The Sudan Remembers Them
Article written by war correspondent Carel Birkby
WICKY AND THE WARRIOR SQUADRON SHOOT A LINE
The people of the Sudan remember with gratitude, affection and admiration No1 Squadron of the South African Air Force which, with ancient Gladiators and Hurricanes, defended this country in 1940 and 1941. This “Warrior” Squadron, as Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham christened it, is now flying Spitfires against the Germans in Italy. The story of this brilliant fighting formation is told below by Carel Birkby, who first knew the Squadron in East Africa and has recently been staying with it on the Adriatic front in Italy.
“ ….. and all those boys
Who ‘shoot a line’
Must bear in mind
The One-Oh-Nine …..
They sing their own ribald parody to the haunting tune of Lili Marlene, the Afrika Korps song that the Eighth Army and the Desert Air Force made so much their own. The pilots of the “Warrior” Squadron are crowded cheerfully around the fireplace built into the wall of their Nissen hut mess, glasses in hand, beer has come up the line for the first time in weeks. The rain is pouring down outside (I happen to be stranded on this advanced landing ground on the Adriatic coast by the weather, which has held up my flight from east to west across Italy) and there’s a biting wind coming off the Apennine snows. But the Mess is cheerful. The young Italian student who has been impressed as barman is filling little glasses with vermouth. They’re “wetting Wicky’s third pip”. Lieut. W D Wickner, who shot down one of the most recent of the Squadron’s 156 victims, has this day been promoted Captain, the equivalent of the Flight-Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force.
“Wicky” is vividly popular. He is a lean young South African with a large moustache, gay and humorous. “Wicky” will always have something amusing to say : “Wicky”. In fact, will shoot a good “line”.
“Shooting a line” has several connotations in the air force, and not all of them are invidious. To boast, the unforgivable Service sin, is to “shoot a line”. To exaggerate in a tale of some experience is also line-shooting, and to be deprecated. But the burlesqued overstatement and the hyper-cautious understatement all constitute a recognized “line”, and may be justifiably well received in the mess. Most squadrons that cherish tradition keep a “Line Book” handy for the recording of remarks that qualify in terms of the laughter with which they are received. Down in it goes the naïve remarks of the newcomers (“sprogs”, as experienced pilots dismiss them), the naïve questions, the leg-pulls, the Munchausen tales told with never a smile. Here in a few lines by pencil or fountain-pen you find the spirit of the Commonwealth fighting man who can laugh, thank God, even in a war.
The “Warrior” Squadron keeps a “wizard” Line Book, and the cream of it is contributed by “Wicky” whose third pip we are wetting tonight.
Let’s flip over the pages and sample the personality of the “Warrior” Squadron.
“Wicky” is stringing along a “sprog” who has just joined the Squadron and has yet to experience air combat. Says the Sprog, obviously “buying it” – “Which part of the Jerry kite do you aim at?” Says Wicky, his wits about him : “I always chip a bit of the wing off first, just to give the Jerry a chance to bale out …..”
Again Wicky and the rest of the Squadron have been out in their Spitfires acting as escorts during a series of intensive bomber raids on Sfax. The gunners in the bombers have been shooting the Messerchmitt 109 fighters without our own fighters’ intervention. Wicky grumbles : “I take a poor view of this business of the bombers putting all the Jerry fighters urs (unserviceable)”.
In March last year the Squadron went out one day and shot down two Me109s and three Macci202s. On their return from slaughtering the enemy’s best fighters in this way, Wicky exclaims enthusiastically : “It’s the greatest thing to meet unescorted 109s .......”
But Wicky reached his greatest heights in January this year when the Spitfire pilots were hanging about at “readiness” in the operations tent and yarning to pass the time. Wicky told his tale of the Valentia, an obsolete British troop-carrier, still used for lack of other aircraft in the early stages of this war even though flying men used to libel it by saying that it could not do more than 90 miles an hour in a steep dive. To illustrate the snail-like speed of the old Valentia, Wicky said : “The other nine in the Valentia panicked when the pilot wrote of the under-cart”. (Wicky means “destroyed the undercarriage, in case you are not familiar with your air force slang). “But I told them not to worry. While the pilot was doing a circuit I kicked holes in the floor and we put our legs through them. As he came in to land we all started running, carrying the Valentia along. It would have been a perfect landing, but one of the blokes got out of step”.
Talk in the mess had turned to operational flying hours. One pilot remarked that during the Nazi advance on Alexandria RAF pilots had flown as much as eight and ten hours daily. A newcomer unimpressionable but careless in elementary mathematics, returned : “That’s nothing to shoot a line about : I’m sure that when the Luftwaffe was attacking England, pilots were flying 30 to 40 hours a day”.
