IBCC Digital Archive Interview Wrap

December 27, 2017 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 2 Comments

I collected my first oral history for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive in October 2015. Interview Number One was with a man named Ern Cutts, a 466 Squadron Halifax rear gunner, and at the time I was one of just two volunteer interviewers for the project in Australia, and the only one in Melbourne.

A little over two years later, the Archive is close to being launched. It is well on the way to being an extremely significant collection of original Bomber Command stories, containing over 700 interviews and tens of thousands of scanned documents. These come from a wide variety of participants: both aircrew and ground crew, civilians who were in some way affected by Bomber Command or its legacy, and even a sizeable collection of material from German and Italian sources.

I’ve now taken a step back from actively seeking out further people to interview, partly to give some attention to other somewhat neglected projects and partly to give someone else a go, but I thought I’d share something of my experiences from the 27 interviews I contributed to the project.

My collection of subjects included nine pilots, seven navigators, four wireless operators, two bomb aimers, one mid-upper gunner, three rear gunners and a single WAAF. To my eternal disappointment, I wasn’t able to find a flight engineer to interview, otherwise I’d have collected an entire crew. In their ‘main’ postings, these 27 individuals represented three Heavy Conversion Units, one Operational Training Unit, and 18 Squadrons. Four of them held a Distinguished Flying Cross. One held a DFC and Bar. There were three members of the Caterpillar Club, four prisoners of war and one evader. 15 flew in Lancasters and eight in Halifaxes. One man flew both. Two flew in Liberators, one in Mosquitos and one poor soul flew in, and was shot down in, something called a Bristol Bombay.

I interviewed four people who were at Heavy Conversion Units when the war ended (two of them on the same crew). At the other end of the experience scale, one man completed 68 operational trips, ending up as a Pathfinder Master Bomber. At the time of interview, they ranged in age from a few months past 90 to more than one hundred. At least five of them have died since I interviewed them.

I interviewed two people in Sydney, one in Canberra and three on a single particularly intense weekend in Adelaide. The rest have all been in and around Melbourne (if, that is, you count as Melbourne the Mornington Peninsula in the south, Warragul in the east and Ballarat in the north-west). I’ve calculated that I have spent almost 250 hours directly working on this project, resulting in about 40 hours of actual taped interviews and more than 50 hours of travel time. I’ve travelled by car, motorbike, train, plane, bus, taxi and on my own two feet. The furthest I travelled for an interview was more than 800km to Sydney, and the shortest a walk of less than two kilometres from my home.

I’ve met some lovely people through this project. The vast majority have been extremely generous with their time, their tea and their stories. I knew seven before I interviewed them – indeed, I could even claim three or four as close friends – but for the vast majority of the rest, the first time I met them was when I turned up on their doorstep carrying my laptop, microphones and camera. I’ve found it quite amazing how open some of these people have been, how willing they’ve been to dive straight into some pretty personal stories within minutes of meeting me.

And some of those stories are genuinely astonishing. Like the navigator who went through all the training only to be shot down on his first trip—by another Lancaster. Or the pilot who went to the UK expecting to go to Bomber Command, but was instead posted to India where he flew a distinguished tour on Liberators. Then there was the pilot who flew for a Special Duties squadron whose operations were so secret he still doesn’t know exactly what he was doing. The Mosquito nightfighter navigator who chased doodlebugs through the skies of south-eastern England. The man who went from Flight Sergeant to Squadron Leader in six weeks, such was the rate of casualties in his squadron, then flew two full tours – all before his 21st birthday. The wireless operator who was shot down over France and spent three months with the Resistance before being rescued by Patton’s tanks. The bomb aimer who was the only survivor from both crews involved in a mid-air collision over Stuttgart. The gunner who still thinks – every day – about his pilot, who was the only member of his crew who died when they were shot down over Germany.

Time, certainly, has dulled some of the memories. But as we’ve gone deeper into the interviews, memories have been unlocked and some long-forgotten details have been pulled to the surface. It was not uncommon to be told afterwards that I’d just heard things that even their closest family members didn’t know. That, in itself, has made this an extremely worthwhile project to be a part of, and the archive is developing into a very valuable collection of original Bomber Command stories.

But I’ve found another happy effect from collecting all of these interviews. I’ve been able to talk with some very interesting people, and several friendships have developed as a result. And in many cases, I’ve been able to ring them up again and even go back to visit them – for nothing so formal as a follow-up interview, simply for a social chat.

I reckon that’s one of the best things that we can do to show our respect for these people: just be friendly, show interest in them as people, not only in their stories. To listen to them, give them some of our time. They deserve that much from us all.

Anzac Day in Sydney 2017

May 29, 2017 ~ Adam Purcell

I was in Sydney as usual for Anzac Day in April – more than a month ago, I know. I’ve been away and then concentrating on other priorities ever since, so I’m only just getting around to posting a few photos.

Along with Bryan Cook I was, once again, honoured to carry the banner for the 463-467 Squadrons Association along the shortened march route down Elizabeth Street. Just one veteran from the group participated in the march, the unsinkable Don Southwell, and he was in a wheelchair. The time is soon approaching when we will no longer have any veterans taking part with us. Until that day, though, I’m happy to continue carrying the banner – but there can’t be too many more to come.

There were several veterans marching with the Bomber Command Association in Australia group, and one or two other squadrons. One of my favourite moments of the day was watching and listening on as, positioned in their wheelchairs in a small circle they all chewed the fat while we waited to form up:

The rather amazing Frank Dell, who was shot down in a Mosquito over Germany one night in 1944. He walked to Holland and actively worked with the Dutch Resistance for the remainder of the war.

149 Sqn Flight Engineer Tommy Knox – a man I’m proud to call a friend

Don Southwell and Keith Campbell looking on as Frank Dell signs an impressive print of a Mosquito

The march officially concluded on Liverpool St, literally around the corner from the Pullman Hotel where we were to have lunch. So Brian and I simply kept on going, leading Don and his wheelchair in our own private parade, right to the door of the hotel!

Four veterans graced us for lunch, and as usual I made sure I got photos of them:

The lunch was of the usual high standard put on by the Pullman, and I was asked afterwards to say a few words about my experiences collecting interviews for the IBCC project. This was the first time I’d spoken about some of the stories I’ve gathered (and some of the stories about what happened when I gathered them) and I think it was well received.

And then after lunch, Bryan and I retired to a pub in The Rocks for a scotch and soda each. The barmaid raised an eyebrow at the odd combination, but understood once we’d explained.

You see, scotch and soda was the favoured drink of a much-missed Lancaster pilot named Don Huxtable.

I suspect we might have started a nice little Anzac Day tradition…

Members of the Australian Army Cadets Band once again came into the lunch venue to play a few tunes

Frank Dell tells some of his amazing story to David Davine, who spends his spare time looking for veterans to sign some magnificent prints of paintings of aeroplanes… a TV crew looks on.

IBCC Interview #11: Jack Bell, 216 Squadron Wireless Operator and PoW

March 23, 2017April 8, 2017 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 2 Comments

You wouldn’t pick it from looking at him or talking to him, but Jack Bell was born in 1917. “I’ll be 100 next year,” he said when I interviewed him for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive in 2016. “Gawd, that’s a terrifying thought!”

Terrifying it might be for Jack, but I reckon it’s an astonishing achievement, particularly after hearing the story of what happened to him during WWII. Jack Bell had a long war, and it was not an easy one.

A child of the Depression, Jack decided in 1935 that he was sick of working in an accountant’s office, and joined the military. As a gun sergeant with the Australian Militia, he says, “I could hit an anthill at a range of 3,000 yards – over a hill!” War came in 1939 and Jack immediately went into camp for a month in Caloundra with his unit. It was during this time that he had a critical realisation. If he could hit an anthill at 3,000 yards, someone else over that hill could probably hit him too. “That’s it,” he thought. “I’m going to get up in the air where it’s more difficult to get hit…” So in November 1939, Jack put his name down for the Royal Australian Air Force.

He was called up in May 1940 – too early for the ITS at Bradfield Park, which wouldn’t open for another month. Jack instead did his early training at Ballarat Showgrounds. His cohort moved to the Ballarat aerodrome for a wireless course after construction of the Air Force station there was completed that August. Next came Evans Head for gunnery training. And suddenly he was qualified. By the beginning of February 1941, Jack was on his way overseas.

Jack disembarked at Port Tawfik in Egypt. At an aerodrome at Heliopolis, just outside of Cairo, he completed a cypher course, then waited for posting orders. Three months later someone finally realised that 216 Squadron was looking for him. It turned out the Squadron was based on the other side of the same aerodrome. Jack had not received his posting orders because he was already at Heliopolis.

