Table Of ContentCONTENTS
Preface
George Smith
Cliff Sullivan
Cy Borscht
Ed Crabtree
David Morland
Stan Pascoe
John Crago
Jeff Perry
Murray Adams
George Clissold
Cyril Burcher
Joe Barrington
Stuart ‘Snow’ Davis
Ron Benson
John Allen
Laurie Larmer
Nat Gould
Rex Kimlin
Sid Handsaker
Dick Dakeyne
Post Script
About the Author
Actor, writer and broadcaster Michael Veitch began his career in television
comedy programs before freelancing as a columnist and arts reviewer for
newspapers and magazines. For four years he presented Sunday Arts, the
national arts show on ABC television, and has broadcast regularly across
Australia on ABC radio. He has produced two books indulging his life-long
interest in the aircraft and airmen of the Second World War, Flak and Fly as well
as The Forgotten Islands in which he explores the little-known islands of Bass
Strait. In 2015, he began touring a one-man stage version of Flak nationally.
PREFACE
Looking back at it now, I remember – at least I think I remember – in the
moment before it happened, that I was laughing.
Surely not.
Laughing?
Yet that’s how I recall it, in as much as I recall anything of that day with any
clarity.
The images, after all, are blurred; the timeline unclear. A year later, the whole
thing now seems distant, remote; a series of images sealed inside their own
dream-scape, but inchoate, like paragraphs rearranged by a toddler, or a jigsaw
puzzle with missing pieces. But which pieces?
The harder I close my eyes and try to coerce my sluggish memory back to that
cold, clear early winter’s afternoon amid the tall trees and the bluish light, the
more the moments scatter before me like moths. And after doing what I can to
bend them into some kind of order, I am simply left, once again, to contemplate
the strange and disconnected pictures of that memorable but unremembered day.
Yet, is this perhaps what memory is? No convenient metronomic timeline, but
moments, flashing vividly for an instant in the brain’s electric palette, connected,
ultimately, to nothing but themselves?
*
After several years interviewing men who fought in the air during the Second
World War, I have developed a pattern in my self-appointed task of recording
World War, I have developed a pattern in my self-appointed task of recording
their experiences. The start is always the same: an exchange of pleasantries, the
settling-in to a living room or retirement unit; accepting the cup of tea which is
almost always offered. Then I begin. ‘Tell me, where were you born?’ Always
the same question. Let them know it’s all about them, that I am there to listen,
and hungry to learn.
He doesn’t suspect it, yet, but I’m searching him out. Sifting for his story,
gambling on how much of it he is prepared to share with me. Will I be given a
dispassionate narrative of facts and dates, or will this former pilot, bomb aimer
or flying boat navigator take me back seventy years to the maw of war?
Sometimes, I will be privy to memories that have not stirred for decades,
long-dormant terrors that will break both of us into a sweat. Some of the men I
speak to become reluctant and elusive; others open up like time machines
transporting my imagination with a phrase or a recollection. Perhaps it’s the
description of a colour, or the nuances of a conversation brought back to life
after seven decades. Or even a smell, as in the case of one former bomber pilot
who speaks of his aircraft being hit by lightning one night over Holland. It left,
he says, ‘a strange, tingling, stale milk kind of smell’.
Sometimes I must gently cajole, drag the record needle back to the part he
seemed to skip, or hide. At other times I will push it forward a little when the
timeline wanders. Many times I will check the recorder lest – God forbid – I
should lose a moment of what I am hearing.
It seems I have been indulging in other people’s memories all my life.
Certainly, at least, since before the writing, when the hidden purpose of a
lifetime’s obsession – for years clumsy and unformed – finally showed itself. As
a kid, I would forgo normal childhood interests, preferring instead to engage in
conversation with some of the tens of thousands of men, then barely out of
middle age, who had taken part in the Second World War. Particularly the
airmen. I would appear to them, this strange child, solemn and inquisitive, boldly
intruding into the violent events of their youth, eager to extract some flavour of
their war. Perhaps my age to them was a little disarming, but they spoke to me,
and I learned to ask the right questions.
*
Could I really have been laughing? Surely not. Yet, that’s how I remember it in
the perfectly framed half-second before the fall of the tree, before the tall
messmate – Eucalyptus obliqua – with all its springy kinetic energy and twenty
metres of height, tilting on its severed base which I had cut – badly as it turned
out – came crashing down on top of me.
