Memoirs of an Air Gunner

Memoirs of an Air Gunner

Ron Bedford planned to volunteer for the RAF as an air gunner but the recruiters believed he had the aptitude to be a pilot. However, while waiting for his training to begin Ron received a letter to say that if he chose to be an air gunner rather than await pilot training he could commence immediately. Ron and his crew joined 620 Squadron flying special operations to drop supplies to the French Resistance. On one operation the pilot instructed the crew to bale out but Ron found he couldn’t open the turret doors to access his parachute. When the call was cancelled he found he could open the doors easily suggesting that it had been the panic of the moment that had made it impossible to open the doors. The squadron lost fifty percent of their crews in five days. The silence of the station was disturbing and surviving crews were given forty eight hours leave. Upon their return they found that replacement crews had arrived and the station was back to normal.

01:51:33 audio recording

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ABedfordRG[Date]-01

RB: At seventeen and a half I think it was I applied to join as an air gunner and ended up by going to Oxford where you got prodded and poked and all the medicals and examinations and a, and a sort of a test in a, like a mock up cockpit with sitting there and you’ve got a joystick in front of you and something like a radar screen which was sort of quite new in those days with a little dot in it and if the dot went sort of off the centre you had to sort of adjust that by the stick. But I mean it didn’t just sort of go very slowly. It sort of switched on one side so then according to your reaction how quickly you could get the dot back in the middle again. And at the same time there was a handle on the left-hand side and if a red light came on you had to put that handle forward. So all these things are sort of happening and you know that’s one of the things you had to do. The biggest laugh really was, well I remember about anyway was the part of the medical test was to blow in a, in a tube with a sort of a mercury. You know, a mercury in a pipe and you had to blow it up and keep it up to a sort of certain level for as long as you could. But I blew it up alright. There was no problem but I suddenly wanted to swallow so I swallowed. Of course, the mercury suddenly disappeared right down through the bottom and I had to sort of get it, get it back up again. But it was, yeah you had three days all told and finally you have your interview and you had about six from a group captain to something sitting behind a table and all sort of firing questions at you. A bit like the old painting, “When Did You Last See Your Father?” But yeah, eventually they said, ‘Well, why do you want to be an air gunner?’ So I said, ‘Well, I just fancy that an air gunner is the job for me, you know being interested in guns and shooting anyway.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘We feel you have the aptitude to become a pilot and we’re going to put you down for pilot training.’ Right. Ok. So, but that’s that. So then you went off. Well, you got sworn in. That’s right. And you know with the bible in your hand and everything and then you went off home and you had to wait to be called up. So, I suppose I must have waited eight nine months and then a letter dropped through and I thought this is it. Anyway, it wasn’t quite it. It more or less said that if you wanted to continue to be trained as a pilot you would probably have to wait another six or nine months but if you would like to remuster as an air gunner you would be called up more or less right away. So, I thought right well I wanted to be an air gunner in the first place so that’s it. So, I wrote back and said yeah, ok I’ll be an air gunner. A fortnight later I was off to London to what they called an Aircrew Receiving Wing at St John’s Wood and that’s when I had to report to Lord’s Cricket Ground where you had hundreds of fellas all sort of pouring in. All different shapes and sizes all had to be sort of sorted out. Anyway, the sergeants and corporals got us all sorted and all the air gunners in one flight and wireless operators in another and so on and so forth. Then the first meal in the Royal Air Force was sitting in the pavilion at Lord’s eating a very thin green pea soup which was lukewarm. And that was about all. So then get marched back to, to your billet and well from then on really it’s the sort of the whole series of getting your kit and everything sorted out and going on parade and being taught how to sort of march and left, right and PT, a bit of football I think. But in the main just a sort of a gruelling three weeks where they sort of more or less knocked you into shape to be an airman.
[recording paused]
RB: A letter I imagine that you know was sent to everybody that passed for aircrew and it’s from the Secretary of State for Air who was Archibald Sinclair at the time. And it says, “A Message of Welcome from the Secretary of State for Air. You are now an airman and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you into the Royal Air Force. To have been selected for aircrew training is a great distinction and the Royal Air Force demands a high standard of physical fitness and alertness from its flying crews. Relatively few attain that standard and I congratulate you on passing the stringent tests. You are of course impatient to begin your flying training at once and the question you ask is when do I start? You may rest assured that you will be called up as soon as you are required and in your turn. While waiting you may carry on with your present job and equip yourself for your Air Force career by studying subjects which will help you. The date on which you enter your flying training is decided by various factors including the requirements of the service, your age, date of attestation and so on. Once your order on the list is determined you may be sure that you will not be overlooked when your turn comes. Arrangements will be made to help you in your studies and you will be told about these in due course. Be sure you make good use of these opportunities they are important to you. I feel however that you will expect me to tell you why it is necessary that you who are so eager should wait at all. The Royal Air Force is a highly organised service. In the first line our trained and experienced crews whose stirring deeds and indomitable courage daily provoke the admiration of the world. Behind these men ready to give them immediate support are the newly trained crews fresh from the Schools. In your turn you and other accepted candidates stand ready to fill the Schools. Without you time might be lost at a critical moment in filling up the training facilities left vacant by those who have joined the ranks of the first line combatants and the vital flow of reinforcements would be broken. Vacancies may also be caused by increased training requirements for the schools being rapidly expanded. For these reasons we must have a reserve of selected candidates like you on whom to call. I hope this explanation will help you to understand the waiting period should not be considered as so much waste of time. There is much you can do. You are exceptionally fit now or you would not have been chosen. See that you keep fit, work hard but live temperately. Learn all you can in your spare time about those things you must know if you are to be efficient at your flying job. The more academic knowledge you acquire before you begin your training in the Royal Air Force the easier it will be later on to absorb specialised Service knowledge. Wishing you success in the Service of your choice I would like to add this. The honour of the Royal Air Force is in your hands. Our country’s safety and the final overthrow of the powers of evil now arrayed against us depend upon you and your comrades. You will be given the best aircraft and armament that the factories of Britain and America can produce. Equip yourself with knowledge of how to use them. Good luck.” A whole load of bumph isn’t it really. 24th of July 1942. Yes, America would have been in the war anyway then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But in any case, I mean even before they came in they were sending us aircraft and armaments and everything. Well, they sent over fifty very old destroyers actually at one time and that was before they were even in the war. In fact, when they, if they sent arms or aircraft or whatever up into Canada they they the Americans had to stop them on the border and stick on a tow rope and the Canadians would pull them across the border because they would flaunt the sort of, you know some international rules if they took them over themselves. You see, being a country which was not at war taking something into one that was at war which Canada was of course.
[recording paused]
RB: Yes. The Commonwealth generally, I mean when war was declared I mean they all came in as well anyway. I mean it was the natural thing to do. Yeah. One thing that I ought to say about that is that you get all your inoculations and vaccinations at St Johns Wood and it’s a case of sort of sticking your arms out on both sides, going through a line of doctors who were sort of jabbing needles in left, right and centre and you had about, I don’t know like ten I suppose all more or less in one go. I can remember we all went back to the billet you know and your arm’s getting a bit sore by then and at St John’s Woods we were billeted in quite sort of modern high-class flats as they were in those days. And he came in, he said, ‘Right.’ he said, ‘There’s buckets, scrubbing brushes, water, all outside. Scrub the floor.’ We all had to get down and scrub the floor and he kept us at it for about two hours. Then when we finished he said, ‘Right. Now —’ I think it was teatime by then, he said, ‘If you hadn’t done that in about an hours’ time your arms would have stiffened up. You wouldn’t have been able to use them for days.’ He said, ‘That will fix it.’ They were sore mind but they didn’t go stiff. So, you know [laughs] the sergeant knew what he was doing. Anyway, from there to Bridlington in Yorkshire which was, oh I forget what they called it now. It was further basic training anyway. Mostly drill and lectures on gunnery and aircraft recognition. Theory and more or less theoretical anyway but but lots of sort of marching up and down. Then you marched from your billet to the Mess Hall and you marched from the Mess Hall to the lecture rooms and you got marched from here to there and you learned more or less about the Royal Air Force. That you learned you didn’t salute a warrant officer for instance. That took, let me think [pause] six weeks. Nothing really much to add to that. That was all sort of pretty mundane stuff. From there then to Gunnery School which was at Stormy Down near Porthcawl in South Wales and that’s where you fly in [unclear]. We had Anson aircraft as a twin engine thing with a two gun turret up on the back and it sort of would fly out over the Bristol Channel and another aircraft would arrive towing a drogue and about, I think it was about six of us went up at the same time. You each took turns having a sort of a bash at this drogue and in between of course you know more lectures, more aircraft recognition. Learn all about a Browning 303. How to take it to bits, put it back together again. What makes it tick. Pyrotechnics. All about various sort of flares and smoke floats and everything to do with that. And that was another six weeks training there and at the end of the day or the end of the six weeks then took your exams. That’s the written exams, the aircraft recognition exams. Then finally you passed out.
