Gordon Henry Williams enrolled at the Mapleton State School as Pupil No. 434 in the First Grade on 25th January 1926, aged 5 years 7 months. He completed his primary schooling there and successfully passed the Scholarship examination in 1934. For his secondary schooling, he attended Brisbane Boys’ Grammar School. After passing the Junior Public Examination in 1936, he entered the service of the Bank of New South Wales and was posted to Atherton, Gympie, Murgon, Mareeba and Cairns as a bank clerk. Gordon was interested in military activities, and around 1938 became a member of the 5th Light Horse Militia as a spare-time interest.
In June 1940, while living at Cairns, he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force (Serial No. 405337) and was called up in March 1941. He completed his initial 12 P.C. at Amberley, Queensland and was then posted to No.2 Elementary Flying Training School (No.2 E.F.T.S.), No. 12 Pilot Course at Archerfield Airfield on the southern outskirts of Brisbane. This was one of twelve Elementary Flying Training Schools run by the R.A.A.F. After passing this course, Gordon went south and completed his advanced training in No. 13 Course at No.2 Service Flying Training School (S.F.T.S.) at Wagga Wagga. He was then posted back to Archerfield as a Sergeant Pilot in the 23 (City of Brisbane) RAAF Squadron, and worked up his flying hours in Wirraways.
The CAC Wirraway
(left) was an all purpose Australian
two-seater aircraft built by the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation in
Melbourne. The name was an Aboriginal word meaning ‘challenge’. Its design
was based on the North American NA-16, which was later developed by the
United States Air Force into the famous North American Harvard. The image at
left shows the prototype, A20-1, having a training flight at Archerfield in
August 1939.
On 27th March 1939, the first of 755 Wirraways took to the skies. It was powered by a Pratt and Whitney nine cylinder air-cooled radial piston engine developing 600 horsepower (447 kilowatts) through a three-bladed metal constant-speed propeller. It had a wingspan of 43 feet and a length of 27 feet 10 inches. The Wirraway could reach a ceiling of 23 000 feet, and had a top speed of 215 miles per hour. It carried a pilot and an observer, and had a range of 720 miles. In service during the war, the Wirraway’s versatility soon became apparent, and it was used as a front line fighter, dive bomber, trainer, Pathfinder, artillery spotter, air-to-ground attack weapon and supply dropper.
Wirraways were armed with two forward-facing Vickers 0.303 inch machine guns mounted above the motor and firing through the propeller. In the rear of the cockpit, the observer was equipped with a flexibly-mounted rear-facing Vickers machine gun of similar calibre, which could be used to fire upon an attacking enemy. When used as a dive bomber, the Wirraway could deliver a payload of 1000 lbs (454 kg) of bombs.
During his training in these planes, Gordon flew to Mapleton on more than one occasion, circling over the school and dipping his wings to acknowledge the cheering and waving children. He would fly over the homes of people he knew and his parents’ former home, providing a great thrill for the local people. Gordon was assigned to Wirraway No. A20-100, with Alan Charles Lord of Ulladulla, N.S.W. as Air Observer. On Friday 13th February 1942, the two airmen were scheduled to practise aerial fighter tactics with two similar planes over the southern end of Moreton Bay, near the Brisbane bayside suburb of Cleveland.
Soon after breakfast, the three Wirraways took
off from Archerfield and headed for
the bay where they
commenced mock aerial dog-fighting. People living in the Redlands market
garden area surrounding the small adjoining towns of Cleveland
and Thornlands were used to seeing Air Force planes take part in combat training in
their skies and military flying boats landing on the calm waters of the bay, and usually
stopped what they were doing to watch. At 10:30 am on that fateful morning, many people
had been observing the action overhead for half an hour, and saw two of the Wirraways
head over their farms in a north-westerly direction, unaware that disaster was
only moments away.
Suddenly the spectators were horrified to see
the two planes, almost overhead, collide in mid-air. Many eyewitnesses still remember the
tragic event. Gordon's plane, swerving to the right away from the town
towards the bay and power-diving with smoke pouring from it, crashed to
earth in the tidal mudflats south-west of Oyster Point. The area had thinly
growing mangroves in the 1940s. Today, the site of the impact is at the eastern end of Bay Street, in the
reclaimed sports field known as Henry Ziegenfusz Park, near the Cricket
Club. The other plane continued on its north-westerly course and broke up as it fell, the main wreckage falling in
virgin bushland just west of Wellington Street and approximately 630 metres south
of the Cleveland Cemetery near the Long Street alignment. This area is still
a bushland refuge. A wing, "falling like a feather" according to an
eyewitness, smashed into
the grounds of the Cleveland State School, where minutes later children
would have
been playing during their morning recess. Both pilots managed to avoid
striking people or property. 
Gordon (21 years old) and Alan (26) were both killed. The crew of the second Wirraway, A20-290, Sergeant Pilot George Arthur Ross Hardy (24) and Air Observer Sergeant Frank Stanley Pledge (22), also died. Gordon was buried at Toowong Cemetery on 15th February 1942 with full military honours. The grave is in the shade of an imposing pine tree, not far from Governor Blackall’s towering monument. The inscription on his tombstone reads as follows: “A noble life nobly ended.” This may refer to Gordon’s heroic action in turning his stricken plane away from Cleveland’s built-up area towards the bay. Gordon’s memorial panel at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra is No. 101. Plans are in hand to place a memorial in Henry Ziegenfusz Park near the site where his plane struck the ground.
