At around Christmas 1942 it was decided I was overdue for an operational rest. I had been continually on operations since the onset of war, and all my operations had been in 11 Group, Fighter Command’s front line of defence, apart from the short break in Wales between Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. My duties had included flight commander, then acting commanding officer of 92 Squadron at Biggin Hill during the Battle of Britain (Fighter Command’s top-scoring squadron) before becoming CO of 72 Squadron, also at Biggin Hill, and finally wing leader of the Kenley wing.
The scenario was that I be posted in the New Year to the restful role of observer-cum-adviser at the newly founded Fighter Leaders’ School at Chedworth in Gloucestershjre. It was a new unit and a new concept, set up by Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the C-in-C of Fighter Command, to train operationally experienced pilots in the art of leadership in the air. Initially I had to go through the course myself in the role of ‘guinea pig’, and after that I looked forward to a lovely non-executive job with no responsibilities. It was not to be. The school’s CO, Wing Commander Paddy Woodhouse, promptly went down with an attack of jaundice. Kingcome, the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, was made acting CO on the spot and took over the arduous task of overseeing the early formative courses that would shape the school’s policy and format.
In practice it turned out to be a highly enjoyable and worthwhile posting. The work was interesting and rewarding besides being relatively free from the incessant nagging telephone calls of an operational fighter station. A further bonus was that I was ably and entertainingly assisted by two well-known stable-mates, Pete Simpson, a massive, benign young man, and P. B. ‘Laddie’ Lucas, back from serving in the Mediterranean on a tour of duty that had included notable exploits during the siege of Malta when he commanded the top-scoring 249 Squadron. Laddie had been famous before the war as an amateur schoolboy golfing champion, and became famous during it as a distinguished fighter pilot who rose from the rank of Aircraftman 2nd class. Fame continued to dog his footsteps after the war, first as a Conservative MP, then as chairman of the Greyhound Racing Association, and finally as the successful author of a dozen or so books, including Malta: the Thorn in Rommel’s Side. It seemed there never was a time when Laddie wasn’t famous. He was also the best of companions and his gift for mimicry enlivened many an evening. In this company the health hazards grew to be considerable. Before long the Fighter Leaders’ School moved to Charmy Down in Somerset, from where the ‘watering hole’ of Bath lay within comfortable drinking distance. Thither we repaired on numerous occasions.
The relaxed, enjoyable life at the school was short-lived and soon ended by the inevitable interruption in the shape of a new posting. This time the finger of destiny was pointing me in the direction of the Desert Air Force (DAF), somewhere in the Middle East. It was decided I should travel by sea rather than air, and the voyage was to form part of my operational rest. Since the Mediterranean was considered too high a risk zone for unescorted shipping, we were routed round South Africa, as was usual at the time. A long, leisurely sea voyage was indicated, with plenty of space for contemplation. Our ship as far as Durban was the SS Orion, flagship and pride of the P&O, though as a requisitioned troop carrier she had been stripped of most of the refinements of a massive and stately luxury liner to capitalise on space and take the maximum number of bodies.
It turned out that as a wing commander I was the senior officer on board, which meant, in turn, that I found myself in the position of OC Troops. It was just the sort of grind I could have done without during what was supposed to be a ‘rest’ trip, but it offered me one important advantage that had to do with the purchase of a razor. For some time in England I had taken to shaving with an electric razor, but if I was going to be living under canvas in the middle of the desert, I now reasoned, then convenient sup plies of mains electricity were liable to be rarities. It seemed I had better change my shaving habits. Safety-razor blades were also going to be difficult to come by, no doubt. The obvious way to make myself independent of such logistical problems would be to invest in a ‘cut-throat’ razor as wielded by such masters of the art of barbering as Sweeney Todd.
Unfortunately I had never used one before, and I realised as soon as I bought the implement that this was no toy to be trifled with. After a certain amount of nervous practice I found I could cope with the right-hand side of my face, though it at once be came clear that dealing with the left-hand side was going to take a different technique. In the barbers’ shops in the old days they used to give apprentices balloons to practice on, but fate had delivered into my hands something even better. On board we had about a dozen young Australian pilots who were also bound for DAF, and now they would be coming under my command for the voyage.
