Bob’s war continued. In Tunisia and Algeria, he battled cold, trigger-happy Americans and the danger of mountains to attack aerodromes, docks and troop concentrations, usually at low level. In May 1943, he led an attack against gun positions in which eleven out of the twelve aircraft in the formation were hit.
Eventually he would lead squadrons in attacks across the water from Africa to Italy, and hunt submarines in the Mediterranean. Not before time, the Blenheims were withdrawn in favour of the faster, better-armed Douglas Boston. ‘There was no conversion course,’ says Bob. ‘We just read some of the manual and took off. Lucky they were easy to fly.’
Bob completed an amazing seventy-four operations in Europe and the Middle East and was more than happy to receive the news that he was being sent home en route to flying again in the Pacific. Upon his return, however, the Commanding Officer at Essendon looked at his record and the DFC ribbon on his tunic. ‘You’ve done enough,’ he said. ‘If you like you can go home.’
‘My son was two years old and I hadn’t even seen him,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t jump at it quick enough.’
Bob went back to his beloved farm with the long row of sugar gums and never left it.
We have come to the end of a long day, and, again, I am exhausted. I say goodbye to Bob who happily takes his place on the couch in his beloved library next to his big dog and resumes his book as if it he had put it down just minutes ago. John, his son, in that quiet unspoken way of country hospitality, brings me over to his house across the way for a meal, which I devour before heading out on my way home.
True to his word, I am permitted to borrow the precious journal and there’s just time enough to make the local newsagent where I can photocopy it. ‘Don’t bother bringing it back,’ I am told. ‘Just leave it behind the counter and I’ll pick it up tomorrow. They know me there.’
On the way, I glance down at the old exercise book sitting on the passenger seat beside me like it’s gold bullion. The car, although sounding decidedly sick, seems to understand the gravity of the occasion and gets me to the newsagent without incident. Next day it’s a different story, and a week later I’m forking out for a replacement engine.
The woman at the local newsagents wants to close up but is happy to wait when I explain what it is I am doing. As I work the machine, I notice something I had missed. The only variation from the pages of compact handwriting are four small newspaper cuttings which he has pasted in. One is from the old Argus dated from the time Bob brought his Blenheim in for a belly landing after the Eindhoven raid. I read the article which begins:
Victorian Airman Wins DFC – Danger Disregarded in Raid. Completely disregarding danger, though his guns were out of action, Pilot Officer John Robert Nassau Molesworth, an Australian pilot attached to an RAF bomber squadron, pressed home his attacks on targets at Eindoven, Holland. He has been awarded the DFC …
But it’s not this heroic citation that moves me the most, or the fact that Bob hadn’t even bothered to mention it. On the very last page, in small handwriting, a fellow airman has penned a farewell on the occasion of his return to Australia. For me, its tone seems to capture the amazing wartime career of this very quiet, very dignified man. ‘Cheerio, Bob. Sorry I can’t see you off. Good luck and keep ducking. Very good shooting. – Wing Cdr J. O. Thompson.’
Some months after I conducted my interview with Bob Molesworth, his son John telephoned to tell me his father had passed away. He had outlived his beloved labrador, whose name I discovered was Ollie, by just three days.
JAMES COWARD
Pilot, RAF
I have had in my possession, for a time longer than I can remember, a blue, cloth-bound little book titled The True Story of the Battle of Britain. It’s a smallish, sombre-looking volume, published in England in the early 1950s. I can’t remember how I even came by it – a gift from an older person, I suspect, curious at the interest I had shown in the period, and probably just as happy to offload the dowdy little thing, still unread after all these years and just cluttering up the bookshelf.
