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Introduction to the Second Edition — David Vernon

Foreword — Air Marshall Ray Funnell AC (Retd)

Preface — Arthur Hoyle DFC

In the Beginning

Surviving the Struggle

Introduction to the Second Edition

— David Vernon

In 1989, Arthur Hoyle DFC, my second cousin, self-published his memoirs, entitled Into the Darkness, detailing his time as a navigator, serving in Bomber Command during World War II. At the time, he was kind enough to give me a copy, which I read cover to cover in one night and then put away as university exams, earning money and young women became my life.

Twenty-two years later, my youngest son showed interest in aircraft in World War II and so I dusted off my copy of Into the Darkness and presented it to him to read. He, like me a generation earlier, read it from cover to cover in one night. His enthusiastic response to the book prompted me to re-read it. What a treat. I have read many memoirs and histories of this period over many years and yet Into the Darkness was one of the best I had ever read. It wasn’t just Arthur’s keen eye for detail and his fascinating anecdotes, but it was his appreciation of history and his ability to place his experiences into a wider historical context that made his book so appealing. In addition, his literate and readable writing style eased the experience of reading about some of the horrors that confronted young men as they fought to take Europe from Hitler’s grasp.

Writing of Arthur’s calibre does not require editing for style or grammar. I have left Arthur’s original text untouched. What I have done is provide photographs and context to many of the events he describes [This material is available in the print version of the book which can be found here: http://www.davidvernon.net ]. The internet has allowed a massive amount of information to become available, which Arthur would never had a chance to find. When I visit him, he looks at me with bemusement when I show him my latest ‘internet find.’ Arthur spent his latter part of his life writing biographies, which involved spending hours and hours in libraries and scouring catalogues for names and events. I now can find material in a matter of minutes that took Arthur days and sometimes weeks to find. The difficulty for today’s researcher is not what to include, but what to leave out. I hope I have found a suitable balance.

As I write this, Arthur is the sole remaining member of his original crew still alive. So rapidly eye-witnesses to the events of World War II are dying. I thank Arthur Hoyle DFC for allowing such a vivid and readable eye-witness report to be made available to the historical record.

David Vernon

Editor

“Stringybark”

February 2012

Foreword

— Air Marshall Ray Funnell AC (retd)

Arthur Hoyle is a member of that great generation of Australian men and women who grew up during the Great Depression, served their nation and the world’s free peoples during the Second World War, and then in the post-war period transformed this nation from a pastoral and agricultural back-water into a vibrant, cultured, and sophisticated community. I doubt we will see their like again, but we all benefit from their legacy.

This is the story, self-told, of how a young man left his youth behind in the dark, deadly skies over Germany during 1944 and 1945. It is a story without heroes and without heroics. Although it was written for Arthur Hoyle’s family, the story is so rich in its perceptions and so wonderfully human in its detail of life in a squadron of Bomber Command in those terrible and terrifying years that anyone who reads it will benefit greatly.

Arthur Hoyle is a gentle man and a gentleman. He went to war willingly and with alacrity. He also went with a naïve conception of what he was facing, so much so that he was concerned that the war would finish before he could put his training into operational effect. Two tours of operations in No 460 Squadron, RAF Bomber Command, left him alive but with a vastly different set of beliefs and attitudes about the war, its prosecution and life itself.

To understand that change, consider these facts: most crews of Bomber Command were killed before they had completed five missions; after only five missions, Arthur’s was the third most experienced crew on the squadron; the squadron had twenty crews, each of seven men, and lost 1019 aircrew, that is more than seven times its total complement in just over two years. These raw statistics reveal the scale of the tragedy but, unless pursued, conceal the cost in human terms including to those who survived. Arthur Hoyle did survive, not only his first tour of thirty missions but also the second of twenty for which he volunteered without hesitation. After those fifty missions, he was a man with very different views of the world and of warfare. He did not volunteer for a third tour.

The pages of this work reveal a perceptive and a thoughtful man. Arthur Hoyle was diligent in his pursuit of excellence as a navigator, his aircrew role. However, he became increasingly aware of the political and strategic framework within which Bomber Command and therefore he operated. He disliked the strategy of area bombing. This came to head in the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 in which he participated. He saw the destruction late in the war of this treasure with little strategic value for what it was, namely, vengeful, inhumane and indefensible. He was part of that; it seared his soul.

