Chapter Five

Back in Bournemouth the gunners were immediately mustered and advised to pack. Hasty farewells to our friends amongst the pilots and observers jolted us out of the happy holiday mood we had lapsed into and reminded us that the war was still on.

The training station was situated on the coast of Wales, near Cardiff.1 On arrival we were told by the CO we were in for an intensive three weeks’ training that would take priority over everything else. In the interests of concentration and study the sergeants’ mess was placed out of bounds.

On the first day we were joined by a New Zealander, a fair-headed, willowy type who had missed the previous course through illness. He was immediately christened Kiwi. He was a happy, effervescent bloke with a perpetual grin. Hally and Blondie took a great shine to him and he immediately joined The Mob. In a matter of a week he was so completely accepted you’d have thought he’d been with us from the beginning.

Classes started at 8 am, really 6 am as English summer time was two hours ahead of standard time.2 On the first day the squadron leader in charge of the course announced that special postings would go to the first twelve on final examinations. He didn’t state what this particular prize was but intimated that it would be worth going for.

That night Happy had a brainwave. He called our crowd together and said, ‘Why don’t we sew this thing up, because if we can get among the first twelve we can all stick together.’

Only Mac and Bourke weren’t sold on the idea. Mac reckoned there was a catch in it somewhere. He was finally won over, but Bourke flatly refused to do any extra study as he declared he could find more interesting things to do. Thus the final line-up was Hally, Blondie, Smithy, Gunner, Happy, Mac, Kiwi and myself.

The main subjects were air technique, aircraft recognition, the hydraulic system of an aeroplane as affecting turrets, a complete study of the .303 machine gun, practical gunnery and firing at targets from aircraft. The latter was supposed to cover a third of the course.

Aircraft recognition consisted of throwing photographs of various aircraft from a projector onto a screen, where they were left for a matter of two or three seconds. In this period you decided what the particular plane was. To confuse the issue, the photos included German, Italian and a number of our own planes. But I never by night found an aircraft that obligingly silhouetted itself so that I could say with certainty, ‘Ah … a Messerschmitt 109.’ However, no-one knew this at the time and we laboured diligently to commit the photos to memory.

In every gunnery course I ever attended, one main subject was the detection and rectifying of the twelve stoppages of the .303 machine gun. Mechanically minded air gunners took these in their stride. The procedure was that you carried out a series of tests which, like Sherlock Holmes’s deductions, covered all possibilities till the correct stoppage was found, then applied the counter to correct it. I had no mechanical leanings whatsoever and found that my endeavours usually meant barked knuckles and, in many instances, the danger of losing the end of a finger. Actually, I never heard of anyone rectifying a stoppage in the limited space of a turret, because while you were struggling to fix the stoppage, who was supposed to do the watching?

In flying tactics, we learnt that fighters had a well-defined plan of attack called a curve of pursuit, in which they followed certain steps. In theory, this consisted of, first, the positioning period, when the attacker flew a parallel course some fifteen hundred yards behind to the right or left of the aircraft, estimating the course and speed of the other plane.

Having assessed this, if he was on the bomber’s starboard or right wing he would bank, drop his port or left wing, and start his attack towards the tail of his target. At approximately eight hundred yards he would straighten up, pull his sights on to the target, drop his right wing and come in for the attack proper. To nullify this, as soon as he banked the second time, the gunner who had been watching and giving a running commentary to his pilot, knew the enemy was committed to attack and ready to open fire.

At six hundred yards the gunner would give the command ‘Turn starboard, go’ at which the bomber pilot threw the bomber into a violent right turn. If everything had been estimated correctly, the fighter pilot, already launched on his final thrust, would be unable to turn, and travelling at a hundred and fifty miles per hour faster than the bomber, would go skidding past its tail. The gunner, estimating distance on his illuminated sight at six hundred yards, was supposed to open fire ahead of the plane so that it passed through his fire.

An easily understood simile would be a greyhound coming in from the right rear of a rabbit making a vicious burst intending to pick up the bunny which immediately swerves right. The dog, already committed to his lunge, cannot stop his rush and skids past the victim’s rear.

