Alan Clark's Lousy Long March - Part 2

Chapter 4. Egypt - Hot Pursuits of Sheilas and Camels

Chapter 5.  Italy – Out of the Frying Pan, into the Icebox

My logbook tells me that on February 20, I did one hour and 10 minutes practice in a Mustang and later that day took off on my first mission.  I use the term “mission” advisedly, because the correct term, as laid down by the RAF, is “sortie” and a perfectionist like Lew would be a stickler for this usage, but I have a preference for the American term.  It has a much nicer connotation, don’t you think?  In any event it is almost universal these days.

At this stage in my career I had about 70 hours on Kittyhawks and six on Mustangs, but it was the latter that I had been ordained to fly in anger.  Even worse, there were two different types of Mustang extant, the Mark III and the Mark IV, both with somewhat different shapes, armament and controls and it was the Squadron’s practice to allot either at random to any pilot.  This was OK if you had plenty of time to think about what you had to do and how you were going to do it, but this luxury was not always available.     

DAF was a Tactical Air Force, as distinct from a Strategic Air Force, such as the various long-range bomber forces of the RAF and USAAF.  Within this structure, RAAF No. 3 Squadron had, over the years, performed a number of roles: reconnaissance, dive-bombing and strafing, bomber escort, and aerial fighting, sometimes individually and sometimes all together.  In my time, and for some time earlier, the main role was close-support for the ground forces of the British Eighth Army.  This entailed moving up fairly close behind  the advancing ground forces, in order to respond to their requests for help ASAP and also shorten the range of the flights.  This latter, however, was becoming less important with the advent of the longer-range Mustang.  As it was now the depth of winter, both the British and the American Armies were bunkered-down on both sides of the north/south running Apennines, so there was almost no call for close support.  Instead we spent our operational time ranging widely over Yugoslavia, Austria and Northern Italy, dive-bombing bridges, strafing trains, trucks, tanks and even horse-drawn vehicles, which the Germans were increasingly needing to use.

We also did some bomber-escort duties which, for us, were “a piece of cake”, as there was no German aerial opposition to worry about.  When the bombers reached their target, we would move to one side while they copped all the flak.  I personally took part in three of these to Vienna, Klagenfurt and Graz and the trips, for us, were uneventful (although not so for the bombers).  - Except for Vienna when, for a few brief minutes, high above us we saw one of the new German jet or rocket fighters streaking across the sky at tremendous speed.  This put a serious dent in us Mustang flyers’ sense of aerial superiority, but it was only brief and never recurred before the war’s end.

My stay on No. 3 lasted until April 3, 1945, when I was shot down on my 25^th Mission.  Though brief, this period was, for me,  replete with incident - in contrast to that of my peers, Lew, Peter Martin and Ron Horton, all of whom had joined the Squadron at the same time and all of whom went through the rest of the European War unscathed and (apart from the usual exigencies of dive-bombing and strafing under fire) without too much drama.  

Let me explain a bit.  Some months before arriving, both 3 and 450 had apparently, through attrition and tour expiration, run out of experienced Flight Leaders.  So an SOS was sent to Australia for some pilots with one tour of operational experience.  As a result, four pilots with a tour done in the Jap war were flown from Australia straight to Italy, two each for 3 and 450.  They, of course, were excellent and experienced pilots, but the aerial war against Germany into which they were now thrust was vastly different to that which they had experienced in the SW Pacific.  In the event, all four were shot down: the 3 Squadron duo - FLTLT  John Hodgkinson DFC and FLTLT Barney Davies - both while flying in front of me!  

At full strength, we flew 12 aircraft in three  sections of four: "Red", "White" and "Blue".  We flew in very loose formation, called “battle formation”, a method that the RAF had learned from the Germans years before, during the Battle of Britain.  The pre-war tactics of showy close formation had proved disastrous in that campaign, as the pilots’ attention was totally taken up watching each other and they failed to see the enemy coming.

Each four flew at staggered heights with the mission leader as No. 1 in the Red section.  Newer pilots (“sprogs”) flew in the No. 2 position about 75 metres behind the leader, while the other two in the four formed a square with 1 and 2.  It was the number two’s job to search the sky continually, while the No. 1s checked the ground and also navigated us to the target.  Our squadron’s radio call sign was “Shabby”.  (Hence the name of my Laser “Shabby Red 2”.  It was from this position that I got shot down.)

But prior to that, on March 7, Hodgkinson, as Red 1 (with me right behind him at Red 2) got shot down in rather dramatic circumstances, after attacking a bridge at Padua.

After bombing, he called me up, sounding rather cross, to come up close and tell him what was wrong with his bloody aeroplane.  I closed in and noticed large bits falling off the back of his plane.  I was mulling over just how to break this news to him when his plane suddenly went into a vertical dive, hit the ground and exploded.  "Hodgy's bought it," I thought; but in the same moment a parachute opened and he hit the ground with a hell of a thump right beside the burning plane.   As I circled, he lay motionless while some bods ran towards him.  At least a broken back, I thought - and as things were 'warming up' a bit, I headed for home.

Hodge was taken prisoner.  The Squadron straggled home, even more untidily than usual, instead of assuming a planned, impeccable and tight echelon formation aimed at impressing a D.A.F. film unit which had arrived at Cervia that day to take P.R. movies.  Earlier on, they had filmed the briefing while we all stood around doing our best to look alert and intrepid.  I believe the film subsequently appeared on Australian newsreel screens.  I'm sure that, wedged amongst the Cervia footage, there were some extraneous shots of excellent echelon formation flying.

On April 1, two days before I copped it, I was again flying Red 2 behind Barney Davies when he too got shot down.  Flying over a mountainous area of Yugoslavia, Barney had spotted a couple of trucks full of German troops.  He told the rest of the squadron to stay up and called me to follow him down to strafe.  This was fairly exhilarating, as we had to dive and weave our way through the peaks of the mountains to get at the trucks.  As we started shooting, a large amount of flak (anti-aircraft fire) came up at us.  Neither of us was hit but we had to pull up very steeply to avoid the mountain on the other side of the road.  We circled back to where we had started the attack and Barney (who was nothing if not intrepid) said:

“All right, Shabby, we are going in again!”

“Shit!”,  I thought, for not only had the flak been heavy but we had been briefed never to attempt a second run as the enemy would be:

(a) Better prepared and;

(b) Rather angry and thus liable to do nasty things to you if you got shot down.     

Which is exactly what happened to Barney.  At a low point in his dive (about 100 feet or so above the trucks), he was hit by several 20 mm cannon shells.  Cool as ever, he called:

  “Hit! - Bailing out, Shabby.”

 He pulled up to about 1,500 feet, with me quite close on his tail, where he executed a perfect ‘bunt’ bail-out; that is, after jettisoning the Mustang’s Perspex canopy, freeing himself from all the impedimenta (such as straps, helmet, radio mike, oxygen mask etc.) he pushed the nose of the plane hard down (he was still climbing at this stage) and floated upwards, beautifully turning somersaults in the air until he pulled the rip cord and that life-saving canopy mushroomed out.

“Wow”, I thought, “that’s the way to do it, so easy and graceful.  That’s the way I’ll do it,  if and when my turn comes.”

But, as I found out, it is not as easy as it looks first time (and this was, I think, Barney’s third go at it).  By now, in spite of my general inexperience, I was the leading Squadron close-up eye-witness of bale-outs, one very good and one botched, almost fatal one.  Mine, two days later, was similar to, if not worse than, the latter.

At this point, while on the subject of bale-outs, I may as well go forward to recount my own bale out, two days later on April 3.  This was to be the day of an athletic carnival for No. 3 and supposedly we had been stood down for the day.  As an athlete of some past standing, I had been looking forward to this event, but the Operations phone rang, summoning us into the air.

Cervia, Italy.  3 April 1945.  Sports day for No. 3 (Mustang) Squadron RAAF in northern Italy was a big event.  The weather was fine,
the competitors were keen, and the spectators cheered lustily as their particular champions proved themselves. 
Shown, 422721 Warrant Officer J. B. Taylor of Youie Station, Coonamble, NSW, clearing the bar in the high jump field event. 
[AWM MEB0287]

The reason for this sudden change of plan was as follows: Several days before, a large Russian advance had revealed an enormous column of retreating German troops, tanks, trucks etc., on a road in Slovenia.  The retreat had been temporarily halted by bombing a passing train at a level crossing, thus the column was at our collective mercy.  Many squadrons had been involved in the two-day carnage, while the column was halted, and it was to this that No. 3 had been summoned.

Now, ever since the Battle of Britain in 1940, it had been a fighter squadron tradition that, at the sound of an alert, the pilots belted, helter skelter, to their machines and took off in a cloud of dust.  Although the need for such urgency was long since past, it was still deemed prudent to get airborne with some celerity.  So  off to the strip in our 3-ton truck (we were now based at Cervia) and into the waiting planes.  To expedite take-off, all aircraft were allotted randomly and each had a parachute with dinghy attached in position, with straps spread out so that the pilot leapt in, clipped on the parachute harness, then the restraining straps, helmet, goggles, oxygen mask, and radio; then roared off into the wild blue yonder.

My allotted plane for this mission (another armed recce) was a Mark III [serial KH631, marked "CV-V"], a slightly older model than the new Mark IVs, which were now arriving regularly as replacements on the Squadron.  It was armed with six 0.5-inch machine guns and two 500lb. bombs.  After clambering in, I was amazed to find that the parachute straps were set up for an impossibly huge person.  Instead of fitting snugly, the straps flopped about so loosely that there seemed to be every chance of falling out of them if I had to bale out.  In addition, the ripcord metal ring,  which you had to pull to open the parachute, instead of fitting neatly in its slot on your chest, was dangling on a foot-long piece of wire almost touching the floor of the cockpit.  

"Very piss-poor maintenance," I thought.  But, no time to speculate, off I went to take up my position behind our newly appointed flight commander, FLTLT 'Tubby' Shannon, who had arrived several weeks earlier to start his second tour of operations.  One thing about being young and silly (I was 20 at this time):  you feel indestructible, bullet proof as it were, and so I said to myself: “Well, it will be all right just this once.”

However, with Murphy’s Law always lurking in the background (albeit as yet undiscovered) - it wasn’t.  So off we flew, across the Adriatic and into Slovenia until we had almost reached Maribor, a large town on the Austrian border, where somebody in the formation spotted a Fieseler Storch aircraft flying low beneath us.  This was exciting stuff as most (if not all) of us had never seen a German plane in real life before.

Tubby decided that just he and I would attack it; so leaving the others up top, we jettisoned our bombs (all 2,000 lbs of them) and dived down to attack.  At this point I should explain that the Fieseler Storch is a light reconnaissance aeroplane, totally unarmed and capable of a top speed of about 90 mph (150kmph), whereas we were much faster and very well-armed.

As Dusty Lane had shot another one down two days before, there was some speculation as to why such aircraft should be flying at all.  Wing Intelligence had suggested that these planes may have been transporting high-ranking German Army officers trying to escape from both the Eastern and Western fronts, which, by now, were rapidly approaching each other.  Their escape plan was, presumably, to try and reach the Austrian redoubt which, as yet, had not been overrun.