The “Line Book” records that Lieut. R Chaplin, who had expended all his ammunition without result in a dogfight, explained afterwards : “The Macci I attacked has a self-sealing fuselage”.
Lt. M E Robinson is credited with the immortal report in the Operations tent “ “When I saw the 109’s I peeled off onto them. Mind you, I was below the telegraph wires myself at the time”.
To a “sprog” who inquired about the intensity of Jerry flak Lt. Tommy van der Heen of Pretoria, replied airily : “The sky is often so black with the bursts that you have to fly through them on instruments”. It was the same pilot that excused himself for losing his way in the air by saying : “I’ve got so much shrapnel in my body that it upsets my compass”. (Van der Veen, by the way, had the unusual experience of fighting ski-troops with a Spitfire : in the Mailella mountains recently he sighted a patrol of eight Germans troops on skis, and while they shot at him with a light machine gun he let them have the full blast of his own multiple guns).
Two of the Squadron’s pilots in the old Desert days went out on a shadow-firing practice. One had no maps and was over strange country. He grew worried as his companion went deeper and deeper south into the Desert with many changes of course. When they returned he complained : “Where did you think you were going? I began to think we’d land up in South Africa”. “Don’t be silly”, replied the other vaguely. “We were nowhere near there”.
Capt. Piet Robbertse, a little, shock-headed fellow whom I first knew as a bomber pilot in Abyssinia, transferred to Spitfires and served with the “Warrior” Squadron in North Africa. He was responsible for a bit of terse wit one day when a patrol over shipping was ordered and the pilots discussed the prospects of being forced down in the Mediterranean. “This Squadron”, he said to the CO “is going to the dogs – all the pilots have hydrophebia”.
The “Warrior” Squadron serves in a South African Spitfire fighter wing, which also includes RAF Squadrons, among them one that fought with Gladiators in Greece. The Wing is led by a brilliant young airman and administrator still in his early twenties – Col. D H Loftus, D.S.O., D.F.C., who comes from the Rand. Four years ago I remember “Dough” Loftus on a Kenya desert airfield, a boyish second lieutenant still to take part in his first air combat. The Wing Commander Flying is Lt. Col. A C Bosman, D.F.C., one described by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Conningham as the finest fighter pilot in the Middle East, a man with preternaturally sharp eyes who can recognize and identify Me109s with the naked eye when they seem merely dots on the horizon.
The Squadron Leader is another young Springbok, Major “Johnny” Seccombe, D.F.C., who has four enemy fighters to his credit. I remember Johnny Seccombe just before the war as a school-boy cricketer with ambitions, which he would have realized, of playing for South Africa in the Tests. Though a Commanding Officer now, he still looks like a schoolboy with his crisp, curly fair hair. Small, slight and smiling, he has a sense of fun which sparkles into the Line Book.
The book records that Loftus one day said to Seccombe : “I want you to save your operational hours. Fly once a week only now, and once a day when the fighting flares up”. To which Seccombe replied with mock anguish : “I’d rather fly once a day now and once a week when the fighting flares up …..”
Major Johnny Seccombe and a Durban pilot now with him, Lieut. Dave Hastie, who had not yet turned 21, both figured in two of the most extraordinary adventures ever recorded in any Line Book. Hastie had the first experience. He was flying in formation over Italy one day when, as the Line Book records, “he saw a snake (not pink) crawling up his instrument panel”. He seized it with his gauntleted hand and pulling back his Perspex hood threw it out of the cockpit. He got into the Line Book not only because of this startling experience but because in the mess afterwards, he dismissed the whole business badly by saying : “Why do you think I always wear gloves when I’m flying, anyway?”
A couple of days later Seccombe had an even more unnerving experience with a snake in the air. Here is the plain fashion in which it is recounted in the Line Book “ “When 50 miles north-west Naples, at 15,000 feet, with Jerry ack-ack intense and accurate, Seccombe was heard plaintively over the radio-telephone : “I’m not happy in my job. There’s a snake swaying from my reflector sight, and he’s putting out his tongue at me”.
Seccombe maintained a round-by-round commentary of his struggle with the snake, which he kept beating off with his gloved hand. He could not get hold of it to throw it out of the aircraft. Eventually when he landed it was wrapped round his throttle lever and nearly caused him to crash. It took air mechanics on the home landing ground three hours to extricate the snake from the cockpit and kill it.
The “Warrior” Squadron as a unit is entitled to shoot a line” of no mean length, but it is not given to seeking publicity. It is the senior fighter squadron of the South African Air Force. I cannot give its official number, but it owes its nickname to Air Marshal Conningham, who christened it in a congratulatory signal after its famous “Stuka Party” over Alamein on July 4, 1942, when its pilots shot down 13 out of 15 Ju87s and one Me109 in one glorious dogfight.
