While the cry of many of the troops stuck on the beaches at Dunkirk was ‘Where are the RAF?”, 500 Squadron and its near-obsolete Avro Anson Mk.Is were there in the thick of it. Robin Brooks recalls some of the unit’s most notable combat exploits during Operation Dynamo
By January 1940, 500 (County of Kent) Squadron had been at its wartime base at Detling, near Maidstone in Kent, for several months. Equipped with the Avro Anson Mk.I as part of Coastal Command’s Order of Battle, the unit’s roles were reconnaissance, light bombing, and escorting Channel convoys. Led by Sqn Ldr William LeMay and the motto ‘Whither the fates may call’, he was to see 500 through one of its most diff icult periods – especially when it came to the vulnerability of the faithful ‘Annie’.
Its basic armament of two .303 machine guns (one nose mounted and the other placed in a dorsal fitted, Armstrong Whitworth-built manually operated gun turret) worried him so much that he and the squadron armament off icer, Fg Off Harold Jones, devised the idea of adding two more guns which would fire through the glazed side windows. They would be needed in the days ahead, for 500 was about to enter a period of …
