Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

on indulgence—I would very much like to make a statement on the 70th anniversary of the operations of Bomber Command. I grew up with a picture on the wall of seven young men in full battledress ready to step into the huge Lancaster towering just behind them, identified as PB853, or 'P for Peter'. There were a line of bombs painted on the side of the plane, representing the number of missions the crew had successfully survived.

The photograph was taken in February 1945, at RAF Station Hemswell, and they were a Commonwealth crew of 150 Squadron, already veterans on that day of more than 20 missions. Even the oldest was barely more than 20. They were a Commonwealth crew, closer than brothers, with six Australians trained back home or in Canada and a ring-in, English flight engineer John Davis. At that time Australia did not train flight engineers to be sent to be part of the deadly and highly effective Bomber Command of World War II.

The United Kingdom has come so very late to recognising the sacrifices and contributions of the WWII Bomber Command. It took until 2012 to see a dedicated memorial unveiled in London. Most of the surviving veterans of Bomber Command are now in their late 80s or 90s. Most could not travel to London to honour and remember their brother aircrew who died and the youth that they sacrificed when they were sent night after night to bomb strategic enemy targets to hasten the end of the war. By the end of World War II, Bomber Command had suffered the biggest proportion of casualties of any service in the campaign against Germany and Italy. Of the 125,000 aircrew 55,000 were killed on operations—3,500 of these were young Australians; the flower of their generation.

Amongst those 125,000 who flew for Bomber Command were the six young Australians and their adopted brother, John Davis, captured on film just as they were about to climb into their Lancaster, P for Peter. It was February 1945. A few weeks later, on 24 March 1945, on their 29th mission, they were shot down near Dortmund, Germany. They had been dropping bombs on the oil refineries at Harperweg when the intense anti-aircraft flak disabled their plane.

This young Commonwealth crew, like every other, knew their chance of surviving a bombing raid was about 50 per cent. As the planes limped back home from every mission, there were always missing mates who had been trapped in burning planes or had crashed on land or sea. Some did parachute to safety, however, living to fight another day or to remain in German Prisoner of War camps supposedly safe to the end of the war.

That crew in the photo on the wall in my home were shot down on the night of 24 March 1945. That loss was especially poignant, and it is one of the great tragedies of the war—one, of course, of many tragedies. While the Lancaster was fatally crippled by the flak, only 20-year-old Flight Sergeant James Noel Griffin, of South Brisbane, went down with the plane. He had helped to keep the crippled Lancaster in the air long enough for the rest of the crew to bail out. His body was recovered from the wreckage. The rest of the crew bailed out safely. They were the Englishman, John Clement Davis, the flight engineer; the oldest of the crew, 24-year-old Robert Lockyer Masters, the wireless operator, from Tumut, New South Wales; 20-year-old Kevin Anthony Kee, the navigator, from West Brunswick, Victoria, and a descendant of a Bendigo goldfield Chinese family; and 23-year-old Philip Henry Morris, the pilot, from Maroubra. These four landed safely and were subsequently rounded up by the Germans and taken to a POW camp near Bochum where, according to the conventions of war, they should have been safe. The end of the war was only months away.

The other two crew members who parachuted to safety were my father, 20-year-old Harvey Bawden, the mid-upper gunner, from Pyramid Hill, Victoria, and 20-year-old James Henry, or Jim, Gillies, the bomb aimer, of Eastwood, New South Wales. Miraculously, these two were not with the others when those four were marched off to the POW camp at Bochum. My father had been badly injured, with a broken femur, and so he was saved from a civilian mob by the German Home Guard equivalent, who carried him off to a police station. Jim Gillies had concussion and landed a distance away from the other four, who had been captured by the military, so he was taken to a different place.

The next day, at the POW camp, a furious mob demanded that the Bomber Command crew—the four who had just been taken prisoner—be released into their hands. The guards complied, and John, Robert, Kevin and Phil were then attacked and brutally murdered. They were then buried by the mob in their home gardens.

With the end of the war just a short time later, and the American Allies sweeping through the area, some of the still shocked locals led them to the buried members of the crew. A war crimes tribunal subsequently investigated this crime, committed outside the POW camp at Bochum. The guilty were sentenced to death by hanging, and one to 20 years jail. There were also several suicides.

So just two of those seven—my father, Harvey Bawden, and Jim Gillies—miraculously survived the war. They of course live with the legacy of what happened. They remain as close as brothers and are committed to keeping alive the memories of their crew. On behalf of those two, I visited the graves of the others and paid my respects. They are re-buried at Reichswald forest, a beautiful place in a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Germany, very close to the Netherlands border. My father and Jim stay in touch with the next of kin but sadly, because all of the boys were so young, there are no direct descendants to carry on the knowledge and understanding of what they sacrificed so long ago.

There have now been several books written about this tragic episode. My father and Jim were reluctant to talk in detail about what happened. We encouraged them to say it like it was, so that younger Australians of today realise that there were crews in their twenties, many had enlisted at the age of 18, who made us so proud, and whose courage delivered a much faster end to the war. Sadly, when the conventions of war fail, some who could have survived lose their lives. In this particular case civilian lives were also lost, and that was another great tragedy of the war.

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