Gaining An R.A.F Pilots Brevet In WW II
Interesting post. I was holding at Manby on Varsities when UDI was declared and I was invited into the boss's office and asked where my loyalties lay. I replied that as I came from Kenya, which was a fair distance from Southern Rhodesia, I had no interest in UDI. However, I could have been in the RRAF as when I left school I applied to from Nairobi to the RRAF, the RN(FAA), and the RAF . Only the RAF replied!!!
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Yet another gem. Thank you, FED.
Your mention of flying around mountains particularly caught my eye.
I lost a friend back in 2001 who, on a (solo) training navigational flight in his Bell 47, 'unexpectedly' encountered a mountain wave.
An expensive lesson.
Your mention of flying around mountains particularly caught my eye.
I lost a friend back in 2001 who, on a (solo) training navigational flight in his Bell 47, 'unexpectedly' encountered a mountain wave.
An expensive lesson.
I replied that as I came from Kenya, which was a fair distance from Southern Rhodesia
One of out Towers course was a Rhodesian, he was woken at 0300 and offered the choice, he stayed. My valley QFI, also a Rhodesian, elected to go back home a year or so later, infuriated that sanctions meant his 70+ years Mother had to ride a motor scooter because she could not get enough fuel for the car
Correct me if I am wrong but if you were attested in Nairobi you would have had a seven figure number beginning with 50.
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Opportunity for a new Thread perhaps - what your service number told those in the know about your method of entry? Mine was 254xxxx which I believe was NS, and a surviving brush in the house carries 266xxxx. At the time 607xxx was the Towers.
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Direct Entry was, inter alia, 423**** for DE aircrew and 433**** for DE GD Ground.
I'm sure we've been here before!
I'm sure we've been here before!
This is the final bit of my btw stuff, with my thanks to the ever-tolerant mods.
Although there were Dutch and Free French squadrons based at RAF Hartfordbridge later in the War, I can only recall meeting British personnel on the airfield. Seeing that I was fascinated by the aircraft there, they often helped me into cockpits and I have a vivid memory of the long belts of .50 calibre machine gun ammunition running in tracks along the inside of the fuselage of a Mitchell in which I sat; the cockpit of a Mosquito into which I climbed seemed pretty cramped, even to a nine year old. Bostons were regulars too, and later on Warwicks, equipped with air-sea rescue lifeboats slung under the fuselage. Other special excitement came when I was lifted up to look into the waist gunner’s window of a B-17 Flying Fortress and when I noticed a Liberator fitted with an anti-submarine Leigh light under one wing. Stirlings and Lancasters visited and there were various USAAF Mustangs, Thunderbolts and Cessna Cranes and Bobcats. On being allowed into a troop-carrying C-47 Dakota I remember being amazed at the sight of piles of comics on the seats along the fuselage sides, and realising that this was the preferred reading matter of grown-up soldiers, or at least American ones. For me I was usually buried in borrowed copies of Aeromodeller or Aircraft of the Fighting Powers and occasionally I managed to acquire the odd copy of the official publication Aircraft Recognition, which was supplied to the forces. When I won a prize for English at school in about 1942 I can remember my disappointment at getting a copy of Peter Pan; what I really wanted was R.A. Saville-Sneath’s Penguin book, Aircraft Recognition, Part 1!
The A30 ran through Blackbushe and when aircraft needed to taxi from the dispersal areas on the opposite side of the road from the airfield, traffic was stopped; waiting at the front of the queue, we could feel the prop wash of the bombers as they passed a few feet away. On one visit there were troops guarding an area of woods on the Hartley Wintney side of the airfield and I was shooed away from a large crater with wisps of smoke where a Boston had crashed just short of the runway. With Farnborough a few miles away there were a lot of strange aircraft flying around; I was a bit surprised once to see an He. 177, but the first jet-propelled one I saw, a Meteor, was another milestone.
In 1944 we had a summer holiday at Cringleford near Norwich and during the train journey there the corridor was packed with US 8th Air Force men; I remember looking up at the ‘winged eight-ball’ shoulder patches and even then trying to imagine what these people had been doing a few hours before and would be doing again a few hours later. While on top of the steps of a playground slide (no ‘child safe’ soft rubber matting to insulate slide users from the reality of gravity in those days!) a Liberator flew over very low, trailing smoke and with flaps and undercarriage down, probably hoping to make it safely into Horsham St. Faith.
