RNZAF Historial
W/C Ron Watts 488 Sqn
By David Homewood, www.cambridgeairforce.org.nz
Aug 13, 2018, 12:48

Wing Commander Ron Watts (right), probably taken in Holland

Serial Number: NZ404974
RNZAF Trade: Pilot
Date of Enlistment: 1st of December 1940
Rank Achieved: Wing Commander
Flying Hours: Total: 1646 hrs (Operational 611 hrs 25 mins - 567hrs on DH Mosquitoes)
Operational Sorties: 121 Ops (285¼ operational hours)
Service Details: See full details below

Date of Birth: 11th of March 1916, at Auckland
Personal Details: Ron was the son of Mr and Mrs G.B. Watts of Woodward Road, Mount Albert, Auckland. He was educated at Cornwall Park and Mt Albert Grammar Schools, before moving to Cambridge. Whilst living in Cambridge he was a prominent member of the Hautapu Football Club and was a Cambridge representative rugby player. When Ron joined the RNZAF he had been a shearer at Dingly Dell, but prior to this he'd also worked on the farm of Mr Wilfred Harbutt of Fencourt. It was from Mr and Mrs Harbutt's place that he was farewelled when he joined the RNZAF.

Today (2006): Ron lives in retirement in Hillcrest, Hamilton
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After training in New Zealand and Canada and 54 OTU in Britrain Ron Watts was posted to 488 (New Zealand) Squadron

The No. 488 (NZ) Squadron Crest

Squadron Posting to 488 Sqn

Eventually Ron did get away from instructing at the OTU, and finally got onto an operational squadron. He was posted to 488 (NZ) Squadron, a night fighter squadron made up mostly of New Zealanders. They had been flying Beaufighters up till the time when Ron joined, but when he arrived they were converting to a new aircraft type... “And when I got onto the squadron, we converted almost straight away to Mosquitoes. And seeing as I'd been an instructor, they made me the instructor of the other pilots onto the Mosquitoes. We had a dual control Mosquito, and so I was able to do a little bit of that. So once you're an instructor, look out, you're there!”

Unknown personel. Note the Mosquito stencil data on interest to modellers

Ron did manage to fly the Beaufighter VI with 488 Sqn, but not operationally, and not for long. He says, "When I started flying with the squadron they were flying Beaufighters. We converted to Mosquitoes pretty much straight away. Pretty much as soon as I got there."

Flying The Beaufighter vs the Mosquito

I asked Ron what was the Beaufighter like when compared with the Mosquito? He answered, “I still enjoyed them, I thought they were very good. When I was doing my Operational Training Unit I flew the Beaufighter Mk II, and they were, I think, probably underpowered. They had Rolls Royce Merlin engines, and they had a propensity to swing violently to the left on take off if you weren't careful. If you did it properly there was no problem. But there were quite a lot of fatal accidents on the OTU from people swinging on take-off. And the later ones, the Beau Mk VI didn't have that fault, I don't know why. It had much more powerful radial engines and it was a very, very nice machine. It was heavier than the Mosquito, and in the Mosquito your navigator sat side by side with you in the cockpit, whereas in the Beaufighter he was sitting away back down in the tail. So it was a bit more companionable in the Mosquito.”

I also asked what was the Mosquito like to fly as a night fighter? Ron says, “Beautiful. I had no complaints at all.” The squadron flew various models of the Mosquito.

This dual Mossie was a Mk III model. Ron says, "The III was the dual controlled one, so that wasn't operational of course. It had no armour plating, no guns or anything. It was very much lighter, so it was a good little aircraft to fly. "

He continues, "The XII, I think, the rated altitude with that when the superchargers kicked in was about 16,000ft. They were automatic two speed, two stage superchargers. And, I don't know how they were regulated, but they kicked in at a rated altitude, and I think it was 16,000, which was good when you were climbing away, and you were getting into the operational height of about 20,000. Most of our work was done at about that."

"Well, then they started us [chasing the planes who were] mine laying in the Thames Estuary and things like that, and they reckoned they wanted speed low down, and they brought out the next one, which the supercharger kicked in at ground level. But it was ridiculous because the mine layers were travelling very, very slowly. You didn't need speed. And by the time we'd got these, they'd stopped mine laying and they'd gone back high! But they still were perfectly acceptable aircraft."

