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No. 418 City of Edmonton Squadron

The Intruders

No. 418 City of Edmonton Squadron - The Intruders continued from page 1

Typical of one of these "Flower" operations was my own experience on 10 June 1944, just immediately after D-Day. The bombers were attacking railway yards just south of Pads, and I was assigned a known Luftwaffe night-fighter airfield called Bourges Avord. It was about 100 miles south of Pads, and [think Hank probably remembers it well. Most of w had been sent there, early on, as a sort of training flight because it was a pretty hot airfield, well defended, and our commanders usually felt that if we could take that, we could take any of the other places. I arrived at Bourges Avord around 11:00 p.m. I was supposed to patrol it from eleven to one. One hour after I arrived the airfield lights and the approach lights suddenly went on. The German Luftwaffe had an approach technique that we called the Lorenz system. It was a single line of lights, with cross lights at different points which indicated to the pilots that they were supposed to be at a given height at each intersection. I saw these lights come on, and I realized there was some activity, that there must be something trying to land. so I got closer to the airfield, and started doing right hand circuits at about eight hundred feet. Sure enough, when I was going right on the down-wind leg for a left-hand circuit I spotted a pair of exhausts overhead. I immediately wheeled around and by this time the aircraft was on base leg and pro bably turning final, and at that point, a searchAight went up right at the end of the Loreni system. Well, I'd been briefed enough to know that when that light went up, it meant that aircraft was on final and already had passed it. It was a signal to the anti-aircraft crews on the approach to shoot at anything that passed the light after the friendly aircraft. However, I went boring in hoping to spot this guy's exhaust on final approach, sure enough, as soon as I'd passed the light, all hell broke loose, and there was a complete curtain barrage of flack! I had to break off my attack and turn steeply to one side of the aerodrome. Unfortunately for the German aircraft just before he touched down, he made the mistake of turning his landing lights on. I was able to wheel in and fire a burst, broadside with cannon and machine guns, and he exploded just as he was touching down. We could tell by the light that it was a Messerschmitt Bf-110, night-fighter.

Then the fun started. The whole airfield, it seemed to me, was like the CNE or the Fourth of July. I've never seen so many coloured lights coming up at me from all directions. There was a wall of flack that seemed to span the airfield. We did a very tight 360 degree turn, at 100 feet, and got out of the area. That was a typical "Flower" operation

One little side-light of that particular trip, which was one of my first ones, shows you how frightened you could get on some of these trips. We were carrying four 500 pound bombs, and we were supposed, as this was just after D-Day, to bomb any railway yard we saw on the way home. I was so frightened after all of this ack-ack, that I carried my bombs all the way home, forgot all about them! It wasn't until I was about to touch down at the airfield that [thought, "God, I've got four armed bombs hanging underneath this aeroplane!" So I did about the most gentle landing I think I've ever done in my life. I taxied in, and the armourers dc-fused the bombs and took them off.

In addition to these so-called "Flower" operations, we did "Night Rangers". The Night Ranger was sort of a trip to a target of opportunity which 'usually resulted from intelligence information directly from Fighter Command or from the "Y" Service. Fighter Command would tell us of some special activity at a particular German airfield, and we would plan a trip there. We would send a pilot or two on the chance that they might shoot down an aircraft because there was this special night activity: bombers taking off on their way to England or transports going elsewhere. There was also a very effective operation in Canterbury known as "Y" Service. "Y" Service was an organization manned mostly by WAAF's who were bilingual. They could speak German or they could speak French just as well as English and they listened on the known German R/T frequencies, arid were able to detect when there was a lot of aircraft activity at an airfield, say in Holland, or in Belgium. They would phone us on what we called the "scrambler line" which were telephone lines, hot lines where you could scramble the message so that anybody who cut in could not understand it. They would phone us and say that JG 23 at Twente airfield in Holland, had three Squadrons doing night-flying tests this afternoon. This would indicate that there were three Squadrons of Ju-88's about to bomb London or some particular city in England that night. We would keep a couple of aircraft practically at the end of the runway, and they would phone us again and say, "Twenty aircraft have taken off from Twente". We would figure out when they would be arriving back, and we'd dispatch at least one aircraft, sometimes two, in time to arrive there and enter the airfield circuit about the time those aircraft got back. This was very effective and we shot down quite a few aircraft with that type of information. Those were called the "Night Ranger" trips and we usually kept about four to five aircraft on readiness every night for those specific purposes.

