When the Henstridge farmers heard that the low-lying land to the south of their village on the A30 was to be turned into a Naval flying station they thought that the river would be allowed to flood the valley for Naval seaplanes to take-off and land. Instead, they were surprised to see the immense drainage scheme that was undertaken — the first since the days of King Alfred — which made it possible to lay asphalt runways in four directions, plant Nissen huts and hangars round its winding perimeter track and build more Nissen huts in the undergrowth for accommodation. After this, they watched their pubs gradually fill up with sailors, then pupil aviators and finally, instructors. Then the Seafires arrived.
The aircraft were secondhand Spitfire Is. Some had hooks fitted and were called Seafires. The older Spitfires still had their bullet-proof attachments to the front of their windscreens where they had been added as an afterthought in 1939 at the insistence of AVM Dowding.
Norman Goodfellow, Snottie and I were detailed for ‘B’ flight; Tait and Yate for ‘A’ Flight. Our Flight Commander was Lt (A) ‘Ben’ Lyon, DSC, RNVR and ‘A’ Flight Commander was Lt (A) David Carlisle, RN. The Chief Flying Instructor was none other than Lt/Cdr (A) Dicky Cork, DSO, DFC, RN. Other instructors were S/Lt (A) Gavin Torrence, RNVR, Lt (A) ‘Blinkers’ Paterson, MBE, DSC, RN — the Air Gunnery Officer — S/Lt (A) Tim Singleton, RNVR (the son of a Lord Chief Justice who had given the Pilgrims’ School an extra half holiday for our singing one year) and the ‘orrible ‘otchkiss — S/Lt (A) Sam Hotchkiss, RNVR. Beside the Captain and the Commander there were only five straight-stripers on the Station and of these, three were RN (A) ‘Short Service’ Officers.
The day I arrived, Dicky Cork saw me in the wardroom at lunchtime. He said: “Hallo Crosley. You’ve flown Spits before I suppose. Get hold of one and meet me over the airfield at 1600 for a bit of formation flying. OK?”
I re-read Pilot’s Notes for the Spitfire Ib. I tried to cast my mind back to a Christmas, eight months ago. I had flown it in a careful straight line and had learned nothing about it. ‘Ben’ (John) Lyon showed me the ‘taps’ and I strapped in, started up and, pretending to know what I was doing, taxied out and took off.
After a few private loops and rolls and a bit of slow flying, I came over Henstridge to meet Dicky. He flashed by me out of the sun and I spent the next five minutes catching up and trying to formate on his port wing. I could not have been making a very good impression for I found the stick forces so light in the pitching plane that I was continually over-correcting. My Spitfire was prancing up and down alongside him like a mustang.
I found that the aircraft I was flying was not a Spitfire Ib, but a hooked Seafire Ib. The latter had almost zero stick forces on the elevator control, a phenomenon that I had not expected and which was totally different from the Hurricane. I described the flight in the ‘Duty’ column of my flying log as: “Trying to formate with the CFI”.
I had heard that the Seafire, like the Spitfire was a delight to fly. I would have to get used to the much lighter stick forces. I soon found out its other characteristics. Its thin wings and smaller frontal area increased its level speed over that of the Hurricane by 30 knots IAS at all heights, at identical power settings. In the dive, whereas the Hurricane more or less stopped at 330 knots, the Seafire got faster and faster until it had some 380 knots on the clock.
Ex-Hurricane pilots and those of our pupils who had been trained on the American Harvard must all have found the Seafire’s light elevator forces very difficult to get used to. The American-trained pupils must also have found navigation difficult. Whereas they could fix their position easily in the US by a quick look over the side to spot the only river or only road for 100 miles around; when flying over southern England, the countryside looked like a patchwork quilt, every patch looking the same as its neighbour and full of identical rivers, railways or roads.
Flying training in the Seafire was a tricky occupation. It was a superb flying machine, but, like the Hurricane, it had been designed to operate from grass airfields. Grass gives freedom to taxi from side to side so that in a long-nosed aircraft like the Seafire, the pilot can easily see where he is going when on the ground. Likewise, when landing on grass, the soft ground has a far greater rolling resistance than hard runways. The Seafire’s brakes, were, therefore, over-used at Henstridge and tended to fade due to overheating after a short runway landing. The Seafire, as opposed to the Spitfire, had the immense weight of an arrester hook added a long way aft of its centre of gravity, and the 28 pounds of solid lead added by the front engine bearers had not entirely corrected this tail heaviness. In the case of the Seafire III series, the aircraft was so unstable fore and aft that it should not have entered service in that condition. (See Appendix 11 (c) Stability Problems in the Seafire.)