I devoured its pages when I was a youngster, but looking at it now, it’s hard to get very excited about it. It was put out by the British government to mark the tenth anniversary of the Battle, and while it gives a good enough sketch of the events of that legendary summer – from the daylight attacks in August to the beginning of the Blitz later in the year – it’s a pretty dry work when all’s said and done. It does, however, have one very interesting appendix, to which I have returned many times: a list of every Allied pilot – British, Polish, American, Canadian, Australian and many other nationalities – who took part in this monumentally important fifteen-week engagement. The list runs for twenty-two pages and includes nearly 3000 names, starting with ‘Adair, H. 213 Squadron. British. Killed’ and ending with ‘Zurakowski, J. 234 Squadron. Polish’, who, presumably, survived.
On several occasions over the years, people kind enough to feel a need to engage with my interest have mentioned that their father, or uncle, or next door neighbour, or former maths teacher, or greengrocer, or whoever, was a Battle of Britain pilot. Admittedly, some of these people were a little vague on details, some even a little uncertain as to what the Battle of Britain actually was, when it was fought, or (amazingly) even where. Others, though, were well informed and quite insistent about this personal connection they had with the epic aerial battle, fought in the war’s early stages, still with a faint residue of chivalry and which, in the glorious summer skies above Kent, by the narrowest of margins saved Britain from invasion.
As a kid, I had planned to make this list a record of my own personal collection of all the Battle of Britain pilots I had encountered. As the vast bulk of them were British, it would be unlikely I would meet many myself, but one degree of separation, I decided, would suffice. I would rule a pencil under the name, then make a little annotation about where I had met them, or via whom.
So, whenever someone told me about their old Uncle Bernard’s Spitfire heroics, I would race home to look it up in the book to underline it. I was always, however, disappointed to find the name was never on the list. Not even once.
It dawned on me eventually that people, despite the best of intentions, simply got things wrong. Maybe Bernard had just missed out on the actual battle itself (the dates of its parameters are quite specific), or had in fact flown bombers, or flying boats, or was in the army Pays Corps for six years or had just made the whole thing up to impress the grandchildren. Whatever the reason, the list in the back of the little blue book remained undefiled, with not a single underline to be seen.
But the name James Coward was there: ‘Coward, J. B. 19 Squadron. British’. Needless to say, it lacked the sombre addendum ‘killed’, and one freezing but fine morning in mid-2007, I pulled up outside his house in suburban Canberra, a rapidly disintegrating tape recorder in hand, ready to meet my first ever Battle of Britain pilot. To top it off, he flew Spitfires. I was terribly excited.
First, though, I had to get him to stop telling jokes. Not that they weren’t funny; in fact I could have sat there and listened to them all day – that was the trouble. James has dozens of stories, usually centred around the eccentricities of upper-class English behaviour. Take, for instance, the one about meeting the Duke of Edinburgh and being asked the name of the place where he was stationed. ‘Oh, yes, I passed right by there yesterday,’ said the Duke. ‘Where do you live?’
‘The married quarters,’ replied James. ‘Well don’t complain to me!’ snapped the Duke. ‘I have to too, you know!’
Or what about the skinny little man in striped trousers and morning coat spotted next to the enormous figure of the Queen of Tonga in the dignitaries’ box at Her Majesty’s Coronation? ‘Who’s that man next to the Queen of Tonga?’ someone enquired. ‘Her lunch,’ was the reply.
He even had one about Winston Churchill going for a pee in the House of Commons loo after the war just as Attlee, the new Labour PM, stepped up to the urinal beside him. Churchill i
mmediately moved three paces away. ‘I say, Winston, you’re very standoffish this morning,’ said an affronted Atlee. ‘I know,’ said Winston (with James supplying the appropriate Churchillian drawl). ‘You socialists. Every time you see something big with good prospects of quick growth, you want to nationalise it!’
And this was all before we had even sat down.
I had caught an early morning flight to Canberra one chilly Sunday, then a taxi ride that seemed to take me halfway home again. As we sped through what appeared to be vast tracts of bush, I had forgotten how deceptively wide is the national capital’s spread. The address James gave me seemed to take me up a path that wound through some native shrubbery, until a weathervane in the shape of, what else, a Spitfire told me I had arrived.
