My sister Jennifer, when visiting Uncle Jack’s grave in Lille, once described the man as the ‘Shadow in the Corner’: someone we were always aware of while growing up. We were told stories about him, we leafed through his little blue felt-covered logbook, we looked at fading black and white photographs of a young man in uniform and on Anzac Day, we pinned medals on the right-hand side of our chest and we marched in our village’s parade. During the minute of silence, Jack was the person we thought about.

We felt, and I think still feel, a personal connection to this man, despite never having met him and despite being, really, only distant relatives of his. Through this blog, I’ve been contacted by people who are more closely related to Jack than I am; he was one of nine children and there are many branches of the family tree. I’ve learned that there are many other people who think of him during their minute of silence, too.

That is no bad thing, and it’s partly why almost thirty years ago I dove into finding out more about Jack: so I can help to tell his story. But I’m not a direct descendent of his – to our knowledge, he never had any – and he was my grandfather’s uncle, not my grandfather. I didn’t grow up with him around, like the sons and daughters of the veterans I once knew. I didn’t see the effect that war had on him; I didn’t have to live with the person he might have become as a result. And I was far enough removed, in time and in family connection, that I didn’t experience how news of his death affected those he did live with. For those people, the shadow isn’t just in the corner on Anzac Day, the ‘one day of the year’, but it’s always there.

In my case, though, the extra level of removal from the story helps, I think. It allows me to look at things a bit dispassionately, and so perhaps more honestly. 2024 will see the 80^th anniversary of the Lille operation from which Jack and his crew failed to return. That makes it a very very long time ago: it’s now almost (but not quite) outside of living memory. For me, that helps the thrill of the hunt for more information to outweigh the sheer horror of what might be found next. The official records, for example, contain some quite gruesome details of what happened to the bodies of the crew, for example. The distance in time makes it a lot easier to be pragmatic about that: this really happened, this is what war does to people.   

That makes me lucky in a way. I’m a close-enough relation to a member of Bomber Command – to the point that I share a surname – to feel a personal connection to that person and his story. But at the same time I’m far enough away that any emotional response to it can be tempered somewhat. And perhaps that allows me to get a little closer to the real story.

© 2024 Adam Purcell  

Late last year I dropped in to visit Laurie Larmer at his home in Melbourne’s north-western suburbs. Though we’d had the occasional phone call, it was the first time I’d actually seen him since the pandemic started. It was a lovely visit, we had a chat and a cup of coffee, and then Laurie graciously kicked me out so he could have an afternoon nap. As I left, he wagged a finger at me:

“Don’t leave it so long next time!”

Sadly, I now can’t comply with his instruction. On 14 April, five months before his one hundredth birthday, my friend, 51 Squadron skipper Lawrence O’Hara Larmer, OAM Ld’H, departed on his final flight.

I have written about Laurie before, of course. He was one of 28 veterans who I interviewed for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive – you can listen to his interview here – and I wrote up details of his wartime story in a blog post shortly afterwards.

Up until we recorded the interview, I’d known of Laurie but beyond a few short conversations at lunches or other Bomber Command events we hadn’t really got to know each other. But once I’d spent several hours in his company, listening to his story, we became friends. After that, if there was a Bomber Command or aircrew-related event, I’d ring Laurie to see if he was planning to come, and then on the day I’d drive him there and back. And it was on those car trips that we got to talk about all sorts of things: about his service, sure, but also about life after the war, or the chances of one of his horses in its latest race meeting, or about politics and current affairs. I’m a bit sad I was born too late to experience Laurie’s hospitality in one of the pubs he ran after the war.

Laurie had a great friendship with Jim Cahir, another veteran who lived close by, and my partner Rachel and I will always remember a hilarious car trip home from the Bomber Command commemoration ceremony at the Shrine one year, with Laurie comfortably riding shotgun and Jim’s long legs squeezed into the back seat of my little Golf.   

Laurie flew nine trips with 51 Squadron out of Snaith in the UK in the last weeks of the Second World War. He was, thus, proudly a Halifax man. At his funeral last week, they played the video clip for Grant Luhrs’ 2013 song ‘Full Moon Tonight.’ You might recognise a lot of the footage from the wartime colour film ‘Night Bombers’ which was filmed in 1943 on the airfield of a 1 Group Lancaster squadron. I could almost hear Laurie making indignant comments about the lack of Halifaxes in the film.

As the film played though, I realised something. Over the last couple of decades I’ve been privileged to know several dozen Bomber Command veterans. I’ve had in my address book many of their names and phone numbers, and I’ve always been able to pick up the phone to one of them for a chat or to arrange to drive them to a luncheon, or just a visit for a cup of coffee.

