Part of a letter written by John Langley in May 2008.
I have been reliving old memories and I can’t get them out of my mind. First of all, I have landed at both Manston and Gatwick and for the life of me I cannot understand why Gatwick was developed rather than Manston.
When I touched down at Gatwick, it was a grass field, ie NO runways, whereas Manston had a huge runway which was so wide that when I took off using the left hand side of the runway a squadron of Spitfires was doing a formation landing on the same runway at the same time. Admittedly I did not like it, but it illustrates the size of the runway.
Additionally, the place is, in my opinion, much better suited than either Gatwick or Heathrow (another grassy field in those days), most particularly from the point of noise pollution, to say nothing of the fact that the circuit above Heathrow is over the most densely populated area of the country.
But the reason why Manston is the place I remember so well is this:
When I joined the squadron at East Kirkby, at first I had to fly whatever
aircraft was not being used by its "owner" as I had to wait until a new
plane was delivered (we were allocated an aircraft and the associated ground crew, but until one came there was always a crew on leave or, as happened to me, I was given the CO’s kite as of course he didn’t fly every op. When eventually I got my brand new Lancaster it was a Mark 2, the only one on the airfield. It differed from the Mark Ones by having Packard-built
Merlins with Stromberg carburettors, which unfortunately no one knew
anything about. As a result, it was very troublesome and eventually it was
"posted" to an OTU while I was on leave.
I was given the letter A Able, which was rather nice. By this time I had
flown about a dozen different lettered planes, including S Sugar, which was
the dual-controlled kite used for training and was universally detested as
being a real old crock. One day, we were told that come what may with the weather (awful), Churchill had insisted a raid must take place, regardless of the consequences. We were going to Munich and were routed over the Alps. When the time came to take off, the cloud base was under 500 feet, it was raining cats and dogs and to crown it all, the wind direction meant we had to use the shortest of the three runways. About two-thirds of the take-off run, when it was impossible to stop, one of the engines caught fire and the flight engineer stopped it, feathered the prop, and operated the fire extinguisher button. I managed to get airborne on the other three engines, but we were unable to get high enough to fly over the Alps and another engine was overheating, so I had to turn back.
The weather at East Kirkby was too bad for landing, so we made our way to the main emergency strip at Manston, where we landed safely. A van with the ‘follow me’ light led us to our parking place and after reporting the forced landing to the squadron, we went to bed.
Don’t have page 2 of the letter, but apparently, they got up next morning to the shock of a badly damaged Lanc where they’d parked theirs, before
realising it was another plane that had come in during the night.
