Gaining An R.A.F Pilots Brevet In WW II

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Coastal Command Memories

Together for eternity, the crew of Sunderland ML743 rest in Irvinestown churchyard, a few miles from their wartime base at Castle Archdale. They were among the scores of airmen who lost their lives in the Donegal mountains.

COASTAL COMMAND fought countless bitter battles in the Bay of Biscay, and the bravery of the strike crews ranging across the North Sea from bases such as North Coates, Banff and Dallachy has become legendary. But the airmen patrolling farther north in the Western Approaches, and their German adversaries, shared a deadly opponent in the Atlantic weather. Heinkels and Sunderlands, Catalinas and Kuriers alike met fiery ends on the mist-shrouded mountains of Ireland.

Aircraft from Castle Archdale and other bases in Northern Ireland flew far out to sea for day after day, month after month, many airmen seeing little more than the grey Atlantic wastes glimpsed through a scudding cloudbase. As very few if any of the Coastal crews are left, and as this 70th anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic draws to its close, over the next few weeks I shall humbly try to tell some of their stories as they were told to me.