Interview with John Robert Dobson McClements

Interview with John Robert Dobson McClements

Interview with John McClements regarding his parents Robert and Iris McClements, and his decision to make a documentary about Operation Gisela, and his father's friend, Jack Laffoley.

Additional information on John Gifford Laurence Laffoley is available via the IBCC Losses Database.

The film 'Gisela: Echoes of a Sacrifice' is available here. 

2025-10-09

00:46:32 Audio Recording

This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.

AMcClementsJRD251009

DE: Right. So this is an interview with Robert McClements. We’re at the University of Lincoln in the IBCC Digital Archive. It’s the 9th of October 2025. So, Robert can you tell me a little bit about what it was, what it was like growing up with your mum and dad and any knowledge that you had of what they had been getting up to during the war.
RM: I can, although it’s an interesting story because for most of my youth it wasn’t a topic of conversation. It was never avoided. It was never something that they wouldn’t talk about. It just wasn’t relevant. It was something that had happened in the past. It wasn’t until probably the fiftieth anniversary when it became more newsworthy and they started to have little conversations about it and then I became more aware that they were instrumental in setting up the 10 Squadron Association which I think is very unusual because it’s not actually an official RAF organisation. It was a collection of volunteers who decided that they wanted to have meetings, gatherings, annual visits and to keep the connection with 10 Squadron and Brize Norton and it was very ambitious and it was very successful. So they would have a number of trips and occasionally they were invited to Brize Norton and would often go, invited to go on the air-to-air refuelling which was very exciting for everybody. I took more of an interest at that point. So, fast forward a little bit and the 10 Squadron Association continued to thrive and I’m now a member. I’m wearing my lapel badge as we speak and that became a much more important part of what was going on. I became more aware of it but not participating in it. When the discussions became a little bit more detailed and I took an interest in listening to some of the stories I was amazed to find that my mother who I’d always known as a businesswoman and housewife had been in the Royal Observer Corps and had served at the end of the war 1944/1945 on the Knavesmire at York as a plotter and she complained about it a lot. She said she never got used to the shift pattern. She complained they had to ride a bicycle in the middle of the night. You’d have thought she was on the front line [laughs]. However, what she was doing was vitally important and she was looking after 6 Group. My father was in 4 Group but they met during that time. I understand that they met one evening when they were promenading I think it was called. My mother being attracted to my father by his good looks, uniform and the fact he was smoking a pipe. I never saw my father smoke a pipe but obviously it was successful that evening. They got together. He continued, having completed his tour and went to work for my father-in-law. It seemed to have taken him an awfully long time to be demobbed. I think he was still looking after RAF Melbourne for nearly eighteen months which was within motorcycle riding distance of my grandfather’s business where he would be most of the time. Unless they were expecting an inspection when he would come back and take charge of the fire duties. So this is all really lightweight going on. I’m beginning to get a picture of what was happening during the war. My father then began to talk a little bit more about things and I think you should listen to his interview with you, Dan that we made a few years ago for, for those details. But from my own point of view it was quite remarkable to realise that he had been in active service. Significant things were he was a volunteer. I know all bomber crew were volunteers but he was a volunteer from Belfast who decided he didn’t like Belfast being bombed. He’d asked his mother to knit him an RAF blue jumper when he was about thirteen or fourteen and wanted to get involved with the Air Force. Joined up, came across and by some miracle was able to complete thirty-eight trips in a Halifax flying as a middle upper gunner. He would have been a rear gunner but at six foot tall it was a bit tight. I believe he did go in tail-end Charlie on a couple of occasions to cover somebody who was married and who was going through a particularly bad time. The way in which the story began to develop I then started to think about what that meant to me and what it meant to me was respect and understanding. And my father’s pilot, a Canadian, Bob Grant came across to visit us. My father and mother went down to see the anniversary of the Dambusters over the Sheffield reservoirs with one of my father’s crew members and so there was a connection there. His wireless operator lived to over a hundred. We were kind of aware they were just like friends from the past and the war side of it was quite secondary. I’ll pause for breath at that point.
