Bill Gunston was ex-Technical Editor of Flight magazine and author of more than 300 books, he was born in 1927 and prided himself as being a DOPE cadet (in for the Duration Of the Present Emergency). I wonder if this is the article you referred to?
‘I remember the thrill I felt when I read in Flight just after VJ-day that future aircrew training would be carried out in Southern Rhodesia. The dream came true. I became part of No. 1 Course, and we sailed from Tilbury aboard the troopship Chitral on 29 November 1946. We docked at Durban on Christmas Day, to find ourselves surrounded by things totally unfamiliar: hot sunshine, giant fruit sundaes, cigarettes in boxes of 50 (price is 3d), flashy American cars, electric shavers, colour film and modern 35 mm cameras, fresh or canned fruit, chocolate, and more liquor than we could take. Austere post-war Britain was 8,012 miles away, and it seemed like it.
‘After two days in trains we unloaded at Bulawayo, spent a day or two at RAF Station Kumalo and then a week or two at 4 FTS, Heany. During the war the Rhodesian Air Training Group had grown to include 15 airfields, using de Havilland Tiger Moths and Fairchild Cornells for elementary pilot training, and Avro Ansons and Airspeed Oxfords for twin-engine qualification and, especially, for training navigators. The RATG and SRAF headquarters was at Cranbourne, outside Salisbury.
‘Along with the rest of what had become the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, the RATG was shut down after VE-day, the stations being put on a Care & Maintenance basis. But the incoming post-war government decided to reopen three stations as the RATW. I would not presume to know the reasons, though obviously the weather was far better than in the UK, and probably overall costs would be lower. The three stations were: Kumalo, HQ and wing admin; Heany, No. 4 FTS; and Thornhill, 5 FTS.
‘After the short spell at Heany about half No. 1 Course, myself included, got back on a train and arrived at Gwelo. This pleasant town was the capital of the Midlands, with Matabeleland on one side and Mashonaland on the other. Today it is called Gweru, and is quite a big city, but 45 years ago Gwelo was a small chessboard of straight streets with one or two substantial buildings and a much larger collection of single-storey shops and dwellings mostly of corrugated iron. It had the air of a Western frontier town, but we loved it. The amazing width of the main streets was explained to us: before the age of the car the streets had to be wide enough to turn a wagon with a long team of oxen.
‘A mile or two outside the town was RAF Thornhill. Its layout followed a familiar pattern. The straight road ran past the guardroom at the main gate. Entering the station, you soon came to a roundabout, with SHQ facing you on the far side and the flag mast in the centre of the grass circle. From this point the station’s built-up area was arranged in concentric semi-circles. Around the outside edge were the four pairs of giant hangars. The latter were of T2 type, but with a row of windows on each side. They were of silver corrugated steel, and so was virtually every other building on the station; I can’t recall a single thing made of brick or wood. Everyone knows the old saying, “If it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t move, paint it white”. This applied to the RATW 100 per cent. Post-war bull**** ruled the day, and the entire station was lined with many hundreds of white-painted rocks. But no problem; this was nothing compared with No. 1 Aircrew Officers’ School at Hereford, which many of us had survived.
‘The AOC of the RATW was Air Commodore G. G. Banting. He was a Grade A1 flying instructor, and he certainly impressed me. We would have seen little of him, but one day another cadet and I happened to meet him in Salisbury. We were in civvies, but he knew who we were instantly, grilled us at great length and put right most of our many beefs almost overnight. Station Commander was Group Captain F. W. Stannard, a no-nonsense cigar-smoker who looked and acted the part, though I suspect the Adjutant, Flt/Lt Hagger, did the routine work. CFI was Wg Cdr Dennis Weston-Birt, who probably wished he was back busting Panzers in the Western Desert as CO of 6 Squadron. SAdO was Wg Cdr E. L. A. Walter, the most hirsute man I ever met; hair bushed out from his cuffs. He was a fitness fanatic, and was heartily disgusted to find hardly anyone on the station who was eager to spend his spare time boxing.
