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Flying Typhoons Part 2

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Douglas Gordon (Part 2): The troubles with Typhoons

Douglas Gordon (Part 2): The troubles with Typhoons

January 9, 2019 by Stephen J. Thorne

(Click to enlarge) Douglas Gordon, 95, with his RCAF identification card, issued when he was 19.

STEPHEN J. THORNE/LEGION MAGAZINE

If the Germans didn’t get you, the Typhoon just might.

Flying Officer Douglas Gordon knew it only too well. Between June and August 1944, 19 Allied squadrons—his own among them—lost hundreds of the hulking aircraft and 150 pilots, many of them due to engine or structural failure.

“She was a monster; she was just a real miserable aircraft,” said Gordon, a 95-year-old native of Lachute, Que., who survived 99 combat missions at the stick of the Hawker-built plane. He flew multiple sorties on D-Day and into the Falaise Gap with 440 (City of Ottawa) Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force.

A Hawker Typhoon. Gordon called the plane “a monster. . .just a real miserable aircraft.”

COURTESY OF DOUGLAS GORDON

The Typhoon was a contrarian of the rudest sort. To start with, its propeller turned counter-clockwise instead of clockwise like most aircraft. Three metres off the ground, its cockpit was crammed with some 85 instruments, switches and levers—“all sorts of crap and corruption,” as Gordon put it.

It proved a rude awakening after flying Hawker Hurricanes. “You got the surprise of your life when you got ahold of one of those things,” recalled Gordon, who ran one into the long grass off the runway on his first takeoff: “The sonofabitch, you couldn’t control it. I think I was 20 miles away before I got the wheels up, even.”

It had a surly disposition. Designed initially as an interceptor, the Typhoon engine had a disconcerting tendency to quit at the most inopportune moments. “The aircraft had a lot of problems which would show up later on.”

Not the least among the Typhoon’s issues were its similarities in appearance to the aircraft it was initially designed to stop, the Focke-Wulf Fw-190. From some angles, the Typhoon’s profile resembled that of its main foe, precipitating several friendly-fire incidents involving Allied anti-aircraft units and other fighters.

Early versions, the Typhoon Type 1A, were powered by 2,000-horsepower, 24-cylinder Napier Sabre or Rolls-Royce engines. But both the 1A and its successor, the 1B, were plagued by design and technical problems. Gordon flew both.

Two armourers of Gordon’s 440 Squadron trudge through the mud of the B78 airfield near Eindhoven, Netherlands, to re-arm a Hawker Typhoon fighter-bomber in 1944.

SAIDMAN/IWM/CL1598

The Typhoon could be hard to start, especially on cold days, and it had a poor rate of climb—not great characteristics for an interceptor. The cockpit was hot and armour plating inhibited visibility, but those could be the least of a “Tiffy” pilot’s worries.

It blew dangerous amounts of carbon monoxide into the cockpit. The problem was never completely resolved and, throughout its service, it was standard procedure for Typhoon pilots to use oxygen from engine start-up to shutdown.

“You’d put the oxygen on for 10,000 feet on the dial before take-off,” recalled Gordon, a salty-tongued plain talker who pulled no punches during an extensive interview with Legion Magazine. “Carbon monoxide was a big problem.

“Pilots just went over and turned down into the ground. [Crash investigators] figured they’d lost consciousness.”

Gordon (front, far right) with 440 Squadron mates at RAF Station Hurn in Dorset in June 1944.

COURTESY OF DOUGLAS GORDON

In the rush to counter German development of the Fw-190, early Typhoons were first flown on Feb. 24, 1940, as replacements to the slower Hurricane—Gordon’s favourite aircraft. There was no time for proper trials. Test pilots died even as it entered service.

During the plane’s first nine months of combat operations, more Typhoon pilots were killed due to engine and structural failure than by enemy action.

Oil coolers failed, forcing engines to cut out on landing. Gordon said the motor would restart and shut down multiple times before dying altogether.

“There was a flight of four Typhoons that had taken off from this airfield and all of a sudden I heard this familiar sound.

“Aaaaa-ump! Aaaaa-UMP! And every time it cut, it cut closer. It would go aaaaa-cut, aaa and then all of a sudden the two cuts would come like that. And then ‘Oh fuck, there’s another one.’ Anyway, that was the Typhoon. Very unreliable.”