However, there is an alternative possibility.  These planes had been used to spot Partisan movements in the mountainous regions nearby and it is possible that this accounted for their aerial presence.  Whatever, down we swooped, putting down our flaps and throttling right back to reduce our speed.  The Storch, by this time, had spotted us and, staying just above the ground, positioned himself behind a nest of German anti-aircraft guns (Oerlikon 20 mm cannons as it turned out) so that we had to fly right across these - low and slow - to get at him.

As we did this, he banked steeply to fly at right angles to us, so as to make it as difficult as possible for us to hit him.  In other words he was maximizing the 'deflection' we had to use to shoot him down.  (By way of explanation, when you are shooting at a target crossing your path, you have to aim a certain amount in front of it in order to hit it, otherwise the bullets will just pass harmlessly behind him.  The amount you have to allow for, of course, depends on the speed of the target, which you estimate and then lay off the correct amount on your gunsight - rather like clay pigeon shooting really.)

We both opened fire as we drew near the German guns; every fifth bullet of our combined twelve 0.5-inch machine guns was a “tracer”, that is a bullet that has a fiery glow, thereby indicating the path of all the other bullets.  I was amazed to see our bullets run up the wing of the Storch , which then burst into flame and crashed.  

Almost immediately, there was a hell of a hit which seemed to lift my plane up in the air.  Large flak holes with ugly jagged edges appeared in both wings and ailerons, the engine started pouring black smoke and my lateral control of the plane almost disappeared.  The engine, however, continued to function, even though it was emitting sounds of dire distress that suggested to me that I wouldn’t make it back over the Adriatic.  I had managed to climb to 5,000 feet and decided to head southwest.  While I was doing this in my terminally-stricken plane, which was pouring huge amounts of smoke (presumably indicating some, as yet unseen, fire) and uttering horrible sounds of malfunction, Tubby kept badgering me with R/T calls, asking me where I was.  Momentarily taking my mind off my multifarious problems, I had a look around: green fields below, mountains in the distance.  How the fuck could I know where I was precisely?

So I ignored Tubby and got back to the problems at hand.  Decisions had to be made; getting back across the Adriatic was obviously out of the question; should I head for the mountains, where Partisans were allegedly active, or for the Russian front which was only some 30 miles to the East?  The latter had some difficulties, so I elected for the former.

Let me explain. As we operated fairly close to the advancing Russian front quite regularly, we were equipped, among many other bits and pieces, with a flag, a Union Jack that hung around our necks and was accompanied by the words “Dobra den, ya sum Englesi piloten.” (Good day, I am an English pilot.)  As we were all dressed in grey English battledress and were wearing wing brevets, the possibility existed that you could be mistaken for a German soldier by the necessarily trigger-happy Russians and summarily dispatched.  In the event of being shot down in Russian-occupied territory we were told by Intelligence to advance towards their troops with hands up and quoting the abovementioned words.  I thought the Partisans might be a better bet.

Nearing the mountains, I thought it would be wise to blow off the canopy in case of a sudden loss of control, as was the case with John Hodgkinson.  This was a mistake as the smoke and leaking glycol now poured into the cockpit, forcing me to decide to bale out immediately, even though I was some way short of the mountains.  It was at this point that I remembered my loose parachute straps and, taking my eyes off the flickering instruments, glanced with some dismay at my dangling ripcord.                                     

No choice - I undid my seat straps, took off my helmet with attached radio and oxygen mask and contemplated which bale-out method to use. Somehow, the bunting method seemed to be losing its previous appeal.  Wouldn’t it be easier and safer just to go over the side and risk hitting the tailplane?  Thus persuaded, I let go of the control column and tried to clamber out.  Halfway out, the slipstream hit me, forcing me back against the cockpit edge with such force that I could neither get out any further nor get back in to regain control of the aircraft.  The plane, out of control, slowly went into a dive, the ground appeared directly in the windscreen as we hurtled towards it with increasing speed, with me desperately trying, to no avail, to reach the stick.

A swift and violent death appeared imminent.  Still pinned immovably against the rear of the cockpit, the engine noise and smoke reached a crescendo of violence.  Then the next thing that happened was an incredible quiet; an eerie silence in marked contrast to the preceding turmoil.  Bewildered (in a state of shock really) I wondered: "...Is this heaven? How quick!  No booking-in formalities.  No sign of Saint Peter."  Glancing upwards, above me was a beautiful white silk canopy.  Wow!  Relief!  - But tempered by the fact that the parachute had about an 8 foot tear in it, stretching from the edge inwards.  Did chutes with tears continue to do so under the pressure of descent?  Shelving this query for the moment, I looked down to see green fields seemingly a long, long way below.

As I hung there in the pristine silence there appeared to be no detectable downwards movement whatsoever.  Am I going to hang up here forever?  I wondered.  After what seemed to be an eternity I began to detect a slight downward movement and also a slight sideways progression towards the West.  People appeared running towards my descent path.  Friend or foe?  Ah well, at least I had my trusty Smith and Wesson 38, with its four bullets.  Misjudging the final 100 feet or so, it seemed as though I would drift gently and gracefully onto the forgiving earth; nothing happened for a bit then the earth rushed up to meet me and I hit with a dreadful thud while travelling backwards at about 15 mph due to the wind.  Dragging along the ground at speed I hit the release buckle and came to rest - more or less in one piece.

People were running towards me, civilians not soldiers, so I walked towards them, whereupon they turned and fled.  Perhaps with my grey battledress, winged chevron and trusty six-shooter at the hip I looked like a German to them…or maybe an alien of sorts.  So I grabbed the parachute and looked for somewhere to hide it, as per orders.  No real hiding place so I put it, as best I could under a small bush and headed for the distant hills as I could see what appeared to be German soldiers coming my way from a distant village.  As I glanced back, I saw the peasant women pulling my ‘chute out of its hidey-hole, evidently assessing the quality of the material.

Much later, thinking about the bale-out, I have concluded that the following was the most likely scenario.  When the plane began to dive, because I couldn’t reach the control column, this must have acted as a partial bunt, perhaps just elevating me slightly from my trapped position.  The dangling ripcord ring must have caught on one of the many projections and levers in the narrow cockpit. This would have triggered the opening of the parachute in the cockpit!  Spilling out into the slipstream, I must have been dragged out perforce, narrowly missing the tailplane, which must have caught the silk of the chute and torn it.  Needless to say I didn’t say anything about this horrible bungle in my official report later, back at the ranch!

At this point I will go back in time to deal with some other aspects of life on a fighter-bomber squadron.  As the fighting spearhead of some 300 odd personnel, we pilots (25 or so of us) ate and socialized together in the Pilot’s Mess without distinction regarding rank.  This was unique, I fancy, in the RAF; usually there was strict segregation between officers and other ranks.  For instance, a bomber crew of seven mixed officers and sergeants upon returning, say, from a mission to Berlin would have to go to separate Messes (Officers’ and Sergeants’), even if the captain of the aircraft may well have been a Sergeant and the navigator a Flight Lieutenant.  There also were substantial pay differences and other privileges which tended to make some of us “lesser lights” a bit Bolshie.  Mind you, such discrimination was the same in the Russian Services and is still, in this allegedly enlightened world, today!

Our relations with the Italian locals were complex.  Perforce, we were living amongst an alien and defeated enemy.  There was, of course, a certain amount of interaction with the local populace.  However, this was limited - by their hostility and fear, and by our inability to speak their language - to exchanges of merchandise and the like.  But more on this interesting topic some time later.

  Living, as we were, in a state of heightened emotions, there was a tendency to have a lot of parties.  One such was arranged not long after Lew and I arrived at Fano.  One way or another, three other pilots and myself were delegated to go off in a 3-ton truck and escort a bevy of New Zealand Army girls who, somehow, had been invited to the party.  Now the back of 3-ton trucks are not really designed for the transport of party guests, rather the transport of more utilitarian items, so we loaded up the truck with a couple of armchairs and a sofa.

Off we drove in total darkness on a freezing winter’s night, rugged up in winter woollies and greatcoats, taking about 40 minutes to reach the NZ camp.  I had no idea where we were (nor have I to this day), but we met the waiting Army girls and loaded them aboard for the return journey.  This 40 minutes, as far as I can remember, was passed in pleasant chitchat and in the complete darkness.  As far as I am aware, there were no gropings or otherwise indecorous behaviour.

This, I am compelled to say, was not the case on the return journey many hours later.  The party got under way with dancing, drinking, and much general merriment.  There were four Army girls and a lot of lusty pilots, and as I neither drank nor danced well, and was generally deficient in the social graces, I retired to the lounge room to read a book and listen to the increasing excitement going on in the nearby bar.  I, of course, had long given up on the girls, but when the party was over, the girl whom I had escorted to the 'do' sought me out and insisted that I should escort her home.  I am not going to give you guys any gory details, suffice to say that the 40-minute return journey in an armchair, in the cold and dark and with a girl on my lap, was a revealing experience for a well brought up 20-year-old from Vaucluse!  I wish I could remember her name, if indeed, I ever knew it.

    Some time in February, 1945 (I have no record of the exact date) we moved up the east coast to Cervia to be closer to the front line for what was obviously going to be a big Spring offensive by the British Eighth Army.  I flew a mission that day from Fano, but landed at our newly completed  strip at Cervia, while Lew and others went up by truck to pitch tents and generally make ready our new home.  Lew had a tent put up for him and myself when I landed - and this we shared until I was shot down.  

Chapter 6.  "Everyone’s Trying to Kill Me"

 Apart from the odd riotous party, social life in the Pilots' Mess centred around the bar, where most operational pilots relieved their tensions most evenings.  The local townspeople kept to themselves and it was too cold to go out on the town anyway.  As we had lost both our Flight Commanders (see earlier), Tubby Shannon, who had recently arrived for a second tour of operations, took over one of the Flights.  He was a delightful man, a  little older than most of us and a font of wisdom on matters of the world etc.  As he is now dead, I can recount the following.  

If you have ever read Catch 22 you may recall a piece of dialogue that goes like this:  

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.

“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.

“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.

“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”

“And what difference does that make?”

…

“Who’s they?” he wanted to know. “Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?”

“Every one of them,” Yossarian told him.

“Every one of whom?”

 “Every one of whom do you think?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“Then how do you know they aren’t?…”

 Well, although it wasn’t quite like that with Tubby and me, I have subsequently joked about three separate incidents wherein it could be construed that Tubby was trying to do just that to me!

Tubby’s first tour had been in the Desert somewhere and he had yet to settle into European aerial warfare conditions when he got promoted to Flight Commander to succeed the now POW John Hodgkinson.  Thus his techniques were a little rusty.  Perhaps promoted rather like the Peter Principle in commercial civilian life, where executives were sometimes promoted to a level beyond their capabilities, there to remain, doing the job badly, for the rest of their working lives.

