The British Pacific Fleet was, and remains still, the most powerful armada the Royal Navy has ever put to sea – a massive force of seventeen aircraft carriers, four battleships, ten cruisers, forty destroyers and dozens of smaller vessels, all determined to return the white ensign to the Far East, avenging the humiliations of Burma and Singapore three years earlier. For Arthur, it was quite a debut. As well as the Fireflys and Seafires, American-built Corsairs, Hellcats and Avengers made up a force of over a hundred aircraft. The flight plan took them on a 240-kilometre overland journey to the target, through a mountain pass and low over the jungle. Then a climb to their operational height of 8000 feet and a dive to attack at 2000.
‘The Corsairs had come in earlier to shoot up the fighters on the ground but we were the first ones in to attack the actual target,’ says Arthur, remembering the morning vividly. They’d been told to expect the fighters and anti-aircraft defences, but as Arthur’s pilot, Dave Hebditch, heard the attack signal ‘Lights Out!’ over the radio, an entirely unforeseen obstacle came rushing up to meet them. Barrage balloons, hanging in the air on long steel cables. ‘I’d been in London during the Blitz and I knew they could shear the wing off an aircraft like a knife,’ he says. The cables were also nearly invisible and Hebditch, from the West Country and, says Arthur, a fine pilot, had to thread his way through them at over 300 miles an hour.
‘Our target was the cracking point right in the centre where the oil is converted into petrol,’ says Arthur. ‘I remember all the pipes and tubes and cylinders and all sorts of things.’ Then the sky erupted around them as the Japanese put up a carpet barrage of flak. ‘That was hairy,’ he says. They came in and poured their four cannons into the maze of metal at the centre of the refinery and up it went, he says, ‘in great sheets of flame’.
After two such runs and an attack on a radio station, their job was then to protect the bombers. ‘There were aircraft of both nationalities going down in flames or out of control all around us,’ he says. At this point, he was soothed by a verse he recalled from the psalms: ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ ‘Just to know that, whatever happened, God was in control was enough,’ says Arthur calmly in his living room today. I wonder if it was words quite so divine that came to him as an unknown twin-engine fighter turned towards them on their starboard beam. ‘Beaufighter,’ thought Arthur in a flash, before realising the nearest one of those was in Burma over a thousand miles away. ‘Break left!’ he yelled to Dave at the controls. ‘We tried to get onto his tail but lost him in the melee of weaving aircraft,’ he says.
Ammunition spent, Arthur and Dave escorted some of the returning bombers back to the carriers. Seven British fighters had been lost at Pelambang that day, as well as two bombers, and a number of damaged aircraft were forced to ditch. However, the biggest Japanese oil refinery in the South-West Pacific had been reduced to 30 per cent of its capacity.
Two months later in March 1945, Indefatigable formed part of the massive endgame on Japan, the assault on the homeland island of Okinawa. Its job, to cover the southern flank of the invasion. Standing on deck, Arthur was awestruck by the scale of the armada: ‘The most amazing spectacle I have ever seen,’ he says. His job for the next few weeks was to continually attack Japanese bases on the Sakishima Gunto, three small islands southwest of Okinawa. The daily routine varied little: shoot down Japanese aircraft; bomb their runways; attack anything that floated and which might be bringing in reinforcements, including junks. The junks were so flimsy that Arthur remembers seeing his armour-piercing rockets pass through their wooden sides without exploding, leaving a long visible wake under the water.
The Japanese defences, however, were not so flimsy, and losses mounted steadily. Arthur tells me that No. 1770 Squadron lost roughly 20 per cent of its strength over the brief campaign. Low-level attacks could be particularly deadly and one squadron leader gave the strict instruction: ‘Never, ever, attempt a third strafing run.’ ‘You could get away with two,’ says Arthur, ‘but by the third the Japanese gunners would find their aim, and it was nearly always fatal.’
One afternoon after strafing anti-aircraft emplacements, Arthur’s aircraft was hit by a shell fragment. ‘We felt the bang and our engine became irregular,’ he says. ‘Our main concern then was to get clear of the enemy coast as quickly as possible.’ Everyone knew the Japanese did not take prisoners and reserved a particular loathing for the Fleet Air Arm, none of whose captured airmen survived the war. ‘They just didn’t like us at all,’ he says, ‘and we knew it.’