Soon after, 23 (City of Brisbane) Squadron was relocated to New Guinea to help stem the Japanese invasion. The Wirraways proved to be no match for the enemy fighters, though on 26th December 1942 one actually downed a Zero near Buna on the coast of New Britain. Generally speaking, they were hopelessly outclassed in the air, and sadly almost all of the planes and half of the crews never returned home.
In response, the Commonwealth Aircraft
Corporation developed a replacement for the Wirraway called the
Boomerang.
This new aircraft was a single-seater fighter whose design used so many
components of the Wirraway that it became known as the ‘Wirraway fighter’.
It had a much larger Pratt & Whitney R-1830-S3C4-G Twin Wasp radial engine
of 1200 horsepower, twice the power of the Wirraway’s engine. With a
wingspan of only 36 feet and being a little shorter in overall length, the
CAC Boomerang had much better performance than the Wirraway and higher fire
power with a 20 mm Hispano cannon. About 250 were built between 1942 and
1945, but as it turned out the Boomerangs saw very little air to air combat.
However, they did valuable work in support of ground operations, especially
in artillery spotting, a role in which they excelled.
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On that fateful day in February 1942, Mr Peter
White had been in the air further out over the bay in the third Wirraway and saw the two planes
with his four mates crash to the ground. In 1994 he began a quest to build a
memorial to his friends. The outcome of his efforts was that in 1995, as
part of the ‘Australia Remembers’ dedications held to commemorate the
fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the people of the Redland
Shire constructed a large memorial in Cleveland Cemetery, in honour of the
four airmen who died:
Due to an oversight, the memorial omitted to mention the names of the four aircrew. Mr White (then 83) and another returned serviceman Mr Bill O'Connor worked to remedy this, and the omission was finally redressed on 24th March 2000, when an additional plaque was mounted on the memorial. This carries the names of the squadron, the planes (with pictures), the names, ranks and serial numbers of the four men, the crests of the RAAF and 23 (City of Brisbane) Squadron, and the simple message “We Honour the Memories of the Two Crews”. Two restored Wirraways from the Caboolture War Plane Museum made two fly-pasts at 500 feet with a power climb to 1000 feet in salute to the Fallen. Though these four young men never saw enemy action in the War, their tragic loss of life was a consequence of training for the defence of Australia, the significance of which was realised when only six days after the accident, the Japanese bombed Darwin, the first of over sixty air raids on that city that brought the War to Australian soil.
The memorial after the second plaque was affixed. The
original inscription could be rectified by altering the words “The other
landed here in the Cleveland Cemetery...” to “The other landed near to the
Cleveland Cemetery...” or “The other landed 640 metres south of this
memorial”.
Mr Peter White at front
The fly-past of honour
The crash site of A20-290 - Long Street is in the background.
Searching the
site with a metal detector. Three of these men were eyewitnesses of the
collision and crash. The gentleman in the yellow shirt was 12 years old at
the time and lived on a farm 300 metres from this site. He was the first to
reach the crash scene within minutes.
Crushed pieces of
exhaust pipe
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Gordon Williams had a younger brother, Billy, who had
enthusiastically and proudly followed his brother’s career in the Air Force.
Not quite fifteen, Billy was heart-broken by Gordon’s death. In his grief, he
carefully hand-printed a poem ‘The Airman’s Hymn’ (written by Francis M.
Miller two years before), decorated it with a drawing of his brother’s ‘wings’, and framed it.
He dedicated it to his brother, and added a postscript: “The most reliable
Pilot ever.”
William David Williams, known
as Billy, then Bill as he grew up, enrolled at the Mapleton School as No. 584 in Preparatory One on 23rd January 1933. He was aged 5 years and 8 months, and stayed
until halfway through Grade Six, when the family moved from Mapleton to 22 Bonython Street in Windsor, a suburb of Brisbane. He was only twelve when war broke out, but
determined that when he came of age, he would do his bit for his country. Gordon’s tragic death served to steel his resolve.
On 19th April 1945, six days before his
eighteenth birthday, Bill enlisted in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve as
an Ordinary Seaman II (Serial No. B 5413), and was sent to the training
centre of HMAS Cerberus near Melbourne for mobilization. During his
time there the war ended, and he was transferred to the shore depot of
HMAS Moreton in Brisbane for additional training. On 5th March 1946 he
was assigned to a ship, HMAS Westralia, and was promoted to A.B.
(Able-Bodied Seaman). Before boarding, Bill had three days at the training
centre of HMAS Penguin in Sydney, and then served five months sea
duty.
That September, Bill was injured in an accident in which he fractured his right patella (kneecap). While undergoing surgery on his leg at the Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick, he suddenly suffered heart failure and died on 9th September 1946. He was nineteen years old.
There was an inquest conducted at the time, but no-one was held responsible for Bill’s death. His father requested that the navy allow him to bury his son in Brisbane alongside his brother Gordon, but his request was denied. Bill’s Record of Mobilized Service card tells the tale: “Father informed that request for private burial cannot be acceeded to as Cabinet decision provides for burial at war cemetery nearest place of death.”
Bill rests at Rookwood War Cemetery in Sydney. His memorial panel in Canberra is No. 9. It was a bitter blow for Charles and Flora Williams, losing two sons, and to their brothers Roy and Ernest. The parents never really recovered from their loss. Upon her passing, Flora Williams was cremated, and her ashes scattered over Gordon’s grave. When Charles Williams died, he was buried with Gordon at Toowong Cemetery.
Digital Nambour Chronicle Picture Sunshine Coast