大象传媒

This my father's story - or at least as much of it as he told me, I know he left a lot of the unpleasant details out. His name was John Anthony Birtle but he was known as Yorkie in the Navy as he lived in Yorkshire. He was born on March 23rd 1925 and died, unnecessarily I believe (but that's another story) on May 11th 2003. It is one of the biggest regrets of my life that I didn't talk to him more about his wartime experiences but he was a reticent man and didn't find it easy to talk about the war, like so many of his contemporaries. When pushed to talk, mostly by his grandchildren who often said things like 'Granddad what did you do in the war?' he would make light of it and joke that he once fell out of his Spitfire; this was the story my Mother told my sister, my brother and myself when we were young as she knew very little herself. She told me that whenever she asked him about the war it upset him so she stopped talking about it. He would be embarrassed knowing that I was writing this story about him now. These are the events and experiences as far as I was told by my Father, gaps have been filled in by research done by my family and myself:

In 1942 at the age of seventeen my Father volunteered and joined the Navy. Exact details of his training and postings are sketchy but we know that he did some training in Sherbourne in Dorset (Henstridge?) where he and my Mother took their honeymoon in 1948. At this time he held the rank of Midshipman. He was then sent to Canada where he learned to fly and subsequently, though exactly when is unknown by me, he joined the Fleet Air Arm as a Sublieutenant on the aircraft carrier HMS Indefatigable. There he met Eric Cowle, who later became his Best Man, Joe Halliwell and Mick Davey who he kept in touch with in later life. My Father and Eric were in 887 Squadron. He spent some time in Ceylon (Dec. '44), Sumatra (Jan. 45), Sydney (June '45)and Japan (July-Sept. '45). The Indefatigable was hit by a Kamikaze on April 1st 1945 (my Mother's 19th birthday!), luckily my Father was airborne at the time but he said he had 'a hell of a job landing' on the damaged decks, it was only the ship's thick steel decks that saved it from worse damage.

My Father was around when the peace treaty was signed with Japan (Sept. '45) but his active service came to an end on the 24th July 1945 when he 'fell out' of his Seafire (no. 120)during air strikes on Japanese islands. Whether he was shot down or experienced engine failure he never revealed to his family but he had to bail out and spent some time floating around the Pacific in his emergency dinghy. He had a broken leg and a damaged eye. As far as I know his plane is still at the bottom of the Pacific (one of four he crashed according to my brother-in-law who has done some research of his own). Both my brother and I can remember him saying that he was picked up by an American destroyer, but my Mother insists that it was a British ship that picked him up. He was transfered to a Dutch hospital ship, my mother thinks the Chichilenka (probably spelt incorrectly). There's a strange story about this: I bought my Father a book on the Fleet Air Arm for Christmas in 1997 and as he was looking through it he said 'bloody hell, that's me!'. I looked at the photo he had found in the book which showed him being transfered across to a hospital ship in a stretcher on ropes. I asked him about the experience and how he felt as he was hanging there in mid air over the Pacific, 'bloody terrified' he said 'the sea was full of sharks'. Apparently, when a pilot had to bail out at sea they qualified as members of The Goldfish Club 'by escaping death by use of his emergency dinghy'. My sister found his member's certificate when she was sorting through some of his things after his death.

I'm sure if I were to contact the Naval Records Office they would be able to fill in some of the details of dates, events etc. but these are already held on file unlike the reminiscences of the people who experienced it. This, I suppose, is the whole idea of this website - to hold on record the experiences of those people who risked their lives, before it's too late to collect them and they are lost forever. This being the case there is one last part of this story to tell: I phoned my Father one night expecting my Mother to answer as she usually did, but my Father answered as my Mother was out. He sounded upset so I asked him what was wrong and he told me, in a very shaky voice, that a pilot had come to him one day on the Indefatigable and said that he didn't want to go up that day because he had a bad feeling about it. My father had had to make him go and he never came back. I don't think he ever forgave himself for that, he'd carried it with him all those years, still blaming himself for it, especially when he was on his own at night. My brother recently told me that my Father had told him a story too: he was on a mission one day in his Seafire to prevent a bridge being rebuilt (somewhere in Japan) and had to fire on the people doing the work on the bridge. Apparently, every fifth bullet had a tracer on it so you could follow it to make sure the target was being hit. My Father followed one of these tracer bullets with his eyes and saw it enter the open mouth of one of the civilians rebuilding the bridge. My brother said he was unconsoleable after telling him this story and that he hated himself for killing a civilian.

I don't think that, unless you've actually been through it, you can possibly imagine how war affects the mind. I know it certainly affected my Father, in later life it became apparent just how much. I am very proud of my Father and want to make sure his story is recorded.

I have photographs which will complement this story and hope to find a way of adding them soon.

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