No Flight from the Cage: The Compelling Memoir of a Bomber Command Prisoner of War during the Second World War

Chapter 1

I was in bed with measles when Neville Chamberlain declared war on Nazi Germany and I heard on the radio the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, announce that therefore Australia was also at war with Germany. Those were the days when Empire came first and the Dominions naturally sprang to the assistance of the Mother Country. I wrote at once to the Royal Australian Navy offering my service. I had had a hankering for the Navy from the age of six. When I was about nine I carved ‘Admiral Lord Calton Younger’ on the concrete wall of our house in Kerang, a town of about two-thousand people, one hundred and eighty miles north of Melbourne, where I spent most of my boyhood. I had intended to apply to the Navy at the age of thirteen, but by then I had the writing bug and decided against it. In 1938, aged sixteen, I was tempted when a special intake of cadets to be sent to Dartmouth for training was advertised. I obtained and completed an application form but again the writing bug got in the way. Also, I was enjoying my last year at Melbourne Boys’ High School, where I was a prefect, appointed rather surprisingly, as I had been a student there only since May 1937, when my father sold his pharmacy and we moved to Melbourne.

The ambition to write manifested itself when I was ten and I began my first novel, The Capture of Fung Su, the Pirate. I remember sitting on my mother’s bed one Sunday morning and reading the first chapter to her. Mother had been an English teacher and her only comment was, ‘Too many adjectives, Cal.’ It took me a year of Sunday afternoons, using the typewriter at my father’s pharmacy to type the manuscript. Two more novels were never typed and I gave the manuscripts to my girlfriend of the time.

I left Melbourne High School with great regret at seventeen. I could have done another year at school or gone to Melbourne University but the great depression had hit my parents hard and they could afford neither. The Melbourne Herald promised me a cadetship when I turned eighteen, but I needed to start earning. I got a job in the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, intending to stay but a few months, but then came the outbreak of war and this time the Navy won. They acknowledged my letter and told me I would be called up in due course, but I heard nothing more and when I turned eighteen on 27 November, I applied to the Royal Australian Air Force. The Empire Air Training Scheme had just been announced.

The peacetime procedure was still being followed and I was interviewed by a board of five senior officers. They approved of my belonging to a rowing club and were impressed that I knew the details of a new American aircraft, the Cobra, which I had mugged up that morning. Had I ever flown, they wanted to know. Proudly I told them I had flown with Kingford-Smith in the Southern Cross. The five shilling flight was a present from my parents for my fourteenth birthday. They had obtained the permission of the headmaster to allow me the day off from school, but they needn’t have bothered as the whole school truanted. One of the many questions, ‘Who was the founder of Singapore?’ I failed to answer, but it came to me as I left the room. I turned back, opened the door, put my head in and said, ‘It was Sir Stamford Raffles.’ As I walked away I heard them laughing. A stringent medical examination followed and my eyes let me down; I could not be a pilot but I was to be mustered as an observer, as navigator-bombaimers were then called. A police officer called on my parents to make sure I was a reasonably well behaved young man and that I had not espoused Communism. Walking in the city one day, I saw a stationary truck, festooned with recruiting banners, with a man standing at a microphone. He began to sing and there was no mistaking the voice. It was the wonderful bass-baritone voice of Peter Dawson. I listened to an exuberant outpouring of ‘Boots, Boots, Boots’. Dawson wiped his brow, and forgetting to turn off the microphone, roared: ‘That ought to get the buggers in.’ I felt rather smug. ‘This bugger is in already,’ I said to myself.

The Empire Air Training Scheme came into being in April 1940 but many, mostly older, men had applied for the RAAF before my eighteenth birthday made me eligible and I had to wait until August for my call-up. In the meantime, recruits were required to attend an evening class in mathematics once a week. Teachers at a number of schools volunteered to take the classes. I was assigned to Scotch College.

The August intake was No. 5 Course and we were sent to No. I Initial Training School at Somers, on the coast about 50 miles from Melbourne. No time was lost in kitting us out. I complained that my cap (field service) was a little too small. ‘Get yer ’air cut’, snarled the corporal in charge. We were given our service numbers and allotted to a hut. Observer recruits filled two huts.

The first letter I received at Somers was a call-up from the Navy. I didn’t realise that it was not too late to transfer and I don’t know now whether I might have done had I known.