Incident 1: 

On March 16 we were briefed for a mission to bomb some bridges, four in all, across the Sava river at a town called Brod.  It was a very extensive briefing for a number of reasons.  Brod was a long way, near the Hungarian border, and very close to the Russian front.  In order to carry two  500lb. bombs there was no room for extra fuel tanks, so it was decreed that we would have to land at a secret aerodrome somewhere in Montenegro on the way home to refuel before recrossing the Adriatic to Cervia.  We were given the call sign of their Radio Direction Finding Station to help us find the place, as it was just a remote grassy field, virtually indistinguishable from zillions of other fields.  (Our own Italy-based RDF station, called “Commander”, would be of no use, as we would well out of its range.)  As usual we were given all the courses to steer, the wind direction, the weather over the target, photographs of targets, maps etc.  Also a rendezvous point near the target (a mountain, whose name now escapes me).  This was necessary to sort out the inevitable post bomb-dive chaos and confusion and help us all to regroup into full squadron formation before heading back.  

This was to be a bigger-than-usual operation, comprising two full squadrons of 12 aircraft, ourselves and a South African squadron.  Tubby was to lead No.3, but the overall leader was to be the Jaapie leader, so we flew above the SAAFs.  I was assigned 'Blue 2' behind Bill Andrews.  We four were the top cover for both formations and I, of course, was supposed to search the sky unceasingly for enemy aircraft and never look at the ground below, this task being left to the leaders who were leading us to the target.  I am sure we looked impressive as we took off; 24 Mustangs bristling with bombs and guns and headed out across the Adriatic Sea.  

After about an hour’s flying the SAAF leader called up and said that there were the targets straight ahead.  Tubby called up the leader to acknowledge and confirm that he too had identified the targets.  It seemed to me to be a bit soon to have reached such a distant destination, but who was I, a sprog, to argue with such august and experienced leaders.   As we got closer we certainly could see a river, some bridges and a town but, even though we in Shabby Blue were the highest part of the formation, it seemed to us that the bridges had already been bombed.

Undeterred by this awkward fact, Bill selected the bridge furthest downstream and we bombed it.  I can’t remember whether there was any flak at all but I do remember, as I pulled out of my bomb dive, seeing the SAAFs bombing a bridge across where the town stood on both sides of the river. They didn’t appear to be hitting the bridge but rather the town as huge piles of masonry seemed to be filling the air near the approaches to the bridge.

By now, of course, we are all out of formation, planes whizzing about everywhere looking for the rendezvous mountain, which was proving difficult to locate.  Lots of confused chatter on the radio - Tubby was calling us all up and insisting that he had found it and where the fuck were the rest of us.  Being a conscientious sprog, I spent a hell of a lot of time diligently searching for this mythical mountain and, not finding it, thought that this must be due to my ineptitude.  This fact was agreed to by Tubby, rather irately, over the R/T.

Eventually silence prevailed, no aircraft of any sort to be seen and I realised that they had all long since headed off, presumably to Montenegro, so I climbed to 13,000 feet and tried to reconstitute my badly mangled thought processes.

“Right,” I said to myself, “get out the map and find out where you are exactly by checking with the landmarks down below.”  Couldn’t make head nor tail of it; couldn’t relate the  map to the ground at all (the reason for this, of course with hindsight, was that I was looking at features on the ground that were at least 100 kms away from the bits of the map that I was reading.  Frustration and a certain amount of panic grew.  Cloud cover above, sun completely obscured; was I flying West or could it possibly be East?  Check the compass.  But unfortunately another unforseen problem arose.

Let me try and explain.  In all my previous (two years plus) flying experience I had always used the time-honoured bowl compass, which had a floating needle pointing to Magnetic North.  Around the bowl was a bezel which, when turned, controlled two parallel lines stretched across the bowl.  If you wanted to fly your plane on a course of, say, 270° (west), you turned the bezel until 270 was at the front of the compass, then you turned the aircraft until the needle, which always pointed North of course, was parallel to the two aforementioned lines and, voila, you were flying West.

However, the P51 was the last word in modern fighting machines and it was fitted with the last word in modern navigating devices, namely a “radio compass”.  Instead of being horizontal, this gadget was a vertical dial on the dashboard with just a moving needle and a dial of 360 degrees.  Now, if I had had my wits about me, a moment’s thought would have made me realise that the needle showed the course that you were steering and wasn’t just pointing North.

By this time I had about 20 hours flying Mustangs but became aware that I had never had the need to look at the compass.  Couldn’t identify the ground objects (they don’t put labels on rivers, towns or state boundaries!); couldn’t see the Sun, was unsure of the compass function.  So I took a punt (correct fortunately), opted for the needle pointing to the heading that I was on and set course vaguely west, still unsure whether I was flying towards Italy or Russia!

Assuming I was flying in the right direction, the next problem was to locate and set a course for the hidden airfield in Montenegro.  To do this, I needed to know the call sign of its radio direction-finding station.  Needless to say I had forgotten it.  Our own one, “Commander”, back in Italy, was, of course, out of range; nevertheless I climbed up to 20,000 ft. and called it up on the R/T.  No reply of course but after a series of plaintive calls a voice came on the air:

 “Hello Shabby Blue 2 this is “Tall Yacht”.

“That’s it!” I cried. “Tall Yacht - how could I have forgotten?”

I set the course given me, adhered to it with great concentration, glancing around furtively for enemy aircraft as I was a long way from home and deep in enemy territory.  After some time I found myself on a converging course with a USA Flying Fortress and, with many incidents of trigger-happy Yanks in mind, thought it wise to break off my course and avoid him.  This necessitated another course correction which the ever helpful Tall Yacht provided.

Approaching the coast I was unable to spot the airfield and found myself over the sea.  This necessitated yet another request to Tall Yacht, this time to bring me back inland again.  This time, luckily, I spotted a wing glinting in the sun as a plane landed in a field and down I went and landed.

“God, Nobby, that was a bloody awful landing!” said Bill Andrews later.

“But, Bill,”  I replied, “any landing that you can walk away from is a good one.”

Incidentally, the town that we bombed by mistake turned out to be Banja Luca, now in the newly-founded country of Bosnia Herzegovina.  As a sequel to this incident, the next morning at dawn Bill Andrews and I took off to do another weather reconnaissance to the mysterious city of Brod, which we located without difficulty, radioed back the weather conditions and returned uneventfully to base.  Flying at this time in the morning was pure delight; green fields, rivers and mountains drifting by down below, smooth progress through the still air, the world beginning to wake up, steam trains and trucks starting to move around the countryside before the Allied air might was up and about.  Tempting though it was to break off and attack these artefacts of the enemy, we stuck to our allotted task, the weather report.  

To digress for a moment, I have always been puzzled by the rationale of weather reccies and, to this day, have never had a satisfactory answer to my queries from any authority or oracle that I could find to consult.  What possible relevance did the weather at dawn have to the prospect of a mission scheduled for 3 p.m., I wondered.  And what message did we give to the Germans by flying over several bridges early in the morning and then going away?  I suppose some other squadrons did eventually bomb Brod, but I bet they got a hectic reception!

Incident 2: 

On March 26 I took off with two 500 lb bombs in a flight of eight aircraft led by Tubby.  I don’t remember the target and my log book makes no mention, as I didn’t get to it anyway, but with two big ones it was probably a bridge.  The cloud cover was low and total - i.e. 10/10^ths.  Now, to fly in formation in dense cloud, it is absolutely essential to fly very, very close.  Because, if you don’t, you can’t see each other, can’t keep together, and are in grave danger of colliding.  We, as usual, were in battle formation, i.e. about 100 metres apart laterally and the No.2s (including me) about 50 metres back.  At 3,000 feet, still climbing, we entered dense cloud and lost sight of each other.

At this point let me pause and give you some info. on blind flying.  This aspect of our flying training was the most exacting, difficult and important skill that we were to acquire.  To fly blind you are completely dependent on your instruments as you are completely disorientated spatially, rather like a hooded bird.  Trouble is, your mind does not really believe this and likes to believe that it has an infallible intuitive grasp of spatial reality.  Many, many trainee pilots died because of this belief and so all of us who survived these gut feelings spent many tedious, concentrated hours under hoods, inside Link Trainers (old fashioned simulators) and flying at night to acquire these instrument flying skills.  However, while I had done a lot of all this stuff in both Australia and the UK; in the Middle East we did none.  Doing OTU in the desert there were never any clouds.  Indeed, to lighten up the Kittyhawks they had taken out all the blind-flying instruments to aid performance.  So, the last blind-flying I had done was back in the UK in May 1944!

    On this trip I was  actually flying No. 2 to Bill Andrews again and at about 3,000 feet we flew straight into dense 10/10^ths cloud.  Instant panic.  Couldn’t see Bill or the leader; what to do?  Keep climbing straight and hope you didn’t run into anybody or vice versa.  To do this necessitated the scanning of a number of very essential instruments: the air speed indicator, the rate of climb dial, the turn and bank indicator, the artificial horizon (absolutely essential to keep your wings level with this), the radio compass (I now knew how this worked!) and lastly to plug in the directional gyro to help in maintaining a straight course when you couldn’t see anything at all in cloud, through which you were belting at several hundreds of mph.  It was also useful to glance at the numbers of temperature and pressure gauges but there was little time for this latter, as one’s mind was desperately focussed on all of the former.      

All the above adjustments to this new situation took place, I would estimate, in little more than a minute, during which time another aircraft flashed past my nose, missing me by a whisker. Either he or I or perhaps both had not held our course properly and the wonder of it all is that there weren't a number of collisions in this inscrutable fog.  After regaining some composure and dredging up from yesteryear some of the old blind-flying skills, I proceeded upwards, still in cloud, for what seemed an eternity of sweaty concentration until I broke out into beautiful blue sky at about 15,000 feet.  This was an enormous relief, tempered only by the fact the sky was totally devoid of other aircraft.  The tops of the clouds, sparkling white in the dazzling sun was what, in those naïve days, I imagined heaven would look like - but of course, I had to get back down to reality a long and murky way below.

    Now one of the serious problems of flying in cloud was mountains; you can’t see them and therefore can run into them if you are not high enough.  Italy has a lot of mountains and the ones that particularly concerned me were the Apennines which, as you no doubt know, form a North/South spine down the middle.  As I could now not see the ground, I had no idea where I was or whether I was over land or water (the Adriatic) so I figured that if I flew East for a while before descending, I had a better chance of being over water.  What about the two 500 pounders?  Well, I thought, better not to jettison from where I was in case I inadvertently obliterated some unsuspecting village (it was necessary to jettison because you couldn’t risk landing with them, as one unfortunate Mustang pilot had attempted to do at Fano several weeks previously.  I still have a series of photographs showing the resultant hole in the runway and the small pieces of P51 lying about).

