A Spitfire Pilot - Part 30
The move east to Bone and first blood to Owen Hardy
We each took our turn to patrol Algiers and the docks, to keep off any stray Ju-88s or 109s or whatever they sent down, but we never saw anything at all. After a day of this we were told we were being posted to Bone, which is a port about 300 odd miles farther east. So again we took off with our long range tanks, got to Bone where they had a single runway, more or less like a single track road and the ground off the runway was rough, full of stones, holes and what have you and also a lot of dust. No sooner had we landed and got into the dispersal, which in this case was a concrete-block house, than two 109s came over and started shooting up the aerodrome. There was no way we could have got out of dispersal, got to our aircraft and taken off, so we just had to sit there and watch these 109s shoot the place up. There were supposed to be two of our pilots up in the air, looking for things like this, but they didn’t see them on this occasion.
We all took our turn at aerodrome patrol and in the evening when it was dark we had to make our way to Bone and try and find somewhere to stay. There was literally no organisation whatsoever while we were at Bone. We had to wander around the town till we came to a hotel and then try and get rooms there. Fortunately we met up with Jimmy Barralldi, the chap who’d given us the talk on how to bale out of an aircraft at Hawarden*, and Jimmy could speak French quite well and he managed to find us rooms in this hotel, which was a good thing. Apart from the fact that there were no lights whatsoever, no candles and we had to blunder our way upstairs, and into rooms to find out if there was an empty one anywhere and finally Johnny Lowe and I managed to find a double bed and we crawled in and that was that.
The following day Owen Hardy and I were picked for the first aerodrome patrol and our first job was to get rid of the long range tanks. We’d had no instruction on this and although we tried pressing every button and switch and lever, there was no way we could get this damn tank off. Eventually one of us sat in the cockpit and pulled the lever and the other one gave the tank a mighty kick and it fell off. So we tried that with the other aircraft and managed to get all of them off without a great deal of further bother.
We’d been doing our usual patrol up and down the aerodrome, seeing if anything was coming our way, flying as usual about 200 yards apart and on the other side of Owen, who happened to be nearer the sea than I was, a 109 came in very, very low and shot across the aerodrome, shooting things up on the way, turned round and belted for home. Owen Hardy and I both turned in to chase the 109, but we hadn’t a great deal of height advantage and from what we could gather the 109 was a lot faster than we were.
Anyway, we chased this 109 on the deck for quite a way and I had visions of the thing getting away and I was shrieking at Owen to fire as soon as he could. He was quite calm about it, he lined up the 109, gave it a couple of good burst and the thing burst into flames and hit the deck. That was our first enemy aircraft in North Africa.
* = A Spitfire Pilot - Post #1230 onwards
Last edited by johnfairr; 28th Dec 2009 at 20:55.