In the RAF the bonds of friendship formed between our personnel and the volunteers from the Commonwealth and Dominions transcended prejudice as the youth of many continents and creeds worked and flew together. I felt at the time that it all boded well for the future, though sadly my optimism that these values would feed through into the post-war world was not born out by history. During the war there was plenty of name-calling between us, but it was all part of the general banter. We did not sulk when the Australians called us ‘Pommy bastards’, using the American short ‘a’ to make it sound worse. The nickname, they explained, derived from the pomegranate fruit, whose pink and white flesh, they claimed, matched the ‘girlish’ complexion of an Englishman. Nor did they throw tantrums when we called them ‘Bisins’, a ‘bisin’ being what an Australian washes his face in – and this, too, was carefully explained, touché!
Luckily the heavy-handed sensitivities of modern-day political correctness were something entirely unknown to us, and so I lined up my young ‘bisins’ and pointed out to them that they were the only pilots on board apart from myself. I assumed that as such, and especially bearing in mind that they might one day wind up in my wing, they would be keen to co-operate in helping me to solve a small problem. Having won their undivided attention I went on to explain my predicament with the cut-throat razor. In the absence of balloons, I said, I looked forward to them volunteering as guinea-pigs.
There was a slightly stunned silence, but I discretely pulled rank a little while suggesting that compliance could be a shrewd career move on their part. They soon saw the force of my argument and for the first two to three weeks of the voyage I had my volunteers reporting every morning at the door of my cabin, ready for me to go to work on them. In this way it did not take me long to master the technique and so far as I remember I never did anyone an injury. In fact, many years after the war I met one of my former victims at a reunion. He was quite unscarred and recalled the episode with surprising good humour. He said they had regarded it as one of their more unusual duties, quite apart from providing an eye-opener into folk customs in the British armed forces.
During the first half of the trip there came a day when my mind was carried inexorably back to the sad demise of my Clyno car when I was a Cranwell cadet in 1936. We had been steaming southwards down the west coast of Africa and passing the Canaries, and conditions for a tropical cruise could hardly have been bettered. The weather was superb, the seas were calm. The flying fish flew and the tropical heat was tempered by the breeze created by our steady cruising speed of between fifteen and twenty knots. We were in a dream world and the grey clouds, rationed food and general shortages of war-torn Britain hardly seemed to be real any longer. Suddenly the dream was shattered. Somewhere off the Canaries there came about an abrupt change of ambience and atmosphere. We could not think what it was, till suddenly the significance hit us. The engines had stopped.
It was nothing more than this, a simple explanation, yet it was enough to send alarm waves through the ship. As any old sailor can tell you, a boat under way is a living creature – it has a vibrant, unique life-force of which its passengers are scarcely aware. The engines, with their gentle, hardly perceptible murmur and steady vibration, become such of part of daily life that their presence enters the area of unconsciousness. They may as well not exist. Yet as soon as the engines stop the ship dies, transmuted instantly into a sluggishly wallowing corpse, dead in the water. And now they had stopped indeed.
The silence was paralysing, almost palpable. It exactly mirrored the sensation of time ceasing that I had felt as I hung upside down in the wreck of my crashed sports car. We stood and waited wherever we happened to be in the ship, nerves on edge and sensing danger but blind to what it could be or from which direction it might come at us. Then, over the klaxon, sounded the duty officer’s abrasive orders: ‘Boat stations!’ The activity of running to stand by our allotted lifeboats came almost as a relief as we realised what the explanation must be: there were U-boats in the area and the engines had been stopped to reduce any risk of detection.
Many more such alarms and silences were to follow before we reached Cape Town. Fortunately no U-boat ever came close enough to unleash a torpedo in our direction and the incidents grew less frequent the farther south we travelled. But the first few moments of each of those literally shocking silences as the engines closed down without warning were unforgettable to me and they always reactivated the feeling of hanging upside down in a limbo of time. These maritime alarms considerably increased my already keen admiration and respect for the Merchant Navy, and the way its incredibly brave and grossly under-appreciated and unsung band of heroes faced up to the dangers of sea warfare.
At Durban the Orion put us ashore before preparing to steam on to the Far East. We transhipped to a small Norwegian passenger boat, a beautiful little vessel with a great crew and marvellous food. There was only one drawback. She had been designed and built for the Arctic Circle, and along the walls of all the cabins and living quarters ran pipes to carry scalding-hot steam from the engine room. There was, it seemed, no way of cutting off the heating without shutting down the engines. As an in-built central-heating system it must have been marvellously cosy when cruising in sub-zero temperatures through the arctic wastes, but it made the ship staggeringly unsuitable for use in the tropics. We made our way up the coast of east Africa towards the Red Sea and the Suez Canal in the early summer, enduring heat that was impossible to describe.
