Once out of the Bay of Biscay and into the Mediterranean the waters became calmer and the weather warmer. Unlike the American system of two meals per day, this vessel stuck to the time honoured British method of four meals per day. Inefficient, time consuming and with stodgy food, it just went to show that without the Yanks we couldn’t have won this war!
The convoy proceeded uneventfully, unlike most preceding ones which had suffered severe air attacks. Fighters from the American aircraft carrier flew reassuringly around us, but perhaps the Germans were busy elsewhere. Earlier in the voyage I had struck up a friendship with a quite nice-looking WAAF named Jean. We were getting along famously for a while, until her eye alighted on another bloke from our contingent, a good looking young fellow of Spanish appearance. This was the end of my social interaction as, by this time, everybody else had paired off and, it seemed to my jaundiced eye, at night in the blacked out ship, that they were all really behaving rather badly! So I solaced myself by running a crown and anchor game with my pal David Linacre. As this was another illegal activity we selected venues in the remoter parts of the ship away from the prying eyes of the forces of authority. After some initial losses we ended up making quite a bundle, which proved to be very useful when we landed at Port Said.
Very hot, Port Said - lots of urchins diving for coins etc. Thence by troop train across the desert to Cairo, where the inevitable eternal wait took place for transport to wherever it was to be. Linacre, the eternal opportunist, spotted an empty truck, so some of us hopped into it and, after some delay, were driven away, waving benignly to the multitude left behind in the blazing sun, to a destination we knew not where. Eventually we arrived at a large transit RAF camp situated on the desert outside Cairo where we acquired a tent, mess gear etc. This camp was at Almaza and after we had been there for three days we realised that there were none of our fellow travellers about. Enquiry revealed that we had come to the wrong camp – this was a camp for troops leaving Cairo and we should have been in the one for new arrivals in the Middle East, which was situated some distance away at the Heliopolis Oasis, where we now made our rather fearful way. Luckily no trouble ensued, in fact I don’t think that the camp authorities had yet realised that there was any of us missing. So, with relief, we got ourselves a room in what turned out to be the Heliopolis Palace Hotel which, rather like the hotels that we had stayed in in Brighton, was a stately Victorian relic, rather the worse for wear.
After several weeks we received our postings to Operational Training Units, again splitting up friends, as some were posted to Ishmaelia and some of us to No. 73 OTU, Fayed, situated near the Great Bitter Lake, which was part of the Suez Canal. By now it was October 1944 and the war fronts were changing dramatically. The Russians in the East, having stopped the Germans in late 1942 at Stalingrad in the South, Moscow in the centre and Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg once more) in the North, were advancing relentlessly west over huge distances, while the western allies: USA, Britain, France and other Europeans, were approaching Germany from France, liberating places such as Paris on the way.
In addition, as I mentioned earlier, the Germans were subjected to the most gigantic aerial bombing, both night and day, ever known to this point in history. To add to the Germans’ troubles the British Eighth Army and the Americans had combined to push them out of North Africa, then Sicily, and were moving north towards Rome when their allies, the Italians decided that they had had enough and capitulated. This was the state of the war when we went to OTU, where we thought that we could have a choice of aircraft to fly and that we could make this decision to some extent ourselves based on our personal proclivities and our perceptions of the degree of activity in the various Theatres of War. We Australians, however, had the choice removed from us.
Arriving at Fayed we were presented with a choice of three different types of aircraft on which to learn operational flying. These were Spitfires, Kittyhawks (P40Es) and Thunderbolts. It was difficult to decide. The Spitfires, by far the most beautiful, slight, elegant, and reputedly a joy to fly, filled our imaginations with memories of their victories in the Battle of Britain. To choose these meant a chance of being sent to either France or Burma, the latter Theatre of War being a very low priority with most us. The Thunderbolt, a large, ugly, immensely powerful (2000 horsepower), modern American machine awed us with its destructive power, but it meant Burma for sure, so most of the course participants rejected this idea.
The Kittyhawk was a sturdy, but attractive veteran of the North African campaign but without the Spit’s charisma. As they were only operating in Italy, at least Burma was ruled out! But, we were told, the Aussies amongst us were destined for Italy, as both Australian Squadrons (numbers 3 and 450) were operating there, supporting the British Eighth Army, as they had done throughout the long Western Desert campaign. Indeed, 3 Squadron had been in the Middle East since June 1940, during which time it had had many updates of aircraft type, starting off flying Gloster Gladiators, a semi-obsolete biplane which would not have been out of place in WWI! Actually it was about this time, unbeknown to us, that no. 3 was converting to the best and most effective fighter of the war, the P51 - known as the Mustang - but little did Lew Ranger or I think that we would end up there flying these magnificent machines.
The airstrips at Fayed, long and level, were laid out over the desert beside the Great Bitter Lake. Apart from the heat, conditions were ideal for flying, no cloud and very little wind. In fact during the entire course we never had to fly in cloud so that we had no need for all the blind flying instruments, which was just as well as these had all been removed from the planes to save weight! This lack of emphasis on instrument flying was to cause us all sorts of problems when we flew in the Italian winter, but more of that later.
The course consisted of three squadrons. In the first we flew Harvards, an American dual controlled training plane almost identical with the old Wirraway. This was by way of being a refresher course as it was now some time since we had last flown back in Blighty. After some 15 hours on these the big day came for me on October 20, 1944, when I was to have my first flight in a Kittyhawk. What an awesome thrill! To fly a single seater fighter the first time - no instructor, just you. They could tell you how to fly it on the ground but, thereafter you were on your own. To start with it had a much more powerful engine than anything we had flown before. We had previously flown only in radial-engined, air-cooled motors, this one was equipped with a 16 cylinder, in-line, liquid-cooled Allison, which seemed to stretch out in front of you forever. Don’t forget that I still hadn’t learned to drive a car.
Unlike most present day planes which have two main wheels and a nose wheel, P40s had a tail wheel, so that you couldn’t see in front of you until you had given her the gun and got up sufficient speed to lift your tail up. This done, you roared along the runway at maximum revs until you felt that beautiful feeling of leaving Mother Earth, and then you were flying. It is hard to describe the feeling of being in control of all this complex machinery and power. As you lift off and retract your undercarriage the feeling of being airborne, of feeling the subtle currents of air gently acting upon your machine, is awesome. The seemingly limitless power at your fingertips and the three dimensional control of height and direction is heady stuff indeed. However, on this first trip in a P40 there were many other things to think about; lots to remember and lots to learn and get the particular feel of this beautiful, sleek beast. Somewhat to my surprise I managed the landing OK in spite of the considerable difference in speed and feel from anything previously. It’s a funny thing that throughout my flying career I never ceased to be amazed that I could actually land these flighty creatures!
Flying training in the Kittyhawk proceeded through the usual gamut of exercises, spins, formations, cross-countries etc. Somewhere I have a few quite good photos, taken by me with a very unreliable cheap camera, of Lew and I low flying across the desert. This was quite a feat as I had to fly one-handed, formating with Lew, and still try to take the photos. Unfortunately at this time one of our group, a good friend and fine chap, Geoff Swinbourne, crashed his Kitty and was killed. Another funeral - we buried him in a desolate piece of desert. He was only 19 years old. But for the rest of us it was get up in the air and get on with it.
Shortly we moved on, to number 2 Squadron run by a very tall, eccentric, rather enigmatic Englishman, Fl/Lt Jim Edmonds whose rather strange mannerisms were, it was rumoured, due to an overly long sojourn in Burma flying Hurricanes, where he acquired the nickname “Jungle Jim”. Although a very quiet and reticent man, Jim demanded a skilful and dashing flying style, both qualities which, he said, he had found lacking in the course immediately ahead of us. So much so that he had requested the Chief Flying Instructor (a wing commander ) to declare that these pilots were not fit for operational flying. This request was denied but the talk of it certainly put us on our mettle.
We got off to a bad start. Jungle Jim (we, of course, did not address him thus in person ) was giving us our initial pep talk stating what were his expectations, indeed requirements, of us in terms of flying skills. At the same time, the Station’s loudspeaker system, which was hooked up to all the flight huts, was babbling away with the sounds of all the aircraft aloft at the time. Routine stuff of course when, suddenly came a Mayday call from an excited Jaapie (South African), saying that his aircraft was on fire and he was coming in to land. With that, we left the C/O in mid-sentence and rushed out to watch the impending crash. The Jaapie, in his haste to reach Terra Firma brought his smoking Spitfire in much too steeply, tried to level out too late, hit the deck, wiped off his undercarriage, skidded along the runway, leapt out of the burning plane and hobbled away from it. The reason that he hobbled was because he had been shot in the leg by a 20 mm cannon shell by one of his colleagues.
