What's in a Name?

Taking off from the Italian shore of the Adriatic, 25 Sqn Marauders reached the Yugoslav coast in less than an hour. During this time the wireless operator, who was Warrant Officer Smit in John's plane, remained at the radio to receive final instructions from the formation commander and to report any developments aboard their own plane. When they were thirty minutes from the designated impact point, Lt. Van Rooyen ordered Lt. Broom to leave the navigator's station behind the co-pilot and move forward through a tiny access door that was just aft of the plane's transparent plexiglass nose cone, where the bomb sights were located, as well as the flexible nose gun. Acting as bombardier as well as forward gunner, the navigator was the only officer on the Marauder to handle a gun. (The pilot remotely controlled four fixed guns that fired forward, two on each side of the cockpit.) As the plane started its bombing run, the navigator swung the nose gun to one side and secured it, in order to put the bomb sight in position.

At the same time that Van ordered Pat forward, he ordered Smitty to leave his wireless station on the port side of the plane just behind the pilot and move aft to take control of two flexible-mounted waist guns and the high resolution camera. The waist guns were fired through hatches, one on each side of the plane's underbelly. The wireless operator opened these hatches after strapping on a safety harness to prevent himself from being pulled out of the airplane by the relentless drag of the slipstream. He was also responsible for positioning the heavy camera on its pedestal to take pictures through the hatches so bomb damage could be assessed. The camera was not hydraulically operated, and holding it in place against the fierce slipstream took considerable strength and skill. Once, when the plane was being tossed around by the percussion of exploding flak, Bernard Davies lost the camera through the one of the waist hatches. After the flight, Capt. Leadbetter asked him if he had taken any good pictures, and he said he was sure he had, but he was afraid the Germans had them by now.

To make his way aft from the wireless, Smitty had to take off all his outer gear: the inflatable Mae West, parachute harness, flying jacket, flight boots, and revolver, and carry them with him to put them on again in the waist. Removing the gear was necessary in order to squeeze through the tiny access door between the forward compartment and the first bomb bay. Carrying his equipment, he made his way along a narrow catwalk between the bomb racks until he came to John, who was in a folding seat just beneath the mid-upper turret. Tapping John's leg, because voices could hardly be heard in the roar of the engines and the slipstream, Smitty signalled him either to turn so he could squeeze past him or else lift his feet so he could crawl underneath.

Moving through such a small space was difficult in the best of times but a major challenge when the plane was under attack. Making his way aft to the waist guns, Bernard Davies once stopped to use the urinal tube in the main bomb bay, when a sudden burst of flak threw him off balance and he grabbed whatever he could to steady himself. Whatever it was came loose, and when he looked at it he recognized the pin of a 500-pound bomb. This represented no immediate danger, because the bomb would only explode on impact, but the plane could not land without disgorging its load because of the risk of the bomb exploding when the plane touched down. Another time, in a similar situation, what Bernard grabbed to steady himself was the rip cord of the navigator's stowed parachute, and he suddenly found himself covered in billowing silk. "Never mind," shouted Capt. Derek Uffold, the navigator, over the noise of the engines, "if we have to bale out I'll borrow your chute." On another op, when he was preparing to drop a "bumf bomb" or bundle of leaflets through the waist hatch, Bernard tore off more of the paper covering the bundle than he meant to, so the package burst just before it hit the slipstream, swirling a dense cloud of leaflets back up through the waist area, where they continued to circulate wildly like driven snowflakes until he could get the hatches closed. "Disaster Davies" they called him after that, and Capt. Leadbetter joked that his wireless operator had been trained by the Luftwaffe.

A feeling that the end was approaching for the Germans in Yugoslavia swept through 25 Sqn in December, 1944, only a month after John arrived, when a long column of trucks and armor was spotted on switchback mountain roads between Bioce and Matesevo. Partisans identified it as the retreating column of the German XXI Mountain Corps attempting to escape from Albania, and the Balkan Air Force committed heavy force to destroying the column, in concert with Partisans who attacked from the surrounding hills. The logbooks record ops with "M.T." or "motor transport" as the objective whenever weather permitted between December 12 and 21, but 25 Sqn was not the only one involved. Divebombing Beaufighters from 16 Sqn were crucial to the attack, and they were joined by bombers from SAAF 19 and RAF 39 Squadrons as well. Despite freezing rain, sleet, frost, and heavy snowfalls at camp, where tents collapsed and roads and walkways turned to mire, morale was high among the bomber crews. It was just the reverse for the retreating Germans. In addition to abandoning locations that they had dominated brutally for more than three years, they were now being destroyed like fish in a barrel.

