We stopped at Gibraltar in Biter to refuel on 12 November and sailed for the UK next day. We had about 20 ‘empty’ liners in company with Avenger and Argus, and we took it in turns to do standby on deck, hoping for a Fw Condor to shoot down.
On the morning of the first day out of Gibraltar we heard the ship’s siren sound off. We rushed on deck into brilliant sunlight to see the 20,000 ton Warwick Castle down by the stern and rapidly dropping behind the convoy. She sank in about an hour with heavy loss of life, the sea conditions making rescue difficult. Avenger was operating her A/S Swordfish at the time but the U-boat (U-155) which torpedoed the liner was not found.
One of Avenger’s Sea Hurricane pilots — Sub-Lieutenant Gavin Torrence — landed on our carrier. Avenger was another of the dreaded Archer Class and was having trouble with her arrester gear again. He told us how her diesels had packed up — just like Dasher’s — on the last day of the Algiers landing and she had had to go into Algiers harbour to make repairs.
Gavin slept on board that night. When he awoke next morning he came into the ante room. “I’m not looking forward to going back to that ship. She’s got a jinx.”
His hand shook as he lit a cigarette and he looked pale and tired. One of the ship’s officers was nearby. “You from Avenger? . . . Well, you aren’t now. She went down last night. Torpedoed. Exploded. Only about half a dozen picked out of the water.”
His squadron, with 883, with six Sea Hurricane Is each — had fought PQ18 — the September Russian Convoy — through to Archangel in Avenger against some 90 Ju 88s and torpedo-carrying He 111s, but he still could not understand why we told him how lucky he was.
There were 12 survivors from Avenger. One of the lucky ones from ‘tween decks was said to have slung his hammock just where the ship split in two. None of the others in bunks could get out in time.
We flew off on 21 November, after a nine day voyage which we were thankful to complete without further drama. We landed at Macrihanish in Kintyre and went on a week’s leave. A week was not long enough to get to Somerset and back by train and bus even if I’d had the money for the fare. Gavin was the only one who could afford it as he had ‘survivor’s leave’ and a free travel warrant home. So I had a look round the Swordfish squadrons at Macrihanish. I came across a Lieutenant Horn who was flying a Swordfish down to Lee-on-Solent for some reason. I got into the back seat — and froze solid in spite of a leather, fur-lined flying jacket I had just acquired.
However, we got stuck at Blackpool with ‘weather down to the deck’ and all I could do was to telephone my immobile Wren twice each evening for the regulation three minutes. Two days later I returned from Blackpool via Arbroath and Donibristle, where I picked up a replacement Hurricane to help me on my way back to Macrihanish. For the next three weeks I spent hours by the phone each night hoping that I could get through to my wife or that she could get through to me.
Macrihanish was like a prison. There was nothing whatever to do in the long winter evenings apart from drinking watery beer, playing snooker in our flying clothing for warmth, and watching the wind lift the linoleum off the floor as it howled past our Nissen hut wardroom at 60 mph two nights out of four.
However, S/Lt Maurice Bannister provided us with some entertainment one night. He had organised a squadron dance. As he was our armament officer, he had naturally included a few explosions in the evening’s entertainment. The Wrens had put on their best stockings and we were all gathered round the fire between dances. There was a blinding flash and coal leapt all over the chairs and tables. Maurice had put a 20 mm cannon shell in the fire. Although he had refilled the cartridge case with Very Light powder — for a nice coloured effect as a Roman Candle — he had forgotten to remove the detonator at the far end. This ignited first and blew the rest all over the room, taking various articles of clothing with it. That was the end of the dance and Maurice was hauled up in front of the Captain and the Queen Wren next morning, with a ‘logging’ as the result.
On 23 December, Bill Bruen announced a week’s Christmas leave. This time I was determined not to be caught napping. I had already earmarked a Swordfish which I knew wanted to migrate south at this time. I had never flown a Swordfish, only started one up. But this made no difference. In two hours of flying I managed to get as far south as RAF Valley in Anglesey. The weather had got worse and worse on the way and by the time I landed I was having to follow every single indentation of the coast at nought feet in 500 yards visibility and with the cliff tops disappearing into the cloud. I had no r/t of course. Pilots of Swordfish were not allowed things like that. I therefore considered it unwise to go on.
