World War II poetry timely reminder as bombs rain on Ukraine

Trawling through the works of her late father’s life, Elizabeth Barber was reminded about the scars war leave on a mind. 

Mrs Barber, who knows the meaning of true anguish herself, is the daughter of former war hero and award winning author Ivan Southall. 

As bombs continue to fall upon the people of , Mrs Barber couldn’t help but ponder the tragic consequences of war. 

Aged 23, Mr Southall was called upon to captain his British Sunderland flying boat patrol fighter on a seek and destroy mission in the Bay of Biscay. 

It was the night of August 11, 1944. 

With German U-boat 385 – a naval submarine – in the crosshairs, the brave captain dropped his payload. 

The vessel was crippled from beneath the surface from the plane’s depth charges and left dead in the water. 

Flying above, Mr Southall circled overhead as the Navy moved in to collect more than 40 survivors. 

‘It was terribly deliberate,’ he later wrote of the attack in a book titled ‘They Shall Not Pass Unseen’. 

‘It was premeditated murder …

their white faces in the moonlight, looking up at me.’

The Captain was promoted to Flight Lieutenant a few months after.  

‘Suddenly you understood what it meant to defeat a U-boat,’ Mr Southall wrote. 

‘Through circumstances over which you had no personal control, you have been given the chance to justify your crew and yourself.’

Upon landing safely, the future award winning author detailed his pure dread of the experience in the form of a poem. 

During World War II, servicemen were forbidden from writing home about their battles. 

‘Dealing death when least expected.

To lonely merchantmen,’ he wrote in a letter to his mother. 

‘Suddenly from utter blackness comes the aircraft spitting madly.’

‘Hate for hate with savage purpose, death for death with bell-like fury.’

‘Bombs away upon the enemy.’

Mr Southall was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1944 for his command of Squadron 461 Sunderland, based at Pembroke Dock, and spent the rest of the war working in the RAAF’s history section. 

In the years that followed, Mr Southall returned to Australia and began what would become a successful writing career. 

Just this week, a video of a Russian soldier breaking down in tears as he spoke to his mother on the phone after surrendering to Ukrainians went viral. 

Then veteran UK broadcaster Jeremy Vine sparked shock after suggesting Russian soldiers fighting for Putin ‘probably deserve to die’.

Mrs Barber, who herself wrote a book titled ‘Perfect Victim’ about the murder of her daughter, told Daily Mail Australia she felt for those caught-up in the war in Ukraine. 

‘Particularly of military personnel often forced into a position they would prefer not to be,’ she said. 

‘I think people have short memories and the young do not know from experience.

These few words of dad’s are so telling.’

Mrs Barber said the war had left a profound impact on her father despite his subsequent success as an author.

‘He and his crew were not dismayed that there were 42 survivors, but I know the death of those he killed stayed with him,’ she said.  

By the time of his death in 2008, inshot Mr Southall had written dozens of books, including a swag of award winning children’s books. 

Told that he had only a short while to live, he had famously replied: ‘I survived the war.

I was given a life denied to many young men and I am grateful for that life.’

Mrs Barber, who is in the process of editing the autobiography her father wrote while suffering dementia, said she had time to reflect on her father’s life after the war given the current conflict in Ukraine.

‘Reading his poem and the excerpts from his book it makes me so sad that we never learn,’ she said. 

‘And I think in those words there is so much – and I can’t believe what is happening again.’