While nominally a bomber unit, 216 Squadron was engaged on transport and support operations. They assisted the North African campaign by ferrying supplies and fuel and occasionally dropping people behind enemy lines. There were so many primitive airfields in the desert that they were given numbers instead of names.

Jack Bell, at ‘Kilo 40’ outside Cairo, 1941

Jack’s first steed for this flying was the alarmingly obsolete twin-engine Vickers Valentia. The Valentia was a strengthened and re-engined version of the Vickers Victoria, a big British aircraft designed in 1922. While the Valentia was marginally more capable than its regally-named predecessor, its genesis in the design offices of the 1920s was embarrassingly clear. “It was like a bus,” Jack said. The Valentia was a canvas-covered biplane with huge, draggy fixed undercarriage and, almost unbelievably for an operational multi-engined aeroplane of WWII, its pilot and navigator sat in an open cockpit at the front of the aircraft, wearing pith helmets and peering through a low windscreen. It carried a fitter as part of the crew, whose sole job was to wind up the big inertial starters to get the engines going at the beginning of every flight. On a good day, the Valentia topped out at 82 miles an hour. “One day we were overtaken by a truck on the ground below us,” Jack remembered wryly.

Happily for Jack’s continued existence, in October 1941, 216 Squadron got rid of its last Valentia. Not so happily, its replacement was the equally uninspiring Bristol Bombay. The squadron had been using Bombays solely as bombers since the beginning of the war, and the aircraft took on the transport duties of the now-superseded Valentias. “They were just useless, absolutely useless,” Jack reckoned. The type was a step up from the old Vickers aircraft inasmuch as it was now a monoplane, and the cockpit was enclosed. But it was a huge, slow thing, its undercarriage was still firmly bolted down and it was grossly underpowered. As a bomber it was more or less ineffective: it could carry just eight 250lb bombs and its bomb aiming apparatus was so old it could not drop them with any degree of accuracy. In an attempt to supplement the feeble punch packed by the official bomb load, “the air gunners and the fitters used to throw 25-pound anti-personnel bombs out of the flare chute.” Reassuring? Not at all. But it was an aeroplane, and it was all that was available.

Like its aircraft, life at 216 Squadron was fairly primitive. For meals, the aircrew ate bully beef and biscuits, or canned herring in tomato sauce. To pass the time they played cricket or poker. There were “probably a million flies per square foot.” But it was, Jack reckoned, “a wonderful experience for a young fella like me.”

For Jack it came to an abrupt end, however, on 23 January 1942. “I’ll never forget it,” Jack said soberly. The plan was to fly to a place called Msus, southeast of Benghazi in Libya, taking up replacement pilots and medical supplies and returning with elements of a Brigade Headquarters. All went well until they were flying down an escarpment near the town of Derna, which was then under attack by Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Down below, suddenly, was an echelon of the 15^th Panzer Division. They could hardly miss the big Bombay.

“The second pilot categorically stated that we were shot down by a tank,” Jack said, “which I never ever believed… the shells, to me, were more like point fives.” Whatever they were, they “rattled across the mainplane and down the centre of the aircraft.” Jack’s mate, Tony Carter, was the navigator. He was killed immediately. The pilot was wounded (he would ultimately lose a leg), as was one of the passengers. Jack received a nasty abdominal wound. Only the second pilot escaped unscathed.

Jack can’t remember much of what happened next. Rescued, and captured, by the troops who had just shot them down, he was operated on by a German doctor who happened to have been a Harley Street abdominal specialist. The doctor had been sent to England as part of Germany’s reparations after the First World War. He had returned to Germany in August 1939 and hadn’t been allowed back to England.

The man saved Jack’s life. After eight or nine days of being fed intravenously, Jack was transferred on the back of a three-tonne truck to Tripoli with other wounded prisoners, a journey of some 40 miles. It was not a pleasant trip. The friendly doctor gave him several phials of morphine and told him to jab one in his leg each morning and night. “Well, the next three days I can’t remember,” Jack said – which is lucky, because the combination of unmade roads, wartime conditions and rough handling on the part of those who loaded and unloaded the truck each night broke the stitches that were literally holding Jack together. “My abdominals – skin and stomach – were wide open,” he said with a shudder. Jack overheard a doctor telling a nurse that they would simply let nature take its course. The nurse refused to allow that to happen and convinced Jack to eat, cooking up a quince with sugar especially for him. “She was the enemy,” Jack said in wonder, “but she fed me that sweetened quince and that’s how I started to eat again.”

Jack was moved to Italy on a hospital ship, and then stayed in a hospital in Caserta until he was eventually interned at Parma, outside Milan. He sold his wristwatch for two blocks of chocolate to give to an officer making an escape attempt – but when the plot was discovered, for his part in it he was sent to the “punishment” camp at Gravina.

It’s perhaps not surprising that from this point, food – or more precisely, the lack of it – becomes a dominating theme of Jack’s story. Prisoners at Gravina were fed, but only just. “They weighed me at the end of February,” Jack said. “I weighed six stone four pounds” – about 40kg. At one stage, he was made “catering officer”. To feed 600 men for two days, he was provided with exactly twelve broccoli, eleven cabbages and a bunch of fennel. The cooks just bashed it up, roots and all, heated it in a big copper pot and served it as a brew.

“We were starving,” Jack said of his time at Gravina. On average, six prisoners a week were dying of malnutrition. The situation improved at his next camp, near Trieste, but not until the middle of 1943 once it became clear that Italy was nearing capitulation. On 23 September, their jailors left. “The British sent messages saying ‘stay where you are, you’ll be relieved in the next 24 hours.’” So Jack and his comrades stayed in the camp and waited for rescue. But in a cruel twist, overnight the camp was surrounded by German forces and the prisoners were loaded onto cattle trains and sent deep into Germany. It would be nearly two years before they were free.

Their destination was Stalag Luft IVb at Mühlberg, near the Elbe river. “It was probably at that stage the worst prison camp in Germany,” Jack reckoned. It was overcrowded. Some 35,000 prisoners squished in an area of about 32 acres, and for the first three months Jack’s group had to sleep in tents on the parade ground while waiting for more huts to be built. Food was adequate, “according to the Germans” – in reality it was barely a subsistence diet and things were grim until Red Cross parcels could supplement the rations.

The Red Cross parcels that made the diet survivable also served another purpose. “Some of the parcels had particular marks on them,” Jack said. “We – the average prisoner – didn’t know that these were sent out by MI5.” The marked parcels contained maps, hidden under labels, and other useful items for escapers. There was an Escape Committee, presided over by the Man of Confidence (who officially was the contact between the Detaining Power and the rest of the British prisoners), and all potential escapers had to be approved by the Committee to preserve the secrecy of the clandestine Red Cross supply lines. As far as escaping activity went, Jack himself was unable to physically help digging tunnels because of the injuries he sustained in the crash, but he would act as lookout if someone was stealing coal from the brazier, for example. He also has many stories of some of the escape attempts made while he was a prisoner: tunnels under vegetable gardens that collapsed on the diggers, for example (“a tomato plant with all the soil dropped down on top of him…”), or hiding a newly arrived man with the assistance of a uniform provided by the French prisoners (who had relatively more freedom than the Commonwealth troops).

After enduring the extreme cold of the winter of 1944-45, and after seeing the glow of the fires at Dresden (less than 60km away), on 4 May 1945 the German commandant simply notified the British senior officer that they would be leaving, wished everybody good luck, and took off with all the guards. The next day the Russian Army arrived – and Jack and the other prisoners were, in his words, “recaptured.” This was to ensure that the Russians had a bargaining chip, he reckons. After three days at Muhlberg the Russians marched everyone to Riga, just short of the Elbe. Jack and a few comrades took off and spent the next few days foraging for food. Eventually they crossed the fragile bridge over the Elbe and were in American hands.

Jack returned to the UK by air. All his clothes were taken on arrival and he was fumigated – and then issued with a complete new uniform. He was bitterly disappointed at losing his faithful RAF battledress jacket, which he had been wearing on that fateful operation in January 1942, and subsequently continued to wear throughout his captivity. “It still had the holes in it from the shellfire”, he said ruefully.

Jack told me of some overwhelming kindness from the British public on his arrival after his release. Staying with a friend in Brighton, for example, he went out grocery shopping with the man’s wife. Jack’s shiny new uniform stood out in the queue at the fishmongers. When the man behind the counter found out that Jack was a returned prisoner, he gave them double rations for free. “And the people clapped me, you know,” Jack recalled. “They were really wonderful people.”

