CHAPTER FIVE

FLIGHT TO MIDDLE EAST

 

From O.T.U. we were posted to No 221 Squadron, which was operating in the Mediterranean. This posting required flying our aeroplane from England to Egypt which, at that stage of the war, was considered a major expedition.

Before departure we were issued with an escape kit. This consisted of items to assist us if we made a forced landing in hostile territory or if we were to be taken prisoner of war. My personal escape kit was interesting. Because I was an occasional pipe smoker I was issued with a pipe and tobacco pouch. It was a really good-quality pipe which I smoked so that if I were to fall into enemy hands it would seem to be just an ordinary pipe which was being smoked. But it was not just an ordinary pipe. It differed in that the stem had a minute hole at its point of balance. If I balanced the stem on a pin (I was even issued with pins to insure I had some always stuck in the peak of the collar of my battle-dress uniform) the stem mouthpiece would swing to the north. Thus it could be used as a compass.

The leather pouch looked natural enough but between the leather and the rubber inner was a set of maps of the Middle East printed on the finest of silk so as not to be bulky. Another compass was a couple magnetized button of the uniform tunic. Fortunately, I never had need to use the escape kit but I carried it always on me during my Middle East Tour of Operations and I had many a pleasant smoke from the pipe.

For the flight from the United Kingdom to the Middle East we took off from Portreath in Cornwall on May 29, 1942, flying a Wellington Mark VIII. The characteristic of this mark was that it carried A.S.V.(air to surface vessels) radar. It was one of the first aeroplanes in the world to be equipped with airborne radar. This early version could search only directly ahead or directly abeam. Later airborne radar was developed with 360 degree search. The beam searching aerials on the Mark VIII stood vertically atop the rear portion of the fuselage. The four aerials were not unlike what we now know as television aerials mounted vertically. The forward search aerials were mounted under the wings outboard of the motors. Because of the aerial array this Wimpy was nicknamed the “stickleback”, after the fish of that name. The Mark VIII was still powered by the same motors as earlier marks. The two motors were Bristol Pegasus each of 1000 horsepower. This meant the Mark VIII was somewhat underpowered, particularly for operations in the hot climate of the Middle East.

From Portreath in England we flew to Gibraltar , a nine and-a-half hour flight in daylight. After crossing the Bay of Biscay we made landfall at Cape Trafalgar where Lord Nelson gained his famous victory over the French fleet in 1805. Nelson was killed in that action. On the route to Gibraltar there was the risk of being intercepted by the German long-range Focke-Wulf Condors whose primary role was to combat R.A.F. Coastal Command sorties against enemy U-Boats. During the crossing of the Bay of Biscay our air gunners were alert for any possible attack. But no Condor was sighted.

We stayed the night at Gibraltar, a key British naval base. Next day we took off in the afternoon to fly the second leg to Malta. We made a very sluggish climb to the briefed height of 1500 feet due to the full load of petrol and the relatively high temperature. The flight to Malta was nine hours (what a contrast to today's jet aircraft speeds). The first five hours of the journey were in daylight. Our departure from Gibraltar had been timed so that darkness would fall before we passed the Italian island of Pantelleria which straddled the narrow sea between Sicily and Tunisia in North Africa. Pantelleria was an Italian and German airforce base which was notorious for its role in attacking Allied convoys trying to get through from Gibraltar to supply the beleaguered island of Malta. For us to have been in its vicinity in daylight would have been fatal. Fortunately at that time the enemy did not have radar-equipped night fighters.

My training as a navigator at Squires Gate in England may possibly have saved my life on that night flight to Malta . On that course I had become qualified in astro navigation, which is establishing a position by star sights. After we passed Pantelleria Island, my navigator Johnnie Devine estimated by his dead reckoning (plotting an aeroplane's position without any radio aids and relying on calculating the influence of wind on track and ground speed) that we were about two hours from Malta .

To make certain we asked Malta by wireless to give us a QDM (a bearing read by a ground station from our wireless signal).The QDM bearing we received suggested that if we were where we thought we were, we would have been homed on to Naples in Italy if we followed the radio bearing. I could not believe the bearing was accurate. Nor could my navigator Johnnie. Malta must surely have made a mistake.

After consultation with Johnnie over the intercom I suggested he take three star shots on the sextant to plot an astro fix. As soon as he had his fix I handed over to the second pilot and took three of my own star sights. My fix was within three nautical miles of Johnnie's and very close to Johnnie's dead reckoning position. That established in our minds the accuracy of our position and the belief that the QDM bearing was bogus. So we ignored it. It subsequently became apparent that the QDM had indeed come from Naples where our request had been intercepted by a wireless station more powerful than Malta's and responded to with with a bearing which the Italians presumably hoped we would follow to Naples. One aeroplane from England that night followed it and was shot down over Naples by anti-aircraft fire.

At midnight we saw the coast of Malta dimly in the faint light of night. The island was, of course, blacked out. We identified ourselves in code by wireless and requested permission to land. An enemy air raid alert was in operation so we were told to stand off the island for one hour.We had enough fuel left to do so. Finally, permission was given to land at Luqa aerodrome. As soon as we touched down the runway lights were extinguished as a precaution against a stray enemy aircraft bombing the strip. In wartime our aircraft did not show navigation lights and we did not use the aeroplane's landing lights. So it would have been difficult for an enemy fighter to spot us approaching to land.

