Volunteering on each occasion, Henry flew into the Stalingrad Kessel five times before the surrender, each one of the missions like a nightmare.
A welcome change in the dynamic comes from Lil, Henry’s younger and elegant companion of the last few years, who comes and sits with us for a while. It gives Henry a chance to regroup as we sip tea. It’s likely Lil just came to say hello but she stays longer, listening, I suspect, to the story of Henry’s war in detail for the first time.
In contrast to his time in the snows of Russia, Henry continued his operational tour of the Third Reich with a short stint in support of the Italians in the Mediterranean. ‘The bloody Italians were bloody useless!’ he says loudly, perhaps having held it back for years. Coming over to the south of Italy with a squadron of Messerschmitt 110s, the crews were told of the dangers – not from the enemy, but from the local women! ‘We were warned not to go near them,’ he says. ‘The mafia were very jealous about their sheilas, you see. We were told there was a knife behind every one of them!’
Henry bombed British and American airfields on Sicily and Malta. ‘They had airfields in the mountains. They covered them with netting so we couldn’t see, but we knew they were there. We dropped bombs right in front of the doors where they had the aircraft so they couldn’t get them out!’ He’s quite proud of that one.
A call comes in from his district nurse, just checking up. Sitting listening to him, his animation rising again, his natural preoccupation with health contrasts with the frenetic descriptions of his youth.
Some things Henry talks about easily, while other information is harder to extract. I gradually glean that as well as being decorated for his work with bombers, he was an outstanding fighter pilot, particularly in Russia. Here, he again flew the 110 against the legendary Russian Sturmovik ground attack aircraft, of which a staggering 36 000 were built – the Soviet factory workers rolling them out the factory doors often in bare, unpainted metal. These virtual flying tanks were heavy, powerful and full of armour plate – even on the undersurface of the wings. ‘You had to know how to attack one,’ says Henry. ‘They were by no means easy to shoot down. From the wrong angle you just watched your bullets and cannon bounce off the sides. I attacked them from the top.’ Here again, he becomes a little cagey.
Did he consider himself a good fighter pilot. ‘Well, yes,’ he says. ‘I think so. I had bloody good eyes back then, you know.’ ‘So how many did you shoot down?’ I’m in touchy territory here. He has already told me how much he hates being asked this question. ‘The core of my fighting – well, that’s my business and nobody else’s,’ he says. Then, almost inaudibly he mutters, ‘Around sixty.’
I have met fighter pilots who have been credited with three or four kills, but sixty is astounding. Doing my best to conceal my amazement, I politely tell him it sounds like an extraordinary total. Upon reflection, however, I decide that it’s really quite conceivable. There is, after all, no reason I can think of for Henry to make it up – he’s already let me know a few things that wouldn’t necessarily reflect well on him and which he could quite easily have concealed – and besides, the numbers of Soviet aircraft destroyed by the Luftwaffe against the often barely trained pilots of the Red Air Force are incredible, running into the tens of thousands.
For the German fighter pilots, Russia was at times a shooting spree. Nearly eighty aces have been recorded with 100 kills or more: Wilhelm Lemke is accredited with 125; Rudolf Trenkel 138 – with ten kills in twelve days. Walter Nowotny was at 252 when his Messerschmitt jet fighter ploughed nose-first into the ground, and then there was the master of them all, the slightly built, almost girlish-looking Erich ‘Bubi’ Hartmann, the highest-scoring ace of any war and any nationality. This remarkable young man accounted for an astonishing 352 enemy aircraft, every one of them in Russia, and survived postwar imprisonment to eventually become part of the West German Air Force.
Next to these giants, Henry’s sixty looks relatively modest.
It was always his wish to fly single-engine fighters. Goodness knows what his total would have been had they let him.
‘The Russian pilots weren’t trained like we were, you see,’ he assures me. Henry met and spoke to a Russian fighter pilot after the war. ‘He had thirty-three kills and was wearing the Hero of the Soviet Union. I didn’t tell him what I’d been doing, or how many I had.’
