CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SQUADRON GETS A NEW TYPE OF AEROPLANE

 

Strange are the ways of the Services. We were at Benbecula for only 10 days before we were posted back to Chivenor in North Devon where I had originally joined 179 Squadron. The reason for the move was that the squadron was going to relinquish its faithful Wimpys and convert to the Warwick Mark V.

The Warwick was in essence a scaled up version of the Wimpy with the same geodetic construction and the same profile. Indeed we were led to understand that this was the original design of the Wimpy way back in 1937 but at that time there were no engines powerful enough to operate it. Now better engines had been developed and the Warwick Mark V was equipped with two Bristol Centaurus motors each developing 3300 horspower. This aeroplane was also equipped with a Leigh Light. With a full war load it could stay aloft indefinitely on one engine as I subsequently proved when an engine failed on an op and, because the weather was good, I just carried on until the scheduled time to return to base .

Vickers Warwick Mk V		The first of our Warwicks was flown in to Chivenor by a Vickers test pilot, Flight Lieutenant Lucke. He took one of our flight commanders, Squadron Leader Wilson, and me for a familiarization flight. The next day I had forty minutes duel with him then did my first solo on a Warwick. I was then chosen to convert the rest of the squadron pilots to Warwicks. By this time I had been promoted to Flight Lieutenant. For the conversion of the rest of the pilots the squadron moved to St Eval, an R.A.F. station north of Newquay in Cornwall. This was not very far from St Agnes where my maternal grandmother had been born.

Before beginning the conversion of the other pilots I went on leave. Operational aircrew had 16 days leave every three months. I, of course, went home to Annette in Reigate. I got a shock to find that Reigate was on the direct route of the German buzz bombs heading for London. The buzz bomb, which the Germans called V1's was a pilotless flying bomb propelled by a rocket engine and its flight path was gyroscopically controlled. Its fuel was measured to cut the motor out over London. Then the machine spiralled down to crash and explode.The programming of the buzz bombs were not so accurate as to drop always on London. Often they fell short or became tangled in a balloon barrage in the Reigate area with the result that a number exploded in Reigate. Annette and her mother generally took refuge in caves under the town which had been excavated out of the sandstone terrain characteristic of the district when a castle was built there by the Saxons in the 5th Century A.D. Ruins of the castle were still in evidence in the park above the caves known as the Castle Grounds. One night on leave the air raid sounded. Annette awoke me telling me we had to take shelter. In my drowsiness I dived under the bed but she soon pulled me to my feet and took me to the caves with her mother and Johnnie.

Before her baby was born Annette, with her mother, had gone to live at Preston, in Lancashire, to be away from German bombing of London and the South East.As the R.A.F. and U.S. Air Force raids on Germany intensified the Luftwaffe concentrated on building fighter aircraft and losses in its bomber fleets were not being replaced. Consequently, the raids on London by bombers virtually ceased. So Annette and her mother returned to Reigate . But no sooner were they back than the buzz bomb attacks began. After experiencing the buzz bomb when I was on leave I wanted to get Annette and Johnnie out of their path. So on return to St Eval from leave I got permission to live off station. Another New Zealand pilot, “Hendy” Henderson and his wife, Jean, shared a rented house with us at Morgan Porth on the coast a few miles from St Eval.

One night we were awakened from a sound sleep by a loud explosion. I looked out the window and all I could see was a blanket of flames. In my drowiness it seemed the whole of the sea was alight. On impulse I proclaimed to Annette that the end of the world had come. Then, on becoming fully awake I realised an aeroplane had crashed into the cliff just below and directly in line with our house. By the grace of God it did not hit the house. It was carrying depth charges which had been flung over the grass in front of us. Luckily they did not explode but flames from the aeroplane ignited the dry grass surrounding the house. We had to rush with anything we could lay our hands on to extinguish the grass fire. Neighbours came running in. Some even grabbed mops which seemed so ineffectual for fighting a grass fire. But we deadened the flames and in due course, it seemed like an age, a fire engine trundled up a rough lane to the cliff. It carried an open water tank. Most of the water had spilled out before it got to the crash. The fire brigade concentrated on the aeroplane which had crashed in making an approach to St Eval aerodrome,obviously getting too low as it came in.Sadly all the crew had perished.

While at St Eval, I acquired a 1938 model Morris 10 sedan. Cars were readily available for sale in England. Many had been laid up for the duration of the war because civilians were not entitled to a petrol ration unless a car was essential to their livelihood. One of my wireless operators, Paddy Murphy, an Irishman, had been a car dealer before the war. He had been scouting around for available cars to sell at a profit. One day,while looking for cars, he missed a flying training exercise. I admonished him and suggested the only way to avoid disciplinary action was to get a decent car for me. He came up with the Morris 10. How much, I asked. Eighty-five pounds, he replied. Nonsense, I said. How much did you pay for it, I asked. Finally he admitted thirty-five pounds. That is what I paid him. A bargain it was. It had five virtually new tyres but its petrol consumption was very high. A visit to a garage for a carburettor adjustment fixed that - at a cost of only one pound!

