Once aloft, a hatch in the floor of the nose which had been left open began flapping in the wind. ‘Go down and close it for me, will you?’ asked the pilot. Alistair crawled down past the cockpit. Just as he put his hand on the hatch, the dog – ‘a little fat thing’ – appeared from nowhere and dashed straight through the open hole! Alistair just managed to get a hand on it, but for a while the mutt – not to mention a significant part of Alistair – dangled outside the aircraft. ‘There wasn’t much of him to grab hold of,’ he says. ‘I managed to get him in in the end but I nearly lost the little fellow.’ The dog, one presumes, was not wearing a parachute.
At his OTU, Alistair befriended Norman Jackson, another mechanic who, among other things, introduced him to a particularly perky girl in a WAAF uniform one night at a dance. Jean fills in the rest.
‘All us girls had parked ourselves on a table near the bar. Norman wandered over and introduced us to all these boys.’
‘No, there was only me with him,’ protests Alistair.
‘No, there was somebody else,’ says Jean.
‘We were the only two that worked together.’
‘Well there was somebody hanging around, then.’
‘No, I think I was the only one there.’
I quietly reach for another cake and scoff some more tea, while they wrangle over the details of their courting days. Eventually they arrive at a compromise, the details of which escape me.
One day in early 1942 as Alistair and Norman worked on a Beaufighter engine, someone wandered over from the orderly room. ‘There’s a new trade out, and you people are eligible for it.’
Alistair remembers it well. ‘Norman and I went straight in and put our names down,’ he says.
The advent of the four-engine bomber meant an almost quadrupling of the aircraft’s fuel and electrical systems, which needed to be monitored full time when in flight by a specialist, and so the highly technical position of Flight Engineer was created. They were mainly drawn from the ranks of ground crew, retrained for the job, and had to know the aircraft inside out. The flight engineer sat behind and to the right of the pilot, who he would assist in take-off by securing his hand on the throttles, and with some very basic straight-and-level flying training, he could sometimes assist in an emergency. His ‘office’ was a seat in front of a panel of dials and switches, all of which he would have to read like a book: oil temperature, oil pressure, coolant, ammeters, boost and so on, more than twenty gauges vital to the internal running of the aircraft. He also had to monitor the complicated fuel system. The Stirling had no fewer than fourteen separate fuel tanks which needed to be balanced and monitored for consumption. The engineer was always the last to join the crew at a Heavy Conversion Unit but, paradoxically, was often its oldest member. It was a job Alistair enjoyed. ‘I liked to be always in front of the gauges because if we were hit, I wanted to be on top of things. And we were hit quite a bit,’ he says.
For Alistair, the transition from ground crew to aircrew was a quick one: Birmingham to front a selection board, further training at St Athen in Wales, joining a crew at Stradishall Heavy Conversion Unit and, finally, posting to No. 90 Squadron, 3 Group, Bomber Command at Wratting Common, Cambridgeshire, flying Short Stirling heavy bombers.
His skipper was Colin Hodges – like Alistair, a sergeant. He was brilliant, says Alistair, but already with a chequered career after a court martial for what Alistair euphemistically describes as ‘a low-flying incident’. With a little prodding, he elaborates. As an instructor in Tiger Moths, Hodges had apparently amused himself with a spot of pheasant-shooting from the back of the aeroplane with a shotgun! Unfortunately, the pheasants in question belonged to the estate of some influential toff or other, and the full wrath of military justice descended upon him. Despite this, Alistair freely acknowledges owing his life to Colin on more than one occasion.
The Stirling had the essence of a great aircraft, but was compromised from the start. It was in fact the RAF’s first four-engine bomber and Short Brothers won the contract to produce it in the mid-1930s. They had already made a name for themselves for the manufacture of flying boats and initially proposed using the wings of their Sunderland on the new bomber. This, however, would bring the Stirling’s wingspan to 110 feet, ever-so-slightly too wide for the doors of the standard RAF hangar. Eleven feet were therefore ‘chopped off’ the wingtips, upsetting its aerodynamics and condemning it to a lifetime of problems. It was wretched to handle when on the ground, difficult to get off it, and when it did, showed a reluctance to get up very high – 16500 feet was the Stirling’s woefully inadequate ceiling, a full 7000 feet closer to the ground, in fact, than its contemporary, the Lancaster.