For six weeks we were drilled by the corporal in charge of our hut. ‘You drongos,’ he would yell at us. (Drongo was the name of a racehorse that always finished last.) ‘Swing them arms tit high,’ he would bawl. But when the day was done he became just one of us. Our arms would get tired as we learned to salute in the required fashion. We learned the Morse code and how to fire a revolver – my first shot was a bullseye and there was much good-natured jeering. We had health lectures from the station doctor, and learned the equivalent ranks in all three services. We did maths and more maths and John (Junior) Burrows, Derek Lock and I, all eighteen, rejoiced in our superiority over the older men. Junior had been clerk to a fish auctioneer and his wit was as sharp as his mental arithmetic. The three of us became friends. Junior kept being refused drinks in pubs because he looked about fourteen and, though he protested that he wouldn’t be in the air force if he were under eighteen, the barmen were unrelenting.

At the end of the six weeks, we sat exams in a number of subjects. One recruit was an English Indian army captain in his thirties. He was a glum fellow but the officers all seemed to be in awe of him and to admire him excessively. They seemed determined that he should come top of the course and achieved this by taking five marks from my drill score, the original score having been posted several days previously.

I had also become friends with Ross Gregory, a cricket all rounder who played in two tests for Australia in the 1936/37 Ashes series and inexplicably was not selected for the 1938 Ashes in England. This omission was always on Bradman’s conscience but Ross bore no grudge and at a charity cricket match chatted happily to Captain Bradman, now resplendent in army uniform. Ross introduced me to the great batsman. As a boy I had aspired to wearing the Australian test blazer and had spent hours practising my bowling, but my ability did not match my ambition. However, when we went on leave at the end of our initial training, Ross took me home to meet his parents. On the way we were caught in a heavy shower and Ross’s mother made me take off my soaked jacket and gave me the choice of Ross’s Victorian and Australian blazers to wear. I made the inevitable choice.

In 1946 I joined South Melbourne Cricket Club, which boasted three test cricketers, Lindsay Hassett, Ian Johnson and Keith Miller, at that time. On Friday nights the bar was full as the team got themselves in trim for the next day’s match. Prominent was the Club’s cockatoo which, when the barman gave it a squirt from a soda fountain, would ruffle its feathers and scream, ‘Get out you bastard.’ Always the joker, Hassett brought Bradman to the Club one Friday night, introduced him in glowing terms to the cockatoo and asked the bird what it had to say to the great batsman. He winked at the barman who squirted the cockatoo, with the desired result.

Our next posting was to No. I Observers’ School at Cootamundra in the heart of New South Wales. On the train to Sydney, Ross, after a hard night, fell asleep with his head in my lap. Such was my hero worship that I did not move a muscle for several hours. At Coota (as we came to call it) we joined Courses 3 and 4, Courses 1 and 2 having moved on to Bombing and Gunnery School. As at Somers, we occupied two huts and were now officially 5A and 5B sections. It was a blazing hot summer with much air turbulence and most of us were airsick on the first few flights. We flew in threes, with an experienced instructor-pilot, in Avro Ansons and DH Dragon Rapides. Junior Burrows and Derek Lock were my partners. The town’s open-air swimming pool was on the flight-path. The dressing rooms were also open to the sky. It was some time before we worked out why the pilots were slowing the aircraft, almost to stalling point, as we came in to land. Girls in various states of undress would gaze up at the aircraft without a thought for the young men looking down at them.

Work in the classroom was intensive and interesting. Mainly we studied navigation, the key to which is the wind. We learned how to calculate the point of no return and how to carry out a square search, the importance of which we realised later when we had to search for dinghies with survivors of crashes into the North Sea. Meteorology, photography, aircraft recognition (of German and Italian as well as British aircraft) and reconnaissance were other important subjects and we continued to practise the Morse code, using Aldis lamps rather than listening to the signals. One night we tried to solve a navigation problem in the hut but went to bed without solving it. In the morning I was told the solution and I asked who had worked it out. ‘You did,’ I was told. Apparently I had talked in my sleep and, step by step, arrived at the right conclusion. We did little drill but occasionally had to brush up our saluting, which the officers considered was too casual. Each day there was a physical exercise session and Flying Officer ‘Spike’ Marsh, who rather fancied himself as a runner, took us on a run round the aerodrome. He looked crestfallen when he rounded the last bend and saw Alfred Luck had beaten him. He couldn’t understand how ‘Lucky’ had passed him without his being aware of it. A railway line ran down one side of the aerodrome and each day, at precisely the right moment for Lucky, railway workers passed on a trolley, which was driven by a lever worked by hand. They would take him aboard and give him a ride for about half a mile or so. Sometimes we gathered in a circle and threw a cricket ball around. Once a rabbit raced through the group and was startled to be caught, one-handed, by Ross Gregory, a renowned slips fielder.

