1 25 7 https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/2613/58615/LCrimminWJ[Ser -DoB]v1.pdf 70900ce19d9ae877f14d5a216c0106f7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Crimmin, W J Bill Crimmin Description An account of the resource Two items. The collection concerns W J 'Bill' Crimmin (Royal Air Force) and contains his log books. He flew operations as a pilot with 115, 161 and 192 Squadrons. The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Josephine Crimmin and catalogued by Nick Cornwell-Smith. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-09-17 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Crimmin, WJ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource W J (Bill) Crimmin’s Royal Canadian Air Force Pilot’s Flying Log Book. One Description An account of the resource Bill Crimmin’s Pilot’s Flying Log Book from 19th June 1941 until 29th December 1944. During this time he trained as a pilot. Training started at No. 4 British Flying Training School in Phoenix, Arizona. This continued at No. 3 Service Flying training School, 1517 Beam Approach Training Flight and 25 Operational Training Unit before being posted to 115 Squadron for operations in August 1942. In March 1943 posted to 161 Squadron and then 1483 (Bomber) Gunnery Flight. Posted to 1655 Mechanical Transport Unit in January 1944 and then 192 Squadron for Special Duty operations. September 1944 saw a posting to Bomber Command HQ Courier Flight. Served at Thunderbird Field (Phoenix), Falcon Field (Mesa), RAF South Cerney, RAF Ipswich, RAF Finningley, RAF Bircotes, RAF Marham, RAF Mildenhall, RAF East Wretham, RAF Oakington, RAF Tempsford, RAF Newmarket, RAF Foulsham, RAF Halton. Aircraft flown were Boeing-Stearman PT 17, Vultee BT13A Valiant, North American AT6A Texan, Oxford, Anson, Wellington, Wellington III, Halifax V, Wellington X, Stirling, Martinet, Lancaster, Mosquito, Tiger Moth, Moth Minor, Auster, Proctor, Hornet Moth. With 115 Squadron he flew 21 bombing operations (2 day, 18 night), 13 night minelaying operations and 1 night special duties. His targets were Mainz, Flensburg, Ameland, Saarbrucken, Karlsruhe, Bremen, Duisburg, Norderney, Dusseldorf, Samso Island, Lingen, Krefeld, Aachen, Osnabruck, La Rochelle, Kiel, Cologne, Genoa, Turin, Frankfurt, Neuwerk Island, Lorient. His pilot on his first two operations was Sergeant Norrington, and then he flew as 1st pilot on all further operations. Flying with 192 Squadron he flew 37 night Special Duties operations. Targets for these operations were Dortmund, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Wittenburg, Karlsruhe, The Ruhr, Aachen, Berlin, Liege, Brest, Cologne, Duisburg, Brunswick, Bordeaux, Laval, Paris, Gelsenkirchen, Neufchatel, Watten, Vitry-le-François, Orleans, Dunkerque, Revigny, Bourges, Wesseling, Hamburg, Stettin, Stendal. Whilst carry out a Special Duties operation to Vitry on 28th June 1944 his aircraft was attacked and damaged by a Mosquito night fighter resulting in a forced landing at RAF Friston. No injuries were sustained. The log book also includes a hand written note from the Officer Commanding RAF Foulsham giving Commendatory Endorsements in regards the Mosquito night fighter attack on 27/28th June 1944. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Great Britain. Royal Air Force Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1941 1942-08-11 1942-08-12 1942-08-18 1942-08-19 1942-08-24 1942-08-25 1942-08-28 1942-08-29 1942-09-01 1942-09-02 1942-09-03 1942-09-04 1942-09-05 1942-09-07 1942-09-08 1942-09-10 1942-09-11 1942-09-13 1942-09-14 1942-09-21 1942-09-22 1942-09-26 1942-09-27 1942-09-28 1942-10-02 1942-10-03 1942-10-05 1942-10-06 1942-10-07 1942-10-10 1942-10-11 1942-10-13 1942-10-14 1942-10-15 1942-10-16 1942-10-22 1942-10-23 1942-10-24 1942-11-02 1942-11-03 1942-11-28 1942-11-29 1942-11-30 1942-12-01 1942-12-02 1942-12-03 1942-12-31 1943-01-01 1943-01-02 1943-01-03 1943-01-04 1943-01-05 1943-01-09 1943-01-10 1943-01-12 1943-01-13 1943-01-14 1943-01-15 1943-01-16 1943-01-18 1943-01-19 1944-03-14 1944-03-22 1944-03-24 1944-03-25 1944-03-26 1944-03-30 1944-03-31 1944-04-20 1944-04-22 1944-04-24 1944-04-25 1944-04-26 1944-04-27 1944-04-28 1944-05-09 1944-05-10 1944-05-12 1944-05-13 1944-05-18 1944-05-19 1944-05-20 1944-05-21 1944-05-22 1944-05-23 1944-05-24 1944-05-25 1944-05-27 1944-05-28 1944-06-09 1944-06-10 1944-06-11 1944-06-12 1944-06-13 1944-06-24 1944-06-25 1944-06-27 1944-06-28 1944-07-04 1944-07-05 1944-07-07 1944-07-08 1944-07-12 1944-07-13 1944-07-14 1944-07-15 1944-07-18 1944-07-19 1944-07-20 1944-07-21 1944-07-28 1944-07-29 1944-08-14 1944-08-15 1944-08-16 1944-08-17 1944-08-18 1944-08-19 1944-08-25 1944-08-26 1944-08-27 1944-08-29 1944-08-30 1945 Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. United States Arizona Arizona--Mesa Arizona--Phoenix Great Britain England--Bedfordshire England--Buckinghamshire England--Gloucestershire England--Norfolk England--Suffolk England--Yorkshire Germany Germany--Ruhr (Region) Germany--Aachen Germany--Berlin Germany--Braunschweig Germany--Bremen Germany--Cologne Germany--Dortmund Germany--Duisburg Germany--Düsseldorf Germany--Flensburg Germany--Frankfurt am Main Germany--Gelsenkirchen Germany--Hamburg Germany--Karlsruhe Germany--Kiel Germany--Krefeld Germany--Leipzig Germany--Lingen (Lower Saxony) Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate) Europe--Frisian Islands Germany--Norderney Germany--Nuremberg Germany--Osnabrück Germany--Saarbrücken Germany--Stendal Germany--Wesseling Germany--Wittenburg (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) Belgium Belgium--Liège Denmark Denmark--Samsø France France--Bordeaux (Nouvelle-Aquitaine) France--Bourges France--Brest France--Dunkerque France--La Rochelle France--Laval (Mayenne) France--Lorient France--Neufchâtel-en-Bray France--Orléans France--Paris France--Revigny-sur-Ornain France--Vitry-le-François France--Watten Italy Italy--Genoa Italy--Turin Netherlands Netherlands--Ameland Island Poland Poland--Szczecin Germany--Neuwerk Island Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Royal Air Force. Bomber Command Royal Canadian Air Force Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Text. Log book and record book Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource One booklet Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Nick Cornwell-Smith Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LCrimminWJ[Ser#-DoB]v1 Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Review Oct 2024 115 Squadron 161 Squadron 192 Squadron 25 OTU 3 SFTS 4 BFTS Advanced Flying Unit Air Gunnery School aircrew Anson bombing bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944) British Flying Training School Program Flying Training School forced landing Halifax Halifax Mk 5 Hornet Moth Lancaster Lancaster Mk 2 Martinet mine laying Mosquito Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944) Operational Training Unit Oxford pilot Proctor RAF Bircotes RAF East Wretham RAF Finningley RAF Foulsham RAF Halton RAF Ipswich RAF Marham RAF Mildenhall RAF Newmarket RAF Oakington RAF South Cerney RAF Tempsford searchlight Stearman Stirling Tiger Moth training Wellington https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/4056/58276/EOCRAFRecOffTuckerP480315.jpg bacf27d86b42b5df5664bd57aff81fe7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Tucker, Eugene Description An account of the resource 16 items. The collection relates to Sergeant Eugene Tucker (581420, 1916-1940). He was shot down flying over Morval, France whilst on day-raid to Arras. He flew operations in a Bristol Blenheim as an observer with 15 Squadron. The collection consists of photographs, documents, and correspondence. <br /><br />The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Mary Collins and catalogued by the following University of Lincoln and Bishop Lincoln University students: Jamie Boyle, Bethany Coleman, Olly Osborne, Imogen Parker, Rhys Phillips and Abi York. <br /><br />Additional information on Eugene Tucker is available at the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/228559/">IBCC Losses Database</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-01-20 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Tucker, E Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Text. Correspondence Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Eugene Tucker's career record Description An account of the resource A record of the RAF career of E. Tucker; it details his career from when he signed up in 1939, to his final position in 1940. It also states that Tucker was killed in action. Written in a letter to Mrs. P. Tucker, who had previously asked to see Eugene’s records. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1948-03-15 Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1939 1940 1940-05-23 Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Great Britain England--Denton (Lancashire) England--Gloucester Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context EOCRAFRecOffTuckerP480315 Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Pending text-based transcription Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Royal Air Force. Bomber Command Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource One page typewritten letter Language A language of the resource eng 15 Squadron 161 Squadron Air Observers School aircrew killed in action RAF Bicester RAF Hendon training https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/3086/58003/LSilverLH19250122v1.pdf 0997f149c5d48d87877563475a26902d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Silver, Leslie Description An account of the resource Three items. The collection concerns Sergeant Leslie Silver (b. 1925, 1814783 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 138 and 356 Squadrons. The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Hilary Curwen and catalogued by Barry Hunter. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-07-26 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Silver, LH Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Leslie Silver's observer’s and air gunner’s flying log book Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context LSilverLH19250122v1 Description An account of the resource Observer’s and air gunner’s flying log book for L H Silver, flight engineer, covering the period from 2 February 1944 to 8 January 1946. Detailing his flying training, operations flown, instructor duties and post war flying duties. He was stationed at 1664 Heavy conversion unit RAF Dishforth, 434 Squadron RAF Croft, 138 and 161 Squadrons RAF Tempsford, 291 Squadron RAF Hutton Cranswick, 356 Squadron RAF Salboni and Cocos islands. Aircraft flown in were Halifax, Stirling, Martinet, Vengence, Liberator, Dakota and York. He flew a total of 58 operations 32 night with 138 Squadron, 14 night with 161 Squadron and 10 Daylight and 2 night with 356 Squadron. Targets were detailed as “Ops as ordered” on most his operations with 138 and 161 Squadrons. Others were detailed as France, Germany, Norway, Rangoon, Kanchanaburi, Malaya, Sumatra and Singapore. His pilots on operations were Flight lieutenant Pynne, Flight Lieutenant Payn, Flying Officer Gilliesand Flying officer Lawrence. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Great Britain. Royal Air Force Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1944-04-09 1944-04-10 1944-04-11 1944-04-12 1944-04-26 1944-04-27 1944-04-28 1944-04-29 1944-04-30 1944-05-01 1944-05-03 1944-05-04 1944-05-05 1944-05-06 1944-05-07 1944-05-08 1944-05-09 1944-05-10 1944-05-23 1944-05-24 1944-05-28 1944-05-29 1944-06-01 1944-06-02 1944-06-03 1944-06-05 1944-06-06 1944-06-07 1944-06-21 1944-06-22 1944-06-23 1944-06-24 1944-06-25 1944-06-27 1944-06-28 1944-07-03 1944-07-04 1944-07-05 1944-07-07 1944-07-08 1944-07-09 1944-07-11 1944-07-12 1944-07-15 1944-07-16 1944-07-17 1944-07-18 1944-07-19 1944-07-20 1944-07-21 1944-07-22 1944-07-23 1944-07-27 1944-07-28 1944-07-30 1944-08-01 1944-08-04 1944-08-05 1944-08-06 1944-08-07 1944-08-10 1944-08-11 1944-08-13 1944-08-14 1944-08-15 1944-08-17 1944-08-18 1944-08-27 1944-08-28 1944-08-29 1944-08-30 1945-06-10 1945-06-11 1945-06-12 1945-06-13 1945-06-24 1945-06-25 1945-08-18 1945-08-19 1945-08-20 1945-08-25 1945-08-28 1945-08-31 1945-09-01 1945-09-10 1946 Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Burma France Germany Great Britain India Indonesia Norway Malaya Singapore Thailand Burma--Rangoon Cocos (Keeling) Islands England--Bedfordshire England--Durham (County) England--Yorkshire India--Bengal Indonesia--Sumatra Thailand--Kanchanaburi Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Text. Log book and record book Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource One booklet Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Mike Connock Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Review Oct 2024 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. 138 Squadron 161 Squadron 1664 HCU 291 Squadron 356 Squadron 434 Squadron air sea rescue aircrew B-24 bombing C-47 flight engineer Halifax Heavy Conversion Unit Martinet RAF Croft RAF Dishforth RAF Hutton Cranswick RAF Tempsford Stirling training York https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/1998/38071/MOates1489926-171207-15.2.jpg 48314c747aca26a2a6663a90954f0d56 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Oates, James J Oates Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-12-07 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Oates, J Description An account of the resource 91 items. The collection concerns Warrant Officer James Oates (1489926 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents and photographs. He flew paratrooper drops and glider towing operations as a navigator with 196 Squadron. The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Gina E Welsh and catalogued by Barry Hunter. Transcribed document A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document [a] Date [b] Sqn [c] Aircraft type [d] Target [e] Crash location [f] Crew Details [g] Fate [a] 5/6 June 1944 [b] 299 [c] Stirling LJ819 [d] Paratroop Operation "Tenga" airborne invasion force over Caen [e] Not known [f] F/Sgt L J Gilbert, F/O A G Franklin, Sgt L G Knight, F/Sgt B A Croft, Sgt R H Fizer, Sgt F L McMahon [g] All killed and they have no known grave. Therefore they are commemerated [sic] on the RAF Memorial to the Missing at Runnymede [a] 31 March 1945 [b] 196 [c] Stirling LX197 [d] Supply dropping in Norway [e] Not known [f] P/O C Campbell, F/Sgt K W Linney, F/Sgt F W Matthews, W/O G G Allman, F/Sgt F C Brenner, F/Sgt E S Lloyd [g] All killed, they have no known grave and therefore P/O Campbell and his comrades are commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial [a] 2 April 1945 [b] 196 [c] Stirling LX193 [d] Container dropping over Denmark [e] In the North Sea, off Cromer, Norfolk [f] F/O M Carroll, W/O G Hughes, W/O S J V Philco, W/O J Grain, F/Sgt A O Bennett, F/Sgt R E Marshall [g] All killed. The bodies were recovered from the sea and buried in Cambridge Borough Cemetery on 13 April 1945, except F/Sgt Bennett who is buried in Barwell Cemetery. Our records show that F/Sgt Cayley was not a member of this crew. [a] 31 March 1945 [b] 196 [c] Stirling LJ888 [d] Dropping supplies to Norwegian Forces (30 miles North of Kravera) [e] Braasted Wood near the Ostre-Moland border, approximately 2 miles north west of Arendal [f] F/Sgt D V Catterall, F/Sgt G S Reed, F/Sgt R S Harding-Klemanek, F/Sgt T L Brunton, Sgt P M Myers, F/Sgt J R Cross [g] All the crew are buried in Collective Grave No 9, Row 5 in Arendal Civil Cemetery [a] 31 March 1945 [b] 299 [c] Stirling LX332 [d] Supply dropping in Southern Norway [e] Crashed at Vierli on Vegars Moor [f] F/Lt R Trevor-Roper, DFC, AFC, F/O H W Ricketts, F/O D Peat, Sgt K C Hayward, Sgt J A Elliott, W/O P S Brinkworth [g] All of the crew were killed in the crash and they are buried in Indre Sondeled Cemetery, 50 miles north east of Khristiansand, Norway [a] 31 March 1945 [b] 161 [c] Stirling LX119 [d] Supply dropping over Southern Norway [e] Shot down over the headland at Holt near Arendal [f] F/Lt E P C Kidd, DFC, F/Sgt G A Heath, DFM, F/O T S Macaulay, W/O A M Taylor, Sgt R A Burgess, F/Sgt A D Shopland, F/Sgt H Minshull [g] All the crew are buried in Arendal Civil Cemetery, Norway Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource List of Crashed Stirlings Description An account of the resource Six crashed Stirlings listed with the date, squadron, operation, location (where known), crew and fate. Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Great Britain England--Runnymede England--Cromer England--Cambridge Norway--Arendal France--Caen Denmark England--Norfolk England--Surrey Atlantic Ocean--North Sea France Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource One printed sheet Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context MOates1489926-171207-15 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1944-06-05 1944-06-06 1945-03-31 1945-04-02 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Sue Smith 161 Squadron 196 Squadron 299 Squadron aircrew crash final resting place killed in action memorial missing in action Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944) Stirling https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/307/9640/PMooreWT1508.1.jpg 46d70c19f0283282b575e00c8060bca7 https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/307/9640/AMooreWT150728.1.mp3 c01c152b10f0fbf9438d9f8a3ee5b0c3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Moore, Bill William Tait Moore William T Moore William Moore W T Moore W Moore Description An account of the resource Eight items. Three oral history interviews with William Tait "Bill" Moore (1924 - 2019, 1823072 Royal Air Force) and five photographs. He served as a navigator with 138 Squadron. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-07-28 2016-03-18 2016-07-06 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Interview Agreement Form - Moore, WT, William Moore-03 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Moore, WT Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document This is Andrew Sadler interviewing Mr. William (Bill) Moore at his home in Woking on Tuesday 28th July 2015 for the Bomber Command Archive. AS: Thank you Bill for allowing me to come and interview you. BM: You’re very welcome indeed. AS: Can I start with some background information, where and when were you born? BM: I was born in Dunoon in Scotland on 26th August 1924 AS: And um, can you tell me a bit about your family background? BM: My, my father was a regimental sergeant major in the Invergyle Southern Highlanders, my grandfather was a chief petty officer in the Navy, we’d twenty two children, I am one of a family of five and, um, I first got in touch with the, err, Royal Air Force as a cadet with the Air Cadet, Air Cadet Association, which was the forerunner of the Air Training Corps. AS: And presumably your father, was your father involved in the First World War? BM: Yes my father and my grandfather was in the First World War, my grandfather was also in the Boer War and he was also in the First and Second World War, and my father was in the First World War and he was called up for the Second World War to the Colours and, um, later stood down when the BEF went to France, and he later took over the, what became the Home Guard for the whole of the County of Argyle in Scotland. AS: Did he talk about his experiences in the First World War? BM: Yes he um, he was a Royal Scottish Fusiliers and um, he was in quite a number of the big, of the big battles, and, um, then he was taken, he was taken prisoner in late 1917 and he was shipped out to Poland then and, he was wounded in the legs, he was given very good treatment by the German, um, medical people at that time. AS: And how did you come to join up into the Royal Air Force? BM: Oh that was through the, the Air Cadets which was the forerunner of the Air Training Corps. The reason for that was I had been a drummer boy in the band of the Argyle’s and um, I fancied the Air Force after having two flights at a place called Montrose quite a long time before the war started. AS: Can I just stop what, - okay we are restarting now after closing the windows BM: Right AS: Noise outside, sorry you were telling me about how you came, you joined the Royal, the Air Cadet Force. BM: That’s right the Air Cadet Defence Couriers AS: And why did you do that, what made you interested in? BM: So it was after I had two flights we’er with the Argyles as a drummer boy in the Band at Montrose on the east coast of Scotland. AS: And that made you want to fly? BM: That’s quite correct. AS: So what year did you actually join up to the Royal Air Force? BM: Well for the, well it was 1940-41 when I was in the Air Defence Cadet Corps and then of course when the Air Training Corps started I joined that immediately and, err, on the Monday night I joined up and um, of course naturally I had no rank and then the Friday night of that week I was made a flight sergeant in the Air Training Corps, within one week. AS: And can you tell me how that came about? BM: Oh the experience of the Air Defence Cadet Corps, that was why. AS: So can you tell me about your training? BM: Oh the training in the, in the Air Training Corps. Yes the Air Training Corps we, um, we attended night school classes in the school along with students who were actually full time students of the school, also members of the Air Training Corps and this was taken by Mathematics teachers and English teachers all the way through, and they had become officers in the Air Training Corps, and one gentlemen Mr. Ozzy Broon, he was the maths teacher and very good in navigation and um, he made it all very, very interesting for us and, um, later on I met up with him but that will come into this later on, um, but he was a person who really gave us the foundation in navigation and bringing us up through math and made it interesting for us. AS: So what age were you at this time? BM: By that time I was sixteen. AS: And um, when you joined the Air Force could, you were immediately made a flight sergeant and what sort of work? BM: No that, no that was just the Air Training Corps I’m talking about, and that was made immediately. Now what happened was that um, we um, when I was, um, seventeen and a quarter I actually volunteered for the Royal Air Force and um, because of my background in the Air Training Corps I, um, had all certificates following examinations that was, um, especially orientated towards air crew, and with that I was selected at Edinburgh to actually join air crew formally and I was given the silver badge and um, became a member of the Royal Air Force on reserve which was actually the, um, Auxiliary Air Force. AS: And what year would that have been? BM: That was, that was beginning, the beginning of ‘42, ‘41-‘42 yes. AS: And can you tell me how you came to be in Bomber Command? BM: Well that’s quite a story, but I’ll cut it short as much as possible, we, we were invited to London to Lord’s Cricket Ground where we were given the medicals etcetera and passed all these things and tests, various inoculations etcetera, etcetera, and um, we were billeted at Avenue Close, um, and fed at the, at the Zoo there, and of course, um, after a few weeks we actually were sent to Scarborough where I, I joined number 17 flight, of the air crew selection, and um, that was at, that was the beginning of our formal training with the air crew, Royal Air Force, the Royal Air Force. They, um, that was when we conducted drill, navigation, signals, um, engines, everything that you had to do in preparation to become a member of air crew, but not a specialist at that time, you were given that particular course so that you could be able to fit in somewhere along the line, we were actually called PNB, pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, at that time. That’s what we were, PNB. We um, I had at that particular time I had a flight and that flight, it was a mixed flight of British, French, Belgians and we graduated, we graduated from there and were given various jobs around Scarborough until I was posted to Scoon, now at Scoon in Scotland that was where we got, we got training on Tiger Moths, and then from there, after that was we, we seemed to be doing all right, we were sent to Brougton in Furness where we, where we did a commando course on, in other words it was an escapees course. If anything happened and you were on the other side then you knew what to do to try and get away, and that was where my army training had come in very good and I was appointed a section leader. After that we were posted to, to Heaton Park, Manchester and that is where we were either billeted on homes around the perimeter of the park or actually in the park. Firstly we were actually on the perimeter with a family and, um, that lasted for about two weeks, and then for about three weeks we were actually billeted in Heaton Park in Manchester, and um, then of course we were given various courses etcetera, etcetera, and, um, during that , during that time you got selected for, for to go for training in different parts of the Commonwealth and Empire. At the beginning I was actually getting posted to go to Rhodesia and the reason we knew that was because of the kit that we were getting, not South Africa but Rhodesia. We got on board the ship in Liverpool and um, on the Mersey, and we got on, we got on board the ship there and, um, it happened to be a ship that I knew very well which was brand new at the beginning of the war and I’ve actually got a model of it here, and um, we, we set sail and, um, one evening I, I was presuming that we near the Bay of Biscay, I turned round and I said to my friend, Alec Kerr, I said ‘Alec this ship is going the wrong way’, he said ‘you and your [inaudible] navigation, how do you know?’ I said ‘I’m looking at the stars’ and we landed back up in Liverpool again, we presumed then of course that the word had got out, that was probably a fleet of U-Boats hovering round about the Bay of Biscay and um, they changed their mind about sending us on that ship, which was called the Andes [spells it out]. We got back into Liverpool and we were there about um, two days on board the Andes, and the next thing we were told that we were being transferred onto another ship and um, I looked across and there was a three funnel boat over there, and, I said to this chap Alec, Alec Kerr, I said ‘Alec that’s a five, three, four over there’ he said ‘what’s a five, three, four?’ I said ‘I’m not telling you that’s a secret’. Well the five, three, four was the Queen Mary, the five, three, four was the number that the Queen Mary had in John Brown’s yard in Scotland, in Glasgow when she was getting built. Anyway we got on board that ship and the next thing we knew that we were in New York and we were there overnight, and the next thing we knew we were on the train and we were bound, bound for Canada and we went all up the, the East Coast of Canada and we arrived at Moncton, New Brunswick, and that was the home station in Canada for air crew who were going to be training under the Commonwealth Air Training Scheme. We were there for ten or twelve days, um, not in winterwear as it was six months of the year in Canada, you get a lot of cold weather and um, they just said ‘oh we don’t know anything about you, we’ll get a message one of these days and we’ll give you some uniform’ , so we walked around there um, at one time I used to say like a [inaudible] nanny, but as I say, in Canada there we walked along like squaws because we covered ourselves in blankets to keep warm, but that was only, that was only a gimmick, once you were inside you were nice and warm. Eventually we got kitted out we with Rhodesian Air Force kit which was very good indeed, it was far superior and a lot more modern than what we had previously, for items like shirts the collars were attached instead of getting two collars with a shirt, the great coats were extremely different and the average cloth was a lot finer, anyways that was one of the good points that we had there. The next thing we knew was that we were, I’d say sent across country and um, that was to be going on to various stations now – this was where our actual training began and we had landed in Moncton and then from there, as I say, we travelled by train across to Dauphin, Manitoba, and Dauphin, Manitoba was just a little bit bigger than a village at that particular time but it was really getting populated with the Royal Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force, and um, that is where we had bombing and gunnery courses on Ansons and Bolingbrokes. The Bolingbrokes, of course, was the Canadian/ American version of the Blenheim Mark IV which was a very good aircraft. We graduated from there and we went from there to aye, err, Portage la Prairie, Portage la Prairie, I’ve got photographs here and there we are at Portage la Prairie which is, and was, and still is today, one of the major stations of the Royal Canadian Air Force. I said today because I have met wing commanders and group captains who have just recently been in charge of Portage la Prairie, and that is where we did the Air Observer School, that was Air Observer School Number 7 which is navigation etcetera, etcetera, and that was on Ansons and Cranes. We, err, we had a mixed bunch there of New Zealanders, Canadians, and British and we actually graduated from there and um, that is the photograph of it there see. AS: And you’re on the front row, second from the left. BM: That’s right [laughs] yeah. That is when I became an air observer, the air observer, of course, has got another name but in this interview I won’t say what it was called. AS: You told me before. BM: [Laughs] that’s exactly what it was, yes. Anyway, as far as we were concerned we err - AS: I think could I, could I maybe I could say it BM: Yes AS: For the record you were known as the flying arseholes. BM: That’s quite correct [laughs], that is quite correct, yes. Now um, with that, we were, we were given our wings there and that was a great occasion because we were made up to sergeants which was, the lowest rank by that time that you could have as air crew. Quite a lot of people don’t understand and don’t know was that right through, for a couple of years the war was on, there was fellow air crew were either AC2’s or AC1’s or LAC, leading aircraftsman and it was only after a while that the rank of sergeant was introduced for minimum rank for aircrew, there’s quite a number of people never knew about that but um, having come through the air cadets etcetera, etcetera, we knew people who were actually flying in operations who were leading aircraftsman and had done quite a number of operations as such and were never recognised as anything else. If they got shot down they never got promotion, they were still at the end of the war leading aircraftsmen. Then um, from Portage la Prairie, um, we got a jaunt down, down to America, I think it was just a matter of, they didn’t know what to do with us for a while and we went down to Florida, and we were flying on Catalina Flying Boats and doing maritime navigation which, from a place called Pensacola. We were there a few weeks and the next thing we knew we were back to Moncton, New Brunswick in Canada, and of course there wasn’t six feet of snow this time, it was a lovely spring cum summer day in Canada. We, we were there for just a few weeks and um, we were told we could have two kit bags and we said ‘why two kit bags?’, ‘well one kit bag you can travel with and if you get a flight back to the UK then that other kit bag will be sent on to you later on’. I was quite happy in one way, I didn’t need to fly back, I got on board a ship and then we were taken from Moncton, New Brunswick to Halifax, Nova Scotia. And when we got to Nova Scotia I recognised the ship and I said to my friend, I said ‘oh I don’t like that one’ and he said ‘why is that Bill?’ I said ‘because that’s the Empress of Japan’, he said ‘what!’, I said ‘yeah that’s the Empress of Japan’. Anyway we got on the ship and by that time it was called the Empress of Scotland, they had changed its name during the war from the Empress of Japan to the Empress of Scotland, and we boarded that and we were put onto D deck which is a long way down and um, when we, we tried to get up for the, for the boat drill for emergencies we found that we were only halfway up, so anyway we thought of a plan. If there is going to be an emergency and they want us up on deck why don’t we try and get a place to sleep on deck because it was summertime, anyway we weren’t allowed that. Anyway we eventually landed in the Clyde and from the Clyde we, we got on the train and we went to Harrogate in Yorkshire, and we were held at Yorkshire, in Harrogate for a short time and um, from there I was sent over to Halfpenny Green. Now Halfpenny Green was a mixed unit it was, a normal navigation advanced school for navigators so and there was also an advanced school navigating on, what will I say, um, yeah, this was to become a specialist on map reading, not just normal navigation a specialist on navigation by map reading and that was the section that I was detailed for. When I asked the ‘chiefy’ why I was a chosen, he said ‘why’ he says ‘because we found out that you’re a country boy’, ‘Oh,’ I said ‘that’s nice’, he said ‘also you’ve been around quite a bit’, I said ‘oh thank you very much’. Anyway, ‘chiefy’, the reason I called him ‘chiefy’ was because he was a flight sergeant and the reason you called them a ‘chiefy’ was because when the Royal Air Force and the Naval Service had been amalgamated during the First World War, a lot of the people from the Naval side came across and they were Chief Prison err, Chief um, Chief Petty Officers and they were the chaps who became the first flight sergeants in the Royal Air Force and the name ‘chiefy’ has been there ever since, ‘cos’ if you called someone a ‘chiefy’ today they wonder what the hell you are talking about, but anyway we could often make a few bets on that one, that’s on the side. But Halfpenny Green, we were flying there on the advanced Ansons, Mk V Ansons, which um, had completely closed bombing doors etcetera, etcetera, and of course it was ideal for map reading because your maps weren’t getting thrown about in the lower part of the cockpit when you are trying to do the map reading, but we didn’t realise why it was done, but in the Air Force, once you joined up, you volunteered ever after that, you did what you was told. Right now, I managed to go through that course, came through with very good marks and um, I was then posted to Desborough, um, at Desborough. We were crewed up and that was part of a Wellington crew and um, also flying there I was flying as second dickie, in other words we only had one pilot and um, I got the job within the crew of being the person to be able to, err, take off and land and of course do a bit of flying in between, in case of emergency I could always land the Wellington. That was because of the position and the type of training that we had got in the past. Now from, from Desborough we um, we were transferred to various stations and where I went to, I went to a place called Tempsford. Now Tempsford was one of Churchill’s most secret aerodromes, airfields, when you got there you had to, you had to sign the Official Secret Act which was slightly different from the one that you normally took. In other words this was top secret, anything you said outside of that aerodrome you could be held responsible, and taken into custody, or shot, if it was got the wrong way. The reason for that that came up during your last week of being at Tempsford. Now at Tempsford we, we were crewing with various people, the reason I say that is because being an observer from time to time I wasn’t with the, the same, same pilot, although for some time I was with a chap called Neil Noble and also with err, a young PO who was a chap called Murray, anyway that was very good indeed. Noble was from New Zealand, and err, he was an excellent chap and he was also a country boy and he was excellent for the type of flying that we were doing and likewise was Murray. Now what happened was that during that time at Tempsford that is where we did flying of taking people out and into France, quite often it was on, it was on Lysanders and you didn’t have much room in Lysanders because err, it being a small one engine aircraft and you were flying low and you were actually taking these people into France. It wasn’t the first time that we had to bring people back from France and on various occasions, the group had actually brought back four gentleman who later on became Premiers of France and they actually also were leading lights in the resistance movement, what we called the Maquis. Now one of the things that happened at Tempsford was that um, we later on had an aircraft and this aircraft was called a Hudson, now that Hudson was an aircraft, American one, which was designed to land on the prairies in America. It was heavily undercarriaged and it was ideal for what we did, it was a way from the Lysander with the single engine and was a twin engine aircraft and what was happening there was that we were carrying a lot of heavy goods for the Maquis. That was the bombs, sticky bombs, all sorts of bombs like that, grenades, ammunition, weapons, oh up to medium sized weapons which they could use without using vehicles to carry them about. Now there was one particular trip when we were on the Hudson and we were on one of the airfields that had been selected by the Maquis, now what had happened was the Maquis people, quite a number of them, had been brought over to the UK and they were given special training as to get airfields that we could land in, the idea being was that the drop zones or picking up and laying down of agents, and it was essential that they were kept on this secret list ‘cos only a few minutes normally that we were on the ground. On this particular occasion what happened was that we came into land and we landed very well, we got to top of the, I call it run section, we turned round and as we turned round we began to sink in the mud, well it felt like mud to us, I suppose it was only a wet piece of ground, and we sank down, and um, I said to the skipper, ‘oh were in trouble’, he said ‘oh we’ll get off all right’, so anyway the Maquis arrived and they got all their stuff out and um, the leading agent there was a lady and she cleared an area, got all the Maquis away and we were ready to take off and then we realised that we couldn’t get out the mud, or whatever it was. So anyway we were about ready for to put the bomb in the air trap and blow it up and then get the hell out of there, but anyway she said ‘no’ she said, ‘we think we’ll get you out of there all right’ and she got the people from a nearby village to come to try and help us out because they were on their way up they met what they call the German sergeant who was in charge of the village and he said ‘right where are you people going?’, ‘oh your big black aircraft, your big black aircraft is on the ground there and if we don’t get it out of the mud the Gestapo is going to shoot us and they’ll shoot you as well’. So his retort was back to hers was that he would look after the village, they could go and get the aircraft out, so anyway the people got all sorts of equipment and we managed to take off again, that was the longest that we were ever on the ground until a few years later, it certainly felt like hours and hours and hours but was, it was just over an hour and a quarter on the ground which was an extremely long period and we got away. AS: Was this work part of what was known as part of the Special Operations Executive? BM: We were working with the SOE, yes that’s exactly what we were doing. Now that was one of the moments where various escapades like that but that that was the one of the longest times on the ground. Quite often we landed in a field and of course one or two of the fields had been used in the past for gliders but of course nobody had been near them in years, not even the Germans had used them and that was why they, the Maquis, had actually selected them for us, and they had um, they hadn’t done any work on them as such just hoping that the odd tree stump or that, that we landed in was, would be avoided which they were quite good. There was quite often a brush, as we called it, on the ground but we managed to sweep that aside when you are landing and take off. Now the thing about that was that um, the area dropping and picking up and laying down of agents was essentially an extreme secret list and only a few minutes were allowed between knowing the target area and the take off and only the crew members concerned knew exactly where. As little contact as possible was allowed between any agents and the crew, I don’t care what people say, Americans and different books nowadays I will call them ‘Joes’, as far as we were concerned we had as little contact as possible so that if anything happened to them or happened to us we couldn’t divulge anything and neither could they, because later on Hitler had said that anybody with knowledge of the situation would be shot as spies, so as little contact as possible was allowed between any agents and the crews. The airfield contacts or landings were seldom used again and again, although there were one of two were very suitable among them was Paris and Chateauroux and various other ones, these were the favourite ones that they were ones that were used quite a few times. AS: When you were working, when you were on those flights you were acting as an observer? BM: An observer yes. AS: And what was the role of the observer? BM: An observer was, it was a navigator but also you did everything, you did everything. AS: So, you were a backup if something? BM: That’s right. The observer learnt to fly, that was one of the other things an observer did, later on of course that was taken over by, on the bigger aircraft, by the flight engineer, but in the early days that was the observer that did that, aye. Now later on, later on during the war once it became apparent with the advance of the allies in France, the role of 138 Squadron and 161 Squadron was diminishing so what happened then was that 138 Squadron we went back to Bomber Command and with that we went to Langar where we actually um, we actually flew on Lancasters and then the Lancasters and then of course we were, I’d say we were part and parcel of the Bomber Command operations and that was from Tuddenham, and at Tuddenham we lay alongside 90 Squadron which was one of the main, main squadrons that occupied Tuddenham right through during the war. AS: And what year was that, that you became part of Bomber Command? BM: That was beginning that was the beginning of ‘44-‘45 and that was from, we started there, the actual squadron according, according to the history, was that everything came into being in March of 1945 but of course it was long before that we were [inaudible] but that’s just from the history books. Later the events all changed and we were sent to Langar to receive conversant to Lancasters, which turned out to be the light of my life as the aircraft which was the one that I favoured best, and from Langar we went to Feltwall, Mildenhall, Methwold, and Stradishall for other special duty training and eventually to Tuddenham. We took part in many of the operations but on the big one to Potsdam our Wing Commander Murray took over as captain of the night. Now that Wing Commander Murray was a pilot officer that I flew with, aye, early in my career with 138 Squadron and he became eventually the, the squadron leader, wing commander for 138 squadron, he took charge of that. Along came the Operation Manna which gave us great pleasure in being part of and likewise to Juvincourt where we brought home many of our fellow air crew members who had been prisoners of war, and after a few weeks of PRDU work at Tuddenham we were allowed to transfer to RAF Benson where we took over our own Lancasters and became part of the operating across Europe and photographing the whole of Europe for um, the secret stations that Churchill had wanted when he was Prime Minister. So that was there crew there, the other air crew in Bomber Command where we did all our operations. AS: And were you still working as an observer at this stage? BM: Yes, yes AS: You were still an observer? BM: Aye AS: And this is your crew next to a Lancaster? BM: Yes, that’s the crew that we eventually had, yes. AS: And which one is you Bill? BM: [laughs] Probably go with the height you’ll maybe get me, [laughs] can you recognise me? AS: I think you are the one on the left on that side on the right. BM: Yes that’s me [laughs], that there the tallest one actually became the rear gunner . AS: And were you always with the same crew? BM: Once we, once we got to Tuddenham we were all with the same crew yes. AS: So these are the same, so this is the same people? BM: That’s right yeah. AS: And obviously you all made it through the war? BM: Oh yes. AS: ‘Cos a lot did not. BM: No, that is quite correct we were lucky. AS: So when you were on the bombing raid can you tell me exactly what your role would have been? BM: Oh we were, there were two things so we acted as a full navigator and sometimes as an electronic navigator and also a bomb aimer as well ‘cos we were qualified to do all these jobs. AS: So you moved from one role? BM: One role to another yeah. AS: To another. BM: In our crew everybody could do everything else except on the Lancasters. The skipper Neil Noble and, and myself were doing the flying, and also our flight engineer ‘cos he only joined us on the Lancasters ‘cos when we were flying in the Wellingtons and that we didn’t have, we didn’t have a flight engineer. The flight engineer were only brought on when we started with the Stirlings and Halifaxes and then the Lancasters. AS: Can you tell me what it was like to fly the Lancasters as opposed to the Wellingtons? BM: Oh yes, it was a much easier aircraft to fly than even the Wellingtons and the Wellington was a good one to fly. AS: In what way was it easier? BM: Well the, the, the controls were simpler, it was easier to control them than it was some of the former aircraft. AS: And can you describe the procedure when you went on a bombing raid? BM: Right, well what happened was once you were crewed and once you had done a few operations like mine laying and things like that, minor operations and then of course you were selected by crews that you moved up the ladder a bit and then of course you were formally taken on to the, I would say, the senior strength of the squadron, but our squadron did not like to put rookie crews onto the heavy stuff at first, you got a baptism of fire by, as I say, doing the mine laying jobs and various other ones which you weren’t so likely to have been involved in heavy enemy fire etcetera, etcetera. We were thankful for that because you were given that training and there was actually training in the actual thing. So what happened was that once you, once you were there then of course you had briefings where the whole crew was together, then of course you had briefings where there was selected sections of the aircrew, mainly the pilot, navigator, and quite often the flight engineer and radio operator were involved. When we were doing special duties with Lancaster’s we had the whole crew together ‘cos we felt as if everybody should know exactly what’s going on and not be a surprise to anybody with what we were doing because quite often there was raids that was known to only a section of a squadron and sometimes a full squadron, whereas if it wasn’t a joint operations with the other squadrons, or the other squadron are out and you lay down so that was how it went, but you were actually given as much information as possible about the targets, about where you were going, the flight, the enemy aircraft etcetera, etcetera. AS: How many missions did you fly with Bomber Command? BM: About thirty six. AS: That was quite a lot wasn’t it? BM: Yes it was quite a lot. AS: It sounds as if you were lucky to pull through because? BM: I was extremely lucky, I was extremely lucky, because with 138 Squadron we had, we had quite a [long pause, shuffling papers], with 138 Squadron, 138 Squadron had taken in nine hundred and ninety five agents, they’d taken in twenty nine thousand containers and they’d taken in over ten thousand packages. We lost seventy aircraft and three hundred aircrew, our motto was ‘for freedom’, that was 138 Squadron you know. AS: Yes you had different people on different stations? BM: Right, now also what did happen was that with 138 Squadron we had a flight of Poles, Polish chaps. Now what happened with them was that they was declared by the German forces that if the Poles were shot down they were to be treated as spies, so I didn’t like the idea of that and all the ones on our flight I taught them a bit of Gaelic, I gave them little addresses from on all the outer isles on the west of Scotland and I gave them Scottish names, and I told them if they got shot down they would have to use them as identification plus their rank and number, and I, ‘cos I do know that quite a number of them actually survived like that because they pretended to be Scottish, Gaelic, and where they pointed to on the map was where they came from and it was a real island but I gave them all different islands, and of course when they were on the squadron if they spoke to anybody they had to say who they were and not who they were in Polish. AS: And why the Poles singled out for special harsh treatment? BM: Oh because their country had been occupied by the Germans. They took it that they were, if they did that they were actually against them that was the end of it. AS: Mmm, when you um, when you were flying with Bomber Command how often, you said you had thirty six missions, how far apart were they, were you? BM: Well sometimes you might be on three nights in a row, sometimes it might be two, two in one week, but it was surprising just how much, just how of course some operations like mine laying and things like that were considered quite minor ones so you probably fitted them in in between times. AS: And went you weren’t actually flying when you were on the ground how did you occupy your time? BM: We kept ourselves fit, we played a lot of squash or we played a lot of rugby that was the two things we did as a crew because we could play together, and we were together, we were a crew. AS: And when you were not flying you stuck together as a BM: As a crew yes. We used to have, in the Nissen huts, we normally had two crews to the hut and we pretty well stuck together. AS: And what sort of conditions were you living in, was it, were they good conditions or? BM: Well, well when we were one squadron there was err, there was a Nissen hut set of accommodation which was two crews, as I say two crews about fourteen men to a hut and a potbelly stove in the middle and then of course your, your, your mess and that on the squadron was a Nissen type building. There was one or two squadrons which were peacetime ones, the RAF Benson was a peacetime one and there’s still peacetime one, but Methwold and quite a few of these other ones were established pre-war and the accommodation was slightly better, but anything that was rushed up during the war time was normally the Nissen huts. AS: Now after the war, what, how did you, what happened after the war? BM: Well what happened after the war, like what I said earlier on, was that we did some PRDU work from Tuddenham. AS: What’s PRDU work? BM: That’s Post RAF Reconnaissance. AS: Ah. BM: What we didn’t realise it was like a programme to see if we were suitable to do the job and there was three crews were picked, three, with their aircraft and we were sent over to RAF Benson and we then came under PRDU people there and, err, we photographed the whole of Europe, north to south and east to west, and we photographed the likes of the city of London, and other big cities from two thousand feet. Towns like Woking and this area would be from about five-six thousand feet and um, then the general countryside was anything from ten to twenty thousand feet, and we did that for the whole of Europe. We also had bases all over the country and also had bases in Norway, bases in South of France and various places like that, so what we actually did was that at one time, one time we landed at one, one particular station and it had been used as a transit camp and we woke up in the morning scratching like hell and we found out we had scabies so of course that was us isolated. We go back to our own station and we were isolated by the, by the medical people until we got rid of it, and then we, what we said, wherever we went after that we took our own kit with us so we didn’t get scabies. AS: And this would have been after 1945 you were doing this? BM: Yes AS: And how long did you stay in the RAF for? BM: Middle of 1946. AS: And, and what did you do after you left? BM: Well I went back into the building industry, and um, it wasn’t that long before I went to Rhodesia where I was supposed to have gone with the with the Royal Air Force and the idea there was that a federation was starting up between Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia, and um, I went out there and I went out as a general building foreman, and instead of staying four years with the company that I worked for I stayed fifty years. I built schools, universities, colleges, hundreds of local houses, all over the territories, and then of course gradually it worked out that Rhodesia was the only one that didn’t get its independence, Nyasaland 1963, Nyasaland was given independence then and became Malawi, and more or less at the same time Northern Rhodesia, which had been a Crown Colony run from Britain, they also had theirs, but Southern Rhodesia, which became Rhodesia, had been a self-governing colony since 1926 and they were not granted independence. And what happened was in 1926 there had been a vote there to say if whether they were going to pick up as a province in South Africa or stay as Rhodesia as an independent self-governing colony and the vote was to stay as Rhodesia self-governing colony, so if they’d had went the other way it would have been a province of South Africa. AS: So what year did you come back to the United Kingdom? BM: I only came back twelve years ago. AS: Oh gosh. So have you, after the end of the war have you kept in contact with your crew mates? BM: Oh yes, well I’ll tell you what, Jimmy Dugg, his great grandson is Israel Dugg who played full back for the All Blacks against the Springboks on Saturday and various other ones. AS: So you kept in contact with them? BM: Oh yes. AS: Did you, um, I mean after the war? BM: What happened in Rhodesia, put it this way what happened there was that I had, in the short term, I had reinstated the family business in the building trade, I found out that the contracts were not being run honestly as far as I was concerned and that’s when I said to my brothers ‘you can have the company I’m going abroad’, I had thoughts for Canada, I had thoughts for Australia, I had thoughts for New Zealand, and at the time they wanted people to go to what was going to become the Central African Federation, um, and that’s where I decided to go to. I had no regrets, no regrets at all. I was there from 1952-53 right up until I came here, came back here and that was in 2003, but during that time, as I said before, I built schools and hospitals and other things all the way through. I even, in 1960 the Queen Mother had come out previously and laid the foundation stone of the hospital in Blantyre, Nyasaland which she named the Queen Elizabeth Hospital then she came back in 1960 and declared it open, now of course it wasn’t just a hospital it was like a major township around the hospital that we built that what took us so long, anyway what did happen when we had a ball at Zumba, the capital, after she had declared it open etcetera, etcetera, and the following the morning the Governor, Glynn Jones came to me and said ‘I’ve got a job for you’ I said ‘No, no, no I don’t need no freebies sir’, he said ‘it’s for the old lady’, I said ‘what’s that’, he said ‘I want you to build a racecourse for her,’ I said ‘what! I don’t know anything about building racecourses’, he said ‘go and find a plan somewhere’ he says ‘I want you to build a racecourse for her’, I said ‘all right how long have I got?’ he said ‘you’ve got ten days’. So anyway I got my own crew which was about fifty-sixty chaps and I went along to Zumba Prison and I got hundred bandits from there, short term bandits, and I asked for all the ones who had been Queen Victoria men, or King George men, or Kind Edward men, people like that and I got volunteers and I looked after them. I said they would be rewarded which they were, properly and kindly, etcetera, etcetera, and we did the job, and instead of what you do today, putting up things in canvas, I did it all in pole and thatch, and um, she, what happened is that she went on the Ilala which is the ship that plies up and down Lake Nyasa, and Lake Nyasa is three hundred and sixty five miles long and fifty two miles wide and there are various ports along it that the Ilala used to either go into or stand off and it used to take cattle, people passengers, VIP’s everything, there were ten or twelve cabins on it so it wasn’t a small one. It was actually built in, in Scotland and taken out in pieces to a place called Monkey Bay where it was put back together again and floated on Lake Nyasa and she has been going there ever since [laughs]. AS: Excellent. Can I um [end] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bill Moore. One Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Andrew Sadler Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-07-28 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 01:10:53 Audio recording Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context AMooreWT150728 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Royal Air Force. Bomber Command Polskie Siły Powietrzne Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Description An account of the resource William Moore was born in Dunoon, Scotland in August 1924 and joined the Royal Air Force after spending some time in the Air Cadet Defence Corps and in the Air Training Corps. He volunteered for the Royal Air Force at the age of 17 and completed his training in Canada, after which he qualified as an air observer. William flew Ansons and Cranes and learned navigation in America on Catalina flying boats. He also tells of flying Lysanders and transporting agents for the Special Operations Executive into France. He also tells how he provided Polish airmen with different information to keep them safe if they crashed. William flew various aircraft including the Lancaster, Stirlings and Halifaxes at different locations and was on 36 operations with Bomber Command, taking part in Operation Manna. He served with 138 Squadron and 161 Squadron. He also tells of his life after the war, when he went to live in Rhodesia where he helped to run the family business before returning to Great Britain in 2003. [Please note: The veracity of this interview has been called into question. We advise that corroborative research is undertaken to establish the accuracy of some of the details mentioned and events witnessed.] Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Great Britain United States France Germany Netherlands England--Bedfordshire England--Suffolk England--Staffordshire Zimbabwe Africa--Lake Nyasa Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Maureen Clarke 138 Squadron 161 Squadron Advanced Flying Unit aerial photograph aircrew Anson Catalina flight engineer Halifax Hudson Lancaster Lysander navigator observer Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945) Photographic Reconnaissance Unit RAF Benson RAF Desborough RAF Halfpenny Green RAF Heaton Park RAF Tempsford RAF Tuddenham reconnaissance photograph Resistance Special Operations Executive Stirling training https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/450/7970/AHarrisonR151116.2.mp3 78c4628fae306c070946abd90f7380e4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Harrison, Richard Richard Harrison Dick Harrison Description An account of the resource 10 items. An oral history interview with Richard Harrison (b. 1924, 1833947 Royal Air Force) a page from his log book and documents about gunnery training. Richard Harrison flew operations as a B-24 air gunner with70 Squadron, 231 Wing, 2015 Group in Italy. The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Richard Harrison and catalogued by Barry Hunter. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-11-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Harrison, R Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document AM: Okay then so, this is Annie Moody for the International Bomber Command centre and Lincoln University, and today I’m with Dick Harrison in York, and what I’d like you to tell me is, first of all, is just date of birth and just a little bit about your family and your, your upbringing, what your parents did, that sort of thing. RH: Yeah, I was born of the 5th of February 1924, I was born in Köln en Rhine, Deutschland, Cologne, Germany and er yeah, Dad English, Mother German, we came back to England in I think it was 1926, I was two years old. AM: How did your Dad meet your Mum then if she was German? RH: He was in the army of occupation. AM: In? In Cologne or? RH: In Germany. AM: In Germany, yeah. RH: Yeah, because he’d been on the Western Front from 1915 to 18, he was a regular soldier when he was in Cologne and various other places in the Rhineland, but he met my Mother in Cologne. AM: Right. RH: I think they were married there in 1922, something like that. AM: So, what did he do when you came back to England? What did your parents do? RH: Well he was a regular soldier and he carried on being a soldier. AM: Right. Right through, yeah? RH: Yeah until 19, yeah 1936. AM: Oh blimey, right. RH: He left the army and became a civil servant. AM: Ah, me too, well that’s another story. [laughter] RH: And me too. [laughter] AM: So, tell me a bit about your school years then. RH: School years, well Dad’s camp was near Salisbury, Winterbourne, so I went to a primary school in Winterbourne, and although people say today, you know, how good the schools were back then, this was a truly appalling school [laughs] well, and from there, I can’t remember what it was called, you sat the exam when you were eleven. And from there I went to Bishops school in Salisbury which was a local grammar school, then unfortunately my Dad left the army, the civil service post was in Gloucestershire, so we had to move to Gloucestershire, and I went to and I had to transfer schools, from a very [emphasis] good and excellent school in Salisbury to certainly a below par one in Gloucester. AM: Right. RH: Near Gloucester. AM: What age were you when you left? RH: When I left what? AM: When you left school. RH: Sixteen. AM: Did you do schools certificate and everything? RH: No, I didn’t. AM: No. RH: No, I had enough of that school. AM: Right. [laughs] So what did you do when you left school? RH: Worked in an office. AM: Yeah, doing? RH: Pardon? AM: Doing just normal administrative? RH: Yes. AM: Office work. RH: Yes, just clerical work, that’s all. AM: Yeah. RH: It was a company that, it was a [unclear]company so I was dealing with invoices and things like that. AM: Right. So what year are we up to now? Sixteen, nineteen, I’m just trying to work my own arithmetic out, if you were sixteen? RH: I left school in 1940. AM: Right, so the war had started. RH: Yeah and I was already involved. [background noise] AM: Right, and I’m looking now at the County and City of Gloucester air raid precautions, and this is to certify that mister Richard Harrison completed his course in anti-gas training, under the auspices of County and City of Gloucester air raid precautions central authority and has acquired sufficient knowledge of anti-gas measures to act as a member of the public ARP service. Tell me about that then, what was that like? RH: Erm, and that’s what I— AM: Oh, I’ve missed a bit, nature of the course attended was— RH: Was a cycle messenger. AM: Right, what did that mean? RH: We were about ten miles north of Bristol, so when they were attacking Bristol, you know I was very interested, the first time I saw flak [laughs] but— AM: What was that like then? RH: Well, I mean as a kid it’s all very interesting, isn’t it? I mean we, the village hall was our local ARP post, and every Friday night that was my job, even when I was at school, every Friday night, get there for six or seven o’clock, I think it was, until six, seven o’clock the next morning, with my bike ready to go anywhere. And all over Bristol, it was a fantastic sight really was, searchlights, flak, German bombers coming over lit up, one crashed about a mile away from us here, but no it was quite a, quite a sight, and when they attacked Avonmouth and the oil tanks were set on fire, the whole of the horizon was red, yeah amazing sight. AM: So, where were you sent off cycling? Taking what sort of messages? RH: [sighs] Well we was just, I can’t remember the details. I remember one, one regular one was to cycle down to the pub and bring them back a pint of cider or something, and that was a regular run. [laughter] AM: Right, so the message was, how many drinks? RH: Yeah. AM: So, so when, so that was it, you did your cycling in your messenger training. RH: Yes. AM: And then what? RH: What? AM: What made you join the RAF? Oh, what came next should I say with regards to? RH: The Home Guard. AM: Right. RH: I joined that when, yeah before I was seventeen I joined that and despite what people say and that, because there’s that film— AM: Dad’s Army RH: Dad’s Army. I mean, it was one of the most useful things ever because I was in a platoon where the officer commanding was World War one soldier, my Father was a platoon sergeant, World War one soldier, there were several of them, I mean when I went into the RAF, foot drill, arms drill, using a rifle, shooting on the range, using a machine gun. AM: You’d already done it. RH: It was easy, yeah, it was easy. I also joined the Air Training Corps about the same time. AM: Right. RH: So, at one time I had three balls in the air [laughs] ARP, Home Guard, Air Training Corps. AM: And [unclear] RH: And in addition to that, I took a St John’s, St John ambulance first aid course and got a certificate for that, so— AM: Right. RH: Yeah. AM: Blimey. So, when you joined the RAF, but I think Gary said RAF regiment? RH: Pardon? AM: I think Gary said you joined the RAF regiment? [phone rings] RH: Excuse me. [interview paused] RH: Where were we? AM: So, where were we? GR: You were juggling three balls, ATC. AM: We were juggling all those balls with your ATC, and your Home Guard. RH: In the end I packed up the, one of them became civil defence from ARP, so I packed, I packed that up, I couldn’t get— AM: Right. RH: Otherwise I was chasing round four nights a week [laughs] and weekends with the Home Guard. AM: And working in your office. RH: And working as well. AM: And working as well. RH: Yeah. AM: So, you’re coming up to eighteen, why the RAF? Where did you join? What was, what was you’re, what was it like? RH: For a young lad I mean it’s, it’s just the glamour of the thing. King and country had nothing at all to do with it [laughs] don’t say that— [laughter] AM: We’ll cut that out. RH: All I wanted, well I mean, one saw a war films didn’t you, ‘target for the night’ and all the rest of it. But unfortunately, I had a heart condition and my, on my medical records which I saw, because I wanted to go into aircrew, I wanted to be a wireless operator. AM: Right. RH: Wireless operator [unclear] because I’d been, Father had taught my brother and I morse code, and in the house, he’d rigged up two keys and we used to use that, even when we were ten or eleven years old we knew the morse code, and in the Air Training Corps, when the CO discovered I already knew morse, I became the morse code instructor for the squadron. [laughter] RH: And, but when I went for the medical, I think I was, temporarily unfit for aircrew duties, they said that would right itself eventually, and I remember being interviewed by the, this officer, he said, ‘well, I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘ that you’re fit for ground crew duties but you’re not fit for aircrew duties,’ I said, ‘right, in that case I don’t want to join the RAF, I’m going to join the army,’ [laughs] because I was fit enough for the army, and I had a mate, a school friend who was up at Catterick driving a tank, saying how great it was and I could picture myself in that, so I said, ‘I’m going to join the army, the Armour Corps,’ ‘no you’re not,’ he said, ‘no you’re not,’ he said, ‘we’re not going to waste, what was it twelve months or more Air Training Corps and then you go in the army,’ he said, ‘you’ll be called up,’ and that’s what happened. I got, yeah, before Christmas it was, 1942. AM: Right. RH: And I got my call up papers and went to Penarth in South Wales where they sorted you out, and because I’d been a clerk in civvy street, I went through trade tests, maths, English, I could type, type writing, book keeping, and that took all morning, and then at the end of it they said, ‘alright you’re now a trade group for clerk general duties,’ but it did mean that whereas a lad going in without any trade at all was getting three shillings a day, I got four shillings and threepence a day because I was a trade [laughs] and of course guys like one of the guys I sort of chummed up with, he had been a metal worker, and I can’t remember what trade he went into, but I know he was getting sort of, six shillings and something a day because he was a group one trade as against group four. Right, so what do you want next then? AM: Ooh, well, what happened next? Tell me about it. What were you actually doing then? So, you got three a day— RH: I can think, in my eight weeks I think it was, square bashing and then I was posted to RAF Tempsford in Bedfordshire. AM: Right. RH: And, that was the base for the special duties squadrons, 161 and 138, and they were dropping supplies and people for the resistance. AM: Right, okay. RH: And it was all top secret, I mean I suppose I didn’t know what they were doing. GR: There was Maurice Buckmaster and Vera Atkins. RH: Well, maybe so, Wing Commander Pickard, DSO, a couple of bars and all the rest of it, he was, he was the C.O. and, but I knew something about aircraft, and so what struck me was these Halifax’s, they had no mid upper turret, and I thought well that’s strange, and bomb trolleys were parked alongside the hangar with grass growing through them, so they weren’t being used [laughs] but no one told you anything. Eventually one of the guys in the office said, ‘Dick, do you know what we are doing?’ and this was after a month or so, I said, ‘yeah, I reckon you’re dropping agents into, into France,’ I said, because I had to do a what, a sort of duty every now and again, overnight, man the phone and so forth, and during that time, you would see a couple of black saloon cars going, going by, and they were going over to, what I discovered later, was a farm, an old farm where they were kitted up before they did their jumps. And, yeah, very secret, so I remember a guy crashed on take-off and they were all killed, and that night or the next night the father was calling and I answered the phone, and I said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything,’ you know, ‘was he on the raid to Berlin?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ [laughs] I knew what had happened to him but wasn’t allowed to say. And another little story, no need to record, as I say it was all top secret, this Halifax was missing, so that was seven guys as well, so into the HQ, came their, the NCOs, their pay books and in the pay book was a next of kin listed. Now the wireless operator in that crew had listed his next of kin as a girl in Sandy village, which was four or five miles— AM: Yeah, I know where you mean. RH: Away, you know? AM: Yeah, I know exactly where you mean. RH: You know where I mean? So, the Padre and another officer went down to give her the bad news, sort of thing he was missing, but I mean I wasn’t witness to this, I only heard about it afterwards, and apparently when they gave her the bad news, she said, ‘well he’ll be alright wont he?’ they said, ‘what do you mean?’ ‘well I mean, they are dropping supplies to the French resistance and they’ll — AM: Oh God. RH: Get him back. Which they didn’t. While I was there, not him, but while I was there a guy came back, but the only thing I saw was her arriving with an RAF police escort in a car, and she was wheeled in to see Wing Commander Pickard, and I suppose he read the riot act to her, keep your mouth shut. AM: Yeah. RH: And some years ago when I was caravanning down there, I went back to see if I could get onto Tempsford, but it was all wired off, but you could see the huts in the background, and I met, a local woman came out of her house, and as a wee child she remembered this place and she said, ‘you see that hedge there?’ she said, ‘we lived up on the hill and we weren’t allowed to come below that hedge, no civilians were allowed below that hedge line,’ it was so, so secret. AM: It’s amazing isn’t it. RH: On one occasion Wing Commander Pickard, flying a Hudson, that’s that one up there, that was— AM: I’m looking at, I’m looking at models here. RH: Yeah, that was his aircraft, and he’d taken people down to the south of France to a landing ground down there, and when it came to take off, he’d bogged down, because it was just a field, and so they had to turn out local farm horses and so forth and pull him onto hard ground so he could take off. I remember next morning in the HQ, one of the guys said to me, ‘have you seen the CO’s Hudson take off?’ I said, ‘no,’ he said, ‘well go and look at hangar so and so,’ and there it was parked up outside, still with mud up into the engines themselves, and he got a, I think he had three DSO’s, was it, Wing Commander Pickard? He was shot down in the end on another raid, yeah. So, there we are, what’s next then? AM: So that’s that, well you tell me. What came next? RH: I must have been the worst clerk general duties that the RAF ever had, because I wasn’t a bit interested in what I was doing [laughs] and I was always on the— AM: Wanting to be up there. RH: Back in front of the adjutant flight sergeant being given a lecture about something I’d done wrong. Then one day two guys came into the office and I knew they’d been in north Africa, and they said, ‘can we have a form to volunteer to go overseas,’ I said, ‘but you’ve only just come back.’ [emphasis] AM: Two aircrew this? RH: Pardon? AM: Two aircrew you talking about? RH: No, they weren’t aircrew. AM: Oh right, okay still— RH: They were two groundcrew. Said, ‘we’ve only just come back,’ and I said, ‘you want to go back out there again?’ ‘well, [emphasis] England, terrible place isn’t it, full of Yanks and all the rest, no, the sooner we get out of here the better,’ so I thought, what a good idea. [laughter] GR: Get me one of these forms. [laughter] RH: Get me one of those forms, yeah. And then I had a medical and this medical officer said, you know, as I said to you on the phone yesterday, he said, ‘right, condition no longer, so I’ll put you forward shall I, for the aircrew medical?’ I said, ‘no, no thanks I want to go overseas.’ [laughter] RH: Did you read that letter? GR: This one? RH: Yeah, the one, the regiment one? GR: Yes, I’m reading it, yeah. AM: I’ll take a copy afterwards. So, you went overseas rather than aircrew? RH: Yes, I volunteered to go overseas, it was all very quick, in fact I was sent on what they called, embarkation leave. AM: Hmm, hmm. GR: Yeah. RH: And I think that was one week or two, and while I was at home in Gloucestershire, a telegram came telling me to report back to Tempsford, and I’d only been home two or three days, and so I went back and there was my posting notice, and I think, I thought the RAF were taking their revenge on me for not carrying on with aircrew because they posted me to an RAF Regiment squadron. And believe me in 1943, to be in the RAF Regiment, you know, I mean today, yes, they’ve got a good reputation, but that was really the backend of everything. And there were about a dozen of us, tradesmen, clerks, cooks, vehicle mechanics, armourers, wireless guys and so forth, and all resentful [laughs] at being posted to the regiment. AM: Where was that though? Where were you posted to? RH: Oh yeah, that was near Peterborough, near Peterborough. And, when I arrived there, there was a corporal clerk in the, what do you call it? Orderly room, in the orderly room. And as soon as I arrived, he sent off a signal under the adjutant’s signature, under who was away at the time, to the airman’s records at Innsworth in Gloucestershire saying, that Corporal so and so, can’t remember his name, was unfit for overseas duty. And so about, a couple of days later a signal came posting him out, didn’t get off kindly. [laughs] AM: So where, where from, where did you go from Peterborough? RH: Overseas. AM: Yeah, but where though? Whereabouts? RH: Sicily. AM: Sicily. RH: We went to, yeah it was a, it took a month altogether, although I think it was three weeks to Algiers on a troop ship as a convoy— AM: I was going to say— RH: As it was, but— Yeah, although in my letter I said, not eventful, in fact it was interesting at times because a U-boat got in amongst the convoy, and there were destroyers dashing up and down dropping depth charges. [laughs] AM: It’s probably quite exciting when you are eighteen, nineteen. RH: It was, when you are a kid, when you are a kid. AM: You’re still a teenager, really aren’t you? RH: Yeah, I remember saying to one of the seamen on our, on our troop ship, you know, ‘why is that, why are they flying a black pennant?’ he said, ‘that’s because they’ve detected a boat,’ he said, ‘they’ve detected a U, U-boat.’ Then we went to Algiers, and then we left Algiers, still didn’t know where we were going at that time. And then, I was in what was called the headquarters flight, which all the tradesmen were in that flight and we were called up for a briefing by the adjutant, and then we knew we were going to Sicily, and there were maps passed round for us to look at, and we were going to takeover, it was a light anti-aircraft squadron by the way, it had a twenty-millimetre cannon. AM: Okay. RH: We were going to take over defence of the Gerbini airfield near Cantania in Sicily, and that was the plan. But unfortunately, the Germans, you know, didn’t know what our plan was— [laughter] RH: And so, when we got to Sicily they were still there. [laughs] And er, yeah, we landed, we went to Malta first, I think we stayed there overnight or a couple of nights, and then we went to Sicily, and it was over the, over the side, down scrambling nets onto the landing craft and then onto a little [old?] pier sort of thing. And then we formed up and marched up into an olive grove and we were there for about a week. We were waiting for our trucks to arrive and the cannon, but they’d all been sunk. It was funny when we were en route from Algiers to Malta, there was a, ‘boom,’ bang and a great column of smoke over in the distance, that was the ship going down, and we heard later that was our ship [laughs] with all the trucks on. AM: Blimey. RH: So when we got to, then we were posted and moved to Lentini and that was a new, new landing ground, and we were sent there for anti-parachute troop duties. The Germans had dropped paratroopers into Sicily, not, not straight into combat, they dropped them as reinforcements to the guys who were already there. AM: Yeah. RH: And, but some of them were dropped too far south, and when the 8th Army had pushed up and they were left behind. AM: I’m just looking, thinking about the geography, so you’re in the south of Sicily? RH: Pardon? AM: I’m just thinking about the geography of Sicily, so the Germans were on the island? RH: Oh yeah, and eventually, eventually they had four divisions there. They had three to, three to begin with and then, then they dropped in two regiments from the 1st Parachute Division, and they were dropped in as reinforcements, behind their own lines. But they were the guys who eventually who stopped the 8th Army, you know, getting any further. But, and so when we got to Lentini, they were forming patrols of about a dozen guys and an NCO, and they [unclear] [laughs] searched the local olive groves and go through, and as I said in, in the letter, you know, God help them if they come across any German para’s because I’m sure we would have been sending out the first missing in action signals. [laughter] RH: Because they wouldn’t have stood a chance, they wouldn’t have stood a chance against those guys. So, that was that. AM: So, how long were you there for, on Sicily? RH: Pardon? AM: How long were you on Sicily for? Ish? RH: Yeah, we landed there a week after the invasion began, July, August, and then, when did we go into Italy? September the 3rd? So, we went into Italy on September the 10th, something like that. AM: Right, so, so the Germans had been pushed back? RH: They evacuated. AM: They evacuated. RH: Yeah, they got everything away, they got everything away, they had a defensive line sort of thing, and they just took it step by step back, and meanwhile they, I think forty thousand men all their guns and tanks, everything they managed to get across the Straits of Messina. And, [pause] the regiment squadron, we were on, we moved from Lentini to the Scordia landing ground, again it’s only a rough strip through, through the fields and that was the American 57th Fighter Group. They were equipped with P-40 Warhawks and they used to go out day after day trying to stop the Germans evacuating the— AM: Getting across the Straits. RH: Their, their stuff. And that was the first time I’d come across American, Americans and they were great guys, [emphasis] they really were. And later on, we were on the same airfield, when I was in aircrew and again, you know, they really are first, first class blokes, I thought. AM: So, you’re on, we’re on the push now, what, what month did we say we were? August? What, what— GR: No, September into Italy. AM: And September into Italy. RH: September into Italy. AM: So you— RH: I’ll just tell this little story while we— AM: Go on, yes. RH: At Scordia, I mean they were suffering losses because I mean they were having to make quite low level attacks with their fighter bombers. And we were watching these guys coming back, and, and one of them he came in rather high, banged [emphasis] down onto the ground, up in the air, bang [emphasis] and then turned over onto his, onto his back, so the pilot was trapped under, underneath. But I mean, they were very, very quick, in no time there was a, the er, a fire tender, an ambulance, and a mobile crane. And the mobile crane lifted the aircraft up, turned it over— AM: [inaudible] RH: And they forced the canopy open and out [laughs] got this young lieutenant, stepped on the wing, walked away a few paces, reached into his overalls, pulled out a cigar— AM: [gasps] Oh no. RH: Lit it and went on walking. [laughter] RH: And I thought, well there’s, there’s a nerve for you, [laughs] there’s a nerve for you. But on the other side of the coin, I remember, I used to like going out into their dispersal and watch them come in. And, they’d taken off— [background noise] RH: And then one of them left the formation, came round, landed and then taxied up to where we were, we were, sort of thing, switched off the engine, pilot got out and he walked over to the, the er. There was a sergeant who was a sort of an engineer mechanic, whatever, and I can’t remember the words after all these years what the pilot said, but he was complaining that there was a fault in the, in the engine, there was something, something wrong, and then he walked away. And I said the sergeant, I said, ‘what do you thinks wrong with that then?’ Now, you’ll have to excuse the language. AM: It’s alright. [laughs] RH: He said, ‘nothing he’s just shit scared,’ he said. [laughter] AM: Fair enough. RH: So then we went into Italy, [pause] now tell you, this was a regiment [laughs] with a squadron, and so I knew [emphasis] very well, being, being in the HQ, the squadron had been told they had to go to Crotone landing ground which was sort of under the, that part of the— AM: The heel. RH: Italian boot. AM: The heel. RH: And of course, and we were following a Canadian division along the coast. They were way, way, way ahead, we never ever saw them. When we got to Crotone landing ground, nothing there at all because it had already been evacuated. Now the same time as the 8th Army landed on the toe and moved up on the north coast, the Canadians were moving along the south coast and the British 1st Airborne Division came in by sea to land at Taranto to push up on the Adriatic coast. And when we were somewhere west of, of Taranto we came across the Airborne guys, and, and they were stopping our convoy. Now in our convoy would be about a dozen three tonne four by four Bedfords, three or four jeeps, two Italian trucks that we had pinched, stolen and, and motorcycles and so forth. Yeah, we spotted these Italian trucks in a little town called Catanzaro down on the toe and the C.O. had seen them, two big Fiat trucks, and so he said to our corporal fitter, engine fitter, ‘do you reckon you can get those going?’ he said, ‘yeah right.’ So sometime around midnight he and another mechanic went out and started them and drove them up the road a bit and then we found them [unclear] AM: Appropriated them. [laughs] RH: And then painted them in RAF camouflage and off we went. And then so, yeah, we met the guys with the, with the red berets and from what they were saying is, ‘go careful, keep your heads down because there are German para snipers in the area,’ [laughs] and I thought to myself, we shouldn’t be here, we had no business to be there with just our, just the C.O. You know, woo, let’s just going, you know so think you can imagine we were some kind of Panzer unit or something. And then we drove into Bari, you know that? AM: Yeah. RH: Well as we went to Bari, there were people on the pavements, waving and cheering and then passing out bottles of wine. [laughter] RH: And I thought, well this can’t be right, and, and where are our guys? I didn’t see any British soldiers at all, and we drove through Bari, and I can’t remember the name of the town now, but about ten miles north of Bari on the main coast road, we came into this little township, and again, [emphasis] people came out and they were waving and saying oh— AM: Italian civilians you mean? RH: Yeah, [emphasis] Italian civilians, I thought it’s got to be something, it’s got to be wrong you know, and then the word quickly came down the, the line, the Germans left here this morning. [laughter] RH: Well that decided the C.O., all the trucks were turned round. [laughs] GR: You were the spear guard you were, you were out in front. [laughter] RH: We go back to, we went back to Bari, and he looked at his map. Bari airport which was an Italian air force base then, we’ll go there, and we’ll the, we’ll take over the airfield, we had no business— AM: Is this just you the RAF Regiment, you’re talking here? RH: Yeah. AM: Right. RH: No business at all to be, to be there. And we drove up to the entrance and there were gates and as we drove up, there were armed Italians carrying their funny little carbine rifles, they shut the gate. Now I wasn’t there I didn’t hear what, what was said but they refused to let us in. So, then the order came down the line, ‘get your rifles out men and load them, and stand by the trucks.’ And of course, in our headquarters truck, where are the rifles? [laughter] AM: We’re laughing now, but I bet you weren’t laughing at the time. RH: Scrambling, put ten rounds in the magazine, get out the truck. Meanwhile the Italians, a lot of them, had crossed the road and were in the olive grove in that side, so I thought, God, we are going to be between two lots here, but I think that fact that they saw a hundred guys or more getting out the trucks with their rifles ready, and that decided the Italians to open the gate and let us in. [laughter] RH: Yeah, so. AM: Blimey. GR: So you’re fighting your way up Italy? AM: And your C.O. wanted you to be fighting your way up. RH: Pardon? AM: And your C.O. wanted you to be fighting your way up. RH: And the, what do you call it? SWO, he was, he was another sort of, you know, let’s get up there and we’ll, all the rest of it. But, yeah then we went up to Foggia and there were several airfields there which the Germans had used, and yeah, we were, I think on two different airfields there, if I remember rightly, well airfields, landing grounds it was just a single strip. But I can’t remember anything worth reporting there. And by that time, we were subordinate to Desert Air Force, and so you’d get the daily orders from Desert Air Force. And on one they were appealing for air gunners, air gunners, now I thought right— AM: This is it. RH: We’ll have a go at this, and so I, you know, I applied and went to Desert Air Force headquarters to get the preliminary medical as such. And, it was, it was quite interesting, because they had my records there and the first officer to examine me, flight lieutenant or squadron leader, doctor or whatever he was, he said, ‘I can’t understand why you were failed in, a year ago,’ he said. He said, ‘there’s nothing wrong,’ and I said, ‘well it says temporarily unfit,’ ‘I can’t see nothing wrong, well, we’ll get a second opinion,’ and he called in the chief, the group captain, and he came in and checked me over, ‘yeah,’ he said, ‘no,’ he said, ‘I can’t think,’ he said, ‘why you were failed a year ago,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with your, with your heart.’ I used to think afterwards, they failed me because when they looked at my background, they realised in fact, that Mum was a German. [laughter] RH: I’ve thought that might be a— GR: That’s possible. AM: Yeah. GR: Yeah, yeah, possible. RH: Yeah. Because when it came to the aircrew selection board, that was the next thing. AM: Are you still in Italy at this point? RH: Yeah, oh yes. AM: Yeah. RH: The, the aircrew selection board, and they asked, they asked that question, ‘what if you were ordered to?’ I mean there was no possibility for me to fly from Italy all the way to Cologne, but still, [laughs] They said, ‘what if you were ordered to bomb Germany, bomb something in Germany, you know, you were born there and your Mothers German, what, what if you were ordered to do that?’ [laughs] And I said, ‘I would obey orders.’ [laughs] [laughter] RH: Yes, so then there was, I was still with the Regiment Squadron, but I mean they hadn’t, they hadn’t fired a shot in anger and they were anti-aircraft, there was no need for them, so they found a new job for the RAF Regiment. That was to go up to the, our artillery gun line which would be a three, or four miles behind the front line, and by day if our guys were flying and bombing, they would put out smoke indicators to show where our front line was, so that our guys didn’t bomb in it. And by night they would put out flares and I was only there less than, less than, less than a week and but apparently, they did have some casualties later, later on. But, so that was it, now I went to Desert Air Force headquarters, and I had three or four weeks there, and then before I went back to the Middle East. Desert Air Force headquarters was the best posting ever I had in the RAF of a, really good guys to work with, we had an Australian flight lieutenant who was our, the C.O. of what’s called the organisation section where I worked. And he used to share his food parcels with us and he knew I was sort of going through them and I was going on for air, aircrew training and he called me in one day and he said, ‘Harrison,’ now I know this sounds like a line shoot, but he said, ‘Harrison, you’ve done a really good job here,’ he said, ‘we’re very pleased at the way you’re, you’re working.’ That’s because I had a gen, I wasn’t responsible to anyone even though I was only an airman I was doing my own, my own job, sort of thing, which was location of units. AM: Right. RH: And briefing people who came in asking questions about you, he said, ‘now why don’t you forget this aircrew thing,’ he said, ‘and I can guarantee,’ he said, in a few months you’ll have your first stripes,’ he said, ‘and I can see you going on from there,’ and I said, ‘no thank you, very much.’ [laughs] And so that was it, now I went back to Egypt AM: Right. Where did you do your training, your aircrew training then? RH: Air gunner training. AM: Air gunner training, where did you do that? RH: Yeah, a place called El Ballah. AM: In, in Egypt? RH: On the canal zone. AM: Right. And how long, so how long were you training for? RH: Right. [pause] [paper rustling] RH: You can take these away. AM: Okay. RH: Later. There were three six-week courses. AM: Right. RH: The first one was at 51 Air Gunner Initial Training School, and they’re all the subjects. AM: Yeah. RH: Then you had a forty-eight-hour pass into Cairo and then you came for another six weeks— AM: Okay. RH: At 12 Elementary Air Gunner School. AM: Yeah. RH: From there are all the subjects again. AM: So, I’m looking at, I’ll, I’ll copy this, and but I’m looking at things like, different gun turrets, the Frazer Nash, the Boulton Paul, the Bristol. RH: Yeah that’s right. AM: Pyrotechnics, the Very pistol, the flares, forty flashes. Smoke floats? RH: Yeah, smoke floats, yeah. AM: Yeah, what’s a smoke float? RH: Well it was, about, about that big and the idea was that, that in daylight, over the sea, over, over water, the navigator would ask someone to drop a smoke float, okay? And then the tail gunner, the rear gunner— AM: Yeah, yeah. RH: Himself. You see that smoke float and you take a bearing on it with your sight, and there’s sort of a compass ring— AM: Right. RH: And you say,’ okay, it’s at so many degrees,’ and then the navigator would count off so many seconds and say, ‘okay take another reading,’ so you take another reading and it shows you your drift. AM: Right. RH: The difference between the two readings. AM: Yep. RH: Yeah, smoke float by day, yeah. AM: Oh. RH: And that’s 13 Air Gunner school where you finally get to fly. AM: I’m looking at this one because I was, I was going to ask you, what were, what did you actually train in? And we’ve got Avro Anson’s? RH: Yes, it’s up there, somewhere. AM: One of those up there? Dinghy drill. Did you all have individual dinghies at that point? RH: No, seven-man dinghies. AM: Because—It was a seven-man dinghy. Right. RH: Then we trained in, in the Suez Canal, and the canal was only a couple of miles away from the, from the air field, so the instructor would tow an inflated dinghy out into the middle of the canal. And that was another, another thing and I’ve never come across it before and I’ve mentioned it to other aircrew types and they’ve never heard of this before. You had to swim fifty yards [emphasis] and if you did not swim, if you couldn’t swim that fifty yards you failed. AM: That was it, you were out. RH: You failed the course. So, I mean you had a life jacket on which was a damn nuisance believe me if you’ve got a Mae West and you try swim. [laughs] So you went out, two of you at a time, went out to a dinghy and righted it. AM: Oops. RH: Sorry. Righted it, then got into it, and then when the instructor was satisfied, when you got out you pulled the dinghy over you so it was upside down for the next pair. AM: Right, and swam out from under it. RH: To go out, yeah. AM: I can’t imagine what the canal was full of? RH: Oh yeah, [emphasis] yeah. Now and then whistles are blowing and everyone would have to get out if a ship came by. [laughs] AM: Theres, there’s crocodiles isn’t there? RH: No, no. AM: Is there not? No. Alright then. RH: There’s far more— AM: I was thinking about horrible [unclear] RH: Theres worse stuff floating in the canal, believe me. AM: I can imagine. [laughter] AM: So, you’ve done your training. RH: Yeah. AM: Then what? RH: Then we’ve went to [paper rustling] from Egypt— AM: Hmm, hmm. RH: To Palestine. AM: Right. RH: For the O T U. AM: Right. [pause] So, I’m looking now at the, it was the 76 Operational Training Unit. RH: That’s right. AM: And you were on Wellington medium bombers at this point? RH: Yeah, yeah. AM: Tail gunner you said you were, weren’t you? RH: Yeah, yeah. AM: Tail end Charlie. RH: Yes, we formed up of, as you may know, you know, the people weren’t detailed, we all assembled in a hangar. AM: You did the crewing up. RH: And we sort of— AM: No other end. RH: Pardon? AM: No other end, is an expression— RH: Is it? AM: An expression, I’ve heard. RH: Yeah well. And Joe, the other gunner, he, he eventually found a pilot who wanted two gunners, and so we met this Eddy who came from the Midlands, and he said to us, ‘who’s best at aircraft recognition?’ and Joe said, ‘he is,’ pointing to me. [laughter] RH: ‘So, right you are the rear gunner then.’ AM: So that was it? That was how that was decided. But then, so when was heavy Conversion Unit, were you still in Palestine at that point? RH: No. We went back to Egypt for it. AM: Back to Egypt for that, right. RH: That was only four weeks I think at that point. AM: So this is the 1675 Heavy Conversion Unit, into B-24 Liberators. RH: B-24 Liberator, yeah. At least we got into a decent aircraft. AM: Yeah. What, how many crew were on that? Was there seven or more? Seven. RH: Well, seven. We trained as a crew of seven but operationally on the squadron, you carried an extra gunner, who manned the two waist guns. AM: Right, so there was waist guns on there? RH: There was also these, yeah, I did two or three [unclear] trips as a beam gunner, but you were the odd job. I’ll come to that when we get to the squadron then. AM: Alright, okay. So, carry on— RH: Well, [unclear, interviewer speaks over] AM: Tell me about that and what happened and any stories about the conversion unit course or on to what happened after that? RH: I can only think of a funny story on that. Sometimes, the nose wheel of the Liberator wouldn’t come down. And so, someone would go from the flight deck, for landing on the flight deck was a pilot, the engineer, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator and top gunner, six of them all on the flight deck in that area. If the nose wheel didn’t come down, there was a, a drill for it. One of them would go back into the nose and help to pull the thing down. Well, we’d been on a night exercise, and Joe our top gunner, a Lancashire lad, he always had intercom trouble. He was an electrician by trade, but he was a real jinx [emphasis] when it came to in, in, intercom. And the nose wheel hadn’t come down, so I mean I’m hearing everything on intercom, so the skipper said to, I think it was the bomb aimer Ron, ‘Ron go on down into the nose right and see if you can do it,’ and so Ron goes down there. Then the next thing I here, Ron’s on the intercom, ’no, I can’t do it and I need some help,’ ‘ah yeah, okay,’ and so the navigator is sent down. So, now there’s two of them in the nose trying to pull it— AM: Yank the thing, yeah. RH: And get the wheel down, and then they come back on the intercom, ‘no I can’t do it,’ so skipper, Eddy turns to Taffy our engineer and says, ‘Taff, go down and sort it, will you?’ So, Taff gets out of his seat and goes down. Theres a hatch in the flight deck that goes down into the nose. Now, Joe the top gunner, knows that the nose wheel hasn’t come down, and then his intercom goes dead. And one after another he sees the bomb aimer— AM: Oh God. RH: The navigator and the engineer all disappearing through that hatch down below, and what does he think? He thinks they’re all baling out. So, his seat release is a wire handle and he pulls that, drops out of his turret, goes straight through the hatch into the end of the bomb bay. AM: Oh no. GR: [unclear] [laughs] RH: He just had a few bruises that was all. AM: I was going to say, I thought you were going to say he went right through and had to pull his parachute. [laughs] GR: Well, the thing is to anybody listening, obviously Lancaster, Halifax, B-17 all land, and land tail down, but the B-24 was one that landed, and landed with its nose up. RH: Nose wheel GR: The same, yeah. So, it landed, straight— RH: Yes. GR: As opposed to sitting back on the tail, so when you were on about the nose wheel coming down that’s— AM: That’s why it’s important. GR: Yeah RH: Well, I— [unclear, interviewer speaks over] GR: In fact that was the only bomber that, that— RH: Yeah. GR: The only, only four engine bomber that, that happened. RH: If I remember rightly in HCU and I mean, I knew guys who were ahead of me and so forth, and Norman, and he came back and he came up to the truck as we were getting off it, and he said, ‘have you heard Mick Berry’s gone?’ Now, Mick Berry had been a corporal armourer and he was in our tent at gunnery school— AM: Right. RH: And he taught us more about the machine guns than the instructors. After all, that was his, his trade, he was a, I can still remember, he was a great [emphasis] man, he really was a good lad. And there they had, had crash landed and burst into flames, and Mick was in the mid er, top turret. Now that was held by, I think it was four bolts and it was a common fault that bang [emphasis] on, on the deck and that turret would drop out, and he was trapped and he couldn’t get out, yeah. GR: Oh God. RH: Mick Berry, he’s buried in the cemetery near Cairo. AM: Oh, right. How big is it? I’m looking at a model of the Liberator here. How big is it in comparison then to the Halifax and the, and the Lancaster? RH: [unclear] it’s a hundred and ten foot wingspan, the Liberator and the Hal, well Lanc, well it’s just over a hundred feet, in total. AM: I was going to say, it looks a bit bigger to me. RH: Yeah. AM: On the, on the model, I know [unclear] GR: Well at the same scales, they’re actually, the Liberators on a par with the Lancaster, probably slightly bigger. AM: I’m showing my ignorance now, is it American? GR: The B-24 was originally was an American bomber. RH: Oh yeah. AM: Oh. RH: Yeah, consolidated to the aircraft company, yeah. [pause] Nice aeroplane to fly because after flying in the Wellingtons as the rear or tail, tail gunner, the heating system, well, didn’t really exist. And, in O.T.U. going out on a flight at night, and we’d six hours, six and a half hour flights sort of thing in freezing [emphasis] weather and you’d have long johns and, and then your shirt and your pants, and so forth. And your wool, pullover, woolly, the battle dress, then over the battle dress, the, an inner flying suit— AM: Right. RH: Which was sort of kapok something or other, brown silky, you put that on. Then over that, the outer flying suit which wasn’t padded at all, then over that your life jacket, then over that your parachute harness. Now, some of the gunners at O.T.U. there was only one entry hatch and that was in the nose, so the guys used to take their kit with them and get dressed when they got down into the fuselage. But I had an arrangement with the navigator, and the bomb aimer, and the armourer who would turn the turret of our aircraft to a hundred and eighty degrees, so I could get in from the outside. And they would lift [emphasis] me up into the turret, and then when we got back I would turn the turret a hundred and eighty degrees, open the doors, fall out— AM: We’re talking about the rear turret then? GR: Yeah. RH: Pardon? AM: Yeah. RH: Yeah. And they would— GR: Tumble out. RH: And they would get me out. GR: [unclear] RH: The advantage of the Wimpy of course, and the rear, and with the Lanc and the British aircraft wasn’t it, you opened the doors as a tail gunner and you just bale out and go backwards— AM: You just flipped out. RH: Couldn’t do that on the Liberator. AM: So, we’ve done Heavy Conversion Unit, you’ve got your crew, you’ve done your training with your crew, when was— RH: I can’t think of any incidents. AM: When was your first operation then? RH: In February 45. AM: Right, and where, where was it too? RH: That’s a very good question, I think— AM: Germany somewhere? RH: No, I, no we were in Italy. AM: Oh, oh. RH: Yep, I think that’s just March, isn’t it? GR: That’s just March, yeah. AM: Yeah. GR: Yeah. AM: Can you remember what it was like going up? Right because now you’re doing it for real instead of training? Did it make a difference? RH: It was just a job. I think, you know guys of our age at that stage of the war, nine, you know, coming up to the end of the war, and you, I can’t think of the term really, indoctrinated or whatever, and you are used to it, you are used to it. AM: So, were you scared? RH: No I wasn’t, no. AM: No. RH: Because I didn’t have enough up there to be scared. [laughter] GR: Am I right in assuming that the, the bomber force in Italy at the time, was doing things like marshalling yards— RH: Yeah. GR: In northern Italy. RH: Yeah. GR: Austria. RH: Yeah. GR: Southern Germany? I think that there was a couple of trips. AM: I think, yeah, I thought, I thought you went to southern Germany? RH: No, we there were, I never went on a trip into Bavaria. GR: But that was some of their, their area of operations. RH: Yeah. GR: There was the northern Italy marshalling yards, the Turin’s, that sort of thing, Verona, to try and stop— RH: It was mainly the railway lines coming down through Bremen. GR: Yes. RH: And also down to Trieste and so forth. GR: Which was the main supplier [unclear] RH: And also, we, yeah, we bombed, what was it? Monfalcone, a little port, Ancona and Assa [?] yeah, they were, they were where the Germans had ships and used to supply their troops by night by running these boats along the coast, sort of thing. GR: Did you normally fly with an escort? With a— RH: On daylight, yeah. GR: Daylights, yeah. RH: Yeah, yeah. We had the Americans. GR: Yeah. RH: American B-51’s. GR: Tuskegee, Tuskegee airmen? RH: I don’t know who they were. GR: They, they were the black— AM: Yeah. RH: I remember on one, on a trip to Monfalcone in the daylight, I mean we didn’t fly in formation, I mean our guys didn’t know how to fly in formation I never, not on heavies. And it just the usual stream, and so there were, sort of sixty, eighty aircraft in a stream. And we picked up the American escort, this was at the top end of the Adriatic, Trieste. AM: Yep, yep. RH: Right, it was the port next to Trieste. AM: Yep. RH: And, we picked up the escort and it was coming up, and our wireless op was listening out on their frequency, there had to be some sort of contact for, for, I didn’t hear this. But I remember we’d said, said afterwards, he said, ‘when they saw us coming,’ he said, and they were [laughs] saying about look at those sort of God damned limeys they’re not in formation, you know, all that how do we protect this lot and all the rest of it. [laughs] AM: It’s like herding sheep. [laughter] RH: Yeah. AM: Or herding— GR: Are the Luftwaffe putting in much of an appearance? RH: No. GR: Towards that stage of the war? RH: No, no. AM: Were they not? RH: No, they had, they were 109’s on the Italian, northern Italian airfields, but I think most of those were in what was called the Italian Republican Airforce. GR: Yeah. RH: You know, Mussolini’s lot, so you did see them, you did see them. Right and I remember seeing a strange sight one night as we were coming away from wherever it was in northern Italy. It was all a tremendous glare of course and, and looking out I saw these three Lib’s flying in and they were in [laughs] formation more or less and then at the back end of the [unclear] was a Bf 109. [laughs] GR: Oh. [laughter] AM: Following you. RH: Following the— AM: Did you ever get shot at? RH: With flak. AM: With flak, but not, not as Gary said, not from a fighter? RH: No, no, I saw, yeah there was a, we were 70 Squadron, 37 Squadron operated from the same airfield. I mean I didn’t know who they were, were at the time but and coming back at night from somewhere, Austria I think it might, might have been, the, and then suddenly seeing green tracer which I knew it was German. And then red tracer [laughs] sort of thing, and then ‘woof’ [emphasis] up went the Lib and down he went, yeah and that was 37 Squadron. Liberator, all lost. AM: All gone. Did you ever shoot your guns at anything? RH: No. AM: Never? RH: No, no you even if, and we were tailed one night by a fighter coming back from Trento I think it was, Trento, Trento marshalling yards you know, and I just reported it to the, to the crew, it was a 109. And he was sitting out and sort of, sort of four hundred yards or so away, you’d just see them occasionally with the glare in the background but he didn’t close and I certainly wouldn’t fire at him because it would show where we were. GR: Were you were. AM: Other people have said that, why would you fire— RH: Yeah. Quite. AM: And you know, mark yourself out to them. RH: Yeah. AM: Effectively. RH: Yeah. Yeah, no you never, never fire unless you’re fired at. Okay? AM: Yeah. I think, have you got any more questions? GR: No, no. AM: How many operations did you do in the end? RH: Bombing, eighteen. AM: Eighteen. RH: And then we converted to supply, as the war was coming to an end— AM: Okay. RH: And the bombing stopped, and then they put some sort of racking inside the bomb bay so we could carry four-gallon cans of petrol and things like that. AM: Right. So, what did you do between the war ending and demob? RH: Er, yeah, we carried, you see although the war ended we’d already converted to transport. AM: Yeah. RH: And so, yeah for two or three weeks after VE Day we were flying, we were talking up supplies up to the north of Italy. And then after that they converted the bomb bay so you could carry bodies, troops, we could carry twenty-two. AM: Live bodies? RH: Yeah. AM: Live ones. RH: Twenty-two in the bomb, bomb bay. Poor blokes, [emphasis] I mean they just had to go down into the, down onto the catwalk and then climb over the back of these seats and then sit down. And there was the aircraft fuselage wall, just there sort of thing, and they had to sit there and on flights back to the UK, it took six and a half hours. AM: You can’t imagine, can you? GR: No. AM: Were these troops or did you take any prisoner of war back? RH: No, no— AM: It was troops. RH: These were troops. The ones we were flying back were due to be retrained and reformed to go out to Burma. These were the, I remember, you see they didn’t need the air gunners as such, so you became an odd bod sort of looking after these soldiers and so forth. And I remember on one occasion we were flying back with some guardsmen from a guard’s regiment, and the truck arrived and this lieutenant got out with his twenty odd bods. And they piled around and he said to our skipper, ‘we were all NCO’s, we were all senior NCO’s, he said, ‘have you anything to say?’ to the men sort of thing, and he said, ‘no.’ Since I was Harrison, generally I was called Harry, and so Ken said, ‘now Harry will look after you,’ well that wasn’t good enough for the, for the lieutenant. He turned around and he said, ‘when you are in the aircraft I don’t want you putting your hands out and grabbing any wires or anything.’ [laughter] RH: So I saw them on board and we were flying up to Peterborough, Croughton, just south, it was an American base at that time and I used to bring them out one at a time and with the beam hatches open they could have a smoke— AM: Right. RH: Sitting there. And I think it was one of the last guys, came out and he sat on the other beam gunners seat, and he didn’t have intercom of course, we could only talk to each other by shout, shouting really, and he shouted, he said, ‘do we go through customs?’ he said, I said, ‘well I don’t.’ Crewmen didn’t, you just went straight through, [laughs] I said, ‘you, yes you will have to go through customs,’ and I said, ‘why?’ and he pulled back the sleeve of his battle dress and [laughs] there were watches— [laughter] RH: On, on there. And I said, oh, how did you get those?’ and they disarmed an SS unit or something and so, and relieved them of all, of all their odds and ends. And er, and then he reached into his blouse, fiddled about and pulled out a pistol, and I said to him, I said, ‘I don’t think you’ll get through with that,’ he said, ‘I’ve got another one in my kit bag.’ [laughter] AM: I thought you were going to say you took them through for him. RH: No, no, no. AM: If you didn’t have to go through customs. GR: They’re here. AM: [laughs] RH: No, after, after we’d landed and I got my travel warrant, and had a forty-eight-hour pass to get back to Bristol. AM: Right. RH: Or near Bristol. And so, it was late evening when I caught a train from Peterborough to Kings Cross, and Kings Cross to Paddington, and Paddington to Temple Meads, then Bristol. Which, I arrived about seven o’clock in the morning, then I had to walk over to the bus station and get a bus, and I arrived at my parents’ house I think, yeah it must have been about nine o’clock in the morning. Knocked them up, then I had, since it was a Saturday, I had to leave next day, just after lunch— AM: To get back. RH: To get back, yeah, so my forty-eight-hour pass in fact was about thirty. AM: In the middle. RH: Oh, so, anything else I can help with? AM: Yes, this is, just out of interest this question. So, your Mum was German, how was she treated during the war? RH: Yeah, okay. AM: Were people okay with her? RH: Yeah, you see we were, when I say Dad went in, into the civil service, he did, he and a lot of other guys including the major commanding who is based and so forth. Some of them were sort of even if they hadn’t given their time were said, okay you’re finished, because now you’re going to an establishment in Gloucestershire where you’ll be training police, fire, in what today are called civil defence duties. And so, you know, my environment from a child and all the way through to the time I left home was, was semi military because all the other guys were like Dad, they all ex-army. AM: Right. RH: They were all ex-army and some of them I remember when we lived at Salisbury, I remember a couple of German women coming there to visit Mum and they were again were wives of soldiers and so forth. But, no and of course we had relatives in Cologne and at the time of the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, we had a telegram which came through the Swiss Red Cross, from Mums sister Gerda, in Cologne, asking if we were all okay. [laughs] AM: Were they all okay, did they ask to— RH: No. AM: Did your relatives not survive? RH: No, no they were, they lived, well as most Germans do in the cities, they live in an apartment block and the block was, was— AM: Blown up. RH: Hit, and Uncle Johan as he was, he died of phosphorus burns. And my aunt and my two cousins, saw one cousin, they were evacuated into, into central Germany. The other one, my, he was about a year or so younger than me and had been like you know like all the rest of them in the Hitler movement and so forth. And then when he was sixteen I think, he volunteered for part time duty on a flak battery, and then when he was seventeen he became a full-time member of the Luftwaffe [emphasis] on a flak battery. When I met him, you know after, we used to have a joke about it. [laughter] GR: That’s a, well at least you had the opportunity. AM: At least you never shot at me. RH: Never fired at me because you were in, on the Rhineland and in the Ruhr, yeah AM: Yeah, Happy Valley, the Ruhr. RH: Pardon? AM: Happy Valley, I’ve heard the Ruhr described as. RH: Yeah, yeah. But they’re all, my cousins and my aunt are not, they are all dead now so, no contact. GR: What I’ve just found amazing is, you’ve saying like yeah, during the Battle of Britain, and Bristol was being blitzed and all that, and a family in Germany sends a telegram [laughs] to a family in England saying are you okay? AM: Are you okay? RH: Yeah. GR: And that’s just like, that’s incredible. AM: Ordinary people in the war. GR: Yeah. AM: As opposed to the Nazis and all the rest of it. GR: But the fact is, so you are in Germany, and you’ve got Hitler, yeah, we’re going to invade Britain and do this, do that, but you can send a telegram. So, it goes from Germany oh yes, certainly a lot of it went through Switzerland through the Red Cross. AM: [inaudible as speaking at same time] RH: Yeah. GR: But you got the telegram in England, are you okay? Is everything alright? RH: Yeah, yeah. AM: What did you do then after the war then, after you’d been demobbed? RH: I became a civil servant. AM: Which bit? Which, which department? RH: The Home, Home office— AM: Oh. RH: Was the governing training department but again [coughs] it was, it was, it civil defence training I sort of followed on, I and my brother we were lucky having a father in it. [laughs] AM: Not what you know, but who you know. RH: Yeah, well yeah, well you had to go through selection board. AM: There was always full fair and open competition and all that, allegedly weren’t it. I’m just looking at this, the warrant on the wall here, which is? RH: The what? AM: I’m looking for the year, 1962. RH: That was commission— AM: You became a, well you tell me what it is? RH: Yeah, I was commissioned in the volunteer reserve training branch here. AM: Ah ha. RH: The Air Training Corps. AM: As a pilot officer. RH: Yeah. Eventually I was a flight lieutenant. AM: Yeah, crikey. Well I think on that note we’ll switch off. RH: Have you been recording all— Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Richard Harrison Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-11-16 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 01:07:06 audio recording Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context AHarrisonR151116 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Civilian Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Pending review Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Egypt Germany Great Britain Italy Italy--Sicily North Africa Temporal Coverage Temporal characteristics of the resource. 1942 1943 1944 1965 Description An account of the resource Richard Harrison was born in Cologne in 1924 to a German mother and English father. His desire to be aircrew was thwarted initially by a failed medical, something he later surmises could be on account of his mother’s nationality. A member of the Air Raid Precautions, Home Guard and Air Training Corps, he was called up in 1942. He was posted to RAF Tempsford, base for Special Duty Squadrons 161 and 138, who dropped supplies and people for the resistance. In 1943 he was posted to Sicily in the RAF Regiment Squadron for anti-parachute troop duties and then to Italy. He successfully applied to join the Desert Air Force and had air gunner training at El Ballah in Egypt. He went to Palestine as a rear gunner on a Wellington for the Operational Training Unit, followed by the 1675 Heavy Conversion Unit in Egypt with B-24 . His first operation was in Italy. After VE Day, they transported supplies and troops. After the war, he worked as a civil servant in the Home Office. In 1962, he was commissioned as a pilot officer in the Air Training Corps and, eventually, became a flight lieutenant Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Annie Moody Gary Rushbrooke Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Cathie Hewitt Sally Coulter Maureen Clarke Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive 138 Squadron 161 Squadron 70 Squadron air gunner aircrew B-24 bombing civil defence crewing up Heavy Conversion Unit Home Guard Operational Training Unit RAF Tempsford Resistance training Wellington https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/307/3464/AMooreWT160703.1.mp3 6fa0b673061052f9a9f442da1a4176b2 https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/307/3464/PMooreWT1506.1.jpg ba450a2587f7d4bdd809b39eda3c5fa9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Moore, Bill William Tait Moore William T Moore William Moore W T Moore W Moore Description An account of the resource Eight items. Three oral history interviews with William Tait "Bill" Moore (1924 - 2019, 1823072 Royal Air Force) and five photographs. He served as a navigator with 138 Squadron. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-07-28 2016-03-18 2016-07-06 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Interview Agreement Form - Moore, WT, William Moore-03 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Moore, WT Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document TO: Right, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, whatever the case may be. This interview is being filmed for the International Bomber Command Centre. The gentleman I’m interviewing is Mr Bill Moore. My name is Thomas Ozel and we’re recording this interview on the 3rd of July 2016. Now, could you please tell me what year you were born? WM: 1924. TO: Mhm. And when you were a child, were you interested in aircraft? WM: The first time I was introduced to the aircraft was when I was taken to Guyun [?] Southern Highlander’s annual camp and that was when I came in contact with my, my first aircraft. And at that time, I was a drummer [?] boy in a band [?], and at that time my father had made me eighteen month older and I was supposed to be because otherwise I would have been too young to have went to the camp with men. As a matter of fact, that eighteen months stood by me for the rest of my life. TO: And whereabouts did you grow up? WM: I grew up in a town called Dunoon which is on the Firth of Clyde in Argyllshire in Scotland. TO: And were your parents involved in the First World War? WM: My father was, yes. As a matter of fact I just told somebody the other day, that I knew where my father was a hundred years ago. In other words, he was right through the whole of the First World War. He was a great battles, the Battles of Boulogne [?], first and the second one, and also the one that was also celebrated this week. And then he was actually taken prisoner by German forces and he was taken to Poland, and he worked in Poland there and that was, and that was until the armistice came along. In other words, he had about, he about between six and nine months as a prisoner of war, mm. TO: And what was your first job? WM: My first job, all depends how you mean your first job. If you mean your first job when you started doing [emphasis] something and getting paid for it, well I was delivering milk and newspapers in the morning. Later on I delivered butcher, butcher meats and I delivered the evening papers, and among one of the most famous characters I delivered to was Sir Harry Lauder, who was a very famous Scottish singer and comedian. And every time I went there I got a farthing [emphasis] each time, which meant that I got a fully penny in one day, but that was four farthings. And I did that from, from Monday to Saturday. And anyway, after that of course I left school, but I left school when I was thirteen. The reason I left school when I was thirteen was because it was during the Great Depression years and every penny my family could earn was to be encouraged because people needed it to survive [emphasis], although my father was always in work, but that was about it because I used to come in. And that was what my mother saved the money so that I could have my school books paid for, instead of, instead of waiting for someone to pass on second hand books to me. TO: And in the 1930s, did you hear about Hitler’s aggressive behaviour? WM: Well yes. As a matter of fact, of course I did, but it was quite, quite strange. Go back further than that, when I was a young boy, I was in what we called the Boys Brigade, which was just an organisation but it was started, it started way back in 1883 by a chap called William Smith, and the uniform they had then [emphasis] was, was taken more or less from the Third Lanark Rifle Volunteers in Scotland. It wasn’t military but the idea was for discipline, because in those days Scotland, Scotland and discipline was two things that people wanted, although with me, that was many years later. I did not meet Sir William Smith himself but I knew both of his sons who carried on the Boys Brigade after him, and also I met Mrs McVicker in Belfast in Northern Ireland when I used to take the Boys Brigade myself [emphasis] over there, and that, that was, she was the, she was the wife of the founder of the Boys Brigade in Northern Ireland. When I joined the Boys Brigade it was through the Life Boys, which was a genuine organisation. I went through there and I went right through the Boys Brigade, and at my age, I’m still a member of the Boys Brigade Greater World Fellowship. TO: Would you mind if I just closed the window? WM: No, carry on, yeah. TO: Is that okay? WM: Oh, you might get the traffic, yeah. TO: Yeah, is that okay? WM: Yeah, carry on [pause while window is closed]. That’s okay. TO: Okay, thank you. And what did you think, what did you think of Chamberlain? WM: Well first of all, going back before Chamberlain’s time and before he was making speeches, what I was saying is we used to look at news reels and we used to see about all the equipment that the German boys and girls were getting, and at times we were quite envious of it, because there was gymnastics, there was gymnastics, I was swimming, I was hiking, I was doing all these same things as, as a, the German Youth were there. Maybe not so severely [emphasis], but that was where the Boys Brigade, as I’ve just said. TO: Mhm. Sorry, there’s a noise coming from the kitchen. Is it okay if I shut the door to there as well? WM: Yes, yes, yes – TO: Sorry [door closes]. WM: Can you stick that through? TO: Sorry. WM: You could get a nickel [?]. TO: Yeah [pause during continued background noise]. Sorry about this, sorry. And what did you think of the Munich Agreement? WM: Well, put it, put it this way. What did happen was that I think growing up at that particular time, we weren’t really interested too much in politics, but then we began to gather that things were getting rather serious. And the big thing that was going around at that time was, was people sincere? And there’d been so many promises broken that, and I’m talking about Scotland now, was the people in Scotland at that time just said, ‘well if, if these people keep on breaking promises, what’s, what’s the Prime Minister going to do? Is he going to be leaving it [could be believing it].’ And of course, it seems, it seemed to us at that particular time that he was being foreborstered [?], brainwashed and as if he was being used as, as they all were in those days was, is a patsy. TO: And what did you think of Churchill? WM: Well, Churchill in the early days was quite a hero [emphasis] because he was a type of fellow who had been through the Boer War, he’d been through the, through the First World War and of course he was still a fiery rebel as far as politics were going as, at that time in the UK. TO: And do you remember the preparations that were being made for war? WM: Well, it all depends on who’s side you mean, because the big thing that we noticed, and that was that where, where the German forces were going over [?], taking over different places. Some of them were, were considered to be German lands of former times, but, but even when they came to Austria and they were welcomed into Austria, at times we wondered whether there were other people there who weren’t quite happy about it, with this, you know? But it wasn’t ‘til, it wasn’t ‘til as we say, clouds [?] are going that, and horizon, as if the, all the promises that were given, made were just null and void. The reason we said that was at that particular time was because the fact was that even, even being with Chamberlain, trying to negotiate [emphasis], and of course France as well were negotiations to see if they could actually bring about a more sensible [emphasis] approach, ‘cause people like my father said that the terms of various things that had been laid in after [emphasis] the First World War were so severe that it was almost impossible for the, for the German people not [emphasis] to revolt against these conditions, and of course this is what people were thinking in the UK at that particular time, was that that’s what they were trying to do was just to regain what had been lost. But of course later on when it came into the, these negotiations that they had, nobody was very sure [emphasis] whether that Chamberlain was playing for time or not. It could have been, it could have been a great strategy on his [emphasis] part. Many people think it was, many people think that he was quite gullible. But if one reads on the history of the Royal Air Force, well the Royal Air Force was starting an amalgamation between the, the Fleet Air Arm, or the Naval Services. The Naval Service became the Royal Air Force and that was 1918. Now, with that coming on, we noticed as young people, we noticed that there was different things happening [emphasis], and also, I remember at one time I noticed that the, the talk was about different types of aircraft, ‘cause that was through the magazine I used to subscribe to. And then of course what happened, I was in the school cadets in my grammar school in Dunoon and we, we were the Army cadets, and of course we wore the kilt et cetera, the same as the local Hern [?] Division, and the Guyun [?] Southern Highlanders. Anyway, I, I started thinking about aeroplanes and there was an organisation just started up which was called the Air Defence Cadet Corps. Well this Air Defence Corps, Cadet Corps, the nearest place to Dunoon where I was, was at what is now Glasgow Airport, and I had to find a handout, to find the money for to go in the boat and train and go up there and attend the lectures et cetera what was necessary to do to be a member of the Air Defence Cadet Corps. Anyway, of course along came different aircraft that we saw, and the, the first of the new [emphasis] ones that I saw and touched was the Wellington Bombers, and that Wellington Bomber came up to me, to Abbotsinch, which is, as I said, Glasgow Airport. Abbotsinch I managed to walk through it and I was absolutely taken with it. As a matter of fact I felt as if I’d fallen in love with it. And then of course what happened, things went from one to another, and then of course along came, along came the Polish incident and with that Polish incident of course it was followed very closely in Scotland because the people of Scotland, people of Poland were always very close [emphasis]. A lot of people don’t realise [emphasis] that but it was a fact, because I always remember that they used to send boxes of eggs from Poland and what we used to do, we used to buy these boxes, these crates, and we’d turn them into canoes that we, that we lined with canvas, and we used to sail in the Clyde. But that, you know, that was, that was our knowledge of in Poland on that day, apart from what I’d been told by my father. Anyway, what happened was along came, along came, as I say, with the trouble in Poland, and of course, then of course the First World, the Second World War started and at that time, being in the Boys Brigade and being in the Air Cadet Defence Corps, I was nominated as a member of the ARP, the Air Raids Precautions people, as a messenger. Then that was fine, that was alright but I still had to go to my lessons with the Cadets, but that was alright, everybody carried on. That carried on and then of course along came, along came 1941 [emphasis] and that was when the Air Training Corps started, and I, I went along. I had to say I was finished with the Air Defence Cadet Corps which everybody else [emphasis] was, and we signed up for the Air Training Corps. That was quite strange, that was on a Monday night, and I went back along on the Friday [emphasis] night at the first official meeting, and we fell in and we fell in ranks according to sizes et cetera, et cetera, and I was made a flight sergeant. And the reason was that, I asked them and said ‘oh no, you’ve had training [emphasis] in the Air Defence Cadet Corps, so you know probably more about it than instructors do,’ because they were all school teachers who had volunteered to do that cadet work, and of course being made a flight sergeant, without uniform of course, it took a wee while to get uniforms, but that was it, and that was, that was me well and truly a part of the Royal Air Force. Anyway, that went down very well and I passed all the examinations. My aim was to become a member of aircrew. I fancied that, not just the glamour of it but there was a practical side. Anyway the, along came a day when I went along to Edinburgh and I took all my papers, exam papers and everything else, and bearing in mind that I was a year and a half older than I was on paper than I was supposed to be, and when I got into Edinburgh the chap says to me, ‘are you sure [emphasis]?’ I said ‘yes.’ He said ‘what you were doing?’ So I told him, he says ‘oh, that seems alright,’ he says ‘alright,’ he says ‘we want you to go along to this hotel and you stay there and you come back here in the morning, and you go there and you find that you’ll be registered and et cetera, et cetera.’ So I did that, go back there the next day and there were one or two other chaps around that I knew, and we, we went in again [emphasis] and we had exams to take and tests to take and, a by the time the day was finished I was a member of the Royal Air Force, and what they did to us was that they gave us a little silver badge that we, we had to wear at all times. And that was to show that we were a fully fledged member of the Royal Air Force, and all we had to do then was just wait until they were ready to take us in [emphasis]. And it wasn’t, it wasn’t being called up for National Service, we were all volunteers of course, which is a big difference because we were already members, voluntary members, and of course the, joining the Air Force like that you volunteered. But as I say, after that, once you’re in, you didn’t get to volunteer again [laughs]. You, you’re then volunteered [emphasis, laughs]. TO: And do you remember what you were doing on the day the war started? WM: The day the war started, yes [tape beeps]. It was a Sunday morning and I was at a bible class in Dunoon, and shortly after that the sirens went and we all had to go to a post. And with us at that particular time, as I say, I was with the ARP. So we had to go there and be ready for to, for to be messengers. That was what, that was what my job was then, to be a messenger [emphasis], so I had to go to my post, which we all knew where we had to go to, and that was it. But after the all clear went then we stood down again, no, mm. But of course there was, was times when there were raids on the Clyde and all the rest of it later on, and my compatriots had a lot of hair raising activities. Most of that by that time I was, I was in the Royal Air Force. TO: And was there much bomb damage or bombing around where you lived? WM: Well, not so much on my [emphasis] side of the Clyde but across the water on the Firth, right from Greenock and Glasgow, Greenock and Port Glasgow, right up the Clyde, right up to Clydebank into Glasgow itself. Oh yes, all the industrial areas. There was quite a lot of very heavy damage, yes. TO: And when the war started, were you, were you expecting that German bombers would be coming on the first day? WM: Oh yes, well that was, that was it. It wasn’t, it wasn’t long after that there was a couple of raids that was, that was, that came across Scotland before there was even, even them in England, yes. TO: And how did you actually feel when you heard the war had started? WM: Well, put it this way, with having quite a knowledge from my father about his experiences, and what we had, what we had actually seen on the news reels about Poland, and I really mean about Poland, that was when we realised what could happen, yeah. TO: And did you watch news reels a lot at the cinema? WM: Oh yes, oh yes. Yeah, when you went to the, when you went to the cinemas there was always, always a portion for the news reels at the beginning of every performance, and that was very good. The news reels were very good, they, they brought everything to you, mm [papers shuffle]. TO: And so when you volunteered for aircrew, what kind of medical tests did they give you? WM: Well, you had, you had a full medical. You know, you had blood, heart, you had all sorts of things done and then, you even had a type, a place where it was called up [?] on night vision. We never knew about night vision in those days and we were told, told about that and you had a test to see whether you could, you could see and come back again and your vision – you had, you were taken into a darkened room and they had various sort of tests they gave you in there, including different things and different numbers and the results was in different colours [emphasis], and if you, if you, if you could identify these things through these different colours then that meant that your, that your night vision was quite good, and you passed and you could identify then, then you’re dropped out. ‘Cause that was one of the main things at that particular time, was night vision. TO: And what role did you train for aboard, in aircrew? WM: Sorry? TO: What, what position, as in, were you trained for? WM: Well you see, when I went to Edinburgh I was classified PNB, pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, you know, the idea being that you selected for that term [?]