Tingwell, Charles 'Bud'

Charles "Bud" Tingwell

Flight Lieutenant

RAAF 413915

680 PR Squadron RAF

87 Squadron RAAF

The man who was to become one of Australia's great stage and screen actors, Charles 'Bud' Tingwell, marked out an equally impressive reputation during the WWII  flying Mosquitoes and Spitfires.

And like his presence on the stage Bud's wartime career was characterised by style, skill and fear. It began ordinarily enough.

"I think it was at Narromine and it was in a Tiger Moth and I know my helmet didn't fit all that well and there was a little gap at the cheeks and a Tigermoth is a very windy, noisy aeroplane, especially when you haven't been in one before and I wasn't excited, I reckon it was hard work flying a Tiger."

Bud had harder work ahead.  Across the Pacific he was rushed through the Empire Air Training Scheme, gained a commission and qualified with above average navigation skills.

At 1 SFTS, Camp Borden Ontario Bud had a mishap with a Harvard.

"I pranged one on my first solo and they warned us, don't use too much rudder because it will automatically unlock the tail wheel and act like a castor. My mate said when I came in on my first solo landing, they're all watching and could see the rudder going, bang, bang, bang, which meant that I landed with the tail wheel unlocked, I lost it a bit, straightened and then lost it a bit more and we ground looped and the undercart broke and then that awful sight of the prop stopping and being bent and a Harvard.oh any aircraft was very, very low on the ground when the undercart's broken and I looked across and there's the CFI, Chief Flying Instructor, Squadron Leader Hilts was screaming across towards me in his staff car. He came right up alongside the aircraft and I think by that time I had climbed out and I remember he was very white faced and said "what happened" and I said " ground loop" and he said "just a ground loop, huh," he reached in and turned off every switch I should have turned off, like petrol, electrics, everything and I hadn't done any of that, but I'll never forget the way he said "a ground loop, huh?". It was a rather interesting experience and I did something like 5000 dollars worth of damage to that aircraft, so I thought, that's it I'll be scrubbed now.

"Our batch was sent to England, across the Atlantic, which was pretty scary and when we got to England, they said "oh yes, you're fighter trained, but you've got a GR (General Reconnaissance) course. PRU (Photo Reconnaissance Unit) and a couple of my mates had already gone up to Dice in Scotland to do their operational training for PRU. But the Photo Reconnaissance Units were made absolutely strictly secret by a very angry Winston Churchill early in the war, beautifully described by Constance Babington-Smith in a very good book called Evidence in Camera. She was one of the senior photographic interpretation officers in the RAF and we couldn't work out why everything was so secret with us, because you flew over and you knew the Germans knew you were there and we knew.  And it was the same when they flew over us, but apparently there was a very early bomber raid by the RAF on Willhemshaven, a port area, and of course all the enthusiastic air crews when they landed said they hit every target, but they lost a lot of aircraft. It was highly successful.  But the next day a photographic recce aircraft went over and they found they'd missed most of the targets and it was a disaster.  The fact that they had lost a lot of aircraft hit the press and according to Constance Babington-Smith, Churchill marched into the House of Commons and said: "from now on all photographic work PRU pictures are absolutely top secret."

"They sent our lot out to the Middle East via South Africa. I expected to do a bit of training in South Africa but all we did was wait for a troopship to take us up to Egypt and I think we had about six weeks in Durban. That was the tough thing I found about Air Force flying, the huge gaps between various types of training. There was a big gap between elementary flying because of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, and service flying in Canada and then a long gap before we did our operational training. I was sent to an aerodrome at a place called Petah Tikva in what was then Palestine, and I think that was No 74 OTU, Operational Training Unit. And we flew Spitfires and things and we were very well trained and it was a very very good course.  And then we were qualified as PRU pilots and I was sent to RAF No 680 Squadron which was a very highly regarded RAF squadron with a Canadian CO, Aussie Flight Commander - it was real Empire Air stuff, good mixture."

Bud found himself in the cockpit of a PRU Spitfire, a Spitfire with some very interesting differences.

"It was designed to fight other aircraft. They took all the guns and armour plate out and where the gun bays were in the fighter, they took those out and we had 65 gallon petrol tanks in each wing, so that gave us an extra 130 gallons, and we had an 85 gallon main tank in the Spit. So that gave us very, very good range. We could almost cover the entire bomber range. The aircraft we flew at OTU were these Spitfire Mk Vs. We did a bit of work in Hurricanes as well which were very nice aircraft to fly, but we graduated on Spit Vs.

