CHAPTER SEVEN

Deputy Flight Commander

No. 19 Squadron was based at RAF Church Fenton, near Leeds, when I joined it, but was due to move to RAF Leconfield, outside Beverley at the end of June 1959, some five weeks later. Leconfield had been having a runway extension and a general sprucing up to become both a fighter base and one of the thirty-six V-force dispersal airfields that had been, or were being, set up around Britain and overseas. The week after I arrived the squadron deployed to RAF Acklington on the Northumberland coast for a fortnight’s air-to-air firing. At the end of this it went directly to Leconfield and so my recollection of Church Fenton is rather hazy – except that I recall that the countryside around it lacked the kind of features that normally facilitate finding an airfield on a visual approach; an easy boob – that one member of the squadron made almost on a daily basis – was to find oneself lining up for a run-in and break at the nearby disused airfield of Sherburn-in-Elmet.

The detachment at Acklington provided a useful opportunity to get to know the members of the squadron. They were all there, living in the Mess, and free from the normal restraints of domesticity at home. As the newcomer I was prepared to fit in, keep quiet, and hope slowly to gain acceptance. However the Boss, Major Newall, a USAF officer on an exchange tour, presented me with a minor dilemma: he announced that he was going to appoint the ‘instructor from Chivenor’ to be a deputy flight commander. I didn’t expect this, and there were others already well into their tours on the squadron who might have hoped that the vacancy that he wanted me to fill would have been theirs. I would have much preferred not to have been bounced immediately over the expectant heads of my new compatriots but I was reluctant to turn down a chance to have an executive role on the squadron – even though I knew that it was somewhat undeserved. I was being accorded much greater experience than I had; I was being treated as a second or even third tour pilot although my time on 247 plus my time at Chivenor merely added up to one full tour’s worth. Someone from the OCU must have said something reasonably complimentary to the Boss before I arrived – a complete reversal from my first departure from Chivenor.

Our Acklington air-to-air firing programme was carried out off the coast of Northumberland under the surveillance and control of the GCI¹ Station, RAF Boulmer, but, as always, with responsibility firmly placed on the pilot for not firing if there were boats below that might be hit by falling shells or shell cases. This required us to be clear of cloud and enjoying good visibility – just one of the factors that made a firing programme difficult to run in the summer in Britain, never mind the winter. Add in aircraft unserviceabilities, gun stoppages, tow aircraft availability, the various problems with the flag, and it is easy to see that a bit of luck was invariably needed to give everyone a decent number of firing attempts – even during a fortnight-long detachment.

The Hunter 6 carried a small radar-set in its nose for the purpose of feeding target range into the gunsight. The alternative, for firing on the flag, was to set a fixed range on the sight by means of the control on the throttle and to fire at the moment that this was reached. The flags were especially fitted with a crude metal reflector to enable the radar to be used during practice firing. However, keeping the radars functioning was held by some to be a bit of an unnecessary effort and not every squadron tried to do it for air-firing programmes. The conventional wisdom was that it was entirely possible to judge the range at which to start firing the fleeting burst that there was time for before having to pull vigorously up and over the flag to avoid colliding with it. If we were about to go to war, that would be another matter. The alternative view was that the sight would predict bullet drop more accurately if the radar steadily fed in the closing range to the point of firing and therefore the set should be kept serviceable at all times. We didn’t use the radar at Acklington and the squadron average over the detachment was a mere 16.7%. One pilot, Tony Park, dragged it up from something worse with a personal best of 78%, at the same time proving that quite decent scores were possible.

The first thing I did when I got to Leconfield was to investigate the possibility of getting a Married Quarter. A pious hope as a number of officers from RAF Patrington, the GCI Station at the mouth of the Humber, had been accommodated at Leconfield while the airfield was non-operational. They were allowed to stay and only senior Leconfield executives were housed. Eventually I found a rather crummy house in Hull, a town that I remember with little pleasure, and moved Esmé and Caroline up from Chivenor – where we had actually enjoyed the advantages of a Quarter during our last four months there. Years later, when house prices had surged, leading people to eschew Married Quarters in favour of buying their own homes, many within the hierarchy of the RAF were aghast at the exodus from the Stations. It was felt best that people should be on hand for emergency call-outs. I listened not long after the rush into house purchase had begun to a Deputy Commandant at the RAF College, Cranwell, describing what was happening as ‘a cancer in our midst’. Having by then been forced more often than not to take whatever accommodation I could find off Stations I was unable to feel much sympathy with this point of view.

