Anyway, he went into hospital and there was another pilot came on to the Squadron and he just looked like an English schoolkid and I flew with him a couple of times and I wasn’t very happy. He didn’t master the machine. The Beaufighter is like a frisky horse – you either mastered it or it would kill you. I flew with him for about a fortnight, I think it was, and then I went to the Flight Commander and told him that I’d like to be taken off and given another pilot because I didn’t feel safe with him. He listened to my story and swapped me over to fly with an Australian pilot. It was only a matter of two or three nights after that, that this English lad was coming into land and he had to come across the Great North Road – it was on the boundary – and he had to come over that at night and he missed it and he was too low and his undercarriage hit the verge on the Great North Road and he crashed into the airfield and he broke his radio operator’s legs at the knees and he had to have his legs amputated.’
Pilot Officer Bernard Brown, after his activities over and around Dunkirk, was to transfer to a more modern type of aircraft, but the introduction was stark:
‘As they were losing lots of Hurricanes at that time they asked for volunteers to go to Fighter Command, so two or three of us went; we were sent to Hawarden, near Chester, and we learnt how to fly a Spitfire and it was very interesting because I’d never flown anything like that. You didn’t have any dual or anything; they said there it is, sort it out. Well, I got it off the ground and got it back again.
After this training at Hawarden I was posted to Biggin Hill, and on arrival I was just in time to see that a number of Junkers 88s had plastered the airfield and there was a big cloud of smoke all over the place. I arrived at the entrance and, as I looked, there were people running round with little red flags, and I enquired what it was all about. They said, “Oh there’s unexploded bombs down there.” Then, when I got to the Mess, there was an orderly putting letters in the rack and taking a number of them out again; there was a big pile of them on the floor. I was quite surprised about this and I said, “What are you doing?”
“Oh,” he said, “I’ve got a list in front of me,” he said. “People’s names that are on this list, they won’t be collecting their mail; I’m taking it out and putting it on the floor.”
I said, “Thank you very much, that’s a very good introduction to Biggin Hill.” They were losing quite a number of aeroplanes every day.
When not on duty, people would say, oh, let’s have a party. On the particular day that I got shot down, it must have been about 2am, the Flight Commander came along to me and he said, “Oh, it’s a pity it’s your day off tomorrow, but you’re on at 6.” It didn’t mean very much – I’d had quite a lot to drink, but I would be off duty at 9am. Anyway, at 8.55 the hooter goes – oh dear – and I was fast asleep, so it was straight into the aeroplane, everything on and away. At 20 minutes to 10 I was floating down in a parachute over Eastchurch.
We had been jumped from above and scattered, and I saw an aeroplane miles below me and I thought, oh, you can’t shoot me, but he did; he must have pulled his nose up and let me have it. That next second there was a big bang in the cockpit and the throttle assembly underneath my left arm and leg just disappeared, gone. There was no control on the aeroplane whatsoever, the thing was roaring its life out and I couldn’t steer it, I couldn’t do anything with it, so I thought, “Right Brown, this is the time.” Someone had said, “This is what you do when you jump out,” and funnily enough, I remember the drill exactly. They said, “Take your helmet off, because your helmet is connected to the aeroplane and you’ll probably get hung.” So I took my helmet off and I remember hanging it on the hook in the cockpit. “Right, now undo the straps,” because we always went into action with the hood open because if a bullet went by, one could not get the hood back, so the hood was already back, so I just undid the straps, said, “Right, here we go,” and turned over. The next moment I knew I was out; I didn’t remember going out, I could feel air coming past my face and then no air. Ah, I’m turning over and over – I’d better find that D ring, which is underneath my left arm, and I just gave it a quick pull and then all went dead quiet and I just sat and I went out at about 16,000 feet.
Everything was quite happy and I saw where I was going to land and I landed in the marsh just out from Eastchurch airfield. Of course, what I didn’t know was that I had a hole in my left leg; I hadn’t any pain, I hadn’t noticed anything. When I landed I really did fold up, thinking I’d got two legs and I only had one, so that was that. Then I looked up and there was one of these Home Guard people coming along and he stopped before he got to me with his .303 rifle and loaded it, so I swore at him and I did everything I could to him, and he approached me with this .303 and I knew it was loaded and he just didn’t say a word, just stood about 10 yards off me and kept me covered with his .303. Well, by this time I looked across and I could see the little van arrive from the RAF, people coming, and they came along and all was well and he just walked away.
Then I ended up in the hospital there and that was the end of my flying career as far as the Air Force was concerned because my left leg was there but I couldn’t stand on it. There was a hole at the back of the knee and the tendons had gone. After they had fixed me up and I was out of hospital I badgered them to keep on flying and they said, “Well look, you can go into Training Command,” so I said, “Yes, I’ll go into Training Command,” and so they gave me an instructor’s course up at Montrose. I could fly a little aeroplane all right, but I had to be very careful, I had to keep the leg absolutely stiff, I couldn’t put any pressure on it. I could bend the leg and walk on it, but I couldn’t stand on it – a little moment and the knee would give way.’
Also flying Spitfires was Roy McGowan, who had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve and, with war considered imminent, was undertaking six months’ training and was posted to 66 Squadron as a Sergeant Pilot:
‘In those early days the Spitfire still had a number of teething problems. The manufacturers, who were both the Supermarine, who built the air frame, and Rolls Royce, who were builders of the Merlin engine, were always with us and sorting out some of these problems. That first Spitfire 1 was very, very different from the later Marks. It had an enormous two-bladed wooden propeller, low revs on take-off and a long, long take-off run on the grass airfields, and a lot of rudder to offset the torsion of the engine and of the propeller. Immediately the aircraft got unstuck you had a big hand pump on the right-hand side at the top bit, which you used to pump up your undercarriage because your left hand was on the throttle holding that wide open. What you saw, having opened up the throttle, was an aircraft taking off in a series of rises and falls because pumping this hard hydraulic pump meant that you had movements on your stick as well, so the aircraft was going up and down, quite an unusual sight but everybody did it.
Roy Andrew McGowan
We started building up hours with the Spit, a beautiful aeroplane, but in May of that year I was commissioned. In those days one couldn’t remain with the same squadron if one moved up from Sergeant Pilot to Pilot Officer, so I was posted to 46 Squadron at Digby in Lincolnshire, where we flew Hurricanes, also, of course, another monoplane fighter. No difficulties in moving out of Spits into Hurricanes. It, too, was a very, very pleasant aeroplane.
I continued with them, and should have returned to civilian life in July, but by then it was very clear that war was a matter of weeks away. We went up to Yorkshire to do our liaison two-week operation with a bomber squadron – Whitley bombers. After one week we were recalled because in late August war was going to start any day, as it were. As soon as we got back to Digby we lived under canvas in Bell tents, alongside our aeroplanes, in what was known as a dispersal point. We started digging slit trenches and really doing 24 hours a day on the job.
We were somewhat relieved to hear on the morning of 3 September that war had been declared. As soon as that announcement had been made we got on to a wartime arrangement of one flight being