Fly

by Michael Veitch

  As mid-upper gunner, Harvey sat astride the spine of the aircraft in a rotating turret armed with twin Browning .303 machine guns. His 360-degree view was by far the best in the aircraft, but his only protection from the red-hot shards of flak or bullets was a thin screen of soft, clear perspex.

  Over the target, an aircraft could be ‘coned’ in multiple coordinated searchlights, and a pilot had just seconds to slip their grip before radar-synchronised guns below commenced tearing them to pieces. ‘I was his eyes,’ says Harvey. ‘I would watch them and shout to the skipper to dive to port or starboard.’ Frequently, he would witness an aircraft not so nimble as themselves. ‘They just fried up there,’ he says. ‘The concentration of fire they threw up at them was terrific.’

  Harvey also needed to be aware of that other inherent danger of night flying: collisions. One dark night, he had a sense of something even darker looming towards him from the side. ‘Then I saw the dull red glow of an aircraft’s exhaust stubs.’ He shouted to his pilot Phil to dive. ‘He would have just about shaved my turret,’ he says. ‘That was the sort of thing that happened.’

  Düsseldorf … Bochum … Gelsinkirchen … Harvey’s logbook catalogues the placenames of Germany’s industry as it was ground down by the terrible weight of nightly aerial bombardment. On their third trip, a sizeable chunk of flak, its force thankfully almost spent, crashed through the windscreen and severely bruised the skipper’s arm. ‘We were broken in fairly early,’ he says. Aschaffenburg … Karlsruhe … Mersberg …

  I pick up one of the smooth, leather-covered volumes, barely the size of a couple of matchboxes. The ink has faded a little after sixty years, but I can still sense the amazement in his nightly entries, written just hours after the events themselves. ‘On battle order,’ he reads aloud from one of them. ‘Took off 5 p.m. Target, Essen in the Ruhr. There was heavy flak. Our starboard outer engine was hit. Came home on three.’ He pauses for a bit. ‘Yes, I remember that one,’ he says. ‘The flak had wrecked the motor’s cooling system.’ From his vantage point, he could see it throwing sparks and glowing red hot in the darkness.

  One night their hydraulics failed and the pilot was unable to fully extend the flaps for landing, so they diverted to the long emergency runway at Carnaby. There, a bulldozer stood in readiness to push you off the tarmac should you ‘go in’, and broken bits of aeroplane lay strewn just off the runway. ‘It wasn’t very encouraging,’ he says.

  ‘February 1945, Cleves.’ I enjoy the sound of Harvey reading the diaries, and sense he has not done so in a long time. ‘They got us out of bed in the middle of the night for that one,’ he recalls. It was an extremely low-level tactical attack in support of the First Canadian Army, held up outside the town. ‘We bombed from 4000 feet through cloud. We were so low that we were tossed about by our own explosions,’ he says. This unfortunate raid was remembered for one of those ghastly ironies of war, a result of a foul-up in communication between the services. Instead of the incendiaries requested by Brian Horrocks, the army commander on the ground, the RAF bombed with high explosive, turning the once-exquisite town of Cleves, birthplace of the fourth wife of Henry VIII, into an impassable sea of rubble, thereby defeating the entire purpose of the operation. It was not one of the RAF’s finest hours.

  Harvey’s crew soon found themselves the most senior on the squadron, one with a reputation for hard work and reliability. They were given a brand new Lancaster, with the designation P-Peter. Leave would come around every few weeks, but that, says Harvey, was a double-edged sword. ‘You’d come back to the base and you’d look around the mess and see many familiar faces gone. It was harder than when we were operating with them. There was the guilt, you see – we’d been on leave while all this had happened.’

  There was, he says, a strange sense of ‘persona non grata’ surrounding those men who had failed to return. It simply didn’t do to dwell on their fate, lest it reflect too much on your own. By the next day, the men of the air force ‘Committee of Adjustments’ had done their ghoulish work – clearing out the personal belongings of the dead airman and stripping the sheets from his bed, ready for his replacement who would often arrive within hours. It was as if they had never existed. The friendships formed within the aircraft were often timeless, but rarely did they extend to other crews. There didn’t seem to be much point.

