Interview with Stanley Albert Booker
Title
Interview with Stanley Albert Booker
Description
Stanley Albert Booker grew up in Chatham in a military environment surrounded with the sort of military paraphernalia he and his young friends found fascinating. He volunteered for the RAF at the earliest opportunity. He trained as a wireless operator and was posted to 10 Squadron at Melbourne. He was shot down on an operation to Trappes and was hidden by members of the French Resistance. He was betrayed and was captured by the Gestapo who tortured him and sent him to Buchenwald Concentration Camp where he witnessed executions. After the war he struggled to get acknowledgement of his experiences from the RAF or the government and spent many years campaigning for the story of his and other airmen’s experiences in concentration camps to be known.
Creator
Date
2024-10-07
Spatial Coverage
Language
Type
Format
01:22:07 Audio Recording
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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.
Identifier
ABookerSA241007
Transcription
SP: This is Suzanne Pescott and I am interviewing Squadron Leader Stanley Booker MBE, Legion d’Honneur today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. Stanley was a navigator with 10 Squadron and was shot down on the 2nd 3rd of June 1944 on a mission to bomb the railway marshalling yards in Trappes in preparation for D-Day. We are at Stanley’s home. This is the 7th of October 2024. Also present at the interview is Pat Vinycomb, Stan’s daughter. So, first of all thank you Stanley for agreeing to chat to us today about your time within World War Two. So, can you tell me a little bit first of all about your time before the war? What you did before the war.
SB: Being a typical schoolboy with love of things mechanic and to do with things the Army, or the armed forces, everything like that at Chatham we had everything. We never knew for instance that Nelson’s famous Victory which everybody knows is one of the most famous ships going was actually built of Kentish oak in Chatham Dockyard. Apparently Kentish oak was the most beneficial for shipping and he had that built at Chatham and then everything that followed on. Trafalgar and all that. But we never knew at school that happened. But there was everything for boys. They built the warships in the dockyard from, from the days of using oak until they graduated through to steam. At that stage they found that they were training people to build the ships. They weren’t training people to sail in them. So they opened up a Royal Naval barracks. It was then found that the British Navy was such a good example after the various conflicts we’ve been in so they always carried a party of Marines, Royal Marines on board and the Royal Marines were only soldiers in Naval uniforms or the Naval people in soldier’s uniforms. The main thing being that they found that gunnery became so accurate they could fire a cannon ball not so much to hit the woodwork and damage the ship but to hit the main mast and if you could hit the main mast meant the sails all fell down. If the sails fell down the ship couldn’t operate any further. At that stage your little party of Marines leapt aboard with a horrible thing called a cutlas and they would produce it and slaughter anything they could see and that was a cheap way of getting a warship and bringing it back. So Chatham then became a Training Centre for Marines as well. Lovely for little boys. Then they started the Royal Engineers who had all the campaigns overseas when we had a mighty empire and the British Army occupied everything from North Africa right on through down through Egypt. Down to Sudan. Right down to, to the very bottom. And they found that sailing down the Nile was a long lengthy process. Why not have your own railway? So they brought the Royal Engineers who could do anything that they were told to do. They did it. And they took a big piece of land near Aldershot and there they formed the Locomotive Training School for the [how to lay] track. So when they had an overseas campaign they took their own trains, their own track and they got to the destination that much better. So that’s even more for little boys to get involved in. Each would have his own training area in the Medway towns and for little boys that meant things that moved. Things of action. Tank. Well, tanks really hadn’t been invented then but there was new, new things coming out all the time which the engineers practiced on. The various bridges, various types of construction. They had an Officer’s Training School there where they had the grounds outside. Where they had demonstrations of this. Demonstrations. Everything that the engineers built and they had an Open Day once a year where you could go down and wander around. Ask questions. You had the wonderful Flying Boat station nearby. Short’s. Short’s Brothers. They’d been initially training. When the Navy thought they needed more reconnaissance they put, Short’s put floats on aircraft for them and then they put them on the, on the ships. They had ships then with the catapult. They’d catapult the ship, the aircraft off but with the floats they could come and land in the sea and a big crane would haul it back on again. So for little boys there was the dockyard, there was the actual Naval barracks, the Royal Engineers side and even more so that every warship that sailed from England overseas it wasn’t generally known that they took along one set of armament for, to a campaign. They had, they to go to war in the Middle East. They had that but held back at Chatham was the largest ammunition depot enscooped in the hill and there was four sets of complete ammunition for every ship in the Royal Navy. So if a ship needed a replacement or something like that there were somewhere there was a pack made up and this was all bits of information because five of us, there were five of us little schoolboys. When it came to weekends Saturday morning couldn’t come quick enough. On to our bicycles. And we each had fathers that were in interesting jobs and could drop little secrets out that we shouldn’t know about and one of them was the fact that every ship that came up as far as Chatham had to stop by two big forts in the middle of the river and then they would offload little [pause] all the ammunition from every ship that had got that far and it