16

Back to Jever.

By the time I and my convoy arrived back at Jever the Squadron flying programme was in full swing.
Almost before I had unpacked my personal kit and given my laundry to Frau Pinnau to attend to, I was detailed, for the first time, for an air-to-ground rocket-firing sortie at Meppen Range. By now the weather had turned snowy. It was not without some difficulty therefore that I found the range in its camouflage of patchy snow. I have no scores for any rocket sorties, but I never did badly.
Practice rocket firing, using 60 lbs concrete head (i.e. non-explosive) rockets, meant a dive angle of 30 degrees, a given start height, and a stated minimum break off altitude (safety height). To fly lower after firing rockets could mean that bits of rocket could (sometimes, but rarely) ricochet off the ground and strike the aircraft that had just fired them. When practice-firing, the rockets would streak ahead of you, without recoil of course, their (sometimes erratic) smoke trails visible, until you actually caught them up and overflew them, almost never seeing whether they hit the white 10 feet square canvas target. The Range Controller radioed the accuracy of your aim back to you. It was usual to use the range in pairs, the Range Controller detailing which of the row of targets you were to aim at when called in to fire.
I flew two such sorties in quick succession that day, the second being aborted after very few minutes as my aircraft proved unserviceable after take-off. The next day I flew two further air-to-ground sorties using cannon. The first of these was aborted because of unserviceability, but the second, of 45 minutes duration, was successful in spite of cloud and frequent snow showers.
Later that same day I was detailed to fly a night cross-country which could have turned into disaster. My briefed turning point was a town (name now forgotten) in northern Schleswig Holstein which meant flying across the Heligoland Bight and back. There was patchy cloud and no moon; what one might call a 'dark' night but reasonably clear. Climbing on a north-easterly course from Jever I reached altitude and continued across the sea, but I did not pick up the lights on the islands or the coast to the west of my turning point. I have always had a good sense of direction, even above cloud, and was seldom far from knowing whereabouts I was. Right now I sensed something was wrong. There was little cloud and only the blackness of the sea below. I checked round the cockpit and, as usual, went to reset the reading on the DI to coincide with that of the compass and, instead of it having precessed only a few degrees out (as was not unusual) I discovered it to be wide of the mark.1 Something was clearly wrong. I could have been heading anywhere. A call to base revealed that my signal was weak indicating that I was some distance away. I called for, and transmitted for, a fix.2 I was given a low grade fix some distance to the north-west of Heligoland, way off course and well out to sea. Although I had never been taught astro-navigation, common-sense told me that if I could pick out the Pole Star through the high cirrus, I would know which way to head south, hopefully to pick up the coast. It was some anxious minutes later that the cirrus cleared enough
_____________________________________
1 DI = Direction Indicator.
2 We were trained in what was called DI orientation but, in this case, the radio fixes were initially inaccurate because of distance and location of fixer stations. In those days to obtain a fix involved changing radio frequency to request the fix, then transmitting for thirty seconds so that the fixer station operators could tune into, and read off, the bearing of the radio signal and then report it by land-line. This bearing was then matched to the bearings taken from the same transmission by other stations (at least two, preferably more) to be able to plot the location of the transmitting aircraft. This information was then relayed to its pilot. It was a lengthy process and, in the instance related above, I spent much time transmitting for fixes once I had realised my predicament.
85