Interview with Reginald Walter Jordan. Two.

Interview with Reginald Walter Jordan. Two.

Reginald Jordan trained as a pilot in Canada before being posted to RAF Hampstead Norris. In this interview he describes his first impression of the RAF selection procedure and his first flights with his squadrons. His first operation was leaflet dropping over France. He realised that his bomb aimer was suffering debilitating airsickness and he had to instruct the wireless operator to take over his duties. He was later posted on to the Burma Campaign.

Taken from video.

2019-10-27

0:43:13 Audio Recording

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AJordanRW191027

TO: Yeah. The section about your medical test please.
RJ: Yeah.
[pause]
RJ: To the RAF. Early impressions. Call up. October 1941 a month had elapsed since my eighteenth birthday and still no call up. I wrote. I wrote reminding the authorities of my attestation the previous January. Back came a terse assurance that I had not been overlooked but it was late December before my papers finally arrived. I was to report to the Aircrew Receiving Centre, ACRC, at Lord’s Cricket Ground on the 19th of January. With a requirement to arrive by 10 in the morning I stayed overnight in a Salvation Army Hostel close to Paddington Station. Sleep did not come easily. The room was packed with twin tiered bunks and people trickled in until the small hours. To complicate matters the last man in left no, left the lights on which was how they were to remain for the rest of the night. In my bemused state I half wondered if it was really complying with hostel regulations. The next morning I was formally caught up in the RAF, in the beg your pardon, in the ACRC induction system along with hundreds of other aspiring pilots and navigators. We were numbered, photographed, checked for venereal disease, given a strong, given a kit bag, a uniform, a button stick and encouragingly a set of cutlery, a mug and a plate. Whilst this was going on it gradually dawned on us that the RAF had at least had a language of its own. At least at the barrack room level. Barrack room level. A colourful often mocking one whereby one’s cutlery became known as irons and being put on a fizzer meant being charged with a disciplinary offence. It was a language with a vaguely anarchic flavour. A useful state that evolved for the old sweats no doubt and for the new recruits like ourselves something novel to indulge in.
[recording interrupted - knocking on door. Chat]
RJ: Really on that first day wags emerged from all our intake to make light of having to provide details of our next of kin, being issued with impenetrable identity discs, receiving our first inoculations and being crammed in and being examined for the pox. By that evening early even the calculated abrasiveness of our corporal in charge was the source of amusement as it was beautifully mimicked by one of our brighter sparks. As the year, as the days went by this bond of shared misfortune seemed to weld us together. Something which did a lot to soften the rough edges of the system. It was a feature I much enjoyed and stronger than anything I could recall from my schooldays. Carry on with that?
TO: Yes.
RJ: Those of us who had been attested for more than six months had to undergo a fresh, a fresh [pause] a complete re-run of the aircrew medical examination. Again I was failed. I failed the test involving a book of coloured dots. Again, this was followed by the more practical test using colourful coloured highlights and once again I got through. On this occasion I was able to observe the light on the man ahead of me as he passed as he was tested. Since I could also hear his responses and he got a pass score I had a useful basis on which to work on. As I finished my tests the medical explained with some exasperation. ‘Why on earth are they wasting our time sending people like you for testing? Your colour vision is perfectly alright.’ [unclear] and I hoped and I hoped that when it came to the real thing I would not make another some, I would not make some dreadful mistake.
TO: Thank you.
[recording paused]
RJ: Where do you want me to start?
TO: Just from the top there if you like.
RJ: First off. I see.
TO: Yeah.
