CHANGE OF VENUE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 32, 6 August 1941, Page 6

CHANGE OF VENUE

A PILOT'S STORY

BRITAIN TO MIDDLE EAST

DESERT TRIPS

This story of a young Wellington D.F.C., Flying Officer C. A. Pownall, as told to the N.Z.E.F. official correspondent in the Middle East, is becoming typical of the long and wide experience in the air war of those New Zealanders posted to the Royal Air Force in Britain shortly after the outbreak of hostilities. Flying Officer Pownall, who captains a Wellington bomber, made - 30 raids from England before he went out to the Middle East a few months ago. CAIRO, July 2. This sun and sand are a* far cry from an English winter. I remember our trips home from Germany only last December —coming back over cloud, locating the 'drome by wireless, and skimming in over the tree tops with nothing in sight beyond a hundred yards. Flying there could be really tough, but here it's not so bad. The, heat is the worst—the way it makes things many times harder for your engines. They have to be able to take j it when you're flying 1200 miles per-j haps twice a week.

Yes, it's a far cry, but we had so much to do in the air last year that England will always seem pretty close. I was lucky enough to be in a lot of

the big shows. Altogether I saved up 30 coupons—that is what our blokes call making 30 raids —and most of them were grand parties. I joined the New Zealand , Squadron , after ten /weeks* final training on Wellingtons, and it was only another three weeks before I began operational flights. That was the time when we were doing our best to hold up the German drive ' into Belgium and France. The trip I liked most in those early days was one in which we picked up a German motor convoy and bombed it from only a thousand feet. We could see bits of vehicles flying across the bomb flashes. PARTY FOR HITLER. , A machine-gun bullet which I stopped in my shoulder on the third trip kept me on the ground for eight weeks, but I got back into the air early in July to make six more raids as second pilot on industrial targets, mostly in the Ruhr. Then after gaining my captaincy I took my kite over on 20 more to objectives such as Wilhelmshaven, Bremen, Kiel, Berlin, and the channel ports. Remember the party we arranged for Hitler during his November beer garden meeting in Munich? A number of New Zealand Squadron machines were there, including my own. It was a grand night, with a full moon, and I remember the way we fixed the spot where Hitler's show was supposed to be. We lined it up with the railway station, our primary target, and I made my run so that our HE's and incendiaries crossed the station yards towards the beer garden. I'll bet he heard them, anyway. Channel port raids kept us busy during the September invasion' scare. My best one was on Antwerp, where we laid two sticks of bombs across the docks and got back home.and into the pub before the bar closed. It wasn't always as simple as that; one night over Berlin, after straddling the railway, we flew south to avoid the flak and were just turning west again for home when searchlights picked us up at 15,000 feet and held us for twenty minutes. We got out at 5000 feet with several holes in the machine. The ackack stuff had been so close that we could hear the bursts plainly and smell the cordite as we flew through the puffs. We carried on until the end of December, with flying conditions becoming increasingly worse. On our last return trip from Berliri we were flying between two unbroken layers of cloud all the way, and then we found the wireless was out of order. | ■ It was nine in the morning when we passed over a hole in the cloud and found ourselves above Cherbourg. Shot at as we circled, we hurried at full throttle back into the clouds, and finally, after narrowly missing a balloon barrage, we reached home at the end of ten hours in the air,- about three hours overdue. MALTA AS STAMPING GROUND. Malta was my next stamping ground. Bad luck dogged me there; we landed on the island in the middle of a raid, and had hardly been there three days before my bus was -destroyed on the ground in another attack. But there was another one for me here, and she has served me well in the trips I've made to Libya in between the jobs I've had of preparing advanced desert bases. These desert trips are long and monotonous, but there is usually compensation at the far end. My best here was a raid on Gazala, beyond Tobruk. We were as keen as mustard when we heard the other morning that we were to take an aerodrome load—that is, our target was an enemy landing field. That night we flew up to an advanced base, and we went forward again at one in the morning, in order to make the most of the moonlight. When I dropped a. flare over the approximate position of the Gazala 'drome I could see about 20 aircraft dispersed on the southern side, and so without opposition I circled down and made my first bombing run. Now that the Germans knew we had discovered their field, they really let us have it. They had very many small anti-aircraft guns, disposed around the 'drome. I carried oh out to sea, climbed, and went back over the target to let go the rest of our HE's and incendiaries. 'We saw them burst again among the aircraft, starting some pretty large fires, and for the next 20 minutes big explosions were visible through the pall of smoke. It was a good show.