Chapter 3; The Men and the Aircraft

Before recording the deeds of the pilots and crews of Coastal Command, something must be said of their training, their environment, and of the aircraft they fly.

In temperament the General Reconnaissance pilots and crews resemble their comrades in Bomber rather than those in Fighter Command.

This is natural, for their duties have this much in common - they involve flights of many hours' duration in almost all weathers, and during much of that time the main preoccupation must be whether the aircraft is on its right course or not. Then, however, the resemblance grows thin. The crew of a bomber are concerned to find a target, which is usually stationary, and to hit it with their bombs ; those of an aircraft of Coastal Command have first to find what is very often a moving target and then to hit it, or to keep it under observation so that a striking force may do so.

Moreover, if they are on convoy protection and this form of patrol is one of their main duties and entails the spending of many thousands of hours in the air and the covering of many millions of miles over the sea -they may never see a target at all, though they must constantly be on the look-out for one. They are therefore, generally speaking, of the phlegmatic turn of mind.

They must find their way by methods of precision, relying on instruments for their guidance. There are no landmarks five hundred miles out in the Atlantic, and they may not see land of any kind for nine-tenths of their patrol.

There is bred in them much of the sense of direction possessed by the sailor or - it is almost possible to say-by the homing pigeon.

Yet this power to find their way with precision and certainty over vast spaces of water, tracked only by the changing lanes traced upon its surface by the wind or by the spume of unnumbered waves, is an acquired faculty, the much-hoped-for result of months of practice and hard work.

<<< He protects the lightships from the vilest of all the assaults the enemy is making at sea.

"Ability to navigate accurately," runs a passage in one of the reports of their first Commander-in-Chief in this war, " is, I consider, one of the most important qualifications of the General Reconnaissance pilot, and my training policy has always been framed with that end in view." So pilots and crews are trained from the first day of their career to have implicit faith in their navigational instruments-above all in the compass. To inculcate this requires patience. It is a natural tendency for the eye to look outside the cockpit straining to pick up some solid object which will give a guide to the position of the aircraft.

It was not easy, especially at the beginning of the war, to induce in the minds of the pilots and crews the belief that in the compass lay their safety; but as the days and weeks passed they became aware and now fully understand that it is dead reckoning which will bring them back to base and that no member of the crew, whether he be pilot, navigator, wireless operator or gunner, can lay claim to be a trained man until he knows, not in his head only but also in his heart, the true meaning of this phrase and all that it implies.

Once this lesson is learnt, this faith acquired, the result is immediately apparent, and it is a remarkable experience to witness the return of a young pilot and his crew from their first sortie in bad weather, when, having carried out all the drill learnt during long hours of instruction, they find that they are safely back in the Mess. They can then begin to feel -and, being young, to show- that joy and pride in achievement which is the reward of trained men.

It will thus be seen that pilots of Coastal Command flying boats must possess many of the qualities of the sailor. The young pilot in the early days of his training, unless he has had previous experience of the sea, is not infrequently found to stand in some awe of the Navy. He is brought into close association with a Service which acquired the title "Royal" in the reign of King Henry VIII, and whose victories have changed the course of history not once but many times.

Soon, however, he perceives that, belonging to a younger Service, he has, nevertheless, a share in the tradition of an older, that he has much in common with those who go down to the sea in ships, and that, though he may behold the wonders of the Lord from a somewhat different angle and from some hundreds of feet nearer heaven, he is none the less of their company and is admitted by right of his calling to their fellowship.

This should, indeed, be so ; for a great part of his training has a strong naval flavour. He must know almost as much about seamanship as he must know about airmanship. He must be able to handle and control a machine which is both an aircraft and a surface vessel. It is moored to a buoy. It carries an anchor. Its instruments are calibrated in knots, for its speed is calculated in sea, not in land, miles, and this is so with all aircraft of Coastal Command, whether they are designed to take off from and alight on land or water.

He must have a sound working knowledge of tides and currents. He must acquire an eye for weather, with all that that implies. He must feel at home in a small boat. He must read a chart as a bomber pilot reads a map. He must be able to recognise ships of every sort and kind and in every condition of visibility.