It happened thus: air to air gunnery practice is usually done by a pair of planes both carrying cine cameras, which were used instead of guns for obvious reasons. Both pilots would shoot at each other using the cameras, the films of which were analysed later in the Station’s theatre. In this instance there had been a serious stuff up as one of the planes (Spitfires) was loaded with cannon shells instead of cameras. The pilot of this plane, Jim Fletcher, a mate of ours, lined up the other plane, laid off the necessary deflection and pressed the trigger. His aim was obviously very good as he only let loose some 12 cannon shells before he realised what was happening and took his finger off the button. The incident above resulted and we returned to Jungle Jim’s rudely interrupted monologue. He had every right to be very angry, as what we had done was not only rude but a potentially serious breach of Air Force discipline. Jungle Jim, ever a mild man, only remonstrated with us mildly. Never the less it was not a good way to kick off with a reportedly perfectionist type instructor.
It was at this time that the penny, at last, really dropped for me and I started to fly the Kitty with a fair amount of precision and dash. I am not sure whether this was due to all the previous varied flying that I had done in different countries and conditions or, perhaps, a process of physical maturation or, again perhaps psychologically, knowing that there was no possibility of anybody else being in the plane to help you out or criticise. The latter, I think, was probably important for me as the single seater style of flying as distinct from, say, a four-engined bomber, seemed to suit my personality fairly well. A similar thing happened to me many years later when, at the age of 40, I fell in love with and started to sail, single-handed racing dinghies. After years of indifferent performance racing in crewed boats I suddenly could do no wrong and, as perhaps your mothers have told you, went on to a fair bit of international success over the next 30 years.
Anyway Jungle Jim seemed to be fairly happy with Lew and me, without exactly showering us with praise. Lew and I had done a hell of a lot of formation flying back in the UK, both enjoying achieving precision in being able to fly very close and maintain station continually without losing concentration for long periods. On our first go, with JJ leading, both Lew and I formed up quickly after take off one on either side at the approved distance of one wingspan away from him. JJ looked at me, looked at Lew and gestured for us to come in closer. Somewhat miffed by this unspoken but implied criticism of our skills we both moved in until our propellers were about a foot away from chewing off his wingtips. Jim took this situation in for a little while before waving us back out again!
Throughout November 1944 we continued to hone our flying skills: dogfighting, aerobatics, section attacks, low flying, and all sorts of other exciting gambits. One interesting exercise was an “oxygen climb”. Having been trained on the ground in a decompression chamber to handle oxygen lack, we were told to take a Kittyhawk up as high as we could get it, before it fell out of the sky. In my case this turned out to be 29,500 feet, at which point the poor old Kitty staggered about like a winded mule and refused to go any higher. This would barely have gotten us over Mt. Everest but later on in the war, given much more powerful planes we could go a good deal higher than this. We then left Jungle Jim, seemingly still with goodwill towards us and moved on to the third squadron, where we were to brush up on dive-bombing, aerial gunnery, strafing and other esoteric arts of the fighter pilot.
This squadron was commanded by a very fine Australian, Flt/Lt Ron Matthews. He and his merry band of Aussie pilots had recently finished their tours of duty in Italy and were enjoying the luxury of flying without being shot at all the time. With the help of these chaps we honed up our skills in those aspects of aerial warfare that we would be expected to perform when we were posted to an operational squadron. These were dive-bombing, low level strafing, aerial combat with cine guns and chasing stray camels in the wastes of the Sinai desert. The latter, of course, was somewhat extracurricular.
We completed our course on December 4, 1944, and were posted to Embarkation Depot at Almaza to await a summons to Italy. Still with the rank of Flight Sergeant I had managed to gain “Above Average” assessments in all three categories. These were Pilot, Fighter Tactics and Formation Flying. It is interesting that the latter, that is close formation, was never used on operations, only on formal fly-pasts or when you wanted to show off.
All Transit camps are horrible places for those passing through. By now I had had experience of many and noted that the permanent staff invariably lived in good quarters, had good food etc. while those going to or coming from the War got very shabby treatment. The reason for this was that we were not to be there long, whereas the permanent staff were and thus needed to have their morale kept up. It may not have been all that long but it certainly seemed, to us, to be long.
The more perceptive among our contingent noted that there was no daily roll call, so without further ado a small group of us moved out, went into Cairo and booked into the much more salubrious Kiwi Club, from which sanctuary we were able to not only take our ease but also to monitor the lists of troops booked onto flights to Italy.
These flights were, of course, Top Secret but one of our number, David Linacre (these days a very big wheel in Australian yachting administration) was very friendly with one of the WAAFs who made up the daily lists. This knowledge enabled us to avoid the tedious duty of reporting back to the piece of desert known as Almaza every few days. We were, of course, technically AWL which, as we were awaiting an overseas posting, was a potentially serious offence, but we were young and, what the hell, it was a rather exciting adventure.
To say that we went about enjoying the fleshpots of Cairo would be, I fancy, somewhat of an overstatement, but with the help of a few WAAFs (photos available on request), outdoor movies, visits backstage to the Cairo Opera House to see the Mikado and various other cultural pursuits we happily whiled away the time until Christmas eve 1944, when a routine check at the BOAC office revealed the fact that we were booked onto a flight to Italy next day. We returned to the Almaza camp, readied our gear for the trip and, next morning, attended parade and answered our names at roll call as if we had been in camp since December 4!
RAAF Mustangs in Flight
Lew Ranger and I flying low in Harvards, over the Egyptian desert near Fayed (No. 73 OTU)
Chapter 5. Italy – Out of the Frying Pan, into the Icebox
The journey to Italy by DC3 transport turned out to be a bit of a saga. The planeload of mixed Army, Navy and Air Force types made it to Benghazi (now in Libya) on the 26th. After all the heat we had put up with, it was noticeably cooler, although we were still in North Africa. We spent the night in a Nissan hut with a fire going all night. Next day we took off for Malta and flew into some appalling weather. We flew at less than 500 feet in pouring rain, as the clouds were so high and dense that the old Dakota couldn’t have got above them. This was a bit of a culture shock to us pilots, as we hadn’t seen or flown in cloud since we left England some six months earlier. Flying so low and without the fancy navigational aids of today the South African pilot had some difficulty in locating Malta which, after all, is only a tiny dot in a large waterway and visibility was restricted by the cloud and lack of height of the aircraft. After some circling Malta appeared out of the mist and rain and, to the relief of all, we landed thereon. Next day we took off for Naples, but after a couple of hours we were forced back to Malta in weather that even the seagulls had refused to fly in! Spent the next two days exploring Valetta, getting a haircut and having my blackheads removed, until on the 30th we again took off and, in still appalling weather, we eventually landed in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.
After the heat of Cairo we were greeted in Naples by snow and freezing weather. Only recently I learnt that this Italian winter of 1944-45 was one of the coldest of last century and the creature comforts presented to us at yet another transit camp were few and far between. The camp was situated at Portici at the foot of Vesuvius, which had had a very spectacular eruption the year before and, although still smouldering, failed to provide us with any warmth at all. We were billeted in a bare stone villa with boarded up windows and tiers of hessian bunks, in which we tried to sleep and keep out the cold with an absolute minimum of Army blankets. Although there were no fireplaces or chimneys, someone was burning a pile of furniture in the centre of the lower bare stone floor. Far from warming us up we spent our time there in a vast, eye-burning fog of acrid smoke not game to open a door because of the intense cold. At least we could see that there were some people (not the permanent staff of course) worse off than ourselves. These were the local Italians who hung around the camp fences, tattered, cold, hungry and defeated. They waited patiently for a hand out of the scraps or uneaten portions of the appalling food that was presented to us. Desperate times of course, but for most of us a salutary experience as we realised that we were getting much closer to the war.
Naples itself was a disaster area. Due to the dirt and filth and lice, typhus was prevalent among the civilian population, who were also cold and hungry. We, of course, as members of the conquering forces were immune to all this with, at least, adequate shelter and food and having been inoculated against typhus.
Americans were everywhere and this was to our advantage, as we were able to see several interesting shows put on by the US Army Entertainment Unit. The first was a production of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirits”, a light and frothy entertainment - just the thing to take our mind off the appalling conditions. I had seen this play in London the year before, but this version was graced by the presence, in the leading role, by a famous Hollywood actress named Annabella, married to the equally famous Tyrone Power, whom we had lusted after during many a Hollywood blockbuster.
This show was followed by an even more seductive display of pulchritude by one Jinx Falkenburg. “Jinx who?”, you say. Well let me tell you, Jinx was a pretty big deal in 1944. An extraordinarily beautiful young woman, she was then the toast of New York, a leading model, an excellent tennis player and the sister of Bob Falkenberg who played Davis Cup for USA early post war. Trouble was that Jinx couldn’t act. However she managed to do her bit for her country by boosting the morale of the sex-starved multitude thus. Dressed in a tight-fitting white sweater, very short shorts, and armed with a tennis racquet, she hit tennis balls into an enraptured all-male audience. Our pleasures were few and simple in those far off days; a fact that all you moderns will doubtless have difficulty in understanding!