Gordon watched as the plane left the formation and started descending.

“He was coming in nice, and he came right across this field. He was over quite a piece from where we were. A perfect landing. Wheels up. The engine was dead.

“All of a sudden he somersaulted, end over end. Why? Because the army had gone across that field and built themselves a road and he hit the side of that road.

“They got to him. The aircraft had buckled, the tail was sticking up in the air. And he was in the middle of that, laced into his cockpit with all of his equipment on. He was dead, the poor bastard.”

Sometimes the engine sleeve jammed and the cylinder would explode.

The aircraft was also prone to mid-air structural failures at the joints between the forward and rear fuselage.

In steep dives, the tail would vibrate violently. The whole tail section could break away. Gordon said they wrapped the rear fuselage with reinforcing belts.

(Click to enlarge photos) Pages from Douglas Gordon’s wartime logbook, showing losses and mission details.

STEPHEN J. THORNE/LEGION MAGAZINE

In his logbook, he made notes of incidents big and small.

On June 10, 1944: “Bernier—engine cut out on takeoff. Cat. (E) crash [a write-off].”

On July 16: “WO McConvey blew up on takeoff.”

Early Typhoons had three-bladed props; later ones four.

“The three blades shook the livin’ shit out of ya,” said Gordon, who flew a dozen different aircraft types during the war, including P-40s, Hurricanes and Spitfires.

“They told you that you couldn’t make a woman pregnant flying a Typhoon. It was a joke.” (Gordon himself fathered three boys).

Things did not improve much with the 1A’s successor, the Typhoon 1B. The British government ordered 1,000 anyway and ultimately began using the plane, and its bigger engine, in what proved to be a more suitable role—as a fighter-bomber.

Issues persisted, however.

Now armed with four 20-millimetre cannons and some carrying eight 60-pound rockets, the Typhoon packed formidable hitting power. Equipped with the newer 2,250-horsepower engine, it was faster and had more range but there was a problem with the cannons—they would explode.

“When we were in France, they had trouble with aircraft blowing up in mid-air,” said Gordon. “This one guy fired his cannons off in a dive and the aircraft blew up.

“He got out. His name was Dougie Stultz, a Maritimer. He got burned quite a bit.”

‘Babs VI,’ a Typhoon of No. 174 Squadron, RAF, coded XP-K, was photographed at Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands on Feb. 9, 1945, the day after it was written off following a forced landing caused by engine failure.

IWM/MH27462

“So they grounded all the aircraft and they checked all the electrical connections and they found five of them that were no good and the rest were all good. I was on duty that day. So they said ‘will you take one up and take it out to sea and fire the cannon to see whether or not the aircraft blows up?’ I said ‘you’re crazy.’”

Nevertheless, he did it. “When I went to fire the cannon, I’m tellin’ ya, I was scared.”

Three weeks after D-Day, 440 Squadron moved to northern France, where sand and dust caused even more problems.

The Typhoon had a big air scoop under the cowling and the sleeve-valve engine turned out to be particularly vulnerable to the conditions at their new location.

“That [scoop] was a goddamn dust collector. They didn’t have a filter on it. It would suck sand into it in France and when the sand got into it, you weren’t airborne for too long. They said the dust was as good [fine] as emery dust.”

When it wasn’t quitting from the dust, the engine was constantly spitting oil.

“I remember my brown jacket,” said Gordon, “the left shoulder would be black from the oil coming out of the engine. The windscreen would get black.

“You had to land with the coupe top [canopy] open because if something happened, if you rolled or something, it would be nice to get out. You rolled it back when you took off and, for the same reason, you had it open when you landed.

“The result was, the oil would hit the windscreen and it would hit you when you were landing and taking off. Sometimes, it was really bad. We’re talking visibility at just about zero.”

Spitfires encountered similar problems in North Africa. A custom-designed filter made by the Vokes company in Ireland solved them.

Gordon’s hand-drawn diagram of Typhoon attack patterns.

STEPHEN J. THORNE/LEGION MAGAZINE

For the 156.15 hours that Gordon flew the Typhoon—his last sortie before he moved on to Spitfires was Nov. 11, 1944—her engine had a tendency to miss.

