by John Moffat
The time for my solo flight came quickly. My instructor, Flight Sergeant Jack, thought I was ready and I remember a sense of mixed pride and nervousness as he climbed out of his cockpit and sent me off on my own for the first time. I took off to do two circuits of the aerodrome before making a final approach and landing. As I flew around I was so happy to have at last achieved my ambition that I could not contain my joy and was singing the hymn 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' at the top of my voice. I still can't believe it, but I did – I had such a great sense of achievement. I felt that I had accomplished more in the few months since I started my training than in the whole of my early life.
I also felt that deciding to join the navy had been the right thing to do. The navy was getting some excellent publicity as a result of some daring exploits. One of the German pocket battleships, Admiral Graf Spee, had been tracked down and there had been a major battle. Graf Spee had sailed for several months around Africa, in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, and had sunk nine British merchant ships, one of the most well known being Doric Star, run by the Blue Star Line. The German warship was finally spotted in the South Atlantic by three British cruisers, Ajax, Achilles and Exeter, and they opened fire. The British ships were hit, but kept up the chase and Graf Spee sought sanctuary in the harbour at Montevideo in Uruguay. She too had been hit and suffered damage. After three days she was scuttled in the harbour and the crew interned. The British ships were badly damaged and there were severe casualties on board, but Graf Spee was better armoured and had much more powerful guns than our cruisers, so it was seen as a major victory, with the British taking on a superior enemy and winning the day.
The aftermath was even more exciting. The captain of Graf Spee had behaved very decently, usually allowing the crews of the merchantmen that he intercepted to man the lifeboats before he fired on their ships. Some of them, however, had been taken prisoner and put on to Graf Spee's supply ship, Altmark. Some weeks after Graf Spee was scuttled, Altmark was spotted in Norwegian territorial waters, heading south to a German port in the Baltic. The crew of HMS Cossack, a destroyer, tried to board Altmark but were stopped by a Norwegian gunboat, which was attempting to enforce Norwegian neutrality. The captain of Cossack knew there were prisoners on board, despite what Altmark and the Norwegian gunboat captain said, and he ordered his gun crews to open fire if the Norwegians threatened his ship. During this stand-off the captain of Altmark tried to ram Cossack, but instead his ship ran aground. Cossack sent over a boarding party to find that there were three hundred British sailors held prisoner in the hold. They were freed and brought back to Britain. The papers were full of the story, naturally, but the icing on the cake as far as we were concerned was the report that, as they broke into the hold where the prisoners had been kept for weeks, the boarding party shouted out, 'It's OK, lads, the navy's here!'
All of us felt a great deal of pride. There we were, newly qualified pilots, walking around in our uniforms, smiling at the girls and basking in the reflected glory of Cossack and the ships that sank Graf Spee. We felt we were the bee's knees. We soon came down to earth with a very big jolt.
Having finished our initial flying training and collected our wings, we were sent off for further training, this time to the RAF station at Netheravon, in Wiltshire, near Salisbury Plain. It was February 1940, and it was a particularly hard winter. Where we had previously been billeted in civilian houses, we were now housed in wooden barracks with bunks for twenty people. They were heated by two old pot-bellied stoves, one at each end of the barracks. I was not at all impressed by this, but thought to myself that it was only for a short while. If I had known how bad it was going to get, perhaps I would have got myself sent somewhere else.
Our training was now going to be on two aircraft, the Hawker Hart and the North American Harvard. The Hart had been designed by Sir Sydney Cam, who also designed the Hurricane fighter that was in front-line service with the RAF. The Hart dated back to 1927, with a fixed undercarriage, biplane wings and a two-seater open cockpit. When it first entered into service it was described as a light bomber, although it was one of the fastest aeroplanes around at the time, faster than most fighters. When I started flying it was obsolete, but it was still a good plane on which to learn longdistance navigation skills and bombing techniques. The Harvard was produced in the United States and was much more modern, being an all-metal, low-wing monoplane with a retractable undercarriage and a Perspex-covered cockpit. It was a sturdy, reliable aircraft with an air-cooled radial engine that could take a lot of punishment. Some of these planes are still flying and they even race them in America. We used the Harvards for instruction in formation flying and for some basic aerobatic and fighter tactics.
