by Jim Eames
Although on the occasion I was worried about using the extra fuel to climb up too quickly to an operating level to make sure we were out of the clouds for star usage, the night was quite a good one and just before dawn I was able to get a very good fix on a prominent star and thus establish my position on the Indian Ocean.
From that point I handed over the navigation to my first officer and I took over control so that I could take quick sights of the rising sun and thus hand them back to him so that he could calculate them and work out whether we were using the correct line of approach to the Cocos-Keeling Group.
At first, however, his sightings indicated he might be as much as 32 to 48 kilometres too far to the west of his planned track. Although Ambrose had allowed for time to carry out a square search if he missed the islands on the first attempt, it was not a prospect he relished, as the ultimate failure to locate them would mean he had insufficient fuel to turn back to Ceylon or make it to the Australian coast. His only option, therefore, would be to turn west again and head for the island of Diego Garcia, where he knew the Royal Air Force used a lagoon for their reconnaissance flights.
Since even under the best flying conditions he could not be expected to reach Diego Garcia until an hour after dark, the prospect of landing on a lagoon he had never seen wasn’t something he was looking forward to. At this point it would not be difficult to gauge the apprehension being felt by the two meteorological officers aboard, once again out in the middle of this vast expanse of water looking for a dot on its surface.
To everyone’s relief, almost dead on time, Cocos was sighted out of the port window. Ambrose remembers:
It was merely a matter of doing a hand-flown circuit and alighting on the lagoon and tieing up to go ashore with the two Met officers who, over the last hour or so had been watching the first officer and myself very carefully in case we made any mistakes and put them into all the problems they had been faced with on their earlier attempt to find the place.
Since the nature of the operation remained a closely guarded secret, few in Perth assumed the Catalinas taking off from Nedlands were involved in anything other than shipping patrols or flights to northern Australia or Papua New Guinea. Although crews were officially on the RAAF Reserve, for security purposes they wore civilian clothes while off duty, a requirement Rex Senior found carried several unpleasant consequences. Once while walking from his guest house near Kings Park into the Qantas Perth office, he stopped to buy a packet of cigarettes at the kiosk, only to be told by the woman behind the counter: ‘Go and join up. There are no cigarettes for bludgers.’ On another occasion he received a white feather neatly enclosed in an envelope.
By mid-1944 converted four-engine B-24 Liberator bombers were introduced on the route using Ratmalana aerodrome in Ceylon and changing the route pattern to a triangular operation via Learmonth as the Australian departure and arrival point. In one stroke the B-24s reduced the length of the trans-ocean crossing from 5653 kilometres to 4952, while at the same time slashing the flight time to between sixteen and eighteen hours and allowing for much greater passenger and freight payloads.
Within twelve months Qantas was operating four services per fortnight as the Liberators gradually took over the role of the Catalinas. Significantly, too, the Liberators would also bring with them the introduction of what became the airline’s first in-flight use of its famous Kangaroo Route insignia, with each Liberator carrying the iconic kangaroo symbol on its nose.
By July 1945, when the Catalinas made their last flights, the aircraft had crossed the Indian Ocean 271 times, covered 2 092 147 kilometres and carried more than 58 059 kilos of cargo and mail. Each of the 683 passengers had joined a unique club to experience the sunrise twice during their 24-hour flight, an achievement which Qantas marked by the presentation of the Secret Order of the Double Sunrise, noting the date of his or her journey and signed by the aircraft’s commander. With Singapore once again opening for civil aviation, Lancastrians—converted Lancaster bombers—took over the England-to-Australia services.
Though the Catalinas of the Double Sunrise service would be casualty-free, Qantas’ other flying boat arm, the Empire Class, would pay a high price in men and equipment during the war years. Three crew and ten passengers would be lost when one was shot down by the Japanese near Kupang in January 1942, and two were lost the following month: one in a landing accident at Townsville while under charter to the RAAF; and another which disappeared with twenty passengers and crew during a flight between Tjilatjap and Broome. Early in March two more were destroyed when Japanese fighters caught them on the water during an attack on Broome. Five others were lost in landing accidents: one during an emergency landing in poor weather at night off Port Moresby; another at Darwin; and three at Qantas’ main base at Rose Bay in Sydney.