All in all, the journey took the best part of three months, and it was thoroughly enjoyable apart from the sauna-bath conditions of the last leg. My initial destination was Cairo, HQ of the Midlle East Air Forces. From there I was to be dispatched to wherever DAF might be at the time. As yet I knew very little about the Desert Air Force other than that it was a completely mobile, utterly self-contained tactical air group whose task was to support the Eighth Army, and that it was having a very busy time as Rommel and Montgomery were slogging it out in north Africa. It was a tough, independent, battle-hardened group, experienced in mobile warfare and capable of moving anywhere at a moment’s notice without interruption to its activities. It laid down the model for the Second Tactical Force (2nd TAF) when it was later formed to support the invasion of northern Europe that began on D Day. Thereafter the DAF became officially known as First Tactical Force, though it never lost its affectionate sobriquet of ‘Desert Air Force’.
The official label tied to my posting was ‘Supernumerary Wing Commander Flying’, which, once translated, meant I would be attached to a fighter wing in a non-executive flying role pending an appropriate vacancy. Heavy casualties were anticipated in the operations ahead and ‘P’ Staff (the postings branch) at the Air Ministry did not want to be caught short on numbers. As it happened, this was a factor that worked out in my favour.
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By the time I caught up with DAF it had arrived in Malta and was preparing for the invasion of Sicily and Italy. Malta was just beginning to recover from the poundings it had taken from the Luftwaffe and, although it was still under a state of siege, creature comforts seemed in reasonable supply. There were, however, a few unusual features. The bedroom of my billet, for instance, only had two walls, the other two having been demolished during the blitz, against which the island’s heroic resistance justly earned a collective George Cross. There was also half a bathroom, in which I seized the opportunity to take a leisurely bath on my first night. A severe ticking off followed. No one had thought to tell me that Malta had no natural water. Every drop needed to be brought in by blockade-busting tankers in mortal danger from sea and air attack, and consequently was jealously hoarded. Commodities of which there was no shortage, it emerged, were safety razors and safety blades. I swiftly consigned my ‘Sweeney Todd’ to the bin. When, years later, I met the Australian ‘bisin’ who had been under my command on the voyage out, I never had the heart to tell him how the shaving exercise which put at risk the youthful good looks of him and his comrades had been a total waste of effort.
I did not have long to wait to shed my ‘supernumerary’ status. DAF was commanded at the time by Air Vice-Marshal ‘Broady’ Broadhurst (later Air Chief Marshal Sir Harry Broadhurst), a legendary air ace and an outstanding senior commander. He was one of the few at his level of seniority to have personal operational experience, but he was also notorious for surrounding himself with his coterie of people whom he already knew. This is an understandable foible, and few are exempt from it to some degree. It was just that Broady had a reputation for taking it to extremes and for an outsider it became a sort of chicken-and-egg situation. You could only be a member of his charmed circle if you had served under him, and you had to be a member of the charmed circle before he would give you a job in the first place. He and I had met several times in the past, but since I had never served under him I was definitely unqualified to be one of his blue-eyed boys.
Shortly before I reached Malta my old friend Ian Gleed, CO of 244 Wing, was shot down and killed. As a result Broady lost no time in sending for me as soon as he knew I had arrived. ‘Brian,’ he announced, ‘I’m over a barrel. I need a replacement for Ian. Given freedom of choice I wouldn’t choose you. Nevertheless you qualify, you are here, and I can’t afford to wait. It’s only fair to warn you that I shall be watching you closely. If you put a single foot wrong you’ll be on the next aircraft back to Blighty.’
I thanked him for the warmth of his welcome, saluted and left the office. Poor old Broady. It was clear his guns had been spiked by ‘P’ Staff. Knowing what a disappointment this must be for him, I could almost feel sorry for him. The rank of commanding officers of mobile wings had just been upped from wing commander to group captain, so Broady had not only been obliged to hand me an appointment for which anyone would have given their eye-teeth, he had also been unable to avoid including a promotion in the package.
