大象传媒

Although I was only a schoolboy in 1939, the Second World War gave me the chance to learn to fly as a pilot. As a boy I had always been interested in aviation, reading books about "Biggles" and taking a weekly magazine called "Popular Flying". My cousin, who in age was more like an uncle, had flown Sopwith Camels and S.E.5a's with 74 Squadron in the 1914-18 Great War .He had learned to fly with only 10 hours in the air on a Maurice Farman Shorthorn biplane. I have sometimes wondered whether there was Government backing for the Alan Cobham Air Displays, which toured the Country and gave so many potentially air- minded youngsters the opportunity for their first flight. Mine was in a Fox- Moth. It took 10 minutes, cost 5 shillings and I was hooked.

Like thousands of others I volunteered for pilot training, was accepted, put on deferred service, took a temporary job in a bank and joined the local Air Training Corps. With their backing, I applied for a place on one of the R.A.F University Short Courses of six months as a means of receiving my initial training. I was accepted for the Third Short Course of the Durham University Air Squadron, based as a student at University College in Durham Castle. (After the war I was to return to the Castle to read for a degree in Politics and Economics.)

From there we went into the Air Force proper at the Air Crew Reception Centre in St, John's Wood, being housed in rather squashed conditions in what had been luxury flats overlooking Regent's Park.We used London Zoo's restaurant for our meals and Lords Cricket Ground to receive our uniforms and equipment. So that the R.A.F could decide whether we would have the aptitude for being pilots or navigators or bomb aimers, we were sent to Grading Schools; in my case at the Wolverhampton Flying Club where I managed to go solo on a Tiger Moth in the requisite 10 hours for potential pilots. After an interesting Engine-Handling Course at the School of Technical Training at St. Athan we went at dead of night to the Personnel Despatch Centre at Heaton Park near Manchester. From this centre for those who were about to make the" pier head jump", I embarked on the Queen Elizabeth liner in the Clyde headed for Canada and pilot training under the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, Thousands of us including Australians and New Zealanders as well as Canadians and British were trained at flying Schools across Canada and some in the U.S.A. Lesser numbers were trained in South Africa and Rhodesia. One of my closest friends during training was an Argentinian of British parentage classified as a British Latin American Volunteer. My elementary flying training took place at Bowden in Alberta in the foothills of the Rockies, using Canadian-built Tiger Moths, initially with skis rather than wheels, and later on Fairchild Cornells, followed by twin engined flying on Airspeed Oxfords at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. I did quite well there and came out top of the course, which resulted in my being posted to a maritime reconnaisnce school at Summerside on Prince Edward Island and consequently into Coastal Command.

I returned from Canada on a crowded Dutch ship, the New Amsterdam, with 18 of us in a cabin for two sustained by only two widely spaced meals a day. Some previous incumbent of the cramped cabin had written on the ceiling his number, rank and name and the encouraging thought "Roll on Death." After reception at another Personnel Despatch Centre using the spa hotels of Harrogate, I was posted to an Advanced Flying Unit at Little Rissington. We were told we were all destined for Bomber Command, but an unexpected telegram from Air Ministry resulted in two of us (the other a former flying instructor) being sent to a Coastal Command Operational Training Unit on Sunderland Flying Boats at Killadeas, near Enniskillen on the banks of Lough Erne in Northern Ireland. The weather was atrocious and Operational Flying Exercises over the Atlantic as far as 17 degrees West must have been challenging, but it was infinitely preferable to having flak thrown at you over Germany. On arrival at the local railway station we passed eight coffins on the platform containing the bodies of the crew of a Catalina flying boat which had crashed in a heavy snow storm during an approach onto the loch. Flying in snowstorms over the Atlantic we used special heaters to counteract carburetter icing and Goodrich pulsating boot de-iciers on the leading edge of the wings to break up the accumulation of ice. At night we would use an Aldis lamp from the flight deck to see if the ice formations were breaking away.
At Killeadeas we were crewed up into a crew of ten, all of whom had come together by varied and circuitous routes. Some had already done a tour of flying on "boats" in West Africa. I was only the second pilot, our Skipper having completed a tour of duty on boats in West Africa. Later in Singapore I was checked out by the Flight Commander as a First Pilot on Sunderlands, but most of my flying was as a Second Dickey. I realised the debt we all owed to our Skipper for bringing us back safely after many hundred hours of flying.

At the end of the course we received some extra tuition at a Ferry Training Unit and were presented with a brand-new Mark V Sunderland to fly out to India and the Far East. It had been built by Blackburn Aircraft at a former shipyard in Dumbarton.
This was a truly adventurous flight. We took off from Lough Erne, flew South to the West of Eire and eventually saw the lights of Lisbon on our Port side. Portugal was not of course at war so there was no black-out at night. In the morning we hoped to arrive at Gibraltar, but we received a wireless message to say that the sea was too rough for us to alight in Algeciras Bay near Gib. We were diverted instead to Port Lyautey in French Morocco, where the Americans had established a Naval Air Base with the splendid title of "the United States Moroccan Sea Frontier" In addition to aircraft they were equipped with small airships called "blimps", moored up to pylon mooring masts. Their main role was to prevent U Boats entering the Med. From Port Lyautey we flew on the next day to Gib and then along the Mediterranean, stopping at Augusta in Sicily and Kasfareit in Egypt, before crossing the desert following a pipeline to Habbaniyah in Iraq, 55 miles from Baghdad, then to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf to arrive at Korangi Creek near Karachi. We flew on to Koggala in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to deliver the aircraft we had flown out to India, before joining 230 Squadron at Redhills Lake, the large reservoir serving Madras. We took over another brand- new MarkV aircraft and learned that we were replacing a New Zealand crew who had disappeared over the Bay of Bengal whilst flying in cyclonic weather.