The squadron spent most of their operational time with Mosquitoes flying the Mk XII and Mk XIII, but near the end of the war a new model replaced these.

"Well then we went to the Mk XXX, and that was just a different engine and a different radar. These earlier ones had a Mk VIII radar, and the Mk XXX Mosquito had the Mk X radar, which was a giant step back for our navigators, they didn't like them very much. You see, the Mk VIII had only one cathode ray tube, and it was excellent and very easy to read, whereas the Mk X went back the same as the Mk IV - before the Mk VIII - with two tubes. One for vertical and one for horizontal. So you had to go from one to the other constantly. They were side by side of course."

"The Mk VIII radar had an oscillating aerial in the nose of the aircraft. It started off with a very close oscillation and went wider and wider and wider. And it showed on the cathode ray tube as an arc, and when the target was dead ahead, the arc would be a complete circle. And then if the target was above the arc would be above, or out to one side the arc would correspondingly go out there. And the distance from the centre to the arc was the range, so it was excellent and the navigators loved that one."

The Mk VIII radar was also able to home in on the beacon used by RAF stations to guide aircraft back to base in bad weather or other foul conditions. Ron adds, "And you could alter it so that you got onto the radar beacon, you could just switch the switch over and that gave a straight line down the middle of the cathode ray tube. And the distance from your blip to the datum point was the distance to the beacon. You showed as a blip on either side of the centre line, and if the blip was out to the right, you were to the right of the beacon. When you'd centralised that blip, you were pointing at the beacon, and there was no error. It was great, and you could pick that up for about 80 miles, so it was very useful." He laughingly adds, "So we didn't need a navigator much, if you couldn't get within 80 miles you were out of luck."

Ops

Ron would eventually complete 121 operational missions, but he is quick to qualify this amount by saying, “That's not like bomber ops, I was night fighting and they weren't very dangerous at all a lot of the time, they were just routine patrols.”

Despite the many patrols Ron made, he was not to have too many encounters with the enemy, “Very few. By the time I got to be night fighting, which was 1943, the German Air Force had shot its bolt, and they didn't send bombers over very often. And for a start when I was night fighting we had radar of course, and it was top secret. Our radar was far more advanced than the German radar, so we weren't allowed to fly over enemy territory in case we got shot down and they got our radar. With the start of the second front, that rule was relaxed, and we patrolled well into Europe then. Over France and Holland and Germany and all the rest of it. We flew from Britain until an aerodrome was liberated in France after the start of the second front, and we went to Amiens Glisy in France, and we stayed there for the winter, and then we went up to Holland and I finished the war in Holland at an aerodrome called Gilze Rijen.”

Gaining Command of 488 (NZ) Squadron

Left to Right: Squadron Leader F.W. Davison, of Timaru; Wing Commander Ron Watts of Cambridge, and Squadron Leader J.L. Gardner of Nelson. Davison and Gardner were 488 (NZ) Sqn's Flight Commanders

“That was the only squadron I went on. It was supposed to be 18 months or 300 hours ops, on a tour, but I had not been there terribly long – I was a Flight Lieutenant when I went there – and I was promoted to Squadron Leader to take over one of the Flights. The set up was two Flights in the Squadron, each one commanded by a Squadron Leader, with a Wing Commander in charge of the lot. And at that particular time, one of the Flight Commanders, a Squadron Leader, had come up due for his rest – he went on rest – and the other Flight Commander got killed. He disappeared. So we needed two new Flight Commanders, and I guess I was the senior Flight Lieutenant so I got made up to Squadron Leader. And that more-or-less started my tour again, you see."

"And so then, at just about the time of the invasion of France, I think they decided they wanted a New Zealander in command of the New Zealand Squadrons. Up until then we'd had English commanders. And I was, once again, the senior Squadron Leader, so much to my astonishment I was made up to take over the Squadron as the CO.”

