Haugesund

“This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bob Davis from the Burgess Hill Adult Education Centre and has been added to the website on behalf of Goronwy Edwards with his permission and he fully understands the site’s terms and conditions”

The Norwegian scenery could be breathtaking, especially the sunrises, as the rays of the rising sun struck the mountain tops at different angles, each with its topping of pink icing. If the Hun’s not about, and you feel a bit playful, you can get an extra sunrise by diving steeply as soon as the sun come up, so that it vanishes behind the mountains. In a few seconds, as you level out, you get your little treat all over again, though with inevitable and delightful differences, because the angles of the sun’s rays have altered, so the colours alter with it.
On 19th. April, the fourth day of the shooting war, we did a recce of Haugesund, as it was thought that German naval ships were now using the port. As they wanted real detail I decided to do a run at nought feet a couple of hundred yards from the shore, as ship recognition is very much more positive in silhouette.
As I skated along the water Bill, my navigator, opened the side window and got cracking with the hand-held camera. Soon, through the opened window, I heard the familiar crack-crack-crack of machine gun bullets going past.
“Can you spot that bloody gun?” I yelled at Bill.
“Busy with this bloody camera. Keep her going as she is, I’m getting some good shots.
‘You’ll be getting some different kind of shots up your jumper if you don’t watch out.’
Then, quite suddenly, the gunfire became much more accurate, each bullet cracking past with a flat, staccato wallop. That gunner had the deflection worked out to perfection, as shots were now crashing through the fuselage. It was high time to give him best.
Just ahead of us a large bridge arched over the hundred-yard strip of water separating the mainland from Risoy Island, and the sloping ground of the mainland and the buildings on the island made of the strip of water a steep-sided gulley in which I felt I could get away from that accursed gun, the waterfront here kinking to the right, which would be to my advantage. Once I got into that gulley I’d be out of his field of fire.
“I’m going under the bridge, Bill,” I yelled, and did a right-left shimmy, as the area was cluttered with fishing boats and their masts, which made the approach and exit a bit difficult. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Bill was still winding away with the camera — he wasn’t the sort of chap to let a thing like flying under a bridge interfere with good reconnaissance shots.
The bridge rushed closer, and I got right down on the deck, the tips of the propellers only a few feet (I hoped) from the water. And then I saw three somethings hanging down from the arch. They came into focus as three hefty-looking wire cables, each capable of tearing off a wing.
It wasn’t on: I didn’t feel like a trip to the knacker’s yard yet. I pulled back on the wheel and yelled “I’m going over the top, Bill.” And fervently hoped that I was.
As the nose of the Hudson rose in the climb it obscured the view, and I sweated out the next few seconds, hoping that the tearing impact would not come, and also aware of a clattering noise in the nose. Then the parapet flashed by a few feet below the port engine.
2.
We’d made it!
I eased out of the climb, steep turned left out to sea in case that gunner was still in business, then climbed sedately away.
I became aware of a furious-faced Bill struggling up the steps from the nose, still with the heavy camera in his hands. I gathered that the clattering noise I’d heard as we swept over the bridge had been Bill and the camera, under the influence of 4 or 5 G, being rammed down the stairs.
“Can’t you, for Gods sake, give me some warning before you pull a stunt like that?” bellowed the puce-coloured face. “You nearly broke my bloody neck.”
“Bill, if I’d taken you under that bridge you really would have broken your bloody neck.”
I explained.
He looked slightly mollified, and we climbed away in silence.
I sniffed. “Can you smell anything?” I asked him.
“Not particularly.” (He was still in a bit of a huff.) “Oh! Like hot metal, you mean?”
“Like hot metal, Bill. Have a good hunt round with the crew.”
I checked the instruments, which all read normal, then slid back the emergency panel in the floor to expose the engine fire extinguishers. Bill came back and reported that they found nothing, then smoke started to come through the cabin heating vents.
I took a squint back into the port engine cowling, where all seemed well, Bill doing the same on the other side.
“This is it!” he cried. “Have a look.”
I put in the autopilot and joined him at the window, to see the crankcase of the starboard engine a streaming mass of green oil.
“There’s a bullet in that lot somewhere. I’ll take her up to 3,000 feet and stick around over land. If we get on fire and can’t control it we’ll bale out and try to join up with the Norwegian resistance. Tell Gilbert to get back in the turret and keep a good lookout.”
The starboard oil pressure dropped, and the temperature rose to a dangerous level.
“I’m shutting the engine down, Bill. She’ll fly OK on one.”
I opened the port engine a couple of inches of boost, trimmed on a bit of left rudder and put the starboard propeller into coarse pitch to reduce drag. But I left the ignition on as I didn’t want the plugs to oil up: we might need that engine if we were jumped by any Luftwaffe boys who’d had an early breakfast.
Within a few minutes the smell and smoke had vanished, and we set off home. With the good engine running well below full power it hauled us along at 110 knots, and I kept our bombs on board as there was no point in jettisoning them, with the Hudson coping so well.
Three and a half hours later we landed, to find that the damage was slight — a bullet had sliced through an external oil pipe that was easily replaced, and the riggers soon patched up the fuselage. The aircraft was serviceable next day, in fact, and that night we flew her Frederikshavn in Denmark.
*
“Reconnaissance at night”, I queried. “We’re not bats.”
“Full moon,” came back the Intelligence Officer.