Limping back towards the fleet, the Firefly’s engine began to shudder, and the temperature gauge went into the red. Dave and Arthur discussed the prospect of it holding out long enough for their ship to turn into the wind and allow them to land, but decided it was a remote one. ‘We’re not going to make it,’ said Dave, and Arthur suggested they ditch. ‘Right,’ he replied. ‘Let’s do it.’
The drill was to fly into the wind at just above stalling speed, catch the tail on a wave, wash off some speed, then hit the water and hopefully not sink before getting out. With the cockpit hoods open, radio leads and parachutes disconnected, Dave Hebditch executed a textbook emergency water landing. Arthur felt the whack of the tail, then a big solid bump as they flopped onto the sea.
‘It all went perfectly,’ says Arthur. ‘I even had time to get out onto the wing, inflate my dinghy and step into it without getting my feet wet.’ Dave, however, banged his head on the compass and must have been a little dazed. ‘We had always trained for this in water, so he instinctively reverted to the drill, jumping straight in, inflating his life raft, then climbing into it, all soaking wet!’
Bobbing in the water in their little yellow inflatable, the two men watched as the 40 000-ton battleship Howe steamed imperiously past without so much as noticing them, then decided it might be an opportune moment to set off a distress flare. In due course they were picked up by the Australian destroyer Quiberon, where the Medical Officer was waiting on deck to greet them. ‘Are you alright?’ he enquired eagerly. When they replied in the affirmative he seemed almost disappointed. ‘Damn. I’ve had nothing more serious than piles since I’ve been on this fucking ship!’ This, we agree, is the moment Arthur’s love affair with Australia began.
Both men were back on board Indefatigable the next day and flying again that very afternoon. ‘They were pretty tough,’ says Arthur. ‘They didn’t give you a chance to get any “twitch”.’ There was, however, in typical British bureaucratic style, the inevitable paperwork to be completed, in particular the ‘A-25 Loss and/ or Damage of Aircraft’ form which awaited Arthur and Dave on their arrival. There’s even a song about it, and in a particularly fine voice, refined no doubt by years of Sunday choirs, Arthur treats me to the following to the tune of an old Irish folk ballad:
They say in the ‘Raff’ that the landing’s okay
If a pilot can get up and still walk away.
But in the Fleet Air Arm the outlook is grim
If you prang in the drink and the pilot can’t swim.
Cracking show! I’m alive!
But I’ve still got to render my A-25.
He assures me there are far bawdier versions.
Not nearly so jolly were the Kamikaze attacks, which erupted around Arthur as the campaign began. It’s surprising just how extensive the Kamikazes were, and at Okinawa they reached their zenith. Figures vary a little depending on sources, but it is estimated that in a ten-month period beginning late-1944, the Japanese sacrificed nearly four thousand young pilots – nearly half of those at Okinawa. Flying everything from dilapidated trainers to specially designed flying bombs – impossible to land and with fuel only for a one-way trip – most of the young Shinto warriors had received barely enough training to fly in a straight line before being given a final cup of rice wine and sent off on their flight to oblivion. Nonetheless, they managed to sink around eighty Allied ships causing over six thousand casualties.
High on the deck, Arthur witnessed t
hem hitting everything around him. ‘They hit all the carriers and all the battleships,’ he says. ‘It was quite terrifying.’ When they came for his own ship, however (the Indefatigable was the first British vessel to suffer a Kamikaze attack), he was safely in his cabin under the quarterdeck. Arthur remembers it well – April Fool’s Day, 1945. ‘I heard what seemed to be just a bump,’ he says. Emerging up top, he saw a large hole in the steel bulkhead at the base of the control tower and a scar in the flight deck. A Kamikaze had crashed into the aircrew ready room, killing seventeen men, including a friend, a young Salvation Army steward. ‘I had the job of writing to his wife and telling her what happened,’ he says. ‘She wanted to know if she could ever visit his grave but there was absolutely nothing left of him, not even his identity disc. He was a non-combatant. It would have been fair if it had happened to me but not to him.’ The unknown Japanese pilot died for little – five hours later, Indefatigable was operational again.
