File:Simon Moores Spitfire U2.jpg

English: Author - Simon Moores (2005) with Spitfire U2 from Merlins over Malta anniversary

—Public Domain

“Two bloody great towers emerge from the gloom, turn for Christ’s sake, that can only be Reculvers, they pass by just to my right, lucky I saw the shore in time.” Geoffrey Wellum, from his book, ‘First Light’, describing his attempt, in a damaged Supermarine Spitfire to find his way home to RAF Manston in 1941

My phone rang. “Squadron scramble”, said the voice at the other end of the line. “A patch of clear weather has just appeared and we’ll be off in ten minutes.”

It was Charlie Brown, chief pilot of the Historic Aircraft Collection and for most of the day; he and his Spitfire Vb BM597 (G-MKVB) in company with a Hurricane XII "Z5140" (G-HURI), flown by Clive Denny, had been trapped by the weather at Manston, en-route from Duxford to the Jersey Airshow and from there, on to the Mediterranean island of Malta.

With the cloud base down below five hundred feet and unable to take my own aircraft out to Deanland for its fifty-hour check, I had wandered over to the flying club at Manston’s TG Aviation; to see how things were going since the airport had re-opened.

Heavy rain started bouncing off the road leading past the boarded-up EUjet terminal building as I arrived at Manston and the first thing I noticed was a covered Hurricane parked on the apron. Behind it a small group in flying suits, directed by a figure with a distinctive handlebar moustache, were hurriedly pushing a blue-painted Spitfire into the shelter of the hangar.

I had always assumed that both the Spitfire and the Hurricane were water-resistant. After all, these tough aircraft had survived the Battle of Britain without dissolving in the rain but sixty-five years on however, these classic collection fighters demand a great deal of loving care and maintenance and both the aircraft that had diverted to Manston that day had good reason to stay dry. The Hurricane, because water apparently leaks into the cockpit and can quickly wreck its radio and the visiting Spitfire, because its blue paint scheme for the journey to Malta was only temporary, hadn’t yet set and was in danger of washing-off in a heavy shower.

Heading first for Jersey via Caen, and forced into Manston by the bad weather, pilots Charlie Brown, Clive Denny and Howard Cook were taking the aircraft, in their original 'Maltese Falcons', colours out to the Mediterranean for “Merlins over Malta” a battle for Malta veterans' reunion and airshow celebration of the historic defence of the island in 1942/43.

At the time, Malta, with its Grand Harbour, occupied a strategic position between Europe and Africa and had become one of the decisive battlegrounds of World War II; used by the Allies as a platform to deny the Germans a strategic advantage in the Mediterranean and north Africa where German Field Marshall Rommel was advancing towards the Suez canal. Between June 1940 and December 1942 Malta became one of the most heavily bombed landscapes on earth as the Luftwaffe attempted to batter the island into submission.

When the siege of the island began the RAF had very few modern aircraft available to challenge German airpower but with the arrival of Hawker Hurricanes in June 1940, the RAF began to stage a heroic resistance, until the arrival of more capable relief aircraft in the shape of seven Mk Vs Spitfires from the carrier HMS Eagle on the 7th March 1942. These were painted in a distinctive blue scheme, seen on Charlie Brown’s Spitfire and reproduced on a special Corgi Aviation limited collectors set, featuring both aircraft. The author, Geoffrey Wellum, also based at Manston, was one of the pilots involved in delivering Spitfires to the island during the subsequent Operation Pedestal in August 1942 and he describes this experience in his autobiography, ‘First Light’.

While Charlie Brown’s MkVb Spitfire is decorated in a naval carrier blue, the Hurricane, Z5140, displaying the code letters HA-C, wears the colours of a Hurricane IIB, flown with 126 Squadron during the siege of Malta. This arrived on the island on June 6th, 1941 during Operation Rocket, having flown off HMS Ark Royal. While the defenders expected that their Hurricanes would be delivered in a more appropriate tropical paint finish, there was no time available to repaint them from the familiar "Battle of Britain" green and brown camouflage.

Lucky enough to come across the team and with my camera to hand, I had hoped the weather would clear for long enough for me to take some good photographs of both aircraft but as the pilots wandered off for a surprise visit and a bacon sandwich at the Manston Spitfire Museum the weather collapsed over the airfield and forced the cancellation of their fly past for the Jersey Air Show that afternoon.

For a while, it looked as if they were going to be marooned at Manston overnight and I went off to arrange emergency hotel accommodation for the team among the fleshpots of Margate. However, I hadn’t been gone an hour, when the rain stopped and quite suddenly, as it does over the Kent coast, patches of blue sky started to appear.

It was then that I had the phone call from Charlie Brown. Keen to escape the clutches of Manston, the Spitfire and the Hurricane were going to take off into a small circle of clear sky that had appeared over Pegwell Bay. “We’ll have to do the photos another time,” he said. “They’ll never do it in ten minutes”, I thought, turning my motorcycle around towards Manston and reaching the flying club in under fifteen, just in time to see both the Spitfire and the Hurricane roar off the runway, with that distinctive Merlin engine sound turn left and climb, in close formation, out over the English Channel towards the distant coast of France, as they might have done in company with Geoffrey Welland in very different circumstances, sixty-five years ago.

--DrMoores 13:40, 23 April 2006 (UTC)