A Spitfire Pilot - Part 28
October 1942, en route to Gibraltar
I got back to Ouston to find that we’d had a few other pilots posted in to us, two of them, Jerry le Cheminant and Chas Charnock.* They’d both been in the B of B and Chas in particular was a terrific flier and we got on very, very well indeed, in fact in later months we flew together quite a bit.
We were issued with tropical kit and given a lot more injections, everything from a cold in the nose to the bubonic plague, I think, and we were also given lectures on how to survive in the Far East and we were all laying bets that we’d be sent to India or somewhere. It wasn’t that we were all that annoyed at being posted abroad, but it seemed to us that we weren’t likely to see very much action, but in fact we did manage to see quite a bit eventually.
Finally, with a few bits of our personal gear packed in parachute bags, we embarked at Liverpool on an ancient merchant ship called the Fort Maclaughlin. It was hardly what you could describe as a pleasure cruiser and twelve of us were down in one of the holds in bunk beds next door to what we could understand were coal bunkers and consequently with the rolling and upping and downing of the ship all we heard were clangings and bangings. In fact on one occasion there such an almighty bang that we thought we’d been torpedoed and two of the chaps were out of their bunks and up the stairs onto the deck before you could say “knife!” In actual fact what had happened was that a large chunk of iron from somewhere had clattered along the deck and frightened the life out of us.
We had a large number of crated aircraft on the deck and on each crate, in letters about a foot high was the word “Gibraltar”, so we thought well that’s the last place we were going to land. Anyway, we went up the Clyde to join the rest of the convoy and there were aircraft and ships all over the place. There were little landing craft zipping to and fro and lots of Dakotas trundling around and it really was quite an impressive sight. We disappeared out into the Atlantic at last and the weather wasn’t too good. Fortunately none of us were sick, but we had a Wing Commander with us, a Wing Commander MacMullen, a strange chap. He had a round face and he looked like one of these cartoon tigers, and he was very upset if he ever heard anyone addressing him as “Tiger” As I say, he was a strange enough lad, we’d never come across him before and he thought it would be a great thing if we had a sweep on who was the first chap to be sick. Well, naturally enough, the first person, and the only person to be sick, was Wing Commander MacMullen.
As I said the sea was a bit rough and we used to go up on deck and watch all the ships in the convoy bouncing up and down. We had a small aircraft-carrier near us and that was followed by a little corvette and we used to stand up on the deck and watch this corvette going up and down and you could almost see the screws at one end and the front sticking up in the air every now and again – I wouldn’t have fancied that job at all.
We were supposed to do anti-submarine lookout, so two of us at a time would go up on deck by one of the Oerlikons and stand there and scour the sea for submarines, but fortunately we never saw anything. In fact we weren’t troubled by any submarines on the whole trip, but it didn’t alter the fact that you always imagined that you were going to be attacked and had visions of sitting on rafts in the middle of the Atlantic for days on end.
Trying to get some idea of where we were going, a couple of us managed to get up into the chart-room and saw our course plotted and from what we could see, we got nearly to New York and turned round and started coming back again and turned round again and all we seemed to be doing were little circles in the middle of the Atlantic. But eventually we got down and we could see Gibraltar and by that time the sun was shining, the weather wasn’t too bad and having got land in sight, we all felt an awful lot better.
* = An interesting chap, Chas Charnock. He'd been a Cranwell Cadet in the 30's, graduated and was posted to fighters, but for some (unkown to my father, but suspected low-flying) reason, was court-martialed and dismissed the service. He joined up again in 1939 as Sergeant Pilot and by the time he joined 72, was a Warrant Officer and was subsequently commissioned again. A lot of the chaps mentioned in this memoir can be found in the definitive volume of RAF & Commonwealth fighter pilots, "Aces High", by Christopher Shores.