Fly

by Michael Veitch

  ‘I went solo at six-and-a-half hours,’ he says, sitting today in his living room in subtropical Coffs Harbour. Roy and his wife Judy, also a pilot (‘She’s got 2000 hours of her own, you know,’ he tells me with pride), have lived in this lush setting since 1951. He had a long flying career, giving it away only four years ago. It all started in 1932 as a twelve-year-old with a joy-flight with his dad in a Genairco biplane. The Sydney Harbour Bridge had just opened and Roy Senior was keen to get a first-class view of the wondrous span. It was Roy’s first time in an aeroplane, and a decade later, he was astonishing his instructors with his uncanny natural aptitude in the air.

  ‘Gee, I can’t cope with you,’ his rattled ex-civil instructor remarked. ‘I’m going to get the flight commander.’

  The officer took the precocious young man aloft to gauge this raw talent for himself. ‘Yep. You’re alright,’ was all he muttered. The next time Roy flew, he was on his own.

  He soon proceeded to advanced training at Amberley. Shortly after arriving at the newly constructed aerodrome, Roy was sitting in the flight hut, waiting for his turn in a Wirraway. ‘About from here to the house over the road,’ he tells me, pointing across a large and exotic flowering vine, ‘I saw my instructor collide with another aircraft and burst into flame. That was my introduction to war: a great big bonfire of two Wirraways and four blokes.’

  Despite this ghastly overture, Roy speaks of the Wirraway with affection. ‘People say dreadful things about them, but I thought they were marvellous. I thought all the aircraft I flew were marvellous.’

  Having again impressed the instructors, Roy headed out on one of the final phases of his fighter pilot education, a long cross-country navigation exercise across southern Queensland. But flying on your own has its advantages. ‘Luckily they hadn’t removed the names of the stations on the train lines,’ he says. ‘If you got a bit lost, you just came down low and saw where you were.’

  With the rare distinction ‘above average’ written in his logbook, Roy collected his pilot’s wings and sergeant’s stripes and, in early 1941, headed to England.

  What is it about these old fighter boys? As I sit across from him, sharing a joke, enjoying the tea, cake and hospitality supplied by Judy, I can’t help noticing the same uncanny confidence common to them all. Almost without exception, you can still see the golden boy in every man who once flew a Hurricane, Spitfire or Kittyhawk: the top footballer or leg-spin bowler; the professional or successful executive – the same flash of individuality that charmed and conquered, and equipped a young man with the unique mettle needed to work as a team and hunt as a maverick. Such a contrast to the quieter, steadied demeanour of the bomber men whose talents could only ever be realised as part of a whole, enmeshed among the personalities of others.

  It was at his Operational Training Unit at Harden in England’s north that Roy first got his hands on a Spitfire – a clapped-out Mark I Battle of Britain veteran, but a Spitfire all the same. A new pilot’s introduction to this 1000-horsepower machine was rudimentary to say the least. ‘You just sat in the cockpit and learned the layout. Then they put a blindfold on you, and you put your hand on the instruments as the instructor called them out.’ Again, Roy passed with flying colours, and he was off.

  On only his second flight over the city of Crewe, the engine of his worn-out warhorse started to cough. ‘I steered back to Harden, and on the downwind leg, it just stopped,’ he says. Roy looked anxiously at the crowded English landscape below and saw a series of ‘bloody great church spires’. Coming in on a glide, he managed to pass over a hangar and felt that he was going to make the runway – then spotted a row of electric wires dead in front. ‘I held it off a bit longer, then the thing stalled,’ he says. With a bone-numbing ‘thump’, the Spitfire flopped hard onto the grass. ‘The right wheel leg came up through the top of the wing, the other made a big bulge.’ The aircraft was a wreck.

  Observing Roy’s travails was none other than James ‘Ginger’ Lacy, Britain’s second-highest-scoring Battle of Britain ace, nine times shot down, a man who once brought his Hurricane back to earth riddled with 87 German bullet holes, and despite having risen through the ranks in an extremely class-conscious society, a virtual national hero. He also happened to be Roy’s boss, and the first on the scene of his inglorious landing.

  ‘Gawd, I’ll be sent home in chains, like our forebears,’ Roy thought as Lacy wandered up to the sorry scene. ‘You alright?’ he enquired.

