Flying your first solo in a Wirraway on your twenty-first birthday was, for Sid, one hell of a present. He was a complete natural, but a few weeks earlier hadn’t dared to dream of ever becoming a pilot, convinced his modest education standard wouldn’t even qualify him for the training. Instead, he put down for wireless operator / air gunner. His talent in the Tiger Moth, however, as well as his good work ethic, had not gone unnoticed. ‘One day,’ he tells me, ‘my teacher, a pilot officer, just walked up with my form and asked why I’d put in for wireless / air gunner. I told him, but he just said, “You can do better than that. What about pilot?” So he just crossed out “wireless / air gunner” and wrote “pilot” next it. So, a pilot is what I became.’ Sid is still amazed by it today.
Being forced to then spend a couple of years flying Fairey Battles at Evans Head Bombing and Gunnery School would have driven many a budding fighter pilot to despair, but Sid didn’t seem to mind a bit. He simply loved flying, and would have been happy remaining there for the duration. Eventually, however, the wheels of military bureaucracy turned and caught up with him, and with an uncommonly large number of flying hours under his belt, Sid boarded a ship and headed to England, stepping off the Queen Elizabeth in September 1943.
Being introduced to the Spitfire was something Sid has never forgotten. It was an aeroplane, he says, you almost felt a part of. ‘With the Spitfire,’ he says, ‘it seemed as if you only had to think about what you were going to do and it would do it. If you thought about putting your left wing down, it went down. If you thought about doing a loop, it’d do a loop etc.’
Sid began his brief tour late in the war, arriving at the all-Australian 451 Squadron at Matlaske in Norfolk in April 1945 and completing three operational sorties. He is, however, the only pilot I have met who remained in post-war Europe for an extended period and gained a firsthand, unique insight into Germany in the immediate wake of the Nazi regime. First though, brief as it was, there was his tour to get through, and among his three trips was one that he’ll always remember.
I have spoken to several bomber men who took part in the famous raid on the German island of Heligoland on 18 April 1945, where the docks, submarine pens and town were all attacked by nearly a thousand Lancasters and Halifaxes, but have never met one of their fighter escorts. In fact, no less than twenty-two squadrons of Spitfires and Mustangs were also up that day, and one of those was 451. There was no enemy fighter activity to contend with, but the flak was, as ever, accurate.
‘We were sitting up at 25 000 feet, and the bombers were coming in between 10–15 000 feet,’ Sid tells me. He shows me in a book some ‘before and after’ photographs of this rocky outcrop in a corner of the North Sea which was once in fact a British possession. During the Second World War, the Germans built U-boat pens and significant anti-aircraft defences here, which in 1945 were deemed worthy of destruction by the RAF. The attack didn’t stop at the naval base or even the town. As Sid’s images show, the raid reduced this pleasant rocky island to little more than a cratered moonscape. The civilian population – safe at least in natural-rock bomb shelters – were evacuated the next day. Heligoland remained uninhabitable for nearly a decade after the war.
‘The bombers were hitting the submarine pens and copping all the flak, then for some reason I copped a burst underneath me,’ he says. With a sickening jolt, Sid and his Spit were thrown upwards, ‘like someone had kicked the bottom of my chair’. Then the five blades of the propeller of his Spitfire XIV suddenly windmilled to a stop. ‘So there I was, no engine, 50 miles out from the coast with only ocean beneath me.’
Instantly, however, Sid’s training kicked in. He closed down the throttle, then reached down to the awkwardly placed fuel cocks in the lower right-hand corner of the cockpit to switch off the 90-gallon drop-tanks and go onto the main. ‘Then I reset everything to start the motor, put throttle and revs at a certain setting, then I had to roll her over on her back and put her nose straight down.’ Sid had performed this somewhat terrifying emergency procedure countless times in practice, but never in battle, and never with a possibly damaged engine. The centrifugal force of the wind over the propeller blades would, like push-starting a car, throw the enormous Griffon engine into life. ‘Well, that’s what you hoped it would do, at least,’ adds Sid. Luckily, it fired, coughed back into life, and as Sid says, ‘bingo’.
A few days later, his logbook records, ‘No more op trips. War has had it!’ Sid’s job, however, was far from over. Being a relatively late arrival, he was put down to accompany the squadron on its five-month stint in newly vanquished Germany as part of the British Air Forces of Occupation, where he would be based primarily at Gatow on the outskirts of Berlin. Flying over the airfields of the now defunct Luftwaffe, Sid remembers seeing ‘thousands and thousands of German aircraft, 109s and Focke-Wulfs etc., all lined up. I think they just got a bulldozer and went through the lot.’ He reckons he would quite like to have had a go at flying one, but one of the deepest impressions left on him was the scale of the destruction he saw.
‘I really don’t think I can describe what the damage was like,’ he tells me with a certain awe. ‘It changed my whole outlook on life.’ In bombed and battered England, Sid had been taught to hate ‘the Hun’, but found it difficult to do so once he saw ordinary people struggling in what was left of their country. Once when playing football on the frozen ground, he slipped and broke a bone, landing him a stint in hospital. ‘The German girls would come in to do the cleaning and you’d hear them harmonising as they sung,’ he says. ‘Just quietly so as not to wake us. It was the most beautiful thing.’ This capacity to sing when around them lay ruins left a deep impression on the young man from Newcastle. ‘At the airfield, there were hundreds of them working on it. At the end of the day, I’d sit in the window and listen to them singing perfectly as they went home.’
