A Spitfire Pilot - Part 34
Prisoners Escort
We were always having the odd a-rab* wandering round our tents and aircraft. They were all spies for all we knew, but they used to carry chickens and eggs and oranges and we used to argue with them about how much we had to pay for eggs and so forth and used our few francs to augment our supplies. There was a bit of a spy-scare on one occasion and a very black a-rab, who was thought to be a spy, because he’d been asking all sorts of questions in broken English and the CO decided that if he was a spy he’d best be taken down to the police station in Souk-el-Arba. I was given the job of escorting him down the road. So I collected my trusty .38, I didn’t have a holster for it, I had to carry the thing in my hand.
Anyway I marched this chap down to the police station and explained what we thought in very poor French, but it turned out he was one of the local characters who went round asking everybody questions day and night so they booted him into a cell, locked the door, said thank you to me and I walked off. But coming back I walked through a little bit of the town and there was a tobacconist which was really like a small stable. It had a door that opened sort of halfway from the top and the proprietor would stand inside, doling out the tobacco and there was an enormous queue waiting for this tobacco ration and when the proprietor decided he’d had enough and was going to shut up, there was a big clamour for him to open the door and start selling again, so he turns round, picks up a club and leans over the bottom of the door and slams away at all the arabs who are standing outside and eventually they packed up and cleared off.
I’d been flying every day since we landed at Maison Blanche, sometimes two or three times a day and latterly in the mixed squadron and on one occasion, Bob Oxspring was leading us and I had a member of 93 as my number 2. We were doing a sweep over Bizerta and we came across a batch of Ju 88s and an enormous gaggle of 109s covering them and I think we numbered somewhere about ten all told. Anyway we piled in to see what we could do and managed to knock down one or two and I found myself tackling a 109E which was quite unusual in those days, because you either met 109Fs or Gs or 190s. Anyway, with my 93 number 2, I tagged on to the 109 and as he pulled up and away I took a long shot at him and his port aileron came off and he went down in a great flutter and a spin, so we wrote him off and I was given a “Confirmed”.
Two days later Nelson-Edwards of 93 was leading our flights and I was leading the port flight with Pete Fowler behind me and a couple of other chaps from the squadron and the rest was made up by the 93 boys. We were on our way home from Tunis and we saw a Ju 88 belting back towards Tunis, with no escort and as I was the nearest section, Nelson Edwards told me to take over and have a look at it, while he’d keep top cover. It was a fairly straight forward bounce in as much as the 88 was making for cloud some way away and I just had to come down straight on top of him. Now the rear gunner started firing at me and I could see the tracer peeling off to my left and I sat there thinking, well that’s alright and it wasn’t until afterwards that I realised that although the smoke from the tracer might be wafting away on your left or right, the actual bullets were carrying straight on and weren’t peeling off any where. Anyway, I took on the rear-gunner first of all to get rid of him and then carried on firing and blew the port engine off and it spun in and by that time we were on top of the clouds, so I shot straight through, came out the other side and I’d lost my section, who’d pulled up when they came to the cloud, inasmuch as there was nothing left to chase, apart from me, and when I came out into the clear I found I was tagging along with half a dozen 109s, which had been the bombers escort presumably, and lost him.
I was some way behind them and running out of ammunition and a long way from home, so I called up the rest of the section and said come down under the clouds and give me a hand, but no one did, so I thought, well, there’s no point in hanging around and I gradually slowed down and let them get well ahead of me, then turned and belted for home.
* There's no point in being politically correct where you are quoting someone, just tell it like it was told to you. If that offends people, well, I make no apology for my fathers' memoirs!