Now you tell me Danny! Too little and too late I fear. Mercifully though there was no call in my flying career to personally transport "Drums Brake 3 Tonners for the use of" nor for that matter fly a Spitfire (more's the pity).
Had you devised an appropriate Abandon Aircraft Drill? To do so with the drums still attached would have risked a face full of cast iron with possibly fatal results, but to divest yourself of them without creating the biggest FOD incident ever equally problematic. I thought that the Spitfire lent itself to creative external stores solutions. Weren't they once famously bombed up with barrels of Watneys Red Barrel?
Geriaviator, your total recall of those days of boyhood innocence are to envy. It's not so much the incidents themselves, though they delight in their Outlaws like anarchy, but the thought processes that they engendered in you at the time. Thank heavens for that advice received re the OSA, for Moscow might otherwise have gained a strategic advantage from which we could not escape. A damn close run thing indeed!