By September 1944 we were more than ready to embark in the huge Implacable; but first she was to have her baptism of Seafires from 24 Wing (Lt/Cdr Wiggington, DSC, RNVR) with 894 and 887 Squadrons. They, and 1771 Squadron of 14 Fireflies, raided the Norwegian leads near Bodo. They sank U-1061 on the way. One Firefly was hacked down. (It was recently dug up and placed in a Norwegian museum.) During this operation, Implacable’s new flight deck party (the 50 ratings organised by Lt/Cdr (Flying) responsible for the movement of aircraft on the flight deck) had had their first Seafire ‘incident’. It had made them nervous. One of 887 Squadron’s Seafire LIIcs had leaped the barrier and had landed full toss into the forward deck park of 20 other aircraft. In the resulting fire, its 20 mm cannon ammunition had ‘cooked off and shot up several more aircraft. There were many casualties. Number 24 Wing flew south after this work-up operation and finally embarked in their own ship on 30 October, bound for the Indian Ocean, Palembang (January) and Okinawa (March 1945).
We ourselves embarked on Implacable (Captain Charles Hughes-Hallet, who had just relieved my old Eagle Captain, Mackintosh of Mackintosh) on 8 November, and received a superb welcome. My diary records: “Made a reasonable show except for the start-up at Skeabrae. We had to do this ‘pilots only’ as our crews had already gone aboard and the RAF were unable to help. We had to unlash and push out, of course. The main trouble was having only one ‘trolley-acc’ (a half-ton, twelve-volt accumulator on wheels) amongst 14 aircraft. However, Red (mine) and Blue (Simpson’s) Flights landed on without fuss in three minutes and 20 seconds, which is very nearly a record. Norman followed with the six remaining aircraft, also without a hiccup. Unfortunately in their second practice sortie, 801 managed to prang our ‘D’ and their ‘R’.” This was very unpopular as squadrons did not like using each other’s aircraft. Luckily, we again had no accidents and managed to land 12 aircraft in five minutes flat. The third range of the day was cancelled, as Implac’s windshield hydraulics ‘went for a Burton’ and also some of the arrester wires would not reset.
Commander Charles Evans, DSO, DSC, RN, our Commander (Flying) had recently returned from Quonset, USA, where he had been organising the workup of new Fleet Air Arm F4U Corsair squadrons for the Pacific. He may have been a little disconcerted to find that his new ship, Implacable, was to have such a large number of Seafires. However, he soon made it clear to us that he thought we were the best in the world — or shortly would be, under his guidance. He always appeared to be in command even when the Captain was on the bridge and particularly when flying was in progress. He would brook no criticism by non-flying Admirals. He would reply to their signals (which were usually asking pointed questions such as “What is the delay?” or “What was that pilot’s name?”) in a cool choice of words, which would remind the Admiral that Implacable had twice their number of aircraft to land and was already doing so at half their accident rate and in half their time. As a result, we would do anything for Charles Evans.
He had arranged no flying for the next day. The ship was testing her ‘degaussing’. This was an electromagnetic arrangement of wires round the ship carrying many thousands of amps in order to reduce the magnetic ‘signature’ of the entire ship to zero in case she passed over enemy magnetic mines. This meant that we could gather in the wardroom that night and have a few beers and get to know the ship’s officers. There were 120 of us airmen and only 40 of them, so we managed to get many of them, including the padré, into a receptive state of mind by bar closing time. They were already learning the words of several of our filthy songs.
Several of us surfaced next morning early enough to finish reading several large tomes of ‘Orders’. Charles Evans’ Flying Orders started off:
“The difficult we will do at once. The impossible may take a little longer.”
Thus Implac was called ‘HMS Impossible’ from that time onwards. At sea, life aboard was like some overcrowded space ship. Everything in a state of crisis, but seldom falling apart. One of the first ‘impossible’ things that Charles Evans suggested that I and my squadron should do was to carry out some harbour decklanding practice. As he had not asked 801, we were proud to have a go. I had had the experience of harbour decklandings in Biter and thought I knew the snags. As we set off, there was a 40 knot wind whistling round the ‘Island’ on deck and squalls of rain were over the hills surrounding Scapa Flow. After takeoff, the joy of flying over the Flagship at nought feet was cut short by a searchlight from Implac, giving us the ‘F’ for ‘Land-on now’.
