Tag: Bomber Command

Chapter Two, Part Four: Tiger Moth

~ Adam Purcell ~ Leave a comment

Decades later, in the skies around the pretty airfield at Camden, west of Sydney, I was also learning to fly a Tiger Moth.

It was not going well.

“Aww, what’d you go and do that for?!?”

The frustration in  the instructor’s voice, despite the distortion in the intercom, came clearly through my headset into my ears. It felt like the words were metaphorically slapping me upside the head as they did so, and I had to admit that in that they were perfectly justified.

Jim Drinnan, sitting in the front cockpit of the Tiger Moth, was one of those crusty old flying instructors who had been around forever. He’d seen it all. I was not the first ham-fisted student he’d had muck up an approach and landing, and I wouldn’t be the last. But at that particular moment, I was the student he was dealing with. The frustration he was feeling just then was being caused entirely by me.

It was a nice approach too, side-slipping in a continuous turn as we descended, popping out nicely lined up with the grass runway. But after we crossed the boundary fence and were over the runway proper,  I completely forgot to pull back on the stick to raise the nose for landing.

What happened in the next few seconds was less a landing than an arrival. The main wheels thumped violently into the ground and bounced us back into the air, the wood and the wires that held the wings together groaning in protest. I heard Jim swear and the engine surge, felt the stick jerk out of my hand as he took over and regained control and we touched down again, much gentler than my effort and more permanently this time. Now certain that the aeroplane was again safe, as we gently decelerated on the runway Jim hit the intercom switch and let my ears have it.   

“I was going to send you solo, today, too.”

It was my sixth flight in a Tiger Moth and we’d just spent an hour flying wide circuits of the aerodrome and practising taking off and landing. But the last ten feet, before we touched down, was still causing me problems. Maybe I was relaxing a tiny bit too soon, maybe I was getting distracted by something. Maybe I simply kept mucking it up. But there was to be no solo flight for me that day.

 In the autumn of 2010, when all this was happening, I was a licenced private pilot with about 180 flying hours in my logbook. Flying was something I did for fun. After I qualified for my licence, I quickly moved on from the little two-seater Cessna that I’d flown on my first solo to bigger four-seaters like the Piper Cherokee and Cessna 182. More recently I’d started flying aeroplanes with the little wheel at the back – “taildraggers” – called Citabrias, which, having the added bonus of being somewhat aerobatic, let me stretch my skills into flying upside down with some regularity. It was all good, clean fun.

I hired the aeroplanes from a flying school at Camden Airport, in south-western Sydney. Camden was a lovely little aerodrome, with one sealed runway that’s more than a mile long and another, shorter, runway with a surface of grass. Most of the hangars, laid out in a group to one side of the airfield itself, were of a single simple design called the Bellman. Skinned with corrugated iron, with big sliding doors at each end, a low-pitched roof and little rows of windows high on the side panels, these hangars began to be built in Australia and the UK from the mid-1930s and were designed to be easily erected using unskilled labour and to break down into transportable components. A large number survived around Australia, unsurprisingly usually located at airfields with wartime histories.

 In the back of one of the Bellmans, behind the modern all-metal aeroplanes, sat a petite and pretty fabric-covered biplane, painted in military camouflage on top and bright yellow underneath, with double-decker wings and a single wooden propeller. It was a Tiger Moth, and every time I saw it I thought of the purple stamp in Jack’s logbook. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a go at one of those, I thought, to see what it was like?

 Every proper flying school needed an instructor like Jim Drinnan. Career blokes, these fellows, with so many flying hours that they probably stopped counting before I was even born. Gruff and sometimes grumpy on the outside they might have been, but there was usually a gentle character that revealed itself as they got to know you. They loved to fly, but more importantly they loved to share the joy of flight with others. And what was more joyful than sailing through the air, on a cold but perfectly still and smooth autumn morning, in the open cockpit of a 1938 De Havilland DH82A Tiger Moth? So I approached Jim, and within a few weeks, wearing goggles and leather flying helmets, we taxied out for my first attempt at it.

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series and an evolving list of contents here. (c) 2026 Adam Purcell

Chapter Two, Part Three: Bradfield Park

~ Adam Purcell

Don drove me to West Lindfield and the site of the old Air Force establishment. There wasn’t much left of it. The Commonwealth Science, Industry and Research Organisation (CSIRO) moved onto the old site when their National Measurement Laboratories were built there in 1979, and more recently most of the remaining Commonwealth land on which the RAAF station once stood was sold off for housing. There were still some reminders, though. The main road past the CSIRO compound was called Bradfield Drive, and other streets close by were named Squadron Court and Brevet Avenue.

