by Colin Downes
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by
Pen & Sword Aviation
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Copyright © Colin Walker Downes, 2005
9781783460373
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Tumult in the Clouds
In memory of
Flight Lieutenant Graham Pearson, DFC, RAFVR
Flight Lieutenant Graham Hulse, RAF
Squadron Leader Douglas Ford, RAF
Squadron Leader Harry Bennett, AFC, RAF
sic itur ad astra
By the Skin of my Teeth is a memoir of flying with the Royal Air Force in war and peace during a career in military and civil aviation covering a half century. The memoir, decorated with other men’s flowers, consists of personal experiences, reminiscences and impressions, and is written in four parts. ‘In Search of Wings’ covers the years leading to the graduation of RAF ‘Wings’. ‘They That Hath Wings Shall Tell the Matter’ covers flying propeller driven fighters during and after the Second World War. ‘A Few Crowded Hours’ covers flying jet-powered fighters before and during the Korean War. ‘Pleasant Hours Fly Fast’ covers the remainder of Service flying until retirement from the Royal Air Force.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE - In Search of Wings
CHAPTER TWO - They That Hath Wings Shall Tell the Matter
CHAPTER THREE - A Few Crowded Hours
CHAPTER FOUR - Pleasant Hours Fly Fast
Epilogue
Index
Prologue
This most excellent canopy, the air, look you,
This brave o’erhanging firmament,
This magical roof fretted with golden fire.
Hamlet
That which hath wings shall tell the matter.
Ecclesiastes
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
Thomas Mordant (1730 – 1809)
CHAPTER ONE
In Search of Wings
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew –
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
‘High Flight’ – John Gillespie Magee (1922 – 41)
LAUGHTER-SILVERED WINGS AND CLOVEN TONGUES
The two world wars produced poetry of high quality and two poets in particular stand out in my memory. In the First World War a Canadian medical officer, John McCrae, wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’ while serving at a dressing-station during the second Ypres Offensive in 1915. This poem became the most famous of the war and I always associate it with my father, who also fought during the second Ypres battle and was a survivor of the slaughter at the Battle of Loos. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, RAMC, died on active service in 1918. In the Second World War an American pilot, John Magee, wrote ‘High Flight’, a poem that encapsulates all the sensations and joys of flying a high performance aircraft. Born in Shanghai of an American missionary father and an English mother and educated in England, John Magee volunteered from the United States for pilot training with the RCAF in 1940. The following year Flying Officer John Magee, RCAF, joined an RAF Spitfire squadron in England and died in a flying accident. The poem ‘High Flight’ was among his effects.
From an early age my imagination and day-dreams drifted with airy navies battling in the central blue where real aces such as the Red Baron duelled with fictitious ones like Biggles. Both fighter pilots, and the Frog model airplane powered by elastic that I would launch on interception flights against kites flying over Parliament Hill Fields on Hampstead Heath, played a significant part in my aspirations to join the list of Aces. Against my vaulting ambition I had a foe named folly. Wellington said of Waterloo it was a close run thing; so it was for me to slip the surly bonds of earth and fly where never lark, nor even eagle flew.
To begin at the beginning: airplanes were always somewhere in my life and my first flight occurred in the late 1920s when at the tender age of six I travelled with my parents to the Belgian seaside resort of Blankenberg. We flew in the open four-seat cockpit of a French single-engine biplane flying-boat, taking off at Harwich on the Suffolk coast and landing at Ostend. I do not remember the reason for the trip or my inclusion. Perhaps it was after my nanny had left our household, which was why the weekend jaunt was a near disaster for my mother. My father was busy elsewhere and while walking along the crowded esplanade with my mother I managed to lose her. Luckily I was bilingual so, after the initial flood of fear and panic, I found a sympathetic policeman and a friendly police station from which a near demented mother retrieved me some hours later.
