You may recall that in my #8179 I said:
...(for most of the F.540 is in my own hand - including the six months before I took over - my predecessor, "Red" McInnis, * hadn't bothered !)..
It seems that that is not strictly true. The first narrative pages in the F.540 start on 1.12.44. and end 22.2.45, written "
ex post facto" (thanks,
ancient aviator 62) by me, and finish in my Summary on 24.4.45 (I'd flown in and taken over on 7.4.45.) and is headed:
...Compiling Officer 156*** F/O J.D.******* Narrative built up from a Flight Diary kept by J.17891 F/Lt V.B. McInnis, RCAF, now returned to Canada...
My Post p.154 #3071 continues the story of the arrears, telling how:
...In my pending tray lay increasingly irate reminders about this Form 540 from 225 Group in Bangalore..... [McInnis had gone back to Canada]..... and we....["Stew" Mobsby and I]... set to work together with the Authorisation Book, made notes of what anybody could remember, and used imagination to fill in the gaps. Henry Ford was right: history is bunk, and in many cases it's not even history. I smoked a pipe then so I cut the cigars up...[which McInnis had left behind] and fed them in. It wasn't really a success...
It seems that "what anybody could remember" didn't amount to much. For it was not until I read Peter C. Smith's "Vengeance !" nearly 70 years later that I found that McInnis had had quite an interesting time in the six months before I arrived. Here is a lengthy extract from that book (published by Airlife Publishing Ltd 1986 [ISBN 0 906393 65 5] - and I hope that this may be sufficient acknowledgment to them):
...A similar but much more military use was made of sprays, fitted to Vengeances by No.1340 Flight, officialy established at Cannanore on 1 December 1944. Vengeance IIIs, ** were fitted with tanks under their wings and experiments were conducted with the use of poison gas. Later, detailed tests were also made by this unit on the application of aerial smoke-screens for use in the combined operations for the invasion of Malaya, Operation Zipper. 'Bud' McInnis from 110 Squadron was in charge of this Flight, and provided me with very interesting details of its work, which almost resulted in a combat use for the Vengeance after all...***
What follows is almost perfect material for inclusion in this Thread. But why didn't McInnis (McInnes ?) put it into his F.540 - rather than tell it to Mr Peter Smith 42 years later ?
..."I went to the Malabar coast of southern India in November 1944. I was posted to a Flight called the Chemical Defence Research Establishment and the idea was that we were going to duplicate a lot of tests with poison gas which had been conducted in England and western Canada
We were going to do them under tropical conditions and they were going to be assessed accordingly. When I got there the place was a madhouse, the airfield was still under construction, half mud, half grass and the aircraft were going to be Vengeances. I was to be the CO of the unit, and so they promoted me to Flight Lieutenant and the first aircraft to come in were Mk.IVs, which differed considerably from those I had been flying up at the front. These were FD 225, FD240 and FD275. The Mk.IVs were more sophisticated in that they had a more powerful engine, but it was still a Wright Cyclone, and more electronics, even the trim tabs were electric. **** It had a higher carrying capacity in that it was supposed to be able to carry four 500lb bombs. # As for the machine guns, we had four instead of six, but they were 0.5s. The aircraft was also heavily protected with armour plating.
When I found out what my job was going to be, I discovered that it was going to involve a lot of low flying. In fact it had to be very accurate, flying for the most part at heights of only 30 ft. ## This is a far from enviable job in the Vengeance because of the high angle of attack, especially at low speeds. So as soon as I was able to fly off the airstrip, I started a programme of low flying to be able to lay a screen that again was measurable from the ground in the size of the molecules ### that dropped. We practised until we became quite proficient. They supplied me with three aircraft and aircrew who had never been on operations, but we succeeded in developing a pretty good unit.
Exercises and tests had commenced on 19 November 1944 ####, and continued through to the end of January 1945. In February the Flight started work out to [at] Santa Cruz, Deolali and Kalyan @ with Vengeance IIIs (FD240, FD955, FD966 and FD955 [sic]. The reason for the switch was explained by 'Red' McInnes thus: "The Army were still miles behind us in the preparations and my people were becoming pretty bored so I volunteered our services for other purposes as there was great preparation taking place at the time in readiness for the planned seaborne invasions of Burma @@ and Malaya. @@ Thus we took part in exercises which required the laying of aerial smokescreens as the landing craft approached the shore.
