AN AUSTRIAN IN THE RAF (Page Two)

One very clear, fall day, I asked a pupil of mine, who needed some dual time, if he'd like to fly to the Rockies, and he enthusiastically agreed. We took off with him in the front seat. This particular aircraft, as most of them, didn't have radio, so we communicated via gosports, simple pieces of tubing from a mouthpiece like a funnel to the earset in the helmet, one from the back to the front seat, the other from the front to the rear.

We were flying through a pass over a dirt road when, suddenly, in the lee of the pass, we hit a very strong downdraft. I immediately took over control, told the pupil to lower his seat because you could see practically nothing from the rear seat, put the pitch in full low, and the throttle to the gate. We were nose up but the vertical climb indicator still indicated that we were descending. We were so low that we were raising dirt devils on the road The pupil thought that I was doing this deliberately, and yelled into the gosport: "Marvelous low flying, sir."  Little did he know! I was a little flack-happy from my combat flying, and didn't care much. I was ready to drop the gear, land on the dirt road, turn around, and take off upwind again, when we suddenly cleared the downdraft, and the aircraft started climbing.  Needless to say, we headed back to base.

When I was posted back to England after my stint at “The Hat,” I stopped over in Pittsburgh to marry Jacquè, my present wife of 55 years, whom I had met there when I worked with Westinghouse. This was on 5 September 1944. A few months later, I was shot up again. I was at 30,000 ft. A hole had been shot into a radiator under the port wing, which I couldn’t see. I was losing coolant, the engine temperature kept climbing until it caught fire and seized up. Not wanting to go into the drink again, I thought that I would crash land on a beach, but it turned out to be vertical because of cliffs, so I crash-landed in a heath. The elevators were full of holes, I couldn’t get the nose up, the radiators caught on the ground, and the Spit went end-over-end, landing me in the hospital for about 3 months. I got out in time to be on sick leave in London at V-E day, 7 May 1945.

In the late years of the war, we were flying single-aircraft U-boat patrols over troop ships as they approached England. We could see the shadow of a sub in the water quite clearly. In November 1944 - a nasty and drizzly day - I was flying such a patrol over the Irish Sea, watching out over the Queen Elizabeth (the original one, 90,000+ tons). She had two Royal Navy destroyer escorts. I had been at this for about an hour, when I received a signal to return to base, and that a relief was coming. I wanted to inform the Navy, so I blinked to them – we had a signal blinker on the bottom of the tail, with a Morse key in the cockpit – “Returning base, relief on way.”

Still a handsome couple!

At that, the signals mate let go with the semaphore from the bridge of one of the destroyers. Blinkety blink, much too fast for me to read. As a pilot I was required only to read 6 signals per minute. So I blinked ..--.. (repeat). Same thing, I returned S-L-O. During all this, I was flying 360s trying to read the message, while the Spit, which was very sensitive in the pitching plane, kept jogging up and down. I finally deciphered the message: “Bon voyage.” I was infuriated, blinked ..-. ..-, and went home. (Shortly after this account was published, Gerry agreed to write a sequel for this site. Before he could finish, he died suddenly and unexpectedly. He will be sorely missed by his devoted wife Jacquè, the proprietor of this site, and all his other numerous friends).