At his Operational Training Unit in Warwickshire he experienced having to land in fog, aided by ‘FIDO’, the Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation. This was truly a triumph for the eggheads of British wartime engineering. On certain aerodromes, pipes were laid beside the main runway, through which fuel was pumped. In heavy fog, burners were lit from which the rising heat not only dispersed the fog for a height of several hundred feet, but made the runway highly visible to returning bomber crews. It used vast amounts of petrol but saved many a wounded, inexperienced or simply blinded aircrew after its introduction in mid-1944.
Again in the dramatic first-person, Ralph describes what it was like coming in to land on FIDO at night. ‘You come in on a normal approach. You’re watching your instruments. You might be coming in on the blind navigation radio beam – move too far off it one way and you hear “dit-dah” in the headphones, or “dit-dit-dah” if it’s too far the other. When it’s a solid “da-ah”, you know you’re right in the middle. You reduce your rate of descent – six or seven hundred feet a minute – then all of a sudden you break through the fog and there’s the runway right in front of you. You do a last-minute check: kick her over a bit maybe, or lift your left or right wing and come in for a landing.’
At the end of Ralph’s training, he expected to be transferred to Bomber Command. But in late 1943, with the invasion of Europe rapidly taking shape, it was decided that whole armies would be moved entirely by air. Newly trained crews were selected from OTUs around the country and transformed into the brand new 38 Group. ‘It was formed up especially to move an army from A to B by air,’ says Ralph.
We’ve said goodbye to the museum and Ralph’s legion of friends and admirers, and returned to his unit where I am strangely absorbed by an extraordinary collection of eggcups he has acquired over the years, taking up an entire bookcase. He makes me coffee and we share the remnants of an extremely good cake, leftover from a recent birthday, as it turns out, and I am genuinely astonished to learn that Ralph has just celebrated his ninetieth. You would never guess it by the man’s energy. He’s so active and keen to talk, I have trouble getting him even to sit down.
Training complete, Ralph went to Horn near Bournemouth to join No. 295 Squadron to learn, among other things, how to pull a glider full of soldiers through the air and drop it into the middle of a battle. His was a new crew in a new squadron. ‘It was all strange for a while,’ he recalls, ‘but once we were given an idea of what it was we were supposed to be doing, well, you became used to it.’
Normandy would involve, for the first time in history, the deployment of thousands of paratroops and glider-borne soldiers, not as an adjunct but an integral part of the battle itself. It would be Ralph’s job to get some of them there, at the right time and in one piece. First though, he would have to survive the Whitley.
The Whitley was a truly woeful aircraft that should really have been retired very soon after it started rolling off the Armstrong-Whitworth production line at Bagington in 1936. Instead, it was used operationally for a variety of wartime tasks, failing to distinguish itself in any of them. ‘It was like driving a four-ton truck,’ says Ralph. Although his experience of this heavy and unwieldy beast was limited to training, it added nothing to his confidence in it to be told that the Germans were occasionally conducting fighter sweeps along the south coast of England, and that it was forbidden to leave the ground without the rear gunner in place. ‘Otherwise we were likely to get our tail shot off,’ he says. Still, the paratroops Ralph was carrying had to learn to jump from something and the ageing Whitleys were available.
Ralph trained extensively, amassing 150 tows or ‘lifts’ in practice over twelve months. With characteristic drama, he conveys to me the feeling of what it was like pulling a Horsa glider into the air full of men and equipment. In another startling present-tense rendition, he tells me how speed and power were of the essence. ‘Travelling down the runway, you have to reach a certain airspeed. You look back and see that your glider is flying twelve to fifteen feet above the ground. He takes off first. Then we bore along and use as much runway as we can and get up as much speed as we can. We have four strong motors and they’re all going full bore. The cylinder head temp goes up to 330-plus and the needles are knocking on the top. They’re hot. The moment we leave the deck, we can only leave the engines a short time on that full take-off speed. They’re working flat to the boards. As soon as the air begins to cool the motors a little bit you throttle off, taking off some flap too. Not too much at the one time. See? Get your wheels up to reduce drag.’ To an aeroplane tragic like myself, it’s all terribly exciting.
