WWII Hawker Typhoon veteran at 100 years old

[Music] [Laughter] i was born in canada moosejoe in saskatchewan and my mother couldn't stand the climate out there so aft when i was four years old we moved to england we settled down my father was a poultry farmer settled down in gloucestershire and that's where i grew up as a boy i always had an interest in [Music] insighting and uh i had a lucky ticket number and uh at uh alan cobham's air circus it was he was going around giving flying displays around the country i had my first flight was in an airspeed ferry which is a three-engined biplane the engine between each of the wings and another one on top of the fuselage won a scholarship to cheltenham grammar school when i finished there i went into photography my boss where i was working in photography was the chief instructor of the cotswold aero club and they had a flying display at uh steventon and he saw me in the crowd and invited me over so uh gave me a free flight in a gypsy moth which is a great thrill for me the second world war started when i was 18 i was due to be called up so i forestalled that by volunteering and they accepted me quite happily and so i've sworn in in the middle of an air raid in london on october the 3rd of 1940 there it wasn't very long before i was called up and went up to blackpool for initial training and uh there's ground um ground drills and uh lectures on the uh the raf and everything else navigation and so on i was due to go back to canada for flying training but the germans sank the ship that we should have traveled on and the next ship that was suitable for me was uh going to south africa so i went to and south africa and on to southern rhodesia i quite enjoyed flying the tiger moths and in fact because i enjoyed flying the airplane it changed my career in the air force because i was uh detailed to go out and practice four standings in the in the tiger and uh but that was no fun for me so i went and i read up in the raf manual sign how to do loops and uh so i i quite practiced in doing loops all on my own and then comes a time when the uh i was due to start uh doing aerobatics officially with a with an instructor and uh he he did a loop with me following through on the controls and he said right now you do loop so i did a loop and did the perfect loop where you hit the slip stream you made on the way up on the way back down again and he said do that again so i did it again and hit the sleep team he said you're for fighters and so my my whole career changed from then on because previously i was in a twin engine stream so we went to the for service flying training in the harvard the harvard one had the canvas covered wings and rounded wingtips and it was rather liable to the ground loop it would drop a wing at the last moment in your landing and uh the uh the wing would hit the ground and you'd do a nice ground loop which didn't do the undercarriage any good at all but then the uh the harvard two was uh that no an all-metal airplane and it was much nicer to fly all together i i quite enjoyed the flying trading and uh managed to pass out with with a the chief flying instructor and gained my wings that was in uh been 1941 [Music] from south africa was posted up to egypt where there was supposed to be an operational training unit but it was operated by the south african air force and they had enough of their own pilots without in having any english pilots horning in on the flying training so eventually and then shipped me back to england and it did my operational training on the hurricane it was a very easy airplane to fly and it was it was great to get up in this lovely merlin engine single engine fighter and it's a great thrill well i was uh authorized uh uh to go and practiced it was a low-flying area designated for us which is a fairly very level grand and uh to fly practice uh not below 200 feet and while i was uh practicing below at 200 feet there was a group of land army girls in a field so i demonstrated to them what a hurricane was like and in the process of which as i overshot from the field where they were working i hit a uh a hawthorne bush which was uh oddly enough 200 feet high would you believe anyway i had to so i spent quite a bit of time the next few days sitting underneath the hurricane picking bits of hawthorne bush out of the radiator so i was confined to barracks from a fortnight i think and and uh also committed to going clean up clean airplanes rather than then go flying by now it's now 1442 1442-43 the hurricane had been drawn from operational use so uh as part of the uh the course each pilot did a an hour or two actually flying the typhoon so come the at the time when uh they needed more pilots on typhoons i went and did a full conversion onto the typhoon much about the same size aeroplane so but it was much heavier altogether than the hurricane before uh i actually did my flying training on the on the uh the typhoon uh the sabre engine had a very very bad reputation all together 24 cylinder horizontally opposed cylinders and producing about 2 000 horsepower which was double the power of the hurricanes maryland of course uh the engines were had the habit of just seizing up uh it was a sleep valve engine and uh they managed to get the uh the patent