For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II. Dr. Campbell-Begg Richard
only had grafts on eyes – top and bottom eyelids were replaced. The pattern was, you had an op and then you went off from there to a Convalescent Hospital down in Torquay, the Palace Hotel, which had been taken over. Then you’d come back for your next op, so it was a long and slow business, but we were well looked after.
After several medical boards I was cleared for home service only and with limited non-operational flying. I was posted as a Flight Lieutenant to the post of Air-ground Control Officer running the watch office, now known as “flying operations”, and this was at Martlesham Heath. They were interesting times. I had control of a dummy town, which was supposed to be Ipswich, and lights came on at night and made it look for all the world like an operating city, and it attracted some German bombs. Also a dummy airfield – we would switch on the flare path at night and aircraft movements showing on the ground, all disguised of course and artificial, but that too attracted bombs from time to time.’
A final vignette of the 1940 air war over Britain comes from Alan Burdekin, who had joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in March 1939 as a wireless operator/air-gunner:
‘We did get some flying; apart from the training in the town centre, we had camera-gun exercises flying. We were flying Fairey Battles and Audax mainly, open cockpits of course, strings and wires, biplanes, all very little different from the aircraft they finished up the Great War with. A monkey wire to stop you falling out and your scarf flying in the breeze, all real Biggies stuff, and for a young man interested in flying all very exciting. So then, of course, we were into the “Phoney War”. We did war training, we did hangar guard, duties at the aerodrome and that sort of thing. I think it was 1 October 1939 I was posted away to join 266 Squadron at Sutton Bridge.
They had Fairey Battles, the odd one or two, that was all. Got no flying there until I went off to Penrhos in Wales for a gunnery course, where we were flying again almost last-war aircraft, the Westland Wallace for instance, which was a fair sort of antique, even then. However, I passed my Gunnery Course and back to Sutton Bridge, where the Squadron had then re-equipped with Spitfires, so there wasn’t a job for me, and I transferred to 264. We went to Martlesham Heath and trained with our new Defiants, which had a good turret, a four-gun Boulton Paul turret – it really was magnificent.
Then I was detached on to a Parachute and Cable outfit; there was just one pilot, myself, a sergeant fitter and a couple of erks [ground crew]. The idea of this Parachute and Cable was that we would lower the bomb-bay of our Handley-Page Harrow, again strings and wires, biplane and canvas, and, when the enemy approached, we would steam across their bows but higher up, if we could get that far, and drop this load of 1,000 feet of piano wire with a parachute on one end and a bomb on the other. The enemy would obligingly fly into this, which would either wrap round the prop or soar back over the wing with the resistance of the parachute and either wreck the engine or blow the wing off. Well, it was a nice idea!
Then, on 10 May 1940 the Squadron was told to be at Knutsford that same afternoon and ready to go into battle, so I went across the road and saw my Flight Commander and said, “What do I do, sir?” and he said, “Well, you’re working on this experimental job – you’d better stay there. I’ll speak to the CO.”
Alan George Burdekin
Well, they went in a rush to Knutsford, went into battle that same afternoon, and the Flight Commander was shot down so he never did speak to the CO and it wasn’t until the thick of that particular battle was over that somebody thought to ask where I was, and I was sent for to join them at Knutsford and found a very depleted lot of aircrew. There were 23 when they left Martlesham and there were seven when I walked into the crew room.
So then they decided virtually to disband the Squadron; they’d had a fair sort of beating because the Germans, once they found out that we couldn’t fire downwards, they used to come up from underneath and that was it because the aircraft was underpowered. So I then did a conversion course on to Blenheims and went to join 600 City of London Squadron at Manston, and this was Battle of Britain time of course. Looking back on it, it was a very, very interesting time. We were night fighting. The Blenheims were undermanned as far as armour goes, of course. We didn’t have a great deal of fire power. The aircraft was too slow and we chased around London – we were supposed to be defending London – we chased around being vectored by all the ground control, and they would say, “There’s enemy aircraft ahead of you,” and so forth. We never did catch one – at least, I never did – and our biggest danger was the anti-aircraft; they’d open up a quarter of a mile behind the enemy and under our nose, which wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Then they’d cone you with the searchlights and that’s an awful feeling when you’re coned – you feel just like, well, as I imagine a moth on the end of a pin feels, you really feel pegged there.
I think our Squadron did get the odd one, but we did lose quite a number. They seemed to hang around – the enemy that is – they’d hang around and when we scrambled, somebody would come down and before you were really airborne you’d be shot down. I know one finished up in Dover Harbour or finished up round Ramsgate. It was a pity because we were, well, we were outdated, that’s the basic thing I suppose, and the Germans weren’t above using their brains. I was going to the Mess one night, going down the main road towards the Sergeants’ Mess, and I heard these aircraft on the circuit and just looked up and saw them, six aircraft with their wheels down, and said, oh, she’s right, as everybody else did, and suddenly up with their wheels and opened up with everything they’d got, and they were 109s. The next thing there was a mixed cannon shell and machine-gun fire coming right up the road behind me and I didn’t wait very long. Barney and I dived behind the nearest hut, which, of course, were concrete block at Manston, and all in 10 minutes they dropped 110 bombs, apart from shooting everything up. There must have been others there because 109s didn’t carry bombs, but they gave us a fair plastering and finally we had to leave Manston – it was wrecked.’
The war at sea – North Sea, Channel and Arctic
The Blitzkrieg in the Low Countries and France was preceded by dire events in Denmark, Norway and the North Sea. The British Home Fleet had sailed from Scapa Flow on 7 April 1940 to cover mine-laying operations off Narvik in Norway and in response to the reported sailing of German naval units from their bases. The Allies were preparing to land troops in Norway but Hitler got in first, and, on 9 April, occupied the major ports in Norway as far north as Narvik and the whole of Denmark. Then, in the North Sea, the first naval battle involving capital ships in the Second World War took place.
John Musters was a Sub Lieutenant RN when he was appointed to HMS Renown as Captain’s Secretary:
‘The Renown was a battlecruiser of considerable antiquity; she was finished in 1916, the sister ship of the Repulse. In 1939, when I joined her, she was just finishing a three-year reconstruction, a total modernisation, new engines and boilers, new superstructure, new gunnery control, new armoured main deck. In fact, they really hollowed out the ship and started again. We carried out sea trials in July 1939. There was a bit of urgency about completing the ship then, because it looked as though we were going to have a war fairly soon, and we finally commissioned for service in the end of August. We arrived at Scapa Flow on 4 September and then started working up in basic gunnery.
On 6 April 1940 Renown was sent out with her own destroyers and also as the cover of a force of four other destroyers fitted for mine-laying. The plan was to go and lay mines in Vestfjorden in Northern Norway, as a rather conservative measure, to interrupt the German iron-ore traffic which brought the iron-ore down from Narvik and which had been brought across from Sweden. This traffic would come down the west coast of Norway, down to Germany using neutral waters for this traffic, which was just legitimate, if somewhat borderline. Anyway, this operation had been overtaken, although we did not know it at the time, by the German plan to just go into Norway and take it over, and