Recently, I sent Les Munro, a 95-year-old retiree living in Tauranga, a cartoon of a World War II bomber, flying through a barrage of searchlights and exploding shells from anti-aircraft guns. The pilot is saying to his bomb-aimer, "I hate this job, I do my best and I get nothing but flak!"
I knew he would be one of the few people alive who would find this both amusing and ironical.
I interviewed Munro in 2009. He is without question one of New Zealand's great World War II heroes and is the last surviving pilot from the famed RAF Dambuster raid. He is back in the news this week having decided to auction in London his medals and flight logbooks to raise money to assist in the upkeep of the Bomber Command Memorial Fund in London. He hopes his decorations might raise about $100,000 to help in the upkeep of a memorial that contains names of many New Zealanders including a number of his mates.
As Squadron Leader Munro, he had a lucky war. In 1942, his first operational sortie over Dusseldorf turned into a disaster for the RAF, with 38 aircraft lost. Munro and his crew, still combat greenhorns, survived. Three nights later they took off to raid Bremen fully armed with 500lb bombs. Engine problems meant his Wellington bomber failed to climb above 15m on take-off and, after clipping trees, Munro crash-landed in complete darkness in a paddock. With an engine on fire, the crew escaped just before the bomber's payload blew up.
The closest Munro came to injury happened when returning from a sortie on Berlin. He ran into heavy flak outside Hamburg and had to put his Lancaster into a corkscrew dive to escape the searchlights and bombardment. He later found shrapnel from an enemy shell lodged in his flying boots.