On take-off, the Stirling took so long to get itself into the air that they decided to jack up the undercarriage to increase the angle of incidence and improve the airflow over the wings. It worked, but made the nose sit a ludicrously high twenty-two feet off the ground, and its complicated, extended undercarriage was prone to collapse. It was also extremely difficult to steer with the rudder. ‘We’d start on the right-hand side of the runway and invariably take off across the grass,’ remembers Alistair. Accidents were frequent.
Once fully airborne, however, the Stirling was a lovely aeroplane: highly engineered and very manoeuvrable. ‘We could even out-turn some of the fighters,’ Alistair says. It was extremely robust and could absorb significant punishment, and its four sleeve-valve Bristol Hercules engines were also relatively quiet.
After just a couple of days orientation, the new crews were placed on the battle order and given some ‘easy’ mine-laying or ‘gardening’ trips. Designed to break the newcomers in gradually, laying sea mines was nevertheless highly dangerous work. The mines themselves were extremely sensitive – a jolt of more than 6G would automatically detonate them, so emergency landings with them still in the bomb bay were out of the question. When deployed in busy harbours and sea lanes, they had to be dropped at low speed and at no more than a frightening 1500 feet. ‘One time we went all the way down the Bay of Biscay, and could see the lights of San Sebastian in Spain,’ says Alistair. Other trips were not so benign. One night, Alistair’s Stirling was one of three sent to mine Flushing Harbour in Holland. A mobile flak platform shot the other two into the sea. His aircraft returned alone.
Although he participated in a number of conventional bombing raids (‘We hit some railway yards. You’d see whole carriages coming up in the air in the glare of the bomb bursts like toys,’ he remembers), high losses led to the Stirling’s eventual withdrawal from main-force attacks. But its strength and excellent low-level handling made it just the thing for night-time cloak-and-dagger business, supplying resistance organisations across occupied Europe.
Alistair and his skipper Colin liked flying low. Six hundred feet was the recommended height, but even this was sometimes too high to be safe. ‘At six hundred, they could see you coming, but lower down you were on top of them before they realised,’ he says. This is when the Stirling’s robustness came into its own.
‘They threw everything up at us,’ he says. ‘The bomb aimer even got hit with a rifle bullet.’ He recalls it clearly. It had been a quiet night, and they were on their way back from Strasbourg. Approaching a hill, the pilot called upon the bomb aimer to assist with the rev controls. Alistair remembers them passing over some great Chateau in the moonlight. As the bomb aimer leaned over – bang – a lucky round, probably a lone pot shot from the ground, passed through the aircraft nose into the middle of the bomb aimer’s seat and right through the bone in his arm. ‘I bunged it up as best I could,’ says Alistair. ‘If he’d been sitting back he would have been killed.’
Even over-flying supposedly safe areas of open country could be dangerous, as the Germans employed mobile flak batteries, mounted on trucks that could hide and wait undetected. One night, on the way out to a rendezvous point on a map, Alistair watched as the ploughed fields and houses passed beneath him in the moonlight. ‘I liked these low-levels
,’ he says. ‘You felt you had a personal connection with the people you saw.’ In a memory that borders on the surreal, he recalls seeing the door of a house opening and a woman ‘in a long black dress’ illuminated for an instant in the light of oil lamps before the image vanished into the darkness a moment later. It’s stayed with him for more than sixty years.
Sometimes the only way to find the target was to pinpoint your way there in stages, and much of Alistair’s time was spent looking out with a map in his hand, finding his way to a field in the corner of a wood at the foothills of the Alps. ‘Fly up a road here, over a bridge there. It was often the only way to do it,’ he recalls. He rarely knew what it was they were carrying, but at the appointed spot, he would watch for a signal from the ground and release the cargo from the bomb bay. Figures would then dash out into the moonlight below to collect the booty, the fuel with which they carried on their difficult and dangerous war. Once they were about to drop when all hell suddenly broke loose below. Gun flashes indicated the resistance had been surprised by the Germans. ‘We would have used our own guns on them, but in the dark we couldn’t tell who was who,’ he says. Helpless, the Stirling turned around and took its cargo back to England, a glumness pervading the trip home. ‘That was a wasted drop,’ he says, still a little bitter.