The RAF put me up at their country house Officers’ Mess. There was plenty of room as it was Christmas Day and everyone was at home with their families or sweethearts.
So I spent Boxing Day struggling south again. The RAF said that even the seagulls were flying on instruments, but after I had explained that this sort of weather was nothing to the average Swordfish aviator, they let me start up and taxi out into the mist and disappear. The Stringbag was perhaps the only aircraft that was able to fly in such weather. I picked my way south, round every bay — hoping I could find the entrance again — as far as RAF Angle, in Pembrokeshire. It was so wet, cold and frightening by then that I landed there.
Next day I crossed the Severn estuary and followed the railway line to Exeter from the direction of Ilfracombe. The cloudbase was still about 200 feet and visibility about 500 yards. The railway line suddenly disappeared into a tunnel after a few miles. I had worked it out that when this happened I would climb up straight ahead into cloud. Then, after a bit of cloud flying — and if the map said that it looked safe — I would push the nose down and hope to pick up the railway line again as it came out of the tunnel at the far end. Pilot Officer Jack would have said that no immobile Wren, however warm, soft and beautiful, was worth taking risks like that and would have thrown me off the course. However, it worked well enough and I landed at Exeter to ask the way to Yeovilton. Once more the Swordfish reputation worked and they let me take off in the direction of Yeovilton, They forgot to warn me about the balloon barrage round Westland’s airfield at Yeovil, and the Observer Corps rang Yeovilton after I had landed there to ask whether a slow flying aircraft which they had heard fly straight through the barrage had arrived yet, or whether they should report the strange occurrence to Fighter Command.
My reward was to spend a glorious 18 hours at home until the early hours of 28 December. I discovered there was a Spitfire Vb at Lee-on-Solent, so I pretended I was an experienced Spitfire pilot — although I had never even sat in one — and they let me fly it back as far as Arbroath. The journey back took just over one and a half hours, above ‘the weather’ at 20,000 feet, instead of six hours of fog and rain at zero feet in a Swordfish. Lt Denham then flew me back to Macrihanish in a Percival Proctor, a wooden aircraft and quite the most frightening part of the trip.
When I got back to the squadron offices, everyone was gloomy. I soon found out why. The squadron was being broken up to re-form 804 and 891 Squadrons after their unhappy performance at Oran. The remains of 800 were going as instructors, or to reform on Hellcats in America, or to second-line duties for a rest. Bill was going to Yeovilton as Chief Flying Instructor, Bannister and Hastings to 891, I and Dougy Yate to 804. The only compensation was, first, that Bill had recommended me for Senior Pilot, perhaps of 804 eventually, he said. The second compensation was that I had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for my part in the squadron’s success at Oran.
The new 804 Squadron formed at Macrihanish on 3 January. We flew to RAF Ouston two days later with our CO, Lt (A) Jackie Sewell, DSC, RNVR. We nearly missed it entirely as it was covered in snow and was indistinguishable from the local countryside. It was just west of Newcastle. RAF Ouston had a beautiful brick-built mess, heated hangars, wide runways and a good ‘homer’. In other words, it was a run-o’-the-mill RAF ‘peacetime’ station. Reading 804’s line book, I found it had a war record equal to that of 800 Squadron. Jimmy Hancock was the Senior Pilot. He and Norman Goodfellow, ‘Piggy’ McClennan, ‘Spike’ Tracy (the Air Engineer Officer), and Jimmy Crossman, had been in the squadron for 18 months already. They were all very experienced, their flying dating from about Number 10 Course, a whole year before I had started to fly.
At Ouston, Dougy Yate and I were intrigued to come across several extremely smart Royal Marines. They tore us off the most shattering ‘beavers’ whenever we passed them and we wondered what we had done to deserve them. At lunch we found that the Marines came with the squadron as our own stewards. Such luxuries were a forgotten relic of the peacetime 804th. The CO, naturally, had kept quiet about them and Their Marine Lordships had therefore mislaid them. As the squadron had spent most of the war at such places as Sydenham and Eglinton in Northern Ireland, no one had spotted this anomaly. Our bathwater was felt, our uniforms pressed with knife-edge creases, our socks darned and these shattering salutes were received for another six months before our good fortune was discovered. Even the RAF was impressed. Life took on a new meaning. The squadron was born anew and we christened Ouston ‘Jolly, Jolly Ouston’ in our flying log books.
