On we flew, engines running sweetly and it seemed as if - we could go on forever.’
There is one man in the world who fell out of an aeroplane flying at four thousand feet, without any parachute and lives to tell the story today. He is a young Ferry Command pilot, Harry Griffith by name. He is one of the men who spend their lives bringing supplies of bomber aircraft across what to them is the one-way ocean, the Atlantic. True, some bombers return westward, but the great mass of bombers coming off the assembly lines of the American and Canadian factories which are ear-marked for the European battlefronts are flown only one way-east. Bombers fly east because the course of battle is eastwards.
Harry Griffith, when he made his record jump, was a passenger in a Boston bomber flying over Lake Louis, in Quebec. The aircraft rolled and he fell straight through the bomb-hatch. As he went down, released like a human bomb, he made a wild grab at the edge of the hatch, got his fingers to it, held on with the prehensile strength of a marmoset and remained there dangling with his body in space and beneath him four thousand feet of uninterrupted thin air. Fortunately the pilot had throttled down and heard Griffith’s cries rising from beneath the fuselage. He looked back, saw in a glance what had happened and turned down the nose of the Boston.
Lake Louis was ice-bound, for it was the depth of the Canadian winter, The Boston continued in a gentle glide until it was skimming along only ten feet above the frozen surface of the lake. The pilot turned towards a large mound of deep snow. As he approached it he cried, ‘Drop!’
Griffith’s numbed fingers opened and he plummeted into the snow mound, He suffered only a few minor injuries from his terrible ordeal and the final drop and in a very short time was recovering in hospital and inquiring about the next bomber he was to fly back to Britain.
That is the sort of man who flies the bombers to Britain from bases in Canada and Newfoundland. They are tough, they are strenuous and they have that essential quality found in the crews of Bomber Command and Coastal Command, the ability to hold on when the going is rough. Hold on to themselves and their aircraft.
Their job is to deliver the goods across thousands of miles of ocean. The countless American-built aircraft now darkening the skies of North-western Europe with their wings attest to how well the goods have been delivered. They cross the Northern Atlantic in good weather and foul, rain or shine, blizzard or squall. Electrical storms do not stop them, nor does ice and drifting snow piling up on the wings and forcing them lower over a wintry sea. Roving Focke-Wulf Condors cannot stay their flight, nor can Atlantic fog.
They fly by the clock. Time alone governs their take-off and true touchdown and time, we are assured, waits for no man. Not that they are oblivious to what is happening around them. Ferry Command pilots keep sharp eyes on the Atlantic’s grey horizon. They observe what rises with the sun ahead and sets with the sun behind. Their observations are valuable. They have even been the means of saving lives.
Flight Lieutenant R. W. Gautrey of Peterborough, a RAF ace pilot attached to Ferry Command, once saved a whole boatload of shipwrecked mariners. He was flying to Britain at the time in one of the latest American flying-boats, which was badly needed by Coastal Command. The flying-boat was entered in his log-book as AH553. He was bringing it over the one-way Ocean with a crew of six. His job was to deliver AH553 on time; with its fully trained crew.
He flew all night. Flying conditions were good and at regular intervals he checked his position. AH553 was a Catalina flying-boat and it had begun its long journey to Britain from the workshops of the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation in San Diego, California.
Shortly before dawn broke Gautrey took a good ‘fix’ under exceedingly clear astronomical conditions. He found that his course tallied precisely with the earlier checks he had made. He was dead on course - and on time.
But he was meeting a fairly strong head-wind, which rose with the coming of daylight. He decided to go down to a lower altitude to avoid the full force of the wind. He turned down the nose of the Catalina and descended from the bright stars to about 6,000 feet. The descent took him below a belt of cloud.
As he went through the cloud and caught the steely light of the Atlantic dawn on the broad waters he felt a strange thrill. This day would see him arrive at an English base with the first Catalina aircraft to cross the Atlantic. Great things were expected of the Catalinas when they came into operation. Coastal Command would employ them in their U-boat hunting. And AH553 would be the first of the many that would wreak destruction and retribution among the U-boat packs congregating along the Atlantic sea-lanes.