Lighthouse keepers are his friends, and the crews of lightships, whom he still protects from the vilest of all the vile assaults which the enemy is making at sea. He cannot hear the seagulls crying, but the flash of their wings may bring him to an open boat freighted with shipwrecked mariners or to a rubber dinghy holding a crew whose aircraft has come to grief over the sea. It is when he sees seagulls walking upon the water that he must, according to a saying of the Service, beware, for then the water is land, and to put down a flying boat on land ...

His chief enemy is not the German Luftwaffe or the German Navy, but boredom, which may provoke first inattention, then indifference. He must spend hundreds of hours with nothing to look upon but the expanse of sea and sky. " Wave, on wave, on wave to West - stretches the vast monotony of the Atlantic Ocean. It may glitter in the noonday or lie devoid of light and colour in the hour after sunset and before dawn ; it may seem to crawl like the wrinkled skin of a beast or stretch in ridged and uneven furrows under the breath of strong winds ; but it will be empty for hours.

The aircraft quarters it, moving in squares of which each side is ten miles long. Its crew, even if it be a Sunderland, have less room in which to move than is to be found in a small fishing smack. They are looking for a convoy. four, five, six hundred miles out, or what is far more difficult, for a single ship. The one or the other is sighted and the protection patrol begins, enduring for as long as there is enough light or enough petrol. Then comes the long journey back to base.

The General Reconnaissance pilot and his crew may envy their comrades leading a life of high adventure in a squadron of torpedo carrying Beauforts in the Channel or of Hudsons striking at shipping off the Norwegian coast. These are flown by men who have passed through the same training as themselves, but who have had the good fortune to be given duties of a more exciting kind. They envy them, but that is all. They know better than anyone else the full importance of their task ; for theirs are the eyes which catch the first glimpse of the great convoys carrying the food and the weapons of war needed to prosecute the fight and achieve the victory.

They watch the ordered lines of merchant ships crossing a vast and vital battlefield. Over this they fly in fulfilment of a task which may be grim and is certainly not gay, but which is slowly and surely winning a decisive battle. " Set me some great task, ye gods ! And I will show you my spirit. ' Not so,' says the good heaven; 'plod and plough.'" So writes a philosopher of the New World. The General Reconnaissance pilots and crews of Coastal Command pay daily heed to this advice.

To provide and maintain a balanced air force, one, that is, in which a true proportion exists between land- and sea-borne aircraft, has ever been the aim of Coastal Command. Adaptable though the modern aircraft has proved to be, it cannot be used for all purposes, nor can one type entirely take the place of another. In general, land-borne aircraft are used for attack and for reconnaissance, while sea-borne, having a greater range and endurance, are more suitable for long-distance reconnaissance and for convoy protection far out in the Atlantic. It is by the judicious use, both strategical and tactical, of each main type that success is achieved.

The aircraft flown on general reconnaissance and convoy protection are some of them land aircraft, some of them flying boats. The first are the Anson, the Wellington and the Whitley, the two last specially adapted for flights of long duration over the sea. These are all British-built. At the beginning of the war among the land aircraft the Anson was the main standby. It has now been almost entirely replaced by faster aircraft, but the services it rendered to this country were of the greatest value. Though not fast, it was very reliable and easy to manoeuvre, and these qualities were summed up by the Command in the phrase, " Anson is as Anson does."

From the start, American-built Hudsons were put into service as fast as they could be procured. The Hudson has a good range, is well armed and has a wide field of vision.

The American-built Liberator has only recently been allotted to Coastal Command. It is capable of long flights far out into the Atlantic. Being well armed with gun-turrets, it can attack and destroy the prowling Focke-Wulfe, and being fitted with depth charges it can deal effectively with U-boats.

The Wellingtons and Whitleys in use for reconnaissance are converted bombers. They are doing valuable service both by day and night.

At the beginning of the war there were three main types of flying boats in use -the Stranraer, the London and the Sunderland. All these were British-built. The Stranraers and Londons, after doing excellent work in the first fifteen months of the war, were withdrawn from squadrons early in 1941. The Sunderland has a very wide range and an armament formidable enough for it to be nicknamed the "flying porcupine" by the Germans.

It is the largest aircraft in use by Coastal Command and can almost be described as commodious. Meals can be cooked on board and there are bunks where those of the crew not on watch can sleep very comfortably. So much so that once a Sunderland dropped depth charges on a U-boat, and the second pilot, at rest and asleep at the time, knew nothing about the attack until he came on watch again an hour or so later.

