Let us return to Scapa. When we repaired aboard Implacable with our 48 Seafires and 49 pilots of 30 Wing on 15 March 1945, we knew that many of us would be saying goodbye to our wives and sweethearts for ever. Nevertheless morale was high. The 880th ‘persoot group’ had now made a running total of 243 landings without a serious prang and bets were being made as to which pilot would break this record spell. Brian Wager obliged on 22 March, making a full toss into the barrier, never higher than six inches off the deck, with his hook bouncing between the wires, its damper u/s. We all, including Wager, said a rude word.
On our way into the Atlantic we carried out four days intensive flying while spare aircraft from the UK were still within flying distance. Lt/Cdr Alan Swanton, the CO of 828 Squadron — newly equipped with Avengers — was also glad of the practice. Although the Avenger was a very easy, strong and highly prized replacement for the Barracuda, the pilots only had about 20 hours flying experience in it and needed more. Lt/Cdr (A) Jock Ellis, DSC, DFC, RN, the CO of our 1771 Firefly Squadron, hit the round-down on a night decklanding approach and was not found in the icy waters. Lt/Cdr (A) Bill MacWhirter, RN took over the squadron in his place.
The Flight Deck party now seemed to have settled down, but the ADR team still had a lot to learn. They could not yet match Tricky’s skill in spite of having a better radar.
On 4 April we passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. It was nice to think we almost ‘owned’ the Mediterranean now and that stand-bys on deck were not necessary.
We stopped for 24 hours at Port Said. This showed that the Commander and the Captain had great faith in the crew’s discipline, for none missed the ship when we sailed, a very good sign. We were there long enough for some of us to have a walk through Simon Artz’ bazaar and buy a few trinkets and a fez each. Dougy, Norman and I and a few others went ashore in the evening and went upstairs into a bar. The only drink available was ‘oozoo’. It made you blind if you had too much, so we only had about three each. On the way back to the ship, Dougy was approached by a small boy, who said:
“Like my sister, Sah? All white inside like Mrs Captain?”
We had been warned about such things by the more experienced officers on board. Our Chief Engineer, Commander Holt-Wilson, told us how some friends of his in another ship had fared one night in Cairo, earlier in the war. They had been caught with their pants down in ‘Mary’s’ — a house of evil repute in Cairo. The reason they had been caught was because Mary’s suffered a direct hit with a bomb. They thought they had better submit ‘Hurt Certificates’ in case their visit had any long-lived consequences — from the bomb damage. When they came to the column in the Hurt Certificate which asked them to ‘Name the place of duty where the injury occurred’, they gave Mary’s address. Their Lordships returned their certificates, demanding what duty they were performing there. Back went the reply to the Fleet Medical Officer at Alexandria, that they were blown in through the front door by the bomb blast as they happened to be walking past. So they received their certificates in due course.
During our run south through the canal, we exercised on the hot steel deck, melting the soles from our shoes and wondering why the British had imagined that the canal could ever have been much use to them — and worth 70 years of Egyptian subjection — in an air war. Implacable would have made a perfect bombing target, surrounded with sand, still air and a blue sky. As we walked up and down we began to notice that the slight breeze over the deck had fallen calm. The ship had stopped, slightly aslant, and with her bow nearer one bank of the narrow canal than the other. We had gone aground. Implacable’s huge cross-section was such a large percentage of the canal’s as she passed in between its narrow sides, that the ‘hydraulic’ effect had offset her to one side uncontrollably. Once off-centre, there was nothing that the Canal Company Pilot could do to correct her in time. There is a very small rise and fall of tide in the canal, so that later in the day we were able to get off with the help of a tug. One of these small Arab-owned tugs ‘exceeded its limitations’ in its efforts to help us, and had an engine room fire. The crew emptied buckets of water down the funnel to put it out. Some even used their fezs. Each fez-full produced a burst of steam from the funnel and we and they were beside ourselves with merriment.
By 16 April 1945 we were off Colombo (Sri Lanka). We and 801 Squadron took half our aircraft ashore to RNAS China Bay near Trincomalee on the north east side of the island. On the way, I heard Bob Simpson, leading Yellow Flight, shout:
“Pull out, pull out, pull out!”
“Yellow One. What’s wrong? Over.”
“Armstrong’s gone in, straight down.”
Bob Armstrong was one of the most able fliers in the squadron. His aircraft must have suffered a petrol leak, the vapour of which, pleasant to start with as it is, must have eventually made him pass out in the cockpit. There was little or no ventilation in the Seafire’s cockpit. Like Implacable herself, it had not been designed for tropical use and everything about it made it almost as unsuitable to operate at low level in the tropics as the ill-fated Buffalo, especially in the very humid air of the Indian Ocean on the Equator. We found our seats wet with sweat when we climbed out under the palm trees on China Bay (HMS Bambara) landing strip, and we all-but passed out ourselves, without any help from 100 octane petrol.
