Chapter 4

During August we made numerous attacks against German armour, and as history records, we were mainly responsible for the annihilation of the German armour in the areas around Mortain and Falaise, during which the enemy put up fierce anti aircraft fire to knock down several Tiffys from different squadrons. Cheval Lallemant was promoted to Sqd/Ldr of our sister squadron 609 and we had a Canadian called Vic Kirsh replace him as Flight Commander. Paul Ezanno was shot down, only to return later riding a superb stallion, which our Groupie decided that he being a N.Z. and born in the saddle, would show everyone how to ride. He set off at a cracking pace forgetting that the wire mesh put down as taxiing strip would be as if it were ice for the well shod horse. They reached the mesh after about thirty yards where the Groupie tried to turn the horse along the track, the legs of the horse went always and they both came crashing down with the horse on top of the Group Captain.
Group Captain Scott was seriously injured, smashing up his leg and was lucky not to loose his command of the Airfield. The horse was luckier and got away with only cuts and bruises. Paul who was both upset and annoyed, muttered away in French which only Cheval had a clue what he was saying.

It was at Martragny B 7 where I almost came to a sticky end, a replacement pilot to the squadron was a fellow called John Champion. He and I had trained together in the States, but he had opted to remain as an instructor and became automatically commissioned, he was now an F/Lt and had been detailed to be my No 2 for the next armed recce. We had by this time adopted a method of speeding up getting our aircraft into the air, previously we waited until the dust cleared before you started your take off run, now we began taking off in pairs, with the first pair getting airborne and climbing fast, as soon as the next pair on the end of the runway could see them they would commence their take off but remain low but bank fairly sharply away from the Strip. This high -low procedure continued until all aircraft were airborne. The reason we adopted this method was simply because of the dust, it had transpired that all the sand being sucked into the engine air scoop was seriously damaging our engines. In order to overcome this, doors were fitted to the engine air scoop, which would open when sufficient air pressure was created to overcome the spring tension holding them closed. This was set to happen once we were airborne. The snag with these doors was that they could cause overheating of the engine, so it became imperative to get the planes airborne as quickly as possible. F/Lt Champion and myself were the second pair to be taking off, I allowed the first pair to start their take off and then proceeded to taxi in the dust storm onto the runway with Champion tucked in beside me, as soon as I saw the first pair in the air I gave Champion the thumbs up and received his in reply.
We opened the throttles and gathered speed in close formation down the wire mesh runway, we were almost at take off speed when I observed out of the corner of my eye a wing going up, I was concentrating on getting myself airborne and was not aware that Champion had crashed on take off until I was well and truly airborne. He had, apparently, raised the tail of the plane to high going down the runway, causing the enormous propeller on a Typhoon to catch in the wire mesh of the runway, which immediately threw him on his back, killing him instantly.
The three of us that were airborne landed at another Airstrip and waited until we received the all clear to return to B 7, the planned recce being abortive.

The whole wing developed a form of dysentery, which became known as pebble dashing, and the powers that be had to send to England for dozens of pairs of underpants, as it became impossible not to soil your underpants when pulling out of a dive. It was vital that we kept flying and were more than grateful when the Medical branch supplied us with a remedy. Never seen so much washing in my life!
Four of us were attacking a gun site just north of Caen when we noticed explosions not too far away, looking up we had observed all the Lancaster Bombers overhead but we soon cleared off when we realized that they were bombing Caen. The ground looked like boiling custard as these thousands of bombs came down; glad I wasn't on the receiving end of that lot. After the capture of Caen and the defeat of the German armour at Falaise the allied armies forged ahead and we left our beachhead airstrip at Martragny to occupy a couple of further airstrips at B.23 Bernay and B 25 Le Treport for only a few days at each before moving on to B 53 Merville Nr Lille. Merville was a genuine aerodrome with two concrete runways plus concrete taxiways and hard standings, but we still lived and dined under canvass.
We arrived on 11th September having vacated Martragny on 2nd September. Our job now was to help the Brown Jobs clear all the smaller pockets of resistance all along the coast- line. Places like Dieppe, Le Harvre, Boulogne and Calais put up some very stiff resistance and several pilots lost their lives during this spell.