Don Nicholson audio recording. One

Don Nicholson audio recording. One

Don was a Flight Engineer with No 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron in 1944-45 at Dunholme Lodge and later at Spilsby and completed 31 operations.
Don lists his 31 operations and recounts how having arrived for the briefing for his first operation, he was grounded by the medical officer and sent to hospital. His crew did six operations without him and did not return from the last one. Having done some operations as a spare flight engineer he describes how he was recruited by a captain who wanted to replace his engineer. He was impressed by his new captain landing a Lancaster with a punctured tyre, ending up on the grass but the aircraft was intact.
He then goes on to describe a number of incidents during his operations. These include bombing the German battle cruiser Lutzow which turned out to be a decoy. Being diverted to Kinloss and the airfield was not open but they had to land as they were out of fuel, they also had a bomb loose in the bomb bay. Returning from an operation below cloud over the North Sea and one of their Lancasters bounced off the water. One of his last operations to Hamburg he did not think that they would survive, they were coned by searchlights, ended up in a power dive when corkscrewing and having recovered flying round to gain height to eventually bomb.

01:34:08 audio recording

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

ANicholsonD151002-01