Eighty years after flying solo in a Spitfire, Max Nash recalls when he and this “beautiful aeroplane” were part of the aerial shield for the Royal Navy as it escorted Russian Arctic convoys through a web of German bombers, battleships and U-boats.
The Aucklander celebrated his 100th birthday in August 2022 and is one of the few left who flew Spitfires and their variant, the Seafire, off Royal Navy aircraft carriers during World War II. Alert and able to get out of his armchair unassisted, he shows his copy of The Manual of Seamanship 1937 from his naval college days, and his Navy Pilot’s Flying Logbook. For decades, this modest man talked little of his service in operations off Norway and in the Pacific, shrugging off the proud record of a versatile pilot who flew 17 types of aircraft, including powerful versions of the Supermarine Spitfire.
His experience of war at sea began after topping a trainee fighter pilots’ course in England at RNAS Yeovilton, the base of the Fleet Air Arm, a branch of the Royal Navy that operated fighter, torpedo bomber and reconnaissance aircraft.
Nash’s ambition back in Auckland in 1941, when the King’s College old boy enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve, was to fly at high speed. This path led him firstly to graduation from the Royal Greenwich Naval College in England, and then naval airman training in Canada.
Carrier action
The young sub-lieutenant’s first posting was to HMS Furious, a veteran carrier from World War I. He recalls: “You flew off the bows and landed on the stern. Coming into land, you had to adjust for the ship bucking around. Of course, there was the problem of finding the carrier with as little as an hour’s fuel supply left. The ship, unlike an airfield, could do 30 knots and wasn’t where it was when you took off. Some pilots were lost at sea.”
Near his favourite chair in his house, the retired medical practitioner keeps a paperback about the Arctic convoys of 1941-45. The author praises the contribution to the war effort of those who put themselves in peril in waters far north of the British Isles in order to keep the allied Soviet Union supplied. Convoy ships faced destruction by the German Luftwaffe (Air Force), U-boats and mighty battleships such as the Scharnhorst and Tirpitz.
Was Nash ever scared?
“No, just bloody cold. I felt sorry for those blokes on the convoy’s little navy Corvettes. They didn’t have as much protection from the seas.” These vessels would rescue pilots from ditched planes and deliver them back to the carriers. Their reward: fresh bread from the carrier’s bakery.
In late 1943, Nash was with No. 801 Naval Air Squadron (motto: “We’ll have them”) on Furious. The ship’s aircraft had been sent to an aerodrome while Furious was sheltering from a winter gale at Scapa Flow, in Orkney, Scotland.
“We got this message to fly back to the ship and I thought, ‘Hell no, not in this weather’, but when we arrived, we were told that Admiral Bruce Fraser of the Home Fleet had ordered the carrier to steam to the north of Norway. Fraser thought that the Scharnhorst was leaving its protected base in a fiord to attack a Russian convoy.
“Old Furious was rattling along, everything was shaking, and when we got up there, the signal came through from Fraser: ‘Scharnhorst Sunk’. We heaved a sigh of relief.”
Furious also made several runs toward the Norwegian fiords, where the Tirpitz was being repaired and readied for sea.
“The carrier’s Barracuda torpedo bombers hit her, though they went in too low for the bombs to pierce the ship’s armour plating and do serious damage.”
Forced change in duties
In March 1944, Nash’s flying combat missions came to a painful halt. He was on patrol near Scapa Flow, where a few days before, a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt 109 fighter had been caught snooping.
“I was flying at 10,000 feet when, through a layer of broken cloud, I spotted a monoplane. I thought, ‘Not another Me109′, so I went at it, straight down, full-bore, and ‘bang’ went my ear. I caught up with the plane, and it was one of our torpedo bombers that had got lost in the no-flying zone. The bang in my ear was caused by the sudden change in air pressure when I dived. When I landed, blood was coming out of my ear. Then I developed an inner ear infection and so was declared temporarily unfit for flying. I was sent to the naval hospital in Aberdeen but there was no eardrum, and they couldn’t fix it. That was a damn nuisance.”
But the Navy still had a use for Max Nash. He was put on a course to become a carrier deck-landing control officer (DLCO). He became the Fleet Air Arm’s youngest DLCO. Others had more hours of flying experience but the Navy, in its understated way, had rated Max as an ‘above-average pilot’.
He was posted to a brand new and bigger carrier, HMS Indefatigable - carrying up to 83 aircraft - and was its DLCO from May 1944 on runs to the north of Norway in support of Home Fleet operations. The new role drew upon all the skills he had learned as a pilot. Landing on a pitching ship was fraught with the danger of crashing on to the deck or into rough seas. Planes returning from patrol could be damaged or low on fuel, or had other planes hot on their tails – as little as 20 seconds behind. Nash was responsible for ensuring that aircraft landed safely on an area only half the length of a rugby field. Aircraft were expected to make a three-point landing within a 50-metre zone where an arresting wire strung across the deck would snag a hook lowered from the aircraft by the pilot.
