Fairey Battle used for training in Australia, photo courtesy the RAAF. Four x 250lb bombs were loaded inside the wing on racks which were hydraulically lowered for loading and for dive-bombing. More could be carried on external racks, just visible. Armed with a single forward-firing Browning and a hand-held Vickers K-gun for the rear gunner, visible here with his canopy tilted as a windshield, the Battle was easy prey for the German Me109, at least 100 mph faster and armed with a 20mm cannon and two 50 cal machine-guns.
The memoirs of Sqn Ldr Rupert Parkhouse, recorded in 1995 – Part 12. The first post in this series is #9775 on page 489 of this thread.
Note: when he took off in Battle L5580 on his second and final sortie, Rupert had only 218 flying hours in his log book.
THURSDAY, June 13, was another long day and it wasn't until 5.30 that we were called to the ops room and briefed to attack German tanks which were supposed to be laagered up in the Foret de Gault in the Ardennes near the town of Sezanne, NE of Paris.
Once again I could not find Hayden after takeoff but flew over quite easily to the target where I could not see any military activity on the ground at all. This rather mystified me because my father used to talk of seeing the line, but of course the two wars were completely different.
I saw the target ahead, it was an enormous wood, then we entered cloud and I thought I would pop out after three minutes and drop my bombs.
Unfortunately my airspeed indicator pitot head must have iced up and I saw my ASI unwinding at alarming speed. In my trepidation of the initial stages of attack I did not check my artificial horizon and I dived out at about 350mph, the aircraft's never-exceed speed in a dive, so I decided on a dive-bombing attack, which I did.
If only I had thought … what I should have done was to carry on low and returned at very low level. Unfortunately I was the last aircraft on the target and as I was climbing back up to the cloud at our 8000ft operating level my gunner, a little Scotsman called Duncan MacDonald, piped up with ENEMY FIGHTERS ASTAIRRRN, SIRRR! Calling me sir at a time like that … Just as he spoke there was a hell of a bang of cracking metal and I thought for a moment the engine had exploded, so loud was the noise.
I had always decided that immediately upon an attack I would turn to port and as my starboard wing came up I saw a great torch of flame coming from it. I levelled out and told the crew to bale out, but they did not reply and I waited for perhaps 10 seconds before starting to abandon the aircraft myself.
I had to get the hood back and I knew this would be difficult, though on operations I had decided I would never fly with the hood closed. Unfortunately on the runup to target my observer Sgt Morris had gone forward to use the bombsight and had asked me to close my hood because of the rush of air when he slid back his bomb-aiming panel. I immediately complied only to find 15 minutes later that I was in a burning aircraft and could not get the hood back however much I tried.
NEXT POST: Rupert describes his desperate struggle to open his canopy and escape from his burning Battle – but in vain. Then the deadly yellow-nosed Me109s of JG26 arrive to inspect their kill.