Cyril Timber Pelly

Well, I went to a flying school in a little place called [Royal Naval Air Station] Worthy Down. It was just outside of Winchester [England], where there was a navy training school. And, as a matter of fact, I flew several flights with Laurence Olivier [famous British actor]. Laurence Olivier was one of the instructor pilots at Worthy Down. We always said, they wouldn’t put them on a front line squadron, you’d put them on a training squadron. Rex Harrison [famous British actor] was there as well. He was one of the instructor pilots there. And that’s where I did my training, Worthy Down, just outside of Winchester. Right in front of me, right now, I’m looking at a picture, the old [Fairey] Swordfish aircraft [anti-submarine aircraft]. They were a biplane, what we called torpedo bombers. We could carry an 18 inch torpedo, four bombs on the wing racks and mostly we did anti-submarine patrol. Every day or every week for months, a year on in, we attacked u-boats [Unterseeboot: German submarines]. You never knew if you sank them or not. Sometimes you’d know because sometimes they’d be in surface, shook up the surface, but most of times, they were crafty. They’d let go an oil slick; the oil slick would come to the surface of the water and that was a bluff. In a lot of cases, it was a bluff. They’d let go this oil slick hoping that the crew of the aircraft or the destroyers [large and heavily armed escort vessels]that was in the area would assume they were sunk because there as an oil slick come up. Most of that was only a bluff. Well, there was nine Swordfish in the squadron. There was three sub flights. There was three aircraft in each sub flight. The CO [commanding officer] was flying the leading sub flight and the other two sub flights were on his left and right. And that’s how we formed, how we flew. I was on four, I think there was four different carriers. The first one is the [HMS] Eagle [Royal Navy aircraft carrier], we lost her in the Med [Mediterranean Sea], and next one was the [HMS] Unicorn [Royal Navy light aircraft carrier], and the new one come right off the deck in Belfast [Northern Ireland]; after we came back from Gibs [Gibraltar], after losing the Eagle, we joined the Unicorn. My squadron was 824 [Royal Naval Air] Squadron. I was in that squadron all through the war. Every landing on the aircraft carrier was a potential disaster. We lost more crews in accidents than we did in actual combat. You know, landing on a flight deck, it’s a ship. The ship is into wind, you’ve got to steam into the wind. At the same time the swell might be rolling in a different direction, but here’s a ship steaming into wind, pitching up and down. At the same time, she’s rolling sideways because the swell on the water is rolling and rolling different from the direction of the wind. And that’s when you had to contend with.