A tough little bird: Behind the Boomerang biography

I started off reading about the Royal Air Force, United States Army Air Force, and the German Luftwaffe in WWII. But later on, I thought, “we should hear about Australian stories, Australian voices”. So, I turned to reading, or trying to read about, the Royal Australian Air Force in WWII in the Pacific, and I found a dearth of writing. There are some books there, but, in comparison with the avalanche of stuff which has been published on Northwest Europe in WWII, there are not many Australian stories. So I thought, “well, you can either lament that or do something about it”. In lockdown in Victoria, we did have a bit of time on our hands, so I thought I’d best find a way to use this time productively.

That sort of started my quest on researching and writing about the Boomerang. I thought I could just pick up a reference book, which would say, “this is the genesis of the Boomerang, this is why it had to be built as an emergency fighter, this is what actually did in WWII, stories of some of the pilots”, but I really didn’t find anything which gave that sort of story – the history of the Boomerang in one standalone volume.

AA: How did the Boomerang come to be?

DW: Well, there are two reasons. The ostensible reason was that Australia in early 1942 had no advanced or capable fighters. So Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation came up with a proposal, and said to the government, “we can build a fighter for you”. The other reason was that the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation factory in Port Melbourne, really, literally had nothing on its order books. We were some years into WWII, and we had what was at the time, a modern military aviation factory, with a trained workforce, which didn’t have enough to do. So, in some ways, the second reason they brought in the Boomerang, and this was made quite clear in the war cabinet records, is, “we need to keep the CAC workforce engaged pending their allocation to other projects, so what we do is almost like a make-work project and get them to build the Boomerang”.

AA: How was the Boomerang an “emergency fighter”?

DW: Australia sort of found, to our chagrin, that Japan had capable air-to-air fighters, but at the start of the Pacific war we had no advanced home ground fighters. There were none in Australia. So, the idea was put forward by CAC that, “well, we can use the Wirraway aircraft we are building, which was essentially a trainer. We can add a more powerful engine to it, clean up the airframe to a degree, and we can produce an aircraft which will be a capable air-to-air fighter”. This was the proposition put forward by CAC and its very pushy managing director, Lawrence Wackett: he said to the government: “we’re in a pickle, we have no advanced fighters in Australia. We can get one to you, and we can get it to you literally within months.”

AA: What were the design and capabilities of the Boomerang like?

The Boomerang was not competitive as an air-to-air fighter. If we compare it with contemporaries that people might have heard of – the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the German Bf 109, the advanced fighters of the early 1940s, the Boomerang wasn’t really in the same league. In terms of maximum speed, it was slower than those aircraft. It wasn’t faster to dive, it wasn’t a very stable gun platform, so it would not have held its own in air-to-air combat – and for the record, it’s the Australian fighter which never shot down an enemy aircraft. In the very few times when it engaged in air combat, for example, it struggled to climb to reach Japanese bombers flying at 20,000 feet.

It couldn’t have fought contemporary aircraft on level terms. There are some reasons: it was derived from a trainer airframe, so the wings were very thick. The engine, although it was the most powerful Australia had to hand, wasn’t as powerful an engine as was found on contemporary fighters. The airframe, although cleaned up, wasn’t a sort of monocoque type airframe which contemporary fighters used. So, inevitably, being derived by essentially shoehorning a more powerful engine into a training aircraft, it wasn’t really clean enough, it wasn’t powerful enough and would not have been able to compete with contemporary fighters on even terms.

There were some initial misadventures as well: things like the cockpit becoming loose on a demonstration flight; during the test of a wooden propeller, part of the propeller failed. It was designed with a great deal of pace, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising, considering this was the first time Australia had tried to develop a fighter aircraft. It was done in a great rush, so perhaps there were some teething problems, and I think with hindsight, that’s probably not surprising.

AA: How did the RAAF use the Boomerang in the Pacific theatre?

DW: This is the backstory which I’ve tried to explore, which has perhaps been a bit unsaid. It was deployed by, if you like, second-line squads in Australia, doing routine tasks like convoy patrol, intercepting incoming aircraft, and exercises with Army ground-based air defences. These were dull tasks, necessary ones, which had to be done in wartime. The Boomerang would be out there but also was employed on what would be termed army cooperation duties, and in that, it was a significant success. My research showed that, out of a total of 250 Boomerangs produced, 88 were employed against the Japanese in the army cooperation role. That’s more than a third of the total number produced.

It was used extensively, mostly in Papua New Guinea, but also in Bougainville, Borneo, and operated quite successfully. The diggers apparently loved it. And interestingly, the Army’s official history sort of recognises how well the diggers respected the Boomerang and its pilots, whereas the Air Force’s official history sort of swept it under the carpet. In its role as an Army cooperation aircraft, it performed with distinction and performed well. I think that’s been under-reported, and that’s one gap I have tried to address in the book, and I’m hoping to do that to some degree.

AA: How was it able to distinguish itself in that role?

DW: The Army cooperation role often required flying at 40 feet above the front lines to carry out reconnaissance missions – and you’re flying in Papua New Guinea in very rugged terrain, in all sorts of dodgy tropical weather. The Boomerang was manoeuvrable, small, agile, tough, and very reliable – so whatever its other shortcomings, it was a tough little bird with a very reliable radial engine. Flew in all sorts of weather, in all sorts of terrain, and carried out missions like very low-level reconnaissance photography and artillery spotting. The Japanese apparently hated the power of the Australian artillery guided by the Boomerangs. Also, you can read the accounts of the pilots, and they carried on under all weather conditions and all sorts of terrain. When you look at pilots killed flying the Boomerang, a number of them flew into terrain – so they didn’t turn back, they just kept on flying in terrible conditions.

I think also, to take a bit of a step back, the Air Force recognised the need for Army cooperation, without too many broad details, other air forces, such as the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force, weren’t very enthusiastic about army cooperation. They thought it was a bit beneath themselves, I think, whereas the RAAF did commit to the army cooperation role – they established a school of army cooperation in January 1942. The pilots were dedicated, the ground crew were dedicated, and as it turns out, the Boomerang was inherently well-suited to carry out those sorts of low-level missions, flying at incredible distances in rugged terrain, in all weather conditions.

AA: How important was the Boomerang to Australia’s victory in the Pacific?

DW: I’m no thorough expert in the Pacific campaigns, but perhaps what we can say if we think about New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, where the diggers had hard-fought campaigns, the Army official history says the diggers loved the aircraft. They loved the pilots, they appreciated the assistance the Boomerang provided to them. So, I think if we use that as a measure, we can say that there’s a very clear recognition of the role of the Boomerang in the Army’s official history, that they did play a significant role in the success of Australian diggers in Papua New Guinea.

The CAC Boomerang: Australia’s Own WWII Fighter, published by Avonmore Books, is out now. To find out more, visit avonmorebooks.com.au.