Squadron Business

Transportation arrived and I was a little surprised to see that we had a companion vehicle in the rear containing armed guards for the trip to Deversoir. I was about to learn that the locals could become a little hostile on occasions and it was not considered wise to travel along the canal road without a modicum of protection, but it was all new to me and interesting. I caught glimpses of the Bitter Lake on one side and the agriculture and ill named 'Sweetwater' Canal on the other, and points of interest highlighted by the driver, who seemed to revel in his role as tour guide. Little did I realise that months incarcerated behind the barbed wire of Deversoir and the sudden release for a trip to Fayid had made him burst into song much as a sparrow would do on being let out of it’s cage.

The approach to Deversoir Officers Mess didn’t seem too bad, a long low building that looked like an elongated bungalow, it was cool inside and with fans slowly rotating that enhanced the feeling of an African safari outpost. A thought ran through my head that, “I could live with this” and thus in a happier frame of mind I was taken to my 'quarters'. A large dose of reality was injected into the scenario upon discovering that my home for the next two and a half years was to be a shared tent without even the comfort of the low brick wall and concrete floor that most tents were erected upon. This was a sand floor covered with a tarpaulin, a truckle bed and a wonky wardrobe whose top corners had worn away the canvas of the tent, and a bare light bulb hung from the centre ridge.

I was assured by the orderly who had accompanied me that it was probably just temporary accommodation and as people died or were posted home and as my seniority progressed I would eventually aspire to a concrete floor and maybe, just maybe, I would finally move into one of the concrete block and tin roofed longhouses that stood closer to the Mess!

A nasty thought occurred to me and it was with some trepidation that I approached the subject of sanitary arrangements. A square tin hut with openings top and bottom was pointed out to me as the shower and wash room in one direction and on the opposite compass heading and about a hundred yards away stood yet another wood and tin arrangement which served as the latrine. It was at about this time that I began to appreciate the usefulness of the ankle-deep sand that surrounded my tent if a midnight trip should become imperative. A later recce trip to the latrine revealed that at least it had the luxury of cubicles with doors but in fact it was nothing more than a long wooden bench with holes and a shared trench, with no water of course. After careful inspection of each cubicle, I decided which was to be 'mine' and for ever thereafter it was my only home when visiting this site. I have no idea what happened inside any other cubicle.

I cannot recall everything that happened on my first introduction to 213 Squadron. Naturally I met everyone who was in the crew room that day and made acquaintance with the Boss who happened to be Squadron Leader 'Mickey' Finn. It was he who took me for a quick look around and a dual check in the Meteor 7. That lasted all of 20 minutes and took place on March 2^nd 1953. The following day I did a sector recce and dummy RP (rocket projectile) run, this is in order to familiarise oneself with the local terrain and features and to find your way to the gunnery range. The Canal Zone was dead simple of course, as the Canal runs north/south and in the middle lie the Little and Great Bitter Lakes and with virtually no other significant features to confuse a pilot it was almost impossible to get lost or miss your destination. A far cry from the roads, railways, rivers, fields, villages, towns and forests of England. In East Anglia, if you broke cloud at 1,000 feet expecting to see an airfield ahead of you after navigating on stopwatch and compass it was no great surprise to see as many as six airfields all within a short distance and any one of which might be the destination you seek. It sometimes took a smart bit of map reading to put the features together, a road here, a railway there or a curve in the river was all that you had to identify your target. Navigation aids were a little sparse in the 'old' days, you could cheat and ask for a course to steer from ground radar or they could triangulate you by using radio transmissions but the object of the exercise was to navigate yourself. Hence the sector recce.

Trips in the Vampire were of short duration, as it had a limited fuel capacity at low level and the majority of squadron exercises were over and done with in 30 minutes or less. A month's flying could amount to about nineteen hours but it required thirty six trips to achieve that, as was the case in May of 1953. It took the fighter pilot of that era a great deal of flying to amass a thousand hours, but one heck of a lot of experience and activity was crammed into that thousand hours. A quick look at a flying log book of that time may seem a bit uninteresting but every second was a working moment and there was no time to get bored . This is why most fighter pilots loved their work and dreaded the day when they were assigned to the 'heavies' or transport aircraft. Not all, but most.

Flying, especially on the heavier aircraft, has been described as "Years of boredom punctuated by seconds of panic” and there is a good deal of truth in that statement but most sensible pilots are quite happy to return after an uneventful trip. However, anyone who has flown several thousand hours, will have, at one time or another, experienced emergencies. If they are very serious and the pilot , by dint of excellent training , quick thinking or just dumb luck survives to talk about it, then he is honour bound to relate his experience in order to possibly prevent a similar thing happening to someone else with deadly results. By and large, my time in the Canal Zone was uneventful from a flying standpoint, I can recall only one incident where everything could have come unwound, but strict discipline averted a more serious consequence.

