Light at the end of the tunnel.
Fareastdriver, Adam, Tom and Chugalug, thank you all for your kind words of encouragement. But I have an uneasy suspicion that this Thread is turning into something into a monologue: I'm "hogging it", and that is neither necessary nor desirable. However, my faithful "Starwriter" will have to go into dock soon (printer u/s), this will cut off my story as it is all on Floppy Disc, and I have no confidence in my ability to remember all the details "off the cuff". So you're all due for a rest from me fairly soon. How long for? How long is a piece of string? Time for someone to take over!
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In the early new year of 42, my time at Gunter had finished. I moved by road to Craig Field, Selma, for the last stage in my flying training - Advanced School on the AT-6A. Craig was another Army Corps field 40 miles from Gunter (but still in Alabama), near the small town of Selma (then unknown, but destined to become notorious round the world twenty years later for the Race Riots there).
At Craig they decided that. as allied combatants, we should now bear arms, and so we learned American arms drill. The US seemed to be better off than we were in the UK, and had a large stock of Springfield rifles kept in mothballs since 1918. So we did not have to use "pretend" wooden rifles, or pickhelves, as we (and the Home Guard) had to do in the early part of the War. It might have been better for us if we had, for these museum pieces had been inhibited against corrosion when they put them away in 1918. They'd been smothered in an evil Vaseline-like goo. It has a trade name, which I've forgotten. Twenty years of drying out had turned this into a coating which wouldn't shame a rhinoceros. We had to shift this stuff, and the only way was with steel wool, kerosene and elbow grease.
It's a wonder we had any prints left on our fingertips. To this day, I can't smell paraffin without recalling the hours spent on that miserable chore. Thankfully, we only had to clean them externally, so as to make them look nice. To clean out the bores would have been an awful job; even if it had been done. I wouldn't have cared to be the man who fired the first round through them. Looking back, I suppose the only reason we got them in the first place was that nobody in the US forces would touch them for love or money.
It would be nice to record that we took pride in our new playthings, and could perform like the Marching Bands you see on films and TV. But US arms drill is comical enough (in our eyes) even when it is done properly - I dare say they would say the same of ours. It is better to draw a veil over our efforts, which almost drove our Master Sergeant to apoplexy.
Then we met the "Harvard", in its original form as the North American AT- (Advanced Trainer) - 6A. While Harvards were built under licence in Canada and elsewhere, the AT-6A was peculiar to the States, and varied mainly in the fact that it was armed. (None of the Harvards I flew in the UK and India were). A single .300 Browning was mounted in the top right of the nose, firing through the prop. The cocking handle stuck out from the top corner of the front cockpit panel, so you could deal with a No.1 stoppage (common, as I suppose the ammo dated back to WW1, like the Springfields, and there would be a lot of duds in it). We used it only on ground practice targets, and that without much success; the cordite fumes came back into the cockpit and choked us. I think they had a different kind of heater, too, but I could not be sure about that.
We no longer wore our RAF flying helmets with the mask/mike, but only a pair of headphones over our RAF forage caps. There was a hand-mike to transmit, and a little hook to hang it on. This often came off when you were upside down, and could give you a nasty clout. The Harvard is well enough known to need no description here. Nearly all the Empire's pilots did the later part of their training on it, and after the War there was usually one on every flying station, doing odd jobs and giving ground-duties pilots a bit of flying practice.
Not only did Craig Field have plenty of AT6s for us, but over on the far side of the field sat a few lonely, sinister shapes under tarpaulins. These were AT-12s, long out of memory except for specialist historians. These put the fear of God into our instructors, for whose use they had been supplied (for Staff Continuation Training), for they had a grim history behind them.
(EDIT: I have Google/Wikied the thing; the official story says nothing about this; I can only tell you what our Instructors told us).
They were built by the Republic Aircraft Corporation, who for decades had supplied generations of good piston-engined aircraft for the US forces (ending with the fine P-47, the "Big Fighter", which we used as the "Thunderbolt"). This AT-12 was originally designed as a one-off single seat dive bomber for the Swedish Air Force, and looked very similar to the Republic "Lancer" of the same era.
Even with today's computers, aircraft design is still something of an art as well as a science; you can never really tell how an aircraft will turn out until you build and fly it. A murderous gremlin had crept into this one. Any wing will "flick" ("snap" in US) stall if you suddenly pull enough "G" at a low airspeed. But this one would do it at approach speed, wheels and flaps down, if more than the slightest back-pressure were applied when coming in over the fence. The effect was to roll you into the ground with no time to recover. I can only hazard a guess that a new, untried wing section had been decided on, and as Burt Rutan once memorably said of a similar case: "It was a real bad dude".
The Swedes sent over two of their test pilots to try out their intended purchase. It killed them both. The customer called off the deal (wouldn't you?), and Republic was left with a pre-production batch on its hands and no offers for them.
What to do? Sell it to your Air force as a trainer, of course! This always happens when an aircraft is no use for anything else, but too expensive to throw away. Why would an Air force buy these lemons? Because the maker is on the doorstep, crying "Save us, we perish!" It's all too true, the aircraft industry lives from hand to mouth on the edge of bankruptcy. The capital cost of scrapping a whole new design, its production line and the surplus unsaleable product, could tip it over. Why should that worry an Air force? Because if you don't keep some of his competitors alive, the last man standing has you over a barrel. (Come to think about it that's pretty well our situation in the UK today.)
Our instructors were required to put in two or three hours a month on these horrors. It was always a crowd-puller when one took off, and even more so when it came back to land (don't begrudge us our schadenfreude, we didn't
have much other fun). A speck on the horizon, exactly aligned with the runway, and scraping dead straight and level over the scrub, would gingerly lower its wheels onto the concrete (nobody dared to try to three-point). Excitement over for the day, back to the crewroom for coffee!
We were naturally interested in these machines; they held no terrors for us; we didn't have to fly the beastly things, and we went over to have a good look at them. All the instrumentation was metric, and all notices in Swedish, of course (it is surprising how many of these little metal plates they can find room for on an instrument panel). We noted with approval one nice little touch. There was a "rounds gone" counter (like the trip mileage recorder in your car) for each wing gun (I think they were .50 Brownings). This is so simple and so useful an idea that you would expect all fighter aircraft to have it. But the Spitfire and Hurricane certainly didn't. From memory, I think they put tracer in the last hundred rounds, so when it appeared you knew you had only a few seconds' firepower left. That was the idea, but my figure may be wrong.
It was at Craig that our first RAF officer appeared, in the form of a "creamed off" Pilot Officer Instructor. I don't know whether he was ex-Canada or ex-US trained, as he had nothing to do with us other than to instruct. All our other Instructors were "Lootenants", as at Gunter.
That'll do for tonight, chaps. Sleep well!
Danny42C
Don't you know there's a war on?
Last edited by Danny42C; 17th Mar 2012 at 03:26.