A Rapide crashed on take-off and the pilot and three trainees from a course ahead of us were killed. I saw charred skeletons being brought in on stretchers and deposited on the platform in one of the classrooms. This was my first acquaintance with death. We had read dispassionately about casualties of the Battle of Britain and Bomber Command losses and somehow this crash on our own ground brought a sense of reality, a realization of what might happen to us.

No one brooded for long. Cootamundra seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of nubile young women, many from the local Woolworths store and from other shops, banks and other offices. As each course moved on, the girlfriends of twelve weeks became available to the course moving in. The town was very open and offered little privacy, so cafes and the cinema benefitted. Few friendships were continued beyond the twelve weeks of the course, but there were some romances, a few of which led to marriage.

The twelve weeks passed quickly and the observers’ course finished on 10 January 1941. We wanted to mark our time at Coota and I worked in the classroom in the evenings drawing caricatures of my 5B fellow-trainees on one large sheet of paper, which we had printed. A 5A Course poet composed ‘ The Observers’ Lament, sung to a popular tune of the day. It began:

A 5A observer lay dying.

Mid old Anson wreckage he lay.

The verses then detailed how each of our instructors had contributed to the tragedy. It was a funny but, at the same time, a rather doleful effort and, I thought, suggested a rather premonitory mindset.

When the time came, the CO and his staff gathered to see us off as we clambered on two trucks bound for the railway station. Gaily we sang a farewell ditty, passed on to us by the previous course. It slandered all the instructors and informed the CO that he could stick No. 1 Observer School in a quite impossible place. It was all taken in good part.

No. 1 Bombing and Gunnery School was Evans Head, on the north coast of New South Wales, where we would catch up with 4 Course. Having travelled overnight, we were given the day off in Sydney before enduring another overnight journey. At Coota I had inherited one of the Woolworths girls, but she had moved to Sydney for a better job. We spent the day together. A natural blonde, she was tall and slender and, in a white frock, looked dazzling. She was five years older than I, really middle-aged, I thought. She showed me Sydney, which I’d seen only from the Central Railway station and I had my first ride on a harbour ferry with her.

As daylight came the following morning, the train was still chuffing its unhurried way north along the coast, the steam from the engine a vivid white in the new morning air. I was struck by the vegetation; I had never seen grass so lush and so green. We disembarked at Casino, the nearest town to Evans Head, and there, in a milk bar, I made a wonderful discovery: knickerbocker glory. Evans Head had a splendid beach and we made good use of it; even some classes were given as we sat on the warm sand. For the first four weeks we concentrated on bombing. There was much to learn and to put into practice. We flew in Fairey Battles and I marvelled at the courage and tolerance of those men who had flown in it on operations in the early days of the war. The Battle looked sleek but was cramped and clumsy and vulnerable. Many had been lost as they attacked targets in France and Belgium.

We flew in pairs and took it in turns to bomb on the practice range. The pilots found it difficult to manoeuvre the aircraft to carry out our instructions as we tried to line up the target on the bomb site. Left, left, we would say, or riiiiight, or steaaaady, but the Battle would move a little too far and would have to be fetched back, often drifting too far the other way. On the intercom we could sense the pilots’ impatience and sometimes gave in and bombed rather wildly. One Italian banana grower protested to the CO: ‘Why drop a da bombs on my bananas? I good Australian.’ To be fair to the Fairey Battle, it was no worse in this regard than any other aircraft from which I dropped bombs. The practice bombs were about 18 inches long and it was a thrill to watch the tiny white shapes spin down, then flatten out and make a long, slow curve towards the target. But I knew this was an optical illusion. In reality, the bomb was first carried forward by the momentum of the aircraft and then went straight down.

