Interview with Jeff Brown. One

Interview with Jeff Brown. One

Jeff Brown was working as an apprentice electrician before he volunteered for the RAF. He had always had a fascination for aircraft and wanted to fly. He trained as a wireless operator air gunner. He was then streamlined into straight air gunner after the authorities called for volunteers to change their trade because there was a surplus of wireless operators. He was posted to 576 Squadron at RAF Fiskerton. He took part in the flights of Operation Manna.

2016

00:17:49 audio recording

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Interviewer: Hello! Good afternoon or whatever time of day it is with you. It’s John back again with another of those interviews that I’ve done occasionally. Now, you know that I’ve met people who have various interests in life. Today it’s another of them guys from World War Two. The few if you like. And rather than me ramble me on for much for longer let me introduce you folks to pilot officer and sometime air gunner Jeff Brown. Tell us your story, Jeff.
JB: Right. Thank you, John. Well, I was born in Ashton under Lyme in 1925. I grew up at the Higher Hurst area on Gorsey Lane and I went to different schools. Mossley Road Council School, Stamford Boy’s School and Ashton Grammar School and I started work when I was fifteen as an apprentice electrician. I worked in the bus depot on Mossley Road working on buses and trolley buses. Now, I’d always had an interest in aircraft. As a youngster I’d always read books about aircraft, made models. My friend and I, the friend next door we lived near the golf course in Ashton so when nobody was around we used to go and fly our model planes on the golf course because it was a large open area. Occasionally we’d get chased off by the professional [laughs] but we had some good fun doing that. And then in 1941, in February the Air Training Corps was formed and I joined it right from the beginning and I was in it for several years until 1943 when I was seventeen and a half. I volunteered for the RAF. Now, I did this for a reason. In those days if you waited until you were called up at age eighteen you could possibly be picked to become what was called a Bevan boy. This was a scheme introduced by a government minister Ernest Bevan to send call-ups down the mines to train as miners. I didn’t want that. I wanted to join the Air Force and fly so by volunteering at seventeen and a half you were given a medical and tests. If you were accepted you were given a number, you were sworn in and you were officially in the RAF but you were then sent home on what was called deferred service until you were eighteen. And at eighteen of course you had to register so you could take your documents with you and show that you were already in the RAF so they couldn’t then send you down the mines as a Bevan boy. But when you were eighteen you were liable to be called up to start serving proper so when I was about eighteen and two months I received my call up. This was in January 1944 and I started training as a wireless operator/air gunner. Now, an interesting fact is in those days as an aircrew trainee the first place you reported to was Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. A strange place to start your service in the RAF and we were billeted in blocks of flats all around the Regent’s Park area. After about three or four weeks there you were sent off to start your training properly. Then after about three months we were called to a meeting by a senior officer who gave us the news that they had a huge surplus of wireless operator trainees and that our training would have to be suspended indefinitely. But at the same time there was a shortage of air gunners and he asked if anybody wanted to change they could do. So most of us being young and daft said, ‘Oh yes. We’ll be air gunners.’ So we had to start training again as an air gunner and I did my air gunner training at a place called RAF Dalcross which was near Inverness in Scotland and I did the training there and qualified and of course you were then made up in rank to sergeant. I then went along to join a crew flying on Wellington bombers at a station near Aylesbury. So we did the Wellington bomber training and then early in 1945 we went on to what was called a Conversion Unit to train on the Lancaster bomber. And then by April 1945 we were posted to join 576 Squadron which was at a place called RAF Fiskerton a few miles from Lincoln. There in the latter part of the war I did operational flights on what was called Operation Manna. I’ll show you some of the things. That was a letter that a man gave me on one of the visits to Holland. It just gives you an idea of how grateful they were.
Other: This is —
Interviewer: The Dutch.
Other: This is from a Dutch gentleman, yeah in Voorburg, which I’ve never heard of. “Fifty years ago when you liberated the Hague and gave us freedom and food after five years of occupation and hunger. I was a shy boy of fourteen. I saw you coming. I saw the Allied planes drop their food supplies but I dared not speak to you because I admired you and thought you were too high to be spoken to by a boy. Fifty years long I have been grateful to you. Fifty years long I remembered you. Especially on the 5th of May and on the 29th of April. The food dropping dates. Today, I can thank you personally. Thank you for saving my parents and my life. But for you we should have died in May 1945. Thank you for all your toils in the war. I’m very glad that you came through the war alive. God bless you.” Wonderful.
