News of old chums.
I still kept in touch with Dickie Freeborne, my ITW chum and we used to explain what each of were doing in our various theatres. Dickie always wanted to be a fighter pilot, as did most of us, instead of which, he got posted to Hampdens. I gather that their losses were pretty horrific and even if the aircraft got back they sometimes had a job winching the body of the rear gunner out. It didn’t sound very nice to me. In one letter, Dickie casually mentioned that he’d a bit of trouble over Brest and had to come back on one engine, it was bit hairy. I didn’t think a great deal about it, all sorts of strange things were happening in those days, but what amazed me was that not long after there was a piece on the radio about an officer who had done the same thing as Dickie and they made a big thing of it and the chap got the DFC. I don’t think Dickie even got a thank you.
It wasn’t all good news in March. I had a letter from Kay, Derek Olvers’ wife, saying that Derek had been killed on March 15th when he was instructing on Oxfords. From what I could gather, he was stationed up at Grantham and two of them had taken off in fairly close company and they were flying into the sun, lost track of each other and collided.
I think Derek was so bad, they wouldn’t let Kay go and identify him, which rather put a pall of gloom over everything. It was nothing unusual to lose a lot of people, but when they happened to be your close friends it did make you think a bit.
By March 1942 I’d got some 170 hours on Spitfires and really, it was a most beautiful aircraft, it rarely gave any mechanical trouble and was such joy to fly. It was very delicate on the controls and it gave you such a feeling of confidence, it just wasn’t true. I must admit that when setting out for any sweep or convoy patrol or whatever, you never really quivered with worry or fright, well at least 90% of us didn’t. You got in the aircraft and just wondered how many you’d shoot down that day. In my case it wasn’t many and not for a long time, but at least you felt that you had an aircraft that could outfight anything that the Germans had to offer.
72 Sqn – April 1942 - Sweeps, more sweeps and first “Confirmed” (or not?)
In April the weather took a turn for the better and we did a lot more sweeps. I think I did sixteen all told in April, which was about twice as many as I did in March and as usual we went to St Omer, Gravelines, Le Touquet. Le Touquet was quite good, you got a fair bit of flak from there, Dunkirk, Dieppe, Boulounge and so forth and with Brian Kingcome leading you, you could almost go to sleep, particularly if it was a Wing do and Jamie Rankin was flying as number 1 of the wing. Both of them were superb pilots, had phenomenal eyesight and were as cool and collected as anyone you could imagine. You had such confidence in them, you felt that, you know, you could happily doze in your cockpit until Brian called up and said,
“Right, here we go boys!”
Naturally, no one dozed in their cockpits, we all switched our heads from side to side and in and out and I was very thankful for the silk scarf Mum had bought me. Now that’s something that may seem a bit of a line-shoot when you see pilots with silk scarves dangling from their necks, but in actual fact it was most necessary, because you had to look, obviously, right, left and backwards and the visibility back in the Spit was not wonderful and if you just had a collar and tie, by the time you’d finished your first trip, your neck was so sore you couldn’t move. So we flew without ties and with a silk scarf round, because a.) it made it easier to swivel your head without being sore and b.) if you finished up in the drink at least you could wave your white silk scarf, at least that was the idea.
It wasn’t until the 14th April 1942 that I actually fired my guns in anger, which may seem a bit strange inasmuch as I’d joined an operational squadron at the end of September 1941, but even then there were people who’d been in longer than I had who’d never fired at anything apart from a ground target. On this occasion we’d been doing a sweep over Gris Nez and we got quite badly jumped and we were flung around in all directions and I managed to find a 190 which seemed to be a bit lost, so I fired like mad at it, but being over keen, anxious and a rotten shot, I didn’t allow enough deflection and all I did was waste a lot of ammunition, but it was quite exciting to get chased round and round.