3.
“But what on earth can anyone see at night, even with a full moon, that’s of the slightest use to the war effort?”
“How about Admiral Scheer for starters?” (That was a pocket battleship.)
“Oh, no,” said Bill. Or it may have been some other four-letter word.
“We’ve lost track of Scheer. She’s been working up in the Baltic recently and she’s vanished from our recce photos, so she may well be on her way out. It’s a long shot, but she could possibly be in Frederikshavn in Denmark. The information is wanted urgently enough to justify a night search.”
I walked over to the wall map. “That’s a fair trip, about 1,000 miles there and back by the time we’ve messed about.”
The I.O. looked a bit embarrassed. “Well actually, it’s a little bit further really, as we don’t want you to fly over Denmark on the way out. We don’t want them to have any warning of your approach, or she might slip through our fingers again. Go North-East up the Skagerrak well away from land, then turn south-westerly into the Kattegat and come in to Frederikshavn from the sea. It’s a long haul, I’m afraid, but you will increase your range by leaving three of your bombs behind. You’ll carry only one 250-pounder, just in case she’s there. When you’ve done the recce, signal us immediately, and you can come home straight across Jutland.”
“You bet.”
I was navigating this trip, and we got away from Leuchars before dark, so that I could get some accurate drifts before nightfall. The moon eventually rose in a cloudless sky, and the North Sea became a very romantic place indeed, the moontrack reflecting beautifully on the sea.
The intercom came to life with a click. “You asleep down there, Dopey? queried Bill.
(I had acquired my nickname because of a fancied resemblance to the dwarf in Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarfs. They said that it cast no aspersions on my mental capabilities, and I had got completely used to it. Even my future wife and her family were first introduced to me under that name.)
“Not asleep, Bill. What do you want?”
“Time to the next alteration of course.”
I twiddled a few knobs. “In eight minutes Bill, turn to port on to Oh-six-three magnetic for about 20 minutes. Then we’ll go east for a while before turning south-south-west for Frederikshavn. I’ll keep you up to date.”
Forty minutes later we were running towards Frederikshavn at 500 feet so I came up out of the nose and clicked on the intercom.
“Captain to crew. We’ll be in Frederikshavn in three minutes, and with this moon we should easily distinguish between Scheer and any merchant ships. She’s 12,000 tons, with straight-cut upperworks in two lumps. She’s got 6 four-inch ack-ack guns which won’t amount to anything at night, and 8 three-pounders and ten machine guns which might.”
“How low do you want?” asked Bill.
“A hundred feet would do. Lower if you feel like it.”
In the moonlight I couldn’t see anything remotely resembling a naval vessel.

