The liberator endures

THE LIBERATOR ENDURES

I can’t tell you how much of a shock it was to clap eyes on the old gal again.

After all those years; forty–six, to be precise. And to quickly weigh up how much abuse and degradation she’d suffered, how much neglect. She was barely recognizable. Imagine my astonishment when they broke the news to me. This crippled old ship bore the name Kiss Me Babe. Another shock: This was the very aircraft assigned to Instructional Duties at the tail-end of the war. At that time I happened to be training Liberator crews in the South-East Asian campaign.

How were we to reclaim the wreckage? Then how to restore it? An estate agent in Moe, a country town in Victoria, had informed the Commanding Officer at Point Cook of the discovery of a B-24 Liberator. Two guys were living in one!

The C.O., the Curator of Point Cook Museum and I drove down in a staff car to inspect the old ship, partially hidden and wedged between trees and awkward to approach and enter – you had to grab a rope and swing across the fuselage and into the hatch on the top of the nose to climb down into the cockpit – a bit dicey when you’re seventy! Cocky about showing off the plane, these two guys were nonetheless behaving oddly, like retarded yokels. The deranged one claimed to be a war correspondent; the other, more of a nerdy greenie, squealed, ‘Youse can’t touch the trees! These ones are historic!’ We were aghast. They had rubbished the Liberator’s insides. At least, the pilot seats were still intact; evidently, the cockpit had not served as their reading room.

The C.O., determined to acquire this sad old hulk for the RAAF as a museum piece, made a successful offer. The dozers were brought in, then a semi-trailer to transport the fuselage and lone battered wing. We reckoned on needing thousands of replacement parts – the B-24 Liberator comprised well over a million. We knew of one collector who had reconnoitred the jungles of New Guinea, where many Liberators had been shot down by the Japanese or crashed in remote or impenetrable terrain, and it was from New Guinea years later that we did recover a wing with the aid of a chopper and the Navy. Steel parts, such as engine mounts, had been buried at Tocumwal in the Riverina and were bulldozed out. In the light alloy die-casting shop at Werribee, a few kilometres from Melbourne, full-size models of missing parts were made from moulds of aluminium castings.

I’m the only one left of my old American crew on the B-24 Liberator, Locklip Lucy. On our missions way above the clouds we rarely spoke of those earthly horrors we witnessed. And certainly not to our loved ones back home. Not until my son was fifteen did he enquire about my role in the war and even then he wasn’t curious. Those frantic, edgy times seemed light years away. Tacitly, we flyers knew what turmoil our mates were feeling. After the war we had our reunions, of course. Memories came flooding back but coloured with the warmth of reminiscing with comrades who appreciated what we had achieved, what we had endured, without the burning anguish of the horrors we inflicted or the sudden

pangs of fear we felt as we taxied down the runway for take-off or when streams of black smoke belched from an engine shot out. Or even nightmares of locking onto an enemy Zeke. No, by and large those reunions were cheerful occasions, notwithstanding several pairs of clouded eyes misting over at remembrance of a few more mates passing since our previous gathering.

I suppose the secret of my long life is living in the bush during my formative years. My mother wasn’t such a great cook, but she always served up hearty fare, the traditional English tucker of meat and three veg. We could always barter, sell mushrooms or shoot and sell rabbits. So I enjoyed a fairly free and comfortable upbringing in spite of the Depression. We lived in a teacher’s residence and leanto with dirt floor, washed clothes in a boiler over an open fire and journeyed by horse and buggy to do the shopping. I was the shy middle one of seven brothers and two sisters, the only kid my mother would take to meetings because she knew I would be no trouble. ‘Hasn’t he got a lovely smile,’ women would say. I’ve been smiling ever since. It works wonders. What might be considered hardships, you simply accepted. You didn’t know any different. Outdoors we went barefoot; our shoes we saved for school. I used to roam the countryside with my two older brothers, exploring water-holes, fishing for eels and trout, collecting birds eggs. We would skin and gut rabbits and earn rabbit skin money to buy aniseed balls and liquorice allsorts. With the fur we’d make ourselves hats. We lived near a river and caught freshwater crayfish. They were a fair size but ugly creatures, so we beat them to death or dropped them live into boiling water. One day a garage proprietor asked for our catch, a great delicacy, he said, and we handed them over for him to keep cool in a sugar bag lowered into a work pit.

