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Aviation History
1948
1948 - 2185.PDF
A great favourite with the pilots, the little Nieuport Scout (1916-17), which had a very narrow chord lower plane. Armament was one .303 Lewis gun firing over the top plane. particularly after 1931, when the squadron first had its much- beloved Hawker Fury biplanes. With a second world war not very far away, the squadron was re-equipped with 8-gun Hurricanes in April, 1939, and had but five months with the new aircraft before proceeding to France as part of the Advanced Air Striking Force under Air Marshal A. S. Barratt (now Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Sheridan). S/L. Halahan was the commanding officer. Then followed the dreary months of what became known as the '' phoney war,'' but it was during this period that No. 1 . scored another first. On October 20th, 1939, P/O. Mould shot down the first enemy aircraft (a Do. 17) to be destroyed on the Western Front. Yet another first scored in France by No. 1 was the shooting-down of the first Messerschmitt no on March 29th, 1940. Air Marshal Barratt had promised a dinner in Paris to the first pilots to do this, and F/L. Walker (who later commanded the squadron), F/O. Stratton and Sgt. Clowes were the recipients. For May 10th, 1940, the day on which the battle for France broke out, the page in the squadron's H C , , . operational record books reads: " It has come today. For us war broke out and there is ceaseless activity. News and information give promise of momentous events. A patrol (F/L. Walker, F/O. M. H. Brown, F/O. Kilmartin, P/O. Eichey and Sgt. . Soper) accounted for a Do. 215 near Longuyon. Later in the morning F/L. Hanks and Lewis got a Do. 17. P/O. Mould and F/O. Drake each got .an Me. no." (Drake later became W/C, D.S.O., D.F.C. and bar and American D.F.C.) Autograph. Hunting' As written in the operational record book, the fight up to the time of France's capitulation appears as a very light- hearted account of what was, of course, a very bitter struggle. A typical passage, for May 14th, reads "Many people who for the past six months had been wearing spurs to keep their feet from slipping off their desks, moved with some alacrity. Wing headquarters retired in a cloud of dust due to bomb dropping. B Flight destroyed an He. ni (F/L. Banks), F/O. Lorimer forced-landed at St. Loupeterrin. In an earlier engagement, ' • • * '. The armament on a No. I Squadron S.E.SA at Clairmarais, 1918. The Lewis gun fired over the top plane and a Vickers through the airscrew. One of No. \'s Morane "Parasols," used for Corps reconnaissance. With a 110 h.p. Le Rhone rotary engine, it had a top speed of 96 m.p.h. The black puffs are A.A. bursts. Mould, Clisby and Goodman accounted for three He. 11 is and two Me. 110s. Clisby landed beside one of,the enemy air- craft shot down and chased the startled crew all over the countryside, waving a revolver. He wanted their autographs! '' With the fall of France at the end of June, No. 1 Squadron flew its remaining aircraft back to Tangmere from St. Nazaire airfield. The ground crews and staff sailed in two colliers to Plymouth and, after joining up again at Tangmere, the unit moved its headquarters to NortholtS1 All main equipment and documents had been lost in France; nevertheless the squadron was fully operational again very early in July, and night- flying training was re-commenced on an intensive scale. Whilst in France the squadron's Scoreboard showed 155 enemy aircraft destroyed and 81 damaged. The squadron's first interception in England was effected by Red Section (S/L. D. A. Pemberton, F/O. P. G. H. Matthews and P/O. D. O. M. Browne). An He. 11 r was sighted 20 miles north of Brighton and engaged by P/O. Browne, who exhausted his ammunition but continued to shadow the enemy aircraft in order to advise its course through his " pip squeak." In doing so he was shot in the glycol tank. He brought his Hurricane down whilst on fire and extricated himself before the petrol tanks blew up. The Heinkel was damaged and subsequently shot down into the Channel by No. 43 Squadron, operating from Tangmere. As the Battle of Britain became intensified, airfields such as Hawkinge, Tangmere, Manston and North Weald became for- ward landing grounds, and No. 1 and the other squadrons moved-in during the early morning and retired at dusk. The ground crews were moved by air. For No. 1 the Battle of Britain can be said to have really started on August nth, 1940, when its pilots shot down two Me. 110s. From then onwards the unit fought from dawn to dusk, taking its full share with the rest of Fighter Com- mand in defeating Gdring's Luftwaffe. Page after page of the Operations Record Book is devoted to this classic air battle, and part of-the report for August 16th follows: After describing the fighting in the morning, the report continues, '' In the afternoon the squadron was engaged in its most successful action in England to date. S/L. Pember- ton sighted enemy bombers, mainly Heinkel 11 is, in" three waves of about 40 each, stepped up. There were ten Messer- S/L £. 0. Crenfell, who went on the squadron's first " op " in 1915, fiying his A.W. Siskin 3A as commanding officer of the unit in 1928.
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