Devonshire June July 16

A faded photo of ’M’ Flight, 276 ASR Squadron, April 1943. In the
foreground an Anson, to the right a Spitfi re and back left is a Walrus.
All WW2 Lancasters carried a secret weapon: homing pigeons!
The need for speed
His first flight in the Walrus was also
almost his last and came out of the
blue. He was roused from sleep at
0600 hours in early April, 1942 and
told that a Spitfire had gone down
in the bay off Portland and he was to
be the Observer/Second Pilot.
He writes, “We circled for half an hour.
It was like looking for a needle in a
haystack. Then, suddenly, there he
was. Our hearts sank when we saw
he had no dinghy and was floating
in just his life jacket. We would have
to hurry”.
They landed in a seriously choppy
sea and Berryman crouched low
and scrambled up into the bows of
the aircraft and opened the forward
hatch. He tried to reach out and grab
the pilot as they went past but missed.
He knew that it would take time to
circle and come in for a second try
- too long perhaps - so he fell out
over the side and into the numbingly
cold water, and after being knocked
half senseless by one of the wing-tip
floats managed to recover sufficiently
to swim to the hapless pilot.
After a long struggle to disengage
the man’s parachute, which was
still attached and dragging both
of them down, he managed to find
the gas bottle that inflated the man’s
Mae West more fully and they both
bobbed up higher in the water. He
now saw that the man had a sergeant’s
stripes on his upper arm a
metal shoulder flash reading “Australia”.
Alas, when he got him back into the
Walrus and they were both hauled
from the water they found that he
was dead and Berryman, numb with
the cold, lost consciousness. He later
likened it to his baptism to his new
career.
On a wing and
a prayer
Bomber crews had parachutes but
only the one dinghy between them.
This meant that a Lancaster with a
crew of seven, would need to ditch
perfectly on the surface of the sea -
even at night - to enable the aircraft
to float long enough to evacuate the
aircraft and for them to scramble out
and onto the upper side of the port
wing where their rubber dinghy was
stowed. If their luck held they might
have four or five minutes before it
slipped beneath the waves.
Only when the crew was safely
aboard the dinghy was the carrier
pigeon released. All Lancasters in
WW2 carried carrier pigeons: sometimes
two. These extraordinary birds,
carried the estimated position of
the downed aircraft - written in waterproof
pencil on a tightly rolled
message strip in a canister on its
right leg - to fly back to their roosts
in England.
As all of these dramas unfolded of
course, Devon’s brave RNLI lifeboat
crews raced out to the rescue, together
with the high speed launches
of the RAF Air Sea Rescue Service
based at Poole, Lyme Regis, Exmouth
and Torquay. Their teamwork saved
countless lives.
Loss of a Lysander
On Monday, 24th August 1942 tragedy
struck 276 Squadron itself when
one of its own search and rescue
aircraft went missing, shot down
probably by German fighters. The
aircraft was a Lysander, a high wing
single engine monoplane that gave
a good all round view of the sea and
could fly at just 70 mph if needs be.
The pilot was a 21 year old Canadian,
Jack Ernst and the Observer on that
fateful trip was a Devon lad, Stuart
Fleet 18, from Torquay. Ever since
his days in the Air Training Corps he
had been mad keen to fly and on
that fateful day had tossed a penny
with a chum - and won - to see who
would go up on what was a flight to
practice the storage and release of
the dinghy the aircraft carried.
Flying south east and ten minutes
into their flight and they were over
Start Point when two German FW.190s
were reported on a lightning raid,
dropping their bombs near Brixham.
The Lysander acknowledged the radio
warning but that was the last ever
heard from them and it is thought
that they were shot down.
The last of the few
By chance there are still two Walrus
aircraft to be seen in the West Country.
The first and best preserved (and one
hundred percent the real thing) is at
the Royal Naval Air Station Museum
at Yeovilton.
The second is part of a display at
the National Marine Aquarium in
Plymouth. It is a replica of the old
Steam Pigeon that once criss-crossed
the city to and from RAF Harrowbeer
on its missions of mercy and now
sits, inappropriately enough under
the circumstances, under water at
the bottom of one of the aquarium’s
enormous tanks where fish glide in
and out of the cockpit: imaginative
backdrop to a day out with a family,
as well as a gentle reminder perhaps
of all those other aircraft out there
beyond the Sound which never quite
made it back to Blighty.
John Fisher
The Walrus with a dinghy: the Observer has climbed out and up
onto the wing as a lookout
in mydevonevents..co.uk 87