Pilot’s Memoirs – Dick Brunton

This is Dick Brunton, and Dick’s going to give us his story – thank you, Dick.

Well my experiences basically started off much the same as Vic’s. [Vic Viggers] I was in the Territorials before the war started, in the Medical Corps; I was interested in St John’s [St John Ambulance] and all that sort of stuff, you know. And of course we were mobilised in August 1939, shot off into Waiouru and so forth. My best mate was in the second echelon in the Army, and I tried to transfer over to go with him in the artillery, and the Colonel would have nothing to do with it, but he couldn’t do anything with me ‘cause I was under age at that point of [in] time.

So on the way back from camp on leave we were passing the T&G Building in Napier, and the Air Force had a sign out to the effect that the Selection Committee was in residence, and looking for recruits. So I thought, ‘Oh, bugger this, I’ll do this – I’m not going to muck around with the Army.’ I didn’t feel like patching up people; I’d rather be in a more active situation. So I went in and volunteered, and I was in uniform so I was more or less accepted on the spot.

Well, everything seemed to happen in a hurry from then on; went to night school, did the assignments, which normally take … well, there’re twenty-one assignments, they usually take a year, and on our first night they said, “Sorry, chaps, it’s going to be six months to do the twenty-one.” Well the next night we went along and [they] said, “Sorry, it’s going to be three months to do your twenty-one – they’re short of pilots.” So I gave up my work and got stuck into that … anyway, that’s the story at that point.

We shot off to Levin – I don’t remember how long we were at Levin – and from there … oh, I went to Whenuapai first as an AC2 [Aircraftsman 2nd Class] – the assistant to the Barrack Warden or something. And then I went down to Levin and from there I went to Elementary Flying School at Taieri. I went solo … we were flying Tiger Moths; I think I went solo at six hours, from memory … and did our time there, were sent home on leave, expecting to have a couple of weeks. And God, I hadn’t got home more than forty-eight hours and I had a telegram: ‘Report to Auckland’ … pronto.

So hiked off to Auckland, and we were on the ship at nine o’clock in the morning, and gone before we could blink our eyes. We went on this Dutch cargo-cum-passenger ship, the Bloemfontein, and we took three weeks to get over to America. It was a lovely trip; it was one of the most enjoyable if it wasn’t for the fact there was a war on, and we landed at San Pedro, just out of Los Angeles. Had a couple of days there and the Americans really made us very, very welcome. This would’ve been early in 1942; I entered the Air force in 1941.

We got on the Southern Pacific Streamliner [train] which was absolute luxury; it was absolutely magnificent, and we were doing a hundred and fifteen miles an hour according to the speedo [speedometer] on the ceiling. We arrived at a place called Martinez, just out of San Francisco, and they said, “Oh, your train’s waiting for you from Canada”, and it was the most beaten up, filthy dirty bloody thing you ever saw in all your life. We went right along all the carriages and got all their toilet rolls [chuckle] and all the paper towels – we had to clean all the crap and coal dust and stuff off all the seats before we could even sit down in them. What a come-down from that luxury thing – it was air conditioned and everything. Anyway, I ended up in Calgary … went to Edmonton, then down to Calgary. While we were at Edmonton they asked for volunteers to go down to what was an RAF [Royal Air Force] Station in Calgary, so twenty of us volunteered and we went down to Calgary where we did our Service flying training on this RAF Station; there were eighteen hundred RAF there and a hundred and twenty pilots going through. We were flying Oxfords, and they were vicious little buggers if ever there was.

