大象传媒

Our first stop in Egypt was Port Said and then on to El Ballah for gunnery training, least said the better as I couldn鈥檛 hit a barn door from six paces. When we first flew out to the gunnery range on a solo exercise my first shots sent the drogue floating to the ground, I had cut through the towing cable and the pilot flying the towing aircraft wasn鈥檛 very pleased. It has since dawned on me that he may have had visions of being shot down by friendly fire although how can any missiles coming in your direction be called friendly?
However I passed and it was back to Cairo and the Palace Hotel Heliopolis. It was here that we changed from Coastal Command to Night Fighter Reconnaissance, this meant a course for night vision. Each morning we would put on dark glasses and from then on everything was conducted in varying degrees of darkness, we even played basketball in a darkened gymnasium. We had to recognise boats and harbours in various enemy territories sat in chairs sometimes with a chain clipped to the back of our collars to stop us leaning forward and cheating鈥s if we would!
We have now moved to Gianaclis and equipped with Baltimores, so after all the training on British equipment it was now all American, but the Bendix radio was very good and easy to use. The turret on the Baltimore used point 5 guns which made the ammunition a good deal heavier and the linkage bigger. This at times made the links jam in the chutes that carried away them away and if you did not do something about it quickly the ammunition jammed in the breech of the guns. The remedy from what I remember was to knock the chute away with your knee but if you were wearing khaki shorts the links fell out onto your legs and after passing through the breech they were quite warm. Have you ever tried doing a square dance in a gun turret! The turret would normally be manned by the Air Gunner but there was a point 3 gun which could be operated by the W/O which folded out on an elbow and could be fired out of the door to the plane. However you had to make sure the locking pin was securely in place otherwise the bullets could go anywhere.

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