RJ: This heading is headed up — pilot training. First solo and now for the acid test. Would we be good enough as pilots. From the classroom and desk and the drill square in Aberystwyth we went to a Pilot Grading School at Sywell. A small grass airfield on the outskirts of Northampton whose sole, whose role was to assess our potential over twelve hours of dual instruction. So it was a Pilot Grading School you see and depending on how you got on in that twelve hours dual allocated to you would decide whether or not you were going for pilot training or navigator training. Here we are. The aircraft were DH82 Tiger Moths. Fabric covered biplanes with two open cockpits in tandem. The air conditioning being obligatory goggles and warm clothing were a must. To navigate with the infallible one in the front cockpit you bellowed into a voice tube. Mostly one, mostly one listened. Acknowledged briefly and then tried to emulate his latest piece of wizardry. This was headed up the first solo. Oh yes. Here we go. Strapping myself in on that first occasion I was struck by the aircraft’s sheer simplicity. Looking up at the fuel tank in the centre section of the top main plane the contents gauge was nothing more than a simple float in a glass column and glancing left at the forward [interplane] strut the external airspeed indicator comprised a simple spring-loaded metal plate free under air pressure to be forced back alongside a static quadrant calibrated in miles per hour. Taking it all in I wondered how the designer had managed to draw the line between being functional simplicity and downright flimsiness always assuming he’d got it right. Yes. At rest the Tiger Moth with its taut fabric covering, its struts and wires and curious half doors seemed a fragile almost an apologetic creation. But once the painstaking pre-start drill was out of the way and with the final swing of the propeller the engine burst into life. The Tiger was transformed into a vibrant living thing. Taxiing out to the take-off, to the take-off position, pushing the nose first one way and then the other to see ahead the tail skidded rumbling softly over the grass giving an occasional burst of throttle to keep the aircraft moving was to become a pleasurable anticipation in the days which followed. I remember the first of the first flight. I’m not seeing very well for some reason [pause] What of the first flight? My first time aloft in an aircraft of any kind. How was that? In the RAF language of the day wizard. First exhilarating charge across the airfield, the slipstream from the propeller pinning my goggles firmly against my face. The tail skin coming up so that the nose no longer blocked off the views [pause] blocked off the view ahead. The final bumping of the undercarriage as we lifted off, the ground slipping away underneath. The expanding view as we clawed our way upwards. The wind in one’s face. The busy busy buzz of the engine. The cars, people, buildings all diminishing in size and taking on the appearance of Toytown as we climbed. Continued in the climb. By the end of the first flight I knew the Tiger and I were going to get along fine. The question was would I show the necessary skill? More?
TO: If you like. Yeah.
RJ: The student pilot has an emphatic advantage over the learner motorist. First he and his instructor have their own sets of controls interlinked with what they are so that when the instructor demonstrates a manoeuvre he, the student can follow through with his hands and feet getting a feel of what is required as well as taking in the instructor’s description of what he’s doing. My familiarisation flight behind me we next explored the effect of the flying controls. RAF instruction takes nothing for granted. With the aircraft flying straight and level I was asked to place my right hand firmly on the control column, the stick, as my instructor eased it forward gently. He pointed out that the nose moved in sympathy. When he pulled it back again the nose moved in the same direction as the stick. Stick to the right and the right wing went down and so on. I was then so involved [pause – pages turning] I was then invited, I beg your pardon to place my [pause] feet on the rudder bar and then to the, and to note that when the rudder was applied the nose swung in the same direction. Next I was told to pick a point straight ahead on the horizon and taking control of the rudder bar to maintain a steady course towards it using nothing but that external reference point. Then I was asked to note the relationship with the aircraft nose to the horizon in the pitching plane for and aft and to keep a constant height by maintaining that inter-relationship with the stick. That’s how you learned how to fly straight and level but it was always emphasised that from day one there was no need to lock one’s eyes on the compass and the altimeter to get from A to B. A frequent check on the cockpit instrument yes but the accent was on flying external, by external reference and keeping a lookout for other aircraft.
[recording paused]
TO: Yeah. Where it says, “We staggered into the air,” near the bottom of this page.
RJ: Yeah. I will read from there.
TO: Yeah. If you could read from there please. “We staggered into the air,” it says.
RJ: Continue on to the next page or what?
TO: Yes. So just start from there and continue on —
RJ: Ok.
TO: To the next page.
