Fly

by Michael Veitch

The composition of the seven men in a bomber crew gave it its own individual personality. Some were cool and efficient, sticking strictly to protocol both in the air and on the ground. There was usually always camaraderie, but in a far more class-conscious age – even among Australians – distinctions between officers and NCOs set the atmosphere. Then there were the crews like Jeff’s – a little more on the larrikin side.

  There was Jock Buchanan, the Scottish bomb aimer who took a while to adjust to the vernacular of his Australian crew. ‘One night,’ says Jeff, ‘he stood up on the bed and threatened to beat up the next person who called him an “old Scots bastard”.’ This naturally led to an immediate barrage of the offending remark. ‘He started frothing at the mouth,’ says Jeff. ‘But then he saw the funny side of it. In the end he was one of the most unifying personalities in the crew.’ (Eventually, he became so enamoured of the Aussies, he migrated to Sydney and married one. It lasted just one day!)

  Then there was Paddy Dowling, the wireless operator, who told everyone he was a third-year medical student studying gynaecology, a line he used when taking out girls. ‘Turns out he worked as a clerk in the Sydney Gas Company,’ says Jeff.

  On their first evening together, they headed to the local to celebrate, but not before the taxi driver gunner, ‘a square, tough-looking bloke of twenty-nine’, felt he needed to check the young Jeff over.

  ‘Do you drink?’ he asked.

  ‘Er, no,’ Jeff replied.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ Jeff said that he didn’t care for that either.

  The man looked alarmed. ‘How do you feel about women?’

  ‘Oh, I like women!’ said Jeff enthusiastically.

  Relieved, the man turned to the others. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘They say only the good die young, so we don’t want to be flying with any saints!’

  And saints they were not, with the possible exception of Jeff who, with his quiet, slightly scholarly demeanour, was less attuned to the ways of wine and women. ‘They were a fun crew. All wags and liked chasing women and drinking. I was a bit of a wowser in comparison but I enjoyed their company. Our pilot gave us all the impression we were all at the top of our craft. We weren’t, of course, but he made us feel like we were. He was a good leader like that.’

  While still in training, a Lancaster, probably running low on fuel after a raid, landed at his relatively quiet aerodrome. It was the first time Jeff had seen one. He remembers thinking the aircraft in which he would soon be flying to attack Germany was enormous. A few weeks later, at Lindholme in Yorkshire, he underwent his conversion course, and was reassured. ‘The Lancaster just felt safe,’ he says. ‘You thought that if you had to fly in anything, this was it.’

  The navigator’s escape route from the Lancaster was, however, an awkward one. From his position behind the pilot, he had to make his way over the main wing spar to a door at the rear of the fuselage. In flying gear with a parachute, this was never an easy task, even in level flight. In an aircraft diving and in trouble, it was virtually impossible. Literally thousands must have been the numbers of uninjured men who were simply unable to reach the doors to exit their doomed aircraft.

  Training complete, the crew were told to have their kit packed and be ready to go by 1530 the next day. ‘We’re going to 460 Squadron at Binbrook,’ announced the pilot. ‘Where the hell’s that?’ asked the crew (Jeff had yet to discover the poem).

  The next day, the truck arrived. ‘It was a trip I’ll never forget,’ says Jeff. After hours of driving across England up and down little country lanes, someone eventually called out, ‘There it is!’ He looked up and saw at the top of a hill ‘three black shapes outlined against the sky’ – the Lancasters of his new squadron. ‘Well, this is it,’ he thought sombrely to himself.

  No. 460 Squadron was the most famous Australian squadron in Bomber Command, possibly the entire RAAF. It was also the most dangerous. Among its many proud achievements – highest number of operations, highest tonnage of bombs dropped – one statistic stands out: 1018 aircrew killed in action. With a flying contingent numbering 200, No. 460 Squadron in its brief four-year lifetime was effectively wiped out five times. This one unit made up just two per cent of the RAAF’s wartime strength, but accounted for an astonishing twenty-three per cent of its casualties. This was the reality facing Jeff McKay as he trundled up the hill in the truck towards Binbrook’s main gate.

  Two weeks after their arrival, the crew filed into the mess for breakfast. Pinned to the wall was the ‘battle order’, the ominous sheet of foolscap upon which were typed the names of the crews detailed to fly that night. ‘We’re on!’ Jeff remembers someone announcing.

