There
are thousands of memoirs of the Second World War, including the war
in the air. But a few feel especially alive – because they were
written while it was happening. Some are still read; others are not,
but should be, for they bring the air war vividly to life
As
Washington Post publisher Philip Graham said back in 1963,
journalism is “the first rough draft of history”. That hasn’t
changed; new books about Donald Trump and Brexit pour off the press
or onto our Kindles almost weekly, and they’re often by journalists
– Bob Woodward and CBS correspondent Major Garrett are the latest.
In a year or two their books will be out of date and out of print.
But in time, historians will go back to them as primary sources.
 |
| A Halifax Mk I (Imperial War Museum © IWM CH 3393) |
The
Second World War was no different. Publishers fell over themselves to
commission the topical. Sometimes, these commissions went to the
well-known – people such as war correspondent Ernie Pyle and
journalist and socialite Ève
Curie, who slugged it out for a Pulitzer in 1943; Pyle won, but
Curie’s book is a
tour
de force;
I
wrote about it here
a couple of years ago. In Britain, Richard Dimbleby published two
books during the war – The
Waiting Year
(about the run-up to D-Day) and the splendid The
Frontiers Are Green.
Even
John Steinbeck got books
out
on the
war while it was on
(Bombs
Away, about
an American bomber crew, and a rather good short novel, The
Moon is Down).
But
publishers know an expanding racket, and they didn’t just publish
the great and the good. A number of serving RAF pilots wrote about
their experiences during the war. The best-known were Enemy Coast
Ahead and The Last Enemy, by Guy Gibson and Richard
Hillary – both to be killed later in the war – and Leonard
Cheshire’s Bomber Pilot. There was much they could not
talk about while hostilities were still on. Airfield names are
omitted, for instance, and sometimes the names of other pilots. And
of course they could not talk about the extraordinary electronic war
that the RAF was fighting in the skies over Germany; some of that
remained secret for some time after 1945. But they could give
civilians a taste of the war being fought above their heads.
Books
like Hillary’s and Gibson’s are still in print, but most have
vanished. The two writers reviewed here are less well-known. Their
books are not notable as literature, but they do offer flashes of
fine writing. And they give an acute flavour of the war and what it
was like to fight it in the air.
First,
R.C. Rivaz’s Tail Gunner.
*
Richard
C. Rivaz was born in 1908 in India, where his father had been a civil
servant. In the 1930s he tried to earn his living as an artist, but
made little money, and turned to teaching. When the war began he
volunteered for the RAF and was disappointed to be told that he was
too old for pilot training, but was accepted as an air-gunner. In the
summer of 1940 he was posted to an operational unit; as it was
wartime he did not name the squadron or the airfield in the book, but
it was 102 Squadron at Driffield, north of Hull.
Arriving
late, he was put in a room with an officer who was already asleep
but had left his possessions scattered all over the room.
I
was awakened next morning by the buzzing sound of an electric razor,
and saw a slight figure in brightly-coloured pyjamas walking up and
down the room trailing a length of electric flex behind him and
running the razor in a care-free manner up and down his face. After a
few moments I said ‘Good morning’… and was favoured with some
sort of grunt in reply. I saw this ...strange person several times
during the day… but never once did he show that he recognized me. I
noticed that he seemed to know everybody, and that most people called
him Cheese. That night I changed my room.
Not
long afterwards he is assigned to fly with this unfriendly character,
who then makes himself quite charming. Rivaz gives his first name,
Leonard, but not his second, which was Cheshire. At the time he wrote
his book, Rivaz would have known that Cheshire was to be a successful
pilot, but not just how famous he would become.
Before
he can get off the ground, however, Rivaz experiences a fierce air
attack on the airfield.
I
saw a party of men digging furiously around a shelter that had
received a direct hit: the ambulance was there… and the orderlies
were lifting a man — with his tunic, face, and hair covered with
earth — on to a stretcher. ...I noticed that his legs were in an
unnatural twisted position. Someone was digging around another pair
of legs: the body was still buried and the legs obviously broken. I
saw two more men crushed — with faces nearly the same colour as
their tunics — between sheets of corrugated iron: they were both
dead.