The tall immaculately dressed figure of James greeted me at the door and ushered me inside. He spoke so quickly with such a delightful accent that I suggested he must surely be related to his namesake, Noel. He assures me his origins are far humbler, but much of the afternoon that followed was like a P. G. Woodhouse novel sprung to life.
‘I left school at fifteen without any qualifications to do anything,’ he tells me as we take our positions on the couch. Then out of the blue in class one day, the young James received a phone call from his father, a businessman who had been knocked back by the army in the Great War because, of all things, “abnormal toes”. ‘Your mother’s left, and I’m taking you out of school,’ was the abrupt message. His father subsequently lost everything in the divorce settlement, and James was sent to work in his office. He hated it, yearning instead to be a pilot in the RAF.
‘I refuse to give permission for you to go and get yourself killed,’ were his father’s stern words, ‘and he was jolly nearly right,’ says James today. But when he turned twenty-one, James was free to make up his own mind, and in 1936 he stood before three Group Captains at a selection committee in the Air Ministry in Whitehall. After looking him up and down a bit, the one in the middle asked, ‘What games do you play?’
‘Er, rugby and cricket, sir,’ James replied.
‘Right. Down the corridor and see the doctor.’
‘And that was it,’ he says. ‘I was in.’
If nothing else, this is turning out to be the most amusing interview I’ve yet conducted, but I wonder if this incident is typical of the Royal Air Force in the years before the war. ‘Oh, it was tremendous fun,’ he says in his rapid-fire way. ‘Just think – I’d gone from working in an office in London to being woken up in the morning by a batman who pours you a cup of tea and runs you a bath; then going down to a splendid breakfast, and dinners in the mess four nights a week – it was a wonderful life!’ However, the notion that it was the exclusive domain of the Oxbridge establishment is, says James, a myth. ‘Where I was at Duxford we had a terrific mixture: people from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, English, Scots, Welsh.’
It all sounds disappointingly egalitarian, but at least there was Lord Dudley. ‘Ah yes, Lord Dudley,’ says James, slowing down a little for the first time. ‘He was posted to us in disgrace – court-martialled for bringing a dog on an aeroplane. But he beat the charge by proving it wasn’t a dog, but a hound.’ Ah, those magnificent men and their flying machines.
‘Actually,’ says James, suddenly sounding rather like Hugh Grant, ‘I wasn’t even sure that I was going to get through the course. I had one or two shaky dos in training, you see.’ Almost decapitating a Squadron Leader would indeed have put a dampener on one’s career.
‘Right, your engine’s on fire,’ said the officer one afternoon in the air when testing James’s readiness to go solo. He was used to the emergency drill by now and turned the Avro Tutor towards a nearby paddock for an emergency landing. Just as he was coming in, however, the officer abruptly announced, ‘I have control,’ and gave the engine a burst of power. Then, it abruptly stopped. ‘I’d already turned the fuel off,’ says James, ‘which is actually what you’re supposed to do in an engine fire.’
They came down roughly in a field. The day wasn’t going too well, and the Squadron Leader wasn’t hiding his annoyance. To restart the engine, they needed to manually ‘swing’ the prop – something James had never done before. Cursing even more, the Squadron Leader grabbed the propeller in both hands while James remained in the cockpit. ‘He swung and swung and nothing happened,’ says James. Then he realised the fuel was still off. Just as the officer was in mid-swing, James switched it back on, and it immediately roared into life in his hands. ‘Amazingly, it didn’t hit him, but you’ve never heard such language in your life,’ he says. ‘I thought, “That’s it, I’ve had it.” ’
Another ‘shakey do’ was an unscheduled landing in heavy fog at an unfamiliar training field. Walking into the hut, the other pilots were astounded he had managed to get down at all, but not as surprised as the woman who rushed in saying, ‘Who’s that bloody fool I just saw fly under the high tension cables?’
‘I hadn’t even seen them,’ says James. ‘Got away with that one, too.’
