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This contribution was submitted by Cyril Totman and is added to the site with his permission.

When I returned from driving a lorry in the convoy to evacuate the 51st Division back to the Nile Delta...my air crew had gone. I was a loose cannon. But it so happened that this crew who were ditched in the Med had lost their wireless operator in the ditching and I was posted to 162 squadron which was on the desert airfield which was by the side of the sweet water canal, east of Cairo. It runs from Cairo to the Suez canal. I was posted to the squadron there. I changed from Blenheims to Wellingtons to join this crew. It was then that I did the tour. I did 35 flights with them. The most memorable was when we ran out of fuel. I had to send an SOS which is something really, you don’t normally do it, but we had to do it. I had the skippers approval. We’d been to Palermo and Catania. We’d done the business of dropping bombs and taking readings on their radar. We were a single aircraft, always went out singly, only time we had an escort was if we had to take off in daylight. You couldn’t cross Sicily in daylight. Particularly between Sicily and the toe of Italy where the Messena straits and that was highly dangerous, you couldn’t go over, you had to go over the mainland. To get to the mainland you did trips up to the coast of Italy, Napoli. Napoli was a open city, we weren’t allowed to bomb it, we didn’t want to, we only wanted to find out where there radar stations were. If we had to cross Sicily in daylight we had to fly with a bowfighter escort, they followed us by means of the IFF transponder, we had that switched on. Their radar or RDF as it was known in those days followed the transponder. The night it went wrong was when we had dropped bombs around Palermo, we were due to go back to Malta. It was on the way back I started using this directional aeriel on this beacon KT1. You could hear KT 1 all over the med. I started to take some bearings on it and I realised there was something wrong. The fault with our radio was you couldn’t tell where you were in reference to a bearing. To find out we had a complicated system. With this particular set of sensing. I sensed it as per the book but being cautious, I thought “oh the skipper better know this“. I told him there was something wrong over the intercom. Can you come back theres something wrong. Hegman, the chief skipper came back and we sensed it together and I was right, we were flying in the wrong direction! We were 180 degrees off course. We turned around 180 degrees and we sensed correctly. We were flying towards the beacon.which was on Luca. Within a long way they put up these two search lights in a cone and we could see it and we followed the cone and we landed. At the end of the runway the starboard engine cut out and we only just made it. The crew including myself all rejoiced. The gunner kissed the ground. It was as near as I want to go….and these people had already been ditched in the drink for five days. The code of practice was if you raised an SOS and everyone did the right thing, all the other people trying to use a station would stop which they did. As soon as I sent the SOS the channel went dead. They responded to me and said please send dashes. I did, and they took bearings on the dashes and they sent what we called QDM- which means my course course for steering. They gave us those QDMs until we landed and even on the approach we went straight in, we didn’t circle. Normally you had to do a circuit because the compass was a magnetic compass and what you did was you approached the airfield, and flew in a way to box the compass so when you lined up on the runway the compass was already set. We didn’t do that, we approached and went straight in. Now I had a telling off because I didn’t cancel the SOS. The normal procedure is to cancel the SOS so everyone else can use the channel. That was my 7th out of 35. All in the Med. Many were over Sicily but we also tried to drop a bomb on Corinth canal - it hit the side and bounced off ! We did Rhodes we did Crete, Heraklion… That was a bit horrendous because on the bombing run I didn’t want to be on the set I always wanted to see what was going on so I stood in the astrodome which is midways back. When I first stood there I thought, this is no good, we had flame retarders on our exhausts because these engines constantly ran with a rich mixture! The flames coming out were all you could see! Even with retarders. When I first saw it I thought it was going to catch fire. Anyway it was horrendous because the Germans had been in occupation for a long time and sent everything up at us. In my note book I’ve noted this down. We went in at about 8 — 10 000feet, the poor plane couldn’t get higher. A bofors gun which is a light anti aircraft gun couldn’t reach us at that height. We could see the shells coming up. They started out slow but increased in speed. If you got into a search light which you did sometime, we did a split arse turn to get out of it…a dive.

In the desert we didn’t wear blue uniform, we wore khaki. The only indication of being airforce we had was the cap and the epaulettes with the rank. But of course at night it gets cold so we usually wore the battle dress at night.

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