Stepping into dead men’s shoes may not sound like the happiest way of climbing the promotional ladder, especially where your predecessor was a friend, as in the case of Ian Gleed. It was probably the commonest way, however, in operational units in war time. The world of the operational pilot was a relatively small one and it was more than likely that any shoes you stepped into were going to be those of a friend or acquaintance. But death in war, even of close friends, was strangely different from death in peace. Abnormal circumstances made the normal abnormal. The peace time death of a friend or relative is usually a deeply disturbing event, but in a general war situation hardly a day passes without news of the death of someone you know. As a result, emotions become curiously detached, is if nature has closed some psychological door in the mind to the contemplation of grief. A typical conversation in a bar or a neighbouring RAF mess would have gone something like this:
‘Heard about old Bifi?’
‘No, what’s he up to, then?’
‘Bought it yesterday.’
‘Really? What happened?’
‘Bounced by some 109s over Calais. Came down in flames.’
‘Parachute?’
‘No. Leastways, no one saw one.’
‘Tough luck. Nice chap. Time for another?’
It would be too easy to dismiss the laconic style as yet another case of stiff upper lip. We all had to find our own ways of protecting ourselves and carrying on.
In the event Broady never fired me. In fact I remained with 244 Wing for almost two years, a long time for an operational posting, and he and I developed an extremely good, understanding relationship. Once he had accepted you he was the ideal boss. His loyalty to his staff was a byword. He let them get on with the job with the minimum interference, but supported them through thick and thin if the need ever arose.
The wing consisted of five Spitfire squadrons. Four were RAF and one was South African. The South African airmen were a mix of Boer and British, and all were volunteers. South African government policy forbade any except volunteers to fight for the Allies abroad, though the effect of this was probably to give us the cream of their talent. They were first class in the air and great company on the ground, the British and Boer elements mingling perfectly cheerfully and involving the usual name-calling banter. They had one asset in particular that made them especially cherished as members of the wing. Their warm-hearted government had ordained an allocation of free brandy for them, perhaps to help them forget they were volunteers. The brandy was known as ‘ish’, short or ‘free issue’, and it arrived in huge wooden casks (forty-gallon barrels, if I remember correctly). The fact that the South Africans possessed a natural generosity of character was a source of great comfort to their fellow-airmen, including their commanding officer.
When I took over as CO, the softening-up process in preparation for the landings on Sicily was well under way. Within a few days we were covering the first wave of landings by the Eighth Army’s battle-hardened troops, flying out from our old bases in Malta. There was little resistance, either on the ground or in the air, and after only a couple of days the sappers of the Royal Engineers had scraped a landing-strip at Pachino, on the southernmost tip of the island, and 244 Wing had moved in. It was still winter, and one of the first things I wondered about was whoever had coined the slogan, ‘Sunny Italy’. The Italian winters were mainly notable for sitting in a waterlogged tent with the rain drumming on the canvas and the duckboards afloat under one’s feet.
DAF’s leading role was to provide protection and fighter support for the Eighth Army. Since Second World War armies, unlike those of 1914–18, rarely stood still, mobility was the keynote. We needed to be based as close behind the ground forces as pos sible, which meant a move of base virtually every time the army advanced or retreated. During my time with 244 I recall eighteen such moves, including the two invasions involving sea crossings, first from Africa into Sicily and then on into Italy. For the air-crews the moves presented no problems. They simply took off from their old base on a normal operational sortie and when it was over landed at the new one. All the work and responsibility fell on the shoulders of the administrative staff, who had developed the process into a fine and disciplined art.
The first task was to locate a new site in the right place and level enough to lay a landing strip 1,200 yards long and wide enough for aircraft to land and take off singly, the regulation size for Spitfire wings. The final choice was jointly agreed between DAF HQ and the Eighth Army, at which point the sappers moved in and, almost within hours, had scraped the surface flat, un rolled their secret weapon known as PSP (pierced steel planking) and hey presto, you had an airfield. PSP consisted of steel planks, pierced with innumerable holes to reduce weight and capable of being coupled together with huge detachable hinges. They could be transported easily and, like mammoth carpets, rolled and unrolled to any required lengths. The system was one of the keys to our astonishing mobility.
To achieve the moves we developed a simple leap-frog action. We would divide ourselves in three, the advance parties consisting mainly of skeleton ground crews and airfield control personnel. They would go ahead and carry enough resources to receive, refuel, rearm and dispatch the aircraft and feed the crews. Within an hour or two of the order being given, the wing itself would be ready for take-off and would continue flying operationally throughout, prepared to land at the new base with mission completed. As soon as the last machine was in the air, the main ground party then began to follow on with the heavy transport and equipment.