Arthur Hoyle went ‘Into the Darkness’ night after night more than 65 years ago. The story he tells is not dated, it is timeless for it reminds us that we are not perfect; we all make errors both as individuals and as members of wider organisations. However, and more importantly, it tells how good people working together with intelligence and commitment can overcome evil and establish a better order.

Ray Funnell

Air Marshal (Retd)

Canberra

February 2012

Preface

— Arthur Hoyle DFC

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.

Henry V Act IV, Scene III

This memoir endeavours to recount the experiences of a very young man, in the first half of this century, in the greatest adventure of his life. It tries to convey how he felt when he looked death in the face and what it was like to live in a group of young men who, knowing that they had little chance of survival, tried to hide that knowledge from themselves and act as though they had many years of life left to them.

I went to war in a spirit of high adventure. The adventure I certainly found but with it went trauma. It altered not only my pathway in life but also many of my attitudes and values.

My experiences made me grow from a boy to a man in a few short months and forever removed any illusions I may have had about my bravery in the face of death. Because, to my continuing wonder, I survived without any physical injury does not mean that I do not still carry mental scars from the experience. But I have never regretted going to the war because it taught me to know myself to an extent that was unlikely to occur in a world of peace.

Inevitably, this narrative is selective but it is, I believe, free from falsity in fact or sentiment.

Arthur Hoyle
Canberra, 1989
Preface to the first edition

In the Beginning

The flight of three Avro Ansons in vee formation flew low over the crowd on the rocky hill. Painted silver, with the sun reflecting from the canopies and the red, white and blue roundels of the Royal Australian Air Force showing clearly on the glistening, silver wings and the fuselage, they made an impressive sight. To me, standing in Centennial Park, Sydney, in the crowd gathered to watch the celebration of the l50th anniversary of the coming of the British to Australia, they were a revelation. As the roar of the Cheetah engines died away and the aircraft became dots in the sky, I knew, for a certainty, that I wanted to fly.

Quite oblivious of the restless, chattering crowd, I stood silent but thrilled as a tingling went through my l5 year old body. I could not articulate it but I knew that the young men with their ugly flying suits, in their shining machines, were the chivalrous warriors of the twentieth century. Far more than the marching infantry in their khaki uniforms or the jingling light horse with emu feathers in their hats, they were the future.

In the late 1920s and in the 1930s, like many another boy, I was fascinated by the feats of the young airmen who had fought and usually died in the skies over France and by the deeds of the aerial pioneers such as Kingsford Smith, Ulm, Cobham, Hinkler and Amy Johnson. Hour by hour I had followed the great air race from London to Melbourne in 1935. Sitting at my scarred desk in the classroom, instead of listening to the teacher, I entered a dream world where my pencil became a Zeppelin flying in the dark skies over London and I was a daring young pilot intent on destroying the great raider.

Nobody in my family had ever been up in an aircraft. My infrequent requests to go for a joyride were always turned down. My parents were convinced that flying was dangerous and they were certainly not going to risk losing their carefully nurtured elder son. After all, one of the neighbours had driven the adjoining households to distraction by building his own aircraft in the backyard and running the engine up and down for hours at a time, only to fall into Cookʼs River on his first flight. As far as they were concerned, I could get all the adventure I needed in the Boy Scouts where I was a patrol leader. If even that was not enough then perhaps — a very big perhaps — I might go to sea like my grandfather and all his West Country ancestors.

I was quiet, and as a natural conformist found school no trial. My path in life seemed to be preordained. I would finish high school and, if I won a scholarship, I might go to Sydney University, become a high school teacher and lead a worthy life alternating between city and country schools. If I did not win a scholarship I would probably become a clerk in the public service with the unexciting prospect of following my father into a lifetime of servitude behind a desk.

Neither prospect entranced me but, in the narrow suburban world of Lane Cove, there seemed to be no alternative. But I dreamt of a more exciting life — one where I would travel and where life would present lots of adventure. Every week, when I crossed the Harbour Bridge on my way to my music lesson, I gazed eagerly on the ships in Walsh Bay and Circular Quay. I knew all the regular liners by name and every Saturday I read the advertisements for P&O, the Orient Line and the Matson Line imagining myself in such exotic, almost fabled, places as Colombo, Port Said and San Francisco. When the great white and cream ships stood down the harbour my heart went with them.