It was the first fighter squadron to leave the Union for service in Kenya, and then it came on to serve brilliantly in the Sudan during the Eritrean and Abyssinian campaigns. It was the first to serve in the Western Desert. It was first into Sicily. Two of its pilots, both lieutenants from Johannesburg, Robert Peel and Harold Smith, were the first SAAF officers to serve outside Africa when they were sent to Malta. One of its pilots, Captain Bryan Boyle, a Selborne College boy, was the first South African fighter pilot to win the DFC – he heart of it in the Sudan on Christmas Day, 1940. A one-time leader of the Squadron, Gerald Lemesurier, an old Bishop’s boy since killed in action, was the first South African to be decorated by the Queen at a Buckingham Palace investiture.
They were the first South African fighter squadron to be given Spitfires – Loftus’ successful wing in the Western Desert had used Kittyhawk fighters throughout – and by November 1942, they had certainly earned their right to these sleek and wasplike machines. Their record proved it. When I was with them on the Adriatic, they had already scored 157 confirmed victories in the air. Of these only nine had been claimed during the Sicilian and Italian campaigns, for the Allies supremacy in the air had allowed them few opportunities for their favourite old game of “hacking Huns”. Hastie had got the latest, a few days before – one of the Nazis’ new crack fighters, a Focke-Wulf 190. In the Mediterranean campaign so far Capt. J H Gaynor and Lieut. R E de Jongh had also both shot down FW190s. Seccombe and Wickner had each got an Me109. So had Capt. S A Finney and Lieut. S J Richards, who also shot down an Me410. Capt. J van Nus and Lieut. B Trotter had shared an Me210.
The Squadron scored its victories faster in the Desert, where their victims numbered exactly 100 plus a half-share in another machine which a sister squadron helped to destroy. The two greatest days in its Desert history were the “Stuka Parties” at Alamein in July 1942. I happened to visit them immediately after the first, when they were celebrating the destruction of the 13 Stukas and one Me109 I mentioned before. What made that show particularly outstanding was that it was their first patrol in the desert after a time back in the Canal Area resting and re-organising, and some of the pilots had not been in action before. On July 27, that is barely three weeks later, they picked off five more Stukas, damaged another and shot down an Me109F. Such victories could be expected of a Squadron as skilled and offensive as this : during the Mareth Line battle, for instance, six of them tackled 43 enemy aircraft, and later in the same day 11 of them took on 31 of the enemy’s best fighters, Me109Fs, and Macci 2028, destroying five.
But before they served in that great Desert advance of 1,500 miles with 11 different landing grounds as their stepping stones, they had won a name for themselves in the Sudan. Defending Khartoum and Port Sudan and then supporting the advance of the Kaid, Lt.-Gen. Sir William Platt, the “Warrior” Squadron flying Gladiators or Hurricanes shot down 48 Italian aircraft besides destroying 53 on the ground and damaging 56 more.
Many of the original members of the Squadron are still remembered in the Sudan with admiration and affection. Major van Schalkwyk, one of the Squadron’s commanders, was shot down and killed. At least five of the pilots won DFC’s – Andrew Duncan, son of the late Governor-General of the Union, since killed in action; Kenneth Driver, who came from Gill College and Kingswood, who served with great distinction in this war just as did an elder brother – who was killed in action with RFC soon after Ken was born – in the last ; Bryan Boyle, now commanding another South African Spitfire Squadron in Italy’ Laurie Wilmot, now a lieutenant-colonel commanding a RAF Kittybomber Wing in Italy; and Robin Pare, a Bishop’s boy from Constantia, who recovered from temporary blindness and paralysis sustained later in a crash in the Desert. Other Squadron members of the early days include Servaas van Breda Theron, DFC, now a major commanding the Sudan Kittyhawk Squadron in Italy, and the late Lieut.-Col. Tommy Ross-Theron, A.F.C., who killed himself in a simple flying accident in Kenya after surviving a narrow squeak in the Western Desert : forced to bale out in action after shooting down two G50s, his parachute harness slipped but caught him by one ankle, and he floated down on earth suspended upside down like a circus-artist on a trapeze, only damaging his face and his shoulder on impact.
The “Warrior” Squadron also had the unusual distinction of having numbered among its pilots three officers who each pulled off the dramatic trick of rescuing from enemy territory, in a single seater fighter cockpit, a comrade who had been shot down. Bobby Kershaw, who won the SDO for doing this for his squadron commander, Major Jack Frost, on Diredawa aerodrome under Italian fire, was the first pilot ever to achieve this feat. (He was not with the “Warrior” Squadron then, but joined it later in the Desert). Kenneth Quick did it next in the Western Desert, somewhere near Gazala if I remember rightly. And H C Liebenberg, then a lieutenant, completed the hat trick when he went down and picked up another subaltern, MacRobert, who had been shot down among aggressively-firing enemy troops south of Halfaya ‘ Liebenberg had to silence the enemy on the ground before he could rescue his comrade. This officer, later promoted captain, demonstrated his courage and guts again when he escaped from captivity among the Germans. Going down in the enemy lines at El Alamein, he was a prisoner for two years and was being taken from Italy to Germany when he leapt from a train in the French Alps and after a long trek which is a saga in itself reached the Allied lines again.