While at Ouston, we discussed Oran, and why our CO now had to attend a Board of Enquiry. Neither Dougy nor I had any idea of the basic reason why 804 and 891 in Dasher had lost nine out of their 14 aircraft at Oran. (See Appendix 4, HMS Dasher and 804 Squadron’s failure at Oran.) Norman Goodfellow and Sub-Lieutenant Jimmy Hancock told us that they had landed out of fuel on the salt lake at Oran. Norman described how he was fired at by the gunner of a Walrus on spotting duties. He writes: “By chance I met a chap from Rodney, the Walrus’ parent ship, ages later in Scotland. He said that the gunner had so riddled the Walrus hull with bullets while shooting at me that it almost sank before they could hoist it on board again.”
Life went on peaceably at Ouston. We sat in our warm, brick built dispersals when we were not flying, listening to the Ink Spots or Tommy Dorsey on a radiogram which some old ladies had presented and which had become part of the ‘Squadron Mobile Equipment’.
In February 1943, Jacky Sewell called us into his office and asked for volunteers for an operation. We all volunteered, but only six were needed. So the CO, Dougy, Norman Goodfellow, Murdoch Tait, Jimmy Crossman and I flew aboard the dreaded Dasher. The date was 13 February and it was probably a Friday.
Once we had landed on board we learned that we, and some of 891 Squadron who were already on board, were en route for Iceland. We were to be the fighter cover for JW 53 Russian convoy. The Ops Officer on board Dasher pointed out that, sadly, Avenger could not be with us. As if we didn’t know.
Things had not improved on board since we had left her at Oran. Still the greasy overalls in the Wardroom, the terrible smell of aviation fuel, no water in the cabins. The weather, too was awful and allowed no flying.
There were seven hours of semi-daylight in the Arctic at that time of year. Several of us remembered having spoken to members of 802 and 883 Squadrons from Avenger when she had returned to Scapa from PQ 18, the convoy before this one. They had had a very rough time indeed in their Hurricane Is, not only because of their lack of gunfire power against the 20mm guns of the German aircraft, but from their own AA which had shot down three of them. They warned us that the sea was so cold that if you ditched, you had three minutes before you passed out. They spoke about the Admiral’s insistence upon wireless silence for most of the time and, unlike the Germans operating from Norway, a relative lack of air/sea rescue arrangements for the British aviators. We six in 804 and the other six in 891 were not feeling too confident on the way to Iceland, but at least we would have cannon-armed Sea Hurricanes this time.
We sailed with 28 freighters. Then we ran into the worst storm for ages — a Force 11 ‘Severe Storm’. By the time we had reached half way to Iceland, six freighters had turned back, the cruiser Sheffield had had a complete gun turret roof removed by the seas breaking over her and we in Dasher were shipping it green over the flight deck and into the hangar and had lost two men overboard. The six Hurricanes lashed down on the flight deck were dripping salt water and I, for one, was prepared to be clapped in irons before I flew them.
Down in the hangar all chaos reigned. There were four Hurricanes in the roof of the hangar, as spares. They were slung on wires, without wings. They had worked loose and were butting each other, propeller spline against propeller spline, burring the spindles over as they crashed together. Below them on the hangar deck, the lashings on our Hurricanes had had to be tightened to such an extend that they had collapsed the oleos. Oil from them was leaking out onto the hangar making it like a skating rink. A complete 18-inch American torpedo had broken adrift and was washing to and fro in the water in the forward lift well. A five gallon tin of aircraft dope with its lid off was leaving a trail as it rolled in time with the torpedo. Although all aircraft had drained tanks, a strong smell of AVGAS as well as dope pervaded. I suppose a single spark could have set the whole thing off.
Barely maintaining steerageway and head to wind, the ship would occasionally fall off into the hollow of a huge wave. She would then roll through ninety degrees, broadside on. Down below, it was no more difficult to walk up the fore-and-aft passageway walls than it was to walk up the passageway deck itself. Sleeping and eating were impossible. There was nothing for it but to hang on to something solid and, like Jonah, wish for the day.