The Night Fighter Squadrons

488 Squadron flew alongside other squadrons also flying Mosquito night fighters. "We had three usually on our aerodrome - that's not quite correct but near enough - we certainly had three in Holland and France. One English, one Canadian and ourselves. And we would be 2nd Tactical Air Force, or 2nd TAF. Now, back in Britain, they had more as a reserve, but I wouldn't like to say how many - not very many. 85 Sqn had been doing that, but I think they changed over to something else. 219 Sqn was the English one; 418 Sqn the Canadian. Basically the three of us, those three squadrons, was the defence of London, before the invasion, and then we moved across to the continent"

"But that was our task, defence of London. And even if we didn't do anything else, if we deterred them from attacking London, that was something. Sometimes I recall we used to get intelligence reports back where the enemy used to send over twelve aircraft and we'd get the lot - us, nightfighters, and the ack-ack. We'd get them all, so that would deter people from it. They wouldn't be too enthusiastic about going over and losing the full strength."

Personal Aircraft and Personnel

Did 488 (NZ) Squadron assign their crews their own personal aircraft? Ron says, "Yes, pretty much. It depended on your ranking in the squadron. As CO, which I was at the end of the piece of course, I had my own aircraft, and it was understood that that was mine unless there was an emergency and they needed to call on it. The Flight Commanders each had their own aircraft, something the same, they didn't lend them much. Then the senior Flight Lieutenants were allocated an aircraft, but that could be flown by somebody else. We didn't have enough aircraft to give and say, "Well that's yours." The establishment was really only 25 aircraft on the squadron, but basically most of the time we would have 30 or more I think. The same as our establishment for aircrews, with probably 25, but we might get 35 or more."

"That was one of the disadvantages of being a New Zealand squadron, as new young pilots came through, if they were New Zealanders and they were being posted to a night fighting squadron they'd come to us. Whereas we'd get the old experienced ones go on rest, and then they'd go to another squadron somewhere else, so we'd lose all that expertise. it was very difficult, because I reckon a pilot wasn't much use to you on his first tour. He was still feeling his way, learning the job. So it was a bit of a shame that you lost your experienced pilots."

"We had a nucleus of very good pilots, they were the successful ones. I suppose you could count them on the fingers of one hand, the really good pilots."

Mosquito MM470 (ME-B) of 488 (NZ) Squadron prepares to take off from Amiens/Glisy, (B.48), in France

The squadron had a lot of men in it overall. "We had 300 men on the squadron, plus probably 50 aircrew. There was the Adjutant, and the Warrant Officer Discip., all the clerks..."

Did 488 (NZ) Squadron aircraft carry any nose art or personalised names? Ron says, "No. That was an American habit. One of them, it was a Mitchell I think, came in and landed, and the nosewheel either didn't go down or it buckled under the strain of landing, and it ploughed along on its nose on the runway. And the name of the aircraft was Gravel Agitator! Well named! The only casualty was one of the crewmen, in his panic to get out of the thing, jumped from the doorway up by the tail and broke his legs. Otherwise they were all right, but I suppose they were frightened of fire, you see. But I was much amused at this Gravel Agitator"

Even when he was the CO of the squadron he didn't bother to personalise his aircraft, which was a common practice in the RAF. The codes of the CO's aircraft could become the pilot's initials if they wished. But Ron says, "No, one CO put his little flag on, but I never bothered about that sort of thing. You could have done it. Some of them used to put down their little victories on the thing, little crosses or whatever, swastikas."

The 488 Sqn Base Companions

"Bradwell Bay, that was my favourite aerodrome. We were there for quite some time. It was right on the coast in Essex, just north of London. I believe there's a big nuclear power station there now. And we, from time to time, had a Tempest unit there. And when we were in Holland we also had a Meteor squadron. The Meteors had never met the Germans in combat. And they sent them over there to see if they could meet them and just see how, one opposed to the other, see how they got on, but they never did. They never came up. And the Germans were starting to fly jet aircraft. They were flying them at night, just about near the end of the war. And they were fast. I chased a few, but, oh, hopeless. Twice as fast as me! The ground chap would be abusing me, "Go faster!" "I am!" But we were starting to get losses too. I don't know if my squadron lost any to the German Messerschmitt 262 I think it was, but certainly one of our squadrons on the airfield had one or two shot down by Messerschmitts."