His arrival in Australia was a different story, however. Japan surrendered while Jack was mid-Pacific. By the time he got home he had been out of captivity and relatively well-fed for three months. He didn’t look like the emaciated prisoners of the Japanese, who began arriving in Australia shortly afterwards. So instead of thanking him for his service, people would ask why he had gone to Europe at all. “The bloody war with Japan hadn’t even started when I left!” he says incredulously. “The reception wasn’t too great.” Even the RSL wouldn’t accept him as a member, saying he would have to go onto a waiting list.

There were personal effects too. “At night time I didn’t know what I was doing – I was thrashing around, kicking and rolling… it took a long, long time to get back to normal.”

The hardest thing he ever had to do, Jack says, was visiting the mother of his friend Tony Carter, the navigator who was killed when Jack’s Bombay crashed in Libya. “He was an only son, and I can still see his mother looking at me with the question in her eyes, why was it my son and not you… I can never forget it.”

Until the late 1980s, Jack didn’t much talk about the war. But then he wrote, for the benefit of his family, a 30-page document that told something of his story. “It was the greatest thing I ever did,” he says now. “It released me… it was out in the world somewhere and it enabled me to talk to people that weren’t old enough to go to the war and who wanted to know what happened.” Now he talks to many people about his experiences – indeed, I first encountered Jack, doing exactly that, at a large public event at the Shrine in 2013.

In wartime particularly, you never can tell quite where fortune might take you. Luck plays such an important role in where you are sent, in when you serve, in which aeroplane you fly. “It’s an experience that I would never ever do without,” Jack says of his wartime service, “but I wouldn’t wish it upon anybody.”

“The strange thing about it,” he says thoughtfully, “is that all my mates who stayed in the artillery came back, and I got shot down…”

Jack Bell in his back garden after the interview

Jack was interviewed in January 2016.

Behind the Wire – Photographic Exhibition at the Shrine

September 18, 2016September 18, 2016 ~ Adam Purcell

I went down to the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne recently to see their current exhibition, a photographic project by Australian documentary photographer Susan Gordon-Brown called Behind the Wire. It is a collection of some 50 portraits of Australian veterans of the Vietnam War, presented together with a short blurb from interviews completed with each veteran over a three-year period. There are cooks, dentists, drivers, gunners, infantrymen, pilots and civilian nurses, among other trades, in the collection.

Some of the portraits are beautiful. They’re not particularly flashy, taken with natural light in most cases, but it’s in part their simplicity that appeals. It’s clear to see that these faces have seen some terrible things – and, sadly, in one way or another, these people are all still coping with their experiences many decades later.

Indeed, part of why I wanted to see the exhibition was because of the parallels with my own post-interview photos of Bomber Command veterans. At the local Keilor East ceremony a week before Anzac Day in April I met a Vietnam veteran named Bill, a local man who was there with his grand-daughter. And that made me realise that there are parallels between the men of Bomber Command and the men who served in Vietnam. Both fought in campaigns that have become controversial. Once they came home, there was no official support – no counselling, no recognition. And both sets of veterans have only started talking about their experiences in much later years.

I spent a couple of hours soaking the whole exhibition in. Highly recommended.

The exhibition is on at the Shrine until 23 October at the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne. Further information can be found on the Behind the Wire website.

Incidentally, wandering around the grounds outside the Shrine I finally discovered that there is, in fact, a plaque dedicated to 467 and 463 Squadrons. It’s on the southern edge, in what I’d call prime position – under the first tree on the right when you’re looking down from the Shrine’s southern steps. It’s a simple memorial, but it’s nice to have found a focal point for remembering the two Squadrons in Melbourne.

IBCC Interview #9: Denis Kelly – 467 Squadron Wireless Operator and Evader

September 14, 2016September 13, 2019 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 9 Comments

denis-kelly-copy

“I thought, I’m done, I can’t get out of this ditch, I’m gunna die here. And that was frightening.”

When I rang 467 Squadron wireless operator Denis Kelly to arrange an interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive, he told me that he’d almost completed his tour of operations when he was shot down over France in July 1944. I was excited when I hung up the phone: no doubt this would be a good story for me to capture for the Archive.

But when I set up my microphones in his little retirement unit in Melbourne’s far south-east on one warm December morning, what he told me was more than just a good story. It turned out, without exception and without exaggeration, to be the most astonishing tale I have ever had the privilege of hearing first-hand.

And it goes something like this.

Denis Kelly was already married with an infant son when he joined the Air Force at 19, wanting to be a fighter pilot. A lack of depth perception discovered at Initial Training School in Victor Harbour saw him chosen instead for wireless training, which he completed at Ballarat. He sailed to war via the USA (including an unauthorised couple of days in New York), did some more flying at Llandwrog in north-west Wales and crewed up at RAF Lichfield with an Australian pilot named Tom Davis.

Posted to 467 Squadron at Waddington, Denis and his crew began flying operations in late April 1944. They were on many of the same trips as the crew of B for Baker, including Mailly-le-Camp on 3 May (though not the fateful Lille raid a week later). Life on operations was a continual strain, broken only by wild parties in the Mess or short periods of leave. Denis was convinced that with each trip, his supply of luck was steadily being used up. “Every op you completed brought you one closer to the one that would get you.”

On 18 July 1944 the crew attacked Revigny, in France. Close to the end of their tour, this one would indeed turn out to be the one that got them. “We had dropped our bombs,” Denis recalled, “and we’d just turned round and [were] making for home and then BANG, we were hit.” His radios exploded as the aircraft started to burn. The pilot yelled to bale out. Denis immediately clipped on his parachute and went down to the door at the back of the aircraft, pulling on the mid-upper gunner’s legs as he went past to signal that he was about to go. He opened the doors to the rear turret to help the 19-year-old gunner inside to escape, to be confronted by a shocking sight.

“His head was… well, he was dead.”

Denis’ parachute pack and battledress was beginning to smoulder by this time, and the pilot was still yelling to get out.

“So I went to step out – and then I remembered, never step out of a Lanc, you gotta dive.”

Denis dived.

“Next thing I know, I was falling, I was smoking, so I pulled the ripcord at the exact second I hit the ground.”

The impact caused him severe injuries: he later discovered that it had compacted his legs and spine so much that he was a full three inches shorter afterwards. “I thought I broke my spine,” he said. More immediately, his legs simply refused to work.

Denis dragged himself painfully over to a nearby tree. “I thought, ‘my wife’s not going to know I’m here, she’ll think I’m dead. She’ll get the telegram, I can’t do anything about it…’”

Two other members of his crew had landed nearby, and all three held a council of war to decide what to do next. Unable to walk, Denis decided he would be a liability and convinced the others to go on without him. They left – and Denis began a courageous attempt to crawl his way across France. “It was marshy ground, fortunately,” he said.

For the next two days, Denis dragged himself laboriously along on his elbows, moving about “50 yards every three hours.” At one point he slithered into a canal and swam, until he came to a bridge that had German guards on it. In the water he beat a cautious retreat. Getting out of the canal was difficult without the use of his legs, but after several attempts he managed and continued on his slow, determined but excruciating way. He came to a road, started crawling across it – and mercifully passed out.

Evidently deciding he was safe enough, Denis’ mind simply shut his body down. “The Harley St people said it was mind over matter, [my] mind said ‘you’re safe there,’ so…” The next thing he knew, he was being prodded by the boot of a curious French civilian. Lying there, Denis croaked the only French he knew: “Je suis Anglais parachutist – soif.” – “I am an English parachutist – thirsty.” The Frenchman produced a full bottle of beer, and Denis gulped the lot. Then the Frenchman rolled Denis into the ditch at the side of the road – and left him there.

“I thought, I’m done, I can’t get out of this ditch, I’m gunna die here. And that was frightening.”

After Denis spent a terrible day in the ditch thinking the worst, that night the Frenchman returned. He brought with him two others, some spare civilian clothes and a bicycle. Dressing Denis in the clothes, they propped him up on the bicycle, legs hanging below, and took him just a little further downstream from where Denis had scrabbled out of the canal to the house of a lock-keeper named Victor.

Denis stayed here for several weeks while his immediate injuries healed and while he figured out how to walk again. At one point he was taken to see two other members of his crew, in another safe house nearby. This happened to be on Denis’ 21^st birthday. Unbelievably, when Denis informed one of the Frenchmen of that fact he produced a bottle of Moet champagne, and all present enjoyed a glass.