. Anyway, what happened then was that I was called, called to the colours, not called up, I was called to the colours which once again, as I say, was different from being called up for National Service, very proud of that of course. Anyway, I, I got a notification to go to London and there I went to, to Lords Cricket Ground and, with many other people. There was one or two people that I’d met on the train, met down there before, went inside and some of these fellows I still know today, which is quite amazing. Anyway, what happened there in, in, at Lourdes, you – and there is a big plaque there today, big black plaque indicating that was where the aircrew was at that particular time. Going back to that, we had further [emphasis] tests and, I suppose to see whether anything had happened in between times, and then we, we got all the usual jabs for left and right, two arms up together and that one and that one going along r at the same time and, and then you had FFIs and things like that, and then of course you came along to another [emphasis] big room and that’s where you started getting your uniform. And there was a system [?] what you’re gonna get, when you’re gonna get, and by the time you got to the end you wonder if you’re able to carry everything, you know. Anyway, we all managed to get there, and at the end of that we were introduced to a corporal, two stripes. Now, we thought that was a high rank [phone rings], oh – TO: Is that a phone call? WM: I’d better take it. Sorry about that [tape beeps]. It’s a bummer [?] – TO: Hmm, anyway – WM: Anyway. TO: So you spoke to her [unclear] – WM: So anyway, as I was saying, we, we were then under this corporal [laughs]. He, he told us that he would be looking after us in more ways than one [emphasis] for the, for the next few days. Anyway, we went along in London to a place called Avenue Close which was a new block of flats in St. John’s Wood which had been built and never been occupied, and the Royal Air Force used that for all their new recruits, and, but there’s no, there’s no canteen facilities there, no mess hall, and we went across to Regent Park’s zoo where we dined. The animals had been evacuated and we were there in place of the animals [laughs]. TO: And did you train to be a navigator? WM: Put it, put it this way, what happens, all depends how deep you want me to go into this, I don’t know. Anyway, what happened was that we had to, we had to pass more, several tests there. They were very strenuous, very strenuous, extremely strenuous, you know. And then of course we were there for about a week, and we were all setting off to different places and the group that I went with was up into the north east of England, to a town called Scarborough where they had quite a number of initial training wings. And what they were, they were just like boarding schools [laughs], certainly a little bit different but that’s what we took them to be. It was just like going back to school or college and starting all over again, and my one was number seventeen, and I was in what we called the Odelpha [?] Hotel, which is a hotel right opposite the Italian gardens in Scarborough. Now, there we studied navigation, theories of flight, engines, just about everything, even how to use a knife and fork in the mess, and that is quite true [laughs]. That seems quite a thing but that was quite true [laughs]. But that was a little on the side [?] there. But we actually studied all of these things, and at the same time we had to do guard duties and various other things like that, and there was two or three times when we were there, there were air raids go on and even a time when there was suspected that we might have had a German couple of U-boats in, about eight boats coming along and they expected them to come up and be looking for certain people that were there on that shore [?] there, people who had been at a conference and we were all turned out for that. They didn’t tell us very much about it but later on we heard it was Churchill and the cabinet members in the Retreat as they call it nowadays. Anyway, but that was, we didn’t know anything, why it was [unclear]. Anyway, what happened was that we had to sit the final exams and everybody in there was doing the same exams, you know? Anyway, what happened after, I passed, I pass through that quite successfully and I was waiting a posting. My posting then was a place called Scone [pronounced Scun], not Scone, Scone [pronounce Scun, emphasis], which is just, just outside of Perth in Scotland and that was where you got to learn to fly on Tiger Moths. Now, when you flew in Tiger Moths up there, we had already been classified from ACs to AC1s and when we, we went up to Scone, actually passed Scone in the Tiger Moths and we thought we could be trusted to do a couple of circuits and you came back down. They didn’t give you wings in those days, they gave you a propeller, always a propeller on your left sleeve, and then we became a leading aircraftsman, which was your first step up. Anyway, what happened after that, I, I was sent from there all the, all the kit bags and everything, and I was sent to a place called Broughton-in-Furness. Broughton-in-Furness, it was like a commander course, only the Royal Air Force calls it an escape course, and you did everything on there that you could possibly do if you were trying to escape. It was always put down to you in the Air Force that you had to try and escape if you were taken prisoner. That was, that was a thing. It was always drilled into you, if you could get back, so much the better. Anyway, that was, that was all about. When that was finished I went to a place called Heaton Park in Manchester. Now, Heaton Park in Manchester, it was mostly Nissan huts, the old corrugated iron ones, you know? And sometimes you also got billeted out with the local people, sometimes you’re lucky and you did both. Well we, we were quite lucky. We were billeted out, and just within a stone’s throw off Heaton Park [laughs], and we, we were with a landlady whose husband was in the Middle East at that time, and we used to pay her half a crown, was two shillings and sixpence in those days and that was for, to leave the snub [?] off the window so that we could lift the window sash up and crawl in after half past ten at night. Well she used to make, she used to make a cup of bronzer [?] up for that [laughs], because she had let out two rooms and that was eight of us in her house, yeah. Anyway, the, everybody knew it happened, but you’re [unclear] to be in by eleven. It was just in case you had trouble getting back you know. Anyway, if you were in the main camp, you had to make sure you were in at half ten at night [laughs]. Anyway, after that we were, we were taken back into the camp, and this was a big camp. There was hundreds of people in there and guesses – we didn’t do a lot of paperwork there but we did a lot of physical training, marching, all that sort of thing, and every time the, every time the Royal Air Force tunes went up you had to march to attention. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you had to march to attention. Anyway, what happened after that, you got your uniform. Now, if you were going to, to South Africa, we, we began to learn these things, you went to South Africa you get tropical kit but long [emphasis] trousers. If you were going to Rhodesia, you get tropical kits with short [emphasis] trousers. If you’re going to America, you more or less get issued with civvies, as we called them, and if you were going to Canada then you were alright. Anyway, what happened to us was that we got issued with short trousers and we said ‘oh no, we know what we are [?], we’re going to Rhodesia. That’s pilot training,’ et cetera, et cetera. Good, anyway, we got shipped out, we were on a ship called The Andes [emphasis]. You’ll see a little thing there – TO: Oh yes. WM: Andes, you know, ship. TO: Oh right. WM: And I’ll show you it afterwards. TO: Yeah, show me it afterwards. WM: But what it was, was this ship, The Andes was brand new in the Clyde in nineteen, 1939, and it disappeared then came back again all painted grey, but where we [emphasis] met it, we met her in Liverpool. And this friend of mine, Alec Care, we must have joined up, helped each other, and we were on the ship and we said ‘bye-bye’ to Liverpool. There’s the – ‘bye-bye, bye-bye,’ you know, and we sailed down the Mersey. Anyway, a while after that we, I judged that we had been round the head of Northern Ireland, go down the west coast, and now they could, well according to roughly the speed of the ship and that, and we’d be near the Bay of Biscay. All of a sudden night fell and I said to my friend, ‘Alec, this boat’s going the wrong way.’ He said ‘you and your Clyde navigation.’ I said, ‘this boat’s going the wrong way [emphasis], we’re now going back north.’ So we ended back up in the Mersey again. Then what happened, we got in there because I suppose they got word there was a pack of U-boats around, you know, and that’s why they changed us. Anyway, we got up into the Mersey and looked across and I said to Alec, I said, ‘there’s the five-three-four over there.’ He says, ‘what’s a five-three-four?’ I say, ‘I’m not telling you, you might be a spy.’ He says, ‘euch.’ I says ‘oh, that’s a five-three-four.’ He says, ‘come on Bill, what is it?’ And I say, ‘that’s the Queen Mary.’ ‘Oh.’ Anyway, we admired this big ship because, well I knew her from the Clyde right from when one of my great uncles was helping to build here. Anyway, there she was. Anyway, we, we had a meal there, and the next thing we heard was the whistle went, ‘all RAF personnel so and so and so and so,’ went ‘oh that’s us, what’s happened now? Oh.’ ‘Get all your kit together, assemble here in, in fifteen minutes.’ ‘Oh boy that was, that was quick.’ ‘Cause you hadn’t, hadn’t taken in any kit bag, was just us, you stood up so it was just a matter of taking your kit bags and going to deck. We were then taken across onto the Queen Mary, and we were weighed [?] down so far in I thought we were going to go to New Zealand or somewhere, and [laughs] – anyway, the Queen Mary set off and a few days later we were in New York [emphasis]. We didn’t see a lot of New York, we had a bit of leave time on the promise that we wouldn’t be late coming back, so that was good, and we got on a train and we went up to Moncton, New Brunswick. All the way up to Canada by train which was a great experience for us, ‘cause the first thing we noticed was the food. Now, there was nothing rationed, this was American trains and we were getting the best of everything. Anyway, we got to Moncton, New Brunswick and the, and we were not given any winter clothing because we were still in this kit that we thought we were going to Rhodesia, so anyway [laughs], for two or three days we walked about up there and they used to call us ‘Scors’ because we were walking around with blankets on us to keep us warm, mm [laughs]. Anyway, that was, that was all part of the trials and tribulations. Then of course was, we were told to fall in and you, you, you’re told that you’re now going to a training station. They didn’t tell you where you were going, they just told you’re going to a training station. So we got on a train, and this was the Canadian national railways and we said, ‘well, Canadian pacific goes that side and nation [?] is that side, mm, oh well, fair enough.’ So we landed up in Winnipeg, went all the way through to Winnipeg, then we got off that [emphasis] train and we went up to another [emphasis] one, up past Portage la Prairie and then the railway finished so we got, we got on we’ll call it a bus [emphasis], and this took us up to Dauphin, Manitoba and then we, we were at Paulson and Dauphin and there we did bombing and gunnery training. We did all these sort of elements again that, that everyone had to go through the same things, and then the next round of course we did, we did flying training and, and then of course we did the navigation, another step up. That was fine and we were still all together, no deviations. Then of course we passed all that and I had a, I had an excellent, I had an excellent bombing record, really excellent one if I say so myself, you know. Anyway, next thing we knew, we graduated from there. You had to pass, it was a hundred percent pass, you know, there was always people dropping out and, but we carried on and we went, we went down, down [emphasis] the line to Portage la Prairie. Portage on the Prairie, that was – now that there [emphasis] was the school for air observers, you know? That was number seventeen air observer school, Portage la Prairie, and there of course we, we got changed around a bit. I was told that I was a good candidate for, to be air observer. I said, ‘how about piloting?’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘if you’re an observer you’ll get to fly as well. You’ll get to pilot as well,’ you know. I said ‘well that’s okay.’ He did really ‘cause you were told [emphasis], you know? Anyway, I graduated from there. I got my wings there, and eventually, eventually ‘cause we [coughs], we went back to Moncton, New Brunswick and we got on a ship to come back to the UK and that ship I recognised as [laughs] the Empress of Japan. I said to my friend, I said ‘I don’t like that name, Empress of Japan,’ you know. We got up beside it and it’s now called the Empress of Scotland [laughs]. They had changed its name. Now this was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, so we come back, we come back across the Atlantic, the North Atlantic, and we sailed up the Clyde and eventually we went to a place called Harrogate. So Harrogate we were more or less brought back to earth again. Rations of course still, instead of the food we’d been having in Canada and that, you know, America. And we, we then – well the [laughs]. It was quite strange, they gave us another FFI to see if we’re alright and we’re okay that way, and another medicals to see if we’re alright, you know? And the next thing I knew, I was, I was in a detour [?], so my friend went that way and I went that way, so that was it. Anyway, I landed up at a place which is just outside of Wolverhampton, and this was an advanced navigation and low flying school called Halfpenny Green. Now, quite a number of years ago they made a film there and then called it “Halfpenny Field,” but it was Halfpenny Green [emphasis], and today it’s been nominated to be Wolverhampton Airport. Anyway, what we were doing there is that we were taught low lying pass flying, landing on beaches, landing on small areas and we wondered why this was all about, you know? But anyway, we didn’t ask any questions, you just did as you’re told and [laughs], ‘cause you’ve already volunteered [laughs]. Anyway, that was it and we [unclear] was successful, it was, it was excellent. We [tape beeps] treetops. We were making bomb, making, making bomb attacks on the railway bridges across the Severn and even, even the RAF stations that knew we were coming but of course they weren’t open up at us ‘cause they knew it was an exercise, and all various target like that. And also as I say, we were learning to land on short, short runways or grass and beaches and all sorts of fancy things like that. Anyway, this was all preparation because what you didn’t realise that you were, you were being selected there, and that was, that was when I was, I felt as if there was something, something strange [emphasis] about all of this because everybody was going to do different things, and that was where, where, where we were taken aside one day and told out where we were going to, you know? And some of the, some of the chaps went one way and I went another way and I landed up in this aerodrome which the first thing I had to do was sign the Secrets Act all over [emphasis] again, because you’d always, everybody signed it but this was what they called a double one, extremely secret, you know? Now, with that all I could see around this place was a multitude of different types of aircraft [laughs]. So we wondered what this was all about. Normally you went to an air station there would be two different types or something like that but on this particular one there was several, you know? And, and of course [laughs, pause] what we, erm, I’ll bring it back [pause], hmm. TO: Was this for the SOE? WM: Yeah, this is, this is, this is really the beginning of the training for that, you know? Well the, we had been doing the training, you know, and of course, as I say, when we were, what we were doing this sort of thing, you see, the secrecy that was coming up, we really wondered what we were, what we were doing [emphasis], you know? Anyway, we were told then that we had joined 138 Squadron, you know? Now, just like everything else, nobody ever knew what 138 Squadron was doing or any other squadron, but we soon began to find out what it was. And it always seemed strange at the beginning that no one would tell us much and we began to wonder what we were doing there, and we were, we were confined to the station. We were confined to the station for at least two weeks [laughs]. Anyway, that’s what we, what we were doing then was we were, we were learning to fly once again low level at night time. We had to do all sorts of things and [pause] we just – oh we were introduced, we were introduced to people who were pilots and, and aircrew and to us, you know, they were a bit rag tag and bob tailed by the looks of them, they were, they weren’t exactly all spick and span like we expected us to be, you know [laughs]. Anyway, excuse me a minute. TO: It’s okay [tape paused and restarted]. WM: We were introduced to groups of people and we were told that ‘you’ll fly with this one and fly with that one, but you might fly in two different ones on the same night.’ ‘Oh, that’s alright.’ ‘So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to introduce everybody, but just remember that when you do get introduced is that, remember what you’re signed [?].’ ‘Cause there was a secret come out, we were at Tempsford. That was the home of the flights for the SOE, and of course there again that was the reason why all these different odd aircraft was lined [?] up, was that they were used for different purposes. Later on what we used to say, we used to say that Bomber Harris used to send over there all the old junk that he didn’t want on Bomber Command [laughs]. Anyway, what happened then was as I say, you got to know the different colours ‘cause by that time, as I, as I, as I say, I was, I was classified and reclassified into what I was doing and this was observer, and that was what I graduated as, and of course I still kept up my flying skills. That’s another story, I’ll come back to that. But anyway, there we were and we, we had one or two short flights with different pilots [phone rings] and we got to know – [tape beeps]. TO: No problem. WM: No, when we, when we flew with these different chaps, they got to know us, we got to know them and each had their own specialities, and what used to happen then was once, once the powers that be realised that you could do [emphasis] what you’re supposed to be able to do on paper, then they would trust you with an operation. The reason being was that we were using the fields or pieces of, strips of roads or even, even old glider fields, we had to land, and it wasn’t always the best of territory ‘cause we did this with Lysanders which was the single engine one, you know? I got lots of pictures of Lysanders over there somewhere, mm, and the idea being there’s, is that when – you were given a map reference, and you had to study that map reference very carefully. And we never [emphasis] tried to find out how our passengers were, and they didn’t try and find out who we were. There was no communication. The reason being is if we got shot down, or either of us got taken prisoners you couldn’t, you couldn’t tell them about the other ones, alright? ‘Cause the ACA [?] people were considered to be a different category from what, even what we were, and we were a different category from them entirely, and we were a different category from normal aircrew, and even – that was known in Germany, that was known. Don’t tell me how they got to know but that’s another story. Anyway, we did, we did several of these operations. We were taking people out and sometimes it was a matter of taking two people or three people about. Squash, it was a bit of a squeeze in the, in the Lysander but we weren’t [?] gonna enjoy the ride, and all I could say was all the trips that I made was very successful, and I flew with certainly [?] different pilots from time to time on that. Then of course likewise they had different observers, you know? But we had great faith in each other, and the navigation aids that we had was elementary map reading, night flying et cetera. We didn’t have the joy of T and all the other things that came up later on. We were actually doing it like the old time pilot, many, many years before. TO: I don’t know how much detail you can tell me about this, but when you brought these agents over from Britain to Europe, did you have a certain, were you, did you have an arranged landing field? WM: Oh yes, when we, you know, same thing [?] we left, we left Tempsford. Well, I knew where we were going [emphasis], I had to know where we were going, and the pilot knew where he was going but I took him there, you know? I took him there, passengers there. Well these passengers were known to be coming. There would be a reception committee ready for them to whisk them away as soon as they were on the ground, oh yes. There was a good communications, yes. TO: And did you ever see any German aircraft when you were flying on these missions? WM: Oh yes, yes. There’s – oh we, well, put it this way. In those days we were flying low [emphasis], very low, and we weren’t too bothered about it. Now and again you run into a bit of trouble, but the night fighters was mostly come to different bits, I’ll tell you more about that, alright? But the, even, even by all the secrets that we had, there was a terrible tragedy that happened through the London office where somebody infiltrated into the London office SOE, and they, they gave away people on the ground, and they were just massacred. But you know, that was one of those terrible things about that, and that was country man to country man, and I’m sorry to say that was in Holland, mm. But we, we, we never knew exactly how our people got on, alright, or if we were picking somebody up and taking them back to the UK, as soon as we landed back at Tempsford they were taken away and we never saw them again, but they were taken away to their different places like that. Quite strange to say there was a big house just quite near here where, where they used to go back you, you know? Did – TO: Did you, sorry. WM: No. TO: Did you – it’s an odd question, but did you get a sense of pride knowing you were helping secret agents? WM: Oh yes [emphasis], yes. Well as a matter of fact, we, we felt we were doing a good job that way, because the thing was nobody, nobody heard about it, but we knew what was going on, sometimes by results. We got, you know, we got to know back, back on the station how well the people that we had delivered had reacted to what was going on, ‘cause there was just a matter of them infiltrating back into populations and we never heard anything, but if it was a special operation they were going to do, someone would say well, ‘well done chaps,’ or something like that, you know? TO: So what, what, do you know what year it was that you started helping SOE with this? WM: 1942. TO: And was it just western Europe you went to? WM: Well, well put it this way, what happened after, after a while, we started getting different aircraft, ‘cause in our station we used all the old stuff, Whitleys and things like that and various other ones like that, vintage. Then of course we got, we got one or two of the American ones come in, you know? And there was one time that we were delivering stuff to the Maquis. Now the Maquis was different from SOE, Maquis’s French. So what we were doing, we were delivering guns and ammunition, there was a full load in a Hudson. Now the Hudson was an American aircraft that was designed to land in the prairies, naturally [?] on good tarmac runways, but anywhere a farmer would put up a windsock, that’s where they were designed to for, and one particular time we, we had this load of stuff, full load, and we had to land on this area and it turned out to be, it was an old glider drone where people used to learn to fly gliders [emphasis] in France, you know? ‘Cause where we were [?] about a hundred and eighty kilometres north east of Colonia [?], you know? As near as I can tell you about that one, ‘cause a lot of stuff’s still secret. Now that is fact. TO: Mm. WM: Anyway, what happened was that we, we landed safely, we turned around and as we turned around to face to go out again, we began to sink. Anyway, I said to Nobby who was the skipper, I said ‘Nobby I don’t like this.’ He said ‘aye, you’ll be alright Bill, we’ll get rid of all this rubbish, we’ll be alright.’ So anyway, the Maquis came out the bush, as I call it, took all this stuff away. They disappeared and then the, the lady who’s in charge of that section, she came and she says, ‘what’s troubling you?’ I says ‘I don’t think we’re going to get out of here.’ So we got the sticky bombs ready for, to stick it to the aircraft and blow it up, and she said ‘ah, I’ll see if I can get the villagers up, push you out,’ you know, just like that. Anyway, she went back to the village. Now, normally we were aware on the ground about fifteen, twenty minutes at the most ‘cause anything after than that was dangerous, yeah, you know? She went down and she got the villagers up and it was quite a way away, but anyway, I asked [?] too many questions about that. Up she comes with the villagers, but on their way back they met the general sergeant who was in charge of the village, and he turns round and says to them, ‘now, all you people, you’ll be in trouble. You’re out here, it’s after curfew, you’re supposed to be in the village.’ And of course the idea was that she turned round and said to them, ‘but your big black aircraft is stuck in the mud and we’ve got to push it out, and the Gestapo says if we don’t push it out they’re going to shoot us all and you.’ So he says, ‘I’ll go and look after the village, you go and push the aircraft out.’ So in the end they got us out. We didn’t need to blow it up. TO: So just to clarify, were you stuck in the mud [emphasis]? WM: Aye, just going down, like that. TO: And how big was this aircraft? WM: Hudson. TO: And how – WM: Twin engine aircraft, hmm. TO: Were you ever scared during these missions? WM: Of course, yeah. But they, you don’t go like that you, you, gung ho, you know what I mean by gung ho? We weren’t gung ho. We prided ourselves on being professional. TO: And is there, are there any other occasions from your time with SOE that you are allowed to tell me about which you recall, a lot? WM: Oh yes, lots of things that we – as a matter of fact, during, we didn’t bring them all [emphasis] back, but during the time that we were there [emphasis] we brought back four chaps, four men, Frenchmen, who actually in later years turned out to become prime ministers, prime ministers of France, hmm. TO: And sorry, did – when you, what happened when you left SOE and started back on standard bombing missions? WM: Well anyway, what, what happened was we were always alternately from time to rime on different missions. It wasn’t as if we, we just jumped from one back into that one, but we were always, was always in the, always doing the missions. Sometimes it was only a few aircraft going out for a special mission, or sometimes, sometimes we joined up with the, a bomber stream. It all depends on how, how we were required, and we, a lot of our chaps became leading lights on the Pathfinders, because of our highly successful rates in navigating to targets. TO: And do you remember your first bombing mission? WM: Yeah, first, my first bombing mission was to Kiel, Kiel Canal, mm. And that, that, that was also for – the idea there was to try to block the canal from time to time. We, in the early days there wasn’t anything that we had big enough that could do [emphasis] it, but the idea used to be that if you could bomb something, you know, bomb ships or something like that, that would make traps in the canal, you know, then of course that, that would be a help on keeping stuff from going through it, you know, hmm. But, no we covered a high variety of trips, you know, oh yes. TO: And what aircraft were you in for these bombing missions? WM: Well first of all I was in, I was in Wellingtons, you know? We did a lot of Wellingtons and then of course we were onto Lancasters. We converted [?] onto Lancasters, mm. TO: And could you please describe the conditions inside a Wellington? WM: Well in the Wellington there was, it was rather cramped but we still considered it a good aircraft. And by that time we had six in the crew, and we, we had crewed up and we were flying together, but you know, it was just, it was just, there was no comfort, there was no comfort. Each person had their own little cubby hole or section [coughs] but that was all. But once you got up over ten thousand feet, then of course, then it gets a bit uncomfortable, you know? You’re always [?] trying to keep warm was the thing, you know? Then of course you’d all sorts of wires for – you had your air com [?], you had your oxygen masks, you had all these sorts of things, you know? And as I, as I say, it was, it was a lot, a lot colder than it was later on in the Lancasters and even the Halifaxes and Stirlings, mm. TO: And as an observer, what were you duties for the mission? WM: My duties – we were highly skilled navigators then. We were, we were a step above the, we were a step above the normal navigators, mm, yeah, because we did, we did everything. We did the whole job. It was the same thing as – at one time, what happened was that the, every aircraft had two pilots. Anyway, there came a time when they took one pilot away and then it was the observer that was the backup pilot, you know? Anyway, after that, after that when the big four engine jobs come out, the, they brought in the role of flight engineer, and the flight engineer was supposed to be able to fly, but the way I’d seen it right from very beginning was that I reckoned that I knew enough about flying, and I told people ‘as long as I can take her home and land it, that’s good enough for me’ [laughs]. TO: Slight side story, a few weeks ago I interviewed a man who was a flight engineer for Lancasters, and he said he was taught how to fly the plane but not how to land it. WM: Yeah well [laughs], well that’s the – my, my big thing was I was taught how to land them, yeah. And I had a good, had a good background in flying and piloting in the lighter aircraft, but then of course between the Wellingtons and the Lancasters and the, we had a – well we did it quite often. We did it as part of an air, sometimes, sometimes you went up for, to test your engines. You did that, you did that pretty often, or to see the rest of the aircraft, and I always took the opportunity to be able to land the aircraft. TO: And can you tell me a bit about Halifaxes? WM: Not a great deal. I didn’t do a lot of trips on Halifaxes but you know, she was also a good aircraft, but I know there’s, there’s friends of mine who, if you have an argument they say ‘ooh, it’s far better than a Lancaster’ and blah, blah, blah, but that’s only, the Halifax was a good aircraft. It couldn’t fly as high [emphasis] as a Lancaster and it wasn’t as fast as Lancaster but that was just about it, mm. TO: And what’s your take on Halifax versus Lancaster? WM: Oh [laughs] to me it was the Lancaster [laughs]. TO: And was the interior of a Lancaster different from that of a Halifax? WM: No, much the same, mm, much the same. It’s just the skin. TO: Mhm. WM: Just the skin, you know? You know, you know, everything was for bomb loads. TO: Mhm. And you mentioned something about Stirlings earlier. WM: Yeah. TO: What’s your take on them? WM: The Stirling was, she was the first of the heavies, and she was, she was quite slow [emphasis] and didn’t have a high ceiling rate, you know, but she did a good job in her day [?], oh yes. There was many, many a crew that did great work in Stirlings, oh. TO: There’s a D-Day veteran I spoke to a couple of years ago, his glider for D-Day was towed by a Stirling. WM: Oh yes [emphasis]. Well there was a lot of that. Halifaxes and Stirlings did a lot of glider towing, yeah, oh yes. TO: And what bombing mission of the war do you remember the most? WM: Er [pause]. Just, just before, just before the war finished we [tape beeps] there were two big ones, and that particular night our wing commander, Wing Commander Murray, who I’d known from Tempsford days, you know? He, he came along and he said he wanted to fly with us that night and be the captain, and he said, and I said ‘no, you can bugger off.’ It’s not we wanted [?] coming into aircrew, you know, taking over. ‘Cause I could say that to him because we’d flown together a lot. Anyway, he says ‘what happens if I don’t sit in the pilot’s seat.’ I said ‘alright then you can come along, that’s my seat’ [laughs]. I mean it was my seat when I was needed, yeah. I said ‘no you can come along and be second pilot,’ you know? But it was, it was, it was quite a thing. It was a place called Magdeburg, it was of the big ones that we were on, but several other big ones as well of course. I could, just hold that a minute? [Pause, tape beeps]. Now there was several big ones but the last, the last big one was Potsdam. That was a real big one, yeah. As a matter, matter of fact, that one was in the, in the fourteenth, fourteenth, 14th of April, so that was one of the last big ones, you know? And that was a night one, and there was another was on the 13th [emphasis] of April was another time we went to Kiel, and what had happened was the night before we went to Kiel, and we put this battleship and we sunk it, we turned it over, mm. And it came back but they wanted us to go back again, but one of the retorts was that night, one of the crews was, ‘I hear you don’t want us to put it back up again’ [laughs]. But that was a, and that actually blocked a canal, that actually blocked a canal, you know, ‘cause then of course one of the, one of the last of the big ones we did was to Bremen on the 20th and 22nd of April, you know, yeah. And course there was places like Merseburg and various other ones like that, you know? But this is something I keep to myself. TO: Okay. WM: You know? Because I got, you know, I’ve got – the way I look at it is, it’s not, not a thing we brag about, you know? It’s, it was wartime and that was it. And today I’ve got, I’ve got, I’ve got many friends across Europe and across Africa and they come from all sorts of walks of life and all sorts of countries. TO: Sorry, can I ask what happened to the wing commander who wanted to be on the flight? WM: Oh yes, oh well he came in the flight with us there and that was it, Wing Commander Murray. We were flying F for Freddie, yeah, and of course, well anyway, he was in charge of the squadron, you know? TO: Mhm. WM: And he stayed on the Air Force for a while, you know, and I lost touch with him, you know? TO: Mhm. WM: Because we’d been, we’d been quite good friends there, mm. But after the war, after the war was, you didn’t really go out of your way [emphasis] to keep in touch, although with my own crew [emphasis] in the Lancaster we have done. As a matter of fact even, even now [emphasis] one of my chaps in aircrew, a fellow called Jimmy Dagg, a New Zealander, his great grandson plays rugby for the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team. His name is Israel Dagg, mm. TO: And are, just in raids in Germany in general, how much anti-aircraft fire was there? WM: Oh plenty. As a, as a matter of fact, what a lot of people don’t realise was that the amount, the amount of German troops, and specialised German troops that had to be contained within Germany because of what the, the Bomber Command was doing. Now as a matter of fact, that was, it was, it was a surprising, there must have thousands upon thousands had to be retrained in Germany who could have been going somewhere else, and they were all very highly trained people, mm. TO: And did you ever encounter night fighters? WM: Oh yes a couple of times, but we were quite lucky. We, we managed to corkscrew away, but the night fighters, what you had to watch even more carefully than over, over a target area or on the way back was just before you landed, because there used to be quite a few of them that used to prowl round about aerodromes and airfields in this country, and waiting for people to come in ‘cause that’s when you’re, you’re, you’re most vulnerable, when everything was shut down. And there was quite a number of people that got shot down just before they landed. TO: And could you please tell me how this corkscrew evasive manoeuvre worked? WM: Well that’s, that’s just what it was, a corkscrew. You might have been flying more or less level or up and down a bit, and then the corkscrew was like that. That was a corkscrew, yeah. They got away, yeah, mm. TO: Did anyone in the crew ever get sick when that happened? WM: Oh yeah [emphasis], my mid upper gunner used to get sick as soon as he put his foot inside the aircraft [laughs]. Once we were still fly, still take off he was alright. TO: Mm. And did you ever, during the, did you ever find out how much, whether you’d hit the targets during the raids? WM: I know we did [emphasis]. As I say, one of my specialities was, was bombing. TO: But could you see photographs of it later? WM: Oh yes, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, mm, yeah. TO: And were you ever on raids to Berlin? WM: Yeah, mm. Oh yes, as I say, that was, that was, that was one that would come up quite often, mm [pause]. Hell [?], mm. TO: Sorry, you still okay for me to ask questions? WM: What? TO: Are you okay for me to ask questions? WM: Yes, yes. TO: ‘Cause just let me know if you want to stop. WM: No, no. TO: Okay. And what did you think of the German aircraft of the war? WM: Oh very good, excellent, yeah, excellent yeah. As a matter, as a matter, as a matter of fact, at the end of the war there was one, one German one, you know? And I thought, I thought at first it was a shooting star, you know? And it wasn’t, it was a jet, and it flew past me just as if it was a shooting star and when I went back to report on this, and they said ‘ah, it probably was a shooting star you saw.’ I said ‘no, no, no, no, this is an aeroplane.’ That was one of the areas [?] ones that we’d seen [?] and spotted, yeah, ‘cause, you know, you got debriefed after every, every trip. TO: Was there any ever occasions where you had to turn back from the target because of bad weather? WM: No, I was, we were alright. No, we didn’t, we never, we never turned back. Ground crew were every bit as good as our aircrew. TO: Mm. WM: They kept our aircraft in excellent [emphasis] condition. We never had any [emphasis] complaints about our ground crew, mm. TO: And you explain to me how the briefings worked for the missions? WM: Right, well what, what happened was that when, when you landed, when you landed you’re taken from the aircraft back into wing on, it was trucks, we used to call them crew trucks. So in other words you didn’t split up, you’re taken in, in a crew truck, and there you’re integrated and say how the trip went. And of course you had your version of what went on and then of course your cameras that you had in your aircraft also their versions, and we always seemed to marry, marry up on tours exactly the same, no. But we had a, we had an excellent [emphasis] crew. We had two New Zealanders, two Scotsmen, two Englishmen and one Londoner [laughs]. TO: And what about the briefings that you had before [emphasis] you went on a mission? WM: Well the briefing was, what happened, they assembled. Now first of all they had an all-in briefing where the, every member of the aircrew was there, and then after that was, that briefing was done and that was more or less told you where you were going and et cetera, et cetera, and you split off into different sections. The gunners was going to see about their guns and talk to their gunnery officers and the flight engineers, they went to see the air officers. The air observers and navigators would go in together and the pilots and the, and the observers were together, you know? That’s, that’s how it went ‘cause you know, we, we had to make sure we were exactly correct at all times between the pilots and observer, the pilot and the navigator, mm. TO: And when you, were you sitting in the cockpit during the mission? WM: Yeah. TO: Could you, could you actually see anything below you during the mission? WM: From time to time you could, yes, mm. From time to time you could, yes, mm. TO: And what sort of things could you see? WM: Well it all depends. The more water about the place the better it was, better reflections and things like that. TO: And could you see what the Pathfinders had left? WM: Oh yes, it all depends – well that was to be able to recognise, make sure that you had taken the right targets. TO: Mhm. WM: Because the Germans were, were quite sophisticated because they could try to imitate your Pathfinder’s TIs, what they put down, no. TO: And were you involved in raids to other cities like Hamburg? WM: Oh yes, mm. TO: And what do you remember from those missions? WM: Well a lot of them, well the big, the big one in Hamburg was a big fire raiser. But that happened to be that the wind conditions, everything was just right or wrong [emphasis] as regards which way you’re looking at it. As far as we concerned that was right, as far as the Germans were concerned, it was a big disaster because at that time a lot of the buildings in Hamburg were wooden, mm. TO: And were you surprised when you heard how successful the raid had been? WM: Not surprised, ‘cause that’s what we went for. Most successful it was, well, the better the raid was, mm. TO: And was, were you involved in the raid on Dresden? WM: No I wasn’t, but we were on standby, but I wasn’t involved in that one, no. TO: Mhm. WM: The, some, some people on the 90 Squadron were, ‘cause at Tuddenham 90 Squadron and 138 Squadron ran alongside each other, you know? TO: Mhm. WM: No. TO: And when did you, when did you react, or how did you feel when Churchill announced that they would start bombing Germany? WM: Start [emphasis] bombing? TO: Yeah. WM: Oh that was right at the beginning. TO: Yes but how did you feel? WM: That was [sigh], well put it this way, we had already had casualties our side, so it was just war, no. It was war, yeah. TO: Mhm. And was your aircraft ever damaged by anti-aircraft flak? WM: Oh we had, we had, but we had nothing really serious, mm. No, we had holes all over the place from time to time. Some very close to the occupants was [laughs] but – TO: Mhm. WM: No, we always managed to get back. TO: And were you ever given, did you get new bombs as the war went on? WM: Oh yes, yes. We, we dropped just about everything that was going, yes. Oh yes, no. TO: Did you ever, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. Did you ever get any of the massive bombs that Barnes Wallis had developed? WM: Well, there were different ones yes, yeah we did. We went on a couple of trips to Bordeaux and things like that, yes – TO: Might be – WM: But, I know for a fact that even Barnes Wallis’ bombs, and the big ones, big ones that were dropping there, the German’s fortification of the submarine pens was, was terrific. Now they even today you can have a walk through them and see what it’s like, oh yes. But there [emphasis] is what I say, is that the – sorry I, there’s what happens is what – the amount of German personnel that had to be employed because [emphasis] of the Bomber Command raids was tremendous, tremendous [emphasis]. It wasn’t just one or two round the village or something like that. The number of people they kept back within Germany itself was properly, oh it must have been millions. TO: And what do you think was the most important battle of the war? WM: Well it all depends what you mean battle. Do you mean aircrew or land or – TO: Any, anything. WM: Or the ships. TO: Well most important campaign then. WM: Well, they’re all different, all different. You know it all depends, you know, if you say that – well the thing that lead up to the retention and taking back over Europe, and that was D-Day. TO: Mm. And were you involved in that? WM: Oh yes, yes. TO: Can you tell me about any of the missions you went on? WM: What, what we were doing, we were, we were, we were on the mock, one of the mock raids further up the coast. And a lot of the stuff that we were dropping that night was, was like aluminium foil, and that was showing them, well came up on the radar where there was massive amount of aircraft flying around, you know? And [laughs] of course at the same time we carried a lot of bombs, but we tried as much as possible to use them away, away from where we’d be flying over, as if it was again going further afield in. But at that time what we were trying to do was trying to keep away from human habitation because that was, that was just something that we were asked to do, because keep it away from the towns and cities and northern France, mm. TO: Mm. And on, in bombing missions in general, what kind of targets were you actually given at the briefings? WM: Well it all depends, you know, because no two briefings were the same, no. Yeah, you had factory towns, all sorts of things that you’re going after. You know even, I wasn’t, as I say, I wasn’t in on Dresden but there is a book called “Dresden,” and if you want to know anything about Dresden, get hold of that book. Now, it’s about that thick, and it goes back into the old days of Saxony, and it goes all the way through from the different things all the way, right through, right up until modern times. But that explains exactly what happened in that city. It’s very [emphasis], very complicated. It’s, but it tells the whole story of Dresden, not just one side of the, it’s the whole story, mm. TO: And, I’m sorry to ask this but did you suffer heavy losses on your missions? WM: Oh, well, from time to time we had losses, but we never, we never had what we considered a heavy loss, mm. TO: And what did you think of Arthur Harris? WM: Oh, we supported him. He was, he was our, our chief. We looked up to [could be after] him, yeah, we did. TO: And what do you think of his tactics and strategy? WM: Well I thought they were alright, because if you go back, go back in time that was his instructions that he was getting from the Air Ministry. That, that what a lot of people forget about, was that he [emphasis] was getting told by the Air Ministry what they wanted [emphasis], and that came from the cabinet meetings. TO: Mhm. And do you think Bomber Command was treated unfairly after the war? WM: No [emphasis]. They were not treated fairly. It was completely unfairly. As far as I’m concerned, even, even it took, it took for recognition, it took over seventy years [emphasis]. Now, on my, my medal bar, I’ve got the ‘39-‘45 Star, but also I wear [tape beeps] a little brass mounting [?] which says ‘Bomber Command,’ you know? That took seventy years for them to give it to us. Have you seen it? TO: I think I saw it briefly when I met you last Sunday. WM: It was in the middle. TO: Yeah [paper shuffles]. And could you ever see fires below you on the ground? WM: Oh yes, oh yes, definitely. TO: Mhm, were they large or small? WM: All depends, all depends what area and what you were doing. Some time you knew, you knew, you know, you had raging fires. Sometimes, sometime, see it all depends what the target was. TO: And do you remember seeing fires when Hamburg was bombed in 1943? WM: Well that’s what I said to you, I said to you already that that was a big one, you know. TO: Mhm. WM: But that was – then again, you’ve got to read the story about Hamburg, because what happened was that all the conditions for a bombing raid was right. The wind and the target and the structures of the building and everything, it all came into it. TO: Mhm. And what did you think of the thousand bomber raid on Cologne? WM: Well that, that was one of the best adverts that Harris could have. I won’t tell you what the thousand bombers were because nobody knows, but what he did was he got all the aircraft that could fly and return from there and used that. You know, right down to, there were some of the Blenheims [emphasis] that were in there to make up a thousand bombers, you know? That was a big propaganda one. And not only that, you say something about Harris and doing that, but there again, all of these things came from the War Cabinet. You know, this is what people forget or don’t know, there’s War Cabinet and then you come down to the Air Ministry, and the Air Ministry would then passed it onto Harris. And Harris was, alright at times Harris was dogmatic about what we were doing, but you think of Dresden. The Russians were fighting like hell coming our way, and at the same time the amount of German troops and everything else that was passing through, through Dresden, and what was happening in Dresden, what they were actually manufacturing [emphasis] for the, for the German, erm – TO: War effort? WM: Well, the German war effort [emphasis] was terrific. There was everything from stuff for the U-boats and aircraft and everything like that, it was all over the place. And this is admitted in this book, this book is, is called “Dresden” and it tells you street by street what they were doing, mm. TO: And do you remember hearing about the attack on the Ruhr damns? WM: Oh yes. Oh we were also, we were also on standby for that mission. We were sat, you know – the idea was that if it didn’t work that night, we were going to go the next night. There was, there was another three squadrons ready to go the next night – TO: And – WM: But it actually came through. TO: And did that improve morale a lot? WM: Oh yes, definitely. TO: This is going to be – WM: Scampton, were the, were the, were the Dambusters squadron was, we were also stationed at Scampton for a while, mm. TO: This is probably going to be an odd question, but what was your least favourite aircraft to fly in? WM: A Bolingbroke. TO: Mm. WM: A Bolingbroke was the American Canadian version of a Blenheim. She was underpowered and if you lost one engine, you had trouble trying to make it back to your base. But in Canada, a lot of chaps were lost over the lakes in the wintertime when they lost one engine, they went down through the ice. TO: Mm. WM: But that was, that was my one, a Bolingbroke. But as I say, I flew them and we were alright. TO: And what was your favourite aircraft? WM: Well I started off, I had a love for the Wellington but of course, later on it was the, it was the Lancaster. But old Lizzy, she never let us down and Lizzy was the Lysander. But the other thing, there’s one that’s hardly ever mentioned and that was the Anson, and of course the, the amount trainees that was through on the Lysanders was amazing. Everybody praises the Lysander, the Anson, mm. TO: Mm. We’re actually out of battery on the camera, so is it okay if we have a break while I charge it up? WM: Yeah, yeah, sure [tape paused and restarted]. TO: Okay so, can you tell me a bit about how you came to be involved in Operation Manna? WM: We, we were stationed at RAF Tuddenham and we, we’d actually been on ops and we were called forward to stay and we thought ‘oh, well it’s another op,’ and this was on a Sunday. TO: Mhm. WM: And we were told that we were going to have stuff loaded on and we were to drop it, but it wasn’t bombs. It was in our containers, the containers that we’d used for dropping the stuff into the, into the Maquis as well, when we used to drop stuff. And that, that was alright. And when we got in the air, of course we didn’t know the whole [emphasis] story but it’s like a very good friend of mine says, her grandmother told her to hide under the table because she thought this was a message [?] they were gonna come and do some bombing [emphasis] round about there. Instead of that of course we were dropping the food. Well that was, that was the plus the operation started, but I suppose you know the story about that, about the two Canadians who went – can I tell you that one? Well what happened was Operation Manna came about because there was two young Canadian officers who had permission to go over to the German lines and speak to the German commander if it was possible and advise them that they could arrange for, to have food dropped into Holland because all the people there were starving, and that included the German troops that was there. Anyway, after negotiations, they had managed to get to them and they managed through the negotiations, the fact that we would be flying in Lancasters [emphasis] and dropping the food and we would not be dropping bombs. And of course the Germans advised that their anti-aircraft guns wouldn’t be firing at us, but they forgot to tell a lot of people with a rifle that what was happening, so it wasn’t impossible for us to get a few pot shots aimed at us with people on the ground with rifle fire. But anyway, we landed, we didn’t land [emphasis] of course, we just went in and we dropped it and certain food dropped and that was it, but later on, on the second or third day, by that time they’d got a bit organised and we were dropping food into, into football grounds. And what had happened, they got the local people to put big white crosses on the football grounds and that’s where we had to drop into. And one of the, one of the trips we were doing was at, we were flying in, and this, all the Lancasters said ‘ooh, a sprog crew.’ And this came, become across us and we had to veer quickly and let him come in, and when we were dropping our stuff, one of them went outside and landed on the railway line. Anyway, I could see lots of people round about it ‘cause it was taking quite a while to get into it of course, but by this time they’d realised it was, it was food in it and not bombs. Anyway, many years later in Africa when we were reopening a new rugby field, and in the pavilion later on I was telling the story, and I said ‘yes, it was, we were dropping the food to Holland’ and there was one of these things, a fellow, and I said ‘it was just like a lot of little ants round a sugar lump.’ And all of a sudden, somebody put his hand on my shoulder and I looked round, there’s this big fellow, a youngster, must have been in his early twenties, and he said to me, ‘you nearly killed me.’ And I said, ‘what do you mean I nearly killed you, I’ve never seen you in my life before.’ He says, ‘I was the first of these little black ants to get there’ he says, ‘because I saw it falling outside and I rushed to it, and all the other people came and dived on top of me’ [laughs]. So you see, it’s a small world there. But also I’ve got, I’ve got a large number of friends in this area, Dutch people, who actually received the food and they also still have services where, where they bless Manna, and there’s one particular family who come here into our court here, our Debbie’s [?] court and one, one Wednesday a month, and she was five years old when we dropped our first lot of food, and she’s always been thankful, thankful all the time, and she does tell people that ‘oh, Mr Moore, Uncle Bill here, he saved my country from starvation’ [laughs]. So you see that that was a real pleasure to do that, and I was actually awarded the Dutch Medal on that one, and very earnestly I consider that one of the finest medals and for the finest properties [?] that I received during the war. TO: So would you say that’s the mission you’re most proud of? WM: Yes. TO: And when you first learned about Operation Manna, were you surprised that you’d be dropping food and not bombs? WM: Oh yes, no, no. TO: And could you, what do you remember most about Operation Manna? WM: Well, the amount of aircraft. Well after, after the first Sunday, after the first Sunday it was well organised, ‘cause the first Sunday and Monday it was a trial run to see what happened really, but after that we, we had several squadrons that was dropping the food, and of course even, even some of the Americans were dropping food as well. But there were dropping food further afield than what we were, you know. TO: And – WM: At the beginning the war was still, the fighting was go on. It wasn’t, you know, it carried on afterwards but the first, the first few days of it that was still when the war was going on, you know. TO: And what about, could you see if any Dutch civilians on the ground were waving British flags? WM: Oh yes, well you could see them waving [emphasis]. You’re not always sure what they were waving but they were waving and clothes and waving anything at all when I realised on the second wave what we were doing, ‘cause it wasn’t, wasn’t bombs we were dropping. TO: Mm. Well Bernie, the veteran, other Manna veteran whose number I gave you, he told me that flying so low he could see a Dutch boy waving a Union Jack. WM: Yeah well, he must, he must have been very lucky to have – ‘cause it maybe that someone dropped the Union flag – TO: Mhm. WM: And then he got it, but not a Union Jack [emphasis]. TO: Mhm. WM: It’s a Union flag. Do you know the difference? TO: No, please explain. WM: Well the Union Jack [emphasis] is flown in the brow of a ship – TO: Mhm. WM: The Union Jack is the one that’s – Union flag [emphasis] is the one that’s flown everywhere else. TO: Oh right, I didn’t know that. Thank you. WM: Mm, the Union Jack is the small staff in the front of a ship. TO: Mhm [pause]. What kind of, when you were sat in the cockpit, what kind of equipment did you have in front of you? WM: I know, I know that this is [?] navigational equipment that we could use. We had, we had G, we had Oboe, we had all sorts of different ones, yeah, mm. TO: And how did G work? WM: Well G was, G was in two, two, two beams, and where these two beams crossed, that’s where you were. It’s as simple as that. TO: And did that improve navigation? WM: Oh yes, yeah, mm. Well the H2S was a different story entirely. The H2S was you were beaming down and the more [?] water that was around the clearer the river [?] became, but your only trouble about that was the German fighters used to vector onto the, what we were, we were projecting. Sometimes that could become a hazard. TO: And how many occasions do you think you deployed Window? WM: Oh quite a number, even, even when we were doing training operations we were dropping Window, which we never counted, it didn’t count as operations as such. But we, we were dropping Window many a time, yeah, during training flights, mm. TO: And when bombs were dropped from an aircraft, did the plane become noticeably lighter? WM: Oh it came, you rose, you rose slightly yes, mm. All depends on how much, how much stuff you’re actually carrying or dropping. TO: And could you please explain what the