That evening the storm had eased somewhat so I thought I would make my immobile Wren a Hurricane ‘penny’. This was a copper penny, cut, bent and polished to the shape of a Hurricane. I had just found a workshop with a vice and had started sawing out the penny with a hacksaw when the ship gave an immense heave. The huge steel workbench came off the side of the bulkhead and smashed me back against an engine packing case behind me. I escaped only because I happened to be pushed back into a hip-sized indentation in the engine itself. I decided against anymore workshop do-it-yourself and retired to my bunk where I wedged myself in for an hour or two.
Later, I lurched, wide-legged and aching, to the wardroom. There, not to be beaten by the elements, were some other good sailors, Norman and the CO. They told me, with their glasses at 45 degrees and without spilling a drop, that the ship was coming to bits. There was a half inch gap between wind and water for 30 feet along the ship’s port side. It opened and closed everytime the ship rolled or heaved, and let in about a ton of water everytime. The ship’s galley fires were already out and the ship’s company were on cold rations. We were retiring to Seydisfiord on the west coast of Iceland to assess the situation. Few of the ship’s company realised this because the Tannoy system was also out of action. Later that evening, the RN ship’s Senior Engineer came into the wardroom and described the crack still further, saying that you could see the entire convoy through it when it opened. He also announced that because two men had fallen off ladders which had become unwelded as they climbed down them, and had drowned, the Captain had ordered the Duty Part to assemble in the welldeck with 14 pound ballpeen hammers to knock off any of the hand holds or ladders which remained. The welldeck had been filled with rusty iron in no time at all.
Next morning, with the storm abated, we dropped our pick in Seydisfiord in about 40 fathoms, using all the ship’s cable end to end. We then brought up some of the better-looking Hurricanes onto the frosty deck and changed their fuel, checked r/t, oleos and engines and sprayed them with fresh water inside and out to get rid of the salt. As this immediately turned to ice, they were taken down below again to melt. Jacky Sewell and some others of us had fun on the deck tractors, towing them about and sliding in ice-rinks of frozen green 100 Octane, spilled from our tanks. We looked ashore at the black and white misty mountains and the cold, ice-strewn sea between, and we hoped that we would not have to fly or force land or bale out.
As Dasher was once again quite useless, we managed to retrieve our 80 fathoms of cable after two hours of heaving in, and set course back to Scotland. Four days later Jacky, Norman, Bannister and I flew ashore in the only four flyable Hurricanes, determined at all costs to get airborne even if our engines were only firing on half their cylinders. I was flying a Hurricane from the hangar roof reserve, now with wings of course, so I made a special check that the aileron rigging wires had not been reversed accidentally by the rigger. All I noticed was that they were very stiff to move. The rigger said that he knew that, but it was only to be expected.
Once airborne, I thought I would do a turn to port in the normal way. I found I could only move the stick an inch either side of central and only by hammering it with the side of my hand at that. This process continued all the way to Arbroath. I did not complain over the radio. First, it was not working, second, I might be told to bale out or something stupid like that.
When we had all landed and were having a nervous drag, the Petty Officer rigger of Station Flight handed me my parachute bag out of the gunbay and told me that the aileron control lines were twisted. The CO heard my reply and looked at me in silence for a moment. But when I told him that taking the aircraft was the lesser of two evils and that Dasher was the other one, he agreed to take no further action.
We did not return to Ouston and the rest of the squadron was brought up north to join us at Hatston. Hatston was crowded with fighters including some new Seafire squadrons working-up for Illustrious and Formidable. We watched them taxying round the narrow perimeter track, unable to see ahead without swinging their long noses from side to side. Sometimes they overdid it, running onto the grass and up-ending in a drainage hole. They were doing their decklanding practice somewhere out in the North Sea. They were very impatient when we, on the runway, kept them waiting. They suffered badly from overheating particularly when taxying downwind — and they would start waving frantically from their cockpits at air traffic control to let them take off before they boiled. We had already seen one of them take off in a cloud of steam.
On 5 March we were at Hatston sitting in our Nissen hut crewroom with the radiogram full on and thick snow on the airfield and runways outside. Norman came in and told us that David Wilkinson had just landed his Seafire with a chap on his tail. The man was his fitter from Furious and he was so cold that he had to be kept in the same shape without bending him, all the way to the sickbay. The story was told in the Press next day. Lt (A) David Wilkinson, RNVR was a former Lord Mayor of London’s son, and therefore pressworthy. The papers of the day gave a remarkably truthful account of the drama and I will quote from it.