Any man would have felt some justifiable pride in meeting that dawn as Gautrey met it. But all such personal retrospection was brushed from his mind by a large stain on the sea. He saw the wide patch of oil as his glance swept over the surface of the ocean.
‘Look!’ he called to his companions on the flight.
They looked.
‘A ship’s gone down,’ one said.
For a moment or two they were all silent, reading this clue to another sea tragedy. A U-boat had struck; and an Allied merchantman had gone down right below where they were flying.
And they were a thousand miles from the nearest land.
Gautrey, staring at the oil stain, fancied he saw it sparkle in the semi-darkness of the dawn. Then he was over it and flying on. He glanced back and caught the sparkle again. The next instant he was turning off course.
What that sparkle was had suddenly come to him. It was a flash-lamp signalling. Somewhere down there in the oil-covered water was a boat with survivors. As he went lower the number of flashes increased and to his amazement, in the brightening daylight, he was at last able to make out no less than nine boatloads of people. One of the boats was towing a raft. He swooped low and saw Lascars in blue dungarees standing up and waving at the flying-boat. Gautrey told one of the Catalina’s crew to signal a message to the boats, asking for the name of their ship. In reply one of the flash-lamps below began slowly Morse-coding the name of the torpedoed ship, letter by letter. But Gautrey had his own job to attend to and time was precious. While ‘he waited for the name of the vessel to be completed he got his radio operator to send out a message to base giving the exact location of the boats.
Then he swooped again and His men waved farewell to the people standing in the boats waving back and flashing their lamps. ‘The occupants of the boats seemed to be in good condition,’ Gautrey reported, when he arrived in Britain. ‘I do not think the vessel, could have been sunk more than six hours earlier, probably in the middle of the night. All the boats appeared to be full and were close together.’
Thus the first Catalina to fly the Atlantic and join the forces of the free peoples of the world made history, for on the day following his safe arrival with his flying-boat and crew Gautrey learned that his radio messages had been duly picked up and promptly acted upon; all the survivors of the torpedoed ship had been found and taken aboard a destroyer which had dashed at full speed to the rescue.
Six weeks after the story of Gautrey’s flight was released another RAF officer who had been posted to duties with Ferry Command broadcast his story of how he had navigated the first of the American Liberators across the Big Pond.
‘We took off,’ he said, ‘from our Canadian base and flew a steady thousand miles or so to Newfoundland. Everything in the aircraft behaved perfectly - just as we expected; and we landed safely. I stood at a window gazing eastwards across the snowy waste which was the aerodrome; looking over the long, wide-paved runways, kept clear of snow by snow-ploughs, which were constantly going to and fro in a plume of powdery cloud and over the hangars, over the snowdrifts and trees’ to the eastern sky, where I knew lay England and home.’
He had been away from England for ten months, training under the Empire Air Training Scheme. During those ten months the blitz had changed much of the landscape of the English cities. He felt a sudden desire to be back with his kith and kin in the middle of the struggle and was glad when finally it was time to take off.
‘With good wishes from all the muffled figures standing around in the zero weather,’ he went on, ‘we climbed in and took off into the darkness on our 2,350-mile trip. Up we climbed through the lower layer of threatening cloud into the clear sky above. Up, up, still higher, to get into the region of favourable winds and favourable weather and also to ensure that we should be able to see as much as possible the stars by which we were going to navigate.
‘The flight engineer sat on my right, adjusting the throttle and mixture controls to agree with the instructions given him by the captain, who was carefully studying his cruising card. Then the captain adjusted his controls, trimmed the aircraft and switched on his automatic pilot, which we in the RAF jokingly called George, but which our American pilot called Iron Mike. On we flew, engines running sweetly and it seemed as if - we could go on forever.’
To the German High Command, a couple of years later, those last words must have sounded something of a prophecy. The pilots and crews flying the big bombers and flying-boats made the one-way crossing as much an everyday occurrence as driving a car along a city street.
