A Spitfire Pilot - Part 35
Bob Oxspring was leading us on a sweep over Zibideja and we were obviously searching for anything we could shoot up and we saw what we thought were bomb-burst down below, not far from a place called Meturr. Now we weren’t really sure whether we were over our lines or the Germans, there was no actual line that you could spot from the air. From what we could gather most of the fighting was done from little holes in the ground in odd spots here and there. Anyway, Bob Oxspring told me to go down and have a look and in the meantime he called up a squadron of Lightnings (The USAAC Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a twin-boomed, twin-engine fighter) which were way above us, and explained that he’d sent a section down and he was going to stay and give me cover and would the Lightnings stay and give him cover? But fortunately we were all on the same r/t channel. The Lightnings, said,
“Yes, OK, OK, we’ll do that”, so with George Malan as my number 2, Owen Hardy as number 3, down I went.
We were bounced by a wad of 190s on the way down, so I called up Bob and said, could we have a little assistance, because we were quite busy, and he started to send somebody down to help us and the next thing we knew the Lightnings had attacked him so he had to bring the section back, and try and get out of the way of the Lightnings and leave us to our fate.
We managed to avoid the 190s that bounced us on the way down and going down lower still I saw two 190s, one behind the other. Now the first one was coming across in front of us and George thought that I hadn’t seen it, so instead of being a good boy and staying as my number 2, he shot past over the top of me to have a crack at the 190 and started firing like mad and all his discarded bullet cases were pouring down on top of me. But what George hadn’t realised was, that there was another 190 behind the one he was shooting at and the 190 happily slid in behind George and shot him down. Well we all had a crack at these 190s, I had a go at the last one and eventually after much toing and froing I managed to shoot it down and came back. I was very upset over George, because I was quite certain that he’d been shot down and finished, but apart from crash-landing, he managed to get picked up by the army and came back to us alright.
As I said, there was no marked front-line, merely a matter of finding little holes in the ground with soldiers sitting in them. So one day, George and I were doing a low sweep just to see what we could shoot up, when we came across a tank. It was the only one we ever saw out there and not knowing a German from an English tank we went down quite low and I can see George now. He was flying round this tank at nought feet, wingtip almost touching the ground, calling out,
“It’s got two little wheels in the front, two little wheels at the back and three big wheels in the middle”
Well that didn’t mean a thing to me, but I didn’t see any Nazi crosses on it, so I assumed it was one of ours and we let it go. In any case I doubt very much whether a 20mm shell would have done much damage to it.
Wing Commander “Sheep” Gilroy joined us about this time and he used to take us on the odd sweep. I was flying number 3, but in fact I was the last man in the section, inasmuch as we hadn’t got have enough bodies to make up number 4 and Gilroys’ idea was to get up high and come down at a fair old rate, shoot across whichever area we were going, in the hope that we’d catch something napping and at the rate we were going we stood a fair chance.
(Distorted ….end of tape)
Well, I was talking to myself and Gilroy said,
“Open up, open up!”
I just said, “I can’t go any bloody faster!” and lo and behold a voice comes back over the r/t, saying.
“OK, OK, we’ll slow down and keep together.”
What I hadn’t realised was that in the particular aircraft I was flying, the r/t was operated by voice as opposed to switching the little switch on as we normally do.
We had a pretty rough day on 5th December. I did two sweeps, one was quite quiet, nothing much happened; I went out on the other one and the engine was so rough, I couldn’t do a thing with it, I couldn’t keep up, so I had to gently ease my way home and land on my own. The other lads got bounced later on and we lost three pilots, MacDonald, an Australian chap who’d been with us at Biggin Hill and Sergeant Moxom and Sergeant Brown. They’d both joined the squadron quite late and weren’t too experienced, but no one seemed to know what had happened to them.
Last edited by johnfairr; 3rd Jan 2010 at 10:22.