Sadly, however, while other Catalinas would continue in Qantas service after the war, those which had performed so magnificently on the Indian Ocean service would suffer a fate which would sit oddly with their achievements. Because of their procurement under the Lend Lease agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States, the aircraft could not be sold or used for civil purposes and the four remaining at Nedlands were handed over to the Royal Air Force Command in Perth. In November 1945 they were taken off the coast of Perth and sunk. The fifth met the same fate off Sydney four months later.
Neither, too, would the men who flew and serviced them receive any official recognition by the Australian government for their service, despite efforts by Hudson Fysh to achieve it. Given that they had flown through enemy territory, often similar to missions by RAAF Catalina squadrons, carried military personnel and cargo and would have suffered the same fate of any other aircraft crew had they been captured by the Japanese, the government’s failure to acknowledge their contribution is hard to understand.
Of those who flew the Catalinas and continued to fly after the war, most would go on to stellar careers in Qantas. Men like Tapp, Crowther, Ambrose, Norm Roberts and others would guide Qantas’ operational accomplishments in the post-war years. One of the Double Sunrise pilots, Captain R.J. ‘Bert’ Ritchie, would eventually become the airline’s general manager. In one of his final acts as general manager before his retirement in 1976, Ritchie called the Double Sunrise veterans together for what Norm Roberts sardonically described as the ‘Last Supper’. Among those who attended was Rex Senior, who had abandoned a flying career at the end of the war to study medicine and eventually open a practice in Robe, South Australia.
Even when viewed against the tremendous development in post-war aviation and the coming of the jet age, the Double Sunrise service stands as an incredible accomplishment. Very strict guidelines have always surrounded the operation of twin-engine aircraft over water, with the essential requirement for the aircraft to be within range of the nearest adequate airfield should one engine fail in flight.
Even with the introduction of Qantas’ Bird of Paradise service with DC-3 aircraft between Sydney and Port Moresby in the fifties, the sector from Townsville to Port Moresby could not be flown direct but was ‘bent’, so that the aircraft was always within 60 minutes at single-engine cruise speed, first of Cairns, then Cooktown, then Lockhart River Mission and finally Thursday Island, all of which had to be ‘open for business’.
With the advent of jet airliners, four-engine aircraft (such as the Boeing 707, DC-8 and later the Boeing 747) took over the long over-water sectors until, eventually, in the 1980s, as the fan-jet engine proved its extreme reliability, twin-engine aircraft like the Boeing 767 were permitted to operate within 90 minutes of the nearest suitable airfield.
In something of an ironic echo of the Double Sunrise, when Qantas first looked at the possibility of operating a Boeing 767 service between Perth and Colombo, calculations showed the 767 would not have been permitted to operate the service direct across the Indian Ocean. One could assume the men of the Double Sunrise service would have agreed with that approach. But as the war moved into 1945 and Qantas’ B-24
Liberators began to replace the faithful Catalinas on the Indian Ocean route, over 3000 kilometres away to the northeast from Perth, another small group of Australian airmen was gathering for a mission which would, at least in long-range aviation terms, have striking similarities to the Double Sunrise service.
2
RAAF 200 Flight
Secret missions behind enemy lines
Australian airmen and ground staff began arriving at an airfield on the outskirts of the small town of Leyburn, near Toowoomba, in southern Queensland in February 1945. Like their Indian Ocean counterparts, they, too, were being equipped with B-24 Liberator bombers, and like the Indian Ocean service, their task would be shrouded in secrecy and would also represent one of the longest military operations of the war, probing well into enemy territory.
Ironically, one of those who would play a leading part in the success of RAAF 200 Flight’s clandestine operations would, like Captain Bert Ritchie, go on to lead a major Australian airline, joining an exceptional breed of airmen who would rise to the top of Australia’s post-war aviation industry.
