Australia. Royal Australian Air Force. Squadron 61 - Barney Greatrex: from bomber command to the French Resistance

Michael Veitch is well known as an author, actor, comedian and former ABC television and radio presenter. His books include the critically acclaimed accounts of Australian pilots in World War II, Heroes of the Skies, Fly, Flak and 44 Days. Barney Greatrex is his seventh book. He lives in the Yarra Valley, outside Melbourne.

To the airmen of all nations and of all wars

Barney Greatrex could bear the tension no longer. Wincing through the cigarette haze, he once again took in the handful of faces that surrounded him in the small wooden hut buried deep in the French forest: hard, swarthy, Gallic faces, outwardly calm, but long inured to explosions of sudden, brutal violence. Even then, Barney had noted, their expressions hardly changed.

Pale sunshine pushed its way feebly through the small, grubby window, cutting shards of watery light through the permanent fug of smoke and stale sweat. Barney swallowed. His knee fidgeted. A raw sense of dread washed over him.

The stranger sat among them too, all but indistinguishable from the others. Like them, he talked quickly, gesturing forcibly with his hands, smiling, even offering up an occasional brittle joke. But he was not one of them, and everyone knew it.

It was his eyes that gave him away, thought Barney: darting from face to face, from moment to moment; preparing for what? A sudden bolt from this bare little room that threatened to suddenly close in on him? Where, though, could he run? Outside was nothing but trees. These endless woods besieged them like a gloomy army, and the hard men of the Maquis knew their every meandering path, and every dank hiding hole. In any case, reflected Barney, hed probably never even make it to the front door.

Careful not to catch his eye, Barney studied the strangers face. Like the others, it was aged far beyond his thirty-five or so years, but he was almost sure it was still unsuspecting. He risked another glance. How, he thought, could he tolerate this atmosphere? This grinning pall of false cordiality that dangled like a noose in front of him?

Barney sent his eyes to the ceiling, then the floor. For how many weeks had these flimsy walls served as his home as well as his prison? How many weeks had these faces been his closest companions as well as his jailers? And when was it that he had first counted himself among their number?

He strained to pick up the conversation humming around him. His French, though a little better now, could barely glean the gist of it. The only thing of which he was certain was that no one was saying what they thought. With an almost involuntary spasm, Barney shoved back on the thin wooden chair, scraping it noisily over the bare floorboards. Unused to the young, blond Australian airman doing anything very much besides sitting quietly and observing, the others glanced up for a moment, then lost interest. Barney excused himself and went to the door. Outside, the air, though fresh, brought little relief.

Walking a short distance from the hut, he picked up an axe and began to chop wood. The rounds of pine, still too green to burn, exploded satisfyingly under his blade, blocking out momentarily the sound of the voices inside the hut.

The irony of the scene was not lost on him. Like the man with the sallow skin and the darting eyes, Barney too was a stranger, thrust into an alien world of danger and uncertainty, over which he had no control whatsoever.

A month earlier, he had watched the south coast of England passing below him through the perspex astrodome of the great black Lancaster bomber, the familiar outline of Beachy Head dissolving into a wintry evening haze. Less than three hours later came the frenzied few seconds that he had long dreaded but long expected: the punctuated conversation over the aircrafts intercom as the night fighter stalked closer: Nine hundred yards, skipper eight hundred The voice of Reg, his now dead wireless operator, still rang in his ears. Then the sickening tear of cannon shells splitting metal, the sudden fire, and those surreal moments as the doomed aircraft gripped him in its centrifugal death spin; the miracle of his escape, the shock of a freezing black wind, the parachute blooming white above his head in the night sky; the snow, then the almost unbearable realisation that, out of his crew of seven, he alone was now alive.

A few days later, cold, hungry and exhausted, he had emerged from another forest much like this one to take the biggest gamble of his life: opening the back door of a small house in a tiny mountain village and stepping inside. The middle-aged Frenchman who met him stood frozen to the spot, as if encountering a ghost.

Still they talked inside the hut. Even away from it, Barney found the tension no less palpable. What could they be talking about? What was there to discuss? The stranger sounded cheerful, even familiar. Was it possible he did not realise his identity as a German spy had been unmasked? Or perhaps, Barney thought, clinging to a sudden, desperate hope, it was all a mistake. What if these men had been wrong? What if the mans unlikely story had, after all, checked out and even now they were joking about how a tragic misunderstanding had been narrowly avoided? But no. Even with his miserable French, Barney could sense some macabre charade approaching its denouement, whereupon it would be kicked over like a flimsy theatre set and the strangers fate would be sealed.

Barney went on chopping, his sweat alternately cooling and warming him against the early spring breeze.

Then, to an exhale of relief, the sounds of more chairs scraping and feet shuffling towards the door. More voices. The party was breaking up. Nothing would happen, he decided, not today. Barney swung his axe once more, then suddenly a pistol shot rang out, followed quickly by another. Two spiteful jabs punctuating the cold, clear air, then the sound of something soft but heavy falling hard.

Without thinking, Barney bolted to the door of the cabin as it swung open before him. A mans dead body rolled out, an oozing smear of blood staining the wooden floor behind him. Barney almost stumbled into him. He looked into the mans dead eyes, wide open at his feet, a moment of hideous confusion frozen forever on his lifeless face. Barney felt a tight wave of nausea even anger course through him. Now blood started to gush from the back of the mans head, expanding quickly in a black-red balloon. Revolted, Barney turned away.

A nearby woodsman, a friend, had heard the shots and had warily approached the cabin. He now stood at the open door, shaking with fear and glancing anxiously back towards the woods like a guilty child about to be caught. In his grim, dark voice, Bbert growled that he would kill him if he breathed a word of what he saw. Everyone knew it was no idle threat.

Well into the night that followed, Barney, wielding a pathetically inadequate implement, would be hacking into the partially frozen ground to dig a moonlit grave and quietly developing a lifelong amazement at the weight the dead weight of a lifeless human body. Eventually, this too would become simply another surreal moment in an ordeal of terror, luck and survival about which he would keep all but silent for the next seventy years. As his small shovel wedged out another clod of frozen earth in the darkness, he glanced up at a dark, skidding sky, and once more pondered what part of his utterly unremarkable upbringing in the Australian suburbs could possibly have led him to this.

As noble as the name may seem, the Greatrexes in fact came from Englands rising industrial class, originally as leather tanners. Sometime in the late eighteenth century, they ventured down from Cumbria in Englands far north-west to bring their entrepreneurial skills to Birmingham, one of the epicentres of the industrial revolution then sweeping the country. By the 1850s, in the village of Walsall, they had built one of the most prosperous leather-making companies in the country, producing everything from saddles to the finest in ladies gloves, which were exported all over Britain and to the wider world.