Levelling out at last, he jettisoned the remaining depth charge and made course for the Scilly Isles. Every moveable object was hurled out to save height and fuel. They arrived without further incident, but ‘with about a pint of fuel left in the tanks’. They had been in the air thirteen hours, fifty-five minutes.
A day like this would be enough for anyone’s war, but a few weeks later, Dudley and his crew outdid themselves again. It is another long story, involving an attack in the same patch of ocean by six Junkers 88s, being forced down after a forty-minute running air battle, landing on top of a seventy-foot swell, and the entire crew of eleven taking to the sole undamaged dinghy designed to hold a quarter that number. Then a miserable night spent in the open before being sighted by a Catalina, and another encounter with Captain Walker who, on the southern extremity of his range, turned around to pick them up. When word got around the flotilla that these were the men who had sunk U-461, an almighty cheer went up, and in the finest traditions of the navy, a whooping chorus of klaxons sounded out over the waves.
Dudley Marrows, to his considerable surprise, became the most highly decorated Sunderland pilot of the war. ‘As I understand it,’ he tells me with a laugh, ‘I got the DFC for the sub, and the DSO for the air battle.’ Quite a haul.
Another first – my one and only recipient of the Distinguished Service Order, an award second only to the Victoria Cross, and rarely awarded to an officer holding so lowly a rank as Flight Lieutenant.
As we talk, Dudley’s wife, Sylvia, prompts him to reveal some other aspects of the story he has omitted, such as his swimming around the sinking Sunderland collecting his men – some wounded – and pulling them towards the dinghy, or the baritone of the rigger who kept the rest of the crew’s spirits up during the long, uncertain night with a fine rendition of ‘A life on the Ocean Waves’.
‘It’s nearly 2008,’ says Dudley, who I have questioned and pummelled and drawn out over a very long afternoon. ‘You’ll have to excuse my memory.’
After sinking a submarine, being shot down in the sea and rescued, Dudley’s tour was considered well and truly completed. He undertook some further training, then taught, then had the honour of flying himself back to Australia – in a Sunderland.
But for the final chapter of the story, I turn to Sylvia.
‘I just love languages,’ she tells me, and she speaks several excellently, although even she isn’t quite sure of the origins of it all. A long time after the war, an address was somehow located for one Wolf Stiebler. By then, the former master of the U-461 was working for an oil company setting up petrol stations across Europe. With Sylvia’s help, a correspondence was started, which lasted many years.
Then, accompanied by Peter Jensen, former wireless operator of Sunderland ‘U’ of 461 Squadron, the two of them made a trip to Regensburg in Germany to meet the remaining survivors of U-461 and their families. With Sylvia translating, they talked and shared stories and reflected on how odd it was that such decent people as themselves had once been mortal enemies. Both Peter and Sylvia were treated like honoured friends. At one stage when Sylvia was leaving, a widow of one of the Germans took her aside. ‘Please thank your husband,’ the woman said earnestly. ‘What he did gave me forty years of happy married life.’ It was a remark Sylvia couldn’t wait to pass on to Dudley.
Then one day a year or so later, a small party waited anxiously at the international arrivals terminal of Melbourne Airport, and Wolf Stiebler emerged to meet the man who was both his nemesis and his saviour. He stayed with them at their big citrus property at Buronga near Mildura, where for a week or two they talked about times both before and since the war, posed for photographs of Wolf wearing his new gift of a big Australian hat, and reflected on the terrible, dramatic events in the middle of the ocean that changed both their lives.
‘Fifty-three dead. That doesn’t sit too well on you at times,’ says Dudley as he looks at the photo of him and Wolf, sitting together in a living room, smiling like old mates. ‘Not that I worry about it too often.’ It’s the only thing he has said all day that I suspect might not be completely true.
Tiring of the war and, I believe, wanting to leave me with an idea of him more expansive than simply his years flying and fighting, Dudley shows me a proud collection of Aboriginal grinding stones discovered on his property, turned up by ploughs over the course of many years. ‘You’d hear a “tink” against the metal and go and investigate.’ He rubs his old hands over the old round stones, savouring their smoothness with his fingertips, and speaking of them reverently, as one would sacred objects of art.
My dad was half right when he told me the big aeroplanes flying out of Rose Bay were Sunderlands. Actually they were Sandringhams, the Sunderland’s civilian incarnation with turrets, armour plate, depth-charge racks and every other vestige of their wartime career removed. In place of the sombre green and grey camouflage which concealed their outline against the deep and murky Atlantic was a handsome red and white livery which welcomed passengers for a pleasant jaunt across to an island in the Pacific – a far happier cargo than in their former days.
