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

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       Alan Gawith

      My work as adjutant terminated at the end of October and the flying went on, mainly searchlight co-operation at night and training, practising, getting some hours in, getting experience during the daylight. Life was pretty busy, particularly because we had to keep crews on standby every night in case of enemy activity, which didn’t start up for many, many months. We were busy expanding, forming more squadrons and, with shortage of crews and aircraft, we were doing stretches of perhaps seven, eight and nine nights consecutively on standby in the hangar or flying. Not a great deal of spare time during the day after one had caught up with a bit of sleep, eaten and so on, and I didn’t see a great deal of my wife during that time, but as the winter wore on and the weather was getting colder I felt that I couldn’t leave her struggling with milking cows twice a day in those sort of conditions, so we got digs in the village of Wansford. I was living out from then on, which meant that I missed out on the mess life, which is half of the fun of the war really, and I had the extra responsibilities. However, we got by.

      Nothing much happened until, oh, we got radar, airborne radar in June 1940, which was pretty useless but still we had to practise to try and make it work. It was in June 1940, I think, that we had our first combat as a Squadron, when both Flight Commanders, Spike O’Brien and Duke Willy, had combats and managed to shoot at two enemy aircraft, not using radar but by visual sightings. Unfortunately O’Brien’s aircraft got into a spin and he tried to get his air gunner out of the aircraft with difficulty and eventually got himself free, but the gunner had met the prop on the way out and was killed. I think we lost two aircraft that night, but I think we got two enemy aircraft so we were all square. It wasn’t a very satisfactory start to the Squadron’s war.

      The Battle of Britain then came on and, of course, the Day Squadrons were thoroughly occupied. We were in No 12 Group, which was the backup group for Sir Keith Park’s 11 Group, which really fought the battle in the south. Our job then became care of the convoys around the coast of Norfolk. The Day Squadrons had been doing those patrols and the enemy were raiding the convoys quite regularly, sinking ships. We used to start before dawn and I can remember many occasions when we took off in the dark and flew up into the dawn, long before it was daylight on the ground. In some convoys we would often find a ship or two sinking but no enemy in sight. We patrolled for month after month. It wasn’t dangerous, simply because we never seemed to be there when the enemy was there and we couldn’t quite understand that, but there wouldn’t have been much point in patrolling at night.

      On 13 August my son was born. I’d just got my wife established back at home from the hospital with our infant, and on 11 September I got a call to say that I was to report back to the Squadron immediately. The Squadron had been posted to Forde airfield, which we’d taken over from the Royal Naval Air Service just south of Arundel on the coast of Sussex. So I had to desert my new family, leave them in the tender care of the landlord and landlady, and disappear down to the South Coast where we landed on a very small airstrip about 800 yards long with our Blenheims, which were used to longer fields.

      We hadn’t been established there very long before the attacks came in from the coast. The enemy would swoop in about dusk and machine-gun the camp. We lived in wooden huts whilst there, and we’d guard our aircraft. Two or three times we had those attacks and, of СКАЧАТЬ