"Z" Special Unit and "Beautiful Betsy"

The following story on the role of B-24 Liberator "Beautiful Betsy" with Z Special Unit was written by Captain Sam Carey. The italic text in this colour was added by his son Harley Carey along with the photos and captions, to enhance Captain Sam Carey's story:-

The parachute training, I had completed at Richmond was all done from VH-CRF a Douglas DC2 transport aircraft named "The Silk Merchant". Clearly a transport aircraft could not be used for Z operations deep within enemy held territory. After discussing this with Holland and Chapman Walker, I was given the assignment to examine all the aircraft types available in Australia which might be suitable. It had to be a long-range operational bomber, which could accompany a bombing raid, then peel off to drop its parachutists, then have sufficient self defence to return to base unescorted. I chose the B24 (Liberator), a heavy four-engine, long range, heavily fortified bomber. At that time the only liberators in Australia were American although a squadron of liberators were expected for the RAAF under the lend-lease program. So, an order was sent from MacArthur's headquarters to the commander of the American 380 Bomber Group operating from Bachelor in the Northern Territory to make a liberator, complete with full operational crew, available to me for development of transport and dropping of parachutists.

On arrival at Bachelor the commanding colonel promised me all assistance, because parachutists had never been dropped from liberators, and the proposition interested him, but he foresaw problems. There are no doors on a liberator (the crew enters through the bomb-bay), so I proposed to exit through the belly camera hatch. I told him the inboard motors would need to be throttled back and feathered to reduce the turbulence as the men exited. He told me that that was impossible, because the liberator would stall at 140 knots, and that the parachutists would have to accept that as the minimum exit speed. He would reduce turbulence to a minimum by partial feathering and partial reduction of revs on the inboard motors. I replied that I would experiment with a wooden dummy to see how the parachute behaved at this speed, before attempting live drops. Whereas crew had often bailed out at much higher speeds, they waited until the air drag had reduced their speed before pulling the ripcord. Moreover, a parachute takes the load more slowly with the pilot chute coming out first which then gradually draws out the canopy, vent first and skirt last. A statichute, opened by the aircraft though a static line which we would use, was packed backwards with the rigging lines coming out first, followed in turn by the canopy, skirt first, and vent last, with a much more severe jolt on the shoulders.

The American colonel assigned to me the liberator "Beautiful Betsy" under Captain Craig USAF, with a crew consisting of a navigator captain, engineer, and maintenance mechanic. He said Beautiful Betsy had completed a number of bombing operations, and the crew was due for a rest. The aircraft would be under my command for operations and movements, but of course Captain Craig was in command in the air.

“Beautiful Betsy” was B-24D-53-CO Army Air Force serial 42-40-40387gned to 528th Squadron had arrived in Australia in April 1943 and was based at Fenton, an airstrip some 80 miles south of Darwin. Her first mission was to bomb the Japanese base at Gasmata, New Britain on the 21st of May. The aircraft commander, 1st Lieutenant Joe Roth, had named her after his wife with yellow running script shadow shaded with red on the drab olive of camouflage.

In August1943 the group mounted one of their most famous raids from Australia to the oil refineries of Balikpapan, Borneo. The refineries were going full blast producing 60% of Japanese aviation fuel needs, safe in the knowledge that they were out of range of Allied bombing raids. The nearest allied heavy bomber base was Darwin, 2700 miles away.

Twelve of 380th Bomber Group’s Liberators were selected for the attack, flying first to Darwin from Fenton for briefing, loading bombs and topping up with fuel. “Beautiful Betsy” landed heavily at Darwin smashing the tail skid into the fuselage and was unable to go on the raid, the longest USAAF raid ever undertaken to this time.

After repair, “Beautiful Betsy” flew a number of missions, but in November 1943, during a mission over Rabaul, she came close to colliding with another aircraft in the formation as they passed through a storm. In the process of avoiding collision, ‘Betsy’ spun out of the formation, still loaded with bombs and nearly full of fuel. The forces imposed on the airframe in the recovery were so severe that it was considered that the wings had been overstressed and “Beautiful Betsy” was retired from combat. She had accumulated over 1300 hours and 25 missions in this time.