Another flying boat almost as large as the Sunderland is the American-built Catalina. It first came into operation in March 1941, and is in constant and increasing use. It is a great standby and for long-distance patrols has few equals. One of these craft remained more than twenty-six hours in the air during the operations which ended in the sinking of the " Bismarck." In winter and bad weather it not infrequently happens that a Catalina returning in darkness to its base after an eighteen hour patrol, and finding it obscured by fog or low cloud, remains aloft all night until it can come down in greater safety by the light of dawn.

Other types of seaplane which have been used are the Lerwick flying boat and the Northrop float-plane.

The pilots and crews of torpedo bombers and long-range fighters undergo the same training as those engaged primarily on reconnaissance duties. No special distinction is made between them ; but, sincc the duty of Coastal Command is as much offensive as it is defensive, its pilots are ready at any moment to strike at the enemy with torpedo, bomb and machine-gun. The target of the torpedo is a ship, either a naval vessel or a supply ship ; that of the bomb may be the same or may be a " fringe " target, one that is situated on or near the coast, a factory or a dockyard, or ships at anchor in a harbour, or a gun-emplacement or a wireless station or troops at drill.

The pilot of a long-range fighter is mainly concerned with getting close enough to the enemy bomber to bring it to action. His is in the nature of a roving commission. He is not directed from the ground on to an enemy formation previously discovered by radiolocation or by other means. He must seek out the marauder, usually a single aircraft itself seeking a convoy or more often a straggler from a convoy. Frequently he is called upon to give protection to ships of the Royal Navy operating in or near enemy waters, and he must then be ready to encounter enemy fighters faster and more heavily armed than his own aircraft, which has to carry enough petrol to take him to the scene of operations and back again over many miles of sea.

It will thus be seen that, though superficially the offensive role of Coastal Command is the same as that of the other Commands, it is in practice more difficult to carry out and requires not only daring and resolution but a special degree of skill.

The aircraft used are, for torpedo attack the Beaufort, for bombing the Wellington, Whitley, Blenheim, and most often the Hudson, for long-range fighting the Beaufighter and the Blenheim. At the beginning of' the war the Vickers-Armstrong Vild0eest was used as a. torpedo-bomber, but was replaced in squadrons by Beauforts during 1940.

Operating under Coastal Command have been various types of aircraft belonging to other Commands of the Royal Air Force and various types of naval aircraft. For example, Battle bombers and Hurricane fighters have been used. So, too, have Swordfish, Albacores, Skuas and Roes of the Fleet Air Arm when its squadrons have beer, attached to the Command for operations.

Before leaving the subject of the pilots and the aircraft, a word must be said about the members of the crew and about the maintenance staff. The work of the navigator will be described later. It is supplemented and completed by that of the wireless operator and the air gunner. A thorough knowledge of wireless is of great use and importance, and all wireless operators receive a specialised training. This must indeed be so in a service of which so much of the work is reconnaissance.

The air gunner in Coastal Command is not only a gunner, he is also a wireless operator and may be trained in navigation.

The ground crews are concerned as much a, are those of Fighter and Bomber Commands to maintain their aircraft and its engines in perfect condition. In the big flying boats the engine fitters and riggers are members of the crew and take part in all their flights. As in the other Commands, logs are kept of the performance of the engines, and it is not unusual or the ground staff to interrogate a pilot and crew on their return and demand a detailed report on the behaviour of their aircraft so as to make sure that it was airworthy.

With men and aircraft such as these, Coastal Command is carrying on its triple task of reconnaissance, protection and attack. This triple task has a double object - to prevent the enemy from imposing his blockade and to help in imposing our own.

Whenever it is possible Coastal Command follows the old principle that attack is the best defence, being ever mindful of the words of Drake in his dispatch of March 1588 : "The nation will be persuaded that the Lord will put into Her Majesty and her people courage and boldness not to fear invasion, but to seek God's enemies and Her Majesty's where they may be found". Its activities are thus at once defensive and offensive, and the line dividing them is often hard to perceive. What fortune has attended them will now be set down. It is a tale of the sea, the wind and the sky, and of men who, careless of the friendship or hostility of the elements, keep watch and ward by day and night, ready to attack and destroy a formidable, unscrupulous, but not invincible foe.