When the squadron had sorted itself out at Leconfield, and started routine training, I found, among other things, that the approach to PIs had changed at some point since I left Odiham. We still did the standard stuff that I knew so well, mostly with Patrington. However, there had clearly been some new thinking about how to cope with radar and communications jamming. It was by now assumed, given the massive Soviet investment in electronic warfare equipment, that there would be jamming by specialist aircraft, as well as by bombers, should a major airborne offensive be mounted against the United Kingdom. The Type 80 air defence radars that had begun to be installed as recently as the mid-fifties were felt to be unlikely to have enough power effectively to ‘burn’ through the jamming that a major Soviet attacking force was now thought likely to be able to produce.² And, of course, jamming of VHF and UHF radio transmissions and reception was almost unstoppable. We could even do it ourselves on a single radio frequency by pressing the radio transmit button and holding the channel open.

To give the fighter force some chance of intercepting a bomber stream in intense jamming, Fighter Command had devised a simple and surprisingly effective scheme. Known as the ‘Lane System’, this comprised a matrix of parallel lines – the ‘lanes’. These were 10 nm wide, and ran out from ‘start gates’ about 60 nm from the east coast. Each lane was designated by a letter, and the whole was reproduced on charts about eight inches square upon which we could write with a chinagraph (wax) pencil. The charts, prepared for different slices of the system, slotted neatly into kneepads, which we strapped on in the cockpit. To enable us to position ourselves – at least at the gates – we drew range circles from selected DME beacons on the charts.

The standard operating procedure for the fighter force in war now provided for aircraft to be allocated to lanes by instructions passed over the tele-brief, given as much information as was available prior to any scramble instructions, and to be scrambled to specific gates with a ‘start time’ to set off up the lanes if nothing further was heard from the ground. If the fighter pilot had not spotted his target by the time that he expected to, calculated on the last given position of the bombers relative to the gate, he would turn about and start a sweep from one side of his lane to the other at an angle to the lane that, given his speed and the anticipated speed of his target, should have him moving landward in pace with the bombers. The Hunter pilot, without airborne radar, would thus have some chance of a visual pick up if visibility was poor or his target was veering slightly outside his lane. All of this would be backed up by a continuous broadcast by the main radar stations on all fighter frequencies giving ‘hostile activity’ in the lanes, or any other seriously pertinent information, in the hope that some of this would penetrate the radio jamming. No attempt would be made by individual fighter controllers to control specific fighter aircraft. And, as we really were ‘the Few’ by now, we would operate as individuals, not by formations, and not even as pairs.

There were refinements to the basic plan, designed by the optimists at Fighter Command HQ, which might or might not have worked depending on the weight of jamming. An example of one such refinement was a code word to swing the lanes onto another compass direction should the general heading of a bomber wave not be straight down the standard matrix. Optimism that the system would work was based on the fact that jamming was attenuated by distance and, as long as the bomber stream was a fair way from the United Kingdom, and the fighters were closer to the radar Stations, the enemy could be seen and the broadcast might well be heard.

We practised with the lane system on every air defence exercise, some with a few targets and some, when there was a major exercise, with numbers expanded by aircraft from other NATO air forces. The RAF had a small force of Canberras equipped to provide jamming for training purposes, and the V-force had some very useful self-defence jamming equipment including ‘chaff’. While the jamming that could be produced on exercises was heavy enough to require designated radio and radar frequencies to be kept clear for safety purposes, and all civil-air radio and radar frequencies to be left unaffected, there was never anything capable of producing the effect that was expected from the Warsaw Pact. To give added reality, the radar Stations simulated the worst effects they thought they were likely to encounter, and the Canberra crews got a lot of pleasure from an otherwise tedious role in cocking up our communications quite effectively.