I thought this might be an opportune time to try and get him to open up a little about his earlier exploits over England – how many Spitfire and Hurricane pilots similarly fell victim to his guns? But he is not to be fooled by my clunky efforts, and appeals to me instead.
‘You know, I just can’t tell you that. My son has asked me and I didn’t tell him either. I’m in a different boat, you see. Those people are my friends now.’ Feeling about the size of a matchbox, I promise myself not to push him again. ‘And you know what,’ he adds, ‘no Australian has ever called me a Nazi.’ One day, though, some Russians weren’t so sure, and it nearly cost him his life.
At the end of a long war Henry found himself in Yugoslavia, scuttling his remaining Messerschmitts on an airfield far from home. It broke his heart to do so, but those were his orders. Despite the years of continual flying and combat, it was here, on the ground amid the chaos of a collapsing Europe that Henry Hempel had his closest brush with death.
He doesn’t remember how long the war had been over but it can only have been a matter of days. Victorious, rampaging Russian soldiers were everywhere, taking what they liked, doing what they liked to whomever they chose.
In a small village, his war lost, his aircraft gone, an exhausted Henry lay under a farmer’s cart. ‘I must have fallen asleep,’ he says, because he was startled by a swift kick to his leg. Peering out, he saw three sets of Russian army boots. ‘Shit. Moscow here I come,’ he thought. They were two young soldiers and an officer, all holding machine-pistols and staring at him in chilly silence. They dragged him to his feet and looked him up and down. They spoke to him in Russian. Acting as docile as he could, he nodded and smiled, barely understanding a word. Then he remembered the Luger pistol he had concealed in his trouser pocket. Henry knew that if the Russians searched him and found it, they would shoot him on the spot. ‘It was the worst moment in my life,’ he says today. ‘After five fucking years fighting in this war, I was going to be shot right here or be put on a train and die in snow and ice in Russia,’ he says.
For some reason, they did not search him. Instead Henry was led into a paddock, watched closely all the while by the Russians, who appeared to pay particular attention to his trousers. This triggered something in Henry. The trousers! A little earlier, fearing just such a reprisal against officers, he had changed into a pair of ordinary soldier’s pants he found in an abandoned truck. He couldn’t, though, find a tunic to match. So, instead of an airman disguising himself as a soldier, the Russians believed they had in their hands a soldier disguising himself as an airman. That he was disguising himself at all could mean only one thing: he was SS and therefore deserving of an instant death sentence. Sure enough, Henry picked out ‘SS’ in their conversation and knew he had to think fast.
‘Kamerad, Kamerad!’ he protested, gesticulating in pidgin Russian as they seemed to clutch their machine-pistols a little tighter. ‘No SS! Pilota! Neminsky pilota!’ He then undid his trousers to show them not the printed flash of the SS on the lining, but the standard German Army eagle. The Russians took it in, talked a bit more, then, says Henry, ‘just turned around and walked off’.
Henry is now looking quite tired. He says quietly, ‘I stood there in the paddock for a long time, just wondering what to do.’
Eventually, he wandered off, at one stage approaching another group of defeated Germans in uniform. Something, though, made him stop. He turned around and decided to make his own way back to Germany.
After an ordeal of many weeks spent dodging internment, scrounging food and grabbing lifts on anything moving westwards – as well as countless miles on fo
ot – Henry found his way back through the turmoil of defeat to his home in Breslau. Like much of the rest of Europe, it had been flattened. Listlessly, he gravitated to a small village where, after a long time, he settled and met his wife, formed a small musical band and eventually rebuilt his life.
‘When I came back from the war I was a different person,’ he tells me. ‘I didn’t give a fuck about Russians or Americans or anyone and I let them know it. My wife said, “You’ll finish up in Siberia if you carry on like that.” ’ Instead, eight years later, they both ended up in a Victorian country town and never looked back.
Henry’s war was a long one, told to me in an amazing series of anecdotes that weave in and out in fits and starts. In talking to me, he has shown bravery and much honesty and I indeed feel privileged to have been his last audience.
As I prepare to leave after many hours, Henry seems relieved of some of the burden of his memories and is again in good spirits. He tells me he has enjoyed himself and invites me to come back to talk some more. I promise to do so.
