大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Sarah Harding of Kirklees Libraries on behalf of Mr. Boocock and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully undersatnds the site's terms and conditions.

When we arrived in Malta our fighters were 4 biplanes and our bombers were pre-war Blenheims. One fighter was shot down but the other 3 lasted a long time and were christened Faith Hope and Charity.
The authorities kept the Spitfires at home for some time and sent us Hurricane fighters and Wellington bombers. Some of our Wellingtons were specially equipped to search for submarines and one of these special Wellingtons landed in Sicily by mistake.
When the Allies were planning the invasion of Europe they had to get air superiority over the Med and decided to reinforce Malta. It was 800 miles from Gibraltar to Malta and too far for fully armed Spitfires to fly, so 40 Spitfires had their guns removed and were fitted with overload petrol tanks. The guns were brought in by submarine.
The Germans knew this and brought over 1000 planes to Sicily and South Italy to attack Malta. The Germans came over in droves, Junkers 88 and Junkers 87 dive bombers. We lost all 40 Spitfires before we could fit them with guns.
The Allies did not give up. We borrowed two aircraft carriers from the Americans and brought 60 fully armed Spitfires within a short distance of Malta with some of our most experienced pilots. The Germans sent their ME 109s over in droves and we had a real ding dong battle. The Germans had 187 planes destroyed or damaged in one day. We watched this in spite of the fact that there must have been thousands of 20mm shells flying around but no one on the ground was ever hurt. Most of the pilots of damaged aircraft bailed out and were picked up, some of them from the sea. We could differentiate between the British and German parachutes and each German parachute brought a loud cheer. The Germans could not stand this rate of loss and soon gave up their heavy attacks on our fighters.
Preparing for the invasion of Europe the Allies brought so many aircraft that the only space left on the Malta airfields was the runways.
I came home on a refrigerator ship travelling in the refrigerator rooms with the refrigerator turned off. It was a twin engined ship but one engine packed up and we could only make 4 miles an hour, however we got home without any further difficulty.
I was given three weeks leave and then attached to a Canadian Airforce Unit. We were a mobile airfield accommodated entirely in tents. We had to be able to pack everything on to trucks and be away within two hours and had to practice moving from one airfield to another.
I was in a Bournemouth hotel on 24 hours leave and woke to find 200 ships moored off shore. We found that all our aircraft had been given identification marks overnight and all our trucks had been made to travel through 5ft of water and keep going.

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