Don stopped the car on the side of the road and pointed in the direction of four nearby tennis courts. “This is where the parade grounds were,” he told me. “There were miles and miles of them.”

Parades and drill featured regularly in accounts of life at Initial Training Schools. This was a trainee’s first introduction to proper Air Force life, and learning discipline was a key part of that. It was no surprise to be told that a large proportion of the space at RAAF Bradfield Park was devoted to drill. Don remembered there being a Women’s Auxilliary Australian Air Force training school on the site as well. “The WAAAFs could out-drill anyone,” he said, clearly still in awe of the sight.

Physical fitness was also an important part of Initial Training School life; Don told me of long route marches and cross-country runs and regular physical training classes, mostly conducted on those very same parade grounds. As well as that, there were the lectures and theory classes; everything from Air Force law to sanitation and of course the subjects that could be considered most pertinent to prospective aircrew like meteorology, theory of flight and aircraft recognition. It was a long course – Don was at Bradfield Park for nearly three months – and there was no time for leave and not much time off.

Not that this stopped the more enterprising of aircrew, of course. Don told me about the white fabric ‘flash’ that was worn in forage caps to signify that the cap belonged to a trainee; some nights he would remove the flash to appear to be a member of staff and squeeze through a hole in the fence, then walk to Lady Game Drive, the main road past the camp, to catch a bus to Ashfield. He’d spend the night at home, then catch the early bus back to camp, arriving safe and well before morning roll call with his superiors none the wiser. 

At the end of the Initial Training School course, each trainee was assessed for their relative suitability for the various aircrew “musterings”. Through the mysteries of the Aircrew Selection Board, they were sorted out into gunners, wireless operators, observers (later split into specialist roles of navigator or bomb aimer) and pilots.

In the middle of October 1941, Jack Purcell had been selected for pilot training, and found himself on a train, and then an Air Force truck, bound for the Elementary Flying Training School just outside Narrandera, in the Riverina district of New South Wales. Almost a year and a half later, Don Southwell followed in his footsteps. On arrival, each would have been struck by the same sight: parked on the tarmac in front of a couple of hangars were scores of little yellow fabric-covered biplanes. They were going to learn to fly Tiger Moths.

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series here, and an evolving list of contents here. (c) 2026 Adam Purcell

Chapter Two, Part Two: Enlistment

~ Adam Purcell

There was a family story I remembered hearing from someone that suggested that Uncle Jack wasn’t supposed to be able to become aircrew. As a young bloke, he had been involved in an accident of some sort that injured a leg. You could volunteer for aircrew from the age of eighteen, but until you turned 21 you still required a signature on your enlistment papers from your parents. Jack’s mother only signed the papers, the story went, in the belief that his leg injury would preclude him from active service.

The only evidence I found that could, maybe, support this story was a line on Jack’s service record describing some scars on his knee and legs. In any case, his mother’s belief was mistaken, and at his medical examination Jack was passed “Category A1B – fit full flying duties”. In October 1940 he was enrolled into the Royal Australian Air Force Reserve and, nearly nine months later, entered No. 2 Initial Training School at Bradfield Park, in what is now the Sydney suburb of West Lindfield.

I decided to find someone who could tell me about Bradfield Park and what life was like in Sydney during the war.

Before the war, Don Southwell lived in Burwood, and he enlisted as soon as he was allowed to, in 1942. Like so many, Bradfield Park was his first posting.

I knew Don through the 463-467 Squadrons Association in Sydney. He’d been part of the group for many many years, organising events and lunches and generally keeping in touch with everyone. Because he was always so involved in organising things, and because he knew everyone, he was always in high demand at the annual Anzac Day lunches. He could be hard to pin down for a proper chat.

If I was to hear about Don’s experiences at Bradfield Park, I’d have to plan ahead. So for Anzac Day one year I travelled to Sydney a day early, so I could visit Don and we could sit down somewhere comfortable, without distractions, for a few hours, just a voice recorder between us, to hear about his war.

It worked. The ‘somewhere comfortable’ turned out to be Don’s loungeroom, the front room in his house in a northern Sydney suburb that was usually described as ‘leafy’. He was 94 and pretty sprightly when I interviewed him, with white hair, glasses and a ready smile.

He also knew how to talk.

Cups of tea in hand, we settled into well-loved lounge chairs and I turned on the microphones.

I always started interviews with the same question: “Can you tell me something of your early life, growing up and what you were doing before the war?”