[music starts playing]
RB: So on the last day there you were presented with your air gunner’s wings and your sergeant’s stripes because you were then made a sergeant and that was [pause] I finished there in July ’43. That’s right. And then seven days leave. Off you go home. So that was pretty much training really from being a, you know, sort of sprog airman to becoming a sergeant. But from there after leave onto Operational Training Unit which was at Ashbourne in Derbyshire. There we flew Whitleys which was a twin engine aircraft. On the way out from coming back from leave going out to Ashbourne I had to change trains at Bristol and Buxton or Burton on Trent. I forget now. It doesn’t matter. And by this time I’d got two great big kitbags all full of gear, all my flying equipment and I stuck this in the, I was pushed actually to catch the train at Bristol. So there was a guard there. He said, ‘Stick it in the guard’s van.’ He said, ‘Find yourself somewhere to sit.’ So, I got in and off we went. Got out at Buxton. I went to the guard’s van. No kit. I think what had happened was that I’d got a little bit confused at this point because there was a guard’s van at one end and another at the other end. So, I went to the wrong one. But anyway, they wouldn’t hold the train for me. The train went off and away went my kit as well. So other than you know a sort of a side bag with a couple of shirts and vests and things in it. That was it. The lot had gone. I arrived at Ashbourne anyway and the sergeant in charge there I told him what had happened. He said, ‘Well, don’t worry about it.’ He said, ‘I expect that will turn up.’ And anyway, within about three days they had a call from Derby Railway Station to say my kit was there so that was alright. At Operational Training Unit then you get crewed up. You know, you get in with your pilot and navigator and it’s not a case of saying you will go with so and so or you will go with this fellow. All the, all the different gunners, pilots, navigators, wireless operators all arrive in a big room, a big lecture room and the fellow in charge, probably a wing commander or something like that I suppose, he said, ‘Right chaps. Now, you’ve got an hour. Just sort of mill about and find yourself a crew.’ So there was all these bods sort of just milling about, you know, looking at a pilot and thinking well do I fancy him or don’t I? And so it goes on. Luckily as far as I was concerned there were several people that had come over previously from flying Blenheims so they were already crewed in the respect that they had a pilot, a navigator and a wireless operator already together and this big long legged fella came up to me, a wireless operator, he said, ‘Do you fancy being our gunner?’ So, I said, ‘Yeah. If you like.’ So, I said, 'Where’s the rest of them.’ So, he said, 'Well, the pilot’s on leave.’ Or something or other. Something had happened that he wasn’t there. And anyway, he introduced me to the navigator who took one sort of scornful look at me because bear in mind that if you’re a crew of three you get sort of very close together. Then suddenly you get another fella sort of slumming on you because on a Whitley there was a crew of four. So, the navigator wasn’t all that happy about it but fair enough it worked out later and the pilot arrived back a couple of days later so we met up with him. So we started our training on that lot. Then most of the training there where you do your circuits and bumps you know which means taking off, going around and around, landing, taking off again hour after hour and cross country’s where you practiced, well the navigator practised his navigation. The pilot does his flying of course. Well, all the crew do their sort of own thing, yeah. They had been trained to fly Blenheims but they were now going to have to go through the routine of of flying another twin engine aircraft prior to being trained on four engine aircraft. Well, at Ashbourne I began to sort of realise what girls were like. Especially the WAAFs because they were all very nice there and I met some very nice ones there. That went on and on and I don’t think there’s sort of a great deal of sort of excitement happened there. Yeah. That’s right. So we finished there on yeah the end of October ’43. That’s right. Anyway, my final assessment at Operational Training Unit was aircraft recognition a hundred percent, gunnery theory eighty seven percent, gunnery practical above average and I got an average pass. So I don’t know what you had to do to get an above average [laughs] Night exercises. Ashbourne, our own sort of base was was fogged in so we had to divert to a place called Valley which is right over on the Welsh coast. Landed there. It would have been about 3 o’clock in the morning I suppose and went off to bed. Got up, had a breakfast and went back out to the aircraft to sort of fly it back to our own base and there was a fella up in the cockpit, he sticks his head out and he says, ‘Cor, hello Ron Beford.’ And this was a fellow from my home town. He was, I don’t know a fitter or something like that I think. No, an instrument checker. That’s right. He was checking out the instruments. So, there we are. It is a small world isn’t it?
[recording paused]
RB: Oh yeah. So that was another thing about Ashbourne too. Being only very young I never never used to drink. When I arrived at Ashbourne and went in the Sergeant’s Mess some of the other fellows were there so they said, ‘Have a pint, Ron.’ So, I thought well I suppose I’ve got to stomach it some time. So up came this foaming great pint and I took a slurp of it and I thought my God this is awful stuff. Anyway, I finished it off and well after that I liked a pint [laughs] And that’s what started me on my downward trend. No, in fact I didn’t smoke until I was about twenty one. I was a non-smoker. Most of the lads smoked. We never smoked in the aircraft mind but I mean if you went to a pub or in the Mess I mean the whole place was just full of smoke. Everybody smoked in those days. But well, I used, I did quite a lot of cross country running and you know I didn’t smoke because of that reason really. In fact, we did, I did a cross country at Ashbourne, it’s funny how these things come back. You know, you’ve got to sort of still keep coming back haven’t you? They had a Sports Day and it was a four mile job and there were hundreds entered for this and I was right at the back of the pack to start with and I gradually sort of you know crawled up and up and up and I finally realised almost at the end of the run there were only about sort of half a dozen people in front of me and I still felt fresh and I remember there was a stile into the sports field and then you had to run all the way around the track to the finishing line and I started overtaking a couple of people. Overtaking and I thought and there was one chap actually he was miles out, you know. No way I was going to catch him but I caught up enough and I just missed being second. I came third. But that was third of I don’t know, God knows, hundreds I suppose and there were some good runners about in those days too. So let’s have a look at what’s next.
[recording paused]
RB: Oh yes. That’s right, and then onto Conversion Unit. This is where you convert from twin engine aircraft to four engine aircraft and this was at a place called Woolfox Lodge in Rutland as it was then. This sort of crewing up business starts all over again because you then take on board a flight engineer and a bomb aimer which makes your crew from four up to six. So that once again you all go into this room and everybody mills about and we acquired ourselves a bomb aimer and flight engineer anyway and I can only ever recall on sort of one instance where it went wrong and that was one gunner and he just didn’t get on with his pilot and they swapped around shortly afterwards. But I mean that’s the only time I can ever remember sort of anybody you know making a wrong decision on that. So that it worked all right. So Heavy Conversion Unit. That means as I say converting from twin engine to four engine aircraft and once again circuits and bumps. You’re taking the thing off, flying it around, landing it and then exercises. Air gunnery exercises for instance where we had to do air to sea firing. Drop a smoke float out in the sea somewhere and then sort of have a go at it. And cross country’s again. Just doing various things. Oh yes, of course and here too I became known as Joe instead of Ron because the navigator was called Ron as well and on a cross country at Woolfox Lodge, one of the instructors comes with you on a cross country, you know, just sort of to see what you’re all up to and on one instance the pilot said, ‘Ron.’ And of course, the navigator answered and I answered. Now, the instructor didn’t say anything about it at the time. He said, when he came down he said, ‘Now,’ he said, ‘You’re alright. You’ve got a damned good crew there. But —' he said, ‘There was one thing. You’ve got two Ron’s in the crew.’ He said, ‘Let’s have pilot to gunner or pilot to navigator or pilot to engineer.’ He said, ‘No first names because you’ll get mixed up one day and you know, it could cause you a bit of trouble.’ And do you know that was that lesson learned. But they always called me Joe afterwards anyway [laughs] because they, you know we did still use Christian names other than on ops and then we just always stuck to whatever the crew member was.
