... The last preparations before we took off were carried out in silence. only Joe Kestruk made a desillusioned remark to the effect that every time the navy made a balls of job, the poor bloody R.A.F. had to clear up the mess. At Ford there was the usual panic about tyres bursts and flat tarter batterie. luckily Yule's long experience of advanced airfields had led to the provision of three reserve aircraft per squadron and at 0950 hours 602 and 132 took off at full strengh.
I was flying as blue four, next to Jacques who was blur three, in Ken Charney's section.
On our way to the rendez-vous we passed three Bostons whose task was to scatter, over a stretch of twenty miles towards Cape de La hague, strips of tin-foil designed to jam the german radar.
Thanks to this, and to the mist, we would probably reach the entry to Cherbourg without being picked up too much.
We joined up with the typhoons at House-top-level over Brighton and set off Obliquely for Cherbourg, skimming the grey sea.
I loathe flying so low as that with all the paraphernalia of supplementary tank and cocks. Somewhere or other there is always liable to be an airlock, enough to make you slap into the drink at 300 m.p.h.
We flew through belts of opaque mist which forced us to do some very tricky I.F.(1) a few feet above the sea, which of course we could not see. The Typhoons, in spite of the two 1,000-lb. bombs under their wings, were setting a cracking pace and we had a job to keep up with them.
Obsessed by the idea of seeing the red light on the instrument panel going on (indicating a drop in the flow of petrol to my carburettor), I began to sweat from head to foot. What would it be when the Flak started ?

1015 hours. The fog thickened and it started to pelt with rain. instinctively the sections closed up to preserve vusual contact.
Suddenly Yule's calm voice broke the strict RT silence :
"All Bob aircraft drop your babies, open up flat out, target straight ahead in sixty seconds !"
freed of its tank and drawn by the 1,600 h.p. of its engine, my Spitfire leapt forward and I took up my position fifty yards on Jacques' left and slightly behind him, straining my eyes to see anything in the blasted fog.
"Look out, yellow section, Flak-ship, one o'Clock !"
And immediately after Frank Wooley, it was Ken Charney who saw a Flak-ship, straight in front of us !
"Max blue attacking twelve o'clock !"
A grey mass rolling in the mist, a squat funnel, raised platforms, a mast bristling with radar aerials - Then rapid staccato flashes all along the superstructure. Christ ! I released the safety catch, lowered my head, and nestled down to be protected by armour plating. Clusters of green and red tracer bullets started up in every direction. flowing Jacques, I wnet slap through the spray of a 37 mm. charger which only just missed me - the salt water blurred my windshield. I was fifty yards from the Flak-ship. jacques in front of me was firing ; I could see the flashes from his guns and hisempties cascading from his wings.
I aimed at the bridge, between the damaged funnel and the mast, and fired a long, furious continuous burst, my finger hard on the button. My shells exploded in the water, rose toward the water line, exploded on the grey black-stripped hull, rose higher to the handrails, the sandbags. A wind-scoop crashed down, a jet of stream sputerd from somewhere. twenty yards - two men in navy-blue jerseys hurled themselves flat on their faces. - ten yards - the four barrels of multiple pom-pom were pointing straight between my eyes - quick - my shells exploded around it. A loader carrying two full clips capsized into the sea, his legs mown from unedr him, then the four barrels fired, I could feel the vibration as I passed a bare yard above - then the smack of the steel wire of the aerial wrenched off by my wing as I passed. my wing tip had just about scarped the mast !
Phew ! Passed him.
My limbs were shaken by a terrible nervous tremor, my teeth were chattering. Jacques was zigzagging between the spouts raised by the shells. the sea was seething.
Half of dozen belated Typhoons passed to my right like a scholl of porpoises, bearing down on the hell going on behing the long granit wall of the breakwater.
I skimmed over a fort whose very walls seemed to be belching fire - a curious mixture of crenellated towers, modern concrete casements and thirty Years War glacis.
We were now in the middle of the roadstead - an inextricable jumble of trawlers masts and rusty wrecks stiking out between the battered quays. the weather seemed to have cleared a little - Look out for the Jerry fighters ! The air was crissed-crossed with tracers, lit up by flashes, dotted with black and white puffs of smoke.

The Munsterland was there, surrounded by explosions, flames, and debris. Her four masts bristling with derrick and her squat funnel well aft emerging from the smoke. The typhoon attack was in full swing, bombs exploding all the time with colossal bursts of fire and black clouds of smoke, thickening as they drifted away. A Typhoon vanished into thin air in the explosion of a bomb dropped by one in front. One of the enormous harbour cranes came crashing down like a house of cards.

"Hullo, Bob leader, Kenway calling - There are Hun fighters about, look out !"
What an inferno ! I was close to Jacques, who was gaining height in Spirals, making for the layer of clouds. Two Typhoons emerged from a cumulus, a few yards from us, and I just stopped myself in time from firing at them. With their massive noses and clipped wing they looked uncannily like Focke Wulfs.
"Beak, Blue Four !"
Jacques Broke away violently and his Spitfire flashed past a few yards under my nose, a white plume at each wing tip. To avoid a collision I waited for a fraction of a second a Kocke Wulf - a real one this time - flashed past, firing with all four cannon. A shell ricocheted off my hood. As I went over on my back to get him in my sights, a second Focke-Wulf loomed up in my windshield, head on, at less than one hundred yards. Its big yellow engine and its apparently slowly turning propeller seemed to fling themselves at me and its wings lit up with the firing of its guns. Bang ! stars appeared all over my slintering windshield which became an opaque wall before my eyes. Thunderstruck, I dared not move for fear of a collision. He passed just above me. A stream of oil began to spread all over my hood.
the sky was now alive with aircraft and full of flak bursts. I let fly at another Focke-Wulf and I missed. Luckily !... It was a Typhoon. Jacques was circling with a German fighter. I saw his shells explode in the black cross on the fuselage. The Focke-Wulf slowly turned over, showing its yellow belly, and dived, coughing smokes and flames.
"Good show, Robbie ! You got him !"
My oil pressure was disquietingly down. the rain began again and within a few seconds my hood was covered witha soapy film. I slipped into the clouds and set course north on I.F., first warning Jacques and Yule over the radio.
I reached Tangmere as best I could, my oil pressure at zero and my engine red hot and ready to explode. I had to Jettison my hood to see to land.
In this business we had lost two pilots, as did 132. Seven Typhoons were destroyed, plus two which came down off Cherbourg and whose pilots were picked up by the launches.

As for the Munterland, although seriously damaged and with part of her cargo on fire, she succeded two nights later in sneaking as far as Dieppe. She finally got herself sunk off the coast of Holland by a strike of Beaufighters.

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