DE: Okay. This is brilliant. Thank you. Yeah. Exactly what we’re after so —
RM: You can edit this bit out. So, where have I got to? We got to we’re going to Barnoldswick to see the crew member. I’m trying to think what happened in terms of sequencing.
DE: It doesn’t matter really about the sequencing.
[pause]
RM: Okay. So, to bring it up to date when we really began to be focussed on the Second World War and particularly in my father’s experience. By this time they’d both been recognised as veterans and they were being invited to various RAF events. 10 Squadron Association was going very well and the local airfield at Sherburn had decided that it was an obvious meeting place for people involved in the Air Force during the war and so Digby who owned the airfield decided to make them all honorary members of the Flying Club and gave them the title of the Bomber Barons. At its peak there would have been thirty-five of them there all telling the tale Thursday at lunchtime. That obviously over the years has dwindled away as they’ve passed away and my mother who passed away about a month ago was the last survivor. So the Bomber Barons are no more. 10 Squadron goes on and my parents were invited to Air Force, the Forces Day at Scarborough and they happened to get themselves in the wrong seats and on their way to where they should have been sitting they walked past somebody who spotted my father’s blazer. Susanne Pescott.
DE: Right. Yes.
RM: Susanne Pescott said, ‘Oi, 10 Squadron. Who are you?’ And began the conversation, a very brief conversation because the display was about to start. My mother is a very determined person and having made that connection she wasn’t going to let it slip. So they scoured the crowd at the end of the day until they managed to find the Pescotts again. Susanne tells me that it was their wedding anniversary. They were going to go for a special dinner. My mother decided they were going to go for fish and chips. They went for fish and chips.
DE: Right.
RM: But that was the beginning of a most incredible friendship and mutual support. They went to Normandy together. They went with the taxi charity. The taxi charity were superb. This is the London taxi charity for ex-servicemen all run by volunteers run by Dick and Susie Goodwin who organised the most incredible trips to Normandy. Taxi service from door to door in Leeds to the battlefields, to the services and back again on more than one occasion and I’m eternally grateful for that support. When my father died three years ago my mother was devastated but within two months they had persuaded her to go to Holland with one of their visits where of course the celebration was a recognition of the Air Force contribution with Operation Manna. Not a little gathering that we might have expected in the UK but mile after mile after mile of Dutch people lining the streets. Lancaster fly over from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. It was an incredible experience for her going on her own so soon after my father had died but really so valuable and I’m so grateful to the taxi charity. The fly past, Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. Well, of course my mother and father became invited to many events as veterans. The annual afternoon tea party, the end of season dinner where I would go with them and rub shoulders with the likes of Johnny Johnson, survivor from the Dambusters. Incredible. Courtesy, friendship, just being part of that recognition and in telling you this it makes me think about what was important to my father. The dedication of the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park. I cannot tell you how important that was to him. Like many bomber crew he felt neglected. He felt insulted at the end of the war when there were no proper campaign medals. The bar that was given reluctantly much too late almost felt like an insult as well. But when he knew that the Command was going to be recognised with a memorial in Green Park it changed his opinion. Not completely because the first thing he said to me was, ‘It’s a bit bloody late and you don’t think the royal family will be there. They’ll send some bloody politician to open it.’ Well, fortunately he was wrong because the royal party were there in strength led by the Queen, Prince Philip and so popular was it, so having miscalculated the level of interest instead of a few hundred people coming I think there was something like six or seven thousand applications and so the facilities around the Memorial were for a few hundred.
DE: Yeah.