“For 15 minutes, Leading Air Mechanic James Edward Overed, 35, FAA technician, who had been swept off the deck of an aircraft carrier, clung to the tail of a Seafire.”
Here is his own story:
“The aircraft carrier was operating in home waters on a cold windy day with a snowstorm likely to break at any moment. We had headed out to sea at about 1100. The snowstorm had already begun and, with a hurricane blowing, we could hardly stand on the flight deck. When the order came over the loudspeaker the aircraft were duly ranged and placed into flying position, with the air mechanics standing by their respective kites. I was responsible for Lt Wilkinson’s and he was first off. The planes were all being ‘run-up’ as the ship turned into wind, and a terrible wind it was, too. Lt Wilkinson’s plane was running at a fast tick-over, warming up before the full-power check. He gave the signal for two men to lie on his tail, while he revved up to full power.”
“This task was done by another rating and myself. We both lay prone on the tailplane, he on the port side and me on the starboard, and we waited for the pilot to open up. After a while, the other rating got off to remind the pilot that we were waiting for him to open up. Then the fun began. The pilot opened up his throttle to full boost and up came the tail. I knew this had happened but still thought he was doing the full-power check. Then, the aircraft started to move forward but I had no feeling of forward motion. The terrific slipstream plus the hurricane was doing its utmost to remove me from the tail. The only grip I had was at the elevator hinge, so with this and my legs swinging in mid-air, I held on.”
“I had a feeling that the tail had come down on the deck again and I got ready to get off at any second. I had my eyes closed, but on opening them I saw to my horror that the carrier was below and astern and that we were just passing over the top of a cruiser underneath. I hung on like glue . . . I thought of my wife and daughter . . . I thought my number was up. I was tempted to let go when I saw the cruiser, for he might rescue me if he was watching, but decided to hang on. After about 15 minutes or so, I heard a reduction in engine revs and I prepared for a crash landing, not knowing where I was. The runway (at Hatston) was white with snow so I thought he was crashing in a field so I pulled my legs up in order not to have them trapped under the fuselage. After landing I did not remember anything more until I ‘came to’ inside the ambulance.”
“I was told afterwards that the pilot removed me and placed me upon the snow and covered me with his flying coat and put his Mae West under my head for a pillow . . . Next morning the pilot visited me in hospital, and though I was too full of admiration for his skill to speak, he said: ‘Good show, jolly good show’.”
If anyone wanted a better description than this of flight deck conditions before take-off, it would be hard to find. During the engine ‘run-up’, the two crew on the tail would have been in Wilkinson’s blind spot. When the man on the left hand tailplane got off, the pilot, already watching to the left to keep his eye on the flight deck officer for taxying instructions, would have seen him and assumed that both men were now off the tail. L. A. M. Overed’s continued presence on the right tailplane would, however, have been noticed by everyone on the starboard side of the flight deck and to those on Furious’s small bridge. However, there was no means whatever in Furious for wireless or loudspeaker communication between members of the deck party, and the noise of the 50 knot wind would have drowned their shouts. So, when the green flag went down, Wilkinson took off. The bump reported by Overed was probably the Seafire’s tail striking the raised portion of Furious’ deck just before reaching her bow. Although the Seafire, with full slipstream over the tail plane would have had more than enough lift from fully forward elevator to hold the tail in the normal flying position with one man’s weight on it, it was nevertheless, a resourceful piece of aviation, particularly, when coming over the ‘hedge’, with the airfield covered in snow and at reduced power.
During the last days in March 1943, we and our ‘chummy’ Squadron 891, were ordered to carry out some decklanding practice. This was for the benefit of the new boys who had just joined. The only ship available for decklandings was the dreaded Dasher. She was back at Scott-Lithgow’s in the Clyde where she had just completed further engine and flight deck machinery repairs. When we returned to Hatston we had to leave Maurice Bannister behind in Dasher’s sick bay with ‘flu as he was too sick to fly. Shortly afterwards we heard he had been killed, learning later that Dasher had been torpedoed off the Clyde. Then we heard that she had ‘blown up’ of her own accord without any assistance from the Germans. We believed the last news. We could easily guess why. Much later, I met Lt/Cdr (A) Brian ‘Blinkers’ Paterson, MBE, DFC, RN, the batsman aboard Dasher when she blew up. He said that someone smoking had touched off the petrol vapour in one of her compartments below. He was batting an aircraft in to land at the time, when a great flame shot into the air all round him. He immediately dived 60 feet over the side. As he always wore a Mae West — even in the shower — he floated high out of the water and was picked up.
