bentley priory - Spink

September 6, 2012 - LONDON
No.324 (Spitfire) Wing, Zeltweg, Austria, 1946
drove... Faster and faster drove Dudley, higher and higher
danced the jeep, till suddenly it had had enough. With no
warning it uttered a final screech, leapt high in the air, shot
off the road and rolled over several times, having fired me out
like a bullet to land on my face in the middle of the bordering
field. For a while I lay too dazed to move, which turned out
to be a stroke of good fortune. I had been deposited between
two rows of mines wired in such a way that if one blew they
all blew. I never could remember being extricated, but the
Sappers came to my rescue and worked their miracles. My
face was badly lacerated, but fortunately no bones were
broken, though as I had lain there, trying to recover my wits,
my mind had flicked back seven years to make me yet again
that Cranwell Cadet, lying in a shattered Clyno and listening
to the first of these now familiar deafening silences.’ (ibid)
As the Eighth Army progressed northwards through Italy
Kingcome’s wing took part in battles such as Anzio and
Monte Cassino, and the long-range cover of the penetration
into the South of France.
A ‘Staff Man’
By December 1944 Kingcome and his Wing were based near
Rimini, close to the Yugoslav border, ‘the Italian campaign
was set to rumble on for another six months until VE Day,
but it was as good as in the bag. At this point my own
participation came to an abrupt end in the wake of an official
visit from the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the
Mediterranean and Allied Air Forces (MAAF), Air Chief
Marshal Sir John Slessor. He took me aside. ‘Kingcome’, he
said, ‘I’ve been looking at your record. I see that your entire
service career has been spent with operational single-seater
fighters. Your horizon is obviously limited. I don’t even know
if you can write. I intend to find out. I’m sending you to
Palestine, to the R.A.F. Staff College at Haifa, and we’ll see
what they have to say about you.’ (ibid)
Kingcome - The Air Gunner
He stayed at Haifa until the end of January 1945, ‘When
Slessor interviewed me again and said how gratified he was to
find I could indeed write, but as I had never held a staff
appointment, he continued, he now proposed to make me a
Senior Air Staff Officer to a bomber group. How did I like
the sound of that
Frankly, in my innermost thoughts, the answer was not at all,
and my innermost instincts turned out to be correct. The
posting to 205 Bomber Group at Foggia, in southern Italy,
proved to be a shattering experience. For one thing, the
bomber crews and I did not even speak the same language in
airmen’s terms. In an attempt to find out what it was all
about I went on a couple of trips as an air gunner, and each
time wished I hadn’t. It was quite beyond me to know how
the boys in the bombers had stood it and I came to appreciate
my luck in having been in fighter aircraft. The war of the
fighter pilot was a truly lovely experience compared with
theirs, which struck me as suicidally dangerous.
I was just getting the hang of the bombing scene at last when
the war in Europe ended and our Lancasters and Liberators
were converted into troop carriers to repatriate troops from
the Allied armies to their homes all over the world. We were
transferred to Egypt to operate from three airfields close to
the Suez Canal and the Great Bitter Lake... Those of us who
had been overseas for several years were subject to powerful
pregnant urges for an occasional home comfort, and high on
my list came the humble kipper. It should have been a happy
day when a girlfriend sent me out a box of kippers... but alas,
the kippers themselves did not enjoy their long hot journey
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