I Sank The Bismarck (6 page)

All of us felt a great deal of pride. There we were, newly
qualified pilots, walking around in our uniforms, smiling at
the girls and basking in the reflected glory of
Cossack
and the
ships that sank
Graf Spee.
We felt we were the bee's knees. We
soon came down to earth with a very big jolt.

Having finished our initial flying training and collected our
wings, we were sent off for further training, this time to the
RAF station at
Netheravon, in Wiltshire, near Salisbury Plain.
It was February 1940, and it was a particularly hard winter.
Where we had previously been billeted in civilian houses, we
were now housed in wooden barracks with bunks for twenty
people. They were heated by two old pot-bellied stoves, one
at each end of the barracks. I was not at all impressed by this,
but thought to myself that it was only for a short while. If I
had known how bad it was going to get, perhaps I would have
got myself sent somewhere else.

Our training was now going to be on two aircraft, the
Hawker Hart and the North American
Harvard. The Hart
had been designed by
Sir Sydney Cam, who also designed the
Hurricane fighter that was in front-line service with the RAF.
The Hart dated back to 1927, with a fixed undercarriage,
biplane wings and a two-seater open cockpit. When it first
entered into service it was described as a light bomber,
although it was one of the fastest aeroplanes around at the
time, faster than most fighters. When I started flying it was
obsolete, but it was still a good plane on which to learn longdistance
navigation skills and bombing techniques. The
Harvard was produced in the United States and was much
more modern, being an all-metal, low-wing monoplane with
a retractable undercarriage and a Perspex-covered cockpit. It
was a sturdy, reliable aircraft with an air-cooled radial engine
that could take a lot of punishment. Some of these planes are
still flying and they even race them in America. We used the
Harvards for instruction in formation flying and for some
basic aerobatic and fighter tactics.

We shared the camp with the RAF, and there were some
Women Royal Auxiliary Air Force members there too. One night
in the mess there was this absolute stunner, a tall, elegant blonde
with Sergeants' stripes, who, I was told, rebuffed any advances.
I approached her and to my amazement we hit it off. I had
noticed her around the camp before and had been told that she
was called Jane. I discovered that her real name was Margaret;
Jane was just a nickname because of her long legs, like Jane the
comic-strip pin-up in the
Daily Mirror.
Towards the end of my
stay at Netheravon we used to play tennis together and there
was always a good crowd to watch her play in her shorts.

My good luck in finding an attractive female companion
wherever I got myself posted was beginning to become the
envy of some of my fellow trainees, but we soon realized just
how unlucky we all were as the weather, which was already
severe, got much worse. There were high winds, a heavy
snowfall and the roads to the airfield became blocked. The
bad weather didn't slacken and the roads in and out of
the camp remained impassable, so food and coal couldn't be
brought in and soon the only place to go where we could get
a hot drink was the NAAFI. It was so cold in our wooden
barracks that we slept in our sheepskin flying suits. The stoves
were inadequate anyway, but after the camp had been cut off
for seven days there was no more fuel for them. We resorted
to breaking the black-out frames in the windows and burning
the sticks of broken wood. We had to melt water that had
frozen in the fire buckets and try to wash ourselves with it,
one leg at a time in each bucket. After the wooden frames
were used up there was nothing.

Then a more serious situation developed. People started to
fall ill with all sorts of ailments. The sickbay became full and
patients had to be housed in the church. I was then told that
there was a call out for funeral parties, because people were
falling ill with influenza, pneumonia and German measles and
the camp was starting to experience fatalities.

It was a dreadful situation and shows just how unable the
country was to cope with the needs of wartime. We were
lucky in a way that the war in Britain had so far been
relatively peaceful, because the armed forces and the government
had still not made a full transition to a war footing. We
seemed to get no direction from the camp's officers, and
nothing was being done to evacuate the sick or improve the
food and heating situation. One of my companions in
the Fleet Air Arm,
Rupert Brabner, was actually an MP, who
had been elected in July 1939. He managed to leave the camp
for London and of course went straight to the Admiralty. The
next thing that we were aware of was the arrival of an
emergency hospital train at Netheravon station. The whole
base was evacuated and we were given two weeks' leave.
When we returned, the place was much improved and so was
our position in a predominantly RAF camp. The final confirmation
of the respect we had gained came with a concert
we put on in the days before we left Netheravon. It was
the usual stuff of comedy sketches and old favourites on the
piano, the high point that I can remember being the appearance
of my Welsh friend Glan dressed in a short skirt and with
pan lids for a brassiere; the turnout was amazing.