Once, he was in a formation of nine aircraft, flying wing on the squadron leader, just behind and beneath him in what was known as the No. 2 position.

“All of sudden I notice I’m starting to slide underneath him. I cut back. Then you’re affecting the guy behind you and all the guys on both sides. I get back in position and, first thing you know, my propeller is right underneath his tail.

“Finally, I just pushed the stick and went into a dive. His Typhoon was missing; the engine was skipping on him and missing and missing. And he lost power. He was sinking. That’s what the Typhoon did. It was very unreliable.”

The Typhoon finished the war but the process of replacing it had already begun by the time the fighting stopped. Its successor, the Tempest, was a better plane, say pilots, but, like most aircraft, it too had its growing pains.

By war’s end, some 3,300 Typhoons had been built, and 26 squadrons of the 2nd Tactical Air Force had flown the beast. The bulk of the surviving Typhoons were destroyed when it was over.

A Douglas Dakota of RAF Transport Command (background) lands at snow-covered B78 near Eindhoven, Netherlands, as ground crew inspect Hawker Typhoon Mark IB, MN659 I8-E, of Gordon’s No. 440 Squadron RCAF, which suffered a collapsed undercarriage on landing after a sortie. Gordon flew this aircraft numerous times.

RAF/IWM/CL3810

Only one complete aircraft exists today. It was originally on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., then presented to the RAF Museum in Hendon, North London, in exchange for a Hawker Hurricane.

The aircraft was recently returned to London after it was on loan to the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa for most of the past four years.

“I never really trusted the Typhoon,” said Gordon. “You couldn’t. You could trust the Harvard. I trusted the Spit. Not the Typhoon. You looked at Typhoon pilots, they weren’t really happy.”

Flying Typhoons part 1

Douglas Gordon (Part 1): Bail out or glide for England

December 26, 2018 by Stephen J. Thorne

As a member of 440 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, Flying Officer Douglas Gordon, now 95, flew 99 certified combat missions in the Hawker Typhoon, dealing with what he calls “all kinds of crap and corruption” along the way.

STEPHEN J. THORNE/LEGION MAGAZINE

Given a choice between parachuting into the frigid waters of the English Channel or nursing his dying aircraft for as far as he could take it, Flying Officer Douglas Gordon chose what he saw as the lesser evil—and it may well have saved his life.

It was May 3, 1944.

Gordon and 17 other Hawker Typhoon fighter-bombers of 440 (City of Ottawa) Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force, had loaded up with two 500-pound bombs each, then set out to rain down “crap and corruption” on a German destroyer across the English Channel near Cherbourg, France. But the Kriegsmarine gave back as good as it got that day.

“We were supposed to dive-bomb it from 9,000 feet,” recalled Gordon, then 21 years old; now 95. “Well, they didn’t tell us one thing: There were four gunboats around it that had anti-aircraft guns on them. So things got a little warm.

“It was like flying into a goddamn dust storm with the amount of ammunition that they shot at us. It turned out that I was smoking halfway back. I couldn’t tell until all my instruments started going screwy. Temperatures went up; pressures went down. Finally, I gave it up and shoved the throttle fully up until the engine seized.”

The headstrong farm boy from Lachute, Que., was well out over the Channel when the order came in over his headset.

“The CO said to bail out. I said ‘No way; the water’s too goddamn cold.’”

He then set out to glide his way to their destination, a refuelling stop at the Allied airfield in Predannack, near the southern tip of England.

“I wound up landing in a bunch of brush in a field. I was just short of the runway by about a mile. It had stood up on its nose in a ditch. I got out of that one in a hurry in case it blew up.

“They came out in an ambulance to pick me up but there was nothing wrong with me, so forget about it. I got my parachute; that was the main thing.”

He was 320 kilometres from his home base at Hurn, near Bournemouth.

“I was stuck,” said Gordon, who considered taking a train. “Our leader was a Wing Commander [Robert] Davidson, a Canadian. He came to me and said, ‘You know something? You and I are going to fly home together.’

“So he had them open the ammunition bays in the wings and he put his parachute in there. I kept my parachute; I got rid of my Mae West. He got rid of his.”

