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An Interview with Bee
A Telephone Conversation with Wing Commander Roland Prosper 'Bee' Beamont, One-time Commanding Officer of 609 (West Riding) Squadron, Summer 2001.
RE: ‘To Live Among Heroes’ By Doctor George Bell.
I haven’t read it right through yet. I’ve read a few chapters; it’s an awfully good book. George is very good indeed. He’s a human man and he understands people. It’s unusual these days to read an account of events, which takes more account of the quality of the people than of the events that are being described. Its a different point of view, but it’s not strange to me because 609 had, before Doc Bell came to us, another M.O. called Mackechnie and he was the same type of man. He was an incredibly warm individual and he looked after the pilots extremely well, he looked after their general well being, and their welfare in an extraordinarily warm way, and I think 609 were very well served by their medical officers.
RE: ‘Under The White Rose’.
‘Under The White Rose’, Frank Ziegler, the author of that book was my intelligence officer, and that was one of the extraordinary things about the squadron at that time, the individuals in the various key places were all exceptional people, and we were very lucky, we had a very remarkable team. That’s undoubtedly why we were such a successful squadron. Each individual was exceptional in his own right, but as a team they rose high above the others that were doing that sort of work, and they showed, and they became very well known in the service, as being the pioneering squadron of the Typhoon which was a rather difficult aeroplane in its early days, until we got it right. I think that’s probably the best squadron history that’s been published.
RE: High Speed Dives And Tail Shedding.
They scared us. Well, I am quoted as saying, after I got involved in that in the very early days before I went back to 609, I got myself into some quite difficult dives and I think I was recorded by my colleagues in the test pilots office at Langley as saying ‘well, if it goes on like this I think it would be safer if I went back to fight the enemy with the squadron!’ and quite likely it could have been.
RE: 609 Squadron Reunion, Duxford, 1st July 2001.
I think it was a fine day, 609 organized a marvellous reunion. I’ve been to a lot of them and I think that was probably the best one that we’ve had. All these old chaps of my age, they all enjoyed themselves enormously, they've got the same spirit that they always had. We always like to meet each other, and they had their wives with them and they all enjoyed it too. A very happy occasion actually, and we had two or three of my friends and colleagues over from Belgium, we had Belgian pilots, and one of them I hadn’t seen since 1943 and it was absolutely marvellous to meet them again, great spirit. Regarding Roger Marley's Replica Typhoon Cockpit, I was close to it. I didn’t have time to climb around it because by the time I got outside to go in to see if their was any more signing going on I was running out of my time scale. The cockpit looked well, and they’d got the windscreen on it and the canopy in its place and everything looked shipshape outside.
RE: Seeing A Typhoon Fly Again.
I think it would be great for all of us. It would be marvellous to do that. I never quite understood why it happened, but certainly there were thousands of Typhoons around at the end of the war and the authorities just ordered them to be destroyed.
RE: Kermit Weeks Tempest V Restoration.
I’ve been in touch with him and I expect that will reach a completed state. Whether it will fly again is questionable I think, because there isn’t a good supplier of Sabre engines. He’s got one fairly low life engine available, and he will complete the aeroplane, he is an extraordinary man and he does this to any aeroplane he gets hold of, he’ll have the work carried on for year after year until it’s done. I gather that with the Tempest, which is at Booker, the fuselage is in a fairly complete state and I think its all looking quite good. I would like to see it flying of course.
RE: The Typhoon/Tempest Against the Rest.
The thing of course about the Typhoon, and particularly the Tempest at the end of the war, was that the Tempest was a development of the Typhoon with all its bugs out. It was a very, very fine aeroplane indeed, but It arrived too late to get into service in large numbers, their were only two wings of them by the end of the war. But they had an incredible record out in Holland and Germany in the last few months, and joined Second Tactical Air Force in September, while the Spitfires had been in second TAF on the continent ever since May when the Normandy invasion started. But the Tempests, my wing that is, ended up equal top scorers with the Spitfire wing against enemy aircraft and at the same time they were the highest scorers of all against MT, transport, and locomotives. They were an extremely successful aircraft. You could out fly anything below twenty thousand feet, which was where that battle was being fought. From September 1944 through to the end of the war I think you could outperform P51’s, P47’s, and any mark of Spitfire. (Myself: It must have been quite a beast) It was, it was very good.
RE: Personal Scores.
Its very different these days to what it was in those days. These days there’s a tremendous preoccupation by, with the best of goodwill, people like yourself talking about victories and things like that. We never talked about victories. We knocked a Hun down, if we were lucky, and that was it, but there was no clocking up of victory scores as such. Sometimes if you thought you saw something, shot something down, but nobody else saw it and it disappeared into cloud, you wouldn’t even report it to the Intelligence Officer, so these days when people look at the records you’ll find different records, different numbers, for the same chap recorded by all sorts of different people. Now my logbook tells me that I destroyed nine enemy aircraft in the air, two on the ground, and 31 V1’s. Trains, I don’t know the total number, they’re written in my logbook. I think it was something over thirty. I successfully attacked 25 trains in the first two months, when I was in command of 609 squadron, that was at the end of '42, the beginning of 1943, and we went after trains in a big way to establish the capability of the aircraft in air to ground attack. I think it was certainly over 30, probably about 35. |
Copyright © 2002 609 (West Riding)
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