  ‘Yes, I … I’m feeling good, thanks,’ said a shaky Roy despite a soreness in the lower back. ‘Oh that’s good,’ replied Lacy, languidly surveying the broken aeroplane. ‘It’s about time this thing stopped for keeps. It’s been giving us trouble.’ And at that, he turned and walked away. Nothing more was said.

  This was but one encounter with the intriguing nature of the British temperament. In training, Roy had to contend with his early Spitfire’s antiquated manual ‘hand-pump’ undercarriage system. As soon as his wheels left the ground, the pilot selected ‘up’ from a small switch on the dash, and with his right hand on the control stick, vigorously pumped a large L-shaped lever with his left to bring up the wheels. ‘You try flying an aeroplane pumping with your left hand, while not making your right hand swing like this,’ he says, showing how he inadvertently slewed the aircraft sideways one morning, collecting his instructor’s wingtip with a nasty bump. It wasn’t serious, but soon the weary voice of Squadron Leader Farnes was in his ears. ‘I don’t mind flying with you, Riddel,’ he said calmly, ‘but please don’t hit me again.’

  ‘He was a lovely man,’ says Roy. ‘We used to go to the pub. He had a car – a little Singer Le Mans – and offered it to me at a good price. He went through France and the Battle of Britain and then after all that, ended up being torpedoed on the way to the Middle East. Terribly sad.’

  Roy speaks quietly, occasionally giving out a deep laugh. He tells me when it comes to the war, it’s the amusing things he prefers to think about, and for good reason.

  ‘There were four pilots that knocked around with me when I first got to England: Arthur Corser, Bill Norman, Norm Mullett and Tommy Enright,’ he says, rattling off the names with ease. ‘One of them had done law. One had a commission. Within six months they were all dead. That’s why I laugh at the war. If I think about all the other stuff, I get all churned up.’

  Roy joined No. 66 Squadron, an RAF unit that had seen action in the Battle of Britain but was now stationed at England’s relatively quiet southwest corner at Perranporth in Cornwall.

  Despite being one of the most instantly recognisable aircraft of all time, the Spitfire throughout its long and illustrious career was made to perform some curious roles for which it was wholly unsuited and for which its famously graceful outline was outrageously defiled. It had, at various stages, its wings stretched and tapered, then clipped off at the ends, and its tail and engine grotesquely enlarged to increase performance. It was made to carry drop-tanks, bombs and rockets, forced into the roles of dive-bomber and ground-attack, and even to fly off aircraft carriers to perform extended patrols over deserts and jungles, all tasks for which R. J. Mitchell’s elegant short-range interceptor was never designed.

  But the particular round hole into which Roy’s Spitfires were shoved was that of long-range maritime escort. ‘We had a 40-gallon tank stuck under the port wing which couldn’t be thrown off,’ he says. This not only looked ridiculous, but drastically affected the performance of the delicately weighted aircraft. On one occasion, the squadron had to escort some twin-engine Whirlwind fighters on a rocket-firing operation into France. Catching up to them in their strangely lopsided Spitfires, the smart alec Whirlwind leader called up his ‘escorts’ on the radio/ telephone. ‘Well, hello there. It’s a pity we had to throttle back so you could keep up with us.’ The jibe was greeted with silence.

  Three German battleships, the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen, were, in mid-1941, harboured in the French port of Brest, being harassed by bombers o
f the RAF before their daring ‘dash’ up the Channel to safety. The Luftwaffe did their best to protect them, which included attacks on British airfields, and one day Roy was a witness to one of them. ‘This Junkers 88 came hurtling over and bombed the airstrip,’ he remembers. His mate, fellow Australian Bill Norman, instantly dived into a slimy gutter, but Roy was intrigued. ‘I was fascinated by the thing,’ he says. Part of the airfield defence was a series of rockets on wires which, at the press of a button in the control tower, shot skywards to entangle in the propellers of hostile aircraft. ‘He was too late on the button,’ says Roy. He watched them fire harmlessly into the air, the Junkers got away, and Bill Norman was covered in muck. A little while later, Bill was dead, killed in a collision attempting to chase down just such a German raider.