[recording paused]
RB: That’s right. Yeah, well this sort of four engine conversion went on to the last day of December ‘43. That’s when we finished. So in my case it would have been eight months training and then you’re posted to an operational squadron.
[background music]
RB: That’s where your training really starts of course and I think everybody in those days anyway at that time I mean we’d been at war three or four years by then anyway and I mean everybody thought right, well we’ve got to get this lot beat.
[recording paused]
RB: On I would imagine the 1st of January, something like that we were posted to 620 Squadron which were still flying Stirlings at Leicester East. 1st of January 1944. Now, 620 Squadron at that time they’d just come off Bomber Command and on to this special duties operations which meant that we had to sort of go on another course of training to get the squadron together and also to be able to tow a glider and drop paratroops or drop supplies etcetera. Also at Leicester East another squadron, a newly formed squadron actually 190 Squadron which was going to be our parent squadron they also sort of got together there so that they in fact had to sort of get together as a squadron. 620 wasn’t too bad because about half of the squadron were still the existing crews and sort of topped up by us. Us new boys. And a lot of them were experienced on, on operations anyway. Leicester East was a brand new aerodrome and it was a very wet winter and all the roadways and paths and that were about two inches thick with a liquid mud and it was awful. Everybody that, we were sort of from our shoes up to our knees were just covered in mud. There was nothing you could do about it because you had to sort of walk in it anyway. But everybody was there sloshing about and nobody was very happy there. And if, if an aircraft ran off the runway I mean the wheel just went slurp straight in and bogged down, you know. It never got out again. Well, at least it would be towed out and dug out eventually but there was, it was a terrible mess anyway. So there we, I have to look in my logbook. Glider towing. Sort of a cross country base at Cambridge. [unclear] Boston, back to base and this went on day after day after day and of course not only were we training to tow a glider the glider pilots were training to be towed. You’d do the towing aircraft would be on the end of the runway and then a tractor would tow the glider out. Yes. Yes the tow rope is attached on the one hand to the glider into a sort of like a claw and the ring fits in the claw and then the claw closes together you see. Now the same thing happened underneath the gunner’s turret so that you had to shout back to the skipper who had a lever which either opened or shut this claw and shout back, ‘Open.’ And then when the fellow who was underneath the turret looks in and says, ‘Right. Closed.’ Then you shout up to the skipper, ‘Close.’ He closed it and then you’d be hitched up to the glider and then you had to taxi quite slowly forward to take up all the slack of the rope until it was nearly taut. So you would say, you know, sort of, Steady. Steady. Steady. Alright. Slack upright. Away you go.’ And then he told him to open up the engines and off down the runway. The only other thing you had to do then was tell him when the glider was airborne because the glider was always airborne before you were. But by this time of course the tail is up off the ground anyway in which the gunner was sitting. So then the glider sort of gets up and they sort of gets up you know sort of towards or above the towing aircraft and then the whole sort of contraption staggers off the ground. So that’s that. One little incident there that we had in Leicester East it was, we had a lot of snow for about three weeks there and apart from everybody having to go out and clear runways we, we went off one day with a glider and flew into a snowstorm and you couldn’t just, couldn’t see anything and obviously the glider couldn’t see us. I realised that the tow rope was beginning to go up and up and up because the glider couldn’t see us. He didn’t know where we were so he was gradually rising above us and in fact the tow rope was almost sort of straight up so I shouted out to the skipper, ‘Cast off quick.’ And he said, but almost at the same time I was going to do that he cast off because the glider was pulling the tail up and of course the nose was going down and the pilot couldn’t do sort of much about it. So anyway, we cast him off and got back a bit of height and sort of flew out of the snowstorm and the glider made a good landing anyway. He landed in a field somewhere. That was one little incident that happened there. As I see in, yeah in March we moved from Leicester East which they more or less sort of had made, well a training aerodrome really down to Fairford from which we would sort of start our operations properly. Fairford was quite a nice aerodrome actually, Fairford in Gloucestershire and in lovely country. Then we started these big glider exercises which meant that to take off with a glider this is a little bit difficult to explain without being able to sort of do a diagram. If you’ve got forty aircraft and forty gliders all having to take off they can’t all take off at the same time obviously. So you get all the aircraft lined up on one side, all the gliders lined up on the other side and your first aircraft comes out, hitches up his glider and off they go and then as quickly as possible the next one comes out and this goes on and on and on until they’re all away. Now, as you can imagine there was probably a gap of perhaps a minute or a minute and a half between each aircraft going away with this glider. Now, you’ve got to get in some form of sort of formation somehow so what you had to do was for the first aircraft would fly out straightaway from the aerodrome for a certain time. We’ll say twenty minutes if you like. Now, the next aircraft would fly out. He’d fly out for nineteen minutes thirty seconds. The next one would fly out for nineteen minutes. Gradually the time cutting down. And at the end of the first one, at the end of his twenty minutes if you say then he would bank around and fly back on a reciprocal. So as he did that the next one behind him is going to turn a bit earlier so he would then turn and more or less formate with the first one. Now, as you can imagine then by the time this is going on each one turning around a little bit earlier by the time you got back over the aerodrome you were in a loose formation. Now, that’s only one aerodrome. And then you had to sort of formate with all the other aerodromes that were doing the same thing. So then you’d fly on another course, all very accurately timed and you couldn’t afford to be sort of ten seconds out even so that you would arrive over another certain spot when the whole sort of gaggle from the next aerodrome should sort of either, or you tuck in behind them or they tuck in behind you. So as you can imagine that it took quite a long time to get the whole thing sort of in some form of formation. You flew at a sort of a given height give or take a few hundred feet because I mean obviously you didn’t fly in formation like you see on Royal Air Force displays. I mean it’s not like the Red Arrows, things like that. I mean you just sort of fly in a broad stream really. That’s, that’s the way to to explain it I suppose. Yes. Yeah, and on these big group exercises there would be a landing zone for the glider which would be another aerodrome actually and so this whole great big stream would arrive over and the glider would cast off himself because he knew where he wanted to land so he would cast off when he was ready and then all the towing aircraft would sort of fly on and fly back to their own aerodromes and all the gliders would sort of plunge down onto this one aerodrome. And I can remember seeing one glider landing from the ground actually and these great things they were big gliders mind you all made of wood. And all these things coming in and great flaps hanging down like barn doors because they came down almost vertically and then sort of you know ran along the ground and they were sort of one runs into this one and another one runs up the back of that one. There was bits of wood flying everywhere. Absolute chaos really. But luckily enough nobody seemed to get hurt. One of the exercises we did was in May ’44. That’s right. It was a big exercise. A big glider exercise and it was done for the benefit of King George the VI. He was sort of on the aerodrome where all the gliders were coming in which we didn’t know at the time. Didn’t even know he was going to be there and it was only because I read it oh years later. I know one day we had to take off towing two gliders. They were American gliders. Smaller than the ones we had but it was, you know just a sort of an experiment to see if it could be done. But we did it alright actually. Got them off the ground and they dropped off but nothing ever came of it afterwards. I think they decided that the Horsa was the best thing.
[recording paused]
RB: One nasty accident there. After you dropped your glider you’d fly back to your own aerodrome and drop the tow rope in a field sort of adjacent to the aerodrome. So there were about twenty of us I suppose all careering back and the trouble is everybody sort of wants to get, get rid of their tow rope, get in the circuit so that they would be one of the first to land. So all this lot was sort of streaming for the field to drop their ropes off and there was one aircraft suddenly started cutting across the whole lot and I could see him sort of coming right in towards us and I shouted out to my skipper, ‘Climb. Climb.’ Which he did and this thing passed underneath our aircraft and how the tail fin missed us I shall never know, and smacked straight into another aircraft which was on the other side of us and they both crashed. You know. All the crews killed. Yeah. Terrible waste. I mean that pilot was an idiot. You know. He chucked away twelve lives there because I mean he never, he should have pulled away and gone around again but no he was going to get his rope in you see and that’s how accidents happen. So, from there. Oh yeah that’s right. Then on to the first operation. That’s the big day this is now. I can remember my skipper coming into the crew room and saying, ‘Right, Joe. Briefing at —’ so and so. ‘We’re on tonight.’ And of course, your first op is always the big, this is what all this training has been about and this is what you’ve been looking forward to. You don’t realise mind you it might be dangerous but it’s too late to turn back then isn’t it [laughs] And anyway, this one was an operation down, well to the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains to drop arms and ammunition to the French Underground movement. And it was nearly our first and our last actually because we got down there alright, no problem and dropped the stuff down. But on the way back I think we were at about five thousand feet at the time and all the instruments went and it was a very dark night because I mean normally we only flew on moonlight nights for this sort of job because you had to map read your way to wherever you had to go and the pilot couldn’t keep the aircraft straight. You know, one minute we were sort of going one way another minute going the other and losing height all the time of course. So in the end he said, ‘Well, prepare to bale out.’ So we all sort of responded and on my turret you’ve got a couple of doors that slide behind you and you have to reach behind your back, unlatch the doors and sort of slide them away so you can get out and my doors wouldn’t unlatch. There I was sort of stuck and your parachute is outside of the turret of course so you’d got to get the doors open to get your parachute, clip it on and then swing your turret around on the beam and get out that way. Mind you he hadn’t told us to bale out at that time but prepare. That means get your parachute on, get the hatch open and be ready to go. Then suddenly the engineer who was very good they’d got what they called pesco pumps actually which controlled the fluid or something or other to, to all the instruments. I don’t quite know how it works but he managed to scrabble over and evidently there’s two of them and he switched over and everything started up again. The instruments came back, you know. He pulled the thing out and everybody relaxed. By this time we were down to about two thousand feet so I thought what’s the matter with these doors? I put my hands behind the back and they opened as easy as anything. So I think it was just sheer panic that I couldn’t get these damned things open.