Indeed they were our only pleasures, as the days slowly passed with interminable cold, considerable discomfort and unending boredom. At last, one morning we were summoned to Portici’s village square where we were told that we were going north, by rail, to some ill-defined destination near where the war was. We stood there, in ranks, in the pouring rain for some three hours before a three ton truck arrived to take us to the train. We stood there dressed in grey battle dress covered by our greatcoats, blue for the Aussies, grey for the Poms. Although not snowing, it was freezing and by the time the truck came we were saturated from the top of our forage caps to the tip of our woollen issue socks. We were accompanied also by our entire worldly possessions, namely one large kitbag which by now was soaked right through. We remained in this condition for the next three days.
During my three year service career I had many train journeys, some good like the trip across USA, some bad like the sardine special from Uranquinty to Sydney, but none quite like this one from Naples to (as we found out three days later) Arezzo. Italy isn’t very wide but is quite long and we had a big load of Army and Air Force troops aboard what could best be described as a cattle train. I suppose the exigencies of war can account for much of the ensuing organisational disaster, but really, I dunno. A few bare wooden seats, no lights, no heating and no food on the train at all. The engine, which had been strafed by the Allies and patched up, exuded steam in all sorts of unintentional directions and after every run down a slight incline had to stop at the bottom for an hour or so to get up sufficient steam to attack the next slight incline.
We set off north into the night, no food and still clad in wet wool. Someone produced a candle and another (Lew, I think) a battered primus stove and we made a cup of tea. Nowhere to sleep and I, in desperation, got off at one of the frequent stops, walked along the train and found a vacant carriage - wooden seats but a net luggage rack into which I crawled, still in my wet gear, and went to sleep. About an hour later the train stopped and a mob of soldiers poured into the carriage and I was summarily kicked out by their officer and returned to the cattle truck.
Due to the cold and the fatigue and the hunger, the next couple of days are a bit of a blur. I remember arriving in Rome next day and we were told that we would be there two hours and to bugger off and find something to eat. Somehow some of us managed to find the Kiwi Club, where I managed to lay my hands on half a stale sandwich, then return to the train. Rome, to my jaundiced eye, did not look like the eternal city. Later that day we did get officially fed. We stopped alongside a Field kitchen consisting of a huge copper filled with watery stew, well known to us as M &V. A ladle full and then a cup of tea. Unfortunately I had no mug and was forced to drink it out of my just used and unwashed pannikin. On through the night, sleeping fitfully on the floor, huddled together for warmth. We reached our destination (Arezzo) next day, where we learned that we few were headed towards No. 5 Refresher Flying Unit, situated on the wide plain between Perugia and Assisi. How do we get there? “Make your own way”, said the RTO, “We only assist with trains!”.
It was now snowing hard and bloody freezing. We all split up and Lew and I managed to thumb a ride in a Jeep going to Perugia. We tossed for seats and I got the front one. When we got there Lew was literally frozen stiff - we had to lift him out of the jeep and straighten him out, after which we stood on the still-hot roadside fire for some time thawing out.
The rest of the journey is a bit hazy. Only Army types there, no RAF and nobody knew where the Airfield was. It was obviously well off the main roads and all the secondary roads were covered in snow. We must have got a lift somehow towards the plain, but all I can remember is trudging across the plain, knee-deep in snow, looking for this airfield, which was beginning to take on mythical proportions. Somehow we eventually located it but, as there was obviously no flying, all personnel were evidently sitting cosily in their billets. But where were these billets? No sensible person was about in this weather to ask. Eventually, however, we must have found some information and were directed towards a huge barn, which was where we were to spend the ensuing refresher course. I have no memory of how our gear, our worldly possessions, reached us, as we could not possibly have carried it all this way.
The upstairs of this bare, concrete-floored barn was to be our home for the next three weeks for some 30 odd pilots. Surrounded by our gear, we slept on folding camp stretchers with five Army blankets which, with care, could be laid down so that you had five layers underneath and five on top. As long as you stayed perfectly still, you could almost keep out the cold while sleeping.
No water and no toilets - ablutions were accomplished at the well, downstairs and outside, where you had to break off the icicles, pump up the water and hastily splash your face, before going to breakfast, where you ate the two eggs that you had obtained from the local peasants in exchange for twenty American cigarettes. No amount of heated bargaining by us ever affected this seemingly inflexible exchange rate.
The heating problem was solved by some ingenious pilots who managed to steal a 44 gallon drum of 100 octane aviation fuel from a nearby dump, roll it up the stairs, attach a copper tube to the lower outlet with a small tap leading to a small metal dish on the floor, into which petrol from the drum was allowed to drip. A match was then applied to the petrol and a satisfying explosion then ensued. Another smaller empty drum with holes cut in was then placed over the dish of burning fuel and as everything warmed up the drips became a jet spray of petrol, a rhythmic chuffing sound, rather like an overexcited steam train, emanated from the whole system. Lovely, if somewhat alarming, heat radiated from the now glowing red hot drum, but the fumes in this enclosed space were overpowering. Undeterred the creators of this device went off and “liberated” about 30 feet of 6¢¢ steel pipe, a hole was cut in the side of the small drum, another in the brick wall of the building and the pipe connected to both. This proved to be an elegant solution as, apart from a bit of leakage here and there, the fumes were minimised and, as the system heated up, not only the drum glowed red but also the entire length of the pipe! Those camped nearest to the pipe were not only the warmest but were able to spend their evenings toasting left-over bread on it.
We all started our flying course on Kittyhawks (P40s) but those of us destined for 3 Squadron (Lew Ranger, Peter Martin, Ron Horton and myself) soon converted onto Mustangs (P51s). This was a tremendously exciting prospect as this plane was state of the art in fighters, combining all the best features of American design and powered by the latest Rolls Royce engine made in USA by Packard under licence from RR. Its speed, range, firepower and strength made it ideal for long range bomber escort and also dive-bombing and strafing. We four were thrilled, while our mates were envious,
Learning to fly a new type of single seater plane is always an interesting experience and quite a challenge. No simulators in those days - you had to study the manual, try and remember the different locations of all the bits and pieces, and hope that when you first opened up all this amazing power you would remember where they were and how they operated. I had had, by this time, some 70 hours flying Kittys but my log book tells me that when I left Perugia to join No.3, I had exactly 5.30 hours on Mustangs! Such are the exigencies and vagaries of war!
This short conversion completed, we moved into the nearby hill town of Assisi, famous of course for Saint Francis and for his church and huge monastery. Civilization at last! Lew and I were billeted in a hotel with the unlikely name of the Hotel Windsor. Absolute luxury for us. I don’t think I had even taken my clothes off for three weeks let alone have a proper wash so when I first looked in a mirror I looked like a miner just up from the depths. Lew and I tossed for first bath: I won, got in and the hot water ran out. I bathed as well as I could in the rapidly cooling water, got out and surveyed a bath full of grease and coal dust. Poor old Lew had no option but to hop in and do the best he could.
We had a few interesting days in Assisi (I have a few photos of this and the preceding period in my album) before the truck came to pick us up to join the Squadron, which we did at the Eastern seaboard town of Fano. No. 3 Squadron (RAAF) was one of six squadrons which made up 239 Wing which, in turn, was part of Desert Air Force. Not much Desert around here, but DAF had been formed, of course, in North Africa years before but even now, in Italy, retained the name. No. 3 was an original member, having been in the Middle East since May, 1940. This was about February 10, 1945. By this time 3 Squadron had operated as a fighter squadron up and down the Western Desert several times, in Syria, El Alamein, North Africa, then Sicily and finally mainland Italy, all the way up from the toe to where they now were at Fano.
Each squadron was an organizational entity of between 300 and 350 personnel. There were usually about 25 pilots, with all the rest support staff such as fitters, riggers, armourers, truck drivers, signallers, administration, cooks etc. A lot of these functions were in different locations in the town. All the personnel were stationed and billeted in various parts of the town but rather than drop us at the Orderly Office, the truck dropped Lew and I off at the Pilot’s Mess where we found a number of pilots on their way to early inebriation by imbibing the only liquor available, egg nog and cherry brandy, known to all as “blood and guts”. We were warmly welcomed by the gathered pilots and offered a drink, which Lew accepted and I, as a teetotaller, rejected (my, how things have changed!). My not being a drinker also created a little difficulty but this defect in my personality was soon overlooked in the rough and tumble of life in the Pilots Mess.
To add to this macabre scene, sitting on the bar, was a complete human skeleton with a DFC attached to his fifth rib. He was introduced to us as Stinky Miller, DFC, and, it seemed, was carted around wherever No. 3 was posted as a sort of good luck charm. Overwhelmed by the hospitality, we completely forgot about the formality of reporting to the Orderly room with all its attendant red tape. This didn’t get us off to a very good start with the administration and the Adjutant gave us quite a rocket.
