Taking to the Skies

by Jim Eames

  Frank Ball wasn’t alone in his reticence to talk about the wartime experiences of 200 Flight. Shortly before Eric Read died in 2004, a family friend, Graham Stephenson, convinced Read to put down on paper an account of his flying career. The result was a detailed, and at times poignant, record starting from his earliest days in the RAAF in 1935, his life during his various postings, through to his work with the Department of Civil Aviation’s Flying Unit towards the end of his flying career.

  Stephenson set about drawing together Read’s notes in narrative form, but when it came to his time at Leyburn there was simply the notation:

  RAAF 200 Flight. This page deliberately left blank.

  Some of the story did come alive for Rae Ball when they attended a ‘back-to-Leyburn’ reunion in the late 1980s. The Royal Hotel, and Leyburn itself, was much like it had been those many years before, but the airfield was overgrown; though this didn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm of the returning 200 Flight and Z Special Unit men. One of the attendees captured the moment in a later circular:

  The strip was located and most ran around like excited schoolboys, some just strode around recapturing our feelings of 40 years ago—it wasn’t hard! The old campsite was now overgrown, but the concrete slab of the cookhouse could be identified. Some memorabilia was recovered.

  Rae Ball well remembers the ‘memorabilia’:

  It was hysterical. It was a little gold container and they all claimed it was theirs. For an instant they were back as young men again.

  Hidden behind a veil of secrecy during the war, to be continued post-war under legislative secrecy provisions, 200 Flight’s existence didn’t become public knowledge until the passing of the Archives Act of 1983. The Australian War Memorial’s comprehensive official war history volume, Air War Against Japan 1943–45, contains no references to it.

  Fortunately, after that 1980s reunion, Phil Dynes took on the task of gathering what he could of the unit’s history, resulting in a detailed account titled Leyburn’s Liberators and Those Lonely Special Duties Air Operations, which was distributed to those whom fate had brought together at Leyburn. Complete with photographs taken during the war, not only of many of those involved but also of the crude training apparatus used by those who dropped into the unknown through the Liberator’s ‘slippery dip’, it remains the only known account of their work.

  There is, however, a memorial in a neat little park at Leyburn, listing the names of the 32 airmen from 200 Flight and the fourteen Z Special Unit men who paid the ultimate price. The losses of 200 Flight are understood to be among the highest per capita for any RAAF Liberator unit in the Second World War.

  Leyburn’s Royal Hotel remains the oldest continually licensed hotel in Queensland, although it was certainly out of bounds for the personnel of the secret 200 Flight in early 1945. Not that the sound of aircraft engines is totally absent. The sky above is now part of RAAF Amberley’s training area and the roar of FA-18 Super Hornets is an almost daily occurrence.

  There’s also a memorial plaque atop the peak of Bukit Batu Lawi in Central Borneo. It was placed there in 1987 by an Australian Army Project Team to honour a promise Major Tom Harrisson made to the memory of Graham Pockley and 200 Flight over 40 years before. It reads:

  . . . of 200 Flight . . . They successfully dropped us at Bareo 25/3/45 but they never got back to Morotai. By Batu Lawi we steered on this and four previous attempts. The RAAF called it Mount 200. I pledged my word to climb it for them in their memory.

  Tom Harrisson, after a successful guerrilla-warfare campaign, returned to his wartime land as curator of the Sarawak Museum in Kuching for more than 25 years. He died in a bus accident in Thailand in 1976.

  3

  Reopening war-torn Darwin to the world

  By late 1945, the Darwin that RAAF 200 Flight crews transited on their epic, long-range journeys north was starting to come to terms with what would happen at the end of the war. Plans were already in hand for a gradual rundown of military infrastructure and personnel when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August; it was time to pack up and go home.

  For those who occupied senior positions in Australia’s Qantas, however, the opposite was the case. Darwin’s township and harbour were not simply bomb-ravaged wartime relics which needed to be cleaned up and returned to normality. Their very location held much of the airline’s future in their hands.

