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Before starting the engines, I asked Graham if the radar equipment appeared to be working OK. He said it was, which was a relief as it could be quite temperamental. I started the engines and let them idle at 1200 rpm. While waiting for them to warm up, I called the Control Tower and checked the local channel of my radio. I also made sure that the gun sight light rheostat was in working order, ran the engines and checked the magneto drop. Everything looked good, so I flashed the navigation lights to signal the ground crew we were ready to go. The ground crew removed the wheel chocks and signalled that all was clear to start taxiing. I pulled away from the dispersal area and headed toward the first flare of the runway. I stopped perpendicular to the row of flares, put the propellers into fine pitch, rechecked the fore and aft trim and called the tower and asked for permission to take-off. I turned onto the runway, opened the throttles and concentrated on keeping a straight run with the flares on my left-hand side. This was the time to pray that a truck had not been inadvertently parked on the runway! We became airborne and I called the tower, turned off the navigation lights, set course almost due north and started climbing. The time was 8:10 p.m. After a few minutes we crossed the coast and headed out over the Mediterranean. As we reached 6000 ft., I levelled off, trimmed the aircraft to fly straight and level at 230 m.p.h. and settled down for the 200-mile flight across the water. This would take us to within about 75 miles from the coast of Crete. At that point, we would have to lose height and prepare to go into enemy territory. It was a beautiful night. The moon was almost full, there were no clouds and the stars were extremely bright. From this height the Mediterranean looked like a vast mirror. I mentally began figuring what would be the best approach to make an attack on another plane, assuming we were lucky enough to find one. We were trained to keep on the dark side and never get in a position where we were silhouetted against clouds. The classic night fighter attack was to approach from behind and below. Then identify the target from directly underneath, throttle back and climb…at the same time raking the enemy aircraft with gunfire as it moved through the gun sight. On a night like this the best approach would be to keep the target silhouetted by the moon if possible. In slightly less than an hour I throttled back and started to lose height. As we got to about five hundred feet it was possible to see the whitecaps on the waves and now that we were a long way from our base, the sea looked a lot more menacing. I carefully lost altitude until I judged we were about fifty feet above the water and set the altimeter to read zero. At the same time, I trimmed the plane to be slightly tail-heavy. Every pilot at that time had his own method of low flying over water at night…this was my approach to do it as safely as possible. When the altimeter registered zero, I knew we were still about fifty feet above the water, while at the same time the plane had a tendency to climb away from danger. (Radio altimeters were non-existent at that time) Maintaining the height at fifty feet we approached Crete. As we neared the coast we started to hear a low humming noise on the intercom system. It was enemy radar sweeping the shoreline. This did not unduly concern us because we had experienced it before. However, it had been rather disconcerting the first time we had heard it, when we realized that this meant the enemy was searching for us. Tonight our plane was low enough not to send back a signal. We were still holding height at 50 feet and airspeed steady at 230 m.p.h. All the instruments appeared normal. The gun button was on the right hand side of the control column and I operated the switch to arm the guns. Then I turned on the gun sight and rotated the rheostat to adjust the brilliance until I could clearly see the ring with a cross in the middle, but without it being too bright to blind me. The theory was, that a wingspan of 50 feet would fit into the ring at a range of 250 yards. All the firepower of the cannons and machine guns was synchronized to fill a ten feet square at a range of 250 yards, making this range the most devastating. If you encountered a plane with a wingspan of 100 feet, then only half of the span would be required to fit into the ring to be at a range of 250 yards, and so on. Graham switched on our radar and I concentrated on flying by instruments, even though it appeared bright enough outside to fly visually. Approached the Straits of Kythera, we sighted Cape Gramvonsa at the western end of Crete. The time was 9:45 p.m. and we had been in the air 1 hour 35 minutes. Graham announced that he was picking up another aircraft on his radar at a range of just over 10 miles. The other plane was showing the I.F.F. (Indicator Friend or Foe). We deduced it could only be Steele and Clay and I decided to find out. I pushed the transmit key and quickly asked if they had seen anything. Steele replied that there was bags of trade. He sounded excited and I would like to have talked some more, but it was not the time to be holding a conversation. |
