Battle of Britain 2

On July 26 1930 JWC More (Th 24) passed out of Cranwell with, among others, Douglas Bader.  He died in 1944 as a Japanese Prisoner of War on a transport and is commemorated on column 431 of the Singapore Memorial. Fighting in France in 1940 he shared in shooting down a Heinkel 111. During the Battle of Britain he was in Leigh Mallory's 12 Group, Commanding 73 Squadron engaged in night fighting.

In Random Recollections RL Ashcroft states that More made the "pioneer deck landing (on the Courageous)." This cannot mean the first ever landing by an aircraft onto a ship. It may mean that More was involved in the trials in 1939 in which Spitfires without arrestor hooks were landed on HMS Courageous. This proved that it would be possible for the Fleet Air Arm to be equipped with better aircraft. The narrow undercarriage of the Spitfire made landing and take off especially difficult unless perfectly executed (operationally there were problems as they could not be lowered to the hangars of many of the carriers because of the wingspan). Nevertheless the experiments led to the development of the Seafire, the naval variant of the Spitfire.

The courage involved in landing a Spitfire with its narrow undercarriage and with no arrestor hook onto a moving ship is not to be underestimated.