We shared the camp with the RAF, and there were some Women Royal Auxiliary Air Force members there too. One night in the mess there was this absolute stunner, a tall, elegant blonde with Sergeants' stripes, who, I was told, rebuffed any advances. I approached her and to my amazement we hit it off. I had noticed her around the camp before and had been told that she was called Jane. I discovered that her real name was Margaret; Jane was just a nickname because of her long legs, like Jane the comic-strip pin-up in the Daily Mirror. Towards the end of my stay at Netheravon we used to play tennis together and there was always a good crowd to watch her play in her shorts.
My good luck in finding an attractive female companion wherever I got myself posted was beginning to become the envy of some of my fellow trainees, but we soon realized just how unlucky we all were as the weather, which was already severe, got much worse. There were high winds, a heavy snowfall and the roads to the airfield became blocked. The bad weather didn't slacken and the roads in and out of the camp remained impassable, so food and coal couldn't be brought in and soon the only place to go where we could get a hot drink was the NAAFI. It was so cold in our wooden barracks that we slept in our sheepskin flying suits. The stoves were inadequate anyway, but after the camp had been cut off for seven days there was no more fuel for them. We resorted to breaking the black-out frames in the windows and burning the sticks of broken wood. We had to melt water that had frozen in the fire buckets and try to wash ourselves with it, one leg at a time in each bucket. After the wooden frames were used up there was nothing.
Then a more serious situation developed. People started to fall ill with all sorts of ailments. The sickbay became full and patients had to be housed in the church. I was then told that there was a call out for funeral parties, because people were falling ill with influenza, pneumonia and German measles and the camp was starting to experience fatalities.
It was a dreadful situation and shows just how unable the country was to cope with the needs of wartime. We were lucky in a way that the war in Britain had so far been relatively peaceful, because the armed forces and the government had still not made a full transition to a war footing. We seemed to get no direction from the camp's officers, and nothing was being done to evacuate the sick or improve the food and heating situation. One of my companions in the Fleet Air Arm, Rupert Brabner, was actually an MP, who had been elected in July 1939. He managed to leave the camp for London and of course went straight to the Admiralty. The next thing that we were aware of was the arrival of an emergency hospital train at Netheravon station. The whole base was evacuated and we were given two weeks' leave. When we returned, the place was much improved and so was our position in a predominantly RAF camp. The final confirmation of the respect we had gained came with a concert we put on in the days before we left Netheravon. It was the usual stuff of comedy sketches and old favourites on the piano, the high point that I can remember being the appearance of my Welsh friend Glan dressed in a short skirt and with pan lids for a brassiere; the turnout was amazing.
Rupert went on to serve in various squadrons, and was on board HMS Eagle when she was sunk in 1942, but survived. After this he became a very young under-secretary in the Air Ministry. He was on a delegation to the United States in March 1945 when his Liberator aircraft disappeare
d over the Atlantic, and he died at the age of thirty-three.
Just before we left Netheravon for good we were sent with our planes to South Wales, where we did a final bombing and gunnery course from an RAF base called Stormy Down near Porthcawl. This was designed to finish our initial combat-flying training, and it also marked a watershed in my education about the female sex. While we were at Porthcawl we lived in a good hotel overlooking the seafront. We were amazed by the number of young girls who were booking in as well. They were there to work on the bombing range, operating the cameras that filmed us as we dive-bombed the targets floating in the bay. On a visit to a local beach I met a rather good-looking girl in a bathing suit, who told me she was staying at the same hotel. Our friendship blossomed and a room key changed hands. This young lady gave me my first experience of someone who was interested only in sex, without any emotional feelings. This is usually thought to be a particularly male attribute, but I am not so sure. Anyway, after four nights of exhausting sex with her I staggered into my pilot friend Dickie Chambers' room and gave him the keys to her room. I was physically drained, I felt used, and I had become tired of it. As I say, it was an education. Poor Dickie was killed not long after in the Shetlands, but I gather both he and the girl became quite attached and were very happy with the arrangement during the rest of the time we were in the hotel.
