Ivanhoe, New South Wales, is a long way from the Atlantic. Though to be fair, Ivanhoe is a long way from anywhere. ‘Most people haven’t heard of it,’ Cyril Burcher tells me of the town where he was born, and it’s not hard to understand why once you try to find it on the map. Get yourself to Orange, head west to Parkes, keep on going past Condobolin and, eventually, you’ll find Ivanhoe, teetering on the edge of the outback. There wasn’t much there in Cyril’s day, nor is there now, save for a railway line that goes over to Broken Hill, and a lot of room to grow sheep. Cyril’s forebears had been just about the first white people to arrive on these flat western plains, and by the time he came along, their station, poetically named ‘Irish Lords’, had grown to a 250 000-acre expanse of very little indeed. Fitting then, that, as a pilot with the RAF’s Coastal Command, Cyril’s job would be to patrol wide open space of a different sort, the endless slate-grey waters of the North Atlantic, hunting German U-boats.
A little older than most of his fellow trainees, Cyril was twenty by the time war started in 1939, but had harboured a notion that he wanted to be a pilot ever since taking a joyride with Charles Kingsford Smith when he dropped in on Bega, all for the princely sum of ten shillings. So in 1941 Cyril left his steady job at the Commonwealth Bank and joined up.
Cyril was selected for pilot training, found it almost embarrassingly easy, and being assessed ‘average’, was granted his wish and presented with his wings in Canada after learning to fly the twin-engine Cessna Crane, an aeroplane so diabolically awful, it was said that if you could fly a Crane, you could fly anything. His only disappointment – and at the time it was a major one – was being selected for multi-engine aircraft rather than the nimble Spitfires and Hurricanes, which virtually every brash young man in blue at that time longed to fly. ‘They chose us by age, you see,’ says Cyril, who was by that stage twenty-four. ‘They reckoned the nineteen- and twenty-year-olds made the better fighter pilots, and they were right too.’
In England, Cyril came to grips with the far more friendly Airspeed Oxford at No. 11 Advanced Flying Unit at Shawbury in Shropshire before, in the middle of 1942, progressing to Hudsons, then moving to Thorney Island near Portsmouth. Here, he would begin to fly not the black-hued Lancasters of Bomber Command but American-built B-24 Liberators, with their all-white undersides, designed to merge with the clouds and mists and squalls of the Atlantic. For five years, this vast ocean stage became the scene of the longest battle of the Second World War, the hunting ground of Germany’s U-boat fleet, and their nemeses, the pilots and aircraft of RAF Coastal Command.
Liberators served in almost every theatre of the war, including, from mid-1941, the North Atlantic, where the RAF saw their potential in operating against Germany’s crippling submarine fleet. No. 86 Squadron took delivery of their Liberators in February 1943, just in time, as it happened, to be joined also by Cyril Burcher.
‘They were a lovely, easy aeroplane to fly,’ he says of the famous and versatile B-24, itself a testament to the might of American wartime industry.
The system for protecting the convoys from the air during the long Battle of the Atlantic was a three-part affair. The shorter-range Hudsons patrolled the first five hundred miles out from England, at which point the Sunderland flying boats took over for the next five hundred. Beyond this, at ranges of a thousand miles and more, deep into the heart of the Atlantic, it was the turn of the VLR – very long range – Liberators, flown by men like Cyril. These aircraft had been especially adapted for distance by having one of their two bomb bays refitted to carry extra fuel, making take-off particularly hazardous. Several crews were lost on Cyril’s squadron alone when aircraft simply failed to get airborne.
‘We’d fly five or six hours out to the convoy,’ he says, ‘another five or six flying around it, then five or six more back to base.’ This crucial development in the war at sea meant the so-called mid-Atlantic gap, or ‘killing zone’ as many of the weary merchant seamen dubbed it, was, for the first time, within range of air power. ‘At last we could cover it,’ Cyril tells me, ‘and with our long-range tanks, we’d cover it for up to four or five hours.’
Flying out of airfields in Northern Ireland as close as possible to Britain’s Western Approaches sea lanes, Cyril’s days were long, with flight times lasting up to eighteen hours at a stretch. His expanded crew sounds like a fair representation of the Empire’s wartime air effort. ‘I had a New Zealander second pilot, an Australian observer,’ he tells me, ‘English air gunners and a Canadian wireless operator.’ But the spotting was largely the responsibility of the two pilots, who at the standard patrolling height of 3000 feet had superb visibility courtesy of the Liberator’s high wing design.