The navigator directing the course of this first member of the Liberator squadrons continued: ‘I was constantly kept busy checking our ground-speed and positions by astronomical observations. In spite of the fact that we were very high and the outside temperature was minus thirty-four degrees I did not feel at all uncomfortable. Of course, we were all wearing oxygen masks, but these were of a pattern which did not hamper our movements in any way. My mathematics came as easily as they would at ground-level. It was beautifully warm in the aircraft and there were moments when I felt I would like to have taken my tunic off; I was not wearing any special flying clothes except my flying-boots and I only wore them because one’s feet are apt to get cold sitting still for a long time. The cabin heating was really fine and I only felt the intense cold when I occasionally opened the astro-hatch to take a shot with my sextant. And so we proceeded on, going through the night ever eastwards towards England.’
Those are personal impressions by a man coming back to England for the first time after a long absence and flying the first of a welcome new fleet of sky giants which were to reinforce the hard-pressed RAF in the great air battle centred on the British coast-line. He is enthusiastic because he is a man making a discovery. He is seeing for himself what tools America was about to put into the hard, capable hands of the RAF. But he had something to add about the men flying with him in the Liberator.
‘Our captain,’ he went on later, ‘was with British Imperial Airways and has had years of experience flying aircraft of all types. The co-pilot, or first officer, as he is called, was an American, who has flown for years and who has now volunteered to ferry these American aircraft to Britain. Our radio officer, also of Imperial Airways, sat in a little cabin aft, surrounded by his radio equipment, which is of the very latest type that America can supply and which is for use in the Royal Air Force. And the flight engineer was an RAF sergeant fitter-air-gunner, who has been specially trained for this work.’
America, seemingly, was giving of her best and it must be borne in mind that this broadcast was made six months before Pearl Harbour brought the full responsibility of active participation in the war as a fighting ally to rest on the shoulders of the American nation.
The navigator concluded: ‘Seven hours passed, the engines still purring sweetly, our course still eastwards. The stars faded out and the sun, like a ball of fire, was just lighting the eastern sky when the radio officer made contact with English stations. I again checked our position and estimated our time and place of landfall; and after seven hours thirty minutes in the air we were off the Irish coast, which I think proves the high standard of these aircraft now being supplied to us in ever-increasing numbers from our friends in America.’
That broadcast was made on 18 June 1941. Four months later to the day, on 18 October, a Ferry Command pilot said over the radio to a British listening audience: ‘There is nothing very much in flying the Atlantic nowadays and RAF pilots regard Atlantic ferrying as a rest from operational flying. And so it is, for it comes as an interesting relief from routine bombing raids.’
Lindbergh and those others who made headlines by conquering the Atlantic skies had faded very far into a flying era that was becoming as remote to the modern ocean fliers as the day when Bleriot spanned the English Channel. As the number of pilots and navigators drafted to Ferry Command multiplied, so the actual crossing of the Atlantic from west to east became more of a routine job.
As one ferry pilot put it: ‘The crossing takes very little time, considerably less than many routine patrols by Coastal Command and many raids over Germany and on the ferry trip you have the great advantage of being able to plan the whole affair on the lines of a civil airline passenger flight.’
The same pilot has provided an intimate picture of such a crossing.
‘From Canada you fly to Newfoundland,’ he explains almost nonchalantly. ‘Just a hop. You get a surprise when you arrive there. A boom town has sprung up in a matter of months, where there was previously nothing but bare rock. This is where the real business starts. Pilot and navigator check up with the weather experts. These are the men who have killed the bogy of Atlantic flying. They will tell you with certainty the sort of weather you will meet right the way across. Any sudden change will be wirelessed to you. It is left to the captain of the aircraft to decide whether and when, he will take off. He’s the boss.
‘We check up and examine very carefully our aircraft, which is under an armed guard. You can’t even approach it without a pass. Meantime the wireless operator goes to see the chief steward, to select a menu for the trip. We carry half a dozen thermos bottles and there is a wide choice of food and drink. There’s soup, cocoa, coffee, pineapple juice, tomato juice and sandwiches in infinite variety. The food’s grand. Then, after one last word with the weather folk, we’re ready to take off. There remains a final duty for the captain to perform. He has to search the aircraft for stowaways. Then we’re off. The trip lasts round about ten hours or so, though some pilots have done it in much less. More often than not you don’t see the sea all the way across. It’s freezing, of course, but you fly so high that there is no moisture in the air to ice-up wings and air-screws.
