Box Brownie (pp John Dunbar DFC (RIP) #9368),
...I was trying to work through the quagmire of officialdom...
British officialdom is bad enough, but Indian far worse by several orders of magnitude !
I have lost grip here, we left him in Ambala instructing on TMs. Now he's got L5s. Dates and moves, please (if poss). Where are we ?
...Eventually someone twigged that the thirty three L'5s on the airfield matched the thirty pilots...
High Authority does sometimes have these Damascene moments - as when AHQ Delhi suddenly realised that they had a bunch of Vengeance doing nothing with next door another bunch of pilots ditto - and Lo - the light struck !
... We managed to scrounge help and tools and put the aircraft together ourselves. There were no maintenance manuals...
Worse case than ours ! At least ours had pukka RAF mechs for the jigsaw, the pilots would never have got one together ("
Needs simple home assembly ?")
...no pilots notes. I took the first one up for about twenty minutes and loved it...
After you'd assembled it yourself ? You are a brave man, Sir !
...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...
Possible Indian politeness - he didn't know himself, but didn't want to upset you !
...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...
Now that's what I call attrition, and no mistake !
...We set off on a four day journey at 110mph, this massive formation of L5's, with no parachutes and no radios...
Where from and when was this ?
...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...
A bit late to ask, if I may say so !
...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...
When was this ? The Imphal front hotted-up in spring 1944. Before that things were relatively quiet. I have an entry in my log 28.10.43. "landed Palel to refuel". Palel is in the plain of Imphal - if it had not been overrun when John arrived there would have been plenty of room for his L-5s there. Which Imphal airfield did he land at, anyway ?
I know nothing of casevac or any other L-5 activities on the Northern front. Down in the Arakan it had been developed into a routine. Army wounded were stretchered to the small strip behind the battle, the L-5 took them 20-30 mi North to one of our strips, offloaded them there and went back for another lot. The supply-dropping Dakotas carried a PMRAF nurse aboard, on their return empty they would pick up the casualties from us and she would do her best for them as it flew on to a proper Field Hospital maybe 100 miles further North.
It must have been hard for them (and for her) as the Daks were fitted for supply-drop and not casevac, all you could do was put them on the cabin floor. The Loadies were very proud of their brave girls and took good care of them.
Danny.