[bobbysocks]

your welcome...
now that i have a little break in the action, a little more from alan clark.

DAF was a Tactical Air Force, as distinct from a Strategic Air Force such as the various long-range bomber forces of the RAF and USAF. Within this structure, No. 3 had, over the years, performed a number of roles: reconnaissance, dive-bombing and strafing, bomber escort, and aerial fighting, sometimes individually and sometimes all together. In my time, and for some time earlier, the main role was close support for the ground forces of the British Eighth Army. This entailed moving up fairly close behind the advancing ground forces in order to respond to their requests for help ASAP and also shorten the range of the flights. This latter, however, was becoming less important with the advent of the longer range Mustang. As it was now the depth of winter, both the British and the American Armies were bunkered down on both sides of the north-south running Apennines, so there was almost no call for close support. Instead we spent our operational time ranging widely over Yugoslavia, Austria and Northern Italy, dive-bombing bridges, strafing trains, trucks, tanks and even horse-drawn vehicles, which the Germans were increasingly needing to use.

We also did some bomber-escort duties which, for us, were “a piece of cake”, as there was no German aerial opposition to worry about. When the bombers reached their target, we would move to one side while they copped all the flak. I personally took part in three of these to Vienna, Klagenfurt and Graz and the trips, for us were uneventful (although not so for the bombers), except for Vienna when, for a few brief minutes, high above us we saw one of the new German jet or rocket fighters streaking across the sky at tremendous speed. This put a serious dent in us Mustang flyers’ sense of aerial superiority, but it was only brief and never recurred before the war’s end.

My stay on No. 3 lasted until April 3, 1945, when I was shot down on my 25th Mission. Though brief, this period was for me replete with incident, in contrast to that of my peers, Lew, Peter Martin and Ron Horton, all of whom had joined the squadron at the same time and all of whom went through the rest of the European War unscathed and, apart from the usual exigencies of dive-bombing and strafing under fire, without too much drama. Let me explain a bit. Some months before arriving, both 3 and 450 had apparently, through attrition and tour expiration, run out of experienced flight leaders. So an SOS was sent to Australia for some pilots with one tour of operational experience. As a result, four pilots with a tour done in the Jap war were flown from Australia straight to Italy, two each for 3 and 450. They, of course, were excellent and experienced pilots but the aerial war against Germany into which they were now thrust was vastly different to that which they had experienced in the SW Pacific. In the event, all four were shot down: the 3 Squadron duo - FLTLT John Hodgkinson DFC and FLTLT Barney Davies - both while flying in front of me!

At full strength, we flew 12 aircraft in three sections of four: "Red", "White" and "Blue". We flew in very loose formation, called “battle formation”, a method that the RAF had learned from the Germans years before during the Battle of Britain. The pre-war tactics of showy close formation had proved disastrous in that campaign, as the pilots’ attention was totally taken up watching each other and failed to see the enemy coming.

Each four flew at staggered heights with the mission leader as No. 1 in the Red section. Newer pilots (“sprogs”) flew in the No. 2 position about 75 metres behind the leader, while the other two in the four formed a square with 1 and 2. It was the number two’s job to search the sky continually, while the No. 1s checked the ground and also navigated us to the target. Our squadron’s radio call sign was “Shabby” (hence the name of my Laser “Shabby Red 2”). It was from this position that I got shot down.

But prior to that, on March 6, Hodgkinson, as Red 1 (with me right behind him at Red 2) got shot down in rather dramatic circumstances, which I won’t recount here as the detail can be found in a brief article I wrote for the 3 Squadron Association newsletter that is now on the web here .

Hodge was taken prisoner. On April 1, two days before I copped it, I was again flying Red 2 behind Barney Davies when he too got shot down. Flying over a mountainous area of Yugoslavia, Barney had spotted a couple of trucks full of German troops. He told the rest of the squadron to stay up and called me to follow him down to strafe. This was fairly exhilarating, as we had to dive and weave our way through the peaks of the mountains to get at the trucks. As we started shooting, a large amount of flak (anti-aircraft fire) came up at us. Neither of us was hit but we had to pull up very steeply to avoid the mountain on the other side of the road. We circled back to where we had started the attack and Barney (who was nothing if not intrepid) said:

“All right, Shabby, we are going in again!”

“Shit!”, I thought, for not only had the flak been heavy but we had been briefed never to attempt a second run as the enemy would be:

(a) Better prepared and;

(b) Rather angry and thus liable to do nasty things to you if you got shot down.

Which is exactly what happened to Barney. At a low point in his dive (about 100 feet or so above the trucks), he was hit by several 20 mm cannon shells. Cool as ever, he called:

“Hit! Bailing out, Shabby.”

He pulled up to about 1500 feet, with me quite close on his tail, where he executed a perfect ‘bunt’ bail-out; that is, after jettisoning the Mustang’s Perspex canopy, freeing himself from all the impedimenta, such as straps, helmet, radio mike, oxygen mask etc., he pushed the nose of the plane hard down (he was still climbing at this stage) and floated upwards, beautifully turning somersaults in the air until he pulled the rip cord and that life-saving canopy mushroomed out.