  Roy operated with Fighter Command at one of its quietest periods of the war, after the initial battles of France and Britain, but before the fury of Normandy and the Second Front. With the Continent occupied, all that could be done was to fly over the German airfields, drop a few bombs here and there, and generally make a nuisance of yourself. These oddly codenamed ‘rhubarb’ and ‘ramrod’ raids were, according to Roy, ‘pretty ineffectual’, with not many sightings of enemy aircraft to be had. Nonetheless, the squadron lost eight Spitfires in the time Roy was with it – almost half its pilot strength. On several occasions, he nearly added his own name to the ledger.

  His obvious skill evident to all, Roy was soon leading formations. Coming back across the Channel in bad weather, he was not too sure just how close he was to the English coast. Then, looking out, he saw that he and the squadron were flying through a forest of barrage balloons, tethered to the ground by strong, steel cables which could shear through an aircraft’s wing like paper. Amazingly, the Spitfires continued through them unharmed. They later realised they had crossed the coast over the heavily defended port of Southampton. ‘Good,’ he said to the rest over the radio. ‘Looks like we’ve found England.’

  Later, he went through an uncanny replay of his earlier engine-failure episode, with near-dire consequences. ‘I think I got hit by ground fire,’ he tells me. With a damaged oil-cooler, Roy made it back across the Channel to his new base at Portreath on Cornwall’s rocky tip, just before his oil-deprived engine began to seize. The prop windmilled for a while and then stopped dead as the cliffs loomed ahead with the aerodrome just beyond. ‘I couldn’t tell if I was going to make it to the ’drome,’ he says. Looking about, he noticed a soft strip of beach right below him and prepared to turn in for a belly landing, but a snap decision made him think he might just make it home. On a long glide, with only the sound of the wind flowing over the aircraft, Roy managed to put his wheels down on the grass at the end of the runway.

  Later that night in the pub, a local soldier approached the RAF pilots as they enjoyed their pints. ‘Who was that fella today whose engine stopped when he was coming in to land?’ he asked. ‘Someone pointed to me,’ says Roy. ‘Oh I wasn’t too worried,’ he announced to the soldier, ‘I was going to just put it down on the beach.’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ replied the soldier. ‘We’d just finished laying mines on it.’

  ‘I don’t know what they were more worried about,’ says Roy. ‘Me blowing up, or them having to come and get me.’

  Even relatively mundane flying duties could have their moments of drama. At 20 000 feet one day, Roy was flying back and forth across Plymouth facilitating a radar check exercise for the operators to test their skills and equipment. The advantage of the Spitfire IIa was the range afforded by its additional fuel tank, but only if it actually functioned. ‘The clouds were getting a bit thick. When I changed over onto the extra tank, it refused to feed,’ he says and, once again, his engine began to splutter and die.

  Deciding now was a fine time to head down through the clouds to Mother Earth, Roy noticed a couple of bright yellow painted Tiger Moth trainers in the sky ahead of him. ‘I was surprised to see them that close to the south coast,’ he says, but he thought that he could squeeze past them to their training airfield below. The trainee pilots would no doubt have been surprised to see a spluttering Spitfire fly down between them, but not as surprised as Roy when he realised that there were a good many more of them, which he had failed to spot in their drab green camouflage paint.

  ‘Suddenly there were Tiger Moths everywhere – landing, and taking off. I hadn’t seen them,’ he says. In the alarm of weaving his way through the trainers without power, he forgot the last part of the landing procedure – ‘undercarriage-mixture-pitch-fuel-flaps’ – and came hurtling along the trainer airfield at high speed. ‘A stone wall pulled me up faster than any flaps,’ says Roy, and he hurtled into it. Just another in the growing collection of very bent aeroplanes Roy was becoming responsible for.

  When at last he was issued with the improved Spitfire V, he was more than pleased with his new mount. I asked him if he encountered enemy fighters. ‘I had a shot at a few,’ he tells me, ‘but I don’t think I bothered anyone. I got better at it in New Guinea.’

  Roy’s war, relatively quiet so far, was about to take a very dramatic turn.

  ‘When we heard the stories of the army blokes being tied to coconut trees and used for bayonet practice, we hated the Japanese. We wanted to kill them all, I think.’