RAAF 200 Flight had its origins in the cloak-and-dagger war carried out by the Australian Intelligence Bureau’s Z Special Unit, elite commandos inserted as small intelligence-gathering parties behind enemy lines. By the time 200 Flight became associated with it, Z Special Unit had been operating for several years, its most notable success being the spectacular Operation Jaywick during September 1943 in which a small group of commandos sailed thousands of kilometres through enemy-held islands to attack Japanese shipping in Singapore harbour.
While Jaywick was to become the best known of Z Special Unit’s exploits, scores of other parties were parachuted or landed by submarine to spend months behind enemy lines reporting on enemy troop, shipping and air movements, along with maintaining contact with locals under Japanese occupation.
Originally modelled on Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), formed at the insistence of Winston Churchill to play havoc with the German occupation forces in Europe, the Australian Intelligence Bureau’s (AIB) version of its northern-hemisphere counterpart had at times faced its own struggle to survive. Conflicts between General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters and the Australian High Command, in addition to a degree of animosity from within the Australian military itself, often didn’t help. Some of those at senior levels in the armed forces, schooled in the more traditional army roles, made no secret of the fact that they regarded ‘special forces’ type operations such as Z Special Unit as little more than attention-gathering military pinpricks.
But those with a slightly broader view of the wartime requirements could see the value in accurate information gained from behind the lines, not only to assist MacArthur’s drive towards Japan but also to determine the degree of resistance which remained after his island-hopping campaign had moved on. Unfortunately, the very shift in the war further to the north often left organisations like Z Special Unit struggling to gain adequate air support for their planned operations, their priority slipping away behind the demand for aircraft and personnel at the battlefront.
By late 1944 it had become apparent that the American 5th Air Force Liberators based in Darwin could not adequately match the demand to accommodate AIB-approved projects for places like Borneo and Timor. One-off deployment of single B-24s for such operations didn’t sit well with the major bombing role of the US squadrons, along with the fact that the inexperienced American crews were often unable to locate the drop zones and were not skilled at handling such big aircraft at low speed and low altitudes.
Such haphazard allocation of aircraft along with the loss of crews with limited experience in the special low-flying parachute-insertion techniques required by Z Special Unit, finally succeeded in AIB winning its argument for a dedicated flight of aircraft and crews specially trained to undertake parachute insertion and supply.
The orders which went out from RAAF Command’s Air Vice Marshal, W.D. Bostock, called for ‘specially selected aircrews and carefully screened personnel for security reasons’. It was so secret that most of those to be posted to 200 Flight had no idea what they were getting into. Phil Dynes, a cryptographer in signals intelligence who would later gather what is believed to be the only detailed historical record of the existence of 200 Flight, found himself one morning directed to report to a building in Melbourne’s South Yarra. When he finally made it into the office of the officer he was required to meet he was asked: ‘How would you like a job in the Queensland climate?’ Dynes later figured he must have nodded his head as he was then issued with a rail warrant to Clifton in Queensland and told to report to the commanding officer of 200 Flight.
One of the pilots who arrived at Leyburn with other aircrew after a conversion course on Liberators at Tocumwal in New South Wales recalls being greeted with: ‘You are all volunteers for special service.’ Which led to the response by one of the group: ‘Are we?’
Many of the aircrew assigned to 200 Flight had been specially chosen for their experience. The CO squadron leader, Graham Pockley, had distinguished himself flying Sunderland flying boats with the RAAF’s No 10 Squadron with the Royal Air Force Coastal Command in England. No 10 Squadron had in fact been in England when war broke out and became the first RAAF squadron to see service in the Second World War. By the time he had returned to Australia Pockley had earned a DFC and Bar for inflicting heavy damage on enemy naval and merchant shipping, including destroying two German U-boats and damaging three others.