  Rumour went around that the target was Nuremberg, the same city that barely a year before had claimed ninety-six aircraft shot down in the most disastrous single night in the RAF’s history. Vague thoughts about trying to postpone their debut crossed their minds, but ‘No, this is what we do now’ was the thought that settled them as they made their way to the briefing.

  Jeff’s tour was a short one, but his evocation of the day-to-day life on a bomber station is like a window into another time. ‘Have you seen those old movies?’ he asks, referring to the ubiquitous briefing-room scenes in black-and-white war epics like The Dam Busters, where smoking, fidgeting airmen – gathered as if in the assemblies they had so recently attended as schoolboys – prepare themselves to be told the ‘target for tonight’. ‘That’s just what it was like,’ says Jeff.

  On a stage at the front of the long briefing room, a curtain was drawn back to reveal a map of Western Europe with coloured tape showing the routes to the target and home again. Often, an audible gasp from the men would release some of the tension. The Commanding Officer would perform a role: part host, part lecturer and headmaster. ‘Well, gentlemen, tonight we’re off to …’ and the briefing would begin. But at this school, everyone listened with an intensity that was almost unbearable. From this point on, the airfield was in lockdown. Telephones were disconnected, and no one could come or go. The whole community of the aerodrome was essentially cut off from the outside world. For some, it would be forever.

  After the main briefing, the various crew members would break off to receive their particular, specialised instructions. Jeff’s began first, in the ‘nav room’ sometimes as early as two p.m. Here, he and his fellow navigators worked side by side, digesting the myriad details of weather, wind direction, bombing altitudes and courses, plotting the zigzagging route to the target on maps with coloured lines.

  At around 5 p.m., the trucks would arrive to take the crews, kitted out in flying gear, to the aircraft. Standing under the big black planes, Jeff remembers hearing the low distant roar of hundreds of other aircraft running-up their engines from the dozens of other airfields for miles around. It was a sensation both comforting and frightening.

  At the appointed time, they would climb into the aircraft, settle into their positions, recheck their equipment and wait for the order of take off.

  ‘I wasn’t particularly nervous,’ says Jeff of his first trip, which indeed turned out to be Nuremberg. He even recalls some bravado, announcing with gusto over the intercom, ‘Righto, everyone, Nuremberg and back!’

  The navigator often saw almost nothing of the fiery world into which he was flying. He sat behind the pilot in a small, curtained-off area that hid the glow of his map-reading light. If he wanted to, he could poke his head up into the perspex astrodome at the rear of the canopy, but he usually chose not to. ‘The job was quite absorbing,’ he says. ‘Anyway, I didn’t want to see too much.’ But he could hear everything.

  When the bomb doors opened underneath him, he could feel the draught coming up through the floor, then the ‘pings’ as the spring-loaded releases let go of the bombs. Then the aircraft surged upwards, and he would need to hold his pens and pencils to his small metal desk to stop them flying around.

  His job kept him busy. At the start of every leg of the route, he would wait for the sweep hand of his
watch to touch ‘12’ then give the pilot an instruction: ‘Turn 040 … now.’ Every six minutes, he would plot their position on the chart, which was checked meticulously by the Navigation Officer back at the squadron.

  He was plugged into the intercom, an audience to the dramas unfolding around him. He could hear the two gunners in particular. ‘Is that a fighter out there on the port beam?’ and the pilot cutting in, ‘Don’t talk unless you have to!’

  Once, hearing a description of a nearby aircraft on fire, he remembers his hand shaking as he filled in his log. ‘If anyone asked how much my life was worth now,’ he thought, ‘I’d say about thruppence.’

  Only occasionally did Jeff peer out into the battle. Once, he immediately saw an aircraft explode on the starboard side. On another, a daylight to Heligoland to attack U-boat pens, he saw a huge chunk of cliff hit by bombs and detach, crashing into the sea and throwing up an enormous wave. On that trip, a Halifax, in trouble and signalling that it was losing height, gradually went down into the water. Jeff radioed its position somewhere over the North Sea but later heard the rescue launch failed to locate it on the crew.

  ‘After a couple of trips, though, you got used to it,’ he says.