Australia in the 1930s was a long way from the rest of an increasingly troubled world. The great brown land was politically insulated from the fears and storms of both Europe and Asia. With only some seven million people, almost all of English, Irish and Scots descent, it seems destined to be set far apart from the quarrels of the old world. As part of the greatest empire the world had seen and protected by the might of the Royal Navy,

it was inhabited by people who were insular, preoccupied with parochial matters and generally distrustful of the products of intellect and culture. Foreign affairs were of little concern, even in the federal parliament in the little bush town of Canberra and when the newspapers did report on foreign happenings, they did so through the eyes of the British press, the British wire services and the pronouncements of His Majesty's Government in London.

I loved history and delighted in the British and European history which I learned at school. But, frustratingly, the textbooks always ended at the end of the 19th century and recent history was largely a blank, filled in only by what I knew of the Great War when Australia lost 60,000 soldiers in the defence of right.

I had never met a German but I knew that Germany was not to be trusted any more than one could trust Japan from which the ‘yellow peril’ might erupt at any time. Totally ignorant of the realities of war, but enthralled by what I believed to be its glamour, I listened eagerly to the stories of my Uncle Bob who had spent three long years in the mud and misery of Flanders.

It was not until 1936, when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, that some of the fog which concealed the march to war lifted from the eyes of some of my countrymen. I suddenly understood that Germany was moving again. As the Spanish Civil War progressed, the potential for another world war began to penetrate the insular minds of most Australians. By the end of 1937, now aged fifteen, I realised, like others who were determined not to be blind, that perhaps even the horrors of 1914-1918 would not prevent the outbreak of another war. Anti-German and anti-Italian feeling gradually rose in the community and I found myself wondering, not if there would be a war, but when it would break out. I found the idea somewhat fearful but, at the same time, rather exciting.

Whenever I could wheedle sixpence from my father to go to the cinema I was among the avid viewers of such Hollywood epics as Hell’s Angels, where the heroic Allied pilots destroyed the Hun planes in dogfights over the Western Front. But, even after the Avro Ansons had thrilled me in Centennial Park, in my calmer moments, when I thought that I might have to serve in a war, I imagined myself in the infantry like my uncle — with feathers in a turned up slouch hat and carrying a .303 Lee Enfield rifle through the fields of France.

The German anschluss with Austria in March 1938 made little impression in Australia for, after all, Austrians were really Germans and most of them seemed to welcome Hitler. But it was a different matter when the Munich crisis arose and Chamberlain flew to Germany to negotiate with Hitler for “peace in our time.” Barely six months later, on 15 March 1939, Germany occupied what was left of Czechoslovakia. Suddenly, even in Australia, the veil was torn aside. Hitler was seen to be terrible and evil; Britain and France were weak and might not be relied upon, Chamberlain was a ridiculous, umbrella carrying figure who disgraced the proud tradition of empire; the Czechs had been thrown to the German wolf; and, perhaps, in a matter of hours, Australia might find herself at war.

It was exhilarating but frightening. Although I was still not 16 I knew just how weak were the Australian defence forces. The navy with its few cruisers was a less formidable force than it had been in the earlier war. The air force, with its few Hawker Demon fighters and Avro Ansons, was insignificant and the army was mainly made up of 70,000 militia men who trained for a few days each year.

Throughout 1939 I spent most of my time worrying about passing the Leaving Certificate and thinking about going to university. However, even the worry of trying to pass mathematics could not stop me becoming aware of the rising tension in the country when, firstly, Germany occupied Czechoslovakia and then, in August, Russia and Germany did the unthinkable and signed a non-aggression pact. I readily understood what had happened — the Nazis and the Communists, the greatest foes of the British Empire and France, had been reconciled and the way was open for Germany to expand, unhampered by any fear of a Russian attack. At school, the teachers appeared worried and, like other students in their final year, I became aware that a European war was probably inevitable. At home my father became even more serious than usual for he understood quite well that, if the coming war lasted more than a couple of years, then, almost certainly, I would have to serve in it. He was no pacifist but he looked on this prospect with dismay.