  ‘Number 20. Dresden.’ My meeting with Max Durham came back into my mind. Harvey’s entry for this infamous night is a grim study in understatement: ‘The target was left burning.’ The men were told they were attacking railway transport centres used to rally German troops for an offensive against the Russians, and had no sense it was to be anything out of the ordinary. Approaching the target, however, Harvey had a feeling that this one was indeed different. ‘We were part of the second wave,’ he tells me. ‘I could see the target glowing on the horizon from about eighty miles away.’ Passing over the inferno, rising heat from the blazing city buffeted the Lancaster, and below, like in a mirage, Harvey saw aircraft shimmer in the man-made heat haze. ‘I’d never seen anything like it – just one mass of molten orange and red. There’s no film or picture that captures what it was like,’ he says. ‘You just had to see it to believe it.’

  The next day Harvey had off and, according to the diary, he attended a dance. Here, the perfunctory entry is revealing: ‘Had a few beers. Did not dance.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, reflecting thoughtfully, ‘perhaps it did have an effect on us.’

  Gelsenkirchen … Hannover … Hanau – then number 29, Dortmund, the trip that should have been his penultimate, 24 March 1945, just a few weeks before the end of the war. What happened that day is described in a single sentence in his logbook, another epic of understatement. ‘Hit by flak at 1632. Abandoned aircraft over target.’

  Just to set the scene, I look it up in my invaluable and much-thumbed tome, The Bomber Command War Diaries. Its description too is cold and cursory: ‘173 Lancaster and 12 Mosquitos of 1, 6 and 8 Groups attacked the Harpenerweg plant at Dortmund and the Mathias Stinnes plant at Bottrop. 3 Lancasters were lost on the Dortmund raid.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, as I read, ‘I watched those other two go down. Actually, they just exploded.’ A couple of days later, he would chance upon one of their crew, lying dead in a field. ‘He was an RAF bloke. His parachute hadn’t opened. I suspect he was blown out of the aircraft.’ But let’s stick to the timeline, just as Harvey prefers.

  Dortmund was a ‘hot’ target – highly industrial and heavily defended, and the attack was carried out in daylight. Turning into the bombing run at 18 000 feet, the smoke rising from the ground made the aiming point clearly visible. Then, says Harvey, from underneath the aircraft came ‘a tremendous flash’ which lifted them as if from a giant hammer-blow. Two of the engines were immediately set on fire, and the Lancaster began to shudder violently, going into a steep descent. Harvey could see the two wrecked motors. ‘I can see it, Phil!’ he said over the intercom. ‘I know, and I can’t hold her any longer,’ came the reply. Harvey is pretty sure the rear gunner, Jim Griffin, had already been killed in the explosion.

  With no sense of panic, the six remaining men were able to bale out, but Harvey nearly didn’t make it. In order for him to be able to leave his turret, his guns needed to be facing forward, but the hydraulics which controlled his turret were powered by one of the knocked-out engines. He was stuck, two metres above the floor of the fuselage with his guns pointing sideways. Precious seconds were expended manually winding the turret round to the escape position as the aircraft went down. Then he became tangled in oxygen and radio leads. ‘I had to fight my way out of the darned thing,’ he says. He can’t remember just how it happened, but in the violently lurching aeroplane, he fell to the aircraft’s floor and broke his femur just below the hip.

  In what must have been incredible pain, he was just able to reach his stowed parachute, clip it on and start crawling towards the open rear hatch which, in the plummeting nose-down attitude of the aeropla
ne, was above him. ‘For the life of me I don’t know how I did it,’ he says.

  He rolled out into the sky, counted three and pulled the cord. There was a jolt, and then, away from the screaming aircraft, an overwhelming sense of peace and calm. At 16 000 feet, he watched the other Lancasters passing high above. ‘It was then the enormity of the situation struck me,’ says Harvey. ‘I can still remember the sense of isolation and loneliness as I watched those aircraft disappear in the distance.’ (Without exception, every aircrew I spoke to who had baled out similarly remembered this same forlorn sensation.)

  His mind however, was calm and clear, his only thoughts being the dreaded telegram his parents would soon be receiving back home, and the RAF issue Smith and Wesson revolver he had tucked behind his Mae West life preserver. ‘In the situation I was about to face, I thought it might be a liability,’ he says. He pulled it out and let it drop.

