Flt Lt John Dunbar DFC (RIP)
Five into four won't go
Taken from two tapes.
I had two or three horrible days - the guys would not speak to me and I was trying to work through the quagmire of officialdom. Eventually someone twigged that the thirty three L'5s on the airfield matched the thirty pilots. Dave Proctor was receiving medical treatment back in Bombay having somewhat excelled himself. We managed to scrounge help and tools and put the aircraft together ourselves. The were no maintenance manuals and no pilots notes. I took the first one up for about twenty minutes and loved it. Basic training kicked in and I made some performance notes. We wrote the book ourselves. I then took two of the other pilots up and they in turn checked out the rest. As we finished a navigator arrived and announced that he was to lead us on the next step of our journey but could not tell us where we were going. You can imagine my reaction. 100 L5's were delivered to Burma split between 4Corps, 5Corps and 33 Corps. Of the 100 delivered sixty were written off in crashes in the jungle
We set off on a four day journey at 110mph, this massive formation of L5's, with no parachutes and no radios. We eventually arrived at Calcutta and it was here that the navigator told me of our final destination, Imphal. We took off and after a while he asked if we could get over the mountains. I asked what height they were and he said 10,000ft. We somehow did and let down into Imphal which was being strafed by the japs at the time. Not a soul was to be seen except for the od bod peering out of a slit trench. Eventually a Group Captain in charge of Imphal landing ground, wearing a tin helmet sort of crawled up to the aircraft. I shall never forget his words "What the hell are you lot doing here? Get these bloody toys out of here. Don't you know there's a war on?" My answer was NO I explained we were short on fuel and had nowhere else to go.
To be continued .
Last edited by Box Brownie; 25th Sep 2016 at 14:54.
Reason: Corrections!