Crete Bombed: A Passenger In A Raid

Northern Advocate, 7 October 1941, Page 7

Crete Bombed: A Passenger In A Raid

(Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E.F.) CAIRO. Sept. 16 There are people who cry, "We must have no more Cretes!” without realising that the grand men who fought that battle didn’t stop to think whether it was worth fighting or not. They are the same people who joined blindly in outbursts against the Royal Air Force without thinking about the men who fly the planes. I went to Libya in a raiding bomber the other night to write a story for those people as part of a series depicting New Zealanders in action. There is nothing sensational or even exceptional about the story, and it is not written to justify Crete or any other campaign. But this story and those that will follow may serve as a reminder that the men of New Zealand and the rest of the Empire who are fighting in this war do not question, or think of questioning, the uses tq which they are put. It may help people to take their minds for a while off the broader fields of strategy and ultimate aim and see immediate warfare through the eyes of men who have not demanded, and have not received, any sort of contract which says their battles must be hand picked and “every one a victory.” Show in Libya “We’re doing a show in Libya tonight,” the New Zealand bomber captain said, “so how would you like to come up as far as the advanced base with us? I'll guarantee you food and a comfortable bed, and pick you up when we come back from the raid.” The thought of any kind of flight had not occurred to me when I went to his desert station—just "across the road” from one of our own temporary training areas—to call on him. And now, before 1 had time to grasp the idea, he went a step further: "Or what about coming all the way?” That question, together with my answer and the Group-Captain’s approval, gave me a thousand miles of flying and another unforgettable experience to add to a collection of "ringside views” of the war. At 2 o'clock on the following morning I stood in the observer’s turret of a Wellington bomber as it flew four times across a Libyan airfield dotted with Axis planes, illuminating it as by daylight with parachute flares, plastering it with high explosive and incendiary bombs, and finally banking under the leaping anij-aircrait fire to loose off hundreds of rounds of machine-gun ammunition. With my own eyes I saw what I am certain was an aeroplane burst into fiery pieces, and red flames were leaping among our white-hot incendiaries as we turned away. And ours was only one raider among eight. Wimpy’s Orders Our “Wimpy,” as the Wellingtons are called (I believe after Popeye cartoon character named J. Wellington Wimpy) was to be briefed, or given its operation orders, at the advanced base, and so we knew only vaguely what was ahead of us when we climbed up through the trapdoor in its belly. If you don’t know planes, the inside of a Wellington would startle you with its maze of meters and fittings and wiring. The pilot sits in front of a dashboard which contains as many dials as a watchmaker’s window; the wireless operator fits into a space that seems to nave been left vacant as an afterthought; the tail gunner squeezes somehow into his remote mechanism-crammed turret. But those are only a layman’s impressions, for after a while when you have become used to it all, you see that everything is planned, everything purposeful. I stood alongside Neville, the captain from Hastings, as the desert fell away beneath us after the long, ponderous take-off run. (Bombs slung below, and hundreds of gallons of fuel in the tanks). Bill, the Scots second pilot, was wriggling into a comfortable position right down in the nose, where the bomb aimer lies when the times comes. He had a novel in iiis hand, and with it he was trying to i,wat—up there, of all places—a stowaway fly. I plugged my earphones into the inter-communication system—an internal telephone circuit with which every member of the crew hooks up, no matter what part of the machine he is in—and heard Alec, the navigator, asking about the nook in his Canadian drawl. Who had it? Oh, Bill did. What was it like? It was a clean book. Oh, it was, was it? “Inter-Comm” That "inter-eomm” system was the cause of tne single regret which the trip gave me. I could only decipher fragments of the conversation at the best of times, whether it was technical data or backchat, and later over our target it seemed that everyone was talking at once —or rather shouting things like “There’s a fighter right above us” or “Look at that flak coming up!” But it was merely the navigator, then at his bomb sights, directing the pilot along his bombing run: Trying to join in the conversation was just as hopeless, because I could not hear my own voice above the roar of the motors, and it was unbelievably hard to tell whether I was saying what I intended to say. In a way I was not sorry when I “lost” the phone socket for several minutes in the" darkened interior. Our Wimpy, 'amazingly steady, droned westwards as we cleared the green Nile Delta and flew over some of the New Zealanders' old haunts in the Western Desert —the first I had seen of them in seven months. I saw no change since then, except for an increase in the military population, and old memories came crowding back. We skimmed above the most perfect ceiling of clouds I have ever seen, and Neville swung the plane gently to fly close by the billowing, snow-white hills and misty valleys that built an unreal j world between us and the earth, i A Fire Alarm As we neared the forward base, which was signposted by a column of dust, a whiff of some odour a shade abnormal touched sensitive nostrils. The intercomm. chattered. Fire? Emergency stations! Bill dropped his book and scrambled past me to join Alec in a finetoothcomb search of the bowels of the ship. They plugged in afresh each time they moved aft, and I tried to interpret the running commentary: “No, nothing here" . . . “Can't see anything” . . . “No smell back here . . .” We relaxed, and Neville said, "No sense in taking chances.” A hot homely stew awaited us on the ground, and we lounged afterwards in "Victory,” an underground mess room with radio and electric light. We had found out about our target—a landing field i where enemy aircraft were known to be dispersed. Once Alec, who had been doing some mental figuring, remarked: “Should take us about ‘so many’ hours to get there." Then we went on talking about home (it meant half-a-dozen countries to the little crowd there) or reading magazines or listening to the radio. Briefing was at 10 o’clock. Six crews were there, to hear about the weather, what to expect in the way of night fight-