With training complete, it was time for Ralph to begin operational flying. With the invasion still some months off, however, it was decided that the best way to use his skills was to drop not soldiers but supplies to the French resistance on special night trips for the clandestine Special Operations Executive.
I stop him here and draw his attention to his logbook entry (he has graciously allowed me to borrow it from the museum) for the night of 3 March 1944. It is extremely vague. ‘We weren’t allowed to put down where we went or what we were doing,’ he says. One such entry bears only the cryptic entry, ‘Ditcher’, code for the agent they were supplying with some unknown cargo on a grid coordinate in the dead of night. ‘We had to go in and find a tiny little field way down in the south of France and put that stuff down from 1000 feet,’ he says. At the appointed rendezvous, Ralph’s crew would look for the pre-arranged letter being flashed up from the ground. They would then circle and wait for the lighting of three fires in succession, which would indicate which direction to drop. Ammunition, food, clothes, weapons. All were vital to supply the French Marquis resistance in the months leading up to D-Day.
Then the day itself. He pauses, and shows me an old copy of Flight magazine dated 15 June 1944. In it, there’s a photo of Montgomery and Eisenhower addressing a crowd of assembled aircrew. ‘That’s me with my navigator,’ he says, and points to himself in his distinctive RAAF dark blue. ‘They came in to brief us the night before we took off.’ He’s proud of that photo, and why not?
At 1.30 a.m. of the morning of 6 June, D-Day, Ralph took off carrying one of the first gliders into Normandy, filled with the men whose job it was to prepare the landing fields for the glider-borne Sixth Air Landing Brigade, scheduled to arrive late that afternoon to meet the expected German counterattack. The gliders themselves were piloted by specially trained soldiers – two in each in case one got a bullet in the back. Once down, they would resume their normal job as foot soldiers.
Ralph has such an exciting way of speaking that I feel I’m about to embark on the great crusade myself. ‘The whole sky was lit up for miles and miles along the coast with fire and smoke and tracer,’ he says. Not that he could do anything to avoid it: when towing, evasive action was impossible. ‘How did they miss us?’ he asks, still wondering. ‘It was just a miracle.’ At the appointed moment, he spoke to the glider pilot via the intercom running through the towrope. ‘Pilot, can you see your landing strip?’ ‘Okay,’ replied the voice, ‘this will suit me fine.’ With a ‘good luck’, the pilot pulled a lever to set himself free and was on his own, sailing down on the wind to land into the battle, with no chance to abort or come around again.
Later, he would befriend that same English pilot, who went on to have adventures of his own on the ground. He and Ralph shared a correspondence over many decades. ‘Every letter I’ve got from him in the last sixty years says, “Thanks, Ralph, for keeping straight and level that night.” ’
After D-Day, Ralph’s night drops to the resistance resumed. Shot at many times, he would occasionally come back with incendiaries still burning, lodged in the wings. ‘We had to get the extinguisher onto it straightaway,’ he tells me.
One night, he had a load to carry almost to the Swiss border: two big baskets and twelve steel cages loaded in the bomb bays. He was by now flying another of the lesser lights of World War II aviation, the
Armstrong-Whitworth Albermarle. From the same stable as the hapless Whitley, the twin-engine Albermarle was also beset by problems. It was designed as a bomber that could be built from steel and plywood to save aluminium, but its lack of performance relegated it to the roles of transport and glider tug, a fact which may explain why only about 600 were built. The Albermarle has always looked a little forlorn to me, not really an aircraft unto itself but a composite from bits of others. No. 295 Squadron was the first to fly them.
