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 based at North Weald, near Epping Forest. There was another English lad, he was posted there with me, and we’d only been there about a couple of days when the Jerries came over one morning and an aircraft flew round the aerodrome and laid a smoke circle right round the aerodrome and all the bombers had to do was to drop their bombs inside the ring. We had a great number of bombs there in a matter of an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half, which did quite a lot of damage to the station. Fortunately we didn’t lose any aircraft through it. That was our first introduction to active warfare.
The Blenheim carried a crew of three, a pilot, the air-gunner and radar operator. Now, radar was very much in its infancy at this stage – we were only operating on about a Mark 1, Mark 2 set – and the Blenheim wasn’t always the best aircraft for the job because it was too slow. It was fast to what we’d been used to in New Zealand, but it still wasn’t fast enough for the Germans, and we were employed mainly as night fighters, but during the daytime in the Battle of Britain we had to do area patrols over designated areas, as for aerodrome defence and also out on the coast. The Blenheim was a very cold aircraft because of the opening where the Vickers gun pointed out through the Perspex; it was an open “V” and the wind used to come in through there; it was sucked in, and even with all your flying clothing on you still used to freeze to death almost. A lot of our flying was up round 15-19,000 feet.
There were two other New Zealanders in the squadron at that time, and one was Stewart Lusk, who at that time was a Pilot Officer and had been a law student at Oxford University. About the second or third trip I did at night with Stewart Lusk some idiot vectored us into the London balloon barrage, and then the control came up and told us that we were to turn on to given courses on a countdown and to turn and to be accurate to within a degree. After some two hours they got us out of it and we landed back at base.
We were at North Weald until about the first week of November, I think it was, when we went to Debden. It was in September the Squadron had received its first Beaufighter and, of course, the pilots had to have ground instruction on it and do some daylight flying on their own to familiarise themselves with the aircraft. One or two of us went up and did some daylight flying with the pilots. The Beaufighter was a very much more sophisticated aircraft than the Blenheim; it was faster, it only carried a crew of two, and it had an armament of four 20-millimetre cannons firing through the nose and six machine-guns, four on the starboard and two on the port I think it was – they were Brownings.
We went to Debden in about the first week in November, as I said, and whilst there we took delivery of quite a number of Beaufighters, and the Blenheims were gradually phased out, but Debden wasn’t a good aerodrome from the point of view of night flying – there was always a danger of fogs. We took off one night and we’d been away for about two and a half hours and when we came back they switched the floodlight on for us to touch down and it gave us a false ceiling – it showed up a blanket of fog, and we landed on top of a 20-foot fog. When the pilot cut the motors the machine just dropped straight to the ground and damaged the undercarriage. It was rather fortuitous for us because the Flight Commander had done exactly the same thing only a matter of about half an hour before us.
When Coventry was bombed we were about a straight line, about 40 miles from Coventry; we could see the blaze of the city and we were patrolling a given line, and although we patrolled for three hours we never even saw a sign of an aircraft. Now, there was always a danger at night that you could be directed on to a friendly aircraft, and one night we did actually line up on a Stirling and it took a minute or two before the pilot was able to get identification of the aircraft because it was one which was only just coming in to beam at that time and we didn’t have a silhouette of him. Fortunately the ground control was able to identify it for us and so we didn’t give it a reception.
Getting back to 1941 again, Stewart Lusk had to go off flying for a while, on account of indifferent health, and I had to fly with the CO of the Squadron. One day I hadn’t had any leave for about three weeks – hadn’t had a night off – and I asked him if I could go into town. I wanted to do some shopping, and that was all right. When I got back, the boys in the mess were quite surprised to see me and I asked them what was the matter.
“Well,