When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 I began to listen to the radio at every news bulletin, suddenly alarmed at the news of the rapid German advance. I found it hard to work at Latin and French, rushed to look at each moment's newspaper and waited eagerly for the day when Britain and France would honour their pledge to the Poles.

Like most Australians, I was shocked by the quick defeat of Poland and the cynical division of the country between Germany and Russia. But then, except at sea, the war went into stalemate and with no great air raids and no action on the Western Front, life in Australia returned almost to normal.

Under the slogan ‘Business as usual,’ Australian rearmament and the preparation of an expeditionary force went forward slowly. There was little sense of urgency and, with an apparent stalemate in Europe, the weak-willed, the communists, the pacifists and the isolationists called for a conference to end the war. Even at that age I believed that the seizure of Czechoslovakia and Poland showed that there could be no lasting peace with Hitler and I had no sympathy for those who believed in its possibility.

Brought up as a Methodist and regularly attending, first Sunday School and then the lovely little stone church near our house, I was more than a nominal believer in Christianity but, typical of my age, I did not share the attitudes of many of the older ministers and lay preachers, who saw such activities as dancing as the work of the Devil. Yet I did not go to dances, being much too shy to even speak to girls, let alone put my arm around one.

We were a close-knit family but my brother was five years younger than I, my mother was mainly devoted to looking after her family and it was only with my father that I discussed politics and the war. A quiet, loving man, frustrated by his failure to advance in his career, he felt deeply about many issues and was capable of sudden outbursts of anger. A conservative and a believer in the justness of the Allied cause, he was yet concerned to keep me out of the war as long as possible — a concern which I did not share.

To my parent's pleasure I won a scholarship to the university and, with some trepidation, in March 1940 I entered the great stone buildings on the hill above Victoria Park. Still without any real idea as to what I wanted to do in life, I had opted for teaching, a profession which attracted many of the upwardly mobile and the uncommitted. I was pleased to be able to obtain a Teachers’ College scholarship worth the munificent sum of £40 per annum paid in installments. This was a considerable help to the family budget.

As yet, the war had hardly impinged on the university. Few of the present buildings existed. There were only some 3,000 students, many of whom saw it as a place for fun and for a few years respite before beginning adult life. Some saw it as a place in which to gain a grounding in practical politics. Studying History, English and Philosophy, I easily accepted a regime of a few hours of lectures a week, no tutorials, a few hours reading in the beautiful old Fisher library, talking endlessly with a few male friends in the quadrangle and trying to find enough money to buy a cup of coffee in the student union.

Preparation

The ‘Phoney War’ ended abruptly in April 1940 and I found myself each morning staring with increasing disbelief at the newspaper headlines and maps as the Allied forces reeled backwards under the weight of the German blitzkrieg and it seemed likely that France would soon sue for peace. Suddenly, there was a new seriousness in campus life. Uniforms began to appear as some students joined the AIF, the navy or the air force. The aircrew trainees, in their dark blue unions with the white flash in the cap, looked much the smartest. I began to consider seriously whether I should attempt to get my father's permission to join the RAAF. The exploits of the Royal Air Force over Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain filled the newspapers and I soon became an ardent collector of all possible information on RAF aircraft. But I was still aged only 17 years and six months and there was no way the air force would accept me before I turned 18. The navy would have accepted me as a wireless operator but, when I broached the matter with my father, he would not hear of it.

Meanwhile, the Sydney University Regiment, a part-time militia battalion made up of students and recent graduates, stiffened by a few permanent officers and NCOs, was increasingly using the No. 2 Oval at the University for training. As there appeared to be no chance of going to the real war, I decided to join it as soon as possible.

In August 1940 it was decided to expand the regiment and, after putting up my age by a year, I was accepted for enlistment. When October came around I joined some hundreds of other eager lads to get my uniform. It was just as well that I was not expected to become a ‘glamour boy’ because I was given a thick woollen khaki uniform which fitted rather poorly on my slight frame, a pair of large, heavy tan boots, a slouch hat and a ‘giggle suit.’ This last was an unglamorous and shapeless working dress made of khaki drill. Of course, I had to put on the uniform at once to parade in front of the family and I broke in the boots by filling them with water and walking around for a few hours so that when they dried they would be moulded to the shape of my feet.