JB: At one of the reunions in Holland a chap came to me. He said, ‘I’ll tell you something now I have never told anybody.’ He said, ‘We were so short of food at Christmas 1944 we killed and ate the neighbour’s cat.’
Interviewer: Oh dear me.
JB: Yes. They were living on flower bulbs and I think it was twenty two thousand people died of starvation in the last months of the war in Northwest Holland. That’s how bad the situation was.
Interviewer: You see people like me and I was, I was born in 1942 and I’ve never heard such a story. That’s just amazing stuff.
JB: I’m sure you’ve pictured. That was a leaflet that was dropped to warn the Dutch people what we were going to do. That’s in Dutch.
Interviewer: All in Dutch.
JB: That’s in English. These are old pictures. I’ll let you look through them. It shows you how the food was loaded to the aircraft and how it was dropped.
Other: Because —
JB: Pictures.
Other: I know in Holland —
JB: Of starvation of children and people dying. Oh, it was a terrible situation.
Other: I was in Holland in May this year. The liberation of [unclear] and one of the Dutch British Legion standard bearers, he would be late seventies, early eighties he was telling me exactly that story.
JB: Yes.
Other: That they ate flower bulbs and his parents sent him somewhere else because there was too many of them to feed and he sent them to be with somebody else.
JB: Yes.
Other: And he ended up, his father was killed and where he was sent it was blew up so they had to go back to where they were.
JB: Yeah.
Interviewer: And he said it was horrendous.
JB: Yes.
Interviewer: You know. What a lovely gentleman.
JB: They went, the people in the big cities were worst hit. The people in the countryside, farmers and so on they weren’t badly off because they could grow their own food.
Interviewer: Yeah.
JB: Potatoes, and they could get meat and things but the people in the cities used to go on foraging trips out into the countryside selling their possessions. Bartering for anything that they could get to eat. A few potatoes and cheese and so on. In Holland towards the end of the war from September 1944 onwards they had suffered from food shortages. One of the main reasons was that the Dutch railwaymen because of the way they were being treated by the German occupation decided to go on strike even under threat of death and the German authorities said, ‘Right, if you’re not running the trains we’re not distributing food. You can find your own food.’ And so food shortages developed quite rapidly and by the early part of 1945 there were a lot of deaths coming through people simply dying of starvation. Queen Wilhelmina their ruler was living in London and through Underground sources she was made aware of the terrible conditions that were existing in Holland and she pleaded with the Allied governments to help. So by April 1945 a very dodgy truce was agreed with the German occupation authorities that they would allow Allied planes, British and American to drop food supplies for the civilians at designated areas and it was a sort of agreement we won’t shoot at you if you don’t shoot at us. But there were several instances where aircraft were fired on. Now, my squadron did in the latter weeks of the war five operations and the food dropping in Holland and we did the final trip on the morning of VE-Day, the 8th of May 1945. On that day I was flying in the mid-upper turret of the Lancaster bomber and looking back I saw the next aeroplane begin its take-off run down the runway and it began to swing from side to side and eventually it ran off the runway. Its undercarriage collapsed and the plane slewed around in a great cloud of dust and grass, broke it’s back in the middle and came to rest. Luckily there was no fire. But that was one load of food that didn’t get to Holland that day. Later we found out the reason. Being VE-Day and the last day of the war the pilot had allowed his flight engineer to fly the aeroplane and he lost control of it on take-off and crashed it. Of course there was an enquiry.
Interviewer: Oh dear.
JB: And a court martial afterwards.
Interviewer: Oh dear me.
JB: There’s a poem here. I’ll just read it to you, written by a Dutch man after the war in a book that he wrote and he said, ‘Pilots who came to us whilst waging the bloodiest war that ever yet befell mankind and that for five years had been raging around and over us making life hell. Look. We wave at you now that all is well. Look how we raise our children on our shoulders and they will tell their children’s children when they are old and wise how man like God dropped manna from the skies.’ Very appropriate that.
Interviewer: Wow. I’m not usually known for being speechless, Jeff.
JB: Now, the squadron I was on carried on after the end of the war until September 1945 and then it was disbanded because at that time the war in Japan had ended and a big rundown of the Air Force had started.
Interviewer: Fantastic, Jeff. Thank you ever so much on behalf of us here. It’s just been wonderful that.
JB: Good.
Interviewer: Thanks again. Great.