A picture of Nash at work shows him in a short-sleeved shirt, standing on the port side of the deck waving the circular paddles - or “bats” - used for the signals that guided a pilot on his final approach.
“We were telling the pilot if we wanted him to go slower, or faster, higher or lower, or to alter his path or to go round again.”
Moving to the Pacific
In late 1944, Nash moved with the Indefatigable to join the British Pacific Fleet, and early action included an attack on an oil refinery in Japanese hands at Pangkalan Brandon, Sumatra. When the carrier was in the naval base, he flew himself to aerodromes around Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) “to keep the boys up to scratch with their landings”. Some impromptu aerobatics in a Fairey Firefly torpedo-bomber earned him the task of testing the aircraft’s new armament of rockets prior to their use on oil refineries at Pladjoe and Palembang, Sumatra, as the carrier squadron steamed toward Australia. Nash recalls “the Japanese were really wild” about their big losses in planes and oil production, and he feared their revenge when “Indefatigable suddenly turned hard to starboard and started shaking as its turbine engines worked up to full power. Six Japanese bombers in formation went right past at deck level, but our Seafires pounced on them”.
In Sydney, the Royal Navy fleet prepared for operations in the Pacific under United States command as part of the US 5th Fleet. Nash recalls the awesome display of naval might when the fleet assembled off Ulithi Atoll in the Caroline Islands. Soon, the carriers headed north toward Japan’s own islands in support of the fleet taskforce, vying for air superiority, attacking military installations and clearing the way for US forces’ landings on Okinawa. With the Royal Navy’s Seafires and the US Corsairs using the same carriers, the Marines adopted the British method for deck landings, which was “the DLCO telling the pilot what he had to do” to avoid dangerous confusion and speed up landings.
Nash’s time on Indefatigable was cut short when a mastoid bone infection put him in the US Naval Hospital in Guam. It may have saved his life. On April 1, an enemy kamikaze plane, armed with a 250-kilogram bomb, dived at the base of Indefatigable’s superstructure. As a result, 14 crew were killed and 16 injured, and seven aircraft were lost.
“If I’d been on the ship, I’d have certainly been killed or blown off the side.”
He returned to New Zealand in August 1945, the month of Japan’s surrender, and though the Navy invited him to stay, sought a discharge from service.
Life after war service
In wartime, he had guided pilots to safe landings; in peacetime, he continued to show that same high degree of care, helping new life enter the world.
“I went back to university, and then [worked for] two years as a hospital house surgeon on five pounds a week, then from 1952 in general practice in Greenlane, where obstetrics and house calls were part of the job.” War medals put away in the drawer were to be trumped by a more personal and fulfilling gratitude for his work: patients’ testimonials to his high standards of professional care, received upon his retirement in 1995.
In 1948 he married Margaret Wigglesworth, the girl next door, and they were together for 65 years and have two daughters, Janet and Philippa.
“I didn’t have the time or money for flying. But when I did get spare time, I went back to the motorbike. I loved the thrill of the noise and the speed and the wind rushing past. Margaret loved being on the motorbike at over 100 miles per hour (160km/h). She was a sport.” Nash hung up his riding leathers at nearly 90, after owning 17 motorcycles and forming a concerned but understanding friendship with Burt Munro, the New Zealander who was aged 68 when he set an official land speed record of 184.087m/ph (296.259km/h).
Nash did get back into the cockpit of an aircraft, by chance; Philippa went for a joyride in a Tiger Moth and mentioned to the pilot that her father had trained in one. The pilot became enthusiastic about taking the veteran next. Nash laughs: “It was very nice. We did a few bumps and circuits, and then the pilot asked me, ‘When did you last fly?’, and I said, ‘63 years ago’.”
Lucky passenger
One of Max Nash’s favourite war stories starts with foul weather forcing HMS Furious’ aircraft to fly off to a Scottish airfield. A normal part of the preparation for leaving the ship was testing the magnetos of the Seafire fighter’s engine ignition system.
“You would rev the engine until the tail lifted, and if a ground crew fellow didn’t come and sit on it to hold it down, it would go over on its nose. But this day, we had the captain’s permission to go without the test because the weather was getting worse. I was to be the second to go, and saw the pilot in front rev up to the flying position and someone dashing past me and throwing himself over the fuselage just forward of the tailfin as the pilot let off the handbrake and was away.
“I saw the plane stagger off the carrier’s bow in a completely stalled position and sink down. I couldn’t see the sea from the cockpit, and I thought, ‘He’s gone into the drink’, but no, after a while, the plane came up into view and the carrier radioed the pilot - ‘There’s a man on your tail’.
“The pilot gradually built up speed and got the thing flying and then flew to the Hatston aerodrome, as [it was] the best place to drop the man off. At Hatston, the pilot radioed the tower to get an ambulance ready. Fortunately, he landed on this narrow runway without going into the bog [wetland] on either side. When they picked the guy off the tail, he was okay, but shaped like a horseshoe.”