James joined one of Fighter Command’s true pedigree squadrons, No. 19, based at the famous Duxford aerodrome in Cambridgeshire, cutting his teeth on slow but steady biplanes such as the Gauntlet and Demon. But one day in 1938, they began to hear about a very new aeroplane which their squadron was to be the first to receive. A few days later, a small sleek monoplane appeared over the aerodrome, put on an impromptu aerobatic display before the slack-jawed pilots and landed. The Spitfire had arrived. ‘I became about the fourth person in the RAF to fly one,’ James tells me. Not that he had much in the way of an introduction. ‘You read the handbook, found out what the stalling speed was and then you flew it,’ he says.
These were indeed the halcyon days, but they were not to last. ‘We all knew the war was coming but we weren’t particularly worried about it. We were having such a lovely time,’ says James.
On the very first day of World War II, No. 19 Squadron was on standby. James remembers he and the other pilots sleeping on camp stretchers under the wings of their Spitfires in case anything happened quickly. It didn’t. In fact, not much happened at all in the first few months of the ‘Phoney War’ while the Germans quietly gathered strength for their attack in the west, and the atmosphere was much like peacetime. James flew mainly on convoy escort patrols. ‘Yes, that was exciting,’ he tells me. ‘As soon as you approached them, the ships started shooting at you with everything they had!’
When the Germans attacked in May 1940, James was spared the disaster of France as it was only the Hurricane squadrons that were sent over to be largely annihilated. His first encounter with the enemy was in June, above Dunkirk.
There seems to be something particular to the Anglo-Saxon temperament that makes us celebrate our defeats as fervently as we do our victories. Perhaps this gives a clue as to why the British have been so rarely conquered throughout history. Australia has its Gallipoli, America its Alamo, but the almost mystical ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ has implanted itself into the most noble aspects of the British character like few other events. And to think it was all a catastrophe.
In three short weeks, the combined French and British armies – victorious over this same enemy barely two decades earlier – were whipped by the highly mobile, new-look Germans who, compensating for their lack of numbers, threw away the military rulebook and employed a deadly combination of speed, bluff and utter ruthlessness. Armoured attacks through supposedly impenetrable forests, sirens fitted to bombs to terrorise the population and clog the roads, then strafing them as they fled to cause further panic: the Germans did every ghastly thing imaginable. The morose, half-sozzled French and woefully ill-equipped British hardly knew what hit them until they were lining up for kilometres along a beach praying for a boat to spirit them back to England. But spirited they were, and in incredible numbers.
With hardly a rifle between them, the army was saved by vessels of the navy, merchant services, fishing boats, pleasure ferries and every other thing that could
float. This ragtag rescue fleet, under constant bombardment, brought over 300000 weapon-less soldiers home to fight another day. The Germans, bewildered as to how easy it had all been, just looked on. People in Britain were so ecstatic that Churchill had to remind them, ‘This is not a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.’
Flying above all this in a Spitfire, James Coward fired off his first shots in an odd, scrappy engagement.
‘Follow me, chaps’ was all that Squadron Leader Hunnard said as his pilots took off from Martlesham Heath in Suffolk. James didn’t think much of his CO – inexperienced, a poor flyer and a bad leader – an opinion reinforced by the fact that, on this day, nobody had the slightest idea of where they were going, or why. ‘We followed him as he turned and took us out over the sea. We thought he’d gone mad,’ James says. ‘Then he put us into a full-power climb. He didn’t even know the proper climbing speed – our engines were all boiling.’
Flying along the coast of Belgium straight into the sun – another serious no-no – James could see columns of thick black smoke coming up from the destroyed oil reserves, and a jumbled flotilla moving in and out, braving air attacks to get the men off the beaches.
Suddenly, he looked up and saw a descending stream of Messerschmitt 109s about to surprise a Spitfire squadron some 5000 feet below. With little faith that his boss knew what was going on, James called ‘Tally-ho’ and led his flight into an attack. ‘They saw us coming and broke away and ran,’ he says. ‘I got a bead on one and fired but I couldn’t get in range.’ At the very least, he had broken up their attack.
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