Attention!
Cette vidéo est disponible en anglais seulement.
Description
After Tunisia, to his dismay, Mr. Edwards had to go set up and run a Gunnery School near Cairo, Egypt. He tells the strange and unfortunate circumstances that got him there and the unexpected joy it brought him.
Transcription
We had a very unfortunate incident. The wing leaders, squadron commander, the wing leaders of our wing were sent back to England as a reward. This was before anything was decided to send anybody anywhere. We had almost just finished. And on the way back to Tunisia, they were shot down off the Bay of Bisque by a night fighter, a JU-8 night fighter, and we lost everybody connected. So, a very strange wing commander appears on the field and he’s telling us how sorry he is about what’s happened, but he’s now got to do something with us and we’re now going to be posted, see. And I thought, well, I would stay with the squadron. I hadn’t really, my tour was over but I didn’t think of leaving or anything. We were going to go on from there to Sicily and Malta, Sicily and so on. And the squadron was going to go back to Tripolitania area just to wait out the time. Be a few weeks before we set off. Anyway, he told me, he said, “You’re going back to, we’d like you to go back to the gunnery, to help set up this gunnery school outside of Cairo.” You know, this to me was way back there, see, and we’re up here. And maybe it’s kind of late to be setting up a gunnery school, but that’s where I went. And I was so upset. He could tell, you see. I never said anything to him. He seems to be a very nice person and he said to me, “You go and do this job for five months and I’ll personally see that you bet back on OPS.” What else could I say? It was great, but I thought, “Yeah, you could get shot down, you could be...” Well, I went. But I couldn’t remember how I got back, and I still can’t, how I got back down there. I was so upset about this. However, I went to this gunnery school and I was in charge of it. And we had a Spitfire there and had Hurricanes and Harvards and we were teaching people how to shoot at the drogue and hit it. Well, strangely enough, I found that most of them couldn’t fly the air plane. They couldn’t keep the ball in the centre. That’s what I mean. So when they fired, they didn’t know where they were firing. This is even guys who did a tour of OPS on Hurricanes. That’s what’s bad about Hurricanes see. But they had this Spitfire there and I flew that as much as I could. It was the most beautiful air plane they ever had.