The premier Naval Air Station Yeovilton, HMS Heron, is off the A303, north of Ilchester. Twelve of us arrived at the end of July 1941, for a three or four month course. The object of the course was to learn to fly, fight and deckland an operational fighter aircraft. At that time there were only a few Sea Hurricanes with deck landing hooks in the FAA. Four were in Furious in 880A Flight and just about to take part, though we did not know it, in the tragically costly and totally unproductive strike on Petsamo/Kirkenes. A few more had been sent out to Gibraltar in packing cases intended for Ark Royal They hardly became operational before she was sunk. (I was allowed to filch two of these left-overs for Eagle in May 1942.)
When we arrived at Yeovilton, we saw several Fulmars Is parked out on the airfield besides the couple of dozen Hurricanes. The Fulmars were two-seat Naval escort fighters, not interceptors, and were little faster or lighter than the Fairey Battle, from which their design had been derived.
Our first lesson at Yeovilton was, therefore, that Hurricanes were extremely valuable and in very short supply. One act of carelessness or a second genuine accident, and we would find ourselves towing targets in Skuas or Boulton-Paul Defiants.
I shared a cabin with Geoffrey Russell-Jones of the Course ahead of me. Our simultaneous arrival must have been a mistake because half of us were given ground duties for three weeks and had to wait patiently while sufficient Hurricanes became available. We occupied our time doing ‘duty boy’ in the Air Watch tower.
After about three weeks of this, we joined ‘C’ Flight. Our CO was Lt/Cdr Rodney Carver, DSO, DSC, RN. My instructor was Lt (A) ‘Wiggy’ Wiggington, DSC, RN recently rescued from Crete. Two others were Lt (A) ‘Jimmy’ R. E. Gardner, DFC, RNVR, and later in the year, Lt (A) ‘Dicky’ Cork, DFC, RN. These two DFCs — changed to DSCs later — were awarded by the RAF for their work in Hurricanes in No. 242 Squadron in the Battle of Britain.
One morning we were taken for a walk round the airfield where we saw our first Skua. It was ‘resting’, Wiggy said. We were all impressed with its size, its dive brakes, its anti-spin parachute and its lethal appearance. However, Paddy Brownlee did question the size of the ‘glasshouse’ along the top of its fuselage and suggested, not for the first time, that it would be good for growing tomatoes if only they would take the aircraft outside in the sunshine and not keep it in the darkest corner of the hangar.
There were still two Gladiators at Yeovilton. There was also a captured Italian CR 42. Wiggy and our CO, Rodney Carver, had a dogfight over the airfield and the CR 42 won. This was rather glossed over later, and no one would admit it; but it was true.
The Hurricanes we flew were ex-Battle of Britain and had no hooks. They seemed very ancient. They were always running out of brakes, leaking oil all over the windscreen, oiling up the plugs — a sure sign of worn engines — and having coolant leaks. Some had fabric wings. However, the Sea Hurricane Ib had already been decklanded by a Naval pilot called Bromwich, who had pronounced it “easy”. But we also heard that it was very “tricky”. We were going to find out for ourselves at the end of the Course, aboard Argus.
One day a beautiful American single-seat radial-engined fighter arrived. It was dark blue and, as it had an arrester hook, we were interested to find out what it was. It was a Martlet — the Royal Navy’s name for a Wildcat — the Grumman F4F -1. Forty of them were leftovers from a French Naval order and we now had them for our own use. However, this early version had Wright Cyclone engines which were always overheating, seizing up or just stopping if hard pressed, for they were designed for civil aircraft. So only experienced pilots were allowed to fly them. They seemed to chuff around the circuit very fast indeed and the squadron pilots thought they were wonderful and far faster than a Hurricane. They were proud that they had been chosen to fly such a difficult aircraft, with its mass of mixture-control levers, its two-speed supercharger, its throttle which, someone said, opened the wrong way, its narrow, manually-raised undercarriage and its impressively large cockpit covered in dials, levers and switches.
My first flight at Yeovilton, my first ever in a high performance single-seater, was an unforgettable experience. The Hurricane Mark Ib had been through the Battle of Britain and was, therefore, a highly developed machine. Everything in it was made as easy as possible for the pilot so that he could concentrate on finding, fixing and killing his opponent. It had automatic boost control and mixture control, a fully constant-speed propeller and, best of all, a modern blind-flying instrument panel with an artificial horizon and a ‘geared’ altimeter. (The altimeter had two hands, the ‘minute’ hand going round once for each 1000 feet.) The only control the pilot had to make a conscious effort to remember — besides the radiator flap — was to change-over the fuel cock from the small ‘gravity’ feed tank of 15 gallons, to the main tank. This had to be done after take-off otherwise the engine would stop 20 minutes later.