[recording paused]
RB: And I mean we did training on the ground where the pilot would give the order to bale out or whatever and everybody would go through the motions. You know, clip your parachute on etcetera but no nobody had to sort of actually jump out but a bit dangerous really anyway. I mean to have to bale out of an aircraft that’s the last straw isn’t it? So anyway, that was our first op.
[pause]
RB: 28th of April 1944. Went from there. Let’s have a look. What did we do? Well, we went on. You know, still doing training but operating as well at that time more or less to, to the, you know to France to the French Underground and also dropping SAS troops for instance. There’s one there the 10th of May which dropped a load of French SAS paratroops into France. Those boys I didn’t know until a little while ago actually they, we dropped them in the right place and the trouble is the Germans were waiting for them and, you know they had a bit of a battle. They killed the lot anyway. None of them got back again so somebody must have, you know, split, you see. In those days there were a lot of sort of French people for instance who were only too pleased to give something away for a reward by the Germans. Then of course the 5th of June the Second Front so that we dropped paratroops near Caen there and so we would have dropped the paratroops at about 1 o’clock in the morning I suppose. That was before the actual seaborn invasion had started because they didn’t come in until sort of first light so that all these paratroops were bunged in to take key positions as far as they could. And that was at the same time you probably, or most people have read about it when the glider boys went in and captured what we now call Pegasus Bridge, you know. Which is, which is common knowledge. There was a tremendous amount of flak that night actually and a lot of aircraft got shot down but anyway we made it alright. I see that in my logbook I fired three thousand rounds at flak positions which is a lot. Still, you’re always training and, but interspersed with with operations. Like July for instance one, two, three, four. Did six operations in July. I can’t think of anything sort of outstanding on any of them. Oh yeah. One in August. That’s right. We got fired on going across the coast and didn’t think we’d been hit at the time but we did go out and we did drop. That’s right. That was a successful operation. On the way back there was suddenly a loud thump. The engineer said the starboard outer was going off the clock so the skipper shut it down and we had to sort of come on three. But the problem was that it had got a bit of flak in it that we, as I say we didn’t know at the time and the big radial engines which means you’ve got cylinders in a sort of a circle which drives the propeller shaft and these had just sort of disintegrated. The problem was it had blown one of the engine covings upright. So, in effect you, you had a big tail fin sticking out. Out on the wing in fact which upset the whole sort of trim of the aircraft so the pilot had to fly it back with the wheels sort of hard over one side just to keep the thing straight and level. Now, I know we got back over to the French coast or near the French coast which was occupied by our troops at the time. So, he said, ‘Well, what we’re going to do lads?’ He said, ‘We’ll try and get down here if you like or do you want to try and get back across the Channel?’ We said, ‘Well, what do you reckon, skip?’ Because we were losing height all the time you see. So, he said, ‘Well, I think we might make it. We might not.’ So we all said, ‘Right. Ok. Come on. Let’s go home.’ Anyway, we sort of gradually drifted on back and called up Tangmere which is right on the Sussex coast actually that, you know, we had a problem. And anyway, they sort of called us straight in. I’ll always remember they called up from the ground and said, ‘Ok.’ You know. ‘Bring her straight in. Do you need an ambulance?’ Skipper came back and said, ‘No. Not yet.’ [laughs] Anyway, made a very good landing and you know landed on our wheels. There wasn’t any problem at all. I always reckoned he deserved a medal for that night but he never did get one. Now, we were still operating to France. This goes on now until September ’44 and yeah they were all French operations at that time. All over France actually. They were all about sort of six or seven hours flying time. Oh yeah. One funny thing. Oh yeah, I do remember. As I said to you before you know it’s mostly that these were done on a good moonlit night and we were operating right around the other side of Paris I think it was and suddenly I sort of looked down and I could see an aircraft flying below us at more or less the same rate. So I called up the skipper. I said, ‘Aircraft below starboard.’ Or port. Whatever it was. He said, 'Can you see what it is?’ I said, ‘No. Not really. Not yet anyway.’ He said, ‘Alright. Well keep your eye on it, Joe,’ which I did and this thing sort of still went on. If we turned right he turned right and I suddenly, I suddenly realised it was our shadow moving along the ground. I dared not sort of admit to it so I called up the skip, ‘I’ve lost him. He seems to have gone.’ [laughs] There we are.
[recording paused]
RB: Well, then we moved into this Arnhem job of course which was in the 17th of September ’44 and for this lot we, everybody was confined to base. Nobody could go out. Nobody could come in. No letters out. Nothing at all for about a week beforehand you know. Complete sort of clamp down because obviously nobody wanted this to sort of leak out. I mean basically I mean you probably all know anyway I mean it was to capture the bridge at Arnhem to allow our ground troops to sort of move forward into Germany. Now, on the first day we were one of I think it was six aircraft that acted as Pathfinders and that meant we dropped paratroops on a given spot and then they laid out tapes and flares and things to allow the gliders that were coming up behind to come in on to their correct landing zones. Now, that was easy. It was a beautiful day and we flew in broad daylight right the way across Holland. The sky was full of our own fighters. I remember one Dutch family they were sitting in their garden having, I don’t know would it be dinner? Probably would have been yeah because we were there about mid-day and they all stood up and waved and we all waved back. We were sort of only about five hundred feet off the ground anyway. But anyway, we went there. We dropped our tricks. We came back and never saw a thing. You could have flown around England for, you know, a lack of anything going on. The next day we towed a glider and it had begun to get a bit different then because I don’t know why because I mean we went on the same route but the Germans had been pretty smart in sort of moving flak guns and that in. So we were shot at more or less all the way through. I fired at a couple of flak guns. Whether I hit them or not I don’t know. I think I was close. Mind you had to be careful with the big gliders sort of bobbing along behind you. You couldn’t really sort of, well you could only fire sort of left or right really. That’s, that’s the thing. The day after that we had a day off. Then the day after that we had to go back and try and supply the troops on the ground. By this time it had really got bad of course but we took a different route in which more or less followed the route that the Americans and the British were taking to move up towards Arnhem. So ok. We were alright there. But once you got over other side I mean it was just everybody just opened fire. And all the sort of guns that they were using against each other on the ground they used against us as we were flying in once again only about a thousand feet up in broad daylight. Lost quite a lot of aircraft that day. As far as we were concerned I mean most of them were going in and dropping their supplies you know on the given dropping zone and then climbing away and getting shot down for their pains because they were very slow at that time. And my skipper said, well he said, ‘Hang on lads.’ He said, ‘I’m going down here.’ He stuck the nose down. We stormed off right down to more or less ground level. As we were going down there was one flak gun firing at us but I think that we were moving a bit fast then and he wasn’t allowing enough lead because he should have knocked us down really. But all the tracer was going out underneath my turret. You know. They were going out behind. He didn’t estimate our sort of forward speed. And anyway, the skipper got it down on the ground, pulled out and as we pulled out we went straight out over the top of this thing and as soon as it sort of came out and under I suppose I gave it a burst of I don’t know, four or five seconds and there was a great big puff of smoke. So I must have hit something, you know which didn’t intend to be hit. I got our own back there I suppose. And that really as far as I was concerned with Arnhem because I see that a couple of days later we went on another normal sort of supply drop but I know the next day or the day after that is we sent nine aircraft and only two of them got back. In fact, we lost about fifty percent of the whole of the crews on that station in about five days. You know, it’s not really very nice. Most people knew each other. Don’t forget you’ve got two squadrons on the aerodrome. I mean you, you knew some of the other boys on the squadron obviously because I mean you all Messed together etcetera but you know it was a very strange feeling actually when they sort of scrubbed the whole lot. You know, I mean, we were still badly knocked about. A lot of aircraft damaged too that couldn’t fly. You know, got back home but couldn’t fly again and in the end they said, ‘Well. Right. Well, you know, you’ll have to stand down.’ I mean, ‘We can’t do any more.’ And I remember sort of the next day went down to the flights. They said, ‘Right. You’ve all got forty eight hours.’ You know. ‘Go home for forty eight hours.’ But the complete silence on the aerodrome, you know after so much going on. Everything was quiet and there wasn’t a lot of people about of course especially among the crews. And so off we went for a couple of days and when we came back of course all new crews had been brought in. New aeroplanes brought in. They were all sort of back to normal again.