To taxi we adopted the usual procedure of following torch light instructions from ground staff. Taxiing that night seemed to continue interminably. When at last we came to a halt and disembarked, unloaded our personal gear and boarded a bus to the debriefing room we saw that we had taxied down a relatively narrow defile to park the aeroplane in a gorge. This dispersal was to give the aeroplane some degree of protection from the daily enemy bombing. It was a tricky task for the ground staff to guide us by hand held torch signals down that defile.

The bus we boarded was an old Maltese civilian vehicle, standard R.A.F. transport on the island having long since been destroyed in air raids. Malta,at this time, was under intense siege by German and Italian air forces because of its immense strategic importance to Britain. The island was no longer viable as a British naval base (except for submarines breaching the blockade to take in food and petrol to the beleaguered island fortress), but it was an important base for R.A.F. strike aircraft to attack enemy convoys taking supplies across the Mediterranean to Field Marshal Rommel's German Afrika Korps which was advancing ominously along the Western Desert in an attempt to invade Egypt - and thus to establish a stepping stone to link up through Palestine and Syria with German forces striking at Russia.

In a bid to eliminate the threat to its convoys from Malta 's strike aircraft, the enemy air forces pounded Malta to try to force its submission. Short of fighter aircraft to combat the incessant air raids, short of food and other vital supplies, the island was hanging on only by the skin of its teeth. Very, very few British supply ships got through the enemy blockade of the Mediterranean . Convoys which tried to run the blockade suffered horrendous losses.

Bomb craters pock-marking the Luqa air field were filled immediately after each air raid by toiling air force ground crew and willing hard-working Maltese civilian labour. But with the very next enemy raid the work had to begin all over again. In March and April 1942 the tonnage of enemy bombs dropped on Malta was twice the total dropped on London in the worst twelve months of the blitz. Despite this, Luqa remained continuously in service for the Wellingtons , Blenheims, Beauforts and Beaufighters striking the enemy convoys.

Service personnel on Malta were rationed for food. When we arrived we were issued with a meal ticket. It was clipped on entering the mess. Only two meals a day could be taken with personal choice on whether to forego breakfast, lunch or the evening meal. But the aircraft were never short of fuel. That was constantly being replenished by Royal Navy submarine tankers.

Within an hour of having arrived on Malta my aircraft was completely painted to conform to Mediterranean camouflage. We had flown out from England with the white fuselage and blue and grey upper surface camourflage of Coastal Command. The repaint at Malta provided a black fuselage and fawn and buff upper surfaces designed to blend with the sand and stone of Malta and the North African Western Desert.

No 221 Squadron was to have been relocated from Egypt to Malta at the time we arrived at Malta . But the posting was cancelled. So,after waiting on Malta two days, we were ordered to fly on to Egypt to join the squadron there.

Valetta, the capital of Malta, was virtually in ruins. The population, desperately short of food, lived principally in centuries-old caves beneath the city. But the people,sustained by deep religious belief, were of good spirits and loyal to the Allied cause. Gradually the situation improved. Two months after I had moved on to Egypt the eminent New Zealand airman, Air Marshal Sir Keith Park, became Air Officer Commanding Malta in July 1942. He had been the victorious commander of No 11 Fighter Group which played a vital role in the Battle of Britain. Later he was promoted to Air Chief Marshal.

Not long after Park had taken over, Spitfire reinforcements began arriving on Malta. They did not have the range to fly directly from Gibraltar . So they were being shipped on aircraft carriers and just before the carriers came into range of enemy aircraft flying from Pantellaria Island and from Sicily ,they were flown off with overload petrol tanks. But the range to Malta was still critical. Some were shot down and some fell into the sea after their fuel was exhausted. But the majority arrived and they gradually attained air supremacy over the beleaguered island. Consequently, the German High Command abandoned plans to invade and occupy Malta. This was later described by the German Field Marshal Kesselring, commander of the Luftwaffe air fleet in Sicily, as the first death blow to the whole of the German plans to conquer Egypt and the Middle East.

When we arrived in Egypt after a seven hour flight from Malta, my aeroplane went immediately into squadron service, but my crew was given ten days leave to acclimatise. We went to a transit camp at Almira, a suburb of Cairo. There we were accommodated in tents. This leave gave us a chance to explore Cairo. We were fascinated by the Casbah - the bazaar with stalls plying every conceivable trade. The Egyptian shopkeepers eagerly solicited our attention in the hope of making a sale. They were persistent. But we were content to just look and absorb the fascinating atmosphere which was, of course, totally novel to us. We enjoyed the variety of restaurants which were not restricted by any wartime rationing. We went to Giza to see the pyramids and the Sphinx, rode on a camel there and climbed part-way up a pyramid.

The New Zealand Forces Club in Cairo was the best Service club in the city. It was under the direction of Lady Freyberg, wife of the Commander of the New Zealand Army in the Middle East . Uniformed girl volunteers from New Zealand known as the Tuis manned the club under the leadership of Major Merryl Neely, a Cambridge woman I happened to know. Egypt was an independent state, technically not at war, but by treaty it was an important British base.