One afternoon, when not on flying duties and manning one of the many light anti-aircraft guns that studded the ship, Arthur witnessed one of those awful little tragedies of war that simply vanish amid the wider calamity. At the height of the Kamikazes, Indefatigable reported one of its Seafire pilots shot down while pursuing an enemy suicide bomber. ‘It was nothing of the kind,’ says Arthur adamantly. ‘I was there and I saw it with my own eyes.’ The pilot, who Arthur knew, was in the circuit to land when, from the port forward side of the carrier Formidable sailing a mile to stern, ‘a stream of tracer opened up’, hitting the Seafire and sending it spinning out of control straight into the water. ‘There was an alert on,’ he tells me, ‘but there were no Japs about at the time.’ In impotent distress, Arthur watched the aircraft and pilot disappear beneath the water. ‘I was so angry I wanted to spray Formidable with bullets. Some trigger-happy gunner on that ship who hadn’t boned up on his aircraft recognition shot that aircraft down,’ he says with an enduring bitterness. ‘I didn’t report it to anyone. There would have been no point. “Friendly fire”, we call it now. It was a very unpleasant moment.’
‘Come and have a look at this,’ he says to me, brightening deliberately and drawing me over to a place on the wall where a large frame hangs, a watercolour of four Fireflys over the ocean with a carrier beneath them. I’m not usually much of a fan of this kind of aviation art, but this is certainly one of the better ones I’ve seen and a source of obvious pride for Arthur. ‘It was painted by one of our observers for the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the squadron,’ he says, pointing to one of the aircraft bearing a ‘277’ on the fuselage. ‘This was my very aircraft,’ he says. It’s a handsome work, and so is the squadron emblem emblazoned close by. ‘“To See is to Destroy”,’ quotes Arthur. ‘Very good for a minister of religion!’
Then he brings out a small parcel of souvenirs, reverentially handling the contents. He passes me over something folded in a clear plastic sleeve. It’s a large yellowish triangle of material inscribed with some homemade artwork. ‘The back panel of my Mae West,’ he says. ‘The one that saved me when I had the crash in the Walrus. It’s never been washed.’ I unfold it gingerly and try to picture it on Arthur that day in the sea off faraway Trinidad, supporting his unconscious head and saving his life. At some stage, someone has decorated it with a cartoon and the somewhat incongruous word ‘Crusher’. ‘I used to play rugby,’ he explains a little sheepishly. ‘Left wing three-quarter. They reckoned I never went around anyone, so they called me Crusher.’ This humble man of God is full of surprises.
Then he hands me two photos: one of a beaming boy in a fresh naval uniform; the other of a face still young but devoid of youthfulness, eyes glazed with a distant hollowness. ‘These were taken a couple of years apart,’ he says. ‘That’s me as a young midshipman, and then later, with all the troubles of the world.’
Arthur indeed saw his fair share of violence and destruction but, ironically, it was not fighting in his Firefly that he came closest to a premature meeting with his maker, but deep within the ship, lying on his bunk in his cabin speculating with a friend as to what might be on offer on the evening’s dinner menu. Above them, through several walls of steel, a Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber, recently stowed in the hanger, suffered a mechanical malfunction – possibly an overheated round exploding in the breech of one of its .5-inch machine guns, or simply an electrical fault – but somewhere up top they could hear all hell breaking loose as the un-manned Avenger began firing off its entire 450-round belt of armour-piercing and incendiary ammunition.
At nineteen, Arthur’s friend and fellow observer Sub-Lieutenant J. A. Ross McIntyre RNVR – ‘Mac’ to his friends – was, says Arthur, the baby of the squadron, ‘a cheerful likeable fellow full of fun and humour’. Barely had he had time to mutter something about ‘some clot having his finger stuck in’ when the shower of bullets burst through the walls of their cabin. The aircraft, its wings folded, and its armament pointing straight down, was aiming straight at them.