Note the number of missions painted as yellow bombs below the cockpit window. According to dad she did return to operational flights dropping “Z” operatives behind enemy lines.

“Beautiful Betsy” at Pell Field, Darwin, 1943 with Sgt. Harry Clapinson RAAF, parachute packer,
Captain Craig USAF, pilot, Fl/Lt Cook RAAF, SRD/RAAF liaison officer and three crew USAF,
navigator captain, engineer, and maintenance mechanic. Photo Mackenzie collection.

The camera hatch was a perspex panel in the belly midline just aft of the tail skid. It could be used to mount either a camera or a belly machine gun. Once out, there were no obstructions of any kind to foul the exit or the return of the bags—cleaner than the DC2s, for I had watched the tail-plane go over, a foot or so above my head. I designed a shovel-shaped slippery-dip to guide the parachutist into the opening. The clearance for the sitting man from the slide to the aft end of the opening was less than three feet, so I protected that edge with foam rubber, and developed the routine drill that he would slap that edge with both hands to force his head and shoulders back.

The exit slide. The hanging straps remain after
the statichute has opened and are then retrieved.

Exit slide swung back on its hinges from the camera exit
aperture. Statichutes on deck to the right and radio to the left.

Looking towards the rear gunner’s position with camera hatch open in the
foreground. The pad to protect the jumper’s head when exiting is shown centrally.

While my slide was being constructed from the fuselage duralumin of a wrecked aircraft, I had the jump-control red and green signal lights installed in Beautiful Betsy and drilled the crew in their operation.

I also requested the making of a wooden dummy five feet long and weighing 200 pounds. I dressed her in WAAAF clothing and named her A.C.W. Wood.

A second dummy A.C.W. Tilly was also constructed – note their names painted on their ‘abs’.

"Beautiful Betsy" of the 380th Bomb Group with front and back views of
experimental dummies ACW Wood and ACW Tilly who is wearing the statichute.

Meanwhile, the successful progress in developing parachuting for Z operations had led SRD headquarters to build up the necessary support staff following adoption of my recommendation to include parachuting as an alternative method of entry to operation areas. Flight Lieut. Cook (a former experienced airlines pilot who had been flying DC2s at Richmond dropping paratroop trainees) was transferred to SRD to become liaison officer between SRD and the RAAF, and also Sergeant Clapinson (a senior parachute packer from Richmond paratroop training school).

So I was joined at Bachelor by a parachuting test team, consisting of four experienced parachutists – my loyal Sergeant Mackenzie, Lance-Corporal Taylor and Lieut. Lees (both transferred to Z from the Para-battalion), Corporal Filewood, a Z signaler, Sergeant Clappison, RAAF, and Flight-Lieut. Cook, RAAF.

Sgt. Mackenzie in slide ready to jump, Capt.
Carey on left, and L/Cpl. Taylor on the right.

The first task was to train the parachutists in the routine to be followed in exiting from the liberator. When the signal light flashed red, No.1 jumped into the slide, No.2 stood ready to follow him from the port side, No.3 did the same from the starboard side, and No.4 was ready behind No.2. When the light flashed green, No.1 slid down and the others followed. With the parked liberator the opening was about 8 feet above the ground so our vertical velocity on hitting the ground was about the same as in a normal landing. We drilled this procedure until we got the exit time down to one per second, implying a linear separation of seven yards per man. This was important because in operations especially at night, it was undesirable to have the party widely scattered.

Next was to test the parachutes under these conditions. So on December 26 we let ACW Wood go down the slide at 500 feet, while photographing the development of the chute as seen looking down the slide.

