The panic of Confrontation was effectively over. Sukarno had tried a few tricks; a few incursions into Borneo and the Malayan Peninsular but they were short lived and ineffective. It was now a holding exercise and an excellent training ground for the British Army in Jungle operations.
Labuan is a small island of the coast just north of Brunei. The civil airfield had been taken over by the military and the old wooden terminal building and hotel was now the Officers Mess. There lived the senior officers plus a lot of fixed wing detachments, ie Javelins, Beverleys and the Valletta transports so helicopter pilots were regarded as not fit to live there. To this end we were banished to the Membedai, which was the Shell Brunei oil company’s leave and recreation centre down by a small beach. Fully air conditioned in brick built accommodation at two to room with a palatial terraced bar and lounge.
I was the new boy on the block as most of the others had been there since it started. They had been on exercise in Libya when the squadron was assigned to the Far East and they were not given time to go home to Germany to pack. They went straight on an aircraft carrier and through the Suez Canal to Labuan.
The beach entertainment was watching the canoe project. This was an attempt by the squadron officers to replicate a dugout canoe of the type in common use in the interior. A suitable tree trunk had been washed up and they had set about it for some weeks hollowing in out in the approved fashion. Came the launch and our heroes embarked; followed by it capsizing. Eventually there were two choices; either put so many in it that it grounded or it turned over. It looked the part but unfortunately there were not the millenniums of experience that the Ibans had for building canoes.
The squadron was tucked away on the other side of the airfield so as not to interfere with the HQ staff’s lunch. There were two long wooden buildings, separated by a canopy which was the hangar. The Royal Navy had a Wessex flight based onshore at a place called Bario and their HQ, together with a solitary Leonides driven Whirlwind occupied one half. 230 Sqn occupied the other half with not more than four aircraft available or undergoing 2nd line servicing. The entire dispersal was perforated steel matting with a boundary of coiled barbed wire. Transport was the so-called Helistart Landrovers. These were Landrovers with an extra battery in series so they had twenty four volts available to a cable installed that had the standard NATO aircraft electrical plug. An added refinement was a platform with a small access ladder at the rear mounted on above the tilt which acted as a servicing platform for the upper reaches of a Whirlwind.
There aircrew were a mixture of grizzled veterans, actually they were only about thirty of so but they looked that after a few years on Dragonflys and Sycamores, one or two still on their first tour and a couple were among the last sergeant pilots to be trained by the RAF. One of the first things I learned to use was the squadron blowpipe. This came fully equipped with local darts; long spicky things with a fat bit at the back and an unrecognisable stain on the pointy end. The barrel, a hollowed out tube of a vine similar to bamboo was about four feet long and was horrendously accurate. Once one had learned the technique of pressuring the cheeks before blowing scoring 180 on a dartboard at ten paces was child’s play.
However, I wasn’t there to play darts so I had various briefings, some still covered by the Official Secrets Act.
To be continued………….
PS I may be posting a few pictures that I took when I was there. Unfortunately I made the mistake of using AGFA film; 'It's German, it must be good', and they deteriorated tremendously after a couple of years.