Something of a loner, I had a cheerful disposition, but was bullied at school on account of my Pommie accent and my Anglophile father being headmaster. Like many kids before the advent of the motor car had drastically changed life in the country towns, I could amuse myself for hours. I’d make model gliders from strips of balsa wood one eighth of an inch thick, cut them up with my rabbitskinning knife and glue them together, following the diagrams in the Boys Own Paper. Then I’d insert a rubber band behind a propeller to drive them. My favourite was a Schneider Trophy, forerunner to the Spitfire. Once I bought a bagful of old pocket watches for two bob and, tinkering about and cannibalizing from old time-pieces, made six of them function again. At school I constructed radio sets from odds and bobs. I guess I’ve always been very resourceful. There were early signs that I’d do something practical with my life.

My health was pretty good. Sadly, my eldest brother died of rheumatic fever at the age of fifteen. I neither smoked nor drank but regrettably my sixty-one yearold son is a heavy smoker and has recently suffered a stroke.

When I was thirteen I forked out fifteen shillings to take a ten-minute joyride with Kingsford Smith, who was barnstorming across the country in The Southern Cross to raise money for his record-breaking flights. I remember her wicker armchairs in the style of Raffles in Singapore bolted to the floor. Throughout that year, 1932, I collected empty beer bottles to add to my rabbit skin money. The celebrated aviator would take you up to about 1500 feet quick sticks so he could

take on more passengers. To meet someone so famous and heroic made a big impression.

Attending Dookie Agricultural College was one of the best things I did, for it provided an excellent all-round practical education, including an invaluable engineering course. I designed a shock absorber system for bicycles and for pocket money I developed photographs, sold radio receivers I had constructed and laboured on the College farm during holidays. In the Depression, it was so vital to make some cash any way you could. Sometimes I regret not going to university to take an engineering degree at war’s end. I vividly remember being bullied in dangerous initiation ceremonies at Dookie, such as hanging onto the shafts of an old Cobb and Co. coach, the senior students smugly eated inside, as it raced round the dam before slewing off course on the overflow from a ditch. I wasn’t the only one thrown off or having my bed up-ended in the middle of the night or subjected to pillow fights when one of the seniors would wield his kakri and slash the capok to shreds and feathers. In 1938 I refused to join the Rifle Club because you had to swear to staff you’d go to war.

But when war did break out in September, 1939 I felt motivated to defend the British Empire. Like my English-born father, who had trained as an Anglican minister and sought to travel overseas supporting English communities for eight years in such far-flung places as Vladivostok, I too was itching to see something of his mother country, which flying a Liberator in the European theatre of war would provide.

At Victoria Barracks I told the Secretary of Air, ‘I want to be a pilot, sir.’

‘Everybody wants to be a pilot. Do you know anything about radio sets?’

I did, the hand-made sort cobbled together, but instead of achieving forty words of Morse per minute, I managed only two. Evidently, I’d done my dash with flying.

‘What about being a rigger?’

‘What do they do, sir?’

‘They chock the aircraft’s wheels, generally handle the plane on the tarmac, clean it, minor repairs, that sort of thing.’

That sounded pretty good. So I completed the six months’ course at Ascot Vale as Flight Rigger, sleeping in the sheep pavilion on concrete in the Show Grounds.

Following in our family tradition, I signed up for the air force. My youngest brother had crashed a Wellington through a hangar two months into training and was badly burnt in the flames in which two crewmen were killed. A couple of cousins in the RAAF also perished in the skies.

It was at Laverton air base, south-west of Melbourne, that I suffered my only wartime injury. We were assembling the various parts of a Spitfire. The sling holding up one of the wings broke as we were positioning it on the fuselage. If

the wing had dropped, the damage would have been a costly setback, so I felt obliged to hold the heavy load up with bare hands for a couple of hours. I severely strained the muscles in my back, but said nothing lest I would be prevented from flying. As a consequence, I was compelled to sleep in a painful, curled-up position for many years after the war.