[recording paused]
RB: Yeah. We had a nice, nice little trip actually after all that lot was over. They were going to organise a big airborne operation in Italy. So what we had to do was to take a whole load of gliders and take them down through the aerodrome near Rome. Couldn’t do it all in one hop actually. Not towing a glider. So it meant going down to an aerodrome in Southern France. Sort of [lobby] get refuelled, stay overnight and then go on to Rome the next day, drop the glider. Then down to Naples. Stay overnight there and then from Naples we could fly directly back which was very nice. We had a nice time in Naples. And of course, then I mean there was plenty of grapes and fruit and things about in Italy which we hadn’t seen in this country for donkey’s years and there was plenty of wine as well. I know one Australian pilot he went, we all went into Naples, you know and had a bit of a knees up and he was so drunk he was still unconscious in the morning. They put him in the aeroplane because it had to go back and the navigator had took the thing on and flew it back to well almost within sort of hailing distance of our own country. By this time he’d sort of come around again and he landed it but you know that was it. He was in no fit state to fly the thing. It was a good job his navigator could fly a bit wasn’t it? In a lot of cases on ordinary sort of cross country’s and you know around our own country I mean the pilot would say to one of the other crew, ‘Do you want to have a go and sort of come out and fly. I’ve flown a Stirling several times. Only just to keep it straight and level mind but, but I mean obviously you get to know the routine about where everything is and landing speeds or take-off speeds and all the rest of it. Earlier on when we started on operations our wireless operator after about the fifth op I think there were some flak spouting up miles away you know which wasn’t any discomfort to us at all and he started singing out, ‘Flak, skip. Flak.’ And we all thought well that’s alright. ‘It’s alright, Bert.’ And we got back that night, went to bed, woke up in the morning, Bert wasn’t there. He'd been to the MO and never flew again. He just, just went to pieces like that. So that meant we had to have another wireless operator. His replacement was a Canadian called George. On this trip down to Italy to get down to southern France you had to fly over the Pyrenees. Now, there is a gap there where you can squeeze through bearing in mind we went down as a sort of a Pathfinder. All the rest were coming along with gliders behind them. So we had to go down and make sure that that gap was clear, clear of clouds and radio back so that the others would come on and sort of be able to come through because if the cloud base was down on the mountains at all they would have had to turn around and come back again. Now, George never got the radio working at all so if there had been any problems we would never have got back again. In actual fact it was a nice day, you know, the sky was clear so we could fly between the mountains and the whole lot sort of came on but it was a bit lucky really. So, yeah. Funny. We had problems with wireless operators because George didn’t stay very long. For some reason he was sent back to Canada and then we had another one come along and he stayed with us you know until the end of the tour. By this time this is sort of October time now the sort of war in Europe was moving more and more towards Germany so we moved from Fairford up to a place called Great Dunmow in Essex to be a bit closer to the, you know, the war zone because you know you don’t want to spend hours flying over your own country before you even start. So we moved up there and started from there. We didn’t do a great deal for two or three months then. Oh, we had another trip down to Naples. That’s right. Took another glider down there. Oh, that’s right, we had engine trouble too. We spent four days in Naples actually and had quite a time. Yeah. We more or less to the end of the year we didn’t do a great deal for some reason. Oh, did a couple of air sea rescue trips that, they were out near the Frisian Islands. There was obviously an aircraft down in the sea. You’d go out and make a square search to try and pick up any dinghy that be in the water. On both occasions we never, we never saw anything anyway. I flew on one of those with an Australian pilot because their gunner was off sick. Something or other. Normally, I mean, my skipper was, he’d always get in the cockpit, everything would be tested. He’d go through all this cockpit drill. He’d do the lot before he was off. This fellow didn’t. He sort of gets in, he starts up his engines, he taxies out and he takes off and he’s halfway down the runway, almost airborne and he said, ‘Everything alright engineer?’ And the engineer said, ‘Yeah. Ok skip. Take it away.’ [laughs] And off he goes. There’s me sitting in the back, you know being sort of used to a skipper that’s sort of done everything and I thought my God what have I let myself in for? [laughs] Yeah. That’s right. Went to the end of the year really without sort of doing anything very much. Just ordinary, you know local flying. A bit of gunnery. Once again air sea firing. I can’t really think of anything outstanding that happened then. Just one of those times when everything seemed to be sort of in a lull. Of course we did have a lot of new crews. As I said, you know it came in after Arnhem and they had to be trained. Oh, that’s right. The next op was in January ’45 and we did a couple of bombing trips then. That was, one was to a railway junction in Germany. I think they were just trying to find us something to do actually. You know, did, did a couple of those. Nothing much sort of happened there. I don’t think we were troubled at all by anything. Yeah. That’s right. Another one was a place called Rees in Germany. I think we were bombing a ferry crossing. Something like that if I remember rightly. Just anything to delay the Germans. Ok then. So, by this time let’s have a look. Where are we? We were in early 1945 now and apart from these couple of bombing trips we did we then started on the operations to Norway and this was to supply the Norwegian Resistance people with arms, ammunition, food in fact as well because a lot of them were living out in the mountains and of course Norway at this time of year is sort of just full of ice and snow. There’s nothing else. So, if I can take you through a sort of typical day and include the sort of one of the Norwegian trips as well. Normally get up in the morning, have your breakfast, a shave, a wash and all the usual things. Get down to the flight offices at nine and then just sort of wait around for your skipper or somebody to come in and tell you if you were on that night or not. But you would assume that he sort of comes in and says, ‘right. Ok. We’re on tonight.’ He normally will take the aircraft up and give it an air test. That’s really only just to sort of take-off, fly around for twenty minutes or so and everybody tests all their different equipment and gear. Come back and make sure everything is alright. If there was anything wrong you could get on to the ground crew then and they could sort it out before you actually took off on the trip. So that briefing would probably be somewhere about 5 o’clock in the afternoon so that everybody, all the crews that were operating that night. Everybody would go into the briefing room. It was a large sort of hall with a sort of a stage at one end and a huge map of Europe and on this map there would be a red tape running from our aerodrome to whatever the target was. As I say in this case it would be sort of all the way up to Norway somewhere. The CO would come in and he’d sort of just give you a general run down on sort of what we were doing and the importance of the target etcetera. And for each different sort of member of crew they always had a squadron commander. He would sort of give his gen to the pilots for instance. And then you’d have a bombing leader as we called him. He would be the flight lieutenant who led all the bomb aimers. He’d give them the gen. And this would run right the way through and you know finally the gunnery leader would sort of give us our gen about, you know the incidents of night fighters etcetera and whatever you might expect on that particular trip. You’d also get a weather report from the Met man which was usually wrong but I mean he would give you, well the amount of cloud that you would expect to find, the windspeeds, experienced heights. Oh yeah. One thing this always reminds me of a briefing is that everybody would get in and everybody would be sitting down and all sort of chattering away and thinking bloody hell that’s a long way to go tonight etcetera. Then the CO would come in and there would be a mad sort of scrambling to feet and scraping of chairs on the concrete floor because we all had to stand up when his lordship came in you see. And then the same thing all over again. Everybody sits down and everybody goes quiet. Yeah. The navigation leader would, you know hold up his watch. That was sort of the time is now sort of whatever it was. 5 4 3 2 1. Yeah. No, only navigators were issued with watches. Yes. That’s right. Yeah. As far as I remember it was only navigators anyway other than a few odd bods that managed to sort of pick one up sort of on the side. They were good watches. Yeah, there would be a clock in the cockpit. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean as far as timing is concerned on any trip I mean the navigator would do that. I mean if you had to alter course at sort of half past eight or something or other I mean at half past that the navigator would come up to the pilot and say, ‘Alter course now to —' so and so and so degrees so that the pilot really had no real use for a watch.
