THE RAFT

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 5, 9 April 1945, Page 22

THE RAFT

By

The thing comes so easily after a while, but the first time it’s different. You get used to it ; but

the first time you haven’t any experience to look back to. You hear other blokes talk about it,, blokes that have been on service in Britain when the same business was common enough ; and there’s plenty out here now that have seen the same thing up top —I’ve seen it myself, and more than once. But that first time, the way I was saying, that’s different. I saw crack-ups when I was going through

the school, and the first time you see one of them you can’t help thinking it could be easy for you. I reckon every one thinks it, but you get used to that, and, any way, it’s all in the game. You know that when you start flying, and soon you don’t bother about it. Then maybe one of the boys goes, some‘one you knocked round with, and for a day or two you keep remembering. You get over it. But the business was different the first time. I had to watch a kite in the sea. Which isn’t quite right, because we

didn’t see the kite —only the blokes on the raft and the sea all round and bad weather coming.

We were finishing on Huddys then, flying from one of the South Island stations. Near the end of the course it happened, and of anything that has happened to me that affair is the one I remember most. . There we were, hanging round and doing nothing, and there they were below us, and the sea and the night coming and we couldn’t do anything for them.

We were out on a cross-country on a day when there probably weren’t more than three aircraft up at the same time. We were heading for home with the light failing and not long to go before sunset. I was flying the kite and Steve was navigating, and Lin Morrey, from Matamata, was playing with the radio when the station called us and gave us the story. One of the Huddys was down in the drink and we were the nearest kite to her. We had been following the coast keeping low. Steve had relations with a farm right on the shore and we were going to beat the place up on the way home. But we got the position and went out to sea. The wind was hard on us and there was dirty weather ahead. Steve got busy working drift and things like that to pick the boys up, though we didn’t really know whether they got clear of the kite or not. It turned out that they had, so we were right. The Huddy was gone when we found the spot, and a couple of minutes later we saw the raft drifting off to the south and in towards the shore, though the coastline was out of sight. Visibility wasn’t good and I had to take the kite down. There was a heavy swell and the sea was chopping and every so often the water swept over them. And there wasn’t anything round but the sea. It was lonely and harsh then. I used to be mad on the sea and sailing, but since then, I’ve hated it.

One of the crew was missing. We counted the boys on the raft, and one of them waved to us as we went over. One hand gone already. He may have gone off the raft or he may not have got to it when the kite went down. It doesn’t make any difference, but knowing that didn’t make us feel any

too good. Lin called up the station and gave them the position of the raft, and then they recalled us. Our gas was getting low and we couldn’t have stayed round any longer.

That was the first time I saw anything like that, the few boys and all round that damnably big and empty sea. On the way back I must have been flying without thinking of what I was doing. The only thing I thought about was the way the raft drifted and the chap on it waving to us and wondering how long he would be waving before the last sea got them.

Going back, I seemed to think they were done already and that whatever any one did would be useless. I went over all the things that could be done, and they didn’t add up. The reasons were good. But I still knew that those boys were as good as gone, sent down with a firing party even, and that is pretty final. I don’t know if it was hysteria. It didn’t seem like it then. I was just thinking as we flew back. We knew where they were and the station knew, and all the business was on the wat to bring them back and put them in the air, but I could have walked into the offices of the heads that were arranging things and said, “ Look, don’t bother, because they won’t be there again and you can’t do anything about it.” I knew it. At the same time, I was all set to go back and have a shot at it. Any one would have done the same.

We got in and reported. They asked us questions and we gave them answers, and somehow I sensed that Steve and Lin felt just as I did. When we stepped outside, the hangars were all under that calm light you get before a storm, a light

very warm and dangerous and lovely, and you can expect hell to break loose. Another kite was warming up outside the hangar. We strolled over to her The C.F.I. was going to take rations out to be dropped for the boys, and as we got close to her I felt suddenly that I had to go out again and see the raft and the one bloke on it who waved to us. There wasn’t any fuss about getting on board ; when the Huddy rolled up the runway I was on her, and I sat staring at the plains and then at the sea till the raft was sighted and we went over again.