At last in 1942 I received a call-up for aircraft training and was posted to Somers on the southern coast of the Mornington Peninsula. I was now an L.A.C. (Leading Aircraftsman) embarked upon the Empire Training Scheme. Blankets and a palliasse were distributed, plus a Hessian sack, which we promptly filled with straw, which made a pretty hard bed. We were allocated to huts of thirty to forty airmen and awaited first morning roll call with apprehension. For two months we studied maths, navigation, theory of flight, Morse code, aircraft engines. Also aircraft and ship recognition, whereby silhouettes were flashed on a screen and you had to name the object within five seconds – five seconds that could save your life. We were also kept occupied with lots of physical training.

On leaving Somers we were issued with a white flash to be worn in our caps to signify we were aircraft trainees. We were very proud of that flash.

I was gaining a reputation for asking awkward questions, being a bit of a stirrer.

Twenty-five out of thirty-two trainees on the course were made sergeants. To my chagrin, I was only made a pilot officer, the lowest commissioned officer, an ‘arse-up corporal’ because the brevet was upside down. I doubt whether discipline in the RAAF was as rigorous as it was in the British services. The longer you served, the more easy-going it became. At first, I was picked on by the drill instructor, who ordered me to move on the double all the time. ‘Right, corporal, go and clean the latrines! On the double!’ he barked. ‘What right have you got to order me about?’ I retorted, as the officer didn’t have stripes sewn on his new overalls. ‘Right-o, I’ll take you down to the Warrant Officer.’ Where I was charged, but in defence I argued that the officer had ‘delusions of grandeur without any authority’. I was still shy in those days – the girls fell for the pilots, not the aircrew – but after putting up with the bullying and baiting at Dookie College I was no longer willing to be pushed around. After all, I was a volunteer to defend King and Country, not a conscript. I merited some respect!

At Benalla, the No.11 Elementary Flying School, the eight-week course comprised trigonometry, Morse, charting courses. The job of us sprogs or ‘tarmac terriers’ was to collect the De Havilland Tiger Moths as they taxied back to the flight line. Two airmen holding on to each end of the lower wing guided them to their positions on the tarmac. These two-seaters had no brakes.

The Commanding Officer declared: ‘Catchpole’s uncle was my legal partner in Adelaide. Get into any trouble at all, Catchpole, come and see me.’ During wartime it was surprising how frequently such co-incidences occurred.

For two months I trained on a Tiger Moth, ‘wire, sticks and linen’, just circuits and landings. I was scared stiff, but soon came to appreciate that the truly brave airmen were the fighter pilots, particularly in Europe, for although they were sent on shorter missions, they were very much on their own, independent, as opposed

to the highly co-ordinated ten-man crew of the Liberator, who were flying at higher altitude and therefore less susceptible to enemy firepower.

On my first solo flight there was a speaking tube, a gadget like a stethoscope used to link the novice pilot to his trainer. In the back seat was Screaming Skull, screamed so you didn’t get over-confident. After five hours, ‘You’re on your own, so go and do a circuit.’ I carefully taxied a short distance on the grass airfield, checked my simple cockpit drill and slowly opened the throttle to the full.

After gaining speed, the tail came up off the ground and we were gently bumping along. Suddenly I was airborne.

I climbed at sixty-six miles per hour to about one thousand feet, eased off the throttle, levelled off and rolled back the trim to take pressure off the controls.

After making a series of left turns I completed one circuit of the airfield and began the descent for landing. Continuing to ease the throttle back, I was down to five hundred feet and approaching the airfield at the regulation speed of sixty-six miles per hour. With almost all the power off, I hovered and sank slowly toward the ground.

Meanwhile The Screaming Skull had boasted to those colleagues who gathered round to watch my landing, ‘I’ve got a fantastic student here.’ Would you believe, I made a hash of it, bumping heavily five times. The Screaming Skull was left with egg on his face. From then on he always came down on me like a ton of hot bricks.

In the early mornings, it was very still and we would often take off before sunrise.

But in getting off the ground and upwards of five hundred or one thousand feet, you’d find the sun would be up and the ground still in darkness. This magical space gave me a sense of freedom, clarity of thought, achievement and even peace.