On paper the lane system looked a bit half-baked but it did work remarkably well. On one exercise, for example, I surprised myself by finding the target in the lane to which I had been directed some 140 nm out from the coast, and a high proportion of successful lane interceptions was not uncommon for the Hunter force, and pretty standard for the airborne-radar equipped Javelins. The continuing conventional wisdom, that the enemy would come only at high level, made life a lot easier for the defenders by minimising the likelihood of the bombers being cloaked in cloud and by allowing the fighters to operate at maximum fuel efficiency. Of course, this might not have been the case in reality.

An inescapable thing on squadrons was the ‘Secondary Job’. This might be allocated by the squadron or by the Station and could range from the very minor, such as squadron entertainments officer, to the more onerous administrative tasks such as Mess Secretary or Officer in Charge of the Sergeants’ Mess. There were also secondary jobs more closely related to one’s primary role as aircrew such as the one I was given on 247 Squadron following a fortnight’s course at the Survival School at RAF Thorney Island, that of Squadron Safety and Survival Officer. All of these secondary tasks, whatever their importance, gave squadron, wing and Station commanders, opportunities to comment in officers’ annual reports on abilities and qualities beyond those displayed in their primary roles. This added refinement to the reporting system – and gave an opportunity to the ambitious young to get themselves noticed.

At Chivenor the Station Commander had called me to his office not long after I had moved from the TTF to tell me that he wanted to have a Station magazine and that I was to have the task of managing it. And I was to make enough money from advertising to enable it to be distributed free. I think the fact that he recommended me to be interviewed for a Permanent Commission after I had done this for nearly a year illustrates quite well the benefits that could come from secondary jobs. Now on 19 Squadron, the newly arrived Boss, Squadron Leader Les Phipps, decided that I was to become the squadron Instrument Rating Examiner. I already had a secondary job running the Station rugby team but becoming an IRE would give me a professional qualification of a kind much valued by junior pilots, and I was therefore more than happy to go to RAF West Raynham, the home of the Central Fighter Establishment, for the month-long IRE course. This involved some pretty intensive general instrument flying on full and limited instrument panels, a lot of recoveries from very unusual positions, dealing with aircraft emergencies including flying in manual ‘in cloud’, Air Traffic procedural flying and, finally, aerobatics on instruments. By the end of the course instrument flying came very naturally, accuracy and precision were watchwords, and its graduates were ready to be painfully and ruthlessly demanding of those they were now trained to test.

Back on the squadron life went on as normal: PIs and more PIs, formation flying, air combat, air-to-ground firing on Cowden range just twenty miles away, a lot of instrument rating tests, air-tests, the occasional flight at night – just enough to keep us qualified to do it – and, twice a year, a drive down to Chivenor for the newly inaugurated week-long ‘Hunter Simulator and Emergencies’ course.

The Hunter Simulator and Emergencies course arose out of the positioning of Hunter Mark 4 and, later Mark 6, simulators at the OCU – a cheaper option than providing all Hunter bases with them. The simulator, mounted on hydraulic jacks and capable of pretty impressive movement, enabled a full range of emergencies, air traffic procedures, and instrument practice to be carried out with a fair degree of realism. Certainly, the box of tricks made one sweat. The week also included dinghy drill, with all being thrown into the sea from the Bideford lifeboat and hauled out (after a an hour or two of chilly bailing and bobbing about in one-man dinghies) by one of No. 22 Squadron’s rescue helicopters based at Chivenor. Apart from anything else this bit of sea bathing provided an opportunity to test the integrity of one’s immersion suit. These rather uncomfortable two-piece garments were made of a rubberised material that was impervious to water but was (supposed to be) capable of allowing air to pass through. There was a rubber neck-seal and wrist seals, all of which gripped tightly enough to keep water out at those points. Rubber boots were vulcanised to the bottom of the trousers, and the top of the trousers and the bottom of the jacket each had six inches of rubber attached that one rolled together to form the final seal. We wore these when operating over the sea around the United Kingdom during the eight months or so when the water temperature was below 10ºC – and they could be a lifesaver.