The sea was running savagely. The raft came up on the crests and slid and went down into them and came up again and hurled on again and back and down and up. I sat and watched them. The rations were dropped, but there was no show of the boys getting them. The tide swept them away, and we watched them go. The bloke below waved wearily He must have been very tired then and probably still hoping. It was very personal to him, where for me it had become almost a problem that had to be argued out and an answer found, just the way a theorem has to be proved. You take a statement or an axiom and there are certain conditions and you consider certain factors, and then at the end there is a new conclusion. In this case, certain lives or deaths that actually didn’t mean much in the mass of strategy but did mean a hell of a lot to particular people.

And we are people, not mechanics and numbers. So we couldn’t do anything that mattered immediately. The kite went over them and we looked down at them, and maybe they looked up at us, and the distance between them and between us was greater than any distance had ever been. It was the distance of the sea, which is impersonal though moody and powerful. After a time we went away. The sunset that night was nothing more than an angry flash on cloud. Going down to the mess in the last of the evening I saw the bare

branches of the trees swirling forward and striking back from the wind. The air was cold then and much colder later. Rain fell, and close on midnight the gale slammed straight across the field to the barracks. The mess was quiet that night. The chaps went off to bed early. Few of them wanted to talk and those who stayed sat quietly. Steve and I played a game of billiards and Lin stood round, and then we finished off for the night.

We were out again early the next morning. The wind had dropped, so the kite could be sent out. All the night I had dreamed of the running sea and the loneliness of that raft and the great curl of breakers that used to come in on the coast where I was a kid. After the gale no one expected to see those boys, but the plane went out to make sure that they had gone. But the raft was still floating and the boys were still on it.

The boats in the nearest port couldn’t get out to them. The sea was sweeping straight into the bay -and there was nothing at the wharf of any size big enough to risk the weather. The surf pounds heavily on some of those parts and the boats couldn’t get to them. The only coastal ship was too far away to get near them. Those boys had everything stacked against them.

The only chance left was pretty thin, but arrangements were made during the night in case the raft was spotted in the morning. Five or six fellows with life-

saving experience in a surf club were flown down and arrived at the drome just after the report came in from the first plane. The raft was close in-shore, drifting towards the mouth of the Mackay River. The river has three bars, and when the weather is in the quarter the sea piles up on the bars and there’s not much show of anything lasting. Either side of the river mouth the beach is flat. Aircraft can land on the sand. One of the light D.H.s took the life-saving crowd and a portable radio. They made the beach, and Steve and Lin and I had the Huddy out to sea spotting the raft. The men on the beach waited. That was all we could do, hang about and wait till the sea took the raft into shore.

That morning conditions weren’t so bad as they had been the night before. The sea was still running hard on the raft, and as we watched it would go out of sight, then come up again while the water played with it. The four boys lay still. As the. raft swept they moved a little. But there was no sign from them that they had seen us. There was nothing to show that we mattered any more. As the raft drifted in, gulls fell round it and beat at the air above the boys. You saw the flicker of their wings and the specks of their bodies like torn paper blown over the raft and the chop of the waves. The life-saving crew moved along the beach. We flew inland for a bit and then back out to sea. Off the river mouth the long lines of the surf were dirty with mud from the bars.

At nine o’clock it was all over. The raft was close to the beach. It passed the outer line of the bar breakers and washed down towards the second. The sea was too rough for the swimmers. The raft danced up and on the crest. It seemed to stop there a fraction longer than it had stayed on any earlier crest. Then it turned, and as it turned it tipped and the boys went listlessly from it and there was only the glistening raft and the total emptiness of the sea. The breakers swept on. We banked over and the sun came out and the shadow of the kite dropped on the raft and the beach and the swimmers were behind and we headed back to the field.

That was the first time I saw anything like that, and it’s the one I remember because there wasn’t anything we could do. Maybe we were playing against the sea and didn’t understand it. Maybe anything. The only thing that was certain to me, and there weren’t any reasons to make you sure of that, was the fact that when we went to look for those boys they were already gone and the one boy left awake was waving to us. But was he really waving to us, or was he already waving us away, knowing then, though he couldn’t really have known, that we were no use, that we were helpless as he was helpless, and the only thing at all important was the great aching space of the sea, the wind from the east and the open ocean, and the cloud that hid us when we turned away from them and went back to the field ?