4.
An automatic gun opened up from the harbour wall, a 40 mm by the rate of the muzzle flashes. No point in telling Bill as it looked as though the gunner couldn’t hit floor with his hat.
“One more run, Bill.”
Still nothing.
“And one for luck. As low as you like.
Bill did a real daisy-clipper across the harbour mouth, and it was obvious that Scheer wasn’t there. As we turned for home I signalled base. ‘Scheer definitely not in Frederikshavn.”
We went up to two thousand feet, and soon flew over Aalborg aerodrome. I considered dropping our bomb into one of the hangars, but didn’t know how the invasion of Denmark was progressing, and I didn’t want to kill any Danes. When out to sea I dropped the bomb to lighten our load, and we droned on. There was little else that I could do until we got nearer land.
I thought back to our fathers’ war. It was in this patch of sea that the first and last action between the massive Dreadnought battleships of the early 19th. century was fought. Superficially, it was inconclusive, but the German battlefleet never put to sea again, until they sailed to incarceration in Scapa Flow after the armistice of 1918.
An hour or so later I went up the stairs en route to the wireless operator, passing Bill in the semi-darkness of his cockpit, the instrument bank in front of him a mass of luminous dials, the only sign of movement being the slow oscillation, left or right, of the synchroscope as one or other of the engines gained or lost a few revolutions.
“Get me a bearing from Leuchars would you, Corporal.”
*
On 24th. April I was No. 3 of a Battle Flight sent to provide air cover for three of our destroyers somewhere off Bergen. It was a bit of a barrel-scraping effort, as the leader and No. 2 were from C Flight, with us as No. 3 from B Flight as No. 3. Not for the first time, I never felt really at home in ‘strange’ company. From hours of chewing the cud in B Flight office, I well knew how B Flight people thought and acted, and I didn’t like the way our flight developed.
When we were quite close to the destroyers we were to escort we were jumped by two
Messerschmitt 109s. Our leader turned westwards, to lead the fighters as far away from their base as possible, must have gone to full throttle, and dived for the sea to prevent them from getting underneath us, where our gunners would be unable to reply. In this I couldn’t fault him, but he was giving the engines a real hammering, and we at Nos. 2 and 3 were having the greatest difficulty in holding formation. The 109s were a hundred miles an hour faster than we were, so could catch us whatever speed we were doing. By throttling back a bit the strain on the engines would have been eased, for with six of them belting away at take-off boost I felt that, sooner or later, one would pack in, in which case that aircraft was a dead duck.
Our gunner fired back as often as he could, then after about 25 minutes, during which time I had heard no bullet go through the aircraft, the 109s broke off, possibly out of ammunition, but probably also worried about their fuel supply, as we’d taken then a fair distance from land. I wished them ill on their journey.

5.
But we, too, had used so much fuel in going flat out that not only did we have to abandon the destroyers; but we did not even have enough fuel to get home. We made for our nearest base, Lossiemouth to refuel.
Lossie was a grass aerodrome, and we landed in a wide V about a hundred yards apart. I was on the right and, after we touched down I took a look at Derry Matson on the left and was dismayed to see that he had developed noticeable swing to starboard, and it looked as though we were going to collide. I abandoned my grip on the wheel, pulled hard on the brake lever with both hands and trod on full right rudder, but for some time it didn’t seem to have any effect on Derry’s apparently firm intention of ramming me. With the undercarriage shuddering and groaning the Hudson skeetered harshly over the ground until, at last, we seemed to be slowing down faster than Derry and, as he slid across me about 20 yards in front of the nose I noticed that his rudders were at full left deflection, as indeed they should have been in an effort to correct his ham-handed landing.
“It’s a fine thing, “ said Bill as he loosened his grip on the bulkhead, “To arrive home intact after a dusting from a couple of 199s only to get nearly clobbered by a pal doing a lousy landing. Now let’s get some fuel, and we’ll probably be home for lunch.”
I looked out of the window before taxying in, and it seemed strange that the hangars, towards which I’d been landing, were nowhere to be seen. I also became aware that I was left wing low, and a glance out of the window revealed a flat port tyre. Feeling extremely guilty that it was obviously I who had swung into Derry, and not him into me, I switched off the engines. Then I noticed that Derry was right wing low. He had a burst right tyre, and we’d both been doing an inward swing. We all piled out onto the grass and Derry and I apologised for all the horrid things we’d thought about each other.

INSERT EXERPTS FROM DERRY - LETTERS FILE

Apart from Derry’s two wounded crewmen our two aircraft were little damaged by gunfire, but it’s amazing how close those 109s had come to writing off two aircraft, and perhaps their crews, with just two bullets. (You don’t hear tyres bursting when in the air - there’s too much noise going on, what with two engines at full blast, the hiss of the slipstream and your own guns going off every now and then.)
Sometimes, to shoot a line, a flight of three aircraft would land really close together, like Spitfires. Thank heaven we hadn’t done that today, or Derry and I would have met at speed.
I had also learned from the incident that the undercarriage would stand up to some pretty brutal treatment, a great comfort in view of our ‘wet’ wing tanks so near to the engines. As for the engines themselves, they had been magnificent: I was beginning to have great confidence in the Hudson.
In the afternoon a Hudson diverted on its way out to patrol, and dropped off a couple of spare wheels, and we could fly again.
*

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