We flew up to Khumbirgram (hereinafter "K") in 15th October '43, I flew my first sortie on the 21st, and on 18th November, Stew and I, and another crew from "B" Flight, were posted to 8 (IAF) Squadron back in West Bengal. So we were there only a month, but (in contrast with the last dull five months) it was packed with action!
A quick tour round K first: it was in a scenic valley up in the Assam hills, a dozen or so miles NE of Silchar. Very unusually, they'd built a concrete runway along the valley floor, obviously intending to stay there for good (it's there yet). They were also building proper dispersal pens and concrete taxiways on our side (the south) of the runway.
"A" Flight bagged some of these; "B" Flight had to make do with just the trees on the far side plus their camouflage to protect them (it proved a blessing in the end!) 45 Sqdn took some of the south dispersals.
The Mess was on top of the hill on our side. It had been a planter's bungalow. The whole hillside was a working tea garden and the scent of the fresh tea tips being harvested from the bushes filled the valley in the cool, fresh mornings.
The planter was away for the duration as a reserve officer in the Indian Army. His Indian foreman was running the show while he was gone; if the planter had a wife and family, there was no sign of them - they would probably have gone back to the UK if they could, or if not were settled in some hill station well to the west out of harm's way.
The large and palatial bungalow had been taken over by the RAF; we had our Mess, anteroom, billiard room and bar in it; our accomodation was in individual "bashas" in the former garden and tennis court.
Amusingly, I recently read on an IAF website, a grumble from a later ex-IAF pilot (7 Sqdn?) who was out in the wilds at Uderbund (not far North, over the hills), to the effect that the Sahibs had pinched all the best accomodation, leaving them out in the bundoo - the exact same complaint I made in one of my Posts long ago (Hullavington) about our transatlantic cousins! You get the picture.
Assam in those days was still tiger country, and there was an amusing incident one night. We had locally recruited chowkidars (guards) keeping night watch on the aircraft. Nothing much ever happened, no one was going to pinch the things and there was little danger of sabotage. So one of our chaps was having forty winks.
He was roused by an animal nuzzling his hand in a friendly way, like a dog. Opening his eyes he found himself nose to nose with a full grown tiger. With a howl of terror, he dropped his rifle (probably empty, anyway), and shot off in one direction,An equally shocked tiger fled in the other - he must have been kin to the Cowardly Lion of the "Wizard of Oz", or Ferdinand the Bull (remember him?), who "just liked to smell the flowers". Or, more probably, he was already full of the villagers' goats.
The tiger is a territorial beast, and it seemed we were on this one's patch. Weeks of tiger-awareness (not to say tigerphobia) followed. As with ghost stories, it is easy to be brave in broad daylight, but when night breezes rustle the bushes, and moonlight shadows move, tigers popped up all over the place.
It must have been on my mind. I awoke one night to feel my charpoy gently tilting and moving about. First thought - "some idiots have had a gin too many and are playing silly b#####s". Then I realised that I was alone in the basha. Next thought was of some large animal under the charpoy, arching his back to scratch on the underside..........Tiger!!!.....Then I realised that the whole basha was moving.......Earthquake!!!I shot out into the moonlight to join the others.
By then the tremor had stopped. It had lasted only a few moments and done no damage. A basha hut, its bamboo frame lashed together with coconut fibre string, is flexible enough to survive much larger earth movements than the one we'd just had.
We hung about for a few minutes, and then went back to bed. It seems that these tremors are not unusual, but full blown earthquakes rare, at this end of the Himalayas.
As in the Arakan, Army close support was the greater part of our work, and we could get feed-back from them. When we went further afield, it was more difficult. Some strikes were on supposed Jap stores dumps in riverside villages. Leaving behind only a huge cloud of dust, you can't tell how successful a strike has been. If it was important to know (ie, do we need to do the job again?) a PR Hurricane would go out to photograph the result.
An air staff officer back at Group had a bright idea (make for the hills, chaps!) Why not kill two birds with one stone? Fit a camera in the bomb bay of the last Vengeance to go down, and let him take the photographs himself after he's bombed. They checked for free space in the bay: it could be done.
This proposal did not meet with any enthusiasm. To begin with, it violated the Golden Rule of Ground Attack, which is "DO NOT HANG ABOUT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME". By the time a defending gunner has put down his mug, stubbed out his fag and swung his weapon round onto you, you want to be hull-down on the horizon, going like a scalded cat. Many a good chap has been lost,
staying behind to admire his handiwork.
Nevertheless they decided to give it a whirl, and I drew the short straw. Our target was a small Burmese town with a jaw-cracking name (my personal best in the log book is: "Kyathwengyaungywa" - but that's not today).
All I remember about our target was the pagoda in the town centre: Its gold leaf sheathed spire blazed in the morning sun; our intelligence officer noted that every single crew made particular mention of it at de-briefing after we got back.
The strike was on the river edge of town. There were no railways so far north in our part of Burma, and the roads (little more than bullock cart tracks) were too dangerous for the Jap to use by day in the dry season. The long dust trail raised by even a single truck could bring down attack by a patrolling Hurricane or Beaufighter.
But all the rivers ran north and south; they were the natural highways of the country. The Jap used them as suppy routes, moving barges by night, and lying up camouflaged under overhanging trees at staging posts during the day. This place was one such post (according to intelligence, which we hoped was correct, otherwise, a lot of innocent Burmans were going to die for nothing).
We were to target the riverside buildings.The strike went according to plan, as far as I could see. I was disappointed to see no black smoke - a sure indicator of rubber or a petroleum product, war stocks on the way to the Jap armies around Imphal, and no explosions after the bombing. The first five aircraft cleared away to the West and left me to it.
I went off down river for five minutes or so, then turned back north at 1500 ft as instructed, bomb doors open for a straight and level run over the target. I was acutely conscious of having no armour plate underneath me.Over the spot, Stew switched the camera on for its ten-second run.
Nothing hit us, and I carried on up north, intending to clear the area before turning west over the ridges. These ran north/south at about 6,000 ft in parallel with the rivers.We must have been flyihg a minute or two, when Stew chipped in: "There's a radial engined fighter about two miles behind us".
More soon.
Sleep tight,
Danny42C
Keep smiling.