It sounds simplicity itself, but it was an enormous logistical challenge to get the right people to the right place at the right time with the right spares and equipment and food to operate the incoming squadrons without a break. More than that, we had to ensure that the main party with its heavy equipment and the bulk of the spares and men arrived safely on schedule after a journey that could be hazardous and complex in the extreme. They often had to traverse shell-holed and bomb-blasted roads, along which the bridges over the gorges and ravines of the spectacular Italian landscape had been destroyed by the retreating enemy.
COs like myself were tempted to puff up our chests and take all the credit, but it was really the achievement of the dedicated and resourceful senior administrative officers (Wing S Ad. Os) who worked with the squadron adjutants and administrative personnel to make it all seem effortless and easy. None of it would have been possible, of course, without the advanced landing strips. The mastermind who oversaw the construction of most of 244 Wing’s was Freddie Keeble, a major in the Royal Engineers. There is an old adage in the film industry, which happened to be one of my various ‘life after the Second World War’ reincarnations, that says be careful how you treat colleagues on your way up, you may meet them again on your way down. In another post-war reincarnation I and my wife created and ran a company called Kingcome Design. We specialised in manufacturing individually crafted sofas and chairs to sell to the interior design trade as well as to the public.
It was important for us to become members of the IDDA, the Interior Designers’ and Decorators’ Association, since we hoped to display our wares at that organisation’s annual exhibition. Therefore we braced ourselves for a gruelling interview with its president, reportedly a fierce, acerbic guardian dragon who was determined to prevent inferior fringe operators wheedling their way on to his membership list. This awesome elemental, who vengefully stalked the esoteric jungles of the design world to eject intruders, turned out to be no less a person than my old comrade in arms and sapper, Major Freddie Keeble, RE. In our service days we always got on well, and happily the relationship carried over into the temperamental world of interior design.
It was fortunate for us that it did, for Freddie’s support and advice were invaluable in the suspicious, jealous, volatile and temperamental mêlée in which we found ourselves. We later discovered that Keeble & Sons, the interior design and decorating business owned and run by Freddie, had been formed by a direct ancestor in 1686, two years, as he liked to tell us, before Hoare’s Bank. They opened an account with the bank, and had been with it ever since, while Keeble & Sons has been owned and run by a direct line of the family down to the present day. There cannot be many enterprises able to boast as much, and Freddie’s inherited skills in technology and management had found an outlet in the utterly different context of the Allied Italian campaign.
Our advance across Sicily and into Italy might have seemed a romp had it not been for several tragedies that tore gashes in the blanket impersonality of war. The first was when we were on the hunt for a landing-strip site and came across evidence of the aftermath of a brave but failed landing of glider units by the Airborne Division on the east coast by Catania. Bodies and broken gliders littered the coastal fields and beeches, providing a salutary reminder that war is not all fun. The second was being blitzed by the Luftwaffe one brilliantly moonlit night, when we were bombed and strafed from low level. The attack seemed to last the entire night, but it can only have gone on for twenty to thirty minutes. We lost far too many men and machines, even though our practice of dispersing as widely as possible saved worse casualties.
It was a deeply disquieting experience that brought home to me the astonishing fortitude of the civilian population, always at the receiving end and always helpless to strike back. It was too easy to become detached and complacent when you were sitting in the comparative safety of the cockpit of a single-seater fighter and watching it all happen on the ground far below. You were in real danger of growing aloof from the dreadful human tragedies and the suffocating frustration of the helpless victim that were the daily norm in life for so many. The mini-blitz on our airfield was a comparative flea-bite, but to be jerked back to facing reality was, as always, a timely experience.
I could never understand why the Luftwaffe did not repeat such targeting of airfields more often. The tactic was extremely effective and could have made some significant differences in the tide of war. The Eighth Army would have been hamstrung without its air cover, but the Germans, just as they had during the Battle of Britain, when the savage blows they were dealing against RAF in their blitz of the airfields came close to being mortal, changed both tactics and targets. This air raid in Sicily was the only time 244 Squadron was attacked on the ground during the whole of the Sicilian and Italian campaign.