I wasn’t so flash on aerobatics, spins, stall turns, rolls, loops. They were always performed above three thousand feet for safety. Learning to spin the Tiger was easy. It meant climbing with little power and at the point of stall, about fortyeight miles per hour, one wing would flip over and the aircraft would immediately spiral down into a spin, mesmerizing me with fear at first, but joystick forward and full rudder in the opposite direction to the spin would soon correct that.

Motor on and ease the stick back and you were flying straight and level again.

Flying upside down was hairy stuff. It was essential to have your leather harness secure. When the motor stopped, you instinctively made a grab for your straps and held on like crazy. As for looping the loop . . . don’t ask!

One time, flying on two engines up to 10,000 feet, the fog was so thick, I said to a fellow-student lying in the nose staring out the perspex window, ‘If you see anything, let me know.’ As we were descending lower and lower, ever more cautiously, I heard frantic drumming with thrashing feet on the floor before a desperate yell, ‘Pull on the engine, we’re skimming gum leaves!’

The only occasion I felt any real fear was in formation flying, three Airspeed Oxfords flying wing to wing over Point Cook. I stayed off a bit on the flank,

while the other two were far too close, inevitably clipping wings and in the blink of an eye went twisting downward. Two gung-ho pilots died needlessly.

To cut to the chase, I was a hesitant pilot, unable to maintain even a slow roll, let alone dare all those fancy manoeuvres. I realized I was incapable of being a fighter pilot. My burning desire was to fly the new 4-engine bomber, the Liberator, so that I could see something of England.

At graduation we were presented with our flying logbook, a much-prized possession. After nine hours of flying instruction, but not before being chewed out by my instructor. I flew solo for the first time in an Airspeed Oxford, but ground-looped, swinging violently round having lost power in one of the engines.

What is it about training instructors and RSMs that invariably turn them into nasty pieces of work?

Then in late 1943 I was one of four Australian pilots posted to an American squadron in Queensland. The only tropical gear issued by the RAAF was a pith helmet, as if I were going on safari! By contrast, the Americans wanted for nothing, enjoying impressive logistic support. They fitted me out with a smart uniform, including a baseball cap. On my first day at Fenton I was ordered, under protest, to draw my personal jeep. Construction and engineering battalions were carving out numerous forward airstrips to facilitate General MacArthur’s push toward the Philippines.

Mind you, I couldn’t for the life of me be a gunner, lying on my front in the Liberator’s belly, peering down on oblivion for hour after hour until the aircraft got in between cones of fire to gain the shortest route possible to the target. In fact, all the crewmen were constantly communicating by inter-com before take-off and all instruments checked out on the journey. The pilot had a throat microphone but only in an emergency would you communicate with another pilot in the squadron, so as not to betray information to the Japanese.

The Liberator was a marvellous plane to fly, a beautiful piece of engineering by Consolidated Designer. It had the same shaped wing with high lift modelled on the Catalina, with a pendulous weight beneath, so it rarely bounced on landing as the nose was heavier and the undercarriage felt as if it was coming up. Although the earlier models were painted khaki with a sealer, the later versions had an aluminium silver that glittered in the sun. On a short run we’d carry 8,000 pounds of bombs; on a long run, 4,000 pounds. We made routine raids on distant resource centres, inter-island shipping and other targets of opportunity. Our aggressive bombing schedule threatened the Japs, but our record in those early months was calamitous.

Night missions for Surabaya would depart at 5.30 in the afternoon, destined to arrive over Java at about 1.00 in the morning. Up above 6,000 feet you could pick out the location of the islands in the Indonesian archipelago because a small cloud would invariably be hovering over them. The return leg was more tricky, trying to locate the landing strip at Corunna Downs, where there were no distinct geographical features to identify it.

On my first mission I was on tenterhooks. You don’t know how you are going to react under pressure. I was reasonably calm, which surprised me. Some men freeze, unable to control their functions. A radio operator was grievously shocked when a shell exploded inside his plane and he was badly scarred on both cheeks.

That plane was dreadfully shot up, a proper pepper-pot. The guy refused to fly again and was consequently charged with having a lack of moral fibre and was court-martialled back in Melbourne. For many of us, it was arse-about: if you get hit by a Japanese fighter, it gets your dander up, makes you wild as hell and determined to wreak destruction on the enemy.

