CAREY, Frank R (#27)

On his sixth day of continuous combat, during which he bagged some 14 “kills” Carey was shot down. He had attacked a Dornier 17 bomber and was following it closely down in its last moments; the pilot was dead but the surviving rear gunner pressed his trigger to set Carey’s Hurricane alight, wounding him in a leg.

The fire stopped, and Carey landed in a large field between Allied and enemy lines. After thumbing a lift on the back of a Belgian soldier’s motorcycle he joined a party of refugees until a British Army truck picked him up.

The 16th Duke of Norfolk (on a Players Cigarette Card) who Chota Carey met as a fellow patient in Dieppe. He scampered to safety with the Duke when their hospital train was bombed.

Eventually Carey arrived at a casualty clearing station in Dieppe where he encountered the 16th Duke of Norfolk, a fellow patient who apologised that he was only there with gout.

As the enemy closed in they were put on a hospital train, which was subsequently bombed. Carey remembered how he and the duke had scampered to safety, then returned to help move the seriously wounded. Meanwhile, the engine-driver had uncoupled the engine, and made off.

Carey and his fellow walking wounded pushed the carriages out of the danger area then kept going until reaching the Atlantic coast at La Baule where the Hermitage Hotel served as an officers’ hospital, though he was soon sent to the less salubrious RAF tented depot, near Nantes.

The Bristol Bombay was built to replace the Vickers Valentia biplane in use in the Middle East and India. The aircraft was required to be capable of carrying 24 troops or an equivalent load of cargo as a transport, while carrying bombs and defensive guns for use as a bomber.

In the second week of June, together with “three similar RAF derelicts”, Carey located an abandoned Bristol Bombay. Obtaining fuel from the French Air Force they filled her up and took off, with Carey manning the rear gun.

“Good shots of Royal Air Force fighter pilots scrambling, they run to their aircraft with several shots of Spitfires and Hurricanes taking off and in flight. VS Good shots of RAF fighters flying in formation into attack, good air to air CUs and ground to air LSs of the fighters peeling off and attacking German bombers, good dog fight sequence. MS Wreckage of German bomber lying in shallow water on beach. N.B. This reel shows some signs of damage.”

After landing at Hendon in north London Carey discovered that he had been listed “missing believed killed” and awarded a DFC and Bar to add to an earlier DFM. He returned to Tangmere just in time for the Battle of Britain.

Battle of Britain by Paul Nash (1941)

The son of a builder, Frank Reginald Carey was born on May 7 1912 at Brixton, South London, where he led a gang in mock battles in the streets before being sent to Belvedere School, Haywards Heath.

Once, after several ships had been lost from a Channel convoy during the summer of 1940 Carey and five other Hurricane pilots of No 43 Squadron arrived on the scene to find enemy aircraft “stretched out in great lumps all the way from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg. At the bottom were Ju87 dive-bombers; above these Me 109s in great oval sweeps, and above them Me 110s. Three of us got up into them. It was absolutely ludicrous – three of us to take on that mob.”

At one stage Carey found himself “hooked on to the tail of the last of an echelon of 109s and started firing away quite merrily. Then I had an awful wallop. It was an Me 110 with four cannons sitting just behind me. There was a big bang and there, in the wing, was a hole a man could have crawled through.”

Carey was slightly wounded by an explosive bullet, then another Me 110 damaged his rudder; but he managed to return to Tangmere only to be fired at by its anti-aircraft guns. That he managed to land was, he said, “a great tribute to the Hurricane.”

He had been in combat up to six times a day when on August 18, the squadron’s losses enabled him to lead No 43 for the first time in an attack on a mixed bunch of fighters and Ju 87 dive-bombers. “The fur was flying everywhere,” he recalled.

“Suddenly I was ‘bullet stitched’ right across the cockpit.” Since Tangmere was under attack he turned away and found a likely field for a crash landing at Pulborough, Sussex, where his Hurricane turned violently upside down.

After a spell in hospital Carey instructed at No 52 Operational Training Unit (OTU), and served briefly as a flight commander in No 245, a Hurricane squadron at Aldergrove, Northern Ireland. In November 1941, he received command of No 135 Squadron, also Hurricanes, as it sailed for the Middle East.

But destiny intervened and, with the outbreak of war in the Far East, No 135 was diverted to Rangoon in Burma where there was little hope of doing more than slightly delaying the Japanese jungle march on India.

On February 27 1942, Carey was promoted wing commander to lead No 267 Wing, though it could seldom muster more than six serviceable Hurricanes. After destroying several Japanese aircraft he was forced to move to Magwe.

Shortly afterwards Carey, painfully aware that “the parlous state of our Hurricanes was showing” and that communications with Calcutta had broken down, attempted to reach the city in a broken down Tiger Moth. But he got only as far as Akyab, where he hitched a ride as spare pilot in a Vickers Valencia transport and arrived in Calcutta, and went down with malaria.

By then he had started to attract press attention in Britain as the RAF’s cockney pilot. His recovery was aided when he was awarded a second Bar to his DFC and was charged with forming a defence wing for the city.

As enemy raids increased Carey turned the Red Road, the main thoroughfare across the city, into a fighter runway. “One advantage,” he recalled, “was that it was quite possible to sit in Firpo’s, the city’s fashionable restaurant, and take off within three to four minutes. I managed it on several occasions.”

Firpo’s, an entertaining account of which by Dibyendu Banerjee can be found here.

Early in 1943, Carey formed an air fighting training unit at Orissa, south-west of Calcutta, for pilots who were unfamiliar with conditions and Japanese tactics.

So exuberant were his young pupils that Carey devised a ruse to reduce their drinking and high spirits to an acceptable level. He enrolled them in the Screecher Club, whose members were graded according to their sobriety and granted privileges to match.

In November 1944 he was posted to command No 73 OTU at Fayid, Egypt, in the rank of group captain. Awarded the AFC, Carey returned home as the war ended in 1945, where he was granted a permanent commission and posted to teach tactics at a newly formed Central Fighter Establishment at Tangmere.

After attending the Army Staff College he reverted to the rank of wing commander to lead No 135 Wing, 2nd Tactical Air Force in Germany, where he flew Tempests. Converting to jets, he moved to Gutersloh as wing commander, flying.

A succession of staff appointments followed until 1958 when he resumed as a group captain and was appointed air adviser to the British High Commission in Australia.

Carey, who was awarded the US Silver Star and appointed CBE in 1960, retired from the RAF in 1962 and joined Rolls-Royce as its aero division representative in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, retiring to Britain 12 years later.

Before the war he married Kay Steele with whom he had two daughters; after their divorce he married Kate Jones in 1947; and after her death he married Marigold Crewe-Read in 1993.”  (Obituary courtesy of The Daily Telegraph)

Replica of Carey’s Medal Group in Tangmere Military Aviation Museum  (Co-founded by Flt. Lt. Alan Pollock, and the original inspiration for ‘They Were There’).

High Flight

by John Gillespie Magee Jr.  (9 June 1922 – 11 December 1941)

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air…

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew –
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God

ohn MaGee, who died aged 19, author of “The Pilots’ Poem”, ‘High Flight’