We practised steep turns without letting the nose drop or allowing the aircraft to flick over on its back with a ‘G’ stall. We did formation flying in cloud, mock interception exercises, camera-gun attacks, ‘oxygen climbs’ to about 25,000 feet, and dogfights and aerobatics.
While I was Duty Officer in the Air Watch tower, I saw several prangs. These were mainly due to brake failure, swinging on landing, heavy landings or taxying accidents. A typical accident was one which happened to my cabin mate, Geoffrey Russell-Jones. He describes it 40 years on: “I adored the Hurricane Is, with the ‘gate-change’ hydraulics, but one day, in my anxiety to keep up with my flight leader, I came in to land a bit quick. I have a vivid recollection of heading for the gate to the (A37) roadway at the end of the runway and seeing a Naval Policeman deserting his post and diving for cover. At that point my starboard tyre burst (brakes overheating) and I spun round — and there was yourself, flashing rude messages from the Control Tower. I wrote my report for the Wren secretary to type, including a little humour for her eyes only — and she showed it to the CO.” (On his A25 the secretary had unfortunately typed it verbatim, and it had referred to the tyre bursting sequence as: “I popped the starboard tyre and swung off, nearly collecting the police box” — words to which Their Lordships took exception.) “I was sent down to St. Merryn (another Naval Air Station near Padstow in Cornwall), where an engineer officer was madly screwing Hurricanes together from bits sent to him in crates. I used to test fly them, thus continuing to distribute some of the unsecured bits round Cornwall.”
My first take-off in a Hurricane was like a first ride on a high-powered speed boat, noisy, shaky and out of control and, with the same colossal acceleration which almost dragged my hand off the throttle and jerked my head back against the headrest, it was so unexpected. The aircraft took charge. It shook with power as the 900 horses, only a few feet in front, wrenched round the propeller and dug it into the air. It was frightening too, for the whole thing leapt into the sky well before I was ready for it and having used only a quarter of the runway. It was so different from the Battle, where there was always sufficient time between one occurrence and the next to keep ahead of the game.
The first landing was just as exciting, for none of us were used to an aircraft having such a high power/weight ratio and which would respond so crisply to the smallest throttle adjustments or stick movements and forces on the approach. The view over the nose was excellent and allowed the runway to be seen straight ahead, even in the tail-down attitude. Sydney Camm had designed the Hurricane for use on grass airfields. It had fat, low-pressure tyres and a wide-track undercarriage, easy enough to cope with bumpy grass surfaces. The only problem with having to land on concrete runways was the rolling resistance which was far less than on soft grass surfaces. The aircraft had therefore to be pulled up entirely by the harsh use of the brakes, something for which they were not designed and in which they consistently overheated when the touchdown speeds were high. High touchdown speeds always occurred in calm wind conditions and sooner or later we might have the bad luck to fly an aircraft where the brakes were weak. One or the other of the brakes would then overheat, depending perhaps on any crosswind conditions, and the Hurricane would swing off onto the grass. It was then a matter of luck whether we could avoid a ground-loop — an uncontrollable backwheel-skid-type manoeuvre — and ‘writing off’ the undercarriage due to side loads. (‘Write off’ was a stores procedure for taking something off-charge when it was no longer any use.) With the CG behind the wheels — as in all tail-wheel aircraft — this ‘back wheel skid’ could only be prevented by having a lockable tailwheel held firmly on the ground to prevent the swing from starting, or, by doing a ‘wheeler’. This latter was what the RAF usually did anyway, for it was by far the most sensible method of landing. In the case of the Navy, ‘wheelers’ were discouraged because they could get us into bad habits for decklanding.