As the vertical speed was about the same as the forward speed of the aircraft, we could see ACW Wood down the slide until the opening of the chute. All looked satisfactory. As a further check on December 27, I flew abeam of Beautiful Betsy in a Curtiss Falcon flown by an American pilot, and again I watched the critical development of the chute.

Sgt. Harry Clapinson RAAF, Lt. Pat Lees, Capt.
Sam Carey, Cpl. Filewood, Sgt. Gilbert Mackenzie
Pell Airstrip, Darwin 1943

Again, all was satisfactory. So I ordered the first live drop for the following morning. I went No.1, followed by Lees, Mackenzie, Filewood, and Taylor. Alas! Each of us found we were spinning soon after the opening of the chute, which would be fatal if the twist reached the canopy, which would surely happen if we did not correct it. This we each did by sending a counter twist to overtake the first. When this happens there is quite a jolt as the risers snap apart.

In the debriefing, I identified the cause of the twist as the curvature I had placed in the slide better to guide us into the opening. ACW Wood was so rigid that she slid out straight, so her shoot opened normally, but our supple bodies rolled and the twist followed. So I redesigned the slide with plane bottom and angles at the sides. Subsequent jumping tests showed this redesign had corrected the problem.

In the next live drop, planning to land from 1000 feet on to a disused former airstrip near Adelaide River, another problem surfaced.

Drop Zone Mount Bundy station, near Adelaide River
with Sgt. Clapinson waiting to pick up jumpers.

In normal procedure, the copilot gives the exit signal to the parachutists in the body of the aircraft who can’t see outside at all. As the pilot reduces speed, he turns on the red light and the men immediately prepare to exit. At the appropriate moment the copilot turns on the green light, and the men immediately commence exiting. But in the liberator the pilot and copilot cannot see the ground for more than a mile ahead, and the copilot gave the signal much too early. I was No.1, and as soon as I was out I knew I had no hope of reaching the clearing of the disused airstrip.

With the more modern TU chutes which leave out entirely the silk right down the central rear gore and from the lowest panels right round the rear half of the chute, the jumper can drive himself in any chosen direction at about 10 knots, and modern rectangular chutes give a great deal more control, but the army standard Dominion 30 ft. statichute then in use we only had a little control of horizontal movement. Pulling down the front set of web risers above our shoulders collapsed the front half of the chute, driving us in that direction at about 2 knots.

As I had no hope of reaching the clearing, I concentrated on avoiding the tall “stags” (dead gum trees, killed off many years before by bush fires, and now rising fifty feet above the scrub). I landed without harm in the scrub. No.2, Corporal Filewood, snagged his canopy in a high branch of a stag, which held up while the air rushed through the vent, but the dead branch broke when the full weight came on, and Filewood dropped to the ground and broke his leg. No.3 Taylor, managed to reach the clearing, as did the rest of the stick.

In conference with Captain Craig, I arranged a new procedure whereby the navigator, who was also the bomb-aimer, should take control through the approach and dropping stage. His station is right forward in the Perspex nose of the liberator, where he can see the whole terrain ahead right back to the ground immediately below. He also has a viewing screen, which shows the absolute direction of the craft’s motion including lateral wind drift as the ground moves through the screen. So we developed a drill whereby the pilots at the flight deck, the bomb-aimer in the nose, and the engineer in the body aft watching the parachutists were connected on the intercom. As the dropping zone came into the pilot’s view, he said:-

“Starboard five degrees” from the bomb-aimer, as he adjusts the ground path to the wind drift. “Roger, five degrees starboard”, replies the pilot.

“Red light” acknowledges” the engineer as the red light comes on in the jump station.

“One gone, two gone, three gone, four gone, all gone” says the engineer as the paratroops exit down the slide.

“Deck control” says the pilot as he resumes control of the ship. With a little drill, this procedure worked perfectly and was adopted permanently. With practice the bomb-aimer learned to drop us with precision.

