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On
the night of July 12th
1944, Fred and I were flying a practice bombing exercise on Wainfleet
bombing
range. There was a 627 Squadron operational requirement, and a very
necessary
one, that when one turned in to start one's dive on to the target,
to call up on the radio and use the
expression, 'Tally-Ho, Number One', or whatever one's turn might be,
which let anybody else sculling about in the
area with the same idea know to keep a sharp look-out, lest they might
meet
another pilot with his bomb-doors open heading for the same piece of
sky as
themselves over the target and converging on to the same spot, which
could be
unfortunate for everybody involved.
On
this particular night, probably from something akin to idleness, as I
am by
nature a fairly idle sort of soul, or perhaps wanting to get things
done in
good time, I certainly can't remember now, I had opened the bomb-doors
early
and fused the marker bomb for our first run-in, starting a gentle dive
from a
long way back, in this case, just north of Skegness.
On our types of Mosquito used for
Pathfinding, the
'transmit' button for
the radio was located on the right-hand horn of the control wheel and
the bomb
release button, which was a similar article of Air Ministry electrical
equipment,
was on the left-hand horn of the column.
I
must have forgotten in which hand I held my fork and was trying to
call 'Tally-Ho' on the radio by pressing the bomb-release button,
which, as
everything was ready to go, had the effect of releasing a
250 pound target indicator which dutifully
detached
itself from the bomb bay, albeit a bit high, exploding in mid-air as it
was
also supposed to do and scattering bright green, inextinguishable
'candles'
over the middle of Skegness town, probably causing the locals of that
quiet
seaside resort to think that the war had suddenly picked up again and
some
renegade remnants of Hitler's fanatics were all set to give the place a
pasting. These
glorified fireworks
contain phosphorous and when, for example, the tide was in at Wainfleet
Sands,
they would sink and burn on the sea-bed before floating to the surface,
a
minute or two later, still blazing.
The
operational target markers weighed in at 1,000 lbs.
Somewhat
surprisingly, not
very much came of the Skegness episode;
I thought there would be a court of inquiry,
a public hanging with me in
the starring role and goodness knows what,
but nobody seemed to get very excited about
it and there were no
representations from the local Skegness Council, that body either being
used to
having friendly bombs dropped in the bailiwick, or were very forgiving.
It seemed that nobody got hurt and there was
only minor damage to property. After a few days there were other things
to talk
about. I
did learn later that mine was
by no means an isolated incident and the same sort of error had also
happened
over enemy targets, so perhaps there was a bit of a problem with the
layout of
bomb-release controls in Pathfinder Mosquitoes.
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