Soon after, Stuart was on a ship sailing through the Suez Canal to join No. 211 Squadron RAF in the Egyptian desert to fly reconnaissance missions against the Italians. It was at times a surreal war against a reluctant enemy. ‘The Italian Air Force had some decent sort of blokes,’ says Stuart. ‘Instead of bombs, they’d drop thermos flasks and fountain pens. If you picked them up, they’d explode.’ Once or twice an Italian bomb did land, but failed to go off. Investigating, the squadron armourers found the fuses hadn’t even been attached, just the threaded hole where they were supposed to screw in. Inside the casing was a handwritten note: ‘Sorry, this is the best we could do for you’, it read! ‘They just didn’t want to fight, you see,’ says Stuart. Later, when the squadron was making a speedy withdrawal to another airstrip, a group of Italian prisoners were released and told they could rejoin their own rapidly advancing army. Horrified, they instead stole some lorries and followed hot on the tails of their retreating captors!
The Western Desert campaign was a fluid one with armies advancing and retreating back and forth along the southern edge of the Mediterranean. Sometimes, Stuart would take off from one nameless desert airstrip, not sure if he would be landing at the same one. ‘They’d post a man standing at a certain spot on the perimeter of the aerodrome. If he wasn’t there when we came back, we’d have to go and land somewhere else,’ he says.
For further training over jungle terrain in the newer and marginally better long-nose Blenheim bomber, Stuart was sent to an Operational Training Unit at a place called Wadi Gazouza in Eritrea. One night, his pilot, Alf Longmore, called up on the intercom, concerned. ‘Scotty,’ he said – for some reason they all called him Scotty – ‘the mountains are playing up with our compass. As far as I can make out, we’re twelve degrees off course.’ Stuart radioed back to the aerodrome to report their problem. From this point, the aircraft’s compass became completely disoriented and they were soon hopelessly lost. After a while, the pilot made an even more sobering announcement. ‘We’re getting low on fuel and we’re going to crash. Do you want to bale out, Scotty?’ Stuart looked out the window. All he could see was darkness and a vast, black mountainous jungle below.
‘What are you two blokes going to do?’ he asked. The pilot and navigator said they were going to stay put and take their chances in the crash-landing. Stuart decided to join them. ‘I got out of the turret in case the trees took it off and decapitated me, and crawled into the bomb well.’ In the dark, the Blenheim hit the ground and skidded. ‘The noise was tremendous,’ he says. ‘Bushes and rocks and everything came hurtling through the aircraft.’ But when it stopped it was so quiet, he could hear the ticking of the instruments. ‘You alright, Scotty?’ asked the pilot. All three had made it down without a scratch.
When the sun came up, however, they saw how close they had come to catastrophe: the aircraft had ground to a halt right between two enormous series of rocks – inches from either wingtip. ‘If we’d have hit those we would have just burst into flame and that would have been the end of us.’ If he could have taken out a lottery ticket, he would have. Two days later, thanks to Stuart’s radio reports, they were picked up. From here, Stuart said good-bye to Africa, but not to the jungle, because No. 211 Squadron was on the move to the Far East to meet the rapacious Japanese.
The official language of the squadron history describes the squadron’s next chapter. ‘211 Squadron then took its Blenheims to the Far East and, in the black days of early 1942, did good work in both Sumatra and Java before being overwhelmed by the Japanese invaders.’ The reality wasn’t nearly so tidy.
‘Things were a shambles when we got out there,’ remembers Stuart. The squadron had flown itself out, ahead of its own ground staff who never managed to arrive. Malaya and Singapore had already gone, so several RAF and RAAF squadrons were put into the hopeless position of repulsing the Japanese invasion from the island of Sumatra, home to the giant oil refinery at Palambang which the Japanese were desperate to capture.
There were two airstrips on Sumatra, P1 and P2. The first was a civilian aerodrome with concrete runways but no place to disperse the aircraft, while P2, the military base, was carved out of the jungle and so well hidden that several aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed trying to find it.
