NORMANDY 75|AUSTRALIA AND THE BATTLE OF NORMANDY AUSTRALIA AND THE BATTLE OF NORMANDY|NORMANDY 75
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ABOVE
A Beaufighter
in invasion
markings from
the Australian-
manned 455
Sqn, Coastal
Command.RIGHT
Three Australian
pilots of 181
Sqn, RAF; W/O
Ronald Gilbert,
Fg Off Thomas
McGovern,
and W/O Jack
Rendall. Gilbert
was killed on
August 19, 1944.BELOW
Australian Flt Sgt
Gilbert, a pilot
with 299 Sqn,
RAF, on June 4,- He was
killed on D–Day
when his Stirling
was downed
over Ranville.
beaches. For his work at Cherbourg,
Goldworthy received a DSC to go with
the George Cross, George Medal and
MiD he had previously been awarded,
and he became Australia’s most
decorated naval officer of the war.’A Hell Of Business’
Meanwhile, Australian pilots and
aircrew were involved in all aspects
of the air operations. Ferrying
paratroopers and gliders of the British
6th Airborne Division to Normandy
were Nos 38 and 46 Group. There
was a notable presence of Australian
airmen throughout the squadrons of
No.38 Group; its 41 Australian pilots
represented 14% of the total force. One
of these was Pilot Officer Ron Minchin
of Perth, Western Australia. “It was a
hell of business,” he recalled.Low cloud, high winds and flak
caused some aircraft to lose formation
and veer off course and, when
Minchin’s Stirling approached the
drop zone, the paratroopers he was
transporting all moved toward the exit
hatch at the rear of the aircraft, making
it difficult to fly straight and level at
close to stalling speed. Minchin fought
the stick with one hand while trying
to control the throttle with the other.
Some aircraft had started dropping
paratroopers from too high up, and
Minchin had to “accelerate like mad
to get above a group of chaps that
unfortunately had been flung out by an
aircraft which had blown up”. He only
saw them when they were illuminated
by an explosion. “I only just missed
them, and they would have seen us ...
It must have been horrifying.”
One Australian to land with
6th Airborne was the war
correspondent Chester Wilmot.
His first dispatch on D-Day
marked his BBC radio debut:
“This is Chester Wilmot
broadcasting from a gliderbound for France and invasion. We’ve
just passed over the coast of France
and all around us along the coast
ack-ack fire is going up... I can see a
way off to the right the river that is
our main guide for coming into the
landing zone. And there now I can see
the light that is to guide us in.”
Wilmot was a familiar voice for
Australians following his reporting of
the war in the Mediterranean and New
Guinea for the Australian Broadcasting
Commission, but from
D-Day until the end
of the war in Europe,
he would become a
familiar and trusted
voice to audiences in
Britain and throughout
the world for his work
on the BBC’s
War Report
programme.
Wilmot
later wrote The
Struggle for Europe (1952),
an early influential history of
the war. His untimely death in