AIRMEN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 August 1941, Page 8

AIRMEN

MANY BATTLE AREAS SOME MIDDLE EAST RAIDS. OPERATIONS IN CRETE AND ELSEWHERE. (From the Official War Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F.) CAIRO, July 2. They wore glad to see us, those lean, sunbrowned, "obvious” New Zealanders we met as they awaited their next operational orders in an R.A.F. bomber station laid out like a modern little industrial centre in the glaring desert. They talked and talked of home and pumped us dry of news. And we understood, because they have not been as lucky in letters as we have and they do not live, as we do, in whole communities of New Zealanders. But then, out of that sea of nostalgia and reminiscences, their own stories began to emerge, and we went back with them into a more recent and exciting past. We' went over Berlin and Benghazi with New Zealand pilots, we sat in the tail of a huge Wellington bomber with a New Zealand gunner as he drove off two Italian night fighters and sent another spinning in flames into the sea. We shared the thrill that came to a New Zealander when' he was chosen to take the first British bomber over US' on the battlefield of Crete. And we learned what it had meant to these men of our own blood to have been prevented by impossible odds from doing more than they did in the sky above us. “You must get ‘Glamour-Pants’ —a wizard bloke,” the English squadron adjutant said when we reached the station. “He is off to Malta this afternoon, so you’re just in time. That’s him over there. Hey Glamour-Pants!” We “got” a flying officer D.F.C. of Wellington, about whose pants there was nothing extraordinary, and who told us with matter-of-fact modesty about his 30 raids from England last year and his work here in the Middle East. The man who was first over us in Crete was a pilot officer whose home is in Hastings. Like the whole of this squadron, he is a seasoned operational pilot with long experience on the European front. Into his comparatively few months here he has crammed raids on objectives in Libya, Greece, Crete, and the Dodecanese Islands. When the Germans were massing aircraft in southern Greece in preparation for the Crete invasion he took part in night raids on the enemy aerodromes. “There was one glorious party we had south of Athens,” he said. “We were talking to one another over the target, which was absolutely stacked with planes. We closed right in on the drome and left a mass of burning aircraft. “When the Crete show began we were all very keen to go over. As luck had it, I was switched from another target on the second night of the battle, and my machine was sent over alone on a sort of armed reconnaissance of the Malemi sector. You can imagine how I felt when I got this chance to help our own fellows. “Things were so obscure that we had very little to work on, but we had arranged with the New Zealanders to fire signals to guide us. The Germans had so many aircraft coming over that they thought ours was one of theirs, and signalled us to go down and land. We went down all right, and dropped HE on their ■ positions and a stick of incendiaries and light bombs on the landing operations.. My front gunner also put out their floodlight.” This pilot officer took part in subsequent raids on Crete and in the dropping of supplies for our troops. One of the most satisfying trips he has made was a raid-on Rhodes Island, enemy base in the Dodecanese, as part of the answer the R.A.F. gave to the bombing of Alexandria. He said: “We met pretty solid ack-ack fire, but we dived to 4000 feet and every bomb seemed a direct hit.” I Stowed away under the tail of more than one big Wellington bomber as it | leaves its desert base in search of new I objectives is a New Zealand machine | gunner. Night operations do not give, men as many opportunities as they would like of using the weapons they tend sp carefully between flights, but I met one—a sergeant-gunner of Wellington—who protected his plane a few weeks ago against three Italian fighters, shooting one of them down into .the sea. “We were raiding the port at Benghazi,” he related, “and were actually making our run across the moonlit target when the three fighters came up behind and to one side of us. As they flew in line towards our stern the first two opened up from about 250 yards. “Tracer flew around me, some of it pretty close. I put a burst across them and they veered off, but the third kept coming. It was a hectic moment . I could hear the bomb layer ( up forward giving his directions as he continued to line up his target, the 1 bloke in the astro hatch was yelling ■Get that fighter!’ and I was swearing softly to myself. “I let the Italian have it when he was about 150 yards off. There was a dull explosion and the plane seemed to fold up. It crashed in flames into the sea.” From his seat in the tail the sergeant has looked down on many an Axis port, city and stronghold. He took part in the extraordinary total of 50 raids before he left England, The figure is mounting again today. Through thick and thin a Timaru flying officer who belongs to another desert-based squadron, has sworn by the cheerful insignia painted on the side of his plane. Based on a New Zealand newspaper cartoon, it shows a cigar-smoking “tough guy” bulldog holding a Nazi daschund up by its tail. It has been his lucky charm through many months of action. This pilot began another fine wartime flying career with a crowded week of battle operations in France, working over the heads of Allied armies striving to hold up the German advance. Then he played his part in the channel port raids which helped to wreck Hitler’s invasion plans. Here in the Middle East his most interesting action has been in the Iraq uprising. Once he landed on an aerodrome around which rebel gunners had established themselves, and took part in a small battle to protect his machine.