Air combat, which had not figured at all when I was on 247 Squadron, and was not on the syllabus at the OCU, was now a recognised training requirement. The Americans had learnt a lot of lessons during the Korean War about fighting in jet aircraft, and these by now had been passed to the RAF fighter squadrons. We would go up in pairs, and sometimes in fours and, from flying abeam at 40,000 feet, turn away from each other through 45 degrees, fly for a minute, turn inwards through 90 degrees, search for the opposition and try to get into a firing position behind him – or them. Pilot’s Notes for the Hunter limited the maximum g that could be applied to +7³ (and -3¾), but achieving high g was impossible until one got down into thicker air. Manoeuvring at height required some delicacy, as trying to pull too hard simply caused drag to bleed the speed off, and thicker air was needed to give the engine the power required to overcome drag. Each combat inevitably involved a lot of turning, looking for an opportunity to trade speed for height advantageously, and the ultimate loss of a lot of height as tighter turns were pulled, with gravity used to keep at the optimum turning speed. There were lots of tricks of the trade to be learned either for gaining advantage or for turning the tables on an opponent. One such trick, for use if one suddenly realised that someone was behind and coming into gun-firing range, was to barrel roll holding a boot-full of top rudder (to skid the aircraft and give the pursuer difficulty in tracking), slamming the throttle closed and, perhaps, lowering some flap (the pursuer would have seen airbrakes go out) to help knock off speed; this could have the opponent hurtling past having failed to realise that his closing speed was building up into a liability. Its success, however, did depend on the opponent failing to spot soon enough how rapidly he was closing on his target.

The Hunter oxygen system could be selected either to supply 100% oxygen to the pilot or to provide an ‘air-mix’. If air-mix was selected the system gradually increased the percentage of oxygen available to the pilot as the aircraft climbed until at a cockpit altitude of 22,500 feet only pure oxygen was being delivered. The idea was to produce economy in the use of the oxygen carried by the aircraft. At first it was standard practice to select ‘air-mix’ but some doubt was cast on the functioning of the system by an incident where a pilot reported that his number two was apparently suffering mild anoxia. By the time we were practising air combat on 19 Squadron the Hunter outfits had been instructed to select ‘100%’ on the ground. One day Barry Pickering, one of the first-tourists on the squadron, came to me and said that he was getting worried about his hearing as he was waking each morning almost totally deaf. I was too, and so we asked around the crew-room. It seemed that most of us were experiencing overnight deafness after pulling a lot of high g on 100% oxygen. I don’t think the Station doctor took us seriously for we never did have this odd but very real phenomenon explained.

One of our more colourful pilots, John (Jeff) Hawke was still living in York several months after the squadron had moved from Church Fenton, and commuting daily to Leconfield in an ageing Bedford van. Coming into the crew-room one morning looking slightly flustered, he grabbed the phone. ‘Is that Beverley police?’ we heard him ask. He went on: ‘I wonder if you are likely to have a patrol-car travelling between Beverley and York this morning?’ The answer apparently being yes, Jeff then asked: ‘I wonder if you might task its occupants to look out for my car number-plate.’ This appeared to elicit the response that a number-plate might be too small to spot readily from a passing car, for his next words were: ‘That will be no problem, Officer, it’s attached to the back-door of my van.’

This was very typical of a man who never took no for an answer and was not above mildly bending any rule for personal advantage. And yet he was among the more popular members of the squadron. I was not at all surprised when years later I came across him as an established trader in vintage aircraft, a one-time terrorist suspect having flown low over the White House in a World War Two B25 bomber that he had just bought, the owner of two Junkers 52s, and a provider of specially built aircraft for film-makers (for example, the mock 747 that he ‘crashed’ for ‘White Knights’, and the Gunbus that he had made for the film of that name). Sadly, he crashed and died in a Cessna 175 in Bosnia during the turmoil there, doubtless on some dubious mission.

In mid-November we deployed to Cyprus, taking our T7 with us, to take our turn at holding the air defence readiness state on the Island. We followed the old familiar route via Orange, Luqa, Nicosia, with no problems en route. The day after our arrival was spent settling into the equally familiar visiting-squadron accommodation at Nicosia – the yellow sandstone-built huts. The outboard drop tanks were taken off and the normal routine of aircraft servicing got under way. Two aircraft were moved to the readiness dispersal – still in the same position just off the remote end of the main runway – and their guns armed.

