Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

James Harold Ryley Marshall (10 January 1919-2005.) Written by his son, David Ryley Marshall.

To give a brief resumé of his wartime experiences, the place to start is his copy of Douglas Gillison, Royal Australian Air force 1939-1942, Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1962. He was a pilot of a Lockheed Hudson, which were used for reconnaissance,  and he is mentioned on p. 347 dealing with the withdrawal to Sumatra of no. 8 squadron on 27-30 January 1942. I think I recall as a child of about 10 a man coming to interview him about this, who was presumably Gillison or one of his researchers, and the relevant part of this passage would have been based on what my father told him. As Gillison explains, ‘No. 8 Squadron’s aircrews were flown to Sumatra in Dutch Lodestar transports. No. 1 Squadron was to take over the 14 Hudsons that No. 8 had left at Sembawang, but only 5 of these were airworthy.’ My father would have been among those on the transports, though he never mentioned this explicitly to me, only that they had withdrawn to Sumatra. (In his copy of Gillison is his official pass for Sembawang, with a Dutch note inside).  

Gillison continues:  ‘On the day that No. 8 Squadron’s crews left for Sumatra crews on No. 1 Squadron took six Hudsons successively on an “endless chain” search from Johore to the Natuna Islands.’ … [on the evening of the 28th]  the squadron [No. 1] was ordered to transfer all its aircraft to Palembang [in Sumatra], taking off at first light next day. Two had already been flown across to undergo major overhaul. The remainder left as ordered. On the same morning Group Captain McCauley, who had been posted to command the R.A.F. station at P. 2, left Sembawang in a Hudson that was airworthy and not fit for combat. A strong party of ground staff remained to work with the aid of a repair and maintenance unit, in an endeavour to restore to serviceability the Hudsons that had to be left behind. One of these was flown out on 31st January. Flight Lieutenant Marshall [note 6], who had been flown from Palembang for the purpose, succeeded in flying out another, with a badly crushed fuselage and warped ailerons—the only other aircraft to be retrieved.’

My father would tell the fuller story, which we called ‘The Last Flight from Sembawang’ which it probably was. He was at Palembang and someone came back from Sembawang (Group Captain McCauley perhaps?) with the story that one of the Hudsons was still airworthy. He had evidently described a particular aircraft. My father was flown to Sembawang (talk about drawing the short straw!) to discover the aircraft in question was not airworthy. However, he found one that could be. Its fuselage had been badly damaged from clods of mud thrown up by Japanese bombing and the ailerons were damaged but working. However, it was missing the propeller on one engine (or it was damaged) and (I think he also said this), one of the pistons of one engine was damaged. He recruited two soldiers to help him (His account made no mention of the ‘strong party of ground staff’.) One was an Australian army sergeant, the other was a British corporal. The army sergeant was a stockman or something like from in the outback, and was resourceful in that he could make anything out of a piece of fencing wire, and was a great help. The British corporal could not do anything without a direct order and was of less use. (That sounds clichéd but I have no doubt it was true.) At one point he went to the officer’s mess, and found that Sikh soldiers of the Indian army had broken into the drinks locker and were lying around drunk. They got the engines running satisfactorily. The Japanese were bombing the airfield regularly every day (morning I think), and during the day he plotted a track between the bomb craters for the take off. He identified a tree on the far side to aim at, and arranged for someone to climb the tree with a lantern before dawn. Before departure a British officer (I think air force) came up to him and said that he had documents that should not be allowed to fall into enemy hands and needed to come with him. My father did not believe in the documents, but he was of higher rank so he took him. Before dawn (to avoid Japanese aircraft) he aimed at the lantern and took off successfully. (He had another story, which must have been before they evacuated, about a Hudson that was overloaded with people trying to escape, with too many down the back, so that it stalled on take off and crashed.) In the air he had no navigational aids and headed in the direction of Sumatra by dead reckoning. Sumatra proved to be completely covered with thick cloud. Only at one point was there a break, so he descended through this and as luck had it he was right over Palembang airfield. He landed and reported to his commanding officer who took one look at the aircraft and said ‘scrap it’. After that he was sent to Brisbane in a former Empire Airways flying boat. He said it was an amazing experience, as it had a vast cabin with few people, and flew very slowly at a 100 feet or so above the water all the way.

Another story from before this event was that they were taking off in their Hudsons (presumably from Sembawang) and were attached by Japanese Zeros. He aborted the takeoff and taxied into some tall kunai grass. He and his crew hid in the grass, except for the turret gunner who stayed on board to fire at the Japanese plans. I think he said the gunner was awarded a medal.

Another story from about 10 December is that they shared an airfield with a Squadron of Brewster Buffaloes (I think this must have been 453 Squadron.) The Buffaloes returned from patrol and one of the pilots said to him (or perhaps to everyone): ‘There are two bloody great ships upside down in the water out there!’ This was the Repulse and Prince of Wales, and this seems to be what is described in the second paragraph of p. 153 in Gillison.

Gillison’s note 6 above gives my father’s units: ‘Sqn Ldr J. H. R. Marshall, MVO, 560, 8, 7 Sqns, 1 OTU, 1 AD; Trans-Pacific Air Ferry Service 1943-44; 23 Sqn and comd 99 Sqn 1945. Regular air force off; of Melbourne; b. Adelaide, 10 Jan 1919.’ The MVO (fifth class) was awarded for being the pilot on the Queen’s flight from Sydney to Melbourne in 1954 when he was working for TAA (Trans-Australia Airlines).