In June 1944 a telegram arrived stating “House bombed. Uninhabitable”. In 1940 my mother and I had moved from West Wickham, near Bromley, to the cottage where we spent the War in Hampshire, after renting our own house to a couple working in London. A V-1 had landed about 50 yards away, killing the occupants of a parked fire tender and levelling several houses. Our own ended up roofless and windowless; a large mirror on the opposite wall facing the window still bears several chips made by the window glass hitting it. When we returned after the War I used to play on what was then waste land where most of the damage occurred and the tailpipe of the V-1’s pulse jet was still lying there.
The same year, walking home from school, I saw huge formations of Horsa and Hadrian gliders, towed by Dakotas and Albemarles and Stirlings; they stretched almost from one horizon to the other. Whether they were going to Arnhem, the Rhine crossing or indeed D-Day I don’t now remember.
The radio played a major part in our lives. As well as the BBC, I listened to William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw) broadcasting propaganda from Germany and remember the distinctive gloating drawl in which he pronounced “gross registered tons” when reporting the day’s tonnage of Allied ships sunk by U-boats. Though my mother and I enjoyed classical music, I did occasionally listen to Glenn Miller, probably on AFN, and the Home Service, or more likely the Light Programme, played songs like Johnny’s Got a Zero and Coming Home on a Wing and a Prayer. I was never an ITMA fan, but Much Binding featured in our listening, and there were separate comedy programmes for the Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as the Johhny Cannuck Review when Canadian troops arrived. Tuning the radio dial to all sorts of foreign language stations brought in the dum-dum-dum-DUM call sign of the BBC’s broadcasts to occupied Europe and with my schoolboy French I tried to puzzle out why mysterious messages that apparently had nothing to do with the War were sometimes being transmitted and repeated. Towards the end of the War news on the Home Service had more and more details of Soviet advances and the names of generals like Koniev, Zhukov, Rokosovsky and Timoshenko became familiar; stirring Soviet tunes like The Song of the Plains, sung by the Red Army Choir, used to follow these news broadcasts.
Eventually my father returned from Stalag Luft III. When I showed him my latest laboriously carved 1/72nd ‘solid’, he seemed less than enthusiastic; it was a Ju.88, but he did give me a Luftwaffe circular navigation computer, and several maps, which I still have, presumably liberated from Halle airfield from which the USAAF flew him home to Cosford.
Although there were Dutch and Free French squadrons based at RAF Hartfordbridge later in the War, I can only recall meeting British personnel on the airfield. Seeing that I was fascinated by the aircraft there, they often helped me into cockpits and I have a vivid memory of the long belts of .50 calibre machine gun ammunition running in tracks along the inside of the fuselage of a Mitchell in which I sat; the cockpit of a Mosquito into which I climbed seemed pretty cramped, even to a nine year old. Bostons were regulars too, and later on Warwicks, equipped with air-sea rescue lifeboats slung under the fuselage. Other special excitement came when I was lifted up to look into the waist gunner’s window of a B-17 Flying Fortress and when I noticed a Liberator fitted with an anti-submarine Leigh light under one wing. Stirlings and Lancasters visited and there were various USAAF Mustangs, Thunderbolts and Cessna Cranes and Bobcats. On being allowed into a troop-carrying C-47 Dakota I remember being amazed at the sight of piles of comics on the seats along the fuselage sides, and realising that this was the preferred reading matter of grown-up soldiers, or at least American ones. For me I was usually buried in borrowed copies of Aeromodeller or Aircraft of the Fighting Powers and occasionally I managed to acquire the odd copy of the official publication Aircraft Recognition, which was supplied to the forces. When I won a prize for English at school in about 1942 I can remember my disappointment at getting a copy of Peter Pan; what I really wanted was R.A. Saville-Sneath’s Penguin book, Aircraft Recognition, Part 1!
The A30 ran through Blackbushe and when aircraft needed to taxi from the dispersal areas on the opposite side of the road from the airfield, traffic was stopped; waiting at the front of the queue, we could feel the prop wash of the bombers as they passed a few feet away. On one visit there were troops guarding an area of woods on the Hartley Wintney side of the airfield and I was shooed away from a large crater with wisps of smoke where a Boston had crashed just short of the runway. With Farnborough a few miles away there were a lot of strange aircraft flying around; I was a bit surprised once to see an He. 177, but the first jet-propelled one I saw, a Meteor, was another milestone.
In 1944 we had a summer holiday at Cringleford near Norwich and during the train journey there the corridor was packed with US 8th Air Force men; I remember looking up at the ‘winged eight-ball’ shoulder patches and even then trying to imagine what these people had been doing a few hours before and would be doing again a few hours later. While on top of the steps of a playground slide (no ‘child safe’ soft rubber matting to insulate slide users from the reality of gravity in those days!) a Liberator flew over very low, trailing smoke and with flaps and undercarriage down, probably hoping to make it safely into Horsham St. Faith.
