3 Squadron RAAF in WW2 | Part 2

Part 2 of a 6-part series detailing 3 Squadron RAAF during World War II, featuring extensive interviews with squadron members who were there. Interviews are from the Australians at War Film Archive. In this episode we feature: Walter Mailey (ID: 2050); Thomas Trimble (ID: 370); Ken McRae (ID: 424); Stanley Brown (ID: 608); Felix Sainsbury (ID: 980).

You can find part 1 here:

December 1941

During the time that the Squadron had been fighting in the Syrian campaign, the Afrika Korps had maintained a continuous siege against isolated Tobruk. 3 Squadron were involved in air cover for resupply missions going into Tobruk.

Walter Mailey

What we used to do, we would cover them in and then we’d circle around until they got out again. Actually, one day we took in the commanding officer of the Middle East into Tobruk. He went in a...I think it was...I’m not too sure of the plane he went in now. But we were close cover. I was within a 100 yards of him and he gave me the thumbs up sign. He was in there for about...he couldn’t have been more than an hour because we only had three hours fuel. And then we escorted him out again, without incident. Nothing happened. We didn’t have to do anything but take him in and bring him out. The supplies most of the time came by ship, and we’d go out in the Gulf and sit over the top of the ships as they were approaching Tobruk.

They were very susceptible to being dive bombed. We would sit out for as long as could and then we’d have to go home. I think half the time the Jerries were watching and would send the planes in as soon as we would leave. Then they put long range tanks on.

We had to go out and help escort the navy into Malta, and that was a very long trip. We put these belly tanks on, and when they were empty you would just drop them. Use those up first. And we could do about an hour over the top of the ships.That seemed to be pretty effective. Once again, as soon as we left they would come in from the mainland. While they were there they stayed away. That was when Malta was being very badly bombed.

Thomas Trimble

Tobruk was being replenished with ammunition and what not by the Royal Navy which was towing barges into Tobruk every night and taking them out by night. It about reached Sollum, which was the border if you like going into Tobruk by nightfall, they towed in and then the ones that were emptied would be brought out and then would about reach Sollum again at dawn. We did a lot of escort of cover of these barges from the city of Sidi Haneish and for that purpose we developed the formation again which was called the “weaving pairs formation”, which was a little bit copied from the Germans in that the aircraft were in pairs but at different heights like this, and everyone was weaving, except the leader - he flew straight, someone had to know where they were going. We had the swingers one down there and one up there and we did a lot of this work. Sometimes the 109s would come out but if we stayed out over the things that we were suppose to protect they would attack us, sometimes they did but generally they didn’t. Sometimes there would be naval ships that we had to protect but you couldn’t fly over them because the navy would shoot at anything that came over it. Sometimes we’d do a patrol just a defensive patrol out past Tobruk and sometimes we’d escort bombers out on the bombing raid near Tobruk.

 In the Allied operation "Crusader", to relieve Tobruk, air supremacy was contested between 19 Allied Squadrons, against a combined force of 19 Italian Squadriglie, and nine German Staffeln. In all, 228 Allied aircraft were fighting 258 Axis aircraft on the last day of November 1941.

On that same day, a 109 flown by Oberfeldwebel Otto Schulz, attached to Staffel 2, JG27, crippled Sergeant “Tiny” Cameron's Tomahawk and this forced him to land behind enemy lines.  Within minutes, Pete Jeffrey had followed him down, picked him up and had taken off for home.  This heroic act helped the Wing Commander win yet another decoration, the Distinguished Service Order.

By early December 1941, 3 Squadron was the first in the Desert Air Force to be re-equipped with the new Curtis P-40E Kittyhawk. These aircraft had superior firepower than the Tomahawks, six wing-mounted 0.5-inch Browning machine guns, and were equally robust - ideal aeroplanes for Desert warfare. 