  It was an old Staffordshire farm worker back in training who gave Jeff’s crew their own piece of folklore in the form of ‘Jasper’s Hat’. Jock, the bomb aimer, was apparently a fine singer and would nightly entertain the locals in the pub. One of them, old Jasper, wore a distinctive bowler and would lend it to the singing Scot to get him going. On the night before they left to commence operations, Jasper presented his hat to the crew in a brown paper bag as a keepsake. It immediately became their talisman, accompanying them on every trip into Germany. Only when the lights of the target could be seen would the ceremony begin. The two gunners, Snowy and Jack, would start it off. ‘Have you got the hat on, Titch?’

  ‘Yes, rear gunner,’ the pilot would reply. ‘The hat is now on.’ It must have looked ludicrous: a pilot in flying gear and helmet, atop which sat a battered bowler hat while flak and searchlights erupted around him. But it gave them all just a little something extra to cling to. ‘He looked rather ridiculous,’ says Jeff, ‘but we all felt a little bit safer.’

  In newspaper articles over the years, the story of ‘Jasper’s Hat’ has been retold, and the surviving members of the crew have been asked many times to bring out the tale. Today, the hat itself resides somewhere deep within the bowels of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. One day, perhaps it will be on show, a testament to the dangers and eccentricities of the bomber war over Europe.

  One trip to Hanau was spent in a particular state of tension. Petrol from one of the wing tanks leaked and the entire aircraft reeked of fuel. One spark in the wrong place could have turned the aircraft into an inferno. It was too risky even to drop the bombs and the aircraft had no choice but to risk landing with a full load.

  Only once, on a trip to Hamburg, was Jeff’s aircraft attacked by a German fighter. ‘I had an upset stomach and had gone back to sit on the Elsan toilet at the rear of the aircraft just as a jet fighter attacked,’ he says. At 25 000 feet, while his trousers were down, the aircraft went into a corkscrew, throwing Jeff, his bare bottom and most of the contents of the pan into the air. As the Lancaster manoeuvred, he was thrown hard back onto the bare metal seat, sticking to it like the inside of a freezer. ‘If I ever get out of this I’ll never be scared of anything again,’ he said to himself, leaving a fair amount of skin behind on the seat. ‘I laughed about it, but only later,’ he says. It was very nearly a most ignominious end.

  One trip he remembers particularly well is the Anzac Day visit to Hitler’s home at Berchtesgarten in the Bavarian Alps – 25 April 1945. ‘I looked out and could see all these aircraft – black spots all flying in one direction against the solid white clouds,’ he says. Amazingly, just as the force of over 300 bombers reached the difficult mountain target of Hitler’s chalet and the local SS barracks, the clouds parted. ‘I looked down at the barracks and could see tiny ant-like figures running everywhere before the bombs started hitting.’

  At war’s end, he was flying still, this time dropping not bombs but supplies to the starving populations of Europe on ‘Manna’ raids, as well as bringing home some of the many thousands of prisoners of war, some of whom – emaciated and exhausted – had been in captivity for four years. ‘They cried as we came over the white cliffs of Dover,’ remembers Jeff.

  One of the most memorable stories Jeff told me occurred on the Berchtesgarten raid not to himself but to his good friend, ‘Lofty’ Payne, whose Lancaster had taken several direct flak hits approaching the target and was the last to bomb. Despite the plane’s severely damaged wing, fuselage, engine and bomb doors, he continued the run to the target. The outer engines then caught fire and the aircraft began to lose height. Payne ordered the crew to bale out, as he intended to do himself.

  For the rear gunner however, it was not so easy. His parachute was stowed back inside the fuselage and he needed to access it, clip it on and exit via the rear door. On this occasion, in his excitement, he grabbed it not by the handle but the ripcord, and the whole thing burst open inside the aircraft. Gathering it up as best he could, he made his way forward through the riddled fuselage. ‘This is all I’ve got,’ he said to the pilot who was himself preparing to bale out. Payne looked at the forlorn young man clutching his pathetic bundle of white silk. ‘Okay. Well, take a seat and we’ll see if we can bring her down’. And he did. The rear gunner resumed his seat and the pilot brought the aircraft down for a miraculous crash-landing on the shores of Lake Constance.

  ‘Worth a medal I think. But he didn’t get one.’ I think they all deserved one, at the very least.