In addition to his running commentary while all this was going on, the gunner, in an endeavour to down his adversary, had to estimate the attacking plane’s overtaking speed; that is, if the bomber was doing two hundred miles an hour and the fighter three hundred, this was a hundred miles an hour, so that he allowed two complete radials of his gunsight for every fifty miles an hour ahead of the attacking aircraft. In such an instance he would allow two radials and when the fighter did his final roll seven to eight hundred yards out, he would open fire.

To bring his target into his cone of fire he had to allow for proper deflection, and in addition to making corrections for bullet trail and gravity drop (the bullet, as it left the aircraft and met air resistance had a tendency to swing away from the target and naturally had a downward gravity pull) the competent gunner would allow a certain amount of radials in front or ahead of his target and shoot upwards so that the bullet trail and gravity drop were compensated for.

I would say it was in deflection shooting that ninety per cent of gunners failed. It must be borne in mind that most of these young fellows came from cities and had never handled a firearm before.

In the lull between shearing seasons during the Depression, I had once joined up with a professional shooter who was employed on a western New South Wales station clearing out what was termed ‘vermin’. For this work we got our tucker and the bounty which went with the heads of eaglehawks and ears of wild pigs. We also shot kangaroos for their skins. Economic necessity dictated that you got the maximum result for a minimum of bullets, and I reckon it took me six months to become a really accurate shot, where I could both hit and drop a fast-moving target.

Even with this experience I found when it came to ‘towed target practice’ (a fighter plane towing a canvas drogue behind it on a long rope), in my three efforts my results were only twenty, twenty-three and twenty-five per cent of hits. The gunner sat in the tail of an antiquated Whitley bomber and had to estimate the approach of the target and fire bursts at it. This result didn’t seem particularly good to me until the instructors informed me that half of the course didn’t score a hit, and a lot of the others had less than five per cent. With these results, how the hell could you expect these young fellows to hit a plane moving a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles faster and manned by an experienced pilot bent on blowing them out of the sky?

On their practical gunners’ training we were supposed to do a total of nine flights and fire approximately eighteen hundred rounds of ammunition. However, nearly every day fogs and mist rolled in from the cold Irish Sea and either stopped these flights or caused their cancellation when the planes were already in the air. Thus, at the end of the course, I had completed only three trips and fired six hundred rounds. In addition, the course comprised the use of a cine-camera gun against actual attacks by fighter aircraft, but due to poor visibility and the bad weather this was never carried out. These restrictions meant we did only approximately one-third of practical gunnery.

Despite the nose to the grindstone technique we still had time for pleasure. On the first weekend we were granted leave for the Saturday and Sunday and found some eleven miles from the camp was a holiday watering place that, although not as large or as beautiful as Bournemouth, combined a lot of the attractions of that place, together with a few extra ones. I was later to find it was like a miniature Blackpool. Here the boys found themselves as popular as ever with the local and visiting females. Some of the Welsh gallants, however, took a dim view of these foreign intruders who dallied with their girl-friends and expressed their resentment in the use of toil-toughened fists so that a few bloody noses and black eyes resulted.

In spite of the local skirmishes that often involved the innocent and guilty alike, we grew to like and respect these hard-working Welshmen, who, once honour was satisfied, extended a warm welcome to us in their working-men’s clubs and in the local pubs.

Over the last week of the course, under Happy’s tuition we forsook the fleshpots and concentrated on extra study. We had the blessing and assistance of various instructors who were taken with our group’s idea of sticking together. When the exams came off we sat together and gave each other a little moral and unofficial assistance. When the results were announced it was found all except Mac were in the first twelve.

The special prize was then announced as a direct posting to an operational squadron in Bomber Command. Hally, on learning this, said to Mac, ‘I’ll fix this for you. I’ll have a word with Tait (a tall serious South Australian) and see if he’ll change with you, as I feel certain he won’t want to come with us low-heels.’ Mac didn’t seem enthusiastic. Hally, however, went ahead, and after some discussion got Tait to agree to the exchange provided the CO was willing. We expected Mac to show deep appreciation of these endeavours on his behalf, but he reacted in the opposite direction, backing and filling and showing a marked disinclination to join the crowd.

Finally Blondie exploded, ‘You’re mucking about like a girl with no pants on. Do you want to be with us or not?’

Put on the spot, Mac then agreed diffidently to be in it.

Hally said, ‘I can’t make this bastard out. Here’s me working myself to a standstill and all he’s done is mess around.’