  For Harvey, the last few hundred feet arrived too soon. Initially, he drifted slowly and thought he would come down among roofs and buildings, but then he saw what appeared to be an old sports field – now growing vegetables – rushing up to meet him. He could also see people converging, silently watching his slow, inexorable descent, clutching rakes, hoes and shovels.

  ‘I landed very badly. My leg had been windmilling up in the air.’ At first the crowd fell back, but when he did not move, they guessed he was unarmed and rushed him. Amid the kicks, spits and blows, they stood on his hands stretched above his head and grabbed at his harness to take his flying clothes. ‘The worst part was having the women fighting over my parachute silk and pulling my boots off. I was not,’ he says, ‘having a very good time.’

  I can see that telling this is not easy for Harvey. At several points he stops, pauses and with shaky hands takes a sip of lukewarm tea. But he’s determined to finish it. Ignoring his emotion, I prompt him with minor questions of detail. This seems to refocus him a little, but it’s hard.

  One can only imagine the state he was in, lying in agony with his shattered leg, being beaten by a mob. Despite the blood in his eyes, though, he can still today picture the little man who pushed his way through the malevolent crowd, clutching an old gangster-style Tommy gun. He was a Volksturm, an old soldier from the Great War and now in the German Home Guard. He came and stood over Harvey and cocked his weapon. The crowd fell back. ‘He saved my life,’ Harvey says. Both of us are finding it hard to keep it together. I suggest a break, but he prefers to go on.

  A second Volksturm man appeared, this one pushing a wheelbarrow. Harvey was lifted into it and he remembers the sound of the wheels as they rattled over the cobblestones. Shrieking ‘Schweinhund Flieger!’ the crowd spat on him but, guarded by the two men, he came to no further harm.

  He was then taken to a building that appeared to be a military barracks and deposited onto a concrete floor. As much as he could, he thanked his two old saviours. They left, and he never saw them again. Lying there without a blanket, his leg began to swell up terribly, almost bursting the seam of his trouser leg. In the evening he was interrogated by a Luftwaffe officer. Among a sheaf of identity cards in the officer’s hand, he saw one for his bomb aimer, Jim Gillies. He showed no recognition, but at least knew that he too had survived.

  The next day, after a night spent on a freezing concrete floor, with only the electric light above him to give his mind some kind of company, he was handed a bowl of porridge and taken to a cell. A short time later, Jim Gillies was brought in, his bloodied head wrapped in crepe paper. ‘We chose not to recognise each other,’ says Harvey.

  Jim, he later discovered, had had a similar experience. Bashed about the head, he too was saved by one of the old men of the Volksturm.

  It is with some trepidation I now ask, ‘What happened to the others?’ Harvey says nothing but pulls out a copy of an old typed document headed ‘War Crimes Group (North West Europe)’ dated 21 April 1947. It refers to case WGG/15228/2/C.1190, ‘Ill-treatment and murder of Allied airmen who baled out of an aircraft over Dortmund. 24 March 1945’. Slowly, hesitantly and through an occasionally breaking voice, Harvey reads me the terrible story of the four remaining survivors of No. 150 Squadron Lancaster ‘P-Peter’.

  One came down near a policeman who struck him on the head. A crowd soon gathered and beat him to death with a hammer.

  Another was captured, then protected by some Wehrmacht soldiers until the local Nazi Party leader forced them to hand him over. He was subsequently beaten and shot. A similar fate befell the last two. The document states that two men, including the local Nazi, were condemned to death by the War Crimes Tribunal after the war, and several others were given prison sentences of varying lengths.

  At war’s end, the Americans undertook the investigation, exhuming the bodies of the men and, with the evidence of their only witness, an extremely brave and noble woman, put the cases together and prosecuted.

  With effort, Harvey reads the document in its entirety, then seems to recover somewhat. Next he hands me an old, yellowing envelope. It is the telegram he so dreaded his parents receiving as he floated to his fate above the town. I unfold it and read. ‘Regret to inform you that your son 419835 Harvey Hayward Bawden missing as a result air operations 24 March 1945 STOP Known details are that he was a member of Lancaster aircraft detailed to attack enemy target which failed to return to base as a result enemy action STOP …’ etc.