I saw the tower from which a year ago the signal was sent to tell Dicky Cork to go round again. I realised what an impossible position it was in for a Corsair pilot to see, approaching as Dicky had done. (See Appendix 8 — Dicky Cork’s Accident.)
The wind at China Bay only had two directions, there and back, according to the onshore and offshore breezes. It changed 180 degrees at about lunchtime. Care was needed to check which end was which every morning as “two aircraft had recently collided”, head-on we heard.
When we flew ashore we had only managed to get a small bag with toothbrush and shaving gear into the wing-gun panels of our aircraft. Dennis Kirby therefore had to oblige once more with a marathon trip to the ship at Colombo to collect the men and the rest of our khaki tropical gear. He sent some tea home for us. This was done for five shillings for a pound of tea, but it never arrived.
We slept in straw huts. These were impervious to the huge rainstorms but entirely pervious to everything else, including lizards, snakes and cockroaches. We had to feel in our shoes before putting them on, and sleep under exceedingly hot mosquito netting. Everything you looked at either walked, hopped, flew or stung, sometimes all four together.
In the cool of the evenings, we visited ‘Trinco’. I bought a Topaz for £1. It measured one inch by half an inch and was about three eighths of an inch deep, beautifully hand cut. We also bought various teak and ivory elephants, book-ends, and so on. It was an absolute paradise of a place. Wherever we went there were white sandy beaches, oysters growing on the rocks and crystal warm water to bathe in.
In the evening we would repair to one of the village cafes. We were told by the doctor to go to the ones which had waitresses-with-shoes-on. After a week at China Bay we took some of the new boys across the island to the west coast — RNAS Puttalam (HMS Rajaliya) — where we did some desultory GGS air-to-air firing. A couple of us also called in at Colombo and picked up some mail from the ship. It was odd, flying over miles and miles of forest, with hardly a road or river and then suddenly catching sight of the white stone western architecture of Colombo itself, sticking out of the greenery.
There were two replacement aircraft waiting for us when we got back to Trinco. They were unflyable. The perspex was yellow and full of bubbles. The panels did not fit. The arrester hooks would not drop. The radio did not work and the tyres were rotting. As for the brakes, they made no difference whatever, like the MG’s.
When the day came on 23 April for us to fly back on board I volunteered to take one of these ‘new’ aircraft. It was an anxious time, for none of us — especially our own squadron riggers and fitters — had had time to check them beforehand. On the way, at about 5000 feet and 20 miles out to sea, I noticed that the normal slight, pleasant, smell of petrol was getting worse. I opened the hood, but the upward rush of air made matters much worse and neat petrol soon splashed up from under my feet in the region of the fuel gauges. I pulled down my goggles — as it was wetting my face and stung like mad — and turned the oxygen on to 100 per cent. Having no other option but to breathe the vapour, I began to feel a sense of mental detachment and my eyesight became blinker-vision. I lost touch sensation on the stick and throttle. I tried shutting the hood all-but a crack, and sticking the unplugged end of my oxygen tube out into the slipstream. The rush of fresh air into the pipe was a great improvement, but the damage was done and I wondered whether I had left it too late. I had pulled away from the rest and I told them I would return to China Bay alone and get the fuel leak fixed. I do not remember much about the flight back or joining the circuit, or even landing. I remember waiting in the cockpit until my legs would bear my weight, climbing down out of the cockpit, soaked with fuel, and telling the rating who had put the chocks in position that the aircraft was a time bomb and not to switch anything on or off in the cockpit as it might blow up.
Next morning, having evaporated the petrol from my flying overalls, I climbed up into the same cockpit again, hoping that the statement on the Form 700 ‘fuel union tightened and locked’ meant what it said. When I got back on board I found from the aircraft’s Log Book — NN268 — that it had been repaired after Salerno and had travelled out east on the deck of Chaser. It had then spent six months out in the sun on China Bay airfield. I also learned the bad news that Len Simpson and David Crabtree had each bent an aircraft while landing on. There had also been two in 801 Squadron. Everyone was feeling the heat.
The next point of land on our way to Perth in Western Australia was the British colony of the Cocos Islands — a beautiful series of coral islands about 2000 miles from Ceylon and about half way to Perth. The Cocos are noted in Naval history as supplying the grave for the German WW1 raiding cruiser Emden, run ashore by her Captain on its northern coast. Cocos was also not far, 300 miles that is, from Christmas Island. I asked ‘Wings’ whether we could use our photo-recce Seafires to take a ‘vertical line overlap’ of the Cocos Islands as we passed by. He agreed that it was a good idea. So we loaded up six of our 880 Seafires with vertical F24 cameras with eight inch lenses, and took off. Cocos was 150 miles off so we used our 45 gallon slipper tanks. Mine did not work and my r/t was u/s as well. I could not go with them, so my absence made a few ‘holes’ in the photography. However, it was the first time that an accurate map had been made of the Islands and the locals were grateful when the Captain sent an Avenger to drop them a copy.