It was a pretty standard opener for an oral history interview. Everyone had an early life, right? And if there was one thing that everyone could talk about, it’s themselves. If it worked, I wouldn’t have to say another word for a while. I could just sit there listening as my subject grabbed the proverbial bit between their teeth and ran with it.

Don needed no such warming up. I asked my normal opening question, and he was off. In the transcript[1], there were almost three and a half thousand words before I asked question number two, and by then Don is just arriving in England.

Yep, this man could talk.

Don told me that he was already a member of the Air Training Corps when war came. He remembered wearing an Air Raid Precautions armband and riding his bicycle around the nearby suburb of Ashfield to make sure people were complying with the blackout laws, and spending nights sitting on top of the Ashfield Town Hall watching for Japanese planes.

“We didn’t get any Japanese planes,” he said with a grin.

He volunteered for aircrew but in the meantime he turned 18, and as happened at that age, was drafted into the army. Air Force bureaucracy caught up with him three weeks into an infantry training camp in central New South Wales, so he was put on a train back to Sydney where the army discharged him and he was immediately taken on strength by the air force. After passing all the medical tests he spent several months guarding various wharves in Sydney until he was finally sent to Bradfield Park.

[1] I interviewed Don as part of the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. The transcript is available at https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/3491

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series here, and an evolving list of contents here. (c) 2026 Adam Purcell

Chapter One, Part Three: Meeting the Pilot

~ Adam Purcell

It turned out that Phil Smith, Uncle Jack’s old pilot, lived with his wife, Mollie, in an old house perched on the side of a steep hill in the well-to-do North Shore suburb of Mosman. After exchanging letters for several months, my entire family – Mum, Dad, two sisters and me – found ourselves walking, slightly nervously in my case, up a short steep driveway that led past a carport to a set of steps up to the front porch. Though a few months off 80 years of age, the man who opened the door when we knocked was a surprisingly sprightly-looking chap.

Over the next couple of hours, and over a dining table groaning with breads, cheeses, salad and cut meats, we slowly got to know this remarkable but modest old fellow. He was a reserved sort of chap, quietly-spoken but with an unmistakable air of authority about him. He played down his experiences, telling us that he wasn’t sure how much he could help because he couldn’t directly remember our Uncle Jack. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell us much about what happened on that final flight. The only tales I distinctly remember him telling us was a rather astonishing one about his troop ship hitting an iceberg mid-Atlantic on the way to England, and how he once, after the war, walked accidentally and unsupported all the way to the top of Mount Fuji in Japan. But Mollie persuaded him to retrieve a small wooden box from a drawer that was otherwise chock-full of papers and documents. Inside was the coloured ribbons and medals awarded for his service, including the polished silver decoration of the Distinguished Flying Cross. Even at the age of 12, I could tell that despite his modesty, Phil had been no ordinary pilot. And when Dad brought out a photo from Uncle Jack’s box, Phil immediately turned it over and pointed to his own handwriting on the back.

I wasn’t imaginative enough at the time to realise it, but this was just the first in what would become a series of connections that reached down through history, from that time to this. Ordinary items and moments, on the surface, that despite their very ordinariness somehow carried with them the weight of years, in a way more profound than you’d expect from the image on a simple photograph. Here was something that Phil himself had held, and had considered important enough to write on and send home, more than six decades previously. It was photograph of the inside of a briefing room, with Phil himself sitting in the middle of the crowd. Three other members of his – and Jack’s – crew sat in the back rows. The photo had been sent to my great grandfather, and then passed on down through the family to us, and on that summer’s day in 1997 it came back to Phil Smith.

After lunch, we went outside to the backyard, where the hill continued, covered in a verdant oasis of lush green ferns and mossy rocks. A photograph was taken to record the occasion.

Adam Purcell with Phil Smith – 1997

There’s me, the gangly pre-teen, with my polo shirt tucked badly into my shorts and my arms hanging awkwardly at my sides. And there’s Phil, the wizened old man, wearing a pair of thongs with his shorts pulled up high and a spectacle case hanging from a piece of cord looped around his neck. He has white hair and gazes steadily into the lens, but there’s a certain melancholy about him.

As he was at the time, and as in that photograph, I suppose, he somehow still is, Phil was the final living link to Uncle Jack’s crew. He was the only person still alive who had, in several senses of the phrase, “been there”.

He alone knew what it was like to be a member of the crew of B for Baker as it flew over Lille.

He alone had known Uncle Jack while he was in the Air Force.

He alone had survived.

And somehow it didn’t matter that he couldn’t tell us much directly about Uncle Jack and that final flight to Lille. Just being in the presence of this bloke, this one person who was there, was to feel a connection to the time. To see his deep-set eyes under a slightly furrowed brow was to wonder what else he’d seen, how life had treated him.