But anyway, my instructor – I had two or three instructors – and the last one I had tried to do me in on a couple of occasions. He froze on the controls when I was doing an emergency landing. So anyway, I managed to take over, and he woke up then. It was all right. But the second time he really had me – I was under the hood doing an instrument takeoff, and I had another pupil with me, Danny Kilgour, who unfortunately was killed later on. And I thought I was doing all right – I was heading off down the runway with wide open throttles, and steering on the old gyro [compass], to try and you know, keep my track right. And then the instructor said, “I’ve got her.” I must’ve got off the runway or something. Then I felt the bloody thing lift off the ground, and it stalled and hit the ground again and bounced, and stalled again and bounced. And I thought, ‘Shit, I’m not staying under the hood any longer.’ So I brought the old hood off, and here we were going over the end of the runway down into a gully, head first. And I thought, ‘Oh shit, this isn’t any good to me.’ And I looked at the instructor … oh, it was all very quick of course … anyway, I grabbed the controls and I give [gave] it a hell of a yank, and fortunately we hit the other side on our belly instead of hitting nose first. Well they ended with no wheels; they wiped the wheels off; it wiped the props [propellors] off. And the engines were screaming away, so I shut those down, got out of the seat quick as I could, rushed down the back – Danny Kilgour already had the door open – and we turned around and the instructor was still bloody sitting there. So anyway, we rushed back and pulled the pin out of his harness and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him out of the aircraft; and then he snapped out of it.

So anyway, I [chuckle] remember running from there – I took off as fast as I could caper, ‘bout … oh, be a good hundred yards, hundred and fifty yards … to where the fire engine was with all their fire crew. And I always remember as I passed this first Canadian, a great big bloke, he said, “By God, laddie”, he said, “you should go and take a ticket in the Irish Sweep!” And I said, “What for?” “Have a look around you.” And you know, the grass was all tall fescue about this high, and it was as white as snow; it was in the middle of summer and it was saturated with petrol for about a hundred yards in all directions, right around. So, only needed a bit of a spark and the whole lot would’ve just gone whooff! And that would’ve been the end of it. Anyway, I got away with that.

From there … I was commissioned at that point, on graduation; there was [were] only four of us out of a hundred and twenty got commissioned … and [I] went to Pennfield Ridge where I ran into Vic again, and that’s how our paths started to cross, and we did our OTU [Operational Training Units

] on [Lockheed] Venturas. They weren’t a bad aircraft, they were sort of a one speed thing. Your landing and your takeoff and your flying and everything was all sort of at one speed. But I was very lucky, I was the only one out of the whole lot, I think, that didn’t have to put down somewhere for engine failure of one sort or another. There was something wrong with the maintenance of the aircraft, and the Pratt & Whitney chap came up from down the States to sort them out.

Anyway, from there [I] went down to New York and got on the Queen Elizabeth, with nineteen and a half thousand others on board, and we went solo across the Atlantic. We really motored, I can tell you that; I’d never realised that a ship of eighty-seven thousand tons could do forty-six knots, which it did.

It’s a huge speed, yes …

Really motored. Anyway, we arrived in Greenock, and we were getting off the ship or just about to disembark, and the tannoy went: “Would Pilot Officer Brunton turn up at the ship’s Commanding Officer’s office.” So I went down; “Oh, Brunton”, he said, “you’re in charge of Train 16, to take her down to Bournemouth.” “Oh”, I said, “I don’t know anything about taking a train” [chuckle] “anywhere”, you know. “Not to worry”, he said, “there’s plenty of help.” So anyway, that was my first introduction to Britain.

So we stopped in and out of tunnels on the way down, arrived in Bournemouth at about … oh, five or six o’clock in the morning, I suppose; went off to the Royal Bath Hotel, and we’d just put our gear in the dormitory there, upstairs, and all hell broke loose. And I looked out the window and here were these bloody Focke-Wulf 190s, and they machine gunning kids in the street, and people on the lawns, and dropping bombs, and it all went wrong. And one of the bombs, I saw it coming straight at me, and I thought, ‘Oh, dear oh dear’ … under the bed. But anyway, it went between the chimneys and landed on the beach which was down below the cliff – we were up on a cliff. So that was all right – that was my first introduction to the war … there was a war on.