For a desperate few days in late January 1942, Stuart and his crew flew constant missions, often in the middle of violent monsoons, strafing and bombing the Japanese along beaches and landing grounds up and down the Malay Peninsula as best they could. Joining them was a thrown-together collection of Hudson bombers, Hurricanes and some utterly hopeless Brewster Buffalo fighters flown in near-suicide missions by the incalculably brave pilots of the Dutch Air Force.
In the rapidly disintegrating situation, the pace – never too far from panic – was relentless. ‘We’d come in, refuel and rearm then immediately take off again,’ says Stuart. With few spares or toolkits, servicing the aircraft was impossible and most of the ground crews were borrowed from the Buffalo squadrons. The attitude of some of the permanent RAF ground crews was astonishing. ‘They’d been living out there so long on wine, women and song they just didn’t give a damn,’ he said. One afternoon, his Blenheim taxied in and Alf, the pilot, indicated he needed to be refuelled and rearmed immediately. ‘This bloke on the ground just looked at his watch. “I knock off at half past five,” he said. Amazed and furious, Alf drew his service revolver and pointed it at him. “Refuel me immediately or you’ll knock off right now!” ’
Then there was the episode of the incorrectly laid flare path. The squadron’s Blenheims were lined up at night, fully loaded and ready to take off at two-minute intervals along the row of lights. The first three took off into the darkness. Suddenly, red Very lights started to appear from everywhere. Something was terribly wrong. ‘Everything stopped and we wondered what was happening,’ remembers Stuart. The path had been laid too close to the trees. The first two aircraft had taken off and gone straight into them, the third hit the orderly room and killed the entire crew. The fourth aircraft in line stopped dead on the runway. Stuart was right behind him.
In early February the airfields started to come under direct attack from Japanese aircraft, with no radar to warn them of their approach. It went on like this for a couple of days.
‘Then, one morning, we were having a cup of tea in the mess before taking off again,’ remembers Stuart. ‘I heard some noise, walked out and saw parachutes coming down.’ Some on the airfield apparently thought the aircraft overhead were Hudsons, but when everyone saw they were being escorted by Zeroes, a terrible sickening feeling crept in. Two hundred and sixty crack Japanese paratroops were descending on the P1 aerodrome and another hundred at the nearby oil refinery.
Some of the defenders abandoned their weapons and fled, others fought bravely and hopelessly, firing over open sights of Bofors anti-aircraft guns at zero trajectory. Stuart remembers a few people firing pot shots with rifles to little avail. There was no time even to get all the aircraft away, and those that were still airborne were radioed not to attempt a landing and continue on to Java.
‘Right,’ announced Stuart’s commanding officer, ‘we’re going to make our way through the jungle.’
In commandeered trucks, the remnants of the squadron headed east towards the coast along choked roads – breaking open the bowsers of abandoned petrol stations along the way. Arriving amid the chaos at the port of Oesthaven, they saw that the Dutch appeared to have left in something of a hurry. ‘There were all these beautiful cars abandoned along the docks,’ says Stuart. ‘We had a great time pushing them over the edge into the sea to stop the Japs getting them.’
In Sumatra, Stuart and the remainder of his squadron found a ship to Java, mindful of being only one step ahead of the Japanese. They made it to the port of Chilachap, roughly halfway along the southern coast of the long island of Java. Here under the command of their CO, they commandeered a couple of powered lifeboats bobbing up and down in the harbour. ‘They were beautiful boats that c
ould carry a fair amount of people each,’ he says. They raided the local warehouses to get supplies – primarily beer – and their small party of about twenty set off in a convoy of pairs out to sea, and hopefully, Australia. Sadly, they didn’t get very far.
‘We pulled into a nearby island to reorganise ourselves and our supplies. On the way in to shore, our boat hit the rocks and was smashed to smithereens.’ Stuart swam, then scrambled to the shore. The squadron CO, in the other boat, ordered them to stay put until rescued while he continued the dash over to Australia.