Flying began with the usual individual sorties for those who had not flown out of Nicosia before. The rest of us got straight away into PIs with the local radars at Cape Gata and on Mount Olympus. Then, towards the end of the first week, we began a gun and rocket-firing programme at Larnaca range. I disgraced myself on my first rocket sortie by pressing the bomb-release button on the stick rather than the rocket firing-button as I dived towards the target. Unfortunately the bomb-release button was the means by which the drop tanks could be jettisoned and away went one of my two tanks. Oddly, the other one failed to release thereby giving me a minor asymmetric problem and a bit of a worry that it might drop off somewhere on the way back to base, or as a result of being jolted on landing. As I didn’t want to be accompanied down the runway by a rupturing fuel tank my touchdown was exceedingly gentle. I expected Less Phipps to be a little less than pleased but, for a man who didn’t take kindly to carelessness in the air, he was surprisingly sympathetic.

In early December I led four aircraft from Nicosia to El Adem to take part in a weeklong army co-operation exercise. When I contacted El Adem Approach Control at about 100 nm range I was told that the airfield was experiencing a ‘bit of a sandstorm’ that was reducing visibility. At that point it would have been an easy option to divert to Benghasi some 180 nm further west. However, I wanted to get down at El Adem if at all possible to meet the exercise deadline and so decided first to have a look for myself at the conditions there. When we got overhead at 40,000 feet and could see the airfield clearly vertically below, I decided to defer the idea of a diversion. We let down, and at 5,000 feet could still see the airfield fairly clearly as we passed over it. If we had climbed at that point we would still have been able to divert to Benghasi with some fuel to spare, but any further delay was going to rule this out as a safe option. Putting the formation into line astern at 500 yard intervals I let down into the circuit, levelled at 1,000 feet agl, and could see nothing but sand. Trying to remain cool I timed the downwind leg, flying the reciprocal of the runway direction on a compass heading, called for wheels and flaps, and started a descending turn onto the runway heading. I didn’t find the runway.

Calling to the formation members to raise wheels and flaps I climbed once more out of the sand level and, with that sick feeling that comes with the realisation that one may have screwed up badly, looked back for the airfield. It was in fact inside the turn I had made onto finals and falling rapidly behind us. Fuel states were not yet critical and we had enough for a few more attempts to get down. However, the sooner we did, the better, and I was desperate to make the next circuit absolutely right. Moreover, I had to get the others down with me and not leave anyone alone in the air to cope by himself. This time I stayed at 3,000 feet downwind, timed with care to ensure that we were beyond the airfield before turning in, and began a gentle descent on finals. I could see nothing but sand as I rolled out on the runway heading but, just as I was about to call for another overshoot, I spotted a large whitewashed concrete block below and in front. This was one of a line of blocks that had been put down in the 1930s by the Italian Air Force for the very situation we were now experiencing. The white blocks led to the end of the runway and unquestionably saved me from a very dicey situation – entirely of my own making. Oddly, the other three members of the formation, following my imprudent lead with unjustified faith, had felt no panic at all.

The rest of the week was spent in finding and carrying out mock attacks on military targets in the vicinity of places one had first heard of when the Eighth Army was engaged with the Afrika Korps; places such as Tobruk and Derna. And we indulged ourselves to our heart’s content in some really low low-flying. I found that ten feet or so over flat desert was comfortable – though not for everyone: once, while running along the North African east–west highway, I caused a long-distance lorry to flash his headlights at me in warning as I approached him at about cab height. The minimum permitted height for low-flying in the United Kingdom was 250 feet agl in the interests of minimising, to some extent, disturbance to those below, and possibly to minimise the risk of accidental encounters with such things as power-lines. We all recognised that in war we would have to be ‘on the deck’ if we were going to pursue the RAF’s policy of attacking at low level, to reduce and hopefully eliminate the chances of being detected and fired at successfully. On this exercise we were in effect anticipating the concept and the authorisation of ‘Operational Low Flying’ training introduced within the RAF some twenty years later.

