大象传媒

"This story was submitted to the People's War site by CSV/大象传媒 Radio Nottingham on behalf of Dennis Ball with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions."

I served in the Royal Air Force for six years during the war and 30 years after it. Most of my experiences during the war took place while I was on Sunderland aircraft. I worked for an aircraft company and was called up in 1940 so came over from Rhodesia and joined the RAF initially as a ground engineer then I remustered to a flight engineer. While completing a gunnery training course on Walney Island near Barrow-In-Furness in 1941 I was on a Hawker Defiant aircraft which crash landed. It was not a very reliable aeroplane and when we landed the aircraft did what was known as a ground looping and we subsequently lost an undercarriage. It was very smashed up and was a frightening experience but fortunately we both got out of it alright.
I was then posted onto 201 squadron, which was a flying boat squadron and flew on Sutherland aircraft. The Sutherland were very long range aircraft but very slow with an average flying spped of around 125 knots. In order to increase the flying range of the sutherland the mid-upper turrets were taken out of the aircraft to allow us to reach the so called 'no man's land' area in the Northern Atlantic where the German 'wolf packs' (U-Boats) used to patrol. They would hang about in that area to catch our convoys because of the lack of air cover.
One of my scariest moments was going into the gun turret for the first time and firing my first bullets in anger at a U-Boat in 1942 in the Bay of Biscay. In this particular instance I remember firing at the U-Boat as we approached and the thought flashed though my mind for the first time that I might actually be killing somebody. I remember firing at the conning tower then dropping a few sea mines on the submarine but we didn't know for sure whether we'd hit it. I'll never forget the U-Boat number, it was the U52. Debris, oil and bits of clothing appeared in the water afterwards but the Germans sometimes released debris through the torpedo tubes to make it look as though it had gone down. We had to report to HQ coastal command to be debriefed about what we saw but it was not confirmed as sunk.
On another memorable flight over the North Atlantic the oil tank on our aircraft was so badly damaged that we started to lose oil. I crawled into the wing and then spent 4 hours catching the oil coming out the bottom in an enamel can and pouring it back in the top. It was a hell of a job, I had to take a lot of my clothing off and I was very cold. fortunately after many uncomfortable and nerve racking hours we made it back alright and all was well.

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