The pilot of the flying boat was a comrade at arms whom my father had met during the First World War while flying with the RAF in France. My father was in his first year of medicine at Edinburgh University when he volunteered for Kitchener’s New Volunteer Army in 1914, enlisting in the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles). After participating in the Battle of Loos in 1915, he suffered a severe wound in the chest during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. On recovering from his wound, he decided that living conditions in a tank were preferable to those in the trenches and transferred to the Royal Tank Corps. He fought as a tank commander in the third Ypres battle and in the tank battle of Cambrai in 1917, where he was wounded for a second tim
e. In the preparation for the Battle of Amiens in August 1918, he volunteered for reconnaissance duty with the RAF to coordinate the operations of the tanks of 1st Tank Brigade with the artillery, the RAF and the Canadian Corps. He joined No. 52 Squadron flying RE-8s and it was here that he met the pilot who would be the main influence in developing my interest in aviation. After demobilization in 1919 this avuncular friend of my father continued flying and joined a major petroleum company and flew the company’s DH Hornet Moth around the country to air displays and racing car meetings. He owned a diminutive, single seat Comper Swift, powered by a 70 hp Pobjoy engine. He knew Comper while in the RFC during the First World War, and he flew the Swift in air races. I thought this little monoplane the most beautiful of all aircraft and I would day-dream of the day when I might be able to fly one like it. Thanks to this generous benefactor my father and I flew to many air shows and air races around the country, and to the motor races at Brooklands and Donnington.
The war clouds were gathering over Europe in the late 1930s and having been brought up on a diet of First World War reminiscences together with a fund of battle tales, I knew it was only a question of time before I should have to respond to a call to arms. My parents had their own different reasons for deciding I should not go into the Army. My mother being French had spent the First World War in Bordeaux and had relatives in the French Army who had fought in the Franco – Prussian War of 1870 – 71 and the Great War of 1914 – 18, and she had no wish to see her son fight in that sort of war. I remember with affection my mother’s favourite uncle who saw action during the First World War, and in Indochina and North Africa. Graduating from the Ecole Militaire and the cavalry school at Saumur, he was the epitome of a French cavalry officer from a past generation. He wore a neatly trimmed moustache and dressed immaculately in the Edwardian style, and always with a boutonniere to match the red rosette of the Legion d‘Honneur on his lapel. His one regret was never to have led a cavalry charge in any of his wars. He died suddenly in Paris in 1977, the oldest living general in the French army. His ancestor was Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, the architect of the Gothic revival in France and noted for the restoration of medieval buildings and a dictionary of French architecture. On his one hundredth birthday the French Army gave him a birthday party, and with his erect, trim figure and full head of silver hair he looked twenty years younger than his age. His eventual departure at the age of 103 was both unexpected and a little bizarre; and no doubt to his regret. He was too old to die gloriously in battle pour La Patrie as he would have wished, but he could at least hope for a warrior’s end. However it was not to be; he died while entertaining a lady friend to luncheon at Maxim’s. In the enjoyment of the occasion; or in the excitement of the moment; or in anticipation of the afternoon to follow; he choked on a fish bone that even a ’37 Chassagne-Montrachet failed to dislodge. His exit had a certain Gascon panache about it; although he came from the adjoining province of the Auverne. Because I lived in England I did not see this urbane and genial relative often but he left an indelible and illustrative mark in my memory of mores and of living in France during La Belle Époque.
My father, influenced by his experiences during the First World War, decided against the Army, and his short and traumatic experience flying with the Royal Air Force also influenced his decision that I should enter the Royal Navy. The RE-8; also known in cockney rhyming fashion as a ‘Harry Tate’ after a well-known music hall comedian of the time, was a well tried single engine, twin-seat biplane that was the unglamorous workhorse of the RAF for bombing and reconnaissance. It also had the more sinister name of ‘Flaming Wafer’ due to its proclivity to crash and burn during landings, particularly when landing in gusty or cross-wind conditions. His contribution to the Battle of Amiens in 1918 ended when his aircraft was shot down over the battlefield on the second day of the battle. His pilot died in the crash landing in no mans land and he suffered severe injuries for a third time. For my father that was the end of a fighting war that included many months in the trenches of the front, two infantry battles, three tank battles, one air battle and many wounds. His injuries kept him in hospital for a year before his medical discharge from the Army in 1920. He met my mother in 1921, they married in 1922 and I was born in London in 1923.