Sometimes, they would be required to drop high up in the Alps. Looking out the clear astrodome behind the cockpit, Alistair would watch as shining black walls of wet rock rose out of the darkness and passed by alarmingly close. In an aircraft with a poor ceiling, this was risky indeed, and needed all the skill of an excellent pilot. In that, Alistair was lucky. ‘We had several Stirlings lost in those Alps,’ he says.
Standing under the astrodome one night, he watched a long, white road with poplars on either side pass beneath him, as he listened to the sound of his skipper’s breathing in the intercom. ‘The pilot was the only one always on the intercom. If you could hear him breathing, you knew you were alright,’ he says.
Suddenly, the blinding glare of a searchlight hit him, then up came the flak. The rear gunner began firing away with his four machine guns, and the pilot, to put the Germans off their aim, dropped even lower. ‘We were actually beneath the tops of the trees,’ says Alistair. ‘I looked back and could see the road dust coming up from our slipstream.’ On the tape, I can hear myself release an audible gasp.
Sparks began shooting off the wings and he knew the aircraft was taking hits from small-arms fire. He returned to the fuel gauges to monitor any leaks in the tanks when, as he puts it suddenly, and in the loudest voice I’ve heard him use, ‘Wham!’
‘Something hit me on the chest and knocked me out. I didn’t know where I was.’ He found himself on the other side of the fuselage upside down between the radio racks. Looking back to where he had just been, something struck him as odd – the sight of the aircraft’s spinning propellers. His mind clearing, he realised that in place of the panel of gauges he had just been reading was a vast hole in the side of the fuselage. From me, another gasp.
His knee hurt, and the buckle on his parachute harness was mangled, but otherwise he thought he was pretty much unhurt. Breathing, though, was very difficult, and this worried him. The radio operator was out cold, slumped over his wireless and covered in light shrapnel wounds – tiny jagged holes in his tunic, and his hand bleeding. Then the rear gunner called up, ‘Fuel’s pouring all over me!’ Alistair looked out towards the wing. The flak had ripped through the leading edge and shattered one of the fuel tanks, and the contents were being sucked into the rear gunner’s compartment.
The electrical instruments had gone, as had the compass and the gauges indicating how much fuel remained. In this state, they carried on to the target and dropped successfully, then returned home. It was the kind of thing that would often earn a pilot and his crew a decoration for bravery. They got nothing. Court-martialled pilots, it seems, whatever their courage, were ignored. Alistair couldn’t care less. The plain old campaign medals, he says, mean far more to him anyway.
‘Tell him about crashing with full bomb load and petrol when three engines failed,’ Jean calls out from the kitchen, no doubt preparing another feast. I blink a bit and look at him expectantly.
Their own aircraft had been borrowed one night by their flight commander who was promptly shot down, leaving them with the squadron spare – a kite with the appropriate designation of D-Dog. It was not a popular aeroplane. ‘We’d flown to Kiel in this thing and had to feather the engines coming back. It was a horrible rogue of an aircraft; nobody wanted it,’ says Alistair. Reps from the Bristol company even came down to look the engines over and sort them out, to no avail.
D-Dog, however, was what was available, and D-Dog was what they flew for several uneasy trips. Having just left the runway en route to a target on one of them, Alistair hit the switch to bring the electrically powered undercarriage up and … nothing. Probably just a fuse, he thought, and changed it over. It blew immediately. Feeling distinctly uneasy about all this, he checked the current: ‘positive earth’. Somewhere in this lame duck of an aircraft was a short. He informed the skipper.
‘What shall we do, engineer?’ was the reply. ‘Do we carry on or turn back?’ The mission was in his hands. It was a moment, Alistair says, in which he felt himself grow up very quickly. Turning back would mean having to dump much of the fuel, as well as the valuable cargo of high explosives for the resistance. Alistair considered his reply. ‘Well, if we can get the two gunners to wind up the wheels manually, Skip, we might be able to carry on.’ The decision was made. They flew on into the night.