The final part of the navy's effort to turn me into an officer and a gentleman was a course in the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. Eighteen of us went there, from the original draft of forty or so that had started in St Vincent some months before, so I must have made the grade in a few things. The college is a magnificent building, with a majestic sweep of colonnades facing the Thames, and even more remarkable is the fact that it was originally built as a seamen's hospital. The painted hall is stunning and would not be out of place in a palace. Some of the buildings were quite badly damaged in the Blitz, but this was after we arrived. We were being trained to do a man's job, to become leaders in charge of ratings who might well have many more years' seniority than us. At heart, however, we were young men of between eighteen and twenty, irrepressible, full of fun and, however grave the situation, always on the lookout for the next drink or attractive female. It was our boast that we would never allow a deserving case to go unattended.
As a precaution against damage from air raids, some parts of Greenwich had been boarded up. The statue of King William on its plinth in the main quadrangle had been completely surrounded by a brick wall and roofed over. One night before leaving we decided that we would leave our mark on the college. There were some small naval cannon lined up along one side of the colonnades, and we got some ropes and pulleys and purloined a couple of ladders. A group of us dismantled one of the cannon, then hefted the barrel and gun carriage on to the top of the brick tower that surrounded the statue, which was about 30 feet high. We then reassembled the cannon and removed all traces of the lifting tackle. Next morning there was a constant stream of people wandering through the quad to look at this cannon perched high in the air.
Of course we were quickly identified as the guilty men. Commander D'Oyly, the captain, called us into his office. We expected the chop, but he was quite calm. He questioned us closely about how we had managed to dismantle the cannon, lift it above the statue and then assemble it again in the dark. 'Well,' he said, 'I am very pleased that you have learned something from your seamanship lessons!' He was right. None of us would have had the foggiest idea how to do it before we had joined the navy. He then said, 'You will take it down before you leave.' We knew that this was not a request and we quickly chorused our desire to restore the cannon to its proper place. Nothing more was said about the incident, but I still have the photograph that one of us took before the cannon was removed.
I had one unpleasant incident at Greenwich, which made me extremely angry. Lord Gort, a senior army general, and a female companion were invited to a dinner, and there was a lottery to find out who was going to have the honour of joining them at the top table. I drew the short straw and sat next to her throughout the proceedings. After two abrupt questions, about my rank and my family, she utterly ignored me. My nervous attempts to start a conversation were cut dead, so I sat there feeling humiliated, sinking lower and lower in my chair as the evening progressed. I have never forgotten her rudeness, and I was pleased to be present when she later received some of her own medicine.
So we became sub-lieutenants in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, the lowest form of officer life, but officers none the less. We were given a few days' leave. In one final daring coup one of my South African colleagues, Buster May, sweet-talked the Wren who was issuing the travel warrants and secured us warrants to travel home via Belfast. So it was a few days with Ruby, whom I hadn't seen for several months, then home to Kelso.
4
The Shooting Starts
In the final weeks of my training at Greenwich Naval College the world started to change very rapidly. The Germans mounted a huge assault on Western Europe, and we found ourselves looking down the barrel of a gun, sometimes quite literally.
It started at the beginning of April 1940 when Hitler launched an invasion of Norway and Denmark, both of which were neutral countries. German warships sailed with a large number of soldiers on board to capture the capital of Norway, Oslo, and several other towns along the coast. The seizure of Oslo didn't go according to plan, the harbour defences sank the leading German destroyer, and the Norwegian government and royal family escaped northwards.