He told us that when he had ‘come to’ in the water astern of the flaming Dasher he could see hundreds of her crew jumping over the side straight into the black smoke and red flames of the burning petrol, where they were swallowed up and burned alive, unable to swim faster than the spread of burning petrol on the water.
Very few of her 528 crew survived the horror of 27 March 1943. Maurice Bannister was trapped in his cot in the sickbay. Of course we did not hear the truth straight off. We merely thanked our lucky stars that we had cleared off the ship the day before. Much later, we heard that we in 804 had been selected to embark again in this frightful ship to attack Tovey’s nightmare — Tirpitz. The idea was that we should attack her at her moorings in Altenfiord with a dozen Swordfish in the Arctic summer midnight. As she was surrounded with two layers of anti-torpedo nets and positioned alongside the vertical face of a 1000 foot mountain, a torpedo attack would have been impossible. It was particularly lucky for us that Dasher blew up when she did. This was just one of the insane ideas that Tovey’s Staff thought up against Tirpitz. She was now a hulk, but Admiral Pound still described her as ‘the ship on which the whole strategy of the war depends’ and which must be removed.
Of course, we wondered how our Russian convoy, JW 53, had fared without us in Dasher. We learned after the war that it had reached a position 250 miles north of Altenfiord before first being reported by a Ju 88. Only one ship was damaged by air attack on 25 February and, having relinquished the convoy to the protection of the Russian Navy and their Hurricane IIc CAP for the remainder of their voyage to the Kola Inlet, the British escort had returned to Scotland by 15 March 1943, unscathed. It is interesting to note that there was a Squadron Leader ‘Nat’ Gould, DFC, RAAF, at Murmansk in 1941, teaching the Russians how to fly Hurricanes. He and twenty other ‘Aussies’ later joined us in 880 Squadron at the end of the Pacific war, as ‘reinforcements’ for the intended Operation ‘Olympic II’.
A week after our arrival at Hatston we were ordered to remove ourselves to RNAS Twatt. If Hatston was primitive, Twatt was Neanderthal. We slept in the usual unheated Nissen huts, but these were dispersed over several fields, half a mile from the wardroom and totally unlit. The intervening fields were only partly drained by deep ditches covered in thin ice and camouflaged with snow. Aviators returning to their pits in the Nissen hut at night from the bar in the wardroom would arrive like despondent Christians, having lost themselves and fallen into the frozen slough of one of these ditches.
During the preceding summer the drains at Twatt had given the Captain much trouble. His neighbours at Skeabrae operated Spitfire XIIIs. When Skeabrae was down-wind, the telephone would ring in his office with a Group Captain at the other end complaining that his boys couldn’t fly at 40,000 feet because they were suffering from Twatt’s disease. After many unhelpful conferences with the Ministry of Works, the Captain had decided to use his own initiative. He emptied 50 gallons of neat Lysol into the station’s sewage works and that cured the smell. However, the smell got infinitely worse after a few weeks and even Hatston, ten miles away started to complain. The Captain’s efforts had killed all the bugs, both the good and the bad. Life being what it is, the bad ones then reappeared first, overcame the good ones and they now ruled again. The new brand of bug was quite beyond the experience of any drainage expert. Finally, the frosts came again and all the bugs hibernated. We were hoping that we would have moved on by the time summer came again and the bugs emerged once more.
I then caught chicken pox and was carted off to an isolation sickbay on the side of a hill overlooking Scapa Flow. After 14 days of this I talked my way into some sick leave, arriving home in Queen Camel unexpectedly. I was not a great success. I was spotty and pale and not the dashing fighter pilot image at all. However, all was not lost, as Jacky wrote to tell me that the 804th was coming south and I was to stay on leave until this happened. The reason why we came south was because the Navy had run out of Archer Class carriers and Sea Hurricanes, the former mostly having gone to the bottom and the latter having gone to Russia or to the Far East. We were going to be put out to grass, at the small grass airfield of Charlton Horethorne, a few miles from Sherborne. Furthermore, Jacky told me he had appointed me Senior Pilot. With this news, a beard to hide my spots and a visit to Buckingham Palace with my wife to collect my DSC, I was once again popular at home.
