CHAPTER TWO

INTO THE AIR FORCE

 

The initial ground training was at Weraroa, Levin. It was six weeks of military drill, cross-country running, boxing and classroom studies in the theory of flight, navigation, Morse and armaments. It got us very fit. I was then posted to elementary flying training on Tiger Moth aircraft at Whenuapai, near Auckland . My most memorable experience at Whenuapai was my first solo flight. Requiring concentration and determination to succeed, it was nevertheless exhilarating. Failure to pass that milestone would have meant relegation to training as a navigator, by no means an unimportant role in aircrew but one which was not my first choice.

Another highlight of the Whenuapai training was my first solo cross country flight from Whenuapai to Onerahi, in Whangarei. At that stage I had a total of 37 hours flying experience.The round trip took two hours. A navigation log had to be kept on a pad strapped to one knee. Aerobatics was another exciting experience in my Tiger Moth training.

After six weeks at Whenuapai, without any home leave, I was posted to Woodbourne, near Blenheim. It was a good posting. Not only were mid-winter sunny days good for flying (although 15 degrees of frost made getting out of bed hard) but also it was the only flying training station in the Commonwealth that had the luxury of a separate mess for airmen pilots (that is trainee pilots). This was at the instigation of the Commanding Officer Group Captain (then) “Grid” Caldwell, who had been New Zealand's top flying ace in World War I with 25 confirmed kills. His reason for the separate mess was that the trainees needed quietude to study their text books in the evening. The anti-room of the mess had a large log fire. For supper before retiring to our barracks we could go to the mess kitchen where cut bread was laid out, take it to the fire to toast, then back to the kitchen to slap the hot toast on to the side of a 56 pound block of butter. Such luxury for service life!

Thirty-five trainee pilots assembled at Woodbourne for the No.12 War Course. Half, including me, were allocated to twin-engine training on Airspeed Oxford aircraft and the other half for training as single-engine pilots. The latter flew old and cumbersome Vickers Vildebeests and the similar Vickers Vincents. We had our total service flying training, apart from operational training units in England, in New Zealand.

After graduating from elementary training, half of New Zealand pilots and all navigators and airgunners were sent to Canada for training in the Commonwealth Air Training Scheme. The New Zealand training was part of this scheme (there was training also in Australia and Rhodesia). So successful was the Commonwealth Air Training Scheme that the Royal Air Force, to which trainees were to be seconded, was never short of aircrew. In fact most of those who entered initial training in the latter stages of the war never saw operational flying. The Air Force understandably preferred to send experienced aircrew back for a second tour of operations such as I did. This was in marked contrast to the German Luftwaffe which, as the war dragged on, became critically short of adequately trained pilots. On the assumption that the war would not last for long, the Luftwaffe did not maintain a regular intake of trainees. And when it became short of pilots it posted flying instructors to operational squadrons leaving no experienced instructors to train more aircrew. It became a vicious circle.

The Woodbourne course was two and-a-half months.The Oxford, the R.A.F's first twin-engined monoplane advanced trainer which did not enter service until 1937 was an excellent aeroplane for multi-engine training.With two 370 horsepower Armstrong Siddeley Cheetah X engines, it was somewhat under-powered.It tended to drop the port wing at the flare-out for landing so it required concentrated and precise flying.

June 15, 1941 was a memorable day. It was then that we were paraded to be awarded our pilot's wings. We were now qualified service pilots. To celebrate the graduation of each course the nurses at the Blenheim Hospital hosted a ball. When we first entered the Air Force we wore a white flash in our forage cap to denote that we were trainee pilots. The Blenheim nurses cheekily dubbed these flashes the “virginity flash.” The wings graduation also gave us a weekend leave - the only one of our New Zealand training. I flew to Wellington as a passenger on an Union Airways flight to spend the weekend there with my mother and father and sister who had gone by train down to Wellington from Cambridge .

I was proud to be wearing pilot wings that weekend, although I was displeased when a gatecrasher to a small family party in the hotel we were staying at, who turned out to be a conscientious objector (a C.O. as they were called) came up to me and urged me to tear the wings off my tunic and go home. We soon got rid of him.

The exultation of getting my pilot's wings was shattered a fortnight later when the reality of war was suddenly brought home to me. My room-mate, with whom I had formed a close friendship, Selwyn Sinclair, went missing on a solo navigation exercise. Losing a comrade was to occur many times in my war service but never would it affect me as much as this first experience. Many civilians who have not experienced war service often assume that ex-servicemen glorify in war. Not so. There is no glory. We enlisted to save ourselves, our families and our country from being enslaved by a rampaging, aggressive and brutal Nazi Germany. To an extent it is true that war is futile. But if Britain and the Commonwealth had not stood up to Nazi Germany to stop her aggression we would inevitably have become ruled by Hitler and his gang. So World War II, rather than being another futile war, did preserve our freedom, albeit at a terrible cost of life.

I flew a solo navigation exercise the same day that Selwyn Sinclair went missing. My route was from Woodbourne along the Marlborough Sounds and west to Farewell Spit. His route was from Woodbourne to Wanganui. The weather turned bad on both routes. I was suddenly enveloped in cloud which tended to disorientate an inexperienced pilot. But I was able to put down at Nelson to await a clearance in the weather. In the murky weather Selwyn must have missed his landfall on the North Island coast and flown inland to crash in the Tararua Range.The wreck of his aircraft was not found until 39 years later when a party of hunters stumbled upon it. An Air Force party then went in and buried Selwyn's remains at the crash site, erecting a simple wooden cross there.