As I said before, the joy of flying a Spit is that you can outturn anything and provided you had enough petrol, and there aren’t too many of the other aircraft, you can get away with it. Anyway, I nearly ran out of petrol on this occasion and I landed at Detling on the way back, got refuelled and went back to Biggin Hill, where we’d moved to from Gravesend on March 23rd.
We were getting a lot more flak when we went across to France now, but although we saw lots of enemy aircraft, they often wouldn’t play but would hover around the outside and I can’t think why. We were quite badly jumped on one occasion on 24th April and the squadron got split up and I and my number 2, an American, Pilot Officer Fran, got chased by a couple of 190s. Now I must admit the 190 is some aircraft. To start with it’s a lot faster than a
Vb, it seems to have all the ammunition in the world and they’d start firing from miles out of range, which is sometimes a bit frightening, especially when you can see all the flashes coming from the gun-ports. Anyway, on this occasion one 190 shot down behind us and my number 2, like an idiot, decided he’d take off after it. I yelled at him to come back, because there was another 190 coming down behind my number 2. By this time there was really no hope for my number 2, because the second 190 overhauled him like mad and although I tried to chase down after him, I couldn’t get within range and my number 2 was shot down which although it was unfortunate at the time, was the only occasion in the whole of my ops career that I lost a number 2, which is not a bad record.
The 190 decided to stay and fight and we went round and round in circles for a while, which was alright from my point of view because the Spit would outturn anything and eventually I managed to get a few hits on him and he decided to call it a day and beetled off towards France. Now I followed, still banging away and he started to smoke and eventually was going down almost vertically at a heck of a lick, through a cloud base of about 2000’. Well I certainly wasn’t going to go through the cloud at that altitude at the speed we were doing, so I pulled up and came home. Now when I landed at Biggin Hill, the others had come back and the discussion was of various fights and Brian Kingcome was quite pleased with me when I explained what had happened, which was afterwards confirmed by my camera-gun. He asked me if I’d seen flames coming out of the enemy aircraft and I had to admit, no, just a wodge of black smoke and the rate at which it was going down. He said, “Well I can’t see anything coming out of that, I reckon you should have a “confirmed””, which made me highly delighted so I wrote in my log-book
“One FW 190 Confirmed”.
About two days later I was told that the powers that be had decided that as I hadn’t seen flames coming out of the aircraft and hadn’t actually seen it crash then I could only have a probable, which was more than annoying.
Before we went on any sweep, all pilots had to attend a briefing and on 27th April we presented ourselves to the briefing room, on one wall of which was a large map covering Southern England and most of Northern France. They’d run strips of ribbon from Biggin Hill to wherever we were supposed to be going. Well on this occasion our piece of ribbon seemed to go on for miles and finished up over Lille. Now Lille wasn’t a very popular place with us and on this occasion we were taking twelve Bostons and it didn’t take a great deal of imagination for the Germans to realise where we were going once we’d crossed the coast.
We got flak nearly all the way but very few enemy aircraft until we got closer to Lille when we saw all their con-trails way above us. Now if we were told to stay at a certain height to protect the bombers, it’s uncomfortable when you see con-trails way above you and knowing that the Germans can pick their own time to come down and knock holes in you. Well I was flying number 2 to Jamie Rankin on this day and my job was to see that he got home alright. We got jumped as we expected, there was nothing we could do about it and, I must admit, I sweated blood. The 190s would come down in batches of four, two would make an attack and whilst we were trying to dodge those, the other two would come down, whilst the first two climbed up and then came down again. Jamie would wait till the last second before calling out to break. Now we were chased from Lille back over the Channel and I didn’t fire my guns once, I was far too busy trying to keep with Jamie and trying to avoid the 190s. Again, I ran out of fuel and had to land at Detling, get refuelled, then go back to Biggin.
The following day we had quite nice sweep between Gris Nez and Calais and it was much nearer home and that’s more my idea of fun and one 190 attacked ‘A’ Flight which was being led then by “Timber” Woods who had taken over from Pete Wickham. Now “Timber” and I managed to damage the 190 but he got away and no one else fired at all.