But as I watched them as a child pulling up off the water and heard the change in pitch in their big radial engines as they banked, then levelled out towards the east, it was the power, even the terror that I heard of a time before my own – so recent yet so different – when a dreadful struggle consumed the far corners of the globe; when the lives of millions were shattered against a mighty anvil, and young men like Dudley, and Arthur, and Max and Nevin, and even Peter and Heinz embarked on a terrible crusade which shaped their lives and changed the world.
Now, heading into the final laps of their long lives, each of them had permitted me to delve and prod and question, to stir up the solid layers of memory – sometimes decades dormant – to hear and record the deeds of their long-departed youth.
For some, the few years spent wearing the blue uniform – a brief moment in the context of their eight decades or more – has continued to tower over the landscape of their lives. Some still seem to be fighting the war, reliving the stresses and the visions which, to their astonishment, have returned with the years rather than diminished. For others, it was simply a blip, forgotten but for the persistence of a curious stranger half their age with a tape recorder.
As close as I could come to what I set out to achieve – understanding what they did, seeing what they saw – bringing to the table a lifetime’s fascination which eased open the heavy gates of reticence, I remained with my four-and-a-half decades spent in luxuriant peace but little the wiser. The fires, the fears, the youthful faces long dead are traumas which I and millions more have been mercifully spared.
For their time given both sixty years ago, as well as in long afternoons with me in their homes, I am both honoured and grateful.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Putting together a book about the airmen of the Second World War was in reality a labour of love for me, and I am indebted to the people at Penguin Australia not only for believing such a project to be a worthwhile one, but for allowing me to write it, then with patience and good grace, standing by as I blithely ignored a series of deadlines before delaying them further with endless, last-minute finessing and fiddling. Thank you particularly to my ever-encouraging editors, Kirsten Abbott and Anne Rogan, and also to Louise Ryan for being an early champion of the book.
I have received great co-operation from many people over the course of the project, particularly those who contacted me with the names and numbers of former airmen, who I would otherwise have never met. I would especially like to thank Charles Palliser, Lisa Louden, Murray Glegg, Ian Spiers, Dick Levy and Les Gordon. Your enthusiasm made my job so much easier.
I am particularly grateful for the patience and support of wives, partners and children, who allowed me to pick and prod at the memories of their loved ones, poring over log books, raiding private photo albums, and stirring up goodness knows what demons to be dealt with long after I had departed t
he scene. Over the course of many hours and many afternoons, you kept both spirits and blood sugar levels from flagging with sandwiches, cakes and encouragement.
Most importantly, I am indebted to the men themselves who allowed a complete stranger into their homes to wrench open the often difficult past with a trust and openness that both humbled and inspired me.
Many of those I interviewed for this book have had to wait a long time to see it appear. For some, sadly, it has been too long, and a number have passed away before they could see their stories published. I hope, for their families and all those interested, I have done their memories justice, and that the effort and the courage they showed in revealing to me their part in a great conflict has been a worthwhile one.
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS
P I: Jock McAuley, private collection
p 2: Jock McAuley, private collection
P 3: top – Jock McAuley, private collection; bottom – Barney Barnett, private collection
P 4: Barney Barnett, private collection
P 5: Ralph Proctor, private collection
P 6: Ralph Proctor, private collection
P 7: Ralph Proctor, private collection
P 8: top – Ralph Proctor, private collection; bottom – Bob Molesworth, private collection
P 9: Bob Molesworth, private collection
PP 10–11: Bob Molesworth, private collection
P 12: Bob Molesworth, private collection
P 13: Roy Riddel, private collection
P 14: Roy Riddel, private collection
P 15: Roy Riddel, private collection
P 16: Arthur Cundall, private collection
P 17: David Roberts, private collection
P 18: David Roberts, private collection
P 19: David Roberts, private collection
P 20: top – David Roberts, private collection; bottom – Max Durham, private collection
P 21: Max Durham, private collection
P 22: Max Durham, private collection
P 23 top – Max Durham, private collection; bottom – James Coward, private collection
P 24: Harvey Bawden, private collection
P 25: Harvey Bawden, private collection
P 26: Tom Trimble, private collection
P 27: Michael Veitch, private collection
P 28: top – wikipedia.com; bottom – Ian Spiers, private collection
P 29: top – Michael Veitch, private collection; bottom – Alistair Smith, private collection
P 30: Alistair Smith, private collection
P 31: Ian Spiers, private collection
P 32: top – Ian Spiers, private collection; bottom – Dudley Marrow, private collection
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