Two other incidents during the Sicilian phase were of an even more personal and disturbing kind. The first came when one of my Spitfire pilots crashed just inside the British lines after being shot up in a sweep over the island. He survived the crash, but was trapped in the cockpit of his aircraft, which then caught fire. A group of soldiers did their best to free him until they were driven back by the flames, and the pilot, powerless to escape the agonising death he saw roaring implacably towards him, implored them to shoot him. Faced with the alternative of turning their backs and leaving him to burn, one finally levelled his rifle and fired. It was a terrible responsibility and an act of supreme moral courage. Even for a battle-hardened soldier inured to killing it must have left a lasting scar. It was also a tragic end for a promising young pilot. I have always felt grateful that this mercy-killing sentence was not mine to approve or execute.
The other involved Jackie Darwin, the CO of a neighbouring wing of Kittyhawks, the American-designed and built fighter bombers in use with the DAF. Jackie was granted a few days’ leave in London to get married, and went to celebrate with his new wife at the famous night-spot of the Café de Paris in Piccadilly. As they danced slowly to the quiet, romantic tempo of the times, immersed in one another and their happiness, swaying gently to the music of ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and his band, the air-raid sirens sounded and the Café de Paris received a direct hit.
The carnage was appalling. Many were killed, including Snakehips, but Jackie was unscathed and protectively clutched his wife of a few hours amid the roaring chaos, the debris and the crashing masonry. Suddenly she sagged in his arms. She had been pierced by a flying fragment and died as he held her. Jackie returned to his fighter-bomber wing, to all appearances unchanged, but his will to live had died with his wife.
Meanwhile his urge for revenge was very much alive. He undertook every possible operation, ran more and more risks, went after more and more difficult targets and pressed home his attacks at lower and lower levels. He was brilliantly successful and seemed to lead a charmed life. But his immortality was an illusion and the inevitable happened. I always felt that when Johnnie finally saw Old Man Death moving in, his scythe already on the down-swing, he would have stepped into the sweep of the murderous blade with a welcoming smile.
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The final stage of the three months or so we were in Sicily passed uneventfully. There was still enough enemy air activity to keep the wing on its toes, but my main memories are of flying around the crater of Mount Etna as she grumbled away in her usual style, and peering down her fiery throat at the obscenities she habitually gargled with before spitting them high into the air as red-hot boulders and ash. I also remember a lovely house that lay directly on the beach at Taomina, a beautiful, compact, quiet resort where the slopes of Etna reached steeply down to the sea. After the war I came to know the English owner of the house and was glad to hear he had recovered it and found it still in good shape.
By now, in the summer of 1943, the Germans were definitely on the run. The whole operation took on the feel of a beautifully organised adventure holiday. The heady scent of victory combined with the summer heat, the scenery, the local wines and the informality of life under canvas in fields of maize. My personal creature comforts were ministered to by a master prestidigitator in the shape of my batman, Corporal Bottell. He had been a docker in Civvy Street and was a most effective scavenger.
As a rule there was all too little contact between the forces and the locals. It was a fact I regretted, but we were self-equipped and self-supporting and therefore did not need them; while they, as citizens of a recently defeated nation, were understandably wary and suspicious. Corporal Bottell, on the other hand, saw things differently. He was one of the few servicemen in Sicily to learn the local lingo, which he picked up surprisingly quickly, and he was a natural entrepreneur. He would disappear with a tin or two of bully beef and some cigarettes and reappear with chickens, sucking pigs, wine, cameras and various local luxuries. Nor was it in his nature to think small. One day he turned up with the Italian version of a double-decker bus, in which one deck was towed behind the other instead of sitting on top of it.
Where he obtained this vehicle or what he used as a trade-in I never did discover. Knowing him, I doubt whether the bargain would have involved more than a couple of hundred cigarettes. At a calculated guess he probably got it from a neighbourhood scallywag who had stolen it in the first place and made a fat profit, while it no doubt started out in life as the property of the local Fascist administration, keen to have the buses running on time. It looked like fair game, in my view.
I concerned myself no further with the ethics. Meanwhile Corporal Bottell presented me with his prize and the Royal Engineers offered their services. The front of the vehicle was swiftly converted into extremely comfortable sleeping quarters with a ninety-gallon overload Spitfire fuel tank on the roof supplying water for a shower. The rear section of the vehicle was transformed into a half-office, half-bar. Needless to say I became an instant object of envy among the other RAF wings. No more sleeping in waterlogged tents for me.