In Java our targets were the engineering works and other landing strips at Surabaya. We took the route round Madeira to fox the Japanese by approaching from a different angle. Although the street lights were on, we were greeted with a relentless burst of ack-ack so missed the Braat Engineering Works. ‘We’re going round again,’ said our Captain, Frank Mercurio, chisel-jawed, impervious to the consequences. ‘We missed the goddam target!’ With deep misgiving and sense of foreboding, I looked for the river to get my bearings and circled back on track.

Going round again, by which time enemy ack-ack had found our range, I was terrified. We were dropping incendiaries to light up targets for the following aircraft to bomb. These incendiaries had left a trail a mile long after the magnesium flare burst. It looked like a runway through the industrial area. You’d never know if you’d hit civilians. Obviously, there would have been workers there but I chose not to think about that. It was never discussed. Ethics was not our strong suit. The nifty Mosquitoes would zip over with cameras next day to assess the damage.

After that ordeal I felt dead, absolutely dead; others would be shaking like jelly.

A shot of much-appreciated whisky was given to crews on their return. As for me, a teetotaler, I made do with lolly water. American flyers were treated very generously by their Government and received two cartons of cigarettes a week: Lucky Strike, Chesterfield or Camels.

A squadron of fifty Liberators made a raid on Hollandia, a big base for the Japanese in New Guinea. Approaching Nadzab on the north coast, I was in the C.O.’s lead aircraft. The Japs turned on the radar-operated searchlights, blinding us so we couldn’t read the maps. Fortunately, their own traceries illuminated the targets for our gunners. We lit the place up with bombs. Tracers were shooting past. Quite by chance, the Japanese planes were re-fuelling at that very moment.

We wiped out all two hundred enemy aircraft, but two days later the United States Navy had the gall to claim the credit with its own belated bombardment.

If a plane had not returned from a bombing mission after four hours, you could assume it was lost. There was no mark of respect, no ceremony. It didn’t bother us flyers if you weren’t particular friends. The loss of aircrews happened often enough. Besides, the tents were spread over some distance, so you weren’t familiar with those not in your crew, but even amongst your own crew there wasn’t much fraternizing. I wasn’t aware of any low spirits or loss of morale when a crew failed to return. Two weeks elapsed before the families were informed by letter that their sons were missing in action. Condolences were sent

along with personal possessions. We would sift through the kit of the dead men to dispose of Esquire and other lewd magazines. Airmen could buy the dead men’s personal possessions. I made an offer for a pair of pearl-handled Colt revolvers that I fancied. One of my tasks was to check the letters of the Americans, many of whom could neither read nor write. What’s more, I had to inspect the fingernails of the catering staff for hygiene lock away the firearms of the black ancillary servicemen at six o’clock lest they hopped into the grog in the evening. Oh yes, they could be pretty volatile after they’d sunk a few beers.

‘Fall out, Jews and Catholics!’ Church Parade on Sundays was run by chaplains.

If you owned up to a religion, you were excused doing chores about the base after the service. Nearly all the Americans I knew had faith. They’d wear a rabbit’s foot round their neck or a gold cross. I’ve never been religious. Whoever’s up there’s doing a lousy job! But on return from a mission my first co-pilot, Frank Mercurio, a strict Catholic, would bend down on his knees and kiss the ground with a salvo of Hail Marys. It was something of a surprise that they didn’t talk about the civilians we were bombing. We were above it all, anaesthetized, spoke only of getting rid of Japanese aircraft, not the crew we had most likely killed.

Whenever the gunners shot down a Japanese plane, there was mayhem. ‘Beauty, one less!’ The Americans would sing away joyously, the delirious thrill of being intensely alive.

My two co-pilots, Frank Mercurio and Marty Conroy, were supreme pilots who could fly the Liberator single-handed without help from us mere mortals in the cockpit. They taught me to relax, not get uptight. On one run from Darwin to Adelaide, we lost two engines. Due to my familiarity with the topography, I was able to guide Frank to a service station at the corner of the runway to maximize the longest run-in. He crunched the plane down and feathered the engines immaculately. A lithe, swarthy, black-haired guy, Frank was unflappable, particularly when the Zekes made head-on passes to shoot out one of our engines.