It is marvellous to watch a swan, or even an old cormorant taking off from the water. They always take off into the wind, even if this is into danger. Likewise, all bird-landings on water are made without the slightest drift, dead into wind. But mere humans seem incapable of judging skid or drift with such marvellous accuracy and often make the dreadful error of coming in to land across-wind, or even downwind on some occasions, with disastrous results. There is no excuse for landing out-of-wind on a grass airfield, but where there are only a few runway directions from which to choose, it is sometimes necessary. If the direction of crosswind were from the port, or left side, this was very awkward in the Hurricane. It would often start to ‘weathercock’ uncontrollably. The pilot might then say, “Gawd, I’ve made a cock-up here!” and suddenly decide to go round again for another try. This could easily increase the swing tendency, for the propeller torque (rotation, being clockwise, from aft), would tend to stall the port wing and swing the tail further to port (due to the twist in the upper half of the propeller wash striking the fin) and the whole thing could end up like “a can of worms”. With thoughts of Skua-dom flashing through the mind on more than one occasion, I can thank my lucky stars that I was not one of the ground-loopers.
The Commander (Flying) at Yeovilton in 1941 was one of the very few surviving ‘vintage’ Naval aviators. He lent dignity to an otherwise somewhat light-hearted activity. He was large, rubicund, frightening, and without humour. He could, nevertheless, very nearly understand the average RNVR sprog pilot. As we found it difficult to understand ourselves, this was no mean achievement. He flew the Station Gladiator each morning at 0730 as a strict routine. After the beautiful little biplane fighter had been brought out of its hangar, it was suitably arranged into wind and near Air Traffic Control, ready for the Commander.
He would drive up, answer the smart salute from the rigger and climb up some short steps, specially placed in position, to the cockpit, his brass hat glistening in the morning sun. After having each strap handed carefully to him from each side of the cockpit by the fitter and rigger, he would adjust various controls in the cockpit, ready for the ‘off’. Then he would lower his hand over the cockpit side for his gloves to be handed up to him. This was the routine.
One morning, I was Duty Boy in the Control Tower and I saw that the routine proceeded normally, noting that the brass trimming on the steps could do with a polish. This time, there was a new rigger on duty and when the Commander lowered his hand for his gloves, the rating, believing the Commander was offering his hand in a last farewell before he rose into the air to fight the Hun to the death at dawn, shook his hand warmly, instead.
The Duty Boy had other things besides the Commander’s Gladiator to try to organise before breakfast. He had to collect the Fulmars and Hurricanes parked out on the airfield. They were dispersed as a precaution against losing too many at once if a Ju 88 or Me 110 came over on a strafing run. There happened to be a stray Swordfish in a far-off corner of the airfield. This was naturally a challenge to any Hurricane pilot, bored with being Duty Boy and not having much fun. It therefore had to be rounded-up whether it wanted to be or not.
There was a routine for starting Swordfish which called for advanced standards of airmanship, split-second timing and a nearby fire-engine. If none of these conditions applied, there was usually trouble, especially if fighter pilots, used to easy, electrical starting, had a go. The routine was written down somewhere in ‘Pilot’s Notes’ for the Swordfish. After the removal of the covers, I climbed into the cockpit and failing to find the Notes, I made one or two inquiries of the riggers and fitters who accompanied me. Apparently, the routine worked something like this:
“Magneto switches — off. Turn prop by hand to check no hydraulic locks. Prime engine cylinders with fuel. Check brakes ‘on’ and pressure OK. Chocks in position. Select the strongest volunteer to insert the starting handle and commence turning. If no one volunteers, detail someone.”
“The volunteer inserts handle into any suitable-looking hole he can find in the engine cowling and winds it round, getting faster and faster. There should be a grinding, whining sound. If there isn’t, select another hole for the starter handle and try again.”
“When there is no further chance of the winder increasing the revs from what must obviously be a sort of flywheel buzzing round inside, he should signal the pilot in the cockpit to ‘engage’. This links the grinding sound with the crankshaft of the engine in some way, and the grinding then gets slower as the engine gets faster. Both then come to a halt, and the whole thing has to start again. If, in the unlikely event, the engine fires, the propeller starts to go round. The man with the handle should then remove it from its hole and run away quickly, before he gets covered in oil, flames or smoke, or gets hit by the propeller or loses his hat down the air intake.”