With the meagre supplies they had managed to salvage from their wrecked boat, the small party stayed on the nameless island for about three weeks. ‘Then the Japs found us,’ says Stuart.
So began Stuart Thompson’s three-and-a-half-year ordeal as a prisoner of war under the Imperial Japanese, enduring the horrors of the Thai–Burma Railway, a story which could easily fill a book on its own and can in no way be done justice here. Suffice to say, his character, to me, represents the archetypical Australian spirit of the time: open, self-effacing, relentlessly cheerful, seemingly without anger or bitterness – one which the Japanese, with their dismal, monolithic worldview, found so completely bewildering and so hard to break.
Stuart was beaten, starved and threatened with execution on a daily basis, yet chooses to speak not of the brutality but of the odd acts of kindness shown to him on a handful of occasions by his captors. The time when, bathing in a river after a day slaving on the railway, a guard came to the bank and ushered the men out of the water. He then threw in a hand grenade which stunned some fish and provided a rare meal that night. Later, on parade, the men were ordered by the camp commandant to point out this renegade who had shown kindness to the enemy. They feigned ignorance to a man. Later that night, a carton of cigarettes surreptitiously appeared in their hut.
Or of another who, after Stuart had bowed and scraped in the standard manner, indicated he take a seat on a bag of rice and spoke to him in perfect English. Before the war, it turned out, this man had been a schoolteacher and was fascinated by Australia. ‘It sounds like a nice place. I wish I was there now,’ said the young guard. ‘Me too,’ replied Stuart. At the end of their conversation, the guard indicated his own officers and said, ‘Don’t tell them I speak English.’
I also learn why Stuart cocks his head when listening. Once he was bashed so hard his eardrum perforated. It never healed and he’s deaf as a post in it to this day.
We talk, Stuart and I, for a good while longer, not about flying but of his time in the jungle as one of Weary Dunlop’s original ‘thousand men from Java’; how he was put onto a ship and then walked through the jungle for a hundred miles and told to build his own accommodation; how he would often work from six in the morning until midnight on nothing but three pitiful meals of boiled rice; how he helped construct the Thai–Burma Railway out of hand-hewn logs of teak and bamboo; how he cut a pass through a mountain with a hammer and chisel, and how, when sick, his life was saved by the skill and almost messianic presence of Weary himself. And how, one day, they were all called to parade as usual and told by the Japanese that no one would work today because the war had ended. ‘They told us the war had finished,’ he says, ‘but we didn’t know who’d won.’
He shows me some pictures, taken postwar, of some of the construction works and the bridges built in captivity, and exudes an unmistakable pride in having played a part in their creation, despite its being done in the service of a brutal enemy amid an ocean of suffering. And why not? Who is to deny him, and others like him, this small but inextinguishable scrap of achievement to help make sense of it all? I am touched by this pride, this inviolable morsel snatched from all the cruelty that this kind and cheery man has endured, a pride his captors could never have understood.
JEFF McKAY
Navigator, RAAF
The pilot, regardless of rank, was always the boss of a bomber crew, but without the constant, meticulous assessment of speed, course and direction provided by the navigator, he was useless – able to do little more than fly in circles around the aerodrome. As has been said to me countless times, the navigator was the ‘brains’ of the plane. It was a point brought home to me within minutes of sitting down with Jeff McKay in his rural Victorian home. I had heard some extraordinary things over the many interviews I had conducted, but never had I been quoted poetry.
‘Do you know “The Brook”?’ Jeff asks me as a piece of fruit slice is handed across the table.
‘Um, I …’ My mind splutters back to schoolboy literature classes. ‘Is that the one by, er …’
I come from haunts of coot and hern (he begins)
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.
He recites it perfectly. Mind like a steel trap. I had noticed an elaborate game of patience still open on his computer, to which he no doubt intended to return after I had gone.
The little stream in Tennyson’s poem, penned in the middle of the nineteenth century, ran its way to the sea along the bottom of a delightful Lincolnshire valley. It was still there a century later, as was the village named after it, Binbrook. By this time however, the tranquillity of the setting had been somewhat transformed because, in 1943, the long flat hill overlooking Tennyson’s charming scene was home to No. 460 Heavy Bomber Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force, the most famous Australian bomber unit in the RAAF.
