Ron Pell went to war as a boy, came home a man with too many memories and put his life back together on the family farm near Kyabram.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
Now 97 years old, Ron stands alone in Echuca-Moama as our last World War II veteran. And he is a man who’s sense of service extended decades beyond his time with Bomber Command as a navigator/bomb aimer in the Lancaster, one of the famous planes of the war.
His unsung commitment to the RSL and Legacy leaves a significant number of war widows and their children living better lives because he got to come home, those men did not.
An impish smile flits ever so briefly across Ron Pell’s face. So fleeting nearly everyone in the room missed it.
But if the smile was gone, the memory, clearly, lingers on, has lingered for nigh odd 80 years.
Back when Ron Pell was in the pride of his life, he was a strapping young man.
Who just happened to be in another land, in a uniform and in the middle of the biggest, deadliest, ugliest war in history.
London in the 1940s was a long way from the rural idyll of 1920s and 1930s Kyabram, where not so many years earlier Ron, on the family dairy farm, was bareback on his pony Toby, clip clopping for three-quarters of an hour to school at Cooma, and later three-quarters of an hour home – in between the pony was parked in the school’s horse paddock for the day.
Now he was in a Lancaster bomber, flying as many as 18 non-stop hours, there and back, to rain destruction on Germany and military installations in occupied Europe. In between arrival and departure there was no parking the heavy bomber in a hangar, instead it was weaving through the skies, its fuselage being aerated by flak shrapnel, the plane rocking fit to fall apart as the flak went off all around them.
The only out was to plunge into the stygian depths of the night, trusting your parachute would open and, in the darkness, not slam you into trees, drop you in the English Channel or a lake, not drop you in Germany where terrified and angry locals would seek revenge for the bombing raids.
Flying with RAAF Squadron 115 as part of Bomber Command, Ron would prove to be one of the lucky few. Out of 125,000 aircrew, 57,205 would die (a 46 per cent death rate), a further 8403 were wounded in action and 9838 became prisoners of war. In that number were about 10,000 Australians and their death rate was even worse, tipping close to 50 per cent.
“Not our crew, never got a scratch, none of us. That was three other Aussies and two Poms,” Ron says, sounding as amazed now as he probably felt back then.
He had seen his plane turned into a sieve it had so many holes ripped in its skin by shrapnel, seen the pilots frantically feather an engine on fire to stop the wing burning off, and had sat in his darkened cubbyhole where, as navigator/bomb aimer, crouched over his charts and taking readings from the stars and rapidly computing key data, he worked out the best way for the plane, with the fuel it had available, to get home, and at what height it had to fly to do that.
In movies and on TV, the huge four-engine planes seem to be lumbering through the sky, but they were travelling at 300 knots – or 555km/h – flying at little more than 10,000 feet when laden with as much as 22,000 pounds (close to 10,000kg) of explosives and to a ceiling of 18,000 - 22,000 feet on the way home.
“It was so cold up there, when we got up really high it could be -30℃ and any exposed skin would immediately stick to metal surfaces,” Ron shivered at the thought.
“We were wrapped in wool and leather, and I also had silk gloves because you could not use a slide rule or sextant in chunky leather gauntlets but still could not risk bare flesh touching metal,” he said.
“The navigator’s space, screened by a blackout curtain so the night fighters couldn’t see us, was cramped and cold but was nothing on being bomb aimer, where you were laid flat out below the nose gunner in his Perspex turret and three miles from the target you directed the pilots and the plane’s course until you dropped the bombs.”
After leaving school as a 15-year-old to work on the family dairy farm; it only took young Ron two years to realise he may have been a little premature in his decision to quit, so in something of an academic about-face, he enrolled in night school with Kyabram Air Training Corps, where he studied Morse code, navigation, aerodynamics and meteorology.
And in a serious case of déjà vu, it was a return to the slow slog simply getting to school and back – this time a 20km round trip by pushbike. Sun-up, and sundown.
What Ron might not have really planned for came straight after his 18th birthday – he was called up and headed for the war.
“I was sent to Somers, where I received intensive training and was assessed for selection for further training as either a pilot, a navigator/bomb aimer, or wireless operator/air gunner,” he said.
“My preferred choice was to be a pilot, but because I had successfully completed the Air Training Corps and was reasonably good at mathematics, I was assigned to be a navigator/bomb aimer where it was essential to be quick and accurate with figures and be able to work out compass direction, wind speeds and directions, air and ground speeds and targets.
“I was then sent to Mt Gambier and Port Pirie in South Australia for further training, which included night flying, gun and bomb handling and parachute training.
“I have to admit on one occasion flying through rough weather I was going to be sick. We didn’t have any paper bags on board, so I used my beret, then pushed it down the flare chute and planned to order a replacement the next day.
“A month later a parcel arrived and inside was my beret, neatly laundered and pressed. The beret was marked with my name and number so was easily identifiable. I have always been very grateful for the thoughtful person who helped with that, and fortunately I was never airsick again.”
Ron might not have been airsick again, but that doesn’t account for those times when his plane was being hammered by anti-aircraft fire and hunted by German night-fighters and terror replaced the nausea.
His crew would complete 23 missions by the war’s end, mostly over Germany but also detouring south to where the Italian frontline was being pushed further to the north of the peninsula and to reach that mark without being shot down or have someone killed or wounded was astonishing.
“One night we lost seven Lancs – planes and crews – out of our squadron. That meant 49 of our mates were dead,” Ron said, his voice going softer.
“The German fighter planes had blended with our planes that night, on the way home and shot them down,” he said.
“We found out next morning that others had also been lost. In the end it was 50 planes in all.
“It was devastating, but the next day we all had to get on with the job.”
When the war ended all Ron wanted to do was get home.
But there was a small catch.
“I had got engaged to a girl in England, but by the time the war was over, the thought of me going to the other side of the world, of leaving her family, of all those things which had seemed so far away in the war, well they suddenly looked very different,” Ron said.
“So I came home, with things a bit up in the air – and then I met Esma, and she was the girl I was going to marry. She was a podiatrist and would tell people I married her because it meant I could get my nails cut for free,” he said.
That he came through such a dangerous part of the war and getting home without a wound was a first for the Pells. Ron’s father Herb had been shot in France during World War I; the bullet going through one cheek, knocking out many of his teeth, bursting an eardrum and exiting through the back of his neck.
“I could have stayed in the air force, but I wanted to get back to the farm, get home to Australia.”
Once there Ron and Esma would have three daughters – Christine, Helen, and Robyn – and as well as farming he would try out some more unusual pursuits, such as building mudbrick houses in Kyabram and Echuca (he built six in each town); making his own bricks with his own design press, powered by the hydraulics on a little tractor he hooked up to it.
Ron still lives in his own house, on a small block he carved off the farm he eventually bought in Echuca West.
And at 97 his memory is pretty good. Actually better than good. When talking about bases where he served in the UK, he most enjoyed one in Wales.
Where in Wales? He didn’t hesitate and didn’t get a letter wrong: “It was Pwllheli”. See if you can remember next week how to spell that, never mind pronounce it.
As for that fleeting smile on Ron’s face, well, he made a quiet little admission about his time in the UK: “Those Pommie girls were pretty good”.
Contributor