There’s a story there, I thought.

And I wanted to find out about it.

After that first meeting with Phil Smith, I was hooked. What sort of war had he experienced, I wondered? What sort of war had Uncle Jack experienced? Why were they – two Australians – flying for the British Royal Air Force? What, for that matter, was Bomber Command, and what sorts of things did it do?

I began reading books voraciously. I wrote letters to Phil, and a couple of times a year we’d journey to Sydney to spend a few precious hours in his and Mollie’s company. The conversation was rarely about his wartime service, though. An intensely private and reserved man, as we came to discover, he preferred to dwell on current things like how we were going at school and how the rest of the family was. On one wonderful occasion he took me down into the depths of the garage under the house, a cluttered space jam-packed with old tools and bits of wood accumulated over a lifetime, all the bits of junk  that ‘might be useful someday’, to share with me his collection of hand-made wooden propellers and electronics and old radios. Clearly Phil had a very technical and practical sort of mindset. But I could always detect a hint of gentle sadness in his eyes. Why had he, the captain of the aeroplane, survived, when the others did not? I suspect that question was never far away, though I can’t recall any direct mention of it. Nevertheless, we became friends. I kept writing him letters and I still have many of his replies.

But then, one day in 2003, we received a phone call from his son, telling us that Phil had died. He’d gone to bed as normal one night, and simply did not wake up the next morning. No fuss. A death befitting the quietly straightforward man he was. The final living link with the crew of B for Baker was no more.

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series and an evolving table of contents here.

(c)2025 Adam Purcell

Chapter One, Part Two: A Logbook By The Fire

~ Adam Purcell

At the time, it was one of those moments that did not seem all that significant.

In mid 1993, I was a not-quite-ten-year-old boy who was interested in things like astronomy, science and space travel. I lived with my parents and two sisters in a big brick veneer house in a semi-rural village in the Southern Highlands region of New South Wales.

On this day, the sun was not yet above the horizon when, for once the first in the family to wake up, I opened my bedroom door and walked out to begin getting ready for school. Outside it was cold, the kind of cold where when it’s raining the freezing drizzle sticks to your face, and when it’s not raining, thick white frost  covers the lawn and crunches underfoot. In the corner of the family room was our old wood-burning fireplace, which was lit around Easter each year and which we usually kept burning all the way until my mother’s birthday in October. It was normal in our household for Mum and Dad – who were both teachers – to leave important things at our respective places on the dining table, for us to find the next day. Normally they were boring but necessary things like lunch money or signed permission slips for school excursions, but this time I found something different. On that morning, by the glow of the fire’s smouldering embers, I first saw the box.

 Of the old-fashioned foolscap size, the box was made out of rather tattered green and black cardboard. It might once have held overhead transparencies or some other tool of the teachers’ trade, but on this chilly morning, as I curiously opened it I found it now held very old photographs.

There was one of a man in uniform who, I thought, if I squinted a bit and looked at it from just the right angle, bore a startling resemblance to my dad.

There was one of several dark and indistinct figures, dramatically backlit, standing in front of a big aeroplane.

There were several photos that showed what looked like graves, marked with white crosses and covered in flowers.

I found a small blue notebook in the box, too. Tucked into a hand-made cover of blue felt, the book was clearly old, its pages yellowed and brittle. It was filled with columns of numbers, times and unfamiliar place names, all inked in with a wide-nibbed fountain pen.

Nhill. Llandwrog. Lichfield.

Munich. Nuremberg. Berlin.

And on the final line, in red ink and different handwriting:

“OPERATIONS. Lille,” I read.

“MISSING.”

I had many questions for my father when he emerged from bed a short time later. Who was the man in the photograph? Why was he missing? And why did he look sort-of like Dad?

The man, it turned out, was “Uncle Jack”, and he had been a relative of ours. Dad told me that he had been in the Air Force , and that he’d been killed during the Second World War. The photos, and the logbook, were all that were left of him.

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series and an evolving table of contents here.

(c) 2025 Adam Purcell

Chapter One, Part One: A Beginning, Of Sorts

~ Adam Purcell

From the very first day of the Second World War, right up until the final week of hostilities in Europe more than five and a half years later, Royal Air Force Bomber Command operated on nearly every date in the calendar. It fought an exceptionally long war.

It was an exceptionally dangerous one, too. More than 125,000 aircrew served in Bomber Command; of those, at least 55,573 were killed in action or training. Thousands of the bombers that took off on bombing raids failed to return; from the majority of bombers that were lost there were no survivors.

