August was a comparatively busy month, even though it included another week of night watches. Hunters, F86s, NF11s, Canucks, and Venoms were allocated to me for a variety of tasks including PIs, scissors PIs, freelance work and, new to me, a range monitoring session. This involved my monitoring the aircraft doing ciné attacks on a towed drogue target at a practice air-air range newly set up at Ahlhorn. Two of the NF11s previously mentioned were Danish. The pilots spoke perfect English and were no trouble. Four good PIs were completed with them.
Sometimes I was allocated Belgian aircraft. Belgian pilots were reluctant to speak English, the standard NATO language, except during an actual interception. Otherwise they went off into what, to me, was utterly incomprehensible gobbledygook. It was neither Dutch nor French, both of which I could recognise. It was their own dialect, said by some to be Walloon. Many were the times when I had to interrupt their gabble and tell them to "Keep the R/T standard". This they would obey - until after the next interception.
Exercise Counterpunch was held in September. For this I was temporarily posted to the GCI at Üdem. I shall briefly describe this detachment in the next chapter. Otherwise, during the month, apart from a week of nights, I only had three control sessions. One was a daytime radar calibration sortie with a Canberra. The others were with single freelance NF11s. The first intercepted two Canberras at 36,000 feet, and the second intercepted a pair of CF100 Canucks and a single NF11, both at 25,000 feet. Both these sorties were at night. My Log Book records that further control activities were precluded because of an Exercise Stand Down until the end of the month, although night watches were not affected.
It was during this autumn that, one weekend when I was Orderly Officer, I had an unusual experience. I had a few minutes to spare before I was due to meet the Orderly Sergeant and Orderly Corporal in the late afternoon before going to inspect the Airmens tea, so I walked from the Officers Mess, a short distance up on to the sports field for a moment's breath of fresh air after having been indoors for a while. Standing there, I heard the sound of an approaching jet aircraft. This was unusual for two reasons. The first was that the RAF, although on standby, did not normally fly at weekends and, secondly, the RAF had never been seen to overfly us since I had been at Borgentreich, it being too far into the south-east of the British Zone. The sound was getting louder and approaching from the south. Suddenly it appeared below a fairly low cloud base. It was a twin engined jet. It approached from over the old tech site where 757 SUs GEE Unit was now established, to over my head at no more than 1,000 feet. It was Russian. I could clearly see the red stars on it. It was an Ilyushin 'Beagle' light bomber. Dumbfounded, I watched it disappear towards Auenhausen. I ran to the Mess and phoned the tech site to tell them to see if they could see it. Then, out of sheer frustration and absolute annoyance at this blatant border violation, I phoned the CO in his married quarter. When I told him what I had seen he said "Well, Pod, what do you expect me to do - get my bloody peashooter out?" I could have throttled the man! With hindsight, that Beagle had probably been a photo-reconnaissance version and almost certainly would have followed a track over Rothwesten, Borgentreich and its tech sites, and very probably Scharfoldendorf, before heading back east at low level in the one border incursion.
October was busier even though I was spending time supervising u/t controllers. Two of my own ten sessions were in the evenings when I was officially on night watches. I only controlled RCAF Canucks and RAF NF11s with, unusually, no Hunters. The month saw the longest control session I ever had. It was on the night of the 16th when I was allocated a pair of CF100s for PIs. I had them under control at 35,000 feet for an hour and seven minutes, and completed three 90° scissors and four head-on interceptions, the last two of which were aborted because
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