I'm George Stewart. I was with #23 Squadron RAF in
1944 during World War II. Mosquito has been a very
sensitive experience for me, but it brought me through a war. My feeling for the Mosquito
today is the feeling I had for the Mosquito when I was 16 and
17. I consider the Mosquito to be
magic. Stewart's Mosquito career was
launched in the spring of 1943 when he was only 18 years old,
with a fateful meeting. At the selection board in
Bournemouth, everybody was being told they were going to on heavy
bombers by night. I would accept that, but in my
heart of hearts, first I wanted to be a pilot. Second, I wanted to fly a
Mosquito. Third, I wanted to get 1,000
hours on Mosquitos. It was an impossible dream. He said, "Well, Stewart, what
would you like?" I said, "Well, sir, if you're
not fooling, I would really want to fly the de Havilland
Mosquito." He said "Well, I can't send you
there directly, but I will send you to a night fighter and
that's flying unit at Grantham." I said, "Sir, I would be so
grateful to do that." He says, "It's done." A year almost to the day after I
started flying at Goderich on the Tiger Moth, I started at 19
years of age to fly the de Havilland Mosquito and never
looked back. There was a lot of pretty
terrifying flying for a youngster who's 19 years of age,
going up and flying an airplane like that. My navigator was a very
religious French Canadian, Paul Bodette. We wanted to get through the war
intelligently as we could. I said, "Paul, we have an
agreement. We're going to fly operations on
this. "Let's not do nothing dumb. Let's take, if there's a target,
an airplane or a train, we'll make 1 good pass at it. If I'm not good enough to get it
in that 1 pass, we both deserve to live: The enemy and
ourselves." What do you think?" He says, "I agree." We shook hands on that. I know, specific cases where
they went back for another shot, and they got hit. We were able to do 50 trips and
we never had a single abort. One particular time, we were
going to the North German plain, to a German town, this is really
one of the best nights we'd had. My navigator said, "Hey, there's
a guy downwind just got permission to land." So we raced around and caught
him on his final approach. He had his landing lights on,
and it was Ju 88 silhouetted in his own landing lights. We shot our cannons and machine
guns at him and got strikes all over the cockpit area. Then every light went off. We went right across with the
searchlights after us and we pulled up, back up into the
downwind leg. On the way up I saw this black
thing going like this, another airplane. I whipped up past his tail, came
back down and it was a Heinkel 111 and we got a good squirt of
it and big sparks and pieces falling off it. So that was unbelievable to get
2 hits within moments. There is always that fear, fear
of screwing up, fear of getting lost, fear of being hit and not
able to get back home, fear of weather in which we flew without
GPS. Ours was by dead reckoning. You didn't reckon right, you
could be dead. We flew from England to Africa,
1,201 miles, dead reckoning. There's a heck of a lot of
growing up when you knowingly face danger because you've got
no other choice. By the end of the war, he had
completed 50 operations with 23 Squadron, RAF. Mosquitos were Mosquitos. To me, I loved all of them. I could hardly wait to get into
it for the next flight. So when the war ended I thought,
"Well, that's the end of my flying, I'm not flying my
Mosquitos". I had almost 600 hours in them. Then that crazy third ideal,
after flying the Mosquito, to get a thousand hours on it. Little did I realize then that
that would happen, because after the war, in 1948, I got more
Mosquito flying. So I probably got 1,200 or 1,300
hours total time. The Chinese had bought a bunch,
and were instructing on them. It was at the time of terrible
unrest. The Mosquitos were purchased by
Nationalist Chinese, who were in the midst of a civil war against
the Communists. I went over to Hankou to
instruct them, to train the 3 squadrons that were going to be
converted. We had a lot of training
accidents. The Chinese lost 50 or 60 of
their 150. Because they had crashed so
many, they hated the airplane. So we had to change that
thinking to show them what an enormous fun RV it would be. We flew in an airdrome very
unsatisfactory for flying Mosquitos. In tropical heat, with engines
that were liquid cooled, we could hardly get back to the
takeoff point before the radiators were ready to blow. We taught them, before they
would take off, they could push full rudder with 1 foot, with no
rudder on the other and go full right rudder to stop turning
left and it was as simple as that. Now, that worked for us in 1948. But then we got them going on
this other method and it saved the day. After the Chinese session was
done, we finished up. We went home before 1949, just
at the end of the year. They carried on and were driven
out of town. They got to Formosa (Taiwan). But our 3 squadrons of guys put
off an invasion attempt of 1,000 vessels by sinking or setting
fire to half the fleet. So we made a pretty good
contribution to their cause for Chiang Kai-shek. George Stewart has over an
estimated 1,200 flying hours on the Mosquito, likely more than
any living Mosquito pilot. The Mosquito was the realization
of not just a boyhood dream, but a dream of my lifetime. I still treasure it, revel in it
and praise the virtues of the Mosquito.
