by Jim Crossley
It normally took six months to train a Stuka pilot. Eventually Hans and Ernst were regularly hitting the centre of the inner circle almost every dive. As they completed their course, the Spanish civil war was looming and there were many rumours about deploying parts of the Luftwaffe to help Franco’s army. The young flyers were aching to use their skills in real combat and anxiously awaited news of their next posting. Ernst went almost mad with joy when he found he was to join a regular squadron which he correctly guessed would lead to deployment in Spain. For Hans, however, a different sort of surprise was in store.
Chapter 5
William was released from his duties with the radar team after six months of hard and extremely valuable work. The essential testing and calibration were done. Now it was a question of learning how to use the system properly as an integral part of an air defence system. Dowding set about this with his usual efficiency and ruthlessly logical thinking, conducting exercises with whole wings of fighters and bombers. It soon became clear that keeping the radar sets operational was beyond the skills of regular RAF maintenance crews. Hugh’s partner, Kilowatt, was set to work to identify ex-colleagues of his from academia, mostly, in fact, from Cambridge, who might be prepared to help out. He soon had a motley crew of physics graduates, armed with oscilloscopes, soldering irons and assorted valves and bits of wire, allocated to each radar station and available if needed in a national emergency.
William found himself relegated to the undemanding peace time role of a bomber pilot with his squadron. Although by now there seemed to be real danger of war in Europe, Bomber Command seemed totally unworried by the possibility of having to commit itself to battle against the might of the Luftwaffe. Training continued in the same old lackadaisical way. Under the uncertain and compromising leadership of the inter war governments, the strength of the RAF had been slashed again and again and budgets for training and equipment cut to the bone. Lord Londonderry, during his time as Secretary of State for Air, had actually evolved a theory that any increase in British air power should be avoided as it might upset relationships with Hitler. The poor old Heyfords continued to trundle about the skies on fine days, their crews blissfully ignoring the lessons which they might have gained from the air battles of the Spanish civil war. There were, however, rumours of changes to come. Someone caught a glimpse of a new bomber – a Wellington – which was almost one hundred miles per hour faster than the Heyford, and in which the crew actually sat in an enclosed cockpit, instead of having their heads poking out into the fresh air. One day maybe they might equip William’s squadron. There was talk too of the new eight-gun monoplane fighters being developed for defence. Like spring coming to a shady corner of a chilly garden, the possibility of war was slowly awakening a somnolent Royal Air Force.
One corner of this garden was particularly late to feel the warmth of the coming spring. RAF Coastal Command had responsibility for giving air cover to British and allied naval and merchant shipping. This involved reconnaissance, bombing and torpedoing enemy shipping at sea, mine warfare and, most important of all, anti-U-boat operations. The Command was in a sorry state. After World War I the Royal Air Force had taken over all flying operations from the Navy and the unique skills which had been built up during the war had been almost lost in the process. Thus whilst, in 1918, Britain had had by far the most capable and the largest naval aviation force in the world, by 1938 this had withered into an ill-equipped Fleet Air Arm, restored to naval control, but unloved by the Admiralty, and RAF Coastal Command whose main role seems to have been to act as a bone of contention over which the two services could snarl at each other. The result of this was that its mission was never properly defined, its equipment was pitifully inadequate for what it had to do and, worst of all, its crews were untrained in long-range navigation over water. To add insult to injury, the Air Ministry had decreed that Coastal Command aircraft and their crews would be placed at the disposal of Bomber Command whenever a major bombing operation was to be undertaken. It was to this sorry force that William found himself posted soon after the notorious Munich Agreement of 1938.
William’s squadron was equipped with Avro Ansons, a type which epitomised the muddled thinking which pervaded the Air Ministry. This was an aircraft designed specifically for Coastal Command and first flown as recently as 1935. From the start it was obviously pitifully inadequate for its task. Ansons were slow, clumsy, ill-defended and had a range of only six hundred and ninety miles. Their normal bomb load was a pathetic three hundred and ninety pounds. For defensive armament they had a single forward-facing machine gun and another in a dorsal turret. Their limited range made them unable to patrol any area except the English Channel and the western part of the North Sea; hence William’s squadron, the “Ospreys” as they called themselves, were based at Lydd in Kent. William arrived there on a drizzly March afternoon and reported to the CO’s office. Wing Commander Swan kept him waiting for fifteen minutes then consented to see him. He was a small, fat man with sharp blue eyes and a face which betrayed an aggressive nature. On his chest, below his pilot’s wings, were rows of medal ribbons testifying to a distinguished war record. He greeted the new pilot without warmth.
“Well, Portman, I see that you joined us from the Auxiliaries. I don’t remember any other aircrew doing that. Please explain.”
William was immediately embarrassed. He could not say anything about his work on radar. It was top secret. He stuttered out something about Duxford’s requirement for a Heyford pilot to undertake some special assignments.