A young Flying Officer Douglas Gordon of 440 Squadron, RCAF, alongside a Hawker Typhoon during the Second World War.

COURTESY DOUGLAS GORDON

Since the Typhoon has a single-seat cockpit, they lowered the seat as far as it would go and the five-foot-seven-inch Gordon piled in. He was sitting so low he could not see over the sides of the plane. But Davidson had a plan.

“He said, ‘You’re going to run the rudder trim and I’ll sit on your lap.’ So he sat on my lap and put his two feet on the rudder pedals and then cranked the coupe top closed. He had his head stuck beside the gunsight on the dash.

“We got off and flew all the way back to Hurn with the squadron and landed. He was the CO, so a car came out to pick him up. He got out of the aircraft and he was talking to the driver. I got out after—the guy couldn’t see me—and I remember the guy said, ‘Jesus Christ, what are you doing in there?’

“The CO told him, ‘We didn’t have train money.’”

Gordon doesn’t know to this day whether they hit the German ship. They were relatively green combat pilots in May 1944. He heard later the destroyer had been sunk by a torpedo bomber.

Weeks later, Davidson was shot down over France. As he crash-landed, he radioed the rest of his flight a goodbye, promising he would see them again. He survived and lit out for cover after going down. He evaded capture for six or eight weeks.

“When the squadron went through Amiens,” said Gordon, “he showed up dressed in civilian clothes, smoking a pipe and wearing a beret.”

(Click to enlarge photo) A page from Douglas Gordon’s wartime logbook, showing his two D-Day missions over Juno Beach and into France. Gordon said the English Channel was “wall to wall boats of every sort.”

COURTESY DOUGLAS GORDON

The 440 pilots knew something was up after bombing a radar station on the French coast on May 30, 1944. They had flown almost daily for the entire month, taking fire on virtually every mission, often returning home with battle damage. The squadron stood down and, over the next few days, aircraftmen painted black-and-white identification stripes on the wings and rear fuselage of their airplanes.

“Prison stripes,” Gordon called them. They would become known as invasion stripes, intended to distinguish the thousands of Allied aircraft that would be flying over the French coast on and after D-Day.

“We were not told what was going on,” said Gordon. “But we knew something was going to be screwed up when they put the black-and-white stripes on us. I thought we were in jail.”

They were out of bed before dawn on June 6.

“They had us up at 4 o’clock in the morning and they served us breakfast. What’d we have? How could I ever forget? They had a great big platter of eggs, which was [unusual]. It would’ve been as big as [a large tray] and it was covered in fried eggs sitting in white grease. The goddamn things were cold.

“So we got a couple of eggs in white grease. It was not the best thing to have.”

The Channel was “wall to wall boats of every sort. We were over the beach about seven. We didn’t run into opposition in the air as much as the ground [troops] were getting. Our job was to dive-bomb some German pillboxes.

“Did we do anything good? I don’t know. All we did was get in and get out. They shot at us. They didn’t like us very much, really.”

According to his logbook, Gordon flew two missions that day, the first lasting 90 minutes, the second, one hour and 40 minutes.

“Bombed beach at Lebreche,” reads the first of the two entries for June 6, 1944. “Direct support to 3rd British Army on beaches. Invasion. Second front. Flak hot.”

And later: “Bombed truck. Strafed town—tank, trucks. Allman missing—dead.”

Some of Gordon and 440 Squadron’s handiwork on the Seine River south of Rouen, France, on May 28, 1944.

COURTESY DOUGLAS GORDON

This was Flying Officer Leonard Ralph Allman, 24, married, from Toronto. His brother Franklin had been killed on Oct. 4, 1940, while serving with the Royal Canadian Armoured Corps. Pilot Allman is buried in Beny-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery.

Juno Beach was “covered with people, tanks, landing craft,” Gordon recalled.

“Everything was a big mess. Some of the [amphibious] tanks sank. The landing craft would drop their ramps and the poor guys would walk off. Were they in two feet of water? Maybe seven. They sure took a beating. I felt sorry for them.

“We couldn’t do anything for them. We just couldn’t.”

A Hawker Typhoon sometime after D-Day. Gordon called the plane “a monster. . .just a real miserable aircraft.”

