COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

CHAPTER FOUR TYPHOON
For the most part, in July and early August, we hammered away
at the enemy around Caen and westwards. Strongpoints, troop and tank
concentrations, headquarters, fuel and ammunition dumps. There was
a wild and savage beauty about those sorties which lives forever in the
memory. Beauty and death.
Down below were the killing grounds of Normandy. Marked by
lurid bursts of flame, and tenuous clouds of smoke, which drifted
across the woods and fields and shattered, stricken, villages of the
Bocage. Beauty and death in the choreography of wheeling, diving,
aircraft - in the lazy rising tracer and the clouds of bursting shells -
in the last stricken moments of a friend. Usually in silence. Sometimes
a few words of shocked surprise, suddenly cut off. Like 'Wee Mac':
"I've had it! Second tour too..... "
One day a huge bomber stream came sweeping in from the sea. For
almost an hour it darkened the sky, a procession of Lancasters,
Fortresses, and Liberators - escorted by Spitfires - on their way to
pound the enemy positions around Caen. The start of Operation
'Goodwood', another round in the fight to break out of the beachhead.
We watched in awe - and then sudden concern, as a Liberator went
out of control in a dramatic sequence of tail slides and stall turns. In
moments the orchard was full of silent figures, willing the crew to bail
out, and praying that their aircraft would hold together until they did.
When the first parachute emerged, and the rest followed, there was an
audible sigh of relief. Until we saw that the falling bomber was
scything back and forwards amongst those helpless swinging figures.
After half a dozen heart stopping passes it fell away below them and
disappeared from sight.
Soon afterwards the weather broke, and became completely non
operational for days on end. The attack petered out in a morass of
bomb craters, mud and rubble on the northern outskirts of the city.
Once again the resilience and tenacity of the Germans had been
remarkable - and there were growing doubts about the wisdom of
using strategic bombers in this way. It seemed too much like Monte
Cassino all over again.
Non flying weather and we were off to explore the local area -
Jimmy Simpson, Pete Langille, and myself- and at the wheel, 'Killy'
from Ulster, Fg Off Kilpatrick, perhaps the only pilot known to have
survived after losing the tailplane of his Typhoon.
To warnings of fifth columnists and snipers in the rear areas we
buckled on our pistols, and set off at suicidal pace, while Pete and
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