Next I had to perfect dropping of stores in storpedos from the bomb bay. A storpedo is a cylinder of ½ inch thick paperboard and seven feet long with a steel ring identical with the ring on a bomb so that it is carried and released exactly like a bomb. The conical nose bursts on impact greatly reducing the landing shock. A sixteen foot hessian statichute is packed at the other end. The trajectory is much steeper than that of the men with normal statichutes, and my problem was to release the stores so that they could not hit the men, but be as near as possible to them on landing. After studying the trajectories of the men and the storpedos, I decided that it was best to release the stores as a rope linked cluster immediately after the last man had gone. For the first three seconds the men almost kept pace forward with the aircraft, but the forward speed is lost within five seconds of the opening of the chute. The trajectory of the storpedo is much steeper and the descent faster, so it reaches the ground before the first man. To make sure, I tested this by dropping ACW Wood and a storpedo.

As the training proceeded, further snags appeared arising from the casual attitude of the Americans. They were friendly and cooperative, but could not be relied on to follow instructions precisely. A procedural instruction I had given, was that immediately after take-off, the light signal system must be checked by the bomb-aimer switching it on and the engineer (in the belly of the aircraft near us) acknowledging. We had been flying north for perhaps half an hour when the red light came on. As I was No.1 and believing that we must have reached the DZ (drop zone), I jumped into the slide ready to exit, and the others took station to follow me. Then the light went green, so down I started. But my legs were partly out when I saw the light go red again! I just managed to grab the aft edge of the exit hole, and the others hauled me out. The crew had forgotten to do the mandatory light test after the take-off, and decided that they should do it.

Down in the rear of the body of the aircraft, the paratroops can’t see anything, and are trained to obey the lights absolutely. If I had gone out, the parachute would probably have been ripped off my back, because the aircraft was flying at some two hundred knots. If I had survived that, I would have landed in the scrub miles from anywhere, without water or food, with little chance of being found or getting out alive. On a later occasion, described later, I was lucky to escape death, again through negligence of the American crew.

Apart from lining up on the catwalk through the bomb-bay for takeoff and landing, the men normally traveled aft in the belly of the liberator, but a special pleasure was to crawl under the pilots deck and stand up in the nose – no engine noise, and a fine view all round through the Perspex. Returning from Pell field to Batchelor, Pat Lees was up there enjoying the scenery, and seeing Batchelor ahead, he decided it was time to go back. At the same time the pilot decided to prepare to land by lowering the wheels. Imagine Pat’s fright crawling back, to find the floor opening up on him and a three foot diameter nose wheel starting to push him out! Fortunately the engineer, whose station is half a deck below the pilots, saw Pat's predicament, and retracted the nose wheel, and Pat crawled out, as white as a sheet!

When I was satisfied that the equipment and procedures were acceptable, it was time to take Beautiful Betsy to Maryborough in Queensland to train a considerable number of Z men (who had followed me through standard paratroop training at Richmond) in jumping and water jumping from a liberator. Maryborough was chosen because a SRD commando training school had been established on Fraser Island in October 1943, and the small lakes there could be used for water jump training with good security.

The American crew of Beautiful Betsy was delighted with this prospect. They had been in the Northern Territory for a long time, with many bombing missions, and no women. They persuaded me to allow them to go first to Sydney (they had heard about Kings Cross), then to Maryborough. We flew non-stop from Bachelor to Sydney. On approaching Mascot aerodrome, the air control directed us to land, not on the longest runway but on the other runway. Captain Craig argued that the liberator needed the long runway, but air control was adamant, much to Craig’s annoyance, which must have clouded his attention so much that he started to come in downwind. In a liberator, all persons aboard must come forward and stand on the catwalk beside the bomb-bay for landings and take-offs. Frank Cook, next to me on the catwalk, was like a cat walking on hot bricks. As an airline captain, he had landed a thousand times at Mascot and he could see we were coming in downwind. Craig saw he did not have enough runway at the ground speed of his approach, and gunned her off again, then to Cook’s amazement started to approach downwind again. This time he saw his error, circled, and came in properly landing without difficulty.