After leaving Victor’s care, Denis was hidden, guarded by a gigantic and fierce dog, in the locked room of an unknown house, and later in the attic of a hospital. A little later Denis was picked up again, by a pair of Resistance fighters driving a car fuelled by a charcoal-burning contraption bolted to the back of it. They informed him that a British aeroplane was coming to pick him up that night, and that they were taking him to the landing ground. But on the way there, they saw an identical little car being towed by some German soldiers. The Frenchmen, recognising the car as belonging to one of their comrades, panicked. Clearly the operation had been compromised. The car stopped, the Frenchmen jumped out and urgently knocked on the door of the nearest house, and Denis was unceremoniously pushed inside. (Denis was later told that a British aircraft did indeed land to pick up a whole bunch of evaders, and that the Germans waited until it was loaded and had taken off before shooting it down in cold blood.)

Denis’ new host was not enamoured with the idea of involuntarily sheltering an Allied airman, and by the third day, despite not sharing a common language, he made it clear that he was not welcome. So Denis left.

He was now alone in occupied France.

For the next little while (he isn’t certain how long), Denis wandered between farmhouses scrounging for food. It was at one of these places that he met an American airman, a Thunderbolt pilot who he knew only as ‘Tex’ who had been shot down some nine months previously. They decided to join forces. For a while all was ok, but scrounging sufficient food for two was even harder than it had been when they were on their own. As they got hungrier they started to take more risks, and one day it all came unstuck.

They were in a café and the plan was for Tex to cause a distraction at the counter while Denis pinched a loaf of bread. Unfortunately, two German soldiers walked in at the exact moment that Tex began talking, in his broad Texan accent, to the girl behind the counter. The game was up. The two unfortunate airmen were handcuffed and taken away.

Interrogated half-heartedly by an elderly German soldier who reminded him of a nice old school teacher, Denis was informed that as they had been caught in civilian clothes it was being presumed that they were spies. They were to be taken to Berlin for further interrogation by the Gestapo. “I’d visions of my fingernails being pulled out,” Denis said with a shudder. Sure enough, the next night Denis and Tex were taken to the station, handcuffed together, and were on the point of being bundled onto the train when one of their two guards ducked around the corner to answer a call of nature.

“Tex looked at me,” Denis recalled. “He didn’t say anything but I knew he was going to [do something].” Denis watched wide-eyed as Tex kicked the remaining guard in the groin, stole his gun and shot him in the head. Predictably the other guard then stuck his head around the corner to see what the fuss was about, and Tex shot him too. And then, still handcuffed together, the two airmen ran. Amazingly they were not chased. They spent the next few nights in several barns until they managed to convince one of the farmers to remove their handcuffs with a cold chisel.

Despite their shared perils, however, Denis and Tex went their separate ways shortly afterwards. And here’s where Denis’ story gets truly bizarre. He was just outside a forest one day, foraging for food, when he heard some tanks approaching. So he high-tailed it into the forest and up a tree – then watched in horror as the tanks, which were German, stopped and proceeded to set up their own camp directly underneath his tree.

They stayed there for four days.

FOUR DAYS.

For all of that time, Denis remained in the tree, having used a piece of his parachute which he had been carrying to tie himself to the branch so he could sleep. He sucked the dew off the leaves to survive. The hardest part, he told me, was smelling the aromas when the troops were cooking their rations. The tanks eventually packed up camp and left – and not once had anyone looked up.

Denis crawled down from his tree, very stiff, very sore, very hungry and very thirsty. He had a drink from a nearby stream and, stumbling across a calf, hacked a piece of flesh out of the unfortunate beast’s side. Suddenly beset by terrible stomach cramps from the unaccustomed nutrition, he drifted into an uneasy sleep just outside the forest. He awoke the next night to the sound of a big aeroplane circling very low nearby.

It was a lone Shorts Stirling bomber, and it dropped something big on the end of a parachute. Denis watched as the parachute descended and was making his way over to investigate when suddenly he heard a deep, threatening and unmistakably British voice. “You German bastard,” it growled, “you stop where you are!” Denis turned around, very slowly, to find a mean-looking soldier levelling an equally mean-looking submachine gun in his direction.

“I’m not a German,” Denis squeaked. “I’m an Aussie!”

It turned out that he had blundered into a small platoon of SAS commandos, operating from a well-hidden base behind the lines. The Stirling had been dropping them a Jeep. Denis would stay with the commandos for several days. At one point while they were out on an operation he snuck into their camp, found their radio and tapped out a desperate message to England. “They never answered and I never knew if it had been received,” he told me, “but I found out later from my wife that the federal police came to her [at home] and told her that I was safe at that time, but still behind enemy lines.”

Some time afterwards the commandos handed Denis back to the Resistance who placed him in yet another safe house – where he found Tex and several of his own crew waiting. Knowing that the fighting front was getting closer, the French were collecting their fugitive airmen in one place to wait for liberation.

It was not long coming. “We heard guns,” Denis recalled, “and thought, that’s real firing. So we went up the road, and it was General Patton’s mob, so we waved them down.”

Once they had convinced the Americans that they were Allied airmen who had been in hiding, the Yanks invited them into their tanks, and Denis had the surreal experience of standing in the gun turret, being handed bottles of wine from the grateful inhabitants of several villages as they were liberated.

Denis was sent back to Paris and eventually flown back to England in early September 1944. He had been on the run behind enemy lines for nearly three months. He eventually returned to Australia and his family.

Perhaps unsurprisingly after his experiences, Denis is still coping with the effects of his war. He still occasionally suffers nightmares – “it’s horrifying how realistic it is” – and he said he’d told me things during the interview that he never told his wife (who died about fifteen years ago). It’s clearly hard for him to talk about. But a decade or so ago, his son sat him down and said, “look Dad, you’ve got grandchildren and great grandchildren now – you should leave your story.”

And so Denis wrote. Only ten copies of the resulting manuscript were ever printed. The book includes his whole story, from enlistment to demob and beyond, and it’s uncompromising in its detail. It’s in need of a good edit but its raw honesty, and the astonishing story it tells, makes it one of the more remarkable aircrew memoirs that I’ve read.

As well as setting the incredible tale onto paper, the act of writing the book, I suspect, helped Denis to in some way cope with the demons he’s carried for so long. But something else helped too. There’s a photo on Denis’ wall of him with his son at the Bomber Command memorial in London. It was taken in 2014 when they went on a pilgrimage to Europe.

As well as England, they went across the Channel to France. They visited the lock keeper’s house where Denis had been hidden. They attended receptions in town halls with ceremonies and local dignitaries. They even found a woman who, as a young girl, had been present at the impromptu party when Denis celebrated his 21^st birthday behind enemy lines. But most important of all, they visited two lone war graves in two separate churchyards: those of rear gunner Sgt Col Allen and pilot P/O Tom Davis, the two members of Denis’ crew who did not survive the crash.

Standing next to the grave of his brave pilot, Denis broke down in tears. “I bless all of you for coming here today in memory of my comrade,” he told the gathering of local townsfolk. “But also a very important agenda on my plate today is to say thank you, thank you, thank you.”

1512-denis-kelly-004

See a video of Denis’ trip to Europe on the ABC 7.30 website.

Denis died in September 2019.

IBCC Interview #8: Arthur Atkins, 625 Squadron Lancaster Pilot

August 3, 2016 ~ Adam Purcell

Arthur Atkins had a fascination with flight that started very early. He built and flew model planes. He was a member of the Cub Scouts. He was lucky enough to take his first flight aged 8 or 9, when two Cubs at a time squeezed in together in the open cockpit of an Avro Avian flying from the old Coote Island aerodrome just west of Melbourne. Arthur really wanted to be a pilot. But in the early 1930s, how on Earth could a lad from Surrey Hills in Melbourne ever afford flying lessons?

By winning them, of course. So Arthur entered a competition run by the Sun News Pictorial newspaper. The prize was enough flying tuition to get a pilot licence. “But I didn’t win!”

Maybe the Air Force would pay instead, he thought, and tried to enlist in his final year at school. But the inter-war Air Force was not very big, and there were lots of other people who also dreamed about becoming a pilot. 2,000 people applied for just 20 positions.

“So I didn’t get that one either.”

Putting his dreams aside for a moment, Arthur qualified and found work as an accountant.

And then the Second World War broke out, and he got his chance.

Two photos of Arthur Atkins as trainee aircrew copy

When I arrived at Arthur’s house for our interview, the gates were closed and I was initially not sure that I had found the right place. But any doubts were dispelled, after I’d parked the motorbike and walked up to the door, as soon as I saw the nameplate on the wall.

‘KELSTERN’

I’d seen that name before. RAF Kelstern, in the Lincolnshire Wolds, was the wartime home of 625 Squadron, Royal Air Force, with which Arthur had flown 31 operations. He earned a Distinguished Flying Cross in the process. I was definitely at the right house.