The examinations ended in early December and, almost immediately, the regiment went into camp at Ingleburn, near Liverpool, for three months. Entraining at Central Station, some hundreds of very eager young men shouted and joked all the way to lngleburn, which was then a tiny village miles outside the city boundary. Under the hot December sun we marched the mile and a half up the hill to the wooden huts of the camp and were immediately sent off to the hospital to be inoculated.

The inoculation parade was a good example of army life! We were given nothing to eat but just lined up in the hot sun, given a vaccination and an injection in each arm and then set to work. The needles were blunt and several of the would-be soldiers fainted.

Army life turned out to be far from comfortable. We slept on the floor on straw palliasses with blankets but no sheets, ate badly cooked food prepared in the usual great army boilers by reluctant cooks and spent the hot summer days in weapon drill — using old .303 Lee Enfield rifles, Lewis machine guns and three inch mortars from the First World War — and in dozens of exercises. We would march out of camp early in the bright morning — after having been awakened by the regiment's Scottish pipe band marching up and down the line of huts. Then, clad in our dirty giggle suits, we spent endless hours of the hot days marching along roads, crawling through the long dry grass — which always seemed to get up my nose — clambering through barbed wire fences, running up hills where our leather soled boots slipped on the dry grass, digging trenches, filling them in and then repeating the exercise somewhere else. Occasionally we took part in a mock battle with other battalions and I soon found that it was better to be ‘shot’ early on for then I could sleep or doze in a dry creek bed under the casuarinas while the unwounded toiled across the landscape, dripping with perspiration, the flies crawled over them and their weapons got ever hotter and heavier.

It was not an unhealthy life and at night I slept like a log. But I soon found it boring. The regiment was unlikely ever to go to the war. Where was the glamour of service life? Sometimes the routines were varied but they did little to make me happier for they mainly consisted of being on guard duty for a couple of days at a time. Never have I known time to go so slowly as when I stood at the headquarters guard in the very early hours of the morning armed with a rifle and bayonet, but no ammunition, constantly imagining that shadows were moving and hardly crediting that time could go so slowly.

What I did like was the practice at the range where the rifle kicked against my shoulder and the long route marches with the lads singing as they marched, the bivouacs under the stars, sometimes in vineyards heavy with grapes and the pay of five shillings a day — by far the most money I had ever had.

Towards the end of the camp I was promoted to the rank of acting lance corporal but this mighty promotion hardly went to my head and I began to think seriously of trying, once again, to get my father to let me enlist, preferably in the air force but, failing that, in the navy. Both airmen and sailors seemed to live a considerably more civilised life than the poor infantryman. Among heat, sweat, flies, poor and hard living the imagined attractions of the AIF were fading fast.

In March 1941, now somewhat more self confident, I returned to the university and resumed living with my parents and brother existing frugally on pocket money of two shillings per week. Several of my friends went into the services and, when they came to university in uniform, I felt both jealous and restless.

The navy continued to advertise for wireless operators and, desperate to get away to the war, I tried again to get my father's permission to enlist. I wasn't really surprised when he refused, but I was amazed when, not long afterwards, after many importunities, he agreed that I could join the RAAF as an aircrew trainee, provided that the air force would defer my call-up until the end of the year, by which time I would be 19 and have finished second year at the university.

I passed the ridiculously strict medical examination and then, as I could not enter the service until the end of the year, I started doing the set of twenty-one lessons. These were a very well designed set on mathematics, electricity, airmanship, meteorology, etc., which cut down the time needed at the Initial Training Schools and kept up the interest of the volunteers. Twice a week I went to classes at the Lane Cove public school. I had no difficulty in coping with the work, although it was unfamiliar. What I did find hard was summoning up enough enthusiasm to work hard for a distinction at university. I needed the distinction so that, when I returned from the war, I could do an honours degree. That there might be no ‘after the war’ was something that I did not think about. Already one of my school friends, Roy Bothwell, had been killed in the Middle East while serving on No. 3 squadron but I was a firm believer of the ‘It couldn’t happen to me’ school.

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Contents

Introduction to the Second Edition

Foreword

Preface

In the Beginning

Preparation