“What sort of special assignments?”
“Sorry, sir, they are still hush hush.”
“Oh! Well, I’ve no time for hush hush here. I need regular reliable pilots who tow the line. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why did the RAF, in its wisdom, select you for this “hush hush” assignment?”
“I think it was because I had more interest than most in long-range navigation, sir. It’s almost become a hobby for me.”
“Hobby? I don’t want hobby pilots in my squadron and I don’t want fancy ideas about navigation either. While you’re here you will navigate by the book and you’d better come back safely and on time. Is that clearly understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now tell me about the accident you had and the enquiry into the damage to your aircraft.”
William told him about the incident at Holkham.
“Well, I think you were lucky to get away without a serious reprimand. Imagine taking off with a rent in the fabric. I’m going to watch you closely, Portman. Any carelessness and you’re out. Quick as a flash. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
A crestfallen William went off to find his quarters and settle into the mess.
The CO’s hostile attitude had clearly rubbed off on the other officers. Instead of the usual friendly introductions in the mess, all he got was a few nods and he found himself buying his own beer and sitting in solitary state in a corner reading a crumpled newspaper. He felt like a new boy at school.
The next morning he was taken to his aircraft and given a briefing by a flight sergeant. He had already had time to study the pilot’s manual and there didn’t seem to be anything too difficult about it, except for the fact that this was to be his first experience of a retractable undercarriage. In the afternoon he was introduced to his two regular crewmen: Sergeant Willis was to be his observer and Leading Aircraftsman Hopson radio operator/gunner. In contrast to the officers, these two had friendly faces and welcomed their new skipper warmly. William was given permission to make a brief familiarisation flight. He knew that Swan would be watching his performance critically and determined that nothing should go wrong. Once in the air the only peculiarity of the Anson was that the undercarriage had to be retracted manually by winding a handle a seemingly endless number of times. They flew sedately down the coast to Brighton, did a few gentle turns over the sea, then came safely back to Lydd. The Anson at least seemed to have
no vices in the air, and the three-point landing was almost perfect. The crew stood together on the tarmac, chatting after the flight and Hopson, who was an inveterate joker, brought out a couple of his famous risky stories, making the other two roar with laughter. William slapped him on the back as the party split up and returned to their quarters. The moment he reached his room, an orderly appeared at William’s door.
“The CO wants to see you, sir, says it’s urgent.”
The little man was red in the face with fury.
“Portman, I saw that. I saw you associating and joking with other ranks. I will not have it. You may be from the Auxiliaries but you’re supposed to be an officer, and I expect you to behave like one. We have proper old-fashioned standards here, and within twenty-four hours of arriving here you are letting us down. Pull yourself together, man! Any more of your nonsense and I’ll take you off flying altogether. Understood?”
William was getting quite used to understanding what the CO was saying.
“Yes, sir.”
As soon as the Ospreys undertook reconnaissance patrols, the inadequacy of the Ansons became obvious. Assigned a patrol area just south of the Isle of Wight, they formed up over the aerodrome into four flights of three aircraft each. They then trundled off to their patrol areas; by the time they had reached them they had been in the air for almost an hour. They were now out of sight of land and in poor visibility; no one was quite sure where they were. However, they split up and patrolled as ordered, the crews looking down at the sea below them and making notes on the various ships sighted. The patrol lasted only just over an hour, then the aircraft had to turn north to pick up the coast and return to base. To William’s surprise, the coastline they saw beneath them was not the Isle of Wight at all but Anvil Point, south of Poole Harbour. The east wind had been stronger than they had anticipated and they had clearly been patrolling the wrong bit of sea throughout their flight. The flight flew back low along the coast line, making hardly one hundred and twenty knots over the land against the headwind. The CO who had not been flying held a debriefing after the flight. He was disgusted at the report he heard, and demanded explanations. William then ventured a suggestion.
“Sir, I could have taken a sun sight several times during the flight down. I know they are not very accurate but it would at least have given us a clue that we were getting too far east. I’ve got a special type of sextant of my own and I am sure that if we all had them this sort of problem would be much less likely.” The others turned to him in astonishment.
“Sun sight? Sextant? What are you talking about? They are not in the training manual and there’s no astrodome in the Anson anyway.”
“But I believe I could have used the dorsal turret.”
“Rubbish, and it would take too long anyway.”
“In the Heyford we were taking them all the time, they were invaluable.”
The CO put a stop to the argument.
“My squadron is not going to have its pilots mucking about in the gun turret. Who’s going to fly the aircraft while he’s there? If Flying Officer Portman wants to do that sort of thing he can go somewhere else and do it. We work things by the book here. Understood?”
Once again William understood. But he never flew without his sextant.
That was as far as the debriefing got. Nothing had been learnt and nothing would be better next time.
