Declared Operational

We were working up, we worked through July and August and we’d do lots of formation flying and, you know, operation practices with 12, the squadron was12 Airborne, four three’s and then they changed to three four’s, it’s like the Germans, it was far better. And we started doing air fire on drogues and we do a lot of camera gun stuff too which was wonderful. I thought flying in drogue was ridiculous because they’d be towed by a slow air plane like a Lancaster, like the Lysander, and at about 110 mph or something ridiculous. And it’s a drogue, it has no wings, it’s a sleeve, tapered sleeve, a hole, you know, the air goes right through it. And they’d paint our bullets, the tips of the bullets so that a number of guys would fire at one drogue. It left a mark according to the paint so they could take the score by the number of holes in the drogue and what color they were. Anyway, we did a bit of that but it was very, you had to go out to the coast but, but we finally worked up and we finally declared operational.