The Squadron Magister

"I had a good trip on a Miles Magister. When we moved to Bradwell Bay, we moved from Drem in Scotland, on the Firth of Forth coast. And the Magister wasn't serviceable so it was left behind, with some other aircraft that had to be ferried down. And I volunteered to go up and fly this Magister back, just for a bit of fun. And when I started out the weather was pretty good, but it closed in very rapidly, and I couldn't keep up above cloud, you see we had no radio or anything like that, so I snuck out over the coast and flew down the sea, just above the sea and under the cloud. And I got an oil leak, and had to go back inland and find an aerodrome, and drop down to get some more oil and get them to fix the leak up. The oil pressure was falling back and the temperature was going up. So anyway, I got down to Bradwell Bay, and I made the normal approach you'd make with a Mosquito, you see, and got over the fence, popped it down and stopped it! I looked an absolute idiot - 2000 yards of runway! I just about had to take it out and get airborne again to get down the end! I felt a complete fool."

Life on Squadron for 488 (NZ) Squadron

Even on active service, the military mind of the Air Force saw to it that the squadron pilots had to do PT. "Yes, they used to get a bit fuzzy about that. They made us run a mile at one stage. When we were at Bradwell Bay you had to run a mile, I don't know if it was every day or three times a week or what it was now, but yes they did get at that. But we never did organised PT, and we never did organised parades."

"At training, yes, training when I was instructing, they used to have parades. We didn't go on the parades much, but we had to take them sometimes as inspecting officer. And we used to do a lot of physical work anyway, played football. I played football right through. We had a good team on the squadron. In fact we had two teams because one flight was usually on duty. And we played a lot of squash on the old established aerodromes, most of them had squash courts. And you could borrow racquets, we played a lot of squash, so we had to keep reasonably fit."

"Once we got off Training Command it wasn't pushed onto us at all. Actually on the squadron, the emphasis there was doing your job properly, and things were pretty free and easy. Officiousness was kept to a minimum, you didn't have much brass business. You could be a bit scruffy and get away with it, it didn't really matter, so long as you did your duty properly and made a good job of that."

Ron feels tht their squadron was particularly relaxed because it was a New Zealand sqaudron. At least one other squadron on the base was markedly different from 488 in Ron's perception. "The Canadian squadron, when I used to visit them in their crewroom, I didn't like them at all. A lot of them were excellent fellows, nice chaps, we got on well with them. But when you went in the crewroom they were squabbling, and a most unpleasant atmosphere I thought. Abusive, bad language. Didn't get that in our unit at all."

"Another odd thing in our outfit too, they weren't womanisers. They'd get on the beer, sure, and a few of them got married, but by and large they didn't chase the girls at all."

"Another thing that was very odd to me was, every time you flew I suppose you knew it could be your last trip - not that it preyed on your mind - but if you had a church parade it had to be compulsory for anybody to go. Nobody was trying to have ten bob each way," he laughs, "That always amazed me."

Funerals

Ron says he found himself attending three seperate funerals for aircrew during the war. Rather than recalling them as the sad occasions they were, he actually found each had a humourous story attached. "One I went to was for a pilot. His wife was at the funeral, and for some reason she decided to stand beside me at the graveside. She was understandably very upset and I suggested that she'd be better going over and standing with the rest of her family, but she wanted to stay with us, the squadron chaps. Anyway, it came time for them to fire the volleys, the 21 gun salute. These airmen were lined up in two ranks, one in front of the other, with rifels at the ready. The first volley went off ok, you know, "Ready! Aim! Fire!". But on the second one a chap in the back row fired his rifle on the command "Aim!" and blew the hat off the fellow in front of him. The rest of us were just wetting ourselves, but trying not to laugh out loud with the widow standing right there!"

"On another one, we were all in the church for this funeral and the widow was seated up the front of the church. It was just about to begin and all of a sudden in walks another widow. There were two of them. When they realised this, it was all on. A full out fist fight, biting and scratching, the lot. It was a real debacle, poor chap's funerla. Just hilarious."

"And there was this one when the squadron was at Bradwell Bay. We had to travel some distance to the funeral for this chap, and the RAF laid on a bus, etc. When we arrived in the village we found we were early. So someone suggested we should pop into a nearby pub and have a pint to kill time. We all filed in and had this pint, but the chap organising the funeral said they still were nowhere near ready for us. So we had another, and then another. By the time we got the call to go into the church, we were all drunk, reeling about all over the place. What a disgrace," he laughs remorsefully.