"Then the squadron I was sent to were flying Spit XIs and I think by then the Spitfire Mk XI had become the photographic recce aircraft which was really the original MK IX fighter aircraft, but again with the guns taken out. Even the highly reinforced clear windscreen which was the fighter windscreen - they took that out and gave us a clear moulded plastic one that helped the streamlining but slightly more vulnerable because you had no armour plating except the seat itself was a sort of armour plated seat standard fitting. No guns, two vertical cameras and one oblique camera so you were well equipped to go and do the photographic stuff.

"The Mk V was OK. But I know I did a height test because I was after the height record at OTU and I nearly got there. I don't know how I managed it but I remember the aircraft wallowed a lot but we got to nearly 40,000 in a Spit V. But I'm sure somebody's going to say 'not possible' but it was interesting. It was just that someone had said go up and have a go at the height record. But in a Spit Mk XI Zoom! You were up... you had the two stage blower, what was the mark of the engine.  It was the Rolls-Royce 65 or something but we had the two stage blower. We could operate right up to 35,000 ft if we wanted to, but generally we operated at about 28,000. Superb aeroplanes of course.

"My first op I nearly flew into the mountains of Turkey, very interesting. Just missed them. Stupid, stupid flying. I was determined not to have any unsuccessful sorties.  I took off and they said 'I think there's some cloud up ahead. Be careful because there will be a lot of it.' And I flew off from Cyprus, we had an advanced flight in Cyprus. I was covering all the islands in I think it was the East Dodecanese Group where the Germans were very entrenched in all that area. And I was supposed to take photographs of certain targets and hit the cloud, and it seemed to me to be pretty endless.  I think I'd seen too many war movies or something but I thought I'd go heroically under the cloud to low level and see what I could see. Thinking I was well clear of Turkey, but I wasn't,  I suddenly found myself in a valley with mountains going up either side into this 10/10ths cloud. So that seemed to be not a good idea so I climbed up through the cloud and I couldn't possibly see the target so I came back. And I was annoyed about it because it was my first operational flight. Technically it was an unsuccessful sortie. And you didn't want to have too many of these for your own ego, I suppose.

"It was a funny feeling because you're flying a fighter aircraft, normally designed to fly with other aircraft, you're absolutely on your own, you've got no guns, just your long range tanks and excellent cameras and we used to fly with 26 inch or 30 inch lens vertical cameras and if we did our arithmetic right we took perfect stereoscopic pictures and for the other one, the oblique camera it was a 14 inch.  It was much easier to cover your target, but you usually did that at 300 feet so you did those - they were very strictly rationed because on those flights the casualty rate was pretty hefty -  the low-level ones. And you knew darned well the moment you turned those cameras on you had to be straight and level, and so did the German gunners knew that you were going to be straight and level for probably ten seconds.  To do it properly you had to fly straight and level to give the photographic interpreters a go.

"I had a very strange war. Really scared of course most of the time I suppose, and the German anti-aircraft fire was amazing, very accurate.

"I used to say we were briefed to be cowards. But if you saw the vapour trail... we used to try to get down just below the vapour trail height so if there was a German fighter lurking around up there you'd be able to see him. And I saw a German aircraft one day and went down that way, oh, crickey! That's about the closest I got. I got chased by a Greek Spitfire squadron once, and they were talking extremely excitedly to each other. I had the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) switched on calling my base saying tell these guys we're friendly. We were finishing an OP and heading back to North Africa where our base was, and a Spitfire is very angry when you think it's about to attack. Because of the different language we had no idea. I have a feeling they were just sending us up... so to see a Spitfire looking a bit angry was an interesting experience.

"By then, this was early 1944, they'd developed some amazing box barrage techniques where they had a cluster of guns, I forget how many there were in each cluster, so that when the anti-aircraft stuff was bursting around you it would be in half a dozen Boom, all over, and it's very soon the sky is black with those things. You'd think: "Can I get through all this?" And often you wouldn't know you were being shot at because it burst below and behind... but I know on one occasion we landed and there was a burst of 88mm smack in the middle of one of our photographs. If it had been 50' higher we wouldn't have known what hit us.