The six Squadrons of 239 Wing DAF consisted of two Australian (numbers 3 and 450), two RAF (numbers 112 and 260), and two SAAF (numbers 5 and 250). All this was commanded at this time by an Australian, Group Captain Brian Eaton DSO, DFC, who had commanded No. 3 back in North Africa and who, post-war, became Chief of Air Staff, RAAF. All these squadrons, together with a Wing of American P47s (Thunderbolts) were clustered around a solitary strip of pressed steel plate (PSP) which served us all as a landing and take off facility. There were, of course, many side strips of PSP leading to many parking bays required by all of us. On this extensive network, without much experience, it was very easy to lose your way. To guard against this all aircraft had to have a ground staff man sitting on the wing while you taxied for seeming ages both to guide you and to prevent collisions because the huge long nose of a fighter plane prevents the pilot, while taxiing, from seeing ahead of him. The whole area, apart from the strip, was a sea of mud so it was essential that you literally stayed on the straight and narrow.
My logbook tells me that on February 20 I did one hour and 10 minutes practice in a Mustang and later that day took off on my first mission. I use the term “mission” advisedly because the correct term, as laid down by the RAF, is “sortie” and a perfectionist like Lew would be a stickler for this usage, but I have a preference for the American term. It has a much nicer connotation, don’t you think? In any event it is almost universal these days.
At this stage in my career then I had about 70 hours on Kittyhawks and six on Mustangs, but it was the latter that I had been ordained to fly in anger. Even worse, there were two different types of Mustang extant, the Mark III and the Mark IV, both with somewhat different shapes, armament and controls and it was the squadron’s practice to allot either at random to any pilot. This was OK if you had plenty of time to think about what you had to do and how you were going to do it, but this luxury was not always available.
DAF was a Tactical Air Force, as distinct from a Strategic Air Force such as the various long range bomber forces of the RAF and USAF. Within this structure No. 3 had, over the years, performed a number of roles: reconnaissance, dive-bombing and strafing, bomber escort, and aerial fighting, sometimes individually and sometimes all together. In my time, and for some time earlier, the main role was close support for the ground forces of the British Eighth Army. This entailed moving up fairly close behind the advancing ground forces in order to respond to their requests for help ASAP and also shorten the range of the flights. This latter, however, was becoming less important with the advent of the longer range Mustang. As it was now the depths of winter both the British and the American Armies were bunkered down on both sides of the north-south running Apennines, so there was almost no call for close support. Instead we spent our operational time ranging widely over Yugoslavia, Austria and Northern Italy, dive-bombing bridges, strafing trains, trucks, tanks and even horse drawn vehicles which the Germans were increasingly needing to use.
We also did some bomber escort duties which, for us, were “a piece of cake”, as there was no German aerial opposition to worry about. When the bombers reached their target, we would move to one side while they copped all the flak. I personally took part in three of these to Vienna, Klagenfurt and Graz and the trips, for us were uneventful (although not so for the bombers), except for Vienna when, for a few brief minutes, high above us we saw one of the new German jet or rocket fighters streaking across the sky at tremendous speed. This put a serious dent in us Mustang flyers’ sense of aerial superiority, but it was only brief and never recurred before the war’s end.
My stay on No. 3 lasted until April 3, 1945, when I was shot down on my 25th Mission. Though brief, this period was, for me, replete with incident, in contrast to that of my peers, Lew, Peter Martin and Ron Horton, all of whom had joined the squadron at the same time and all of whom went through the rest of the European War unscathed and, apart from the usual exigencies of dive-bombing and strafing under fire, without too much drama. Let me explain a bit. Some months before arriving, both 3 and 450 had apparently, through attrition and tour expiration, run out of experienced flight leaders. So an SOS was sent to Australia for some pilots with one tour of operational experience. As a result four pilots with a tour done in the Jap war were flown from Australia straight to Italy, two each for 3 and 450. They, of course, were excellent and experienced pilots but the aerial war against Germany into which they were now thrust was vastly different to that which they had experienced in the SW Pacific. In the event, all four were shot down: the 3 Squadron duo F/Lt John Hodgkinson DFC and F/Lt Barney Davies, both while flying in front of me as their no. 2! At full strength we flew 12 aircraft in three sections of four: Red, White and Blue. We flew in very loose formation, called “battle formation”, a method that the RAF had learned from the Germans years before during the Battle of Britain. The pre-war tactics of showy close formation had proved disastrous in that campaign, as the pilots’ attention was totally taken up watching each other and failed to see the enemy coming.
Each four flew at staggered heights with the mission leader as no. 1 in the Red section. Newer pilots (“sprogs”) flew in the no. 2 position about 75 metres behind the leader, while the other two in the four formed a square with 1 and 2. It was the number two’s job to search the sky continually, while the no. 1s checked the ground and also navigated us to the target. Our squadron’s radio call sign was “Shabby”, hence the name of my current Laser “Shabby red 2”. It was from this position that I got shot down.
But prior to that, on March 6, Hodgkinson, as Red 1 with me right behind him at Red 2, got shot down in rather dramatic circumstances, which I won’t recount here as the detail can be found in a brief article I wrote for the 3 Squadron Association newsletter that is now on the web here .
Hodge was taken prisoner. On April 1, two days before I copped it, I was again flying Red 2 behind Barney Davies when he too got shot down. Flying over a mountainous area of Yugoslavia, Barney had spotted a couple of trucks full of German troops. He told the rest of the squadron to stay up and called me to follow him down to strafe. This was fairly exhilarating, as we had to dive and weave our way through the peaks of the mountains to get at the trucks. As we started shooting, a large amount of flak (anti-aircraft fire) came up at us. Neither of was hit but we had to pull up very steeply to avoid the mountain on the other side of the road. We circled back to where we had started the attack and Barney (who was nothing if not intrepid) said:
“ All right, Shabby, we are going in again!”
“Shit!”, I thought, for not only had the flak been heavy but we had been briefed never to attempt a second run as the enemy would be (a) better prepared and (b) rather angry and thus liable to do nasty things to you if you got shot down.
Which is exactly what happened to Barney. At a low point in his dive (about 100 feet or so above the trucks), he was hit by several 20 mm cannon shells. Cool as ever, he called:
“Hit! Bailing out, Shabby.”
He pulled up to about 1500 feet, with me quite close on his tail, where he executed a perfect ‘bunt’ bail-out; that is, after jettisoning the Mustang’s Perspex canopy, freeing himself from all the impedimenta, such as straps, helmet, radio mike, oxygen mask etc., he pushed the nose of the plane hard down (he was still climbing at this stage) and floated upwards, beautifully turning somersaults in the air until he pulled the rip cord and that life saving canopy mushroomed out.
“Wow”, I thought, “that’s the way to do it, so easy and graceful; that’s the way I’ll do it, if and when my turn comes.”
But, as I found out, it is not as easy as it looks first time and this was, I think, Barney’s third go at it. By now, in spite of my general inexperience, I was the leading Squadron close up eye witness of bale outs, one very good and one botched, almost fatal one. Mine, two days later, was similar to, if not worse than, the latter.
At this point, while on the subject of bale outs, I may as well go forward to recount my own bale out, two days later on April 3. This was to be the day of an athletic carnival for No. 3 and supposedly we had been stood down for the day. As an athlete of some past standing, I had been looking forward to this event, but the Operations phone rang, summoning us into the air.
The reason for this sudden change of plan was as follows: Several days before a large Russian advance had revealed an enormous column of retreating German troops, tanks, trucks etc. on a road in Slovenia. The retreat had been temporarily halted by bombing a passing train at a level crossing, thus the column was at our collective mercy. Many squadrons had been involved in the two day carnage, while the column was halted, and it was to this that no. 3 had been summoned.
Now, ever since the Battle of Britain in 1940, it had been a fighter squadron tradition that, at the sound of an alert, the pilots belted helter skelter to their machines and took off in a cloud of dust. Although the need for such urgency was long since past, it was still deemed prudent to get airborne with some celerity. So off to the strip in our three ton truck (we were now based at Cervia) and into the waiting planes. To expedite take off all aircraft were allotted randomly and each had a parachute with dinghy attached in position, with straps spread out so that the pilot leapt in, clipped on the parachute harness, then the restraining straps, helmet, goggles, oxygen mask, radio and roared off into the wild blue yonder.