When I felt it likely that I was over water I started to descend through the all-encompassing murk.  When my altimeter showed my altitude as 1,500ft, I was still in dense cloud and beginning to worry about the accuracy of my previous assumptions.  No option but to press on downwards and, to my immense relief, at 1,000 feet broke into the clear over water.  As I was obviously well out to sea, I jettisoned the two big ones and as I was not under fire could observe the resulting explosion in some detail.  What a terrible waste though -  I don’t know how much it cost to make those bombs, but I felt it a dereliction of duty to waste them in this way.  I then made my lonely way west back to our strip at Cervia and to relieve my feelings did a slow roll before landing on it.  What had happened with the rest of the formation was that, as Tubby had not issued any orders after entering the cloud, Bill Andrews had called out, “This is madness, let’s go down and get out of this!”  I had not picked this up on my RT for some reason, so I had pressed on regardless as we used to say.

Incident 3

Occurred on  April 3 when, as you know, Tubby led me, flying low and slow with flaps down, over a nest of gun emplacements, which promptly riddled my poor old Mustang with 20mm cannon shells.

When we were back in Australia in Bradfield Park awaiting discharge from the RAAF, I mentioned to Tubby that, even though I had no car and, indeed, could not even drive properly, the possession of a Driver’s Licence might be handy in civilian life.  He promptly got some official (letterheaded) RAAF paper and got a nearby WAAF to type a letter to the effect that I was licensed to drive four wheeled vehicles on No. 3 Squadron.  Armed with this fictitious document, I went to the RTA and was given a license straight away and I still hold it to this day.  Perhaps Tubby felt that he owed me one… or two!

I see that I have digressed more than somewhat from “life on a squadron”. If you can recall I was writing about the social life.  Now for a couple of other features.

Food: Not too bad really and certainly much much better than for the Italians.  We were rich and they were poor; we had plentiful supplies of the basics, cigarettes, liquor etc. and they lived in abject poverty, trading eggs etc. for cigarettes which, because of the enormous inflation, they then used as currency.  There was, of course, a certain amount of monotony in the food and it was hardly cordon bleu cooking, although Bill Nash, the Pilots’ Mess cook, did a pretty good job in the circumstances.  Take Spam for instance.  Sometimes we would get it 3 times a day: Spam fried in batter for breakfast, Spam salad for lunch, and Spam stew with dehydrated spuds mashed with Oleo margarine (filthy tasting stuff) for dinner.  Still, in hindsight, it was better than eating with the Partisans.

Hygiene: Pretty well non-existent, especially in the bitter winter of 1945, when we just went dirty.  I can recall though one visit to Fano (and it was the only one) by the DAF Shower Unit!  The Shower Unit set up in the middle of a snow-covered field, placed down some wooden duck boards, surrounded it with canvas (to shield us from the gaze of the locals or perhaps vice versa), fired up their portable oil furnace and set up six showers. We queued up and in groups of six, were given 30 seconds of hot water, then a minute to soap up, followed by another 30 seconds to wash off.  And that was it for the winter of ‘45, shower-wise.

Some other vignettes of life at Fano which now come to mind.  Finding some Australians (us) nearby, a number of the New Zealand Army types, mostly Maoris, issued us with a challenge to a game of Rugby on a local mud patch and I was roped in to play Inside Centre.  Having seen NZ footballers, especially Maoris, play rugby in Australia, I was not overly filled with enthusiasm for this encounter but, like going on an operation, one was not able to refuse.  The actuality of the game proved to be even worse than the prospect and we were defeated by a substantial margin before we could remove our battered bodies from the field.  I have always disliked wet-weather Rugby at any time, but this was the pits.  I can’t recall how we cleaned up afterwards, but the Shower Unit had moved on.

 Another incident occurred when a new pilot joined the Squadron at Fano, several weeks after Lew and I got there.  He was a  Flying Officer, but with no previous operational experience, and he was allocated his first operation on March 3, 1945.  At the briefing, the "job" (as we called them) was explained - we were to dive bomb and strafe some gunpits defending a series of bridges, while two other squadrons were bombing the bridges.  This poor bloke was so frightened that he was visibly shaking all over; so much so that it was embarrassing to look at him.  Anyway he got off the ground and proceeded in formation with us until we got to the target and did our dives, after which the usual confusion resulted until we got sorted out and found that the new bloke was missing.  Someone said that they thought he had bailed out, but there had been no word at all from him.  After the war he returned to the Squadron, having spent the remaining period of the war in the Apennines with the Italian Partisans, none the worse for wear.  I have subsequently wondered, and of course I will never find out for sure, whether he didn’t just bale out to get out of a war that he had barely entered.  I have not heard of him since we came home.

Another new arrival about this time was a bit of a surprise.  A new, very tall pilot with a ginger handlebar moustache turned up; none other than our old Squadron Commander from OTU at Fayed, Jungle Jim Edmonds.  A surprise, because we had never had an English pilot posted to our Australian squadron before, but it turned out that Jim was lined up to take command of, I think, No.250 Squadron in the near future and was sent to us to acquaint himself with flying conditions in Northern Italy, which were quite different from those experienced by him on his previous tour of operations in Burma.  In the event, he didn’t make it to 250, as he was shot down and killed flying from Cervia.

In this period of the war, late March and early April, No. 3 SQN had an extraordinarily high casualty rate.  Nine planes were shot down in a period of some 10 days.  Dave Tennant (North Italy), John Hodgkinson (POW), Barney Davies (Yugoslavia Evader), me, Ken Higgins (POW and badly wounded), John McInerheney (same op. as me), Don Williamson (crashed onto the Venice Lido), Don Redenbach (POW) and Jungle Jim.  Extraordinary because, of all that number, only Jim Edmonds died in action.

Chapter 7. Yugoslavia – the Lousy Long March

Chapter 8.  Back to Italy – "La Dolce Vita"

 The next day Barney and I took our leave of the NZers and made our way into the centre of Trieste with a view to finding, hopefully, some administrative advance guard of the Desert Air Force.  The war had been over barely a week, chaos and turmoil reigned everywhere and we had no idea where to go or, indeed, whom we were looking for. 

Wandering through the main square we spotted a 3-ton truck in the distance.  As we drew closer we noticed a large crowd around the open tailgate, brandishing  bottles of exotic liquors, other goods useful for barter, and large sums of money.  Standing in the truck was a bloke, a serviceman, busy collecting all this loot and, in exchange, doling out cigarettes, bully beef and all sorts of other useful comestibles.  Waving their wares, the crowd were calling out “Bill, Bill,” to attract his attention.  Closer inspection revealed that the truck was an Air Force one; still closer we spotted a 3 Squadron badge on the side and the bloke on the back was one of our operations drivers, Bill Sims!

We managed to gain his attention in the din, and when he spotted us in the crowd he nearly keeled over with amazement.  We too were amazed, as the last time we had seen Bill was way back at Cervia, where he used to drive us from the Pilot’s Mess to our planes in this very truck. What the hell was he doing in the middle of Trieste?  Well, actually, we knew quite well what he was doing.  All the experienced old hands, like Bill, who had probably been with the Squadron for three years, opportunistically followed up any rapid military advance (as had just happened) to seek out any commercial or, indeed, other opportunities that might present themselves.  In these matters, speed was of the essence and legality ran a poor second.

Bill, it seems, was supposed to be on a transport errand some hundreds of kilometres in a different direction but, to his eternal credit, upon spotting us he ceased his trading activities and offered to drive us to the Squadron’s new location.  We, in turn, offered to not tell the C.O. (Murray Nash) where he had been!  The whole of No.239 Wing (all six squadrons) it seems were in the process of moving from Cervia, where Barney and I had been stationed, to a grassy plain outside the Northern Italian city of Udine (pronounced “Oo-deen-ay”, for you of the niente cognoscenti).

Number 3 had been allocated a village called Sammardenchia, some 10 kilometres south of the city and about 40 kms north of the Adriatic coast.  This was where we set off in search of, with Bill in his 3-tonner.  If you look at a map of Northern Italy you will see that we had to traverse what is known as the "Austrian Riviera", which is similar to the French Riviera in topography.  No doubt you have all seen movies of the latter featuring high-speed car chases around the cliff-top roads.  Italy is just the same - a winding two lane road, cut  high up into the vertical cliff face, with a nice view of the Adriatic some 200 metres below, almost uninterrupted by any fencing.

Bill was driving a right-hand drive British truck, but unfortunately in Italy you also drive on the right hand side.  This was OK if you were willing to stay in column behind a lot of slow-moving trucks, but Bill was intent on maximum speed.  Barney was sitting next to Bill and I was in the left hand window seat,  so Bill could not see a thing when he went to pull out to pass, which he did frequently.  I, being first into the visual situation, could at least yell at him if the oncoming traffic was  about to pulverize us, but this was not much help when you are on the outside of a mile or two of trucks, going like a bat out of hell around the tortuously bendy road with no place to hide.  Even the normally phlegmatic Barney had white knuckles!

With luck however, we arrived safely at Sammardenchia, to be greeted with some amazement by a small group of the advance party who had just arrived themselves (and had, as yet, no time to start getting organized).  This small group consisted of Murray Nash (CO), Jock Gale of the pilots, and some ground staff, such as Norm French and Norm Saville and some I can’t recall.  By this stage I was a "lousy", nine stone, somewhat jaundiced scarecrow, with nowhere to live, no money, no clothes and no prospects.  All my gear had been sent to Cairo, my log book had been sent to somewhere in North Africa and my paybook was sent to Algeria.

The Squadron’s equipment and clothing caravan with the equipment officer in charge had not yet arrived from Cervia, so I could not discard my infested clothing until they turned up.  Also I would have to wait for my uniforms etc. to be returned from Cairo and, until my paybook returned, I would have to rely on charity to survive.

The next task of the advance party was to arrange suitable accommodation and facilities for some 300 or so personnel and all their equipment; no easy task.  Sammardenchia was a one-street village, narrow and cobbled with a little central square, wherein lay the one and only village pump.  In the  square all the old men of the village sat around watching the old women pump up the water.  All the young women were out working in the fields.  There were no young men.  In the square there was a café and bar, the sole social centre of the village; there were no shops of any kind.  Opposite and down the road a bit was a large park, set back from the road, which belonged to a large mansion, then empty, as was often the case in rural Italy.  This was probably due to either the exigencies of a long war or, as was not uncommon, the residence of an absentee landlord.  Up the road a bit, almost opposite the bar-café, was the inevitable Catholic church, wherein resided the inevitable local priest, the font of all wisdom and guidance on all matters both venial and spiritual, from God to birth control.  His church was in no way remarkable (for Italy), but still stood as an example of minor splendour compared with the humble abodes of his poverty-stricken parishioners.

The few locals in the bar and scattered around the square looked at us invaders askance, as well they might - as it now became evident to me that our advance party was about to commandeer a portion of their village.  Of course, as we learned later, wild rumours had been circulating amongst the local folk as to the nature of the invaders.  They had heard that some Australians were coming to take their village.  Australians!  Who were these strange and no doubt fierce antipodeans?  Were they cannibals?  “Let us ask the priest.”

“Yes they are,” said the priest, “and child molesters as well.  Worse still, I hear... that they are Protestants also!"