From there we went to … oh, a place over near Buckingham; converted onto Mitchells, then was posted to 226 Squadron at Swanton Morley, which is just out of Norwich, ‘bout twenty miles west of Norwich.

It wasn’t very long of course that [before] we went on our first op. [Operation] Being a new chum of course, you usually got the worst place on this – it was all daylight stuff by the way, we did all our bombing in daylight and it was always in formation, too. So you were usually arse-end Charlie, which was Number Five or Number Six right at the back where they could pick you off easy. We went over to … oh, some place in France and dropped our bombs, and on the way back suddenly ran out of gas; one engine stopped, and I thought, ‘Oh dear’, you know, ‘something’s wrong.’ And I checked on the petrol tanks [chuckle] and there’s no gas, so I thought, ‘Well this isn’t any good.’ So anyway, I transferred what fuel I had over to the other motor, and I yelled out to old Stan, my navigator, you know, “Where’s the nearest airfield?” And he said, “We’re in between two”, so I thought, ‘well, I’ll keep on going.’ And just as we approached this airfield the other motor cut, so I did a deadstick landing. I managed to get it in all right; I tipped it up sideways to get between a couple of trees, and dropped it down on a grass airfield. I always sort of remember this particular one, because I’d no sooner come to a standstill and a jeep rolls up, and the fellow’s standing up … “You can’t bloody well land here!” [Chuckle] “The aerodrome’s unserviceable.” [Laughter] Yes – I could’ve jumped out. I said, [chuckle] “If you’d been in the road I’d’ve landed on top of you. I had no choice.” It happened to be an aerodrome that the Americans had decided to abandon because it wasn’t fit for human habitation. So anyway, we got petrol from them and – oh, actually, while I was there I can remember another jeep turned up, and it was an American Colonel and two or three of his other officers. And oh, they made a real fuss of us, you know, because we’d been on an op, it was obvious. And anyway, I made arrangements with him to get petrol; well of course we never saw him again, he didn’t show up [chuckles] with petrol [for] a couple of hours or so.

So we made our way to the mess, and I was in the mess when the phone went and they said, “Oh, the phone’s for you”; so I went on the phone and this fellow on the end of it who was a Pom. [British man] He said, “I think you’re most discourteous”, he said. “You didn’t bother to come and see me.” And I said, “Who the hell are you?” And he said, “I’m Squadron Leader So-and-so”, he said, “I’m the CO [Commanding Officer] of the station.” I said, “Are you just? Well why the hell didn’t you come out and see us, give us a helping hand, see what was wrong?” He said, “I’m the CO”, and I said, “I don’t give a stuff what you are, all I want is bloody petrol.” I said, “You can stick your bloody station up your ar… [Laughter]

So anyway, we got petrol and I duly arrived back on the squadron and the bloody CO tore a strip off me because I’d done the forced landing. I always laugh about that. He said, “How the hell did you run out of petrol?” ‘Cause we were well within our range. “Oh”, I said, “what was the number of the aircraft?” He said, “Oh, it was Z – Z for zebra.” I said, “That’s the oldest bloody aeroplane you’ve got on the books”, and he said, “Yes, it is.” I said, “Yeah, well it munches up petrol like nobody’s business.” They got rid of it anyway, so … they got a new one then.

But that was my story up to that point. While I was on the squadron – I was on the squadron for nearly two years – and I had all sorts of various jobs to do. I went up to Drem [Scotland] and did some trials with this aluminium foil that they called ‘window’ … did the trials for them up there along with another one of our aircraft. And we used to go out over the North Sea and drop the stuff out at different rates and so forth; we experimented with it while the boffins in what was called Tantallon Castle – right on the edge of the water they had this old castle there – and they worked out the quantities needed. And that knowledge was used on D-Day [code for important date] from several different areas in the English Channel to bluff the German radar because they didn’t know where the landing was going to take place. They’d bluffed them for quite a while; they thought there was an armada of ships coming in near Antwerp, was one place, and there were two other places that they dropped this stuff so that the Germans were confused, and they didn’t know where to send the emergency troops.