Bomber Command fought in a way war had never been fought before, and in a way in which it will never be fought again. It was the biggest, most powerful aerial armada the world had ever seen – right up until the moment the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and rendered the whole operation instantly obsolete. There are several experiences that most veterans will mention when you ask them about their time in Bomber Command, things that together made the force a unique product of its time, place and context.

Some of these things might be the way you formed your own crew, for example, and the extraordinarily strong bonds that typically developed between the airmen thus joined. The high tension of the briefing room, with the collective gasps as the curtain was flung aside to reveal a long red ribbon stretching into the very heart of Germany. The ‘operational egg’, a genuine treat in severely rationed wartime Britain, and the predictable jokes about who would get yours if you didn’t come back tonight. The female drivers who ferried you out to your aeroplane, and the dread of waiting before take-off, with nothing to do except think about the upcoming operation. The sudden churning of your stomach as you heard the rear gunner’s voice in your headphones saying “corkscrew port, go!” The bomb aimer over the target, calmly guiding the pilot: “left left, steady, steeeaaaady… OK bombs gone, let’s get out of here!” The sudden silence and palpable sense of relief as the engines shut down after landing, and the dog-tiredness as you fell gratefully into bed as the sun came up. And then doing it again and again, all the while watching others simply disappear and knowing full well the high probability that you, too, would join them on the list of the missing well before you reached the magic number of thirty operations that entitled you to a rest.

It’s hard for anyone today to fathom just how dangerous a job it was. Consider this: in very rough numbers, your chances of dying by accident or some other external cause, on any one day, is approximately one in a million. The average RAF bomber aircrew, on the other hand, faced the same level of risk of violent death that you or I face in an entire day – one in a million – each and every second that they were in the air during an operation[1].

The longest operation in Jack Purcell’s logbook is a raid to Munich in April 1944 that lasted for a little over ten hours, or more than 36,000 seconds. That’s 36,000 times the daily risk of death for the average man on the street. Or, to put it another way, it would take you or I close to 100 years to be exposed to the same risk of death by external causes that a bomber crew faced on that single raid. And that was one raid, on one night, of a very long war.

This is something that still astonishes me, every time I think about the aircrew of Bomber Command. They were volunteers, every last one of them. They saw other bombers blowing up, they saw the empty places at the table the next morning. They could do the maths: five percent loss rates from every operation. 30 operations required for a tour. As one of them said, “we sort of end up owing them something…”[2] They knew the danger – and yet they went anyway, night after night.

What was it like, I wondered? What was it like to be a member of a bomber crew during the Second World War? What was it like to go to the other side of the world? To live on a wartime airfield? To knowingly face that level of risk, night after night?

What happened to these men happened within a unique and very specific intersection of place, time and context. Those things all combine with individual experiences to make what we call history. I suspect we cannot ever truly know wer es eigentlich gewesen – how it actually was – if we weren’t there, at that time, in that place, and influenced by that context. But any historical event leaves echoes that can be heard if you listen closely enough.

We can’t travel back in time. But nowhere, perhaps, are the echoes of the past stronger than in the places where the past happened. And that is somewhere to which we can go.

This post is part of a series, publishing writing originally completed as part of my now-discontinued book project. Find an explanation of the series here, and an evolving list of contents here.

[1] Taken from Blastand & Spiegelhalter (2013), The Norm Chronicles: Stories and numbers about danger. Profile Books Ltd Great Britain. p.17. They base the “one in a million” calculation on 18,000 recorded accidental deaths out of a population of 54 million in the UK in 2010. The RAF calculation is based on 55,000 deaths, 364,000 sorties and an average crew size of six. The figure is necessarily an approximation, but it’s a vivid illustration for our purposes.

[2] Charlwood, Don (2002), Australians at War Film Archive #0666. Accessed from http://www.australiansatwarfilmarchive.gov.au/aawfa/interviews/1767.aspx 13SEP12

An Announcement

~ Adam Purcell

“My ultimate aim with this research is to write a significant piece of work – a book – to tell the story of the crew of B for Baker.”

So starts a post on this blog that was written in March 2012.

That’s now more than thirteen years ago.

After I wrote that post, I spent a few years thinking about the idea of writing a book, then a bit of time thinking about actually writing it, and then maybe two more years organising and manipulating sources into something that I thought I might be able to turn into a coherent story. And finally, in July 2017, I started actually writing.

I wrote several thousand words, and then I pretty quickly realised I wasn’t getting anywhere useful, so I re-started my draft. And then I re-started it again, and again, so that the current file is version 5.

Ha, ‘current’. My laptop tells me the last time I opened my draft, before tonight, was on 6 June 2022.