Enemy Claims

A 488 (NZ) Sqn Mosquito shortly after the invasion of Europe. Note the black and white invasion stripes

Ron shot down two enemy aircraft during his operational career. He is modest when he describes the circumstances. “Well, they were pretty routine. The first one was an enemy aircraft sowing mines in the Thames Estuary. And it was interesting really that every day – we spent two days on duty and two days off - when we came on duty, we went onto the night state which was listed eight pilots in order of take-off. And this particular night we took off in pairs, although we didn't fly in formation – you couldn't in the dark of course. And I was first off this night, and when I went down to the flight, there was some little fault in my aircraft, and I couldn't go. And one of my great friends, a chap I roomed with called Jim Gunn, went in my place. And he'd not long gone when there was a raid developed. And my aircraft came right so I scrambled too. And I could hear on the radio, I could hear him saying he was in contact with an enemy and he'd got it. And I thought, you know, if my aircraft had been serviceable I'd have been the one - that was the first aircraft that the squadron shot down - and that would have been mine!”

“Anyway they vectored me down over the Thames Estuary and it was a very, very black night. And they were flying at about 200 feet, sewing these mines, and it wasn't very pleasant at all. But we got a head on contact on our radar, and we had to turn round behind him, and I shot him down all right. And then we found out later that when Jimmy Gunn had shot his victim down, the rear gunner had shot back at Jimmy and shot him down too. So perhaps it was just as well that my aircraft wasn't serviceable.”

Ron's second enemy kill came later. “That was over Europe, towards the end of the war. It was just a normal interception. You must appreciate that we intercepted hundreds of aircraft, and most of them were friendly aircraft. That was one of the problems, the sky was full of Allied aircraft and there were practically no German aircraft about!”

Was it easy for a night fighter crew to recognise another aircraft as friendly or as a foe? “No, not always. And the radar wouldn't tell you what the aircraft was, it would only lead you. The range of the radar was roughly from about four miles, and you had to be in touch with the ground. We were in contact with the ground the whole time and they directed us, told us where to go, what height to fly, and all the rest of it. And if we were doing an interception, they would aim to put us to within at least four miles of the target, and from there on our radar operator talked us in. And often it was very difficult to pick what the target was, and there were a lot of friendly aircraft shot down that way.”

The second crewman in the night fighter Mosquito – where in day fighters a navigator would usually be – had a different function. Ron explains, “He was called a Navigator Radar, but in fact he didn't do any navigation at all. He was a straight out radar operator. He was called a Navigator Radar, and on his brevet he had NR.”

Though the night fighters hunted alone in the dead of night, they were able to prove their claims by the use of gun-cameras. "We had cameras on the aircraft that took a photograph every time you pressed a button. You could fire the camera independently so you could assess what happened."

Hits on his aircraft

“I got hit a couple of times with anti-aircraft fire, but that was quite rare. Most of our flying was done at 20,000 feet and we were pretty safe from anti-aircraft fire once or twice, but never seriously. I had a pretty charmed life really, because a lot of fellows did get shot down of course. But most of them I would think got shot down with what you might even call small arms fire low down. I know one of our Flight Commanders, the other Flight Commander to me when I was a Flight Commander, got shot down over the battle lines by light armoured fire – machine gun and Bofors, that sort of stuff.”

Other 488 (NZ) Sqn duties

“We always used to test our aircraft during the afternoon if we were going to fly at night. And we tested in pairs, and did mock interceptions…one would be the target… just to give our radar operators practice. So inevitably we trained every afternoon we flew.”

488 Sqn was not just about intercepting enemy aircraft though, another primary role was rescuing allied aircrews. Ron elaborates, “We had other functions too, for example if somebody got lost, and perhaps their electrics had gone and they couldn't get home, couldn't find their way home, didn't even know where they were perhaps, then they'd fly what was called a ‘box'. You'd fly one minute due north, one minute due east, one minute due south and one minute due west, and north, and keep repeating that. And the radar would then pick that up and know then that you were lost and needed help. And over Britain they would direct you by means of searchlights to the nearest aerodrome, but if you were outside Britain they would probably push one of us up and we'd pick you up and lead you home. I have picked aircraft up from the coast of Holland, about a hundred odd miles away from Britain, and brought them back – which must have been comforting for them, especially if they'd be very vulnerable, and vulnerable from attack from fighters too. It must have been quite a relief to see us.”