At Maryborough the American crew went really wild! They had been sequestered for so long from female company, and this was a RAAF base with lots of WAAAFs, and lots of barmaids and regular prostitutes.

They had accumulated plenty of cash, so there was no shortage of willing girls. It was not my place to interfere, so long as they maintained Beautiful Betsy properly and met the needs of my training program. My assignment was as chief instructor to train the Z men in jumping from the liberator and jumping into water. For this purpose I proposed to use Lake Mackenzie on Fraser Island, quite small, but excellent for training, both for the men and for the Liberator crew. Sergeant Clappinson, the expert parachute packer had come from Batchelor with me.

For most jumps I acted as jump master, hauling in the webbing static lines with the parachute bags after the men had gone. In the first night jump, I followed the men out, and overshot the small lake, but I landed in the bush without difficulty. The liberator crew was a little nervous of a night landing on the Maryborough runway (which lacked instrument approach facilities) so they flew around until daylight.

Finally, I had a party of eight (which included my brother Walter), ready to leave on an operation, which needed a fully operational practice jump including the dropping of four storpedos and two folboats. I hung two storpedos on the bomb-hooks on each side of the bomb bay. The folboats did not have rings to hang on bomb hooks, so I wrapped them in canvas and ran plaited wire round them, and formed the wire into a ring to hang in the bomb-hooks, one on each side below the storpedos. I connected all six (storpedos and folboats) with a one inch manila rope so they would come down as a cluster. Then I tied together the six static lines of the hessian parachutes. I went as jumpmaster, and the parachute packer, Sergeant Clappinson, went along to see how liberator jumping worked. Little did he know what was in store for him!

Everything was normal on the approach run to Lake Mackenzie. In the aft belly of the liberator I heard the intercom:_

“Green light. One gone, two gone, three gone, four gone, five gone, six gone, seven gone, eight gone….Stores g…Christ! Bomb-bay malfunction!!”

I was about to haul in the eight bags now flapping under the tail plane, but clearly there was trouble. It transpired that although I had given the order on arrival at Maryborough that the aircraft must be maintained at full operational status, the crew had serviced the engines and flying related parts in accordance with the manual, they had neglected maintenance of ancillary functions, including the bob release mechanisms, for the greater indulgence in the carnal pleasures of Maryborough. So when the lever was pushed to release the stores, the jaws holding the rings only opened partially, enough to let the folboats go, but not enough to release the storpedos.

Two folboats dangled from two hessian parachutes were being towed like drogues on one inch manila ropes, plus eight parachute bags flapping under the tail. The four parachutes on the storpedos had developed in the bomb bay and billowed as a great cauliflower under the belly of the aircraft.

The plight of the aircraft was now critical in the extreme. Ground clearance was less than 500 feet and the ground was rising ahead. The speed had dropped almost to the point of stalling. By all expectations we should have crashed. But Craig gave the throttles full power and managed to clear the ridge.

Ten inch wide catwalk of B24 with open bomb bay doors (while
on the tarmac). This also functioned as the keel -beam of the craft.

Clappison and I got on the catwalk to drag in the four flapping parachutes, while the engineer inched the bomb bay doors down as we tugged. Our position was most precarious. The catwalk is the keel of the aircraft, about ten inches wide. With the bomb-bay doors open, there is open space three feet wide on each side of the catwalk, so if we lost our balance we would fall straight through. With the plane now flying at 200 knots, rigging lines and parachutes lashed our faces, Bit by bit we dragged the flapping mass in, as the engineer gradually closed the bomb-bay doors – or nearly, for Beautiful Betsy still had some of her shirt hanging out when we landed. Notwithstanding this near disaster, this Maryborough conversion assignment firmly established the practicability of using liberators for Z operations.