I had warned the pilots not to land if the ship was swinging out of wind. This annoyed the batsman. He was a ‘personality batsman’. This was the new type of batsman who must have done a course of theatricals at RADA. He took it far too seriously, throwing himself all over the deck, his body contorted with signals, several at a time. If, in the midst of one of these extravagant and outgoing gestures, the pilot were to open the throttle smoothly and go round again, making a ‘V’ sign as he passed a few feet away, well, he could expect trouble when he landed. It was my fault. I should have warned the batsman Lt (A) Trevor David, RNVR — for he was really the most charming man and later became Flight Deck Officer. But there never seemed to be enough time for good manners in Implacable.
We had, as our Lt/Cdr (Flying) none other than Charles Lamb, DSO, DSC, RN. Of course, we realised that he must have done something to get the two gongs that he had, but we had to wait until after the war to read his book War in a Stringbag, to get the full, unbelievable story. He led his flight deck party with a mixture of terror, kindness, example and pugilistic prowess. They were a very tough crowd indeed, and as everything tended to be their fault when there was a ‘balls up’, which there usually was, they and Charles Lamb could often be seen giving each other ‘the treatment’. If he had asked them, however, they would have knowingly followed him into hell. He was that sort of man.
Implacable had originally been designed to take only a little more than half the 78 aircraft that she would shortly have to accommodate in her two hangars. No guns or other impedimenta had been removed to compensate for the extra space now taken up to be the extra hangar. With 500 extra crew, she was grossly overcrowded. When 880 and 801, with 828 (18 Barracudas) and 1771 (12 Fireflies) arrived, the squadrons’ ratings had to take pot luck with the left-over messdecks. The initial result was that most of our squadron were having to sling their hammocks in the passageways. These were in use day and night and our men were being bumped by people trying to get by and were losing their sleep. Many of the more junior officers in the ship had to ‘treble up’. As all us (A) RNVR boys were most junior of all, we got a particularly poor choice. I had the deepest, noisiest and least ventilated cabin the builders could have devised. It was three decks down and over the starboard outer screw. Still, it was at least mine own and there was plenty of room to spread out.
On 21 November 1944, we set off for northern Norway again in company with two Woolworth carriers, Trumpeter and Pursuer. This, we thought, was in the nature of a working-up exercise for Implac before she and ourselves went out to the Far East to fight the Japs.
My diary reports:
“Implacable, with the two ‘banana boats’, stayed out of sight and sound of the Norwegian coast for the next three days, waiting for a ‘window’ in the weather. It has been blowing a 70 knot gale all day (23 November) and that was as good as saying goodbye to the two banana boats. One’s flight deck began to bend in the middle and unpeel. The other, Pursuer, had trouble in her hangar, most of her aircraft breaking loose and ramming each other. We think there may be a shipping strike tomorrow. We and 801 might be allowed to shoot up Orlandet airfield, and if there’s nothing there, to find some shipping near Trondheim.”
“Monday 26. The weather has at last improved somewhat. Hanging about with everyone seasick was getting on everyone’s nerves. We were able to carry out a strike involving about 40 aircraft today. We took off in a snow storm, not good for the nerves, and over the target area (south west of Alsten, round Vefsen Fiord) there were frequent rain storms. In a clear patch we saw four big ships and half a dozen flak boats in a convoy that the Firefly recce had reported. We were supposed to be top cover, but once again Charles Evans said we could come down and do a bit of strafing if there were no Jerries about. The first ship I came across in the fiord was a small flak ship. It started to fire as I dived on it. I opened fire at about 1000 feet — and using the gyro gunsight to correct drift — in half a second the whole ship disappeared in white spray as the 20 mm hit all round her. As I was pulling out below the cloud I could see a larger ship with smoke already coming from it, so I gave that a burst too, followed by all the rest. She was stopped or going slowly towards the rocks and seemed to be on fire.” (She was the SS Korsnes, a Norwegian ship of about 3,000 tons, which later sank.) “I later saw her discharging grey-clad German troops over her bow, on to the rocks.”
