The War in the Air

As we have seen already, many began at the flying school in Piarco and went to Britain to complete their training. David Rochford was in school in England when war broke out. As soon as he left school he joined the Royal Air Force (RAF), was accepted for pilot training and so impressed his instructors that he was made an instructor himself. In his book "The Golden One Hundred" Gaylord Kelshall tells how it came about that Rochford was sent to the Far East; that when diving on a test flight in Australia, his plane, a Mosquito Bomber, began to come apart.

I quote now from the book to be launched on October 24: "Directly ahead of him was a school and, instead of getting out, he stayed with the machine to ensure that it would not hit the school. David Rochford was the last Trinidad and Tobago aviator to be killed in the Second World War. Today, on the anniversary of his death, the school in Australia still holds an annual memorial service for him."

Retired Justice Ulric Cross was in his early 20s when war broke out. He volunteered to serve in the RAF, did his basic training at Piarco, then, with seven other hopefuls, kicked his heels for six months or more, waiting for a ship to take them to Britain, which was fighting alone against the Axis powers.

The ship was a liner, the "Strathallan" if he remembers correctly, converted to a troopship "for the duration." As the Battle of the Atlantic (the U-boat war) had scarcely begun the troopship sailed directly across the Atlantic, they did not go in convoy. His fellow passengers and volunteer flyers were Mervyn Cipriani, who was killed in a raid over Cassell, Kenrick Rawlins (a classmate at St Mary’s CIC), who became a bomber pilot and was killed on his seventh operation, and fighter pilots Gilbert Huber and Winston Racy.

The troopship docked at Gourock in Scotland where the seven young men were met with a lorry (truck), taken to the station in Glasgow and, still in civilian clothes, put on a train to London.

"Strangely" said Justice Cross, "a number of young airmen, not pilots necessarily, were in school with me. I was very friendly with Reggie Pitts, Peter Pitts’ elder brother, they lived just across the road from me in Upper Henry Street, above Park Street.

"Then there was Anselm de Freitas, whose father was Mayor of Port-of-Spain at one time. Some time after the war I went to a party at the home of the then Police Commissioner Sealey; a young man came up to me, introduced himself and said I was lucky that I knew his father Anselm de Freitas; he didn’t know his father because his mother was pregnant with him when his father was killed in World War II.

"Of course, all the young men who volunteered from here wore shoulder flashes on their uniforms with the words ‘Trinidad and Tobago’. Most hoped to be pilots but Ulric Cross, among others, was told the RAF already had enough pilots, that he would be a navigator.

"The training," he said, "took a year. I started at the elementary Air Observers’ School in Eastbourne, then I went to Cranwell. I went West Troon in Scotland to do my navigation training — that was six months — so I got on to operations early in 1943.

"Interesting story . . . After your training (we had exams, obviously) the school was closed down for a day and everybody, pupils and staff, went on a six-mile cross-country run — in November — which I won. Next day we had interviews to determine whether you would be a sergeant or a pilot officer."

Justice Cross explained that "pilot officer" was a rank, it didn’t mean you were a pilot flying planes.

"We used to say the height of impertinence was to be a source officer, (not air crew) wearing flying boots.

"I walked into the interview room, saluted the Group Captain. He got up, shook my hand, said ‘Splendid race yesterday, Cross.’ I said ‘Thank you, Sir,’ sat down and he said ‘Do you know Learie Constantine?" - and that was the interview. The rest of the time we talked cricket, and I was a pilot officer. Incidentally, one of the first persons I met when I went to England was Learie Constantine. Strangely enough, one of the staff pilots was David Rochford," (the same heroic pilot who was the last TT airman killed before the end of the war). I was commissioned from that school. I went to London on leave as a Leading Aircraftman in the ‘other ranks’ mess, and came back to the same station as a pilot officer in the Officer’s mess. David Rochford took me under his wing and introduced me to the other officers.

"Then I was assigned to a squadron. We were doing low-level daylight raids in those days. We flew over in formation across the coast at sea level, more or less, under the radar. Then we went to treetop height to the target, then you went up to 1,200 feet and into a shallow dive onto the target. You drop your bombs on the target; then, in order to escape the blast of the bomb you have just dropped (there was an eleven-second delay between dropping the bomb and blast from the explosion) you climbed as fast as possible.

"It was very easy at first because the Mosquito was a very fast aircraft; the German gunners didn’t realise how fast it was so the flack" (the anti-aircraft fire) "was always behind you. But, of course, the Germans weren’t stupid, they soon caught on and then it became rather expensive and, as I mentioned before, Kenrick Rawlins, who was in school with me, was killed on his seventh operation. His name is on the memorial at the Military Museum in Chaguaramas.

"I was a navigator right the way through. At first I was a navigator bomber. After my first 30 operations my pilot decided he had had enough (you could go for a rest after 30 operations) but I stayed on with the squadron. You could go for another rest when you’d completed 50, but, again, I stayed on, I did 80 without a rest.

"Of course we got a lot of leave in between operations; we had ten days leave every six weeks. On leave you headed straight to London even though there was bombing. We got a special ration of chocolate when we were flying, we were very well fed. When we went on leave, we had to take our ration books with us. I had friends in Lewisham, I stayed with them and handed them my ration book so that they could collect my rations for my meals.

"The bombing in London was a bit disconcerting."

"The biter bit?" I asked. Ulric Cross laughed.

"The only time we felt safe," he said, " was when we were back on the squadron flying. And we did see people sleeping in the Tube." (The London Underground).

"As a navigator I was too busy to think about being shot down. I was talking to one of the chaps at Reunion last year - we’re all in our 80s now — and we discussed how brave the pilots were. You see, as a navigator you were busy all the time, you had to find the target, you had a chart table on your lap, and your slide rule and were busy with calculations but the pilot was just sitting with nothing to do. Every so often he’d ask ‘Where are we now?’, you’d hand over the map and say ‘Somewhere here,’ and go on working,"

Justice Cross told me the Mosquito had just two crew, the pilot and the navigator. I asked who dropped the bombs. "The navigator does that. I did seven or eight low-level bombing runs, then we went to high-level bombing from 25,000 feet, and then we went on the Pathfinder force dropping flares to mark the target for the heavy bombers following us.

"I remember a Reunion dinner some years back (we have lunches now) and a chap named Jackman came up to me and said ‘Do you remember this flight when you tried to kill us?’ I said ‘Yes, Jacko, I remember.’ We were bombing in the Ruhr and I was trying to get the target right, cut down to the bomb sight line to make sure it was in the right place; I didn’t quite get it right because there was a lot of flack, there were searchlights, you could see fighters milling around, we were caught in the searchlights but I knew I’d not quite got it right.

"I said ‘Sorry, Jacko, we’ve got to go round again.’ And I did that two or three times, and the searchlights got us every time — but we escaped."

I asked where his squadron was stationed in the UK.

"We started at Marham in Norfolk, then went to Whitton and Upwood in Cambridgeshire — all stations in East Anglia, and it’s not a place I’d recommend in winter. The wind seems to come straight from Siberia, there’s nothing to stop it."

When I asked about his decorations, his DFC and DSO, he only laughed and showed me the photograph taken outside Buckingham Palace.

Next week Wallerfield, the cadets, perhaps cricket and VJ celebrations.