RM: They had to relay it on tv screens into the rest of the park. I wasn’t having any of that. I set my stall out to make sure that my parents were going to be in the stall next to the royal party and I could spend the next ten minutes telling you how I did it but none of the things that I tried worked. I tried the RAF, I tried the 10 Squadron Association, I tried the local MP, I tried the local council. I tried everything. Nothing was going to shift the fact there was a ballot and they hadn’t been given tickets in the ballot. We did have tickets for the ballot to go to the dinner the night before at the Guildhall. I went to that with my father. During the course of the last efforts to get tickets I’d been in touch with somebody at the RAF Association who happened to mention casually that she was going to be going to the Guildhall that night and she’d be selling ties and memorabilia. So I left my father part way through the dinner and went to find her. I said, ‘You know at the last minute there’s always someone doesn’t turn up to these do’s.’ And she said, ‘Well, right now my brother is in the RAF Club doing the final seating plan. I’ll ring him up.’ I listened to the conversation and I watched her face. She gave nothing away. She came to me and she said, ‘Have you got something to write on?’ And I only had a serviette from the table. I gave it to her and she wrote two code numbers and two seat numbers on it and said, ‘Give that to your parents. Tell them to go to the duty officer at the entrance to the Royal Enclosure. They’re in.’
DE: Wow.
RM: We had to go and sit and watch it on the bloody screen in the park.
DE: Right.
RM: But they were in. They were in and that was a most important thing to my father. To see that recognition of all the sacrifice. Friends that had been lost. Experiences that he’d had. It really might have been very late but still massively important. Talking about people who had been lost during the war and friends brings me right to IBCC and the work that you do with the Archives because not long before my father died he said to Susanne Pescott, ‘Could you go through the IBCC and arrange for a poppy to be placed on the name of my friend who died at the end of the Second World War. He was called Jack Laffoley.’ And I overheard this conversation and I said to my sister, ‘I bet you recognise that name. Jack Laffoley.’ And she said, ‘I do but I don’t know why.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m beginning to understand it was somebody who was a friend of my father’s who died at the end of the war and it means a lot to him. So much so that he wants to have this recognition beyond his death.’ That then got me to look into what the story was about Laffoley and amazingly we discovered that my father’s bombardier Jack, not Jack [pause] start again. Amazingly we found that my father’s bombardier [pause- laughs] I have to gather my thoughts. [pause] Amazingly we found that my father’s bombardier, Albert Hodkinson DFC was still alive at a hundred and one and I can’t remember how I managed to do it but somehow we managed to make contact with him and he said that he was in touch with Jack Laffoley’s family. They’d tracked him down in Pennsylvania where he’d gone to live after the war although he was a Londoner and become very good friends. And so I thought I’d speak to Jack Laffoley’s family and find out more about the man. So, in conversation with Ross Oliver who is Jack’s nephew and this conversation was full of big circles and little circles. This is a little circle because within the immediate conversation from Albert to Oliver he said to me, ‘I went and made contact with Albert seven or eight years ago. Do you know he’s got a photograph on the wall?’ I said, ‘No. I don’t know anything about that.’ He said, ‘It’s my uncle. Jack Laffoley.’ That’s the picture he’s got on the wall now nearly eighty years later. Albert is soon to be a hundred and four. Last month he was given an embroidery which had been produced by some local group in America and it was presented to him almost like a blanket to Albert Hodkinson dedicated to Jack Laffoley. The impact that that man had I tried to encapsulate in the film that I made, “Operation Gisela: Echoes of a Sacrifice,” which tells some of the story that I’m giving you now but it also begins to reveal what Operation Gisela [pause] It also begins to reveal what Operation Gisela was and how Jack Laffoley died so tragically on his last trip two months before the end of the war when this aggressive action was launched by the Luftwaffe. I am convinced in response to the bombing of Dresden because the idea of flying back or waiting for the bombers to return and shooting them down over England had been forbidden by Hitler until the Luftwaffe built up enough pressure to say this is what’s happening. We might be finished but we’ve got to show that we can do something about it so they waited for them coming back and shot them down and Laffoley was one of those casualties. So that probably brings me pretty much up to date.
DE: Yeah. Can you go into a bit more about the how you came to make the film? I mean you sort of talked a bit about how you found the people.
RM: Yeah.
DE: But what was —
RM: Okay.
DE: What was the story of making the film?
RM: “Operation Gisela: Echoes of a sacrifice.” You can find it on YouTube.
DE: We’ll put the link with the interview.