488's Navy Detachment

Ron recalls, "We had a Navy Detachment. They were navigators and pilots, and they came to get a bit of experience. They were going to fly night fighting with the Navy."

The Most Exciting Op

“The most stressful was, one day, we used to be on duty by day as well. The Flight that was flying at night flew two nights on, and the other Flight was stand-by during the day. The thing was, if you got any very, very bad weather, with low cloud and fog underneath it, the day boys couldn't intercept enemy aircraft. So we used to have to stand by to take off in those circumstances."

"And when that happened, fog and low cloud, the enemy would put a radio beacon across from France to London, with dots on one side, the dashes on the other and a steady beam in the middle. And the German fighter-bombers would fly along that, and when they got a cross beam from another part in France, they were over London and they'd drop."

"And this one trip I had that will stay in my memory forever, it was a filthy, filthy day with very low cloud, at about 200 feet, and fog underneath it. And they insisted I take off. Really, it shouldn't have been, you shouldn't have been allowed to take off. It was virtually an instrument take off, which is not easy to do at any time."

"Anyway, I was fluttering around at about 150 feet, and I knew I couldn't get back in again, so I was stretching the endurance as best I could, flying very, very slowly and low revs, and all that sort of thing. And I was being directed from the ground where to fly. I was over the Thames Estuary, just going to and fro across to cut them off, you see. Nobody came by the way, I think they only put the beam on just to see if some idiot would get up and crash!"

"But as we were going along, there was an object in the water on stilts. What they used to have, they had buoys moored in the Thames Estuary, so if a fighter pilot got shot down, he could paddle up to this buoy, and climb up the ladder, and get in to warmth and food and all that sort of thing. And they had a flag that they ran up the flag post if anybody was in residence. And I said to the navigator, “See if the flag's up”, you see. I thought it was a buoy.

“No fear! It was a fort! The Royal Navy had forts in the Estuary, and they would fire at anything within range - no questions asked - with Bofors! And of course I was sauntering along at about 170mph, which was the point of stalling, at about 150 feet. And they opened fire on me, and the firing was beautiful. The line was perfect, it was right across my nose. Of course if I turned away there would have been no deflection, they obviously thought I was doing 220mph or whatever, and they allowed that much deflection. And when I tried to climb into cloud cover, of course I was on the point of stall, if I throttled up too much I'd go faster and fly into it. It was a long, long while to get up into cloud, a long, long while!

“And the Bofors comes up, it looks like a dotted line as it comes up. And it seems to be very, very slow from the gun, and as it progresses it gets faster and faster, and when it gets in front of you, it shoots across at great speed. But I got up eventually, and everywhere else the cloud had been about 200 feet, but here it was about 1,200 feet! So I was staggering up on the point of stall, and when I got in there, I had something to say to the ground people for putting me over this thing and they apologised, and circled me round, and I was in cloud for a bit. Then they brought me down, and I was right over a battleship! And they too would open fire on anybody within range! So I said “Thank you very much, who's side are you on!” Oh, that was great!” he laughs.

“And then I had to go back, there was no raid, nobody came up, it was all a waste. I had to go back and for goodness how long I had to wait till the fog would let me slip back in. So that was really exciting, without any enemy action, who needs the enemy?!!”

Another Tight Spot

“We were flying over France one night, over the front lines. We couldn't see them of course, but we knew pretty much what it was, the Allied army and the German army. And an aircraft was flying low at about 2000 feet. That's a very vulnerable height for light arms fire. And they were coned, and when I say coned, it was the most intense tracer I've ever seen in my life. It was silver and gold and white stuff, and green I suppose from 20mm, and red from Bofors. And it was all hosing up in a pyramid, and I reckon you wouldn't get a pin in there. Incredible really. And I said to my navigator, “We'll just circle in close, and if he comes out of that we'll pick him up and see who he is.”

However Ron's plan went slightly awry, "We got too close, and they switched to us! Of course I didn't stay too long, I got out of it smartly." But he was sure the Mosquito was badly dammaged by the anti-aircraft fire that they'd flown into. "I felt the controls of it, and thought, “We're going to be like a colander here.” And the navigator said, “Is she all right?” He was a bit concerned.