We emerge into a clear, cooling sky in his quiet street and a flight of yellow-tailed black cockatoos pass lazily overhead, squeaking like rusty door hinges.
For men like Henry, as well as Peter, there were, of course, no parades, nor should there have been. But neither have they had the sympathy and support of a grateful nation, or even that little comfort given to those other men whose experiences can be shared on days of reunion in pubs and clubs amid laughter and memory and tears. Like them, their youth was hurled into a cauldron of loss and destruction, but this legacy has been one dealt with entirely alone.
‘You know, Michael,’ Henry says, turning to me at his gate, ‘some people tell funny stories about the war. I have no funny stories to tell. I’ve seen people falling out of planes when their parachute didn’t work – desperately twisting and turning in the sky to try to make it open. Other things, too, that I can’t tell you about – can’t tell anyone about. I had ulcers from all the flying – vomiting all the time from the stress of it. I’m a soft bloke now, but I was a bastard in the war. Some people have said I should write a book about it all, but what I have seen and what I did, and saw others do, well, it would just make me cry.’
I can see the old blokes of the RAAF listening to him, mesmerised, and thinking how similar it had all been for them, and for all the young men caught up in the terrible storm.
MAX DURHAM
Pilot, RAAF
Some people age in both body and spirit, some in mind only, while others seem to escape the process altogether. Despite some lucid encounters with a wide variety of men of the World War II generation, there was always the inevitable gulf of years that yawned between us. But when I sat down and started speaking to Max Durham, I felt like I was in the company of a contemporary, and a pretty sharp one at that.
Max even remembers what they asked him on the form when he signed up, just to make sure he wasn’t a complete dill: ‘Captain Cook made three voyages of the Pacific. On which one was he killed?’
To join the air force, Max had made the trip into Melbourne from his home in Bacchus Marsh. He still lives there, in a house he built himself after the war. It’s a lovely home, with some interesting works of art, and we sit looking out over his immaculate garden drinking tea and devouring (well, I devoured them) a packet of Mint Slices. ‘That’s where my crew and I used to have our reunions,’ he says, indicating the lawn through the large window.
Initially, though, he was a little wary of me, and whatever it was I was up to. When I phoned him, we chatted cautiously for a while before he asked me one particularly pointed question: ‘Tell me, where do you stand on the whole Dresden business?’ I considered my answer carefully. ‘Well, Max,’ I began, ‘I think the reasons for attacking Dresden are still murky at best’ – at this point I heard a disapproving grunt – ‘but blaming the airmen who took part – who were ordered to take part – I’ve always thought unfair, and even absurd.’ That was good enough for him, and he agreed to my request for an interview.
I’ve often felt that many former Bomber Command men knew just what those young men returning from Vietnam in the early 1970s went through. Like them, they had felt bitterness and confusion when, having answered their country’s call and headed overseas to war, they had returned to face often open hostility from their own community.
Even before the firebombing of Dresden, the tide of opinion regarding the area bombing of German cities had begun to turn, with many British politicians – particularly those from the incoming Atlee Labour government – keen to promote the idea that the nurturing of Bomber Command from its virtual incompetence at the start of the war to the terrible weapon of mass destruction into which it had evolved six years later was akin to the creation of a Frankenstein.
Numbers of deaths quoted from Dresden have been revised up and down over the decades. Depending on who you believe, between 60 000 and 160 000 people were killed in the raid and debate still rages fiercely as to why this relatively unindustrialised city, swollen with refugees, was chosen for a major attack twelve weeks before the end of the war. Was it really that important a communications centre? Was the Zeiss optical works a ‘significant’ military target? Was it all done simply to terrorise the German people, or to impress the Russians? These and other matters will no doubt be speculated on for another sixty years at least, but the facts are that it took just fifteen hours for over a thousand heavy bombers to wipe out Dresden’s magnificent Baroque centre in a massive, manmade firestorm, along with countless treasures of Western art.