I watched the land-on from Wings’ bridge. It was awful. We had not flown for some days and two aircraft were bent, one by Peter Arkell. He told me that when he had tried to open his throttle on the landing approach, the engine had cut-out completely. He had to close it fully and ‘pump’ it before he could get his engine to pick up. His wheels all but touched the sea.
The fault — in the accelerator pump — was because the pump plungers had dried out in the hot sun and were not working properly. We had no spares, but we asked all pilots to beware. If they had a cut out, they were to pump the throttle furiously — like a garden syringe — to regain power. We kept our fingers crossed. But in vain, for the next day Ken Boardman, a future Flight Leader, our best decklander, spun-in on the final approach — for precisely the same reason. His aircraft remained afloat with just the tail sticking out for five or six seconds. We were shattered to hear that by the time the rescue destroyer arrived a minute later, there was no sign whatever of poor Ken, although several of us thought we saw him climbing out of the cockpit.
We tried to work out why he had suddenly disappeared. We dismissed the idea of sharks and concluded that he had landed-on with his dinghy pack still made fast to his Mae West by its long lanyard and had been pulled under when it and the aircraft sank. Yet another cause could have been the gunsight knocking him out. Yet another Squadron Flying Order was made. ‘Pilots are to disconnect their dinghy packs from Mae Wests as well as parachutes when entering the landing circuit’.
The Avengers were also having engine trouble. It, too, was caused by high temperatures and the extreme humidity. They had salt in their sparking plug harnesses which earthed the spark in the humid air, causing both spark plugs to fail on two or three of the 14 cylinders.
They spluttered and banged whenever full power was demanded by the pilot. Three fell into the sea with immense splashes off the end of the catapult. Free take-offs were tried. As they took the whole of the flight deck, this was not popular. No one else could be ranged on deck at the same time. We had to sit, strapped in, in the 120 degree heat of the hangar. However, if we were not flying, it was exciting to watch them. They would stagger off the deck, radiator gills fully open, flaps down, the pilot willing it off like a jockey at the last fence. It would then settle down a few inches off the Indian Ocean and fly in the ground effect, leaving a trail of ruffled water and blue smoke behind with its slipstream. The pilot would get the undercarriage up and hope for a little excess thrust-over-drag. No such luck. So he would not be able to raise the flaps for fear of sinking further and he could not close the gills for fear of overheating. He would then fire all manner of Very Lights, send a variety of radio messages and ask for instant land-on priority to save his aircraft, himself and his crew from the sharks. The spluttering and backfiring ‘Pratt-and-Watney’ engine would then make another exciting circuit at nought feet. The pilot would put the undercarriage down just in time, and the whole lot would subside onto the deck at its last gasp. Spares were eventually flown out from America and the fault was rectified, but not before we had lost a few more Avengers. We found out later that Indefat’s Avengers had suffered from precisely the same fault three months before we arrived.
Next day, 28 April, when a few miles off Perth, we had planned a full day’s flying with 200 sorties. There were no less than four decklanding accidents in 880 and three more in 801. Ours were by Hugh Smith, Alan Dent, ‘Legs’ Lethem and CPO Pete Watson. S/Lt Keith Jelley of 880 flew slap into an Avenger in poor visibility. The Avenger pilot alone survived this accident.
On 30 April we steamed into Fremantle Harbour, near Perth, the capital of Western Australia. We were made exceedingly welcome by the Aussies. Then we lost the services of Claude Leighton owing to ill health. Much to our regret, he finally left the squadron a month later. He married a Wren in 1946 and was killed in a car accident in New Zealand in 1947. I asked for Tim Singleton as a replacement Flight Leader. He was at that time in 899 Squadron. This squadron had already been cut up into small pieces to make replacement Seafire pilots for No 24 Wing and we were in high hopes of getting him.
Twenty-four hours after entering Fremantle and after some of us had enjoyed a dinner as guests of the Royal Perth Yacht Club, we had completed our refuelling. We set off round the south of Australia for the last leg to Sydney. On the way we heard of Hitler’s last days in Berlin and of the similar and satisfactory fate of Himmler and the rest. So ended their war against two thirds of the world to establish their vainglorious Thousand-year Reich.
We hoped that our loved ones at home would remember us on VE night, 15,000 miles away. But I had found only one letter from home when we got to Fremantle. Perhaps there might be some at Sydney.