It
was August 15 1940 and Driffield had been attacked by a large force
of German bombers; 14 RAF personnel were dead, including the first
female RAF fatality, and 12 British aircraft were destroyed. These
were details that Rivaz couldn’t give, but it doesn’t matter –
his description of the raid is very vivid. So is much else in the
book; Rivaz was to see a lot of action, and there are few dull
moments. Flying over Cologne, his aircraft is hit and a flare
explodes in the rear of the plane, temporarily blinding the crew,
injuring one terribly and blowing an enormous hole in the fuselage;
Rivaz, in the tail turret, must struggle past the damage and try to
put out the flames. Cheshire eventually regained control of the
aircraft and brought it home, a feat that won him the DSO. Later,
Rivaz would twice fly on missions against the Scharnhorst at
Brest, daylight attacks on a heavily defended target. He was not to
know that in the first of these raids, in July 1941, armour-piercing
bombs of the type he was carrying did damage the ship quite badly.
They may have come from his aircraft. He also “ditched” twice and
was rescued from the sea, both times in winter; on one of these
occasions, he only barely survived.
 |
| Whitleys at Driffield (Imperial War Museum © IWM HU 104766) |
Rivaz flew as rear-gunner in two types
of aircraft. Again, he was writing in wartime so says little about
them, but he does identify them. At Driffield it was the Armstrong
Whitworth Whitley, a
twin-engined type that had been introduced in early 1937. In a time
of rapid change, this meant it was already outdated. But
it was not unsuccessful as a bomber, and later variants
were also
used for sub-hunting and for clandestine long-distance transport.
What
it wasn’t, was fast. Rivaz records that on one raid, to Leuna in
Saxony, they were in the air for 11 hours. Life in the rear turret
must have been extremely uncomfortable (and he does mention the
extremes of heat and cold). Later
he transferred, like Cheshire, to 35 Squadron at Linton-on-Ouse; this
was the first squadron to fly the new four-engined Handley Page
Halifax Mk I.
Rivaz’s
writing is inconsistent. But
at its best it is excellent. He
was a thoughtful and observant man; at one point he describes, in
detail, taking off on a mission to Cologne on a March night. The
Whitley’s engines are being run up. “The ground crew were
standing by, watching: one stood too near the slipstream and had his
hat blown off… it was rolling over and over behind the aeroplane,
and he was chasing it. ...A large pool of water by my turret was
being thrown up into a fine spray, and some bits of oily rag were
flying about in the air.” They move off; the tail lifts in the air;
the plane sways from side to side as the pilot keeps it straight with
the rudder; then they are crossing the airfield perimeter, the lights
glowing yellow and red below. Rivaz, as a gunner, is alert, knowing
that enemy intruders have sometimes attacked bombers as they take
off. Yet he sees
his surroundings.
He was, after all, an artist:
 |
| Rivaz with Cheshire in 1940 or 1941 |
We were still
circling the aerodrome and climbing… and it was getting lighter
instead of darker the higher we climbed. The ground appeared as a
sort of grey-green colour, and seemed very remote and unreal. The
aerodrome beacon was flashing red. ...The sky above us was a
green-blue… and the western sky was lit by a glorious red sunset.
The red glow tinted the edge of my gun barrels and the perspex round
my turret a bright red colour. I was thrilled with the beauty, and
called through to A__, telling him about it and asking him if he
could see it. He replied that he could just see the edge of it. They
would have lost the sunset from the ground by now… but up here it
was as vivid as the ground was obscure. On the ground one is not
always conscious of the transition of light to darkness. But in the
air one is in the change… it is all around one.
But
this night would
not end well. By early morning “A__”
(the
captain) would
be dead. Rivaz does not identify him; in fact, his name was Clive
Florigny and he was from Streatham, South London. Rivaz
also does not say, and probably
did not know, that Florigny’s brother, also a Whitley pilot, was
to
be killed later the same day. Their
names are on the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede, along with other
aircrew with no known grave.
