By Land and By Air

wondered that there were no further crashes when we used to take off at one minute intervals. I only flew on one path, finding misses with all the flares. We had the best equipment, such as, GEE1 and Lasagne. GEE was a godsend to the Navigators. You remember when you stood on a wharf and threw a stone in the water the ripples went in circles, and when they hit the shore or wharf they started ripples in the opposite direction. The one who invented the G figured if he let go a radio signal, it would hit the object and return back to sender. As a result, two such stations were placed in England, but it did not take long for the Germans to jam the signals over Europe. You can imagine that circles from two points in England would cross at some point and give a fix. Instead of aiming for our airdrome, I headed for a GEE line and ran along it, until I struck the other line over our airdrome. I always got a fix running down the runway on take off, which would give the exact spot to land. I was able to tell the Pilot which side to look out and when he was over the exact spot, but team work was necessary. One night I was leading him home and he called up from G (George) permission to land, and they started to lower him in stages as many planes were flying over the airfield. So I started to fill in the blank areas of my log, which would be examined in detail the next morning. To my surprise our station landed him on a station ten miles away - some red tape to get off, but I never heard anything about it.

The H2G, now used by fishermen, had a hand like a clock and showed a picture of the ground, especially grey shapes of cities, but very good on rivers and coast lines. We were one of the first to receive one. The first

1. GEE — A radio—pulse system, code named GEE, devised tofind and bomb targets. GEE— H, high level bombing using GEE.

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