With Laurie goes the last of those men that I knew in Melbourne. No more can I ring a phone number and hear a familiar old voice on the other end. No more can I go and visit someone to hear about life in Bomber Command, from someone who was there.

That makes Laurie’s passing all the more poignant.

© 2023 Adam Purcell

Everyone looked up when the jet screamed over the city.

It was Anzac Day 2021, and once again I’d returned to Sydney to mark the occasion. First order of business was the march – and for once, first order of the march was the Air Force.

The Bomber Command contingent, made up of four veterans with banner bearers and assorted supporters, made their way down the route slowly and somewhat unsteadily. While it appeared that the WWII veterans in preceding groups had been pushed along the march in wheelchairs – these fellows aren’t old any more, they’re now ancient – two of the Bomber Boys made the journey on foot. Consequently they weren’t moving particularly fast, and a fair gap opened up between them and the group in front. You could be forgiven for thinking that they were leading the entire march.

It was at that moment that the jet appeared. Flying north to south over the parade, the sound of its engines growled, roared and boomed off the surrounding buildings as it whistled overhead. It was an F-35 fighter-bomber – in the long lineage of Royal Australian Air Force bombers, it’s the current holder of the role once held by the Lancasters and Halifaxes of WWII – and for just a moment it looked like it was giving Bomber Command its very own flypast.

Travelling interstate in the midst of a global pandemic, however under control it might appear in Australia at the moment, is always a somewhat fraught business. And there were certainly signs that things aren’t ‘normal’ yet. Masks on planes and trains. Helpful people dotted around the city holding QR codes for contact tracing check-ins. Overall spectator numbers looked to be a long way down on usual. But the skirl of bagpipes, the smell of horse poo and that little chinking sound made by bemedaled chests made it feel like an almost-normal Anzac Day. There was more than one moment where I felt how lucky we are to live here, when compared with the rest of the world.

It’s been a year and a half since I’ve seen most of the veterans who were present this year, and I can say most of them have aged in that time. But they were there, still pressing on regardless – like Ron Houghton who, determined not to be pushed in a wheelchair, had the assistance of two of his adult grandchildren. Matt, on the right of shot here, is an RAAF Reservist, and flew down from Brisbane to march in uniform.

Then there’s the one who, in the words of one of my lunch companions, “always looks like he’s just stepped out of the gym”: Tony Adams. A 149 Sqn wireless operator (Stirlings! Lancasters! Oh my!), Tony’s one of the more switched-on veterans you’ll find these days. He’s also a bit of a film star: just the night before Anzac Day, A Current Affair featured him (and two others who were on the march, the previously-mentioned Ron Houghton and the rather incredible Frank Dell) in a short report (see here). That’s just the latest in a long string of recent TV appearances. Tony had no trouble completing the march and, yes, looked like he’d just stepped out of the gym at the end.

Off to lunch, after all that, with the Bomber Command Association of Australia. On the way, I ducked into the Anzac Memorial with Fiona Campbell for a quick look at the new RAAF Centenary exhibition they have there, which includes a silk ‘escape map’ that belonged to Fiona’s late father Keith.

Then to the Royal Automobile Club for a lunch that was up to their usual high standards. There was good food and good conversation throughout. Speeches were short and to the point and the surroundings were comfortable and classy. Five Bomber Command veterans were present: Tony Adams (complete with what seemed like the entire, er, Adams Family), Rodney Higgs, Ron Houghton, Bill Geoghegan and Bill Purdy.

Also present was a good-sized contingent of current serving RAAF personnel, from 37 Squadron at RAAF Richmond. This was a wonderful way for members of the current Air Force to get to know some of their predecessors, and it certainly seemed like the passing on of wisdom was well underway:

As I left the lunch to catch the train to the airport and fly back to Melbourne, I saw perhaps the best example of this. Bill Geoghegan – at 101, said some wag, Bill is older than the Air Force himself – was deep in conversation with a young 37 Squadron pilot, with plenty of ‘Top Gun’ hands in evidence from both sides.

It would appear that Bomber Command’s legacy in Australia is in safe hands.

See my full gallery of photos from Anzac Day at Melbourne Ceili Camera.

Text and images © 2021 Adam Purcell

It’s shaped like a stubby little aeroplane, with comically short wings and a tail. It’s not very big: inside is seating accommodation for a single occupant only. When in use, it rotates and pitches and rolls on air-operated bellows and if you’re unfamiliar with this machine you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for one of those coin-operated children’s rides you find in dreary suburban shopping centres.