*
At
about the time Rivaz was arriving at Driffield, Arthur (Art) Donahue
was arriving at his own first operational station; like Rivaz, he
does not name
it,
but it was Kenley in Surrey, on the southern approach to London. It
was a rapid transition. As he recalls in Tally-Ho!
Yankee in a Spitfire,
also
published
in the middle of the war, just six weeks earlier he had been at work
on his father’s farm in St Charles, Minnesota. He had applied to
join the US volunteer reserve very early in the war, but had
heard nothing. Now, hearing
that France had collapsed, he decided that, as an American, he
could
wait until his people were forced to fight,
as they surely would be; or
he
could join the battle now. He
travelled to Canada to join up and just 10 days later he was on a
liner to Britain.
I
didn’t have any of the qualifications of a soldier. I was neither
big nor very strong; I was quite mild-tempered and absolutely afraid
to fight, and I was more cautious in my flying than the average pilot
then.
 |
| Art Donahue |
This
may be modest. Donahue, then 27, had
been
a Depression-era barnstormer but was
also
a serious pilot; when
the war broke out, he was instructing. Even so, the speed with which
the RAF got him off the boat and into combat
is astonishing, given the very long training that most RAF pilots had
to undergo. On
arrival, he was
sent straight to an Operational Training Unit (OTU) – again, he
does not say which, but it was No. 7 OTU at Hawarden. OTUs were what
their name indicates – advanced training units from which newly
trained pilots would undertake their first missions. After
a brief period flying trainers, he was unleashed on a Spitfire, a
plane that cruised at twice the speed of anything he had ever flown
before.
As
in Tail
Gunner,
there is hardly a dull moment. Donahue began his combat career by
chasing a Messerschmitt
109 across the Channel and engaging it, he says, at Cap Griz Nez –
a hot pursuit that I’d always thought Battle of Britain pilots
avoided, not wishing to be lured into combat over enemy territory.
Which is what happened to Donahue, who caught the fighter but was
then bounced by its friends. He
escaped, and landed at Hawkinge on the Kent coast with serious damage
to his aircraft. Then
just a week later his aircraft caught fire after being hit in combat,
forcing him to bail out with serious burns to one leg. By the time he
returned to flying, the Battle of Britain was essentially over. Yet
he had taken part in it – one of only about 10 American pilots to
do so.
Tally-Ho!
is not always as gripping as Tail
Gunner,
and Rivaz is the better of the two writers. But every now and then
Donahue does capture the imagination. A flight from Kenley to their
advanced base at Hawkinge:
We
had to fly to our advance base at dawn, and it was an unforgettably
beautiful flight for me. It was just getting light when we took off,
and the countryside was dim below us. Wicked blue flames flared back
from the exhausts of all the engines as I looked at the planes in
formation about me. We seemed to hover motionless except for the
slight upward or downward drift of one machine or another in relation
to the rest, which seemed to lend a sort of pulsating life to the
whole formation; and the dark carpet of the earth below steadily slid
backward beneath us. The sun, just rising and very red and big and
beautiful, made weird lights over the tops of our camouflaged wings.
We were like a herd of giant beasts in some strange new kind of
world.
There
is also striking detail on the life of a fighter pilot. They were
clearly very organised. Donahue describes how, preparing for a period
on readiness, he puts his parachute on the aircraft’s tailplane, as
that is where he can grab it quickest if he’s scrambled. He even
arranges the straps so that they will fall easily to hand. In
the cockpit he hangs his helmet over the control stick and plugs in
the radio and oxygen leads, making sure that they are hanging in the
right way so they won’t slow down the business of putting the
helmet on. The seat and shoulder straps are similarly arranged. Then
Donahue methodically sets various valves to the open position so that
he will not have to waste time doing so when the call comes. There
are many more checks, all of them – by his account – meticulously
carried out.