“Wow”, I thought, “that’s the way to do it, so easy and graceful; that’s the way I’ll do it, if and when my turn comes.”

But, as I found out, it is not as easy as it looks first time (and this was, I think, Barney’s third go at it). By now, in spite of my general inexperience, I was the leading Squadron close-up eye-witness of bale outs, one very good and one botched, almost fatal one. Mine, two days later, was similar to, if not worse than, the latter.

At this point, while on the subject of bale-outs, I may as well go forward to recount my own bale out, two days later on April 3. This was to be the day of an athletic carnival for No. 3 and supposedly we had been stood down for the day. As an athlete of some past standing, I had been looking forward to this event, but the Operations phone rang, summoning us into the air.

The reason for this sudden change of plan was as follows: Several days before, a large Russian advance had revealed an enormous column of retreating German troops, tanks, trucks etc. on a road in Slovenia. The retreat had been temporarily halted by bombing a passing train at a level crossing, thus the column was at our collective mercy. Many squadrons had been involved in the two-day carnage, while the column was halted, and it was to this that No. 3 had been summoned.

Now, ever since the Battle of Britain in 1940, it had been a fighter squadron tradition that, at the sound of an alert, the pilots belted helter skelter to their machines and took off in a cloud of dust. Although the need for such urgency was long since past, it was still deemed prudent to get airborne with some celerity. So off to the strip in our 3-ton truck (we were now based at Cervia) and into the waiting planes. To expedite take-off, all aircraft were allotted randomly and each had a parachute with dinghy attached in position, with straps spread out so that the pilot leapt in, clipped on the parachute harness, then the restraining straps, helmet, goggles, oxygen mask, and radio; then roared off into the wild blue yonder.

My allotted plane for this mission (another armed recce) was a Mark III [serial KH631, marked "CV-V"], a slightly older model than the new Mark IVs, which were now arriving regularly as replacements on the squadron. It was armed with six 0.5¢¢ machine guns and two 1000lb. bombs. After clambering in, I was amazed to find that the parachute straps were set up for an impossibly huge person. Instead of fitting snugly, the straps flopped about so loosely that there seemed to be every chance of falling out of them if I had to bale out. In addition, the ripcord metal ring, which you had to pull to open the parachute, instead of fitting neatly in its slot on your chest, was dangling on a foot-long piece of wire almost touching the floor of the cockpit. Very piss-poor maintenance, I thought. But, no time to speculate, off I went to take up my position behind our newly appointed flight commander, FLTLT Tubby Shannon who had arrived several weeks earlier to start his second tour of operations.

One thing about being young and silly (I was 20 at this time): you feel indestructible, bullet proof as it were, and so I said to myself:

“Well it will be all right just this once.”

However, with Murphy’s Law always lurking in the background (albeit as yet undiscovered) - it wasn’t. So off we flew across the Adriatic and into Slovenia until we had almost reached Maribor, a large town on the Austrian border where somebody in the formation spotted a Fieseler Storch aircraft flying low beneath us. This was exciting stuff as most (if not all) of us had never seen a German plane in real life before.

Tubby decided that just he and I would attack it; so leaving the others up top, we jettisoned our bombs (all 4000 lbs of them) and dived down to attack. At this point I should explain that the Fieseler Storch is a light reconnaissance aeroplane, totally unarmed and capable of a top speed of about 90 mph (150kmph), whereas we were much faster and very well-armed.

As Dusty Lane had shot another one down two days before, there was some speculation as to why such aircraft should be flying at all and Wing Intelligence had suggested that these planes may have been transporting high ranking German Army officers trying to escape from both the Eastern and Western fronts, which, by now, were rapidly approaching each other. Their escape plan was, presumably, to try and reach the Austrian redoubt which, as yet, had not been overrun.

However, there is an alternative possibility. These planes had been used to spot Partisan movements in the mountainous regions nearby and it is possible that this accounted for their aerial presence. Whatever, down we swooped, putting down our flaps and throttling right back to reduce our speed. The Storch, by this time had spotted us and staying just above the ground positioned himself behind a nest of German anti-aircraft guns (Oerlikon 20 mm cannons as it turned out) so that we had to fly right across these low and slow to get at him.

As we did this, he banked steeply to fly at right angles to us so as to make it as difficult as possible for us to hit him. In other words he was maximizing the deflection we had to use to shoot him down. By way of explanation, when you are shooting at a target crossing your path, you have to aim a certain amount in front of it in order to hit it, otherwise the bullets will just pass harmlessly behind him. The amount you have to allow for, of course, depends on the speed of the target, which you estimate and then lay off the correct amount on your gunsight - rather like clay pigeon shooting really.

We both opened fire as we drew near the German guns; every fifth bullet of our combined twelve 0.5¢¢ machine guns was a “tracer”, that is a bullet that has a fiery glow, thereby indicating the path of all the other bullets. I was amazed to see our bullets run up the wing of the Storch , which then burst into flame and crashed. Almost immediately there was a hell of an explosion which seemed to lift my plane up in the air, large holes with ugly jagged edges appeared in both wings and ailerons, the engine started pouring black smoke and my lateral control of the plane almost disappeared.