From the beginning of 1943, Cyril’s primary job would be convoy escorts, flying to a pre-determined spot in the middle of the ocean, where, hopefully, beneath him he would spot the weather-battered masts and hulls of ships of all sizes, heading east towards the United Kingdom, laden with the essentials to enable a country with few resources of its own to make war: fuel, food, matériel, sulphur, steel, men. ‘Our job was to meet them and fly around the convoy and attack U-boats,’ he says simply of his role in the great drama. ‘There were quite a few of them at that stage of the Battle of the Atlantic.’
It’s a fact that many airmen who served with Coastal Command hunting U-boats went the entire war without so much as glimpsing a single one, but in that there is no shame. The ocean is after all very big, and a submarine very small, and in any case, it was figured the next best thing to finding and sinking a U-boat, which was considered extremely difficult, was to keep them submerged as much as possible, thereby cutting their speed dramatically and forcing them to expend far more fuel. Simply the presence of Coastal Command’s aircraft in the skies over the Atlantic was considered a major factor in eventually winning the battle. Cyril’s tour, however, turned out to be considerably more dramatic than that, beginning with his very first operation, in February 1943.
‘We went out to do an anti-submarine patrol in the Bay of Biscay, looking for them coming out of France and heading for the Atlantic Ocean,’ he tells me. ‘Cloud cover was down to 100 feet. So, for nine hours, that was the height I had to stay at. It was a very trying experience, and even if we’d spotted a U-boat, we couldn’t have turned around to attack it.’ As the dusk set in at the end of this exhausting ordeal, Cyril received a wireless communication to land back at Thorney Island near Portsmouth as their normal base was clouded in. The approach and landing were uneventful, but as they were taxiing, Cyril noticed the squadron CO apparently waiting for them at the end of the runway. Thinking he was simply there to greet them, he was taken aback when he was told by the agitated man, ‘You and your crew are the luckiest people to be alive. Do you know what you just did?’
Cyril looked perplexed.
‘You’ve just flown straight through the balloon barrage of Portsmouth!’
The site, close to the primary base of the Royal Navy, was, understandably, one of the most heavily defended places in Britain, complete with masses of anti-aircraft guns and a forest of barrage balloons, each tethered by a steel cable designed to slice off the wings of any low-flying aircraft. ‘In a Liberator, well, you can imagine the size of it,’ he says, still bewildered as to how he blithely managed to avoid catastrophe. But avoiding catastrophe became something of a speciality during Cyril’s highly eventful tour, and he has his own theory as to why.
As a child, Cyril was told by his grandmother that a guardian angel was watching over him, and after hearing the story of his war, full of near-misses that many times should have spelled his demise, I’m tempted to concur. Fittingly, Cyril has given the title On the Wings of an Angel to his own modestly small volume of the story of his life and wartime experiences, which I have used as a source here.
Over the course of thirty-four operations, Cyril not only sighted but attacked nearly a dozen U-boats, sank at least three, survived storms, lightning strikes and deadly wing ‘icings-up’, and had several encounters with the great liner turned wartime troopship Queen Mary, possibly even, on one occasion, preventing the famous vessel’s sinking. In the process, he earned for himself the admiration of his crew and squadron, and a well-deserved Distinguished Flying Cross. Inevitably though, his most formidable enemy was the weather. It seems there was barely a trip in which Cyril did not encounter rain, sleet, monstrous seas and the gale-force winds of the North Atlantic. Often, his crew were sick to the point of incapacitation, but he always knew that no matter how bad it was for them in the sky, it was always worse for the men on the ships of the convoys below.
‘I remember going out to a rendezvous to escort the Queen Mary,’ he tells me. ‘They were sending me Aldis lamp messages in Morse code from the bridge, but we couldn’t read them because the waves were actually breaking over the bridge.’ (To give some perspective, the 1000-foot-long Queen Mary displaces nearly 82 000 tons and sits 180 feet above the waterline.) ‘Eventually, they signalled me to patrol about 10 miles ahead of her, but I was more concerned with the ship as she was leaning over about 50 degrees. I thought she was going to capsize!’
On another trip in similarly filthy weather, the wireless operator wound out the 100-foot-long trailing aerial from its hole in the fuselage to get a radio ‘fix’ on their position. ‘All of a sudden, there was a very loud explosion,’ says Cyril. ‘It knocked out the entire crew, including myself.’ Cyril estimates that everyone inside the aircraft was out cold for up to two minutes. ‘When I came to, I was amazed we were still flying,’ he says. The aircraft, however, seemed to be locked into a large right-hand circle, and Cyril sent his engineer to investigate.