These exercises broke the monotony for myself and my men and were quite interesting. And we had quite a few amusing incidents because the Army with whom we were working were, for the most part, in the lower stages of training and had no idea what to expect and they were blundering away. I in turn had to learn all the procedures of laying smoke screens, signalling between the attacking forces, which were invariably late, and so on, and so we had a lot of fun doing it.
The last one I did was the most interesting of the lot. It took place just north of Bombay. I had my three aircraft there and this was to be the final rehearsal before they left and landed in Rangoon [?]. My aircraft were again called on for laying smoke. Two aircraft were to lay a screen along the beach, but one aircraft had to lay the perimeters, in other words, each side of an area about 400 yards from the shore had to have a marker dropped to guide in the ships and the landing craft from the sea.
Well, as CO, all this fell on my shoulders and when I went and had a look at the type of marker I was quite apprehensive. It was a float marker of course and it was perfectly spherical, about the size of an ordinary sea mine about 28-30 inches in diameter. @@@ I had to hook one under each wing and drop them in turn, not only accurately but again from not more than 35 ft. Well, there was no means of practising, no means of knowing how the aircraft was going to handle after one was dropped, and naturally they had to be dropped at two different times, one on each side of the landing area.
So I briefed my men on the straight smoke-screen aand armed-up my aircraft with the smoke floats. An amusing aspect of it too was that, just as I was going in to drop the first one, off my starboard side was a small island which was supposed to simulate an island that was just alive with artillery and ack-ack and it was to be bombed by Hurricanes armed with napalm bombs. I had never seen napalm at this point and I was getting nicely lined up to go in and drop my own smoke marker and concentrating hard, when suddenly the complete island erupted in flame. I can remember what a terrible fright it was for me,@@@@ because I didn't know whether it was going to have repercussions on my own aircraft or not. But the napalm, having such a low explosive factor, didn't affect my Vengeance at all. So I got rid of my first marker and was pleasantly surprised to find very little difference in lowering and dropping the second marker. Again, it is a tribute to the solidness of the Vengeance that you could do this sort of thing and get away with it. This exercise was conducted on 27 March 1945. Two days later I returned to my own base where there was a signal saying that I must report to Bombay for repatriation, so I never flew a Vengeance again."[/I]
All this demands a whole series of explanatory or question-type notes - so here goes:
Notes:
* Was it McInnis (my recollection) or McInnes (Peter C. Smith) ? And I always knew him as "Red" (never "Bud" - he was on "B" Flight of 110, having come out on the "
Stirling Castle" with me). May still live, but doubtful.
** They were IVs - the numbers McInnis quotes ("FD" series) confirm it. So what happens to my assertion that the IVs never got to India ? In the bin, that's what !
*** Half a mo' ! Six squadrons of the things had been dive-bombing the Japs in Burma from May '43 to June '44. McInnis himself had flown 66 sorties "
without a scratch" (as he says in "Vengeance").
****
OMG ! (and McInnis seems to have forgotten the [most important] AoI change).
EDIT:Why would he notice ? He would never have dived the things at Cannanore or Bombay (any more than I did). On the Squadrons, I did 100-120 practice dives, then 52 operational, but only one "demonstration" after that (and it caused a bit of a gefuffle !) Perhaps the Powers that Be had realised that, for the smoke-laying and marker buoy dropping job at 35 ft, it might be handy for him to see where he was going, so the four-degree AoI on the Mk.IVs would be helpful. But that is a large assumption !
Did they give him Mk.IVs just for that task, then swap him back to IIIs ? Don't know.
# Don't think they ever tried it (the IIIs and IVs were never operational). The IVs had one 0.50 in the back and four (later six) 0.50s in the wings.
## True ! (the lower you are, the harder target you are from ground fire). In his case, they would want the smoke markers and the smoke exactly right.
### Droplets, I think !
#### No record of this period in F.540.
@ All near Bombay.
@@ So there were two ? Could one have been the mysterious one (of which there is now no record) which ended in farce (my Post p.251 #5015). And how were the VVs going to get to target (for there would be no sense in training on the things if they were not to be used in action). With only 200 miles radius of action (they can't fly off a carrier, for steam catapults had not been invented yet), our ground forces would have to be no farther North of the action than that. And,
AFAIK, the 14th Army were still much farther away from Port Swettenham on VJ day. That "invasion" was planned with carrier-based air support.
@@@ Peter C. Smith's "Vengeance !" (p.155) has a good pic of McInnis taking off with one smoke float under the port wing.
@@@@ I had a similar moment of terror (my Post p.119 #2373).
Greetings all round, Danny.