Open Writing

We remained in Takoradi for some days and enjoyed the sun, sea, pineapples and other fruits. It was a welcome change from bleak, rationed UK. Soon we realised that Takoradi was the beginning of one of our secret routes, about which we were not permitted to write home.

The Middle East was a vital war zone. Indeed at that time it was the only area where we were engaging the Germans and Italians. However it was a long and costly sea route round the Cape, up the East African coast and through the Suez Canal. Then all the way back again. The Mediterranean was closed to Allied shipping because the Axis (Germany and Italy ) held the entire coastline except for Palestine, Egypt and a part of Libya.

It was realised that it should be possible to fly aircraft across Africa, although at that time there was no regular route across jungle and desert. The few airfields were developed, but the distance between them was far too great for the single seater fighters that were urgently needed.

The plan was thus to ship fighters in large components to Takoradi, assemble them there and fit large overload tanks (90 gallon in the case of Spitfires) and fly them across Africa in convoys of about 10, led by Beaufighter or Blenheim with a navigator aboard. An engine failure was liable to be fatal because landing on jungle treetops was not ideal.

The only problem was that there were no convoys arriving in Takoradi with fighters aboard. So finally the decision was to fly this batch of aircrew to the Middle East as passengers. However, no spare passenger aircraft available, so we waited.

Some of the lads were already missing girlfriends and took advantage of African prostitutes, who were readily available.

One evening I made my way to our toilets, which were a row of three buckets in cubicles outside our hut, and sat down there. A few moments later a large shape crawled under the door and I screamed for help. A couple of lads came running out and found a large land crab that finally crawled away into the bush. When not used to such creatures, they were frightening when first seen in the dark.

Long treks through the bush and visiting African villages provided exercise and entertainment. I became friendly with an African bush policeman. He too found it interesting to talk with someone from England. We managed a brief correspondence afterwards. At night we could sometimes hear African drum music in the distance.

Finally they flew us up the coast to Lagos where we were dumped for a couple more weeks. We could never find out why. One evening a party of us made our way to the Victoria Hotel in Lagos and there drank Congo beer, which I recall as a particularly potent beer. The game that evening was ‘Cardinal Puff’. For those not familiar with the game, there is a spoken ritual, in between which one drinks sips of beer.

If a mistake is made, the pint of beer has to be finished and the ritual restarted with another tankard. Thus, more and more beer was drunk, and the ability to get the ritual right was increasingly impossible.

Two of our party were ex-army friends who had re-mustered as trainee aircrew and were sergeant pilots like the rest of us. Slowly they became completely sloshed and started fighting one another. It always seemed strange to me that alcohol could have the effect of causing friends to fight each other.

Now to try and get these two back to camp. I obtained a taxi and with difficulty got them both into it. By now they had collapsed and the journey back to camp was made worse by both being sick. Eventually I got them to bed. No thanks the following morning because they did not remember the episode.

Finally we boarded a Hudson aircraft and were flown across Africa to Khartoum and then down the Nile to Cairo. The Hudson had the range to miss several of the airfields that single-seater fighters would have needed to use. For them the flight would have been Takoradi - Accra - Ikeja (Lagos) - Kano (a fine old African walled city) - Maiduguri - El Geneina - El Fasher-Wadi Seidna (Khartoum) - Wadi Halfa (halfway down the Nile) - Kilo 8 (eight kilometres to the west of Cairo).

First sight of Cairo from the air convinced me that the city had been bombed. However, examination from the ground later indicated that there were so many half-finished buildings and rubbish tips. The narrow green strip along both sides of the Nile suddenly ended with desert. It was almost a straight line dividing the two.

We were then placed in a transit camp not too far from Kilo 8 and within range of Heliopolis and Cairo, which we could reach by tram. So we were able to familiarise ourselves with our first Middle Eastern city. In those days overseas travel was not an activity for more than the very few.

On one afternoon when returning to camp at the tram starting point my bare arm was resting on the open window ledge of the tram when I spotted a knife blade moving down towards my wrist. A quick move saved my wrist, although what the Arab was after was my wristwatch, held by a white linen strap, which was the fashion in the heat. I leapt up to give chase. Fortunately for me the Arab quickly escaped in the crowd.

There was a flow of the wildest pornographic paperback books in the camp, which horrified this comparatively innocent young man. I therefore sat down and wrote a letter to our commanding officer, suggesting that such books were bad for morale. I must have started a habit that has stayed with me ever since - of writing to the press and/or authorities on various matters.

Finally we started getting posted to Units, and three of us were sent to a Kittyhawk squadron a little further up in the Western Desert. This was the summertime when the Allies had been driven right back to El Alamein and quite a few of the Cairo HQ staff had been moved away in fear of the Axis overrunning Egypt.

The Western Desert troops were scornful of the Cairo based HQ personnel, who were scathingly referred to as ‘The Groppi Light Horse’. Groppi was a luxurious Cairo café where delicious cakes and ice cream could be enjoyed.

The Kittyhawk was an American fighter, known by them as the P40, and a development from the Mohawk. It was a heavier, less manoeuvrable and slower aircraft, but was very suitable for ground support work, attacking airfields and tanks with machinegun and bombs. Two 250 pound bombs, or one or two 500 pound. The CO on one occasion even managed a 2,000 pound bomb. Not something to be repeated because of the difficulty of taking off on comparatively short runways.

The main activity was attacking airfields. One time one of our aircraft was hit and made an emergency wheels-up crash landing in the corner of the airfield. The pilot was unhurt and climbed out of his plane and waved to us. Trucks were moving towards him in order to take him prisoner.

Our CO announced over the radio that he was going in to land to pick him up and that the rest of us were to cover him and attack the trucks. This we did. He landed in the far corner of the airfield and ended by the crashed plane, whose pilot climbed in and sat on his lap. I am not sure how they managed it because the cockpit was barely large enough for a large pilot. However, they did, and the two got back safely.