procedure would be for, in terms of what the crew would do, each crew member would do and say when you got over the target? WM: Well each person had their own to do. The pilot, he was taking instructions from whoever was doing the, the lead onto the target. Sometimes we did that with myself, quite a number of times of course, and sometimes, sometimes it was the wireless operator, sometimes it was another, we had a radar operator as well, they used to use that over the targets ‘cause as I say, we were, we were still on special duties. Of course your gunners were always on the left and as I say, engineer, he had to be very careful then making sure everything was alright on his side, yeah. But everybody was active. TO: Mhm. And were there ever any times on a mission when you could more or less relax? WM: No [emphasis]. If you relaxed you, it was wrong. There’s many, many a time, many a time – what happened with us was that, and I’ve said this before, we never really relaxed until we were home. Can we give that a break for a minute? I’ll show you something. TO: Yes, certainly [tape beeps]. Mhm. And did you or anyone else in the crew have a special name for your own aircraft? WM: Yes, well we, we called our one after the Loch Ness Monster, that was it, yeah, mm [laughs]. It was, it was a favourite of ours you know, especially with two Scottish men was there [?] and we adopted, we adopted the rest of them, you know? Mm. TO: [Paper turns] and when you were on missions, could you, or rather night missions, were there other British planes flying near you? WM: All depends, all depends on what type of mission you were on. TO: Mhm. WM: Now, if you’re in the stream, well – at the beginning the squadron took off but you had a rendezvous point. A lot of rendezvous points were like Beachy Head, you know, and they used to assemble in that area and then they took off. And of course the thing about that was that the Germans also knew we were assembling at different places, and they could actually send out their night fighters if, if they did, you know? But there was, there were umpteen different places and they couldn’t, they couldn’t get to them all [emphasis] because often there was more than one raid on one night, on the same night. And that was deviations to keep away from maybe the real big one of that occasion, you know. TO: And how many times a week would you go on a mission? WM: Well sometimes it was night after night, three nights in one week [emphasis]. Sometimes according to the weather, it might be about eight days, maybe a week. TO: Mhm. WM: The weather had a lot to do with it you know? TO: And were you ever escorted by fighters? WM: We, well we, we were escorted ‘cause we did quite a few daytime raids, yes, we were. But we, we were quite, we were quite happy with that, mm. ‘Cause we used to see them, we used to see them on the verges of the, of the streams, you know, mm. TO: And do you remember what kind of fighters they were? WM: Well the ones that we saw was Mustangs, mm. All depends on how far in you were going. If you were going a long way in that was, that was a Mustang. Sometimes, sometimes it was a Hurricane, sometimes it was a Spitfire, mm. But they were only used as short flights, mm, whereas a Mustang was built for long range, mm. TO: And was it cold aboard the planes? WM: Oh it was never pleasant [laughs]. At one time everyone used to have a different [?] suit. It was like a fur jacket and things like that. But once we got onto the heavies they took all that stuff away from us, saying we didn’t need it. Well that was alright for these [emphasis] people, they weren’t flying [laughs], mm. TO: And did you ever carry food with you aboard the plane? WM: Ever carry? TO: Food with you? WM: No, all I carried, used to carry was five, five barley sugars, sweets. TO: And what sort of entertainment did you have back at the airfields? WM: Well all depends on what the, if it was, if it was one of the pre war stations there was generally a building that was used for dances and things like that, and concerts. If it was the war time ones then sometimes all you did was make sure there, there was an empty hangar and you had something in there. But, you know, that was how it was done, no. But that, that, that was the main thing of entertainment, you know, ‘cause the picture shows and things like that within the camp always started off as I say with propaganda [laughs], mm. TO: When you saw those propaganda things, did you ever wonder whether they were being truthful? WM: Well, the things we used to say ‘woah, woah, woah, woah’ [emphasis] and things like that, you know, the British sense of humour, you know, mm. And that’s a fact, mm. TO: And were there any particularly popular songs? WM: Oh yes there was all the, all the, I’ve got, I’ve still got all the tapes here of all the popular songs, mm, oh yes, I have all them, yeah. All of the artists at that time, yeah, and these artists I have, I have run [?] many a concert here and had the same ones come performing for me. TO: And was there anyone that you knew of who refused to go on bombing missions? WM: I never met anybody who refused to go on a mission, but I always remember there was two people who graduated and got their wings and then they, then they refused to go on ops. But that’s the nearest I ever came to it. But they never did any ops, they never were in, they weren’t even on a bombing station. And I’m sorry to say that we heard later on that they’d transferred to the Pioneer Corps and both of them got killed [pause]. TO: You mentioned that there was a raid where you had to attack a German warship in Kiel. WM: That’s right. TO: Do you remember its name? WM: Not off hand, no. TO: Would it be the Hipper? WM: Oh it’s quite possible, it’s quite possible it was, yeah. I’ve got the date there, I told you the dates of it the other – TO: Mhm. WM: Yeah. TO: I think I remember, I remember the sinking of the Hipper though because it was sunk on the 9th of April which coincidently is my birthday. WM: Oh [emphasis]. TO: So – WM: Oh [emphasis], 9th of April? TO: I think I kind of have a selfish reason for remembering that if you see what I mean. Or maybe it was the Cher [WM laughs], I’m not sure. I do know though that – WM: No, no, no. 9th of April [pause], 13th, 13th of April. TO: What does it say was the target, or – WM: That was in Kiel, mm, yeah. That was the 13 of April. TO: Mhm. WM: That’s what that was, that was the target. TO: Mhm. WM: That was the one that I told you that we, that we we bombed it that night and knocked it down and we had to go back again and make sure, one of [?] the chaps said ‘are you sure you don’t want us to put it back up again?’ [TO laughs]. ‘Cause you’d obviously got somebody – TO: Mhm. WM: Who [laughs] would give you an answer for something [laughs], mm. TO: And were there ever any occasions were you could, where you ever flew over neutral territory and could see the cities all illuminated? WM: There was one night we were, we were coming back from a trip, and the next thing I saw was these lights, and I thought ‘well what the hell is going on?’ And what had happened was that the [laughs], we were almost sent to Dublin, and what that was, was that the wind speed was ferocious and what we thought we’d found out was that we were nothing near [emphasis], we were nothing near the wind speed, what the actual wind speed was, and of course as soon as we saw that we turned round and we were on the way back. TO: Mm. WM: But that was the nearest I’ve been to being on neutral territory, you know. TO: Mm. WM: From that point of view, mm. TO: Mm, and were there ever any occasions where you were accidently fired at by allied anti-aircraft guns? WM: Well, what we, what we had was that we had the Junkers 52-53 aircraft, and we used to do special missions on that and we used to fly low [emphasis]. And what had happened was that that one had been liberated in the desert and we were using it on special duties, but there was no esigners [?], painted black, and going out was fine. Coming back [emphasis], it wasn’t until we got into our own territory that we used to get a few pot-shots at us, you know? Probably because [laughs] we were flying without the proper identification and things like that, that’s why we get into trouble. But we never actually, never actually had anything serious happen to us. TO: Mhm. WM: But that was under secret risk [?]. TO: Mhm. So was it, so you were trying to use, you were using German aircraft for the missions over France? WM: Yeah. TO: For the SOE. WM: Yeah, SOE, yeah. TO: So it wasn’t always Lysanders then? WM: No we, we used many, you know, the Lysander was for the agents. TO: Mhm. WM: But as I said before we used to use other aircraft for taking other stuff in, for Maquis and things like that, you know. TO: Mhm. WM: Oh yes, mm. TO: And did you ever meet any senior commanders during the war? WM: Well every now and again you had a parade where we didn’t actually, we didn’t actually get to meet [emphasis] them as such. Not like, not like last Sunday, no. TO: Mm. And were some missions much more dangerous than others or were they more or less the same? WM: Well, what we used to do, we used to classify every mission as dangerous, because if you didn’t and you dropped your guard, that’s when you would have been in trouble. I don’t say they weren’t, but we never loaded [?] to be. TO: And were there ever any times where you, where your missions were just taking photographs of areas? WM: Oh yes, we had that [emphasis] from time to time, yes, mm. TO: Could you tell me about any of those? WM: Well they were, they were done by 138 Squadron and that was, you know, the idea behind that was sometimes it was targets, that they had been bombed, and sometimes they might have been targets that we flew past. We passed them as if we were going somewhere else and we might have been taking them then. But we got a lot of practice in that, because that’s another story I can give you, mm. TO: And did you hear how other events of the war were going? WM: Oh yes, we were kept up to date, we were kept up to date. As I say, between the news reels and bulletins, you were kept up to date, mm. TO: Were you ever worried that Germany might win? WM: Well, we, I would never say that, that I was frightened of them winning [?][emphasis], but we always worried every now and again where it might have been something that was going the wrong way, but not, not for an all out win no. No, no, no. TO: And what was the most feared German night fighter? WM: The Junkers-88, ‘cause she’d a cannon on her, and she, she actually fitted onto her guns that would fly, fire upwards and try and get under the bellies of the Lancasters. And that’s where we lost quite a number of Lancasters, firing guns from the, from the JU28, JU88s, yeah, mhm [pause]. TO: And did you ever feel any animosity towards Germany? WM: Well, that’s a difficult one because, you know, there was people who lost friends, relations and all the rest of it. Some of them got quite bitter but on the whole people just took it as war. TO: And how do you feel today? WM: Ah, what I can say is that I have been involved in promoting rugby, football all over Europe and all over Africa, that’s my answer to that. TO: And how do you feel today about your wartime service? WM: It was something – when I had to something and that’s what I did, mm. TO: And do you think the war was worth the price? WM: I think yes. I think yes, because that’s another story I can tell you, that you haven’t asked me about. TO: Yes, tell me, yeah. WM: Well after, after the war finished, we still had special duties to do, and one of the first was to bring, bring back prisoners of war which were British, well there was all sorts involved but most of the ones we brought back were British, and a lot of the stories that they related to me including two of my uncles who were prisoners of war since 1940. Some of the stories they had to say was horrific. Anyway, when we finished that job bringing back the prisoners of war, we, we then went onto ferrying people from parts of Germany down into a place called Eastridge [?] in France and we had camps there where we took the refugees into, and a lot of these people thought that we were going to lock them up, same as they’d been before. But it was trying to tell them that it was to help them and that the, the camp was just secured so that the local people wouldn’t be coming in to try and get what they were getting, ‘cause this was to try and build them up again, you know. But then of course after that, the next big thing after that, we, we were put on photograph and the whole of Europe. We started off with photographing the likes of London from about two thousand feet, and then towns like [unclear] Woking here, from about four thousand feet and then the countryside was from, anything from ten to twenty thousand feet. We did that for the whole of Europe, mm. And that was 138, 138 Squadron again, because what we did, we’d started doing it at Tuddenham and then when they realised that we were quite successful, they transferred us over to RAF Benson and we did that over at Benson. And then of course we, we had several substations, substations in Norway, substations in France, we had substations around the country here at different places where we would load [?] to land and fuel up, and we had special signal recognition that we could, we could use and that went on for quite some, quite some time, ‘cause that photographing Europe was one of Churchill’s ideas that he left behind after he was out of office. TO: And during those photography missions, could you see the damage from the bombing? WM: Oh yes that was the idea, mm. Anyway you done it at two thousand feet you could see right down, no [unclear] of course, mhm, mm. That’s where we, well that’s where we started [emphasis] photographing, mm, but it was the while, the whole area was done, mm. TO: Are there any other missions of the war that stand out a lot to you which you’d like to tell me about? WM: Personal ones? TO: Well any, any ones you were on from, that were missions that, but only if you’re willing to talk about, don’t if you – WM: No. TO: If you don’t want to talk about it it’s fine. WM: No, as I say in general, in general we, we carried out what we had to do, and as I say, 138 Squadron of special duties, we were doing all sorts of things and there’s lots of things that, that we still should not talk about, because we are sworn to secrecy about them, because that was in conjecture [?] with SOE, ‘cause there was lots of people who maybe still, maybe not in favour of some of these operations. TO: Mhm. What about some of the other bombing missions? Are there any others that you’d like, any others that stand out that you’d like to tell me about? WM: You know, you know, the big, a big, a big thing was that there was missions we knew [emphasis] –about and there was other missions that people were on that we got to know about and [tape beeps] I can assure you that once the reason, these missions – people said ‘oh that could have been us,’ you know? ‘Cause even the Dambusters, ones we were a back up squadron for that. It wasn’t a method, it wasn’t just a method of a few fellows doing that, there was back up squadrons as well. TO: And when did you hear about the Holocaust? WM: Well that, that’s hard to say because we, we, we got, we got to know in bits and pieces. As I say, I started to learn a lot of that from our own prisoners of war that we were bringing home, and then of course we found out from other people who, who had been there in the camps. And, course the big thing about it was you didn’t realise just how widespread it was. I don’t think anybody did at that particular time. I know there was some friends of mine who visited Belson and visited the other ones in person and as I say, they were horrified how the treatment that people was getting. But that’s a different category all together you know, that was someone away from, away from a normal war. That was, that wasn’t the same. TO: Were there ever any times when you were tasked with dropping leaflets? WM: Oh yes we had that from time to time, mm, we had that, mm. We were never sure whether the leaflets were doing any good or not. TO: Arthur Harris said after the war that never engaged in those leaflet dropping exercises because it only accomplished two things. One, it gave the German defenders practice in getting ready for the real thing and two, it supplied a substantial quantity of toilet paper for – WM: That’s right. TO: The Germans. WM: That’s more or less correct, yes, mm. TO: Mm [page turns]. Did you ever wish you’d been in something other than the Royal Air Force? WM: I had been in the Guyun [?] Southern Highlanders – TO: Mhm. WM: But not, not an active service, no. But I never, never felt as if I should have been there, no. TO: And did you ever wish that you hadn’t been an observer or a navigator? Did you ever wish that you’d been a different position on board the aircraft? WM: Well we did, on aircrew we went around the different jobs in case anything happened to one of us up there. We actually flew in different positions [emphasis] from time to time [emphasis]. TO: So did you ever fly the Lancaster yourself? WM: Oh yes, yes. Oh yes. TO: But the pilot would always do the takeoff and landing? WM: Well that was the idea, although we had to do, I had to be able to land the aircraft. TO: Mhm. So would you consider yourself a flight engineer as well as an observer? WM: No, observer, my observer, my observer – I covered all these courses – TO: Mhm. WM: As an observer, mm. The flight engineer came into his own with the four engine bombers, mm. TO: And you mentioned you were on Wellingtons for a while. WM: Mm. TO: Were they generally reliable? WM: Oh course [emphasis]. They were the most reliable bomber that we had. TO: And did you hear about the, how the early bombing of the war was progressing? WM: Well the thing is, everybody hoped that it was for the best because there’s everything else. There’s, the accuracy improved. Obviously the saturation bombing was started by the Germans. They started saturation bombing. Our people tried to go for individual targets and alright, after that there was [emphasis] saturation bombing, you know. TO: And were your airfields ever attacked by German fighters? WM: Not to my knowledge no. TO: Mm. And I’m sorry to ask this, but were any of your friends killed during the war? WM: Yes. A lot of school friends, school friends and friends from the Boys Brigade, oh yes, mm. School friends were the younger ones but the older friends were the ones I’d made through the Boys Brigade, and they were, most of them was on aircrew [emphasis], different categories. TO: How, how was morale in Bomber Command throughout the war would you say? WM: Good, it was good. It was excellent. TO: And why do you think it stayed so high despite the losses? WM: It was the camaraderie of sticking together, yeah, oh yes, mm. We were all volunteers, and we’re still volunteers [laughs]. TO: And you know after Dunkirk, was there a general fear of invasion? WM: Not fear [emphasis] of invasion. There was, what did I say, there was – people didn’t think it was imminent but [phone rings] it could happen, you know? Hello? Caller on the phone: Hello. WM: Hello dear. Caller on the phone: How are you? WM: I’m very, very [tape beeps]. TO: And what did you think of the atomic bombs that were used against Japan? WM: Well the big thing about that is that it could have happened to us, because as we know from hindsight, that the Germans had been working on that, and that could have been us. And of course, if the development of the V2s had come, could have come, come all the way across the Atlantic into America [emphasis]. As far as I’m concerned it’s, it’s one of these weapons that it could, it could obliterate mankind if it went on too long. And of course we noticed what happened with the aftermath of these things, but our war was nothing compared with that. I also, also think that if it hadn’t been for the, for the ones dropped in Japan that millions of troops would have been massacred, and it doesn’t say how far on everything else would have went if they hadn’t been dropped because that may have gone on for years and years and years, so it may have been at the time was a good thing. TO: And, just going back to the crew that you were good friends with – WM: Mm. TO: Did, did they talk much about their lives before they joined the Air Force? WM: Yeah, we all had that, but yeah. The pilot, pilot was a sheep farmer in New Zealand, our radar [?] man was an accountant in New Zealand, our wireless operator, his father had a joinery business across in Lanes [?] Bay, across the water from where I come from. The, the rear gunner was an, a surveyor for the [unclear] down the water here and the mid upper gunner his, his family had got a hotel in Canterbury in Kent, and that’s quite strange was that I got married on a Friday night in Scotland, and we had another party in the Fleur-de-Lis Hotel in Canterbury on the Wednesday following, because the crew was all going home to New Zealand and places like that. But no, we did, and as I say, Jimmy Dagg, his great-grandson is playing rugby as Israel Dagg for the All Blacks, [unclear] rugby, mm. TO: And did you ever actually, I know you could see them from the sky, but after the war did you ever go through any of the cities like Berlin or? WM: No I didn’t. All I did was flew, flew over them you know, mm. TO: Mhm. And what’s your opinion on Britain’s involvement in recent wars like Afghanistan? WM: Well there, there again the – that’s an entirely different thing. It all depends how far back you get. It’s always been said that, that nobody ever wins a war in Afghanistan, ‘cause even going back to even before Christ [emphasis] there’s been, been wars and people trying to take over and trying to settle Afghanistan region. But some, some of the other, some of the other wars that goes on, you just wonder why, no, because – on the other hand you don’t really get down to it, you know. The likes of Korea was quite a war, and also the McArthur at the time, he was right up to the Chinese border and he was, he wasn’t defeated or anything but the American government told him to come back, and of course that was reintruded when the, when the two states were formed, Northern and South of Korea. Now, if you talk about Sing, Malaysia. Now in Malaysia there was thousands of troops and everything in there, and where I was from in Africa, there was African regiments in there from, from Rhodesia, from Kenya, from Tanganyika. They were called the King’s African Rifles and they Rhodesians, the Rhodesian regiment, they were all involved in there, no. And then of course you got these other skirmishes up, was up in Europe and there again, they all seemed to arise from either petty politics or religions. If you, if you go into some of these other ones where there’s still fighting today, and you turn around and you say to Syria, but what is it? It’s one against one, it’s a civil war. That’s really what it is, but why can’t they get together on it? You know, there was a civil war in Spain pre-1938. Now that was a vicious war as well, but 1938, thirty-nine it came to a close and a person who took over Franco and the nation was brought together again. Before Franco died, he brought back the king and that was, that was brought back and that settled both people, both lots of the people in Spain. Now you see all these other ones that’s gone on, skirmishes and even in the South American countries, that’s all about drugs, that’s not really about people, it’s about drugs and things like that which is entirely [emphasis] different thing entirely [emphasis]. Now holy wars as I call them can never be settled, ‘cause one, one against the other they will never, never change [emphasis]. What happens with these things is they just goes on and on and on, and that, and that’s been going on for centuries, or one country wants to take over the other one and it’s through, it’s though their, their type of religions it happens, which is wrong. TO: And one of my last questions now, what’s your best memory of your time in the war? WM: When I met my wife [both laugh]. I came, I came back from a raid, a raid on Bordeaux and I was given three days leave. Instead of that I got it made up to ten days and I, I went home and I got a lift in fish truck. I was never sure if it was real fish or scrap fish for [laughs] for to go for manures or something like that. But anyway, I got there and the first thing my mother did was put all my clothes in the boiler and she’d have put me into the boiler if I hadn’t got into the bath. Anyway, that night I, I went along to the local dance, the big pavilion, the big high balcony and all the people up there spectating, and I was dancing with this young lady, and my friend wanted to dance with her. ‘Come on, come on, this is my one, you go and pinch your own lady,’ you know, ‘your own girl,’ you know? Anyway, what I didn’t know was that her mother and father, two sisters and sister-in-law and some kids were all up on the balcony, and every time I danced, being in the Air Force they were shouting ‘hooray,’ because their son Walter was in the Air Force in India, and my friend Vann Muir [?] was in the Navy, so I was winning according to them, and I did [laughs]. That was my happiest [emphasis] that was my happiest [emphasis] occasion in the whole war, mm. TO: Mhm. Well that’s all of my questions – WM: Alright. TO: Do you have anything at all that you want to add? WM: No, it’s just [unclear] want to say this, I’ve had another two of these interviews, there might be a little discrepancies or differences but – TO: That’s fine. WM: It’s all going from in here you know. TO: That’s fine, your memory’s been great – WM: Oh. TO: And I’ve really enjoyed what you’ve told me. WM: Oh, no. TO: So thank you so much for telling me. WM: Oh okay, thank you, welcome, thank you very much. TO: Thank you so much for your wartime service as well. WM: I must see you from time to time somewhere – TO: Yeah. WM: Along the line. You come to some of these gatherings from the Royal Air Force, I’ll be there. TO: Mhm, thank you. WM: Yeah. TO: It would be great to see you. WM: Thank you very much indeed. TO: Thank you. WM: Anyway – Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context AMooreWT160703 Title A name given to the resource Interview with Bill Moore. Three Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource 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. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Language A language of the resource eng Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 02:50:38 audio recording Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Pending review Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tom Ozel Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-07-06 Description An account of the resource Bill Moore grew up in Scotland and volunteered for the Royal Air Force. He completed 36 operations as a navigator with 138 and 161 Squadrons. Please note: The veracity of this interview has been called into question. We advise that corroborative research is undertaken to establish the accuracy of some of the details mentioned and events witnessed. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Royal Air Force. Bomber Command Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Canada France Germany Great Britain Netherlands Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea England--Suffolk Germany--Berlin Germany--Hamburg Germany--Kiel Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Katie Gilbert Maureen Clarke 138 Squadron 161 Squadron aircrew Anson Bolingbroke bombing bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943) briefing Churchill, Winston (1874-1965) displaced person fear Gee H2S Hudson Lancaster Lysander military service conditions navigator Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944) Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945) perception of bombing war RAF Halfpenny Green RAF Heaton Park RAF Tempsford RAF Tuddenham Resistance Special Operations Executive training Wellington