  With his homeland in peril, Roy was posted back to Australia, to join the ranks of perhaps the most famous fighter unit in the RAAF, No. 75 Squadron. Thrown together in Townsville in March 1942, its pilots were sent into battle with just a few weeks’ training, and proceeded to write themselves into the history books. In an extraordinary six-week defence of Port Moresby, they stood alone against the continuous Japanese aerial assault for 44 legendary days. Although its heavy P-40 Kittyhawks were no match for the nimble Japanese Zeros in a fight, No. 75 Squadron nonetheless accounted for thirty-four enemy aircraft destroyed – the first being chalked up just hours after its arrival at Seven Mile Strip – but virtually wiped itself out in the process. When time came for it to be stood down, there was almost no one left to be sent home. Only one serviceable aircraft remained out of the original twenty-five. Twelve pilots had been killed, and many more wounded.

  In July 1942 Roy, now a junior officer, became part of No. 75 Squadron’s most recent incarnation, just in time to be sent back into another maelstrom, the Battle of Milne Bay.

  Historians, as well as veterans of this campaign, constantly bemoan the poor status Milne Bay holds in the pantheon of our military achievements. They’re probably right. Turning back a 2000-odd strong force of elite Japanese marines, preventing them from gaining the vital aerodromes and outflanking Port Moresby was an astonishing feat of daring, quick thinking and courage which cost the lives of 161 Australians, but many times more of the enemy. It was also the first real occasion the air force fought alongside the army, each winning the undying respect of the other. For the Japanese, it was an unmitigated disaster, their first defeat on land, ending in an ignominious, previously unthinkable, withdrawal.

  In stark contrast to the fields and stone walls of Cornwall, Roy’s new home was a clearing in a coconut plantation on the eastern tip of New Guinea – wedged between the mountains and the sea – where perforated metal ‘Marsden Matting’ had been laid down over mud to form a runway. ‘It rained every day,’ says Roy, ‘but it was quite a good strip. I enjoyed landing on it.’

  Not long after arriving, Roy and some of the pilots were sitting about as the intelligence officer explained the situation. ‘The Japanese fleet is currently in the China Straits,’ he said. No one paid much attention. ‘The China Straits,’ he reiterated with a little more urgency, ‘are not in China. They lie between us and Good-enough Island – just around the corner!’ Early next morning, 25 August, the Japanese landed just a few miles down the track.

  ‘People decry the Kittyhawks,’ says Roy. (He’s right, and I’m one of them, though I resist the urge to do so now.) ‘But they were perfect for Milne Bay.’ Indeed, photographs of
the jungle after heavy strafing by the Kittyhawk’s six half-inch machine guns show it looking like it had been done over by a giant scythe.

  ‘We were up before dawn,’ says Roy. ‘We stuck to our leader and just strafed the hell out of things. We destroyed their barges, destroyed their food and petrol and hopefully destroyed them.’

  The Kittyhawks got to grips with the enemy that morning even before the soldiers of the 2/10 Infantry Battalion did so on the ground. Roy shows me the photograph of his own aircraft, inscribed with the word ‘Orace’ on the nose. ‘My father was Horace – it was named for him,’ he tells me.

  The Japanese brought in their men and supplies along the narrow, twenty-mile wide bay not on large ships, but as a flotilla of small boats and barges. Many were of light construction and were shredded by the tremendous firepower of the low-flying Kittyhawks. An army officer six miles away on the other side of the bay described the sound of their guns not as a chatter but as a roar.

  For the next few weeks, Roy and the men of Nos 75 and 76 Squadrons underwent a daily ritual of taking off and blasting the Japanese as they attempted to fight their way towards the airstrips. One day in August, he is reminded by Judy, he was up four times.

  The Japanese advanced but failed to break through. The defending Australians (and some rather terrified Americans from an engineering company) were reminded of the Western Front a quarter of a century earlier, as successive waves of bunched-together Japanese marines attempted to charge over open ground and were mown down in piles.

  As sure as they attempted to resupply by night, the Kittyhawks would appear at dawn roaring in low over the coconut fronds and blasting everything the pilots could cram into their gunsights. One of the most famous photographs taken not only of Milne Bay but of the entire New Guinea campaign is that of a lean, exhausted Australian soldier standing next to a damaged Japanese Type-95 light tank they had managed to get ashore. For a while its commander had guided it along the narrow jungle track until shot by an Australian sniper. The vehicle slewed off and became bogged, blocking the way for others behind. It was still there long after the battle had ended.