To avoid the German defences around Paris, Ralph was told to bypass the city by at least fifteen miles. At this stage of the war, however, German units were on the move everywhere to join the battle in Normandy, and one night Ralph flew right over the top of one of them. ‘Everything came up, everything.’ In quick succession, he felt the concussion of five 88-millimetre shells from a mobile ground battery below. ‘We got a line of them all along the fuselage. Bang, bang, bang …’ But the shells were incorrectly fused, set to detonate at an altitude higher than the 5000 feet at which Ralph was flying and failed to explode. Ralph did a quick intercom check of the crew. One by one, they all called in, unharmed. ‘None of them was touched,’ says Ralph. ‘The shells all went between them.’ Their luck continued – the engines were intact and even the radio still worked. He got back on the intercom. ‘Right, we’re still all here, we’ve still got our engines going, so we’ll continue on the course to drop the baskets. We might be carrying something these people want.’
At the designated rendezvous, Ralph spotted the correct signal and released the two parachute baskets which were manually pushed out of the aircraft by the crew. But when he went to put the flaps down to slow the aircraft and release the cages in the bomb bay, they failed to respond, as did the bomb doors. What he only then realised was that one of the shells had taken out the aircraft’s hydraulics, cutting power to the bomb doors, wheels and flaps. With a sour taste in his mouth, Ralph had no choice but to turn around and take the load back to England. He could only imagine the looks of despair and bewilderment on the faces of the resistance fighters as the sounds of his engines faded away to the north. He also realised that without power to lower the wheels, he had a belly landing to look forward to.
Approaching his aerodrome several glum hours later, something else – something rather serious – also struck him. What was it exactly he was carrying? And was it something likely to explode on a rough landing? He radioed in to the control tower. ‘I want to know what it is I’m carrying. I’m not going to land on something that’s going to blow us up,’ he explained in no uncertain terms. The alternative was to climb and let the crew bale out. ‘Alright, Proctor, we’ll have to ring through to Group,’ came a response. So, while his Commanding Officer manoeuvred his way through the appropriate levels of British military bureaucracy to find someone who could get their hands on the appropriate form to indicate just what it was in Ralph’s bomb bay, he and his crew hung on the line, ‘on hold’, circling the aerodrome with no hydraulics, the petrol gauges knocking on empty and hoping that they weren’t going to be blown to kingdom come by their mystery cargo.
‘Boys,’ he said to his crew, ‘you’d better get ready to jump.’ He called up again. ‘Yes, just hang on a minute,’ came the reply. Ralph circled again. It was becoming farcical. One more circuit with them about to open the escape hatch, and the call came up. ‘Okay. You can belly land. You’re not carrying anything that’s going to explode.’ Ralph picked the softest piece of ground he could see between two runways and came in on the grass. After all that, it was surprisingly easy. ‘All the props got bent up, but that was about it,’ he says.
For the big aerial armada which was planned for Arnhem, Ralph converted to the Stirling, and did four trips into northern Holland in a week. He began on 17 October carrying a group of paratroopers in a glider, one of the first groups into Nijmagen – men doomed to be pinned down in the maelstrom that became the very rushed and very botched Operation Market Garden.
A couple of times he dropped supplies to the remnants of the British First Airborne Division on the northern side of the Rhine River, where it had been caught on the wrong side of the infamous ‘bridge too far’. I ask him what of the battle he could see from the air. ‘All we could see was a heck of a mess,’ he says. ‘The Germans had opened the dykes and flooded the countryside and had dug poles into the ground for the gliders. A lot of them were smashed to pieces as they landed.’
Recalling his last Arnhem trip, he relives coming in at a thousand feet, a sitting target if ever there was one. Church steeples were smashed and bent over at right angles. Small-arms fire pelted the fuselage. A shell exploded in the port wheel undercarriage nacelle and also punctured the starboard tyre. On the way back, the crew went to their crash positions behind the bulkheads and the main wing spar. Landing as gently as he could at Harwell, Ralph put the port wheel down, but it was wrecked to the rim. With more weight, it collapsed and the whole undercarriage was wrenched at right angles up into the fuselage. The tearing, wrenching metallic sound was deafening, and Ralph grits his teeth remembering. He quickly switched off the electrics as the aircraft spun into a ground loop. ‘Out, boys!’ he ordered, and out they all tumbled again, amazingly without a scratch.