  Harvey’s ordeal continued throughout the final, surreal weeks of the war in Europe. He and Jim were put on a truck and taken out of the city. On the way, they stopped by a field to retrieve the body of the RAF airman whose aircraft he had seen explode over the target shortly before his own was shot down. He was taken to a three-storey military hospital in nearby Kirchlinde, and was there witness to the terrible endgame of Nazi Germany played out violently around him. He was caught in what became known as the ‘Ruhr Pocket’, where the foul-mouthed, pro-Nazi General Model pointlessly held out against the encircling Americans until almost the end of the war. Then, rather than surrender to face war crime prosecution, he walked into a forest and shot himself.

  In the prisoner-of-war hospital, Harvey received some rudimentary medical attention but his broken leg had fused, shortening it considerably. I ask him about the pain. All he says is, ‘It wasn’t a happy time.’

  In a basement as the floors above him were steadily obliterated, he listened to the chaos and the bombing outside. Next to the hospital an 88 battery, similar to the one that had claimed his own aircraft, fired constantly. He met a blind English soldier, an American GI and a wounded young German called Helmut whom he befriended and told stories about life in Australia. Helmut was fascinated, but Harvey doubts whether he survived. At one stage, a deranged SS soldier wandered in and held a Luger to his face, leering. He still gets a slight shudder thinking about it.

  At last, the Americans arrived. He was lashed to the front of a jeep and taken to a US army field hospital. His femur would have to be re-broken and reset. On a nice sunny morning, Harvey was loaded into a Dakota and flown back to England, landing in Swindon.

  A few weeks later, in his hospital bed, he listened to the church bells pealing for the first time in years, and the massive victory celebrations on the radio. He shared little of the joy around him. ‘There really wasn’t any great feelings of joyousness where I was.’ His thoughts were with all the young men who had contributed to the victory but were not there to see it.

  A buxom English matron brought in two bottles of hospital brandy under each arm, apologising that she had nothing better to offer. That was how Harvey finished his war.

  For all the unhappy memories still alive in Harvey’s head, he is thankful for his time in the air force and is surprisingly magnanimous to the people who so tormented him on that terrible afternoon after he parachuted into the city he helped destroy. ‘They were quite justified. I understood that. We knew in Bomber Command that if you had to bale out over the target your chances of survival could sometimes be small. It was an absolute mirac
le that I was spared.’

  Harvey remains firm friends with his fellow survivor, Jim Gillies, who came home to have a long career as a dentist. The two still speak every week or so. Perhaps Harvey thinks himself lucky after all.

  Before I go, he hands me some type-written sheets briefly summarising the events we have spoken of. The last sheet ends simply with a list of his crew:

  Phil Morris, pilot

  Kevin Kee, navigator

  Joe Davis, flight engineer

  Bob Masters, wireless operator

  Jim Griffin, gunner

  Jim Gillies, bomb aimer

  And Harvey Bawden, mid-upper gunner.

  ROY RIDDEL

  Pilot, RAAF

  After two years, Roy Riddel had had enough. Slogging his heavy rifle and pack across the paddocks of southern Queensland on route marches with two or three hundred other bods from his University Regiment was, he decided that afternoon, not for him. So, together with a couple of mates, he hatched a plan.

  Somewhere near the site of the present day Route 2 Motorway, along which cars speed between Brisbane and Ipswich in minutes, the trio of miscreants quietly dropped back to the rear of the column, and waited till the little railway station at Goodna came into view. It’s all wall-to-wall suburbs now, but in 1940 it was a quiet little staging-post between the two towns.

  A glance to see they were in the clear, and the three men walked into the office. ‘Look after these,’ said Roy, passing his rifle and kit to a surprised stationmaster, ‘we’ll be back tonight.’ As the column continued on without them, the boys boarded the next train into Brisbane, signed up at the nearest RAAF recruiting office, then headed back to collect their packs a few hours later.

  Thus, Roy deserted one branch of His Majesty’s Armed Forces for another, destined not to march over wartime forests and jungles but to soar above them as a fighter pilot.

  A few months later at Archerfield in Queensland, he was part of the very early course 5 at No. 2 Elementary Flying Training School. At the same time the pilots of the RAF were slogging out the Battle of Britain, Roy was getting the feel of a Tiger Moth.