Though for a while a coin-operated amusement is exactly what it was, this 90-year-old piece of technology is actually a highly sophisticated simulator. It is, of course, a Link Trainer, and last weekend, I got the chance to try one.

Edwin Link – the man who designed the machine – did so using expertise gained from his previous career as an organ builder. Hence the bellows. In 1931, the world wasn’t quite ready for the leap in sophistication that the simulator represented. That’s why for several years the only models that Link managed to sell were the aforementioned coin-operated varieties for amusement parks. But when a number of pilots were killed flying air mail in the US in the mid 1930s, the Link Trainer’s potential as an instrument flight trainer became clear. When the Second World War erupted, the little simulator truly came into its own. More than 10,000 were built; apparently at its peak one rolled off the production line every 45 minutes.

Open the logbook of any World War II pilot and you will almost certainly find that they spent considerable time in a contraption just like this one. It seems to have been the custom at Australian training schools to add an extra column in one’s logbook to record time in the Trainer on the same pages as real-life flying, but once pilots got to the UK they transitioned to what was evidently the RAF way of doing things, dedicating entire pages in the back of the book to time in the simulator and leaving the main section of the book to the real aeroplanes. But relegating time in the simulator to a forgotten section at the back of a logbook seems rather like selling it short. This little box-on-bellows played a crucial role in pilot training, allowing the realistic simulation of instrument flying and procedures, at a much cheaper cost than flying in a real aeroplane, and at virtually no risk to life and limb.   

The operating Link Trainer that I had a go in is part of the excellent Nhill Aviation Heritage Centre in western Victoria. NAHC volunteers Wes and Trevor explained things as we moved around the hangar, and after looking at the Anson they have under restoration, the exquisite Wirraway parked in a corner and an airworthy Tiger Moth, eventually we ended up standing next to the trainer. We chatted here for several minutes before Trevor casually asked me if I had any flying experience.

Well, yes, I admitted. But it was a looong time ago now.

That didn’t seem to matter. “Would you like a go in the Link?” he asked me.

I didn’t have to be asked twice.

Trevor flicked a few switches on the outside of the machine while I climbed in. It took a little while for the valves to warm up – there’s nothing digital about this thing, everything’s electro-mechanical or pneumatic. I looked around the cockpit while I waited. The pilot’s seat is padded leather and the control stick is a big piece of turned wood that falls naturally to hand. My feet rested on flimsy-looking rudder pedals on the floor. In front of me was a wooden instrument panel with a standard ‘six pack’ of dials like you’d find in any aeroplane of the era, with a big artificial horizon in the middle. There was a throttle lever on the left wall of the cockpit and a compass between my knees, in the manner of a Tiger Moth or a Spitfire. There was even a Morse key mounted on the right-hand side. It was a reasonably comfortable little cockpit.

Once the instruments started indicating things, Trevor turned on the compressor that powers the simulator’s motion, released two stabilising metal strips, and I was away. The whole machine wobbled immediately, like it was floating on air – which, I suppose, on those bellows, it pretty well was. I started off carefully, with the hood open, getting a feel for how the controls moved and how the simulator responded. Before too long, though, I started pushing the envelope a bit, pitching the nose up and down as far as it would go and, somewhat more tentatively, rolling from one side to the other. I’m slightly ashamed to admit that it took me a while to realise that if I pushed the rudder pedals far enough, the Link would spin around – I later discovered that if I’d tried it, I’d have been able to rotate through a full 360 degrees.

As you will see if you watch this video, I had a grin from ear to ear. It was great fun! But it also wasn’t the point. The Link Trainer wasn’t for fun. It was a trainer, designed to allow pilots to learn and practice instrument flying so they could go flying in cloud without killing themselves. I wanted to get the full effect, so I asked Trevor if I could close up the hood. He nodded. So I did.

It was very dark under the hood (he says, obviously). The only illumination, apart from a tiny bit of light that leaked around the base of the hood, came from a pair of lights mounted on either side of the cockpit, bathing the instrument panel in a dim orange light. It was consequently not much of a challenge to concentrate on the instruments: there was nothing else to look at. With the vacuum pump running it almost sounded like a jet inside; the air flowing through the pipes made a reasonable approximation of a slipstream flowing past the fuselage. There was some ungainly wobbling, but I managed to fly something resembling straight and level for a little while, and even made some more-or-less coordinated turns. I was concentrating so hard I started sweating, but I was still grinning widely. It really did feel like flying.