At Deversoir, there were three squadrons, 213, 32 and 249 and every so often we went up on what became known as a 'Wing Ding'. Each squadron fielded about twelve aircraft and we would get 36 planes airborne in a mass formation, usually in boxes of four and all in close formation, in other words our wingtips were 3-4 feet apart and any aircraft flying in the number two, three or four position was totally reliant on the box leader to maintain distance from the adjacent box of four. It was not possible to look around you since your whole concentration was taken up by maintaining position on your box leader. On this occasion I was flying in the number three position , in other words, on the box leaders left or port side and looking over to my right and away from the centre of the mass formation. Quite suddenly all hell broke loose when one of the aircraft in the centre of the mass and flying in the number four position below the tailplane of his leader struck the tailplane. This not only rendered the tailplane useless it also quite severely damaged the cockpit area of the number four. So here we are, 36 aircraft in close formation and a midair collision in the midst of it all. Now you cannot break formation with that many planes in close proximity or there will be even more collisions. Everybody displayed enormous self discipline and remained exactly where they were whilst emergency calls were being made by one pilot bailing out of an uncontrollable aircraft and another disabled aircraft falling through the formation and on its way down. All this was happening over my left shoulder and I was looking away from it not daring to take my attention off my leader. I saw nothing of it even though it was all happening about forty feet away from me. Section-by-section we slowly broke away from the formation, rejoined the circuit and landed. One pilot bailed out and that aircraft was lost and the damaged aircraft made it onto the ground safely. It had taken enormous will power by all the other pilots not to do anything foolish or to make sudden moves under very testing circumstances. I take my hat off to them all, as it could have been a disaster!

We did lose a pilot from 213 Squadron on another occasion. A battle formation of four aircraft was detailed to carry out mock attacks on a disused railway station in the Sinai Desert on the far side of the Canal. It was thought that Pete Coutts, the pilot in question, had suffered from target mesmerisation. He pulled out of his dive far too late, bounced off the desert and broke up. The impact killed him instantly and threw him out of the cockpit, free of the wreckage. Target mesmerisation is not that uncommon, as the pilot concentrates so much on keeping the target in the gunsight he forgets to monitor his closeness to the object and flies straight into it or gets too close to the ground to be able to pull out of the dive in time.

One great advantage of being aircrew is that you can fly the coop. The barbed wire and tense political situation prevented most folks from really seeing Egypt. Cairo and Alexandria were out of bounds, an occasional trip to the Officers Club at Fayid soon lost its attraction and the rigamarole involved in trying to visit the French Club in Ismailia made it a chore rather than a pleasurable experience. I did, however, get to see it all by air if not by land.

Perhaps my greatest surprise was to find that although the pyramids on the Giza Plateau were most obvious and world famous, the whole area was dotted with incipient pyramids. Structures that had risen but a few courses and then been abandoned either because of the death prematurely of the King who ordered the landmark to be raised or because of some internal political struggle. Had they all come to fruition there would be twenty or more pyramids standing for us to admire. The majority of them ended up by being little more than raised platforms.

Our most treasured escape was for Armament Practice camp in Cyprus, a whole month visiting that little green oasis. The first thing we did on arrival was to troop down to Nicosia and hire transport, either a car or motorbike and from then on the whole island was our oyster. This was before the days of Enosis and EOKA. Kyrenia was our favorite spot if there was time to spare, and the Harbour Club and the 39 Steps were home from home. A day spent lounging in the sun and swimming under the shadow of the castle, perhaps a trip to St. Hilarion Castle with a stop at Newman's Farm for a banana split with two types of real cream. Then an evening sitting outside the Habour Club sipping brandy sours or a Singapore gin sling and revelling in the soft Mediterranean evening. Life was good despite a marked lack of female company. Female companionship could be obtained but was of the type my mother always warned me about and I was young and healthy and wanted to stay that way. They were amusing company in the many bars and clubs in Nicosia and it made a change from talking to hairy males all the time but it was wiser to go home alone. Besides which, I was an 'officer and a gentleman' wasn’t I?

I recall one silly little incident that has eaten away at me for 50 years now, one of the meaningless and mean-minded things that plagues my conscience when far more important things have been forgotten.

A pilot from another squadron, whom I shall call 'RR', and I were quite good buddies and we were both in Nicosia at the same time. After an evening of entertainment at one of the many watering holes in Nicosia, 'RR,' having had a surfeit of brandy sours and feeling great, invited one of the 'young' ladies in the club to accompany us on the morrow when it was our intention to spend the day in Kyrenia. I mentioned on the way home that he might regret his decision by the cold light of day. It has to be said that these ladies were for most part somewhat older and a little more worldly wise than we pilots.

'RR' had made arrangements to pick up the lady in question the following morning, bright and early, at one of the local landmarks and from there we would proceed to Kyrenia. On arriving at the rendezvous I could see the lady waiting; she was decked out for a day in the sun, dark glasses and a headscarf and in her hand a straw bag with her accoutrements. Sunlight did not become her as had the moonlight the night before and I guess 'RR' suddenly became aware of that fact but a date was a date and I expected 'RR' to slow down. Instead he ducked his head and accelerated by, and I don't know if she saw us, probably not. I implored 'RR' to go round the block and pick her up, as she was his date after all. His comment was something to the effect that he would rather be dead than be seen in her company and we carried on to Kyrenia. I did not enjoy the day, as I felt like some heel who had promised a kid a day out at the seaside and left them standing at the kerb, bucket and spade in hand.

I should have told 'RR' that I would take responsibility for her. It has been on my mind for 50 years and if I could but have that moment over again I would have taken her to Kyrenia and shown her a good time. I would have treated her to breakfast, we would have basked in the sun, maybe gone to Newman's Farm for a banana split and spent the evening at the Harbour Club having a meal. I would have ignored the stares and comments of my fellow pilots. I would have done the honourable thing and kept my end of the bargain. But I didn't and I regret it. Going back over old times has dredged it up again and I still feel a heel after fifty years!

The host and hostess at the Harbour Club had a daughter who came to visit. She resided, I seem to recall, in Berkley Square in London and modeled hats for a living or as a part time occupation. Maybe it was just the hormones but I thought she was one of the most beautiful women who has drifted around the periphery of my life, ephemeral and untouchable. Easy to talk to and not really conscious of her good looks, but far too sophisticated and worldly for this young lad of nineteen summers. I wonder if I would have the same opinion of her if I were to meet her today and she still looked the same way. Time has a habit of opening our eyes to the minute flaws that youth in its enthusiasm overlooks.

Armament Practice Camp (APC) was a month of intensive gun firing, rocketing and bombing using air-to-air towed banners and the ground ranges at Morphu in western Cyprus. I was fortunate in that I had a natural ability at these arts and it was not something I had to work at or worry over. I was exceptional at air gunnery and above average at rocketing, bombing and air-to-ground firing. In fact, on the 17^th and18^th of April in 1954 at APC my score on air-to-air in three sorties were 37%,22% and 58% using 20mm cannon on an air towed target. This was pretty good scoring from a Vampire. On the previous day I had shot four banners in a row off the towing aircraft, really quite a nuisance since it meant repeating all these sorties until we could get a target back to assess the hits. It was a miracle the 58% target got back in one piece !!

There were also many other opportunities to get away from the confines of Deversoir. In September of 1953 the Squadron carried out ‘Exercise Quick Return’ a trip to South Africa to test our ability as a mobile squadron to get down to the south quickly and utilizing existing and sometimes unpaved strips, refueling from drums. Our destination was Swartkop in the Transvaal and we went via Shallufa in Egypt, Wadi Halfa, Khartoum, Juba, Entebbe, N’dola, Livingstone, Swartkop and return. Quite a trip and the crowning moment was arriving at Swartkop where the South African Air Force were still using Spitfires. To see a whole lineup of these fabled aircraft still in use was a sight for sore eyes, but unfortunately, restrictions on the use of cameras on the base precluded my getting photographs of this historic sight.

In May of 1954 we went to Mafraq and Aman in Jordan and from there to Habbaniya in Iraq and came back to the Zone via Aqaba. I did get a chance to go down into Baghdad and have a look around, it was pretty mucky at that time. Later that year in August we were detached for a time to Takali in Malta

For ‘Exercise DXM’ defending the Island against carrier borne Banshees and Cougars from the American 6^th or 7^th Fleet operating at that time in the Mediterranean. I think we acquitted ourselves pretty well, I certainly got several good gun camera shots of these intruders.

Exercise DXM

At the end of August in 1954 rumours began to spread around that the squadron was to be disbanded and by September it was confirmed. It was a great disappointment to me, not that we were to leave Egypt but that I had only completed a year and a half of my fighter tour. I was still only 20 years old and no longer sure what my flying future would be. I thought that maybe I would be asked to become a gunnery instructor at Leconfield in view of my strong performance in that field. I really did not want that at this stage, one more tour on fighters, maybe Hunters was what I really wanted. After that I would be happy to instruct, I felt that I had been robbed of my full Squadron experience.

I went home to England and the subject of instructing in gunnery came up. I made a point of airing my disinclination to be put upon this path at such an early stage and imagine my joy at being posted to 19 squadron Hunters at Church Fenton. The Gods had smiled upon me!! Alas, halfway through my leave a change of posting came and I was to be sent to 527 Squadron at Watton in Norfolk to fly Meteor NF11 and NF14’s doing the tedious job of Radar calibration, all straight and level stuff, no gunnery etc. I suppose it was my come-uppance for turning down the Leconfield job.