Fl Lt John Dunbar DFC (RIP) Five into four won't go
Taken from three tapes
With General Messervey it was always “ Right Ginger, 3Brigade are going in at 2o'clock at ….... I'd like to go and watch” “You know damn well sir, I cannot fly you over the battlefield”
“Oh it's all right Ginger, it'll be all right” I have told you before when 'Norris the nose' took him up when I was not available. I will never forget his words when he got back “Ginger, you're not going to like this.” Jimmy thought 'the General has spoken – I had better do as asked' This was the sort of army we had out there. It was a joy to work with them. Jimmy got his nickname when he put his face into the dashboard when crashing on take off on one of those silly jobs.
As you know, we dropped the order of battle every morning to the advanced units of 4Corps and we would bring information back as to where they had got to. I remember Joe Edwards
coming back and saying “I've boo boobed. I dropped the mail and the japs have captured it. I circled round and realised that I had dropped it in the wrong place. They have loaded it on to an elephant and it has charged off into the Japanese side.” This is the whole battle of order for the army. I said”Oh my God!”and rushed into G ops and they got hold of Major Gibson, a most wonderful guy. If anyone said the RAF and Army can't get on... We never had a disagreement on anything. “ You tell me what you want Ginger and we will do what we can” We went through the whole war without a cross word.
In Gibby's tent I said “ For God's sake Gibby, we've boobed” “ Oh “he said, “ I must get hold of the General right away” General Messervey came running back. We were both stood to attention saying “I'm sorry Sir, we have dropped the order of battle on an elephant and it has charged off and there is nothing anyone can do about it, nothing at all” Messervey was very calm and said to tell Joe to go back and have a look. Joe was away for about an hour. When he landed
he just looked at us and said “ The elephant is back, they've got the elephant back” The elephant had somehow made it's way onto our side of the line. The war in our part of Burma hung in the balance at that moment because we would have blown the complete gaff, these were the sort of things that happened.
We lost several aircraft in this game because we were trying to land in silly places. If we had two hundred yards cut out that was as much as we could hope for. This went on all the way to the Irrawady crossing which was one of the great experiences when I flew General Messervey. There is a book called 'The Spearhead General' which is a book written about him. He was the only General in the British Army who was operational on 3rd September '39 and was on the VJ hand over in Rangoon at the end of the war and the only General to be captured by the Germans and to escape. I flew him every other day.
To be continued