Heroes of the Skies

‘I’m on my way, Jeff, see you in about half an hour.’ I can’t recall ever having been to Dubbo, and am taken aback by the size of it, with its low, confusing sprawl of seemingly identical shopping strips, truck and car yards, and outlets boasting a bewildering array of machines destined for various agricultural purposes: gargantuan tractors, wheeled and multi-armed harvesters and other contraptions a determined person might well convince me are actually surplus from the Soviet space program. That at least makes up part of the excuse I give myself when running late to meet Jeff Perry, who flew bombers in the early part of the war. But if he is put out by my tardiness, he doesn’t let on, instead giving me an errand. ‘Look, while you’re out,’ he says over the phone as I am on final approach, ‘can you pick me up some milk? And make it that low-fat stuff. I’m trying to lose a bit of weight.’ Jeff, I might add, is ninety-eight years old.

I meet Jeff at his front door where he shakes my hand firmly and invites me into his modern unit on the main road. It’s December and the sun is white and blinding, and makes me think of insects I tortured under a magnifying glass as a kid. The relief of getting inside is overwhelming. Jeff pauses at the door. ‘Hmm, looks like rain,’ he says, glancing up at a clear sky.

‘Really?’ I say, expecting him to elaborate. He doesn’t.

The first glance into a former airman’s home can be telling. Some are crammed with photographs, mementos, squadron emblems, often model aeroplanes of the type the airmen flew. Usually, there is at least something, but not a single item in Jeff’s abode in any way indicates his wartime life in the RAAF. He draws me into the kitchen. ‘My great-granddaughter’s just given me one of these coffee machines,’ he says, waving in the direction of a shiny new appliance taking up rather a lot of room on the kitchen bench. I’ve recently had a go at a similar-looking one, and quickly attempt to reacquaint myself with its function, anticipating soon being called to lend a hand. Jeff watches me patiently as I fiddle with the lever where the cartridges are inserted. ‘Would you like a cafe latte?’ he says finally. I step aside and Jeff proceeds to make me one, perfectly. I take that as my cue to sit down and jettison all remaining assumptions.

It’s not surprising Jeff appears so at home on the western plains of New South Wales. His family have been out here since Europeans first began to hammer fences around the boundaries of sheep stations the size of minor principalities. ‘I was born about a hundred miles west of here,’ he tells me, throwing a hand somewhere in that direction. ‘There wasn’t really a town. The nearest railway station was called Mullengudgery.’ When later I look it up on the map, I see it’s still there but there’s no sign of a train station, tracks or anything much else for that matter. When giving me a brief history of his family’s long association with Merino sheep, he mentions events that took place in the ’80s. I shake my head slightly when I realise he’s talking not of the 1980s, but the 1880s.

With an uncle who’d been in the trenches, Jeff wanted nothing to do with the army, so in April 1940, he made the long trip east to join the air force in Sydney. At No. 4 Elementary Flying School at Mascot, he took to flying easily and, to the delight of his instructor, was the first pupil in his very early No. 7 Course to go solo in a Tiger Moth. His prowess earned him selection for single-engine fighter training. Being so close to Sydney, they were all given one very particular instruction: never, under any circumstances, fly under the Harbour Bridge!

Almost as an aside, Jeff mentions a name that makes me stop in my tracks, one of his fellow student pilots whom he knew not only on the course but back home, a young man whose father ran a property close to his own. A quiet fellow, with whom Jeff regularly played tennis, but who didn’t have much to say for himself. ‘You’d hardly get to know him,’ he says of Rawdon Hume Middleton who, two years later, for a trip to Turin in a Short Stirling bomber, would win the Victoria Cross, posthumously. Shockingly wounded by anti-aircraft fire, Middleton would complete his bomb run on the Fiat aircraft factory, then, blinded in one eye, in agony and losing blood from lacerations all over his body, would deliver his crew back to England, ordering five of them to bail out once they’d crossed the English coast. He went down with his aircraft in the Channel, and his body was washed up a little later. ‘Played a good game of tennis, too,’ remembers Jeff.

