Catalina Flying Boat Captain - Denis Saunders

Aged 21, Bruce Daymond enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force in 1941. He joined to serve the British Empire, as it then was, knowing he would serve thousands of miles from Australia.Sixteen days into his flying training, Bruce went solo for the first time. Having trained as pilot and navigator under the Empire Air Training Scheme, in both Australia and Canada, he went on to serve in the RAF throughout the Second World War. As a pilot of Consolidated Catalina flying boats, he flew with a number of Coastal Command units, namely Nos. 209, 357, 628, and 240 squadrons. Throughout his service, Bruce maintained a 330,000 word, detailed, candid, and personal daily diary; it is that which forms the basis of this insightful account of one flying boat captain’s service. The result is a revealing account of one man’s dedication to service and leadership, endurance of hundreds of hours of monotonous flying, interspersed with periods of terror and courage in the face of great danger.Bruce describes what must be an extraordinary record of hours in the air over a short time, inserting and rescuing Allied coast watchers off the Japanese-occupied Burmese coast, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Flying Cross. The former was rarely awarded to junior officers, as he was. His operational experience included flights, many of longer than twenty hours, almost entirely over the sea, often at night, on operations such as convoy anti-submarine escort, clandestine operations in Japanese controlled waters, and frequent meteorological flights in tropical cyclonic weather over the Bay of Bengal, that in one incident in a violent down draft caused a nearly unrecoverable descent into an angry sea.This is an extraordinary account of wartime service, and living life to the full under an uncertain future.