RM: Incredibly it’s done two and a half thousand hits on YouTube which I’m told is a pretty good score. Even more incredible encouraged by Rachel Semlyen the co-founder of the Yorkshire Air Museum we entered it for a film festival. The Tees Valley International Film Festival who selected the film and then nominated it so that it’s one of five finalists at a ceremony that we’re going to early in November. How we got there I can only explain in retrospect because at the time it was something that had its own momentum and I just had to hang on to it. It started with the discussion about dedicating the Laffoley name at the International Bomber Command Centre and me taking an interest in who was this man. What did it mean? Through that connection I spoke with my father’s bombardier who put me in contact with the Laffoley family. I started to share the story and I found so many people knew nothing and were fascinated. Along the way the family members connected with Laffoley told me that there was a stained-glass window in the church in Canada which had been dedicated to him and sent me a beautiful photograph. Well, then I did start to plot. A bit like my mother was a plotter. I was a plotter. So I arranged to have breakfast with a very good friend of mine who has a printing company and I showed him the photograph of the stained-glass window and waited, not too long until he said to me, ‘I could print that.’ And I said, ‘Well, I used to work for a sign company that make light boxes so you print it and I’ll get a box for it.’ ‘What are we going to do with it?’ ‘Well maybe we could take it to the Yorkshire Air Museum because they’re talking about having some kind of a service on the eightieth anniversary of Operation Gisela and refreshing what at the moment is quite a modest display. So I’ll go and offer it to them.’ Which I did. Ian Richardson, whose official title I can’t think of at the minute [pause] just say Ian Richardson at the Yorkshire Air Museum had a connection with us already and the background to that connection was that we’d had a Memorial Service for my father when he passed away and we did that at the Yorkshire Air Museum. This is a bit of a sideways step here because when I contacted the Yorkshire Air Museum about having a Memorial Day for my father Ian Richardson answered the phone and I told him what I wanted to do and he said to me, ‘Was your father involved with the Legion d’Honneur?’ And I said, ‘Well, not involved. I mean he was awarded one at the Yorkshire Air Museum.’ And he said, ‘Oh, in that case it must be Robert McClements.
DE: Right.
RM: ’Yeah,’ I said, ‘It was.’ He said, ‘Well, what do you want? Do you want the RAF colours? Do you want to plant a rose garden? Anything you want to do.’ So that’s what we did. We went there. So, I go back to Ian and I say, ‘This service you’re going to have for Operation Gisela. I think that I could bring you a replica of the stained-glass window and you can put it into the display.’ ‘What a good idea,’ says Ian. It took a lot of organising because my original idea for the light box didn’t work but eventually I went back to a company I had worked for thirty years ago with somebody who had worked for me whose son now runs the business who said, ‘Yeah. We’ll make a light box for you. Just get the panel.’ We did and everyway along the step the meticulous attention to detail, the quality of the print, the technical way it was done, the lightbox. Absolute perfection. Everybody treasured their involvement and their contribution. So, I go to the museum with a rolled up panel the right size but not the light boxes to show them what it looks like. In the course of two journeys the location for the replica stained-glass window moved from the modest Gisela display into the chapel. The back wall of the chapel. ‘No. No. Let’s try it on the side wall of the chapel.’ ‘Well, you can’t quite see it there can you from the back. No. We’ll put it near the altar.’ ‘Well, okay.’’ ‘Well put it — ’ Ian Richardson says, ‘Give it to me’ and puts it on the altar on the back wall next to the cross and I thought, you know this is absolutely incredible. ‘It’s a bit lopsided isn’t it?’ At which Ian Richardson says to the engineers there. ‘Take the cross down and put the window in the middle will you.’ And that’s where it is now.
DE: Yeah.
