Ghosts of the Empire Read online

  Ghosts

  of the

  Empire

  by Justin Sheedy

  Copyright © Justin Sheedy, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the author.

  ISBN 9781742983806 (ePub, Mobi)

  Digital edition distributed by

  Port Campbell Press

  www.portcampbellpress.com.au

  Conversion by Winking Billy

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  This book is a work of historical fiction based on actual events. All sequences featuring the De Havilland Mosquito aircraft are based on real events and on personal pilot accounts of those events. Key supporting characters are based on real historical figures, the air force squadrons featured actually existed, all facts, figures and dates as accurate as the author’s research would allow. Where artistic licence has been taken, the author’s intention in doing so is to reveal tragic truths of the period of our history which this story brings to life.

  For my parents

  Angela and John

  PROLOGUE

  Mick didn’t make the slender bi-plane turn; he simply did turn. The Tiger Moth needed only the slightest touch on its controls, and it obeyed Mick’s touch instantly, precisely. With its wooden joystick handle between his right thumb and forefinger, Mick guided the yellow craft through the narrow gap between two cumulus clouds in the early morning sun. Fluffy gold and whiteness whipping past as he flew between them, he came out the other side – into infinite open space.

  In the clear silvery blue ahead of him now he saw a ‘thermal’: a column of hot air rising – becoming visible as it hit higher, cooler air and turned to cloud. A giant pillar of white in the sky, he skirted closely round it, feeling for long moments like a race car on some vast showground corner. He grinned at the notion; he’d never driven a car…

  Mick felt beyond comfortable in the cockpit seat, way beyond: With the gravitational forces of the curving bank through which he flew, he felt pressed down so sweetly, so reassuringly in his seat and within the aircraft. He felt he wanted to curve, and curve, and curve, a slight shudder in the airframe now and then, but that only kept things fun.

  Collossal in the western distance, a cumulus massif beamed back the eastern light of morning as brilliantly as if beaming its own. Mick straightened towards it.

  He wasn’t alone, a voice still so very pleasantly in his ears. It had never left him…

  Spare a thought, Michael… Spare a thought for the countless millions. Who’ll only ever either in their wildest dreams or in the next world get to do what you are about to.

  Sydney, 1939

  In the front bar of the Lewisham Hotel, Pat O’Regan sat waiting for his son. He did every Friday afternoon, after knock-off from the railyards. Payable dues of the young blokes to stay back and sweep up, Mick’d be along any minute now.

  Pat looked forward to this moment every week. He’d always got along with his eldest of seven, but since their mother had died a few years back, the lad had become a real good mate to his old dad: pretty much always cheerful, never complaining when times were hard, getting the tea on for the littlies when Mrs Plunket from next door got rotten too early…

  No error, Pat was proud of his eldest. A few blokes said young Mick was wasted at the yards; should be at the University. Yeah. Right where Pat couldn’t afford to send him: A man with a stable job through the Depression, as Foreman of Carpentry at the Everleigh Carriage Workshops Pat O’Regan had the respect of his street, also seven mouths to feed. Without the pay packet Mick brought in they’d go barefoot. So instead of Engineering, or some such discipline befitting his brains – the uni just a few bloody blocks away, it fairly stung Pat and daily – the lad would have to be content with Foreman of Carpentry, with a bit of luck, when his old man retired. And Mick had never whinged about that prospect neither.

  Still, Friday night was usually a happy one at the O’Regan place; father and eldest brought home fish and chips – mainly chips. Then the littlies’d clear up and all eight of them would sit together by the wireless. The wireless that a week ago had declared War.

