A Spitfire Pilot - Part 35
Chas Charnock and George Malan take centre stage
George Malan had gone off to get married before we left England and hadn’t reached us by the end of November and consequently I did a fair amount of flying with Chas, either as his number 2 or 3 or anywhere in his section. It didn’t really matter because as we were normally jumped or broken up, it was a free-for-all. After one of these rather brisk exchanges, I hadn’t managed to hit anything, on the other hand, nothing had hit me, but Chas was shot down. He landed quite close to an English army group and when he was dragged into the trenches, the first thing that the officer said to him was,
“I see you’re a member of the rival establishment”, because Chas always flew with an Old Harrovian scarf round his neck and the officer, apparently, came from Eton!
Anyway, Chas eventually came back. Incidentally, he found a monastery on the way back where you could get red wine quite cheaply and he spoke to me the following day and said that the army officer had pleaded with him to send him up some clean underwear. They’d been living in little holes for weeks on end and were filthy dirty and could we help? So for Chas that was quite a simple operation and he arranged to get loads of clean underclothes and he and I would go out and find this place where the army was, drop the underwear and beetle off home. Well the CO decided that no, we weren’t going to go, and that was that.
I don’t know where he’d have got the clean underwear in any case, because the rest of our gear hadn’t arrived.
Chas was quite a character, he’d been a commissioned officer pre-war, been court martialled and slung out. He joined again at the beginning of the war as a Sergeant Pilot, went through the Battle of Britain, picked up a DFM and continued on ops for years. He looked as old as the hills and I gather he was 37 at the time I knew him, but he could still outfly and outshoot anyone on the squadron and he definitely was one of the real characters.
He got hold of a 15 cwt truck and drove up to this monastery he’d seen on the way back from being shot down and he’d taken lots of washed-out four-gallon petrol cans and filled them up with red wine at a very cheap price and brought the whole lot back to us. Now the only things we had to drink from were large, white enamelled mugs and if you pour red wine in those, you have to pour a lot in before it looks as though you’ve got any in at all. Consequently we half-filled these mugs with red wine and all sat around enjoying ourselves.
The only snag was the following day. I woke up in the morning, not really with a headache, but my head just wouldn’t leave the ground – I felt like death. So we decided that maybe red wine wasn’t for us if we were to go on flying.
On 27th November, we lost Johnny Lowe, we got in one of our usual tangles and by the time we’d returned to base, Johnny wasn’t with us and his body wasn’t found for some time. He’d crash-landed or been shot down not too far from the aerodrome
On the last day of November George Malan arrived together with one or two other chaps and also some decent tents, the rest of our gear and proper camp-beds, which made a world of difference. George and I started flying together again, it was just like old times and on one occasion I was leading with starboard flight on one of our half squadron efforts with our flight commander, Krohn, leading, and we were going, as usual, between Bizerta and Tunis and I noticed a couple of 109Fs just on the port side, in fact, almost had they come in much closer they’d have been formating on our port section. So I called up the 93 chap who was leading us, explained the position and I quite thought he’d send a section off to have a go at them, but nothing happened, so I called up again, with a similar message and still nothing happened, so I thought, well, pot this, and with George I swung underneath the flights and came out to have a go at these 109s. They didn’t want to play, one disappeared entirely up high and one started to go down. Now that one seemed to be the one for us, so we started belting down after it, but I’m afraid it was getting away from us and suddenly we got messages from the chap leading our semi-squadron, screeching at us to come back and reform and come back and reform and as we couldn’t get the 109F anyway, we reluctantly pulled up and came back. When we landed at Souk-el-Arba, I got quite a rocket from the flight commander for leaving the squadron. So I did explain to him that I’d rather shoot down a 109 than have the 109 sit there and shoot me down and if he couldn’t lead the flight properly he’d better let somebody else do it!
Later in the month Krohn was taken off the squadron strength and David Cox took over A Flight and to even matters up I was posted to B Flight, which was rather sad because I’d been in A Flight with 72 ever since I joined.
I’ve previously mentioned what a beautiful aircraft the Spit was and what little trouble we had with it, but I’m afraid out in North Africa things weren’t quite so good. What with the tropical modification we had on it and the general lack of proper maintenance facilities, we had quite a bit of trouble and on one or two occasions I had to come back for odd things such as an oiled-up windscreen, r/t u/s, and various other oddments that caused us a bit of trouble. They also took out the two outboard machine guns in order to lighten the aircraft and get a bit more speed out of it, so we finished up with two cannons and two machine guns but it was still enough to shoot something down if you got in the right position.