Many countries have been conquered by an enemy, who then usually proceeded to occupy that country and  inflict looting, pillage and rape upon the local populace.  Many books have been written about this throughout history, so there was nothing new about what we were doing.  By now, May 1945, Italy had been occupied for nearly two years and 239 Wing had been part of the process all of that time and the old hands had lots of experience in the art of occupation of enemy territory.  I think that a little looting and perhaps some pillage took place from time to time but, as far as I know, no raping!

Anyway there I was, about to witness my first and only village occupation.  Although of course I had been billeted in a number of taken-over towns, Cervia, Fano, Naples etc., I had given absolutely no thought to how the process of acquisition was achieved.  Isn’t it amazing how one can take something for granted, something that can cause a lot of people extreme amounts of distress and suffering?  Nevertheless, the exigencies of war meant that we had to be ruthless and insensitive.

Jock Gale was one of our older pilots with a lengthy war record before coming to No. 3.  He was also the Pilots' Messing Officer and in that capacity he, the CO, several others, Barney and I strolled into the café and looked around speculatively, checked out the upstairs accommodation and decided that this was to be the Pilot’s Mess, with sleeping upstairs, while across the road in the large grounds of the mansion were to be put all the Admin. trailers, signals equipment, ground staff tents, supply trailers and offices, Pilots Mess marquee (where we were to eat) etc.   Other sections of the Squadron, such as Transport, Engineers, Electricians etc., were to be installed further afield, where there was more space.

The occupants were told to pack their things and leave… forthwith!  There was a terrible to-do; much weeping, wailing and gesticulation.  Where would they go? What would they do?  Jock was firm, “Out! Now!” After much protestation, they packed up and headed off down the road, I don’t recall any threat of violence on our part nor any show of firearms.  Perhaps the priest’s words about cannibalism had their effect.  One of the most vigorous protesters had been a 16-year-old daughter of the house, named Dolores, very attractive (especially at this juncture), with dark, flashing eyes.  When the dust had settled, several weeks later, she came back to work for us as a cleaner, but remained proud and aloof and volubly abusive.  Forgiveness took a lot longer.

Meanwhile, other personnel were checking out other houses in the village, to billet more of the pilots.  It did not occur to me at the time to ask whether we gave any financial recompense to any of the locals - I think I probably assumed it was all just part of the fortunes of war to the victor and bad luck to them!  Interestingly enough I have, over the years, thought a lot about these matters and have asked some of my wartime mates whether they knew the answer to these issues.  So far, I have not found anyone who knows or, indeed, has ever thought about it.  I really should pursue this issue more assiduously; there must be somebody who knows about it.

This was about May 17.  Soon the rest of the Squadron arrived and we all settled into tents or billets.  Sammardenchia had never seen such action; the natives were agog!  Lew and I got ourselves a room above the bar, as a nice change from a tent, although some of the ground staff actually preferred tents as they had used them for years and were adept at making themselves very comfortable with all mod cons such as showers made out of old belly tanks, carpets, electric light etc.  The equipment officer and his caravan arrived and I was able to start the delousing process and get some new summer gear.  As I was being fitted out, a crowd of local urchins gathered, hoping to beg, borrow or steal some of the apparel.  This was a common phenomenon all over Italy at the time, especially where there was food about.  We were the rich, the conquerors; they were the poor, the hungry, the downtrodden.

Much had to be done; the bar was equipped with furniture and liquor, some looted, I suspect, and some obtained from a brewery in Brescia.  I have always been amazed at the power and omnipotence of Allied Intelligence.  Never mind about enemy gun emplacements or troop dispositions, not a brewery nor a distillery in all of Italy went undetected by their unceasing vigilance.

The occupied Sammardenchia cafe once it became the bar of the 3SQN Pilots' Mess Sammardenchia - featuring "Stinky Miller".
[Photo from the Arthur Pardey Collection.]

A kitchen under canvas was installed in the park beside the Pilots Mess marquee, so we were able to resume our steady consumption of Spam.  We also let it be known that we needed a Mess Waiter, and up rocked a rather distinguished-looking bloke, about 40, who claimed to have been the head waiter of the leading hotel in Udine.  We hired him at a salary of 80 American cigarettes per week.  At this time of the year, and as we were in the 'field' as it were, we only wore shorts and open-necked khaki shirts, but the newly-appointed waiter (whose name now escapes me) wanted to know whether he should wear tails!  Our only Mess rule was that you had to wear a shirt to dinner, but nevertheless I like to think that we always gave him the respect that he deserved.  It took him, and the village as a whole, some time to adjust to our informal and casual Aussie ways.

Once we had settled in, some bright spark decided that Stinky Miller would be better placed hanging up outside the front door of the bar (I still have a photo of this).  This was the final blow for the locals, who nearly shat themselves.  All the priest’s words came flooding back in their full horror; had these blond-haired, blue-eyed invaders actually eaten this scarecrow?  The priest was persuaded to approach us about the lack of delicacy, tact and general non-appreciation of his flock’s sensibilities.  Common sense prevailed, and Stinky was returned to his usual position on the bar.

We settled in and gradually adapted to our new environment.  Life was very pleasant, the weather had warmed nicely and as yet the aircraft and landing field were not ready to resume flying, which we were all anxious to resume, especially as there was now nobody to shoot at us.  A party of pilots had headed off for Austria to see what they could find in the way of loot from the defeated enemy, especially cars.  They had the approval of the Group Captain, Brian Eaton, who requested that they find him something special in the vehicular line.  They came back some days later with an Adler for the Groupie, a Volkswagen, a Chevrolet Station Wagon and several nondescript cars, which the pilots used until we left Italy some months later.

Some of the local women were recruited for cleaning and laundry duties and, as there was no flying, we spent our time lazing around the Mess or the bar playing cards, usually poker or 500,  playing volleyball with the unoccupied ground-staff, or swimming in the local irrigation ditches.  Life was good, parties were organized with other 239 Wing Squadrons, as well as some nearby NZ Army troops.  We had the chance to meet up with some of our old Aussie mates from 450 Squadron and even a few Australian Army blokes, ex-POWs, who had escaped in the chaos of the last days of the war and who, somehow, had made their way to Northern Italy, found out that there was an Australian squadron in the area and lobbed in.  That’s initiative for you.  We took them in, fed and watered them and they found life as equally pleasant as we did.  This great life lasted until May 26, when we heard from headquarters down in Naples that they understood that No. 3 was harbouring some evaders (Barney and I) and some POWs - and that we were all to report to Naples forthwith.

This we did by flying down to Naples in an Avro Anson (the fondly-called “Aggie”) which was semi-obsolete and so slow that we had to spend a night at an RAF station in Ancona, a town on the East coast, before proceeding to Naples next day.  At Ancona, Barney and I were split up for the first time since we had met in Slovenia.  This was, of course, because he was an officer and I was not.

At the camp the WOD (Warrant Officer, Disciplinary) came up to us, saluted Barney and said, “CO’s compliments, Sir.  He would like you to join him in the Officer’s Mess.”

“What about me?” I asked.  He looked at me disdainfully (even though we were the same rank, I had not yet acquired any badges of office, as there had been none in the Squadron’s stores and anyway on the Squadron we never wore them).

“Sergeant’s Mess for you,” he said contemptuously.

This mention of class distinction reminds me that I forgot to mention our Intelligence Reports, which, of course, Barney and I had been required to submit to our Squadron Intelligence Officer, Bert Ellis, shortly after we returned.  Bert, a Flight Lieutenant, then sent these on to the DAF headquarters Intelligence Officer, a Wing Commander, who then summoned us up to DAF (Desert Air Force – if you haven’t been paying attention) to meet the really big cheese, the Air Vice Marshall who, it seems, wanted to talk to us about our Slovenian adventures.  So Barney and I made our way to DAF headquarters, he wearing his Flight Lieutenant’s brevvies and me, in khaki shorts and shirt, with bugger-all.  Now, DAF was pretty sumptuous and, instead of one Officers’ Mess, it had three: A, B and C.  

'C' was for ranks up to FLTLT, 'B' for Squadron Leaders and Wing Commanders and 'A', where we were instructed to present ourselves, Group Captains, Air Commodores, Colonels and Generals (the Army ranks applying to the South Africans) and the CO DAF, Air Vice-Marshal Forster.  We entered a large Mess lounge and were directed to two hard-backed chairs, where we sat rigidly upright receiving strange querying looks, especially directed at rankless me, from an assortment of Groupies and Colonels.  When anyone of slightly higher rank entered the room all the occupants leapt to their feet until the enterer told us to sit.  Quite disconcerting, really, and I longed for the familiarity, camaraderie and relaxed atmosphere of good old No.3’s Mess.  This nerve-wracking process went on for some time, but no sign of the Air Vice Marshall who had requested our presence.  

Then it was lunch time and everybody trooped off to the dining room, with Barney and I bringing up the rear, fearfully wondering whether we could cope with the expected (but unknown to us) dining rituals and protocols.  In the event it wasn’t too bad, as we were completely ignored where we sat with our elbows pressed closely to our sides.  The food was nothing to write home about - not much different from No.3, but without the spam.  We never did get to see the AVM, who was presumably occupied with more important matters of state.  (I actually did get to meet him later, but in a different context.)

From Ancona (next day) we flew to Naples in the Anson with the usual 120 turns of the winch to retract the wheels and the same chore to lower them for landing - nothing too modern about the Aggie.  Here we proceeded to the POW repatriation camp, where again Barney was whisked off to the splendours of the Officers’ Mess, while I was directed to the Sergeants’.  This camp was a British Army one and run mostly by permanent Army types, whose ideas of hierarchical structures and discipline were vastly different from the informality and egalitarianism of an Air Force Pilots’ Mess.

My rank of Warrant Officer First Class was the highest rank achievable by a non-commissioned officer; so, in the Mess, I was allocated a seat at a table reserved for WOs.  I still had no badges of rank to indicate my exalted status and, although I was 20, I must have looked, to the grizzled army veterans at the table, about 16.  In the British Army it took about 16 years to achieve the rank of WO1, by which time the traditional procedures and pecking order were thoroughly ingrained in their limited minds.  All of a sudden, in walked the senior WO and everybody at our table stood up, rigidly at attention.  Everybody that is, except me; I just kept on eating.  "Blimey," I thought "this is worse than at the bloody AVM’s Mess."  

I was, of course, ostracized; but this worried me not one iota for, after being shot down and spending two months in Slovenia, I had a fair bit of hubris upon me and disdain for these Army types, who had probably spent the War sitting on their respective arses.  After lunch I found the kit store and acquired a shiny new WO's badge and strap and wore it thereafter.  “That’ll show these oafs,” I thought.

In the next few days I was interviewed, medically examined at great length, and deloused properly.  Some of the rigorous Air Crew fitness tests proved a bit beyond me, but otherwise they said that I was OK.  The interviews were about repatriation to Australia.  All the Australian Army POWs were, it seemed, to be flown to UK prior to shipping home.  This idea had a certain amount of appeal to me - I envisaged looking up all my well-scattered girlfriends in England.  However this move did not apply to RAAF personnel who, we were informed, were to go home via the Middle East.  “Not Cairo again,” I cried in horror.  “Send me back to the Squadron.”  And thus it was arranged.  But while awaiting transport back north, I had the opportunity to wander around this huge camp, which contained a multitude of displaced persons, both service and civilian.

