An Airman Far Away/the Story of an Australian Dambuster

by Eric Fry

The tragedy of WWII personified in the biography of a dedicated young man from the Australian Outback. Charlie Williams was an air combat veteran killed in the top-secret Dam-Busters Raid.

242 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1993

Reviews

[Alice Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and well researched tribute to one of our very brave airmen Charles Rowland Williams. Written by his future brother in law and full of family memories. Like so many who served in the RAF he didn’t make it home. He left behind a devastated fiancé, who he was meant to marry the following week. They deserved a happy ending.

[Susan Paxton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although published in 1993 only in an Australian edition so far as I know, there may be some new interest in this title since the publication of James Holland's magisterial Dam Busters, which features Australian Flying Officer Charles Rowland Williams, DFC, the subject of this biography, as a main character. A bit of a labor of love, well-known Australian professor of history Eric Fry, who was married to Charlie's sister (and a WWII airman himself), wrote this after his retirement, using Charlie's letters home and other family information, adding in details - some more interesting than I would have expected - about the war situation, the treatment of Australia by the mother country, and on how Australian airman were used by the RAF during the war (neither efficiently nor very wisely, it turns out - when the war in the Pacific broke out, Australia was nearly undefended and a lot of Australian airmen, Charlie included, were sitting around in the UK doing a great deal of nothing waiting for assignments; later many were thrown into the meatgrinder of Bomber Command, again Charlie included, and few survived).

The major problem with the book is that since Dr. Fry wrote, the Queensland State Library in Australia has acquired Charlie's letters to his British fiancee, which, judging from the excerpts printed by Holland in his book, seem to have been considerably more revealing, emotional, and interesting than the (pretty relentlessly cheerful) letters Charlie wrote to his family (They were also more timely; letters to Australia took two to three or more months, so it was only long after Charlie was dead that his family actually heard about the woman he hoped to marry and bring back to Australia and his decision to start his second operational tour immediately after his first - imagine the horror of this -, while Charlie and Bobbie were actually writing back and forth to one another). To his fiancee, Charlie could admit depression, exhaustion, and trepidition (some of his letters to her were evidently addressed "from the chamber of horrors: Lincolnshire"), but not to the folks back home. Fry's portrait of Charlie is bland and idealized (St. Charlie), while Holland's book actually moved me to tears (Charlie going through remarkable contortions to contact, much less sleep with his fiancee; Charlie writing about their future children). Still, there's a lot of good information to be found in this title, but though Dr. Fry passed away several years ago, one might hope that someone takes the opportunity to update and so complete this book and Charles Rowland Williams' story. I believe he deserves it.