RM: That’s, that’s where it is now, continuing to tell the story of Jack Laffoley and his nephew and his family most of whom had been influenced, inspired by this man to become pilots. His nephew’s daughter flies Apache helicopters in the American Air Force. Impact. Connections. Amazing. So having decided to make the stained-glass window I thought really I need to do something about recording the story and why not make a documentary? I’d never done anything like it before. I’d no idea where to start. I just had a feeling that there was so much goodwill and information to gather that I could do it. Now, in my day job up until recently I worked very closely with the British Printing Industries Federation and organised an annual conference for them looking at print. Any form of communication, digital, online, holograms, holographs, you name it and I had created for that a video capturing the event, capturing the day with interviews, vox pop and I’d worked with a student to do that. I just had seen him working on the editing of that. Worked with him editing that and thought we could do it together which we did. I have to say that at the end of the exercise he took me on one side and said, ‘You know when you asked me to do this job you’d got a lot more confidence in my abilities than I had.’ But we did it together. I spent the next four months gathering information, pulling all the bits and pieces together and throwing them at Ryan Lee from Ryvacious Productions who converted it into a stunning documentary film complete with soundtrack, graphics and you know the most incredible thing about the whole experience was where information came from. One thing led to another led to another and to another. Theo Boiten, the author, the most respected authority on Second World War bombing and the Luftwaffe, his book, “Nachtjagd,” I sent him an email and said, ‘You’ve got a very nice map in your book that shows the whole of the Operation Gisela.’ He replied with a link and a pdf file and said, ‘Yeah. Put this in your film.’ Wow. I can’t remember how it happened. I think I tracked down a website of aero enthusiasts and found myself communicating with a pilot, a young pilot in Brazil who had the logbooks of the Luftwaffe pilots from Operation Gisela and who had spoken with those pilots twenty years ago, ‘Would I like images to put into the film?’ ‘Yes please.’ The whole thing just grew like topsy. Along the way I realised that not only was this important to my father but that the Air Museum were working with the Doncaster Air Gunners, Jacqui [pause] surname [pause]. You’ll have to help me with that one.
DE: No. I don’t know.
RM: I’ve only put Jacqui down.
DE: No.
RM: No. Anyway, this was a remarkable, this is a remarkable lady who many years ago had discovered that the Doncaster Air Gunners no longer had a place to meet and offered her pub for them to do that. The Doncaster Air Gunners had struck up a relationship with Luftwaffe members and had visited and had visits from because one of the casualties of Operation Gisela, one of the Luftwaffe crew crashed into a farmhouse right next to the Yorkshire Air Museum unfortunately killing the members of the family of the farm. But the German Luftwaffe pilots wanted to remember their comrades and with the Doncaster Air Gunners had done just that. So now my eightieth anniversary at the Yorkshire Air Museum includes the Doncaster Air Gunners and the work they were doing with the Luftwaffe and they came and shared in the Memorial Service together along with the Cross of Nails and the young German girl who was working on the same idea in Germany and what came out of that was an unexpected dimension. The strength of reconciliation. Overwhelming. These people who had fought each other respected each other, shared stories with each other, talked about the tactics. But the reconciliation was the most important thing that’s come out of all of my experience and I feel as though at least I’ve been able to leave something. A memory. A longstanding memory to go along with that poppy every year at the IBCC for Jack Laffoley, for his family, for Albert Hodkinson. All of the people that were associated with that terrible period during the twentieth century and the sacrifices that were made. I called the film, “Echoes of a Sacrifice,” because it is its own story. There were fifty-five thousand or more casualties from the RAF. Every one of those has a story like this. Thirty odd thousand Americans, fifty thousand Germans all of whom deserve a story and recognition like this. I can only do one.
DE: Yeah. But they can be representative in a way. Yeah. What do you think was so special about Jack Laffoley? I mean as a person but also to your father.
[pause]
RM: Do you know, Dan I can’t properly answer that question. I can only surmise. When we learned that Albert Hodkinson still had his photograph on the wall eighty years later and my father wanted to leave some memorial not long before he died eighty years later I can’t really explain it properly. I have interviewed his family members who knew his mother, his sister and clearly he was an exceptional man. He was very talented. He was a leader at school. He was a captain of different sports. He clearly had a great personality. For my father, well it’s all very strange because they had the same birthday. The sixth of December. And the plane that Jack was shot down in had the markings V-Victor. The plane that my father had finished his thirty-eight trips in two weeks before was V-Victor. I can’t imagine. I can only try to imagine what that meant and we can only measure it by the strength of feeling and the durability of that feeling that continues to this day. Alright?
