WARTIME FLEET AIR ARM                                                 

Rather than wait for call-up it was better to make an early choice of service and entry: so the RN it was.  After interview, medical and signing-up, I received the King's shilling - no glass-bottomed tankard involved!  There was a pre-entry service scheme whereby one's education continued with one day a week given over to naval matters.  It introduced us to such as semaphore, bends and hitches, and rowing in a five-oared Montague whaler.  A uniform was also issued.

The call came: it was down to Portsmouth Harbour station and onto the Gosport ferry and into HMS St Vincent.  We were led into a vast dormitory, rather dark and dank, of tiered metal bunk beds.  We understood the barracks were built to house Napoleon's prisoners of war.  The bottom bunk bed proved to be my only privacy for the whole stay.  In the dining hall there were rows of wooden tables and benches, each table taking 14 of us.  Every day two 'cooks of the day' were selected from each table to fetch food from the kitchen and serve it out.  Entering the kitchen one was confronted by vast vats; porridge with lumps 'as big as one's fists' were ladled out - very awkward to dish out.  Soup was another mystery but we were a hungry lot.  After the mid-day meal we were lined up for the PO (petty officer) to dish out the evening duties: 'from here to here cleaning, from here to here sentry duties (only overnight), from here to here kitchen duties (a synonym for spud peeling), from here to here ….'  Faced with a vast pyramid of potatoes it seemed never ending, I regret to write that the potatoes were rather grey and cubic.  We were paid three shillings a day and payday was fortnightly, 42 shillings - it seemed a fortune after pocket money of half a crown a week and we were being kept by the Navy for free!

The first free evening, wanting to go out for a beer, we arrived at the gate, but were not allowed out.  We were to await the liberty boat - we could not see one, but we could see civilians and traffic passing by.

After eight weeks we were sent up to Heston Park in Manchester to await passage to North America.  We were put up in huts in the park and the overflow was billeted out.  A story is told of a lad who came back late at night because he was expected to share the landlady's bed; upon investigation she was much affronted saying 'the others hadn't minded!'

Soon we then entrained once more to Greenock on the Clyde.  We were a small advance party to go aboard the Queen Mary to be ship's 'policemen' or guards.  Bunks were narrow and tiered four or five high, meals just twice a day.  The ship was victualled in New York and that first meal was memorable after our British rations.  6000 men came aboard.  On its return it would be carrying 19,000 and in the summer, even more by using the promenade deck.  This ship and the sister one, Queen Elizabeth, brought the bulk of the American Army to Britain.  The ship, capable of 30 knots, sailed alone, the voyage taking four or five days.  Standing guard on the after deck I could tell by both temperature and the sun, that we sailed northwards and later southwards into warmer air so that we made a course to New York in the shape of a large S (12 years later I was to take passage in her under quite different circumstances).

Arriving in New York we took a train overnight to New Brunswick in Canada.  From then on we were in the care of the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).  For our ab initio training we went to a snow packed airfield, a little west of Montréal.  Most of the locals were French Canadian.  The days were mostly brilliant, blue above, white below; the weather forecast usually CAVU (ceiling absolute, visibility unlimited), temperatures occasionally dropping to -40℃ - our sailor gear hardly coping, we were glad of our teddy bear flying suits.  A weekend off in Montréal was to be my first encounter with French cuisine and a half bottle of wine.  The next stage in training was in Kingston, Ontario.  On completion of this course we were in a train once more, this time bound for Halifax to board the former Empress of Japan.  It was back to two meals a day. You could only walk around the deck in a clockwise direction, the ship being so packed with Canadians.  We disembarked in Liverpool.

All our future training, apart from some on the Isle of Man, was in Scotland.  The conversion course was to the Blackburn Barracuda torpedo dive bomber.  It was a high-winged monoplane weighing as much as two Spitfires and engined with a Rolls Royce Merlin (landing speed 70 knots, cruising speed 135-140 knots).  It carried a crew of three: pilot, observer and telegraphist air gunner (TAG).  It sported a radar scanner.  Its flaps, when turned upwards, became dive brakes.  It could carry sonar buoys, for submarine location, depth charges, bombs and bouncy bombs (these were dropped ahead of the ship, would sink and then rise under the hull).  To carry a torpedo the TAG was left behind as he would otherwise have affected the trim of the aircraft adversely.  To get off the flight deck when loaded, rocket-assisted take-off was resorted to - just push the button at the RIGHT time…

The squadron consisted of two flights of six.  One method of attack by six aircraft was getting in line astern at about 5000 feet, diving at the same time and, approaching sea-level, turning into line abreast and then, at 190 feet above the sea, dropping torpedoes in an arc towards the target.  

HMS Trumpeter (top speed about 20 knots) was a light fleet carrier, built on the west coast of the USA, a merchant ship hull with a wooden flight deck some 400 feet long - great for deck hockey and Japanese kamikaze pilots. Our aircraft were loaded onto the carrier  from Abbotsinch and she set sail for Cochin in southern India.  Once arrived we flew to Katakarunda, south of Colombo, in Ceylon as it then was.  We landed on a jungle airstrip of pressed steel interlocking sheets.

Not far away there was a superb beach.  The squadron had a fair rugby team so we found a dry paddy field to play on - thirty minutes was more than enough. We rejoined Trumpeter in the Indian Ocean.  Meals in the wardroom were good but plain.  The accommodation was very cramped; many bunks (tiered) in the cabin and rather oppressive - the interior of the ship not being built with the tropics in view…  Much of the time was spent in the ready/waiting (mostly!) room just under the flight deck.  There were briefings for the exercises for the invasion of Malayan peninsular, as it then was and lectures.  But otherwise, not being involved in the running of the carrier time hung rather heavily; some played bridge incessantly, reading matter was sparse and digested quickly and deck hockey could only be played in 30-40 minute bursts due to the heat and sun exposure.  The best place was definitely up in the air.  When allowed I liked to do a night watch as a supernumerary - with the famous Ki or cocoa for sustenance.

On one occasion a Gruman Martlet fighter appeared out of the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean and duly landed on.  It was some years later when I met a schoolmaster in Bristol who was his accompanying wingman.  There had been a difference of opinion as to the whereabouts of their carrier so they parted company.  It was a miracle that he found us in such an expanse of ocean and especially as we were obliged to keep radio silence. but then the 8th August arrived and the Pacific War was over.

Written for Mariner's Tales by Frank Legg who, after the war spent sixteen months training Canadian lieutenants as observers.  It was then difficult for him to decide whether to stay in the RN or take up the option of a university education with all fees paid, and a grant of ₤163 a year in support.  Frank decided on the latter and managed to supplement his income by joining the RAF Volunteer Reserve, which had a branch nearby.  With the advent of the Korean War he was called up to do a conversion course onto jets.