Spitfire hero who flew unarmed
If you think the minimum requirement of a World War II fighter aircraft is that it can fight, think again, writes Michael Fallow.
Southlander Roy Buchanan flew sky-blue Spitfires into World War II battle zones. But his was a fighter aircraft stripped of any capacity to fight. Fuel and automatic cameras took the place of armaments.
Buchanan flew daytime photoreconnaissance missions, feeding crucial information back to base.
The task allowed no time to muck about in dogfights.
‘‘It was imperative,’’ he wrote in his private papers, ‘‘that the photos be the priority. A whole night operation of hundreds of aircraft could depend on it.’’
Though he flew more than 140 operational sorties, when later interviewed by the media he would downplay his feats to the point of almost making them sound serene – even the ones where battleships Admiral Schneer, Scharnhorse and Gneisenau, around Trondheim, Norway, were opening up on him with everything they had.
‘‘There was nothing Jerry had that could touch us,’’ he would say, ‘‘provided we saw them first. We were just a speck in the sky.’’
Which makes it sound straightforward. It wasn’t. His private papers reveal peril – oblique references to ‘‘scares’’, and baleful acknowledgments of the letters he had to write to the families of dead comrades.
By war’s end he was a wing commander and a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross and the United States Air Medal, which he won flying alongside Americans in Algiers.
Mataura-born, Roy Buchanan had joined the Invercargill City Council as an engineering cadet and was taking evening classes in civil engineering when war broke out.
He volunteered and was called up in April 1941. He spent the rest of the year in urgent training, starting at Levin, then learning to fly Tiger Moths at Taieri, then to Canada where he learnt to fly twinengined Cessna Cranes.
Sailing from Halifax for Britain brought near-disaster, his vessel limping to Newfoundland for repairs after navigational error had put the ship on a collision course with convoy headed in the opposite direction.
Finally landing in Liverpool, on Christmas Eve, and posted to Blackpool for a special navigation course, he earned a commission.
Then the Royal Air Force called for volunteers for what Buchanan airily described as a ‘‘more or less secret’’ special unit flying Spitfires.
‘‘Three of us volunteered,’’ he later told reporter Bruce Scott.
‘‘We didn’t have a clue what it was for. We were all about 20 and ready for anything.’’
‘‘Anything’’ proved to be quite something: a newly formed photo reconnaissance unit of specially fitted Spitfires that held enough fuel to stay airborne for four, even four-and-a-half, hours compared with the usual half-hour.
They say forewarned is forearmed. And even when your aircraft has no weapons, some techniques at least help you see trouble headed your way.
In his papers, Buchanan reveals one or two of the flying techniques.
One was to climb so high you left a vapour trail, then drop
500 feet (152 metres). This meant anything coming at you from above would itself leave a nice, hopefully tell-tale, vapour trail of its own.
Notwithstanding ‘‘some scares’’, it usually worked. Just what those scares were, Buchanan kept to himself. He never went into detail about specific sorties, says British military historian Andy Fletcher, ‘‘being the sort not to play up his own role’’. Fliers such as Buchanan didn’t get the recognition they deserve, Fletcher believes.
‘‘It took a special sort of courage to fly an unarmed aircraft deep into enemy territory, relying solely on your own abilities.’’
The only means of navigating was by dead reckoning – that’s with a compass and stopwatch – and hoping that the weather would allow you to visually pin-point your position so you could correct any navigation errors due to wind.
And yet their skill was such that they were routinely able to find their targets.
Buchanan’s services were used far and wide. In 1942 he flew over France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. Covering the ports and fiords of Norway, he followed the movements of German naval units.
In July that year he photographed the Pocket Battleship Lutzow from the Trondheim area,
from 25,000ft. Under intense flak, he was forced to take evasive action.
But it was often the weather over the North Sea and Norway that was a bigger enemy. Many pilots simply never returned.
Buchanan went to Algiers by sea for the 1st Army, landing in 1942. He served throughout the North African campaign; his diary notes acknowledge the loss of six planes, and six pilots in December that year.
They combined with the American Photographic Unit, which had arrived in Algiers.
Although their aircraft had two huge drop tanks, the Americans were not allowed to undertake the longer trips. Buchanan’s diary entry – ‘‘they would land with probably more fuel than we started off with’’ – would hardly have been a casual observation. Fuel capacity was a life-and-death matter.
He writes of an Australian, Ted Brown, who had run out of fuel and drowned after ditching. ‘‘He was the second Aussie for whom I had to gather up their belongings and send them home with a letter.’’
With the capitulation of Axis forces in Tunisia in May 1943, his squadron could begin covering targets in Italy in preparation for the invasion of Sicily, at some stage becoming a flight commander.
A month into the campaign, he was posted back to Britain and was in service in time for the D-Day Normandy landings. ‘‘I was at Benson when the D-Day invasion started and observed the waves of gliders on their way. The sky was a busy place.’’
He did a sortie to the Calais-Le Mans area, and went well inland, low level, trying to find a triangular-shaped wood.
Unlike a comrade who had failed the day before, he did find it and got large-scale images that revealed . . . well, actually, he never did find out what was so special about that wood. But the images were needed and he got them.
Buchanan also photographed sites in Northern Europe looking for doodlebug (flying bomb) sites. He had good reason to show a personal interest in this task.
Back in London, he’d survived a close encounter with a doodle bug while emerging from the Underground at Liverpool St Station. ‘‘One dropped just outside and I was blown back down. No damage to me, but a bit of a mess outside.’’
At war’s end, Buchanan was offered a permanent commission, but declined. Back in Invercargill, he resumed his job as an engineering assistant at the city council.
As reporter Scott wrote, it was ‘‘a bit of a hard landing for a man accustomed to command’’.
So he took leave and came to Christchurch to take up his bachelor of engineering (civil) degree. Then he went back to the council as a works and drainage engineer, confronted by an enormous backlog of work.
He married Elizabeth Pairman of Dunedin in 1952 and became Gore’s borough engineer in 1957 – buying and levelling the land for Gore’s airport.
He later moved to Christchurch Airport first for an engineering role, but soon becoming assistant manager-engineer and then becoming the director of the Christchurch Airport, and patron of the Canterbury Aero Club.
He was a founding member of the Southern District Aero Club and its first president.
Roy Buchanan died in 2013. His daughter Sue Vercoe lives in Invercargill.
‘‘It took a special sort of courage to fly an unarmed aircraft deep into enemy territory, relying solely on your own abilities.’’ British military historian Andy Fletcher