[recording paused]
RB: Right. Having got something to eat finally get back to the flight offices and everybody would get dressed up and then for a gunner that meant sort of you know as much clothes as you could wear really. Although we did by this time have electrically heated suits like [pause] like a boiler suit in the form of an electric blanket you know which you plugged in and that did keep you warm. You’d draw your parachute and your dinghy and then at the sort of appointed time the crew would get together. You’d be picked up by the crew bus, taken out to your aircraft. Then everybody would climb aboard and all go about their own business. As far as I was concerned I would sort of get back into the turret. To explain sort of briefly about a rear gun turret I mean it’s a, we’re talking of a Stirling aircraft with a long fuselage and a long single tail fin and the turret is perched right at the end of the fuselage so you would have to crawl back through the tunnel of the fuselage. That’s where the turret is situated. Open the doors and get hold of a couple of handles which are above you. More or less swing yourself into the turret like sort of squeezing yourself in I suppose because there wasn’t a lot of room. So then I would be sitting in the turret by now and the turret was all Perspex with the exception of of the rear panel which was cut away completely and we all did this because in flying there is a lot of oil and muck so it comes back from the engines, creep down the fuselage and the slipstream would blow it up over the Perspex and after about an hour’s flying you probably couldn’t see much out through the rear. So, we used to take the whole panel right out and you would be sitting with two guns on either side of you and what they called a ring sight sort of more or less straight in front of you which was an electrically operated. Well, ring and dot and that’s how you sighted the guns. The guns and the turret were operated by something like, well a pair of handles. You moved the handles to the right the whole turret went to the right. You moved them up and the guns went up so that you could have movement through a hundred and eighty degrees in fact. They would open up all the breechblocks, loading your belts of ammunition which came up through the bottom of the turret because the main bulk of the ammunition was stored in big cans back in the fuselage. The ammunition ran down sort of something like railway lines, came up through the bottom of the turret as in fact all the hydraulics and electrical system did. So you’d load up your guns and you would leave them on safe at that time. Everybody else would have been checking over all their equipment etcetera and by this time the pilot would have started up the engines. They would have revved them up. Made sure there was no problems at all. So, you would then taxi out ready for take-off. Looking at this when we took off at half past eight in the evening bearing in mind this is wintertime so it was pitch dark by then a chequered hut at the end of the runway with one of the controllers there and it was his job to give you a green light and then you could sort of get started. So off you would go. And as soon as, as far as I was concerned anyway as soon as we were off the ground I would put my guns on fire so that all I had to do is press the triggers and away they went. This was done mainly because at that particular time there were quite a few German night fighters about intruding our airfields just waiting for aircraft either to be just on take-off when you’re vulnerable or landing when you come back again. Anyway, right we flew out across the North Sea at about if I remember rightly about five thousand feet and get up to, you should sort of hit landfall on the coast of Southern Norway depending on which bit of Norway you were going to anyway. Generally speaking up there they had a few flak ship flying about so normally they had a go at you. And then you would descend to about five hundred feet above ground level. Bearing in mind that mountains in Norway are sort of pretty high so that you know that was a feat in itself I think in those days. You get towards your dropping area and all you had to look out for was some fella on the ground flashing a hand torch with a coded signal. I mean the letter A or C or something like that so that the navigation and the map reading had to be bang on to be able to sort of pick up the dropping zone. Having found that you’d circle around and they’d light a line of little fires which gave you the direction to fly in and drop. So then that would be the next thing. You’d fly over and once the bomb aimer’s ready press the button and you go and drop away which is dropped by parachutes in containers. So that being that ok. You turn around, you come home again. And another long flog back across the North Sea. All the time as far as I, well as far as all the crew was concerned everybody keeping a very good lookout because generally speaking you could only do these operations in bright moonlight so it meant it was almost like day in fact. Particularly with the ground being absolutely white, covered in snow and a dirty great full moon up over as well. You could see for a long way. So, all being well without any problems shall we say hare off back home again. And when you were within sort of calling distance of your aerodrome you’d call up, ask permission to land and depending how many aircraft were operating that night and depending sort of whether we all got back the same time or not I mean you might have to orbit for a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes and at various heights. If there were sort of twelve aircraft returning at more or less the same time I mean the first aircraft to call up would be given permission to land. I mean the next one would be told to orbit the airfield at say a thousand feet. The next one at fifteen hundred feet. The next one at two thousand feet. And then as the aircraft landed so the stack would gradually descend. So finally you get your permission to land and you come in and you plonk down on the runway and taxi back to the dispersal, switch everything off. As far as I was concerned I would then put the guns on safe, take the ammunition out and make sure everything was switched off. The crew bus would be there then to pick you up, take you back to the breifing room again. You’d dump off your parachute and your dinghy. That would be signed back in again. Then you’d sit around a table with an intelligence officer and then he would want to know exactly what you did or what you saw. Anything at all. In fact, I can remember one night going out through the flak ships there and there was tracer and stuff coming up and he said, ‘What colour was it?’ He said, ‘Was there green tracer in it?’ My skipper said to him, ‘I don’t know whether the tracer was bloody green, red or purple. I was doing my level best to get the hell out of it.’ [laughs] But intelligence officers, I mean that’s fair enough. When you look back you realise they want, they were enquiring all the time to find out whether there was anything new going on which they don’t know about. But you’d be having a cup of tea at about the same time. The thing that always struck me about debriefing was that when you’re flying of course you’ve got your oxygen mask on all the time. And whilst we didn’t need oxygen because we didn’t fly high enough for that it also contained your microphone to speak into through the intercom. Now, this sort of typical trip that I just talked about took nine hours fifty five minutes. It’s a hell of a long time. With that oxygen masks on all the time all the boys would come back and they’d have a great ring all the way around their face where this thing had sort of dug in and everybody was the same. It looked as if they had great big smiles on their faces because of this sort of red ring right the way around. Then you’d finish your debriefing, go back to the Mess and have bacon and eggs etcetera and then off to bed.
[recording paused]
RB: For the crew there was an elsan. You know, a chemical toilet at the back of the aircraft or back in the fuselage for the crew. They could walk back and use it. For the gunner if he had any sense he wouldn’t. You either didn’t go or you did go where you sat and I mean that was it because the moment you leave that turret and you can only be gone maybe for sort of three or four minutes but bearing in mind you’ve got to crawl right the way back through a tunnel. You’ve got to sort of undo all your flying clothes, you’ve got to put it all back on again, then you’ve got to crawl back through again. Now, in that time you’d have a night fighter up your tail and knock the hell out of you. So you just didn’t move. That’s it. You stayed where you were.