The job was boring for the pilots, who were longing to see service overseas, and they sometimes broke the monotony by doing aerobatics, which was rather risky in the clumsy Battle. One day I was watching one looping the loop some distance away, when suddenly the nose went down and didn’t come up again. The Battle disappeared behind some hills and into the rainforest. No one else seemed to have noticed and I reported what I had seen. I was able to provide a bearing from where I had stood and the bodies of the pilot and two trainees from 4 Course were recovered, not without difficulty.

The four weeks of bombing passed quickly and we moved on to gunnery. No. 6 Course arrived and took our place on the bombing range, while No. 4 Course moved to No. 1 Astronavigation School at Parkes to learn astronavigation. Courses 1 and 2 were already on the high seas. The Empire Air Training Scheme had made a smooth beginning.

I did not enjoy the gunnery course. I learned to fire an ancient Lewis machine gun at ground and air targets. Standing in the rear cockpit of a Battle, I set my face against a rush of searing summer air and struggled to keep the bouncing machine gun trained approximately on the target, often a drogue towed by another Battle, making the right allowances. The smell of glycol was unsettling. My normally inept hands were trained to take a Browning machine gun to pieces, though not without self-willed springs flying away of their own volition. Fortunately, I never had to touch a Browning machine gun again.

Weekends were spent mostly on the beach as we were some distance from Lismore and there was little to do there. We could buy a case of bananas for two shillings and bananas were usually our Sunday breakfast. Sometimes a concert was organised and on one occasion I was asked to do lightning caricatures on stage. I drew them faintly in pencil beforehand, so the audience wouldn’t see the lines. To my great relief, the concert was cancelled.

At the beginning of March 1941 we had another long overnight journey, a very cold one despite the time of year, to Parkes, a town very similar to Cootamundra, and a little to the north of it, where the last four weeks of our training would take place. Astronavigation fascinated me from the start and I loved the cold, clear evenings when we did star recognition. The theory was interesting but in the air we had to use marine sextants and marine tables, which were fine for a ship doing fifteen or twenty knots, but took far too long, even in the unhurried Anson. Again I was teamed with Junior Burrows and Derek Lock and we shared taking sights on sun and stars and working out the complicated tables. All three of us were now nineteen. Early one Sunday morning we were to do a cross-country exercise that would take us over the town of Orange, almost a clone of Parkes and Cootamundra. We took as many oranges as we could find onboard and dropped them on the galvanized iron roofs of the somnolent town. This was one of many practical jokes the three of us cooked up.

A feature of RAAF Parkes was the food. The cook had been a hotel chef in civilian life and his desserts especially were food for the gods. It helped that Parkes was a small station and he was catering for just one course. The adjutant, a veteran of the First World War, went out of his way to make life pleasant for us and when we left, saw us off at the railway station. There was, of course, a graduation parade when we received our wings, but the only visitor was an invisible crocodile that Arthur Dansey had found homeless, or so he said. One-third of the course were commissioned. With so many older men on the course, we youngsters had no chance of being commissioned at that stage, although we and others a little older had been near the top of the course at each stage of our training. There seemed to be a preference for married men. The youngest to receive a commission was Bill Lovell, a Tasmanian aged twenty-two.

Most of us were from Victoria, but a minority came from South Australia and Western Australia and they faced a very long train journey home. Derek lived in Perth. We were surprised to learn that we were to spend the night at Cootamundra, occupying the billets recently vacated by No. 8 Course, now on their way to Evans Head. It was a lively evening, with the instructors now treating us as equals and leading, rather than joining us, in the fun. I received an education in dirty song singing that night. Some managed a reunion with their erstwhile girlfriends and still spent several hours celebrating in the officers’ mess.

Our excitement at arriving at the Embarkation Depot, the requisitioned Melbourne Showground, with the prospect of an early departure overseas, fizzled out as week after week passed with a frustrating absence of news. No. 6 Course caught up with us. We did occasional classes, when someone remembered us, and drilled trainee pilots who were to continue training in Rhodesia. Junior Burrows was a particularly enthusiastic drill sergeant. We were sent home on leave, or given days off, which I spent ensuring that, when embarkation became a reality, I would have seen every film showing in Melbourne’s many cinemas.

Towards the end of May we were recalled from leave and assembled in a large room, where, weeks prematurely, we had held a Farewell Ball. One party was to sail to Canada, cross that vast country by train and embark at Halifax for England. To my disappointment, Ross and Junior were both included, or perhaps the disappointment was because I was not. The rest of us were to sail from Sydney to England via South Africa. The trainee pilots were to disembark at Durban. We were sent home for the weekend and were enjoined to tell no one that we were to take the train to Sydney at Spencer Street station on Monday morning.