But I do recollect his brooding silence when the Slinky Sue was shot down and half the crew lost their lives.

Slinky Sue was hit in engine 2, her captain told us a fortnight later. She lost power, smoking badly, weighed down by a bomb load that had stuck fast. We were falling behind the lead formation, as you probably remember, he said. A Jap pilot fired his cannon into the right side of the fuselage, ripping a three-foot hole into the radio operator’s cubby and damaging the engine controls. The intercom was destroyed, so crewmen in the tail received no word about ditching. She was losing altitude so fast she slammed into the ocean, hurling an immense shower of water and debris skyward. We seven survivors prised open the two life rafts jammed in the storage hatches only seconds before poor old Sue gave up the ghost. Then bloody hell, there was more strafing over her grave. We lashed our two rafts together and prayed with all our heart. The rations from our life rafts could be made to stretch the few days we were adrift in the drink. We collected extra water from the rain in tins. Six days into our ordeal, another bloomin’ Jap plane strafed us. I yelled out for everyone to dive down quick, but the turret gunner, who was much afraid of the water, refused to dive beneath the surface and was a sitting duck. We retrieved his floating body, uttered a few words over it, deflated his Mae West and let him slip below the surface. Eventually, we struck

landfall on an island not so distant from the mainland. The rescue plane picked us up twenty-four hours later. Christ, we were dead lucky!

My other co-pilot, Captain Marty Conroy, an open-faced, blond-haired guy with the dashing good looks of Alan Ladd, was Group Operations Officer, who was destined to chalk up 416 combat hours. At times he could get frustrated by the severe weather conditions, from the relentless heat of Queensland that left him choking at the red dust to the torrential rains during the monsoon season. Those long fifteen-hour sorties when you suddenly dropped out of the zone of calm and infinite blue into poor visibility and strong turbulence, sleet and lightning storm, put a strain on everyone’s nerves. Inevitably, someone would chirp up and sing ‘Oh what a beautiful morning’ to ease the tension.

Apart from burning himself on the red-hot skin of his own plane caused by the blistering heat of the outback and the incineration of his best buddy called upon to replace another crewman who withdrew with an ear infection, he did enjoy solving the problem of deterring crocodiles in the Katherine River by exploding a hand grenade in the water before venturing into the water-hole. And found two solutions for the monthly beer rations: cool them by pouring aviation gas over the bottles and then allowing the rapid evaporation to do the job; or take a B-24 up for a spin, a flying test at high altitude with a cargo of beer.

No doubt, a sense of humour was vital to keep your spirits up. There was an American navigator who had a pet cockatoo that he would take up in his plane.

One time his crew switched cockie with a moulting cockatoo and rubbed petroleum on its wings, so it looked even seedier. You should have heard his purple language and cries of anguish before we apprised him of the truth. He also kept an iguana six feet long with awful teeth. It was tied between the trees and occasionally would rear up when disturbed and scare the living daylights.

Pilots and crewmen had a lot of affection for their own ship, referring to them as ‘she’. Their captains invariably chose nose art with saucy names, such as Jezebel or Mississippi Madame or Lucky Strike, Drunkard’s Dream, Sleepy Time Gal. Altogether I flew about fifty different planes, each one having its own temperament or strengths and weaknesses. You didn’t feel comfortable flying in another plane but your own. It was the captain’s prerogative to choose the aircraft’s name. I remember ‘Beautiful Betsy’, a pig of a thing that used too much fuel, perhaps it was something in the rigging, but you always wondered if you had enough fuel to get her back home. On the fuselage the painted image of a bomb indicated the number of missions or strikes, whereas the icons of vertical planes represented the number you’d shot down.