At night, he would sometimes ride with his fellow pilots to a club or bar through the shattered Berlin suburbs in trucks. ‘On a clear night, you could ride through these streets and all you’d see were gaunt, burned-out walls of buildings with the moon shining through them,’ he tells me. Only very occasionally, the glow of a single kerosene lamp from a cellar would indicate evidence of life.
‘There were signs as you came into the city saying “No fraternisation”, but if you had chocolates or cigarettes,’ says Sid, ‘you were a millionaire.’ On the post-war black market, a single Lucky Strike cigarette could fetch about five marks. The Americans would give Sid cartons of them. ‘At the market you could give someone a carton and people would be fighting to give you money in these great wads of banknotes,’ he says. ‘I never counted it, but they were always scrupulously honest,’ he says. For those who wanted to take advantage of it, exploiting the defeated Germans was easy. Women greatly outnumbered the men, and few of them had very much of anything, let alone luxuries.
‘They didn’t even have things like soap,’ Sid tells me. ‘People think I probably took advantage of that, but I didn’t drink and I didn’t smoke and I was engaged back home to be married. I was probably a bit sanctimonious, I suppose.’
Coming out of a club, the conquering airmen were always followed by small children, requesting treats, cigarettes, anything. ‘The smokers would throw a butt their way and there’d be a scramble for it,’ says Sid. ‘They’d open them up and make fresh cigarettes out of them. It was pitiful.’
A moment that stays with Sid to this day is being discharged from hospital. On crutches, he hobbled towards a village which was under a foot of snow. As he made his way along the frozen pavement, he saw standing ahead of him a sole German private, in uniform, missing his right arm. As he passed, the German recognised Sid as an officer, stood to attention, and gave him a solemn left-arm salute. ‘I had to recover from the crutches to return his salute,’ he says. ‘I can’t tell you why but that really shook me.’ Reaching the village, he saw, perhaps for the first time, thin children, boys, girls, women, but very few men. Suddenly he saw his own family in their faces, his brothers and sisters; nieces and cousins. ‘These were the Germans, the people we were supposed to kill. It still gets me, thinking of it,’ he says. Sid couldn’t bring himself to enter the village, and turned back.
Berlin, like the rest of Germany at war’s end, was divided into zones of jurisdiction under the four victorious Allied powers, as it would continue to be for decades. While there was little distinction between the French, British and American zones, the Russian sector was a different story. ‘I used to see them using oxen to pull carts down the streets of their zone,’ Sid tells me. It was also not a place, at the dawn of the Cold War, to find yourself uninvited. ‘You had to be careful taking off,’ he continues. ‘As soon as we pulled up our wheels we were over the Russian zone and they’d fire at you!’
It took a while for Sid to break the habit of constantly scanning the skies for German fighters that were now confined to the ground, but he settled into a routine that was little more, he says, than ‘keeping our hand in’.
Flying once or twice a week to show the flag to both the defeated populace and, increasingly, the Russians, Sid would do the odd bit of practice bombing or strafing, but it must have seemed an anticlimax after the stress of operations. But there was still the weather or accidents to claim you, even though the guns were now silent.
Flying through cloud on one occasion, Sid did his best to stay in close formation to his section leader who had his eye on his instruments. Soon, however, all he could see was white. Knowing there was, somewhere in the area, a high mountain range, he climbed as high and as quickly as he could. At 10 000 feet, he was hopelessly lost. Then, beneath him, a break in the cloud. If he put his nose down and emerged from the bottom of it, he might get a clue as to where he was. Down and down Sid now went, watching his altimeter drop away rapidly. At an alarmingly low 1500 feet, he realised that the gap was far closer to the ground than he’d thought. ‘When I came out of the cloud base,’ he says, ‘I was so low I can remember making out the details of a single fern tree.’ Once again climbing, Sid did the sensible thing and radioed base for a bearing.
Sid arrived back home in May 1946, after four years and one month in the air force. His adjustment, he says, was a difficult one. ‘I had an ulcer that I didn’t get rid of for twenty years, just from the stress. And I’d gotten used to the air force way of life. For four years they told you what to do, gave you your food, your clothes and you didn’t have to think for yourself.’ As almost all of the airmen I have met have told me, after the war, nobody wanted to know about what they had gone through. Few questions were asked and almost none were answered. People simply wanted to move on.
Sid’s healing came much later, after nursing the demons of what he’d seen and felt in post-war Germany, when a re-injury of the ankle he’d broken while on the squadron proved a catalyst to recovery. As well as qualifying him for a war-related injury, his doctor suggested he tackle the depression which had visited him regularly since the war. ‘They told me I should see a psychiatrist,’ he tells me. ‘It was a bit like a red rag to a bull at first, but it turned out to be the best thing I ever did.’ The pride that had prevented him from contacting Veterans Affairs abated, and he came to see that he was in fact thoroughly deserving of the modest help a free and grateful society should offer men such as he.
Recently, Sid was asked to talk to a professional group about his experiences flying Spitfires, and it proved to be a revelation. ‘They couldn’t get enough of me,’ he says. He’s now given a number of talks, all to fascinated responses, and the experience of doing so has been positive. A trip back to England in 2009 was less successful, rekindling the stress of war which for decades had, as is the case with so many of the men who flew, lain dormant in his memory.
Spitfire pilot Sid Handsaker, in a newly-defeated Germany, 1945. Seeing the plight of the civilian population changed his attitude to war forever. (Picture courtesy of Sid Handsaker)