A Spitfire Pilot - Part 33
Two become one and Beaufighters arrive.
We lost seven or eight aircraft completely destroyed and after that we were never able to put a whole squadron in the air at the same time and consequently we used to join up with 93 and make up a squadron between us. Sometimes Bob Oxspring would lead and sometimes Nelson-Edwards, the CO of 93.
We also started getting bombed at night quite regularly and apart from high explosive, a lot of butterfly bombs were dropped, which opened out like little peeled oranges when they hit the ground and scattered shrapnel right, left and centre. But as we were still lying flat on the ground in our little tents, nothing hit us, but the tent had a lot of holes in it. After that we decided to dig slit-trenches and these sprung up all over the place and most nights we spent a good part of the night stuck in them. Consequently we were up in the morning a bit on the tired side
A squadron of Beaufighters had come in and taken over the far side of the aerodrome and they used to keep off the Hun as much as possible at night although we were still bombed, but one night we were in our slit trench as usual and I heard an aircraft go over and then a whistling noise and Daniel, who knew everything, said,
“Don’t worry chaps, it’s a Beaufighter, you can tell by the whistle”
Well the snag was the whistle was the bomb coming down. So after that Dan had a bit of ribbing to put up with.
During the day the weather was pretty good, it was reasonably warm, visibility was good, but occasionally you’d get a spot of rain. Now you could never really tell when it was coming, one minute the sky would be clear, everything fine, then the next minute, clouds would come up and it would simply belt with rain and I’ve never seen rain like it. Anyway, it turned our concrete-packed mud field into a sea of mud and it was just like walking in glue. Naturally the aircraft just sunk into the mud and to begin with, we used to all get out and crawl under the wings of the Spifire, then heave it up, move it over a bit and put it down again. But the aircraft just sunk into the mud again, so we gave that up as a bad job. The snag was that the Germans were using proper airfields in Tunis, with proper runways and they were also using the roads, because there were lots of long, straight roads in that area and they could get up and fly around and shoot us up and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. They also did a lot of damage to the Army, so much so that General Anderson came round to find out what we were doing about things and why weren’t we protecting the Army. But when he saw the conditions we were working under, he thought we were doing as good a job as possible, so that was that.