Though Jack Purcell did start out on a pilot’s course, he was fairly rapidly scrubbed from that and remustered as a navigator. Presumably there was a Pilot’s Logbook that recorded his flying training but it hasn’t survived so I don’t know if he ever got into a Link Trainer. But his pilot Phil Smith certainly did, and it was towards him that my thoughts turned as I bounced around in the Link cockpit. It wasn’t much, but I could feel a distinct connection reaching back through the decades to him. For a moment, I could feel just a tiny bit of what these people experienced.

Then I opened the hood and got out again.

Thanks to my partner Rachel for the video and some of the photos in this post. She had a go in the Link too. Let’s just say I’m not a very good flying instructor and leave it at that, eh?!

The Nhill Aviation Heritage Centre is open on weekends or by appointment. See their Facebook page for the most up to date information.

© 2020 Adam Purcell

One of the highlights of the Bomber Command weekend in Canberra in June was the rolling masterpiece of a speech delivered during the lunch by AWM Director, Dr Brendan Nelson.

The War Memorial has posted a transcript of the speech on their website – you can find it here.

I’ll even claim a little bit of credit for one section: I was the IBCC “Oral Historian” he mentioned, who collected Denis Kelly’s story (if you haven’t read that rather astonishing tale yet, it’s here).

The transcript isn’t quite word for word – it omits some perhaps less-relevant anecdotes – but the main thrust comes through loud and clear. Well worth a read.

Primary records are the foundation of any good history. And there’s nothing quite like going directly to the source to find them. I travelled to Canberra last month to plough through files at the National Archives of Australia and, as it turned out, also at the Australian War Memorial.

The National Archives are housed in a squat white building located behind Old Parliament House. While most files are stored off-site, the building houses offices, exhibition spaces and, in the back, the Reading Room where researchers can access original documents. I had previously ordered a number of files and they were waiting there for me when I arrived.

This visit was primarily looking for general 467 and 463 Squadrons stuff, and I wasn’t disappointed. Among other things, I found an internal signal to the Squadrons, explaining what went wrong during the disastrous Mailly-le-Camp raid on 3 May 1944, and the original order detailing the special training sortie to be carried out prior to the Marignane trip of 9 March 1944. I know that the crew of B for Baker were involved in both operations so these documents add considerable detail to the story. Another file allowed me to solve the mystery of why Jack Purcell waited until the middle of February to do his first operation, despite having arrived on the squadron in early January: he spent a week and a half in the Station Sick Quarters in the latter part of January and missed the Berlin trip (28 January) on which most of the rest of his crew made their operational debuts.

Some other files that I’m interested in, with intriguing titles like “Flight Planning Conferences”, “5 Group Tactical Summaries” and “Ideas and Inventions”, are marked “not yet examined” – offering the tantalising prospect of looking at files that no-one has ever seen before at the Archives – but these were not yet ready in time for this visit. Guess I’m coming back another time.

There are a few other files listed on the NAA database under a search for “467 Squadron” that are part of a series called ‘AWM64’. As it turned out these are actually held at the Australian War Memorial Research Centre. Conveniently, after spending most of the morning shuffling and photographing old papers at the Archives, this was to be my next stop.

As part of plans for the Centenary of ANZAC commemorations, the War Memorial is undergoing significant refurbishment works at the moment. Consequently the usual entrance to the Research Centre is unavailable and you need to be escorted through ‘back of house’ to access it. That minor inconvenience aside, the staff are exceedingly helpful and the collection, of course, is world-class. I was able to examine an original navigation log and chart for an operation to Konigsberg in August 1944 (the overwhelming impression is that navigators worked like cut snakes, with fixes every six minutes), a number of logbooks (including one for a navigator who completed a tour on Lancasters, then another one on Mosquitos and after the war flew extensively for Qantas Empire Airways) and diaries and, eventually, the relevant AWM64 files. Included among these are large-size notebooks which appear to be the Orderly Room’s master list of sorties carried out by each member of aircrew. They are incomplete and contain frequent blank pages but it was interesting to see evidence that French targets only counted for a ‘third’ of a raid up until Mailly-le-Camp. The crew of B for Baker were not among the names on the pages but others who occasionally flew with Phil Smith are there. I’m not sure that the full records have survived but even so, this could be a valuable resource for deciphering some of the more badly faded pages of the Operational Record Books.

A certain amount of ‘pot-luck’ is needed when ordering records at libraries and archives – sometimes the entries in the catalogues are less than descriptive – but that’s all part of the fun. Many times the files are not entirely relevant to the task at hand but, every so often, you find something unexpected in amongst the files. It was a useful couple of days work.

© 2013 Adam Purcell