Dr Max Nash, RNZNVR, FAA pilot

[DavidIsby]

The New Zealand Bomber Command Association
2 days ago
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VALE DR MAX NASH - FLEET AIR ARM PILOT
We are saddened to learn of the passing of Dr Max Nash, possibly the last New Zealander to have flown with the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm. He was 103.
Wayne Thompson of the New Zealand Herald interviewed Max for Anzac Day 2023 and we share his story here.
Nash’s enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve in Auckland in 1941, but he had an ambition to fly. This path led him firstly to graduation from the Royal Greenwich Naval College in England, and then naval airman training in Canada, followed by a trainee fighter pilots’ course in England at RNAS Yeovilton, where he topped his group.
Now a sub-lieutenant, Max’s first posting was to HMS Furious, a veteran carrier from World War I. A modified Courageous-class battlecruiser built for the Royal Navy, Furious was modified as an aircraft carrier while under construction. It was modified again in the 1920s with a full-length deck added.
Operating from an aircraft carrier brought special challenges. Max recalled: “You had to adjust for the ship bucking around. Of course, there was (also) the problem of finding the carrier with as little as an hour’s fuel supply left. The ship, unlike an airfield, could do 30 knots and wasn’t where it was when you took off. Some pilots were lost at sea.”
In late 1943, Nash was with No. 801 Naval Air Squadron (motto: “We’ll have them”) on Furious. The ship’s aircraft had been sent to an aerodrome while Furious was sheltering from a winter gale at Scapa Flow, in Orkney, Scotland.
“We got this message to fly back to the ship and I thought, ‘Hell no, not in this weather’, but when we arrived, we were told that Admiral Bruce Fraser of the Home Fleet had ordered the carrier to steam to the north of Norway. Fraser thought that the Scharnhorst was leaving its protected base in a fiord to attack a Russian convoy.
“Old Furious was rattling along, everything was shaking, and when we got up there, the signal came through from Fraser: ‘Scharnhorst Sunk’. We heaved a sigh of relief.”
Furious also made several runs toward the Norwegian fiords, where the Tirpitz was being repaired and readied for sea. “The carrier’s Barracuda torpedo bombers hit her, though they went in too low for the bombs to pierce the ship’s armour plating and do serious damage.”
Forced change in duties
In March 1944, Nash’s flying combat missions came to a painful halt. He was on patrol near Scapa Flow, where a few days before, a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt 109 fighter had been caught snooping.
“I was flying at 10,000 feet when, through a layer of broken cloud, I spotted a monoplane. I thought, ‘Not another Me109′, so I went at it, straight down, full-bore, and ‘bang’ went my ear. I caught up with the plane, and it was one of our torpedo bombers that had got lost in the no-flying zone. The bang in my ear was caused by the sudden change in air pressure when I dived. When I landed, blood was coming out of my ear. Then I developed an inner ear infection and so was declared temporarily unfit for flying. I was sent to the naval hospital in Aberdeen but there was no eardrum, and they couldn’t fix it. That was a damn nuisance.”
But the Navy still had a use for Max Nash. He was put on a course to become a carrier deck-landing control officer (DLCO). He became the Fleet Air Arm’s youngest DLCO. Others had more hours of flying experience but the Navy, in its understated way, had rated Max as an ‘above-average pilot’.
He was posted to a brand new and bigger carrier, HMS Indefatigable - carrying up to 83 aircraft - and was its DLCO from May 1944 on runs to the north of Norway in support of Home Fleet operations. The new role drew upon all the skills he had learned as a pilot. Landing on a pitching ship was fraught with the danger of crashing on to the deck or into rough seas. Planes returning from patrol could be damaged, low on fuel, or even had enemy fighters on their tails.
Nash was responsible for ensuring that aircraft landed safely on an area only half the length of a rugby field. “We were signalling the pilot if we wanted him to go slower, or faster, higher or lower, or to alter his path or to go round again.”
Aircraft were expected to make a three-point landing within a 50-metre zone where an arresting wire strung across the deck would snag a hook lowered from the aircraft by the pilot.
Moving to the Pacific
In late 1944, Nash moved with the Indefatigable to join the British Pacific Fleet, and early action included an attack on an oil refinery in Japanese hands at Pangkalan Brandon, Sumatra. When the carrier was in the naval base, he flew himself to aerodromes around Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) “to keep the boys up to scratch with their landings”.
Some impromptu aerobatics in a Fairey Firefly torpedo-bomber earned him the task of testing the aircraft’s new armament of rockets prior to their use on oil refineries at Pladjoe and Palembang, Sumatra, as the carrier squadron steamed toward Australia.
Nash recalled “the Japanese were really wild” about their big losses in planes and oil production, and he feared their revenge when “Indefatigable suddenly turned hard to starboard and started shaking as its turbine engines worked up to full power. Six Japanese bombers in formation went right past at deck level, but our Seafires pounced on them”.
In Sydney, the Royal Navy fleet prepared for operations in the Pacific under United States command as part of the US 5th Fleet. Nash recalls the awesome display of naval might when the fleet assembled off Ulithi Atoll in the Caroline Islands.
With the Royal Navy’s Seafires and the US Corsairs using the same carriers, the Marines adopted the British method for deck landings, which was “the DLCO telling the pilot what he had to do” to avoid dangerous confusion and speed up landings.
Nash’s time on Indefatigable was cut short when a mastoid bone infection put him in the US Naval Hospital in Guam. It may have saved his life. On April 1, an enemy kamikaze plane, armed with a 250-kilogram bomb, dived at the base of Indefatigable’s superstructure. As a result, 14 crew were killed and 16 injured, and seven aircraft were lost.
“If I’d been on the ship, I’d have certainly been killed or blown off the side.”
He returned to New Zealand in August 1945, the month of Japan’s surrender, and though the Navy invited him to stay, sought a discharge from service.
Life after war service
In wartime, he had guided pilots to safe landings; in peacetime, he continued to show that same high degree of care, helping new life enter the world.
“I went back to university, and then [worked for] two years as a hospital house surgeon on five pounds a week, then from 1952 in general practice in Greenlane, where obstetrics and house calls were part of the job.” War medals put away in the drawer were to be trumped by a more personal and fulfilling gratitude for his work: patients’ testimonials to his high standards of professional care, received upon his retirement in 1995. See less

[DavidIsby]

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