‘Skipper, there’s a huge hole in the side of the aircraft, I think we’ve been hit by lightning!’
His deduction was correct. The trailing aerial, it seemed, had served to discharge the aircraft’s current from one cloud to another and the Liberator was hit by a massive bolt of self-generated lightning. The hole created was now causing a lopsided drag on the fuselage, forcing the aeroplane to fly in a continuous loop. To counter this, the second pilot had to apply continual full left rudder to stop the swing. ‘But worst of all,’ says Cyril, ‘we lost our heating, and with over a thousand miles still to go!’
Even the regular test flights could be hazardous. One day Cyril opened up the throttles to take off when, ‘Halfway down the runway, I looked down at my instruments and I didn’t have any!’ he says. ‘They were all blank.’ Deciding to abort, he hit the brakes, which worked momentarily then failed. With a jolt, Cyril ran off the end of the runway, the aircraft going over on one wing, luckily causing only minor damage. He was, it seems, the victim of two pieces of misfortune, neither of his making. First, the ground crew had neglected to remove the canvas pitot-head cover, blanking out his instruments, and second, a motor used to boost brake pressure, which was only supposed to be switched off once the aircraft was in flight, had been disengaged way too early. ‘It was the crew’s fault,’ he says, ‘but I didn’t let on, otherwise they would have gotten into trouble.’
A month into his tour, on 17 March 1943, after having flown 900 miles through huge seas and rain squalls to meet a convoy whose escorts were under attack from a wolf pack, Cyril attacked his first U-boat. Through extensive research, he has been able to identify nearly all those he attacked, and all those he sunk. He first encountered U-439, captained by one Oberleutnant zur See Helmut von Tippelskirch, on his first command. ‘I remember spotting the wake first,’ says Cyril. Diving steeply to attack as the boat was submerging, he found his speed was far greater than it had been in practice bombing and he overshot, dropping four depth charges into the swirl of water in front of the boat. It was enough, however, to subdue it, and U-439 took no part in the attacks on that particular convoy. (Just a few weeks later, in May, Tippelskirch and all but nine of his crew would meet their demise, bizarrely, in a collision with another U-boat off the coast of Spain.)
On 6 April there occurred one of the most dramatic moments of Cyril’s tour, when at midnight they set out from their base at Aldergrove, again in appalling weather, to meet a convoy south-west of Iceland. Around dawn, they found the group of ships as planned, but also the 220-foot-long Type-VII U-boat U-632, running on the surface. ‘That was unusual,’ says Cyril. ‘I think he thought he was beyond the range of air patrols and was carrying out some maintenance.’ Dropping height to attack from cloud cover, Cyril followed the wake of the sleek grey vessel and clearly remembers seeing the German crew on the deck. ‘There were about seven of them,’ he recalls, ‘all running around trying to man the heavy guns fore and aft. I remember one of them pointing directly at me.’
Seared in his memory also is the image of a man with a beard in an officer’s cap. ‘It was obviously the captain,’ he says. ‘I distinctly remember him shaking his fist at me as a group of them disappeared down the conning tower to dive.’ At just 30 feet, Cyril hit a button on his control column and straddled the U-boat with four depth charges. ‘I could see the swirl of the conning tower just as I laid my depth charges right on it,’ he says. Quickly circling, he laid another four across the boat, and watched it shudder in the water as he banked away. ‘We weren’t sure at the time if we’d sunk it, because the weather was so bad,’ he says. Later, however, it was confirmed as a kill: U-632 was lost with all forty-eight hands. The image of the German captain shaking his fist defiantly in the final moments of his life, would, sixty years later, be recalled by Cyril for reasons he could never have imagined at the time.
While some of his fellow pilots were not seeing a single U-boat on their patrols, Cyril was finding them – and attacking them – on a regular basis. He puts it down to luck, and the exceptional eyesight of both himself and his crew. On one occasion, again near Iceland on an uncharacteristically perfect day, they had climbed to 8000 feet when Jack, Cyril’s second pilot, called out, ‘I think there’s a U-boat down there at periscope depth.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ replied Cyril, convinced that nothing so small could be spotted at such a height. Jack, however, insisted, so Cyril gave him the benefit of the doubt and descended. Nothing was seen on or under the water, but Cyril knew that a flotilla of four destroyers was in the area, and he’d been told to call them in if anything was spotted. Half an hour after reporting the possible sighting, they arrived and immediately picked up a submarine contact on their asdic (sonar). Circling above, Cyril watched, fascinated, to see how the little ships hunted in much the same ‘pack’ pattern as the U-boats themselves, descending on the position from all points of the compass, then attacking with a fury of depth charges. For their efforts, Cyril and his crew were credited with ‘half a kill’.
