If you’re 19 or 20 and the toughest decision you’re making today is what you’re going to do for the weekend, Ron Pell would have been thrilled to bits for you.
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If you’re 19 or 20 and are agonising over which university or which course you really want to do, or job you want to take, or are looking at buying your first car, Mr Pell would have loved it, and loved to have helped you if he could.
Just as he would have loved the chance to have had those same problems.
But Mr Pell’s 18th birthday present was to be conscripted.
By the time he was 19 and 20, he was in uniform, in a Lancaster bomber in darkened skies above Germany and occupied Europe and, eyes glued to his bomb aimer, waiting to unleash 10,000kg of high explosive hell on unseen cities, towns and farms below him.
And all the time he was doing that, artillery batteries on the ground, and night fighters in the sky, were trying to kill him, to turn his plane into a funeral pyre.
You can’t even imagine that; your parents can fear it for you but can never fully understand it.
But for Mr Pell it was a ‘routine’ that didn’t happen once, or twice, it was a heart stopping, bowel-loosening terror, night after night, mission after mission.
And the reason those are decisions you don’t have to live with is because of Mr Pell, and the millions of others like him who fought, died and, if lucky enough, came home to rebuild the Australia, and other countries, in which you and I live today.
Mr Pell was Echuca-Moama’s final page in the story of the world’s worst, and probably only, war that had to be fought.
When this grand old campaigner died on January 23 this year, just weeks short of his 100th birthday, the book was closed on our direct connection with World War II.
Because Mr Pell had been our last man standing, our last link with the men and women who went to that war, and the many, too many, who did not come home.
On Wednesday, February 5, Mr Pell’s life will be celebrated at Echuca Uniting Church, Hare St, at 1.30pm — a life and time that sent a teenage Kyabram farm boy almost 17,000km from a rural Australian idyll to the world’s bloodiest conflict.
Mr Pell’s war was squeezed into just two years, but those years would come to haunt much of the rest of his life.
Yet in many ways they would also define him and his sense of commitment to his family and his community.
He was one of the first through the door when Legacy was founded in Echuca, and he then quietly and determinedly dedicated decades to helping the widows and children of those who did not come home.
And he and his wife Esma raised their three daughters: Christine, Helen and Robyn.
The daughters who this week have been busy planning their father’s funeral, ensuring it is a fitting tribute to the man they loved, the man you probably didn’t even know but who represented a generation to which we owe almost everything.
Talking about him they shared fond memories of the only man they knew, in peacetime, and, for example, his love of whistling, yodelling and singing — whether he was in the dairy milking or in the Cooma men’s choir, and later the choir in Echuca, entertaining everyone from the residents in aged care to his children watching him hard at work.
“Dad was,” they agreed, “a character, with a seriously dry sense of humour.”
He was also a dad they recalled who never really had to discipline them (even though they confessed to being “more than handful”) because his growl alone was sufficient to instil silence and best behaviour.
Their dad was also the man who gave the better part of 20 of his most senior years to helping out at the Uniting Church community meals, another service he maintained up to COVID-19, when he was well into his 90s.
“Mum and Dad made the move to Echuca in the 1980s on a farm in the west and although Mum died in 2016, Dad continued to live there until he had his stroke in November last year,” his daughters said.
“And he missed her every day of the rest of his life — she was the only one who could calm him, help him, when the nightmares came back.”
Mr Pell’s war was fought inside a Lancaster, as part of the legendary Bomber Command, which was the only major way for the British-based forces to take the war to the Germans from 1940 until D-Day in June 1944.
Flying with RAAF Squadron 115, Mr Pell would be one of the lucky few.
Of Bomber Command’s 125,000 aircrew, 57,205 died (a 46 per cent death rate), a further 8403 were wounded in action and 9838 became prisoners of war.
In that number were about 10,000 Australians, and their death rate was even worse, tipping close to 50 per cent. They were the worst casualty rates of all Commonwealth forces.
“Not our crew, never got a scratch, none of us. That was three other Aussies and two Poms,” Mr Pell said in an interview a few years back.
He saw his plane turned into a sieve it had so many holes ripped in its skin by shrapnel, saw pilots frantically feather a burning engine before a wing fell off, and had sat in his darkened cubbyhole where, as navigator/bomb aimer, he was crouched over his charts and taking readings from the stars and rapidly calculating key data (with maths, not a computer).
“It was so cold up there, when we got up really high it could be -30℃ and any exposed skin would immediately stick to metal surfaces,” Mr Pell said.
“We were wrapped in wool and leather, and I also had silk gloves because you could not use a slide rule or sextant in chunky leather gauntlets but still could not risk bare flesh touching metal,” he said.
It wasn’t just a world away from his farming boyhood, it hardly describes the man his daughters recall as once owning a drawer with enough shoelaces in it to open his own shop.
Topped up on an almost daily basis because the girl of his dreams, Esma, worked in the Kyabram shop that sold them, and because he wanted to see her so much, and was too nervous to simply come out and say it, he kept going in and buying more shoelaces from her.
His daughters still laugh when they tell that family-favourite story.
“Dad and Mum gave us an amazing life as kids — despite the inevitable fight in the back seat of our old EH Holden every time we went for any drive taking more than 10 minutes,” they said.
“We had so much freedom on the farm, so much fun, loved being on the motorbikes but none of us ever thought much about helping out in the dairy — when you’re a teenage girl, getting covered in cow shit is hardly your idea of a good time.
“It probably wouldn’t bother us much these days, but it was hardly cool back then.”
After he was conscripted, Mr Pell didn’t get his chance to be worried whether he was cool or not.
He was sent to Somers, where he received intensive training and was assessed for selection for further training as either a pilot, a navigator/bomb aimer, or wireless operator/air gunner.
His preferred choice was to be a pilot, but because he had successfully completed the Air Training Corps in Kyabram and was reasonably good at mathematics, he was assigned to be a navigator/bomb aimer where it was essential to be quick and accurate with figures and be able to work out compass direction, wind speeds and directions, air and ground speeds and targets.
After reaching the United Kingdom and being posted to Bomber Command, Mr Pell and his crew would complete 23 missions by the war’s end — a feat rarely matched.
Mr Pell never failed to get on with the job, and never failed to get the job done.
Now he has gone, in today’s world his war has faded from many minds, even his work with Legacy is also slowly disappearing as time marches on and there are very few left to help — or available to offer that help.
Mr Pell’s legacy, however, will live on.
Through his three daughters, 11 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and 20 great-great-grandchildren — and the countless hundreds, possibly thousands, across two, three or four generations whose lives were made that much better because of Echuca Legacy.
And through your life and mine, because of Mr Pell and the army of Ron Pells who marched alongside him.
Donations in lieu of flowers are encouraged to Legacy in Mr Pell’s memory at inmemory.legacy.com.au/page/RonaldHerbertPell
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