They Spread Their Wings (18 page)

November the 26th was a busy day. Taking off at 08.45, Flt Lt McAdam led the squadron back to the Goulet but had no success and was back by 09.50. At 16.40 No 10 Group mounted a Ramrod to bomb Martinvast airfield and No 183 Squadron led by Sqn Ldr Dring provided eight Bombphoons, each armed with two 500lb medium-capacity (MC) bombs with instantaneous fuses. Course was set from Harrowbeer, flying at sea level for twenty minutes, then climbing to 11,000ft over the French coast just south of Cap de Flamanville. Following a railway line the formation reached the target which was dive-bombed from 11,000ft down to 6,000ft amid moderate flak. It was a source of great irritation that despite all bombs falling within the target area, all failed to explode! Flt Lt McAdam took the squadron back to the Goulet next day and had better success against a couple of minesweepers, both of which were strafed and one hit on the waterline.

Two 45-gallon drop tanks were fitted to each of No 183’s six Typhoon fighters for a long-range Rodeo sortie to the Kerlin-Bastard area of the Bay of Biscay. In company with ten Typhoons from No 257 Squadron, and two Spitfire squadrons making up the wing formation, it was an operation designed to tempt the Luftwaffe into the air for a fight. Taking off at 14.00, the Typhoons flew in two groups of eight aircraft at sea level until they reached the target area, then climbed to 8,000ft where, with visibility of 25 miles, they circled in the crisp, clear air while increasing their altitude to 12,000ft. The Spitfires provided top cover at 20,000ft waiting for the opportunity to drop on the enemy should he be so bold as to appear. In the event it all fizzled out and apart from seeing a couple of Me 410s on the airfield and a stationary 8,000-ton merchant vessel near Île de Groix, no enemy aircraft came anywhere near the Typhoons and all returned safely to base. Actually, the outward journey itself was not without incident. There was no cockpit fuel gauge for the drop tanks, so after taking off on main tanks, a signal was given in the air for everyone to switch to the first drop tank and run on it for a pre-briefed period of time. Another signal from the formation leader prompted a switch-over to the second tank, which would again be used for the set period of time. At a third signal the pilots would switch to the main tank and jettison the drop tanks. This latter point was reached near Lorient and the wing leader, Wg Cdr Denys Gillam, duly gave the order to drop the tanks. This was all very well but he seemed to have forgotten that eight aircraft of No 257 Squadron were in front of and slightly above the formation of six 183 plus two 257 aircraft. On his signal, sixteen drop tanks from the first group whizzed back towards the second group, which had to take rapid and violent evasive manoeuvres to miss these incoming aluminium missiles! The leader of the second formation was Walter Dring in JR128 ‘S’, who turned the air blue with his protest to the Wingco at this bombardment. The Wingco at least had the good grace to apologise.

Things looked up on 18 December when Sqn Ldr Dring led eight Typhoon fighters with drop tanks on a long-range escort sortie to Concarneau in the Bay of Biscay. Take-off was at 11.05 and the Typhoons met up with a squadron of torpedo-carrying Beaufighters from Coastal Command. The Beaufighters took up line astern and the Typhoons flew four on each side of the line. Under a 3,000ft overcast sky with rain showers, keeping station on the slower and heavily laden torpedo bombers was tricky, and being responsible for navigation, the bombers took a wide course around Brest to the west of Ushant to approach Concarneau at 800ft from the south-west. The target was a convoy creeping along close inshore, comprising a 6,000-ton merchant vessel escorted by two destroyers and two E-boats. The Beaufighters attacked the merchant vessel and two torpedo hits were seen. Going in with the first of the bombers, Flt Lt S.J. Lovell and Fg Off Peter Brett attacked the ship with cannon fire and broke away when the torpedoes exploded, while the rest of the squadron made dummy passes at the targets as each of the other Beaufighters made their runs. This tactic was successful in putting off the enemy gunners because, despite being fired upon from all the ships and from gun emplacements behind Concarneau town, none of the attackers was shot down, although Fg Off C.N. Walley made a wheels-up landing back at Predannack because he had a flak hole through his wing and thought a tyre had burst. This sortie lasted two hours and thirty-five minutes.