I have already mentioned how the Seafire’s progress round Hatston’s narrow perimeter track was often interrupted by its running off onto the grass at either side. When this occurred at Henstridge, the wheels sank into soft clay and the aircraft became a write-off as it went up on its nose, shock-loading the engine and bending the engine bearers. Slow taxying to avoid this, or taxying downwind, led to engine overheating. Although this could sometimes be cured by turning across wind so that the prop slipstream went through the radiator under the starboard wing, this usually caused the oil cooler to overheat under the port wing and the aircraft had to be towed back to cool down and try again. After the anxiety of taxying — knowing that the eagle eye of your instructor followed you round — the pupil might at last be rewarded by the take-off. Once the tail was raised — by prop slipstream over the tail and a small push on the stick — and the pilot could see where he was going, the true enjoyment began. The acceleration was like a racing car. Once airborne, the Seafire responded with the sensitivity of a polo pony to nearly all our ignorant demands upon it. It behaved in its normal habitat with such unselfish grace and with such rapid response and power, that we knew we were being allowed to fly a thoroughbred. Once we were climbing away into the sky, all we had to do was keep our eyes open and the enemy could not touch us. (Appendix 11 (a) — Some Seafire flying characteristics.)
We instructors considered ourselves particularly lucky in having Dicky Cork as our CFI and ‘Wings’. When 880 Squadron was landed ashore after Indomitable’s retirement after sustaining her serious damage in ‘Pedestal’, Dicky spent a few months in the USA and then returned to UK to organise flying at Henstridge.
He was a valuable buffer between us ‘branchmen’ and the authorities. The Captain was a kind, almost benevolent man in his dealings with his RNVR aviators, but the Commander was not quite so patient. He was a destroyer man, and Dicky and he did not see eye to eye, “remarkable man though he is in many ways” the Commander was heard to say. The Commander himself was equally brave in his own way, verging on the intrepid. He was determined to learn to fly. He came past our Nissen hut at ‘B’ Flight one morning in a Tiger Moth with the ‘orrible ‘otchkiss in the back as his instructor. As the Commander was the senior officer on board, ‘otchkiss had no power to alter things. There was a strong crosswind blowing, and two ratings, each grasping a wingtip, were having trouble keeping their hats on and the Tiger Moth on the perimeter track as it swept past. A flurry of yellow and blue, they zigzagged past us at about 20 mph and the Commander could be heard above the noise of his revving engine shouting “Handsomely, there. Handsomely”, to each rating in turn.
The whole lot disappeared out of control past our hangar, in a series of groundloops. When we later asked one of the ratings on the wing tips what he thought ‘handsomely’ meant, he said: “Push like fuckinell, Sir, I expect”.
We had no doubt that the Commander had seen our merriment as he went by. So next morning we expected and received one of his most meticulous inspections. He descended on us very early indeed and from a great height. There was a long list of matters to attend to in his report. The Commander told ‘Ben’ Lyon to make sure, next time, to have all ratings with hats on and chin stays down. They should be standing to attention by their aircraft. Drip trays were to be cleaned out, fire buckets were to be full of water or sand and not yesterday’s half-eaten Tiddy Oggies (a Naval type of Cornish pastie) or fag ends. All aircraft were to have their cowlings on, even if they had no engines, and all pointed the same way. So far as the squadron offices were concerned, they came in for more criticism. There was to be “clean blotting paper on the desks and pens arranged in order of size”. Ben then told Dicky that our flying would, henceforth, be nil on all inspection mornings, as the finding of clean blotting paper and pens in order of size would take time. We had no further trouble from inspections of this sort.
It was inevitable, however that one of us would eventually fall foul of the Commander. Norman Goodfellow was the unlucky man. In Dicky’s absence, he had gone to the Captain to complain when one of his best pupils had been thrown off the Course for landing his Seafire in what was judged by authority to have been a carefree manner. Norman had reported that the cause of the accident had been because the pupil concerned was suffering from anoxia following an oxygen climb. When he landed, he, like Barker in 804 Squadron, could not remember a thing about it; but Norman’s mistake of protocol in going over the Commander’s head to plead for his pupil was frowned upon even more than the accident. The Captain sent Norman back to see the Commander and he rounded upon Norman and gave him a fortnight’s Duty Boy.