Implacable seemed satisfied with the day’s strike. Two flak ships sunk, one stopped and on fire and our Korsnes on fire and sinking. After the war I sent a copy of my G45 camera-gun film to Knut Store, a Norwegian, and he told me that the Korsnes was being used for running military supplies and army replacements to the north from Germany at the time. The Norwegian skipper had taken the first opportunity to run his ship aground when she was hit. Armour piercing and high explosive cannon fire and 3″ rockets seemed to be very effective. The 3″ solid, rocket projectile, eight of which were carried by Fireflies, was a ship-sinking weapon and much more accurate than bombs, particularly when using the GGS.
On the way back we joined in with a couple of returning Fireflies from 1771 and strafed some oil tanks at Mojoen, near Sandnessjoen. We saw no results from our shell flashes as they hit the tanks and there were no results from theirs aimed at us. After this strafe, I looked down at my compass — the gyro compass — and found that it had toppled with the pullout having been over the vertical. I had to reset it from the magnetic compass. This was easier said than done, for we were so near the earth’s magnetic North Pole that the angle of dip was nearly 80 degrees, allowing no proper horizontal component. With the slightest angle of bank, the needle would execute a complete 180 degrees towards the earth and stay there. Eventually I remembered what ‘Buggy’ Muir had taught me in the physics lab at school. I turned the aircraft — together with the seven others — towards what I hoped was a northerly course and waited patiently with wings level until the compass needle settled down. I was then able to reset the gyro compass and steer for the ship, using the ship’s beacon.
“There is the usual talk of a gy-normous gale, Force 11, tomorrow, so we are going west at 25 knots to try to get out of its way. The millibars on the weather chart look like the cross-section of an oak tree. All 50 of our aircraft were recovered without a single accident, except our favourite New Zealander Claude Leighton, who burst a tyre. One of the Barras of 828 broke one of its immense undercarriage legs off. The wreckage was towed forward by the tractor, but the leg was left behind. A couple of sailors thereupon tried to shove it over the side to clear the deck for the next man to land on. They couldn’t move it. Eventually eight were needed.”
“It is marvellous seeing Charles Lamb’s ‘supporters’ working on the flight deck. It’s just like a Rangers v Celtic football match when the spectators get on the pitch, with Charles Evans adding his pithy comments from time to time over the Tannoy. There is never a dull moment and ‘a seat in the goofers is worth 50 quid’, cold though it is. Trouble is, I or Stuart Jewers have to get up on Charles’ bridge during every land-on. It is a harrowing sight, sometimes. Today, when eight men were pushing my aircraft from one side of the deck to the other, Implac rolled badly. The man on the brakes was too late and they shoved some chocks under the wheels to stop her going over the side while she was doing five knots. She nosed over until the prop hit the deck and two bits broke off. It’s either a prop change or a ‘cropping’ job, to make them all an equal diameter and weight.”
It was a frightening sight watching up to 30 men pushing and heaving the three-ton machines in a 50 knot gale, controlled by a Petty Officer with a flag, a man on the brakes in the cockpit and two further men ready to place chocks in front or behind the wheels for an emergency stop. Yet there were very few cases of damage to our Seafires. In two cases of cockpit damage, Crusty Pye had his radio socket crushed by a boot and another had his long-range tank jettison lever half-pulled so that it dropped off on take-off and caught fire as it slid along the deck, plunging into the sea just ahead of the ship.
At the end of this period of flying in Implacable, 880 had done 127 decklandings with only two burst tyres. This was then a record for any continuous one-squadron effort with Seafires, but had we been at Salerno with 15 knots of wind over the deck, we should have had half a dozen by now. We flew off to Skeabrae on 5 December, having waited off Norway in vain for the weather to moderate again. While on the way back, I had asked Charles Evans whether there was any chance of my seeing the new, very ‘clued-up’ Fifth Sea Lord, Dennis Boyd, to use his influence to get us some better Seafires, the Mark XVs. These had a Griffon engine of about 1800 horse power combat rating, more fuel, plus a stronger, ‘long stroke’ undercarriage, capable of withstanding heavier landings. It also had more external fuel in the form of a proper bullet-shaped tank of 60 gallons and had rocket launchers. It all seemed to be just what we wanted and there were several of them already flying. (See Appendix 11 (m).) Considering that we now know that the first low-level Griffon-engined version of the Spitfire — the Mark XII — had been in service since January 1943, my hopes were well justified that the FAA should have them a year later.