There were civilians, both Australian and British, who had made their way here from all over Europe, seeking repatriation to their homeland.  Some from France and quite a few from landlocked Switzerland and some from all sorts of exotic places, all with fascinating stories to tell, but most intriguing of all was a smallish group of old men, all Aussies, who had deserted from the AIF in France during World War One and lived with their French girlfriends from 1917 until now, 1945.  Some even had these now old ladies with them and all they desired was to return to Australia.  (Of course, desertion in WW1 was an offence punishable by death and although no Aussies were shot for this, quite a few British were.  Technically this also applied to WW2, but the penalty  was never invoked - except, I think, for one US Army bloke.)  Anyway, I gathered that these fellows had been granted an amnesty by the Australian Government, but I doubt if they got any back-pay!  All this was but a small part of a Europe-wide mass movement of displaced persons seeking to return home - in many cases to find utter devastation if and when they got there.  So the French Aussies were very, very fortunate.

I remained at this camp until about June 12, when Barney and I flew back to the Squadron, which had started flying again and had just taken part in a massive DAF formation flypast to honour the chief of all Mediterranean Armed Forces, Field Marshall Alexander, an event I still have a couple of photos of.   A pity to miss such a significant event but I guess you can’t be everywhere.  

Poor old Barney had of course been replaced as Flight Commander, so was demoted to F/O.  (Which was a shame, as he was a far better leader than Tubby, who had replaced him and, you will remember, nearly had me killed three times.)

My log book, which never lies, tells me that I resumed flying on June 15 with some local flying.  So, it seems, I must have remembered how to do it.  This was the beginning of a marvellous period, where we mixed great flying, interspersed with lots of leave, sport, card-playing and lots of leisure activity, a bit of social interaction with the local girls, reading and just lolling about.  I suppose we were all there to ensure that the peace was maintained and so, to that end, we flew and trained as a squadron, as a wing (six  squadrons), and sometimes individually.

The latter was the best.  I felt that I was getting to know the aircraft really well – something that  had not really been attainable whilst on operations.  I took a Mustang up to 40,000 feet, something that you couldn’t do in a Kittyhawk, just to see what the Earth looked like from up there.  I flew one upside down to see how long it would go before the motor conked out (about 3 minutes as I remember) and sometimes I just horsed about, jinking all over the sky in this beautiful, lethal, powerful machine.  And, of course, there was always the incredible thrill of low-flying at more than 700 kph.  Nevertheless, having survived the war to this point, I was conscious of the need for some caution when low-flying, as the countryside was studded with high-tension power lines, which had brought many an over-enthusiastic pilot undone.

Actually my only accident happened on the ground.  Previously, when we were operating from Cervia (and thinking that it was 'about time' that I learned to drive) I persuaded Bill Sims, our Operations truck driver, to let me try and drive it down to our planes.  The truck was a 3-tonner, with crash gearbox.  These short trips were judged by the other pilots in the back of the truck  to be more hazardous than the actual mission!  Thus little progress was made in my driving skills, until the following occurred at Sammardenchia:

Returning rather late from an enjoyable solo flying exercise, I found that all the other pilots had returned to the village in one of the two 15-cwt trucks belonging to our Flight Commanders, leaving the other one, which belonged to Ken "Pee Wee" Richards (DFC and bar), with one ground-staff bloke ['Erk'] in attendance.  It turned out that he couldn't drive either, so I elected to have a go at driving the three or four kilometres back to the billets.  The roads were gravel, with very deep ditches either side.  These ditches had already been the undoing of many a truckload of inebriated revellers returning home from one of our parties, and proved to be mine as well.  Making the last turn off the main road, going too fast, and attempting the (to me) difficult double-declutching manoeuvre, we skidded in a circle and fell into a ditch backwards, with front wheels pointing skyward.  Back at the Squadron this was not going to be a feather in my cap, but fortunately a 3-ton Army truck came by and hauled us out.  I swore the Erk to secrecy and circumspectly drove back the rest of the way.  I only told Pee Wee about this a year or so ago.  After 50 years, he didn’t seem too fussed.

Actually, with the euphoria induced by Victory and the ability to do as we liked, the Wing experienced a number of tragedies.  One of the greatest and most memorable excitements was to fly up the valleys of the Swiss Alps, soaring and weaving between the snow-covered peaks.  Unfortunately six Mustangs from 112 Squadron, flying line-astern, were doing this while the peaks were covered in cloud down to about 12,000 feet.  Weaving through the narrow valleys, turning sharply around a blind corner they were suddenly confronted by a snow-covered cliff.  They all pulled up hard into the overlying cloud to avoid it, but only the sixth pilot, who had slightly more time to react, made it out.  The other five crashed into the cliff.  Later we flew over to have a look.  All were dead, of course... 

[The peak, Carè Alto, is so inaccessible that some of the wreckage is still there.  The five 112 Squadron Mustang pilots - one Brit and five South Africans - were buried in Padua War Cemetery.]

The modern-day Italian memorial to the 112 Squadron crash victims.

A couple of the other squadrons also lost the odd plane, running into one of the many monster mountains in the region.  No.3 were a bit more circumspect, it seems, but one of my old mates, Cec Abrahams of 450 Squadron, flying very, very low over Lake Garda,  hit the water with his propeller and promptly burst into flames.  Cec pulled her up a bit and managed to bale out into the lake.  Cec had been an above-average pilot at OTU, and the keenest flyer you ever saw, but after he pranged a Kitty at Perugia and then this, he seemed to lose enthusiasm for piloting.  

Perhaps our most exciting, and dangerous, escapade was when six of us 'shot-up' Venice Shipping Harbour for an extended period (metaphorically, no guns), thereby terrorizing the already bomb-happy locals.  In doing this we were really showing off to a group of American Army officers, whom we had befriended in Venice itself.  It was thrilling, but we got a bit disorganised and several times almost ran into each other, let alone the shipping in the harbour.

We were given leave several times; in groups of about half the pilot-strength, while the other half kept flying.  A group of us took a truck down to Venice, only about 100 kms away, for a stay of seven  days.  There the Australian Comforts Fund had established a pensione for Aussies on leave, on one end of the Venice Lido, which is a long island protecting the Venice lagoon from the Adriatic.

While swimming on the ocean side, we came across a party of US Army officers also on leave and staying at the nearby Grand Hotel.  They were from the 12^th US Mountain division, mostly from Colorado and ranged in rank from Lieut. Colonel, down through Major to Captain.  We, on the other hand, were only masquerading as officers, but nevertheless we struck up great rapport with these blokes and had a lot of fun with them during the next week.  I struck up a particular friendship with their Regimental Adjutant, captain David Rosendale from Aurora, Colorado, a man of perhaps 35 with whom I corresponded after the war.  I still have his wonderful letters written while he remained for several years with the Army of Occupation.  I also still have some photos of him and me taken on the Lido.

We spent a lot of time, of course, in Venice itself, doing all the usual things one does there.  Being officers, we had access to the top-line hotels such as the Danielli and the Europa, where we wallowed in what was (to us naïve, young Aussies) the lap of luxury.  Allied servicemen and women, mostly American, were everywhere celebrating victory, but there was very little fraternization with the local populace, who mostly chose to remain aloof.

The trip to and from the Lido, too far for a gondola, was done by a US Army Duck, an amphibious vehicle which provided a regular ferry service.  One night I missed the last one and found myself staying in a hotel room with an RAAF Squadron Leader liaison officer, who turned out not to be heterosexual as he had stoutly claimed, so I had a fight on my hands to preserve my virginity!  (Several days later, Lew had the same problem with this bloke but, true to form, adopting his usual vigorous methods, dropped him with a solid right.)

We had a lot of fun with our American friends who, like us were letting off steam after the victorious conclusion to the war.  They were all highly-specialised troops, skilled skiers and mountain climbers, who had been in the vanguard of the USA forces in the final push to the Italian border, where they had performed the notable feat of climbing a 3,000-foot cliff in the Dolomites, to take the retreating Germans by surprise from the rear.  One rather bibulous dinner, they offered to demonstrate their skills by scaling the outside wall of their 10-storey hotel.  We disbelievers were amazed to see these not-so-young and highly-ranked officers get out their grappling irons and ice axes and climb the wall like a swarm of delinquent schoolboys.  I don’t think it did the walls much good though.

They were exciting fellows to be with, and when we left to go back to the Squadron we promised to come down to Venice, where they were remaining for a while, and put on an aerial display for them.  In return they invited us all up to their headquarters at Gorizia, up in the Dolomites, for a weekend.  We turned on the aerial beat-up, as I mentioned earlier, and some weeks later we spent a riotous weekend with these lively characters.  Their ringleader was Lieut. Colonel Hank Hampden from Oakland, California, who was the  executive officer of the regiment (that is, second in charge).  The big boss was a full (or “chicken”) Colonel, a West Point graduate and, of course, permanent Army type, quite different in temperament and attitudes from his rather boisterous and egalitarian underlings.

Fortunately, he had been away on leave when we were up there, but arrived back on the Sunday to a scene of some chaos and disorder, which he promptly set his chastened juniors to put to rights.  Before I left for Sammardenchia, David gave me an excellent set of skis and an ice-axe.  I brought these back to Oz with me, but never used the skis and broke the ice-axe trying to penetrate the hard black soil in Moree.

Back to flying after Venice, and it was absolutely marvellous.  It resulted in an unexpected promotion. 

On our previous flight back from Naples,  Barney had suggested that I should apply for a commission, but I had grave doubts.  If you missed out getting one off-course, as Greg and Dave had done, it was a much more difficult procedure.  First you had to get the C/O to recommend it (and ours, Murray Nash, who was always somewhat aloof, had always proved difficult to deal with).  In addition, you traditionally had to wait until you finished your tour of operations (some 200 hours) before applying and the most recent case of a bloke going tour-ex, John Turkington, had had his case rejected by Murray Nash.  (For reasons that none of us could fathom, as John had been an excellent pilot and operational leader, as well as being a good style of bloke.)  Finally there were  at least eight W/Os more senior to me, but who had not completed their tours when the war ended, so I thought it not worthwhile even approaching the rather distant and withdrawn C/O.

However, I had a stroke of luck when one day we duty flyers were sent up in pairs, to practice some advanced formation flying,  followed by a dogfight between each two planes.  I was down to fly with the Boss, who of course was regarded as a shit-hot pilot, and at this stage was the possessor of two DFCs and a DSO.  We took off in pairs and, once we had sufficient height, I close-formated on Nash as required.  As I mentioned earlier, I had become fairly skilful at this back in England, so I tucked in very close and maintained position precisely, as the boss increased the degree of difficulty of the exercises.  Actually, this was the first time I had ever flown formation with him and, although there was no verbal communication between us, I got the feeling that he was impressed.

