Eddie, I’m not arguing, just not fully comprehending. The diagram you’ve very skilfully drawn looks like a perfectly acceptable defensive method. But as you indicate that sometimes it was done all the way to the target, I assume you mean it’s like weaving, in case something happened.
What I mean is something different.
A very famous local Lancaster pilot, Roy Calvert DFC and Two Bars, MID, who is now deceased apparently when attacked went into a corkscrew dive. He perfected this manouvre and then went on to teach others in the squadron, and it apparently saved his bacon on many occasions during his 59 ops.Though I never met him personally I have read some of his writings, and his wife recalls all his stories as if they were her own. I first heard of this spiralling corkscrew dive from her, and she indicated the motion he’d always told her by showing me with her hand, a spiralling downward motion, like a coil spring – or realistically a diving barrel roll I guess. Apparently it disoriented the fighters, or they assumed you were going to crash, so they’d usually break off.
I was of course sceptical about it at first (though I knew you could roll and even loop a Lancaster). Then I heard it first hand from a pilot.
I met this other pilot, Gordon Easter, who flew Stirlings. He mentioned the defensive corkscrew so I asked him to demonstrate and he showed a spiral with his hand too. He said that you could really throw the Stirling about when you needed to. It seems incredible, but I believe it. Maybe it just wasn’t in the RAF handbook, but it apparently worked because Roy and Gordon came home.
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