After various adventures on the long voyage to Britain, including a near-miss by a torpedo in the Pacific (which Jeff, on watch at the time, saw and initially thought to be a swordfish), and colliding with an iceberg in the Atlantic, Jeff arrived in the battered British Isles in early 1941. In Bournemouth, a fortune teller unnerved him by predicting he would fall, ‘but not from a great height’. Performing just a little too well on a night-vision test saw him transferred from fighters to night bombers. ‘Everyone was rated average or below average,’ he remembers. ‘I was apparently “exceptional”,’ so instead of the Hurricanes or Spitfires he’d had his heart set on, Jeff was soon off to the other end of Britain, Lossiemouth in northern Scotland, to transfer onto Wellington bombers.

He enjoyed the Wellington and didn’t seem to mind too much his change of mount, but wasn’t ready to divest himself of his fighter pilot skills just yet. ‘First thing I thought I’d do when going solo in the Wellington was some aerobatics,’ he says, obviously noticing my look of bewilderment. ‘I thought I’d do a stall turn, and then if that worked okay, I’d do a loop.’

‘A loop?’ I exclaim. ‘In a Wellington?’

‘I couldn’t see why not,’ he says.

So, somewhere over northern Scotland, Jeff put some speed on his heavy twin-engine Mark I Wellington bomber, pulled back the stick to make it climb straight up, stalled, kicked on some rudder and let the nose drift down towards the ground in a dive. So far, so good. But when he tried to pull the bomber out of it, the stick wouldn’t budge. ‘It was like trying to pull at a tree,’ he remembers. In a vertical dive with the speed increasing and unable to make the aircraft react, Jeff suddenly realised he might be in a spot of bother. ‘Shit! I thought to myself. The wing commander won’t be very pleased when I wreck his plane.’

With the ground fast looming large in his windshield, this, one might have thought, would have been the least of his worries. But he didn’t panic. Instead, he decided to reach down and turn the elevator-trim control wheel at the bottom of his pilot’s seat. Replicating the movement seventy years on, Jeff unconsciously slides his hand down the side of his armchair and turns an imaginary wheel. With only a thousand feet between him and oblivion, the nose of the Wellington started to rise. Probably for the better, Jeff decided to give the loop a miss. But he’d learned something about the aircraft he was soon to be flying into battle. ‘I knew then that if I was ever attacked by fighters, I could put her into a dive and get out of it,’ he says. It was knowledge he would need to put to good use.

Jeff joined No. 115 Squadron operating from Marham, in Norfolk on the edge of The Wash, a relatively comfortable pre-war brick-building base, as the captain of an all-English crew. (‘They were all from Lancashire and Cheshire,’ he says. ‘Their accents were so strong I could barely understand them.’) Jeff would complete an exceptionally long tour of thirty-seven operations, mostly to targets in the industrial Ruhr valley of northern Germany. Sadly, his logbook was lost in a bushfire in the 1950s (along with, he says, many photographs taken with a secreted camera from his cockpit while actually on operations – I wince at what could have been), so we are unable to go through his tour chronologically, but he certainly remembers a great deal.

‘I’m not sure of the target. It may have been Hamburg,’ he remembers of one operation. ‘An anti-aircraft shell exploded inside the plane. It shattered my instrument panel, wrecked the compass and most of the other instruments.’ He reckons the shell went off just behind his cockpit, which quickly filled with smoke. But one of the Wellington’s strengths was its ability to absorb punishment due to its unique latticed, or geodetic, skeleton of aluminium ribs, wrapped in doped, shrunken canvas. This allowed the shock of exploding shells to pass through the thin canvas wall rather than be absorbed by the crew. There are many instances of Wellingtons returning to base with so much of their outer covering missing they resembled see-through diagrams. So, with his controls intact, Jeff flew on.

‘Was anyone hurt?’ I ask him.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says, then after a pause, ‘although I still have some shrapnel in my leg.’ His definition of hurt obviously differs from mine.

With no compass, Jeff had no idea where to fly, so the instructions from his navigator to simply ‘head west’ were somewhat moot. It was, however, a clear night, and looking to his right, he saw the friendly white orb of Polaris, the north star. ‘So long as it was on my starboard side, I knew I’d reach England somewhere.’ Eventually, the coast did come up, but his troubles were not yet over. ‘Suddenly the anti-aircraft guns opened up on us,’ he says. ‘The British ones! And they didn’t miss by much, either.’

