Page 68 - Demo

64back and so the engineers worked on it for weeks to get it serviceable again. When they started the engines for the first time everyone went out to watch and in fact one engine did burst into flames. However, it was eventually declared serviceable and I think Wg Cdr Crash Amos came out to fly it back. He was called Crash because on his Shackleton refresher he was running through his initial cockpit checks when the nav doing his shouted out%u201d check the bomb jettison switch%u201d. What he meant was check it was to safe. However, Crash operated it and dropped a complete load of smoke bombs onto the tarmac. They went off and that was when they discovered the fumes were toxic. One of the navs took a while to get out and I found him slumped in a telephone kiosk that night. The docs had checked him earlier and just said come back if you feel poorly. A couple of us got him to sick quarters where they found the linings of his lungs had been stripped. I think he eventually recovered ok but a whole load of new rules regarding smoke bombs came in. These bombs were about 9 lbs and dropped to simulate depth charges or anything else really. The tail lookout could then score the accuracy as he could see the smoke. We used similar flame bombs at night. Anyway, Wg Cdr Amos set off in the Shackleton and had been given the transit callsign of MOSES. That night we got a signal saying that Moses had reached the Promised Land. In this case Malta. When our turn came, our Navigators planned a route home for us through Malta and Gibraltar, but we would have to refuel somewhere in Egypt. There were a lot of problems between Egypt and Israel at that time and everyone was very suspicious. I think our Navs had planned for us to refuel at Jeddah, but Coastal Command just signalled that the route was unacceptable, without saying which bit. The Navs eventually decided on Luxor and that was agreed but we had to maintain 10,000ft over Egypt and all our cameras had to be stowed so we could not use them. When we landed at Luxor there were antiaircraft guns manned all over the place and they had built an enclosure into which they had bulldozed