Air Commodore Leonard Birchall [Archive]

rotornut

19th Sep 2004, 12:38

The 'Saviour of Ceylon'

Canadian pilot spotted the Japanese fleet in the Indian Ocean and warned the British forces in Colombo

By COLIN HASKIN
With files from Canadian Press; archives

UPDATED AT 8:35 AM EDT Saturday, Sep 18, 2004

It is 62 years since a 27-year-old Canadian pilot lifted off from a makeshift air base in Sri Lanka to forestall what Winston Churchill said was the most perilous moment in the Second World War.

In 1942, Leonard Birchall, who has died in Kingston, Ont., at the age of 89, cast far out over the Indian Ocean in a long-range Catalina flying boat in search of the same Japanese naval fleet that had devastated Pearl Harbor. Hours later, almost at the point of turning back for what was then Ceylon, he found the armada and very nearly lost his life.

Len Birchall had wanted to fly almost as long as he could remember. Born in July, 1915, in St. Catharines, Ont., he grew up near an air base and watched fighter pilots duel overhead in mock dogfights and resolved to some day take their place.

He attended St. Catharines Collegiate Institute and by the age of 16 he had managed to get enough money to take his first flying lessons. Two years later, he entered the Royal Military College in Kingston, graduated in 1937 and received his commission. In 1939, while attached to 5 Bomber Reconnaissance Squadron in Dartmouth, N.S., he led a flight of aircraft that escorted the King and Queen during their visit to Canada.

By the time the Second World War had erupted months later, Mr. Birchall was one of the few experienced pilots in the Royal Canadian Air Force and in 1941 he found himself with RCAF 413 Squadron in the Shetland Islands. All that winter, the squadron patrolled the North Sea, hunting submarines and protecting convoys.

In March, 1942, everything changed. Mr. Birchall was suddenly promoted to squadron leader, made deputy commander and ordered to lead eight Catalinas to Ceylon. Japan's mighty Pacific attack fleet had made its move into the Indian Ocean.

After a brief stop for repairs and maintenance, Mr. Birchall and his crew of eight flew to the Royal Air Force base at Koggala on the southern tip of the island. A small lake there had been prepared for the Catalinas. The lagoon, which was ringed by tall palms and offered a nasty rock in its centre, was not well suited to operations or even supplied with such military necessities as maps.

Mr. Birchall arrived late on April 2. He and his crew, which was made up of fellow Canadian Bart Onyette and RAF airmen Brian Catlin, Ginger Cook, J. Henzell, Ian Davidson, P.O. Kenny, L.A. Colarossi and radio operator Fred Phillips, grabbed a day's rest and then took off at dawn on April 4 in Catalina AJ-155. They were furnished with hand-drawn charts, and their first patrol was destined to be their last.

In the late afternoon, after having been in the air for 12 hours, Mr. Birchall discovered that the inaccurate charts had probably caused him to fly 450 kilometres off course. It was an extraordinary stroke of serendipity for, almost at the end of the last leg of the patrol, the crew saw something far to the south.

They had just finished a snack "when we saw some specks which looked like a convoy," he told the Empire Club in Toronto in October, 1945. "[We] went over to investigate.

"We ran into the outer screen of the Japanese fleet. We identified the ships and sent back their position, course, speed and composition."

As he approached for a closer look, more vessels came into sight. He identified battleships, several aircraft carriers and other warships. Fred Phillips radioed that too, but by then all hell had broken loose.

"There were 30 Zeros buzzing about and we got as low as we could to prevent them from coming up at us, but they punctured a gas tank and flaming gas poured out," Mr. Birchall said.

The Catalina was ditched in flames and quickly sank. All but one man got out. "We swam hard to get away from the burning gas in the water," Mr. Birchall said, "but the Japanese came after us."

Again and again, the fighters machine-gunned the water and he was hit in the leg. "We kept repeatedly diving under the water to evade them. When they were finished, two more of our lads were gone and there was six of us left."

They were picked up by a Japanese destroyer and interrogated. "They were anxious to find out if we had got our wireless message off and we told them we hadn't; that the first shell hit our radio," Mr. Birchall said.

Next, they were transferred for more questioning to the aircraft carrier Akagi, later to be sunk at the Battle of Midway. "We got our story over to them pretty well," he said. "Then Colombo radioed and asked us to repeat it."

For his trouble, Mr. Birchall was soundly beaten. It was his first taste of mistreatment.

All the same, his brief report had been enough to warn the island. Unlike the U.S. forces only months earlier at Pearl Harbor, the British had spent long weeks preparing defences.

When Japanese planes dropped their first bombs on Colombo and the port of Trincomalee at 7 a.m. on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1942, the British forces were as ready as they would ever be. The RAF had only 20 planes against 120 Japanese planes, but, with the support of anti-aircraft guns, they proved sufficient.

The Japanese pilots were repulsed without sighting their main target. Warned by Mr. Birchall, the Royal Navy had sent its Ceylon fleet to sea and, unable to bring the British to battle, Japan withdrew its large attack forces from the Indian Ocean and abandoned plans to invade India by way of Ceylon.

Soon after the war ended, Mr. Churchill said the sighting of the Japanese had averted the most dangerous and distressing moment of the entire six-year conflict.