Henstridge was an extraordinarily happy place otherwise and as time went on it was probable that the Commander realised that he should not try to apply the strictures of a peacetime battleship to a crowd of RNVR schoolboys enjoying themselves in the heart of the Dorset countryside. It was Gavin Torrence, assisted by the ‘orrible ‘otchkiss, who put aviators and administrators back on an even keel. Through some clever impersonations on the telephone they managed to arrange for a completely fictitious Course of new pupils to arrive ten days early. As these new pupils included some Indian or Moslem-type pilots, special eating and praying arrangements were laid on. The telephone was going all the time in ‘B’ Flight, with Gavin’s arrangements falling into place, for days on end. When the transport sent to fetch them arrived back from Templecombe railway station at the appointed hour without a single pupil, an investigation was put in progress to find out where the Course had gone. This took until midnight, by which time the Commander’s Officer realised that it was April the First.
During the autumn and winter of 1943, huge air and ground reinforcements came to England from the USA. These were some of the fruits of Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s Lease-Lend arrangements, made before Pearl Harbor and when British and Commonwealth blood was being shed for democracy for the rest of the world to enjoy. The Americans were generous. There were to be no cast-offs for the British. Wildcats, Hellcats, Corsairs and Avengers were in service in the Royal Navy simultaneously with those in the US Navy and Marines and at no immediate cost to the British taxpayers. (Appendix 6 — Inter-Service rivalry.)
Long range aircraft such as the Liberator, at last being made available from Bomber Command for their proper use as anti-submarine aircraft in the Atlantic ‘gap’, were also being delivered to England by air. They flew via Iceland straight from the USA. Sometimes they arrived over the UK and found it entirely covered by cloud up to 25,000 feet. The pilots had no idea where they were or whether it would be safe to come below the cloud. By the time that they had covered the British Isles from north to south without seeing the ground, they became desperate. Some used to break cloud a few hundred feet above the mountains and survive. Others would hit a ‘stuffed cloud’ and perish. Other luckier ones might break cloud and catch sight of an airfield. One of these airfields was sometimes Henstridge. These silent, white-painted monsters would suddenly appear off the end of the runway and screech to a smoking halt at the far end, propellers stopped. The crew would immediately come out of every hatchway, kiss the ground, throw the Dorset clay over their heads joyful in their deliverance. After they had collected their baggage we would take them to the wardroom in our various motor cars. There, with only short interruptions to send messages home, they would blunt the sharpness of their nerves in Strong’s Best Bitter until carted off to bed in the small hours of next day.
We later found out the reason for their poor navigation. Lockheed used the metal fuselage for the ‘negative return’ to the aircraft batteries and variations in the electrical load and route taken, caused up to 15 degrees compass variation due to induced magnetism, which was unpredictable.
Next day, when the Liberator crew had sufficiently recovered, they would unload their huge aircraft of everything heavy, including its guns still wrapped in manufacturer’s tape, and with three crew only, line up on the longest possible runway for a take-off. The four Double Wasp engines, their exhaust-driven turbo superchargers whining, would then flatten the hedges and trees behind them with their slipstream as they ran up to full emergency power on the brakes before take-off.
Although the Liberator sailed into the air with a few feet to spare, a Martin Marauder which tried the same thing a little later in the year nearly came to grief. Although the Marauder had a better power-weight ratio than the Liberator, its unstick speed was 35 knots higher. As any student of physics will know, the excess energy required for a take-off at this much higher speed was roughly in the ratio of 1:2. We therefore worked it out that the Marauder wouldn’t have a chance of making it. So we all watched, with cameras at the ready.
A Wellington bomber had already overshot the far end of the longest runway a week before. It was still there, lying across the river, a useful pier from which to bathe or fish. Perhaps the river was now going to be bridged for a second time, this time with a Marauder full of even more exotic instruments, fan motors, and wireless sets for use in our cars.
At last a day arrived having a full 20 knots of wind blowing down the longest runway. The American pilot, superbly dressed in his highly polished boots, brown two-piece leather flying suit, studded with guns, goggles, badges, fasteners, knee pads, pencils and two stopwatches, smiled a dazzling smile as he climbed up into the cockpit of his lethal looking, anhedral fighter-bomber. Getting a tractor to push him backwards against the hedge, so gaining a few more feet of take-off run, he started each 2000 hp engine in turn, warmed them up and then ran them separately at full power. In doing so, a man on his bicycle, passing astern of his aircraft on the road behind and all unsuspecting of the knife-edge blast of the slipstream across his path, was lifted with his bicycle into the far hedge as if he had been an autumn leaf.