They called it ‘window’, didn’t they?

‘Window’, yes, it was ‘window’. Yes – we did the trials on that. We also were the first squadron to get what they called the ‘G Box’, which was a little bit more advanced radar for navigation purposes. It was run on the basis of … there were three beacons which shifted, you know, frequently in England … and if you can imagine a stone being thrown into a pond, how the waves radiate out from it, well that was what their signals were like, and we had three different frequencies. And our machines were picking up these signals and wherever these radiations crossed … intersected … we knew exactly where we were all the time. So you could fly along one of these … well we’d call it a beam, I suppose. And we’ve actually bombed in 10/10ths cloud, and bombed very accurately because we had this equipment.

To start off with we were used as bait of course, which requires bigger aircraft. We carried four thousand pounds of bombs, and this is where Max [Collett] and these other gentlemen come in[to] the picture. They came along as fighter escort; they were very useful too, I might add – it was very nice to have them along. But they were up very high, and then they were close escort. We had one occasion when we had a Polish squadron of fighters escorting us, close escort; and when we were over France they saw this black speck away to hell and gone on the horizon, inland unfortunately, and the whole bloody lot of them took off after it [chuckles] and left us sitting up there like the [chuckles] proverbial dog’s whatnot. [Laughter] Wasn’t much fun, either.

But we got fairly busy around D-Day – I wasn’t actually in the landing, but we were bombing sometimes two, three ops a day. And about a fortnight before D-Day I was sent to Boscombe Down, the experimental station, to do intensive flying trials on a new aircraft at the time called a Bristol Buckingham, which was a shocker. But it was very fast and had the most wonderful engines – Bristol Centaurus – that’s when we first encountered them, and we had two of those on, you know, twin engine aircraft, and it was swinging four-bladed fourteen foot six [inch] props. And when you opened the throttle for [of] those things it just literally sucked you off the ground; they were fantastic things. But that was one place where one of our previous [??] did the same – they took us along and said, “This is the cockpit, and that’s the throttle, [chuckle] and that’s the flaps, and that’s that”, you know, “get in and fly it”, [chuckles] which we did of course, but it was a little bit of fun for a while. But that was very fast, but unfortunately it flew just as fast sideways as it did fore and aft [chuckle] … the most unstable thing you’ve ever come across; it had enormous great fins and rudders to try and stop it and make it more stable but they didn’t work. So while I was there, actually that’s when D-Day took place. I went back to the squadron which had at that time shifted across the Channel, and I was sent back to Swanton Morley. I’d finished my tour; I did thirty-seven sorties, so thirty-one ops I was credited with. [I] was flying spare crews, and mail, and you name it backwards and forwards across to Europe, into France and Belgium, and I was in Brussels when the Germans made their breakthrough in the Ardennes. And I was in the middle of the airfield at Brussels – I don’t remember the name of the place, it was the main airport – and the bloody Germans came across and they strafed; the Yanks had all their Liberators and all their Marauders and stuff, they were all lined up beautifully along the runway – all they had to do was just go straight down the row and squirt the lot of them, and they must’ve burnt … I don’t know, fifty aircraft there went up in a puff of smoke. God! No joke in that. But I didn’t like the feel of the bullets going through the grass as I was tip-toeing very quickly [chuckle] through [laughter] … it was horrible. Anyway, that was part of that story.

Then I met up with another chap from Hastings, Jack Grant, the chemist’s son whom I’d known for a long time, and Jack was having a few problems with his pilot – he was a navigator – so I said, “Oh well, we’ll go and have a go on Mosquitos.” So I walked into the Orderly Room and we talked about this, and went to the Adjutant and said, “What about going back?” And he said, “No”, he said, “sorry, Brunton, you’re going home.” So I was forthwith transferred to Brighton and awaited my turn, and in due course went home.