Later, back in Darwin, we had a night operational test drop with storpedos into Darwin Harbour in which I also jumped. Each of us had quite a bulk to get through the opening, with a K-type dinghy under the parachute, Austen gun, automatic pistol,, ammunition, explosives, hard rations and a pair of paddles like ping pong racquets, but all the men and stores got down satisfactorily, and into our K-type dinghies in good time; crocodiles abound in these waters, although this did not concern us, because, faced with a strange situation, crocodiles take off. But the storpedos leaked at the junction, which raised a problem sealing them with luting.

On August 13 1944, Beautiful Betsy dropped Lees and Taylor (of my Bachelor test group), with Sergeants A.N. Thompson and L.H. Duffus into lightly timbered rainforest near the junction of Kelasack and Warsoemsoem Rivers in the Vogelkop (Bird’s head) area of western Dutch New Guinea.

But the role of USAF 380 Bomber Group was long range bombing, and whereas they had co-operated willingly in the development of liberator parachuting techniques, the continuing role of dropping operatives and stores on the scale visualized by Z was outside their intended function, so Z should seek its own liberators from the group about to arrive for the RAAF.

This led to the establishment on February 15 1945 of RAAF Flight 200 (Special Duties), twelve liberators (A72: 159,169, 174, 180, 182, 185, 187, 191, 195, and 373) assigned primarily to Z and M duties, and based at Leyburn Queensland. Flight 200, in addition to training of crews and parachutists, completed 130 special missions into Timor, New Guinea, Borneo, Sarawak, and other islands to the north of Australia. Two of the liberators were lost with crews and operatives.

The records show that Z Special Unit conducted more operational parachute jumps than any other unit in the Australian Forces.

The last operational role for “Beautiful Betsy” was 1 August 1943 as above. Instead of being sent to the salvage yard “Beautiful Betsy” was kept with 528th Squadron as a hack. She was stripped of her camouflage, guns, and armour plate, and “Beautiful Betsy” was repainted on her nose in black.

In Adelaide picking up supplies on the ‘Milk Run’. Note the name is now in black and the
absence of guns. The mission ‘bombs’ are still present below the cockpit window.

USAAF units in Australia used to supplement their rations by buying produce with mess funds. Each member of the squadron paid a levy and when a kitty was established an aircraft was flown to an Australian city on what was described as a ”fat cat” flight, loaded up with alcohol and food and flown home. For the next 6 months “Beautiful Betsy” roamed far and wide throughout Australia collecting fresh fruit, vegetables, alcohol, ice cream and even live poultry to relieve the monotonous diet.

528th Squadron mess had raised £600 and “Beautiful Betsy” was sent on her last fat cat mission, this time to Brisbane, before she was scrapped having over 1500 airframe hours and considered ‘war weary’.

She took off at 2200 on the 26 February 1945 from Darwin with Lieutenant William E. McDaniel at the controls heading 125 degrees magnetic estimating a 9 hour trip to Brisbane. Others on board were co-pilot Eugene Kilcheski, navigator Rout, navigator-bombardier Owens, Sgt Tucker, engineer, Sgt Lemons, radio operator and 2 passengers, Spitfire pilots from 54 Squadron RAF, Flying Officer Cannon and Flight Lieutenant Cook. Cannon was due to marry the following week and Cook was his best man.

In July 1994, Queensland National Parks Ranger Mark Roe was monitoring the progress of a back burn in heavily timbered country in the Kroombit Tops National Park located between Gladstone and Biloela in central Queensland. The fire had cleared the undergrowth and suddenly Roe realised that what he was seeing among the trees was the wreckage of an aircraft. It was the shattered remains of “Beautiful Betsy”.

The inverted rear section lying uphill at the end of the debris trail, bits of the
fuselage further downhill but most had simply vaporised with the force of the crash.

"Beautiful Betsy" crash site at Kroombit Tops with Robyn Loughhead (nee Carey) in 2004

I'd like to thank Graham McKenzie-Smith OA, Harley Carey and Trevor Potter for their assistance with this web page.

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