When news of the devastation started to filter out, a sourness began to pervade the upper echelons of Britain’s fragile wartime coalition government. A planned Bomber Command campaign medal was cancelled, and a disgusted Air Chief Marshal Harris turned down a peerage in protest. Winston Churchill, one of area bombing’s earliest and most slavering enthusiasts, began to turn against the whole idea, and in hushed tones, an unfamiliar term began to be uttered in the corridors of Whitehall: ‘war crime’.
The airmen of Bomber Command themselves began to sense the turning of the worm. Having lost 55 000 of their number executing a policy once deemed vital to the defeat of Germany, it is understandable that some survivors might have felt a little bitter. ‘Harris was virtually in disgrace,’ says Max, ‘and so were we.’
Whether Max was even on the Dresden raid remains to be seen. What is certain is that the young Max wanted to be a pilot. That, after all, was the reason he, along with 90 per cent of the 400 other inductees of 34 Course, Number 1 Initial Training School, had joined the air force in the first place. In late 1942, Max stood on the parade ground waiting for his name to be called out. ‘The following will fall out to be trained as navigators,’ announced the booming voice of the flight sergeant. He survived the first cut. ‘The following will fall out to be trained as wireless operators.’ He waited with bated breath for the Ds to go by, then with a quiet exhalation, knew at that moment he was to become a pilot. ‘There were a lot of happy faces, and a lot of blokes just about crying,’ he says.
Then it was down to Western Junction in Tasmania for Elementary Flying Training, where he went solo in seven hours and was assessed ‘sound average’. Much of it depended on what kind of trainer you had. ‘Some of them were brutal bastards who just abused you,’ he says. ‘I was lucky. I had a real gentleman.’
The thoroughness of Max’s recollections extends to his logbook, in which he has preserved such intriguing memorabilia as a diagram of the fuel system of the Airspeed Oxford trainer, which he had to learn by heart.
‘You were always frightened you were going to be scrubbed. Even though you were going to a war. Sounds silly, doesn’t it?’ he says. In fact, Max was very lucky not to have been scrubbed – for an indiscretion entirely of his own making.
‘I came over and shot this place up,’ he tells me, glancing out the window towards some fruit trees. Based just a few minutes flying time away at Point Cook, Max decided on a qu
ick low-level home visit after a training flight one afternoon in his twin-engine Oxford. ‘We lived up on the side of a hill back then. I came in and flew level with my own back door!’ he tells me.
The fun stopped, however, when he caught sight of the air observer’s post in the corner of the local reserve and a figure clearly looking up at him through a pair of binoculars. ‘God help me, I’m caught,’ thought Max. He needed to come up with something fast. Hightailing it back to Point Cook, he immediately put in a leave pass and quickly made his way home by road. There, he approached the same observation post he had seen from the air a few hours earlier, its occupant now nowhere to be seen. Inside, he found what he was looking for: the report slip, filled in with all the details of his afternoon’s indiscretion – aircraft type, number, time etc., and tore it out of the book. ‘I’ve still got it,’ he says, laughing. ‘I didn’t hear anything more about it.’ With the authorities none the wiser, Max received his wings on a rainy afternoon in July 1942.
To Sydney he went, then San Francisco, and across America to New York by train en route to Europe. ‘The Americans were fascinated by us,’ he says. ‘They huddled in little groups and listened to us talking, saying, “They even talk American.” ’ (I tell him I had a similar experience there five years ago.) Then on to Britain via the Queen Mary at thirty knots to avoid the U-boats and start his war in earnest.
Arthur Miller once said that you never really forget anything. Think hard, and you’ll recall a piece of orange peel you once glanced at on the footpath twenty years ago. Talking to Max, I well believe it. I feel I could ask Max to tell me exactly what he was doing at any given hour of his wartime career. Sometimes he’ll skip over seemingly uninteresting parts (though to me none of it is uninteresting) but I pull him up and ask him to elaborate further, even down to the meal he ate on the train travelling down the Clyde towards the south. Looking out the window, he and his pals saw bombed buildings for the first time, and there was silence among them. ‘Suddenly we realised we weren’t playing anymore,’ he says.
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