The Royal Navy had put to sea when the German fleet was spotted, and there was a battle with some of the invading ships at Narvik, which lay at the head of a large fjord, Ofot Fjord, in northern Norway. Two German destroyers were sunk and three others damaged, as were two British destroyers. The German warships had succeeded in landing their troops, but were bottled up in the fjord, and unfortunately for them Britain had selected Narvik as the point where they would land British and French troops to fight the occupation. A few days later the battleship Warspite, with a fleet of destroyers, entered Ofot Fjord. The German destroyers were taken by surprise, and all eight of them and a submarine were sunk or scuttled in the ensuing battle. It was a great victory for our lads. The Fleet Air Arm had also come out of it well, because it was a Swordfish aircraft catapulted off Warspite that bombed the German U-boat. It was the first U-boat to be sunk by an aircraft in the war, and Narvik was the first naval battle.
A few days later the Fleet Air Arm pulled off another historic victory when a group of Skua dive-bombers that had taken off from Hatston in the Orkneys attacked a German cruiser. Königsberg had been part of the fleet that landed troops in Bergen, and she had been damaged by shells fired from the Norwegian shore batteries. She was moored against the harbour wall, awaiting repairs. The Skuas scored several direct hits, setting the cruiser on fire and rupturing the hull below the waterline. This was the first time that a warship had been sunk by air attack.
But from then on the boot was on the other foot. The Germans reinforced their troops by air, sending several squadrons of bombers and fighters to Norway. Within a few days the Royal Navy was being attacked by these German aircraft. German bombers, twin-engined Junkers Ju88 and Heinkel 111, sank a modern Tribal-class destroyer, HMS Ghurkha, and hit a battleship, HMS Rodney, although not much damage was caused. The vulnerability of the fleet to the German aircraft meant that they could not sail close to the shore to bombard German positions or to attack their shore communications. The aircraft carriers HMS Ark Royal and Furious had sailed with the fleet to provide air cover, but the problem was that the aircraft they carried were no match for the modern German planes with which they were coming into conflict.
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I had still not completely finished my training, so I had been posted to another Fleet Air Arm base at Eastleigh, near Southampton, where I was being given instruction in naval fighter aircraft. Here I was flying the same aeroplanes that the navy was relying on to fight off the Luftwaffe over Norway, an
d it was quite clear to me that they would not be up to the job. We had Blackburn Skuas, Rocs and Gloster Gladiators. The Skua was a single-engined aircraft, an all-metal monoplane with a covered two-seater cockpit. There were four machine guns in the wings, and the observer at the rear had a rearward-mounted machine gun to fight off attacking aircraft. As well as this, it could carry a 500lb bomb. It was a good dive-bomber, but as a fighter it was outclassed by the German Messerschmitt 109, which had a much better performance. Even the twin-engined Messerschmitt, the 110, which was also classified as a fighter bomber, could outrun it, although it probably wasn't as manoeuvrable as the Skua in the turn.
The Roc was a completely useless aeroplane. It looked like a Skua with a gun turret mounted at the rear of the cockpit. It had no forward-firing guns at all. Finally there was the Gladiator, which was a biplane with a fixed undercarriage and an enclosed cockpit. The Gladiator, however, despite its obsolete appearance, was my favourite aircraft. It was wonderful to fly and very good for aerobatics. But unfortunately, like the Skua, it was not up to the performance of modern fighters.
One morning at Eastleigh I was told to take a Gladiator up and I decided to see how high I could get. The Gladiators had been fitted with an oxygen supply for high altitude, so I went out over the Solent and started to ascend, switching the oxygen on at about 12,000 feet. It was a beautiful day, and as I went through some clouds I came out into early-morning sunshine. I continued to climb, reached 29,000 feet and would have gone higher if I could, but the controls were starting to feel vague and I lost any positive feel. I thought it wise to start my descent and took her down in a gentle banking turn, heading back to Eastleigh. I hit some cloud at 6,000 feet and continued my shallow dive through it, coming out underneath at 3,000. I could see the coast, but while I was checking my position in relation to Eastleigh I suddenly became aware that I was in the company of some other aircraft.