I have some photos a Vultee Vengeance in mid-air that he was flying, and a faded signed photo of his Hudson crew. There is (or was, the link from a few years ago does not work) a related photo on Trove of the same crew, with everyone identified.

On his return he was based at Sale with 1 OUT training pilots on Bristol Beauforts, presumably because he was one of the few pilots with combat experience. Navigation was the problem. My father had joined as a regular air force officer just before the war, and he and his intake was well trained in aerial navigation by an expert who went to Britain when the war began. But apparently quite a few aircraft got lost beyond Gabo Island and were never seen again. Once an American squadron on Aircobras (single engine fighters with a single gun in the nose) arrived from Melbourne where they had been assembled en route to Brisbane, but they mostly didn’t make it to Brisbane as they got lost on the way. This must be well-known.

There is a well-known piece of newsreel footage of two Beauforts colliding in mid-air at Sale; Jamie was in the air at the time and I think he said he witnessed it in the distance. He met my mother (June Elizabeth Copplestone) then, as she lived in nearby Bairnsdale, and he would fly low over her house waggling his wings to impress her. Less creditably they would fly over the Gipplsand lakes so that the gunners could practice on moving aerial targets by shooting at swans.

After that he was at Laverton test flying and accepting for the Air Forcre aircraft that had been shipped from the UK and assembled there, including Spitfires.

In 1943-1944 he ferried American aircraft from Honololu to Brisbane, via Canton Island and Fiji. In Honolulu he quickly learned to give his rank as ‘brigadier’, the equivalent of Squadron Leader in the US, because the Americans heard that as ‘squad-leader’, i.e. a lowly lance-corporal. While in Honolulu he sometimes borrowed aircraft to fly them. These are recorded in his log book. Once he was shown on board an American submarine before it went on patrol, never to return. They surprised the Americans at the atoll of Canton Island by simply turning up without requesting a radio beacon. This was because, as indicated above, he had been trained in long distance astral navigation, which is what they used. He retained an interest in navigation all his life, going on the Sydney-Hobart yacht race as a navigator, and reading books on the long distance Pacific flights of Francis Chichester and P. G. Taylor and others, not to mention books on the Polynesian navigators. I still have his sextants.

At the end of the war he was at Amberley air force base in Queensland, where they has a squadron or B24 Liberators about to depart for Japan when the war ended. This is the ‘comd 99 Sqn 1945’ in the biographical note, which seems to say that he commanded the whole squadron, but I am not sure he did, but I could be wrong.

After the war he joined ANA (Australian National Airlines) and when the government-owned airline TAA (Trans Australian Airlines) was formed by the Chifley Government he, with two of his fellow ANA pilots, walked across the tarmac at Essendon airport to sign on. The first to sign on was Peter Gibbes, who was also in Hudsons in Malaya and figures quite a lot in Gillison’s history. I remember as a teenager in the 60s going with my father to some airshow where Peter Gibbes was flying a Supermaine Walrus, a single engine WW2 flying boat. The second was Ron Widmer, who was in the same intake and remained friends with my father. The third was my father. He retained his number 3 seniority status throughout his career at TAA (he retired in 1975), which meant he had third choice on the blocks of flights each month.

In 1954 he was chosen to fly the Queen and Prince Philip from Sydney to Melbourne (or Launceston) during their Royal Tour of Australia. Forthis he was awarded a MVO (Member of the Victorian Order), an award given for personal service to the Queen. He was interviewed by John Ford (?) , together with the head air hostess, on Voice of the Voyager, a radio programme. He was known as 'Gentleman Jim' to his work colleagues, and undoubtedly his gentle and gentlemanly manner was one reason for choosing him.

My father joined the air force before the war as a regular officer, the last intake before the war. Or so he told me, though newspaper reports of the Royal Flight say otherwise. His father (Reginald Ryley Marshall) was a mining engineer who rose to be general manager of the Sulphide Corporation, a Broken Hill mine later absorbed into North Broken Hill. This meant that he knew Essington Lewis, the general manager of BHP, and the man appointed by the government to develop manufacturing capacity in the light of imminent war. He was behind the building of the Wirraway, a copy of a North American Harvard. They sometimes stayed at Essington Lewis’s property at Seymour.

My father had a mechanical bent and was fascinated by cars and aeroplanes: I still have a few of his Popular Flying aviation magazines from the 1930s; the rest he gave to Deakin university. I checked their catalogue and nothing is listed; no doubt they have pulped it, university libraries being what they are. He commenced first year engineering at Melbourne University, where he would drive up to the red brick engineering building that is still there and park his 1929 3.5 litre Bentley (or possibly it was his first car, an Itala). However, he was not a good student and joined the air force instead. Essington Lewis said to him (very sensibly): ‘you want to build them, not fly them’. In the end, that is what he did, and after his retirement devoted himself to building large radio controlled scale model aircraft, mostly of the First World War and interwar periods, the periods that formed his imagination, never WW2 aircraft. I still have them, but to the discomfort of guests, who wake in the morning to a dogfight taking place overhead.

One of the models is of a particular Gypsy Moth owned by the Royal Victorian Aero Club (VH-UAL), in which he both had his first flight, as a teenager taking a joyride, and his first solo. He then trained in navigation in Avro Ansons and then flew Hawker Demons, a biplane that was in 1938 a front line fighter. One still exists and he went to a reunion of former pilots of the aircraft in the 90s sometime, of which I have a photo.