Fly by nights (RAAF)

[Kyt]

Fly by nights - Books - Entertainment - theage.com.au

They were ordinary men by day, heroes by night. Michael Veitch shares his fascination with the flyboys of WWII with Lou Robson.

MICHAEL Veitch is happy to confess that he is a coward. After years interviewing the men who flew in the air forces of World War II, he admits he can't imagine himself summoning the same courage if he found himself in their situation.

Men like Roy Riddel, who shot down two Japanese Zero fighters with his hopelessly outclassed Kittyhawk (think David and Goliath); or Ian Robinson, who survived a fall from an exploding Lancaster heavy bomber, followed by 16 months in a German PoW camp; or Fred Phillips, one of the elite Pathfinder Force that guided bombers to their destinations.

Veitch, the presenter of ABC TV's Sunday Arts program, has collected the stories of these men and others from among the thousands who flew through flak and fear between 1939 and 1945. Some of their stories were published in his first book, Flak, but many had remained untold until Penguin asked him to write a second volume. The resulting book, Fly, has just been released.

The death rate among flyers was phenomenal; only German U-boat crews had higher casualty rates. According to the RAAF, more than 3400 Australian airmen were killed while serving with Bomber Command.

"For a good few years you had a less than 50/50 chance of surviving," says Veitch.

Veitch is struck, too, by the contrast between the normality of their everyday lives and their airborne feats of heroism. "They lived in the peaceful English countryside with nice beds with clean sheets," he says. "You'd go down to the pub or go to London and then at night you would fly into this catastrophe and fly back again and then you'd wake and a couple of people weren't there.

"The mental strain on these people is unimaginable. I couldn't have done it for a day or a week."

And what would he have done in their place? "You mean if I was flying an aeroplane? Something very safe, somewhere in Burma or India where you had a much smaller chance of being killed. Certainly not over Europe, although I often think about what it would have been like. No, something cushy for me, I'm afraid."

Veitch loathes the jingoism around Anzac Day, but as a boy he was obsessed with model planes. "My parents didn't always get on that well and a bit of an escape really was having this little world in the end of a balcony in a draughty annexe where I had a little studio set up with paints and glues and things. I'd just retreat there, physically and mentally."

Most of his models are long gone. "Actually I had a box of unmade ones that I'd kept," he confesses. "Some were 20 years old and I had a little splurge after Flak came out."

Our interview takes place at the Australian National Aviation Museum at Moorabbin, to the backdrop of planes taking off and the smell of aviation fuel. Veitch darts from plane to plane, expounding on their good points and bad.

As a teenager, Veitch was friends with a former Lancaster bomber pilot. When he died, Veitch decided to track down those who were left in Australia. They weren't easy to find. Few airmen joined the RSL, and other associations are largely defunct. Contacts came by word of mouth and serendipity.

"I knew virtually nothing about what they really did when I contacted them. Often they would tell me things they had not told anyone — deliberately not told anyone because, for various reasons, they didn't think anyone would be interested.

"They are very modest people. They are from the generation where one doesn't promote oneself, you don't big-note yourself in any way. They were always using the 1940s term 'being a line-shooter'; a line-shooter is a bragger, and they hated it. It was anathema to the way they carried themselves through life.

"But what's happened as they get older and their closing years approach, it's been, 'Well, if I don't tell someone who's interested … then no one will know, and it's a huge part of my life that seems to resonate even louder as the years get on'."

For some subjects, the experience of talking to Veitch revived long-buried memories. One man confessed that he had dreamed, 60 years on, of a whole trip over Germany from start to finish after he had told Veitch his story. Others admitted they hadn't even told their wives about their war.

One of these told Veitch of his escape from a PoW camp with four comrades. They were walking down a lane when they encountered two German SS men. Luckily none of the escapees was wearing insignia. "He knew that if he turned round he would be shot," says Veitch. "He just walked past them and went, 'Guten tag, Guten tag'.

"His wife said, 'I've never heard that before' — they'd been married 50 years, they got married in 1944 — and he was, 'Well, you never asked me, dear'."

Fly, by Michael Veitch, published by Viking, is now available. RRP $49.95.