My allotted plane for this mission (another armed recce) was a Mark III, a slightly older model than the new mark IVs, which were now arriving regularly as replacements on the squadron. It was armed with six 0.5¢¢ machine guns and two 1000 lb bombs. After clambering in, I was amazed to find that the parachute straps were set up for an impossibly huge person. Instead of fitting snugly, the straps flopped about so loosely that there seemed to be every chance of falling out of them if I had to bale out. In addition, the ripcord metal ring, which you had to pull to open the parachute, instead of fitting neatly in its slot on your chest, was dangling on a foot long piece of wire almost touching the floor of the cockpit. Very piss-poor maintenance, I thought. But, no time to speculate, off I went to take up my position behind our newly appointed flight commander, Fl/Lt Tubby Shannon who had arrived several weeks earlier to start his second tour of operations.
One thing about being young and silly (I was 20 at this time): you feel indestructible, bullet proof as it were, and so I said to myself:
“Well it will be all right just this once.”
However, with Murphy’s Law always lurking in the background (albeit as yet undiscovered), it wasn’t. So off we flew across the Adriatic and into Slovenia until we had almost reached Maribor, a large town on the Austrian border where somebody in the formation spotted a Fieseler Storch aircraft flying low beneath us. This was exciting stuff as most, if not all, of us had never seen a German plane in real life before.
Tubby decided that just he and I would attack it so, leaving the others up top, we jettisoned our bombs (all 4000 lbs of them) and dived down to attack. At this point I should explain that the Fieseler Storch is a light reconnaissance aeroplane, totally unarmed and capable of a top speed of about 90 mph (150kmph), whereas we were much faster and very well armed. As Dusty Lane had shot another one down two days before, there was some speculation as to why such aircraft should be flying at all and Wing Intelligence had suggested that these planes may have been transporting high ranking German Army officers trying to escape from both the Eastern and Western fronts, which, by now, were rapidly approaching each other. Their escape plan was, presumably, to try and reach the Austrian redoubt which, as yet, had not been overrun.
However, there is an alternative possibility. These planes had been used to spot Partisan movements in the mountainous regions nearby and it is possible that this accounted for their aerial presence. Whatever, down we swooped, putting down our flaps and throttling right back to reduce our speed. The Storch, by this time had spotted us and staying just above the ground positioned himself behind a nest of German anti-aircraft guns (Oerlikon 20 mm cannons as it turned out) so that we had to fly right across these low and slow to get at him.
As we did this, he banked steeply to fly at right angles to us so as to make it as difficult as possible for us to hit him. In other words he was maximizing the deflection we had to use to shoot him down. By way of explanation, when you are shooting at a target crossing your path, you have to aim a certain amount in front of it in order to hit it, otherwise the bullets will just pass harmlessly behind him. The amount you have to allow for, of course, depends on the speed of the target, which you estimate and then lay off the correct amount on your gunsight - rather like clay pigeon shooting really.
We both opened fire as we drew near the German guns; every fifth bullet of our combined twelve 0.5¢¢ machine guns is a “tracer”, that is a bullet that has a fiery glow, thereby indicating the path of all the other bullets. I was amazed to see our bullets run up the Storch’s wing which then burst into flame and crashed. Almost immediately there was a hell of an explosion which seemed to lift my plane up in the air, large holes with ugly jagged edges appeared in both wings and ailerons, the engine started pouring black smoke and my lateral control of the plane almost disappeared.
The engine, however, continued to function, even though it was emitting sounds of dire distress that suggested to me that I wouldn’t make it back over the Adriatic. I had managed to climb to 5000 feet and decided to head southeast. While I was doing this in my terminally stricken plane, which was pouring huge amounts of smoke (presumably indicating some, as yet unseen, fire) and uttering horrible sounds of malfunction, Tubby kept badgering me with R/T calls, asking me where I was. Momentarily taking my mind off my multifarious problems, I had a look around: green fields below, mountains in the distance. How the fuck could I know where I was precisely?
So I ignored Tubby and got back to the problems at hand. Decisions had to be made; getting back across the Adriatic was obviously out of the question; should I head for the mountains, where Partisans were allegedly active, or for the Russian front which was only some 30 miles to the East? The latter had some difficulties, so I elected for the former.
Let me explain. As we operated fairly close to the advancing Russian front quite regularly, we were equipped, among many other bits and pieces, with a flag, a Union Jack that hung around our necks and was accompanied by the words “Dobra den, ya sum Englesi piloten (Good day, I am an English pilot)”. As we were all dressed in grey English battledress and were wearing wing brevets, the possibility existed that you could be mistaken for a German soldier by the necessarily trigger happy Russians and summarily dispatched. In the event of being shot down in Russian-occupied territory we were told by Intelligence to advance towards their troops with hands up and quoting the abovementioned words. I thought the Partisans might be a better bet.
Nearing the mountains, I thought it would be wise to blow off the canopy in case of a sudden loss of control, as was the case with John Hodgkinson. This was a mistake as the smoke and leaking glycol now poured into the cockpit, forcing me to decide to bale out immediately, even though I was some way short of the mountains. It was at this point that I remembered my loose parachute straps and, taking my eyes off the flickering instruments, glanced, with some dismay at my dangling ripcord.
No choice - I undid my seat straps, took off my helmet with attached radio and oxygen mask and contemplated which bale out method to use. Somehow, the bunting method seemed to be losing its previous appeal. Wouldn’t it be easier and safer just to go over the side and risk hitting the tailplane? Thus persuaded, I let go of the control column and tried to clamber out. Halfway out, the slipstream hit me, forcing me back against the cockpit edge with such force that I could neither get out any further nor get back in to regain control of the aircraft. The plane, out of control, slowly went into a dive, the ground appeared directly in the windscreen as we hurtled towards it with increasing speed, with me desperately trying, to no avail, to reach the stick.
A swift and violent death appeared imminent. Still pinned immovably against the rear of the cockpit, the engine noise and smoke reached a crescendo of violence. Then the next thing that happened was an incredible quiet, an eerie silence in marked contrast to the preceding turmoil. Bewildered, in a state of shock really, I wondered is this heaven? How quick! No booking-in formalities, no sign of Saint Peter. Glancing upwards, above me was a beautiful white silk canopy. Wow! Relief, but tempered by the fact that the parachute had about a six to eight foot tear in it, stretching from the edge inwards. Did chutes with tears continue to do so under the pressure of descent? Shelving this query for the moment, I looked down to see green fields seemingly a long, long way below.
As I hung there in the pristine silence there appeared to be no detectable downwards movement whatsoever. Am I going to hang up here forever I wondered? After what seemed to be an eternity I began to detect a slight downward movement and also a slight sideways progression towards the West. People appeared running towards my descent path. Friend or foe? Ah well at least I had my trusty Smith and Wesson 38, with its four bullets. Misjudging the final 100 feet or so, it seemed as though I would drift gently and gracefully onto the forgiving earth; nothing happened for a bit then the earth rushed up to meet me and I hit with a dreadful thud while travelling backwards at about 15 mph due to the wind. Dragging along the ground at speed I hit the release buckle and came to rest more or less in one piece.
People were running towards me, civilians not soldiers, so I walked towards them, whereupon they turned and fled. Perhaps with my grey battledress, winged chevron and trusty six shooter at the hip I looked like a German to them…or maybe an alien of sorts. So I grabbed the parachute and looked for somewhere to hide it, as per orders. No real hiding place so I put it, as best I could under a small bush and headed for the distant hills as I could see what appeared to be German soldiers coming my way from a distant village. As I glanced back, I saw the peasant women pulling my ‘chute out of its hidey-hole, evidently assessing the quality of the material.
Much later, thinking about the bale out, I have concluded that the following was the most likely scenario. When the plane began to dive because I couldn’t reach the control column, this must have acted as a partial bunt, perhaps just elevating me slightly from my trapped position. The dangling ripcord ring must have caught on one of the many projections and levers in the narrow cockpit. This would have triggered the opening of the parachute in the cockpit! Spilling out into the slipstream, I must have been dragged out perforce, narrowly missing the tailplane, which must have caught the silk of the chute and torn it. Needless to say I didn’t say anything about this horrible bungle in my official report later back at the ranch!
At this point I will go back in time to deal with some other aspects of life on a fighter-bomber squadron. As the fighting spearhead of some 300 odd personnel, we pilots (25 or so of us) ate and socialized together in the Pilot’s Mess without distinction regarding rank. This was unique, I fancy, in either the RAF or the RAAF; usually there was strict segregation between officers and other ranks. For instance, a bomber crew of seven mixed officers and sergeants upon returning, say, from a mission to Berlin would have to go to separate Messes (Officers’ and Sergeants’), even if the captain of the aircraft may well have been a Sergeant and the navigator a Flight Lieutenant. There also were substantial pay differences and other privileges which tended to make some of us “lesser lights” a bit Bolshie. Mind you such discrimination was the same in the Russian Services and is still, in this allegedly enlightened world, today!