COURTESY DOUGLAS GORDON

The following day, he was flying wing to Stan Garside, a big flight lieutenant out of Edmonton.

“We came in sorta low and there were about three different German vehicles on the road. He went in and attacked and dropped 500-pound bombs on them. I was flying wing, which meant I was flying higher.

“The bomb dropped, exploded, and he pulled right up and his left wing was in flames. He pulled her straight up and bailed out. He was too low. The parachute never fully opened. He landed in an apple orchard.”

Gordon turned for home. Garside was 24. He is buried in Bayeux War Cemetery, southwest of the city of Bayeux, France.

“There were a lot of them. June, July to about Aug. 10, [19 Typhoon squadrons] lost 150 pilots killed.”

The Canadians conducted daily operations throughout June 1944, bombing railways, bridges and roads. On June 27, 440 Squadron moved from Hurn to northern France, settling in at Longteuil in tents.

Padre Hebert Ashford MBE, presides over a church service for 440 Squadron and other RCAF members in France on Aug.13, 1944.

COURTESY DOUGLAS GORDON

In August, 440 played a crucial role in the encirclement of German forces at Falaise, south of Caen—a turning point. The nine-day battle contained the enemy and closed the gap through which German forces were escaping.

Most of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group B west of the Seine was eliminated, opening an Allied path to Paris and the German border.

“It was a mess,” said Gordon. “There were German horses-and-wagons, vehicles. There were all sorts of aircraft in on it, attacking everything that moved.

“I went to make an attack on a vehicle. I had him lined up, I headed in and before I could even do that two rockets went right over the top of my head. A Typhoon behind had shot my target right out from in front of me.”

Wing Commander Robert (Bob) Davidson, in civvies in September 1944 after evading capture in France.

CWM/LAC/PL-32731

They would move to Melsbroeck, Belgium, outside Brussels, then on to Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Gordon’s last deployment with 440.

He flew his 99th and last Typhoon sortie at 10 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1944. It was supposed to be a reconnaissance mission into the north of Holland, looking for a prospective target, a waterway. He was flying wing to Flt. Lt. Del English. He didn’t know it would be his last mission with 440.

“On the way up, we saw trains moving,” he recalled. “On the way back, I took a whack at this train near the waterway. The Germans weren’t very happy with that.

“When I went in, I went in low. Del came in behind and they switched shooting at me and started shooting at him, so he had to pull up and get out of there. Then we came back and got two more trains…. They blew up.

“That night, the CO came along and said ‘You’ve had the biscuit.’”

His CO put in for a Distinguished Flying Cross for both Gordon and English, but they heard nothing more about it.

Gordon was transferred to the RAF, where he instructed transitioning pilots on Typhoons and flew Spitfires until the end of the war in Europe. He volunteered to go to the Pacific, but the atomic bombs ended the war with Japan before he even reached Canada.

He went to work at a couple of car dealerships around Lachute, working parts departments until he moved to Cornwall, Ont., in 1954. He married his wife of 62 years, Yvonne Annie Bedard, and they had three boys. She died in 2012.

Gordon worked 33 years at the local Chevrolet-Oldsmobile dealership, retiring as leasing manager in 1987. He was recently named a Knight of the French National Order of the Legion of Honour.

“This distinction represents the profound gratitude that France would like to express to you,” wrote Ambassador Kareen Rispal. “It is awarded in recognition of your personal involvement in the liberation of our country during World War II.

“Through you, France remembers the sacrifice of all your compatriots who came to liberate French soil.”

(Click to enlarge photo) Gordon’s war medals (ABOVE) and his letter and medal of the Knight of the French National Order of the Legion of Honour.

STEPHEN J. THORNE/LEGION MAGAZINE

Gordon keeps the medal and the letter packed away in a suitcase with the rest of his wartime memorabilia.

“I liked flying,” he said between serving a peanut lunch to a persistent blue jay keeping vigil at his living-room window. “You could do stupid things.”

But he didn’t miss it: “Too much trouble. I’d had enough of it.”

—

This is the first of two stories about Douglas Gordon’s wartime experiences flying Typhoo

1/24 Airfix Typhoon by Mike Garamond

Excellent modelling here.  Plus great reference.  All pictures by Mike Garamond