Here we prepared for the planned invasion of Malaysia at Port Swettenham, where troops were to be landed by assault landing craft. The logistical build up for this operation was immense, involving the construction of new railway marshalling yards near Madras, which was to be the springboard for the invasion. Republic Thunderbolt fighter aircraft, now no longer needed in the European Theatre of Operations, were to be fitted with drop tanks and flown one way from the recently recaptured Rangoon to support the invasion and we were to pick up the pilots when these fighters were ditched having completed their close support of the infantry. A lot of preparatory air to air firing practice took place in expectation of exciting times ahead, but fortunately for us before the invasion date the Americans dropped the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after a short delay Japan surrendered.

So we flew a large number of mercy missions bringing out of Singapore and back to Madras British and Indian Prisoners of War and Internees on the first stage of their journey home. Our first of 21 trips between Madras and Singapore was made on the 19th September 1945 about five weeks after the atom bombs were dropped. The ex-POW's were very thin and some of them were on stretchers. On the outward trips to Seletar near Singapore we carried mainly RAPWI personnel(Relief of Prisoners of War and Internees) We took off at night on Redhills Lake so as to make our landfalls in Malaya or on the Nicobar or Andaman Islands in the daylight. The beauty of the sunrises as we flew East into the dawn was unforgettable, although on several flights we met Monsoon- generated line squalls which stretched down the Bay of Bengal and which had to be flown through. The vertical climb and descent caused by the cummulo- nimbus clouds were pretty alarming and we thought it best to fly through the line squalls at about 1000feet where we judged the turbulance would be least. After all, we reasoned, the downdraft would have to slow to zero when it hit the sea. As our aircraft engines were designed to operate at low level there was no possibility of flying above the weather, as would be normal today.

Later we were sent on detachment to the island of Labuan just North of Brunei in North Borneo (now Sabah) From here we flew Colonial Administrators and other officials to remote outposts like Sandakan and Balikpapan, so that they could take over the governance of the countries from the occupying Japanese. In Sandakan which I visited with another Skipper we attended the first post war dinner of the Anglo Chinese Society where speeches were made and we were honoured guests. At the suggestion of an Australian Army Medical Officer we gave four of his Filipino nurses a good will flight on an air test of our Sunderland and in the evening we were invited to a party at what appeared to be the remains of the local night club in the jungle. We danced with the Filipino nurses in their chong -sam dresses to the strains of the only record which had been preserved during the Japanese occupation. It was "The Girl in the Alice Blue Gown" and had to be repeated interminably to a background of cicada chirpings.

We also made one memorable flight from Singapore to Hong Kong and after several attempts to fly into Kaitak, near the Hong Kong airport in clamped weather, we were diverted by the Hong Kong Control to a remote island off the China coast, in the Gulf of Tonking, called Hainan, where we alighted at Sama Bay. We made several attempts in the following days to fly into Kaitak, but on each occasion the weather deteriorated at the last minute and we were obliged to return to Sama Bay. By then we had insufficient fuel to fly to Hong Kong when the weather did improve and another Sunderland flown by the C.O. of 209 Squadron joined us having found themselves in a similar predicament. It had an ENSA party on board and the sound of jollifications carried across the water until the early hours of the morning. At least we were able to work the Hong Kong Control Tower using our top aerial and our petrol generator housed in the front of the Starboard wing. Eventually a further Sunderland arrived bringing both marooned aircraft extra petrol in Jerrycans. These had to be transported between our anchorages in rubber dinghies. I had become familiar with the J Type rubber dinghy which we carried on board so we inflated it so that I could go ashore and obtain some fruit and vegetables from the local villagers by bartering with tins of cigarettes, the international currency of the immediate post war Far East. We had an unexpected visit from a Chinese officer who came out in a boat to see us and said we could not take off without prior permission from Canton. We resolved to receive this instruction with politeness but to ignore it. When the weather did eventually clear we were activated by the Hong Kong Control Tower and all three aircraft took off and were soon safely down and moored at Kaitak. The pilot who flew the petrol out to us was a 209 Skipper called Hector Munro, who later became M.P. for Dumfries, a Minister for Sport in the Conservative Administration and the Honorary Inspector General of the Auxiliary Air Force. He was knighted and more recently raised to the peerage.

In April 1946 the whole of 230 Squadron was posted from Singapore to Pembroke Dock in South Wales and we were to fly back along the same route on which we had come out, except that we would miss out Gib, flying directly from Sicily to Pembroke Dock. Portland Bill was the first bit of England we all saw, craning our necks forward on the flight deck .We had brought back a large contingent of ground staff, all devoted to the Squadron and great chaps, but who became very anxious at one stage on the flight back after we had taken off from Kasfareit on the Bitter Lake in Egypt. They said they could see petrol leaking out of the port inner engine and probably they knew more about the dangers of this than the aircrew. So we told everyone not to smoke and so as no to risk anyone's life, we jettisoned nearly all our fuel into Aboukir Bay near the delta of the Nile. This involved pushing out seldom- used jettison pipes through the planing hull of the flying boat. We then went back to Kasfareit, where they found that the leak was due only to a badly fitted screw cap, so we fuelled up and restarted the rest of our journey the following day. We had jettisoned 2500 gallons of petrol, enough perhaps for me to have driven a car on it for the rest of my life.

Looking back I realise how fortunate I was to get on to Flying Boats. I much preferred battling with the weather rather than with the enemy. Bringing back the POW's was worthwhile. I saw a lot of the World, which only whetted my appetite for travel; and I made friends on our crew who stayed friends for life.

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