Ken McRae

It was the warhorse of the ruddy air force, amongst Fighter Bombers. Like the Dakota was with transport. It was a fantastic aircraft back then, it’s still flying around the place. But the Kitty, as a Fighter Bomber it was good. But as a fighter, the 109 was much better and the Macchi was the same thing. But I think our pilots were better pilots than the other people. To survive.

In the air, the Kittyhawk Mark 1s coped well with most of the enemy aircraft they met, they could turn tightly but their weight slowed them down, especially in the climb – a distinct disadvantage against the Bf 109F-2s which were then appearing in the desert skies in increasing numbers.  

Walter Mailey

I was still a sergeant. I hadn’t got flight sergeant. But it didn’t matter. In the air force rank didn’t mean anything, and by this time I was getting reasonably experienced. So, they put me in charge of the wing.

I learnt later that I was the only sergeant ever put in charge of a wing. Anyway, we went to an advanced airstrip or aerodrome, and I had eight planes from my squadron, and the other squadron had twelve. So there were twenty of us all together.

So when we were sitting on the ground waiting for the take-off time. Waiting for the scramble. The call came, and I had spoken to this CO, the leader of the others. I said, “I’ll let you take off first.” The wind was coming in one direction. I said, “I will take off cross wind, you go off first and your gust will go away. Circle once and I’ll be underneath you. Then I’ll go above you.” Anyway, he took off. He didn’t wait. We then took off and we climbed up. There was cloud cover of about 11,000 feet.

It was light wispy cloud, but you couldn’t see through it. I was climbing up and I thought I could see a shadow and we had always been taught that where ever there were...if there were Stukas [German bombers] coming in to dive bomb us...and if they were around then there were usually fighters sitting above them to protect them. And once again it was experience. I was going up towards the clouds, I could nearly smell them there, and one of my crowd came on the RT [radio transmitter], which wasn’t awfully good. He said something about “The fighters down below.” I just ignored him. I had hardly heard that and out of the clouds came six 109s.

We were heading up towards them luckily. If we had been going down towards the Stukas they would have got all of us. It seems a strange thing to say, but a plane going up is a very steady platform for firing. A plane coming down at you is turning, and it’s not as steady. So I was able to lift my sights and get a good shot at the leader. Then I had a go at a second one. That day we shot down, between the two squadrons, I think it was either eighteen or nineteen, and we had one bullet hole in one aircraft. I got two 109s and damaged a couple. When we got back to the squadron and we were being debriefed, I said that I thought I got one and damaged a couple. But my number two said, “No you got two. The very first one that came in and you shot at, he kept going. He went straight in.”

Of the new arrivals to 3 Squadron was the Australian national Rugby Union player, Flying Officer Nicky Barr, destined to eventually destroy more enemy aircraft than any other pilot in the Squadron.  Just a few days after joining the Squadron he brought down a Messerschmitt 110, and the very next day a second 110 and a Ju88.

On the 13^th of December, Tommy Trimble would become yet another victim of German ace, Hans-Joachim Marseille, on a mission out to Martuba just north-west of Tobruk.

Tommy Trimble

The weather was moving westward so that it just about reached to Gulf of Bomba moving west. We were told that we were going out as less than squadron strength and we’d do just one sweep over that area and we’d come home because we were going as less than a squadron. On the way out I could see streams of bombers coming back, streams of bombers escorted by fighters and every now and again you’d see 109s attacking them, but we were coming and we stayed well to one side. They wouldn’t attack us because we were just fighters and we weren’t going to do any damage. We came in over the Gulf of Bomba and there we ran into wispy cloud, it was sort of darkish, the cloud wasn’t darkish but because of all the cloud that was about. It was beautiful I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen wispy cloud but it’s a bit of cloud and a bit of wisp there and it’s glorious. We came over this El Martuba and we were told that there would be no fighters, the German air force would have gone right back to Benghazi. I had never seen so many aircraft on the ground in all my life. Have you ever looked down on top of an ants nest, not these little black ants but the big ones, we that’s what it looked like and I thought, “God, we lost a couple of blokes from the flight just getting in there”, getting in that far because of the cloud and various other reasons. By this time I’d been leading the left hand section which normally four but it was down to one and we were down to myself at this stage.