At the outbreak of war in 1939 I was in France staying with friends during a school holiday. I saw the arrival in France of the RAF squadrons of Hawker Hurricane fighters and Fairey Battle light bombers. The majority of these were to remain in France with the loss of more than 900 fighters and light bombers during the German Western Offensive in 1940. Meeting some of the RAF air crew with my French friends they all commented on how young they looked to be flying these planes. Indeed, many of them were not much older than myself, being in their late teens and early twenties. A few years later I met up with some of the survivors from the Hurricane squadrons while flying in Fighter Command. While in France the French radio announced French infantry sallying forth from the Maginot Line to attack the Germans with bayonets fixed and led by the graduates of St Cyr in parade uniforms and plumed shakos. Amid the cries of admiration for the élan of the French troops there was neither mention of casualties nor of the needless slaughter along Marne in 1914 – 15. Expectations then ran high, fortunately not to be realized, of the French cavalry responding with the graduates of Saumur; with the inevitable same result as that experienced by the Polish cavalry when attacking the German Panzer thrusts into Poland. In endeavouring to return to England in time for the school term, I had some difficulty in getting to Boulogne in time to catch one of the last scheduled ferries back to Folkestone.
On return to school in Dorset my parents decided I should enter the Royal Navy and instructed me to sit for the Dartmouth College direct entry examination. However, I was to circumvent a career in the Royal Navy by failing to pass high enough in the competitive examination for acceptance to Dartmouth. I gave no thought to the RNVR, the ‘Wavy Navy’, for if I could not join the Royal Navy and put the straight rings on my sleeve I decided to try elsewhere. With my failure to join the Senior Service my parents gave no thought to the Junior Service, and although my mother was not enthusiastic in my interest in the Royal Air Force, never-the-less she always wore a jewelled brooch of RAF wings when I eventually wore a pilot’s brevet.
There were some who regarded the RAF with suspicion and considered it not suitable as a career. Inter-Service rivalries between the British Armed Forces were to some extent the result of the British class system. Some years after the Second World War, while a guest of the Royal Yacht Squadron during Cowes Week; my host being my squadron commander on a Royal Auxiliary Air Force squadron, I heard first hand how he, as a prominent yachtsman and MP, became a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron with another well-known yachtsman and MP. Prior to this the RAF members of the squadron, who, if counted on the fingers of one hand would leave fingers to spare, were of very, very senior rank. The names of those proposed for membership were posted with the names of their proposers during Cowes Week for vetting by the members before balloting during the week. The dropping of one black ball in the ballot box spelt finis to the expectations of more than one distinguished applicant as the squadron demonstrated the view that a king can make a knight but not a gentleman: or a member of The Royal Yacht Squadron. My host and his friend were more successful, despite the reservations of one senior member. This occurred as two senior members in their distinctive squadron dress viewed the posted list prior to the balloting and one was heard to say: ‘What’s this – Air Commodore Sir Vere Harvey MP, and Group Captain the Hon. Max Aitkin, MP?’
To which the other replied, ‘Oh, yes – fine fellows – keen yachtsmen – outstanding war records.’
The first member viewed the list again and said, ‘But – Air Commodore and Group Captain – they must be Flying Corps wallahs!’
His companion replied, ‘Ha, but it’s called the Royal Air Force now.’
His elderly friend was not mollified and continued to complain, ‘But, da
mn it – flying wallahs – good God, we’ll be having dirt track riders next!’
From the table of my memory during my adolescence all my summers appear bright and all my winters white. Of course this was not the case but certainly the late summer of 1940 was glorious. While staying with my mother in London during the school holiday I viewed the Battle of Britain being waged at a great height above London. The RAF fighters weaved their white vapour trails through the lace pattern of the Luftwaffe bombers and fighters against a backdrop of deep azure. It was very exciting for a schoolboy and I longed to be able to join the gallant Few. Occasionally, among the weaving, diving aircraft, one plane would detach itself with black smoke trailing behind it as it dived or fell to earth. Sometimes a parachute would blossom as if it were a white flower and seem suspended in the air against the blue sky. My mother lived in Hampstead on the north-west side of London. The house was on a hill that overlooked the city and during the night raids on London the fires from the burning docks lit up the sky, and my mother and I would retire to an Anderson air-raid shelter buried in the garden. Wrapped in sleeping bags in our snug cave with her two dogs, who regarded the whole exercise as some game, we listened to the drone of the German bombers overhead and the bangs of the anti-aircraft guns. Shrapnel rained down from the exploding anti-aircraft shells above, and we felt the thud and shake of the detonating bombs. In the morning I would find a few jagged shell fragments in the garden; a compelling argument not to venture outside during the air raids. Living in Hampstead on a hill overlooking London and surrounded by the open parkland and woods of Hampstead Heath and Highgate Woods, we did not expect the village to suffer from the bombing during the Blitz on London; but Hampstead received more than a fair share of the random bombs.