Tag Archives: Keast

Frank J.B. Keast

Friday, 11 October 1940

RAF Stradishall

Farley and Oettle return to RAF Abingdon in Whitley P5025. It may have required maintenance; North Weald is a Fighter station, without the facilities and technical staff to service a heavy bomber; Abingdon will perform the Flight’s Whitley maintenance for several months to come. At 17.20 Farley takes off in P5025 for Stapleford, North Weald’s satellite airfield. (Its runways are long enough provided the Whitley is empty.) He takes P/O Greenhill with him. Farley has other duties, for he hands the Whitley over to Greenhill and takes Lysander P9027, one of the Flight’s new long-range Lysanders, over to Rochford (Southend) for the evening.

Greenhill ferries Whitley P5025 over to Stradishall. (According to Ken Merrick, Greenhill is a Lysander pilot, and not cleared to fly the Whitley.) Sergeants Bernard and Davies are aboard; Bernard is to arrange the Flight’s Other Ranks accommodation; he travels in the rear turret. Davies in the wireless-operator’s position in the cockpit. As the Whitley approaches Stradishall to land, Bernard realises that they are coming in at too steep an angle, too high and too fast. The Whitley’s going to stall: Bernard knows a crash is inevitable, and braces himself by grasping the cross-beam that runs through the fuselage between the twin fins, just forward of the rear turret.

In the crash, Bernard sees the rear turret is torn away from its mounting ‘like a rotten apple’. Up in the front, Davies grasps for a pencil that has fallen on the cockpit floor. It saves his life, for in the impact the wireless-operator’s position is crushed by the impact; the W/T sets end up where he had been sitting. There is no fire: the Graviner system isolates the fuel and triggers the fire extinguishers, but the almost-new Whitley is a write-off. Sergeants Bernard and Davies are taken to sick bay, but they are both fit enough for operations the following night.

24 Squadron

F/Lt Keast is posted to 419 Flight. A pilot with a domestic airline before the war, he had flown several times to northern France during the Phoney War and during the German invasion. He appears to be the replacement for F/Lt O’Neill, who has been posted away within Fighter Command.

Monday, 20 May 1940

France

German forces reach the English Channel. The BEF and the cream of the French Army are trapped in north-eastern France and Belgium, unable to join the rest of the French Army further west and south.

24 Squadron

F/Lt Frank Keast flies a D.H.89 Dragon Rapide to the fighter airfield at Merville and returns to Hendon. Though Keast’s logbook does not mention his passengers, or the purpose of the flight, he was probably dropping off P/O Louis Strange, who was to act as an Air Movements Officer to organise the safe evacuation of RAF men and machines back to the UK.

51 Squadron

Flying Officer Albert John Oettle flies as Second Pilot in Whitley V No. 4972, on a 51 Squadron raid to attack German forces at Ribemont. Jack Oettle had joined the RAF in 1937 and this was his eighth operation. His first had been flown from Rheims, dropping leaflets over Germany two nights after war had been declared. More recently, on the night of 3 May, Oettle has had to bale out over England from a 51 Squadron Whitley when it ran low on fuel after a raid on Norway.

Wednesday, 15 May 1940

Holland

After a week of heavy fighting, during which the German airborne forces suffered heavy casualties at the Hague and elsewhere, the Dutch Army capitulates. The Germans attempt to include all Dutch armed forces, especially Dutch pilots who have escaped to England, in the surrender, but the Dutch commander-in-chief General Winkelman refuses; the armistice agreed is only local, for the Dutch armed forces forces in Holland.

Belgium

Henri Leenaerts, an insurance salesman and swimming instructor, is recalled to the Belgian Army Air Force from the Reserves. He served his compulsory national service as an 18-year-old in 1921, and was trained as a wireless operator.

France

On the night of 15-16 May the headquarters of BAFF (British Air Forces in France) is moved from its advanced HQ at Chauny to Coulommiers, 30 miles east of Paris.

24 Squadron

F/O F.J.B. Keast, a pilot with No. 24 (Communications) Squadron, is promoted Flight Lieutenant.

Friday, 10 May 1940

German forces cross the borders of Holland and Belgium. French and British forces move over the Belgian border in reaction to the invasion.

Flying Officer Frank Keast, a pilot with No. 24 (Communications) Squadron, flies from Hendon to Le Bourget, then to Amiens in a DH95 Flamingo. He has been with 24 Squadron since the end of February, ferrying senior officers and politicians around the UK, and between England and the British Expeditionary Force in northern France. Highly-experienced, with more than 3,500 hours, Keast is one of many pilots trained by the RAF in the early 1930s then put out to the Reserve. During the later 1930s he had flown with domestic civilian airlines, including Railway Air Services, and he may have had a spell with Sir Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus. After his recall in 1939, Keast had flown Ansons at No. 3 Air Observers’ Navigation School, putting trainee Observers through their paces in practical navigation exercises.

Pilot Officer Ron Hockey has been with 24 Squadron since the beginning of 1940. He flies a brace of generals, two squadron-leaders and a wing-commander to Amiens from Hendon in a DH86b. He takes the two squadron-leaders on to Le Bourget before returning to Hendon with six new passengers. On these flights he is accompanied by a rigger for the elegant four-engined biplane.

Notes:

FJB Keast logbook: copy available in the RAF Museum.
Grp Capt. R.C. Hockey logbook, now in the Imperial War Museum; copy available in the RAF Museum.