"Then they got the 105mm we were told they were, they chased us up a bit higher, I was later told by a former German anti-aircraft gunner that it was 103mm not 105.

Bud's operational flying was a mix of Spitfire and Mosquito sorties. On one Mosquito sortie he and his navigator Bill almost 'bought it'.

"I can remember losing my voice I got such a shock when there was a burst right in front of me. We were iced up over Athens which was very heavily defended and I remember scraping a little bit of the ice away from the interior windscreen so I could see, like driving a car on a misty morning before we had airconditioners, Bill, my navigator is down in the nose, and he's doing left left right right, and I was being very lazy, I should have gone up and downwind over the target at about 26,000. But it was more convenient to go against the wind because of all the other targets so we were a slow moving target and the German gunners knew exactly where we were going to be, but I didn't see any flak until one burst right in that gap where I'd cleared, and I tried to tell Bill, and I actually tried to say, this was uncensored: "Gosh Bill flak!" I could have used a stronger term, and the voice didn't come out properly. There was a strange wahh wahh wahh noise in my earphones and he was saying: "What are you saying, what are you saying?" And I told him, and he said: "Well DO something!" So I turned and there was an ocean of these 88mm puffs and not one scratch on the aircraft when we landed.

"We had exactly the same aircraft all the time. We got some slightly snazzier looking Spitfires with a slightly more pointed rudder and a retractable tailwheel. I was looking at some photographs at the Temora Aviation Museum and they've got a Spitfire Mk VIII and when I looked at it I thought ooh, that's what we thought was still the Spit XI, and I remember talking to another Spitfire fighter pilot who'd been in the airforce almost from day one and I mentioned we were flying the Spit XI which was the photographic version of the Spit IX and I said we had the ones with the pointy rudder and he said those were the Spit VIII. Whatever mark they once were, when they came to us with the camera positions we were flying Spit XIs.

"We were deadly dull, beautiful colour of pale blue all over and I believe they did all sorts of clever things with paint but we didn't. We were just pale blue. They looked rather good I thought.

"I remember at OTU we did have some Spit Vs that were in a kind of darkish blue, and I have a feeling that was one of the first experiments where they used dark blue and by the time I was operational it was pale blue. But I think later it was I read they had all sorts of clever colour schemes but I don't think it made any difference. In bright sunlight you could be seen, and in any case the radar knew exactly where we were.

"We had a lucky run on our squadron.

"When you saw the flak, particularly that one that was smack in the middle of a picture, if that had been just a bit higher, Bill and I wouldn't have know what hit us - an 88mm shell bursting particularly in a Mosquito, made out of balsa wood - that was a bit of a worry, not so much in a Spitty, I don't know why, but it was a smaller target, something like that.

"The only time I really got hit was doing a low level over the Northern coast of Crete and I remember there was a guy looking at me and I was up and down looking for a radar site and there seemed to be no German aircraft about, and no tracer fire, so I went up and down a couple of times, and there was a bloke at one end when I was turning he seemed to be always looking up at me, in a grey suit. I nearly waved to him at one stage. When I went to land the flaps wouldn't come down, and that meant that I had no brakes either because the flaps and brakes were an air pressure system. And a Spitfire without flaps and brakes - gee it takes a long while for them to slow down. I had about three or four attempts to land and realised I was going to cross the road and hit the Arab laundry up ahead and on the final attempt I kicked lots of left rudder and let it bounce onto the sand on the side of the runway expecting it to go up on it's nose but it didn't and the ground crew weren't impressed, because they wondered whether I'd copped any flak.  I said: "I don't know, I don't think so." And they said: "You stupid so and so, you nearly wrecked the best aircraft. It was a wonderful aircraft. You had certain aircraft that were a bit better than the others for some reason. This was our prize aircraft. Then one of the boys said: "Oh, look!" and there was a hole in the tailplane and I said something naff like: "Oh, no, it was a stone on the runway." I realised the guy I thought was just someone looking up at me probably was a German officer in a grey field uniform with his Luger. When Ron was killed they thought it could have been something as simple as a bloke with a Luger."

Bud completed 87 missions before returning to Australia joining 87 Squadron. His last duty was to ferry aircraft to storage depots for scrapping. "Don't bother with the park brake, we'll push them all together."

Bud Tingwell died 15 May 2009.

From an interview made for the Temora Aviation Museum in 2007

Roger Clarke and Keith Webb