The precise pilot

A Southland war hero and jet-age pioneer

‘‘I made a rapid alteration of heading ... but overshot and came to rest in a wood nearby.’’ Bruce Wallace commenting on a dangerous landing

Southlander Bruce Wallace was twice awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross with RAF Bomber Command in World War 2, then became one of the world’s first jet airline pilots on the innovative but ill-fated Comet 1. His memoir reveals a man whose meticulous discipline made skies safer in war and peace. Michael Fallow writes.

When George VI invested him with his first Distinguished Flying Cross at Buckingham Palace, Bruce Wallace’s eye for detail of course kicked in.

The atmosphere was quiet and subdued. Anything but triumphal.

No fewer than 150 personnel from all three services were presented to the monarch who had a word for each one of them.

All of which struck the Invercargill-born Wallace as highly satisfactory.

He was always one who valued painstaking discipline, meticulous diligence and economy of effort.

His son Don, who has compiled and edited his late father’s memoir, Flight Plans, readily acknowledges he ‘‘wasn’t a Flash Harry’’.

But neither was he meek.

‘‘If you met him he was probably a little bit detached in person,’’ says Don.

‘‘He wasn’t slow putting himself forward for things, but wanted to do it on his own merits. Didn’t want to owe anyone any favours.’’

The sort of dad who, should either of his sons be sharing a story that perhaps reflected well on them, would have a caution readily at hand: ‘‘Don’t shoot a line’’. It means don’t exaggerate. Bruce Wallace mightn’t have been a yarn spinner, then, but behind the plain, clear storytelling in his memoir, the yarns spin themselves.

A case in point; just weeks before the flight that earned his first DFC, Wallace and his crew had been lost over Germany due to a (subsequently replaced) crew members’ navigational error in trying circumstances.

They had made it back to England with engines spluttering from lack of fuel when Wallace identified an unfamiliar runway off the port bow.

He called the tower for landing clearance, but there was no reply.

He descended anyway, noticing on final approach a group of five white lines, indicating the airfield was still under construction.

‘‘I made a rapid alteration of heading,’’ he dutifully wrote afterwards, ‘‘to land clear of heavy construction equipment on the runway but overshot and came to rest in a wood nearby.’’

The shattered windscreen left him slightly injured, but all crew escaped serious harm.

He doesn’t mention this but the upshot is that he could lay claim to being the first pilot to land at London Stansted airport.

Just weeks later, one March night in 1943 he had another shortrunway issue, this time on take-off.

He was again captaining a Stirling bomber, for an attack on Munich.

It was a long-distance target requiring both maximum fuel and the maximum bomb load. But in a late call, they had to take off from a shortened alternative to the damaged main runway at Chedburgh.

With no time to lighten the load, this captain with a well-deserved reputation for being risk-averse found that as the senior officer present he had the dubious duty to show the other crews that it could be done.

Able to achieve just 105 knots, instead of the nominally required 120, he hauled it off and staggered into the air in a semi-stalled condition.

‘‘We rolled our wheels up the slope of a thatched roof cottage as they were retracting, and made it through a gap in a line of trees.’’

Nursing his grossly overheating engines to rated power, he called back to the tower to advise other pilots not to attempt ‘‘this hairy procedure’’.

Too late. The next aircraft off hit the trees and crashed in flames.

The crew were rescued and hospitalised. The other flights were grounded.

But with a damaged undercarriage and tailplane, Wallace and his crew continued to accomplish their part in the mission. Later, their mid-upper gunner had them autograph a branch found in the tail plane and kept it as a memento.

As his first DFC citation notes, three nights later, in an attack against Essen, his aircraft was caught and held in searchlights.

Lit up as a target and pursued by flack, they managed to hold steady long enough to see the flash of their payload exploding on target.

After the bomb doors were closed, still held in searchlight, they took a long shallow descent to the Dutch coast, a tactic ‘‘designed to stay below the flak and fox the searchlight crews’’.

It paid off handsomely. Wallace’s gunners had a ball shooting up the light and flak positions and managed to silence some of them.

On return, however, they were questioned by a senior officer who, because of their return ahead of the rest of the squadron, was suspicious they had not reached the target or dropped their bombs short.

But it transpired that his was the only flight photo to show successful delivery and he was then asked to submit a report on his tactics, to be passed on to other squadrons.

Wallace earned a bar to his DFC a short time later, with another brace of successes, making it back from a Berlin raid with most of his instruments unserviceable from ground fire, and then securing a telling photograph to testify to a successful attack on Dortmund.

The citation concludes: Asa Flight Commander, his experience and balanced judgement have been invaluable to new crews under his command.

What emerges from his memoir, however, is that apart from his performance in the air, he had become intent on bringing more discipline to the protocols.

Appalled by the aircrew losses, particularly among Stirling squadrons, he was inspired to develop better training methods, with more precise checklists. Not the sort of stuff that they make war movies about, but in terms of lives saved there’s a case to put that this disciplinarian side of his approach was the greater part of his wartime legacy.

Speaking from his home in the UK, Don acknowledges that all the professionalism in the world wasn’t, alone, the reason his father survived the war. As many a skilled pilot found for better or worse, luck played a part in their fates.

The book is dedicated to all the RNZAF personnel who defended the United Kingdom – ‘‘in particular those from Invercargill, the southernmost town in New Zealand, who travelled further than any other members of Commonwealth or Allied Forces to reach the European theatre of war’’.

As Southland readers were informed in proud news reports of his honours, he was a son of Mr and Mrs J A Wallace of Ythan St, Invercargill, attended St George School, was an active Boy Scout, took a commercial course at the Southland Technical College, and had been a member of the Alpine Club.

For his part, Don believes that the disciplines of climbing served his father well, honing his ability to focus on step-by-step safety and the needs of the moment.

He married an Invercargill woman, Sylvia Ross, who was nursing at Christchurch when her new husband departed, having completed his preliminary training and shown sufficient aptitude for Bomber Command officer training.

As the war approached its conclusion, with the Japanese theatres still active, he wrote to Sylvia that he was intending to pursue a civil aviation career with the new BOAC (later British Airways), and she left to join him.

His new job was to become one of the first pilots of the world’s first jet airliner, the ill-fated de Havilland Comet 1.

It was in many ways an impressive aircraft, cuttingedge for its time.

But then the mid-air breakups began.

The first was in Calcutta on May 2, 1953, claiming 43 lives. He’d last flown that plane two months earlier.

Another at Elba on January 10 1954, left 35 dead, four months after he’d been its pilot.

A third on April 8 1954 in Naples, with 21 deaths, came nine months after he’d last flown it.

His own experience as a BOAC route captain, instructor and pilot examiner – and that meticulous personality – meant he was called in to play a role in the testing that led to the realisation that the airframe skin had a defect in the corner of a cabin window.

None of the pilots could have done anything about it.

The Comet 1 was doomed but a new incarnation, the Comet 4, proved an emphatic success. Wallace not only flew it, but was also made training manager.

There at the dawn of the jet age for Britain, Wallace also flew the last all-British long-haul airliner, the Vickers VC10.

His duties also included royal flights, notably the Queen, Prince Philip and Princess Anne on their 1970 royal tour to Australia.

The Duke of Edinburgh – himself a pilot – popped in to the cockpit during take-off and landing, just to keep current.

Wallace’s civil career which reached into the 1970s, was full of travel in days when a jet captain’s lifestyle was pretty luxurious.

And when the time came for holidays, the jet pilot took his family camping. It made a break from the daily grind of fine hotels, good restaurants, shopping and sightseeing.