ers and anti-aircraft fire, what courses to follow, order of take-off, method of attack, alternative targets. I forget the whole story, but there are snatches of the Wing-Commander’s words: “You’ll be able to pick uo this metalled road quite clearly. Follow along it and by the grace of God you’ll come to this junction . . . if you see anything that looks like Mr. (motor transoort) in a wadi, go down and have a smack at it on the way homebeat it up . . . Keep clear of our own fighters at so-and-so, they’re pretty keen and looking for something to down . . .” A Wonderful World The moon was up when a truck took us out to the Wimpy again. We were first away, and soon the dim lights of the flare path were flashing by. After a while I went amidships and stood with my head in the observer's dome, looking about at a wonderful world. We were high above the sea; but there were broken white clouds below us, and it all looked like a slightly rippled lake of I oil, with tufts of cotton wool floating on the surface. I was lending the crew my eyes and a complete lack of experience by looking out for suspicious signs. I had to laugh when I reported a reddish light just above the horizion, and Alec, coming back to let go some drift indicator flares, pulled back my helmet flap and shouted: “That’s a comet just rising!” Surely enough, it climbed slowly into the sky and became as bright a star as the rest of them. On through the moonlight, with no variation beyond an occasional steep turn. We crossed the coastline again, heading inland. I grew cold and drowsy, standing there, but my watch at last told me it was time we were near the target. Almost immediately staccato words from Alec ! proved the accuracy of this reckoning. He could see aircraft quite plainly, lying on the moonlit sand. As we turned to fly back over them. Bill hurried -through the plane to the flare hatch from which he sent two long cylinders hurtling earthwards with little puffs of acrid smoke. We turned again, and I saw the burning flares hanging in the air, flooding the ground with an orange glow.

First Bombing Rim We (vere beginning our first bombing run. The Wimpy thundered across the flares, and it was then that the intercomm. chatter became completely unintelligible to me, and I felt the ship lift a little as half the bomb load dropped from under us. I had never been on that end of an air raid before. I wondered what those men on the ground thought as the explosives came screaming towards them. We banked sharply out of the run, and as the wing fell away I looked down on one of the most extraordinary sights in my memory. I was just in time to see a violent explosion on the ground—something big blown into little pieces. In a cluster,, like scores of white electric lights, lay our incendiaries. Our flares were still flaming and smoking above them. And then came the flak. “Fairly light,” they said afterwards, but it was heavy enough for a first experience. It came up at us from four or five groups of guns, necklaces of brilliant red and green jewels, leaping quickly at first and then seeming to grow slower and slower until each jewel puffed out with a yellow flash. The necklaces were not straight; they arched and curved all over the sky, as if the gunners were relying on the volume of their fire rather than on its accuracy. We made two more runs, one with fresh flares and one with the rest of our bombs, and so doubled the brilliance of the spectacle. By this time two “torch-bearers” — Fleet Air Arm machines laden with flares —had arrived over the target and gone into action. With perhaps a dozen balls of flame hanging in the sky, I held my breath when we circled down below them and below the effective height of the flak to fling the enemy hundreds of parting shots from our fore and aft machineguns. The tail gunner was gleeful, certain that a fair share of the thousand rounds he Bred had bitten into aircraft and stores. Now, too, I saw red flames spurting in the centre of one of our groups of incendiaries. Our partners in the raid had taken the job over as we flew away. I stood watching until the white incendiaries looked like the twinkling lights of a city which had forgotten about blackout. I thought of Neville and Alec and all the rest of those fellows, many of them New Zealanders, who are fighting the war all the time —the Corinth Canal last week, Libya tonight, Crete in two days—three and four nights a week, and the only comparative respite in the blackness between moons.