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This story has been written onto the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War site by CSV Story gatherer Jessica on behalf of John Hone. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

As our air craft carriers in the Mediterranean were either sunk or damaged their squadrons were sent ashore to assist in the land warfare in the desert. After continuous weeks of flare dropping and illuminating German targets, followed by dive bombing of any targets discovered - having advanced almost out of Egypt - but then having been beaten back to El Alamein - the time came for ’the big push’. The battle of El Alamein was about to commence. Our task was to illuminate defensive German gun positions for Wellington bombers to hit - when our flares ran out we were to take our four bombs into the area occupied by the 21st Panzer division. The battlefield presented an amazing spectacle - covered with myriads of flashing lights - red and white, bursting shells and flashes from the guns - no man’s land was criss crossed with coloured tracer bullets bombs rained down from the Wellingtons above us as we weaved violently to avoid accurate Breda fire. Our armoured windscreen was split from top to bottom by a splinter which failed to penetrate (it was heading straight in the pilot’s head) and we were holed in the wings. Later a Wellington collided with one of our Albacores - our pilot managed to bail out, but his two crew - and the five from the Wellington all perished.

Earlier I had to take a new pilot to dive bombships in Mersa Matruh inner harbour. We were greeted with very accurate, fairly intense heavy flack each time we began to make a glide approach. Twice we almost reached the diving position when the illuminating flares ran out rendering the target ship invisible. Petrol was running short and the time had come for our last attempt. The ’new boy’ through inexperience and anxiety caused by the flack began his glide from too far inland (to make his escape out to sea) twice he had to take avoiding action to escape the barrage of Breda fire, but continued to glide in losing much too much height. Eventually we arrived over the wrong end of the inner harbour at about 1000 feet every gun in a complete circle around us opened up and we were transfixed by white, red and green tracer coming up in long snake like streams, dropping away in very rapid succession so we had to turn around inside the harbour so as to make our escape out to sea. We had now descended to about 800 feet and were clearly visible by the light of our own flares! Our bombs fell just ahead of the ship - they nearly finished us off by themselves as there was a terrific lurch which tilted our tail up in to the sky and ourselves diving earthwards. I thought we had been shot down but we made our escape followed by what appeared to be every gun in the Western desert!!

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