for uh the sleeve so that it was properly lubricated and didn't seize up anymore and then the typhoon also suffered from vibration of the tail plane and the tail would eventually break off so that was the reputation it had when i started flying it but it was a delight to fly in and take off full left rudder trim and open the throttle very slowly with the the uh left foot well forward to counteract the swing of the uh the 14 foot favela but do remember when you get airborne take off that rudder trim because otherwise the aircraft will be flying with skid on all the time and the fuel would supposed to fed evenly from the two wing tanks was being fed all from one tank and the other one was uh was completely full and the the left-hand one would be empty so it was important to get the aircraft properly trimmed very quickly after takeoff a loop of course because it was a bigger heavier aircraft the loop was quite quite big it gained up speed very quickly and on the way back down again after a loop built up to over 500 miles an hour the limiting speed i think was 527 above which we were not supposed to go although quite frequently in in a dive on a target i i saw my airspeed indicated was indicating about 550 miles an hour the aeroplane seemed to stand it i found the uh the controls very evenly balanced it was never the elevator being lighter or heavier than the aileron control i found the spitfire was nothing like as well balanced as as the typhoon very light on the elevator but quite heavy on the ailerons that that's a sacrilege isn't it i think that the the typhoon was a superior aircraft for that sort of operation as opposed to the hurricanes but foreign air force training was always to do three-point landings but um this holding the aircraft uh off it was very easy for one wing to stall before the other and and so you'd drop a wing and uh quite quite possibly have that wingtip hit the ground for some reason i diverted i was landed at an aerodrome where which was operating mosquitoes and the mosquito uh pilots were having a lot of trouble with landing the aircraft and then they were getting into ground loops and all sorts of difficulties with the mosquito and and i was in the in the mess and um mosquito came in and landed and made a beautiful wheel landings you know the the pilots were all tremendously impressed with the way that aircraft was landed and uh it came in and shot down and the uh cop copies oh her hood slid back and finally got out and uh jumped down into the ground and took off the helmet and out dropped a lot of uh blonde curls and it was an ata pilot a transfer auxiliary pilot who their job was to deliver aircraft to the squadrons and there was this beautiful blonde girl flying a a a mosquito which they were all having difficulties flying and there was this young beautiful young lady came in and made a beautiful landing and a mosquito that really put them all to shame where we would be approaching in somewhere around about four 400 miles an hour normally we we did a a sort of a zoom climb as an approach to loose speed and do a do a loop in the in the circuit and we'd actually put the undercarriage up as we were upside down in the loop and then the undercarriage was selected down which of course was this time it was going up not down then we can't come out of the loop and that was us with the the speed bled off now uh for us to get get some flap down and turn in and land that was quite a normal procedure really is sort of i can remember my my very first operation uh on the typhoon uh the um i was given number two to the flight commander and he said joe just stick behind close behind me and and do what i do so um he went into some grand attack on he went in firing his cannon at the german positions and i was tucked in closely behind him and of course i flew into a cloud of the the links which held together the uh the ammunition the links were all discarded as the the the shell was pulled out of the uh out of the chain i flew into the cloud of those and got got quite a number of them stuck in the leading edges of my my wings which didn't make me popular with the flight commander against the luffa by this time had virtually disappeared so i never saw another uh luffaf aircraft while i was flying in typhoon the only time there was a a german ship and we we noticed um a flying boat which it had been moored alongside the the ship it's started a take-off run across the bay and with a squadron of war-hungry typhoons above that was a rather foolish operation because it was his very last flight as we moved up into germany we didn't want called on very much for support of the army we we had some very noticeable sorties in early february when the allied armies did the first um crossing of the river rhine and we were there in close support to contract the anti-aircraft fire which was being directed at the um all the gliders that were being flown in the dakotas uh towing gliders with the invading forces to cross over the over the river the germans had uh four elegant uh 20 millimeter cannon in uh grouped in a turret and there was a pretty formidable anti-aircraft fire from that all of the early operations we've faced with that uh return fire of course we had um uh four and twenty millimeter cannon in the wings