‘No-Ball’ was the code name for V–1 launch sites in the occupied countries. These launch sites for the Fieseler Fi 103 (V–1) pulse-jet-propelled missile, colloquially known as a ‘Doodlebug’ or ‘Buzz-bomb’, were relatively small constructions often built in wooded areas for concealment, making them difficult to spot from the air. The sites contained a concrete, ski-shaped missile launch ramp and associated buildings, and No 186 Squadron, among others, was tasked several times to make dive-bomb attacks on some sites under construction. The missiles, Hitler’s first ‘V’ weapon, had a warhead of 1,900lb of explosive, a range of 150 miles and the ramps were directed mainly – although not entirely – at England and London in particular. The first V–1 missiles were not launched against England until 13 June 1944, but sites were being built prolifically along the Channel strip of France, Belgium and Holland many months prior to operational use. Once this new weapon had been identified and linked with the construction sites discovered in France, it became a target for Allied bombers of all types.

One such operation was mounted on 22 December, when Walter Dring, flying JR128 ‘S’, personally led two sorties that day to one of these ‘ski’ sites being built near Cherbourg. Taking off from RAF Harrowbeer, to which the squadron had flown for the operation, at 11.00, leading a formation of seven Bombphoons from No 183 Squadron, Walter reached and, in a clear sky, identified the No-Ball target near Maupertus at 11.32. With No 193 Squadron acting as top cover, Walter ordered his squadron into echelon at 10,000ft altitude and led the wing-over on to the target. He released his two 500-pounders at 5,000ft in a dive before zooming back up to reform his aircraft for the trip home. German flak was sporadic and inaccurate but only one bomb-burst in the target area was spotted. They landed back at 12.25 and after a debrief, a second sortie was planned against a different No-Ball target in the same area, this time at full wing strength. No 183 supplied eleven Bombphoons and No 164 a further five, while Nos 193 and 266 Squadrons provided sixteen fighters to act as top cover for the bombers. Take-off was at 15.00.

The weather was fine until the French coast when 8/10ths to 10/10ths cloud south of Cherbourg made it impossible to identify the new target. Turning the formation westwards, Walter Dring spotted, through a gap in the clouds, the construction site he had bombed that morning and decided to bomb that instead. One of the pilots flying with Walter on that op, Fg Off Peter Brett, wrote a vivid description of the dive-bombing attack:

As we approached the target area, the cloud cover was almost complete. However the CO [Dring] put us in echelon port and then started a slow turn to starboard to see if he could pick up the target. He managed to spot what we were aiming for through a small hole in the clouds and tightened up his turn to keep it in sight, as he called the ‘arm bombs’ and ‘diving now’ orders. I was flying at number two to the leader of the second four of the second squadron [eight Typhoon aircraft was, in the light of practical experience, considered to be the optimum number for a ‘squadron’ formation; therefore, for the duration of this op, for example, Peter Brett in JR145 ‘A’, Fg Off Foster in JP973 ‘E’ and Flt Sgt Grant in JP601 ‘L’, all from 183 Squadron, became temporarily attached to the five Typhoons from No 193 Squadron, referred to here as the ‘second squadron’.] which made me fourteenth of the sixteen aircraft to dive. It also meant that I had to keep on opening up the throttle in order to keep up as I was on the far left hand end of a string of aircraft turning right. By the time that the aircraft in front of me peeled off into the dive, I was nearly at full throttle and banked steeply to keep in formation. I just managed to glimpse the target through the small hole in the cloud as I peeled over into the dive but had to pull over almost inverted to get round on to the line of the bombing dive. As soon as I was in the dive I realised that I was going much too fast but there was nothing I could do except throttle back in fine pitch and hope that the following pilot would be able to keep clear. I concentrated on lining up with the target, released my bombs and pulled out. By this time I was experienced enough to pull the maximum ‘G’ I could stand and had learned that this could be increased by putting my feet up on the ‘high’ rudder pedals, curling up into a ball and yelling as loudly as possible. All of which tended to push blood up into the head and thus help counteract the effects of ‘G’ force. Even so, my vision went immediately and I blacked out almost completely. When my vision returned I was going almost straight up and just had time to see my airspeed was well over 450mph, before I was back in cloud. Before I had time to settle onto instruments I was through the cloud layer and found I was shooting up past the rest of the formation, although my airspeed was bleeding off rapidly and I quickly rejoined. The trip back was uneventful but I was unsure whether I had been hit by flak or not. The aircraft seemed noisier than usual and I was having to use very slightly more throttle and higher revs to keep station. On landing at Harrowbeer, the local ground crew drew my attention to the undersides of both wings. Several rivets had ‘popped’ at the point where the wing ‘cranked’ and this had allowed the metal skinning to pull away from the rib and left a gap of a centimetre. This had been enough to cause a slight increase in drag and change the noise and feel of the aircraft in flight. As far as anybody could tell, the only way this could have happened is that I had far exceeded the maximum speed and consequently the maximum ‘G’ on pullout, which had actually bent the wings! I was considered to be extremely lucky to have survived.