I did not see the rigger’s frantic signals that he had reached the end of his energy in turning the flywheel. However, I had enough sense to realise that the revs were not getting any higher, so I pulled the tit to ‘engage’. The thing gave a slight chuffing noise for about half a revolution, and there was silence once more; silence, that is to say, except for panting sounds and expletives coming from the rigger. Reinforcements arrived and two men then started turning, one either side. (Another handle had been found in the observer’s cockpit behind me.) This took the engine by surprise as the revs obtained were much higher than before. It began to fire on two of its nine cylinders. If it had been a Merlin, I would have kept the starter button pressed and the priming pump going during this ‘will she — won’t she’ period, and the other cylinders would have had to have joined in, through sheer embarrassment. But with the Swordfish, only the waning revs from the flywheel arrangement could continue to give power. With but two cylinders out of nine, it is not enough on a cold morning for the engine to wake itself up unless something urgent is done. I was now told what this was by a crowd of interested onlookers.
“More dope, pilot.” “No, you’ve given too much already. There are flames coming out of the air intake, sir.” “Try again with more throttle.” Then, aside: “Put your hat over the air intake and put the flames out, you idiot.” “No, you’ll have to blow out now, she’s too rich.”
Eventually, with me priming as hard as I could the other cylinders gradually joined in with the two that hadn’t let me down, and the whole aircraft disappeared from sight in a cloud of blue smoke, visible from Queen Camel four miles away. The birds flew up in alarm, the fire tender crew fingered their nozzles, others ran after their hats, but all was well. Having recovered a little of my confidence, I waved the chocks away and trundled the Swordfish towards the ‘Duty Flight’ hangar.
The Swordfish was a rare bird in Somerset. It was not often seen in the south, even in summer. However, when it came in small numbers, it always tended to merge with the countryside more than the flying machines of a later age. Had I left it there in peace that morning, it could easily have become overgrown by long grass in a month or two and become, like any other picturesque farmyard machinery, a home for rabbits and birds. But this was not to be, for one morning a strange pilot came along, dressed in a fur-lined leather flying jacket. His name was ‘Boris’ Morris, a Sub/Lt (A) RN, my wardroom snooker opponent. He placed some golf clubs in the back, started it up first time and flew it back to Scotland, to Crail, to Wick or somewhere, where Swordfish lived. It was six months before I saw another Swordfish so far south.
One Monday morning, I came back from a weekend at home and found a whole lot of Wall’s Ice Cream tricycles — ‘Stop-me-and-buy-one’s — on the grass outside Air Traffic Control. While everyone else was taxying past them in clouds of dust, various officers in flying helmets were pedalling them all over the airfield. They were apparently listening-in to radio signals. This, I was told, was the new Fighter Interception School in action.
Although ADR (Air Direction Radar) and all the skills of interceptor-fighter operations had been in marvellous and vital use for two years in the RAF — and in the Battle of Britain in particular — the art had not spread to the Royal Navy. It still preferred to rely on AA guns rather than interceptors. It also abhorred ‘chatter’ over the r/t and had refused to use radar or r/t much at sea for the past two vital years, thinking it might give away the position of the Fleet. However, sanity began to prevail, as one ship after another was disabled in the Mediterranean by the Stuka dive-bomber and enemy torpedo aircraft. Lt E. Lewin, DSO, DSC, RN, a fighter pilot from Ark Royal, had come to Yeovilton to get ADR operators trained for interception duties in carriers and in ‘air defence’ cruisers.
A ‘Schooly’, Lt/Cdr Coke, RN, who organised the daily work of the school itself, managed to do this on ‘a shoestring’ and without fuss.
The Wall’s ice cream tricycles were the ‘aircraft’. The ‘pilots’ pedalled them under radio directions from a small transmitter in the Control Tower, which was the ‘aircraft-carrier’. Some tricycles were enemy ‘bombers’. They pedalled slowly. Others were ‘fighters’. They pedalled faster — but only a little faster, we noticed.
The pilots of the bombers and fighters carried their wireless sets where ice cream should have been. The bombers steered a course for the carrier, and the fighters were sent to intercept them. They steered whatever course and speed that Lt/Cdr Coke ordained, using a compass below the handlebars to give them the required direction and a metronome on top of the ice cream compartment to give them their pedalling airspeed.
Neither bomber nor fighter could see where they were going, so we watched each collision as it occurred. We would then listen to the polite comments of the fighter pilot towards the bomber as they unseated each other in mock combat. Sometimes there were r/t failures. The Tower then lost contact, and aircraft would get lost on the airfield and sometimes be seen pedalling slowly down the roads between the hangars or by the Captain’s office. We suspected that they had purposely switched off and were making a beeline for the wardroom bar. There was no let-up, come-rain-come-shine. They even worked during the lunch hour. Some would take sandwiches and beer with them. They kept them in the ice cream compartment, munching them while they pedalled. It was odd to see, at times, a fighter making about 1000 knots equivalent speed. When we asked him why, he said that he had had to ‘land’ to have a ‘strain off and was making up for lost time.
