Lucky Tim

While researching and writing my 21st book, Running Up The Down Escalator, I have had to cut various sections to ensure the thing doesn’t become too voluminous. Here’s one section I cut, telling the story of our father, Tim’s, persistent good luck, despite many incidents and accidents, through WW2.

Born in 1920, Tim lived to fly—though it almost killed him many times. He had trained at RAF Cranwell, joining No.1 Squadron in 1940, as the war got under way. The day after he shot down an enemy fighter, he was himself shot down, but was soon back in action. On 9 October, he probably destroyed a Junkers 88, then on the 27th he sent a Dornier 215 diving into the Channel. 

On the debit side, at one point he flew into a high-tension power cable across the River Tyne, plunging the village where he was billeted into darkness. ‘Not popular,’ his notes to me recalled. ‘Posted!’

By August 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he set sail with 134 Squadron, as part of 151 Wing. They operated Hurricanes in the Murmansk area, teaching Soviet aircrew to fly and service the aircraft. While in the Soviet Union, he would share in the destruction of another Ju 88. 

His convoy was the only one to make it unscathed both ways. And the luck kept coming.

At one point he was a CAM pilot, a daredevil ploy that involved flying rocket-assisted Hurricanes on sorties from converted merchant ships to protect convoys. The life expectancy of downed pilots in the icy Arctic waters was measured in minutes. 

In 1994, Tim faxed me the background details on one of the biggest issues the RAF pilots faced at the time in Russia. Low quality standards in the Russian fuel industry meant that the Hurricanes would stall when wax formed in the fuel at low temperatures experienced as the aircraft climbed. In the end, tin—of which Russia was a major producer—became a key element in the Broquet fuel catalyst, which helped save the day.

That adventure ended when the rest of his squadron was sent to the Middle East and Far East, where many of his colleagues and friends were lost. Of thirty-five CAM ships, he later discovered, no less than twelve were sunk.

Posted back to No. 1 Squadron, he also narrowly avoided the disastrous PQ17 convoy to Russia, where his replacement CAM pilot was killed. Next, he was switched to hazardous night fighter work and attempts to down early V1 flying bombs, or ‘doodlebugs.’

Then came 197 Squadron, flying heavier Typhoon fighter-bombers. Here Lady Luck seems to have intervened particularly energetically. With another pilot, he was posted to 67 Squadron, then sent to India, considered extremely dangerous at the time for RAF pilots. Their convoy through the Mediterranean was unescorted, losing several ships along the way. And that other pilot? He was shot down and beheaded by the Japanese. 

Back home, meanwhile, 197’s Typhoons were used in low-flying ground attack roles during the D-Day landings, resulting in the loss of 38 of their 40 pilots. Again, that could so easily have been Tim.

In later life his upper lip sported a scar that made him seem permanently, quirkily amused. That wound had been incurred when the engine of his Mustang failed on take-off in India. Trapped in a fume-filled cockpit, he managed to crack through the canopy and escape. 

Later, test-flying a captured Japanese Zeke-52, his cockpit filled with spurting fuel. Next, flying a Tempest back from Delhi, he was overcome by fumes, tried to bail out, failed and eventually, as a last resort, managed to land the aircraft safely at Cawnpore. In 1945 alone, his aircraft suffered four successive tire bursts, with India’s baking sun causing rubber to perish rapidly.

But one of his greatest wartime escapes happened as the war reached its bloody finale. He was ordered to lead a flight of six spotter planes down to Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka), to take part in ‘Operation Zipper’ as the Allies invaded Burma (today’s Myanmar). By its very nature, a low-flying mission, in slow aircraft, he was informed, would be something of a suicide mission. 

Then, as they were on their way, the news came through that Japan had surrendered. Thanks to the psychological impact of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings on a Japan that would otherwise have fought on, at immense cost to its own people and to the invading forces.