DE: Yeah. Wonderful. Wizard. Thank you. I’m just checking my notes. I think you’ve just about said everything that I thought we, thought you might. So you spoke a little bit about how your father considered that Bomber Command had been neglected and then through the Green Park Memorial and later the IBCC there’s this, there is this sort of growing idea of recognition. How do you feel about the memory of Bomber Command?
RM: I think I carry a cross for them. I think whenever I’ve got an opportunity to point out their contribution and the significant part that they played in the eventual victory over Germany that’s what I try to do. Not at every verse end but whenever there’s a conversation, whenever I hear somebody making a comment that doesn’t really understand I feel obliged to explain and try and put the picture a bit more clearly. There was a little bit to the end of the story which I’d forgotten and it’s not in the film. When we had the Memorial Day at the Yorkshire Air Museum and I had attracted the attention of a number of people in the Air Force including, I want to give a name call here, Squadron Leader retired Clive Rowley MBE from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. We had a bit of a bumpy start actually because I was so full of expectations about promoting what I was doing and he was a little bit uncertain as to what I was trying to do. However, once he saw the film he couldn’t help enough and the story and the link to the film appeared on the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight website as a result of which the nephew of the second pilot Ken Palmer who survived the Laffoley crash rang me and we’re hoping he’s going to come up to Memorial Sunday and we’ll meet Jenny Kay, the daughter of Bill Kay another survivor from the Laffoley crash and in an odd way it might be a reconciliation because if you watch the film you will hear Bill Kay say, ‘Ken Palmer pushed me out the way.’ Bloody good job he did.
DE: Yeah.
RM: Because if he hadn’t done they wouldn’t have found the door for them both to get out.
DE: Yes.
RM: And I can tell, I’ve told Malcolm Brown, that’s Ken Palmer’s nephew that Bill Kay’s daughter has forgiven him [laughs] Another person who saw the film was a farmer who contacted the Air Museum, Ian Richardson again and said, ‘I’m the farmer who farms the field where the plane came down. We wondered if you’d like to come and visit the site.’ ‘Well, yes. I think we would.’ So on the Tuesday after the Memorial Service Ross Oliver and his wife and myself went to Spellow Hill where we were met by the farmer and we were taken in his four-by-four up to have a look at where the plane had crashed. Richard Tesseyman was his name. Third generation farmer. His father had talked about it, his grandfather had talked about it and unbeknownst to us on every Remembrance Day he and his family go to the War Museum [pause] not the War Museum, he and his family go to Harrogate, to the War Graves, to Laffoley’s grave.
DE: Wow.
RM: We didn’t know there was a connection. We didn’t even know they knew the name of the crew. That’s been going on ever since the Second World War.
DE: Wow. That’s incredible.
RM: And at the end of it as we were leaving Richard Tesseyman said, ‘We’ve got one or two bits and pieces that we dug up from the field.’ I’m now putting a 303 bullet on the table in front of me.
DE: Crikey. Well, I’m going to give this straight back to you because it’s still live isn’t it that one.
RM: It is. There were two bullets. Richard said to us, ‘Would you like one each?’ And I said, ‘Well, Ross, you can’t take one back to Canada because you — ’ [laughs] ‘So I think what we’ll do is I’ll take one.’ And it now sits on the base of my father’s model of the Halifax which you’ll see in the —
DE: It’s in the collection.
RM: Digital Archives. And I thought that was the end of the story. Last week, I’m talking to Ross about coming over again and mentioned this story about the bullet and we’re now on Zoom. He said, ‘Hang on a minute.’ And goes off and comes back to show me the second bullet which he smuggled through security and took back to Canada.
DE: Right. Okay.
RM: So we’ve both got one.
DE: Rather him than me I guess.
RM: Yeah. Yeah.
DE: Crikey.
RM: It’s been a bit of a journey.