Arthur came out of the front door, a fit and distinguished-looking gentleman, and immediately wanted to talk about my bike. “Oof” he said, giving it a curious push. “It’s a bit heavier than mine was.” He was referring to a 350cc Calthorpe motorcycle that he used to hoon around on in the years immediately before the war.

Arthur Atkins and his 350cc Calthorpe motorcycle copy

This was my first clue that Arthur was quite a technical person. The next one followed soon after, as we walked into his old-fashioned study, with an Anglepoise lamp and one of those big green banker’s desk lights over the desk. As I set up my laptop among the model planes and boats and piles of motorbike and aviation magazines, I remarked on a big picture of a Wellington that was hanging among dozens of photos of cars, boats and aeroplanes on the walls. Arthur immediately launched into a highly detailed explanation of why sleeve valves in the Wellington’s engines made them so complex and therefore unreliable, especially as they got older. This set the tone for the next couple of hours.

Interviewing Arthur was easy. I kicked off with my standard opener about what he was doing before the war, and he was off. He used his meticulous logbook as a memory prompt. Moving through it, he would announce the name of a place or a unit (“then we went to Mallala”) and then he’d lean back, take off his reading glasses, and proceed to tell me a story about that place.

At the end of the story, the glasses went back on and he picked up the logbook to read the next place name. And off we went again.

Ansons over Mallala, early 1943 copy — A very rare air-to-air photo, taken by Arthur, of another Anson as he flew over Mallala

The stories he told were sometimes serious, sometimes funny and sometimes gory. But they were always interesting. He told me of his first solo at Benalla, and of the desert heat at Mallala. He told me about a weekend spent on leave in New York on his way to war. Of arriving at an Advanced Flying Unit at Greening Common in the UK and going for a walk onto the airfield with a few mates. They found a big black patch, about 50 or 60 feet across, the scene of an Oxford crash the night before. “They hadn’t scraped everything off the runway,” Arthur said of the ghastly scene. The next day he was chosen to be one of the pallbearers for the dead pilot. “We carried the coffin to the local train station,” he said, “where we shoved it into the guard’s van and said ‘goodbye sport’ – and that was it…”

He told me of landing a Wellington at his Operational Training Unit at Church Broughton on one engine, and of a Nickel leafletting raid on Chartres in France that was almost comedic. First, the bomb aimer pressed the wrong button over the target, so instead of opening to scatter leaflets in the slipstream, one of the two six-foot-long canisters in the bomb bay was jettisoned entirely. It disappeared from the aircraft with all the leaflets still tightly packed inside. Then, when they were approaching the French coast, someone in the crew said “there’s a searchlight on us!”

“Well, that of course rattled everyone… and after a while we found that the searchlight was following us!”

It was actually their own landing light, which when not in use was supposed to be retracted flush against the wing and pointing straight down, that had been mysteriously switched on.

“We were flying over German-occupied France with this bright light shining straight down…”

Of his time at Blyton, a Heavy Conversion Unit, Arthur told me how, rolling out after his first landing in command of a Halifax, he relaxed a tiny bit too early and the big bomber swung violently. They ended up on the grass facing the way they’d come. But the control tower frequency stayed silent. No-one had seen the grassy excursion. So Arthur innocently taxied back to his dispersal. “I never did it again – you couldn’t relax until the thing had stopped rolling at your parking spot!”

Most of his stories, though, come from the seven months that he was at 625 Squadron, Kelstern, from June 1944. Like the time they were coned over Mannheim, on the way to Russelsheim to attack the Opel works there. They got picked up by a blue “master” searchlight:

“I could hardly see the instruments because I was blinded… I remember thinking, ‘Geezus, I’ve done all this training and now I’m gunna be killed’… I pushed the stick forward and immediately lost the searchlight…”

(While he was telling me this he grabbed an imaginary control column and shoved it forward to illustrate. It might be decades since Arthur flew an aeroplane, but the instinct has never left him.)

Then there were a pair of low-level daylight operations on consecutive days over the Bay of Biscay to attack the Gironde Estuary in France. The first trip happened to be on Arthur’s birthday. “Beautiful day,” he recalled, “no wind, blue skies, not a cloud in the sky. A delightful day… so I got a nice birthday present, a nice trip to southern France, at 50 feet across the Bay of Biscay – and we dropped bombs on it.” He remembers roaring over an old horse and cart in the dunes on the way in to the target.

On the second one, they were all hurtling “hell for leather” over the water when Arthur’s rear gunner called up.

“Someone’s gone in!”

Two other Lancasters had collided. Arthur looked around in his seat, and:

“There’s this great splash of water still hanging in the air…”

One aircraft survived the collision. The second did not.

Another trip that stuck in Arthur’s mind was a night raid on Frankfurt in September 1944. “That was a good one,” he said. “I liked Frankfurt.” From 17,800 feet in the cockpit of his Lancaster, Arthur looked down on the great city. “It looked just like Melbourne would from the air at night, with the streets all lit up… but it wasn’t lights, it was the burning buildings on each side of the street.” Arthur lost a close friend on the same night, a Flight Lieutenant named Dave Browne who died attacking Stuttgart with 467 Squadron.

Dave Browne, Chieveley copy — 418804 F/L David Dorey Browne

Incidentally, in the early 1990s Arthur went to Germany with a group of old bomber aircrew organised by the Royal Australian Air Force Association. Among the places they visited, in a bus driven by two German Air Force pilots, was Frankfurt. “They’ve got a big new wide boulevard through the centre,” Arthur said “Well they can thank me for putting that there – I removed a whole heap of scruffy old houses from a great strip in the middle of Frankfurt!” The bomber boys were subsequently guests of honour at a dinner held by the German Ex-Fighter Pilots Association, where the Germans perhaps got a little of their own back. “They had these long tables in the room, with the big pots of beer, and they were singing songs… stamping their feet and banging their pots on the table… I spoke to the bloke next to me (they speak a lot of English in Germany), and said “what are they singing now?”

It was the old battle song: “Wir fahren gegen Engeland!”

“I said, oh, that’s interesting!”

Arthur reckons he flew over about eight European countries in his Lancaster, including Sweden and Switzerland, Norway and Denmark. “I’ve been around in that Lancaster. It was a beautiful thing to fly.”

More than two hours had passed from the time Arthur first picked up his logbook to the time I asked my final question. How will Bomber Command be remembered, I wanted to know?

“I think it’ll be remembered by the people that were in it, alright,” he said. “It was the best job I ever had in my life.”

And he has left his own little piece of remembrance too. Several years ago Arthur sponsored a racing boat for his rowing club. As sponsor he was allowed to choose the name of the vessel.

After his much-missed good mate, he called it “David Browne”.

Arthur Atkins

Wartime photos courtesy Arthur Atkins. Colour photo by Adam Purcell

Bomber Command Commemoration Day 2016: Canberra

June 6, 2016June 7, 2016 ~ Adam Purcell

It was an unfortunate fact that the Bomber Command Commemorative Day ceremonies were on the same day this year in both Canberra and Melbourne. While in previous years I have prioritised travelling to the nation’s capital, in part because it has tended to attract Sydney-based Bomber Command types who I count as friends, with the recent incorporation of the Bomber Command Commemorative Association Victoria and my deeper involvement with that group in Melbourne, I needed to be in the southern capital on Sunday. But neither that nor the big rain band that’s been chucking it down at the entire east coast of Australia all weekend stopped me making a flying visit to Canberra last Saturday.

While it was only a short visit, I made sure it would be well and truly worthwhile by arranging an early flight on Saturday morning and doing a sneaky IBCC interview with 466 Squadron bomb aimer and prisoner of war Keith Campbell. I’ll get around to writing about Keith’s story in more detail one of these days (I’m afraid there’s a six-month backlog on that series of posts at the moment!), but at this point I must acknowledge the superb support cheerfully given by the staff of the Australian War Memorial in arranging a suitable venue for the recording. We’d hoped to be able to get an early check-in at the hotel but as this could not be confirmed until very late in the piece I thought I’d ask a contact at the AWM about the possibility of finding an appropriate spot somewhere in the building.

To AWM Events and Ceremonies Coordinator Pam Tapia, Media Relations Manager Greg Kimball, Duty Manager Richard Cruise and the staff at the front desk go my grateful thanks. We had the use of the Memorial’s BAE Systems Theatre for a couple of hours and it made for a very comfortable and appropriate location. Keith was the only survivor of a mid-air collision over Stuttgart in July 1944 – he still doesn’t know how his parachute was clipped on or how it opened – and it was wonderful to listen to him telling his story in detail, and get it on tape.

