When the only Australian air defence was a Boomerang

Production of the Boomerang was organised by Essington Lewis, who was appointed by Prime Minister John Curtain as the director-general of the newly created Department of Aircraft Production.  According to his biographer Geoffrey Blainey, Lewis wielded enormous power during World War Two as Australia’s munitions supremo, and introduced considerable innovation into large scale manufacturing.  “Much of Australia’s industrial expansion after the war was based on wartime techniques which he introduced”, writes Blainey.         

In October 1942, the Australian War Cabinet agreed to increase the order for the Boomerang to 200 planes and eventually a total of 250 were ordered.  As aviation historian Stewart Wilson notes, this decision was taken “as insurance against overseas fighter aircraft not arriving as promised”. 

The last of the 250 Boomerangs to be built was delivered in early 1945, by which time the plane had been overshadowed as a frontline fighter by Spitfires and Mustangs, the latter being built in Australia by Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation.  After the war, CAC continued to produce fighter aircraft, parts and engines for the RAAF before being acquired by the partly UK-owned aircraft company Hawker de Havilland in 1986, which in turn sold off its Australian operations to Boeing Australia and Tenix in 2000.    

Throughout the latter part of the war, squadrons of Boomerangs were based in Australia and saw service overseas in the Bougainville and Borneo campaigns.  The resemblance of the Boomerang’s design to German and Japanese planes that Fred David had worked on meant that tragically some pilots were shot down in “friendly fire” incidents.            

One of the pilots who flew Boomerangs with RAAF No.5 Squadron at Bougainville is Jack Hearn.  Hearn, who lives in Melbourne, recalls flying low altitude missions over the jungle that included dropping smoke bombs to mark Japanese positions to guide bombers and strafing enemy soldiers working in vegetable gardens. Hearn says the Boomerang had its technical flaws though he appreciated the reliability of the plane’s engine: “At that level, if it failed then you had no hope”.     

Military historians today regard the Boomerang, a few restored examples of which are still flying, as having served in the World War Two with credit, if not distinction.  For a stop-gap fighter conceived in haste during a time of national crisis, the Boomerang proved durable and adaptable. 

According to Stewart Wilson, “the Boomerang had only limited use in the role for which it was designed but it did find a very useful niche in the field of army cooperation flying, a role in which it excelled due to its manoeuvrability and good low altitude performance”.  The plane flew so low, in fact, that “it was not uncommon to find the Boomerangs returning from a sortie with small branches and debris attached to some part of the airframe”. 

Perhaps for the pilots that flew the Boomerang such an occurrence gave particular meaning to the expression “flying by the seat of our pants”.  And indeed it seems an appropriate way to travel in the aeroplane that was born uniquely of a national emergency.