"We got back home and landed, and we said to the ground crew when they came out – they used to come with a ladder for us – “What's she look like?” And they said, “Oh, all right.” And there wasn't a scratch on it!! Not a scratch. From this, which was so intense that, you wouldn't put a pin in it, and not a scratch . I must admit, I was sort of disappointed,” he laughs.

“With ack-ack, it's a funny thing. If you see an aircraft coned in the searchlights at say 20,000 feet, it looks about as big as a little moth. It looks impossible to hit that little thing. But when you're up there, you feel as big as a barn. It's just impossible to miss me! That's the difference.”

The Mosquitoes had four 20mm cannons. Ron says, “They were pretty lethal. They were armed with semi-armour-piercing incendiary, and high explosive incendiary alternate rounds. And if you hit, it would blow an engine to pieces, and set fire at the same time. They were very, very lethal. They were calibrated 200 yards ahead so they passed over at 200 yards ahead. If you hit something, that was it, no second burst needed. They would shatter an engine block to pieces.

No Press Coverage for 488

“We were never given credit for anything, because we were carrying this secret equipment. There was one press representative, Alan Mitchell, we knew him quite well. I got to know Alan quite well, but he couldn't write anything about us, you see, because of this secret business of the radar. He'd go to 485 or 486 Sqn, and put a big story in, and so we were left with people saying, “Well what are they doing? Pretty cushy sort of a job, that.” But in fact, it wasn't. We had to fly in some filthy weather, terrible.

“Another episode of the sort of thing, we took off one night. I took off and must have been the second lot to go off. The first lot had gone off, and they were just coming back. We used to go off in pairs, though we didn't fly together of course. It was quite a light night, overcast, completely overcast but bright underneath and not too bad anyway. I didn't pay much attention, I just took off, and looked inside to check my speed and lift me wheels, and I looked down and I was in cloud, right off the ground! So I called up flying control and I said “Aerodrome's red, nobody to land.” Orange was very sour is the code word. And immediately the fellow from my squadron who'd taken off from the first patrol called back and said, “Don't you listen to him, its perfectly all right.”

"I said, “Check your altimeter.” I think he'd misread his altimeter and thought he was at 1000 feet when he was at 100 feet. I can't understand how he could make that mistake. He was a very, very experienced pilot. And the perspective looking along from 1000 feet to 100 feet is completely different. He'd been looking at the runway lights. Anyway, while he was talking to me, that was the end of the conversation. I called up flying control and I said, “Get him to check his altimeter.” And they made soothing noises – he'd gone in, he'd crashed."

"But one humorous aside – there's always something funny that goes on – as he went in he hit two American Negro soldiers who were walking along the road. And one of them was in hospital, and of course there is always a court of enquiry when anything happens like that. So the officer who did the court of enquiry went to interview these American Negroes in hospital. And the Negro's story was, “Well I guess me and my buddy was walking along the road, and there was this noise and I found myself in a ditch. I picked myself up and went to my buddy, but I guess he just couldn't take it.” Ron laughs at this statement, and quips, "You sissy! Hit by an aircraft at 200 miles an hour and you couldn't take it!!??” Why did we win the war? What a scream. That's true too that.”

“So anyway, after that we had to go over and land of course. We couldn't land there, no show. So there was an aerodrome right on the south coast of England called Ford, and it had a radar beacon, so you could go and approach from the north, and the radar allowed you to tune into a beacon on the ground. And that was absolutely accurate, so the navigator could put you so you're pointing directly at it. You came from the north and lost height to perhaps a couple of thousand feet, a thousand feet over the aerodrome. Then you went on flying south and you could let down over the sea, knowing there were no obstructions underneath. We had a sensitive altimeter that read straight down, it didn't read anything in front, and it was pretty accurate to within, I don't know, ten or maybe fifteen feet. It was quite accurate. So when you got low down you could look at that one as well as the normal altimeter. And I broke cloud, I did this twice at Ford, I broke cloud at about 200 feet or less, which is pretty low at night on a black night. Then you turned on a reciprocal, came back and landed with a cloud base of a couple of hundred feet. Even by day a couple of hundred feet is pretty good, because all the sheds and hangars are pretty near that tall anyway, and trees, by the time you go on one wing to turn, you're not far off obstacles. And at night in the black, it's pretty nerve racking. That's the sort of thing you had to cope with. If you couldn't cope with it, then of course, you were a statistic and that's all there was to it."