Our relations with the locals were complex. Perforce, we were living amongst an alien and defeated enemy. There was, of course, a certain amount of interaction with the local populace. However, this was limited by their hostility and fear, and by our inability to speak their language, to exchanges of merchandise and the like. But more on this interesting topic some time later.
Living, as we were, in a state of heightened emotions, there was a tendency to have a lot of parties. One such was arranged not long after Lew and I et al. arrived at Fano. One way or another, three other pilots and myself were delegated to go off in a three ton truck and escort a bevy of New Zealand Army girls who, somehow, had been invited to the party. Now the back of three ton trucks are not really designed for the transport of party guests, rather the transport of more utilitarian items, so we loaded up the truck with a couple of armchairs and a sofa.
Off we drove in total darkness on a freezing winter’s night, rugged up in winter woollies and greatcoats, taking about 40 minutes to reach the NZ camp. I had no idea where we were (nor have I to this day), but we met the waiting Army girls and loaded them aboard for the return journey. This 40 minutes, as far as I can remember, was passed in pleasant chitchat and in the complete darkness, as far as I am aware, there were no gropings or otherwise indecorous behaviour.
This, I am compelled to say, was not the case on the return journey many hours later. The party got under way with dancing, drinking, and much general merriment. There were four Army girls and a lot of lusty pilots, and as I neither drank nor danced well and was generally deficient in the social graces, I retired to the lounge room to read a book and listen to the increasing excitement going on in the nearby bar. I, of course, had long given up on the girls but when the party was over, the girl whom I had escorted to the do, sought me out and insisted that I should escort her home. I am not going to give you guys any gory details, suffice to say that the 40 minute return journey in an armchair, in the cold and dark and with a girl on my lap, was a revealing experience for a well brought up 20 year old from Vaucluse! I wish I could remember her name, if indeed, I ever knew it.
Some time in February, 1945 (I have no record of the exact date) we moved up the east coast to Cervia to be closer to the front line for what was obviously going to be a big spring offensive by the British Eighth Army. I flew a mission that day from Fano but landed at our newly completed strip at Cervia, while Lew and others went up by truck to pitch tents and generally make ready our new home.
Lew had a tent put up for him and myself when I landed and this we shared until I was shot down. As always Lew, in spite of linguistic difficulties, had some success with the local damsels, which I did not, but he also, with his adventurous techniques, managed to corral a couple of English Army girls with whom we spent some pleasurable social moments.
This was made possible, in part, by our three Padres, the Anglican, Bob Davies, the Presbyterian Fred Mackay, and the Catholic John MacNamara. These three remarkable gentleman really invented Ecumenicalism and, in an age when religious bigotry was rife, combined together admirably to look after, at least some of, our social needs. Mind you, they had, of course, been appointed to look after our spiritual needs, but rapidly learned that most Air Force personnel’s (and I suspect all other services as well) needs were more venal than spiritual.
Being practical men as well as men of the cloth they set about establishing, wherever we moved to, small clubs called Koala Casa’s, where we could get a cup of tea and a cake and socialize generally. This they did in addition to supplying the necessary religious counselling to those few who felt they needed it. All of us have wonderful memories of these very fine gentlemen. Padre MacNamara died many years ago, but Fred died just last year aged 90 plus and Bob Davies, who became Archbishop of Tasmania, is still alive and although very shaky can still tell excellent, if vaguely risqué, jokes at 3 Squadron reunions. Fred Mackay, after the war, went on to a lifetime of distinguished service for the Flying Doctor Service (at which pursuit he had started pre-war with Flynn of the Inland) and the Uniting Church as Moderator. A true scholar and a true Christian.
Me, wearing battledress, feeling the cold.
Tent Lew and I shared in Cervia. Note canvas bag for water and canvas washstand outside. Spring had arrived.
Pilots rigged up waiting for briefing for Op. Note Mae West life jackets and “six shooter” side arms.
Three Squadron pilots at Cervia, March 1945. I am fourth from left, in front. Jungle Jim Edmonds is far right.
Kittyhawks taxiing for take-off on PSP strip. Note crew on wing tips to guide pilots.
Fatal Crash
The one and only PSP landing strip at Fano, after a Mustang tried to land with
an unexploded bomb still attached.
Above: remains of the
plane.
Yanks moving in to repair
the strip.
Twenty minutes later all airborne planes could land.
Chapter 6. Everyone’s Trying to Kill Me
Apart from the odd riotous party, social life in the Pilots Mess centred around the bar, where most operational pilots relieved their tensions most evenings. The local townspeople kept to themselves and it was too cold to go out on the town anyway. As we had lost both our Flight Commanders (see earlier), Tubby Shannon, who had recently arrived for a second tour of operations, took over one of the flights. He was a delightful man, a little older than most of us and a font of wisdom on matters of the world etc. As he is now dead, I can recount the following. If you have ever read Catch 22 you may recall a piece of dialogue that goes like this:
“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”
….
“Who’s they?” he wanted to know. “Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?”
“Every one of them,” Yossarian told him.
“Every one of whom?”
“Every one of whom do you think?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Then how do you know they aren’t?…….”
Well, although it wasn’t quite like that with Tubby and me, I have subsequently joked about three separate incidents wherein it could be construed that Tubby was trying to do just that to me!
Tubby’s first tour had been in the Desert somewhere and he had yet to settle in to European aerial warfare conditions when he got promoted to Flight Commander to succeed the now POW John Hodgkinson. Thus his techniques were a little rusty. Perhaps promoted, rather like the Peter Principle in commercial civilian life, where executives were sometimes promoted to a level beyond their capabilities, there to remain doing the job badly for the rest of their working lives.
Incident 1:
On March 16 we were briefed for a mission to bomb some bridges, four in all, across the Sava river at a town called Brod. It was a very extensive briefing for a number of reasons. Brod was a long way, near the Hungarian border, and very close to the Russian front. In order to carry two 1000 lb bombs there was no room for extra fuel tanks, so it was decreed that we would have to land at a secret aerodrome somewhere in Montenegro on the way home to refuel before recrossing the Adriatic to Cervia. We were given the call sign of their Radio Direction Finding Station to help us find the place as it was just a remote grassy field, virtually indistinguishable from zillions of other fields. (Our own Italy based RDF station called “Commander” would be of no use, as we would well out of its range). As usual we were given all the courses to steer, the wind direction, the weather over the target, photographs of targets, maps etc. Also a rendezvous point near the target (a mountain, whose name now escapes me). This was necessary to sort out the inevitable post bomb-dive chaos and confusion and help us all to regroup into full squadron formation before heading back.
This was to be a bigger than usual operation, comprising two full squadrons of 12 aircraft, ourselves and a South African squadron. Tubby was to lead us but the overall leader was to be the Jaapie leader so we flew above the SAAFs. I was assigned Blue 2 behind Bill Andrews. We four were the top cover for both formations and I, of course, was supposed to search the sky unceasingly for enemy aircraft and never to look at the ground below, this task being left to the leaders who were leading us to the target. I am sure we looked impressive as we took off; 24 Mustangs bristling with bombs and guns and headed out across the Adriatic Sea. After about an hour’s flying the SAAF leader called up and said that there were the targets straight ahead. Tubby called up the leader to acknowledge and confirm that he too had identified the targets. It seemed to me to be a bit soon to have reached such a distant destination, but who was I, a sprog, to argue with such august and experienced leaders. As we got closer we certainly could see a river, some bridges and a town but, even though we in Shabby Blue were the highest part of the formation, it seemed to us that the bridges had already been bombed.
Undeterred by this awkward fact, Bill selected the bridge furthest downstream and we bombed it. I can’t remember whether there was any flak at all but I do remember, as I pulled out of my bomb dive, seeing the SAAFs bombing a bridge across where the town stood on both sides of the river. They didn’t appear to be hitting the bridge but rather the town as huge piles of masonry seemed to be filling the air near the approaches to the bridge.
By now, of course, we are all out of formation, planes whizzing about everywhere looking for the rendezvous mountain, which was proving difficult to locate. Lots of confused chatter on the radio - Tubby was calling us all up and insisting that he had found it and where the fuck were the rest of us. Being a conscientious sprog, I spent a hell of a lot of time diligently searching for this mythical mountain and, not finding it, thought that this must be due to my ineptitude. This fact was agreed to by Tubby, rather irately, over the R/T.
Eventually silence prevailed, no aircraft of any sort to be seen and I realised that they had all long since headed off, presumably to Montenegro, so I climbed to 13,000 feet and tried to reconstitute my badly mangled thought processes.
“Right,” I said to myself, “get out the map and find out where you are exactly by checking with the landmarks down below.” Couldn’t make head nor tail of it; couldn’t relate the map to the ground at all (the reason for this, of course with hindsight, was that I was looking at features on the ground that were at least 100 kms away from the bits of the map that I was reading. Frustration and a certain amount of panic grew. Cloud cover above, sun completely obscured; was I flying West or could it possibly be East? Check the compass. But unfortunately another unforseen problem arose.