Some of the cyclists were Wrens. We thought that a particularly large one should have had ‘Buy me and stop one’ written on her tricycle. It was in the days of Lisle stockings. A few could look quite formidable at times, particularly those wearing ‘St. Trinian’ Naval hats over their eyes on dark nights. Fortunately, these were scarce. Most were beautiful and all were kind. They were the delight of our lives at Yeovilton.
By September 1941 there were only two more flying hurdles to climb for my Course. One was the art of making camera-gun attacks on other aircraft. The other was trying to hit a target towed at the regulation 160 knots by a frightened Skua or Defiant pilot, with real live bullets. All fighters naturally had their guns aligned to the mean line-of-flight of the fighter itself. The gunsight was aligned to the same spot. In theory, all the pilot had to do was to fly his aircraft at the target, press the button, and the whole thing would disappear in a thousand smoking pieces. As this seldom happened even in theory in our camera gun attacks, we soon came to the conclusion that air-to-air firing was a very difficult business.
Attacks from dead astern, were, of course, asking for trouble. First, you gave the rear-gunner of the bomber an easy no-deflection shot at you. Secondly, he might have 0.5 inch guns to your 0.303 inch and so he could easily out-range you. He could then start shooting at you 150 yards before you could hope to hit him with your much less powerful Brownings. Thirdly, by spending any time right behind him, you would find that your fighter aircraft would become uncontrollable in his slipstream. Accurate aiming then became impossible.
The answer was to do a quarter attack, starting from about 30 degrees to one side or the other of his stern, or from above or below. This avoided the slipstream effects and provided the bomber’s rear gunner with a difficult target. (See Appendix 3 — Air-to-Air firing from a fighter in World War II.)
Difficult as it was, some pilots took to it almost immediately. They were those who could judge speeds of approach, angles-off and ‘curves of pursuit’, by using eyesight and the equally marvellous computer in their brains to arrive at 250 yards from the target, with an overtaking speed of about 50 miles per hour and at an angle-off of about 30 degrees. They would then have about three seconds of firing time as they closed the range from 250 to 100 yards. During this time, their eight front guns would shoot off about 500 bullets, 10 per cent of which should, if correctly aimed, hit something vital.
When we were learning to judge distances, ranges, angles, heights and approach speeds at Yeovilton, we only had about 10 hours of Hurricane flying in which to master these skills. We then had to try them out on our poor instructors. As many of them had already spent part of the war flying unmanoeuvrable and underpowered fighters such as Skuas and Fulmars, and had probably lost half their fellow pilots and observers in doing so, they did not take kindly to pupils putting them to further unnecessary risks when they were again the targets.
Wiggy, my instructor, a skilled fighter pilot himself who was reputed to have shot down an Me 109 with a Skua, took me aside one day. “Crosley”, he said, while walking on the airfield, “you have a certain amount of flying ability, but you are going to kill yourself and me as well, if you go on with your quarter attacks as you are doing at the moment. You silly idiot, you broke off at about 10 foot range this afternoon and I could hear your engine noise, it was so close, as you passed underneath me. It’s all very well for you. You think you know what you’re doing and you don’t worry. I know you don’t know what you are doing and I’m frightened fartless. So don’t do it again, otherwise I’ll chuck you off the course. Got it? Good.”
I’m glad to say I was sensible enough to do what he told me. However, it was impossible to receive any sort of detailed instruction while in the air, as the TR9D radio sets in the aircraft seldom worked. However, they occasionally served some purpose, for if there was a sudden crackling noise — like a thousand Donald Ducks — you naturally inferred that it was your instructor getting angry at what you were doing, so you did something else.
Yeovilton has always had an aura of fun, competition, Wrens and fast cars. In 1941, the phenomenon of the ‘immobile’ Wren was new to us. The thatched country houses in the surrounding villages all seemed to have one, each more beautiful, rich and well educated than the last. Some had even been to Roedean.
