Laurie Larmer was just 21 when he skippered a Halifax bomber to fight the Nazis

Laurie Larmer, now 98, was just 21 when he skippered a bomber during WWII and learnt he would not have a funeral if he died.

LAURIE Larmer is 21 years-old and wondering if he will make 22. He is in a cockpit the size of a coffin, gripping the controls of a Halifax bomber exactly 20,000 feet above Germany’s torched and terror-filled towns, watching the flak shells blossoming around the squadron.

Any one of the shell bursts means almost certain death if it hits the plane, just as the bombs dropped mean death to those below.

Every instinct screams to escape the danger. Even after the last bomb is gone, the boy “skipper” has to fly the great, shuddering machine straight and level while an automatic camera records the scene to prove they are above the target — a precaution enforced because some crews jettison bombs over empty countryside to cut the risk of being shot down.

Despite the nerve-jangling adrenaline, young Larmer holds position exactly as the instructors have told him.

Dive below the set height to avoid the flak and the risk is that “friendly” bombs drop on you from above. Climb higher and you risk killing your fellow airmen the same way — not that this stops some pilots from losing their nerve. A million years of fight or flight can easily trump a few months training.

Laurie Larmer with his Halifax bomber crew. Picture: David Caird

On a raid on a German naval base at Heligoland in the North Sea, the crew sees what can happen when pilots break ranks and “cheat” by changing altitude.

“Hey, Skip,” says Larmer’s observer. “Look at two o’clock!” He looks and sees a Halifax rising fast, its pilot not realising another bomber is directly above. The two collide. There are 14 airmen in the two planes. Only five parachutes open. This is the brutal arithmetic of warfare at a time when one in six Allied air casualties are “accidents”.

When Larmer’s crew returns from another mission with 51 Squadron, they see a plane overshoot the runway at home base in Yorkshire, killing all aboard. When Laurie asks an English officer when the funerals are, he is shocked at the answer: “No funerals. There’s a war on.”

The crewmen are buried in a nearby churchyard: No flag at half mast; no salute; nothing to indicate they died on active service. An example, he says a lifetime later, of “the callousness of war.”

Laurie Larmer, a publican’s son from Moonee Ponds via Ballarat, is youngest in his crew of seven, the only Australians in 51 Squadron. The “old man” of the crew is Lance Myers, the wireless operator, from Sydney. Lance is 25.

Larmer says later he isn’t sure why the air force selected him as a pilot, other than he didn’t have the mathematical brain to be a navigator and claims he “couldn’t learn the morse code” to be a wireless operator and that he hated guns too much to be a gunner.

The reality, as he admits on closer questioning, might be that he was better educated than most Depression-era youngsters: He’d matriculated from secondary school, a rare enough achievement in his generation.

Laurie Larmer is pictured in the back row six from the right, with his squadron during WWII. Picture: David Caird

Reflexes count in a pilot. So does the instinctive “touch” that means some learn to land and take off better than others. But intelligence and personality count, too, because they inspire confidence in those whose lives are in your hands. Larmer is the youngest and smallest in the crew but his superiors must think he’s a quick thinker under pressure.

The Australian crew’s first raid is over Dortmund, on March 12, 1945. Their ninth and last is over Wangerooge in the North Sea on April 25 — Anzac Day, exactly 76 years ago today. Not that they know it’s their last raid then. It turns out that way because Germany surrenders on May 7.

The missions happen fast, the first four in four days straight in March: A baptism of fire that burns into his memory, followed by another four missions in April.

He remembers the procedure as if it were only months ago.

A big breakfast of bacon and eggs. Change into flying gear. Collect a “Mae West” life preserver — and a parachute. You have to sign for the parachute and smile at the compulsory joke: “If it doesn’t work bring it back and we’ll give you a replacement.”

They are driven onto the airfield to wait while other crews start engines and taxi onto the strip to face their destiny. Smokers have a last smoke. Everyone has a nervous pee.

Start each of the Halifax’s four radial motors in order and get them to operating temperature. Take off. Fly south to gather above Redding then zig zag across the English Channel at 150mph, close to the lumbering Halifaxes’ maximum speed.

The targets handwritten in ink in Larmer’s log book tell the story of the dying days of the Third Reich as Bomber Command smashes Germany into inevitable surrender. A long lifetime later, Laurie can still list — and spell — the names of the target cities his crew bombed in those few terrible hours.

His sixth mission, on April 11, is to bomb Bayreuth — “that’s where Wagner came from.” The targets are military but inevitably the casualties are often civilian, something he carries with him afterwards.

Laurie Larmer, now 98, holds a model of a Halifax bomber that he flew during the war when he was just 21. Picture: David Caird

In 1945, of course, he is just grateful to be alive. He has just turned 22. He disembarks in Sydney in October and is put on the train to Melbourne with hundreds of others. His parents and sister come to the big reception held at the Exhibition Buildings. It’s the first time he has seen them since going to Canada to be instructed in early 1943, aged 19.

Laurie Larmer is now 98. The blue eyes are as bright as they were when he was called up for his military medical when he turned 18 and was given the choice of volunteering for the air force or being conscripted in the army.

His wartime experience didn’t wreck his life but it did distract him. He wasted a year pretending to study law but couldn’t take dry textbooks and droning lectures seriously after the life and death realities he’d been through.

He ditched study and took a job — first with Shell and later with a company that imported English cars. He married Pauline in Essendon in 1949 and raised a family. In 1978 he returned to his father’s trade of publican, taking over the Doutta Galla Hotel in Racecourse Rd, Newmarket.

“The Doutta” was near the saleyards, the abattoirs and the racecourse. Armed robbers drank there to celebrate payroll heists. Police didn’t come inside unless there were four of them, but the clientele didn’t worry Laurie Larmer much.

What did worry him, as he grew older, was the devastation the bombing raids had left behind.

Seventy years after the war, he decided to write a letter to the cities his squadron had bombed. He took the letter to the German consul in Melbourne, who forwarded it to the German Ambassador in Canberra, who sent it to the mayors of the cities.

Laurie wrote to mayors in Germany to express his ‘deep regret’ for the deaths of innocent civilians during the war. Picture: David Caird

In part, he wrote: “I cannot recall the military reason for the raid and I make no apologies for it. But I deeply and truly regret that we were responsible for the deaths and injuries of so many innocent civilians — men, women and children. Good people on both sides suffer and die.”

The mayors wrote back to thank him and the circle was complete.

When Laurie Larmer gathers with a tiny band of veterans today, he will wear his Australian medals beneath France’s highest military decoration, the Legion of Honour. He was one of 106 Australian veterans to receive it in 2015, in recognition of what they did to liberate France.

He was at a dinner a few years ago and got chatting to the woman next to him. She asked him what he had done in the war. When he said he had flown bombing raids over Germany in 1945, she threw her arms around him, eyes wet with tears.

“You saved my parents,” she said. The explanation tumbled out: Her parents were starving with thousands of others in a concentration camp and the war’s swift end meant the Allies freed them before they perished.

Despite the scarifying experiences he still has his sense of humour. He chuckles about the fact that when he got back to Australia in 1945 he had flown hundreds of hours in five different sorts of aircraft, from tiny Tiger Moths to huge bombers — but had never driven a car.

He has made up for it since. Parked in the driveway of his house is a good one. It’s a Mercedes-Benz.

Lest we forget.