Next item on the agenda was the dogfight.  It had been arranged at the briefing that the leader should first try to get the No.2 (me) off his tail.  First the C/O flipped his plane on its back and screamed off vertically downwards, spiralling wildly as he went.  I managed to follow suit and, in spite of his evasive manoeuvres, stuck to his tail like glue.  Eventually, well after the time I theoretically could have shot him down, he threw me off with another vertical dive from which he pulled up so hard that to stay with him I blacked out completely with the force of about 3 or 4G (G for gravity), so that when I had regained my sight, I had lost him.  He explained to me later that he had pulled up starting a loop but rolled out of it and finished up somewhere well above me.

However, I seemed to be having a good day, finishing off with a beautifully-executed landing manoeuvre right beside the boss, so that we arrived back at the parking bays virtually simultaneously, rather than the more usual tardy straggle.  During the post-flight discussion between the two of us, I could see that the boss had been impressed,  so I seized the moment to ask would he put me up for a Commission.  After some pause for thought, to my enormous relief he agreed to do so.  

Actually, that was the hard part.  The next interview, with the Wing Commander (Group Captain Brian Eaton, DSO and Bar, DFC; who didn’t know me from Adam) was a breeze.  - A five-minute chat and that was it - approved!  

But one more hurdle remained, an interview with the Big Chief of Desert Air Force, an Englishman - Air Vice Marshall Forster, who arrived at our village with, as one would expect, some degree of pomp and ceremony.  He was the bloke whom Barney and I were supposed to tell our story to some weeks earlier,  but other matters intervened.   His visit to the area no doubt had to do with matters much weightier than interviewing me, but he chatted with me at some length about my family background, including items like my parents’ divorce and my mother’s working as a telephonist in a department store.  Nobody had ever asked me such personal questions and my hopes sank, as such background matters, it seemed to me, were unlikely to prove to be the requisites of an officer and a gentleman.  Nevertheless, he seemed to be well-disposed towards me and I think he must have indicated at the conclusion of the interview that I would get it.  The commission came through a month or so later, when we were in Cairo waiting for a ship home.

Incidentally, of all the WOs on 3 Squadron  (some 10 or so) I was the only one to get a commission and thus was the last one appointed to this rank during the rest of the war, the end of which, of course, was not all that far away.  Whether any of the others applied, and were rejected, I know not.

Meanwhile back in Sammardenchia the locals were not only getting used to us but starting to recognize the social and economic benefits of our presence.  In spite of our boisterousness and bravado,  they came to realize that we were just a group of young men going about our business. We didn’t look particularly militaristic, bloodthirsty or even fierce.  We didn’t walk around wearing guns, we wore casual clothes, not jackboots, and spent most of our spare time playing volleyball, swimming in the irrigation canals, and playing cards on tables set up on the cobbles outside the erstwhile café and bar, which was now our billet.  The dark-eyed Dolores and her two lovely sisters, Clementina and Aïda, now smiled at us occasionally.  Perhaps the fact that “quality youth” was in short supply had something to do with this.

We helped the old ladies pump water from the nearby village well and paid them to do our laundry.  We were able to give them tinned food, cigarettes and other goodies - the like of which had never been seen in this poverty-stricken region.  Some of our few Catholic members, Peter Martin for instance, may well have attended Mass at the local church, but I have no particular memory of this.

Because of this burgeoning good feeling, the Mess decided to have a dance and invite the locals.  We were able to supply the music via a small group of ground staff musicians, led by my good friend Norm French playing the saxophone.  They called themselves the “3 Squadron Hotshots” and they performed admirably. Norm was an amazingly gifted bloke, a pre-war motorbike racer and superb mechanic, an artist (he devised a squadron badge with all the relevant images), a musician; a lovely bloke, somewhat feckless who, perhaps for that reason, never rose above the lowest rank in the Squadron.

After the war he, his wife and three children all became dental patients of mine and his son, Kiernan, much to Norm’s joy, rose to be a Squadron Leader pilot in the RAAF, thereby outdoing his father (and the rest of us) by miles in rank and standing.  During his RAAF service Kierman had the unusual experience of having his aeroplane hijacked by the Fretilin in East Timor and being forced, at gunpoint, to fly an over-full load of Fretilin fighters back to Darwin.  That was in, I think, 1974 and has never been made public, so by reading this stuff you have received some exclusive top secret information.  He is now flying with Qantas, lives in the old family home in Drummoyne, where Norm’s ashes now lie in his saxophone in the garage.

Back to the dance – it was quite an event.  Good music, pretty girls, all the oldies sitting around watching the action - and their daughters!  In these circumstances there is nobody quite as vigilant as an Italian parent - as I found out when I decided to escort Dolores home.  We set off and I tentatively held her hand.  No resistance but, as I came to learn about all the girls, her palms were hard with callouses due to her labouring duties in the fields.  I glanced behind – Mama and Papa were following at a discreet distance.  Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all.

I also got to know another handsome girl named Regina Riga who lived a few  doors from our billets (photos available on request).   I used to visit her in the evenings, bearing little gifts such as a tin of bully beef or spam, but there was always an old bloke sitting quietly in the corner, saying nothing.  I don’t know who this man was, but he was not her father (who was, as I found out after a few visits, a POW in England).  Regina, also a field worker, had the usual calloused hands and she had tremendous strength as I found out when we, for reasons I can’t remember, indulged in a bit of arm-wrestling.  She used to flatten me within a second or two every time.  This defeat I could handle, but during attempted conversation I was at a loss with my lack of the local language.

By this time I had been in Italy for seven  months and was rather ashamed at my inability to communicate.  The reason for this lack was pure superstition on my part.  When we arrived in Naples, I decided that, if I tried to learn the language and succeeded, I would probably be killed - which I very nearly was of course, but nevertheless was a stupid mode of thinking.  A smattering of nouns,  the odd verb infinitive, and little grasp of syntax was all I had to sweet talk the ladies and this proved miserably inadequate.  When the word was about that we were going back home, Regina got quite weepy, as Italian girls were prone to do.

We corresponded a bit after the war but it was a hopeless business as I couldn’t understand her letters nor could I find an Italian speaker who could.  No doubt she could not manage my English as well.  Her last letter to me included a photo of her looking very sad with tears running down her face.  At this stage being involved in Uni work, I could see no future in this futile correspondence and so that was that.   I have never been back to Sammardenchia.

Life in the village had become routine but still pleasant, the sports and cards interspersed with our flying.  What a way to earn a living!  A couple of events are possibly worthy of mention.  We had another of our slap-up parties, during which some alcohol-affected pilots started shooting "Two Star Reds" at the local church bell tower for a bit of a lark.  (Two Star Reds are very powerful phosphorous distress flares, used for all manner of things aerial from air sea rescue to aerodrome control, but were not meant to be used frivolously by inebriated airmen.)  As the party hotted up, someone started lobbing the burning flares into the park, where all the ground staff were peacefully sleeping in their tents, several of which were set alight and burned down.  Somehow another group of revellers got their hands on a few Very pistols (guns that fired flaming phosphorous bullets) and started lobbing fiery shells from the park out at the mob near the church.  This latter group raced off and got some Very pistols of their own and soon a spectacular fiery battle was raging between the two groups.  I must admit that I, although sober, was very much part of this exciting action, but when a very pissed Barney came up and wanted to borrow my German sub-machine gun to  move the action up another level, I resisted his drunken pleadings and shortly thereafter the action subsided - probably because the ammunition ran out – without any loss of life or limb.

The other incident was of an entirely different character.  Seated at  tables outside our café playing cards and just chatting on a balmy summer evening, we were at peace with the world when along the cobbled road came a very large, black African soldier, steering a rather erratic course.  When he spotted our café he must have assumed it was a bar and he went through us into the café looking for some action.  A truly nasty-looking character and very drunk, he started demanding a drink – or else.  None of us was game to take him on, and the situation was looking very dodgy, when along came a black African military policeman, who had evidently been looking for this bloke, and proceeded to try and arrest him.  Like lightning the big bloke whipped out a large knife and slashed at the MP - inflicting a foot-long gash down his forearm - and then ran off down the cobbled road.

We all sat there stunned by the speed of the incident, all except Jock Gale, the skinny, quiet, older pilot who used to sit in one corner of the bar sipping brandy with shaky hands.  Quick as a flash, Jock raced after the retreating African and brought him down on the cobbles with a perfect rugby flying tackle.  Subsequent events were a bit confused, and neither Lew nor I could remember them precisely,  but we both still have a clear memory of Jock’s brave reaction.

Shortly after this, some of us were given another seven days' leave and five of us (Dave Tennant, Ron Horton, Peter Martin, Lew and I) decided to head off to Milan and Lake Como (made famous in  Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”).  To this end  we took a 15-cwt truck, loaded it up with seven days' provisions for all of us,  plus seven jerry-cans full of petrol and other odds and ends.  Dave was the only one who could drive and also the only officer, but nevertheless we all got out our false officer’s brevvies, put them on and headed off along the Autostrada.  The road was still choked with refugees walking both ways and we gave a lift to selected individuals from time to time – mostly, I have to say, women.

When we reached Milan we booked into the Albergo Gran Turismo, a hotel reserved for officers only for a subsidised fee of 1 shilling six pence per day.  (What we had been supposed to do, of course, was to have gone out to the Sergeant’s camp on the outskirts of the city and get allocated to a tent and live on the food we had brought with us.)  As we had managed to refuel the truck at Army depots along the way, we still had all our petrol and food so we wandered around an industrial area, found a likely-looking factory and asked the management if they would like to buy it all.  Would they ever!  

So we got all the fuel and food, put it on the boardroom billiard table, and started bargaining.  Well we ended up with huge amounts of paper currency, millions of lira, but we were to find out that it was next to worthless, as there was nothing worth buying.  Most transactions were being done like ours, with barter, but we were OK as we were "all found" back at the hotel.  I am not particularly proud of my part in this incident as it tends to destroy what is left of any moral fibre existing in either party to the transaction and sabotages all the attempts being  made by the authorities to restore law and order to a devastated country.  Similar things, I think, are happening in Iraq today.

Milan had had its share of bomb damage of course; even its magnificent cathedral had some.  When we went to look at it as tourists, we observed some graffiti splashed in large letters on an outside wall which said, translated, “This building was damaged by our Anglo Saxon liberators.” But, in addition, it contained a play on the words Anglo-Saxon which they had written, in Italian, as “Anglo–Assassini”! 

At this early stage Italy was dividing into two main political forces.  Although nominally a Catholic country, in 1945 communism was gaining a huge number of supporters, as the local Partisanari Resistance had been purely communist.  In their elections the Communist candidates captured about 50% of the votes, an extraordinary result in such a priest- and Church-dominated country as Italy, but because of the enormous gap between rich and poor  and the grinding hopeless poverty of the rural peasantry, not altogether surprising.