Flying around a bit, eventually I nearly collided with a Tomahawk and a 109, I don’t know which one was following which but I followed both of them anyway, and then eventually I saw another Tomahawk being chased by a 109 up there and I thought, “I’ve got to knock that 109 down”, so I flew up towards him, and I looked at him and he fired and he had one of the new 109s, which had a canon firing through the centre of the airscrew spinner and I saw the beautiful rounds going out like that, but back here you see. I told you that gravity is working at thirty three feet per second per second, and everything that you fire takes a path like that and I saw this beautiful stream and it was way underneath me and it wasn’t going to hit me I thought, “He won’t hit me”, and I was aiming at these blokes and then he put another burst out and it still was a fair bit away from me but as it got closer I could see that it was going to hit. I turned my head away and still trying to shoot at this bloke up here and all of a sudden I felt “thump, thump”, two close rounds had hit me, my feet were knocked off the pedals and I will tell you more about it. I felt one round hit just under the tail plane and it hit me and it caused me to slightly bunt and then the fourth round hit now I’ve got a model of an airplane there to show you. I had the canopy half way back and I didn’t have my goggles on because it was hard to see in the conditions. The canopy is half way back because I’d been flying partly in rain and I wanted to be able to see out to the sides. The fourth round just hit the front bow and it put a little dent in it like that, and I will tell you why I know all this later. That round was a twenty millimetre that exploded on my head it was only about that far away from it and the hole there is gradually closed up, but various things happened all at once.

My head was filled with fragments, these two rounds burst the fuel lines of the engine and ignited the fuel which came up through the cockpit, so the cockpit is burning and my windscreen was blown out, blown away from the top bow and fortunately it curled forward like this because it was held at the bottom. The other plate of glass in the front of the Tomahawk was separate from the windscreen, it was behind it because it was an afterthought from the Americans when they sold them to England.

I immediately knew that I’d have to get out because the airplane was burning so I went to undo my strap and pulled the pin out and at that instant I became unconscious, just before I became unconscious, I thought, “Oh, thank goodness, I’ll be dead before I hit, I won’t feel it”, this was what I’d thought. I’m lying there and burning, and my face was just burning, cooking.

I’ve got helmet down to there and a oxygen mask here with the microphone so my eyes and everything was cooking up here and the flames were burning my gloves and I always wore leather gloves, so all that was happening was the gloves were shrinking a bit. Then all of a sudden I woke up, sorry, as this happened the stick had come back and the airplane had flicked and I was spinning, when I came to I became scared. I thought, “Geez, I’m not going to be dead, I’m going to feel all of this”, and so I got out of the spin.

The flame was starting to die down because all that happened was that the fuel lines were cut and the explosion of the explosive rounds had ignited the petrol but once that was finished the flame had gone out. I get the thing out of the spin, but my eyes, this eye was closed completely and this eye was closed but I managed to squeeze it open and I saw the Gulf of Bomba was out on my left so therefore I was heading south which was better than flying into the sea.

Then I realised I was going straight down, having come out of the spin I was still going down. I was only a couple thousand feet when I was hit so if I pulled it out, if I pulled the aircraft out of the dive I might not fly into the ground. I pulled it out of the dive and I still hadn’t hit the ground and my eye had closed up, so I’m blind now but I can feel things and so I pulled the airplane up until it just started to reach it’s stalling speed, because you can feel all these things and then I put the nose down a little bit until it built up speed and then like that and eventually I felt the air scoop hit the ground and I just flattened it out and skidded to a stop.

As injured as he was, Tommy managed to avoid the enemy and was found by Arabs who facilitated his return to the Allies.

Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa", the offensive against the Russians, since the 22nd of June, was diverting Germany’s supplies away from the Middle East. Consequently, this was giving the Allied forces time to regroup and re-equip, particularly now that the Americans were manufacturing more and more aircraft, a lot of which were gradually finding their way to North Africa.

A welcome innovation for 3 squadron, when it was available, was the Marston mat – rather than an airstrip of cleared sandy desert floor, the Marston mat was a hard metal surface that made take off and landing much more efficient and safer.

Stanley Brown

It’s pressed out metal. It’s got about three inch diameter holes, and it’s nearly a quarter of an inch thick. I tell you, it would take you all your time to lift one. Two blokes, or three blokes used to have to put it together. And I think it was about six or eight feet long, about fifteen inches wide. And it was perforated with these holes, to keep it light, you know. You just couldn’t have a flat piece of metal. That’s no good. And on the edges, it had like a sort of a key, a finger like that, and it would lock into the next one. And you just needed to push them together like that, and they’d stay there, because to pull them to pieces you had to pull them out this way. One end, one after the other. But it was fantastic stuff.

1942

Early January 1942, the squadron shot down 12 enemy aircraft, another seven probably destroyed and six more damaged.  On the 11^th, Nicky Barr shot down a G50 and two 109F's before his Kittyhawk was hit and crash-landed behind enemy lines.  Disregarding a wounded leg, he spent the next three days disguised as a desert nomad, riding a camel past German motorised units, and gathering vital information about the enemy on his way back to base.  After his intelligence report, he was immediately awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions.

Rommel had commenced a strong counter-attack by January 23rd and the Squadron's advance party at Belandah, was almost caught when they awoke to find a semi-circle of Panzer tanks firing at them from only 300 yards away.  Corporal Lee, the NCO in charge, ran to a truck 50 yards away, and raced south, collecting his men on the way, as the Panzer's blew up a nearby petrol tanker.  Ground fog hid the escaping truck, and by jettisoning everything not screwed down to gain speed, they survived.

3 Squadron, along with number 450 (another Kittyhawk Squadron), retreated eastwards to Gambut and continued to fly patrols, in conjunction with No.112 "Shark" Squadron, RAF, against the enemy.  Hans-Joachim Marseille brought down two of 3 Squadron's Kittyhawks on the 15th of February, killing Sergeant Reid and injuring Pilot Officer P. J. "Tommy" Briggs, who bailed out at an altitude of just 100 meters.

Bobby Gibbes, promoted to Squadron Leader, became the Commanding Officer of the Squadron on the 26th of February 1942 and arranged the Squadron's first escort assignment for some recently-arrived Douglas Boston light bombers, which commenced bombing the enemy at Martuba on March the 14th. By the time No.3 Squadron was given 14 days' stand-down, on the 25th of March, they'd claimed 68½ enemy aircraft destroyed, 59 damaged and been credited with 16 probables in a little over six months.

On the 7th of April, the Squadron began three weeks of intensive training to prepare for a new campaign in which the Kittyhawks would play the role of fighter-bombers. At this time Marshal Herman Göring withdrew much-needed airpower from the Russian front to double his force in the Mediterranean. While Rommel commenced his 'Battle of Gazala' on the night of the 25th of May 1942, with intensive night bombing and strafing of the Allied forward landing grounds. His land-assault started the next morning, with four Italian Divisions, the German 15th and 21st Panzers, and 90th Light Divisions, attacking the Allied line from Gazala south to Bir Hacheim.

