The Armaments Officer 06

Some of the jambs which occurred were quite new, and difficult to trace. Let me give one example which caused considerable loss of sleep to P. O. Downs and myself, and one or two armourers as well. We had a series of gun failures whose cause seemed impossible to trace. The guns in question all had a good history according to their logs; they had all been stripped completely on several occasions and all the alterations necessary had been made; the ammunition was good, the temperature not too cold, and the

firing gears also apparently perfect. And yet from time to time the pilots - all experienced and with a good knowledge of the guns - reported jambs which completely held up the firing, but cleared themselves by the time the machine had landed. After several days of brain-teasing telephoning other squadrons and hurried visits to the local Army expert, I was reduced to a state of considering the advisability of trying to take a Camel up myself, and so doubtless end an inglorious career.


For the umpteenth time I sat down and made a list of possibilities which might be the cause of the trouble. I took a spare gun and criminally assaulted it. I filed its gear out of shape, altered the spring tension, mixed tracer ammunition with the ordinary, altered the angle of parts of the lock, and ill-used it in other ways which amounted to assault and battery on Messrs. Vickers’ good name.  Between each experiment I tried the gun, and it fired perfectly. The gun will, in fact, stand an astonishing amount of abuse without packing up.


And then one day when things were reaching breaking point, a pair of the defaulting guns arrived back on the aerodrome, the pilot having missed a sitting Hun. I climbed on to the machine, complete with dental mirror and a high blood-pressure induced by suppressed blasphemy. Nothing apparently wrong, until I shoved the mirror down one of the chutes through which the wonderful new disintegrating aluminium belt links were supposed to escape, and saw two of them fixed in a loving embrace right across the fairway. The mystery was solved. As the machine dived, an air eddy was formed at the exit of the chute, and the links being very light got held up, then finally mixed in a tight mass, and very soon stopped the firing. Usually as the machines returned home the links cleared themselves, and by the time it got back the chute was free again. I got Jordan to prove this for me, and he succeeded in getting back from a trial flight with one chute completely full of jambed links. I keep two on my desk now, just to remind me never to try and use my brains when in a difficulty.


A slight alteration to the shape and angle of the chute completely cured the trouble, and left everything nice and clear for the “next please.”

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