"Its [Ceylon's] capture, the consequent control of the Indian Ocean and the possibility of a German conquest of Egypt would have closed the ring, and the future would have been bleak," he said in August, 1945.

Mr. Birchall, he had earlier declared, was "the saviour of Ceylon."

As it turned out, the war was over before Mr. Birchall learned that the warning had reached Colombo. Listed as missing and presumed to have perished, he and the five other survivors of the Catalina spent the next 3½ years in a succession of prison camps where they were starved, beaten and tortured.

A slender man who became even thinner in captivity, Mr. Birchall nonetheless gained a fierce reputation. As the highest-ranking officer in at least two camps, he called for sit-down strikes to protest against ill treatment and starvation.

Until then, PoW officers had not generally stood their ground. Immediately after the war, he told a Globe and Mail reporter that Canadian officers had been appalled by British officers who had neglected their men and remained aloof from lower ranks.

Mr. Birchall resolved to act. He targeted a Japanese medical sergeant named Ushioda who systematically victimized prisoners. A few days later, he spotted the sergeant forcing sick prisoners into work parties. When he savagely kicked a crippled American soldier, Mr. Birchall promptly stepped forward and, after a brief exchange of blows, drove his fist into the sergeant's face. Sgt. Ushioda, he learned later, suffered a broken nose, a fractured jaw and lost several teeth.

"He hit me and I hit him," Mr. Birchall said simply. When pressed, he acknowledged that Sgt. Ushioda had hit him with a club.

Retribution was swift. Mr. Birchall was suspended by his thumbs for hours and then sentenced to death by a military court. He was taken outside, blindfolded and made to kneel. Silence descended, followed by a rustle of air as a sword passed over his neck.

"I believe honestly that we will not see his like again," retired Major-General Frank Norman said Monday.

"Here was an individual who was condemned to death on three separate occasions by the Japanese. Obviously, they didn't carry out the sentence, but the last time this happened, he turned to the individual [Sgt. Ushioda] and said, 'You have just made a terrible mistake. We will win this war and I will live to see you hanged.' "

There were more horrors to come. Mr. Birchall, who continued to take many beatings for his men, always said his last camp was the worst. Put in charge of 233 prisoners, he was sent to work in an open-pit mine halfway up a rain-shrouded mountain 150 kilometres west of Tokyo.

"The conditions there were worse than I had ever struck in any of the camps," he told his 1945 Empire Club audience. "We had absolutely nothing. They weren't prepared for us and food was very scarce. The only supply of water was a little mountain stream.

"Our kitchen consisted of three rice boilers stuck up on some rocks. We were eating wild vegetables, anything we could find. We lost two Dutch laddies up there because they ate some poisonous vegetable. We had nothing in the way of medicines, and no way of getting them.

"The camp was getting in a pretty bad state when all at once . . . we heard of Hiroshima. The Japanese district papers passed it off as something just a little different. But the news of it went through the underground like wildfire. We never saw anybody so scared in our lives."

On Aug. 19, 1945, word arrived that the war had ended and suddenly the food situation improved. Out of nowhere, U.S. "biscuit bombers" dropped tons of supplies on the camps and, after the prisoners feasted on a cow bought from local farmers, their condition rapidly improved.

By October, Mr. Birchall was ready to go home. Wearing bits and pieces of hand-me-down British and U.S. uniforms, and newly promoted to wing commander, he led a 230-strong band of motley Britons, Americans, Dutch and Canadians through the gate of Suwa PoW camp to the Yokohama docks and to freedom. Sadly, they left behind thousands of comrades -- one in four had died in captivity.

In 1948, he returned to Japan to attend a war-crimes tribunal and testify against Sgt. Ushioda. A prime piece of his evidence was diaries he kept throughout his imprisonment. Made up of small, improvised notebooks, they were sewed up in a pillow as they became full. Later, he transferred them to the false bottom of a box.

The diaries did the job. Mr. Birchall made good on his promise to Sgt. Ushioda and witnessed his execution.

Years later, he released the diaries in a campaign to win federal compensation for PoW survivors and in 1997 they were used by writer Barry McIntosh in the book Hell on Earth.

After the war, Mr. Birchall rose steadily to the upper levels of the RCAF and by 1963 was Air Commodore and Chief of Air Operations. His last position was Commandant of the Royal Military College. He suffered lung cancer and died on Sept. 10. Coincidentally, Fred Phillips, his radio operator, fellow camp survivor and lifelong admirer, died at his home in England two days later. Of the AJ-155 crew, only Mr. Catlin is still living.

Mr. Birchall, who outlived two wives, leaves his wife, Kathleen, two daughters and a son.

He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his action off the waters of Ceylon and the Order of the British Empire for his leadership as a PoW officer. He received numerous other awards and honours, including the Order of Canada and Order of the British Empire. He was also inducted into Canada's Aviation Hall of Fame and the U.S. Legion of Merit.

The longest-serving officer in the history of the Royal Canadian Air Force, he was also Honorary Colonel of 413 Squadron. For all that, it is the title given him by Mr. Churchill that shines brightest. Len Birchall will always be remembered as the Saviour of Ceylon.

Colin Haskin is The Globe and Mail's obituaries editor.