The engine, however, continued to function, even though it was emitting sounds of dire distress that suggested to me that I wouldn’t make it back over the Adriatic. I had managed to climb to 5000 feet and decided to head southeast. While I was doing this in my terminally-stricken plane, which was pouring huge amounts of smoke (presumably indicating some, as yet unseen, fire) and uttering horrible sounds of malfunction, Tubby kept badgering me with R/T calls, asking me where I was. Momentarily taking my mind off my multifarious problems, I had a look around: green fields below, mountains in the distance. How the **** could I know where I was precisely?

So I ignored Tubby and got back to the problems at hand. Decisions had to be made; getting back across the Adriatic was obviously out of the question; should I head for the mountains, where Partisans were allegedly active, or for the Russian front which was only some 30 miles to the East? The latter had some difficulties, so I elected for the former.

Let me explain. As we operated fairly close to the advancing Russian front quite regularly, we were equipped, among many other bits and pieces, with a flag, a Union Jack that hung around our necks and was accompanied by the words “Dobra den, ya sum Englesi piloten (Good day, I am an English pilot)”. As we were all dressed in grey English battledress and were wearing wing brevets, the possibility existed that you could be mistaken for a German soldier by the necessarily trigger-happy Russians and summarily dispatched. In the event of being shot down in Russian-occupied territory we were told by Intelligence to advance towards their troops with hands up and quoting the abovementioned words. I thought the Partisans might be a better bet.

Nearing the mountains, I thought it would be wise to blow off the canopy in case of a sudden loss of control, as was the case with John Hodgkinson. This was a mistake as the smoke and leaking glycol now poured into the cockpit, forcing me to decide to bale out immediately, even though I was some way short of the mountains. It was at this point that I remembered my loose parachute straps and, taking my eyes off the flickering instruments, glanced, with some dismay at my dangling ripcord.

No choice - I undid my seat straps, took off my helmet with attached radio and oxygen mask and contemplated which bale-out method to use. Somehow, the bunting method seemed to be losing its previous appeal. Wouldn’t it be easier and safer just to go over the side and risk hitting the tailplane? Thus persuaded, I let go of the control column and tried to clamber out. Halfway out, the slipstream hit me, forcing me back against the cockpit edge with such force that I could neither get out any further nor get back in to regain control of the aircraft. The plane, out of control, slowly went into a dive, the ground appeared directly in the windscreen as we hurtled towards it with increasing speed, with me desperately trying, to no avail, to reach the stick.

A swift and violent death appeared imminent. Still pinned immovably against the rear of the cockpit, the engine noise and smoke reached a crescendo of violence. Then the next thing that happened was an incredible quiet; an eerie silence in marked contrast to the preceding turmoil. Bewildered (in a state of shock really) I wondered is this heaven? How quick! No booking-in formalities, no sign of Saint Peter. Glancing upwards, above me was a beautiful white silk canopy. Wow! Relief; but tempered by the fact that the parachute had about a six to eight foot tear in it, stretching from the edge inwards. Did chutes with tears continue to do so under the pressure of descent? Shelving this query for the moment, I looked down to see green fields seemingly a long, long way below.

As I hung there in the pristine silence there appeared to be no detectable downwards movement whatsoever. Am I going to hang up here forever? I wondered. After what seemed to be an eternity I began to detect a slight downward movement and also a slight sideways progression towards the West. People appeared running towards my descent path. Friend or foe? Ah well, at least I had my trusty Smith and Wesson 38, with its four bullets. Misjudging the final 100 feet or so, it seemed as though I would drift gently and gracefully onto the forgiving earth; nothing happened for a bit then the earth rushed up to meet me and I hit with a dreadful thud while travelling backwards at about 15 mph due to the wind. Dragging along the ground at speed I hit the release buckle and came to rest - more or less in one piece.

People were running towards me, civilians not soldiers, so I walked towards them, whereupon they turned and fled. Perhaps with my grey battledress, winged chevron and trusty six shooter at the hip I looked like a German to them…or maybe an alien of sorts. So I grabbed the parachute and looked for somewhere to hide it, as per orders. No real hiding place so I put it, as best I could under a small bush and headed for the distant hills as I could see what appeared to be German soldiers coming my way from a distant village. As I glanced back, I saw the peasant women pulling my ‘chute out of its hidey-hole, evidently assessing the quality of the material.

Much later, thinking about the bale-out, I have concluded that the following was the most likely scenario. When the plane began to dive because I couldn’t reach the control column, this must have acted as a partial bunt, perhaps just elevating me slightly from my trapped position. The dangling ripcord ring must have caught on one of the many projections and levers in the narrow cockpit. This would have triggered the opening of the parachute in the cockpit! Spilling out into the slipstream, I must have been dragged out perforce, narrowly missing the tailplane, which must have caught the silk of the chute and torn it. Needless to say I didn’t say anything about this horrible bungle in my official report later back at the ranch!