Spitfire Ace by Gordon Olive DFC|Dennis Newton

Author:Gordon Olive, DFC|Dennis Newton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2015-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

12

Death in August

By the following morning it was clear to everyone that this was a new phase in the fighting. 54 Squadron had been bombed at Manston that morning in almost identical circumstances to our own. They made it with a few more yards to spare than we did, as they were alert to the dangers.

To my dismay I found we were to go down there again at midday to relieve 54 Squadron. It seemed impossible that anyone could operate off Manston after the mess made by the carpet bombing of the previous day and that very morning.

When we arrived I discovered how the miracle had been achieved. An Army gentleman in a new device called a bulldozer had succeeded in filling in enough bomb holes to give us a clear strip a hundred yards wide to land and get off on. It was flagged out like a runway and we were back in business.

It seemed to me the height of absurdity that we should risk Spitfires for another attack by the German bombers. We were only twenty-two miles away from their nearest aerodromes and our hopes of surviving by another miracle were nil in my opinion. It took the bombers less than five minutes to cross the Channel at that point. But it seemed the politicians had decided that Manston would be held and operated regardless of danger and inconvenience to the pilots.

Right or wrong, we were on Manston at 12.00. The place was a greater mess than I had imagined. All the dozen or so huts had been destroyed except for two. Two Me 110 fighter bombers had been caught by the explosions of their own bombs. They had crashed and rolled themselves up in front of the crew room in an unrecognisable tangle of metal and wire. Four bodies were still trapped in them – dead – but it had so far defied the resources of the ambulance and rescue teams to extricate them.

Sergeant Franklin came in sporting a pair of very smart German flying boots. He had managed to get them off one of the corpses! They were much dressier than ours.

A belly-landed Me 109 was a few yards away. It was in quite good shape and we spent some time studying it. It was almost the same size as a Spitfire but the petrol tank was behind the pilot instead of being in front of him, as in the Spitfires and Hurricanes. This was a big advantage from the pilot’s point of view.

An aeroplane was a structure full of petrol, oil, inflammable engine coolant and explosive bullets or bombs. Once a bullet holed the petrol tank the fumes of petrol and oil in the fuselage became highly explosive. A single tracer bullet was more than enough to explode the lot.

Once the petrol tank was set on fire a vast sheet of brilliant orange flame trailed back from the tank, rapidly melting and consuming what was left of the frail aluminium structure. No human could survive the heat of the burning petrol.

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