so we retaliated to some extent so they did um managed to shoot down uh one of our flight commanders was an australian pilot uh he he he bailed out and was able to return to his uh to his uh the allied side of the uh of the invasion uh when he landed amongst uh british army tribes he was an australian and they didn't they had a dark blue uniform compared with the lighter blue raf and he also uh was wearing a belt which he'd taken off a dead german in the invasion of normandy uh with debacle got uns on the on the buckle and when he landed in amongst the british army troops and there's this chap in a rather peculiar uniform which they didn't recognize being dark blue and uh wearing a german belt that he was put immediately with the uh the ground troops on unloading the glue gliders as they were flying in the arms and ammunition for the allied forces until his rather profane use of the english language persuaded them that he really was an australian and was sent back to his unit so we had the job of trying to interdict and uh also bombing the um railway launch through holland where the germans were taking up the uh v1 and v2 uh flying bolton rocket uh taking taking the um all of those up to the dutch coast to fire them across the channel to to london i i never never involved in the in the actual defense of the in southeast england from the doodlebugs and although just occasionally we did encounter one and uh i did our best to stop it the easy way of doing it because uh of course it was uh loaded with uh high explosive bombs and if we start shooting at it the bombs would possibly explode and we're close behind it was not very good for us so we we tried to fly close close underneath the uh the dodelbug and then pull up in front of it so that our slipstream hit the uh the the flying bomb and the its autopilot couldn't cope with this uh sudden change of the uh of the airflow and uh it would lose control of the of the of the bomb and it would spin and crashed it crashed to the ground hopefully when it caught causing too much trouble down there we've been re-equipped with bomb racks which would hold uh each would hold a thousand pound bomb we've raced at antwerp from the runway at antwerp uh the far end of the runway and finished in a very solid looking uh castle built of granite and uh to put um two thousand pound bombs on the typhoon and it's terribly short runway at antwerp with a good solid castle at the far end it was a bit daunting we made sure we got lots and lots of power on before we released the brakes and started to take off run but we did we were attacking an ammunition dump in in holland actually and as we flew over the top of the dump some something exploded down below and whether it was our own bombs or from uh or whether the the dump itself uh blew up my friend peter dale was closest to it when it when it blew up and he managed to fly his aircraft back to our base at antwerp uh when the top of his aircraft was littered with mud from the uh from the explosion and that was about the last operation of the war actually just the one occasion where we actually saw one of our members lost as we as we crossed over the lines uh we're probably about 8 000 feet and quite suddenly his aircraft just dissolved in a great big ball of flame and there's a we never really knew what hit him it's presumably it was anti-aircraft fire but then there we are i i can't recall that i was ever ever felt any fright about going into operations like that if we fired all um all eight rockets uh if we fired them all at once they they meant quite a a quite a round of whoosh as they as the aircraft and uh if we had a little bit of aileron you know as we were slight turning in towards the target the uh blast from the rockets hit the uh aeron which is which was down a bit below uh normal level in the wing it gave quite a kick to the uh to the stick in the cockpit we never uh never really saw the results of uh of what our uh rockets or bombs dead because we make our dive in onto the target fire a rocket or drop bombs climb away and and then make course for home normally about 45 minutes total than this didn't go back to examine to see see what we had done but by this time the war was virtually over it was the last or uh sortie was may the third any fly we did we it was just a question of going up and practicing uh aerobatics and and formation flying and things but uh just thoroughly enjoying flying the airplane for the sake of flying the airplane the war ended uh may the eighth so we we did no more operational flying after that uh and we just uh carried on impressing the germans with our formation flying and so on so we we brought the typhoons home and uh they uh we landed at odium i think it was and they were virtually scrapped from that time on they never flew again the only typhoon left in one piece uh was one which had been lent to the americans to uh for them to evaluate the the aircraft and that aircraft was um was brought back and and he still existed in the raf museum attendant that's the only typhoon which is left [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Hawker Typhoon RB396

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Id: pYQ-owqnCyw

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Wed May 18 2022