Bob Cowper

D-Day fighter ace Born: June 24, 1922; Died: June 19, 2016

SQUADRON Leader Bob Cowper, who has died aged 93, was a much-decorated Second World War veteran, a night fighter ace pilot who engaged Luftwaffe warplanes in dogfights to protect allied ground troops on and after D-Day.

Flying a Mosquito, he shot down four German planes over the beaches of Normandy while his comrades in RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force) 456 squadron – Australia’s only night-fighter unit – accounted for a total of 35 enemy aircraft. In the weeks after D-Day, Cowper and his squadron also shot down 24 German V-1 (Doodlebug) flying bombs, probably saving countless lives in and around London.

The son of a London-born father who had fought in the Australian army during the First World War, Sqn Ldr Cowper also bailed out of his aircraft twice during the Second World War, once onto the Sahara desert with his Scottish radar navigator Flight Sergeant Bill Watson and once into the Mediterranean off Sicily.

In the latter incident, his RAF navigator Pilot Officer Alexander Farquharson, also Scottish, standing in for the ill Watson, did not survive. In the Sahara, Sqn Ldr Cowper was listed as missing in action before walking 65 miles behind enemy lines for five days. He had torched his Beaufighter plane to keep it from enemy hands and was forced to shoot his service pistol at apparently hostile Arab nomads. Having realised he was an Australian ally, the Arabs protected and fed him and he was able to link up with allied troops and get back in the air.

He ended the war as acting Commanding Officer of RAAF 456 squadron, a major back-up to our own RAF through- out the conflict. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) with bar, was later given the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) by the Queen and was made a Chevalier (Knight) of the French Legion of Honour by President Jacques Chirac in 2004.

Robert Barson Cowper was born in Broken Hill, in the New South Wales outback, to Australian parents of English origin but he grew up in Kangaroo Flat, South Australia, where his family were part of the great Gold Rush. His father William Henry Cowper, born in Hoxton, London, had emigrated to Australia when he was 21 and returned to Europe to fight in the trenches of the First World War with the Australian army’s 3rd Pioneer Battalion where he suffered serious mustard gas burns.

Young Bob, who had three sisters, studied at Queen’s College, North Adelaide, and got a job as an engineering draughtsman before joining the RAAF on his 18th birthday in 1940.

He first trained in de Havilland Tiger Moths and continued training in Yorkton, Canada, where he gained his wings flying a Harvard trainer before sailing to the UK. In August 1941, he trained as a night-fighter pilot at RAF East Fortune near Edinburgh before being posted to Ballyhalbert, County Down, Northern Ireland. Initially flying Boulton Defiant night-fighters but later Bristol Beaufighters, he flew night sorties to protect not only Ireland but the Atlantic convoys carrying troops and supplies to Europe from North America.

It was in the operations room at Ballyhalbert that he met Katherine (Kay) McCall, an Australian orphan of Scottish origin who was working as an air plotter for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and had previously done the same key job at RAF Kenley during the Battle of Britain. After visiting Kay’s guardians, the McCall family of Dahlandui/ Garelochhead, close to the Trident submarine base at Faslane, to ask permission, they married on December 9, 1943, and honeymooned in Perth before Bob was posted to Malta with RAAF 456 Squadron.

Having picked up a brand new Beaufighter from RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire, he and Flight Sergeant Watson were on a secret mission between Gibraltar and Malta in January 1943 when they got lost in darkness and heavy cloud, with an inoperable radio and virtually out of fuel, and crash-landed in pitch darkness and without wheels in the Sahara desert.

Guessing correctly that they were behind enemy lines, they torched the Beaufighter as per their training because it contained state-of-the-art radar technology they did not want to fall into enemy hands. They had one box of matches and they used every one because there was so little fuel left in the tank to ignite.

“We decided to start walking to Tripoli but noticed we were being trailed by sword-wielding Arabs on horseback. After firing my service pistol, I yelled that I was Australian and they were not hostile at all.” The Arabs sheltered them in tents for five days before a Hussar corporal from the British “Desert Rats” picked them up. Within weeks, he and his navigator were back in the air, flying out of Malta and bombing and strafing enemy planes over Sicily.

Sqn Ldr Cowper also played a major air role during Operation Husky, the allied invasion of Sicily on July 9-10, 1943. On July 11, since Flight Sergeant Watson was down with dysentery, Cowper had the Pilot Officer Farquharson, from Bendochy, Perthshire, behind him when they had a dogfight with a Luftwaffe Junkers JU 88 fighter-bomber they had seen attacking allied ships. Sqn Ldr Cowper blew it to pieces in a fireball but some of those pieces hit his own Beaufighter and sent it spiralling into the Mediterranean. Sqn Ldr Cowper called on his navigator to get out of the bottom hatch before him but apparently he never did. He was missing in action, presumed dead.

Sqn Ldr Cowper parachuted into the ocean, where his automatic mini-dinghy inflated and he drifted all night, exhausted and expecting to die. In the morning, he spotted a ship “lit up like a Christmas tree” which he assumed was a hospital ship since no others would have their lights on in a combat zone. It was the hospital ship HMHS Aba. Its captain saw his flare and he scrambled aboard with a broken nose and shrapnel in his legs, demanding to be returned to Malta to get back in the battle. He did, and was flying again within a week, wearing a reinforced oxygen mask over his broken nose and shooting down another JU 88 off Sicily, this time with Flight Sergeant Watson back behind him. The two buddies went on to fly against the Germans in support of the allied thrust towards Berlin. They flew over the city, shooting down several more Luftwaffe aircraft.

After the war, Sqn Ldr Cowper went on to breed Jersey cows and thoroughbred race horses. His wife of 70 years, Kay, died in 2013. Two of their four daughters, Pamela and Margaret, also predeceased him. He is survived by daughters Helen and Susan, nine grandchildren, 16 great grandchildren and his sisters Joy, Ruth and Margaret.