Dogfight (3 page)

The loss of homeland and family was also tempered by the friendships struck up on the long journey. Within a handful of days of leaving the great southern continent, Crossman faced his girlfriend's birthday with sadness but surrounded by his new companions. ‘Pat's birthday to-day,' he scrawled in his diary. ‘Should have liked to send a cable but costs too much. We had bottled cider, sandwiches and biscuits in my cabin at night and drank to her health.'[16] On 28 August, the twenty-one RAF hopefuls crossed the equator and in accordance with naval tradition and in the spirit of youthful exuberance were initiated into the watery court of ancient monarch of the deep, King Neptune. A three-day break in the city of Colombo, Ceylon, was a good chance to enjoy the heady delights of the British colony.[17] A natural port that had seen 2000 years of traders was now an attractive stepping stone for the young Australians heading to northern Europe. The Suez Canal and the Mediterranean followed, further stepping stones to Britain. The final night on board the SS
Orama
arrived in mid-October, two months after departing Sydney. An air of expectation hung over the evening meal as the diners laughed over self-authored limericks directed at each other. The
typed-up rhymes were signed by all and treasured as mementos marking the end of their high-seas journey and the beginning of the great enterprise ahead.

Weeks of oceanic voyaging, however, did little to prepare the colonials from the sun-favoured cities and farms of their homelands for the British Isles in winter. Sailing up the River Thames, five weeks after departure, Deere and his fellow New Zealanders stood at the deck railings and avidly picked out the famous landmarks from their schoolboy history lessons. The chaotic water trade and the sights and smells of London were a reminder to the colonials of just how far from their small antipodean towns they had travelled. However, Deere's dreams of a ‘luxurious gateway to London' were soon shattered by ‘the grim rows of East End houses, pouring smoke into the clouded atmosphere' and he was ‘appalled by the bustle and grime of Liverpool Street Station'. Notwithstanding the shock of London's grimy early winter cloak, he was taken aback by its sheer size and complexity, and the ‘wonderful things to see, and the great achievements possible' at the very heart of the British Empire's ashen yet regal capital.[18]

Gordon Olive, who had arrived on one of P & O's old ladies of the sea,
Narkunda,
earlier—in 1937—shared Deere's impressions. ‘Our first glimpse of our future home was a bleak one,' noted Olive. ‘Between squalls of rain we could see the flat grey coastline which was just discernible from the cold grey sea.' In the pouring rain the arthritic ship gingerly docked in the Thames on an ‘Arctic morning'. London in winter was no tropical Panama City, Rio de Janeiro or Colombo. ‘How unbelievably wet and cold and dreary! And millions of little houses all looking the same,' recalled the Australian as he and his countrymen gazed upon the eastern suburbs of the great city through train carriage windows.[19]

Training began soon after landfall and involved three main components. First, the pupil pilots were instructed at one of Britain's civilian flying schools operating to RAF contracts over a period of eight to twelve weeks, incorporating an initial twenty-five hours of dual pilot flight training followed quickly by twenty-five hours solo.[20] Second, two weeks at RAF Depot Uxbridge was scheduled for RAF disciplinary instruction. The final phase of thirteen to fifteen weeks was at the RAF's own Flying Training School (FTS). The two terms at the FTS—Intermediate and Advanced
—totalled some 100 hours of flying time. This regime was, with some variation and diminution as war became increasingly likely, commonplace from 1936 onwards. The training involved the first meeting of British and Dominion personnel.