Rupert went on to serve in various squadrons, and was on
board HMS
Eagle
when she was sunk in 1942, but survived.
After this he became a very young under-secretary in the Air
Ministry. He was on a delegation to the United States in
March 1945 when his Liberator aircraft disappeared over the
Atlantic, and he died at the age of thirty-three.

Just before we left Netheravon for good we were sent with
our planes to South Wales, where we did a final
bombing and
gunnery course from an RAF base called Stormy Down near
Porthcawl. This was designed to finish our initial combat-flying
training, and it also marked a watershed in my
education about the female sex. While we were at Porthcawl
we lived in a good hotel overlooking the seafront. We were
amazed by the number of young girls who were booking in as
well. They were there to work on the bombing range, operating
the cameras that filmed us as we dive-bombed the targets
floating in the bay. On a visit to a local beach I met a rather
good-looking girl in a bathing suit, who told me she was staying
at the same hotel. Our friendship blossomed and a room
key changed hands. This young lady gave me my first experience
of someone who was interested only in sex, without any
emotional feelings. This is usually thought to be a particularly
male attribute, but I am not so sure. Anyway, after four nights
of exhausting sex with her I staggered into my pilot friend
Dickie Chambers' room and gave him the keys to her room. I
was physically drained, I felt used, and I had become tired of
it. As I say, it was an education. Poor Dickie was killed not
long after in the Shetlands, but I gather both he and the girl
became quite attached and were very happy with the arrangement
during the rest of the time we were in the hotel.

The final part of the navy's effort to turn me into an officer
and a gentleman was a course in the
Royal Naval College at
Greenwich. Eighteen of us went there, from the original draft
of forty or so that had started in St Vincent some months
before, so I must have made the grade in a few things. The
college is a magnificent building, with a majestic sweep of
colonnades facing the Thames, and even more remarkable is
the fact that it was originally built as a seamen's hospital. The
painted hall is stunning and would not be out of place in a
palace. Some of the buildings were quite badly damaged in the
Blitz, but this was after we arrived. We were being trained to
do a man's job, to become leaders in charge of ratings who
might well have many more years' seniority than us. At heart,
however, we were young men of between eighteen and twenty,
irrepressible, full of fun and, however grave the situation,
always on the lookout for the next drink or attractive female.
It was our boast that we would never allow a deserving case
to go unattended.

As a precaution against damage from air raids, some parts
of Greenwich had been boarded up. The statue of King
William on its plinth in the main quadrangle had been completely
surrounded by a brick wall and roofed over. One night
before leaving we decided that we would leave our mark on
the college. There were some small naval cannon lined up
along one side of the colonnades, and we got some ropes and
pulleys and purloined a couple of ladders. A group of us dismantled
one of the cannon, then hefted the barrel and gun
carriage on to the top of the brick tower that surrounded the
statue, which was about 30 feet high. We then reassembled
the cannon and removed all traces of the lifting tackle. Next
morning there was a constant stream of people wandering
through the quad to look at this cannon perched high in the
air.

Of course we were quickly identified as the guilty men.
Commander D'Oyly, the captain, called us into his office. We
expected the chop, but he was quite calm. He questioned us
closely about how we had managed to dismantle the cannon, lift
it above the statue and then assemble it again in the dark. 'Well,'
he said, 'I am very pleased that you have learned something from
your seamanship lessons!' He was right. None of us would have
had the foggiest idea how to do it before we had joined the navy.
He then said, 'You will take it down before you leave.' We knew
that this was not a request and we quickly chorused our desire
to restore the cannon to its proper place. Nothing more was said
about the incident, but I still have the photograph that one of us
took before the cannon was removed.

I had one unpleasant incident at Greenwich, which made
me extremely angry.
Lord Gort, a senior army general, and a
female companion were invited to a dinner, and there was
a lottery to find out who was going to have the honour of
joining them at the top table. I drew the short straw and sat
next to her throughout the proceedings. After two abrupt
questions, about my rank and my family, she utterly ignored
me. My nervous attempts to start a conversation were cut
dead, so I sat there feeling humiliated, sinking lower and
lower in my chair as the evening progressed. I have never forgotten
her rudeness, and I was pleased to be present when she
later received some of her own medicine.

