Interview with Max Barry
Title
Interview with Max Barry
Description
Max was born in Beaufort Victoria and grew up on his parents’ dairy farm. Gaining a scholarship led him to become a student teacher and attend training college. He was called up when he was eighteen and applied to become a reserve in the air force as an air gunner. He was posted to Bristol in England for training and then went to Brighton and Lichfield where they formed crews. Training on Wellingtons Stirlings and finally Lancasters took place at Church Broughton. Max then joined 463 Squadron based at Waddington, Lincolnshire. The squadron carried out many operations to France, including Orléans where they bombed railway yards. On returning home their aircraft caught fire and the crew baled out. The crew survived apart from the pilot. After walking for three weeks he was offered a barn to stay in. He was finally arrested by the Germans and was sent to an interrogation centre at Frankfurt and then taken by train to Stalag Luft 7. He explained a typical day in the camp. Max was on the long march beginning in January 1945 and described the conditions and their destinations. After the war Max enrolled on a 5-year vet training course and married soon after graduating. He kept in touch with some of his aircrew and later went to Normandy to find the people who were kind to him during the war. The friendship has continued. Max thinks that Bomber Command did the right thing and contributed to victory.
Creator
Publisher
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
2018-03-28
Contributor
Rights
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.
Format
00:53:59 audio recording
Language
Type
Identifier
ABarryM180328
Conforms To
Spatial Coverage
Temporal Coverage
Collection
Citation
John Horsburgh, “Interview with Max Barry,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed February 25, 2021, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/10099.
Item Relations
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