It was exciting, watching the Marauder gather way slowly and begin its headlong dash for the far hedge, nosewheel held firmly on the ground. At the very last moment the pilot yanked back on the stick with full nose-up elevator. The nose reared up, the tail skid hit the runway in a shower of sparks and after an age, the roaring, smokey beast lifted off the ground a few feet, purely on the ground effect, and banged down again in a shower of turf and mud in the grass overshoot area. It continued like this until the wheels hit the far bank of the river which bounced it into the air again. This time it staggered along at hedge height, seemingly flying through several willow trees by the river, clawing its way skywards, its two airscrews thrashing white vortices into the damp Dorset air. Two minutes later, flaps, engine gills and wheels retracted, engines throttled back in polite deference, and in a beautifully judged shoot-up made in the best possible taste, the Marauder flew off to its Cambridgeshire airbase, there to work-up for the daylight raids shortly to begin over Germany and France, before the ‘Second Front’ landings took place in six months time.
In the winter of 1943 we often had to struggle to complete our flying programme in the short daylight hours and there was little time for relaxation with our wives or sweethearts. Even in the summer there was seldom time for cricket or some such relaxation unless the weather was far too bad for flying. One day, when we had waited all the morning for the weather to make up its mind one way or the other, Norman had an idea. This was to give the weather an artificial nudge. ‘Seaweed’ alone had the power to arrange matters. He worked at his Met charts in an adjoining Nissen hut. He seldom, if ever, looked through his small hut window to see what the weather actually was. He preferred to rely on his charts. However, Norman intended to give him an ‘actual’ from a watering can. He climbed stealthily onto the roof of the Met Office and poured the ‘rain’ onto the Met Officer’s window with a watering can. While this was going on I telephoned Seaweed for his afternoon’s forecast. It only needed for me to ask him to have a look outside at the ‘rain’ now falling and he cancelled flying for the afternoon, noting the onset of precipitation on his Met chart accordingly.
My immobile Wren and I now lived in a house in Long Street in Sherborne. My wife’s mum had died and it became necessary to move from ‘Camel Farm’ in Queen Camel. But when I had to sleep ‘aboard’ on duty I shared Hut 13 with the instructors. The beds were arranged as in a crowded and thoroughly septic ‘Scutari’. Some had small wardrobes in between, others had small tables. In the centre of the hut was a small coal-burning, cast-iron stove. There were two ceiling lights, switched on and off by a switch at the door. There were no windows of any sort. The floor was of bitumen. The washing and other arrangements were in a separate hut about 100 yards away.
Each night, ‘Seaweed’ would rise from his bed in the darkness, shuffle his way towards the door and go outside for a walk to the Heads. We had long since decided that the Heads were too far away and preferred to pee out into the blackness of the night from the shelter of the hut doorway. This, as it happened, was all over Seaweed’s radishes. When he produced a bowl of radishes from time to time at tea, he was surprised that none of us liked radishes. He offered his lettuces and none of us liked these either.
Porridge was another thing we seemed to dislike. It happened like this. Each night that we had both petrol and money, one or the other of us would tow a whole lot of instructors on their bicycles to the local pub, the Lion at Marnhull. On the way back, those who made it without crashing, repaired to Hut 13, there to await the cooked delicacy. This was usually heated-up leftovers from the wardroom galley. The ‘duty cook’ for the evening was Murdoch Tait. He found the galley had been locked and he had to get in through the pantry window.
He turned up late with our plates of food in Hut 13 and we were complaining. He told us that when he got in through the pantry window he had lowered his flying boot into tomorrow’s still warm porridge. He said that he only noticed it after it had welled over the top and into his socks. It was getting all this cleaned off and back into the porridge tureen that had taken the time. None of us, including the Met Officer, had porridge next morning.
Then there was the case of Gavin’s flying boots. He was one of the unlucky officers whose bed was by the door of Hut 13. He was slap in the path of the traffic to and from the radish beds. One night, in the total darkness, someone opened his wardrobe door instead of the Nissen hut door and filled his flying boots in his wardrobe. It was several days before he discovered this. It was no joke. Beds near the door were therefore allotted to newcomers who were not entitled to wardrobes anyway. Hut 13 was being used as a farmer’s pigsty when I saw it in 1963 so that it had not changed much in 20 years.
At about this time, news started to filter through the grapevine that there had been a FAA disaster. Twelve squadrons had been operating more than 100 Seafire LIIcs as fighter cover from four or five escort carriers in the Mediterranean. Admiral Vian was in charge of the carriers supplying this fighter cover for the landings near Naples, Operation ‘Avalanche’ at Salerno. His report on their operational use and efficiency had been full of criticism, particularly of their short range, their lack of speed to catch the Fw 190s and their total unsuitability as decklanders. We heard that 70 had been lost in the first two days operations, in accidents. (For the proper reasons for the Seafire’s failure see Appendix 5.)
