The phone rang frighteningly in the middle off the night. I picked it up with trepidation, as you do. Calls at this hour seldom bring good tidings. I needn’t have worried. It was around midday in England and a gentleman with a polished British accent announced that he was a spokesman for the R.A.F. It seems the good people in the village of Dennekamp in North Eastern Holland are unveiling a memorial to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of a bomber crashing on the outskirts of their village in Holland in 1941 with a total loss of life. My father’s brother Frank was the pilot. The unveiling is to take place on the 13th of March, sixty years to the day since the tragedy.
I was to let other members of the immediate family know and if any of us were to make the pilgrimage to the ceremony he promised we would be made extremely welcome.
It reminded me of this coming Sunday’s airshow at Hood Aerodrome and the heroic pilots who made it back, some of whom will no doubt be in attendance to watch with respect a display of some of the planes they flew that helped win the Battle of Britain. The fact that some of the planes and their pilots still endure is a testimony to their fortitude. These men and their aircraft played a huge role in allowing us to live as bountifully as we do today.
They might well reflect, however, that in the interim we have become a nation of wimps.
Last week for instance ACC announced that anyone who has witnessed a traumatic event may be eligible for compensation. Whilst I have the greatest sympathy for those folk who have observed a tragedy at first hand, I am mystified to know how throwing money at those traumatised, by whatever the event, is going to make the unfortunate images dissipate.
But that was just for starters. It was also disclosed that the precious people who work for the N.Z. Qualifications Authority had been given $2000 each for the severe discomfort they had suffered when they shifted from one centrally heated/air-conditioned office to another centrally heated/air conditioned office, just up the road. This was on top of a $1000 performance bonus for presumably doing the job they were being paid for in the first place. And not all that well according to students who rang the 0900 number to get their exam marks and were told that they had got 0! “A glitch in the computer,” explained the Qualifications Authority spokesperson as he or she no doubt downed their caviar with champagne.
Then there were the highly indignant Air New Zealand passengers who threatened, through their lawyers, to sue the hapless airline for not disclosing to them the risks they took flying in economy class and contracting a form of thrombosis that could prove fatal. Never mind that Air New Zealand reported that since its inception it had flown millions of passengers with no known clots.
An ex-RAF pilot rang last week after reading about these litigants and wondered how he and his colleagues survived World War Two. My caller flew Lancaster bombers for up to 12 hours at a stretch in cramped conditions and the thought of blood clots never entered his head - nor his legs. The Catalina crews, he told me, were in the air for up to 22 hours. He didn’t say so in so many words but I suspect neither those Lancasters nor the Catalinas had stewardess service, with drinks and nibbles, in-flight movies or stereo headsets. I’m not sure that they even had toilets.
My uncle survived dozens of bombing raids before the one that killed him and a magazine interview he gave in 1939 after a reconnaissance flight over Germany, gives us some idea of the discomfort they endured so that we might live in comparative luxury today.
“ As the temperature, increasing with our descent, approached freezing point a snowy type of ice grew on the control column, on the insides of the windows, and on the instrument panel....the visibility was bad..so I opened the window to see better. It was snowing. The navigator table and the instruments were soon covered again with half an inch of snow.
The front gunner could see nothing from his cockpit but white snow - when he came back to see us his helmet and his shoulders were buried beneath an inch of the stuff. Shortly afterwards a blinding flash, and a bump bigger than the others, took away our trailing aerial - and knocked all the snow off the instruments.”
Later in the article he said the discomfort had been shared with other planes in their group.
“In one machine the tail gunners eyebrows became frozen when the aircraft was at twenty-one thousand feet where there was 72 degrees of frost....Two of the gunners of the other machines suffered from frostbitten fingers.”
The Whitley bomber had much of its wings shot away on this trip and its safe return to England was described as “a miracle” by the newspapers of the day.
“We thought we should have to land in the sea, so the navigator went back to prepare the rubber dinghy and collect the rest of the crew. However as we got down to 500 feet the engines began to pick up and when the navigator returned to report “all OK for landing” we were maintaining height at one hundred and ten miles per hour and it seemed that we might be able to make England.”
Those brave men and women who served in the army, navy and air force could never have envisaged at the time that we, as a result of their sacrifices, would have inherited a society that today has so many creature comforts. Not that they would have begrudged us these, but those ‘so few’ might have been disappointed to know that it now takes monetary compensation to help us overcome those uncomfortable events that life throws at us from time to time.
A phone call in the middle of the night might even be worth a couple of hundred dollars. I must check with ACC.
(First published on the 24th of January 2001)
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