Donahue
was apparently a strict Catholic and teetotaller (he mentions neither
in the book), and one wonders how he fared with the hard-drinking RAF
pilots; well enough, it seems. Also, he recounts in the book that he
went to Canada to join the RAF but does not say that he claimed to
be Canadian, almost certainly because he faced losing his American
citizenship for serving under a foreign flag. In fact, the US
rescinded this threat only a few weeks later. But it may explain why
there are different stories as to how many US nationals flew in the
Battle of Britain (between seven and 11, depending on where you look;
more joined the RCAF/RAF soon afterwards).
*
Rivaz’s
Tail Gunner ends with
the second daylight raid on the Scharnhorst
at Brest (he gives no date, but it was in January 1942). At the end
of the book, Rivaz staggers ashore after another ditching; the second
attack, it seems, proved as hairy as the first one.
Rivaz
still wanted to be a pilot, and finally persuaded the RAF to post him
for training. The result was a second book, Tail Gunner
Takes Over. It describes his
training in Manitoba, and ends with his posting back to Britain. Tail
Gunner Takes Over is not as good
as Tail Gunner;
there’s some padding, and the details of his training are now
really only of interest to historians of wartime flying. Rivaz was a
good rather than great writer. But the first book is gripping –
not least because
he was in the thick of the air war at the start of Bomber Command’s
offensive against Germany. The casualty rate was high, and relatively
few of the early pilots can have survived to write of those early
raids in Hampdens and Whitleys. Later aircrew were more likely to, by
virtue simply of having less time to get killed.
Moreover
Rivaz could be quite thoughtful, and was fully aware of the
destruction he was causing below:
 |
| Cheshire's Whitley after Cologne (Imperial War Musem © IWM CH 1764) |
The
fires would still be burning in Cologne, where there would be a lot
of suffering and misery. That was what we had intended. Our target
had been a large factory, and a lot of night-shift workers would have
been working there: there would be people dead or dying… there
would be people burned there. Some might be alive… living with
broken bones, unable to move, and with crushed and mangled bodies
pressed against them… with nothing but the stink of rubble and
putrefying flesh for company. There would be people with arms and
legs blown off… and people with their stomachs blown open… and
people with half their faces blown away. They might have to wait
hours or even days until they were found; unable to help themselves
and wishing they could die… yet afraid to die. Some would be badly
burnt and would die; [or] would not die, but would be crippled and
scarred always… All these things I had seen when our own aerodrome
was bombed.
Did
Rivaz have doubts about what he was doing? He might have done; he was
clearly aware of its consequences. Nearly 700,000 Germans would die
in the air bombardment before the end of the war, and Rivaz was right
– they would not always die mercifully. In practice, though, he
probably felt, as others did, that the Germans had started the war,
and besides had bombed us, and others; they could hardly complain
that bombs were being thrown back. Most members of his generation
still had no sympathy when I was growing up. But a few were not so
sure.
*
Donahue’s book
ends a year or so before Rivaz’s, early in 1941; the Battle of
Britain had really ended by the time he recovered from his injuries,
and he was reposted to another squadron in the south of England. Here
there is much that Donahue does not say, hinting only that he was
transferred more than once. In fact, it seems that he was posted to
an embryonic squadron for American RAF volunteers. It is said that he
disliked it; no planes had arrived, and the Americans were not to the
taste of the strict Catholic from the farm. But he does not say this
in the book, and it is hard to confirm. At any rate, he gets himself
posted again and as the book finishes he is flying offensive fighter
sweeps over Northern France. These became more common in 1941 as the
RAF, stronger now, looked for ways to strike back. They were not
without losses; Douglas Bader, flying a Spitfire V, was captured on a
sweep of this sort after his plane collided with a German in combat.
Still, the fierce fighting of the previous summer was over. Tally
Ho ends there.
Donahue’s
flying career, however, didn’t. Like Rivaz, he was to write a
second book. Unlike Rivaz, he would have plenty of action to speak of
therein. In the autumn of 1941 he was transferred to a squadron that
was going overseas, apparently at his own wish; he wanted to fight.
