Black Arrow Blue Diamond: Leading the Legendary RAF Flying Display Teams

FRAeS

Introduction

My life in aviation spanned the years from 1946 to 1996 and this book is about what happened to me and my friends during that period. We are the forgotten generation; just too young for World War Two and just too old for the Falklands. We were the Cold War warriors and whilst most never had to shoot guns in anger, some of us did have moments of drama in such places as Malaya, Suez, Aden, the Oman and of course the big one – Korea. Significantly, Korea is now referred to as the forgotten war.

The RAF’s involvement in Korea was small, but useful lessons were learned by those who flew on attachment to the American squadrons and No 77(F) Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force, because only they had experience of Jet v Jet combat. Nevertheless, the F86s shot down the Mig 15s at the rate of twelve to one and their task did not compare with that of Johnny in his Spitfire or Hank in his Thunderbolt up against Fritz and Heinz in their Messerschmitts and FW190s. The German pilots were very good indeed, as were the Italians, despite what we were told at the time. But history is full of examples of brave and gallant men fighting for rotten causes.

Our main task in the fifties and sixties was to confront the projected mass assault on the United Kingdom by large numbers of Soviet bombers, some of which would be carrying atomic bombs. To counter this nightmare we would have to scramble a mass of fighters as rapidly as possible irrespective of the weather conditions. Training for this scenario in our jet fighters, which had very limited endurance and carried no worthwhile navigation aids, led to some very interesting moments. We had plenty of accidents and I find it amazing that we did not have more.

I thought that the life on a fighter squadron was wonderful. The squadron was like our family, it meant everything to us. The mess parties could get a bit wild particularly in the fifties but it should be noted that all our Station Commanders, Wing Leaders, Squadron Commanders and most Flight Commanders, were veterans of World War Two, so the wartime attitudes were still in vogue. The same attitude prevailed on the night fighter squadrons despite their lone wolf type of operation.

So for year after year we practised and trained; honing our skills at air combat and gunnery and took our turn at sitting in cold cockpits at the end of a runway, ready to scramble at the first sign of a mystery blip on the air defence radar. Scrambles were quite frequent but thankfully it was never the real thing.

For some time I was involved in international display flying as a leader or a member of a formation aerobatic team and that added considerable spice to life at the cost of extra stress. Display flying meant that we saw interesting places and now and again met exalted personages. I was glad that my parents were able to attend one of my investitures at Buckingham Palace to make up for the problems I gave them as a rather unhappy schoolboy. I was amazed by the Queen Mother when she gave me my first gong. Despite the fact that I was about number three hundred in the queue, she knew exactly who I was and what I had done and she did not seem to have received any prior briefing.

There was a bit of fear now and then. When you are running out of fuel in bad weather and unsure of where the hell you are, those icy fingers start to dance up your spine. My periods of greatest tension used to occur just before a big air display. I remember at Furstenfeldbruck having to steady my right hand with my left to push the starter button. The funny thing was that as soon as the engine was running, all the tension vanished and I felt completely calm and in control.

Originally I intended to write only about the Air Force but then decided that Civil Aviation, particularly Cathay Pacific, deserved a chapter. Flying airliners is a job but flying fighters is more of a vocation and I hardly ever met anyone I did not like in the fighter world. Alas, I cannot say the same about the civil flying game where life is governed by the two S’s: Seniority and Salary. But at least Cathay Pacific was more like the Air Force than any other airline I can think of.

I would like to thank my old friend and colleague Air Chief Marshall Sir Patrick (Paddy) Hine for writing the Foreword to this book. My thanks also to David Watkins for his help and encouragement and finally, to Sheila Moss for her typing and patience.

Brian P. W. Mercer

Araluen, Western Australia

2006

CHAPTER ONE

Early Years

I think it all started about 1935 when as a small child I was taken to an airshow by my father. It was probably in the Manchester area and very likely Alan Cobham’s flying circus. I must have been five or six years old and remember little except for the noise, but one memory stayed with me. A small red biplane taxied very close to us and when the pilot climbed out of the cockpit, his leather jacket, white scarf and goggled helmet left a lasting impression.

I grew up during the depression of the 1930s in a small town in north-east Lancashire, Great Harwood. The town had been the abode of John Mercer, the inventor of mercerised cotton, a process which gave to cotton some of the qualities of silk. Consequently the town meeting place was the Mercer Hall and the central square contained a clock tower called the Mercer Clock. However, neither fame nor fortune had filtered down to my father’s branch of the family from this distant relative.