  ALISTAIR SMITH

  Flight Engineer, RAF

  ‘Right, now dig in. They’re wholemeal, and the funny ones there are ryebread.’ Thus I was welcomed into the home of Jean and Alistair Smith – a groaning plate of cakes and sandwiches set in front of me and a teapot the size of my head that was never allowed to run dry. I had come to talk to Alistair, because he was the only bloke I had met who had filled the very specialised and rather tricky role of Flight Engineer, perhaps the greatest unsung heroes of Bomber Command. Hardly any Australians were trained as flight engineers, so I had to rely on the goodwill of an immigrant from the British Isles. But in reality, I could have interviewed both him and his remarkable wife, for she also had served in the wartime RAF as a WAAF. They were quite the double act.

  Alistair, in his eighties, though you’d never know it to look at him, speaks with one of those wonderful, ancient-sounding accents, so soft as to be almost undetectable yet redolent of faraway places. Alistair comes from the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, and his is no typical brogue, but gentle, an accent probably unchanged in 500 years. I half expected him to break into Gaelic at any moment. His wife Jean, on the other hand, grew up twenty miles from London and her voice boomed in comparison. Strangely they complemented each other perfectly.

  ‘He took me up there before we were married to be vetted by the family,’ says Jean. ‘They were all so softly spoken. I felt like a bull in a china shop!’ Lucky for Alistair, she got the nod and they’ve been together ever since. Having seen the horror of the trenches, Jean’s parents, as well as her aunt, swore off having children to be ‘cannon-fodder for the government’.

  ‘Me and my cousin were mistakes!’ she laughs. And when the time came, Jean was as keen as any male to don a uniform. ‘I would have loved to have been somewhere where I could have had a rifle and a bayonet!’ she says, but had to content herself with being secretary to the chief instructor at No. 27 Operational Training Unit at Lichfield in Staffordshire. Not that this closeted her from the awfulness of war.

  ‘There was a form called Category E,’ she says: paperwork that needed to be completed after an aircraft crashed with no survivors. One night she listened to a Wellington circling the airfield, obviously in trouble. ‘They were still
under training and we watched from the flying control tower. Eventually it came in and bounced, crashed, started burning then skidded towards us.’ Frozen with their faces to the window, Jean and some other WAAFs watched helplessly. ‘We were just mesmerised by this flaming, smoking thing. Then we heard the screaming, and then the smell. Later I saw them taking the bodies out. It was just horrible.’ Training accidents in the wartime RAF were common. ‘After a few weeks I got hardened to it,’ she says.

  One of her jobs was handing out the maps and sweets and other comforts to the airmen as they prepared to depart, primarily on training flights, but occasionally on raids, such as the first ‘1000 bomber’ attack on Cologne, at the end of May 1942.

  The crews in their flight gear filed past Jean seated at a table. ‘There was a young navigator we knew – a lovely boy with blond hair. As I handed him his map, he leaned over the desk and gave me a hug and a kiss. “This is just to say goodbye,” he said. “I won’t see you again.” ’ ‘What do you mean?’ Jean asked. ‘I know I won’t be coming back.’ ‘He said it so casually,’ says Jean – and he didn’t. ‘He’d had a premonition, you see.’

  From beside the runway at take-off, Jean and the other WAAFs would see the big black bombers off, and she can still recall the pale young faces of the pilots who were waving from the cockpits as they lifted into the failing light. Soon, she would be married to one of them.

  With no recruiting depot on his remote Scottish island, Alistair joined up in Inverness, agreeing to his father’s plea to avoid any of the actual flying himself. ‘Your mother would be terribly worried, you know,’ Dad had said. Dutifully, Alistair became a mechanic, but quietly harboured ambitions to re-muster later as a pilot.

  Happy enough as an engine fitter, Alistair never missed an opportunity to scrounge a trip in the air. One of them he will always remember. On a chilly day, a flight lieutenant he knew was preparing to take a Wellington up for an air test, and Alistair asked to go along. ‘He was a nice chap,’ he remembers, but he couldn’t help noticing the small dog under the pilot’s arm, who likewise seemed to be coming along for the ride. It didn’t get off to a good start. As the Wellington thundered down the slushy, slippery runway in winter, a man on a bicycle suddenly appeared in front of them. ‘The pilot swore like anything and we only just missed him,’ says Alistair.