OBITUARY
MILES, George William (Bill)
of New Zealand, passed away in March 2016 at the age of 92 years 11 months.
Final rank : Lieutenant (A) RNZNVR – Pilot
Brief Summary
Served from 1941. Bill was the second youngest in his squadron having signed up
under age.
Trained as a pilot with the US Navy at Detroit, Pensacola and Miami as a fighter pilot
on Brewster Buffaloes. Converted at Yeovilton, Somerset, to Hurricanes and
Spitfires.
Joined 885 Squadron on HMS Formidable in Mediterranean, Malta, Salerno then
with 899 Squadron based in Northern Ireland, Orkneys, Scotland, South of France,
Crete.
Some of Bill’s memories
On arriving in Britain he trained initially at HMS St Vincent at Gosport on Course No.
31, Rodney Course – ‘This number is imprinted in your brain forevermore’ he said.
Following this the Americans offered training places for 30 pilots and Bill became one
of these.
They started training on a circular grass field at Gross Ile between Detroit and
Canada. ‘Nobody on our course had ever flown a plane before. Only a few had ever
been in an aircraft. After 10 hours’ training in the air they then decided whether or
not you could fly solo.
18 out of 40 of us went on from there to train at Pensacola, Florida. Our class was
British Pilots 3A FAA. We were flying Consolidated Vultees and the training aircraft
N3N and N2S- sometimes from grass airfields learning how to spin the aircraft and to
control the spin if you were in one. We had to learn to land the plane by sideslipping
with no throttle – definitive flying aimed at getting you to land on the deck.
We learned to fly in formation with 2 or 3 other aircraft and instrument flying on a
radio range.
In the course of our training in instrument flying we were going up in Harvards with
two people. One person in the front pilot’s seat had a cover which he pulled over his
head and he could just see the instruments but he couldn’t see out, and the other
behind him was the safety pilot.
We went off to do some of this flying one day. Two aircraft went off – myself and
another guy and two other pilots from our team and we struck some very bad
weather. The area they had sent us to fly in was subject to thunderstorms and we
were to fly there for half an hour within this area and we did but it became quite
frightening and very, very difficult.
We got into these big thunderheads in the cumulus nimbus clouds and it was near
impossible to control the aircraft. I did a thing then which I have never done before
or since – I said to the pilot with me “You are flying the thing but I want you from this
point on just to control the rudder and keep us going dead straight. I will control the
stick and I will control the power.”
We were surging up and down in these thunderheads – huge rates of climbing and
huge rates of descent. I said “We will fly one course in one direction until we come
out of it but we are not going to go around in circles thinking we are getting there.”
I think it was by doing so that we did come out of there. We eventually flew out of
this bad weather area but it seemed like an hour – it was probably 10 or 15 minutes.
That would be the longest 15 minutes I have had in an aeroplane that I can recall.
We got back to find that our two compatriots had crashed – they were both killed.
They were both Sergeants in the London Metropolitan Police – Pitman and Statham
were their names.
I don’t know that on my own I could have got us out of that situation. We had not
been taught to divide the tasks between us – no suggestion at all of it. These other
pilots ended up stalling and spinning out and spinning into the ground coming out of
a cloud at 1000 or 1500 ft with not enough time to recover.
I was posted to Scotland to travel by ship to Gibraltar. I was the only pilot on board.
Only 4 of us knew where we were heading. Up past the Orkneys and out into the
Atlantic. I was given a job in the plotting room – there were maybe a thousand
vessels in the Atlantic which we plotted on this chart: maybe 500 ships. This was a
most interesting part of my life.
When we arrived in Gibraltar my ship, the Formidable, was out in the Med. I was
flying two new planes – a Bolton Paul Defiant and a Swordfish.
I was to take a Swordfish to Algiers, about a 3 hr journey, a solo flight – no radio, no
communication with anybody. They’d sent a signal to say I was coming and there
was a Dakota DC3 which took me back. They gave me the same task the next day.
After about 10 days I joined my Squadron, 885, a small squadron of 8 pilots and 5
aircraft and made a catapult-assisted take off in a Spitfire with the wheels on deck
and the tail wheel out over the ocean. We could fly as high as 25,000 ft. We cruised
up and down the Med hunting for enemy aircraft. One carrier, the Formidable, and
several ships including two battleships took convoys to Malta. We took off before we
got to Malta and landed at Luqa Airport.
After the port of Naples was captured our ship sent back to England. I joined 899
Squadron at Ballyhalbut. HMS Kadiv was our carrier. We went to Ayre and to
Scarpa Flow before they moved us to Peterhead in Scotland. We were the fighter
squadron for Scotland – out to catch the Germans who came over spotting from
Norway at dusk or dawn. We had 2 hrs daylight saving during the war.’
More recent history
Bill represented New Zealand at the unveiling of the FAA Memorial on the Thames
embankment in June 2000.
His funeral was held at the end of March in the Fleet Air Arm Memorial Church, Saint
Bartholomew’s, at Yeovilton in the presence of his closest family members.
The comments above are compiled from video recordings my father and I made of
his history 15 years ago.
Sharon Fredriksson