Another officer in the “Warrior” Squadron whom I remember with a salute was Charles Martin, who led a bomber squadron in Abyssinia as a lieutenant-colonel and then, after a spell in the Union, found that there was no appointment vacant for one of his rank on the Mediterranean front. Though a married man with a family, he sacrificed his rank to return to operations as a captain – as an ordinary fighter pilot. He has since made a greater sacrifice : he has been shot down and killed in action.
Among the memorable characters who have flown and fought with this Squadron is the one-legged South African pilot, Lieut. D S Rogan. After losing the leg in action, Rogan like the famous Douglas Bader in great Britain, returned to operations with an artificial limb. The Line Book records very simply an involuntary exploit of Rogan’s. He took off in his Spitfire one day without realizing that an air mechanic who had been servicing the machine was still on the tail. He found the reason his aircraft was answering the controls peculiarly when in his rear-view mirror he spotted the petrified “erk” behind him. He did one circuit of the aerodrome and managed to land safely, and though a tyre burst the aircraft came unharmed to a standstill, probably because the weight on the tail kept her steady. The Line Book records that the mechanic afterwards reported laconically : “The slipstream kept me pinned to the tail but I don’t think I could have held out for more than 100 miles”.
Now this fine Squadron is serving in Italy, where it has been ever since it helped to cover the first landings. They operate from a runway of steel strips laid on an Adriatic beach within sight of the enemy’s shell flashes by night. (Basuto pioneers built the landing ground while the Germans were still within artillery range). They are doing excellent work in conditions not always idyllic. On New Year’s Day they were almost washed out of their camp by an Adriatic storm, and the mechanics could scarcely hold their freezing tools in the snow and sleet of that winter day. (They remembered then with some nostalgia their al fresco camps in the olive groves of Sicily and times when they tired of a surfeit of turkey for dinner night after night). They meet few enemy fighters, but on many of their missions they have to face the intensive flak which has now become the German’s main defence against the irresistible Allied air forces in Italy. They tackle all sorts of tasks in the air with their graceful Spitfires. They defend airfields and forward troops. They strafe trains north of Rome and German trucks on the Adriatic coast road. The other day they helped to destroy a 5,000-ton German cruiser in the port of Zara, Jugoslavia. They strafed and stopped it with 700 rounds of armour-piercing cannon shells and 2,000 rounds of machine-gun fire, which enabled an Australian squadron to come in and blow it up. Not long ago, also, they saved a Walrus of the air-sea rescue service, which had alighted on the Adriatic to pick up a Wing Commander “in the drink” and was then attacked by an Me109. The Spitfires drove the Hun away. The “Warrior” Squadron pilots have even had such other unusual tasks as dropping supplies to units of the Eighth Army immobilized in the mountains by winter snowstorms.
It is a spirited Squadron : only the other day, emulating RFC pilots of the First World War, one of them, Capt, Geoffrey Hilton-Barber, of Cradock, flew over an enemy landing ground and dropped a challenge to the Nazis to come up and fight.
All these fighter pilots, gay and courageous, are young men. But somehow, here on their Adriatic landing-ground with them all, I thought that the spirit of this “Warrior” Squadron was typified not by the young flying officers but by their elderly Intelligence Officer. The I.O. Capt. Vivian Voss, has been with the Squadron for two years and celebrated his 50th birthday in the field with them. He is quiet, baldish and wears silver spectacles, and everybody calls him “Pop”. A fighter pilot in the last war, he saw 700 hours of “ops”, mostly in Bristol Fighters. He wrote a book about it called Flying Minnows, and a good book it is reckoned too. After the war he studied at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Md. And for 20 years before this war he lectured placidly in physics in the university in Pretoria. A man like this goes to war again because he is fighting for principles.
When the young fighter pilots in Sicily decided to climb Mount Etna, “Pop” clambered up the volcano with them. Somehow, this old fighter pilot among his maps and intelligence reports in his trailer next to the landing strip, carefully recording rosters of the Squadron’s triumphs, quietly jotting down little tales in the Line Book, stands for the continuity of tradition that makes a Squadron not merely an aggregation of men in a tactical unit known by a number, but a living thing. The spirit of all the fighter pilots who have served the “Warrior” Squadron lives on in it.