75 Sqn Vampires at Ex Golden Kiwi 1969

In his 2013 book ‘Iggy’s Air Force Tales’,  page 41, Ian (Iggy) Wood (a Pilot Officer in 1969) said under a story headed ‘A Costly Gesture’ : “Late on the first day of our tented camp at Gisborne Airfield, we were setting up tents. Light rain had set in. Having transported its first load of people and equipment from Ohakea, the Bristol Freighter was on its way to Ohakea to pick up the second load. The loading ramps, used for access to the large nose doors, were left lying adjacent to our line of parked Vampires ready for use when the Bristol Freighter returned.  A local top dressing pilot returning to Gisborne carried out his standard rejoin  over top of the camp at somewhere between 50 and 100 feet. He landed adjacent to the camp and taxied at high speed to his parking spot, making a less than friendly gesture in our direction from the cockpit as he passed. We, of course, were waving back at him in an endeavour to alert him to the obstacle right in front of him. His Cessna 180 hit the loading ramps at high speed, tore off its undercarriage legs and skewed around with its propellor chopping up the ground. The pilot stepped out of his aircraft and without even looking at the damage walked across to us. “Where’s, the bar?” he asked. “The first round’s on me.”

I can recall that some pilots had not got around to pegging down their four or six berth modular tents before the evening meal was served, which in turn was followed by a mass adjournment to the local Pub. While away at the Pub a very strong squall preceded some heavy rain, so any unpegged tents were blown around and ended up in badly twisted mess of pipes and canvas.  One issue discovered on this camp was the number of breakages of the many 4-way connections that joined the pipes making up the tent frames, and this was due to the constant fretting movement of the pipes and frames in the prevailing winds. The cure undertaken after the camp was to retrofit bracing strands onto each arm of the 4-way connecting joints.

We were completely self-contained at the camp with tents for everything including food, work, medical, stores and recreation. Toilet facilities were provided in separate male and female tents with wooden seated ‘cans’ (portaloos came years later!). In those days, for a ‘quick pee’, males used open-aired ‘gonophones’ that had one end inserted into the ground and were surrounded by scrim – but in later years use of gonophones ceased to be used as they did not meet with good health and safety practices.   Water heating for both the kitchens and showers was done by way of what seemed to be fairly lethal petroleum-based immersion heaters placed into 44-gallon (200 litre) drums of water.  It was the job of rostered junior airmen to awaken early and start the heaters so that hot water would be available in time for showers by the masses.

The camp showers were the product of a great ‘number-8 wire’ Kiwi invention.  A two-bucket shower was the norm and the procedure was that a person arrived at the respective male or female communal shower tent, wearing flip-flops, with a towel covering non-public bits, and a jacket if it was cold. On arrival inside the shower tent the first task was to collect two empty 20 litre plastic buckets.  A trip back outside the shower tent saw the two buckets filled with water from one of the hot water filled 44-gallon drums, with a little cold water added as required to get the temperature in the buckets just right. Back inside the shower tent the handle of first bucket was connected to a hook at one end of a rope that went up through a pulley on a beam above the shower area. The other end of the rope was then pulled so as to raise the bucket above head-height before the rope was secured to a tent peg in the ground, thus keeping the bucket with warm water aloft. Stripped of the towel the person stood under the bucket and pulled a looped string in the bucket that had a small lead ball fixed into it – the purpose of the lead ball was to fill a hole to stop water from running out of the shower rose in the bottom of the bucket. Having got wet, the person pulled the string in the opposite direction to shut off the flow of water before shampoo and soap were used as needed. The water flow was then activated again by pulling the looped string to wash off the suds.  The second bucket was there merely to enjoy the shear luxury of having a warm shower.  Throughout all this process, the person stood on wooden duckboards covering a rudimentary open drain that carried the used water away to a soak pit. The showers worked a treat but it was a bracing process to follow on a cold morning.

Local Exercise flying – While at Gisborne we did a lot of flying in support of a Forward Air Controller (FAC) course that was run to train two FACs (Fg Off Bruce Donnelly and Fg Off Daryl McEvedy) who were soon to depart New Zealand for war service in Vietnam; we also flew attacks with practice weapons at Volkner Rocks weapons range located in the sea adjacent to White Island in the Bay of Plenty, and we did three ‘notable’ Diamond 9 flypasts.

My first Exercise Golden Kiwi flight from Gisborne was on Wednesday 1^st October wherein I flew Hi- with Fg Off Jim Jennings as aircraft captain in Vampire T11 NZ5707 on a Hi-Lo-Hi profile to Volkner Island and return. The 50 minute flight to Volkner and return saw Jim dropping practice bombs and firing 2 inch HVAR rockets at the rock – this was all new stuff to me as I had only ever used the land-based Raumai air weapons range adjacent to Ohakea, and positioning the aircraft over the featureless open sea at Volkner was a new challenge.

My second exercise flight was also on 1^st October where I was number 2 of a 2 aircraft sortie (2 of 2) tasked as Mission 107 with a FAC coordinated simulated attacks on a number of targets. Flying Vampire FB5 NZ5751 on the 45 minute sortie, we carried out a pairs close formation takeoff from Gisborne and flew at low level in ‘lo battle’ formation to a pre-arranged holding point (HP) where we contacted the FAC. The FAC gave us instructions to proceed from the HP on a designated heading for a nominated time and speed before entering an orbit at some six to eight thousand feet (which was above the threat of simulated small arms fire). The FAC, flying in a Harvard trainer, then described the ‘target’ to we the ‘fighters’ using a technique of going from big features to small, and sometimes using coloured smoke grenades popped by a ‘friendly’ troop on the ground.   Once the ‘target’, such as a farmer’s barn or a small bush-clad area, had been identified and the location of the ‘friendly forces’ clarified, the fighters set up to attack with simulated bombs from the FAC designated safe attack heading.  After a number of attacking runs were carried out by the fighters, the FAC surveyed the ‘target’ and passed a Mission Report to the fighters, which in turn was relayed to the tasking authority on return to base. Of course, all this was without any actual weapons being dropped, but at least it gave good practice to the two ‘trainee’ FACs including locating the target, devising a plan of attack and giving clear instructions to the fighters, and good in-house cockpit management – and all this before the FAC’s own departure to Vietnam to face the ‘real thing’.