In the summer months of 1943, an incident with the MG convinced my immobile Wren and I that it was time to get another car. Driving to Henstridge one morning, a lorry ahead slowed down as a cow walked across the road in front of it. With its inadequate brakes, the MG slid under the tailboard of the lorry and we stopped with it three inches from our windscreen. It bent the Union Jack flagstaff on the radiator, but did no further damage. The lorry driver got down out of his driving cab, looked down at our car and said; “Can’t you see no Tri-bloody, angu-fucking-lation Mark?”* He then got into his driving cab and drove away, bending the flagstaff back the other way as he did so. Looking at the Union Jack, my wife said: “Let’s get another car”. So we did. The choice consisted of a 1934, red Hornet Special or a loan of my brother-in-law’s 1939 BMW-Frazer-Nash 327. Both did about 90 mph and 20 miles to the gallon. Both were flashy cars, with open exhausts here and there and a good deal of chromium. The Hornet cost £75 and the brother-in-law’s was free. However, he might return any moment from his job in the Army Legal Department in Beirut and I would have to hand it to him in the same pristine condition in which I had found it. That could be expensive. In the end we used the BMW for dignified occasions and the Hornet for mucking about.
During the trial runs of the Hornet, we had touched 80. There was nothing odd about this except it was in the blackout and in the winding country lanes round Henstridge. Dougy Yate was driving. Dicky Cork was on his left, pulling hard on the handbrake from time to time, and I was in the back, afraid. Dougy had been unaware of Dicky’s braking precautions so that his opinion of the car’s performance was not very good. Standing in the thin blue smoke of the red-hot Ferodo, he said that it lacked staying power in steep turns and would never make a good fighter. Apart from the Hornet’s colossal oil consumption and its propensity for ‘running’ big ends in the resultant dearth of oil, it worked well until the end of the war. So much for social arrangements. How was work progressing?
So many FAA pilots — including Butch Judd — had been killed making stern attacks, we tried for much of the course to teach the pupils how to make quarter attacks. The Seafire was fast enough to make this a possibility — even against the Ju 88. (Those who are interested should read Appendix 11 (b) — Pilot Gunnery Instruction.)
While at Henstridge, Dicky Cork was visited by some of his ex-Battle of Britain friends. One was Wing Commander ‘Splinters’ Smallwood. He suggested that we should come and do a few ‘sweeps’ over northern France with his wing of Spitfire IXs, based at RAF Church Stanton in Devon. The idea was to give us some Douglas Bader-type ‘Wing’ experience. These huge RAF fighter sweeps were aimed at attracting the German fighters into the air and reducing their numbers before the invasion. Dicky Cork said that flying in formations of up to 50 fighters at a time was bound to be a feature in the Pacific war which we should all have to fight one day, and that it would stand me in good stead in case I ever had a squadron of my own. So I volunteered, although it meant more goodbyes to my immobile Wren wife.
I joined Number 10 Group where Splinters was the Wing Leader. It was interesting to be a part of a big organisation, entirely geared for flying and nothing else. The RAF were complete professionals. The two squadrons in the Wing were Numbers 165 and 131. The Spitfire Mark IX was a heavier and more powerful version of the Spitfire Vb and was about 20 knots faster with 20 per cent more internal fuel. First introduced into RAF service in July 1942 it became the replacement to the Spitfire V series. Later versions were the first to be fitted with a ‘teardrop’ hood, a beautiful transparent canopy which allowed marvellous air-to-air visibility from the pilot’s seat. Some 6000 were introduced to equip 60 RAF squadrons.
Whenever we went over France the sky was often black with British or American aircraft, from zero to 30,000 feet. Although the Germans were now on their home ground it would have been the utmost folly for them to have tried to confront such air superiority and there was no serious opposition unless we attracted them into the air by combining with American Fortress raids as ‘area support’.
I also had to do my stint of stand-by duties and did several ‘Scrambles’. These were chases after unidentified low flying aircraft approaching from France. The last of these was on Christmas Eve 1943. We chased what looked like an RAF Typhoon — probably from Warmwell — to the coast of France, before turning round and coming back, unable to catch it up. It might possibly have been a ‘tip-and-run’ Fw 190 fighter/bomber, but I was doubtful. However, Fw 190 raids were quite a common occurrence at this time. They climbed to 25,000 feet over France, approached Plymouth at 400 knots in a steady dive, dropped their bomb and scurried off back home at nought feet, underneath radar. (This is exactly what they did at Salerno. No wonder our Seafire LIIcs could not catch them.)