  Qantas had come through the war in relatively good shape. Its aircraft and crews had played an important role in wartime support operations through its Indian Ocean Double Sunrise service and troop supply and evacuation in war zones to the north of Australia, and a number of its people were now drifting back to the airline after service in the RAAF both in Europe and the south-west Pacific.

  In other respects, however, the war had been costly. Not only had its sole major air route—to London in concert with British Overseas Airways Corporation over Singapore—been cut by the Japanese in February 1942, but its international flying boat fleet had been reduced from eleven to one. Since these and the four-engine, land-based DH.86s had formed the mainstay of the Qantas sector of the route to Singapore via Darwin and the Dutch East Indies, what was left would have to be put in place as soon as possible. Otherwise, as Qantas founder Hudson Fysh was only too aware, his airline would be in danger of losing its international franchise, the very key to its future.

  With international services across the Pacific yet to come, Darwin, sitting strategically on the exit and entry point for all international services to and from Australia, was a vital part of the equation from the Qantas viewpoint. Neither was its significance lost on the British at the other end of the route. Although just beginning to stagger back from years at war, the British, too, were anxious to restamp their aviation footprint around the globe, not least because they recognised that other factors were in play.

  The Second World War had brought a spectacular surge in the development of aircraft design and engine performance. This, along with the wartime construction of thousands of aerodromes around the world, had provided the United States with an overwhelming superiority when it came to postwar aviation. Companies like Pan American Airways were already looking to spread their wings as instruments of US foreign policy. By contrast, Britain, its own aviation industry battered by the war, was struggling to regain its prewar prominence. Darwin, therefore, had to be up and running as soon as possible and it was Qantas’ responsibility to achieve it. Hartley Shannon got the job.

  Born in Adelaide in 1916, Hartley Ellis Shannon would prove typical of a small group of men and women who would be asked to make considerable sacrifices in strange, often dangerous locations in order to re-launch airlines like Qantas into the post-war era. Leaving school at sixteen, Shannon spent a short time in the wine and food industry in Adelaide before moving to Darwin, first with the Department of Treasury in 1938 and later in defence supply with the Department of Defence. By the time he had been seconded to Qantas in a similar role in 1943 he had survived the bombing of Darwin and earned a reputation as resourceful, determined and, when necessary, uncompromising.

  He spent six months in Townsville, a key transit port during Qantas’ involvement in the New Guinea campaign, then moved back to Darwin in 1944, by which time he had acquired a comprehensive knowledge of how Darwin worked, along with a formidable range of contacts, both military and civilian. In late February 1945 Qantas general manager George Harman called Shannon to Sydney. The war, Harman said, would soon be over and he had a proposition for him. First, would he like a job in Qantas after the war?

  ‘I certainly would, but I’m on a five-year contract with Defence and I presume I’ll have to go back there,’ Shannon replied.

  ‘We’ve been in touch with Defence and they’ve agreed if and when we get a signed peace agreement with the Japanese they would agree to release you,’ was Harman’s counter. In addition, Harman said, a position would be created for him in executive management, and, since he knew the place backwar
ds, his first assignment would be the reopening of Darwin.

  ‘We’ll let you go unfettered as we know you’ll be starting from nothing. Your main task will be to get us established, and keep the aircraft operating.’

  For Shannon it appeared an offer too good to refuse, but he was determined to keep his wits about him. If he’d learned anything during his Qantas secondment it was the Qantas management’s reputation for forensic oversight of expenditure, with every penny spent requiring detailed justification. And since George Harman, the man promising him an ‘unfettered’ assignment in Darwin, had risen to general manager via the position of company secretary, Shannon needed to ensure he had the flexibility to do the job Darwin would demand.

  He also knew Harman’s own authorisation to spend was limited to only 500 pounds without seeking the specific approval of the Qantas board. Even double that wouldn’t go far in Darwin. He did his best to be diplomatic.