Let me try and explain. In all my previous, two years plus, flying experience I had always used the time-honoured bowl compass, which had a floating needle pointing to magnetic North. Around the bowl was a bezel which, when turned, controlled two parallel lines stretched across the bowl. If you wanted to fly your plane on a course of, say, 270° (west), you turned the bezel until 270 was at the front of the compass, then you turned the aircraft until the needle, which always pointed North of course, was parallel to the two aforementioned lines and, voila, you were flying West.
However, the P51 was the last word in modern fighting machines and it was fitted with the last word in modern navigating devices namely a “radio compass”. Instead of being horizontal, this gadget was a vertical dial on the dashboard with just a moving needle and a dial of 360 degrees. Now, if I had had my wits about me a moment’s thought would have made me realise that the needle showed the course that you were steering and wasn’t just pointing North.
By this time I had about 20 hours flying Mustangs but became aware that I had never had the need to look at the compass. Couldn’t identify the ground objects (they don’t put labels on rivers, towns or state boundaries!), couldn’t see the sun, was unsure of the compass function so I took a punt, correctly fortunately, opted for the needle pointing to the heading that I was on, set course vaguely west, still unsure whether I was flying towards Italy or Russia!
Assuming I was flying in the right direction, the next problem was to locate and set a course for the hidden airfield in Montenegro. To do this I needed to know the call sign of its radio direction finding station. Needless to say I had forgotten it. Our own one “Commander” back in Italy was, of course, out of range; nevertheless I climbed up to 20,000 ft. and called it up on the R/T. No reply of course but after a series of plaintive calls a voice came on the air:
“Hello Shabby Blue 2 this is “Tall Yacht”.
“That’s it!” I cried. “Tall Yacht - how could I have forgotten?”
I set the course given me, adhered to it with great concentration, glancing around furtively for enemy aircraft as I was a long way from home and deep in enemy territory. After some time I found myself on a converging course with a USA Flying Fortress and, with many incidents of trigger happy Yanks in mind, thought it wise to break off my course and avoid him. This necessitated another course correction which the ever helpful Tall Yacht provided.
Approaching the coast I was unable to spot the airfield and found myself over the sea. This necessitated yet another request to Tall Yacht, this time to bring me back inland again. This time, luckily, I spotted a wing glinting in the sun as a plane landed in a field and down I went and landed.
“God, Nobby, that was a bloody awful landing!” said Bill Andrews later.
“But, Bill,” I replied, “any landing that you can walk away from is a good one.”
Incidentally, the town that we bombed by mistake turned out to be Banja Luca, now in the newly founded country of Bosnia Herzegovina. As a sequel to this incident, the next morning at dawn Bill Andrews and I took off to do another weather reconnaissance to the mysterious city of Brod, which we located without difficulty, radioed back the weather conditions and returned uneventfully to base. Flying at this time in the morning was pure delight; green fields, rivers and mountains drifting by down below, smooth progress through the still air, the world beginning to wake up, steam trains and trucks starting to move around the countryside before the Allied air might was up and about.
Tempting though it was to break off and attack these artefacts of the enemy, we stuck to our allotted task, the weather report. To digress for a moment, I have always been puzzled by the rationale of weather recies and, to this day, have never had a satisfactory answer to my queries from any authority or oracle that I could find to consult. What possible relevance did the weather at dawn have to the prospect of a mission scheduled for 3 p.m., I wondered. And what message did we give to the Germans by flying over several bridges early in the morning and then going away? I suppose some other squadrons did eventually bomb Brod, but I bet they got a hectic reception!
Incident 2:
On March 26 I took off with two 1000 lb bombs in a flight of eight aircraft led by Tubby. I don’t remember the target and my log book makes no mention, as I didn’t get to it anyway, but with two big ones it was probably a bridge. The cloud cover was low and total i.e. 10/10ths. Now, to fly in formation in dense cloud it is absolutely essential to fly very, very close because, if you don’t, you can’t see each other, can’t keep together, and are in grave danger of colliding. We, as usual, were in battle formation, i.e. about 100 metres apart laterally and the no. 2s (including me) about 50 metres back. At 3000 feet, still climbing, we entered dense cloud and lost sight of each other.
At this point let me pause and give you some info. on blind flying. This aspect of our flying training was the most exacting, difficult and important skill that we were to acquire. To fly blind you are completely dependent on your instruments as you are completely disorientated spatially, rather like a hooded bird. Trouble is, your mind does not really believe this and likes to believe that it has an infallible intuitive grasp of spatial reality. Many, many trainee pilots died because of this belief and so all of us who survived these gut feelings spent many tedious, concentrated hours under hoods, inside link trainers (old fashioned simulators) and flying at night to acquire these instrument flying skills. However, while I had done a lot of all this stuff in both Australia and the UK, in the Middle East we did none. Doing OTU in the desert there were never any clouds indeed, to lighten up the Kittyhawks they had taken out all the blind flying instruments to aid performance. So, the last blind flying I had done was back in the UK in May 1944!
On this trip I was actually flying no. 2 to Bill Andrews again and at about 3000 feet we flew straight into dense 10/10ths cloud. Instant panic. Couldn’t see Bill or the leader; what to do? Keep climbing straight and hope you didn’t run into anybody or vice versa. To do this necessitated the scanning of a number of very essential instruments: the air speed indicator, the rate of climb dial, the turn and bank indicator, the artificial horizon (absolutely essential to keep your wings level with this), the radio compass (I now knew how this worked!), and lastly to plug in the directional gyro to help in maintaining a straight course when you couldn’t see anything at all in cloud, through which you were belting at several hundreds of mph. It was also useful to glance at the numbers of temperature and pressure gauges but there was little time for this latter as one’s mind was desperately focussed on all of the former.
All the above adjustments to this new situation took place, I would estimate, in little more than a minute, during which time another aircraft flashed past my nose, missing me by a whisker. Either he or I or perhaps both had not held our course properly and the wonder of it all is that there was not a number of collisions in this inscrutable fog. After regaining some composure and dredging up from yesteryear some of the old blind flying skills I proceeded upwards, still in cloud, for what seemed an eternity of sweaty concentration until I broke out into beautiful blue sky at about 15000 feet. This was an enormous relief, tempered only by the fact the sky was totally devoid of other aircraft. The tops of the clouds, sparkling white in the dazzling sun was what, in those naïve days, I imagined heaven would look like but, of course, I had to get back down to reality a long and murky way below.
Now one of the serious problems of flying in cloud was mountains; you can’t see them and therefore can run into them if you are not high enough. Italy has a lot of mountains and the ones that particularly concerned me were the Apennines which, as you no doubt know, form a North/South spine down the middle. As I could now not see the ground, I had no idea where I was or whether I was over land or water (the Adriatic) so I figured that if I flew East for a while before descending, I had a better chance of being over water. What about the two 1000 pounders? Well I thought, better not to jettison from where I was in case I inadvertently obliterated some unsuspecting village (it was necessary to jettison because you couldn’t risk landing with them, as one unfortunate Mustang pilot had attempted to do at Fano several weeks previously. I still have a series of three photographs showing the resultant hole in the runway and the small pieces of P51 lying about).
When I felt it likely that I was over water I started to descend through the all-encompassing murk. When my altimeter showed my altitude as 1500 ft I was still in dense cloud and beginning to worry about the accuracy of my previous assumptions. No option but to press on downwards and, to my immense relief, at 1000 feet broke into the clear over water. As I was obviously well out to sea I jettisoned the two big ones and as I was not under fire could observe the resulting explosion in some detail. What a terrible waste though - I don’t know how much it cost to make those bombs, but I felt it a dereliction of duty to waste them in this way. I then made my lonely way west back to our strip at Cervia and to relieve my feelings did a slow roll before landing on it. What had happened with the rest of the formation was that, as Tubby had not issued any orders after entering the cloud, Bill Andrews had called out “This is madness, let’s go down and get out of this!”. I had not picked this up on my RT for some reason, so I had pressed on regardless as we used to say.
Incident 3 occurred on April 3 when, as you know, Tubby led me, flying low and slow with flaps down, over a nest of gun emplacements, which promptly riddled my poor old Mustang with 20 mm cannon shells.
When we were back in Australia in Bradfield Park awaiting discharge from the RAAF I mentioned to Tubby that, even though I had no car and, indeed, could not even drive properly, the possession of a Driver’s Licence might be handy in civilian life. He promptly got some official, letterheaded RAAF paper and got a nearby WAAF to type a letter to the effect that I was licensed to drive four wheeled vehicles on No. 3 Squadron. Armed with this fictitious document, I went to the RTA and was given a license straight away and I still hold it to this day. Perhaps Tubby felt that he owed me one… or two!