Other Night Ranger flights took place on the crews own initiative, based on the intelligence bulletins. I'd like to give you another personal example of a Night Ranger trip that I did on 17 July 1944, to an airfield called Altenburg, south of Berlin. Intelligence reports indicated the Luftwaffe were moving their training fields from France deep into Germany, and at this particular airfield they were converting Focke-Wulf day units into night-fighter units. Since they were doing night-fighting training, Bob Bruce (my navigator) and I plan ned a Night Ranger. It was to be about a six hour trip at low level. We planned a course to be flown at about 500 feet to avoid radar detection. These trips were always accomplished on dead reckoning navigation. I find it amusing today to hear of so many pilots who aren't able to go anywhere unless they've got a VOR, an ADF and all the latest aids, when I think that we flew right across Germany, into Poland and so on, at 500 feet on D.R. and we usually arrived at the target right on schedule. It is kind of amusing that if you really want to work at it, you can do it. The only navigational aid we had was our GEE, (medium range about 50 miles, radio aid to navigation) which was the early LORAN (Long Range Aid to Navigation). We could get a fix for about fifty miles out to determine drift, but from then on we were on our own.

On this particular trip, I crossed the Belgian coast at Coxyde with my next turning point on the river Meuse between Belgium and France, and my third one a bend on the river Rhine. Then there was a tiny reservoir, that I'm sure practically everybody knew, north of Nuremburg as water usually stands out on a pitch-black night. Bear in mind that the whole of back from the intruder trip, there was great excitement in the operations room because several of these V-I Flying Bombs had been launched that night. It was their first night and a massive assault on London was anticipated. We had been called up by the Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command personally and told that all the Mosquito Squadrons, (night fighter squadrons and intruder squadrons) from that night and for the next few weeks were going to be on patrol over the Channel frying to shoot down these V-I's because the Cormmander-in-Chief and, I guess, Churchill himself, expected that Hitler was going to launch a massive attack. Well, we weren't disappointed.

The next night a barrage of 20 or 30 of these things was launched. We started to patrol, trying to catch them in the usual manner by diving down on them from a couple of thousand feet. We soon found that we couldn't get anywhere near them, and decided to work out a tactic. Two or three of us got together in the Squadron particularly Don McFadyen, who had been a fellow instructor at Central Flying School in Trenton, and decided that the only way we could catch these things was to patrol at 10,000 feet, (they flew at about 300 feet) in the middle of the Channel. As soon as we saw one launched, we would head out on an intercept course at our height. Instead of heading for it, we turned toward London, and kept looking over our shoulders, dipping the wing until we saw it catching up. When it was directly underneath us we went into a dive and achieved about 430 miles per hour. The thing I do remember about the Mosquito was that to keep it straight at that speed it took full rudder, because of the torque effect. But, at least we had a little bit of surplus speed on the V-1's when we got behind them. It would cruise usually at about 375 miles per hour and we attack it from about a thirty degree angle to avoid any particular debris. We becarne fairly adept at this, and I believe we were the most successful night-fighter/intruder squadron at shooting down the V-1.

We had some amusing incidents. These V-I's were a pilot less aircraft that had about a 25 foot wingspan and probably a 20 foot length. It had wooden wings, and metal fliselage with a pulse-jet engine powered by hydrogen-peroxide, I seem to remember, and kerosene. It carried a 1500 pound warhead. The engine was a pulse-jet and it really looked both interesting and odd. Mthough most of them flew at about 375 miles per hour you'd get the odd cripple flying at about 200 miles per hour; there would be something wrong with the engine. They were kept on course by means of a very simple auto-pilot, and I had one experience where I fired a burst at one and watched it go into a 180 degree turn after which the auto-pilot straightened it up. It flew back into France and crashed. We did have a few experiences like that. We had another hazard, and that was enemy night-fighters. To avoid collision, as soon as we started to dive from 10,000 feet on a V-I flying bomb we had to turn our navigation lights on becawe there might be somebody else diving from the other side. So a few German night fighers would hover around the Channel while we were there and I'm afraid we lost some of our fellows to them.