‘Wings’ allowed me to fly off from the ship. I was delayed on the way to North Weald by fog at Milltown and Crail, but I eventually arrived at the Fifth Sea Lord’s Office in St. James’s Square, and was shown in.
He removed the wraps from the future FAA models he had round his office walls. They all looked very formidable and complicated, especially the Blackburn Firebrand. Its nose seemed longer, by far, than the Corsair, and its size about the same as a heavy bomber. I asked what it was. Admiral Boyd said that it was the new torpedo/fighter/bomber — the new multi-role combat aircraft for the Fleet Air Arm. I also saw the new ‘cut down’ Centaurus-engined Typhoon (later the Sea Fury) which was on order at the time, and a Griffon-engined Barracuda and a Short Sturgeon. He could make no promises for the Seafire XV, the first 40 of which had not yet fully passed through the Storage Depots. (The first flight of a Spitfire with a Griffon had been by Jeffrey Quill in November 1941.) Neither would we get clearance to use the new ‘Zero Length’ rocket launchers for our existing Seafires. He said that their rocket motors were only cleared to fire safely in low air temperatures. I returned north, empty handed.
While I was away, Implacable had gone to sea again for another strike on Norway, but she was unable to embark either 801 or ourselves on the planned day, and by the time I returned, she had been so damaged in a storm that she had to retire into dock for two months at Rosyth. This effectively put an end to Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser’s plan to use Implacable as well as Indefatigable in the Pacific for Operation ‘Iceberg’, March-May 1945.
We were now about to have an entire change of aircraft Marks, from IIs and FIIIs to FLIIIs. Apart from that, we had to train up 15 new pilots — each straight from Fighter School — in elementary interceptor fighter and decklanding skills and also in ground attack and escort fighter duties. An additional task was to instruct them in the use of the Gyro Gunsight (GGS) and, for eight out of the 20 pilots, to use the vertical and oblique reconnaissance F24 cameras, with which six of our new (PR) aircraft were fitted.
We also had to be allowed some time for Christmas leave. In order to make our unexpected arrival home more welcome, we decided that we would each take a turkey with us on the journey south. Dougy Yate, whose father ran a chain of London East End butcher shops, knew all about turkeys, and he came round on the squadron BSA motorbike and side-car to visit the crofters on the islands. The crofters would then parade their turkeys, either in the farmyard or in the kitchen, depending on the weather. Dougy would pick the ones he liked, diving on the poor birds before they knew what was coming. Our cabins at Skeabrae were full of feathers for the next few days as Dougy organised a squadron plucking party.
In the snow of January 1945, we set about collecting our new aircraft. Some had already arrived while we were on leave, by the ladies of the ATA. Dougy was wondering how they managed at five ‘g’. He reckoned their bra straps would part. He invented a new type, with a cantilever system of weights and pulleys, which was self-compensating. The Mark II version used more sophistication still — solenoids and rheostats to arrange constant uplift at all ‘g’ loadings from minus two to plus eight.
We had to taxi our ‘old’ aircraft to a dispersal hangar. This was three miles from the airfield and up a country road with an incline of 1:5 in places. The road was covered in snow. This was badly rutted and it was necessary to have a person walking alongside to direct the pilot away from the ruts and the hidden ditches either side. Half way, with the radiator temperature over 120 degrees C and the brake pressure nearly zero, we would stop to replenish and cool down. It took several days, but it was accomplished without more than a single ditching.
Half way through January 1945, just as the snows had melted and we could guarantee that we would be able to stop in time on the runway (which had not been cleared of snow and had therefore become icy) we were told to take ourselves to RNAS Grimsetter — a new FAA-owned wartime airfield. It was on the opposite side of the island, north of Kirkwall. We were getting too big for RAF Skeabrae.
At Grimsetter, we were joined by Lt/Cdr Colin Campbell-Horsfall. Our two Seafire squadrons were now known collectively as 30 Wing — not 38 Wing as in some history books. ‘C-H’ was a magnificent choice as our Wing Leader.