Perhaps not so much a laugh, but a moment of clarity. An instant in which I
foresaw the whole thing: the mistake in hastily cutting the wrong tree, its fall, the
ambulance, the hospital, the metal, the scars, the crutches and the rehabilitation.
As if the whole thing had already played out from start to finish and I was there
merely to observe, an audience to a macabre piece of theatre.
The images, though disconnected, are clear: the trunk of the big tree passing
me on its way to the ground a mere hand’s width from my face. Why so close?
Why this odd angle? I still recall the exquisite details of the tree trunk – mottled
grey spots with a touch of pink, framed in my vision like a photograph – just as
it fell, catching my left thigh, pile-driving it into my bursting ankle, ramming my
shattered tibia and fibula into the soil, and pinning me under its ton of weight.
Of the actual break, however – I mean the moment of it – I have no memory at
all. No thud, no sickening crack, certainly no shock of pain. Not yet anyway. I
was simply on the ground, under a tree, wondering how on earth my boot had
managed to come off my leg, before realising my foot was still inside it. Then,
suddenly, I was very, very cold.
It certainly doesn’t sound like much to laugh about. Perhaps in the hospital
under the long and lingering bouts of anaesthetic, or the deranged morphine haze
in which I remained, seemingly, for weeks, everything became warped,
overcooked, like dreams in a fever.
*
The most physically traumatic event of my life took place barely a year ago, and
already my memories of it are confused and fading. How then will I remember it
should I be around in, say, another thirty years, or forty? If I live to be the age of
Jeff Perry, a Wellington bomber pilot who survived his tour of thirty operations
at a time when it was almost a statistical impossibility to do so, I will have
carried the memories in my head for forty-eight years. How will I recall them
then? Will the drama of my little injury, caused by nothing but my own foolish
misadventure, diminish across the wider landscape of my life, or will it amplify,
misadventure, diminish across the wider landscape of my life, or will it amplify,
its colours more vivid?
The quiet generation that fought the Second World War are, finally,
heartbreakingly, leaving us, and taking their memories with them. As we
farewelled – so recently it seems – the last living remnants of the First World
War, so we will soon mourn those from the Second. It is a parting I have
anticipated, and dreaded, all my life.
They leave us at a time when the world has rarely seemed more uncertain or
more neurotic, and we will soon be left to simply speculate on how much their
courage, their modesty and their humour might have assuaged the runaway
anxieties of early twenty-first-century life. We will soon – all of us – be orphans
in their wake.
But they are not gone yet. Not quite. As the years 1939–45 continue to emerge
from the cocoon of shock and silence that enveloped the early post-war decades,
more and more books, television shows and films on the subject are voraciously
consumed in the furnace of popular culture. The incomprehensible scale of the
events themselves are slowly digested, but the remaining men who saw it with
their own eyes are largely ignored. Perhaps it is assumed their stories have all
been told, and it is now up to the scholars and film-makers to make sense of the
catastrophe. But they have not all been told.
Like a volcano exploding somewhere over the horizon, the booms of the
Second World War continue to echo down the decades. If the French Revolution
could prompt one historian, when asked to comment on its legacy two hundred
years later, to reply, ‘Well, it’s a little early to tell,’ the reverberations of the
Second World War are set to buffet us for a long time to come. And yet still
today, we are fortunate enough to have a few of those who can tell us what it felt
like, sounded like, smelled like.
Now in their ninth decade, how do the extraordinary events of their youth
stand out against the landscape of a long life? To those lucky ones who are, for
the moment, beating the odds of time, and whose faculties have remained intact,
have the memories become more vivid, or faded to a kind of sepia? How were
these men’s lives shaped by the war? What did it mean?
It is somewhere close to midnight of the day when the men of the Second
World War will still be with us. I have met just a few of them, and the following
are just a few of their stories, snatched from the darkness in the nick of time.
Description:'It is somewhere close to midnight on the clock when the men who fought the Second World War will still be with us. I have met just a few of them, sometimes goading them to reveal their experiences, at other times being simply a conduit to the river of their memories, sensing, on occasion, a kind of