The squadron set off on a troopship, to be united with their new
aircraft at their destination. They weren’t to be Spitfires but
Hurricanes, which Donahue had not flown before.
The Hurricane
had entered service a little earlier than the Spitfire. It too was a
fast modern monoplane with retractable undercarriage and eight guns,
but instead of being all-metal, it was – like older aircraft –
partially fabric, with a linen skin stretched and shrunk over a
skeletal framework. This had its advantages, as it could be repaired
more quickly, but it was also more prone to fire, and most RAF
fighter pilots who suffered terrible burns did so in the Hurricane
rather than the Spitfire. It did not help that the fuel tank was
sited right in front of the pilot. (Though Messerschmitt 109 pilots
actually sat on theirs, which may have felt worse.)
Donahue never
learns where the squadron was supposed to have gone. In fact, it
seems to have been the Middle East. But in South Africa they learn of
Pearl Harbour; also, that they have a new destination. Arriving in
the Dutch East Indies, they collected their new planes, and at the
end of January they arrived in Singapore.
In Last
Flight from Singapore, Donahue recalled his first sight of the
island.
We began
passing under heavy, blue-black storm clouds that forced us to fly
lower and lower, and looking ahead I could now make out a great
harbor on the coast, with the dim shapes of several ships anchored in
it. Singapore harbor! ...We made it just ahead of a heavy rainstorm
that was bearing down from the north, and though the setting sun was
still shining from the west, we had to fly through a curtain of rain
on the north side when we were approaching to land. Even circling the
drome we could easily see we were in a war zone, for it was spotted
with filled-in bomb craters just like the ones in England, and there
were quite a few unfilled ones, too, indicating that the airdrome had
recently been bombed. There was a fresh hole in one end of the
concrete runway that we had to dodge when landing.
The next two
weeks are intense. There are only a few Hurricanes, and less capable
Brewster Buffalo fighters, on the island. Although they fly daily,
the Hurricanes are rarely able to get high enough in time to get
above the Japanese bombers, as there were no observers in Malaya to
warn of their approach; the peninsula is now occupied by the
Japanese, and on his first night Donahue is woken by the sound of
British engineers blowing up the Johore causeway onto the island.
Singapore is now under siege.
It is a bizarre
time for the pilots, fighting for their lives in the day and then
returning to the luxurious Seaview Hotel, where they are served
wonderfully cooked multi-course meals and lived in sumptuous suites.
Meanwhile the pilots encounter snobbery from the colonials, with one
elderly man who was waiting to be evacuated protesting that they
should not use the swimming pool because they had not been
“introduced”. “His dislike for us was made obvious quite
often,” records Donahue, adding that besides “fighting to
keep the Japs off his head now, we would quite likely have to patrol
and perhaps fight over his ship later, to keep him from being sunk.”
Donahue becomes
aware that terrible mistakes are being made in the defence of
Singapore and that the decadence of the British in the East is not
helping.
 |
| Australian nurses arrive at Singapore, October 1941 (© IWM FE 49) |
There’s no
need denying that I was terribly disillusioned by much of what I had
seen and experienced out here — things that I have avoided or
passed over in this story because it isn’t in my province as a
member of the forces to speak of them, and because I could only do
harm by telling about them now. The enemy don’t advertise their
failings either, you know. Doubtless you have seen references to this
in the press, so there’s no harm in admitting that I saw many
things out here that were very bad.
Yet there is
also a poignant unreality. One day, with the Japanese already on the
island, he and another pilot watch an “exotic, dark-haired English
girl” exercising two greyhounds on the hotel lawn, as if nothing
has happened.
She was
swinging a cloth about for them to leap at. Her movements and theirs
were so graceful that I thought she must be a dancer, but someone
said she was a nurse. It seemed that either she or the approaching
enemy and the terrible fighting must be unreal. It just didn’t make
sense — but neither did a lot of things, in the last days of
Singapore.