At 0200 hours on 12 April 1943, Cyril’s crew took off in Liberator H for Harry for a trip they were convinced was going to be a quiet one, once again escorting the Queen Mary partway across the Atlantic as it headed back to America, carrying several thousand wounded and repatriated US servicemen. ‘Nothing ever happened when our squadron escorted the Queen Mary,’ he tells me, and it was considered a milk run. This was due to the great ship’s extraordinary speed, up to 35 knots – the rate of an average speedboat – whereas the U-boats, even on the surface, could manage no more than 20. ‘The only way they could attack a ship as fast as the Queen Mary was if they happened to be directly in front of it,’ he says.
In another sense, however, the trip was anything but usual, as they had been selected to carry a new and highly secret weapon, a 600-pound magnetic homing torpedo, together with its American operator who was to evaluate it in a real attack. To accommodate this hush-hush piece of hardware, they had dispensed with all but two of their usual complement of ten depth charges to make room in the bomb bay. But there was a caveat: ‘We were expressly forbidden to deploy it against a U-boat on the surface,’ Cyril tells me, ‘just in case the attack wasn’t successful and they reported its details back to their base.’ Being armed, however, with just two depth charges was ‘next to useless’, he says. ‘You needed at least four.’
After many hours flying the 1500 miles to their designated rendezvous point in the Atlantic, Cyril spotted a large U-boat running on the surface. It was a new one, another type VII, and as Cyril was to discover, it was in no mood to run and hide. ‘We attacked hoping to release our two depth charges before it submerged,’ he says. ‘To my surprise, it remained on the surface and starting firing at us.’ Armed with four 20-millimetre Oerlikon cannons mounted on the conning tower, plus a Bofors and various other machine guns on the deck, the boat put up a tremendous fire, which shocked Cyril and his crew. ‘You could see the tracer bullets coming up and shells bursting all around us,’ he says. ‘It was pretty scary.’ He dropped his only two depth charges, which exploded close to the boat, causing it to roll, shudder and even be momentarily tossed up out of the water, but it remained unharmed.
In the face of fierce protests from his crew, Cyril then decided to attack it again. ‘They weren’t happy and we only really had a single machine gun, which was pretty useless,’ he says. Nevertheless, in Cyril went for a second pass. The German fire this time was even more intense. ‘They were more accurate with lots more flak. It’s a miracle we weren’t shot down.’ With his depth charges gone and another attack seeming pointless, Cyril’s mind turned to the secret weapon in the bomb bay, which he was forbidden to use while the U-boat was on the surface. ‘I decided to try and trick him into thinking I’d broken off the attack and to make him dive,’ he says. Banking away into a nearby rain squall, he planned to make a quick 180-degree turn and catch the German in the act of diving, at which point he would deploy the weapon.
Emerging from the other side of the squall, however, Cyril got ‘the shock of my life’ when the vast grey camouflaged bulk of the Queen Mary appeared directly below him. ‘There she was, heading straight towards the U-boat, and just a few miles away, the U-boat was heading straight towards it.’ Immediately, he ordered his navigator to send a visual Aldis lamp signal to the ship’s bridge, ‘U-boat on surface six miles directly ahead’. Barely had the message finished sending when he witnessed ‘one of the greatest sights of my life’, as all 80 000 tons of the great Queen Mary, perhaps the most famous ship afloat, executed a sharp 90-degree turn to the right. ‘That image will stay with me forever,’ he says.
Cyril was never given the chance to use the torpedo. Despite returning to the area where he’d last seen the German submarine, it was now nowhere to be found. They returned to the Queen Mary and continued escorting it for another six hours before heading back to Ireland, perhaps just having saved it from a torpedo attack. Certainly somebody high up thought so, as two days later, Cyril was granted an immediate Distinguished Flying Cross.
Years later, Cyril had the chance to meet the man who was the captain of the Queen Mary that day, Sir James Bisset, at a lunch in Sydney. Questions were asked and answered, anecdotes exchanged and Sir James was invited to sign Cyril’s logbook. ‘Thanks and good luck,’ was the sum of his somewhat perfunctory gratitude.
