CHAPTER SEVEN

OPS

 

My first op (operational sortie) was on the night of July 7-8, 1942 which took me into my 24th birthday. It was a radar sweep of the Western Desert Coast to Tobruk and return to search for any E-Boats (the fast German torpedo motor boats). No contact was made. We did not talk of radar on aeroplanes in those days. It was always S.E. (secret equipment) in the hope of disguising from the enemy that we had airborne radar. But it was surely fatuous to think that our radar signals would not have been picked up by the enemy and interpreted as coming from aeroplanes in flight.

Occasionally 221 Squadron was employed escorting British convoys out of Alexandria in feints towards Malta in an attempt to divert enemy attention from the vital convoys trying to get through to Malta from Gibraltar.While the Royal Navy was presumably briefed that the R.A.F. was providing air cover for these convoys, the destroyer escorts were wary of any aeroplanes. They preferred to consider everything in the air as hostile. We carried Verey pistols which fired coloured stars. The combination of colours were the code to identify friendly air cover. The colour combinations changed every four hours to prevent the code being compromised by the enemy. But the Navy frequently ignored our colour-code identification --- understandably perhaps because the Royal Navy small ships had taken a tremendous pasting from the enemy in the early stages of the war. Certainly the Navy was less trigger-happy later in the war.

Convoy escort was only a minor role for our squadron. The main focus was on attacking enemy convoys from Suda Bay in Crete sailing to Tobruk near the eastern border of Libya in North Africa with troop reinforcements and supplies for the German Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps. Crete was established as the main transit base for supplying Rommel's force after it was overrun by the Germans at the end of May, 1941, in a 10-day battle following the first large-scale paratroop air assault of World War II. The enemy air fleet which attacked Crete comprised 430 Stuka dive bombers, 180 fighters and bombers, 52 JU52 troop transports and 100 gliders. Nearly 6000 paratroopers and assault troops were flown in. Some 14,000 reinforcement troops were landed from the sea. German casualties were so high ( 4000 killed, 2600 seriously wounded and 220 aeroplanes destroyed) that the enemy never again during the war mounted an airborne assault.

The Allied defenders included the New Zealand Division which had the task of trying to defend the airfield at Maleme where the enemy paratroopers landed.The New Zealanders exacted a huge toll on the enemy as they dropped from the sky. But the assault was so overwhelming that the Allied forces were eventually ordered to evacuate Crete. Many of our troops were captured and spent the rest of the war in German prisoner-of-war camps. At night some survivors walked, or rather staggered, over the rugged mountains attempting to reach the south coast of Crete. During daylight they sheltered behind rocks from Luftwaffe air attack. At the the south coast many were evacuated to Egypt by the Royal Navy in a number of daring sorties in which a handful of troops at a time were barged off the rocky coastline to destroyers offshore. But a large number had to be left behind when the Navy could no longer cope with the numbers. They became prisoners of war.

Some of the more resourceful New Zealanders who had been left behind daringly found their way back to Egypt by stealing Cretan sail boats and navigating themselves across the Mediterranean Sea. One who did this with a group of mates was my close friend Buster Snelling, who, as recorded earlier in these memoirs, was subsequently killed in action in the Western Desert .

Throughout the remainder of the war Cretan resistance forces harassed the occupation forces in what the Germans called Festung Krete (Fortress Crete), paying heavily in lives of not only resistance fighters but also of civilian hostages.

All our ops were at night when the enemy convoys were at sea. The attacks were timed to be made midway between Crete and Tobruk. Since the return flight from our forward operating base was ten hours, there was little time over the target for bombing attack (or torpedo attack by our sister squadron, No 38). So aircraft were dispatched in three waves. First, a radar-equipped “stickleback” with overload petrol tanks to give it extra range went to locate the enemy convoy. About an hour behind flew an aeroplane carrying parachute flares. When the convoy was located, the search aeroplane homed the flare-carrier to the target by D.F. (direction finding) wireless signals. Once over the target, the flare carrier dropped a pattern of flares to illuminate the vessels. This gave a visual target to the third wave of three planes carrying bombs (or torpedoes if from 38 Squadron) which also homed in on the D.F. transmissions.

I rotated between all three phases, either locating and homing, or illuminating, or attacking.The technique worked very well. The enemy convoys normally consisted of three merchant ships - a troopship, a tanker and a ship carrying munitions. Generally the convoy was escorted by two Italian destroyers. When the first of our aeroplanes arrived over the target the destroyers would put up a curtain of anti-aircraft fire. It included red tracer shells so we could see the volley coming up at us. Because the tracers were only at intervals in the firing, the shells appeared to be coming up very slowly. Concentration on flying the aeroplane in evasive action cast out of mind any apprehension of being hit.

The Italian destroyer crews apparently had little heart for a battle. Soon after the first flares were dropped they frequently scattered away from the convoy they were supposed to be protecting. Our radar operator would report the blips representing these destroyers disappearing off his screen at what seemed an incredible speed. At times we would return to base with an odd hole in the fuselage from the destroyers' first response but mercifully only one of our aircraft was lost during the whole period of the convoy attacks. Among the crew of that aeroplane was Sergeant Buller who had been on my crew when we flew out from England. When he was transferred from my crew shortly after we began operations he was reluctant to go. I believe he had a premonition that the transfer would be fatal. Premonition of death was not uncommon during the war. Sergeant Buller showed the typical signs by becoming withdrawn and morose. He pleaded with me to get his transfer cancelled. I made representations to the commanding officer but to no avail.

An Australian in one of the squadron crews was hit in the earphones of his flying helmet by a piece of shrapnel. The earphone diverted the shrapnel from fatally piercing his head but it sliced open the forehead exposing part of the brain. His crew gave him first aid treatment with the medical pack carried on the aeroplanes. He survived but the poor fellow was invalided back to Australia as an imbecile.

It never crossed my mind during my war service that I would become a casualty.