  Pat hadn’t touched his beer. Just this morning he’d heard the news from Harry in Payroll: Mick had requested the New South Wales Government Railways release chit he needed to go and sign up. For the bloody Air Force. Pat had seen it coming: Mick had long said rail was a technology of the past, aviation the way of the future. Probably on the money too – lad usually was – but all Pat saw in aviation was his son’s way to War. And all while he could stay safely and honourably at home: Essential Personnel: The Railways would be integral to the local ‘war effort’, also Mick’s ticket to a nice, steady future. A plodding sort of future, perhaps, but better than no bloody future at all…

  Most of Pat’s memories of France had faded in the years since 1918…

  Once he’d thought it’d never stop, his waking bolt upright every morning about 3 to the sight of Jacko Morgan standing there with his arms freshly blown off – the uncomprehending look on his face. Yet it stopped. About a decade after Pat got home. So too, though Pat never imagined the thunder of the artillery bombardments would fade in his ears, it had. Albeit having left him partially deaf, in one ear nigh on completely.

  Though one memory stayed with Pat. A vision clear as yesterday. Not one of his time in the trenches, but of the first night he’d ever headed toward them: the long line of blokes in front of him, and behind, the twin glass disks of their gas-masks reflecting the green parachute flares that floated in the sky up ahead. The men said nothing, just tramped steadily, mutely onwards in the green-illuminated fog, passing here and there some poor bastard without his mask – one running around mad, screaming like a pig getting butchered alive.

  Only reason Pat had ever made Foreman, or so he had always assumed these long years since, was that so many lads from the yards had joined up on that day back in 1914. So often since had he passed their names carved in stone in the parks of Lewisham, Stanmore, Newtown, Redfern, Waterloo: names that once belonged to faces, workmates. Friends…

  Jacko had lived in Camperdown. The figure in white marble had stood in Camperdown Park since 1920: Slouch-hatted. Sided rifle. Looking straight ahead, upright and fit. Not standing there with its arms off. Eyes turning to horrified agony… The moment in time clawed Pat anew as the rabbitoh man’s donkey and cart clattered past the open doorway of the pub.

  Yet up the pub step from the street now climbed a black-haired figure – work boots, overalls, slightly frayed jacket, his usual smile: the one that made the whole front bar want to smile also, these blokes with the seats outta their pants. That look in those green eyes of his as if sly to something really quite promising on the cards y’haven’t heard of yet but y’soon will…

  Mick didn’t speak. He took off his cap, brushed a stray wood shaving off it, and sat at the bar by his dad. The publican edged the new arrival a just-drawn middy of beer across the counter, also without a word.

  Pat, too, only sipped his beer. Until his son was 21, the New South Wales Government Railways release chit needed his old man’s signature, didn’t it. Lad was only turning 20 next month, wasn’t he…

  The whole front bar heard Pat’s whisper to his son. It was Pat’s ears, they all knew: Sometimes Pat didn’t think you could hear him.

  ‘No. Fucken. Way.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  May 1941

  As the
twin-engined Avro Anson climbed over the endless brown patchwork of Narromine, Leading Aircraftman Michael O’Regan 217831 pressed his nose up against his passenger seat window, and peered down. He thought of a Sunday afternoon that already seemed long ago.

  It had been the first time Mick had ever seen his father shed tears, first time ever. He hadn’t cried exactly, but as he’d signed the chit at the kitchen table the tears had clean rolled down his face. Sure, the old boy’d bucked up after a few beers but his face stayed hard. The swaying factor for Pat O’Regan had been what his son wasn’t signing up for…

  This is for the Air Force, right? Well that’s something; better than the bloody Infantry… Now those bastards can’t getcha, see. No fucken trenches for any son o’ mine … Swimmin’ in mud thick with pieces of other blokes no bloody thankyou … An’ no poison bloody gas attacks up in the air … You bloody-well stay UP there, Michael… Don’t EVER come down.