He didn’t realise it at the time, but the explosion had also wrecked the IFF (identification friend or foe) device which would have marked him as friendly to the gunners below. Evading the friendly fire, he still had to find his way back home, which he did by checking the two-letter identity codes – flashed by all aerodromes – against the daily changing code list on his destroyable notepaper, the ‘flimsy’. Finally, and extremely low on fuel, he found his way back to Marham. ‘So, yes,’ he tells me, ‘that was a bit of an exciting one.’

Jeff’s tour, in mid to late 1941, took place during the great nadir of Bomber Command when unsustainable losses were expended for little result. To counter the U-boat threat, the bomber crews had in March of that year been directed to concentrate their attacks on submarine pens along the French coast, but in July they were thrown back into the Ruhr, or ‘Happy Valley’ as the airmen came to dub the heavily defended industrial centre of Germany’s north. The RAF believed that with the bulk of the Luftwaffe now in Russia, the west would be relatively undefended. They were in for a shock. Between July and November, Bomber Command would lose a staggering 526 aircraft to enemy fire, the equivalent of its entire front-line strength in just four months. The chance of surviving a standard tour of thirty operations was at this time considerably less than 50 per cent. Added to this, it was realised that the crews, at night over a blackout continent, were barely even finding their targets, let alone hitting them. The sensational Butt Report of August 1941, derived from the analysis of over 4000 aerial target photographs, showed that barely one in four crews had dropped their bombs within 5 miles of the target.

What part experience played in keeping a crew off the casualty list was demonstrated to Jeff on one of his early trips when, nearing the target, his rear gunner called up calmly, ‘Skip, there’s a plane flying behind us. Should I fire at it?’

A split-second of incredulity gave way to Jeff yelling an emphatic, ‘Yes!’ down the intercom, then executing a violent turn to port. ‘At that moment,’ he says, ‘a whole stream of yellow and white tracer bullets poured over the top of my port wing.’ It was, he thinks, a Junkers Ju 88, which had snuck up behind them in the dark, making itself visible to the inexperienced young man in the rear turret only at the last second. ‘I had to tell him afterwards in no uncertain terms, “Don’t ask, just shoot!”’ There were more encounters with night fighters throughout his tour, but each time he evaded them, remembering the hard lesson he had learned in training over Scotland. His gunner never asked permission again.

The trick with the elevator trim came in handy on another occasion when he was trapped or ‘coned’ by a series of powerful coordinated German searchlights. ‘I’d seen aircraft coned time and time again,’ he says, ‘and almost invariably they were shot down. And they got me too, once.’ When his turn came, he threw the Wellington into a twisting dive, evading the lights and the concentrated flak that invariably came with them, brought it out of the dive with the elevator trim, and got away with it.

This period of soul-searching for Bomber Command – when it was poorly led by now forgotten commanders and its purpose, even its existence, was being questioned – combined with unreliable weather, meant Jeff’s tour spread out over many months. Days, sometimes weeks would pass without an operation, but his crew gradually became an experienced one, surviving at a time when so many did not. It was frequently a close shave, however.

One trip, he tells me, still shakes him up to think about. The target was a city on the Baltic, and after a successful attack, Jeff was flying home over the North Sea. Feeling relatively safe, he engaged the automatic pilot, known as ‘George’, dropped down to the relative warmth of about 600 metres above sea level, and gave permission for the crew to break out their nightly complement of sandwiches and coffee. ‘Suddenly, all hell broke loose,’ he says, as a massive barrage of anti-aircraft fire exploded all around him. ‘What the hell was that?’ he said to the navigator, grabbing the wheel.

‘I don’t know,’ was the reply. ‘We’re supposed to be over the sea!’

Flying carefully home, he checked the map and, to his horror, realised he’d flown low, straight and level over the extremely well-defended German island of Heligoland, a mini fortress not only bristling with guns but also well-equipped with barrage balloons tethered as high as 6000 feet. ‘I must have flown between the cables without knowing it,’ he recalls, realising that contact with any one of them would have sliced a wing off like a knife. ‘That shook me up a bit, actually,’ he says, and by the look on his face, I believe him.