‘We take a good look at the coast of Newfoundland as we say good-bye. Then as we climb up through the cloud the navigator gets busy. He waits for it to get dark, for he wants to get an astro fix, to check our position by the stars and it’s extraordinary how long it takes to get dark after the sun has disappeared behind us. Then we plug in the automatic pilot and settle down for the night. The navigator is the only one with much to do - the rest of us read or talk. At last we see the dawn break. That’s a grand sight. On my first trip it had just got light when I saw a great red blaze through the cloud. I thought it was a ship on fire, but it was just the sun coming up through the cloud.’
He concludes succinctly: ‘Then eventually we put down on this side. It’s satisfying to descend through a hole in the cloud and find yourself in exactly the right spot at the right time. It’s a grand feeling. That’s about all there is to it. I can tell you of no incidents I’ve experienced on the way over and neither can my fellow-pilots.’
Food and flight are both grand.
The same might be said of the pilots and crews and of the records they achieved. For the pilots of Ferry Command soon found a way of livening up the routine journeys. They began lopping minutes off each other’s flying time.
A Boeing Flying Fortress piloted by Coastal Command’s Squadron Leader Bulloch, the ace U-boat hunter, made the crossing in eight hours forty-five minutes. That was the first Fortress flown by Ferry Command. This time was equalled by a Liberator pilot. For a period both pilots held the record and shared it.
Then a former Imperial Airways and British Overseas Airways pilot, Captain O. P. Jones, rocketed a Liberator across in eight hours twenty-three minutes. He arrived in Britain on 1 December 1941. The time of crossing was taken to be the interval from take-off to touch-down.
By July 1942, seven months later, crossing the Atlantic had become monotonous for one famous Ferry Command crew, headed by Captain F. A. Dugan, of New Orleans. Dugan and his crew were employed normally in flying the west-to-east bombers, but in one week they were asked to supplement the Montreal-to-Britain return ferry service, which transports Government-sponsored passengers and urgently needed war material, carrying back ferry crews to collect still more bombers. In the one period of nine days Dugan and his men made the Atlantic crossing five times in the same aircraft, a Liberator, carrying on each journey a maximum all-up load. This record was completed without incident.
At the end of that period the crew had seventy-two hours’ rest, while their Liberator was given a routine overhaul. Then they flew back to Montreal - their sixth crossing in less than two weeks.
Dugan and two of his crew had been in the service for nearly two years, since September 1940. They held the amazing ferry record of more than five hundred hours of trans-ocean flying in ninety days. In that period of special flights they flew the Atlantic, the Pacific and eight journeys to and from Australia.
On the 21st of that same month, July, the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, RAF Ferry Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill GBE KCB received a telegram of congratulations from the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal KCB. Sir Charles said: ‘I send you all congratulations and best wishes on the first birthday of Ferry Command. You are playing a most important part in building up the strength of the RAF and we are full of admiration for your magnificent record. May your second year be as successful as your first.’
It was a Ferry Command pilot, Captain W. J. Vanderkloot, who flew Mr. Churchill home in August 1942 after his historic journey to meet Premier Stalin.
‘Having flown from Africa to Montreal,’ Captain Vanderkloot related subsequently, ‘we were given ten hours off duty and then we were ordered to return to England to fly Mr. Churchill to Russia. We brought back to this country Lord and Lady Halifax.
‘During the whole of the fourteen or fifteen thousand miles Mr. Churchill has flown with us he was certainly swell. I calculate that he has spent two-thirds of the whole time in the cockpit. He is obviously very interested in everything connected with flying and with either the second pilot or myself with one stick he often took over the other.’
Captain Vanderkloot, a Californian, had 5,000 hours in his log-book when he piloted the British Prime Minister to the Soviet Union.