And so it continued throughout 1939. Even the outbreak of the “phoney war” made little difference to the operations of the Ospreys. Bomber Command made some disastrous raids on German shipping in harbour, and on one occasion one of Ospreys Ansons saw a German flying boat, but nothing else was seen of the enemy. No German U-boat captain was stupid enough to sail down the Channel in daylight on the surface in good visibility and the Luftwaffe was too busy in Poland to give much trouble to the Coastal Command. William and his crew continued to “tow the line”, as Swan had put it, so their flying duties became extremely boring. Their Anson droned over miles and miles of grey sea, its crew trying to keep alert but constantly looking at their watches and longing for the order to return to base. The one thing which gave William pleasure was the attitude of his regular crew. Willis was intelligent and keen and William was able to teach him most of what he knew about navigation. He passed on, not just the theory, but also the skills, learnt from Branston, of how to calculate wind strength and drift, where to find calmer air and how to scan a seemingly empty seascape so as to spot the smallest irregularity which might indicate a small vessel or a conning tower. Hopson was brilliant at keeping up morale with his cheeky humour delivered down the intercom. Gunners were allowed a short burst to test their weapons during each flight, and he always made the most of this, getting William to take them close to any floating debris or off-lying rock to test his aim. C-Charlie, as she was called, was a very happy aircraft and, in spite of his best efforts, Swan could find little to criticise.
Unknown to the Ospreys, however, there were happenings at the Air Ministry which were to bring about radical changes in their role and duties during the course of the war. Air Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill had taken control of Coastal Command in 1937. He was perfectly qualified for the job: trained as a cadet in the Merchant Navy, he joined the Royal Naval Air Service and qualified as a pilot in 1912. During the Great War he was captain of a seaplane carrier which conducted a successful raid on German airship sheds. In the interwar period he had transferred to the RAF and commanded a squadron policing Iraq. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with the standard of training of his command and set about making drastic changes. The first of these was to fit radio direction finding to the aircraft in his charge. This proved a great boon to the navigators. The next was more difficult to achieve. He fought a running, and eventually successful, battle with Bomber Command and with the Air Ministry to get more up-to-date aircraft in place of the pathetic, frequently worn-out machines which had traditionally been issued to the coastal service.
Early in 1940 the Ospreys learnt that they were to lose their Ansons and would have to convert to an altogether more formidable and warlike aircraft, the Bristol Blenheim.
Although it had been in service since 1935 and was considered a bit of a death trap when used as a daylight bomber, the Blenheim was an exciting prospect for a squadron used to Ansons. William met his first Blenheim at Upwood Operational Training Unit. It was standing outside the hangar when he arrived at the unit and he couldn’t resist a look over it. Just as he was climbing onto the wing, a bus carrying the squadron NCOs arrived, and his two crewmen scrambled to join him. The pilot’s instruments and controls were not unlike the Anson’s except for the variable pitch propeller controls. The observer/ bomb aimer had a seat beside the pilot and also a position in the nose of the aircraft into which he had to wriggle in order to get at the bomb sight and to operate the two forward-facing machine guns. The gunner/radio operator was in a separate dorsal turret with an excellent view upwards and astern, but very little downwards. The three men scrambled over the machine and were suitably impressed. They could hardly wait to see how she felt in the air.
The first week at Upwood was spent in the classroom learning the procedures and systems on the aircraft. William’s colleagues from the Osprey squadron made a show of finding this boring and an insult to their many hours of flying experience. William himself did his best to pay attention, however, as mechanical things interested him and he liked to understand the details of the Bristol Mercury radial engines, the Claudel-Hobson carburettor, the variable pitch propeller and the workings of the Browning machine guns.
Then it was time to fly the beast. For initial training there were a number of Mark 1 Blenheims fitted with dual controls. William made his first flight sitting alongside a sergeant pilot instructor, one of the few who had survived attempts to raid German shipping in the early months of the war. He demonstrated a perfect circuit then handed the controls over to his pupil. William taxied unsteadily to the beginning of the runway then opened the throttles so as to run the
engines up against the brakes. The machine shuddered and danced with the vibration of the engines, the spinning propellers shining in sunlight only a few inches from the cockpit windows. Brakes off, plus five boost, full power, and she started her take-off run, slowly at first, then, as he pushed the stick forward a little to lift the tail, she seemed to come alive and quickly built up to ninety miles per hour. Gently back on the stick and the rumble of the wheels on the tarmac faded and up came the undercarriage. Once in the air the Blenheim was remarkably handy and responsive, and the pilot had an excellent view. William made a quick circuit then came in to land. The machine seemed to be going awfully fast compared to the Anson, but it was not difficult. The instructor immediately climbed out onto the wing and told William to go round a couple of times solo. No problems. William’s now considerable flying experience had enabled him to overcome his early clumsiness as a pilot and, although the Blenheim’s top speed of two hundred and seventy miles per hour was almost a hundred miles per hour more than anything he had flown previously, he had little difficulty in mastering the aircraft.