During our absence from Cyprus the rest of the squadron had redeployed from Nicosia to RAF Akrotiri, then just reopened following a major makeover to transform it into a main base capable of handling V-bombers and strategic transport aircraft. We joined them directly from El Adem on a new, very generously sized, concrete parking apron designated as the fighter dispersal. Unfortunately the hangar and office accommodation planned for the dispersal had not yet been started. There was no cover for the aircraft and thus all servicing had to be done in the open. The air and ground crews were accommodated in four interlinked marquees that leaked badly in the heavy winter rains.

The Mess at Akrotiri was a different matter. Attractively built in yellow sandstone, with a welcoming log-fire burning in the anteroom, it was a pleasure to escape to it from the marquees. Most evenings at Nicosia five of us had played poker together, and we took up this pursuit again at Akrotiri, nobody winning much but passing the time happily, constantly entertained by the repeated malapropisms of one of our number notorious on the squadron for producing them. Unhappily, Nigel Pickesgill, B Flight commander and one of the more gentlemanly members of the squadron, mislaid his wallet one evening and we spent an uncomfortable four weeks as he silently wondered if one of us might have misappropriated it; we were all very glad when he found it – where he had left it, on a ledge under the table in his bedroom where we had been playing.

The final few weeks of the detachment passed enjoyably in a series of army co-operation exercises and another session of air-to-ground gun and rocket firing. However, by mid-January, when it was time to go back to the United Kingdom we were all pleased to give up cold leaky tents and head for home. Cyprus in winter does not have the appeal of Cyprus in summer. However, southern Europe was much colder, as we discovered on the way home: we had to stay overnight at Luqa because of poor weather at Istres and icy conditions affecting Orange. Foolishly we had stuffed no kit for an overnight stay into the radio-bay – the only stowage space available in the Hunter – and, with nothing other than our flying overalls we had a miserable night in Malta, and shivered at Orange the following day while the aircraft were being refuelled.

Back at Leconfield we settled down once more to normal life – lots of the usual things but every day different, and always an extra bit of something to add spice. For example, I was off to the Royal Netherlands Air Force base at Soesterberg in early May with half the squadron on a fortnight’s NATO exchange – memories of canals and dykes and polders, and of Captain Darrell Bjorkland, our US Marine exchange officer, and myself borrowing bicycles to ride around the airfield to a USAF enclave and finding it extraordinarily difficult to ride back with any dignity after the hospitality we received there.

Another out-of-normal event was the Queen’s Birthday fly-past on 11 June. The squadrons taking part each deployed four aircraft and a spare to two airfields in Norfolk a few days beforehand. Our detachment was to RAF Stradishall. On the day of the fly-past the 19 Squadron aircraft made up the last box of four in eight boxes and it was a hell of a ride as the leader kept adjusting his throttle in the interests, I suppose, of getting his timing right over Buckingham Palace. Down the tail end it was necessary to pump the throttle through its full range from closed to maximum power simply to maintain station. He also seemed to have failed to take into consideration how far below his own level the back end of the formation would be stepped down, and I recall as we crossed the north-eastern approaches to London the ground flashing past very alarmingly close below us.

In July the squadron deployed to RAF Sylt in the North Frisian Islands for three weeks of air-to-air firing. Sylt was RAF Germany’s armament practice camp, and as such was well prepared to provide the facilities for a firing programme that were such a pain to organise from home. It was my first experience of life in Germany, a RAF posting to which most pilots aspired. Sylt is a long thin island with about twenty-one miles of beach and dunes that would have been very attractive had it not been for the constant wind that blew off the North Sea. However, as it was also a nudist beach, few of the squadron’s air and ground crews were deterred by the wind. Several of us, sunning ourselves in the dunes one day, trying to shelter from the chill breeze, were amused to see three of our fellow pilots, coming down the beach. They were obviously on the outlook for something prettier than the overweight and ageing Fraus that seemed to make up the majority of the females frolicking on the sands: Neddy Nicholls, a tall gangly lad trying to pretend that he was looking only at the quality of the sand but surreptitiously sneaking the odd look here and there; Pete Taylor, showing no such inhibitions, his head swinging continuously from side to side as if he was at a tennis match; and Ching Fuller, trying to cover his mild embarrassment at being with the other two by carrying his squadron boater (it was the thing on 19 Squadron to have boaters) strategically in front of his lower body.