The most impressive part of the RAF was not its flying, which was barely average by Fleet Air Arm standards, but its back-up organisation. Aircrew were briefed an hour before each flight, not a haphazard five or ten minutes as in Dasher. Every aspect of an operation was given in detail; r/t frequencies, call signs, air/sea rescue details, position of rescue aircraft and ships, likelihood of French agents to contact if shot down and weather in every detail. In addition we had extra ‘airborne’ rations; raisins, sweets, chewing gum for the nervous, soft drinks for those with dry mouths. Back at the Mess we would have extra eggs, fruit, nuts, orange juice and chocolate. There were special transport runs into the local town and to the local pubs. Entertainers visited the station regularly. Flying clothing was of a luxurious standard. We normally flew in battledress uniform at Henstridge as there was nothing else. The RAF flying clothing had pockets for everything and each pilot had a magnificent pair of black leather flying boots which, if we were shot down, would readily convert into tough, unobtrusive walking shoes. The Mae West was of a more recent pattern and had dye-marker, torch and whistle, and could be automatically inflated by pulling a toggle. Besides all this, the runways at Church Stanton were double the width and nearly half as long again as the longest Henstridge runway, making formation landings and take-offs safe and easy and with no strain on the aircraft brakes. Life was very easy and relaxed compared with the life aboard ship.
However, for some reason, we in the Fleet Air Arm, struggling with last year’s facilities, were not in the least jealous of the RAF. We seemed to take it for granted that we should be the poor relation. In fact we thought ourselves rather special, being able to cope without it. (See Appendix 6 — Inter-Service rivalry.)
Dicky Cork was relieved by Rodney Carver as CFI at the end of 1943. Dicky was appointed as CO of 15 Wing, 28 F-4U Corsairs, working-up in America for operations in the Far East aboard Illustrious. Lt/Cdr Rodney Carver, DSO, DSC, was another fighter pilot of outstanding ability and a super replacement for the incomparable Dicky Cork.
At about this time the Fleet Air Arm was in urgent need of a sensible replacement for the Swordfish and Albacore torpedo/bombers. The Fairey replacement, the Barracuda, was showing all the usual signs of intractable obsolescence even before it was fully in service, and the Admiralty appointed as Assistant Air Attaché to Washington, Captain Casper John — to organise Lease-Lend replacements. (See Appendix 6.) The latest American equivalent of the Barracuda was the Grumman Avenger. This was now replacing the Douglas Devastator in the Pacific US Fleet and forming new FAA Squadrons at home and in the States. It was a 45-foot wingspan, midwing monoplane in the Grumman style, with power-folding wings, a three man crew, a bomb bay stowage for a torpedo or 3000 pounds of bombs and a turning performance little short of a fighter after it had dropped its load. It could even out perform, out lift and out range the RAF’s Wellington.
In January 1944 I was told to take part in a trial with two RN Avenger squadrons forming at Hatston. The Avenger squadrons wanted to know whether it was better to defend themselves with their rear turrets’ 2 x 0.5 inch guns or to dispense with the guns, save weight and crew and protect themselves by evasive manoeuvres. The only thing wrong with their theory of using evasion in such a highly manoeuvrable aircraft was that they intended to remain in a close formation while they were evading. They had worked out that a sort of ‘coordinated’ corkscrew could be adopted. This would put the enemy fighters off their aim and still not cause collisions or separation among the Avengers while they plodded on to their targets.
Lt Alistair McAlpine arrived at Henstridge one day and we flew in his Stinson Reliant to West Wittering. There we collected two of the Naval Air Fighter Development Unit’s Spitfire Vbs and flew them to Hatston for the trials.
It was so frightening watching the Avengers behaving in formation in such a dangerous and drunken fashion only 250 yards in front of us that we completed the trials as quickly as we decently could and flew home again. We had decided that it was far safer for them to rely on ‘area support’ or ‘top cover’ à la RAF than to rely on either guns or drunken corkscrews. While Alistair and I had been at Hatston, we had met many of the pilots who had just bombed the Tirpitz so successfully, on 3 April 1944. One of the pilots flying Barracudas on this operation was my Yeovilton cabin mate, Lt (A) Geoffrey Russell-Jones, DSC, RNVR. He told me what he had done so far in the war and I thanked God that I had stayed on fighters.