Chapter 2

Mother showed me to the front door, rather formally, as if I were a departing guest. I was nineteen and going to war. I had obeyed orders and given no hint about the future, but Mother was sure I was bound for England. ‘Well, Cal,’ she said, offering her hand, ‘we’ll see you in about two years.’ ‘The war won’t last as long as that,’ I assured her. ‘Perhaps not, but you may want to study over there.’ I leaned forward to kiss her and she inclined her head in her gracious way to receive my lips on her cheek. There was no tear in her eye, but her lovely long neck – which in her school teaching days had earned her the sobriquet of ‘the Swan’ – was taut. Mother felt deeply but did not believe in showing her emotions, even to her family.

There had been a family farewell at the table. We had the usual Sunday night high tea and my brother Geoff, then aged ten, presented me with a watch on behalf of the family. Four and a half years later, at a similar family gathering to welcome me home, I passed on the watch to him. I am sure that my father, a man of great gentleness and generosity, checked the eagerness of my brother and sister Jeannette to see me off. Just let Mother go,’ he would have said.

I had hated the smell of dope in the parachute room and the glycol fumes in the Fairey Battles, winding up the wheels of an Anson (over 140 turns of the handle) on a boiling day, being sick in the flimsy Rapides, which lifted and lurched and pitched and fell in the air currents over the parched plains of outback New South Wales. But I was beginning to enjoy flying and navigation was an irresistible challenge. And I was ready to go to war. I envisaged bombing bridges and factories and enemy warships, probably from a Fairey Battle. At Embarkation Depot we had talked about our chances of survival. It was said that Battle crews did not last very long. We were sure we would all be dead within a year. Most of us were.

There was no one in the street, the quiet suburban street I knew so well. No front door was open but ours. Mother was still standing in the doorway, I knew, but the hedge hid her from me. The night was still, touched with an autumnal chill. I was elated as I walked towards Auburn railway station. In eight months I had learned to navigate an aeroplane by dead reckoning and by the sun and the stars. I had learned the joy of making figures work for me, to achieve an end I thought worthwhile. Not the dreary columns of other people’s cheques that had to be added up and balanced, but figures that deceived the wind and took an aircraft to a precise point at a precise moment. Well, nearly. I could fire a machine gun, or take it to pieces, drop bombs with reasonable accuracy, I had learned about maps and charts and projections, about the weather, about radio and photography – and so many other things.

But we were jubilant as we arrived at Spencer Street station to catch the train to Sydney. We seemed to have done this trip so many times, but this time there was a sense of eagerness and anticipation. I was quite shocked to see the platform crowded with weeping Mums and comforting Dads. It seemed that I was the only one who had obeyed the injunction to say nothing about our movements. My sister guessed this, telephoned the Embarkation Depot and was told what she wanted to know. She raced into the city and arrived at Spencer Street, only to see a forest of waving arms and my train already gathering speed.

In Sydney Harbour were several of the world’s greatest ships: Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Normandie and Rex. All were trooping. The Blue Funnel ship TSS Sarpedon, which we boarded, looked insignificant by comparison. She was a 15,000-ton veteran of the China trade, a little shabby, but she rode proud. We were joined by a party of pilots from New South Wales. They had already elected a leader and were somewhat put out when they discovered that the Air Board had appointed Pilot Officer Bill Lovell commanding officer, with Sergeant Stuart Wood as his adjutant, Hal Rogerson took charge of the office. Aware that I had lost my friends, Hal, Stuart and Bill Nettle, all in their late twenties, took me in hand.

We were three to a cabin. My cabin mates were Bill Nettle and Ray Roget who occupied the two bunks. My bed was just a padded bench and in rough weather I had to push my head and feet hard against the walls so that I didn’t roll on to the floor. When the trainee pilots left us at Durban, two to a cabin became possible. Bill moved out and I took over his bunk. There was consternation when we first used the showers. No one had used them for seventeen years, we were told, and the rust that descended upon us confirmed that. Two nurses had also boarded the ship at Sydney. They had been on the Rangitane when she was sunk in the Pacific by the German raider, Count von Luckner, and put ashore on an island with the other women and children. They had scarcely any possessions and we had a whip-round to enable them to go shopping