  ‘I’d be happy to do it, Mr Harman, but I would need a free hand. I’ll need a letter signed by yourself, the chairman (Sir Fergus McMaster) and Mr Fysh because from the moment I get back to Darwin I’m going to have to break all the rules!’

  By the time he boarded the DC-3 to Darwin the following day he had the letter in his pocket. It was as well he did. A few months after his Darwin assignment was completed one of Harman’s deputies charged Shannon with exceeding his authority on expenditure levels, threatening to report him to Fysh. Shannon produced the letter and the problem dissolved.

  The Darwin Shannon was returning to in 1945 was little more than a shambles. The impact of the 60 bombing attacks by the Japanese between 19 February 1942 and November 1943 both on the town itself and the surrounding military installations had left little of its prewar structure recognisable. Not only was Darwin’s harbour strewn with the wreckage of sunken vessels but 130 of the town’s original 400 buildings had been destroyed; although some of the latter damage could be blamed on the occupying troops who seemed to have gone out of their way to unnecessarily bulldoze much of the town’s remaining commercial and housing area into rubble.

  With more than 100 000 troops of all services based there during the war it was inevitable that hundreds of ugly, army-issue black-iron huts would be necessary, but much of the destruction to achieve them would later be described as extreme vandalism.

  The situation would, in fact, have both short- and long-term consequences for Darwin. Many former residents, anxiously awaiting their return immediately after the war, would arrive back to find their homes had disappeared, forcing them to live in those ugly left-over army huts for years, all the while watching with increasing frustration as government indecision and red tape led nowhere. While all land within 19 kilometres of the town was compulsorily acquired to accommodate the planned construction of new Darwin, nothing happened. Eventually the ‘all new Darwin’ concept would be abandoned and authorities would be forced to revert to the town’s original layout.

  But for Hartley Shannon and Qantas, waiting was not an option. Aircraft maintenance and refuelling facilities had to be restored; crew accommodation created; and a catering centre, along with all the other administrative requirements needed to keep an airline operating, established. And, at least as far as Qantas was concerned, prewar Darwin had not been just another stopover point on its network. With as yet no regular services across the Pacific or Indian oceans, it was still to be the biggest Qantas base outside Sydney.

  Within weeks of his arrival in Darwin, Shannon had started his recruiting campaign for staff, insisting on attracting people from Sydney and Melbourne. This was a deliberate ploy as he needed reliability and was not prepared to take a risk on some of the itinerants who had started drifting back north. In the meantime the Department of Civil Aviation was arranging for the airport site to be moved from Parap, near Fannie Bay, which had existed since Sir Ross and Sir Keith Smith’s first flight from England to Australia in 1919, to a joint military-civil facility to the north-east of the town.

  Accommodation, however, was the most urgent priority, a problem Shannon initially solved by taking over a section of the Darwin Hotel along with the Burns Philp management quarters for aircrew stopovers and several large houses still standing at Miley Point. But much more was required if the deadline for service start-up of April 1946 was to be achieved. So, armed with Harman’s letter of approval, Shannon went on a spending spree. To house staff and any emergency passenger accommodation he acquired the old timber-framed army hospital at Berrimah and although it was 16 kilometres out of town it would have to do.

  Even with the original long, open hospital wards carved into rooms, it would hardly be a home away from home. Privacy was at a minimum: the partitions separating the rooms stopping short of the ceiling and the floor, ostensibly to help airflow. There were few creature comforts, with the passenger end of the building the only one with hot running water. That would remain the case for some time due to a parsimonious Qantas head office belief that staff in the tropics could survive without it. Indeed, Shannon would find the same policy extended to a later posting to Lae in Papua New Guinea where one of his engineers was almost fired when head office found out he’d fitted his own hot water system.

  Establishing a flight kitchen at the RAAF airport was also a priority as aircraft transiting between Sydney and Singapore would need catering. The days of aircraft carrying more than one hot meal on a flight sector were still some years away. When he heard that a 500-strong unit of Canadian army construction engineers out at 16 Mile camp were sitting around waiting to sail home, Shannon called their commanding officer.