          We explored this very modern city at some length,  during which time Lew and I managed to pick up a couple of girls in an outdoor café, factory workers I think, whom we persuaded to come with us the next day to Lake Como.  We hired a couple of rowing boats and took the girls far out on the lake in true Hemingway style.  Very romantic –  except my girl seemed to panic a bit and kept saying “Andiamo!” repeatedly and, when I dived over the side for a swim,  she grabbed the oars and started  rowing towards the shore some two or three kilometres away.  Fortunately I could swim faster than she could row and managed to catch up and clamber aboard.  Although I was a good swimmer in those days I doubt whether I could have made it back to shore by that method.  “Andiamo,” incidentally, means “Let’s go” – another useful acquisition for my Italian vocabulary.

Time came to return to Sammardenchia and Stinky Miller, where we found the pilots sitting at the bar, as usual, playing games of “liar dice”.   We became enamoured of this fascinating bar-room pastime and spent many a leisure hour thus engaged.  Village life continued its even tenor, with increasing interaction between the locals and the pilots.  By now we were well into July and the flying continued to be great fun and exhilarating, while at the same time we more junior pilots were learning new skills and honing up old ones.  I remember wishing that I had had these abilities when we were on operations, but nevertheless it was a marvellous feeling to be confident of your ability to fly these thoroughbred machines with dash and flair.  And anyway we had, or thought we had, the Pacific war to deal with one day.

While all this pleasurable activity was going on, mail, of course, was arriving regularly from home and UK.  I had already sent Mum a cable to say I was still alive which, I think, she got some time before the official notification.  Most of this mail from Mum consisted of, “What do you want to do after the war?”  I had no idea of what I wanted to do – all I knew was that I could happily keep on as I was for ever.  I even thought about the possibility of staying with the occupation forces like my good friend David Rosendale was in the process of doing, but of course, such a pathway was not available for us.  I did not suggest this in my letters to Mum but, really, I would have been more than happy to stay on there, or elsewhere in Europe, for years.  Also news came that there was to be an election in Australia and as hardened veterans we were to get a vote even though we were mostly below the legal voting age of 21.  I could not get enthused over this concession to the young, as my interest in politics was, and has remained, minimal.

Even with these vague disturbances to our life of hedonism we kept on flying until July 30, when my log book tells me that I flew a cross-country and also practised battle formation, which was a bit ho-hum by now.  The cross-country, from memory, involved a fair bit of low flying in amongst the valleys of the 15,000-foot Alps, weaving and soaring in a way you could only do in a high-powered modern fighter.

I did not know it at the time (and if I had I would have savoured the experience more intensely) but this was to be my last flight ever.  News came shortly thereafter that we were to go home via train to Taranto in the heel of Italy, ship to Egypt then ship to Oz.  The locals, somehow, were already aware of this and they were looking a little gloomy – they had learned to love us, sort of.  Regina cried quite a bit, but ours is to obey, so we packed up, leaving the aircraft where we had landed them.  We expected to be re-equipped, possibly with Mosquitos, back in Oz but, when we paused at Rome in the train for a few hours, we saw the newspaper posters with “Bomba Atomica in Japan” and so it was all over.

Chapter 9.  Back to Oz - an Officer and a Heartbreaker

 The train from Udine to Taranto took three days, but the weather was warm and, unlike the epic journey going up, we were well-fed.  Taranto, like most of southern Italy, was a hole.  While waiting for the ship I turned 21, but was unaware of this until Lew, who never forgets anything, even to this day, informed me.  The trip to Port Said on the Winchester Castle was not unpleasant and we met some rather nice WAAFs aboard.  The memory of Regina faded just a little.  Back to smelly old Cairo, where we were billeted in tents on a patch of desert called Almaza.

Whilst here, my commission came through. “Whacko!” I thought, “at least I will have a comfortable trip home,” but it was not to be.  The ship meant to take us, the Orion I think, broke down in the Bay of Biscay, so our waiting time lengthened.  This waiting, of course, was endemic throughout the Services, so we were used to it and spent the intervening time chatting up the WAAFs.  Eventually we were sent again to Port Said where we boarded the Stratheden which, to our horror, already had about 10,000 Aussies from the UK well-entrenched upon it, so that all of us, with the exception of the CO,  were consigned to the aft hold.  Even the CO with his DSO, DFC and bar was put in a two-person cabin with six other ranking officers.

The aft hold (meant for cargo of course) was down below the waterline and right above the propeller shaft.  Here we all, officers and scum, bunked down on the floor.  We had all (both officers and scum - you will note the new term for my erstwhile colleagues) recently been issued with new pyjamas that had wide dark blue vertical stripes.  The hold was then named, appropriately enough, "Belsen".

We sweated our way through the Red Sea, jammed in this airless hold, perhaps rather akin to the Black Hole of Calcutta, idling away our time playing poker, at which game I proceeded to lose a lot of money.  The ship was jam-packed with servicemen,  mostly RAAF,  and around the ship, I ran in to many old friends, acquaintances and course-mates, most of whom had survived the rigours of the European Theatre Air War.  They included a couple of old classmates from Sydney High:  Harry Butler and Eric Armstrong.  Eric, now an F/O Navigator, had done a tour with the Pathfinders flying Mosquitos and Harry, also an F/O, a tour on Wellington bombers in Italy.  From the Vaucluse Yacht Club  were Frank Jackson (who had been a WAG on Mitchell bombers) and Ron Neilsen, now sporting a DFC after a tour on Lancasters.

Also on board was another ex-V.Y.C.-ian, Ian Wrigley.  He was an RAN Lieutenant Commander, the equivalent rank to our CO, but being RAN he had a First Class cabin to himself, so we didn’t see too much of him.  Ian is still up in Princes Avenue, so he can still lord it over us peasants (or is the term “pissants” these days?).  He later distinguished himself in pistol shooting at one of the Olympics and still sails a yacht, from whose lofty heights he can occasionally look down on me sailing my Laser.

We crossed the Indian Ocean in discomfort but without incident, although I was still losing steadily at poker.  Obviously I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, but isn’t this always the way in life?  It wasn’t until I got to Moree in the 1950s that I learned how to play this game with any real degree of skill.

 We reached Fremantle in due course where, approaching the wharf, our senses were assaulted by a female chorus of pure Australian vernacular.  We were duly appalled, but what had happened was that we had all acquired a trace of pommy in our voices over the two years or so, and it took us some time to get back to normal, as it were.  An evening in Perth was the treat for all the troops.  Most hit the pubs.  Some, who could no longer curb their impatience to get home, shot through AWL and some, like Eric and I, went to sort out the girls at a dance hall.  Back to the ship late in the evening and off to Melbourne, where the load was lightened considerably further; then on to Sydney.   On the evening before we reached Sydney I was given my one and only turn in the First Class dining room –  very nice, but it was left to those of us so privileged to tip the Indian waiters for the entire voyage!

Ron Neilsen and his family lived in Hopetoun Avenue Vaucluse.  When we eventually entered Sydney Harbour and anchored out near the Wedding Cakes, a number of small launches came out to greet us, among them the Neilsen family led by Gwen and sporting a big placard with "WELCOME HOME F/O RON NEILSEN" on it.  I spotted them and, fearing a Customs  inspection of a kitbag containing a sub-machine gun and some 5,000 duty free cigarettes, hailed Gwen.  As they came alongside, I lowered the kitbag on a rope to them, with instructions to take it directly to Russell Street.  In the event, there was no Customs inspection, but at least it got home before I did.  Ron and I, by the way were both on 34 course at Uranquinty.

After staying on the water for a night, we moved up to the wharves and disembarked onto double-decker buses, which took us through the city with cheering throngs waving madly.  Heady stuff!

The buses took us to No.2 ED, Bradfield Park, whence I had departed some two years earlier.  We then disgorged onto the old parade ground, where hordes of relatives (not, of course, arranged in any sort of military formation) awaited us.  Much chaos, confusion and frantic rushing about, until eventually we all got sorted out.  I eventually located Mum (bewildered by all the anarchy), Aunt Thistle and Jill Calman, whose letters (and mine) had grown ever more intimate as the two years progressed.  Jill was a very social person, and to have a long-lost boyfriend returning as a pilot, an officer and a shot-down airman was, as Colonel Cathcart would say, a feather in her cap.  It didn’t do me much harm either!

Home to an alien domesticity and thoughts of what to do next – very hard to adjust to.  We were given several weeks leave, after which we reported back to Bradfield Park for discharge.  I was discharged on December 5, 1945; three years to the day since I had entered the same gates.  

That’s all folks!

10. Epilogue 

After the war I started a course in Dentistry at Sydney University.  At the first clinical session a tall figure dominated the room.  It was John Hodgkinson!  All this is anecdotal (and self indulgent) rather than historical, but Hodgy's remarks started these memories flowing.  

-

Barney Davies:  Barney returned to W.A. after the war, took up dairy farming and produced four daughters.  Like most of us on the Squadron, he was a heavy smoker.  I remember, in the Mess he would often have a severe coughing attack, followed by “Clear my tail while I jettison my left lung.”  This proved to be prophetic, unfortunately, as he died of emphysema a few years ago.  During the war, of course, lung trouble seemed to be a relatively minor hazard, scarcely worthwhile thinking about.  Hearing that he was ill, I rang him up, the first contact in many years.  He sounded terrible, could barely talk and died shortly thereafter.  A sorry end for such a fearless pilot.

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Clark Cornell:  In 1954, while living in Moree, I wrote to Clark at the address he gave me when we were in Slovenia.  Although only 20, he was already married and had set up house in Los Angeles.  No reply was forthcoming.  In 1973, I was in L.A. at a Congress, but didn’t think to track him down.  In 1999 I had a phone call from the Chief Executive of  the Australian Dental Association; “Was I the Alan Clark who had been in Slovenia with an American named Cornell all those years ago?” 

- “Yes indeed!” said I.  I rang Clark and he told me that his wife of 54 years had died after a long illness.  Bereaved and lonely he had gone up to his attic and found a box containing my 1954 letter, as well as one from Barney.  He had never replied to either.  He was keen to come to Oz and see us both, but of course Barney had gone.

He duly arrived here shortly after, accompanied by a new bride!  (Bit of a fast mover, the old Clark.)  He also brought with him the diary that he had kept in Slovenia.  We spent a pleasant few days together seeing the sights and reminiscing about our time together in Slovenia.  Extraordinarily though, our recollections of those dramatic events were wildly at variance.  This was puzzling but, of course, memories are notoriously unreliable so long after the events.  Nevertheless I have always prided myself on having a pretty accurate long-term memory and was still convinced that my version of events was much closer to the mark than Clark’s.  So Clark produced the diary.  Again extraordinarily, he had not had a look at it since he put it in the attic 55 years ago!  Nor had he looked at it since he got it out of the box.  So we got down to the business of going through it and, would you believe it, every one of my versions of particular events proved to be correct!  One in the eye for Clark, eh?

Clark and Mimi went back to a new life together in California and we corresponded, mainly through Mimi, since Clark, as we know, is a lousy correspondent.  But I haven’t heard from them for a long time in spite of a number of e-mails.  He was planning a trip back to Slovenia with his daughter, who had just had a book published in Serbian.  When I enquired about his trip I got a two-word e-mail which said, “No Slovenia.”  And I haven’t heard since.

Jill Calman at Nielsen Park, December 1945.