The ‘immobile’ part of their title was intended to remind the Naval Appointment authorities at Lee-on-Solent — the Fleet Air Arm headquarters for ratings — that these particular Wrens were not volunteers for any job but only there for the one which was near their home. They therefore lived at home in splendour, knowing they could not be posted to Singapore, Colombo or Scapa Flow. Their mums were naturally keen that they should meet a good cross-section of Fleet Air Arm officers. There were therefore plenty of party invitations for us. We played tennis and croquet outdoors and various other games indoors.
Many of the pupils were extraordinarily gifted in the Arts. Sub/Lt (A) Barry Lyster on Course 20 was able to play and sing as well as Noel Coward or ‘Hutch’ and would keep us round the piano until the small hours. Some of the Sub-Lieutenants were extremely rich, including one with an orange Rolls-Royce. Local mums tended to be a trifle more protective than usual when they were around.
Then there were barn dances at North Cadbury. Wardroom dances were organised off the Station because KR and AI (King’s Regulations and Admiralty Instructions) forbade us to dance in public with Wrens in uniform as they were ratings and we were (perhaps) officers. Neither could the Wren ratings be invited into the Wardroom. To get round this, the Wrens dressed in their party dresses and danced with us at a suitable distance from Yeovilton. The dance was better and safer than those at the Café de Paris when Barry Lyster organised it, and cost us nothing but the beer.
At one of the parties, the time had come to leave. I and my immobile Wren were seated on the MG’s bench-type, air-cushion seat, ready for the off. Along came Geoffrey Russell-Jones, and I offered him a lift back to base. He climbed on to the bonnet and we set off. As the huge P100 headlamps on the MG still had their peacetime 65 watt bulbs, they soon ran the battery down unless peak revs were sustained. Since only a dim light emerged from the blackout masks, we had to follow the car in front and use his illumination.
A hill leads down from North Cadbury village and it suddenly turns left at the bottom, over the bridge. The red light of the car in front — another MG — had set off at a furious rate, and I couldn’t keep up. We just about managed to keep him in view down the hill when his light suddenly turned left over the bridge, leaving us in total darkness.
After coming to a standstill with a crash against the stone wall of the bridge, I had a look round for Geoff. I climbed out over the windscreen and peered over the bridge and listened. His description, as he remembers it, is as follows:
“One evening we went to a party somewhere, and coming back we all piled into your little MG. You had a bird beside you and I sat outboard on the nearside wing facing aft. You never quite managed a small bridge. The bird went through the windscreen and I carried on with a lamp under my arm doing a graceful somersault and landing on the bank of a stream 20 feet below. After you had sorted yourselves out, you could not find me, and there was a suggestion that I was simply a myth of someone’s imagination. Fortunately, after a square search, I was recovered.”
I asked him as politely as possible whether he had broken anything important. Having been reassured that all he was missing was his hat, we thumbed a lift home in a Station lorry. I went to the sickbay to have an arm stitched up and Geoff kindly ran my immobile Wren home in a proper car — his Hillman coupé — painted bright yellow and with a good lighting system.
Next morning I collected the MG from where I had left it. All that it needed was the light refixing and the track-rod straightened. I looked down into the reeds either side of the river and rescued Geoff’s hat. Fashioned by Gieves, it was still afloat. The accident showed that Wiggy was right. I was still following too close astern of my targets.
The Great Reaper took his usual five per cent per month at Yeovilton, as anywhere else in the wartime flying business. Lt K. V. Spurway, DSC, RN (who had helped to sink the Königsberg in Skuas) was driving his motorbike along the Sparkford to Ilchester Road and had a fatal head-on collision in a sudden fog patch. Two Fulmar squadron pilots, working-up at Yeovilton and practising night landings, piled in at almost the same place in their down-wind circuits on the same night. The Fulmar was not then fitted with an artifical horizon. Without it, the pilot had to keep his eyes outside the cockpit, looking for clues on the ground, rather than rely on the ‘turn-and-bank’ instrument. With only very few, dim, runway flares and with everything else in total darkness, the eyes could be misled. The spiral into the ground could start at the time the pilot selected undercarriage and flaps down. There was a gentle nose-down trim change as the flaps extended which required re-trimming. With his head in the office for a moment, the pilot could easily become disorientated. The whole lot might then spiral gently into the ground — a mere 250 feet below.