  ‘Have you got anything we might use?’ he asked.

  ‘Come and have a look,’ replied the Canadian. ‘It’ll probably all be thrown into the sea when we leave.’

  The end result was a cache of building materials, along with tractors and spares which Shannon estimated to be worth around 50 000 pounds, all added to the Qantas manifest for next to nothing.

  It didn’t stop there. With another Department of Works and Housing colleague, Bruce Litchfield, Shannon roamed Darwin looking for ‘bargains’. Their modus operandi went something like this: Litchfield would say, ‘That’s a fairly good building. What about a hundred quid?’

  ‘I’ll have it,’ Shannon would reply. Others were as low as 30 pounds. The more he looked the more bargains Shannon found, at one point paying just over 8000 pounds for 8 hectares of freehold land with 72 buildings on it!

  ‘We thought that was a pretty good property deal,’ Shannon recalls.

  On 7 April 1946 Qantas reopened services through Darwin to Singapore with converted wartime Liberators, and three days later a thrice-weekly service by Lancastrians began, with Qantas crews taking the aircraft through to Karachi to be then flown to England by BOAC crews.

  The following month Hythe flying boats replaced the Liberators, which meant that the Sydney–London service had parallel options—a 67-hour Lancastrian flight alongside the more comfortable and leisurely five-day flying-boat operation. The Hythes, however, would be destined to have a short career as an intense struggle was taking place behind the scenes between the British and the Americans for aviation supremacy in the postwar world.

  The British government and BOAC were anxious to have Qantas continue to operate Lancastrians and Hythes until they could be replaced by a British-built land plane, the Tudor II, which was as yet untested. BOAC was intent on making sure the Hythes were here to stay, at least in the medium term while they forecast daily flying-boat services to London, predictions Shannon often got firsthand as BOAC executives passed through Darwin on their way to talks with Qantas in Sydney. Indeed, on one occasion with Shannon present, BOAC Chairman Lord Knollys told Melbourne Herald journalist, Douglas Lockwood, that not only daily services were to come but also an ‘around the world service by way of Australia, controlled exclusively by the British Empire’.

  Qantas, however, had harboured serious reservations about the suitability of British aircraft like the Tudor for
its purposes, intent on looking towards the Lockheed Constellation, which promised longer range with more payload capability. Inevitably, despite intense pressure on Australia by the British government, victory would go to the Americans and it would be the Constellation which would become the mainstay of the Qantas fleet.

  Such high-level machinations were well beyond Hartley Shannon’s responsibility as he continued to oversee the return of Darwin to international operations against a background of makeshift facilities, businesses being carried on in still damaged buildings along with inflated living costs. When it came to the latter, Shannon and his wife, Joan, at least had some advantages over most of the locals. Douglas Lockwood would tell the Herald’s Melbourne readers that vegetables, with the exception of potatoes and onions, came out of tins and were double the southern prices. Fruit also came out of tins and was well beyond what southern housewives were paying. Egg prices were exorbitant, beef the only meat available and a tropical essential like a block of ice was roughly similar in price to down south but only a third of the size.

  Along with the daily battle with makeshift resources, Shannon had to deal with a passing parade of VIP visitors. Tending to the needs of BOAC’s Knollys and his own managing director, Hudson Fysh, were occasional interruptions.

  After passing through late in 1946 Fysh wrote back to tell Shannon how pleased he was at the progress in Darwin, adding a few suggestions of his own:

  ‘The keynote of success in Darwin is going to be a retention of smartness, tidiness and efficiency . . .’ Acknowledging ‘the blighting atmosphere and surroundings of Darwin’, Fysh went on to emphasise the ‘maintenance of real trim tidiness in all Qantas camps, houses, cars, general equipment, hangar space, everybody’s personal dress, the way everybody leaves his bed each day . . .’

  As for the impression of passengers Fysh opined: