[November 1st 1940: 92 Squadron. Kent was CO.] "Kinder, a hefty New Zealander, was shooting at a second Stuka when he too was attacked. A few days later I received a letter from him written in hospital and I think it is one of the most perfect examples of unwitting understatement I have ever come across. The purpose of the letter was to lay claim to one Stuka destroyed and one probably destroyed and he followed up with a description of what had happened:
I was firing at the second Ju87 [he wrote], which began to smoke heavily at the starboard wing root, but at this point my attention was distracted by a cannon shell which entered the left wing and blew the end off. I turned and chased the 109 that had hit me and I last saw it going down smoking near Herne Bay. I did not feel very well so I decided to return to Biggin, but after a while I felt worse so I landed in a field, I regret to say, with my undercarriage retracted. After a little while I felt better so I phoned the nearest RAF Station and they came and collected me from the farmhouse from which I had phoned.
"Tiny" Kinder was not the sort of man to try to impress me with his coolness, he was just stating plain facts. He did not mention, because to him it had no bearing on the matter, that the shell that "blew the end off" had also badly wounded him in the left arm and leg. Despite this he clamped his arm on to his leg in an effort to stop the bleeding in both, turned his partly disabled aircraft and succeeded in out-manouevring the German and, I was able to establish later, shot it down. It was no wonder that he "felt ill" but again he did not mention that he had to walk nearly a mile from where he had landed to the farmhouse. A remarkable person."
From: Johnny Kent, "One of the Few", Tempus Press 2000
"I was by myself now and still in the battle area and I was weaving madly for I realised how vulnerable I was. I was easy meat to German fighters, just their cup of tea, particularly if there should be more than one of them, for the Germans always seemed to fancy themselves when the odds were in their favour, particularly numerical odds. It was past six o'clock now and the sun was getting lower in the west, the direction I was travelling in. I felt fairly secure from behind, provided I kept doing steep turns.
I could see a single Spitfire in front of me and a little lower. It must be Ferdie, I thought at once, and chased after it to catch up. It would be nice to go back to base together. When I got closer to it I noticed a white stream of Glycol coming away from underneath. There wasn't very much but it was enough to tell me that the machine had been hit in its radiator. It seemed to be going down on a straight course in a shallow dive. I got to within about three hundred yards of it and called up Ferdie to ask his position, feeling that he would be sure to tell me if he had been hit in the radiator, although he might not have wanted me to know in the first instance. I got no reply and for a second became convinced that he had been attacked since I had last spoken to him. I opened up my throttle, although I ought to have been conserving my fuel. From the direct rear all Spitfires look exactly the same and I had to get up close to it to read the lettering. I came up on its port side and at a distance of about twenty yards. It wsn't Ferdie. I felt relief. It didn't belong to Maida squadron at all. It was 'G' for George and belonged to some totally different squadron. I made a mental note of the lettering for 'Brain's' benefit. I closed in a bit to see what it was all about. The Glycol leak wasn't severe. I couldn't think what to make of it at all. Perhaps the pilot wasn't aware of the leak. Perhaps he had baled out already and the machine, as they have been known to, was carrying on alone, like the 'Marie Celeste'. Perhaps it was my imagination, an hallucination after the excitement and strain of the past hour. I came in very close to it as though I were in squadron formation and it no longer presented a mystery to me. The pilot was there, his head resting motionless against the side of the perspex hood. Where it was resting, and behind where it was resting, the perspex was coloured crimson. Now and then as the aircraft encountered a disturbance and bumped a little, the pilot's head moved forward and back a little. The hood was slightly open at the front, which gave me the impression that he had made an instinctive last minute bid to get out before he had died. The wind had blown into the cockpit and had blown the blood which must have gushed from his head, back along the entire length of the cockpit like scarlet rain. I became suddenly and painfully aware that I was being foolhardy to stay so close as this for a sudden reflex from the pilot, dead though he was, a sudden thrust of the rudder bar or a movement from the stick could hurl the aircraft at me. I swung out and left it. I didn't look back any more. Before I left it, it had started to dive more steeply, and the Glycol flowed more freely as the nose dipped and the speed increased."
Roger Hall, "Clouds of Fear", Bailey Brothers and Swinfen Ltd., 1975, pp.79-81.
Colonel Walker M. "Bud" Mahurin, 56th FG WW2 (20.75 kills Europe; 1 kill PTO; 3.5 Migs Korean War):
"The excitement and the thrill associated with shooting down an enemy airplane is indescribable. I always liken it to a big-game hunt, only here the quarry has the same advantage as you. Boy, it's touch and go, but Jesus, is it thrilling! I think the most fun and the most excitement I ever had was flying an F-86 in Korea against the Russians. That was just sheer delight and pleasure."
"In Europe though, we were bore-sighted for 300 yards, and at that range the pattern would be a square of about 12 feet. The natural tendency was to fire way out of range. With the first two airplanes I got, I came home with German oil on my airplane and on the windshield. But lots of times I fired out of range. Lots of times I took "snap shots" and didn't have the presence of mind to slow down and take things easy and really get things lined up. But the more experienced one became, the closer one got to the enemy airplane, and as more inexperienced German pilots were encountered, the easier it was."
"But the perspective - we just didn't have training aids that were good enough to simulate ranges as the range would look in the gunsight... to show, for example, what a 109 would look like out there at 600 yards, so you could get a perspective. In theory, we were supposed to be able to control the circle so you could set it for the wingspan of, say, a Focke Wulf Fw190, and if the airplane filled the circle, you were within range... except, how the Hell are you gonna do that when it went this way and that way and up and down and sideways? You just couldn't do it."
"I was in several dogfights. With the Me 110s, most of my kills were rear-quartering stern shots; most were real stern chases where they were wide open, and they knew we were behind them and we were closing very slowly. If you couldn't get into that kind of position, your chances of hitting the guy would be a question of how good you were at aerial combat, and most of us weren't that good."
from: Philip Kaplan, "Fighter Pilot: A history and a celebration", Aurum Press 1999, pp.145-6.
"I got chewed out by General Arnold when I came back to the States to help train and form up other groups to take over. He asked me, "What is the best bomber we have?" I looked him in the eye and said, "Sir, I think the P38 is the best bomber we have." God, he got mad! "Why do you say that?, he said. I said, "Well. it's got two engines instead of four. It carries two 1000-pounders, has only got one guy in it instead of ten, so, if you lose one, it's a lot cheaper on people. Also, when you send the fighter pilot in a P38 in to bomb something, he can probably hit the target most of the time and the bombers can't."
Major-General Carroll W. McColpin, USAF (Ret).
__________________
|