The prize for ingenuity goes to Adam, the AWM’s Theatre Manager who, noticing my struggles with the low light in the room, suggested, supplied and operated a theatre spotlight for the traditional photo:

1606 BCCDF CBR-013 — Keith Campbell OAM LdH in the BAE Systems Theatre, Australian War Memorial

After all that excitement we had a brief respite at the hotel (back at the QT again after last year’s experiment further down Northbourne Ave), and then it was back to the War Memorial for the evening’s cocktail party. This has always been my favourite part of this weekend: the atmosphere provided by Lancaster G for George is second to none. There was a reasonable crowd, though veteran numbers were somewhat lower than we have seen in recent years with eight present.

1606 BCCDF CBR-050

A notable absence was Don Southwell, who had been taken to hospital on Friday with a mild infection. Long a stalwart of the organising committee of this weekend, Don was devastated at missing the event, and he was certainly missed both at the AWM and at the post-function drinks back at the hotel. Apparently he’d been on the phone to his son David every three hours to make sure everything was going smoothly in Canberra, so we hope to see him back on his feet soon.

Geoff Ingram provided MC services on the night and the guest speaker was Air Vice Marshal Kim Osley. He hit precisely the right note with a short address that was informal enough for the social nature of the occasion yet thoughtful enough to touch on some important issues. He started on a humorous note, telling the crowd that his father had been German. “So I’d like to thank those of you who attacked Stuttgart,” he said, pausing for effect, “…and missed!”

1606 BCCDF CBR-038

The airmen of Bomber Command, Air Vice Marshal Osley said, were to the modern Royal Australian Air Force role models, leaving a legacy of moral courage in adversity and professional mastery. “Bomber Command shortened the war – end of story,” he declared, and no-one in the crowd could possibly argue with that.

I was happy to renew acquaintances with some veterans I know well: Tommy Knox, Bill Purdy, Tom Hopkinson, Ray Merrill and Jim Clayton (who claimed after AVM Osley’s Stuttgart quip that “we didn’t [miss]!”). And I managed to meet a new one too: Les Davies, a 466 Squadron mid-upper gunner, a lovely bloke who I found sitting under G for George.

1606 BCCDF CBR-052

The night ended with the return of the Striking by Night sound and light show, which finished things off with a nice little punctuation mark.

1606 BCCDF CBR-063

1606 BCCDF CBR-072 — Jim Clayton, Ray Merrill and some plane called George

There were a small band of people in the QT hotel bar when we got back to the hotel for a nightcap or three. That distinctly Huxtable-shaped hole in proceedings again made its presence felt, but there were some passionate and very useful conversations in progress as the night wore on.

And then the next morning I got up early, Geoff Ingram drove me to the airport and I flew, in cloud the whole way, back to Melbourne. The next part of the Bomber Command Commemoration Day events was about to begin.

IBCC Interview #5: Joe Shuttleworth, 50 Squadron Rear Gunner

January 19, 2016January 19, 2016 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 1 Comment

You had to be lucky to survive a tour in Bomber Command at any time during WWII. But you had to be really lucky to survive a tour if you were operating in the winter of 1943-44, when the Battle of Berlin was at its height and the RAF were losing upwards of 30 or 40 aircraft a night.

A 21-year-old Australian named Joe Shuttleworth got lucky while heading to Berlin in the rear turret of a 50 Squadron Lancaster on 15 February 1944. It’s fair to say it would not have felt much like a stroke of luck at the time. “There was a flash about 11 o’clock high,” he told me when I interviewed him for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive late last year. “I felt immediate pain…”

That was some time off, however, when a very young Joe Shuttleworth saw Bert Hinkler land at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm racecourse in 1930. Like many of his generation, that inspired an interest in flying so it was only natural that he would join the Royal Australian Air Force when war broke out. Unfortunately Joe had a deficiency in one eye which precluded him from becoming a pilot, but he was accepted as a Wireless Air Gunner and after training and receiving his gunner’s brevet in Australia he embarked for war.

Joe Shuttleworth in Brisbane pre-embarkation

Joe travelled across the Pacific Ocean, then across the US by train. He was very impressed with the trip. The scenery on the way was very nice, and he had “the biggest icecream of my life” in Salt Lake City. England was pretty alright too. “Lovely country”, he said.

“Lots of beautiful girls, lots of warm beer – it was pretty hard to get cold beer in those days – but the countryside was absolutely beautiful.”

Joe completed further training at 29 Operational Training Unit at Bruntingthorpe, where he survived a crash in a Wellington after a tyre burst on take-off. But something else happened while he was at Bruntingthorpe: something with far further-reaching consequences for Joe’s life.

Nearby the airfield was the village of Lutterworth. Having been to a party in the village one night, Joe was walking around the town when two girls came up. One of them asked if Joe had any change. He was able to oblige her, but it was the other girl, named Freda, who caught Joe’s eye.

“Of late I have been going out on a few occasions with a Lands Army girl (and very nice too I may mention)”, he subsequently wrote home in July 1943. “And here’s another tip, don’t jump to all kinds of conclusions!”

I know this because Joe let me borrow, to scan for the Archive, a wonderful collection of letters from his time overseas. There’s more than 40 all up, and in letters from the second half of 1943 there are plenty of mentions of “my little Lands Army girl friend.” So any conclusions to which his family may have jumped actually turned out to be correct: Joe and Freda became engaged during a leave in November and, on 30 December 1943, they married. I asked Joe what a wartime wedding was like. “We toasted with a bottle of Australian wine”, he said. “How it happened to be there I’m not quite sure, but it was there!”

Portrait Front copy

Joe and his crew were posted to Skellingthorpe on 15 January 1944. Over the next month the 50 Squadron Operational Record Book records Joe’s name against five operational flights. All five of them were against the same target.

Berlin.

“We’d be sending out about 750 aircraft [a night”, he said. “We’d generally lose about 50. So on a tour of 30, statistically it’s impossible to get through.” For Joe and his crew, though, things went relatively smoothly. After each raid they landed successfully at Skellingthorpe, feeling very relieved and thinking, “there’s another one towards the 30.” Everything went smoothly, that is, until that fateful night in February 1944 when Joe met his Waterloo.

The flash he saw in his turret on the way to Berlin was, Joe now thinks, the result of an attack by a nightfighter equipped with the as-yet-unsuspected upwards-firing Schrage Musik cannon. His turret was wrecked and he was badly wounded. “I think one of the crew dragged me out of the turret”, he told me, though there is a letter in the collection that suggests he actually insisted that he remained in the turret until they returned to Skellingthorpe. He did not lose consciousness until he arrived at the RAF hospital at Rauceby.

So what were Joe’s injuries? At this point, I’ll quote from what is probably the most poignant letter amongst the collection, written by Joe’s new wife Freda to his cousin Keith, who was serving in the Royal Australian Navy in London at the time. Understandably, Freda beats around the bush for a page and a half first.

Excuse me Keith for going all round to get to the point, but you see, I just can’t put into words the thing that is so hard to grasp. I hope it won’t give you too much of a shock Keith – he has had his right eye out and has also fractured his right arm.”

Joe was the only man on his crew to be injured in the attack, and his turret was the only part of the Lancaster to be damaged. This probably felt like some rather bad luck at the time. But as it turned out, the eye that Joe lost was the bodgy one that had precluded him from pilot training. And with Keith’s support Freda remained relatively upbeat. Even though the surviving letters tell a tale of grief and uncertainty they also reveal a determination to keep positive about the future. As Freda wrote at one point, “From all the horror of this, I have one great consolation, this is, he will not be flying again.”

She was right. Once he had left hospital, Joe spent some months working in the office at RAAF Headquarters in Kodak House, London, before he came home via the United States towards the end of 1944. Freda followed him to Australia a year later.

As we approached the end of the interview I asked Joe what he thought about his time in Bomber Command. “Great experience,” he said without hesitation. “Great experience. I had a world trip… I saw places I’ve never been back to.” Indeed, since he returned from the war he has not once left Australia.

After Joe was removed from operational flying, the rest of his crew carried on. On 3 May 1944, they were in one of 42 aircraft that failed to return from the disastrous attack on the German Panzer depot at Mailly-le-Camp [1].

“I was one of the lucky ones,” Joe said, very quietly.

50 Squadron rear gunner Joe Shuttleworth at home in Melbourne — Joe Shuttleworth following the interview

[1] Thanks to Mike Connock of the 50 Squadron Association for copies of the Squadron’s Operational Record Books

Bomber Command in Canberra 2015

June 1, 2015June 2, 2015 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 5 Comments

The cabbie who picked me up from the airport couldn’t work out why I would be coming to Canberra for non-work reasons.

On a weekend.

In winter.

He perked up, though, as he drove me down Fairburn Avenue and through a big roundabout, pointing to a big domed building up the hill.