In June 1944 a telegram arrived stating “House bombed. Uninhabitable”. In 1940 my mother and I had moved from West Wickham, near Bromley, to the cottage where we spent the War in Hampshire, after renting our own house to a couple working in London. A V-1 had landed about 50 yards away, killing the occupants of a parked fire tender and levelling several houses. Our own ended up roofless and windowless; a large mirror on the opposite wall facing the window still bears several chips made by the window glass hitting it. When we returned after the War I used to play on what was then waste land where most of the damage occurred and the tailpipe of the V-1’s pulse jet was still lying there.
The same year, walking home from school, I saw huge formations of Horsa and Hadrian gliders, towed by Dakotas and Albemarles and Stirlings; they stretched almost from one horizon to the other. Whether they were going to Arnhem, the Rhine crossing or indeed D-Day I don’t now remember.
The radio played a major part in our lives. As well as the BBC, I listened to William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw) broadcasting propaganda from Germany and remember the distinctive gloating drawl in which he pronounced “gross registered tons” when reporting the day’s tonnage of Allied ships sunk by U-boats. Though my mother and I enjoyed classical music, I did occasionally listen to Glenn Miller, probably on AFN, and the Home Service, or more likely the Light Programme, played songs like Johnny’s Got a Zero and Coming Home on a Wing and a Prayer. I was never an ITMA fan, but Much Binding featured in our listening, and there were separate comedy programmes for the Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as the Johhny Cannuck Review when Canadian troops arrived. Tuning the radio dial to all sorts of foreign language stations brought in the dum-dum-dum-DUM call sign of the BBC’s broadcasts to occupied Europe and with my schoolboy French I tried to puzzle out why mysterious messages that apparently had nothing to do with the War were sometimes being transmitted and repeated. Towards the end of the War news on the Home Service had more and more details of Soviet advances and the names of generals like Koniev, Zhukov, Rokosovsky and Timoshenko became familiar; stirring Soviet tunes like The Song of the Plains, sung by the Red Army Choir, used to follow these news broadcasts.
Eventually my father returned from Stalag Luft III. When I showed him my latest laboriously carved 1/72nd ‘solid’, he seemed less than enthusiastic; it was a Ju.88, but he did give me a Luftwaffe circular navigation computer, and several maps, which I still have, presumably liberated from Halle airfield from which the USAAF flew him home to Cosford.
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Repeating what I said in another Thread ...
Oh God ... so sorry, Danny.
My thoughts are with you, and thanks for letting us know in the midst of that.
Oh God ... so sorry, Danny.
My thoughts are with you, and thanks for letting us know in the midst of that.
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God be with you, Mrs Danny42C
OK, gentlemen. I've had a Calvados or two, but ...
... I'm going to stick my neck out a long way now.
Mrs Danny has clearly had a long life in the company of an amazing gentleman. So perhaps we should raise a glass to her, and mark her departure to pastures new with a raised glass? And at the same time raise [another] to Danny, who has informed and entertained here for so long, and has suffered a dreadful loss?
It's the mark of the man that he posted this sad news on all 3 [AL1 = 4] of his active Threads ... who else would think of doing that, at a time like this?
Many of us have lost 'mates' along the way, so perhaps we should apply that upper lip stiffener and say "Bugger", give Danny a cyber-hug, take a deep breath and ... Carry On.
God Bless, Danny ... and cheers from here. My eyes are wet.
... I'm going to stick my neck out a long way now.
Mrs Danny has clearly had a long life in the company of an amazing gentleman. So perhaps we should raise a glass to her, and mark her departure to pastures new with a raised glass? And at the same time raise [another] to Danny, who has informed and entertained here for so long, and has suffered a dreadful loss?
It's the mark of the man that he posted this sad news on all 3 [AL1 = 4] of his active Threads ... who else would think of doing that, at a time like this?
Many of us have lost 'mates' along the way, so perhaps we should apply that upper lip stiffener and say "Bugger", give Danny a cyber-hug, take a deep breath and ... Carry On.
God Bless, Danny ... and cheers from here. My eyes are wet.
Danny is of Irish stock. I would wish to offer my condolences as they would put it around here - "I am sorry for your trouble - but, it comes to every door"- it might seem inelegant to a non-Irish audience, but it is sincerely meant.
RIP Mrs D.
Strength to you Danny.
Ian BB
RIP Mrs D.
Strength to you Danny.
Ian BB