Of course this is only conjecture, but it seems a probable cause. The reason for the shortage of artificial horizons was the bombing of the Fleet Air Arm stores in the Midlands and a shortage from RAF sources owing to the sudden decision to increase the size of Bomber Command. In the first three years of the war, a combination of blackout, poor night flying illumination, pilot inexperience and a shortage of proper cockpit instrumentation, was responsible for many Fleet Air Arm crashes.
The last part of the Yeovilton course was drogue-shooting. It took place over the sea off Portland and we flew from a small clearing in the gorse on a hilltop airfield near Exmouth. It had been a flying club in peacetime, using Tiger Moths. It was far too small for inexperienced Hurricane pilots.
The social arrangements were, however, quite good. We were put up at a local hotel. While waiting to fly, we sat in the rustic clubhouse in comfortable armchairs, warming ourselves by a log fire. When fog descended in Lyme Bay, we ordered drinks from the bar from the club’s steward, and imagined ourselves to be pioneer aviators, like Amy Johnson (we had learned that as an ATA ferry pilot, she had recently disappeared over the Thames flying an Oxford) and other flying heroes. Their pictures, together with a few animals’ heads, festooned the walls. The drogue shooting results were not very good. Some did not manage to get a single bullet on the target.
We were allowed to use two of the eight guns on the drogue, 100 rounds per gun. This was enough for about five attacks on each of five sorties. The target-towing aircraft was a Boulton-Paul Defiant, not a Skua. Incidentally, we heard that the Defiant had had a brief moment of daylight fighter success during the withdrawal from Dunkirk. Its success was entirely because the Germans thought it was a Hurricane and, of course, came straight up its jacksie to shoot it down. As it had a revolving turret which could point most ways, the gunner in the rear of the Defiant had a nice shot with his four guns at the unsuspecting Me 109, — which hardly ever got back to base to tell its friends. However, one German pilot had baled out and survived. He told the other German pilots to beware of the ‘Hurricane that shoots backwards’. They then carried out head-on attacks and that was the end of the Defiant.
When we returned from our flying club holiday in Devon, we learned that we were going to do some decklandings in Fulmars, but first we would have to learn to fly it and do ADDLs (Aerodrome Dummy Deck Landings) on the airfield.
The runway which was chosen for ADDLs had white lines painted across it as make-believe arrester wires. The batsman told us that he was in charge and that if we did exactly what he signalled with his bats we would not be blamed for any crashes. This was the policy. The Form for any accident was the A25. The policy giving the batsman the power to fly us into the deck, over the side, or perhaps straight into the barrier, and then if we did not follow his orders to blame it on us, was a tenuous one. Batsmen were therefore carefully chosen: for their strength of character and their ability to charm, juggle with facts, conjure with strange devices, influence with weird signs, confuse with science and sway by emotion the decisions of others more senior, as to who was to blame for the thousands of accidents they presided over, and to equally influence Their Lordships that it could not have been their fault, when filling in Form A25.
“When the batsman says: ‘Lower’. I always go higher. I drift off to starboard and prang my Seafire. The blokes in the ‘goofers’ all think I am green, but I get my commission from Supermarine. Cracking show, I’m alive, but I’ve still got to render my A25.”
Generally speaking, a pilot of any ability at all was allowed two accidents. The theory probably worked on the principle that one could be misfortune but two must be carelessness. If there were to be a third — within, say, a year or so — he was classed as ‘accident prone’. This was a sign that the pilot might then be trained to become a batsman. Eventually this policy was discontinued and batsmen were chosen for their flying knowledge and skill. There was much wringing of hands in the policy change-over period, for until the new brand of batsman could be seen to be a radical improvement, they all tended to be tarred with the same brush. The better batsmen eventually became key appointments in a carrier and wielded as much power on the flight deck as Lt/Cdr (Flying) himself. A ship which could trust her batsman was a happy ship with a low accident rate.
However, our batsman at Yeovilton was one of the originals. He used the early signalling system — which always seemed to be telling you to do something elese. This mandatory approach encouraged paranoid behaviour and was the opposite to that of the American batsmen. The American system informed you politely that you were doing something wrong — such as: “I think you are too low, too fast, or too high”. It was then up to you to do something about it. You took the responsibility, not the batsman.
We found that the Fulmar, compared with the Hurricane, was a very staid old thing on the approach to land. Once trimmed into the approach, it would sometimes stay there. The visibility over the nose was not as good as in the Hurricane and for this reason, and because we could not get the same number of visual cues when landing it as in a Hurricane, we tended to obey the batsman more. There were therefore several broken undercarriages and burst tyres on our Course. This further reduced the numbers of Fulmars available at Yeovilton. In the event we were not required to go up to Scotland, as Argus was needed as a Hurricane ferry to Russia. Consequently, we left Yeovilton without any decklanding experience.