Ferry Command has its moments of celebration. Such a moment arrived on 30 September 1942, at a Ferry Command terminal base in England. An aircraft from the United States was signalled in and landed. It drew up and out stepped Lieutenant-Colonel Elliot Roosevelt, son of the President of the United States, Ten seconds later a Liberator got the signal to come in. It touched down after making a 3,000-mile flight from Montreal. From it alighted the Right Honourable Clement Attlee, the Deputy Prime Minister and Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, the British High Commissioner in Canada. Twenty seconds after their arrival a third aircraft landed, to deposit Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill, Ferry Command’s chief. As he walked across the tarmac another aircraft from Montreal got the all-clear signal to drop its undercarriage and touch-down. The passengers alighting from this plane included a special Canadian Government mission made up of the Honourable C. D. Howe, Minister of Munitions and Supply, Colonel the Honourable J. L. Ralston, Minister of Defence, Mr. Ralph Bell, Director-General of Aircraft Production and Mr. Desmond A. Clark, Director-General of Shipbuilding.
As though a magician’s wand had been waved, these men met from the distant corners of the earth on the aerodrome’s apron, to chat together, drink a glass of sherry and bite a welcome sandwich and then disperse. Sir Frederick Bowhill stepped into a Liberator and went on to Montreal and Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt left to join the American Army Air Corps in Britain.
Of course, every crossing is not of the magician’s wand kind, unless one includes very unfriendly magicians. In December 1942 the North Atlantic weather turned very bad for the ferry pilots. So bad that one Catalina flying-boat took twenty-three hours and 58 minutes on the journey across - two minutes under twenty-four hours. That month one Ferry Command skipper with 37 crossings in his log-book described the journey from farther south, in Bermuda, as the worst he had ever experienced. His flying-boat was at times scudding along on its back, blown like a feather before the force of the storm.
But the Ferry Command aircraft came through. Schedules as well as masses of equipment went overboard, but the much-needed flying-boats finally made it.
Here is how one of the Catalinas that month beat the worst storms on record.
‘About fifteen hundred miles out we really hit it,’ the wireless operator reported. ‘Something struck the kite then and for the next minute or so what happened was almost unbelievable. The skipper says we went up five hundred feet and down six hundred as nearly simultaneously as mattered. In any event, everything that was loose in the aircraft began flying around the fuselage. We began ducking our personal luggage, spare parts and everything else. We were all spattered with oil that came splashing out of every place it could splash from.’
The civilian wireless operator took up the story at that stage.
‘And that wasn’t all,’ he added. ‘I was sitting at the wireless set and suddenly blue flames started shooting out from it. I don’t know whether it was static electricity or whether we were hit by lightning that our radio aerial diverted through the wireless. The same blue lights were just dancing along the top of our wing.’
The captain decided to climb above a storm he could not outpace. The crew had no oxygen equipment, but he risked climbing up to 19,000 feet and stayed at that altitude for the best part of an hour. Referring to this, the wireless operator said: ‘The skipper told us all to sit down and not move around anymore than was absolutely necessary. But sometimes we had to get around. Even walking the few feet to the rear of the fuselage was a physical effort. You’d come back absolutely tired out. We sat there and watched our fingernails slowly turning blue from lack of oxygen.’
The Catalina, not unnaturally, got badly off course, so that when land was sighted it was neutral Eire. If they touched down in Eire the RAF members and the aircraft would be interned. So, with storms still raging, they turned out to sea again, despite the fact that they were all physically exhausted and waited for dawn to make a careful landfall.
In one day, in that weather, the RAF put down four Catalinas at British bases. Whatever job they tackle, the RAF crews seem to be unstoppable. They get through; produce the necessary results - somehow.
The following April was another bad month. Icing conditions were really bad. The Ferry Command captains took their aircraft well above the 20,000-feet line to make the journey, necessitating the use of oxygen for continuous spells of seventeen and eighteen hours by the crews. For long, unbroken periods those April 1943 flights were made at times through a cold that reached an average temperature of sixty-three degrees of frost, Eighty and even ninety degrees of frost were common on some trips.
From November 1942 until that April the continuous flow of Ferry Command supplies of bombers and flying-boats went on uninterrupted in any serious way, in weather conditions not generally equalled in severity for forty-seven years.
But the fact remains that the aircraft continued to set out - and arrive.
And in May, when the weather improved, Ferry Command pilots began setting up fresh records. Record-breaking is an established pastime with Ferry Command skippers. As one laughingly told a reporter, ‘No one gets hurt when we break another - except Jerry.’