“That War Memorial. You must go there.”

Don’t worry, I said. I’ll be going there alright.

The Australian War Memorial, that big domed building on the hill in front of Mount Ainslie, is the traditional and spiritual home of much of the activity associated with the annual Bomber Command Commemorative Day. The weekend just gone saw the 8^th edition take place, under blue skies for once.

It began, though, with sad news. While preparing to leave for the commemorations, Bomber Command Commemorative Day Foundation President Ross Pearson suffered a stroke. As I write it is still too soon to know much but the early signs are, I hear, not good. The knowledge of Ross’ illness cast a dark shadow on the weekend, and he remained in the thoughts of many of those present. But the show, as they say, must go on, and in the best spirit of Bomber Command, we pressed on regardless.

First up was the Meet & Greet function, in the shadow of the great black bomber named G for George. It was one of the bigger crowds in recent memory I thought, and was quite a good evening.

A highlight was seeing two old pilots sitting next to each other having a chat. Alan Finch (who I met at this function last year) was posted to 467 Squadron in August 1943 and completed his tour on 19 March 1944. Bill Purdy arrived at 463 Squadron two weeks after Alan left. So while they were not quite both at Waddington at the same time, they were there at the same time as the crew of B for Baker. There are not many men around these days who were operating around that time, so to find two of them sitting next to each other was a special moment for me.

Bill was telling a story when I passed by. After his tour ended in August 1944, he was posted to a Heavy Conversion Unit as an instructor on Stirlings. His first pupil, he said, could fly better than he did. “We didn’t even realise we had landed!” His second pupil was even better. But Number Three? There was much swerving all over the sky. “It was a controlled crash every time!”

Once they all got to their operational squadrons, though, it was a different story. The first man was lost on his first trip. The second man lasted three. But the third pilot survived his tour. “Maybe the other two were too good…” Bill mused thoughtfully.

It strangely makes sense. Flying perfectly straight and level in a combat zone could be fatal when flak and nightfighters were around.

There was an attempt to get a group photo of all the veterans present but it was less than successful. But seeing as everyone was gathered near the lectern at the tail end of George, 467 Squadron mid-upper gunner Albert Wallace took to the microphone to tell a few stories about Australians, WAAFs and sugar tongs. He mentioned being one of the last crews to fly S-Sugar, the Lancaster preserved at the RAF Museum in Hendon.

Bomber Command veterans gather to hear Albert Wallace speak

That brought Alan Finch to the front. “We were the first crew to fly Sugar on 467 Squadron!” he said. He wasn’t impressed: “I said it wasn’t fit for operational service…” As we now know, of course, Sugar would go on to fly over 100 operations.

Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

While all this was going on, I noticed Don Southwell sitting on a convenient ledge in front of a painting of a flight engineer. He had some interesting light falling on his face from a set of lamps that were ostensibly there to illuminate the speaker at the lectern.

I got an idea…

VETERAN PHOTO BOOTH!

Alan Finch. What a brilliantly relaxed pose!!

As the event wrapped up I also dragged the lights over to get a nice portrait of two of the key organisers of the event, Don and David Southwell:

The ‘official’ hotel for the Bomber Command group had changed to the brand-new Avenue, in the heart of the city. A small group repaired to the hotel bar there following the function for a few drinks. The group was down a little on numbers from previous years, partly because some were still staying at the QT hotel as usual and also because some of the usual suspects were missing (Don Huxtable being a very noticeable absence, being in hospital in Sydney). The ghosts of absent friends were very evident. But it was still a very useful and enjoyable evening. At one point I asked Keith Campbell, who had just been served the biggest ‘little’ beer he had ever seen, what he thought of wartime English beer. Not much, as it turns out. “It was weak and tasteless!” he said.

The grass in front of the Bomber Command memorial sculpture in the western grounds of the War Memorial is the original venue for the Bomber Command Commemorative Day, and given it is a dedicated memorial to Bomber Command it makes sense to hold the ceremony in its shadow. But having experienced the heightened atmosphere and mood in the cloisters of the War Memorial for the last two years, I reckon it’s much better up there. And so I was almost hoping for rain when I awoke this morning. But for the first time in three years the ceremony on Sunday morning was held outside under blue skies, and it went rather well.

I’m told there were 600 seats provided, and they were all full well before the ceremony kicked off at 11:00, with other people standing around the periphery. Sitting behind me was Tom Stewart, a Canberra local who was a 77 Squadron (Royal Air Force, not the Australian fighter squadron!) wireless operator. I snapped a quick photo before the ceremony started:

A representative flight of the reformed 460 Squadron ‘marched on’ to open the ceremony. Dr Brendan Nelson, AWM Director, again spoke well and mostly without notes, quoting the words that end Striking by Night presentation in which G for George plays such a starring role. “My memories are of young men, Aussie men,” it goes, “laughing, dancing, singing and enjoying the moment… Never to be heard of again.”

Well, Dr Nelson told us, setting the theme for the weekend, “they are to be heard of again: here, today.”

I was most impressed, however, by the speech from Dr Peter Hendy, the Federal Member for Eden-Monaro. It started off the usual way and I was a little worried that it would be a typical politician’s speech, saying the right things but without really knowing or believing in what was being said. But then he veered off into much more personal territory. Dr Hendy, it turned out, had an Uncle Jack, actually a cousin of his father’s, who was a rear gunner in Bomber Command. And so, just like I did, Dr Hendy grew up with stories of “Uncle Jack,” bombers and gun turrets. He said that while it’s tempting to speak of Bomber Command airmen as being superhuman, they were actually ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. “The extraordinary, ordinary Australians”, he called them, and I thought that a most appropriate description.

Keith Campbell (who at breakfast that morning was singularly unruffled by the short notice) gave the Reflections address in place of Ross Pearson. He spoke of the WAAFs who would issue parachutes to the airmen with the old line “if it doesn’t open, bring it back!”, of “the longest ten seconds you would ever know” after the bombs went down, waiting for the camera to tick over, and of listening to a Master Bomber’s voice on the radio over the target one night: “Goodbye chaps, we’re going in – we’ve been hit by flak and we’ve had it.” And he spoke of his demob: “There was no tickertape parade. Just a suit, new hat and best wishes.”

Keith Campbell giving the 'Reflections' address. — Keith Campbell giving the ‘Reflections’ address.

But it was Keith’s conclusion that rang most true for me. He was speaking to the veterans present, urging them to tell their stories while they still can. “Maybe you can pass the torch on to others,” he said. “Make sure that their name lives forevermore.”

The Australian Rugby Choir led the singing

Tom Hopkinson and Don Browning, laying a wreath for 463-467 Squadrons at the Bomber Command memorial. Don's daughter Jocelyn providing support. — Tom Hopkinson and Don Browning, laying a wreath for 463-467 Squadrons at the Bomber Command memorial. Don’s daughter Jocelyn providing support.

The luncheon was moved from the War Memorial at quite short notice to the QT Hotel because of high demand. More than 180 people were there.

There was a lot of brass there. The soon-to-retire Chief of Air Force, Air Marshall Geoff Brown, delivered an intriguing address looking at current capability of the Royal Australian Air Force, including some very rare bombing footage of recent operations in Iraq.

Air Marshal Geoff Brown, Chief of Air Force

Where in Bomber Command’s day 1,000 aircraft might be sent to one target, these days one aircraft might engage four individual targets on a single sortie. He even showed an example of the requirement to avoid collateral damage, when non-combatant vehicles were observed nearing a target and the laser targeting system was used to push the munitions off target after the weapons were released. A capability, one suspects, which Bomber Command would have found quite useful.

Also speaking was the Chairman of the Trustees of the International Bomber Command Centre, Tony Worth. Tony was in Australia as part of a delegation of IBCC people who are working on “an international story of Recognition, Remembrance and Reconciliation”.

The Centre, in the early stages of being established on a hillside within sight of Lincoln Cathedral, will consist of a Memorial Spire (which was erected last month), steel walls engraved with the names of those who died in Bomber Command, an education and exhibition centre, ‘Peace Garden’ and, most significantly for me, an ambitious digital archive that aims to become a comprehensive research resource – the ‘go-to’ point for Bomber Command information into the future. As such they are looking for people worldwide to scan documents and interview veterans and it’s possible that I may become a point of contact for this in Melbourne. It’s a big project with very lofty goals but it certainly looks like they have an enthusiastic team behind it and it will be very interesting to watch their progress.

