemy, you’ll do this again.’ It went down ‘like a lead brick’, and was one of several instances of outspokenness that he says contributed to his remaining a relatively lowly Flight Lieutenant till war’s end.
Having been indirectly responsible for a great many holes in several of His Majesty’s aircraft, Nevin completed his first operational tour of thirty-five trips and was sent to the Group Support Unit at Swanton Morley to cool his heels while the air force decided what next to do with him. ‘I had nothing to do but sit around, winning at poker and losing at craps,’ he says.
He now faced a spell as an instructor, a job which suited him not one little bit. By chance he became friendly with a ‘bloody mad English Wing Commander’, who Nevin still doesn’t want named. ‘This bloke had been a jackaroo in Australia and seemed to have the run of the place,’ he says. ‘There were aircraft of all sorts up there, and he and I got on well.’ So well that, one day, the ‘mad’ Wing Commander made a rather ‘mad’ suggestion.
‘Ever flown a Mosquito?’ he asked. Nevin hadn’t, but was keen to have a go at this already legendary all-wooden machine. ‘Well, we’ll go and get one then.’ He signed a form, and the two men treated themselves to a flight through the Midlands in a very fast, very manoeuvrable de Havilland 98 Mosquito. Nevin could ins
tantly see what all the fuss was about. ‘It handled like a peregrine falcon,’ he says. The Wing Commander was also enjoying himself – so much so, that he didn’t want to come home. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘Let’s go over to France and do a raid. Unofficial. Find a train to shoot up. We’ll tell ’em we’re just going down to the south coast.’
‘And like a ruddy fool, I went along with it!’ Nevin says today, shaking his head at the madness of it. Like a couple of kids taking Mum’s car out for a spin, they headed off to German-occupied France to look for trouble. Where exactly they got to, Nevin was never sure because this was one trip that didn’t make it into his logbook.
At 3000 feet, they spotted a train pulling out of a station somewhere or other, and Nevin put the nose down. But this was no B-2 he was flying, and almost as soon as he’d lined up the locomotive and pressed the gun button, it came roaring up in his windshield and he was virtually on top of it. He had to pull up sharply to avoid hitting it, and the engine shot by just beneath him. ‘I wasn’t aware of how fast it was. Like a fighter. I bloody near wiped myself out!’
Then from nowhere, flak came up and one of his engines caught fire. Nevin thought the aircraft was lost. ‘This thing’s made of wood!’ he thought to himself. Thankfully, normally unreliable internal fire extinguishers worked, and the wing was saved.
The hydraulics, however, were shot – no flaps, and no brakes. ‘When we landed, the only way we could stop it was by my steering it into a field at the end of the runway and doing a ground loop,’ he says.
In a lather of sweat, Nevin emerged and surveyed his very expensive, very damaged aeroplane. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’ he asked the Wing Commander, who seemed curiously unruffled by the whole business. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said calmly. ‘I’ll get the erks to fix it up.’
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