TRAINING    COMMAND    IN    WAR
preparations increased, it became possible to get things done in
days instead of weeks.
In our large and comfortable ante-room at Buntingsdaie, staff
officers of headquarters assembled to hear the B.B.CL news
bulletins which told us, on September ist, that Germany had
invaded Poland and that general mobilization had been ordered
in Great Britain and France. On September 3rd we heard the
voice of our Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, announce that
no German reply having been received to our ultimatum which
had been issued at 9 a.m., and expired at 11 a.m., we were now
in a state of war with Germany. So for the second time we were
in for a war which I recorded in my diary would be a long and
bloody one.
Next day I started on a round of visits to some of my air
stations to see that they were lacking nothing to continue full speed
ahead with their training. I had recently been allotted a useful and
comfortable Q,.6 communication aircraft. It had twin engines,
carried a radio operator and was piloted by nay personal pilot,
Flt.-Lieut. Bowen. First we flew over to Aldergrove near Belfast,
passing over the submarine Thetis en route. She was off the North
Wales coast, close inshore, with the lifting vessels trying to raise
her. This naval pre-war disaster was now no longer headline news.
Aldergrove Air Station was crowded with aircraft and per-
sonnel. No. 502 General Reconnaissance Squadron of Coastal
Command was already operating on anti-submarine reconnais-
sance, though some of the Ansons had neither wireless nor bomb
racks. A large number of reservists had just reported, and five or
six hundred of them had to be accommodated in the aircraft
hangars. There was a certain amount of apprehension as to
possible trouble from the southern Irish across the border, but
except for minor incidents nothing materialized.
My next visit that afternoon was to West Freugh near
Stranraer, and here I had the opportunity of seeing how this
bombing and gunnery school was planning to compete with the
increased number of aircrews arriving for training. This school was
one of a dozen or so similar ones situated round the coast. Each of
them had one or more target rafts moored off the coast, close to the
• aerodrome, at which small practice smoke bombs were dropped
from varying heights by the bomb aimers under training. There
were also ground attack targets on the beach and areas over the
sea in which air gunners and fighter pilots could practice various
methods of attack and fire live ammunition at sleeve or flag
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