VE [Victory in Europe] Day was celebrated in the Indian Ocean, and His Majesty [King George VI] told the captain to splice the mainbrace. So there was about … I don’t know how many people were on board, there were quite a lot of us … but that’s the first time I’ve had a rum on the house.

You brought in a couple of interesting things – talking about the Buckmaster, [Buckingham] the only aircraft of that particular type that got into service was the Bristol Brigand and that got into service towards the end of the war, and it was powered by the Bristol Centaurus motor, and that’s the biggest motor that Bristol ever produced.

Twenty-eight cylinders …

That’s right.

… four banks of seven.

And [of] course the famous Sea Fury powered by the …

That’s right. They had trouble identifying them with the Focke-Wulf … was it the Focke-Wulf?

Yes, 190.

Yeah. But the motors were fabulous. When we had those aircraft – they gave us six, that’s all – they were the first ones off the assembly line. I remember one of the fellows was in one of these aircraft starting up on the tarmac, and the bloody thing backfired, and it was just like … I often laugh about it, he had the wing down here, and he went yaa, yaa, yaa – bang! And it just went phff! One wing collapsed. [Chuckle] The air intake was in one of the roots for the wings. They were enormous engines; one of those air intakes would’ve been about that square, you know, great big things.

Yes, yes.

Well when you took off, ‘cause we were doing proper trials with these things and we had gallons / metres; well where you’re … you know, you’re idling or moving around the tenths of gallons just went sort of flick, flick, flick, flick, flick, but on takeoff the gallons – you couldn’t read it. [Chuckle] It just spun around – I think it did about a hundred and twenty gallons a minute, something like that – oh, God, did it get through some stuff.

Well I was trying to think of the other one; the other one was the Buckmaster. That was [Those were] the three that Bristol brought out, and you’re the first person I’ve actually known that flew the …

I flew the Bristol Buckingham. Yeah, it was quite fast; I remember one day we were flying along and an American Lightning took a fancy to us, and they pulled up alongside, you know, they couldn’t make it out. They’d never seen the thing before, they didn’t know what to do about it. And we just sort of played around for a bit, and then I just opened the throttles and I just left them for dead – they just couldn’t catch us.

One of the things that I found quite interesting – we’d been over to Cherbourg and bombed the docks and the port. And as I say, we flew in a box of six; [six aircraft in close formation] and it’s formation all the time, no matter what the leader does – he does all sorts of evasive action and stuff – and you’ve got to be there in position, and it was very taxing on us – but anyway it was all for our own defence. Each turret had its own sector to keep an eye on. And we’d been across, and it was a pretty rough … you know, we got shot at a lot. We were about three quarters of the way across the Channel; it’s fairly wide at that point, and all of a sudden everybody … the bloody guns were going off in all directions. One aircraft was shot down, and another was pretty badly knocked about – not our aircraft, but these fighters. It turned out they were two Americans that were coming out of the sun; we, you know, we thought, ‘Oh gee, we’ll be in trouble now about this business’, because there were Standing Orders; you weren’t allowed over the coast unless you were on legitimate business, so they were breaking the rules anyway. But when we got back to base the Air Vice-Marshal, who happened to be Air Vice-Marshal Basil Embry [who] you all know, he was there and he congratulated everybody on doing a bloody good job, ‘cause he knew all about it before we got back.

Well thank you, Dick, thank you for that experience, it’s very interesting. I knew you’d been at Boscombe Down, ‘cause I think you’d alluded to that once before when I was chatting with you.

Oh, I could’ve mentioned it, yes. I enjoyed Boscombe Down. They had a hundred and forty-eight different aircraft on that station – they had all the German aircraft; they had all the American models; every aircraft that’d been produced I think was on that station – even the latest Meteor, or the original Meteor. That was interesting too, insofar[as] they used to have a tape measure, and they’d hook it over a little button on the front of the fuselage, and they used to measure the length of the aircraft every day. Well when I was there it stretched four and a half inches.

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