Brothers in arms

Murray and Eric Maxton are two of a kind.

Their father served on the Somme as a stretcher bearer in 1917 and was attacked with mustard gas, a chemical weapon.

Warning his sons not to join the army for fear of getting gassed themselves, Murray, the elder brother, joined the air force on the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, when he was 21.

From there, he took part in the Empire Air Training Scheme and was posted to Britain.

He vividly remembers his arrival in Perth for the departure.

“I’d only been to Perth once before the war,” he recalls.

“I’d only walked about 10 feet before I walked into a lamp post and knocked myself unconscious.”

From this unlikely encounter with the big smoke, Murray was posted to Britain where “I got my wings” and wrote back to his family in Albany to tell them.

In the meantime, Eric had joined the air force and had been sent to Scotland to finish his training to become a wireless operator air gunner.

Murray, then flying Vickers Wellington twin-engine, long-range bombers out of Southern England, stopped off in London for an evening.

There he chanced on his brother in a pub and the pair soon realised they were to be posted to the same base the next day.

Arriving late for the arrangement of crews, Murray, now a chipper 91, recalls how everyone had found a place except for he and Eric, now 88.

“When we got to the squadron, everyone had their crew, but I didn’t know what to do,” Murray says.

“There was one navigator around and I chose him, then we all started flying together.”

It took the remainder of the squadron about a month to 8realise the pair were brothers.

“By then, they all said, ‘Crikey, you’ve been flying together so long we can hardly split you up’,” Murray laughs.

A commanding officer decided: “If you don’t tell your mother, I’ll take you on your first trip, and if you don’t tell your parents, I’ll let you fly together.”

At one juncture, it was the Maxton boys’ mission to bomb Hitler’s weapons factories.

“Some nights, we blew up 30,000 people,” he admits.

“Sixty years later, it plays on your minds a bit. But it was something we had to do. We had to muck up (Hitler’s) factories and his railways.”

The pair flew a total of more than 30 missions, one of which went horribly wrong when a Messerschmitt “blew a hole in the side of us”.

The resulting fire set off the ammunition in the cabin and to make matters worse, the plane came back for another series of attacks.

While Eric went to the rear of the plane to return an attack and put out the fire, Murray spotted a cumulonimbus cloud and flew straight into it.

“It saved our life,” he says.

“And to go within one second of death makes you really appreciate life.”

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