John Atkins
Born in England in 1919, John, at an early age, developed a wonderful love of aeroplanes and wanted to be a pilot like his uncle whom he thought was the ‘bees knees’.
He wanted to join the Air Force so he could go to Cranwell, the Royal Air Force College but his father refused.
John, 3 years old
John, 96 years old
Learning to Fly
My father said, ‘ Look you’ve got to understand, when you’re a pilot you are liable to have an accident and that would mean you can’t fly anymore and what would you do? You would just be a ground officer in the Air Force and that wouldn’t please you at all.’ He was right of course.
So like my father, I went to Kings University in London in 1935 to study engineering, both mechanical and electrical.
After 3 months, the Air Force started an auxiliary squadron, called the City of London Squadron. I was one of the first to enlist and I didn’t need my father’s signature. I continued at university and at the same time I was training as a pilot on weekends.
I had my wings by the age of seventeen. It was 1939. The war was coming.
The navy was going to reinstate the Fleet Air Arm and I was accepted but had to learn to land on an aircraft carrier. I was nineteen years old.
Young John at school
Dunkirk Evacuation
Dunkirk evacuation
In 1938 the Munich crisis came and that meant that all reservists were called up.
I liked the sea so I thought this'd be nice to fly and be at sea, over the sea. I was fairly good at navigation so I applied to transfer from the Royal Air Force to the Fleet Air Arm.
So the first day I must admit I didn't know what I was in for and we got to Dunkirk, we didn't go alongside because we were in a shallow enough draft to get into the bay. We got the bow up on a sand dune and there were all these soldiers in their military gear waiting to be loaded. So we loaded them just over the side of the ship. They scrambled up. We put scrambling nets over the side and they scrambled aboard. We got about 500 aboard in the holds...
I made three voyages back and forth from Dunkirk to Dover.
Encounter with German Luftwaffe
After my involvement in the Dunkirk Evacuation in 1940, I was lent to the RAF as a fighter pilot because the RAF was in dire straits. They had lost a lot of pilots during that pivotal moment in WW2, the Battle of Britain.
John in his flying gear
I had to do another one of these radar rhubarbs - the pilots called them rhubarbs - rhubarb obviously because they tend to loosen the bowels a bit. A bit frightening because you're a lone pilot. I managed to get to about 30 miles from Amsterdam which was very close to my turning point and I was flying higher this time at 32,000 feet because the weather was good. There were two of them up there waiting for me, two Focke-Wulf 109s and they attacked me.
I shot one of them down, I was hit a few times. Then the other one did a very foolish thing. He flew in front of me, so I hit him.
Whether he ever got back I don't know. By this time I couldn't handle the plane. It was in a mess. I mean it was falling apart and apparently the tail had almost fallen off. So I decided to crash in the water. I hit with such a bang that I just went unconscious. The strut of the canopy went in my head behind my left eye.
John and Pat, 1941.
John’s story was part of the Mornington Peninsula Shire presentation of Telling Tales at the Rosebud Italian Club in 2015.