Jeff, I would discover, was full of such interesting pieces of information.
The air force couldn’t believe its luck when Jeff McKay joined its ranks in 1942. Most potential young airmen were obsessed with becoming pilots, and would whine and pine if not chosen as such. Jeff on the other hand, upon being offered the coveted pilot’s job, turned it down and asked instead to become a navigator. He immediately got his way. Why on earth would you shun the glamour of being a pilot? I ask. He tells me he’d worked briefly as a surveyor, and the job just suited his temperament. ‘The idea of navigating by the stars appealed to me,’ he says.
He learned the basics at Bradfield Park in Sydney, then sharpened his skills in the icy flat plains of Canada. It was on his way over in the ship, though, that Jeff had his closest encounter with the enemy, in the form of hundreds of German soldiers who had been captured in the North African desert. Like Jeff, they were en route to Canada, but in their case to sit out the war in peace.
‘They were all down in the hold,’ he says, and there they would have remained, if not for the fact that Jeff happened at the time to be learning the steel guitar, which he had lugged with him for the trip across the Pacific.
The Germans, it seems, wanted to put on a concert to amuse themselves and their CO had asked if anyone on board would lend them an instrument or two. Jeff volunteered his, and a mate of his a banjo, and so both of them scored an invitation to be in the audience, guests of several hundred recently vanquished members of Hitler’s Afrika Korps.
Standing on a table at the back of a vast, packed dining room to see the stage, they were both, says Jeff, ‘a little apprehensive. We didn’t know what they were going to do.’ I ask how the Germans responded to him. ‘They weren’t unfriendly, but there was no conversation,’ he says. A couple even smiled, perhaps realising just how lucky they were. ‘Lilli Marlene’ is one of the numbers Jeff remembers from the show. I tell him it’s one concert I would love to have had a ticket to. He thinks for a moment. ‘Yes. And it was a pretty good one, too.’
Twice a day the Germans were allowed up on deck for some fresh air. Some hardliners would take the opportunity to jump overboard rather than face living with the shame of captivity. Jeff remembers watching their heads bobbing in the ship’s wake for a while till they disappeared beneath the water. ‘Rather sad, really. They looked like fine young fellas,’ he says.
In fact, he came close to knocking off one or two of these ‘fine young fellas’ then and there. Their British guards would occasionally tire of the job and give it to others
for a while. One day, Jeff was asked to watch the Germans while they ate in the main dining room. So, with his Sten submachine gun, he took his place at the side of the hall while they tucked in. He hadn’t actually had any training on the Sten, and started fiddling around with it. ‘I was trying to uncock it but the spring was that strong when I pulled the bolt back it flew out of my hand and it started firing!’ he says.
Thinking a massacre was in progress, the Germans coming into the hall doubled back in the doorway; chips flew off the walls and general panic ensued. Eventually, the magazine emptied and Jeff was immediately frog-marched off to the CO. ‘The Germans thought there was going to be a bloodbath!’ he says. He was reprimanded for his foolishness and confined to his cabin for a couple of days. Further requests for guard duty were not forthcoming.
In Canada, he saw snow for the first time in his life and learned to deliver an Avro Anson from one frozen pinpoint on the tundra to another, as well as to read the wind direction by watching the cows – when it started to blow hard, they turned their backs into it and faced the other way.
At his Operational Training Unit in Staffordshire, a man with pilot’s wings whom he’d never met approached him. ‘You’re McKay, are you?’ he said. ‘Well I wouldn’t mind you joining me, if you’re interested.’ The man indicated a couple of other figures milling around in uniform. ‘I’ve got a bomb aimer. Oh, and that redheaded bastard over there is our wireless operator. I’ve got a couple of gunners lined up too. I think they’ll be alright. One of them’s a Sydney taxi driver.’ Thus, Jeff’s crew was formed.
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