I see that I have digressed more than somewhat from “life on a squadron”. If you can recall I was writing about the social life. Now for a couple of other features.
Food: Not too bad really and certainly much much better than for the Italians. We were rich and they were poor; we had plentiful supplies of the basics, cigarettes, liquor etc. and they lived in abject poverty, trading eggs etc. for cigarettes which, because of the enormous inflation, they then used as currency. There was, of course, a certain amount of monotony in the food and it was hardly cordon bleu cooking, although Bill Nash, the Pilot’s Mess cook, did a pretty good job in the circumstances. Take Spam for instance. Sometimes we would get it 3 times a day: Spam fried in batter for breakfast, Spam salad for lunch, and Spam stew with dehydrated spuds mashed with Oleo margarine (filthy tasting stuff) for dinner. Still, in hindsight, it was better than eating with the Partisans.
Hygiene: Pretty well non-existent, especially in the bitter winter of 1945, when we just went dirty. I can recall though one visit to Fano (and it was the only one) by the DAF shower Unit!
The shower unit set up in the middle of a snow covered field, placed down some wooden duck boards, surrounded it with canvas (to shield us from the gaze of the locals or perhaps vice versa), fired up their portable oil furnace and set up six showers. We queued up and in groups of six, were given 30 seconds of hot water, then a minute to soap up, followed by another 30 seconds to wash off. And that was it for the winter of ‘45, showerwise.
Some other vignettes of life at Fano which now come to mind. Finding some Australians (us) nearby, a number of the New Zealand Army types, mostly Maoris, issued us with a challenge to a game of Rugby on a local mud patch and I was roped in to play inside centre. Having seen NZ footballers, especially Maoris, play rugby in Australia, I was not overly filled with enthusiasm for this encounter but, like going on an operation, one was not able to refuse. The actuality of the game proved to be even worse than the prospect and we were defeated by a substantial margin before we could remove our battered bodies from the field. I have always disliked wet weather Rugby at any time but this was the pits. I can’t recall how we cleaned up afterwards but the Shower Unit had moved on.
Another incident occurred when a new pilot joined the Squadron at Fano, several weeks after Lew and I got there. He was a F/O, but with no previous operational experience, and he was allocated his first operation on March 5, 1945. At the briefing the job (as we called them) was explained - we were to dive bomb and strafe some gunpits defending a series of bridges, while two other squadrons were bombing the bridges. This poor bloke was so frightened that he was visibly shaking all over; so much so that it was embarrassing to look at him. Anyway he got off the ground and proceeded in formation with us until we got to the target and did our dives, after which the usual confusion resulted until we got sorted out and found that the new bloke was missing. Someone said that they thought he had bailed out, but there had been no word at all from him. After the war he returned to the squadron, having spent the remaining period of the war in the Apennines with the Italian Partisans, none the worse for wear. I have subsequently wondered, and of course I will never find out for sure, whether he didn’t just bale out to get out of a war that he had barely entered. I have not heard of him since we came home.
Another new arrival about this time was a bit of a surprise. A new, very tall pilot with a ginger handlebar moustache turned up; none other than our old Squadron Commander from OTU at Fayed, Jungle Jim Edmonds. A surprise, because we had never had an English pilot posted to our Australian squadron before, but it turned out that Jim was lined up to take command of, I think, no. 250 Squadron in the near future and was sent to us to acquaint himself with flying conditions in Northern Italy, which were quite different from those experienced by him on his previous tour of operations in Burma. In the event, he didn’t make it to 250, as he was shot down and killed at Cervia.
In this period of the war, Late March and early April, No. 3 had an extraordinarily high casualty rate. Nine planes were shot down in a period of some 10 days. Dave Tennant (North Italy), John Hodgkinson (POW), Barney Davies (Yugoslavia Evader), me, Ken Higgins (POW and badly wounded), Jim McInerney (same op. as me), Don Williamson (crashed onto the Venice Lido), Don Redenbach (POW) and Jungle Jim. Extraordinary because of all that number only Jim Edmonds died in action.
That’s about all of interest about my abbreviated tour of operations but I don’t think that I have mentioned the Fano airstrip incident. To make airstrips in a hurry and to make them weatherproof, the engineers used interlocking sections of pressed steel plate (PSP) laid over the bulldozed and often muddy earth. Although we always only had one landing strip, we had many PSP laid tracks leading off it so that a large number of squadrons (up to nine or ten) could use this base at any one time. One day a plane, Mustang or Kittyhawk I think, landed, still carrying one of his bombs, a hang-up we called it, i.e. a bomb that did not come off as was intended during the bomb dive. Murphy’s Law being what it is the bomb fell off and burst just as he touched down leaving the plane and pilot in very small bits and a big hole in the runway.
At the same time a number of squadrons were returning from their operations, low on fuel and seeking to land in a hurry. Well the American airport maintenance crowd moved in and within 20 minutes had the strip operational again. You can say what you like about the Yanks (and we often did), but I don’t think any other mob could have done in a couple of hours. Incidentally, I am compiling a photo album to go with this Memoir, which will include three or four photos of this incident. Unfortunately most of the photos are showing their age, but at least they may give you some visual idea of these times.
Fieseler Storch
Chapter 7. Yugoslavia – the Lousy Long March
Now I think it is time to return to the story, which will take us from the bale-out landing to my meeting Clark Cornell some three weeks later. “Only three weeks,” I say to myself. So much happening, so much drama, so many strange experiences; it seemed at the time like three months.
Having unsuccessfully tried to hide my parachute, I set off at a fast jog for the nearby hills with, I thought, a German posse just coming out of a distant village. Spurred on by this thought, I paused little until I was well up into the hills, which seemed to be uninhabited. Proceeding at a fast walk, ever upwards, I eventually came to a clearing with a small house on it. By this time I was fairly exhausted, the surreal shock of the whole event was starting to wear off a little, but I didn’t know what to expect at the house, pro-German peasants, anti-German peasants or, indeed, Germans themselves. What I found was a middle aged couple with whom, of course, I could not communicate and therefore could not determine which category they subscribed to. Now we had been well and extensively briefed on what to do in these situations and had been issued a booklet with a series of phrases in some 10 different dialects and languages. Fortunately I still had it in my battle dress pocket as well as my Union Jack (in Russian) around my neck.
Some of the languages were printed in Cyrillic, some in Roman script. I showed the booklet to the couple but neither of them could read; some other people arrived but they could not read either. At last a 10 year old boy was fetched who could read and he located his language and proceeded to read out the phrases to the burgeoning gathering. Unfortunately the first phrase was “I am hungry/thirsty” so out came some food from the house. This, of course, was the last thing I needed as I gazed anxiously around for approaching Germans - although I tried to eat some of this unfamiliar food, but couldn’t manage it. Ironically, much later it would have been very welcome indeed.
Eventually, after much discussion I was taken to a bunker some little distance away and placed inside and the lid replaced. This bunker was excavated from soil in a steep hillside; it was about four feet high, six feet long and five feet deep, with a trapdoor lid which was covered by the peasants with leaves which were thick on the ground outside thereby making an excellent hiding place which was just as well as during the next day or two I could hear search parties moving around very close outside, but evidently they didn’t have dogs or I would have been a goner.
Left alone in the dark, I took stock of myself and my situation. I very badly needed a cigarette but these had come adrift in the bungled bale-out along with all my emergency kit and rations. I seemed to be in one piece except for cuts in the back of my left hand where my watch had been smashed against it. That night the man brought me some more food and very sour wine, neither of which did I want. I think I was in the bunker for 3 days and nights; it seemed like an eternity. Unable to stand upright or move around, I just sat there in the dark and gloomily pondered my future. I wondered how mum would take the news when it reached her and, of course she had no way of knowing that I was still alive (actually, if I can find it, I will include the very extensive telegram that she did receive in the proposed photo album).
On the third night the farmer came and escorted me to the house, where he gave me to understand by words and gestures that the partisans would be coming later that night. At about midnight a group of some five or six youths arrived, dressed in a motley collection of uniforms and armed with a motley collection of weapons. They were all in the 17 to 19 age range and appeared to have no particular leader. I stood up and gave them my best military salute but, understandably, they appeared unimpressed. For about two hours they just sat around talking to the family and drinking schnapps, testing my always limited patience, as I was anxious to get on with the obviously lengthy business of returning to Italy. There was some talk about taking me to a secret Partisan aerodrome which cheered me up a bit, but was never to eventuate. At about 2 am they decided to get going, so off we set with many kind gestures from this very obviously poor family who had risked severe punishment, if not death, for harbouring me. If I ever got back I resolved that I would fly back to this area and drop them a parcel of food, soap and cigarettes but, alas, this was not to be as, at war’s end or rather shortly thereafter, the “Iron Curtain” descended and we were told that if we flew over Yugoslavia, we would be shot at.
It was a pitch black night as we s