Men Who Killed Qantas - Matthew Benns [25]
Satisfied the plane was about to sink, the fighters left and the seven surviving crew and passengers held a hasty conference to decide what to do. Despite a wound to his leg, Captain Koch and a passenger called Mr Moore set out for the shore eight kilometres away with the intention of finding help. It took them three hours and, upon reaching the breakers on the beach, the indefatigable pilot found he had to be helped out of the water because his leg would not support him. It was ‘a graze on the knee’, he later reported in something of an understatement.9 Meanwhile, the flying boat had caught fire and the other survivors had also struck out for the shore using baskets and mail bags as flotation devices – two did not make it.
Once they had regrouped on the beach the survivors, including First Officer Lyne with a graze on his neck, agreed that two of the passengers would go for help. They swam a 360-metre-wide crocodile infested river to raise the alarm. The five survivors were finally evacuated by a Dutch flying boat. Captain Koch made it back to the hospital in Darwin just in time to give his eyewitness account of the Japanese bombing three weeks later.
As the Japanese pushed into Java, refugees gathered on the south coast at Tjilatjap, which became an evacuation point to Broome in Western Australia. Singapore fell, with Captain Bill Crowther flying the last Qantas flight out on 4 February 1942. On 19 February, the day Darwin was bombed, he also flew the last flight out of Batavia. A great deal of activity was now centred on Broome, with 8,000 refugees, many with dengue fever, and Dutch flying boats, military land planes, transports and bombers all crowded into the tiny town and its harbour. Qantas flying boats played a vital role in the hazardous operation. Two Qantas Catalinas, Circe and Corinthian, left on the same day but only Corinthian made it back to Broome. Circe, with Captain Bill Purton in charge, was never found. It was presumed shot down by enemy aircraft. A search by Qantas flying boat Corinthian found no trace of Circe but located the crew of an American DC3 on an isolated beach north of Broome.
Qantas chief pilot Lester Brain had arrived in Broome on 21 February and reported that most of the refugees appeared jittery, ‘as though the Japanese were close behind them’.10 Although the Qantas planes were originally intended to take supplies into Java, it quickly became clear that it would fall and instead the flying boats went out empty and returned full with refugees. On one day alone there were 57 landings and Brain worried the activity could attract Japanese attention. He was right.
On the morning of 3 March 1942 Japanese fighters, gleaming silver in the early morning sun, flashed over Broome with machine guns blazing. Tracer bullets tore through the 15, mostly Dutch, Dornier flying boats, waiting to be fuelled in the harbour. The lead fighter took the Qantas flying boat Centaurus, which was under charter to the RAAF, as its first target. It burst into flames under a withering hail of fire. Captain Ambrose was refuelling the Catalina Corinna, as 25 passengers stood with their baggage on the jetty waiting to get on board and the Zeros, with the red rising sun insignias clear on their wings, swooped down. The Japanese bullets ripped it apart and, as he described in John Gunn’s book Challenging Horizons, Ambrose witnessed the frantic rescue operation to save those who had already been loaded on to the flying boats. He was disparaging about the people of Broome, who fled as soon as the raid began, but he described how the flight crews and other personnel made valiant efforts to save passengers in peril from drowning or being burned to death, as they struggled to swim away from the fuel leaking into