The New Year of 1944 saw several changes for us at Henstridge. We all became Lieutenants overnight. Their Lordships considered that those who instructed others should have the dignity of two stripes. COs of squadrons should all be Lt/Commanders. These qualifications just included J. F. (‘Snottie’) Bullen who had at last reached the age of 20. Our pay increased to 15 shillings a day which put me above that of a Constable in the Met, so their assistance ceased.
At Yeovilton, 887 and 809 Squadrons were working up on Seafires for the landings in southern France. As the school’s Pilot Gunnery Instructor (See Appendix 11 (b) — Pilot Gunnery Instruction), I paid them a visit and met a couple of school friends, C. R. Prentice and Peter Meadway. Both had been in the choir at the Pilgrims’ School and Meadway had been the solo boy before me. I also heard news of Fl/Lt Jack Graham, DFC who had been Lady Macbeth, and Andrew Fairbairn, one of the three witches. The former had been shot down over France and the latter made a POW as a Lieutenant in the Scots Guards.
Back at Henstridge once more in April, 1944, I found that I had been appointed as PGI to 3 Wing. The new Wing consisted of four squadrons and 50 pilots. Lt Manley-Cooper, DSC, RNVR was Wing Observer, We used an old farmhouse on the airfield as our offices. The Wing had 48 Seafire IIIs and my first job was to go down to the air-firing ranges over the sea at St Merryn in Cornwall and take them up in the back of a Miles Master II to check out their air-to-air gunnery.
The tempo of the drogue firing programme at St. Merryn took the four squadron Commanders by surprise. In order to get enough firing done to make it worthwhile in the short time available, it was necessary to use each drogue, four times. It was then dropped, and the bullet holes counted. Each pilot’s bullets were dipped in different coloured dye before they were loaded. The dye on the bullets marked the canvas of the drogue if they passed through it, and the pilots were credited with their score accordingly. The programme needed careful timing, each pilot taking off, arriving at the target towing area, waiting for his turn, finishing his shoot, landing, refuelling, reloading and taking off again with a new pilot, and so on, with six aircraft in the air at once. It also needed perfect r/t communications particularly from the pilots of the towing aircraft, who were responsible for safety.
Lt (A) M. W. ‘Mat’ Wotherspoon, DFC, RNVR was in command of the target towing squadron. His boys would sometimes take off with their drogues at ‘short stay’ on some misty morning and that was the last anyone saw of them until lunchtime. There were, therefore, mornings of chaos as well as mornings of success.
One of the COs, ‘Willy’ Simpson, complained that he was no longer in command of his squadron. However, the three others were only too glad for someone to do the donkey work for them. The shooting results averaged about seven per cent hits. This was fairly good, considering one in eight of the pilots could not hit the drogue at all.
In April 1944 our Wing Leader, Commander Shaw, RN was relieved by Commander ‘Buster’ N. Hallet. Although Buster was a straight-striper, a Dartmouth Cadet dating from 1926 and therefore ‘suspect’ to the average Branchman of that time, he soon set about changing our minds on that score. He must have been one of the very few people in the straight-stripe Navy who could understand the minds of us RNVR aviators. He could recognise our irreverent and lighthearted approach to traditional RN discipline as something which was necessary and which greatly increased morale and the joy of living for us in an otherwise unfriendly and dangerous world.
The second thing he did on taking over the Wing was to get us a better low-level version of the Seafire III. This had the Merlin 55M engine, which gave more output at low level and less at high altitude. This was because the 55M engine had a ‘cropped’ blower. It did not then absorb the engine power to no purpose at low altitudes. The energy saved was then available for going faster and farther on the same fuel. A third improvement then followed. This was the replacement of our fixed 100 mph GM Mk II gunsight with the new GGS Mk IID gunsight. (See Appendix 7 — The Gyro Gunsight Mk IID.) This sight had two ‘rings’. One was a fixed, four-degree ring and merely substituted the GM Mk II ring for those who wanted to use it. The second ring altered its aiming point such that, if the pilot kept it on the target, it would automatically allow the correct deflection.
A fourth modification was then made to our Seafire LIIIs, as they were now called. This was to remove the last two feet of their elliptical wing tips. This allowed us a better rate of roll. The decreased area made no difference to our low level turning circle and the slightly reduced drag made a further small increase in indicated air speed (IAS).
The Seafire LIII now had 200 more horsepower at 3000 feet than the Spitfire IX. Its fuselage was lighter by about 200 pounds. It was further lightened in 3 Wing by removing half the gun ammunition and taking away the two outboard .303s altogether. In this condition it could out-turn, out-roll and out-climb the Spitfire IX at all altitudes up to 10,000 feet, a feature which would come into urgent use on several occasions in the forthcoming operations. At last the Fleet Air Arm had an aircraft which could out perform, in a narrow heightband, its contemporary in the RAF. All we needed was a certain amount of good luck, “excellent sight, very quick reactions and lots of self-confidence” (German ace Galland’s opinion) — and we should succeed.