In 1944 after nine months of flying combat, I had clocked up three hundred hours in combat conditions; 150 hours in extreme conditions. Perhaps that’s why I was next deployed as an Instructor to Tocumwal in the Riverina, noted for its dust storms and poor visibility. This was the biggest base built in Australia by the Americans in three or four months. It comprised two long runways, housing constructed like a village to give the impression that it wasn’t a military area with some 4,000 trainees. Many of these were experienced pilots who’d flown Lancasters, Halifax’s and Sunderlands in England and the Middle East, some

highly decorated with DSO and DFC. Consequently, I was promoted to Flight Lieutenant because it was deemed improper for a mere Pilot Officer to train senior officers. Even then our relationship could be prickly. They were happy to get onto a modern aircraft when the war in Europe finished. They could have piloted two-seater Mosquitoes, but the Liberator was much preferred as the best aircraft.

The B-24s were ground-checked, test-flown, then flown to Tocumwal.

Australia received about 380 B-24 Liberators from the United States and I was detailed to assist fly them over. I was in San Francisco when I heard some startling news. ‘What’s an atomic bomb?’ I asked. People were going crazy up and down every street, breaking into stores, looting, throwing their clothes off, marching, partying, you couldn’t move for gyrating people. The euphoria was manic. Of course, Americans love Australians, they’re the salt of the earth. But my English accent stuck out like a sore thumb. ‘Bloody lime-juicer!’ they’d call out, as if their ancestral memory of the English went back to the American War of Independence. The stoushes I got involved in left me with scratches and bruises all over my body. I filled up my Mae West with nylon stockings, which were like sharks teeth back in Australia, so made great gifts for girlfriends.

A former test pilot was due to examine Instructors one Sunday morning, which pleased me as I would miss church parade. I thundered down the airstrip towards the living quarters and got the nose up to find that the Examiner had cut number one motor. I quickly got into gear, as I had anticipated something challenging like that. About two hundred feet up, he cut number two motor. By this time I was slewing to the left over hundreds of troops in their blue uniforms lined up for church parade. Most of the men hit the deck. Later the Wing Commander chewed my ear in no uncertain terms never to pull such a stunt again!

Gradually, the fortunes of war turned against the Japanese; the Americans pushed their bases northward to draw closer to engagement with the enemy, first to Brisbane, then Port Moresby.

I came to enjoy my brief period as Instructor in spite of the odd emergency, such as a practice bomb hang-up; the landing gear stuck in the ‘up’ position; and a Beaufort, which had blown a tyre during a take-off run and careered towards us with one engine on fire.

One of my last flights as an RAAF pilot was returning from Moratai with a cargo of ex-POWs. Such a pitiful sight, they were invited into the officers mess at Gawler, South Australia, where they ate their first square meal in years.

Unfortunately, their digestive system couldn’t cope and to a man they were sick as wretched dogs.

Having left school at fourteen, I am proud to have begun my air force career as a Flight Rigger and finished as a Flight Lieutenant and Captain of B-24 Liberators.

Since the Liberators had been purchased from the United States under LendLease, they could not be flown for civil use. After the war I continued flying with Trans-Australia Airlines for five years.

Each week at Werribee, where I put in several hours every Thursday, we muster about twenty-five volunteers – civil engineers, locksmiths, architects, all sorts, young and old. The skin of the rebuilt plane is parked on a section of original runway. Parts badly corroded are recast or we make them ourselves. We possess quite an assortment of tools: sand-blasting machines, lathes, grinders, welding.

We are also restoring an Airspeed Oxford, whose under-carriage I’m currently busy on. I had experience working a lathe as a fitter. We completed the exterior of the Liberator three or four years back, so now we are sprucing up the interior, refitting oxygen bottles and hydraulics. The tail plane is sitting on trestles, as we can’t yet connect the control cables. We trade parts, but three different models of the Liberator were manufactured, so sizes don’t always measure up. Henry Ford supplied eight thousand Liberators, but there were D and J models too.

At the same time we are restoring the under-carriage of an Airspeed Oxford, which has a wooden frame and numerous metal brackets. I’m working on the hydraulic struts whose steel has corroded and rubber glans have perished. I take them apart, clean or sandblast them or use a wire brush on the end of a drill. Then you prime and paint ready for assembly.

I may be slowing up a bit, but I continue to enjoy practical work, solving engineering problems and getting my hands dirty. Oh, and I can still find a great deal to smile about.

Michael Small March 11- May 6, 2013