The difference between Twatt in midwinter and Charlton Horethorne in early spring was so extreme that several of us in 804 became delirious. Within days we changed from tense, introspective, disgruntled, under-confident grey shadows, into relaxed, outgoing and very gruntled fighter pilots. Jacky saw to it that, on this small ‘private’ airfield, I organised our flying mainly for pleasure, like a flying club. Our polished, becrested Sea Hurricanes — mine had a green knock-kneed camel painted on it — were spread out in lines. We stretched out on the beautiful green grass beneath them and listened to the skylarks. Occasionally one of us would take the squadron 12-bore and go down to the rabbit warren on the hill side and shoot some supper. Others would organise squadron parties, bathe or tinker with their cars. We called it ‘Jacky’s Holiday Camp’, having our own film shows, our own piano and radiogram in the airfield ‘clubhouse’, our crewroom. The Station Officer was a mere Sub-Lieutenant RNVR and he always warned us when ‘royalty’ was about to descend upon us from Yeovilton nearby. We would put on our uniforms and hats, begin to study Admiralty Fleet Orders and salute anyone we had not met before.
New flying techniques flourish in such surroundings. We became very proficient at the new fighter formation known as ‘finger four’. This was first used in Spain by the Condor Legion and later by the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. It allowed free movement and the use of everyone’s eyes to guard each other’s tails, unlike the close ‘vic’ formation as heretofore. Eventually, we could turn, dive, climb, strafe, re-form afterwards and then join the landing circuit, almost without altering our throttle positions and without the use of r/t. We could make a co-ordinated strafing attack — 16 aircraft ‘firing’ at once from three or four different directions — the first time this had been part of a squadron’s repertoire.
Four of us were then required to attend a week’s course in Ayrshire, funded by Lease Lend, to gear us up for our new aircraft — the Hellcat. We shared a famous golfcourse hotel with about 20 old ladies and 40 Pekinese. The ladies had paid heavily to get away from the war in the south and it seemed as if they resented our sudden appearance. They switched off the radio when we wished to hear of each new disaster as it happened and further encouraged their Pekinese to misbehave with each other and to occupy all the chairs and settees. The course turned out to be a waste of resources, for half of it dealt with the Double Cyclone Engine which was not used in the Hellcat.
Back at Charlie-H and with our wives and sweethearts once more, we heard that ‘Titus’ Oaks — our ‘flying water-pongo’ — had had his rudder removed by Snottie Bullen’s prop while in close formation practice for a war weapons week at Balbo over Devon. Both landed safely. Then, S/Lt Barker overshot his landing one day on the wet grass of Charlie-H and finished up with his spinner in the Sub-Lieutenant’s In-Tray, removing part of the Nissen hut en route. He was suffering from anoxia at the time after carrying out an oxygen climb with a defective oxygen mask valve.
A few days later a signal arrived at dispersal by cleft-stick messenger hotfoot from Yeovilton, to say that Dougy Yate, Norman Goodfellow, Murdoch Tait and I, instead of joining a Hellcat squadron in the States, had been appointed as instructors to the new fighter school at Henstridge, flying Seafires. Jacky Sewell and most of the others were appointed to the USA on Corsairs. Sam Mearns, much to his grief, was appointed to a Sea Hurricane A/S outfit in the Atlantic, on escort carriers.
It was inevitable that the FAA had to have the Seafire. It was the only fighter available that would fit into the new, low-hangar-roofed Implacable and Indefatigable. There were no other British aircraft. Hawker’s Hurricane replacement — the Typhoon — was too large, the Martin-Baker MB5 was not being built and the Blackburn Firebrand had yet to fly properly. The Hurricane itself was not available in sufficient quantity and it was unlikely to be fitted with the Griffon engine or be modified to allow wing folding. Nevertheless, we had heard much about the beautiful Spitfire and we looked forward to our new task at Henstridge, although we were sorry that the 804th, raring to go and with its very high morale, had been broken up — on the First of June, too.
Sadly, we heard later that Jacky had been killed soon afterwards in a collison in a Corsair with his new Senior Pilot — Lt David Watson — of 1837 Squadron in the States. I also heard that Lt/Cdr (A) Rupert Brabner, DSC, MP, RNVR, had been killed in a flying accident.