At the civilian schools the Anzacs noted not only the chilly weather of England, but also their sometimes frosty reception by their British counterparts. Accustomed to making friends easily, they were bemused by the odd English cold shoulder. Even as late as July 1940, when the straight-talking Wanganui-born Bob Spurdle was introduced to Uxbridge, he and a fellow New Zealander were uncouthly and off-handedly referred to by an officer as ‘bloody coloured troops'.[21] In Deere's case, at the De Havilland Civil School of Flying at White Waltham near Maidenhead, he generously put the less than enthusiastic reception down to the ‘natural reserve of all Englishmen.'[22]

On the whole, social lines were blurred by the colonials who did not really fit into the strict class-based hierarchies of British society and its military machine. Most RAF pilots were drawn from the upper echelons of society and were invariably graduates of public schools.[23] While British officers of the pre-war RAF were more or less considered of a higher social standing than their Dominion counterparts, class distinctions in the southern Dominions were less well defined. Athleticism was a key to easing into the new environment. More than any other sport, the game of rugby served to break down class differences. Deere's low status was brushed aside with a ‘game of rugger' some weeks later. In winning this first rugby game by an extremely wide margin, he and his compatriots had demonstrated to the Englishmen that ‘we wouldn't be such bad chaps after all and that, perhaps, under our rough exteriors there existed people like themselves'.

At the civilian or elementary schools the young men trained eagerly for the moment that had brought them thousands of miles from their native lands: the experience of taking to the air. The hatchlings were initially familiarised with the flight controls and the engine, and then progressed to execution of the all-important take-off and landing.[24] How to handle an engine failure, forced landings, low flight and turns all had to be mastered before the Anzac fledglings were considered proficient enough to leave the nest in solo flight—invariably in control of a biplane.

Deere's irrepressible desire was evident in his first unaccompanied flight, which was preceded by a circuit with the instructor who, after disembarking from the machine, stood beside the cockpit and gave the over-excited Kiwi
some final pre-flight advice. Barely able to suppress his enthusiasm, Deere promptly forgot the instructor and opened up the throttle, forcing the officer in mid-sentence to dodge the aircraft's tail section as it roared past, with the resultant slipstream tossing him to the ground.[25] After touching down, Deere was so pleased with his first effort he immediately took off again, much to the consternation of the flight instructor, who, in the process of trying to give him a piece of his mind, again found himself cast to the ground by the Tiger Moth's slipstream. Deere and the officer repeated this graceless ballet once more before the Anzac finally landed and cut his engine off. He was confronted by the red-faced officer, who tore strips off the young New Zealander. Deere, however, in his post-flight euphoria, was more fascinated with the man's large moustache which had collected fat drops of dew from ‘kissing' the grassy airstrip.[26]

Spurdle had his first solo flight in New Zealand and years later still remembered with great clarity the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) Flying Instructor uttering the thrilling directive, ‘Go ahead—and don't prang it.' ‘There are no words,' he recalled, ‘however magic to describe completely the thrill of having, for the first time, a whole aircraft to oneself. The absence of that rasping, chiding voice of the instructor in one's ear, all the troubles a mile below and the shining wings slipping through the whispering air. And the Sky—that huge beautiful arena.'[27]

Pupils who survived the training then considered placement with bombers or fighters. At the time most observers gave greater weight to the future of the much larger machine. Orthodoxy held that bombers could prevent a repetition of the interminable misery of the Great War's trenches by directly attacking industrial production and enemy morale, thereby crippling an adversary's war-making capacity. It was also believed that the bomber, as an offensive weapon, could strike unexpectedly anywhere, and, even if intercepted, its powerful defensive armaments would fend off fighters. This fostered the widely accepted maxim ‘the bomber will always get through'.

With this in mind, many elementary school instructors and students were of the opinion that the bomber offered the best possibilities for future advancement. Some trainees, like Olive, also felt experience in large bombers would aid them in their eventual entry to multi-engine airline flying. Although to Olive's mind the ‘fighter was a machine of the past', his chief instructor was adamant: ‘You're a natural for the fighter my boy!'[28] Most Anzac short service commission men, however, had not signed up
with a view to career climbing or post-RAF careers; they simply wanted to fly, and to their minds the best way to do this was in the single-engine fighter.[29]