As Mac and I were walking back to the mess, I said, ‘What the hell’s wrong with you? Anyone would think you didn’t want to be with us.’

There was silence for a while, then he said, ‘To tell the truth, John, I don’t.’

I looked at him in surprise. ‘You’re kidding,’ I said.

‘No, the main reason why I don’t want to go to this particular posting is that I’m not a fighting man. I’m not like Hally, Blondie, Smithy and yourself and the rest of The Mob. I’ve never had a fight in my life. I’m such a coward I faint at the sight of blood.’

I looked at his long sad face and mournful eyes and said, ‘Arr, balls.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s fair dinkum. I’m no hero. I wish I had enough guts like Clarkey to try to get out of this bloody mess.’

Listening to my companion I realised he was dead serious and said, ‘For Christ’s sake cheer up, Mac. You’ll feel different when you get on to the squadron and into a crew.’

‘That’s another thing,’ he declared, ‘We shouldn’t be going on to an operational squadron. What type of training have we had? Two weeks in Australia where we learnt nothing and three weeks here with practically no gunnery work. Why, it’s the equivalent of giving a foot-slogger a three week course leaving out the rifle drill, and sticking him into the front line. I never scored a hit on the target and neither did seventy per cent of the others. We’ve done an elementary course on air gunnery, left out the essential practical parts, and they’re posting us direct to an operational squadron. It will be sheer bloody murder.’

‘But,’ I protested, ‘we’ll get more training there.’

‘Do you think we will?’ he asked mournfully.

‘We’re a moral to,’ I declared, ‘only it’ll be with your own crew. Cheer up, you old bastard.’

Afterwards I gave his words some thought and decided there was a lot of truth in them. An interesting point, I realised, was that whereas they would scrub a pilot, observer or WAG at the drop of a hat, no matter how poorly a gunner performed he still stayed on course.

Clarkey, I knew, had made no attempt to pass the examination and, prior to this had pleaded air-sickness, vomiting on the few flights he had been on. With his record of malingering, the medical staff had sent him off in an Anson with a doctor on either side. Unable to put his fingers down his throat he had shown no signs of sickness and was passed.

When the course was completed, due to our lack of practical training, the squadron leader made an application for an extension of the course from Training Command, which was refused. He was so angered at this decision that in the remarks in our log books at the end of the course report he wrote: ‘Extension of course requested but refused.’3

The other four place-getters, making the dozen, were a tall, studious South Australian named Drake, a skinny little fellow from Western Australia, a bloke called Sherwin from Melbourne who was so good-looking he was almost effeminate, and a dark Italian-looking joker called Martin. They were a quiet quartet. We soon found they were brothers under the skin, however, and they were assimilated into The Mob.

A week prior to our exams, Gunner had captured a harmless green grass snake about 14 inches long. This little fellow, which he nicknamed Pancho, had round googoo eyes and took kindly to captivity, lived in the pocket of his master’s battle jacket, and at a whistle of command would poke his head out to see what was going on. He drank milk and beer with complete impartiality and swallowed with gusto the various insects the boys collected for him so that at the end of the course he had developed a spare tyre. A deal of amusement was had by his owner with WAAFs and other females who crossed his path.

The morning after our exams were completed we were mustered for a full medical. The procedure consisted of passing through various check-points, the last being a short-arm inspection, before a very near-sighted medical corporal, with the thickest pair of bifocals we had ever seen. When we got to this myopic, we had to drop our strides, pull up our shirts and he would then conduct a minute examination at about two inches range of the chest, tummy and finally the privates, the latter being held up to facilitate examination.

Gunner was in the middle of the parade and word got around that he was going to offer Pancho for inspection. When his turn came the corporal started his usual close-sighted viewing of his chest and stomach, then brought his glasses within a couple of inches of Pancho’s wriggling head.

For a few seconds, his head and eyes moved with the undulating snake. Then, as he suddenly realised that this penis was behaving in a most unusual manner, he let out a startled squawk and fell backwards.

At this the whole course collapsed in screams of laughter and even the head medical officer, who was an irritable old cuss and had ‘had’ Australians, laughed too.

When Bourke followed, the corporal viewed his generous offering with obvious distrust. Someone said, ‘He must think it’s a python,’ and there was another roar of laughter.