‘The instructors, whom it was my privilege later to join, were naturally ex-operational types who in some cases regarded the job as a chore to be suffered for a short time until their number for release came up. The erks, a splendid lot, were almost all ex-Palestine or Egypt. We soon learned that the truck taking those off duty into Gwelo each evening was actually “a gharry”. And, incidentally, I never found one who didn’t wish he was back in the Middle East.
‘Like most of Southern Africa, Southern Rhodesia is on a high plateau. Though more than 1,000 ft lower than Jo’burg, Thornhill was still 4,680 ft up, so a Tiger was getting on for half-way to its ceiling before we took off. We began on Tigers, and because most of us had already done lots of “gash” flying we soloed pretty quickly. Ian Stebbings made it in 3 hours, and I took 4 hr 50 min. I am sure we had no “washouts”. It was a difficult period for the Air Force but we were lucky in getting plenty of flying in mainly glorious weather with no prospect of being shot at. The very fact that the war was over removed from most of us our reason for being in uniform. Many cadets, especially the navigators, were mature chaps—real oldies, over 25—who had been through the war in ground trades, re-mustered as aircrew and, from 1944 onwards, had spent their time mowing lawns and cleaning out latrines, in between fierce kit inspections and staying up half the night varnishing the coal in the mirror-like scuttles and polishing the soles of their boots. As for the instructors, most were simply counting the days.
‘Half the time, classroom lessons were made up on the spot. F/O Johnson, a nav instructor, thought one day he’d teach us about map grid references. Then he called a cadet out to demonstrate. “Bich” Pope strode up to the blackboard and quickly drew a map and a grid, with the letters QO, RO, SO, TO, etc, and TA, TB, TC, etc. Marking a point, he said, “This is grid reference ROTB 1947.” The whole class was convulsed, because this was a belligerent chant heard day and night, ROTB standing for “Roll on the boat” (to take chaps back to Blighty).
‘Somewhere in between we did a lot of things. When we arrived, our khaki drill shorts reached to our knees, but having seen the vast expanse of bronzed thigh and leg exposed by the local white Rhodesians, we soon cut 10 in off. We got on well with half the locals, though I recall we had an official complaint from the Gwelo Rugby Club who couldn’t take the RAF team’s brandy-soaked breath (this on Sunday mornings, mark you). The other half, of Afrikaner origin, had lain low during the war, but now they came out looking for trouble, and the young ones—locally called Yarpis—caused fights in the town almost every night. Down the road was a town reputed to be 100 per cent Boer—Enkeldoorn—and we were told if we went there we would be unlikely to come back. We didn’t test the belief. On the other hand the congregation of St Cuthbert’s, Gwelo, included several hospitable Afrikaner families who found the aggro embarrassing.
‘We also rehabilitated the station itself, and in our spare time uncrated 115 Cornells, took out the map cases with beautifully hinged lids, which could serve many purposes, and then sledge hammered them into pieces small enough to be loaded into trucks. The Lend-Lease Act precluded their post-war use, and the USA didn’t want them back. We also played a lot of water polo, built a theatre in a hangar, and built dozens of giant flying models powered by Ohlsson petrol engines bought from a shop of the Das Brothers (we’d never seen such things before). In odd moments we learned to fly Harvards. One day two Spitfire IXs arrived with officers of the SAAF who promised us what sounded like an air marshal’s pay, but I don’t think they got many takers. Several of us, me included, though totally unqualified as instructors, stayed on to help teach No. 3 course. I can only remember one prang in two years. S/L Hyland-Smith, a brilliant aerobatic pilot, got caught in a whirling dust devil as he practised his routine in a Tiger for a forthcoming air show. He lay encased in plaster in Gwelo hospital, where the nurses spent much of their time rolling him over to see what we had written on him.
‘Southern Rhodesia obviously has many happy memories for me. The RATW was finally closed in March 1954. Subsequently, Thornhill was to go through dark days in which white Zimbabwe AF officers were tortured during investigations into sabotage of Hawk jet trainers. I hope that by now they have got their act together.’