A maverick pilot who serviced patients in Australia's top end during World War II hailed from Warrnambool. On the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Darwin, JENNY McLAREN looks back at his remarkable life and fortuitous survival that day.
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JUST four days after Britain surrendered Singapore to an advancing Japanese army, World War II came to Australia as Japanese bombs rained down on Darwin 80 years ago.
The aerial bombardment of February 19, 1942 killed 243 people, sank eight ships, destroyed infrastructure, and struck fear of an invasion into the hearts of Australians.
While some took up arms against the enemy on our northern shores, others like Warrnambool-born Clyde Cornwall Fenton, served his country with a doctor's bag and a flimsy aircraft.
Fenton's two passions were flying and tending to the sick. In wartime as in peacetime, he combined both, earning his reputation as a Top End folk hero.
During six years' piloting his own plane as a pioneer flying doctor in the Territory during the 1930s, the maverick medic survived at least four plane crashes, flew unlicensed to China with an atlas and no radio in an unairworthy Gipsy Moth, and was stranded in the bush for a week after a forced landing.
One of Fenton's original DeHavilland Gipsy Moth air ambulances from 1934 now takes pride of place at the Katherine Historical Society Museum, housed in a purpose-built climate-controlled hangar.
Still relatively intact, the plane was retrieved from a paddock in New South Wales in the late 1980s and is now a major tourist drawcard.
Fenton's name also lives on in Katherine's Clyde Fenton Primary School, built on the site of the old aerodrome once used as a landing strip by the flying doctor.
A self-taught pilot, Fenton's dream of joining the fledgling Aerial Medical Service, later to become the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS), was thwarted by founder Reverend John Flynn's policy that doctors could not also be their own pilots.
Undeterred, Fenton raised funds for his own flying doctor service which evolved into the Northern Territory Aerial Medical Service. As the government medical officer, he operated out of Katherine from 1934 to 1940, bringing medical services to the Territory's far-flung settlements and stations.
With his daredevil rescues, escapades and occasional practical jokes, the lanky, bespectacled doctor was often in trouble with civil aviation authorities who described his flying as 'reckless'.
He was once fined 20 pounds and his flying licence was cancelled after buzzing an outdoor picture theatre in Darwin. He was also said to have flour-bombed local football matches.
His devotion to duty, however, was unfailing, attending remote callouts without navigational aids and landing on bush strips lit by kerosene flares or car lights.
His work in developing Australia's first flying medical service was recognised with an OBE.
In 1940, Fenton answered the call to arms enlisting with the RAAF as a pilot and flight instructor.
The Broken Hill Barrier Miner newspaper reported the news, lauding the doctor as "untiring in his devotion to his exacting task and courageous to the point of recklessness, he is idolised by the pioneers of the north of Australia".
When the War in the Pacific drew closer in 1942, he returned to Darwin, tasked with aerial surveying. He was reportedly out of town scouting for a suitable aircraft on the day of the first Japanese air raid. Two days later, he returned to scenes of death and devastation in the port town.
Drawing on years of flying over the lonely outback, Fenton's experience earned him an appointment as commanding officer of a RAAF supply unit delivering mail and provisions to army and RAAF outposts, as well as unofficial medical assistance to missions.
Officially called the No. 6 Communications Unit, to most, it was known simply as Fenton's Flying Freighters. For those manning radar stations and bases in the lonely north-west, Flight Lieutenant Fenton and his team were often their only link to civilisation.
Based firstly at Manbulloo near Katherine, Batchelor airstrip and then Darwin, the unit flew as far afield as the Wessell Islands. With a few discarded RAAF Avro Ansons and four ancient Dragon bi-planes, Fenton's Flyers were said to be the only unit in the world still flying bi-planes at the end of the war.
Church Missionary Society's Len Harris, who doubled as a coast watcher on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria, was known to carry out surgical procedures on local indigenous residents, guided step-by-step by Fenton on pedal radio.
Reverend Harris recalled Fenton, who was renowned for his aeronautical exploits, at times landing on the island's beaches for medical emergencies. When it was time to take off, he would lop off trees that stood in his way and call on locals to help turn the plane around.
When an aerodrome was later established on the island, Harris said Fenton would come over to the mission "for a cuppa".
"He said that he could always find the Groote aerodrome because the white roof of the mission house shone in the moonlight. He said that on really dark nights he had a powerful torch and he could hold it out the window and locate the roof and land safely," the reverend recalled.
An airfield 200kms south of Darwin which was the major offensive base for long-range bombing operations against Japanese forces in 1943-44, was named in Fenton's honour.
Known colloquially as 'Doctor', Fenton Airfield was the headquarters for RAAF squadrons and the US army and airforce units. It became the jumping off point for armed reconnaissance missions against Japanese airfields and shipping.
Recognising its strategic importance to the Allies, Fenton Airfield was targeted seven times in retaliatory Japanese bombing raids between June 30 and September 18, 1943. The site is now entered on the Northern Territory Heritage Register.
Clyde Fenton was born in Warrnambool on May 16, 1901, the second son of George and Kathleen Fenton's four surviving children.
George's work with the Colonial Bank of Australasia, later amalgamated with the National Bank in 1918, kept the young family on the move around the state.
They were living in Terang when their first son Cyril was born in 1897 but had been transferred to Warrnambool by the time a daughter, Veronica, arrived in 1899. Sadly she died at just a few days old.
The family was still in Warrnambool when Clyde came along in 1901, followed by another son Frederick in 1903. In 1908 a daughter Nonie was born at Mansfield.
Records show the family residing in Natimuk during Clyde's primary school years. At St Patrick's College in Ballarat, where both he and Cyril were boarders, Clyde excelled, qualifying for university at just 15.
The Fentons settled back in Melbourne where Clyde attended Xavier College before graduating in medicine from Melbourne University in 1925. He learnt to fly and spent several years in London, including a stint with the RAF, before making his mark in Australia's Top End.
After the war, the thrice-married Clyde joined the Commonwealth Department of Health where he remained until his retirement. He died in Melbourne in 1982 aged 80.
Fenton was not the only one of his siblings to leave his mark. As a 14-year-old boarder at St Patrick's, Cyril was commended by the Royal Humane Society after he saved a boy from drowning at Lake Wendouree.
He went on to serve in World War 1 and had the distinction of surviving being shot down over France by German flying ace, Lothar von Richtofhen, brother of the famed Red Baron. Repatriated back to Australia after the war after spending time in a German POW camp, Cyril died tragically aged 24 from cancer.
Clyde's younger brother Frederick followed him into medicine, serving in the RAAF in World War 2 as an ophthalmologist.
