Whittaker was twenty-eight years of age and had studied architecture at university prior to enlisting with the RAAF as a flying officer in 1936. Born and bred in Perth, Western Australia, the young man had grown up strong and fit as a teenager working on his father’s sheep farm. Tall and lean, with fair hair and a pair of sharp, blue eyes, a love of amateur boxing had kept him in shape through his university years and left him in good stead for his military career as a pilot.
The pilot was an original member of 10 Sqn, having been with the unit since its formation at RAAF Base Point Cook in July of 1939, and had left Australia later that same month to train in England on their newly-delivered Sunderland flying boats. The outbreak of war had prevented their return to Australia, and instead the unit had remained in Europe, basing out of RAF Mount Batten in Plymouth and taking the war directly to enemy U-boats operating in the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay.
Coming in hard from the west, the setting sun making them invisible until practically the last moment, Keller’s J-4A thundered in toward the tail of the Sunderland at full speed with his wingman at his port rear quarter. The leutnant smiled as he closed to within cannon range, the flying boat’s tail gunner spotting them far too late. As the man screamed a warning over the intercom and Whittaker threw the aircraft into an evasive corkscrew to port, the fighter’s wing cannon and nose machine guns opened up and four deadly streams of tracer poured into the Sunderland’s rear fuselage. The wing cannon of the J-4A fired at much higher velocity and rate of fire than any before fitted to a Luftwaffe aircraft; all of which meaning it was a deadly weapon in the hands of a good pilot, and Keller was as good as any.
The sparkle of shell detonations flickered across the rear of the flying boat, its tail gunner dying before he was able to return fire. Keller’s fighter roared past in a tight circle, immediately coming around to begin a second attack run as their prey banked away in the opposite direction trailing smoke, that single pass inflicting severe damage on the already-failing Sunderland. Inside the cockpit, Whittaker’s heart sank further as the ailing port inboard engine chose to give up the ghost completely at that moment, right in the middle of his evasive manoeuvre. The Pegasus radial died in a shower of lurid sparks and clouds of smoke, and at that point the pilot realised there was no hope left whatsoever of keeping his aircraft intact: he gave the order to bail out.
Keller opened fire a second time just eight hundred metres astern of his target, centring his Revi gunsight on the flying boat’s port wing root. The radio operator died under the barrage, vainly calling out across the airwaves for assistance that would never come. Whittaker’s co-pilot slumped forward under that same attack, his back a sea of crimson and half his head blown away as glass and instruments shattered all around them.
Whittaker became the last of just five of the aircraft’s ten crewmen to get clear, bailing out just moments before the enemy fighters raked the Sunderland with fire for a third time. The starboard wing became engulfed in flame as what remained of the fuel within it ignited. It tore completely away from the stricken aircraft and the two shattered, burning remnants of flying boat spiralled away trailing dense clouds of smoke and fire. Keller radioed back to base with instructions to alert units on Guernsey of the attack as the pair turned away. Within minutes, an E-boat or rescue aircraft would be on its way to pick up any survivors.
By that stage the German fighters were just eighty kilometres south of the English coast and for the second time that day, Keller’s wingman spotted an enemy aircraft in the failing light: this time a lone Spitfire heading north-west at very low altitude. Faint trails of silvery smoke trailed behind it, a good indication it was already in trouble, and the pair of Shrikes turned in to attack once more.
Trumbull caught the flash of sunlight off canopy glass in his rear-view mirror just seconds before Keller opened fire. He threw the Spit into a hard, banking turn to port as the tracer sizzled past him, fire from just one of the enemies’ cannon chewing at his starboard wingtip and leaving it a ragged mess. Their superior speed was so great that both Focke-Wulf fighters overshot their target quickly, banked high to starboard as they circled back around. Trumbull desperately fought to gain some altitude with which to manoeuvre — the coast was tantalisingly close but still too far away under the present dire circumstances. Turning back to the north, he began a slow, agonising climb as his exhaust stacks chugged grey smoke in protest.
From a distance of 600 metres, Keller’s cannon sent a deadly burst of fire past Trumbull’s cockpit just thirty seconds later. The British pilot tried a ‘Split-S’ manoeuvre but didn’t have enough speed to make it effective and he felt the Spitfire reel as 13mm machine gun slugs ripped through her. One struck the back of his armoured seat a glancing blow, not penetrating but denting it to the point that he could feel it intruding into his back.
He almost lost control for a second or two, the thought of how close the slug had come to killing him shaking his frayed nerves almost as much as the impact had physically jarred his body. A 20mm cannon shell smashed straight through the top of his canopy above his head at a shallow angle, showering him with glass fragments before punching right through the centre of his windshield. It finally detonated itself against his already-damaged engine cowling, tearing another hole in it at the very front near the propeller. Coolant fluid spewed across what was left of his windscreen and his face also through the huge, ragged hole left in the glass.
As he frantically tried to wipe the foul liquid from his goggles in an attempt to clear his vision, he imagined the fleeting image of a huge, dark shape streaking past him in the opposite direction at incredible speed followed closely by a sound much like the howl of a cyclone. The rear-view mirror was miraculously still intact above his ruined canopy frame, and through it he rather unexpectedly saw one of the pursuing enemy fighters explode in a fiery ball a moment later.
With no time to truly be intrigued by what had just happened, Trumbull concentrated on maintaining level flight and waited for the other fighter to blow him apart. He was absolutely astounded to suddenly catch sight of the second enemy fighter in his peripheral vision, and he turned his head to find it was racing away to the west at what had to be full throttle, all the while dodging and weaving for all it was worth.
“Bloody hell…!” Trumbull remarked in astonishment, for the moment he caught sight of what was pursuing it he understood why it was running. What he saw was like nothing he’d ever encountered before: a huge grey machine the size of a medium bomber, it had no propellers he could see. Instead, a pair of gaping, angular ‘radiator vents’ of some kind were fitted on either side of the fuselage below and to the rear of a long, two-seat cockpit.
Trumbull couldn’t pick out any national insignia on the aircraft as it roared past, although its overall mid-grey paint scheme appeared to sport some kind of unit crest on its twin tails and several pieces of printed lettering along its fuselage and wings that were unintelligible at that distance and speed. There was just one flash of variation however that he could see — a thin strip of multiple colours along the fuselage from just aft of the large ‘vent’ on one side running back to the point where the leading edge of the large, swept wing blended seamlessly into the body of the aircraft. Trumbull was somewhat relieved as he realised the one thing he could make out from that ‘bar’ of colours was the distinctive pattern of a small Union Jack, and that at least suggested the newcomer was a ‘friendly’.