It took no fewer than 774 turns on each side to wind the wheels up. As Alistair watched the gunners sweat away on a long handle, he heard the pilot’s urgent voice in his ears. ‘Engineer, starboard outer’s cut. Come up to the cockpit!’ The evening was rapidly deteriorating. There was no question of carrying on to the target now. The pilot turned the aircraft around back towards the airfield for an emergency landing. Then, ‘Starboard inner’s cut – crash stations everyone!’ He looked forward through the canopy. ‘The nose was tilted straight down towards the ground. I remember seeing the aerodrome controller’s caravan door wide open,’ says Alistair. ‘He must have heard us coming and run for cover!’
The faulty engines now decided to catch fire as 73 000 pounds of aircraft, explosives and 100-octane fuel crash-landed near a wood off the side of the runway and skidded along the ground. ‘I remember earth coming up the stairs from the bomb aimer’s compartment,’ says Alistair. The burning wing sheared off as they scraped along, expecting oblivion at any moment. ‘The sound was horrible – a twisting scraping noise,’ he says, likening it to a recording of Cyclone Tracy he once heard in Darwin Museum – I’ve heard the same thing – a demented, shrieking whine. Incredibly, it remained in one piece – testament to this aeroplane’s construction. Unhurt but slightly shocked, Alistair became aware of the rest of the crew filing past him through the escape door. ‘Come on, Smithy!’ shouted the rear gunner. They huddled in the trees and watched the aircraft smoulder a bit but there was no explosion.
Nor was there any subsequent enquiry as to why they had been made to fly an aircraft they had already reported as faulty. ‘They gave us a check-up, a bottle of rum and seven days’ leave,’ says Alistair. At least they would never again have to fly D-Dog. It was written off, mourned by no one.
On one of the last trips of his tour, Alistair dropped dummy parachutists behind the German lines near Rouen on D-Day. Upon hitting the ground, a spike would detonate very noisy flashes and explosions to kid the Germans that these painted wooden midget soldiers were the real thing. As the cool, grey dawn broke on that momentous day, he skimmed low over endless lines of numbered ships, agog at the power spread out below. ‘Are they all ours?’ he said to himself. ‘They can’t be all ours.’ But of course they were. As the momentous battles in Normandy and beyond got underway, Alistair’s war drew to a close.
Late in the afternoon, I take my lea
ve, thanking the quietly spoken Alistair and his vivacious wife for their time and hospitality. I drive away, no doubt leaving many newly dredged emotions to be dealt with in my wake. Heading home, my mind returns to a comment made by Jean on the doorstep, a comment that oddly seems to put some kind of perspective on those few brief but tumultuous years spent over the course of a long, shared life. ‘Yes, they were exciting days,’ she said, turning to her husband of more than six decades, ‘weren’t they, love?’
HEINZ [HENRY] HEMPEL
Pilot, Luftwaffe
It was a long, long time before Henry could talk about the war, even to his own family. Oddly enough, it took another ex-air force bloke to get him to open up, and then only by way of a sleight of hand. A couple of years ago, a mate of his persuaded Henry to come along to a local air force association meeting in the country town where he lived. It wasn’t the thing he usually did, and he felt awkward among all these chummy ex-RAAF blokes who all seemed to know each other so well.
A guest speaker was a regular feature of these half-yearly get-togethers – usually a local retelling the same well-worn anecdotes most had heard many times before. More often than not it was the cue to duck out and get another beer or catch up with a mate by the bar. But tonight would be different. ‘Tonight we have in our midst a very special person,’ Henry’s friend announced to the gathering. ‘Someone who can tell it from the other side. I’d like to welcome as our guest this evening, pilot and former Leutnant of the German Luftwaffe, Mister Henry Hempel.’ Stunned, but with no escape route in sight, Henry had no alternative but to walk awkwardly to the lectern, every eye in the room upon him. ‘I … don’t know if I have much to say,’ he began hesitantly. Forty minutes later however, he found he indeed did have much to say, and to people who very much wanted to hear it. Throughout his impromptu talk about his five years in the Luftwaffe, the room stood still and the bar remained empty. Not bad for a bloke who had once been ‘the enemy’.
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