Like all RAF hopefuls, the Anzac pilots who made it through the elementary phase at civilian schools were then shipped off to the RAF Depot at Uxbridge. The pupils were now Acting Pilot Officers on probation. The two weeks among the dreary red-brick buildings at Uxbridge were an initiation into RAF disciplinary training and, as Wellingtonian Alan Gawith reasoned, to ‘try and make gentlemen of you'. The young men were inoculated, marched endlessly around the parade ground, lectured to, fitted out for their uniforms and instructed on the finer points of mess etiquette.[30]

‘Square-bashing' soon gave way to a posting to an RAF Flying Training School, and the civilian aircraft of the elementary schools were replaced with military machines. As early as possible in the intermediate term, the pilots were introduced to the rudiments of aerobatics in order to acclimatise them quickly to their machines and the frenzied cut-and-thrust of aerial combat. To these aerobatic manoeuvres was added an introduction to cross-country flying. Careful observation and thorough planning was needed for airmen to find the way to their targets and home again.

Hillary's first solo cross-country flight in Scotland nearly ended embarrassingly when his airborne reverie was interrupted by an irritating ‘winking' red light. Within moments the engine cut out. ‘The red light continued to shine like a brothel invitation,' recalled Hillary, ‘while I racked my brain to think what was wrong.'[31] More concerned with the prospect of ‘making a fool of himself than of crashing', it was not until he had glided down to 500 feet that he remembered the light indicated low fuel and he quickly flicked over to the reserve tank. ‘Grateful that there were no spectators of my stupidity, I flew back, determined to learn my cockpit drill thoroughly before taking to the air again.'[32]

One of the scarier, but necessary, skills was the ability to fly at night. It proved the undoing of many pilots. In his first solo night-flying session, Hillary recalled losing his bearings completely when the airfield's ground flares disappeared momentarily from view.

Hillary rose halfway to his feet and with a sigh of relief caught sight of the flares, and, ‘thoroughly ashamed' of himself, soon had the light biplane skimming the ground as he delicately brought the machine in for landing. His post-panic contemplation was cut short when it became clear that the very next trainee had lost sight of the landing lights and was headed towards the coast and open waters. The mangled plane and dead pilot were soon discovered by Hillary and the attending officer, straddling the beach and the water's edge. ‘I remembered again the moment of blind panic and knew what he must have felt,' reflected Hillary. In the dead man's ‘breast pocket was ₤10, drawn to go on leave the next day. He was twenty years old.'[34]

Even instructors could fall prey to errors of judgement. The six-foot, five-inch and seventeen-stone Aucklander, Maurice ‘Tiny' Kinder, remembered one of the more gruesome examples of this while he was under training at Sealand, Wales. An air commodore came to educate the budding pilots in accident prevention. He instructed his understudies to ensure that the wooden chocks were in place and to stand clear of the propeller before starting the engine. All of this seemed simple enough until the officer ‘went to his own aircraft with the propeller turning ... [and] did what he had just been telling us not to do. He walked into his own propeller and was decapitated.'[35]

Before graduating to the second term of FTS, one of the most important events in the life of an RAF trainee took place: the presenting of the pilot's Wings. Recognised worldwide, the Wings of the RAF were as coveted then as they are now. At a ceremonial parade, the silver and gold insignia were pinned on the blue tunic of the proud pilots. ‘I can recall the thrill of the achievement and pride of service as I stepped forward to receive the famous emblem of a qualified pilot,' reminisced Deere. With their newly acquired Wings, the pilots entered the final stage of training in their advanced term: war-making was applied to their general flying skills and knowledge.

This incorporated everything from formation flying to high- and low-level bombing, to air-to-air gunnery and close air support.[36] As with a number of flying skills, formation flying was first introduced to pilots in
a two-seater, and then subsequently a solo attempt was made. This usually required the new pilots to take up their position behind their leader. The constant adjustment of the throttle in order to hold position took time to master. The most important gunnery exercises were the air-to-air attacks. These were carried out by a student towing a drogue target for attacking students. At Penrhos, North Wales, Gray found that drogue duty was undersubscribed—the live ammunition combined with the inaccuracy of some new pilots made the task perilous.[37]