After the war, before sailing home to New Zealand, I sold that car for 125 pounds. However, it was not all that large a profit because I had to have a crown wheel and pinion in the differential replaced at a cost of some 40 pounds. The garage that did the work had to search car wrecking businesses for a second hand replacement part because, spares not having been made during the war, no new part could be found. While we owned it Annette and I had a great deal of pleasant driving with our petrol allowance.

Operational aircrew were entitled to be issued with petrol coupons for 20 gallons a month for recreational driving. Furthermore, more than one owner could legally be registered So I added a couple of Australian aircrew who were able to draw recreational petrol allowances as well. On going on leave I had the option of a free rail ticket to my leave destination and return or additional coupons for sufficient petrol to get me there and back. I chose the latter and when my co-owners went on leave I paid for their rail ticket and in return they drew petrol coupons on the car and handed them to me. So I was never short of petrol. Annette and I used to drive to her mother's home in Reigate on leave. And to make doubly sure of sufficient petrol I was not averse to stopping the car on the open road and, with an empty petrol can in hand, hailing a passing American Army convoy with the plea: “Could you let me have a drop of gas, Bud, to get me on my way?” Invariably they would brim fill the can!

At St Eval I spent all of November and the first half of December 1944 giving the other pilots duel in both day and night flying to convert them to the Warwick. In this period I did one ten and-a-half hour flight with the whole of my crew as a fuel consumption test on a fully loaded Warwick. It was a lovely aeroplane to fly. On Atlantic patrol we cruised at economic power at a speed of only 120 knots to get maximum range so we did not utilise its speed potential. One day, however, I did test its speed and manoevrability when a single engine Navy fighter from a nearby aerodrome “buzzed me” which was a breach of flying regulations. I wanted his number and gave chase. I was able to throw the Warwick about to keep on the tail of the fighter as it weaved, dived and climbed to try to shake me off. I caught up with him at 300 knots an hour. He must have been surprised to see a multi-engined aeroplane keeping pace with him. The speed potential of the Warwick would have stood us in good stead had we been attacked by an enemy fighter. But by this time the Luftwaffe was not ranging over Britain and it had abandoned long-range ocean patrols by its redoubtable Foch-Wolfe Condor aeroplanes.

On landing from one of my flights converting the other pilots an engine mounting sagged and the engine dangled from its nacelle. Fortunately, the fuel line was not broken so there was no fire.The mishap revealed that the mounts on the Warwick were not strong enough for the weight of the new Centaurus motors. Lucky the mount had not broken on ops well away from base. All our aeroplanes were immediately modified with stouter engine mounts. As 179 was the first squadron to be equipped with the Warwick Mark V, the engine mount weakness had not been detected before.

After the conversion of the pilots was completed I resumed ops in the South-Western approaches to England on convoy escorts and anti-U-boat patrols. On one occasion I flew to London, landing at Croydon which was the principal pre-war civilian airport. The purpose of this flight was to do a high frequency direction finding calibration for civil aviation.

About this time we received a new navigational aid called GEE. It was a pulse phasing radar system displaying on a cathode ray tube in the aeroplane intersecting lines to give the aeroplane's position. In its early days it was only reasonably accurate but, nevertheless, a good check on dead reckoning navigation which was still the essence of good aerial navigation. Basically dead reckoning navigation was the navigator's plot of the aeroplane's position by calculating the effect of the speed and direction of the wind on the aeroplane's flight path.

Bomber Command had GEE but its Pathfinder Force was also being equipped with OBOE which enabled it to pinpoint vital German targets even when ten-tenths cloud obscured visibility. OBOE, which was after the war developed for civil aviation, was a responder system worked by two transmitters in England which sent radar pulses which were received in the aircraft and sent back to each of the ground stations which measured the time between broadcast and the return signal to calculate the distance the aeroplane was from each transmitter. The intersection of the bearings and distances established a pinpoint position.

One of the St Eval runways was equipped with FIDO. This was a system to disperse fog. Two pipes one above the other were laid 50 feet out from both sides along the runway and extending back 1000yards along the approach path. The bottom pipe carried petrol with burners at intervals in the pipe. When ignited by flaming torch the burners heated the top pipe so that petrol flowing through that pipe vaporised through fine holes in the top of pipe. The vaporised petrol flared, generating intense heat which dispersed fog enshrouding the runway. No smoke was generated by the vaporised petrol so a clear chasm was cut in the fog the width and length of the runway and 1000 yards of the approach. It gave a pilot a clear visual approach and landing in conditions of dense fog which would otherwise have closed the aerodrome. The sight from the air of a clear illuminated canal in a sea of fog was quite awesome.

One morning when the aerodrome was still fogbound a weary pilot who was a stranger to our Station walked into the control tower. When he was asked who he was he replied that he was the pilot that landed the previous night in the Lysander aeroplane. The controller said no Lysander had landed during the night. The pilot explained that he he was lost until he had seen the runway cleared by FIDO and he had followed an aeroplane in. It would have been one of our aquadron's aeroplanes. But just as he came to a halt at the end of the runway Fido was switched off and he became enveloped in dense fog. He could not see the perimeter track to taxi on and indeed had no idea which way the control tower was. So he sat in his cockpit for a chilly and cramped night until the light of morning when he walked round the perimeter taxiing track and eventually found the control tower. He was a lucky man because he could not have found another R.A.F. station in South-West England open that night.