Night Fighter over Germany: Flying Beaufighters and Mosquitoes in World War 2 by Graham White

Author:Graham White
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781783460762
Publisher: Pen & Sword
Published: 2007-03-27T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Anchovy Airways

Not many people get the chance to run their own airline. We called ours Anchovy Airways, after the squadron’s callsign at the time, and I was its chief (and only) pilot.

We set up the organisation following my one and only war-wound. Which meant that I flew our one and only plane (well, it belonged to the RAF, which also paid our wages) with my one and only left arm – my one and only broken left arm – set in plaster.

Firstly, about the war-wound. After flying some twenty operations over Germany, shooting at and being shot at by all and sundry (or should it be Alles und sundry?), I remained in fairly pristine condition, untouched by human hand, as it were. Then, on New Year’s Day, my luck ran out. It was because there were eggs for breakfast – real live eggs I mean, none of your powdered rubbish, and they were a rare wartime delicacy. I was late up (when wasn’t I!) and I was running from the billet to the mess for my share of the rare treat, when I skidded on some ice and fell heavily on my left arm, promptly breaking it. To my utter disgust I was sent off at once to the nearest RAF hospital, which was at Ely, and they obligingly slapped the entire arm in plaster and sent me back. They didn’t even save me an egg.

The CO looked at my plastered arm disapprovingly. He was short of pilots, but even he grudgingly admitted that there were limits. ‘We can’t send you over Germany like that!’ he complained. ‘It’s probably against the Geneva Convention.’ (It was also, though he didn’t know it, against the Cotmanhay Convention, and in case you’re wondering, I’d just made that up because that’s where I was born.) Then, being a busy man, he suggested dismissively, ‘Make yourself useful – try flying the old Annie. You’ll have a job killing yourself on one of them, and you need to keep your hand in.’

True. The ‘Annie’, or Anson, was a rather crude old aircraft, used as a general runabout, that bumbled about the sky at around a steady hundred and twenty miles an hour, happily absorbing all the pain and indignities that we pilots heaped on it. If you dived it at a hundred and seventy or thereabouts and then pulled out sharply you could make the wooden wingtips flap up and down rather alarmingly. Great fun. But, like the amiable old Labrador that it resembled, it didn’t like sitting down – coming in to land it seemed to go on bouncing on down the runway for ever. I couldn’t bend my left arm, but with a little squirming of the left shoulder, and using the fingertips poking out of the end of the plaster to maximum effect, I found I could manage the throttles fairly well. Not that there was any question of doing ops on an Anson, of course – not without an overnight stay

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