RJ: We staggered into the air at dusk on the evening of the 5th of November hoping to a man I’m sure that there were [pause] that there would be no fireworks that night on our account. I use the term staggered quite deliberately since the aircraft was most reluctant to unstick and I was obliged to use practically every yard of runway in persuading it to do so. Airborne E for Eddie showed a little more guts for the task of gaining height making such a meal of it that I finally settled for a cruising level of just over nine thousand feet. Less than I would have liked. As we set course over Hampstead Norris I carefully checked the heading with my navigator, turned down the cockpit lighting to an acceptable minimum and sat back to await our crossing out point over the coast. Meanwhile my vision was adapting to the gathering darkness. We were on our way on our first operational sortie and now that we were actually on stage so to speak what slight tension I might have felt had simply ebbed away. When the aircraft had been allocated a few hours earlier I had managed to talk our flight commander into letting me take an aircraft equipped with Gee. I had not managed I should say. I had not managed to talk, I had not managed to talk our flight commander into letting me take an aircraft equipped with Gee, the latest navigational aid which my navigator put me up to. But I had tried and having drawn a blank we now had to do the best we could using dead reckoning navigation, astro shots and map reading plus whatever benefit we might coax from our limited radio aids. As the flight commander had put it ‘Gee wasn’t even heard of when I did my first operations. You’ll manage.’ Right. At the south coast we identified our position visually and made a small correction to our heading. Clear of land the gunners asked permission to test their guns and loosed off a few rounds. About mid-Channel we saw an aircraft coming in towards us slightly below and to one side in-bound for England. As it came a beam of us it was silhouetted in the moonlight, engine against a layer of white cloud and the intercom burst into life as two or three voices exclaimed, ‘A Junkers 88.’ Art, my young Canadian wireless operator/air gunner, w/op a.g. having a, adding a request to fire a burst. I cut him short with an emphatic, ‘No.’ Adding that our mission was to drop our leaflets on Montereau not to mix it with a JU88. The intercom lapsed into silence. Quite apart from the need to attain the aim of the mission I could hardly imagine a fleeting burst of 303 would be likely to cripple the JU88 and I certainly did not fancy my chances matching a particularly docile and dated Wellington 1C against an aircraft which had numbered amongst its roles that of night fighter. That’s it. We’ve come to the end there. We looked without success for landfall on the French coast.
[pause]
RJ: Yes. In spite of my air bomber lying prone in his cockpit bomb aiming position and although we later made out one or two [unclear] of course enroute to the target based on dead reckoning calculations I gradually formed the view that we would be extremely lucky to pinpoint Montereau given the deteriorating visibility and the lack of distinctive ground features in the target area. Indeed after three hours and having reached our estimated time on target the best that Leo my navigator could say was that we were somewhere in the vicinity of Montereau. Given the passive nature of our load I decided that that would have to do. We released our leaflets and to the glee, and to the aid of a flare photographed what lay below. The leaflets disposed of hopefully not all of which would be eaten by the local cattle my air bomber went off, went aft. Yes. To top up the engine oil tanks. This involved hand pumping oil from a fuselage tank to both of the engine nacelles in turn. The whole operation taking about ten minutes. This was standard procedure for the Pegasus 18 engine after the first three hours after which it was repeated every hour. An overriding requirement was that if the oil pressure warning light came on the hand pump had to be operated until the light went out. Our return flight procedure uneventfully for the first hour except for the cloud cover beneath us progressively increasing as we made our way north which did nothing to help our navigation. At this point the oil tanks were once again due to be topped up but when I indicated this to my air bomber he demurred complaining that he felt sick. Not wishing to show him up unnecessarily I switched off my microphone and removed my face mask and leaning across to where he lay slumped in the second pilot’s seat I ordered him to get aft and start pumping. He hauled himself out of the, out of the seat and disappeared towards the pump. Short of taking someone else off their active task I had no option. After some months with no word, after some minutes rather with no word from the air bomber I sent the wireless operator to see how the pumping was going. In less than a minute the wireless operator reported that he personally would be doing the pumping and would return to his set when the job was done. No one who has, who has been air sick [pause] would underate its power to test a man’s resolve but it is potentially threatening when it disrupts the official working of an aircrew on operations. As the flight continued my reaction to my air bomber’s lack of determination was one of disgust. He was virtually a passenger from that point onwards spending a good deal of his time where the wireless operator had found him. Draped over the elsan. Later the pilot, later in the flight the oil pressure warning light came on on two or three occasions and the wireless operator no doubt felt a bit like the proverbial one armed paper, one armed proverbial, unarmed paper hanger as he tried to cope with pumping the oil and operating his set.