Preventing or punishing the German retreat remained the major task for 25 Sqn until the end of the war. Soon no targets were left south of a line from Mostar to Sarajevo to Visegrad, but the Germans struggled to maintain escape routes in the north and west of Yugoslavia, and on May 4, 1945, 25 Sqn's objective was a bridge on the railway line between Dugo Selo and Papovaca, just east of Zagreb, part of a major east-west line of retreat. Twelve Marauders were to make the run, led by Lt. Col. Bosch. During the previous month, Lt. Van Rooyen and his crew had bombed marshalling yards on this line at Bonova Jaruga, Sunja, Zunica, and Okucani, usually facing light to medium flak but sometimes no opposition at all. John had logged forty-five operational hours in April, more than in any month since he had joined the squadron and five times as many as he had logged in January.

That morning, Warrant Officer Thirion made his way from one crew to the next, asking to be taken on board. Turned down by one pilot after another, Thirion came at last to Lt. Van Rooyen and his crew, standing near HD667 as it was being fuelled and armed for what turned out to be its last mission. Van Rooyen was popular and well liked, with a friendly smile and a huge handlebar moustache, which had been caricatured in Old Stooges, the squadron newsletter. Thirion hoped he might succeed here though he had failed elsewhere, and his hopes were rewarded. Van Rooyen had no more interest in replacing a veteran with a newcomer than any other pilot did, but he listened to Thirion's request and let him fly as an extra gunner. It would give him the satisfaction of recording at least one operational mission before the end of the war. As it turned out, Thirion's first opeational mission was also his last.

Planes from RAF 39 and SAAF 25 both flew this op, with 39 going in first and 25 following up. Since the previous October, standard procedure had been to make only one attack run on a target, in order to maintain the advantage of surprise. In this case, the double blow seemed best because of difficulties bombardiers had been experiencing both with the new T1 bombsight and the new tactic of bombing at right angles to the target. Besides, no anticraft guns had been reported near the bridge. RAF 39 completed their bombing run without opposition. The Germans quickly activated anticraft guns, however, and by the time SAAF 25 was over the target, the Marauders encountered accurate heavy flak, inflicting damage on several planes and fatal damage on one. HD667 was caught just as its bomb bay doors were closing. Van Rooyen tried desperately to crash land, but the plane made a slow right hand turn and exploded as it hit the ground 10,000 feet below the rest of the bombers, which were also in difficulty, three of them having been holed, the lead bomber thirty-four times.

Why John's plane" Because Van had taken on a spare bod" That kind of explanation was certainly common and was fervently believed among bomber crews. Alex Kinch told me that in one crew, the rear and mid-upper gunners always boarded their Marauder by climbing through the port waist hatch, but on one occasion they boarded through the starboard hatch instead. The mission was a rough one, because the target was heavily defended, and they took a lot of flak. When they returned, the gunners counted the number of times the plane had been holed and discovered it was thirteen. Awestruck, they never entered through the starboard hatch again.

Such thinking is understandable for young men under severe stress, where life is unpredictable and it is difficult to see how one's actions relate to what happens, whether for good or ill. For all of us, moreover, the significance of life is determined in part by the way we die. When death is premature, unexpected, and violent, as it usually is in war, it evokes unusual pity for the preceding life--the kind of pity Shakespeare draws on for the tragic effect in Romeo and Juliet and even in Hamlet. With pity also comes the need to explain, but the obviousness of an expla nation seems inversely proportioned to its ability to pluck the heart out of the mystery. Another way of thinking about life is in the way it is lived: how people grow, and change; how we fail, and try again, or give up; what we decide and choose, and what we don't, and why; whom we love, and how; how we are shaped by those we love, or befriend, or work with, or make our neighbors, and how we shape them.

In April, 1996, just before I left Cambridge, I invited three of my veteran correspondents to visit who could easily do so in a day's drive. Bernard Davies had another obligation, but Frank White and Alex Kinch were able to come. They had not seen each other since they were in Italy, more than fifty years before, and they had a lot to catch up on. Photographs, logbooks, artifacts, and stories were eagerly shared and examined. We had lunch together and then walked to the George on Benet Street, a pub where RAF crews liked to relax during World War Two. Over our pints in the "air force room," we admired the graffiti still on the ceiling, where young men etched their names and units by standing on chairs and using the smudge from their cigarette lighters. I learned a lot by listening and asking questions, and some of it has helped me understand John's brief life better. Certainly I could not have understood his life as well as I do without the generosity of five RAF men who flew with the SAAF at the same time John did and whose stories are therefore, in some sense, his story as well. On the other hand, telling their stories for the first time after fifty years seemed to help them too, finally bringing closure to harrowing events from their youth, doing a lost comrade a favor, offering something vital to the next generation before silence closes in on them.