Later Donahue
would wonder what became of her, as well he might; the Japanese would
kill a large number of staff and patients at the British military
hospital on February 14. (Although it was the Chinese community in
Singapore that would suffer most; tens of thousands would be killed
during the occupation.)
 |
| Donahue's own picture of a crashed Hurricane in Singapore |
The battle for
Singapore was brief. A week after Donahue’s arrival, the Japanese
landed on Singapore. Two days later, on February 9, orders came to
evacuate the last fighters to Sumatra, and he took off with two other
Hurricanes and a Buffalo from an airfield that was already under
ground attack, the crack of rifle fire only a few hundred yards away.
It appears that this was indeed the last flight from Singapore, and
there were no further Allied air operations over the island. It fell
five days later.
Donahue
continued to operate for a few days from Sumatra, but before long
this too was invaded. On February 16, with other pilots, Donahue
attacked the invading troops as their boats came up the Musi River
towards Palembang. Hit by ground fire and seriously wounded, he
managed to land his aircraft, and was evacuated to hospital in
Bandung and finally embarked on a hospital ship. Last Flight from
Singapore ends there; he wrote it shortly afterwards in India and
in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where he had rejoined his squadron.
*
What were these
men like?
Rivaz, the
artist, seems to have been the more worldly; Donahue was from rural
Minnesota and proud to be, and his letters home talk of the pigs on
the farm there, and of the eggs and potatoes that the airmen produce
on the base. But both were men of substance. Neither had had to
fight; Rivaz was too old, and Donahue was a national of a neutral
state. They were also, in the manner of the time, quite modest. Rivaz
does not mention his prewar career; though he’d made no money as an
artist, he must have been a good one, as he had studied at the Royal
College of Art and is known to have exhibited at the Royal Academy.
Donahue nowhere says that he had qualified as a commercial pilot at
just 19, at a time when flying in the States was dangerous. Moreover
both write warmly of other men’s courage but speak little of their
own. They do not reveal in their books that they had both had the
Distinguished Flying Cross – Rivaz for his conduct on the first
daylight raid on the Scharnhorst, when he destroyed an enemy
fighter and saved his own plane, and Donahue for that last desperate
low-level attack on the Japanese in Sumatra.
 |
| Spitfire Vs of 91 Squadron, Hawkinge, 1942 (© IWM (CH 5429) |
One
wants of course to know their eventual fates. On
completion of his pilot’s training, Rivaz was posted back to
Britain – not, to his
disgust, as a combat pilot, but to the forerunner of Transport
Command. He
survived the war. In October 1945 he was a passenger on a Liberator
that crashed on takeoff from Melsbroek,
now part of Brussels Airport. All 31 passengers and crew died,
including Rivaz; he
is buried in Brussels Town Cemetery.
Donahue
stayed for some months in Ceylon, but in August 1942 he returned to
Britain and was posted to 91 Squadron at his old airfield of Hawkinge
in Kent. On September 5 he wrote to his family in Minnesota:
Well, I think
my plans are definite enough for the next few months so I can risk
telling you this much, that the chances are four to one that I’ll
be with you for Christmas this year! I have the furlough coming and
could take it now if I wished to, but prefer to wait until then. I
hope to have a month in the States, possibly more, so don’t go
planning any celebration but keep it in your hope chest anyway.
Five
days later, on September 11,
Art Donahue
took off in his Spitfire to chase a Ju 88, which he caught; it later
crash-landed in Belgium. But
his
own aircraft must have been damaged in the encounter, and
a brief message was received
saying that he was ditching off Gravelines. His body was never found.
Tail
Gunner, Tally-Ho!:
A Spitfire Pilot's Personal Account of the Battle of Britain and
Last
Flight from Singapore: The Gibraltar
of the East are all available in
e-book form Amazon and other retailers. They can usually also be
found in printed form. The e-books of all
three can be bought in an omnibus
edition together with D.M. Cook’s Spitfire
Pilot.
Mike
Robbins’s books are available in e-book or paperback from