‘I dived from the top bunk to the floor,’ says Arthur, ‘but Mac didn’t move and was hit by several bullets in his stomach.’ He rolled onto Arthur, covering him with blood. Mortally wounded, Mac pleaded with Arthur not to leave him. The ship’s doctor soon arrived, but could do nothing with his bloodied, mangled stomach, and in a few minutes the young man was gone. He was buried at sea within the hour.
A deeply shaken Arthur was taken in hand by a fellow officer and walked around and around the flight deck. He was not allowed to attend the funeral. ‘If I hadn’t moved it would have been me too. He was nineteen,’ says Arthur, shaking his head at the waste of it still. Another awful little tragedy of war.
In his little parcel of memories, he rummages again, pauses, then sighs quietly and hands me a small knob of twisted metal in a plastic envelope – one of the bullets he dug out of the wooden frame of his bunk, which nearly killed him deep within the bowels of the great aircraft carrier Indefatigable sixty years ago.
‘Yes, one way or another I had a few hairy moments,’ he says. But Arthur believes he was spared by the atomic bombs that brought the war to an abrupt close in August 1945. Had it gone on, Arthur doesn’t believe he would have survived. ‘The atomic bombs were terrible, terrible weapons, but I just look at it statistically. Sooner or later my number would simply have come up. I remember when peace came there was this strange feeling of relief. A feeling of “I’m going to live, I’m going to get an ordinary job – I might even get married!” – the very things you hadn’t dared let yourself focus on for years.’
Arthur went on to do all this, and much more.
FRED PHILLIPS
Pilot, RAF
It was a little ironic that when trying to find the home of Fred Phillips, a Pathfinder pilot who flew his Lancaster at night over thousands of blacked-out miles to pinpoint the targets for the rest of the bomber force to attack, I became hopelessly lost. Despite the most detailed of instructions, I was foiled by an old map, a dead mobile and a muddy country lane which, only on the third circuit, began to suspiciously resemble another country lane I had already travelled not once but twice in the last half-hour. No wonder that farmer on the tractor shook his head and seemed to grin as I came around, yet again, in my seriously muddied hire car.
Not that Fred seemed to mind. He lives an hour or so out of Sydney in an exquisite 1880s-built heritage home, amid delightful rolling countryside teeming with the ghosts of early settlers. It was a cold but sunny winter’s afternoon, and despite my being well over an hour late, Fred cheerfully unwrapped the sandwiches he had prepared and sat me down next to the heater overlooking an old and sculptured garden. Just as well – I was starving.
The Pathfinders were an elite. Which is precisely why the head of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, wanted nothing to do with their establishment. But in 1941, a quiet bespectacled civil servant in the War Cabinet Secretariat named D. M. Butt took the time to study hundreds of actual bombing photos taken of targets the morning after raids and compare t
hem with the results claimed by the aircrews. The report he handed the British Government was, well, a bombshell. In it, he claimed that, far from Bomber Command’s ebullient confidence in winning the war single-handedly, 90 per cent of its aircraft were in fact missing their target by between five and one hundred miles, and that almost half their bombs were falling in open countryside. Only when the moon was bright could targets be found and attacked, he said, but when dark, barely one aircraft in fifteen bombed within five miles of the intended aiming point. The Butt Report was a bucket of iced water in the face of those who were running Britain’s war effort, and caused many to never quite trust Bomber Command again.
The problem was navigation. It was simply not possible to pluck people from civilian life, train them up for a few months then expect them to deliver an aircraft to a pinprick on a map in the middle of a blacked-out continent in wartime.
So, in August 1942, amid much protest, Bomber Command’s five Groups – similar to an army’s Divisions – were each made to surrender a squadron to form the nucleus of the brand-new No. 8 Group, which would henceforth become known as PFF or Path Finder Force. The crews of this special outfit were selected (one could not volunteer) for their skills in navigation and bombing accuracy and were immediately granted an increase in rank and, after a few trips, the permission to wear a unique silver eagle on their tunics, just under the medal ribbons. It was the very least they would deserve. Instead of the standard thirty operations, the ‘Pathfinders’ would have to complete the almost impossible feat of fifty. So much for Harris’s attempts to avoid the creation of an elite.
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