I’ve not been able to prioritise this project enough to do something about it for more than three years. Heck, I’ve barely even posted on this blog.

Life has intervened, and other priorities have come up (not least of which, my partner and I are expecting a baby in a few weeks). I’m simply unable to make the time needed to finish a draft, edit it, and do all the other work that’s needed to get a book printed and promoted.

So, I’ve made a difficult but necessary decision. It’s time to stop kidding myself: the book about B for Baker that I was planning and working on is no longer going to happen, and I have accepted the need to abandon the project in its originally imagined form.

All is, however, not yet lost. I do still have that draft: all 56,000 words of it. And some of it, even if I do say so myself, is pretty good, actually. It seems a shame to just chuck that out without giving anyone else the chance to read it, without sharing the story of B for Baker, and what it was like for her crew, with a wider audience.

Like, say, the audience who reads this blog…

So though a book in the traditional sense is not going to happen, I’ve decided to share the guts of the story with you, right here. Over the next little while, I will turn each chapter of my draft into a series of posts, and then publish them one at a time. There will be no set posting schedule: you’ll get them as they come. The important thing is that the story will be out there, and seven more members of Bomber Command won’t be forgotten.

Because that, at the end of the day, is what I’ve been trying to achieve the whole time.

Let’s see how it goes!

An Evolving Table of Contents:

(c) 2025-26 Adam Purcell

Vale Don McDonald

~ Adam Purcell ~ 1 Comment

This week, the world lost a legend.

Bomber Command lost one of its last remaining veterans.

An extraordinarily tight-knit family lost its much-loved patriarch.

And I, and a lot of other people, lost a friend.

On Sunday morning, at the age of one hundred and one, Don McDonald took off on his final flight.

Box Hill RSL, February 2017

I last spoke with him on the phone on his birthday, a little over a week previously. His voice, in hindsight, might have been wavering just a bit more than usual, but his mind was still sharp and we chatted about lots of things. He was positive, upbeat and, as always, anxious to know how everyone else was handling the pandemic.

But that was Don: always caring about other people. “Life’s kind, Adam,” he’d invariably say when you asked him how he was going. “Life’s kind.” Then he’d change the subject back to you.

Over the last few years – before COVID restrictions put a stop to visits, and even one time in between two of Melbourne’s frequent lockdowns – Rachel and I occasionally organised to go and pick Don up from his unit at the ‘Fossil Farm’ or, later, from his aged care home, to drive him the short distance to the Box Hill RSL for lunch. On one of those outings, we asked him what he’d been up to lately and he admitted so many people wanted to catch up with him that ours was his third visit to the RSL that week. His calendar was always so full with social visits and lunches and excursions, so we knew what a privilege it was to be able to enjoy his company, just him and us, for such extended periods of time over those long lunches. 

You don’t get to 101 without gathering at least a few stories, and you certainly don’t survive one-and-a-bit tours on Halifax bombers during WWII without amassing a reasonable collection, either. He told his stories well, often in a slightly self-deprecating fashion. In 2015 I managed to sit Don down with my laptop and a pair of microphones to record some of those stories for the IBCC’s Digital Archive. Those who knew Don will not be surprised that, at more than two hours, this was close to the longest interview I recorded with any veteran!

After recording our IBCC interview, October 2015

There are plenty of memorable pieces in the interview – descriptions of several engine failures in Wellingtons, seeing the D-Day invasion fleet from the air, and what he called “a magnificent bloody ground-loop” after crashing a Whitley while instructing between his tours, to mention but a few – but perhaps my favourite ‘behind the scenes’ moment came when Don was telling me about a ‘second dickey’ operation that he flew on, with an experienced crew before he took his own out for their first raid. They were attacked by a night fighter on the way home, and Don was impressed with the violence of the evasive action that the pilot carried out to get away. Don was in the middle of demonstrating this supremely violent corkscrew – complete with hands doing the actions on an imaginary control column – when he suddenly broke off, looked at me, and asked…

I’m not boring you, am I?”

I could only look at him, eyes wide, and shake my head. Absolutely no chance of boredom here, sir! It showed the measure of the man, again: here we were, sitting down for the express purpose of talking about his war story, and all he could do was think about my welfare.

Don with wife Ailsa at the Bomber Command weekend in Canberra in 2014

I could fill a book with my memories of Don (and I suspect I’m not the only one who could). Like the first time I met him, with his wife Ailsa, in the shadows of the great Lancaster G for George in Canberra. The riotous evening that followed at their retirement unit at the ‘Fossil Farm’ a few weeks later. Telling me about the circumstances of how, during one of his wartime leave periods, he came to be in possession of a crystal glass from an exclusive London hotel – and then going to a cabinet in the living room and producing said glass for me to inspect. And holding court at a lunch at the Toorak RSL in late 2019, telling a story or two.

