I Sank The Bismarck by John Moffat

in Norwegian territorial waters, heading south to
a German port in the Baltic. The crew ofHMS Cossack, a
destroyer, tried to board Altmark but were stopped by a
Norwegian gunboat, which was attempting to enforce
Norwegian neutrality. The captain of Cossack knew there
were prisoners on board, despite what Altmark and the
Norwegian gunboat captain said, and he ordered his gun
crews to open fire if the Norwegians threatened his ship.
During this stand-off the captain of Altmark tried to ram Cossack, but instead his ship ran aground. Cossack sent over
a boarding party to find that there were three hundred British
sailors held prisoner in the hold. They were freed and brought
back to Britain. The papers were full of the story, naturally,
but the icing on the cake as far as we were concerned was the
report that, as they broke into the hold where the prisoners
had been kept for weeks, the boarding party shouted out, 'It's
OK, lads, the navy's here!'
    All of us felt a great deal of pride. There we were, newly
qualified pilots, walking around in our uniforms, smiling at
the girls and basking in the reflected glory of Cossack and the
ships that sank Graf Spee. We felt we were the bee's knees. We
soon came down to earth with a very big jolt.
    Having finished our initial flying training and collected our
wings, we were sent off for further training, this time to the
RAF station atNetheravon, in Wiltshire, near Salisbury Plain.
It was February 1940, and it was a particularly hard winter.
Where we had previously been billeted in civilian houses, we
were now housed in wooden barracks with bunks for twenty
people. They were heated by two old pot-bellied stoves, one
at each end of the barracks. I was not at all impressed by this,
but thought to myself that it was only for a short while. If I
had known how bad it was going to get, perhaps I would have
got myself sent somewhere else.
    Our training was now going to be on two aircraft, theHawker Hart and the North AmericanHarvard. The Hart
had been designed bySir Sydney Cam, who also designed the
Hurricane fighter that was in front-line service with the RAF.
The Hart dated back to 1927, with a fixed undercarriage,
biplane wings and a two-seater open cockpit. When it first
entered into service it was described as a light bomber,
although it was one of the fastest aeroplanes around at the
time, faster than most fighters. When I started flying it was
obsolete, but it was still a good plane on which to learn longdistance
navigation skills and bombing techniques. The
Harvard was produced in the United States and was much
more modern, being an all-metal, low-wing monoplane with
a retractable undercarriage and a Perspex-covered cockpit. It
was a sturdy, reliable aircraft with an air-cooled radial engine
that could take a lot of punishment. Some of these planes are
still flying and they even race them in America. We used the
Harvards for instruction in formation flying and for some
basic aerobatic and fighter tactics.
    We shared the camp with the RAF, and there were some
Women Royal Auxiliary Air Force members there too. One night
in the mess there was this absolute stunner, a tall, elegant blonde
with Sergeants' stripes, who, I was told, rebuffed any advances.
I approached her and to my amazement we hit it off. I had
noticed her around the camp before and had been told that she
was called Jane. I discovered that her real name was Margaret;
Jane was just a nickname because of her long legs, like Jane the
comic-strip pin-up in the Daily Mirror. Towards the end of my
stay at Netheravon we used to play tennis together and there
was always a good crowd to watch her play in her shorts.
    My good luck in finding an attractive female companion
wherever I got myself posted was beginning to become the
envy of some of my fellow trainees, but we soon realized just
how unlucky we all were as the weather, which was already
severe, got much worse. There were high winds, a heavy
snowfall and the roads to the airfield