Most of the instructors had already had 18 months — some two years — of continuous operations and were usually glad to be allowed a comparative rest at Yeovilton. They still retained their sense of humour and their joy of life still burned bright. Each one of them could have made Admiral, had they lived. One of the most outstanding of our ‘heroes’ was Lt (A) R. J. (Dicky) Cork, DFC, RN. He was perhaps the smoothest aviator of them all. He was, moreover, irresistible to every Wren on the Station. He left a wake of wistful-eyed beauties wherever he went. He was entirely unaware of this effect and the emotional havoc he caused. He remained, it seemed, unselfish, impeccably mannered, a marvellous example to us less experienced youngsters.
Dicky left Yeovilton in October to join 880 Squadron as Senior Pilot to take part in the Petsamo operation. He it was who later had his own ‘private’ Hurricane in Indomitable. This was a hybrid, with the cannon-fitted Mark IIC wings but with the older, original Sea Hurricane I fuselage and engine.
When we said goodbye to our immobile Wrens at the end of the course at Yeovilton, none of us had been given any idea where we might be appointed. First we had to attend a ‘knife-and-fork’ course at the Royal Naval (Staff) College at Greenwich where Their Lordships had allowed us a month off flying to teach us how to behave. They failed to do so. However, we were impressed with the beautiful surroundings at Greenwich, especially the Painted Hall. We all thought that the Navy had organised itself very well to have such a beautiful palace as an Officers’ Mess in wartime. There were even white-coated, be-gloved stewards padding about, distastefully, yet deferentially sliding plates of rubber-egg, baked-beans-on-toast and watery porridge under our noses as we sat down at the lines of beautiful oak tables. However, the snooker tables were of high quality and so was the wine to those who had police pay to augment that of an Acting Temporary Sub-Lieutenant. There was also a sort of rumpus room — the Gunroom — where there was a strongly constructed piano of fine English kicked oak, and a vaulted stone roof which made singing such a pleasure — for the singers. As it was Christmas, several of us including Wrens, made up a choir. We sang carols and songs such as Early One Morning and Lyndon Lea. None of us had any idea what the technical aim of the course might have been. At the end of it we were still none the wiser about new weapons, new aircraft, new carriers or who was winning the war at sea.
In fact the Navy might as well not have had a single carrier at Christmas time 1941, for all the use that was being made of them in their proper task. Courageous, Ark Royal and Glorious had been sunk by November 1941 and the two large armoured carriers, Illustrious and Formidable, were in America under repair for a further six months. Both had been caught by Stukas while lacking fighter defence. Furious and Argus were ferrying RAF aircraft as usual. Eagle was on refit in Liverpool. Hermes was on ‘trade protection’ duties in the Indian Ocean. This was a totally useless task in the so-called ‘hunter-killer’ role — and, without a single fighter on board, she was shortly to be sunk by the Japs’ carrier aircraft in what was about to become a Japanese-owned carrier-fighter-patrolled lake. The new Indomitable was working-up in the Caribbean just before she ran aground at Kingston. (As a result she missed the Prince of Wales and Repulse episode.) This only left Victorious. She was at Scapa, but once again she had left her strike squadrons to fend for themselves in Coastal Command while she went on yet another ferrying trip — RAF Blenheims for Takoradi. Her fighter complement of 12 Fulmars and two Wildcats was meanwhile at RNAS Hatston in the Orkneys.
As we watched the postman each morning, hoping to find out from Their Lordships which fighter squadron wanted us, we had no knowledge whatever of this extraordinary and sorry tale. There were no slots for Sea Hurricane pilots — and no Sea Hurricanes either — except two pilots for 800 Squadron in Indomitable and one for 813F in Eagle, when she came off refit in December. I was the lucky pilot picked out of the bag for Eagle. Paddy Brownlee went to Indomitable. I have no idea about the others although Barry Lyster did not survive long. He was killed in a collision while flying Wildcats in the USA.
My appointment arrived two days before New Year’s Day. It told me in similar language to that used to appoint Admiral Byng: “Repair on board Eagle by 2400, 28 December, 1941”. I was to be spare fighter pilot.