Spitfire Guardians
The echoes of war rippled throughout the world in 1939, reaching the ears of young men eager to prove their worth in the coming battle. Engineers, bankers, farmers, drug store clerks and schoolboys answered the call. Hundreds of thousands entered service for their country.
The Supermarine Spitfire was the pinnacle of fighter plane technology at that time, capturing the imagination of the people for its valiant defence of England in the Battle of Britain. The Spitfire fought in every major theatre of war, from the deserts of the Middle East, the jungles of Burma, the scrub of Australia, the skies of England and France, and the islands of the Pacific and Mediterranean.
In the cockpit were men aged in their twenties, thrown into the most powerful fighter aeroplane of their time, and pitted against a tenacious adversary. All the while placing implicit trust in their ground crew’s abilities to keep their machine flying. For every pilot, their crew maintained the engine, the guns, the instruments and the aircraft itself in a complex symphony to keep the pilots flying against the enemy.
The experiences of the pilots involved in the Battle of Britain are well documented, what is not well documented is the varied experiences of the Australian men who were trained then scattered to the far corners of the globe. Their only knowledge was of their job, their trust in their ground crew and the Spitfire fighter plane.
Spitfire Guardians has captured this essence, their pain, sorrow, joy and affection. Narrated by Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell, their stories are from a time of uncertainty, their world a cockpit and gun sight. The crew facing only hard work and the stress of waiting for their flying counterparts safe return. The heat of operations remains forever with the pilots, the battle against attrition fresh for the ground crew.
While all served in varied parts of the world, their common thread of flying the Spitfire binds them together into a prestigious group, with a common vein of experience showing through. Their experiences are documented as an oral history of a time fast fading, in an uncertain world of our own.
The destruction of the Spitfires at Oakey can be compared to how we are forgetting the heroic deeds and actions of our forefathers. Oakey base was an aircraft graveyard, and what the Japanese and German guns could not destroy was hacked up with axes, burnt, and melted down. It is here that the machine died, but it was not the end of the legend…
Even today the Spitfire fighter plane still captures the imagination of generations, the men who flew and maintained it part of a select few to understand its true charisma.