What's in a Name?

I learned a lot in conversation with Alex Kinch, whom I visited in Southampton at the end of February. Speaking to him earlier on the phone, I mentioned that I'd been invited to lecture at the University of Southampton and asked if we might meet while I was in the area. His response was to invite my wife and me to stay with him. We were warmly and generously welcomed by a couple who were the same generation as our parents, but the adolescent John was alive for me in Alex, whose youth therefore interested me intensely. He had left Scotland at age sixteen to look for employment in the industrialized south and had found it as a joiner's apprentice in the Southampton docks. His parting with his boss had been even less amicable than John's, and though the man was obliged to rehire Alex after the war, welcoming him back and thanking him efusively for what he done for his country, he took the first possible occasion to lay him off, in tacit retaliation for Alex's earlier obstreperousness. Alex and Phyllis showed us photographs of their reunions in Dronten, Holland, with other veteran air gunners in the 1980s, and Phyllis told my wife that they don't go to the reunions anymore because so many of the veterans have died, except that in Phyllis's west country accent she pronounced "died" as "doyed," as Shakespeare is thought to have done, and we were puzzled, for a second or two, as to what she meant. They also showed us pictures of their son and grandchildren. Their son is about my age, and I found myself wondering what his life had been like in 1968. He had not gone to university, and I doubt if he ever heard of the Democratic National convention.

John's fellow air gunners not only provided me with specific details of flying with the SAAF but also pointed me in the direction of books where I could learn more. I found Eagles Victorious, the book Bert Briscoe had mentioned, in the Cambridge University Library. It is a fat volume, one of many in the official history of the South African Forces in World War Two. From it, I learned all I needed about the SAAF in the Mediterranean and about 25 Squadron in particular. Alex mentioned Chaz Bowyer's history of air gunners, which I also found in the CUL. There too I discovered a history of the B26 Marauder that Alex had shown me in Southampton. Gradually, the picture became clearer and more detailed.

I learned that in 1943 RAF men were "seconded," as the British say, to the SAAF, because South Africa was able to supply planes before it could train crews to man them. The Balkan Air Force was comprised of three SAAF squadrons, together with RAF, Rhodesian, Polish, Yugoslav, and Italian squadrons. It was formed for the first time in June, 1944, with a mission to support ground forces in offensive operations against the Germans in the eastern Mediterranean. SAAF 25 Squadron was initially based at Pomigliano, then moved in the spring of 1944 to an airbase that was constructed near Termoli, where the Biferno River reaches the Adriatic, an area that had been liberated by the British 8th Army the previous October. A runway made of pierced steel planking (or PSP in military jargon) was built on level ground not far from the beach, and a camp consisting of tents and quonset huts was set up on an inland plateau above the runway. Alex showed me a small piece of the PSP runway when I visited him in February. He had been given it by an Italian farmer on a return visit to Termoli in 1985. The farmer said the runway was abandoned after the war, and the locals plundered it for their own purposes; forty years later the farmer was using PSP as an overhead trellis for his grapevines.

By the time John reached the hastily constructed camp near Termoli in November, 1944, he had been in the RAF for almost two years. Most of the time had been drudgery. The hype continued, but the excitement was always somewhere else, and he had almost given up hope that he would see action before the war ended. Boredom, meaningless routines, and uncertainty were relieved by his training as a wireless operator and air gunner, but even his training involved more classroom work than anything else, and he had never relished the classroom. Gunners in training were given interminable lectures, blackboard demonstrations, and exams. According to Bowyer, they were instructed in armament, Morse Code, navigation, math, and RAF law and administration. Even gunnery training was technical and difficult. They learned about quartering the sky in search of attacking fighters, about "the curve of pursuit" that a gunner had to allow in aiming at an attacking plane, about how to use the 50-mph gun sight to make good use of their ammunition.

All of this seemed meaningless apart from practical application. "Never hosepipe," the trainees were told, not only because it wasted ammunition but because it reduced the chances of an effective hit. The double-barrelled Browning automatics were not cheap to fire. They spat out 600 .303-inch caliber rounds per minute, varying four types of round in succession: armor-piercing, tracer, incendiary, and explosive. Even a one-second burst accounted for ten rounds. Yet "hosepiping" was irresistible to novices, and Bowyer reports that it was actually standard procedure for the USAAF, whose planes carried the longer-range Colt-Browning .505s that were capable of keeping fighters at a greater distance. With target acquisition (or the amount of time the target was in a gunner's sightline) lasting only seconds, spraying the target seemed the only way to hit it. They began with practice on the ground, shooting at a model airplane drawn by a small train on a circular track. In the air, the target was a wind-sock-like "drogue," pulled behind an airplane. Hits were scored by giving each gunner a belt of training ammunition that left a different color, red, green, or blue, as it struck the drogue. Looking at John's logbook, I noticed that his percentage of hits in training was remarkably low (5.3, 1, 2.1, etc.), but Alex told me that those scores were really quite good: at least he was hitting the target. "Average," wrote his instructor in his logbook, "A steady reliable type. Has fairly good knowledge and should improve with experience." Alex said that's about what they wrote for everybody.