Experience-wise, though, Pockley was in good company. The 200’s captains were all experienced pilots who had seen service in various theatres of the war. Arch Clark had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal (DFM) while flying twin-engine Wellington bombers in the Tunisian campaign. Two of his crew members had also won DFMs—Col Manning during a night raid over Kassel in Germany in a Lancaster, while Herbie Clark, his tail gunner, had shot down one enemy aircraft and possibly another returning from the Dam Buster raid. Another skipper, Bob Carson, had a similar decoration for missions over Germany in Wellingtons.
Les Anderson had flown B-24s in the Burma campaign. John Hopkins, his nose gunner, radar operator, Doug Bullock, tail gunner, Tich Burness, and mid-upper gunner, Jackson Neilson, served with Royal Air Force Bomber Command. Indeed, Neilson had the rare distinction of not only being forced to bail out to save his life but endure a remarkably brief stint as a prisoner of war when his B-25 Mitchell was shot down near Calais in September 1944. Captured by the Germans on landing and held in the attic of a chalet with other prisoners, Neilson had only been there fourteen hours when allied soldiers, unaware there were prisoners inside, assaulted the chalet with grenades and rifles. Many of the prisoners were killed, but Neilson managed to survive and later returned to Britain and Australia.
Flying Officer Col Walker and three of his crew had served together with 459 Squadron RAAF in Britain and the Middle East. Flight Lieutenants Frank Ball and Tom Bridges both flew C-47s with transport squadrons in New Guinea before being posted to Leyburn. Despite their accumulated experience, however, as crews on B-24s they were to have a steep learning curve.
The B-24 Liberator proved to be the workhorse of the USAAF bomber strategy in the Second World War, serving on every war front. Although its role, at least in the public’s mind, would be somewhat overshadowed in subsequent years by its sister frontline bomber, the B-17 Flying Fortress—in a similar way to the fate of the Hurricane alongside the more iconic Spitfire in the Battle of Britain—more than 18 000 Liberators were built, as against 12 000 B-17s. Heavier than its counterpart, the B-24 also outperformed the B-17 in both range and payload, but many crews reported it was a more difficult aircraft to fly, a factor which would doubtless have added to the challenges faced by 200 Flight crews in the low-level operations they were asked to perform.
Presumably designated as a ‘flight’ because it fell well below the number of aircraft and personnel required to qualify as a squadron, during its relatively short career 200 F
light would consist of a maximum of six Liberators. Each Liberator would carry a crew of eleven comprising a captain, a copilot, a navigator, a bomb aimer, a flight engineer, a wireless operator, two radar/ waist gunners and a nose, mid-upper and tail gunner.
Beyond a standard crew compliment, however, 200 Flight’s Liberators were anything but normal. All armour plate and anything else on the aircraft deemed unnecessary had been stripped out and each had been fitted with a specially developed slide/escape hatch below and at the rear of the aircraft fuselage through which personnel and supplies could be delivered. The introduction of the ‘slippery dip’, as it was to be known, had been the result of a series of trials carried out at Fenton in the Northern Territory in 1943 and 1944, utilising a B-24 named ‘Beautiful Betsy’ from the USAAF 380th Bomb Group. The idea was to match the B-24s exceedingly long-range and payload capability with the ability to drop small parties of paratroopers well behind enemy lines, a mission in stark contrast to dropping bombs from 20 000 feet. Thus it would provide AIB and Z Special Unit with the best of both worlds: long-range penetration of enemy territory by a well-armed four-engine aircraft capable of spending time seeking out the required drop zone before delivering its cargo with pinpoint accuracy.
But it would also mean overcoming several other physical challenges. The insertion points required operating over jungle clearings sometimes only a few hundred yards long, often surrounded by mountains of unknown height, shrouded in cloud. Like much of that part of the world before the war, maps and altitude information of Central Borneo were nonexistent apart from the coastal areas where exploration had been undertaken by some oil companies. Crews like Ball’s were to report that even the rivers they needed to use as navigation points didn’t match the names they had on their charts and their estuaries took totally different forms.