For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II. Dr. Campbell-Begg Richard

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ that afternoon I had my first sweep over France, which I was quite interested to see, you know, the fields and colours and all this sort of stuff. That was my introduction there and then, of course, that stopped very quickly, because then they started to come in over England and we were kept mainly confined to fighting over England and over the Channel. I remember once, when we climbed out over the Channel, it was a hazy day, lovely, it was sort of a marvellous summer that year – a lovely hazy sunny day, and there was a bit of cloud about and we were climbing up over the Channel and I looked behind. We flew in a section of three in those days, and looking back when we were out in battle formation, which is flying out and wider so you’re not in close formation, I saw three aircraft and I thought, oh good, they must have scrambled another section.

      The next time I looked behind there was a great big Iron Cross on a 109 and I knew instantly that I had one right behind me, so I rammed the stick hard fully forward and hard over to the left, and I just about started to move downwards when there was a huge bang and I’d been hit. The shell went into the engine and glycol streamed back and I was way out over the sea. I thought, my God if I catch fire, which mostly you did; fortunately I didn’t, and I got into a huge spiral going down and eventually looked back and could see I wasn’t being followed, so straightened up. I couldn’t make out which coast I could see in the distance was England, so I thought, well, there’s nothing for it, the next coast that comes round I’m going towards that – if it happens to be France, well, I’m a prisoner and that’s it. As it so happened it turned out I was east of Dover – I recognised it and it was pure luck. The reason why I had to do this was because the compass was spinning and I couldn’t see the sun to get a bearing of which way to fly, north or south. Anyway I was lucky, it was England, and I glided in and I realised I was east of Dover – we’d taken off from Hawkinge near Dover. I glided back and was going to do a wheels-up landing, but then I suddenly realised I had plenty of height and was quite all right, so selected wheels down and blew them down and locked them. I hadn’t time to pump them down so used the emergency air bottle and landed and taxied in. I went down after I’d turned and taxied and just swung off the grass field – it was a grass field, had no runways – and climbed out of the aircraft and went to Air Traffic Control to go and report in, which I did. Walked back and then eventually I met the CO, who came up and said, “I’ve been looking for you, I’ve been searching for you down in the water. Number Three went down in flames.”

      That was that, so we went back and had a look at my aeroplane and he said, “Well, we’ll have to wait here and I’ll get somebody to come and pick you up and bring you back to Biggin Hill,” which is where we were stationed then. Eventually a Blenheim came and I went off, had a look at my aircraft on the ground – which you’ll probably be interested to know is AB910, which is flying today and is preserved by the Battle of Britain Memorial Society.

      So we had interesting times there, scrambles and stuff like that, and the most scrambles – take-offs to go and meet incoming enemy – was seven in one day. Then you get a bit tired after a while, even if you are only 20. You didn’t know anything else, there wasn’t anything to compare it with, so it was a way of life, it was just accepted and that’s all there was to it. There was no sort of bravery or stuff like this or stiff upper lip and that stuff – that was the way it was. It was a learning period and a fairly steep learning curve because if you didn’t, you didn’t live and that was quite simple. You didn’t realise, of course, it was that sort of thing, because as I say, and I can’t emphasise enough, if you’d never experienced anything like it before you just carry on. People come and go and that’s it. My first Squadron, which was 610, we lost a lot of people in fairly quick time; they were all experienced flyers, they were Royal Auxiliary Air Force characters, having been flying in their spare time for some years.

      When, at last, we were pulled out of that scene, and as the casualties came in, I went to join 222 at Hornchurch. I remember my introduction, my first day there. We went down to dispersal – I was a sergeant of course – and a chap said, “Oh, you see that burnt patch over there by the railway line?” This is I think at Romford, which was our forward base, so I looked over in that direction and could see a brown patch, so he said, “That’s where Baxter went in – you’re his replacement.”

      That was that. Baxter having been shot up and got back to the airfield, collapsed and obviously crashed coming into land, after being wounded, as I subsequently was told.

      Eventually we went up to Coltishall, which is in Norfolk and near Norwich, where we used to do what we called Kipper Patrols, which was guarding the fishing-boats, because the Germans used to send the 88s and 110s over and bomb the fishing-ships or nip in and go and bomb the local ports, and that was our job to guard against such intruders. The next time I was shot up was night flying one night and a chap attacked me when I was coming in to land at night at Coltishall and I saw all this stuff going by. I didn’t know I was being attacked, and pretty shortly afterwards I saw the tracer going by me and ducked and weaved and got the aircraft down and swung off the runway, which was grass and lit with grid lamps, and swung through those into the darkness, switched off, had no lights, turned everything off. Climbed out and got away from the aircraft in case I was going to be strafed, but in actual fact it didn’t happen; he was driven off by a couple of friends of mine, one was Ray Marlen, and in the end we got back to dispersal. It took us ages walking about there trying to find the aircraft in the darkness again to bring it back to the Squadron.

      On those fishing patrols I remember tackling the odd 88 and Heinkel 111 there. I don’t know, but I think the Flight Commander and I definitely got an 88 between us because we fired every round we had into it and we weren’t getting any return fire, but he was dropping down, in level flight; he just disappeared into the clouds and we never saw him crash, but I would say pretty certainly he didn’t get back because I could see all my ammunition exploding and flashing all on the upper wings of the 88. As I say, there was no return fire, so I presume the gunner had been killed. They used to come over at night and try and bomb us. I told you, I got attacked by a chap who used to come round and find us; we used to call him Coltishall Karl because, you know, if anything’s a bit on the light-hearted side, when things aren’t going too well or you’re getting a bit frightened or worried, so you just laugh it off. While I was on that Squadron I got commissioned; Ray Marlen and I were commissioned together. Ray was, unfortunately, killed in the desert later. So I stayed with the same Squadron, which was very unusual after being commissioned.’

      Alan Bennison, another New Zealander, joined the RNZAF on the outbreak of war. He left for Great Britain in May 1940 and was duly promoted to the rank of Sergeant Air-gunner:

      ‘We were posted to Aston Down No 5 OTU for further training in the power-operated turrets. We were there for virtually four weeks and we were flying with Czech, Polish, Belgian and English pilots, and some of the foreigners were very aggressive in their method of flying and they used to throw the aircraft around like a single-seater, or try to. They had a pet hobby of flying under the Clifton Suspension Bridge, and the span of the bridge wasn’t just quite wide enough to take them down going straight through, they had to side-slip through. This went on, until one day one of the Polish pilots, I think it was, he clipped the mud bank on the other side of the bridge with his wing tip and that was that – that put the end of that episode on flying under the bridge.

       Alan Bennison

      Then there was one day when we were quite surprised to hear shooting going on up in the air, and we rushed outside and looked up and here were some Hurricanes that had attacked a couple of German Junkers 88s. Both of the Junkers crashed fairly close to the aerodrome and we tore across the field, and although we weren’t supposed to, we snaffled souvenirs and took illegal photographs and we got away with that anyway.

      Well then, about the second week in September 1940 the party started to break up as we were posted to various RAF Squadrons. I was the only New Zealander posted to 25 Squadron, which was СКАЧАТЬ