Flak by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

13 Dick Thomas

Pilot

Our job was to generally mess everybody up

On the night of 14 November 1940, Dick was lying in hospital in Cheltenham having his appendix out. Further north, in Coventry, the German air force was carrying out the most intensive air attack of World War Two thus far, sending 500 bombers to destroy the centre of the city, including the only cathedral Britain lost during the war, the fourteenth century built St Michael’s. It was also the first big-scale use of an electronic device to aid in bomb aiming and this night, it worked horribly well. The Germans called the operation Moonlight Sonata – the insult to Beethoven can hardly be imagined.

Although miles away, Dick heard the raid, as he could the shrapnel from the virtually useless anti-aircraft guns raining down on the hospital roof. He determined then and there to join the air force.

After several months of elementary training, Dick found himself on a ship, sailing across the Atlantic to Canada in the middle of winter. The ship had been in dry dock, the air was stale and the sea was rough. In a moment of insanity, he volunteered for cookhouse duties, and found the choice of cuisine, well, not conducive to a rough sea voyage. He is still scarred by the experience.

‘The main meal was something swimming in gravy, and then custard with prunes’ – just the thing for a stormy Atlantic crossing. As the sea got worse, more and more sailors and airmen left the foetid atmosphere of the mess in a hurry.

‘I was literally up to my knees in a mixture of gravy, tea, custard and prune juice,’ he remembered.

As quickly as he could, Dick volunteered for submarine watch duties up on the icy deck, and stayed there. For the next fourteen days he survived on All-bran. Years after, he still couldn’t go near the stuff.

Via an uncommon arrangement, Dick ended up training not in Canada, but way down south in sunny Florida with the Americans. He found flying pretty easy and ended up graduating with not one, but two sets of wings – the metal badge of the US Army Air Force, as well as the cloth of his own RAF. In fact, Dick was such a good pilot that the Yanks decided to hang on to him and train him up as an instructor, a job for which he had absolutely no relish. Protest he might, but instruct he did, for over six months, clocking up 900 hours before they let him go home. The journey this time was on the Queen Elizabeth and took just four days.

In retrospect, the extra training probably saved his life. Most new pilots went into battle with a couple of hundred flying hours up their sleeve. Dick totalled 1,100, an advantage in experience impossible to measure. However, this setback proved to be just the first in a series of unexpected events – some bureaucratic, others just bizarre – which delayed the beginning of his operational flying nearly until the end of the war.

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