My War - Chapter 8 - ORTU

Chapter 8 Heavy conversion-unit and ORTU

After about 14 days leave, as usual, we all received reporting instructions. We had to report to RAF Weathersfield an OTCU. First of all we had to get used to flying the Halifax bomber. Johnny, as I said before, was a very experienced pilot and he went solo after about 4 hours. However we had to put in the regulation number of flying hours so, as the plane was fitted with duel controls, he let me take over for a whole three and a half-hours trip. We went right up the east coast of England and then back south again. I now knew why I had been given a few hours pilot training in a link trainer. There followed a number of night circuits and bumps some with and some without an instructor and four cross country trips. Some were over seven hour trips. A one hour exercise practising descent through cloud completed the heavy conversion part of the training. We were now fully trained but we had to practice a few activities.

O.R.T.U

One of the activities was glider towing. One trip was at 500 ft and another at 1500 ft and we also towed gliders in cross-country map reading trips. One day a mass glider tow was arranged. All twelve halifax bombers were lined up with gliders connected and ready to go and our aircraft developed engine trouble so we had to pull out. All the rest went off but they released the gliders in the wrong location. The glider pilots were not too pleased.

We also had a couple of parachutist dropping exercises called Share out V and VIII. The planes were equipped with a trap door in the floor towards the rear. It was fitted with a split lid about 4 ins thick and the rear side of the hole had a smooth surface for the parachutists to strike with there forearms to protect their faces as the slipstream caught their legs as they dropped out. The night before Share out V we met some of the jumpers in the pub but they were very subdued. We had been briefed not to touch a parachutist's equipment before a jump as it may make them nervous. The exercise was due to start at 7 AM and as we stood by the aircraft waiting for the off signal we were awkwardly chatting to the jumpers. We had to be very precise as the field that was the dropping zone was quite small. The aircraft had to be exactly at 250 ft and the air speed had to reduce to 120 MPH for the jumping and at that speed we had no steerage. This meant that when I wanted to line us up with the dropping zone I had to use S turns. That means that my instructions had to be left-left right steady or right left-left steady as necessary. Then as we neared the field I put on the red light as a warning for the troops to clip their straps on to the rail along the side of the fuselage (the strap opens the parachutes as they drop clear}. Then when we were over the field I put the green light on and away they go. This was repeated until 2 p.m. We were trying to drop a total of 600 troops, and we only carried eight troops and a dispatcher at a time. We actually managed eight drops. That night in the pub the troops that we met the night before were full of the joys of spring. It was quite a boisterous evening.

The second Share out VIII was a different story. We were the last in line for take off and we could see that the cloud base was too low {below 250 ft}. One of the pilots called up control to question the sense of trying do a drop when the cloud base was clearly too low but control ordered the first in line to take off and report the conditions over the dropping zone. He reported that the cloud was well below the 250 ft required but then they ordered us all to take off. Johnny said that we would climb up above the cloud and wait there until everybody was down. Over the radio we heard that a dozen Stirlings had arrived back from a cross country trip. That meant that there were twenty-four aircraft all circling round in the dense cloud over the base. I got as near as I could to the glass in the nose to try to see as far ahead as possible but it didn’t help. Out of the mist in front of us a plane suddenly appeared, but there was no time for me to report it. Luckily it passed less than a hundred feet below us and all I could do was say what had happened. Eventually we broke cloud at 12000 ft. When all the others had landed it was our turn. The cloud base was so low that the navigator had to guide us in. He had to use the rebecca which showed a bleep on either side of a scale showing our distance from it. The size of the bleep indicated which side of it we were pointing. The snag was that the beacon was about a hundred yards to one side of the runway. So he had to judge by the size of the two bleeps how much offset we needed to break cloud exactly on the end of the runway. It took about ten attempts before we could land.

Other exercises such as a cross-country which was half day and half night flying and routed via Dunkirk, Luxembourg, Corblens, Gotha, Hamm, Haarlem, and base. A night cross-country trip taking 5.50 hours. An exercise called Quiver which involved a four hours flight out over the Atlantic to find a rock sticking up out of the sea called Rockall and a square search to find it. We failed to locate the rock and the return of four hours involved night flying. We also had the experience of taking off with a jeep loaded under the bomb bay. I had to drop it in a nearby field. The jolt as I released it was very strong and the jeep landed a few yards from the target.

That completed our training and we were off on the usual leave before setting off to join 298 squadron in India.

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