FlyPast – August 2018

82 FLYPAST August 2018

Spotlight

Short

Sunderland

A

fter years of rationing in

Britain, I was living a life

of luxury for three weeks

on a troopship taking

me to Singapore. My only task was

to be ‘duty officer of the day’ and

visit the troops on the lower decks,

asking: “Any complaints”?

I had been posted out to the Far

East Air Force and 88 Squadron, part

of the Far East Flying Boat Wing

equipped with Short Sunderland

GR.5s. The flying-boats were based

in Seletar on the Johore Straits on the

north side of Singapore.

Flag-waving

Our role in Malaya was to support

the British Army in an operation

called ‘Firedog’. Army intelligence

would determine an area of, perhaps,

several square miles in which they

believed the bandits were operating.

We would be called in to strafe the

area with machine gun fire and drop

20lb fragmentation bombs. This was

to frighten the Communist troops

into moving out, and would lead to

them hopefully being intercepted

by the army units waiting on

the perimeter.

Around 20 young navigators were

posted at the same time; the purpose

was to be trained on the job – to

double up navigators to two per

aircraft, as the workload on the

Sunderlands had increased with the

Cold War. Normally training would

have taken up to a year on the

type in the UK.

There were two conflicts – the

Korean War and the less publicised,

so-called Malayan ‘Emergency’.

Chinese-backed Communists were

infiltrating down the Malayan

peninsular, threatening Singapore.

Cold War

Sunderlands

Sqn Ldr Alan Coles remembers his time in action with 88 Squadron in the 1950s

Far right

The author (left)

in 1951 with an

Avro Anson of 2 Air

Navigational School

at Thorney Island,

Hampshire.

ALL VIA AUTHOR

Below

Sunderland PP148

‘F-for-Fox’ moored at

Kai Tak, Hong Kong.