  Through the window of the Anson, Mick scanned out to the horizon. What did they farm out here? he wondered. Dust? Narromine… At least he was back in New South Wales, finally. Until the Royal Australian Air Force had called him up towards the end of 1940, to Mick O’Regan, ‘all round the world for sixpence’ was something that happened to other people. People with a spare sixpence…

  At his ‘initial interview’ back at the start of that year – for what they were calling the ‘Empire Air Training Scheme’ – the two air force officers on the selection panel down at Woolloomooloo had spoken briefly but definitely about a spot for Mick in ‘Ground Crew’, given all Mick’s carpentry work with the Railways since the age of 14. In truth Mick had felt a bit preoccupied as the younger officer wrote, smoked and stamped in files one-handed being minus an arm. The older officer was the chummy type, said ‘Ground Crew’ like he’d missed his own true calling though to Mick his smile looked plastered on. There’d been a civilian on the panel too: a balding, spectacled gent who never took his eyes off Mick, never a word, there’d hardly been time; Mick was only in there a few minutes and they called ‘Next’.

  So, a whole nine months later, the first surprise off the rank was Mick’s call-up letter ordering him to report to Initial Training School not for Ground Crew but for Air Crew. Surprise Number 2: not to the new depot at Bradfield Park on Sydney’s North Shore – standard for New South Wales blokes – but to one at some place called Sandgate near Brisbane, enclosed in the call-up letter the most expensive railway ticket Mick had ever held.

  And so had begun his experience of the Australian Military: three months of being screamed at by RAAF Drill Sergeants, marching up and down the square – ‘ Sarh!’, obstacle course bashing in the Brisbane heat and what felt like an Olympic marathon every other day, the result of which was that Mick ended up fitter than he’d ever been – not that in his life so far he’d ever had the time for so much exercise.

  The academic side of Initial Training had been a bloody nightmare to begin with, until it began to sink in with a few of Sandgate’s RAAF teaching staff that, having had to leave high school in 2nd Year, Aircraftman 2nd Class O’Regan had only ever brushed with basic Mathematics, forget uni-level Physics… Once this had registered properly for some of these RAAF teachers, they proceeded by expressing the fundamentals of their subjects for what they were to Mick: a foreign language being absorbed. Indeed, one teaching Flight Lieutenant not only noted O’Regan’s progress from that point on as remarkable, but also a rise in the marks of his whole Trigonometry class.

  By the end of Initial Training Mick assumed he’d just about had his quota of surprises. Only to find he had not.

  The great big ugly moment at the end of Initial Training was called ‘Categorisation’. Here Mick sat down before his ‘aircrew selection board’, who promptly advised he’d be going on to Elementary Flying Training School.

  For training as a Pilot.

  And not to the one at Sydney’s Mascot either, but to ‘3EFTS’ at Essendon outside Melbourne, where, promoted to Leading Aircraftman, or ‘LAC’, Mick learnt to fly.

  For a carpenter like Mick, the De Havilland Tiger Moth was a work of art. And no error. The woodwork of the thing! Mag-nificent. Canadian Spruce, a really first-class ply-wood and a lovely job of gluing and lamination… But the wooden frame of the upper and lower wings and tail was what really got him; what a structure: so many pieces so finely curved and fitted together – Seemed almost a shame to cover the whole thing with linen that, painted with coats of dope, dried tight like a drum.

  Flying in it, Mick enjoyed every minute in the open cockpit biplane, first with an instructor in the rear cockpit, then flying ‘solo’. For Mick, the whole flying experience came as one of the most pleasant surprises he’d ever had: It looked harder than it was. A bloke had to keep his wits about him alright but after just a few goes Mick really didn’t want to come down – his dad might crack a smile. Though he loved landing it, bringing the Moth in for a long, curving approach and touch-down as that only meant he could take her back up again!

  Mick so enjoyed his months at Essendon that as for the blokes who struggled and got ‘scrubbed’ off the course, well, that was just too bad; aviation was the way of the future, that future was going to be his, some blokes just weren’t made for flying. He was. His instructor wrote in the comments section of his final report on Mick that LAC O’Regan’s flying displayed one flaw: A tendency to fly the aeroplane instinctively instead of as instructed, a tendency typical of so-called ‘natural’ pilots. The report concluded, however, with a phrase that Mick had to query: The instructor assured him it was in fact high praise and meant ‘enviable coordinated control of stick and rudder’. The phrase was A very nice pair of hands.

