Roy Borthwick’s
memories:
NOT
THIS TIME !
For 'Somewhere
Over the Bay of Bengal' click here
"Skipper,
we've been hit in #3 (engine) and we've got black smoke pouring from it".
The urgent voice of my Flight Engineer came through on my headset. We had just
pulled up and away from a low level attack on the railway bridge near Three
Pagoda Pass, south of Moulmein. This was one of the many bridges on the infamous
Bangkok to Moulmein railway built by the Japanese using thousands of Allied
POWs.
The
engine was the nearest to my cockpit window, but the wing hid my view of the
smoke that was coming from the bottom. I pulled back on #3 throttle and directed
Fred, my co-pilot, to feather the propeller. He hit the large button for #3, but
nothing happened.
It
then dawned on me that the black "smoke" was actually black oil,
making it impossible for us to feather the prop to stop its rotation. We had now
left the coast and were heading for base, six hours' away across the Bay of
Bengal. Ordinarily, flying with three engines in a Lib was no problem, but in
this case a propeller still rotating at a fairly high RPM was a serious
development.
The drag created by the
propeller having stuck in "coarse", the other engines would require
extra power and fuel. The engine oil soon dissipated, but the prop kept turning,
the engine getting hotter and hotter as it began to seize, and was shaking so
hard it was on the point of either the prop or the whole engine shearing away
from the wing.
Finally
there was one great jolt as the engine seized completely and burst into flames,
but the prop did not shear. Fred pulled one of the fire extinguisher levers for
#3 but it did no good. The second extinguisher also failed to have any effect,
and if anything, the fire increased.
Now our only option was
to ditch, and this was not good news. Very few Liberator ditchings were
successful, as they had a tendency to break up badly when they hit the water.
The soft bomb bay doors would collapse, water hitting the aft bulkhead with such
force it would break the back of the aircraft.
Since
we had no alternative and the fire was threatening to break into the wing, then
to the gas tanks, we prepared for ditching. The rest of the crew moved onto the
flight deck and Fred secured me to my seat and backrest with the Sutton harness
so I wouldn't go through the instrument panel when we hit the water, then was
tied down himself.
The
fire was still burning fiercely. When we were down to fifty feet above the water
I began easing off the throttles to just above stalling speed. At twenty feet,
ready to cut the throttles I saw out of the corner of my eye - NO FLAMES!
As
I rammed on the power again and thanked whoever was looking after us that day,
I couldn't help wondering if
our problems were yet over. Since we couldn't feather the dead prop it meant we
had a lot of drag and a possible fuel shortage before we got back to base just
beyond Calcutta.
Our route was over
ocean and then over the dreaded Sundarbans.- * The latter region extended
approximately 170 miles along the coast, and 60-80 miles inland. It consisted of
myriads of waterways, swamps and islands, densely forested with mangrove and
sundari trees growing in the soft mud, and home to snakes, crocodiles, and
various mammals, among them two species definitely unfriendly to man. Neither
sea nor land offered an appealing welcome should a fuel shortage necessitate
ditching, bailing out, or a forced landing.
The
latest intelligence we had regarding Akyab, a small island farther up the coast
of Burma, reported it was presently under British command. It had recently
changed hands, the Japanese and the British alternately gaining control. It was
now used as a staging point for wounded British Army personnel, who were picked
up on the Burma mainland in small ambulance planes, then transferred to larger
DC3 transports for passage to hospitals in India.
Although
we were aware the airstrip might be too short for large four-engine bombers, it
seemed the best option and we had to try. Dick, my wireless operator, was able
to pick up their ground control, who advised us they had a short dirt strip on which we
could land. By this time it was night, and pitch black with no lights
showing, but they offered to put two flares at the end of the strip. We landed
and skidded to a stop with our nose against the jungle.
We all sat back and
thanked our very lucky stars for having landed safely. Moments later a Jeep
arrived and a British Army officer climbed aboard our aircraft. He handed us a
large bottle of Scotch saying "Here, chaps, I expect you could use
this." We certainly could and polished the bottle off in record time. He
told us we were lucky because Japanese aircraft had come in earlier and cratered
the strip on which we had landed.
*An interesting
account of developments in that region is given in the book "Spell of the
Tiger - The Man-eaters of Sundarbans" by Sy Montgomery, published by the
Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston and New York in 1995.
After
he left we fell asleep in our seats, and woke in the morning to find assorted
Burmese clambering all over our Lib, poking into everything they could find. A
blast on the loud Bail-out Bell sent them scattering in all directions. We then
inspected the landing strip and were able to see that we had miraculously missed
all the bomb craters. We also discovered that our flaps on the same side as the
burnt engine had been damaged by the same enemy fire, and if I had elected to do
another circuit before landing we would have rolled over when I poured on the
power again and made a bigger crater of our own.
Later
that same day we left our Liberator to its fate when we were picked up and flown
back to base.
Roy Borthwick’s memories of : SOMEWHERE OVER THE BAY OF BENGAL
On an operation, to night‑bomb a target on the Salween River my job was to locate and light the target with flares for the rest of the squadron. The monsoon weather was at its wildest that night and our Liberator was being badly bounced around when my co‑pilot Fred yelled "There's another Lib. off our starboard wing ‑-- CLOSE!"
Since all the other aircraft should have been at least five minutes behind me, we tried to make radio contact but with no success. The other Lib. kept flashing his navigation lights on and off and obviously had a message for us.
Thinking that base had tried to contact me with a change of plans, we flashed the message "WHAT?" to him with our "Aldis" lamp. The "Aldis" reply came back reading like a wartime poster on a London train station:
"IS THIS TRIP REALLY NECESSARY?"