My father was one of nine children. They were English Protestant stock with some Huguenot blood. They were also very poor. My paternal grandmother was a remarkable woman, for in addition to bringing up nine children, she was, by all accounts, a very accomplished cotton weaver. Apparently she used to go to the mill at 6 a.m. and set up her looms; return home to give the children their breakfast, then return to the mill for a full day’s work. I remember her as a large, kind woman with a very commanding presence and my father thought the world of her. He was the second youngest of the nine and the only one who went to university. My mother was an Irish Catholic from a town called Swinford in County Mayo. She came to England following the Great War, together with her sister, Cissie. They were both teachers. Mother was apparently something of a beauty in her younger years, with startling green eyes and jet black hair. Perhaps a distant ancestor had been a survivor of the Spanish Armada.

The mixed marriage meant that I was sent to a Catholic college and my sister, Aileen, to a girls’ convent school. Mother was a staunch Catholic but father had a much more relaxed attitude towards religion and in general outlook was a true liberal. It seems that during the ‘troubles’ following the Great War, my Uncle Willie on my mother’s side was a fringe member of the IRA whilst my Uncle Leonard, on my father’s side, served for a while in Ireland as an auxiliary policeman, a ‘Black and Tan’. Leonard had fought in Palestine as a trooper in the 11th Hussars and, unable to get a job after the war, had gone over to Ireland. Neither uncle seemed in the least bloodthirsty to me. Willie farmed in County Mayo and Leonard, after a variety of jobs, married a wealthy widow. Both of them lived to a ripe old age.

Father went to France in 1916 as a private in the Royal Engineers just in time for the Somme battles. He eventually became a staff sergeant and was the chief despatch rider at one of the army headquarters, I think General Plumer’s Second Army. Father was pretty lucky. He was never wounded but was gassed near Ypres and had to be invalided home for a while. He was talked out of joining the Royal Flying Corps by his mother, if she had not done so, the chances are that I would never have been born. He told me that he became so sick of the squalor of the ground war that the thought of a comfortable bed every night and escape from the never-ending bully beef and plum jam made the risk worthwhile. However, becoming a pilot in 1916/17 was only just short of committing suicide. Father had a lot of his old maps from the war and I have clear memories of his stories of that awful conflict. At the age of eight or nine, I knew about places like Ypres, Messines Ridge, the Menin Road and Passchendaele.

After the war my father obtained a BSc in Chemistry from Liverpool University and no doubt enjoyed a few years of batcherlorhood in the ‘roaring twenties’. He had a rich friend, the scion of a cotton family, who owned an Hispano Suiza car. He told me that the two of them once averaged a speed of 60 mph from Blackpool to home, a distance of some 40 miles, and a remarkable feat in the early 1920s.

Our part of Lancashire was a pretty good place to grow up. We lived right on the edge of town just beyond the really affluent street, naturally called Park Lane. This was the area of the cotton barons and the successful businessmen and professionals. Between our home and my elementary school there were areas of terrible poverty during the years of the Depression and I remember one night watching a large gathering of unemployed men holding a meeting in the town square. We were in my Uncle Claud’s flat over his insurance broker’s office. There were speeches and banners, a lot of noise, but no violence, and when they dispersed the sound of the clogs which most of them wore made a deafening noise. Martin Cruz Smith, accurately described this sound as ‘like a river of stones’.

Uncle Claud was nicknamed Bogie, I never knew why but suspect it was because he could never manage a par on any golf hole. Father was a keen golfer and I often went around with him and his Scottish friend, George Robson, a local doctor. From my bedroom window I had an uninterrupted view of Pendle Hill, made famous by the Lancashire witches of the seventeenth century. The western foothills of the Pennines are really very beautiful, and in my view compare very well with the Yorkshire Dales. I have happy memories of cycling all over the area with my friends and swimming in the River Ribble at Mitton and Sawley. This is the area of Whalley Abbey, Clitheroe Castle, Stonyhurst College, Ribchester (a Roman cavalry outpost) and the Forest of Bowland, which stretches north up to the Lake District. I also remember bonfire nights; that old terrorist Guy Fawkes bequeathed a lot of fun to the boys of my generation, like raiding other bonfires to pinch their wood and ambushing rivals with little red firecrackers called demons. Great fun, but I suppose that is all forbidden now.

Six days after bonfire night was Remembrance Day. I well recall the sombre looks, the cripples, the men with missing limbs and disfigured faces in the crowd gathered around the war memorial. We lived in an area of the ‘pals’ battalions’. In the small town of Accrington, not far away, there was street after street with no young men left after the First World War. The park in my home town of about 8,000 souls has a war memorial containing hundreds of names, most of them from the Great War. Every Australian knows about Anzac Cove in Gallipoli, but how many British people know of Lancashire Landing just a few miles further south, where the Lancashire Fusiliers suffered 53 per cent casualties before they even reached the beach. The survivors still drove the Turks from the beach and established themselves ashore. British reticence has done a great disservice to the memory of our soldiers. A few years ago I had a discussion with an Australian about Gallipoli. He had no idea that any British soldiers had been there. I told him that the British lost 21,000 men, the French 10,000, the Australians 9,000, the New Zealanders 3,000 and the Indian Army 3,000. I didn’t think he believed me. The British 29th Division, a first-rate division of regulars with Lancashire, Hampshire and Irish battalions was mathematically wiped out twice in the ill fated Gallipoli campaign.

On 3rd September 1939 the world changed. At the age of ten I listened to Neville Chamberlain’s speech with my parents and could not understand why they looked so worried. In my ignorance and innocence I thought it was all terribly exciting and no thought that we could possibly lose the war entered my mind. To the children of my age it was all the Empire, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘Rule Britannia’ and that ludicrous song, ‘We’re going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’. I never heard my father sing that song. He and his generation knew just how hard it was to beat the Germans.

Our politicians had done it again. The army was small and badly equipped. The navy had no effective way to counter the inevitable U-boat offensive. Only in the air force was there a glimmer of hope, but even in the air we had a lot of catching up to do. But I was just a schoolboy trudging on foot and by bus to school every day. I did not really enjoy my schooldays. I was taught by Marist fathers some of whom did not spare the rod. They certainly did not generate any enthusiasm for learning. The only subject I really enjoyed was history which was taught by a Mr Earnshaw, our only lay teacher. The school’s sporting facilities were poor; it was soccer or nothing. To my mind there was too much religion including an annual period of retreat; days of prayer and meditation – sheer torture for the average schoolboy. At the age of eleven I was told that to skip Mass on Sunday was a mortal sin and should I die before going to confession, then I would burn in hell forever. My mother actually believed this rubbish.

One day, amorous advances were made to me by a priest. He did not succeed, and he was not a member of the school faculty. I did not tell my parents; it would have devastated my mother. But my scepticism towards organized religion began to grow from that day. However, I am not anti-Catholic. The service padres I met later were mostly good men and the Catholic ones seemed more human and relaxed than their Protestant counterparts. In his autobiographical book on the Great War, Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves says that the only padres one saw where the bullets were flying, were the RCs.

School was accompanied by the blackout, sirens and air raids. We had great excitement one day. The siren sounded and off we jogged to the school air-raid shelter when right over our heads came a German bomber flying extremely low – so low in fact that I could clearly see a helmeted German face in the nose, which seemed to be staring right at me. The next moment two Hurricanes came flashing over, and they shot him down in the Rossendale Valley just a few miles away. One night my mother stuck my sister and me under the heavy kitchen table when a stick of bombs went off fairly close. There was a factory that made Bristol aero engines not far away and if that was the target then they missed. This factory was surrounded by barrage balloons which were all destroyed in spectacular fashion one day by an electrical storm.

My father was teaching mathematics and science at a local grammar school during the war and also served as a special constable. Mother was doing some supply teaching and my sister was at her convent school. She did not enjoy it much but was more academically inclined that me and eventually obtained a degree from Leeds University.

I clearly remember standing on a hill one night with my father, listening to the sound of the German bomber engines and watching the glow of the fires from a raid on Liverpool. Cousin Donald was a fighter pilot, and flew Spitfires and other types over Europe and Burma. His brother Joe was in the Western Desert. He was an RAF radio apprentice and after a pretty exciting and uncomfortable war, ended up as a squadron leader signals officer. Cousin Arnie was in the USA learning to fly under the ‘Hap’ Arnold scheme. He ended up flying Mustangs and Spitfires but did not survive. Cousin Edna was a corporal in the WAAF at Biggin Hill and Uncle Arthur, who had been the radio officer on a White Star liner, was a radio instructor in the RAF. I could not wait to join them. Arnie was like the big brother I never had. He gave me my first ride on a motor cycle, his Scott Flying Squirrel, and also my first drive at the wheel of a car, on Southport Sands in his ancient Talbot. His father, my Uncle Fred, was rather cross about that because I was only ten at the time.

One day the Americans arrived, to the delight of the young women in our locality. The John Schlesinger film Yanks caught the atmosphere perfectly: trucks, jeeps and soldiers with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of chocolate bars and chewing gum. I arrived home one day with an American soldier I had met on the bus from school. He was a big, polite young chap from Michigan. I hope he survived Omaha Beach and Normandy.

At about this time I realized that if I wanted to get anywhere in my life then I had better get cracking with my school work. In my final year, instead of hovering round the bottom of the class, I moved up to about second. At the school prizegiving following matriculation, the headmaster wore a rather bemused expression as he presented me with a prize. Out of ten subjects, I had done very well in nine but had failed Latin. I could never see the relevance of this subject. I objected to being rapped over the back of my fingers with the edge of a ruler by