Ron Houghton launching a new book, called Severed Wings about a Bomber Command crew who were shot down and bailed out over Germany. Four members of the crew were subsequently murdered by German civilians. Looking on is the RSL's Ken Doolan and Peter Rees — Ron Houghton launching a new book, called *Severed Wings* about a Bomber Command crew who were shot down and bailed out over Germany. Four members of the crew were subsequently murdered by German civilians. Looking on is the RSL’s Ken Doolan and Peter Rees

Veterans at the Lunch gathered for a group photo with the two top-ranking members of the current Royal Australian Air Force. Front row, L-R: Tom Hopkinson, [unknown], Keith Campbell, Max Barry, Rex Austin, Ray Merrill, Jim Clayton. Back row L-R: Deputy Chief of Air Force Air Vice Marshal Gavin 'Leo' Davies, Tommy Knox, Angus Cameron, Bill Purdy, Chief of Air Force Air Marshal Geoff Brown, Ron Houghton, Don Southwell. — Veterans at the Lunch gathered for a group photo with the two top-ranking members of the current Royal Australian Air Force.
Front row, L-R: Tom Hopkinson, [unknown], Keith Campbell, Max Barry, Rex Austin, Ray Merrill, Jim Clayton.
Back row L-R: Deputy Chief of Air Force Air Vice Marshal Gavin ‘Leo’ Davies, Tommy Knox, Angus Cameron, Bill Purdy, Chief of Air Force Air Marshal Geoff Brown, Ron Houghton, Don Southwell.

The increased interest in Bomber Command and events of this type can easily be seen in the numbers attending this year. While not the “biggest ever” I think it was a modest increase on last year, even with those notable absentees. While I didn’t come away with as many ‘new’ veterans as I have in the past I still made a lot of contacts and there were many family, friends and hangers-on present. (Including, incredibly enough, one of my high school PE teachers whose wife has a 467 Squadron connection).

The news of Ross Pearson’s stroke concentrated some minds on thoughts of what the future might look like for the organisation of this event and others like it, and there was discussion of this important question at various points over the weekend. The intention of the group of veterans – led by the late Rollo Kingsford-Smith – who developed the concept for the first Bomber Command Commemorative Day was that it would continue “in perpetuity”, and this intention was restated a couple of times on the weekend. Certainly the numbers present demonstrate that the demand is there and indeed is growing for events of this type. Much of the burden of organising this event already falls on the younger generation, but the inspiration for it is still drawn from the hardy but dwindling band of Bomber Command ‘originals’. Some hard questions will need to be answered when the last of the ‘extraordinary, ordinary Australians’ finally leave this life.

Ian Coffey (left) talking to Keith Campbell and Tom Hopkinson at the lunch

Tommy Knox, Angus Cameron and Rex Austin. Angus and Rex have just recognised each other for the first time in about 20 years. In the early 1950s, both rejoined the Air Force and were on the same ITS course together.

The luncheon was beginning to wrap up and the crowd was thinning. As I prepared to leave I saw two old blokes, the last people sitting at a table. They were Angus Cameron and Tom Hopkinson, two Canberra-based veterans, and they looked very relaxed.

Two extraordinary, ordinary Australians, sitting back and having a lively chat.

They were still at it as I left the room.

The official photos from the AWM are now on their Flickr stream, here

Before it’s too late

April 1, 2015September 1, 2016 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 1 Comment

Tony Wright, National Affairs editor at The Age newspaper here in Melbourne, usually writes about the goings-on in and around Parliament House in Canberra. His series of Sketch columns usually throw an interesting light on the events of the day (and, if you’ve been following Australian politics, he’s had a not inconsiderable amount of material for inspiration recently).

But every Saturday, Wright gets the opportunity to write about something other than politics. One week last year it was about Mike Druce, the man who made a modern-day escape from Colditz Castle in September, then walked unsupported to Switzerland. Wright wrote another interesting one early in February.

“They are disappearing fast now”, he wrote, “the generation who experienced a world war.”

It seems not so long ago that those who had lived through World War I and had seen horses step aside for internal combustion engines and a lot more were being put in the ground, but memory plays tricks – it’s 100 years since that war began.

Those who knew it, even those who lived to astonishing ages, breathed the last of this earth’s air a long time ago.

Now it is the turn of the last of the survivors of World War II.

Some of those shuffling off into the sunset in recent times, of course, were well-known in life and widely mourned in death. Giants of politics like Gough Whitlam (an RAAF navigator) and Tom Uren (a survivor of the Burma-Thai Railway). Journalist and Korean War correspondent Harry Gordon. “These are, of course, big and extraordinary lives”, Wright says:

…generous spirits well documented, celebrated on a broad stage, their stories teaching us something that transcends the experiences that will go into books about their achievements: call it wisdom.

But while these were some of the better-known men whose lives intersected with some of the biggest conflicts in the history of mankind, so many others were there too. In Wright’s words:

…each day others whose lives were not destined to be celebrated so publicly or granted obituaries pass beyond this existence. Every one of them has a story, and in those stories we can often find ourselves enriched, because wisdom often resides there.

He’s dead right.

This is more or less why I flew to Sydney last month to have lunch with a Bomber Command veteran who also happens to be a good friend of mine. Hugh is a former rear gunner and we arranged to meet at one of those very old and very exclusive clubs in the city, all cedar panelling and leather Chesterfield armchairs. Hugh has been a member for a quarter-century.

He’s clearly well-known here. As we entered the bar the bartender poured my beer but gave Hugh the bottle and an empty mug. “I like to pour it myself”, he explained. Somehow, I imagine, with its sharply-dressed, exclusively male clientele, beer in pewter mugs and discreet murmur of conversation, the atmosphere in the bar at a wartime Officer’s Mess (in one of its quieter moments) might have been something similar. And perhaps for Hugh that’s at least part of where the attraction lies.

With that thought in my head, it’s not surprising that our conversation very quickly turned to flying. As we drank our beers we shared experiences flying the Tiger Moth and I mentioned my recent visit to Nhill and the Anson that is under restoration there. “I loved the old Aggie”, he said simply. We continued talking in the dining room as we waited for and then enjoyed a scrumptious meal while looking out over the State Library across the street.

Hugh is a little unique. He actually trained as a pilot but when he arrived at his squadron, he was one of twelve who were asked/chosen to re-train as gunners to operate a special ‘secret weapon’. It turned out to be ‘Village Inn’, an automatic radar-guided gun system. Despite what you might read on that link, Hugh’s opinion of the equipment is not very high. It was unserviceable half the time, he said, and the rear turret was not a nice place to be. Nor was it safe. On his first trip – to Bremen, in October 1944 – two of the twelve Village Inn men failed to return.

Hugh flew on his last operation – his 32^nd – a matter of weeks before the end of the war. There followed the traditional fortnight’s end-of-tour leave, part of which coincided with the regular 12-days-every-six-weeks leave of a good friend at the squadron called Johnny Garrett. Hugh had arranged to meet up with Johnny in Cardiff but was a bit surprised when he did not show up. On return to the squadron he found out why.

On 22 April 1945, 49 Squadron was moving from Fulbeck to Syerston. As happened frequently on these occasions, on departure each bomber “beat up” the control tower before setting course for their new home. One aircraft flew past at extremely low level. Johnny, like Hugh a pilot/rear gunner, was in the rear turret.

The pilot pulled the Lancaster up into the air.

Too late.

The tail of the aircraft hit the MT shed. The Lancaster fell to the ground, killing all six on board. Fifteen more people – part of the works party which were about to begin runway extentions at Fulbeck – were killed on the ground.(1)

It was a sobering story to hear over an otherwise very civilised lunch. But that’s just the point. Such was life, and death, in Bomber Command. Tragic as they are, stories like these actually happened. While official records like the squadron Operational Record Book reveal something of what happened to the aircraft, they won’t include the personal details – like the friends of those killed who wondered why they did not show up for an arranged meet-up while on leave.

These are the sorts of details and stories that can only come direct from those who were there at the time. So I see part of my role, as a Bomber Command researcher, but also as a member of the human race, to collect those stories while I still can. Hugh is one of the younger Bomber Command veterans I know, but he turned 90 last year. He’s no spring chicken. And one day I’m going to want to ask him something… but he won’t be there anymore. So in the meantime, says Tony Wright as he finishes his piece:

…the rest of us could do worse than sit with those close to us and explore what they might have to share and teach before they are gone and we find ourselves turning, bereft, to their shadow.

Amen to that.

Hugh McLeod, 49 Squadron rear gunner and my good friend, died on 7 July 2015.

(1) The ‘Fulbeck Tragedy’, as it is known, is described in Ward, J 1997: Beware of the Dog at War: Operational Diary of 49 Squadron Spanning Forty Nine Years, 1916-1965, pp. 542-5. Thanks to Colin Cripps for the steer.