So we became
sub-lieutenants in the Royal Navy Volunteer
Reserve, the lowest form of officer life, but officers none the
less. We were given a few days' leave. In one final daring coup
one of my South African colleagues, Buster May, sweet-talked
the Wren who was issuing the travel warrants and secured us
warrants to travel home via Belfast. So it was a few days with
Ruby, whom I hadn't seen for several months, then home to
Kelso.

In the final weeks of my training at Greenwich Naval College
the world started to change very rapidly. The Germans
mounted a huge assault on Western Europe, and we found
ourselves looking down the barrel of a gun, sometimes quite
literally.

It started at the beginning of April 1940 when Hitler
launched an invasion of Norway and Denmark, both of
which were neutral countries. German warships sailed with a
large number of soldiers on board to capture the capital of
Norway, Oslo, and several other towns along the coast. The
seizure of Oslo didn't go according to plan, the harbour
defences sank the leading German destroyer, and the
Norwegian government and royal family escaped northwards.

The Royal Navy had put to sea when the German fleet was
spotted, and there was a battle with some of the invading
ships at
Narvik, which lay at the head of a large fjord, Ofot
Fjord, in northern Norway. Two German destroyers were
sunk and three others damaged, as were two British destroyers.
The German warships had succeeded in landing their
troops, but were bottled up in the fjord, and unfortunately for
them Britain had selected Narvik as the point where they
would land British and French troops to fight the occupation.
A few days later the battleship
Warspite,
with a fleet of
destroyers, entered Ofot Fjord. The German destroyers were
taken by surprise, and all eight of them and a submarine
were sunk or scuttled in the ensuing battle. It was a great
victory for our lads. The
Fleet Air Arm had also come out of
it well, because it was a Swordfish aircraft catapulted off
Warspite
that bombed the German U-boat. It was the first U-boat
to be sunk by an aircraft in the war, and Narvik was the
first naval battle.

A few days later the Fleet Air Arm pulled off another historic
victory when a group of Skua dive-bombers that had
taken off from Hatston in the Orkneys attacked a German
cruiser.
Königsberg
had been part of the fleet that landed
troops in Bergen, and she had been damaged by shells fired
from the Norwegian shore batteries. She was moored against
the harbour wall, awaiting repairs. The
Skuas scored several
direct hits, setting the cruiser on fire and rupturing the hull
below the waterline. This was the first time that a warship
had been sunk by air attack.

But from then on the boot was on the other foot. The
Germans reinforced their troops by air, sending several
squadrons of bombers and fighters to Norway. Within a few
days the Royal Navy was being attacked by these German aircraft.
German bombers, twin-engined
Junkers Ju88 and
Heinkel
111, sank a modern Tribal-class destroyer,
HMS
Ghurkha,
and
hit a battleship,
HMS
Rodney,
although not much damage was
caused. The vulnerability of the fleet to the German aircraft
meant that they could not sail close to the shore to bombard
German positions or to attack their shore communications. The
aircraft carriers HMS
Ark Royal
and
Furious
had sailed with
the fleet to provide air cover, but the problem was that the aircraft
they carried were no match for the modern German planes
with which they were coming into conflict.

*

I had still not completely finished my training, so I had been
posted to another Fleet Air Arm base at
Eastleigh, near
Southampton, where I was being given instruction in naval
fighter aircraft. Here I was flying the same aeroplanes that the
navy was relying on to fight off the
Luftwaffe over Norway,
and it was quite clear to me that they would not be up to the
job. We had Blackburn Skuas,
Rocs and
Gloster
Gladiators.
The Skua was a single-engined aircraft, an all-metal monoplane
with a covered two-seater cockpit. There were four
machine guns in the wings, and the observer at the rear had a
rearward-mounted machine gun to fight off attacking aircraft.
As well as this, it could carry a 500lb bomb. It was a good
dive-bomber, but as a fighter it was outclassed by the German
Messerschmitt 109, which had a much better performance.
Even the twin-engined Messerschmitt, the 110, which was
also classified as a fighter bomber, could outrun it, although
it probably wasn't as manoeuvrable as the Skua in the turn.