I can see that it’s all coming back a little too fast for Ralph, and he simply sits quietly for a while with a wide-eyed look. ‘Now you’re making me shake,’ he says. I’ve probably been pushing him a bit too far, but we press on.
On Ralph’s last dramatic moment in the air, it wasn’t enemy action that was nearly his undoing but the weather. On 2 November 1944, five aircraft from No. 295 Squadron, led by the station commander, Wing Commander Wilfred Surplice, were detailed to make a drop to the Norwegian resistance at a spot forty miles west of Oslo. When they arrived, it was a white-out. ‘We reached the drop zone but you couldn’t see a thing,’ says Ralph. Once again, they were forced to turn around with their twenty-four steel containers still secure in the bomb bays. But when Ralph turned the control column, the Stirling’s response was a dreaded soft, spongy feeling on the control surfaces that meant one thing: ice. In moist, subzero air, it could happen in just a couple of minutes, and it was a killer: water vapour condensing, then freezing onto the sub-zero metal surface of the wing, upsetting its ability to lift and instantly weighing it down with hundreds of pounds of ice. There were ways to get rid of it, but you had to be quick.
‘Engineer, put on all the de-icing you can!’ yelled Ralph to his engineer. ‘I’ve got to put the nose down to lose height!’ But could they? They were, after all, over the Norwegian mountains. ‘Okay, Proc,’ came the voice of the navigator. ‘We’re just clear of the rough country.’ Ralph pushed the column forward to build up speed and descend to a thousand feet above the water. Here, the air was warmer and the fatal straightjacket of ice began to shed in clumps. Amazingly, even the spinning propellers had iced up and chunks began to fly off the blades, hitting the fuselage with a terrible noise, ‘like someone throwing bricks’, Ralph says. It also made a ghastly screaming noise, adding to the cacophony of wind and engines. ‘We didn’t lose all the ice until we were halfway back to Scotland,’ says Ralph. ‘The boys were frantic. So was I, but I didn’t tell them that!’ They made it back, but Wing Commander Surplice didn’t. His crew baled out, but he went in with his aircraft as it crashed into the same Norwegian mountains they had so narrowly avoided.
It’s been a tough couple of afternoons for Ralph, and at one point, the emotions get too much for him. He apologises, unnecessarily. It’s been a privilege to meet him. At the end, both exhausted, we talk over another cuppa about his time before the war, mustering cattle in outback Queensland. It’s a relief to wind down in this more gentle way, talking about his days on the big cattle and sheep stations out near Charleville and Longreach. He still manages to convey the colour and motion of his memories, but more gently, without the whiff of terror that I have managed to stir up in his mind from his time spent flying in the long dark night of wartime Europ
e.
STUART THOMPSON
Wireless/Air Gunner, RAAF
‘So why do you want to join the air force, son?’ asked the officer behind the desk when a young Stuart Thompson went to join up right at the beginning of the war.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve always been keen on flying but I’ve never had the chance to take it up.’
‘Well, aren’t you lucky!’ replied the man in the uniform. ‘Now you can learn all about it and serve your country at the same time.’ It was just what the lad from Moe wanted to hear, and the air force, in turn, were happy to have him. Unlike 99 per cent of new volunteers, Stuart wasn’t even fussed about being a pilot. He just wanted to get into the air. So, with a background as a cinema projectionist and a dab hand at tinkering around radio sets, the job of ‘WAG’ – Wireless/Air Gunner – suited him to a tee.
A few months later, throwing up in the back of a clapped-out Fairey Battle at No. 1 Bombing and Gunnery School at Evans Head, New South Wales, the gloss had worn off somewhat.
‘I came down that sick one time I was going to tell them what they could do with their air force!’ he declares. But then an officer stepped up and handed him a glass of strange white liquid. ‘Here. Drink this,’ he was told. Stuart swallowed it down, felt better immediately and was never airsick again. He still has no idea what it was.
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