Don was, for so long, so fit that I was genuinely convinced that he would be the last Bomber Command man standing in Melbourne. But it was not to be.

I’m going to miss Don. I’ll miss his company. I’ll miss his quiet humour. I’ll miss his stories.

But most of all I’ll miss the man himself: a genuine old-school gentleman, the likes of which they just don’t make anymore.

Don and ‘that’ crystal glass

Don McDonald DFC LdH died at a care home in Box Hill Victoria, on 17 October 2021 at the age of 101.

© 2021 Adam Purcell

Where, exactly, was the target? A Google Earth story

~ Adam Purcell

“[O]ur boys joined in the attack on the Marshalling Yards at LILLE” – 463 Squadron Operational Record Book, 10 May 1944

The concept of a marshalling yard in Lille has long formed part of my understanding of what happened to the man known in our family as ‘Uncle Jack’. It’s been part of Purcell family folklore, I suppose, for as long as I can remember: that the target of Jack’s Lancaster on that fateful night was a set of railway lines in northern France.

But which set of railway yards, exactly?

The thing about Lille, you see, is that it’s a pretty important railway junction. It’s now a key stop on the Eurostar cross-Channel tunnel route between Brussels and London, an hour from Paris on the TGV and about 40 minutes from Brussels. There’s also a significant local railway network. There are two key stations in the centre of the city; Lille-Flandres, which hosts local and regional trains and some high-speed TGVs, into which I arrived when I visited Lille in 2009, and Lille-Europe, serving the Eurostar cross-Channel trains and international TGV services, from which I departed three days later. While a lot of these train lines and services have been built since the Second World War, their slower fore-runners also ran through the city: Lille sat on the route from the ports of Calais to Berlin and on to Warsaw, for example, and one of the first railroads in France, the line between Lille and Paris, opened as early as 1846. Locomotive building and repair workshops were also located in the city. 

It’s pretty clear, then, why the city’s railways were targeted as part of Bomber Command’s pre-invasion Transportation Plan. But which part of them, specifically, was the target on 10 May 1944?

In the International Bomber Command Centre’s superb Digital Archive I thought I found the answer: a bombing photograph from the night in question, which shows a distinctive set of marshalling yards amongst the smoke – just above the white bomb burst in the photo:

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Extremely helpfully, the IBCC’s volunteers have geolocated this photograph over a modern-day map. I fired up Google Earth, bearing in mind that this is a modern-day image and a lot of this infrastructure wouldn’t have been present in 1944, and immediately found the relevant spot. The facility in the bombing photo is pretty clearly the Hellemmes workshops, circled in blue:

And it looks like the 50 Squadron crew who obtained the bombing photograph just missed the target – the centre of the photo, the point where the bombs themselves would have theoretically fallen, being plotted a little way south of the marshalling yards. In this view, which I’ve geolocated onto the Google Earth screenshot, the red ‘X’ marks the crosshairs:

If I remove the bombing photo overlay, you can see the red ‘X’ just above that little white building – not very far away from the marshalling yards at all:

Or so I thought… until I saw the other side of the bombing photo, which has also been scanned in the IBCC’s Archive:

Hmm. “1300 yds 114°” – that looks to me to be a bearing and distance. I wonder if it’s a location referencing the actual aiming point, or in other words, how far away from it this crew’s bombs landed?

If 114° is the bearing of the photo from the aiming point, as I suspect, its reciprocal (114 + 180 = 294) is the bearing of the photo to the aiming point. So here’s a Google Earth ‘ruler’ showing where that point is. The bottom right of the yellow line is located on the position of the red ‘X’ in the earlier screenshot. If I’m right, the other end of it shows where the actual aiming point was:

Looking promising – that’s clearly one of the other marshalling yards. But can I find any other evidence to corroborate this theory?

I wouldn’t be writing about it if I couldn’t. In the Night Raid Report[1] from this night’s operation, there’s a description of damage as shown by later photo-reconnaissance:

A great concentration of bombs fell on and around the railways and sidings 200yds S.W. of the steel and engineering works of the Fives Lille company. 2 locomotive sheds and a repair shop were destroyed, together with numerous smaller buildings, and many hits were scored on lines and rolling stock. The Fives Lille factory and several other industries were damaged.  