Cyril’s luck held through all manner of circumstances. One day in May 1943, towards the end of an escort, he sighted and attacked yet another German submarine, dropping a stick of depth charges along its wake as it dived. It escaped, though in all likelihood not undamaged. Cyril was unable to wait and confirm this, however, as his fuel was low and his relief aircraft had arrived. ‘I told the relieving pilot of the position where we’d attacked it and turned for home,’ he says. Back at Aldergrove, Cyril enquired if the relief aircraft had discovered the German vessel, only to be told that it had indeed found it, and attacked it on the surface but in the process was shot down into the sea. The entire crew was lost. Cyril was shocked. ‘It could so easily have been us,’ he says.
Not surprisingly, Cyril held his squadron’s record for the greatest number of German U-boats spotted and attacked, and remains vague about his final tally. ‘We saw thirteen, attacked twelve and as far as I know, I sunk three,’ he says. The weather, however, probably prevented that being even higher. ‘We attacked a lot of them but usually we didn’t know the results because of the weather conditions,’ he tells me. ‘The waves were so big they just blotted out any evidence of damage.’ A sense of the monstrous conditions in which he was operating can be gained from some of the operational photographs he managed to take of his attacks at sea. Thunderous skies, violent seas and, somewhere among it, the white plume of an exploding depth charge.
Cyril’s tour took him on to patrols further south to the Bay of Biscay, where his amazing knack of finding submarines, and attacking them, continued. He finished with just over a thousand hours’ operational flying time and was promised a bar to his Distinguished Flying Cross, which oddly never materialised. In March 1944, he was delighted to hear that he’d been selected to ferry newly purchased B-24 Liberators from the factory in America to Australia, which meant that he’d be home far sooner than he could have anticipated. But perhaps his guardian angel was telling Cyril that, finally, enough was enough, for soon after his first ferry job was completed, he developed a duodenal ulcer, which promptly ended his flying career. But he was home, and he was safe.
His return to civilian life seems to have been relatively straightforward, save for the ulcer, which he was told had been brought on by the stress of flying, and which took three years to heal. But no nightmares, no depression and few regrets. His book, written in the same open, matter-of-fact style in which he speaks, dwells little on reflection. I ask him if he ever thinks about the dozens of young German sailors who perished at his hands. Does that not haunt him sometimes?
‘But that’s war, you see,’ he says. ‘It’s a terrible thing, but that’s what happens in war, you kill people.’
Sixty years later, however, one of those sailors, in a sense, did come back to haunt him. In April 2007, Cyril was surprised to receive a letter mailed from Reston, near Washington DC in the United States, from a woman he had never met. It began: ‘Hello Mr Burcher, it is difficult for me to write this letter to you . . .’ and continued for several paragraphs, signed at the bottom, ‘Inge Molzahn’. The letter told the story of the captain of U-boat U-632, Hans Karpf, lost in the Atlantic along with his entire crew, on 6 April 1943. Karpf was Inge Molzahn’s father, but they never met. ‘My father had left home and shipped out on March 15th from Brest. I was born a few days later, but never saw him,’ she wrote. Inge had grown up in Germany and Argentina wondering about the father she never knew, and eventually began to put together the story of his life and naval career, even to the extent of tracking down the man listed as having sunk his boat, 86 Squadron’s Flight Lieutenant Cyril Burcher from Australia. ‘I would like to hear from you. By finding out about you and your plane it closes the chapter.’ Cyril, though somewhat taken aback, was more than happy to oblige and wrote back immediately.
Inge had long pondered if her father ever knew of her existence, and after much research, tracked down a signal in the German government archives, sent by the navy to the captain of U-632, congratulating him on the birth of his child, ‘born without a periscope’, so it said.
‘So at least he knew he had a daughter,’ says Cyril. This remarkable exchange was only the beginning of a story which developed into a firm friendship between Cyril and Inge’s family, who have now visited each other in several parts of the world and still keep in touch to this day. ‘It even turned out that her father’s and my birthday were the same day, 14 May,’ he says, giving away, for the first time, a slight touch of emotion in his voice. ‘I think that more or less created a bond between us.’
86 Squadron Coastal Command B-24 pilot Cyril Burcher, suited-up for another anti-submarine patrol in the wild north Atlantic, 1943. (Picture courtesy of Cyril Burcher)