TO: Is there any more or is that it for the, for the leaflet raid?
RJ: Using the radio beam equipment in the latter stages of our return we eventually homed overhead to Hampstead Norris or was it Harwell and let down on instruments through a thick cloud, layer of cloud. As we emerged, as we began to emerge from the cloud base I realised I was becoming disorientated and for a second or two I had to use every ounce of will power to keep control of my senses and fight off a feeling of near panic. With only a partial view of the airfield lights I began to align the wings to the reflection of the flight path in the sloping glass of my side window instead of on the flare path itself. The urge to follow that false horizon was so compelling that I knew I must get rid of it and quickly. My reaction distinctly deliberately to remain, to re-enter the cloud, settle myself down once more on the artificial horizon and this time to let down with my seat lowered and with my eyes riveted on the instrument panel until we were completely clear of cloud. It worked and I had no further problems but the six and a half hours of flight most of it in enemy airspace and the aggravating discovery of a weak link in the aircrew, in the crew had obviously left me a bit spent. On landing we were debriefed by the intelligence staff.
[pause]
RJ: By the time we reached the Mess and settled down to our supper of bacon and eggs my air bomber seemed to have largely recovered as he entered brightly into conversation. Something which added [pause] to my suspicion that his sickness might be fundamentally a nervous problem. It did nothing to lighten my mood and later as I tried to sleep I found myself going over the events of the sortie. I reflected on what action I should take. The next step I [pause] the next day I took the painful step of reporting adversely on our weak link. It was an unpleasant task but one which I could not duck knowing that on operations proper as opposed to a, as opposed to a leaflet raid on rural France there would be even less room for a passenger. Any shred of doubt as to what I might have about what action I should be taking was quickly removed when first my navigator and then the remainder of the crew spontaneously expressed the wish not to fly on operations with a man who could be so incapacitated by air sickness.
[recording paused]
TO: Ok. Yeah.
RJ: So where am I reading from?
TO: Just from near the top where it starts talking about your first mission in India.
RJ: This first operation of mine was not especially challenging or exciting but at least one of our crew had made a start. My main impression of the flight was the sharp contrast between the long flog out and back across the Bay of Bengal and the ten minutes or so of exhilaration in the target area as we delivered our attack from a few hundred feet. It also occurred to me as we flew over the target area that had we been shot down at that juncture separated as we were from the nearest friendly troops by a mixture of dense jungle, hills and broad rivers expanding, extending, I beg your pardon, extending over a distance of eight or nine hundred miles our chances of regaining our own lines would have been virtually nil. To take but one practical problem even if we managed to evade capture by the Germans, to take but one practical problem even if we managed to evade capture by the enemy and survive the leeches, the snakes, the crocodiles and malaria my Army marching boots as well, such as they were were hardly likely to have lasted a long trek to our own lines. And in retrospect I know that we would not have been much better off if we’d been obliged to ditch at sea unless we had come down on the last stages of the return flight say within a hundred miles of the Sunderlands. Such was the limited extent of our air sea rescue coverage at that time. But with more immediate matters to occupy our minds and being blessed with the unquestioning optimism of young men I doubt if it would have cost us much sleep had we known the worst.
TO: Ok. Thank you.
RJ: That’s it.
TO: Yeah. Just have a —
[recording paused]
RJ: Types of raid. We attacked mostly in daylight. Partly because many targets were too ill defined to locate at night and because in daylight we could do so in formation. The latter technique sometimes referred to as pattern or carpet bombing in which the aircraft releasing their loads simultaneously produced a devasting effect with the sticks of bombs unrolling carpet like cover to cover the whole area in a matter of seconds. Generally this technique made up for minor inaccuracies in aim and the very concentration of the attack increased its effectiveness by flogging the enemy’s recovery services.
