Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

39 In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF Three days after Keith was posted to 455 Squadron and two after his future navigator, Gil Docking, joined him, the Squadron was amalgamated with 489 Squadron, Royal New Zealand Air Force. Moving to Langham in north Norfolk on 12 April, this new ANZAC wing was deployed to keep German vessels from entering the English Channel in preparation for the D-Day landings. The next few weeks were spent largely in preparation. After two uneventful reconnaissance missions to the Channel and the Dutch coast on 4 and 9 May, the records for 11 May show that ‘up to date, the Squadron has averaged approximately 20 hours training flying per day’. A weakened Germany didn’t reduce the risks for airmen. In late 1943 West Australian Jeffreys, Keith’s opening partner in the first RAAF match at Lord’s, had been killed. As the new cricket season approached, reinforcements for the RAAF team included Bill Roach of Western Australia and an accomplished player from Keith’s own Mosman club, Clive Calvert. Long before Calvert’s death in action in December 1944, it was remarkable that the demands on the new ANZAC Wing allowed Carmody to find time to play any cricket in May. But play he did, in between flying sorties that quickly confronted him with the kind of action conspicuously missing in his time with 461 Squadron. On 14 May Carmody and Docking were among 12 crews on an ‘anti-shipping strike’ on the Dutch coast who encountered heavy flak while torpedoing a 3,000-ton merchant vessel – one of four protected by 16 escort vessels – leaving it ‘blazing furiously’. A minesweeper was hit by cannon fire and left listing but one damaged aircraft plunged into the sea at the rear of the convoy. Another, damaged by flak, made a ‘very good belly landing’ and four others returned damaged. On 19 May on a four-crew ‘first light recce’ of the Dutch coast, one aircraft encountered a convoy of 15 vessels in the Hague area and Carmody and Docking successfully avoided ‘accurate flak’ from a 16-vessel convoy ‘in the marshalling area’. The next day Carmody led the RAAF – boosted by newcomers Bob Cristofani of New South Wales and Reg Ellis of South Australia – in the first match of the 1944 season against the RAF at Lord’s. After Carmody retrieved a top-order collapse with an innings of 30, his dismissal led to further disasters before McDonald’s 39 and Ellis’s 23 took the total to 170. Cristofani’s bowling then won the match by 47 runs: Charlie Barnett, Cyril Washbrook and Bob Wyatt were among the victims in his seven for 39.