大象传媒

I was a navigator throughout the war, and was involved with the early part of night fighter radar when it started. As well as doing the night fighting with radar, I did high altitude flying, and low level intruders. It was my job when the low level radars gave us instructions to find the enemy aircraft, I had to find it on my radar, follow it up, take him up behind and a little below it, and let him shoot it. That was the objective of the exercise.

Radar was a new invention at that time. The early part of the war, the Battle of Britain, of course was mostly daylight but then it switched to night. In the early part of the war, because it wasn鈥檛 so good, we very often went up and got nothing. But, when we got over from Blenheims to Bullfighters, then the whole thing changed. We had a better radar, we had a better aircraft and instead of freezing the in the Blenheims we were quite warm in the Bullfighters, which was an added benefit.

It was a fighter, the first one we were in was the fighter version of the Blenheims at Martlesham Heath and then we went to Debden and changed to Bullfighters, and eventually we went over to Mosquitoes which were very good.

The Bullfighters were good but they were very heavy, and I have known the enemy to fly just over head because we couldn鈥檛 reach the height. On Mosquitoes, of course, we could do anything, and we did.

My pilot and I did low level flying, in those days 46,600 feet was high, really high. We did that for a very little while, but then they decided it wasn鈥檛 worth going up there for nothing so we were back on night fighting.

I did all sorts of things, I did low level intruder work over Germany and France. Not a specific target. You had specific targets allocated to you by the ground radar when you were doing night fighting, but when the moon was up then we went over the other side and did low level intruder work and at that time if you saw barges or convoys, or anything like that, trains, we shot them up. That was all to disrupt the enemy transportation, which was what we did.

We encountered quite a lot of things and obviously your feeling depended on what was thrown at you but it was a job, it was what we were there for. I was very, very fortunate during the whole of the war. I went with my squadron from 1940 to 1944, with the one squadron and during that time, in the whole of my travels, if you can call them that, I only had one bullet hole in a petrol tank. I considered it lucky.

On the low level intruders it was down to the skills of the pilots because we both looked out for targets, I was supposed to keep a note of where we were going and a roughly where we were, because it was a rough idea. It was the pilot who did the shooting. We were very much a team and I suppose of all the times I flew that was time when I was closest to the pilot and what we were doing.

It was very good. I liked it because we were together, we could both look out, we could both see what was happening, although he pressed the button, I had a fair bit to do with him, so I was happy with the situation.

I never did want to be with the army who had a hell of a job. When it was D-day I was up there and was happier than if I had been on the ground on D-day. I did work with the navy after the war but I had no longing to work with the Navy the RAF was my life, absolutely.

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