Where is or was the Lille-Fives company? It’s that white-roofed industrial area to the right – east – of the marshalling yard in the following screenshot. You might just be able to see the label above it that says ‘Fives Cail’; this is a new redevelopment project that aims to turn the old factories of the ‘Lille-Fives Company’, which later became known as ‘Fives-Lille-Cail’ and, now, simply ‘Fives’, into an urban project with housing, public areas and creative industries. But it’s where the Lille-Fives company was located during the Second World War, and its edge is clearly 200 yards north-east of the same marshalling yard identified by my yellow line earlier. In other words, the marshalling yard is 200 miles south-west of the factory, as noted by the Night Raid Report:

So it looks to me like the marshalling yards near Fives were the actual target for the bombers on the night of 10 May 1944. While the bombing was mostly accurate, some landed closer to the railway yards and workshops south of Hellemmes – and all of the six bombers that crashed within two miles of the target area, including B for Baker, fell east of the aiming point. That, however, is a story for another day.

Screenshots from Google Earth. IBCC material used under the CC BY-NC 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Creative Commons licence. Analysis, additional geolocation and text © 2021 Adam Purcell

[1] The National Archives of the UK (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), AIR 14/3411, B.C. (O.R.S.) Final Reports on operations, Night Raids Nos. 416-620, September 1943 to May 1944, vol. 4: Night Raid Report No. 602

Book Review: And Some Fell on Stony Ground, by Leslie Mann

~ Adam Purcell

While wandering my local remainders bookshop recently, I was surprised to spot a Bomber Command-themed book that I hadn’t heard of before. I was first attracted by the subtitle: A day in the life of an RAF bomber pilot. And when I pulled a copy out I saw an ungainly-looking twin-engined aeroplane on the cover. A Whitley! There are very few books about that part of the bomber war.

Sold!

As far as impulse purchases go, And Some Fell on Stony Ground, by Leslie Mann, turned out to be one of my better ones. At less than 200 pages it’s not very long. The novel centres on the thoughts of Pilot Officer Mason, a Whitley skipper, over a single day in June 1941. It follows him as he winds his way back to his aerodrome after an afternoon at the pub. It follows his preparations for an operation. It follows him as he climbs into his Whitley, takes off and points the nose towards Germany.

Despite being based on actual events, And Some Fell On Stony Ground is not, and does not claim to be, a history. There never was a Pilot Officer Mason who was on that particular operation in June 1941. The release from the bounds of strict accuracy allows the author to really run with things, with no fear of offending the purists or disrespecting those he served with. Mann opens the door and lets the reader in to the deepest feelings of his protagonist, and you get the strong idea he knows first-hand exactly what he’s talking about.

He does. Leslie Mann was in fact a rear gunner on Whitleys, shot down over Germany on the night of 19/20 June 1941. A raid on Dusseldorf, the same operation that’s depicted in the book. It’s pretty clear that it’s Mann’s own thoughts and feelings we are reading here. The result is very honest and searingly powerful. That its focus is on the early part of the bombing war, when aeroplanes like Whitleys and Hampdens were still front-line weapons, is an added bonus.

The concept of a fictional memoir naturally invites comparison with They Hosed Them Out, the book written by John Bede Cusack in the 1960s. But where Cusack’s original story is known to deliberately stretch the truth for the sake of a good narrative, somehow I get the feeling that Mann’s story doesn’t stray too far from how he experienced it. After his Whitley was shot down he was a prisoner of war for a little over two years, before being repatriated to England towards the end of 1943 on psychiatric grounds.

It’s evidently this last fact that led in the first place to the existence of And Some Fell on Stony Ground. Mann wrote it in the late 1940s, seemingly as a way of dealing with the demons that were still hanging around. It’s not clear whether anyone in his family knew about the manuscript until he died in 1989, and it took another quarter-century until it was released.

My edition of the book – which was published in association with the Imperial War Museum in 2014 – includes an introduction by Richard Overy, the distinguished and respected historian of The Bombing War fame. His writing places Mann’s story in context, both of the overall bomber offensive and of Mann’s own part in it. “The value of Leslie Mann’s perspective”, he writes, “lies in the explanation it gives of how it was possible for young men to endure this degree of combat stress and to continue flying.”

As the veterans of the bombing war die out, books like this will soon be one of the few ways we have to understand something of what it was like to live with the strain of continued operations, and how they coped with it. In that sense, And Some Fell on Stony Ground tells a vitally important and little-understood part of the story.

Mann, Leslie (2014). And Some Fell on Stony Ground: A Day in the Life of an RAF Bomber Pilot. Icon Books Pty Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Rd, London N7 9DP. ISBN 978-184831-720-8

© 2018 Adam Purcell