TO: Carry on.
RJ: Do you want me to go on from there?
TO: Yes. Please.
RJ: A feature of these formation raids was our involvement with other Liberator squadrons. Not only of RAF 231 Group but with the gleaming aluminium Liberators of the USAF usually attacking them from high above us as the identity of the other RAF Liberator units in addition to 355 Squadron, 99 and 215 Squadrons regularly joined us in these attacks. So that comparatively speaking they became mass affairs as sixty or seventy aircraft funnelled into the target area and individual squadrons found their allocated place in the attacking stream. Each squadron sporting its distinctively tail markings for easy identification. When pattern bombing worked and usually it did it felt enormous, we felt enormous relief and dare I say it satisfaction. When not, when it did not and the pattern was largely or partly off the target there was anguish, frustration and on the intercom at least some barrack room language. During their fall the bombs were affected of course by wind and if the lead aircraft had to make an error assessing the mean speed, wind and direction for a typical [pause] I’m making a bit of a balls of that. I’ll read that again if I may. When pattern bombing worked and usually it did we felt enormous relief and dare I say satisfaction. When it did not and the pattern was largely or partly off the target there was anguish, frustration and on the intercom at least some barrack room language. During their fall bombs were affected by the wind and if the air bomber and the lead aircraft had made an error in assessing the mean speed, wind speed and direction from a typical bombing height of eight thousand feet the error on the ground could amount to hundreds of yards.
[pause]
RJ: The positives of flying in formation on a daylight raid was not for offensive reasons alone. A single Liberator in spite of its generous defensive armament could have been a dubious match for a formation of Japanese fighters but the compact formation of twelve or [pause] eight or twelve Liberators with their combined fire power was another matter. From early 1945 we enjoyed occasional top cover from Thunderbolt fighters. Such luxury was confined to short raids such as targets in the Rangoon area. Thus there was, thus it was that attacks on the Burma Siam Railway, invariably daylight affairs were made by individual aircraft. We nevertheless flew out in formation and regrouped where necessary when the daylight portion of the —
[recording paused – knocking on the door]
TO: You were saying when the daylight portion, attacks on the Burma Railway, you were saying the daylight portion of the raid.
RJ: Thus it was that although attacks on the Burma Siam Railway, invariably daylight affairs were made by individual aircraft we nevertheless flew out in formation and regrouped where necessary for the daylight portion of the, of the return. Our targets were bridges and locomotives which we bombed from three hundred feet or so using DA fuses of eleven seconds to allow us to get clear before the bombs exploded. Our targets were bridges and locomotives which we bombed from three hundred feet or so. That’s right, using DA fuses of eleven seconds to allow us to get clear before the bombs exploded. The major problem was persuading the bomb to stick on impact and it took a while to become, it took us a while to become at all proficient in the art. The instinctive approach of putting the aircraft practically on top of the target at a few feet before releasing the bombs merely brought gasps of astonishment from the rear gunner as the sight of the bomb bouncing along in pursuit of him, initially achieving heights well above his turret as we sped away hugging the ground to avoid the defences. The approved method of attack from low level was to regard the target as a runway threshold in an aircraft circuit pattern and to approach via downwind and crosswind taking care to keep clear, taking clear, taking care to keep a safe distance from the aircraft ahead so that its bombs exploded comfortably before we closed in. By approaching, by arriving at the release point after the aircraft in the nose down attitude our bombs stowed vertically were at least given the right bias as they left the aircraft thereby the theory being that during their fall they would become further nose down and so stick on impact. Sometimes it worked. The Americans rarely short of solutions with such problems fitted spikes to the noses of their bombs and it was soon apparent that their low-level results were superior to ours at which [pause] as with the [pause] bloody hell [pause] The Americans short of, rarely short of a solution to such a bomb fitted spikes to the noses of their bombs. It was soon apparent that their low-level bombing results were superior to ours at which as with the many control columns fitted to the auto-pilot of the USAF Liberators. We were never supplied with this modification but at least someone on our side benefited from it.
TO: Shall we stop there?
RJ: I think so. Yes.