The Roc was a completely useless aeroplane. It looked like
a Skua with a gun turret mounted at the rear of the cockpit.
It had no forward-firing guns at all. Finally there was the
Gladiator, which was a biplane with a fixed undercarriage
and an enclosed cockpit. The Gladiator, however, despite its
obsolete appearance, was my favourite aircraft. It was
wonderful to fly and very good for aerobatics. But unfortunately,
like the Skua, it was not up to the performance of
modern fighters.

One morning at Eastleigh I was told to take a Gladiator up
and I decided to see how high I could get. The Gladiators had
been fitted with an oxygen supply for high altitude, so I went
out over the Solent and started to ascend, switching the
oxygen on at about 12,000 feet. It was a beautiful day, and as
I went through some clouds I came out into early-morning
sunshine. I continued to climb, reached 29,000 feet and
would have gone higher if I could, but the controls were starting
to feel vague and I lost any positive feel. I thought it wise
to start my descent and took her down in a gentle banking
turn, heading back to Eastleigh. I hit some cloud at 6,000 feet
and continued my shallow dive through it, coming out underneath
at 3,000. I could see the coast, but while I was checking
my position in relation to Eastleigh I suddenly became aware
that I was in the company of some other aircraft.

As tracer bullets started to whip over my upper wing, it
quickly dawned on me that these aircraft were not friendly.
Then a fast monoplane
fighter shot past me and I saw the Iron
Cross markings of a Luftwaffe fighter. I decided to follow at
full throttle, when more bullets started to go past. I looked in
my mirror and saw another aircraft approaching fast, its gun
ports twinkling as the pilot tried another burst. I made a very
tight climbing turn to the left and the attacking plane shot
underneath me. I could see that it was a Messerschmitt 109,
and as I pulled round tightly I saw the German pilot's face as
he looked up at me out of his cockpit. It was my first face-to-face
contact with the enemy.

I realized that I was no match for these fast fighters, with
their no doubt much more experienced pilots, so I kept climbing
into the cloud. I stayed there for about ten or fifteen
minutes before venturing out, and by this time the German
fighters had decided to head back. During my flight to
altitude Eastleigh had come under attack and had launched its
barrage balloons. Under these conditions we were instructed
to fly to Worthy Down, near Winchester, which was our
reserve station.

I was lucky, because the Messerschmitt 109s were at the
limit of their endurance and did not have the fuel reserves to
fly around and wait for me to appear once more. Also, there
was a good chance that a group of Hurricanes or Spitfires
might be sent up to take them on. If I had been flying over
enemy territory, however, I would not have had that
advantage. This was the problem for the crews of the Skuas
and Gladiators in Norway. The aircraft carriers HMS
Furious
and
Glorious
had ferried some RAF Gladiators and
Hurricanes to fly from an airstrip at Bardufoss to provide air
cover for the allied troops. Both carriers remained on station,
sending out anti-submarine patrols and bombing missions.
It was a strain on the crews, because in northern waters there
was daylight for almost twenty-four hours, so the carriers
were the target of lots of dive-bombing attacks from the
Luftwaffe. There were a lot of
casualties in the Fleet Air Arm
during this period, because not only were their machines
inferior, but if they were shot down over land they were
usually taken prisoner. The German army did not have it
all its own way, however: Norway is particularly difficult
terrain to fight in. But the war there was overtaken by other
events.

Hitler invaded Belgium and Holland on 10 May, and then
crossed into French territory. The British Government decided
to pull our troops out of Norway. There was a squadron of
Hurricanes still operating there and, because every modern
fighter was now precious, a decision was made to recover
them on to an aircraft carrier and get them back to Britain. I
was told that they could have gone on to
Ark Royal,
but her
deck-lifts were too narrow, so they opted instead to try to fly
on to
Glorious.
Remarkably, they succeeded. Unfortunately,
Glorious
was seen on her journey back to Scapa Flow by two
German warships,
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau,
battlecruisers
with large-calibre, radar-controlled guns. The two destroyers
escorting the carrier,
Ardent
and
Acasta,
tried to attack the
German vessels, but they were hit and sunk, although
Ardent
managed to fire a torpedo at
Gneisenau,
forcing her to break
off the action. But
Scharnhorst
fired shell after shell into
Glorious
and she went down with most of her crew, and with
her aircraft, including the Hurricanes. Around twelve
hundred men were killed.