Felix Sainsbury

And then all of a sudden there’s 250 German tanks had broken through the line. So we sent our aircraft bombing, dive bombing and machine gunning them. In one particular day we did 68 sorties or attacks. We were very successful, gee whiz back behind them further they had another 400 tanks coming through with 1200 transport. So we had a big front coming through. So there was no alternative. We had to start thinking about retreating or getting to another advance landing ground. These advance landing grounds are only a strip of flat desert and they put some 44 gallon drums along and that’s your landing strip. The sandy desert there was a gravelly sort of stuff so it wasn’t bad to land aircraft on. So any way we retreated out of there. We just got out of there in time. We stayed back and threw…some of the enemy bombs that were there, we just laid them all over the strip, and we thought that might hold them up a bit from landing an aircraft. It wouldn’t make much difference to the tanks. And then we scattered a few bombs around which we couldn’t carry. We had some bombs in the bomb truck and the ammo truck was ok. And we had a personnel truck. We only had 3 trucks in the armament section. I drove the personnel truck.

They say the retreat would be on so we’d get the aircraft serviced straight away. The pilots would say, “We’re going to fly back to El Gazala” or  Gambut or one of the other landing grounds we had been at on the way up. So they’d say we’re going to make for that. And our other flight would be there. We had two flights. When we advanced we’d leapfrog over like that. So C Flight were probably back there. We didn’t know where they were. We didn’t know where the base was or anything like that half the time because communications were very poor. So the pilots…we’d get them off the ground, and then any aircraft which was unserviceable and couldn’t be shifted, we’d just destroy. Although one of our fitters at one stage, he got an aircraft going and he flew it back to the next advance ground. He was an engine fitter.

A very experienced guy and he said, “Blow it, I’m not leaving my bloody plane here”, so he took off and he took back to the next drome. He just had to follow the coast along. So that was that retreat. Now that wasn’t….although we came back a fair way. We came back past Tobruk, Sidi Barrani, Salum Pass…and that’s another story, coming down these passes. There were 3 passes along that coastline.

On one particular occasion we had to come down the pass. Now these passes were a death trap really because the Germans…especially when there was a retreat on, they were flying and observing everything.

Now observing in the desert is dead easy because one truck just ploughing through the desert, the dust trail that it leaves can be identified from the air from thousands of feet up. And you’ve got no cover. You haven’t got anything. They can just come down and strafe you or bomb you. There’s nothing you can do. You can keep driving or you can pull up and just run away from your vehicle and lie on the ground.

Anyway, we came down this pass, and you’ve only got to go down the pass once to see all the vehicles that have been strafed and pushed over the side of the road. It’s about an 1100 foot drop in 2 miles. You’d come down these passes and they were built by the Italians and they came around like this and it’s just a single road and you’ve got to take a correct lock on your truck or you’ve got to stop and back them. They were fairly well built originally but they had been bombed and strafed and bombed that much that they were pretty rough and rugged when we came down them.

You’d have to stay in a very low gear because the steepest of the decline and you had to stay on it. And if you went off the edges you were likely to hit a mine. You either hit an S mine or a ratchet mine. That’s another story, I’ll tell you about mines later. So you had to stick to the middle of the road and if you transgressed off the side of the road you could hit a mine. They were aware of this when they set their mines. Places where you were likely to go off the edge of the road.

That’s why whenever we passed anybody we’d pass them that close. Sometimes we might even knock them with the trucks. So, you didn’t like getting off the road at any time. So, coming down this pass with the German aircraft in the vicinity, it was a pretty scary operation because you know they were shot halfway down there. It was no good jumping out because it was a drop off each side. You were up against the cliff on this side, but on the other side it just dropped away, and you’d see trucks that had been shot up and shoved off the road by the tanks and they just rolled down the bottom. So we never ever liked the coast road or these passes. Hellfire Pass, Salum Pass and Duna Pass. There were 3 big ones and gee whiz they took a heavy toll on transport at times. The Germans knew them well and they were always waiting to strafe or bomb them, particularly when there’s a retreat on because when there’s a retreat on there’s nothing organised. All your trucks are nose to tail going down that coast road. We used to stay in the desert whenever we could.

We reckoned we were a lot safer up in the desert, away from that coast road. Even though you left dust trails, at least you could scatter, and we used to scatter our trucks right out, never follow each other unless we were absolutely positive we were safe.