The weather was ideal for flying on the range while we were there and the firing programme went extraordinarily well. I had twenty ‘live’ sorties – which doubled my total experience of air-toair firing to date – and there is no doubt that this continuity was valuable as the squadron average reached 24.5%. I was averaging 30% hits on the flag, with a best of 56%, a matter of little moment now, but a very important matter of pride to me at the time. Clearly the original OCU rating of ‘below average’ had stung.

We went to Sylt again – for a month – in January 1961, but this time we fell foul of the German winter and spent half of our time there snowed in and unable to fly. We did a lot of ground-training during the day and relieved the tedium in the evening in the Mess bar enjoying the relative painlessness of duty-free prices, and inevitably we fell into the practice of playing silly games for drinks. The most popular, and most destructive was ‘horsing’ for Sekt, the German equivalent of champagne. This required each member of the ‘horsing’ group to select up to three coins, or none at all, hold the amount selected in his closed hand, and guess at the total in the group. Anyone getting this right could relax. Eventually a pair would remain and the loser would buy the booze for the group. At five shillings (25 pence) a bottle for Sekt we tended to get through rather a lot, and as it was quickly intoxicating it stoked the evening from the outset. My final duty after a night in the bar was to search the snow between the Mess and the block in which our bedrooms were located for Tony Park, with whom I shared a bedroom. He had a marked tendency to fall asleep en route to bed.

I escaped for a week from all of this to go back to Hull where Esmé was giving birth to a second daughter, Julia, and to see how my mother was coping with Caroline. I got a lift over by air but had the odd experience of travelling back by the troopship that then still plied between Harwich and the Hook of Holland. I was sought out by the Duty Transport Officer at Harwich, who just happened to notice that I was destined for Sylt, to act as escort to an airman being returned there accused of assaulting an officer. There followed an interminable journey as far as Hamburg by military train, and then onward by a rather slow connection to Sylt town. I had always understood that prisoners had to be escorted by people of their own rank so that they could not compound their situation by striking a superior. I had made this point at Harwich but the DTO had pleaded with me in desperation and, grudgingly, I acquiesced. As it happened my prisoner had cooled down from whatever passion had previously afflicted him and he behaved impeccably throughout the journey. He was in fact quite an agreeable travelling companion.

Towards the end of the second Sylt detachment Boss Phipps decided that the squadron should give a drinks party for the Station personnel. This was to begin at 1900 hours but unfortunately most of the pilots anticipated the party by getting into the bar two hours before it, and ‘horsing’ madly for most of that time before stumbling off to change. Not everyone survived to return and the Boss was left rather unsupported to host the party. The following morning we could see that he was somewhat upset. Pete Taylor had pointed out months before that his lower lip turned down when he was angry. For some reason this had become known on the squadron as the ‘Habsburg Lip’ and the degree of anger was assessed by the level of its lowering. Irritation was labelled ‘40 degrees’, the take-off flap setting in the Hunter, and real anger was ‘full flap’. The morning after the discourteous failure of a fair number of the squadron officers to meet their hosting duties it was, justifiably, at full flap, and it stayed there long after he had expressed his displeasure to us.

The snow and the resultant reduction in firing sorties notwithstanding, the detachment was a success in terms of the scores achieved. After the first spell at Sylt Les Phipps had decided to ensure the serviceability of the radar ranging sets on all the aircraft for the second, and this unquestionably led to better scores. The squadron average was 29.7%. My best was 64%.

Shortly before we had embarked on this second Sylt spell the Boss had told me that he had nominated me to go on the next Day Fighter Combat Leaders’ School course at West Raynham. The DFCLS course had been formed by adding to the former DFLS course the content of the Pilot Attack Instructors’ course, itself a casualty of the changes that had flowed from the Sandys cuts. I was naturally pleased to be going as the course was widely acknowledged to provide the best professional training available within the fighter world at that time, at least in the United Kingdom.