Another diversion from Intruding was spotting V-2 launch ing sites. This was the V-2 rocket, you remember, the first real ground-to-ground missles - devastating weapons because you never knew they were coming. The first thing you heard, if you were somewhere in the vicinity of London, was a crunch and a loud explosion, at any hour of the day or night. There were a lot of severe casualties. Usually, if the air-raid siren went of it was never more than four or five minutes before they crashed, so it didn't give anybody much chance to take shelter. Shortly after these V-2's were launched, in September 1944, we got a special call from 11 Group to send a couple of aircraft out to patrol and I believe, Hank and leach did one of those. The one that I went on was in the Houlogne area early in September; I remember that I was patrolling at about 2,000 feet in behind the city - everything was dark when suddenly, I saw a few lights and could make out a few trucks. I thought, "Well, this might be some activity" and kept circling around, yet nobody seemed to bother about me. Suddenly I saw this giant fire-cracker come up! I thought somebody was shooting at me; but the thing passed me, spiralled up into the heavens and kept on going, I was fascinated and then I realized that this was a V-2, one ofthe first rockets to be fired into England. We flew right over it. Our job was to take a GEE fix and radio it back to England so that rocket firing Typhoons could be dis patched at first light to try to destroy the tmnsports, that really launched the V-2's. I enquired the next day whether the Typhoons had had any success! They had not, the launching vehicles had moved on. We flew these missions for a period of time. There was no question of shooting V-2's down, it was just a matter of trying to locate them. But the German Army became very adept. The launching units were all portable, and as soon as they fired off a couple of missiles, they moved the unit out.

I should mention an interesting experience I had with the V-I's, later on. Since so many of them were launched from the coast of France and so much damage was done in London, intensive retaliatory bombing was done on their launching sites, then the Gemans started using portable sites, causing the army offensive to be accelerated along the coast in an effort to clear them out.

The Germans next began to launch their V-l's from air craft. They selected some squadrons of Heinkels up in northern Germany and on the Borders of Denmrk and put one flying bomb under each wing of their aircraft. The pilots flew out towards London at wave-top height pulled up to 500 feet and launched their V-I's toward London. They then turned around and flew back. I was then commanding 406 Squadron. We had radar and I spent many nights trying to catch some of those fellows but they were really far too smart. Many times, my radar-operator would say, "We've got a fix at 400 yards. He's dead ahead, and twenty degrees below," I would look down and see the wave tops right below me and not dare to go any lower. But, as I've said, these fellows were pretty smart they got right down among the wave tops and flew home.

Yet another role for the Squadron was the landing of agents among partisans in Czechoslovakia and twice in Yugoslavia. A couple of our fellows used to make some very tricky trips, delivering one of our own agents who had to huddle on the floor in front of the navigator. They would be given a 'fix' in Czechoslovakia, requiring them to land in a cow pasture at night, on a given signal, with a Mosquito guided only by four or five flashlights lined up in a row. A tricky business requiring great skill - these trips were always successful. In addition to that, we often dropped supplies to some of these partisans which required a real feat of low level navigation in order to get in there undetected, drop the supplies and get home again.

I won't try to bore you about the history, but in July of 1944, we made some quick moves: to Hurn then to Middle Wallop and later on to an airfield at Hunsden, north of London, which we shared with three other Mosquito Squadrons. That was where I became CO of the Squadron for a period of time replacing W/C Tony Barker, an RAF officer. I remember specifically that I was 24 at the time, and this didn't really occur to me as anything unusual because most of the Squadron Commanders were of that age. You'd be amused to know that we had a pilot in our Squadron who was 29 and we called him "Pappy". Anybody over 26 or 27, I think got this title; Hank was one, really.