DE: Yeah. Yeah. So you find out if you’ve won with your film beginning of next month.
RM: Ahum.
DE: Yeah. I’ve just sent a copy of our bit for the IBCC Newsletter and I’ve put the fact that you’re up for the, up for the award. That will be in the newsletter in a few weeks. I’m sure I’ll think of another question as soon as I press pause but I’m going to —
RM: No. No. It’s fine. I’m chilled. I would like, let’s just to have a think. What have I missed out? I would like to be able to put Jacqui’s surname in and I don’t have it with me. You know, in a, just to recognise it somewhere.
DE: Jacqui from the Cross of Nails?
RM: Ahum.
DE: Whitehead. Jacqui Whitehead.
RM: Yeah. Yeah. So if I can give you a sentence or two to edit in somewhere about that. [pause] I discovered that the [pause] lost the thread. The rhythm. Lost the rhythm. [pause] When I realized that the Yorkshire Air Museum would also be recognising the death of the Luftwaffe pilots and the farm family at the farmhouse that had been destroyed as a result of the crash during Operation Gisela I met Jacqui Whitehead. An amazing lady who had been working with the Doncaster Air Gunners and with their Association with the Luftwaffe had been recognising and intended to do again on the eightieth anniversary.
DE: Yeah.
RM: And a bit about the German logbooks. The guy in Brazil [pause] the aero enthusiast that I made contact with, Adriano Baumgartner in Brazil made available the logbooks of the German pilots who had been involved in Operation Gisela so that I could include those in the film.
DE: Smashing. Right. Well, thank you very much. I’m going to press pause.
[pause]
RM: The story I had was a patchwork and the more I looked the more I found bits more of material to complete the patchwork and add to the stories. So I knew from my father that they had had an experience coming back from a raid when they’d iced up. He didn’t really go into too much detail about it. Albert said he remembered it vividly. What had happened was they were coming back from a raid, they got separated from the bomber stream and the fighter pilot had picked them out. Now, my father said that had happened but he didn’t explain what happened next. My father decided if he’s not shooting at me I’m not going to shoot at him. So I don’t know how close the encounter was but Bob Grant’s answer to this was to fly into the clouds and Albert will tell you even now very energetically cumulus nimbus is not a cloud that you want to fly into. It's a big black cloud and they flew into that cloud to get away from the fighter pilot and were buffeted and tossed up and down all over the shop and in the cloud began to ice up. That’s what happened. Now, when they eventually got out of the cloud the temperature was a little bit warmer. Bob had pushed the throttles of the Halifax through the restraining wire which was supposed to be in maximum revs until the bloody plane was shaking to bits and a combination of the warmer weather and this vibration shook the ice off the wings. Bob and Palmer were standing on the control desk with the stick right back to eventually pull the plane out of the dive and Albert said, [laughs] you’ll have to put your own adjectives in here —
DE: Right.
RM: Not quite so politely, ‘We could see the fish in the ice in there when we pulled out of that dive.’ And they bent the wings on the plane. The plane never flew again.
DE: Right.
RM: It got them home and that was it. It was scrapped. So I now know a bit more about the story that my dad used to tell part of.
DE: Wow. That’s fascinating. Yeah.
RM: There’s a bit in the middle actually which he did tell me about. When they iced up to begin with Bob had issued the instructions ‘bale out’.
DE: Really?
RM: They couldn’t. Why couldn’t they bale out? Because they were pinned to the floor with the G force and when they got to the door that was iced up as well. Otherwise, they might have been floating around in the ice.
DE: Yeah.
RM: They couldn’t get out. Thank God he managed to pull it out of the dive.
DE: Yeah. Wow.
RM: Rambling on a little bit more, Dan if you look at the losses the tragedy of the night of Operation Gisela the following night and the night after that the RAF lost nearly as many planes through icing up in weather conditions. Nothing to do with enemy fire. Nothing to do with anti-aircraft guns. Icing up.
DE: Yeah. Everything was against them.
RM: But they didn’t need to do it. Why it didn’t get called off [pause] no. You can turn it off now.