I went down to West Raynham on 1 March and began flying the following day. We started gently with battle formation at 45,000 feet and went almost straight away into cine quarters and ranging and tracking against an evasively weaving target at 40,000 feet. From there we went into an air-to-air firing phase – very different from what I had been used to in that we flew four aircraft in the flag pattern simultaneously rather than the normal pair. This required a pretty careful effort at continuous synchronisation to keep one aircraft on the perch, one halfway into the firing position, one firing, and one halfway out to the perch. But it actually worked surprisingly well, possibly because of the level of experience of the participants, and I found I was getting some very good scores – a best of 83%. Perhaps I was ready at last for seriously hostile skies!

We followed the air-to-air phase with an air-to-ground one, firing rockets and guns on Cowden range. After this came a fighter reconnaissance phase and, finally, a lengthy air combat one. The air combat phase started gently with pairs of students manoeuvring against a staff member, or a staff pair, and built up into formations of four students ranged against staff pairs or staff fours. Initially all combat exercises were flown with a starting height of 40,000 feet and were called off at 7,000 feet, but towards the end of the phase we were doing our stuff down to 1,500 feet agl.

Every sortie on the course, other than the single-aircraft FR ones, was student led with instructors flying in the number two or four slots in critical watchfulness. As a result we became rapidly adept at meticulous pre-flight planning and full but succinct briefings and de-briefings. The final test of our planning and briefing came when we had to prepare for a ‘fighter sweep’ to Germany. This was the culmination of the course, the grand finale. It involved getting a formation of thirty-two aircraft airborne, Hunters of the Day Fighter course and Javelins of the Night Fighter course that was running concurrently, forming them up into a planned spread of battle fours, and flying to Germany. Our destination was RAF Geilenkirchen, just over the Dutch border, about fifteen miles north of Aachen. The weather on the day chosen for the ‘sweep’ couldn’t have been better, with hardly a cloud in the sky.

We levelled at height and settled into formation, spread out across a wide front, contrails streaming from all but the battle four that was flying deliberately below contrail height. As we were fair game for every available fighter aircraft based in northern France, Belgium, Holland and West Germany we expected opposition, and we got it. One moment there was nothing to be seen, the next, someone out on the starboard side of the formation called ‘Pair, right, three o’clock, five miles’. With best steely British calm the formation leader, Jeremy Hall, instructed a pair on the starboard side of our grand gaggle to break away to engage them and thus allow the rest of us to fly serenely onwards. That is not how it happened, however. Within seconds of the first sighting aircraft were appearing from all quarters, and in no time our large and unwieldy formation was forced to break into smaller units. Very quickly, these disintegrated into pairs manoeuvring against pairs or singletons, pulling maximum g and spiralling downwards. One moment the sky was full of aircraft wheeling and turning. Then, suddenly individuals were breaking off their own private mock combat at a couple of thousand feet or so with none of the other participants in sight. I couldn’t help thinking that it was fortunate that visibility was good for I wasn’t entirely sure where I was when I levelled out. We had not left everything to chance, of course, and had spent a bit of time at the planning stage picking out possible diversion airfields and major identifying features along and well to the sides of our route. I didn’t immediately see anything to help, and I didn’t have the fuel to hang around, so I pulled up a few thousand feet to have a wider look at my surroundings. I was, in fact, about 20 nm to the east of Geilenkirchen with enough fuel for about 40 nm. We usually ended sorties on the DFCLS course with a little more than that, but not a lot. So I didn’t sweat too much; just enough to be glad when the airfield came into view. About a third of the formation ended up spread around various other Dutch, Belgian and German bases.

The DFCLS course lasted until the end of May and it had been well worth every minute. When I got back to Leconfield bursting with enthusiasm to share what I had learned I found that I would shortly be moving again. I had been posted as a flight commander to No. 20 Squadron. Disbanded in Germany at the end of 1960, No. 20 was to reform at RAF Tengah on Singapore Island on 1 September 1961, and I was required to join the squadron commander designate at the Maintenance Unit at St Athan at the beginning of July to organise a plot to ferry its aircraft out there. I had flown 586 hours on 19 Squadron and had enjoyed them all. I had even become almost reconciled to living in Hull. However, the idea of going to the Far East and still flying Hunters was very appealing.