Despite accurate medium and heavy flak, on this occasion several bombs were seen to fall in the target area.

There was no operational let-up over Christmas 1943. At 12.30 on Christmas Eve, Flt Lt Lovell led six aircraft to dive-bomb Guipavas airfield. This was followed at 16.35 by Walter Dring leading four Bombphoons on an armed shipping recco to the favourite hunting ground around Ushant, the Goulet and Batz, but nothing was sighted and the aircraft were back by 18.00. Christmas Day did indeed bring a present for Sqn Ldr Dring, in the form of a shared claim (one-third) for an enemy aircraft shot down during a long-range fighter sweep to Kerlin-Bastard airfield. Walter took off at 14.00 in JR128 ‘S’ with four other aircraft, arriving over the target at an altitude of 5,000ft. He spotted an enemy aircraft taxiing on to the runway below and while orbiting the airfield watched it take off. In his combat report he described what happened next:

[As Blue leader] I gave the order to my section to go in line astern and doing a half-roll, I dived on the aircraft which was then at a height of 500 feet, closing in on it at a speed of 380–400mph. At a range of about 400 yards I gave it a short burst, following this with another at 300 yards and giving a final burst from about 200–150 yards. I gave 30° deflection on the port side and estimate the e/a [enemy aircraft] was doing about 140mph. I saw strikes in the front of the e/a and on the port engines, the outer engine being set on fire. Return fire was experienced from the dorsal turret ahead of the tail. After my attack I broke away to port to avoid hitting the e/a and looking over my shoulder, saw that my numbers 2 and 3 had delivered their attacks and that the e/a was going down in flames in a 45° dive. I saw no one get out and later saw it burning on the ground, with smoke rising to about 500 feet.

Flt Lt Raymond Hartley, on his first operational sortie with the squadron, described his part in the action:

I was flying as No 2 to Blue Leader. As we arrived over the target I heard the order to go into line astern. We were then at 5,000 feet and I saw Blue Leader begin his attack on the e/a from astern. I followed him down and as he began to break away, succeeded in getting in a burst closing in from about 450 yards to 250 yards, with 5° deflection changing to dead astern. I saw one of the starboard engines burst into flames and then I broke away to starboard almost passing over the e/a. I turned and followed Blue Leader and rejoined the rest of the formation. During my attack I experienced return fire from the dorsal turret.

No 183 Squadron’s operational diary recorded this aircraft as ‘an FW 200K’, but post-war research by historian Chris Goss identified it as Heinkel He 177A–3 bomber, Werk Nummer 535672, operated by 6/KG 40. When attacked by Walter Dring it was about to fly from Kerlin-Bastard airfield at Lorient to Bordeaux-Mérignac airfield and was destroyed in the attack. The crew of four, Ofw Hans Behr, Fw Werner Götze, Ofw Kurt Wyborny and Ofw Paul Herzog, all died when the He 177 came down in La Fontaine de Kériaquel in the village of Pont Scorff, about 4 miles north of the airfield.

Walter Dring led armed shipping, fighter sweep and dive-bombing operations – usually in JR128 – to the Brest area on 27, 28, 30 and 31 December 1943, with the squadron often flying two such operations in a day. He always led from the front and, while sparing neither himself nor his pilots in this constant harrying of the enemy airfields, rocket installations and shipping movements, he remained a popular and inspiring CO. In his letters home, Walter said that as an officer having command he must be in the lead and do the leading, and even though he might come in for some criticism, he just had to get on with it. He said: ‘Responsibility makes character.’ He pushed his pilots hard but found it easy to mix with them and he looked after them. Fg Off Peter Brett, for example, recalled that the CO always arranged things so that pilots going on leave could fly an aircraft to an airfield near their destination which would then be picked up and flown back by another pilot returning from leave, thus saving them a lot of travelling time. New Year’s Day 1944 brought recognition of Walter’s efforts with the award of a DFC. The citation read: