HISTORY
formation and instead flew into him. Ivor had seen his parachute taken off him just before flying – ironically for safety checks. Left with a heavily damaged plane and no way to parachute to safety, he coaxed it down to land with considerable skill. In April 1944, his Fighter Wing were
sent south to RAF Culmhead to carry out low-level fighter sweeps over occupied France, using Bolt Head as a forward operating base. He described the posting as ‘Sheer
Joy’ as the crews flew at ‘zero metres’ above the channel across to France and ‘shot anything German that moved’. This is where he achieved his first ‘’kill” shooting down a Messerschmitt Me110, which had the misfortune to take off from an airfield directly on ivor’s line of flight and appear ‘in front of my sights’. It was during one of these missions
that Ivor found his story forever linked to one of the most tragic episodes of the war – Exercise Tiger. He was sent with others to scan the sea for survivors in Lyme Bay following an attack by German
E-Boats on a convoy involved in a secret training exercise for the upcoming D-Day landings. ivor wrote of the flight: “as the sun climbed over the Eastern horizon we saw the full extent of the catastrophe. The sea was full of sinking ships, bodies and flotsam, but we saw no signs of life.”
The sea was full of sinking ships, bodies and flotsam
Then Ivor’s squadron leader mistakenly took a turn towards France, rather than north to home. They saw the returning E-boats off Guernsey and had to quickly retreat as they came under fire. On their return to base, their commander gave them a severe ticking off for going the wrong way, but said there was an operation to go and destroy the E-Boats responsible for the Exercise Tiger attack. Ivor and his colleague who had gone in the wrong direction would lead several
Typhoons to the place the boats were moored – ‘firing at everything in sight’ to draw fire, allowing the typhoons to line up their missiles. If they returned safely, they were told, their detour would be quietly forgotten.
The mission was a complete success. All the E-Boats were sunk, including one by Ivor himself, whilst they were moored in St Peter Port Harbour. In 1944, he joined the HMS
Indefategable and was involved in raids in the Baltic and the Far East, surviving a crash landing on deck and a direct hit on the bridge of his ship by a kamikaze pilot, even though on that occasion his flying boot was sliced in half by flying debris. After the war he became a teacher, and retained his connections to the navy and to flying, taking to the air for the last time in 2004 in a Tiger Moth - one of the planes in which he had first trained. he died in October 2010 after a long illness, and Dartmouth was the lesser for his passing.•
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