More Info →What is courage 6 Jan 2012

Description

What is courage?

Our last article celebrating the 70^th Anniversary of the WAAFs and focussing on some who served at RNZAF Base Ohakea featured a typist, o photographer and a tailgunner. One of those three didn't survive the war.

Sergeant Aubrey (Dan) Dally and his brother Charles, chose the RNZAF when they signed up. They joked that is was "better to be shot out of the air with a bunch of feathers". They were duck-shooters, on the farm. They didn't fancy death by drowning in the navy or the brutality of the bayonet in the army.

Charles had a permanent disability – a smashed elbow that had mended very badly – so he was accepted "for home duties only". He became an instructor and an aerial surveyor in the photographic section at Ohakea.

Dan was different. Young, fit and strong from farm work, he was given initial training and then posted to Canada, to a specialist gunnery school.

After graduation, proudly wearing his new "Wing", Dan was then posted for operation duties with RAF Bomber Command. By now – 1942 – the war was three years old and the RAF had detailed records of tailgunner losses. The "boys" in the sergeants' mess knew how tailgunners died.

The Station Warrant Officer had a four-gallon paraffin can he kept for tailgunners. These "30-second men" knew their survival odds were slim – very slim – and they certainly knew what the four-gallon can was for.

The Luftwaffe ME 109 fighter was a killing machine, built to inflict maximum damage. It had two fearsome weapons: twin 30-calibre cannons. Each fired 650, high-velocity, explosive rounds per minute. Just one 30-calibre projectile can make a terrible mess: a twin-stream of them leaves little to clean up.

That's what the Warrant Officer used his four-gallon can for – tailgunners' remains.

So, knowing the record, knowing the talk in the mess of "30-second" men, some tailgunners must have thought, often, of the alternatives. A posting to another job? No. Too much had gone into their specialist training for them to be cooking in the mess, or driving base lorries. Simply run away? Be a coward to yourself, forever – if not caught – are face a firing squad if you were? Maybe an "accident" with a knife, slice off a finger, but survive the war? Some must have tried it (we still use the expression "shot himself in the foot").

Unfortunately the RAF Station Medical Officers had ben hardened by stories of "battle fatigue" or "combat stress", so while short breaks at the end of their bomber's "tour" were allowed, each crew counted the days until "duty called".

Comradeship helped their courage. Their personal philosophies or religious beliefs would have helped, too. Perhaps some believed they would "get lucky"; beat the odds and survive. Albeit missing an arm or a leg or an eye from just one "glancing cannon shot" before the ME109 ran out of ammo.

Dan was killed over Dusseldorf.

Courage. We know what it means, but to climb into that very cramped tailgunner's pit, day after day (or night after night), raid after raid, knowing the very slim odds of surviving and avoiding that four-gallon can. That must have been courage.

By Michael Dally and Pearl Forster.

Identification

Date

January 6, 2012