Sea Flight: A Fleet Air Arm Pilot's Story

by Hugh Popham

Hugh Popham joined the Fleet Air Arm in the summer of 1940 and was soon in training as a pilot at HMS Vincent and then HMS Yeovilton. His wartime career as a naval pilot took him to the far corners of the world, notably to the Indian Ocean where he had to contend against the Japanese Navy. Popham's story is one of a naval fighter pilot having to do his best with hopelessly inadequate planes -- first, the Sea Hurricanes, and then the Supermarine Seafires, which proved to be far too fragile for the rigors of carrier operations. But it is this story, incorporating the kind of detail that is missing from many wartime memoirs, that makes this book so fascinating. His war years aboard HMS Indomitable, HMS Illustrious, HMS Campania and HMS Striker are described with a modest charm that is so typical of a generation that adapted to their wartime roles with humor, energy and, in the end, great bravery.

Genres: Aviation, World War II

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

Reviews

[Manray9]

I picked up Hugh Popham's Sea Flight due to an abiding interest in the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm during World War II. Early on I was impressed with the book's humor, lucid prose, and clever turns of phrase. Only then did I explore and discover Popham's career as an award-winning poet and novelist. In fact, his poem Against the Lightning, written aboard an aircraft carrier during the war, appears in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse.

Hugh Popham was one of many young men who felt the allure of flying. The coming of the war and the boredom of his legal studies led him to the Fleet Air Arm. The British naval aviators of the period were handicapped by decisions made by parsimonious politicians in the thirties who dismantled the Royal Navy's air service. Only the approach of World War II remedied the situation. The navy's young pilots were trained and sent to war in a scratch group of makeshift aircraft – such as Sea Hurricanes and Seafires – or planes so poorly designed or outdated as to qualify as flying coffins. Popham and his mates themselves made fun of the ungainliness of the Fairey Barracuda. Nevertheless, they did their duty and dealt many telling blows against King George's enemies. Popham's account of flight operations from HMS Indomitable during Operation Pedestal (the opposed resupply of Malta) is particularly gripping.

Sea Flight is best described as a charming personal account, and even though it's about war, it reflects the atmosphere and attitudes of what in many ways was a simpler and kindlier era. Readers with an interest in naval aviation training and operations during World War II or those just looking for the well-written memoirs of a young man at war should take up Sea Flight. It earned Four Stars on my bookshelf.

[KOMET]

The author, through a skillful economy of words, relates his experiences as a fighter pilot in Britain's Fleet Air Arm through 5 years of war.

The Fleet Air Arm, which was detached from the Royal Air Force in the late 1930s, entered the war with several handicaps. One of which was a paucity of quality aircraft. As the war went on and the Fleet Air Arm expanded and was tested in a variety of battles from the Mediterranean (Taranto and Malta) to the Atlantic, the Arctic Ocean, and the Far East, it developed into an invaluable tool in the Allies' efforts to check and defeat the Axis Powers.

Popham's experiences in the Far East, Madagascar, and in the Mediterranean are lllustrative of what the Fleet Air Arm accomplished. He writes with understatement, which nevertheless succeeds in giving the reader a clear view of how the war shaped him.

[Dan]

First person narrative of one British Naval Aviator’s WWII experiences. Interesting to see the differences from the stories of American carriers and pilots who were fighting a very different war in the Pacific.

[Jesse Callaghan]

Really well written account of life in the fleet air arm.

[devin]

Paul graham rec

[Nat]

Mostly nautical romp around lesser-known corners of WWII (training in Canada, sailing around the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, around Africa, to Murmansk late in the war), where most of the danger comes from accidents, rather than enemy action (with the exception of a perilous convoy escort to Malta). The author is involved in one air-to-air battle in which a German bomber was damaged, and one light strafing of a Vichy french aerodrome on Madagascar. But he suffers an aerial collision over Great Britain during training, and he crashes other airplanes at least twice (once because one of his landing gear doesn't extend), and breaks his back. He ends the war in the unglamorous role of "batsman" (the guy who instructs the planes how to adjust for landing on the carrier), and he wins a poetry prize for his poem "Against the Lightning", about serving on an aircraft carrier.