He seems to have been shaken too by the visible effects of what he was doing, night after night, to German cities and their inhabitants, and gives an extraordinary insight into one of the most famous raids of the war, the one and only attack on Lübeck, the old Hanseatic League city on the Trave River on the Baltic coast, in March 1942. This was the turning point for the RAF, the first major success against a large German target, and the raid that would set the terrible pattern of area bombing for the next four years. On this clear night, for the first time, everything went right for the bomber crews, with nearly all 234 aircraft reporting successful hits on the aiming point, the altstadt – the very heart of the old medieval town. Lightly defended, the bombers ventured down to as low as 2000 feet above the city for greater accuracy. ‘We set the whole town on fire,’ remembers Jeff, who saw it all from his cockpit. ‘There were these bridges over the water on the western side. I remember seeing a whole stream of cars trying to get across them to escape the inferno. It was a traffic jam. For the first time, I felt sorry for them. I hadn’t felt a thing for them up till then, but this night I felt sorry for them down there.’

Jeff’s mood seems to change a little after this revelation. He pauses for a moment, then tells me that after his first trip, he’d conscientiously told the CO that he couldn’t be ‘absolutely certain’ of having hit the target dead centre. The senior officer was untroubled. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he replied matter-of-factly. ‘Even if you missed the target, you probably would have hit the buildings next to it where the workers lived and killed them.’

‘After that,’ says Jeff a little haltingly, ‘we’d always try to aim very carefully at the target.’

Having reached his tour’s designated thirty operations, Jeff expected to be stood down, but nobody said anything and his name appeared on the battle order for the next trip, and then the one after that. ‘Actually, I think they lost track of me,’ he says casually, as if discussing a misplaced rates notice. ‘I thought a lot about this afterwards. They could never find my records and such. I think it was because I trained as a fighter pilot then transferred to bombers. I don’t think I was in their system.’ Still he went on flying – thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five – and surviving, and still no word on when he might be done. ‘Finally, I said something to the adjutant who seemed surprised and looked something up. Then, after number thirty-seven, they told me that was enough.’

Jeff no doubt earned the Distinguished Flying Cross several times over – not least for his unofficially extended tour – but being on the wrong side of his old-school CO, who took umbrage at Jeff’s lack of concern for such military niceties as saluting and treating said CO with the respect to which he believed himself entitled (‘Actually, I used to wind him up a little,’ he admits), made certain that decoration was never going to come his way. After his tour, Jeff spent time as an instructor, and by war’s end, was back running his family’s property in western New South Wales, having been greeted on his return by the news that his father had been diagnosed with cancer and had not much time to live.

Flying during a period when his chances of survival were slim, did he think his number was going to come up? His answer surprises me.

‘I thought it might, but I knew I could handle a plane better than most other pilots. I thought perhaps some of them contributed to killing themselves.’ Jeff is of the firm opinion that many pilots and crews, through inexperience, simply ran out of skill: failing to recover from stalls and spins, miscalculating fuel or distances, or simply getting lost and disappearing without a trace. There was luck, certainly, he believes, but also the smallest of margins to make your own.

He says he can’t recall the faces of the many men who came and disappeared during his dramatic time on the squadron, but one stands out, and he tells me the sad story of Allan Weller, a fellow Australian pilot from Brisbane. Weller had been shot down over the North Sea but survived a raging storm to be picked up in his dinghy by a Norwegian vessel and soon found his way back to the squadron. ‘I shared a hut with him,’ says Jeff. ‘His nerves were shot to pieces. At night he’d yell and make noises, so I told the wing commander that I didn’t believe he was fit to fly.’ The news got back to Weller, who ‘went crook’ at Jeff in no uncertain terms. In any case, it made no difference. Weller kept flying. ‘The next trip they sent him on, he didn’t come back,’ says Jeff.

Jeff tells me that he has never spoken of his war in such depth to anyone, which humbles me. ‘I’m sure I’ve been affected by it,’ he says. ‘We didn’t have a name for it back then. Stress disorder they call it now, or something. I’m sure I must have had it. I smoked and I drank. Sometimes even now I wake up in the middle of the night and think of things that happened, what I could have done, what I should have done.’

We wind up our meeting – he was right about the rain, which bucketed down suddenly then vanished, leaving a strange, salty smell in the air as I emerge into a much cooler Dubbo. I ask him, just as I’m leaving, about the prophecy of the clairvoyant in Bournemouth about the fall from a short height. While erecting some electric lights at home, Jeff broke both his wrists when a ladder slipped. ‘So that old lady in Bournemouth was right after all.’

JEFF PERRY