[recording paused]
RB: That’s all we had just the, in the type of operations we did just the rear gun turret. In the original version of the Stirling when it was used as a, as a bomber purely and solely they had a mid-upper turret with two guns in it and a front turret with two guns in it. Now, nothing firing forward at all but purely really for defence. I mean, you know we weren’t going to a big four engine bomber we weren’t going to go chasing after it. Normally that, that didn’t happen you see. Not a frontal attack at night because I mean if a night fighter is going to attack a bomber he will pick the bomber up on the radar screen, on his radar screen shall we say and then normally he would stalk that aircraft. He would gradually creep up from behind when bearing in mind you make an attack from the front, the fighter’s traveling at say three hundred mile and hour, the bomber is travelling at about a hundred and eighty. Yeah. As far as sort of technique of air gunnery is concerned the gun, the turret as I explained a bit earlier on would rotate sort of a hundred and eighty degrees towards the rear of the aircraft. The gun sight as I said was a ring with a sort of a spot in the middle. The actual guns themselves were Browning .303s with a firing rate of eleven hundred and fifty rounds a minute. Bear in mind you’ve got four of those all sort of going at the same time. You’re maximum range generally was about six hundred yards. After that really you wouldn’t do much damage to anything and it was better to open fire at less than that rather than more than that. Although the trouble is if you got attacked by a German night fighter he usually had a damned great cannon and his range was probably a thousand yards. Although at night it didn’t matter quite so much because I mean you wouldn’t be able to see that distance anyway. When you fire a gun the bullet doesn’t sort of, well it comes out of the barrel and it immediately once it leaves the barrel it starts to drop which is called trajectory drop. So that if you are firing at a target this target is moving towards you probably from the bit to one side. Might be higher. Might be lower than you. You’ve got a speed difference of probably a hundred miles an hour or so so that it’s no use aiming or putting your gunsight directly on to the target because for one thing the bullets are going to sort of drop underneath it unless it’s absolutely, you know really close range. For another thing I mean all your shots are going to go behind it. So you have to allow a lead, that’s to aim the guns a bit in front of the target and a bit above as well. Give a sighting burst and if you were sort of near enough on target ok you know you sort of judged it right. The ammunition belt would be made up of one tracer in every four rounds. The other three would be, well it read more or less one tracer, one incendiary, one armour piercing, and one what we called ball which was just you know an ordinary round. I mean the aircraft is noisy. Everything is vibrating and shaking anyway. If you can imagine I mean a big sort of radial engine is like if you can imagine a car with no exhaust pipe and then multiply that by about six you’ve got four of those going all the time. You can imagine the noise and the whole aircraft is shuddering and shaking all the time and well although you had a flying helmet on with earphones on that tended to deafen it a little bit but above all this when you fired your guns I mean you could hear them but it wasn’t that noisy. We did four. Four trips altogether. Or five in total. We did have a cross with a night fighter one night up there. That one came head on strangely enough. We were talking about this earlier on. But once again bright moonlight night and it came head on and the skipper sort of called up. You know, it was a night fighter. A Fokker Wulf 190 it was. It was a single engine aircraft. Before that he told me to hold my fire in case this thing just sort of went on and, but it went past us, dropped a great flare which was probably to one of his mates that was skulking about as well, turned around, came, had a look at us. I gave him a quick burst at fairly long range which was pretty accurate strangely enough and he sort of fell away and that was the last we saw of him. I don’t claim that I shot him down. I rather suspect that he was wanting to get home as opposed to you know mix it knowing that he, he’d got an alert gunner there anyway.
[recording paused]
RB: I did thirty six all told from start to finish. Quite a long period actually because on this job that we were doing as I said earlier you could generally only do the special operations on a moonlight night so that the nights when there was no moon well you wouldn’t be flying anyway. And there was also a lot of training once again as I said earlier in the respect of dropping paratroops and towing gliders. In fact, it was one of the longest tours of anybody in the RAF because it was spread over a long time. Well, it spread from, spread all over really. France, Denmark, Germany, Holland. All over the place you see. Yeah. After the Norwegian ones I think and this is the sort of thing I did the next operation was the one where we towed a glider for the crossing of the River Rhine. That was when all our troops had got to, got to the River Rhine for the final push into Germany and we and the Americans towed hundreds of gliders. That in itself, I mean the actual operation wasn’t too bad. There was a bit of flak over Germany itself but I mean that was alright. We didn’t get hit. Several people did though but I can’t remember now how many aircraft took part but the whole stream passing over the fields of Waterloo in Belgium I’m sure I read somewhere that the whole stream of aircraft took an hour and a half to pass over there. There were literally thousands. And I can remember when we were joining up and all our lot coming over the coast. Also coming in were a big formation of American Dakotas each towing two gliders. Smaller gliders than we towed and they were about twelve abreast and they must have been oh, I don’t know stepped up another sort of twenty. Stepped up and the whole sky was full of these things and you know an amazing sight. A sight you would never see again. You know, there are just not that many aeroplanes about anymore. But that in itself was very memorable in respect of the amount of aeroplanes about and everybody sort of getting in formation. Getting towards the end of it now there was one other interesting operation and that was we had to drop some French SAS troops in Holland because our troops had got bogged down in the country there and they wanted to drop these Frenchmen in behind the Germans so that they could sort of attack from the rear and hopefully sort things out. Now, this was done at night and in thick fog and we had to drop, or the navigators would have dropped by Gee. A Gee was a navigational aid of course. It’s you should be able by using this thing and I don’t know much about it you should be able to by you know arriving at a spot know exactly where you are and we dropped these troops sort of by this navigational aid. I never knew what happened about it all until a bit later on. I read about this thing and funnily enough it was called Operation Amherst and I read that all of the troops were dropped within a mile of the actual dropping zone. So once again, you know navigation must have been pretty good. In fact, going on to navigation on these special duties things they would only have the best navigators. If a navigator was no good that was it they were out. My last operation was a trip to Copenhagen and that was a low level one. Once again right across the North Sea right the way across Denmark and that was in bright moonlight but it was really done at about five hundred feet all the way. It’s not too bad in Denmark because Denmark is very flat so that if you didn’t have any hills then you needed to worry about. That was the 12th of April 1945. That was it then apart from we’d finished our tour actually then apart from going over to Belgium and Germany. We were flying over empty and bringing our own prisoners of war back. As they were being released they’d sort of get them altogether in a group and I mean loads of aircraft were being used on this anyway. We’d go over. We might take over a load of something. Petrol or something like that to go up to the front line. Then we’d pick up these prisoners of war and bring them back home. I remember one [laughs] we were picking up a load from Brussels and there were all these aircraft about. All these ex-POWs, you know sort of excited wanting to get home and this Stirling sort of start pouring off down the runway. The Stirling had a very long fuselage and a big single tail fin and if you weren’t very careful it would swing on take-off. The tail would start to go one way, if the pilot overcorrected it it would go the other. If you didn’t sort of correct it very quickly the whole thing would go haywire and well this thing would run off the runway. And this is what happened. One of these things ran off the runway heading straight for a great big hangar. The pilot sort of was quick thinking enough to put the undercarriage up so the whole thing settled down on its belly and it was alright. Nobody was hurt at all but it just sort of slithered to a halt in a great cloud of dust and that. All these POWs were saying Bloody hell.’ You know. ‘We’ve gone through all this and this is what happens.’ [laughs] But yeah, as I say apart from flying about like that that was it. The end of the war of course and well we, all of us ex-aircrew we messed about doing very little. In fact, I was sent home on what they called indefinite leave and I was home for three months on full pay before I was called back again and they found us various jobs to do but really it was only a matter of awaiting your number to come up to be demobbed. So after I’d finished flying and the war was over of course by then I was eventually posted to take charge of a German prisoner of war camp near Abingdon. At the time you know I had the rank of warrant officer and there was also a sergeant there with me as well. The German prisoners of war, most of them had been taken prisoner in North Africa I would think about 1941 so they were pretty keen to get home. They never gave any trouble at all. They were alright. They all kept their billets clean, tidy. They did the work about the aerodrome or whatever they did. They did it well so that it was quite an easy time for me. The only problem was then we were right on the edge of the aerodrome and there always had to be someone there so that if you wanted to go through the Mess for dinner that meant you had to walk about two miles and then the other fella would have to stay behind and he’d have to wait ‘til you came back before he could go. It made life a little bit difficult in that way because we actually slept in the POW camp as well. Our own quarters were there. But that was about it really. I moved about after that.
[recording paused]
RB: No. No. Everybody sort of got on alright I think because as far as everybody was concerned ok the war was over and that was that. I mean, you know the Germans there were quite a good bunch really.
[recording paused]
RB: I don’t know it’s a, it’s a difficult thing but I don’t think people were so horrified about things like that then as they are now. I mean you know everybody was sort of shocked by it obviously but in the aftermath of war and I mean there were, well there were lots of sort of guards etcetera I understand that they were just sort of shot down anyway. You know, when the Americans or our own troops went into these places and I think that revenge was sort of swift and sweet then. But as I say people seemed to make more of it now than was made of it at the time. Probably my own opinion. Well, just how I felt I suppose but no one seemed to fall out about it. I suppose after how many years? Five years or so of war you know perhaps you got a bit battle hardened to things like that. It would probably affect people more now than it did do then.