Scharnhorst
had also been slightly damaged by the attack
from
Acasta
and anchored in Trondheim fjord for some
repairs. The air group on
Ark Royal
was ordered to mount an
attack on the ship while she was at anchor. In my view this
was a risky operation, and I gather that many on the
Ark
thought the same. However, if there was a possibility of crippling
the warship, which was a powerful threat where she
was, then I believe that there was no option but to try it. Two
squadrons of Skua aircraft took off for a daylight attack. The
RAF should have bombed the local German airstrips to
prevent Luftwaffe fighters taking off, but the plans went
totally wrong. The Skuas were met by Messerschmitt 109s,
which tore into them. Our planes made some direct hits, but
the 500lb bombs carried by the Skuas couldn't penetrate the
deck armour of
Scharnhorst.
People on the
Ark
at the time
still remember the day when they waited for the planes to
come back and only seven out of the fifteen returned. Sixteen
pilots and observers had gone missing. To lose the equivalent
of a whole squadron like that is a severe blow to an air group,
very damaging to morale, and it was probably a good thing
that the
Ark
returned to Scapa Flow.

So there we were, in the space of a few days, with the loss
of another aircraft carrier and her aircrew, as well as eight
Skuas and some very experienced pilots. The results of this
operation probably helped to influence a decision I made a
few months afterwards, but for now the disaster in France
completely overshadowed what was happening to the Fleet
Air Arm. The German army had stormed through the French
lines and the French were retreating. Holland and Belgium
had surrendered. The British army had been surrounded and
there was an all-out attempt to rescue them from the beaches
at
Dunkirk. For almost a week we listened to the six o'clock
news on the radio, and read the
Daily Mirror
and
Daily
Express
for news of what was happening to our troops. As an
individual you went about your daily duties, but I thought
that we were approaching an extremely serious and difficult
time. These were very worrying events. Winston Churchill
had become Prime Minister after the invasion of France, and
there was a feeling that the lot who had got us into this mess
were no longer in charge, so there was less of a sense of
despair than there could have been at what was really a
humiliating defeat.

I remember listening to the wireless as Churchill made his
speech about fighting on the beaches, never surrendering. I
think it helped that there was no attempt to pretend that
things were better than they were. It was a clever way of
making people feel too proud to contemplate surrender.

Our base at Eastleigh was part of the Supermarine factory,
which produced Spitfires. It was a juicy target, in easy flying
range for the Luftwaffe now situated in northern France,
hence my contact with the two Messerschmitt fighters.
Subsequently, there were frequent raids on the factory and
the airstrip and incursions by
German fighters became very
common.

'Air raid imminent' warnings were received on a red telephone
in the air duty office at the base. Almost immediately
the barrage balloons would be released and they would shoot
up into the air at an enormous speed, causing the tethering
wires to smoke with friction as they unwound rapidly on the
rotating cable drum. Of course, once the balloons were lazily
bobbing about in place the airfield was out of use; no planes
could take off and none was allowed to try to land. I was
often diverted to our alternative airfield, Worthy Down,
because an air-raid warning had Eastleigh on alert. Sometimes
these precautions did not work. During one of my stop-offs at
Worthy Down I was with three other pilots in the air-watch
office, waiting for a call from Eastleigh telling us it was safe
to make our way back there. It was a lovely summer's day and
we were idly chatting, probably about our plans for the weekend
and the local girls we were interested in, when we heard
this aircraft. We recognized the engine noise almost simultaneously
– we had heard it too many times during raids – and
we all shouted, 'Jerry!' There had been no air-raid warning,
but we all rushed for the door, my three companions turning
left while I turned to the right, heading for a slit trench near
the aerodrome fence. I had run not more than a few yards
when a bomb dropped behind me and exploded with an
immense bang. I remember flying up in the air, then plummeting
back on to the ground face down, with stones and gravel
falling on top of me until I was almost covered. I could hardly
breathe, the blast had winded me so much, and I was stone
deaf, but I managed to crawl a few yards and fall into the slit
trench. It was obviously one of those lone raiders that used to
sneak over the Channel in broad daylight. It came back on
two other passes, machine-gunning anything that appeared in
the pilot's sights.