After joining the RAAF in August 1942 and serving as an aircraft mechanic, Len Waters applied for pilot training. Among the top five in his course at No 5 Service Flying Training School at Uranquinty, New South Wales, he graduated as a sergeant pilot.
He completed an operational conversion course on the P-40 Kittyhawk with No 2 Operational Training Unit at Mildura, Victoria, at the end of which he was posted to No 78 Squadron on 14 November 1944. Waters thus became Australia’s first (and only) Aboriginal fighter pilot.
While serving with 78 Squadron at Noemfoor (West New Guinea), Morotai (Netherlands East Indies) and Tarakan (Borneo), he flew 95 sorties; as the Japanese had few aircraft in these areas by this stage, his missions did not entail air combat. Promoted to Flight Sergeant in January 1945, he became a Warrant Officer 17 days before discharge in January 1946.
Although Waters was the only Indigenous fighter pilot, he was not the only Indigenous Australian to fly with the RAAF in the Second World War. Flight Lieutenant David Paul DFC, whose great-grandmother was an Aboriginal woman, piloted Baltimore light bombers with No 454 Squadron and became a prisoner of war after being shot down over the Aegean Sea in December 1943. Flight Sergeant Arnold Lockyer, a Kariyarra Ngarluma man from the Pilbara, flew as a flight engineer on Liberator bombers with No 24 Squadron. Shot down over Celebes in July 1945, he was killed by Japanese guards on 21 August, days after Japan’s surrender.
Story and images courtesy of the Royal Australian Air Force
