James R. Doyle (Primary Source)

Transcript

My name is James Raymond Doyle – I'm a Scot. I was blitzed while sitting at home in Clydebank by the German Air Force and I volunteered after that. Actually, I volunteered for the Army first and they turned me down, and I volunteered for the Navy and they turned me down as well because I was in a reserved occupation. So the Air Force would only take me as a navigator or pilot. So I was a year in reserves, and then I was called up in 1942, and I had a grading course in the UK. Then I got ill with tonsillitis, and the group of people I was going to Canada with all left and I was left behind, so they shipped me out to South Africa. So I did my initial training in South Africa in 1943, and I did that on Tiger Moths. Then there was a secondary course which I did on Harvards, again in South Africa. It was there that I qualified as a fighter pilot in March '44. I was shipped up to North Africa and given some pre-training there on Spitfires, and after that pre-training shipped over to Italy, where I joined the 92 East India Squadron, 244 Wing of the Desert Air Force.

I started war operations in August '44. My last operation was my eighty-fourth sortie, and my last flight was in 1945 in Italy. There was one sortie in particular that we were doing at a Gestapo headquarters. There were only two of us there and my leader went down to bomb and strafe this chalet. I followed him down and as he got down to the base, he says to me, "Watch the flak! Break port," which I did, but what he meant to say was "break starboard," so I went into the most frightful barrage of twenty-two millimeter cannon shells I'd ever seen. I weaved about as best I could, and to finish up I was too tired so I just took my hands and feet off the rudder and the stick and just said, "Well, hit me if you can." I flew over hardly touched. It was a frightening experience.