  Yet all that was behind him now; Mick was finished with Tiger Moths, at least, for the foreseeable future: Ahead of him lay the next phase of his training, and an entirely different sort of aircraft. As, below, the browns of Narromine became countless only to recede in a filthy haze, Mick drew back from the window of the Anson, and peered at the young face in the passenger seat beside his own – one of the blokes they’d just picked up at Narromine. As with the other faces on board that Mick had glimpsed, it was unmistakably glum…

  Six passengers now on board the Anson including Mick, en route from Essendon the aircraft had first landed at Wagga – where everybody had so dearly hoped to be posted as that’s where you became a fighter pilot. Yet they were only stopping there to pick up and refuel; their destination, Number 1 Bombing and Gunnery School (1BAGS), Evans Head, Far North Coast of New South Wales – precisely where everybody had hoped never to be posted: At Evans Head these young men who’d wanted to be fighter pilots would train to fly in bombers and not even as pilots but as bomb-aimers and air gunners. In time, so the word went, most of them would end up with British Royal Air Force Bomber Command flying twin-engined Wellingtons or even Blenheims out of England over enemy-occupied France and Germany. Where their chance of completing the required ‘tour’ of 30 operations would be one in three.

  One.

  In three.

  Mick had gathered, since his second week of Initial Training back in Brisbane, that the vast majority of blokes went to Bomber Command and so, most likely, would he. From the precise moment, however, when he learnt of his own worse-than-even chance of survival with Bomber Command, Mick saw no other option but to go hell-for-leather for an alternate path. He saw no good reason he should be dead by 22, nor that his family should go under, which they more than likely would without him. Consequently he’d settled on a plan. And it was working. All-round-the-world-for-sixpence but it was working.

  His plan was stay alive.

  To stay alive, stay home.

  To stay home, become a Flying Instructor; instructors stayed in Australia.

  Elementary Flying Training, if you survived being ‘scrubbed’, ended with your ‘Pilot Ability Rating’. It went Below Average, Average, Above Average, any one of which could see you on overseas operational aircrew duty, as a pilot if you were lucky –
so to speak. To become an Instructor, you needed something better. You needed no less than the highest rating there was…

  Having been an apprentice, then journeyman carpenter with the New South Wales Government Railways, Mick O’Regan understood hard work. He understood dogged application, also practice-makes-perfect but, above all, as a carpenter he understood physical precision. At the very moment he heard ‘ 1-in-3’, Mick knew these things he understood were all he had to keep him alive.

  And so from that moment worked his balls off.

  At the end of Initial Training, he took none of the ‘inter-course leave’ he was then entitled to, nor any of the free weekends permitted during the Elementary Flying Training course that followed, not even any leave at the end of that. Instead he took a five-mile run every morning, a vacant stretcher bed at the Essendon barracks plus all the textbooks and extra tuition he could scrounge from whatever RAAF teaching staff he could corner. These types, for the most part, were only too happy to help him with their pet subjects: Applied Mathematics, Navigation, Aeronautical Physics, Morse Code, Radio-Telephony, Aircraft Engine Theory and more. He even stole a few extra flying hours on the Moth though these, truth be told, had felt to Mick like pure reward for hard work.

  Just a few days ago he had flown long and low over the farm fields of Essendon feeling three-quarters stoked, one quarter on edge: on edge as he’d always imagined ‘butterflies in the stomach’ to be a thing only girls got. But he’d had them and in direct response to what he’d just been told: LAC O’Regan, M., 217831 would being going on to 1BAGS Evans Head. As a Trainee Instructor. His awarded Pilot Ability Rating?

  Exceptional. The highest rating there was.

  He had worked like his life depended on it. Which it had.