By May 1944 we were beginning to wonder what task Their Lordships might have in mind for us. All soon became clear, however. We were sent on a course of bombardment spotting to an airfield in Ayrshire. I journeyed northwards in the Master II. The Clyde was packed with ships bristling with guns. They pounded away at the Isle of Arran and we circled overhead, trying our best to give them directions by means of a complicated code over the r/t, so that their shells fell somewhere near the target. It all worked fairly well as long as there was good r/t contact between us and the ship doing the firing. This was, however, seldom the case and we wasted at least half our flying time trying to raise the Navy on the r/t.
During this time in Scotland we first met the ‘C-Balls’ or Carrier-borne Air Liaison Section, or Army language for half a dozen soldiers who told us, on maps, what they were doing ashore and how we could help. They taught us how to carry out the spotting routine in the safety of a cow barn on the airfield. The boss of C-Balls was Major Michael Scott, Royal Devons, assisted by Capt Bob Hudson, RA.
C-Balls rigged up a scale model of a typical enemy target. They used hessian canvas and models of farms, transport, cows, German soldiers, etc., camouflaged as we might expect them to appear from the air. The target area represented several square miles of territory. We sat around the target in the barn, staring down at it as if from our aircraft in real life.
Soldiers somewhere underneath then blew puffs of smoke from eye droppers through the hessian to simulate shell bursts. We then had to make corrections to the fall of shot to bring them onto the target. The soldiers would oblige with their eye droppers again.
There were two methods we could use. The first was ‘Ship Control’. We could ‘hang a clock’ over the target, with 12 o’clock on north, using the clocktime as directional information. Distance information on the fall-of-shot was given in yards.
The second method, not as popular with the gunners as the first, was ‘Air Control’. In this system of control we would tell the gunners what to do: “Up 400, right 600”. The aim was to ‘bracket the target’ first of all, using just a few guns. Once the shot had been adjusted to fall over, then short, or right then left, of the centre of the target, to ‘bracket’ it, the pilot controlling the shoot would halve the distances between the two extremes and order “Fire for Effect”. If he was correct and the ship’s gunners had done what they were told, four or five broadsides would then fall on the target. If he was incorrect, or if the gunners had made a mistake, the four or five broadsides would fall in an adjoining field. Once the gunners started to ‘Fire for Effect’ they tended to get carried away. Nothing could stop them until they had completed their four or five broadsides.
When the battleships had completed these broadsides, a voice might then be heard over the r/t asking how they had got on. It was sometimes with poignance that we had to say that all their fifteen tons of shells had fallen a quarter of a mile away. It was natural under such circumstances that the airman got the blame. Ships therefore tended to use ‘Ship Control’ and not ‘air control’.
Before the Seafire became available for spotting, it was usual for the ship’s own Walrus or Fairey Seafox to be catapulted for this purpose. When, early in the war, Lt E. G. Lewin, RN had spotted for the Exeter’s guns in the Battle of the River Plate against the Graf Spee, he probably knew each gunner personally and they trusted each other. Success was therefore assured. This was seldom the case in large bombardment spotting operations. However those about to open fire over the Normandy ‘D’ Day beachheads were by far the most successful of any, for they carried out their shoots at close range with the ships at anchor and where the starting position of the shell and its hoped-for destination were known accurately.
After returning to Henstridge from our shooting practice we were shattered and sickened to hear of the death of Dicky Cork. Although it had happened 10,000 miles away, it hit us hard at Henstridge. It seemed he had scarcely left us. We heard that when he was about to take off from China Bay airfield in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, another Corsair, driven by a sprog pilot, had landed on top of him. We did not ask for further details, for it sounded so typical an accident due to non-existent flying control, that we believed that it was the true story. After the war the history books told an entirely different story of this accident, blaming it on the dead pilots and absolving the airfield from all blame.
No one knows exactly what happened. However, it was beyond belief that the accident was due to Dicky Cork’s disobedience of an air traffic control signal telling him not to land — as the report stated. He was far too experienced for that. It may therefore be interesting to sift the available evidence which I found for myself, when my squadron called at Ceylon in the following year. (See Appendix 8 — Dicky Cork’s accident.) At the same time that we heard this news we were told to remove 3 Wing to Lee-on-Solent and we had to put the tragedy from our minds, for something more important was in the wind.