[background music playing]
RB: In the, our sort of billet that we more or less slept in really I mean you lived in the Mess but you slept in the billet which was a Nissen hut. Normally I think there were about twelve beds. Six on either side which would accommodate three, two crews and one of the lads had picked up an old hand wound gramophone somewhere. We only had one record for it and on one side was the music that I’ve chosen now. “Softly Awakes My Heart.” I forget what was on the other side. But in the morning I mean we normally if nobody was night flying but ok everybody would be up probably about half six something like that. Somebody would always get up, put this record on so everybody would sort of be awakened to the strains of, “Softly Awakes My Heart.” [laughs] Anyway, then many ribald comments and perhaps a pillow being chucked at the gramophone etcetera and that’s the reason for that bit of music. About two or three years ago we were invited to go back to Fairford aerodrome. Do you remember I spoke about Fairford earlier on which the Americans now have and there they’ve built a big new complex to accommodate travelling officers. It’s like a hotel in fact and if you’ve got a fella that’s travelling perhaps from Germany back to America in transit he could well stop off at Fairford for two or three days or even a week and he’d stay in this place. They called this place Stirling House and they’d got a big plaque on the front of it with a big, with a picture of a Stirling on it. A Stirling bomber. As many people as possible from our two squadrons were invited for the day for the opening of this place so I managed to tie in with my navigator and bomb aimer and we met the day before in Cirencester. Booked into a hotel there and had a good meal. Plenty to drink, a good chat about old times and then went on to the aerodrome at Fairford where the Americans sort of met us. Some general or other flew over from Germany to open this place. There were all sorts of things going on. They made us ever so welcome. Gave us a smashing day. Gave us lunch and we went all around the airfield, went aboard one of the aircraft that they they fly from there which were big Boeing tankers that do the big mid-air refuelling. Well, in those, it just turned to be a very pleasant day. It didn’t look a bit like the Fairford that I knew because it had altered so much. And the next link with the past was last year. A trip to Norway. Now, I’d been very friendly with a chap called [Gunar Lindass] and we’d corresponded with each other for many years. It all started, actually I’d written an article in an aircraft magazine about Stirlings and he read it but the only thing that he knew was that I was R Bedford of 620 Squadron, Torquay. Now, one of our aircraft was shot down by a night fighter and crashed near the village in which he lived at the time. Now, he wasn’t very old at the time so the German guards that were guarding the crash didn’t mind him wandering around having a look at it. In latter years he got more and more interested in this particular crash and so he thought well let’s write to this chap. So he wrote to me and all he did was addressed it to R Bedford, 620 Squadron, Torquay. And within four days of being posted in Norway it dropped through my letter box. Obviously one of the postmen there knew me and or at least gathered it was me anyway. I was able to give him quite a lot of information about this particular crash that he was interested in. Having started on this lot he then sort of got more and more interested in the sort of other work that we were doing and their Resistance boys were doing. So we wrote to each other and wrote and wrote and wrote and this is going back quite a few years now and in fact they came over one year and came to see us. You know, we took them about and showed them as much of Devon as we could and then finally it became that it was the hundredth anniversary of the Norwegian Defence Association of which he is a member. And they thought it would be rather nice to invite some of us chaps up there. So once again he wrote to me and they could manage to have six of us and our wives to go up for, well about six days all told. Being the sort of, well only one in this country in touch with Gunar I had the dubious sort of pleasure of deciding who should go. A bit difficult really. I mean naturally I sort of asked my navigator and flight engineer and they both said yes. Through them I got a couple more and I finally got my six anyway and they booked us a free passage up on the ferry. The Braemar from Harwich to Oslo. Anyway, I got everybody together at Harwich at the appointed time on the right day and off we went. The only problem with that was that we had a force eleven gale going up through the North Sea and boy did that thing go. But anyway, we arrived in Norway and we were met and taken to various people’s homes to stay and they gave us an absolutely marvellous time. One of the days and this is quite coincidental that I chose this chap we were taken to a Norwegian air base. Oh, I know, we went to see the graves of this particular crew because they were all friends of ours of course in the morning and then went on. Had lunch at the Norwegian air force base and after lunch they lifted us by helicopter up to one of the dropping zones where the Resistance lads were waiting for us. And we were dropped off there and there were speeches made etcetera but the biggest thing really was George Neil, one of, one of the pilots that came with us. George and a chap, and his bomb aimer called Ted they had actually dropped a supply into that zone to the very people that met us there on that day. That was quite coincidental that I, you know had got George and Ted to go because I didn’t know this was going to happen at the time. And we were taken all around Norway. We were given slap up meals. Plenty to eat. Plenty to drink. You know. It was a fabulous time really. You know, they made us all very very welcome. So that was that and it looks as if next year on the forty fifth anniversary of the Arnhem week we shall be going back there as guests of the Dutch people. That is all in the air at the moment so I don’t quite know what, sort of what’s going to happen. But more of that anon I imagine. Yeah. About three days after I retire. Well, yeah so I did have ear trouble which developed through flying actually. Through flying. Well, it’s called tinnitus which means that you have like the sound of rushing water in your ears all the time and of course your hearing decreases. I can’t hear birds singing and things like that. But the doctors put it down to noise, vibration and swift descents of altitude. If you lose sort of a couple of thousand feet very quickly I mean as you know your ears will pop and bang etcetera so they reckoned that was, that was the problem.
Interviewer: Yes.
RB: I didn’t realise it for some years, you know. I did sort of, I suppose about five years after the war I realised I had these noises. I mean they weren’t too bad and I went to see the doctor. I mentioned it and he said, you know, ‘Your ears are a bit bunged up I suppose.’ But it gradually got worse and as you get older so all these things get worse and worse anyway. But, you know finally I sort of saw a doctor and he said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think you’d better go and see an ear specialist.’ So this fellow had a look at them and gave them a test on these things you know they’re, whether you get the range of hearing from low to high. So I went back in to see them. He said, ‘Done any flying?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, 'Ah, yeah. Ok.’ He said, ‘The best thing you can do is put in for a pension because this isn’t going to get any better.’
[recording paused]
RB: Yeah. Yeah. Air Gunner’s Association which is open to anyone that gained well, either an air gunner’s [pause], pre-war an air gunner was only an ordinary airman. An AC2. The lowest form of rank and they would wear a winged bullet on their tunic. On the arm of their tunic. Having sort of got into the war it was changed then that you wore a half wing on your chest as did navigators and wireless operators, and pilots had the full wings of course. But the Air Gunner’s Association was open to anyone that gained either the winged bullet or an air gunners brevet and was formed in about 1950 I think. I’m not absolutely sure. Formed by, you know a few blokes in London and that sort of has gradually grown and grown and we eventually formed a branch here in Torquay. Or at least its called Torbay and South Devon Branch. We have a meeting once a month and we lay on various sort of trips. We always have an annual dinner. But it’s a choice for all the boys to get together and you know it was quite a good bunch of lads in there. All knocking on a bit now of course and some are falling by the wayside.
[recording paused]
RB: Never find him. I know the navigator made quite strenuous efforts to find him. Mackenzie. Obviously called Mac. But a very good pilot too. Well, the bomb aimer was called Gleason. Paddy because he was an Irishman. Flight engineer Ken Selby. Navigator Ron Cassingham. My wireless operator we had three. Well, we had more than three. Remember earlier on I said our original one couldn’t take it. He went off. We had a Canadian and then after after he went back to Canada we had well spare people really. We never never really had another sort of not one that we had all the time. On, on all squadrons you would have a spare gunner and a spare wireless operator, a spare navigator who was not crewed up with anybody. But if anybody was short of, you know, sort of any crew member well then this fellow would fly with them. I suppose the good really was Gunnery School and passing out and being presented with your sergeant’s stripes and your air gunner’s wing. That’s something that I suppose all of us that worked for a long time and you finally you’ve made it and you started flying and you looked forward to going on further to Operational Training Unit and then operational etcetera. And I think that was the highlight. I don’t know about lowlight. I mean you had your ups and downs I suppose. I suppose the most sort of wrong thing was Arnhem really. I mean we lost so many people and it was frightening. It was really bad wasn’t it. But apart from that no. Ok. I must say I enjoyed my stay in the RAF. I mean its it was wartime. A lot of people got killed and wounded etcetera. I was lucky I got away with it but it’s something that I certainly wouldn’t have missed. Particularly back in those days. It’s probably we were only sort of talking about this the other day that if it hadn’t been for joining up I would have probably still stayed at Brixham where I was living at the time. I would have probably ended up as an electrician and spent all my time in Brixham and never sort of done very much. But the fact of wanting to fly and getting in to the Air Force took me right away from all that and changed the whole course of my life really.