Into Europe

I asked Ron how long after D-Day was it that the squadron moved from England to base itself in Europe, and he replied, "Oh, I thing it would have been getting onto about three months I'd think. We had to wait until the aerodrome was liberated."

Initially the squadron moved into an airfield at Amiens/Glisy, (B.48), in France. Whilst there they endured "Heavy snow, heavy, heavy snow," Ron remarks. He says of the airfield's facilities, "The buildings, there were several of them on the aerodrome, they were put up by the Germans. They were sticks, like teatree sticks, camouflaged, just to give the impression that it wasn't an airfield."

It was cold, a very. very cold winter there. And the engine covers had spouts going down, and they put kerosene heaters in there to keep the engines warm. they had -3 degrees of Fahrenheit, 35 degrees of frost!"

On the airfield the men lived in German pre-fabricated buildings, in relative comfort. "Before going there, we were under canvas. They put us under canvas in Britain to get us used to being in canvas. They only time we lived under canvas was when we were training," Ron laughs at the irony. "When we got to France, I was C.O. by then, and I got scouts out going round the countryside looking for German buildings. They were all prefabricated and they came to pieces, and any we got, we pinched and brang back. Those were used as sleeping quarters there."

They also had a commandeered Chateau to live in, as well as these prefab huts. "There were not enough beds in there because there were three squadrons there. It was down an imposing avenue, and the Chateau was a very big building. But the Germans had been there, and they'd subdivided all the rooms up, partitioned them to make small rooms, and it wasn't an ornate place at all."

They took over a town house in Amiens as a rest home too, "So the boys could go to town, and sleep the night there. A lovely house. We had put put an oil heater in there, with waste engine oil dripping on a hot plate."

As the C.O., Ron had another form of accomodation too, "My caravan. The central caravan was an office, and then you had a floor that let down and a roof let up, and you propped pipes in between it, and you wrapped canvas around. It made two little bedrooms. I used to sleep there a lot, rather than sleep back there in the Chateau. So I was on the job right down at the edge of the runway. But it was cold, and it was canvas wrapped around, and where it overlapped the fine snow would drift in. And I'd wake in the morning to a snow drift literally three feet deep, three feet high. And I had a jerrycan full of water. I had a kerosene heater but I couldn't leave it on all night otherwise I'd have been asphyxiated. So I'd switch it on, light it about six in the morning, put the jerrycan on top to melt enough water to get a little bit of water to shave with. And I'd put that in a little billy and get it hot for shaving."

The Battle of Arnhem, best remembered today thanks to the film A Bridge Too Far, was on of the most famous battles of the European war, and 488 (NZ) Sqn was involved. "We did a lot over Arnhem when that was on. Not that it made any difference, it was all pitch black down there - we couldn't see a thing!" Looking at his logbook he points out an entry, "Yeah, that's over Arnhem, over the bridgehead.... 'Coned by searchlights twice, much ground fighting'... That's when we moved to Holland."

Ron commanded No. 488 (NZ) Squadron, RAF until its disbandment in April 1945, and he finished the European war looking aftert Gilze Rijen airfield in Holland, which was a major fighter station and the final station from where 488 had operated. Also operating from that airfield was No. 485 (NZ) Squadron's Spitfires.

"When the war finished we disbanded the squadron, and I took over the job of second-in-command of the airfield. And as soon as the war finished, all the permanent RAF fellows were rushing around, organising soft jobs for themselves. And this fellow who was running the airfield got himself a job down in the south of France - it sounded pretty good to me. So I became head of the airfield, the C.O. of the airfield."

Ron was Mentioned in Despatches twice for his efforts in the war.

When he returned to New Zealand by troopship, he came back in the same cabin as the chap he'd shared a cabin with on the way over! Amazing after all that time.

To read a little more about No. 488 (NZ) Squadron, see here:

New Zealanders With The Royal Air Force Volume II (Text Online)
www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2-2RAF-b3-5.html

And for a much more indepth history, you can try to track down the squadron's official history, entitled Defence Until Dawn by Les Hunt (1949). Hunt was the squadron's Intelligence Officer. The book is difficult to track down and very rare, but your local library might be able to track a copy down from the National Library of New Zealand

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