was taken down to a place called Upnor Castle. The castle they built after the Dutch one night did what the Japanese did to the Americans. Sailed up the Medway and sunk half the British Navy. But they weren’t taught about that at school. It was told that we’d built this castle and the ships then put the ammunition away. It was tucked away in there and people didn’t officially know it was there. But we had somebody who had a father there and we knew where this went and where that went. But as far as the Flying Boats were concerned the lady next door had a boyfriend who was working in there and when we knew they had a new seaplane or Flying Boat in we were down there always watching it. If you had some secret equipment on a, on a new Flying Boat which they didn’t want the public to see if it was published in the book it was scribbled over and obliterated. Yet if anybody took the trouble to walk along the sea front by the factory there would be one being towed out and they’d run up the engines and whilst they were running up the engines you could see then that all the guns and you could see how. Be wondering how did the Flying Boat manage to open its bomb doors and not get all the water come in. It didn’t have any bomb doors. It had sliding things under the wing where you could slide out with the bombs on it. Little things like that. And then this wonderful little scale model of a four-engine bomber started flying around the area. It was a complete scale model right down to the turrets, the gun turrets and little engines were made in the nearby factory and this, this thing we didn’t really know was the prototype for the first RAF four engine bomber. The Stirling. And every day, every week, Saturdays long we’d be up there and were they going to roll a Stirling out this week or whether they are they going to roll this week. Just hoping it would happen and something would go wrong. All little boys wanted a crash. You could see a crash or something. And the very week that I joined the Air Force on my seventeenth birthday I was posted to the Royal Air Force Records Office. Records Office at Ruislip near Uxbridge in Middlesex. We were posted there. That very weekend they wheeled out the first time the new aircraft out of the hangar. The crew got on board. They flew two circuits around the airfield, came in to land and the undercarriage collapsed and there was this lovely shiny new bomber we’d been waiting all this time to see and I was the one in the Air Force and missed it. My other four pals there never ever got over the sight of this great bomber tumbling across there. There were little things like that that just made the Medway towns for little boys’ attraction. There was Navy Week. Then there was always the same submarines that were built there were to turn up. The same crews as would have built them would turn up and then the Navy would sent some aircraft to cross and do a dummy attack. That happened every year on Navy Days. So you had a week with the Navy competing with the Army who they put on an Army display of bridging and everything they could like that. So the Royal Air Force then stepped in and they built the first Sunderland Flying Boats which we officially didn’t know anything about but somebody’s father worked there so we had the inside information on where they could fly and what they could do and what they didn’t have. Where the gun turrets worked. All little boys delight. Everybody’s father had something to contribute.
SP: Stanley —
SB: In a, in a way that just made going to school something you did for four days of the week but Saturday morning despite belonging to the Scouts, the very active Scouts we had a Scout Leader who was the school, one of the schoolteachers who during the war had served in the Royal Engineers. So he, we had permission to use all the exercise area which the Army used and the Army was sometimes careless with what they left around so there was always pairs of pincers and things like that. Or if they were doing explosions and you were warned and something attracted. What you did on a Saturday was just sheer adventure. And then you’d get down as far as the entrance to the Royal Medway and Medway and the Royal Thames where the two met off Sheerness the big warships couldn’t get any further up the river because it was so shallow and they’d moor off there and then they’d do their practices. And then you see them offload their, all this ammunition on to the little barges and into another railway which didn’t exist. That just went all the way down the Isle of Sheppey and it was just marshland and you ended up by these two huge airship sheds, airship sheds which in the First War were used by the Navy to do reconnaissance and they’d just fly ahead. So the ships would send messages back. Well, they replaced those by the actual Flying Boats but there was all the more information we had. So it was. Altogether it was a dream. And I was in the Air Force then but on a non-operational station but it was near RAF Northolt and Northolt of course was the first station to get the new Hurricane fighter and they chose a day when there was a tremendous gale blowing and they made the headlines on the paper Britain’s first six hundred miles an hour winged aircraft. And then it flew from Northolt to Edinburgh in some amazing speed because the wind was actually stronger than the engine that took the aircraft. But we led the world. Britain led the world now in the Hurricane. It had the Spitfire and then things got a little more lively. They found that most of the Spitfires, well, all of the Spitfires in fact were made in the one factory down in south, Southampton and they said they thought if one day they bombed that there would be problems. So they had to find alternatives like that and all sorts of motor factories were able to turn out spare parts for this and that and they made Spitfires on four or five different locations which people didn’t realise. That’s how they did it. But we, they just thought if they bombed that one factory then we were in trouble. So, there was all, in fact we were in the Air Force we didn’t see many aeroplanes until D-Day. Until the time came for, the war broke out and we had to bring all the soldiers back from Dunkirk and this was hundreds and hundreds. Well, according to the statistics there was three hundred soldiers brought off the beaches at Dunkirk and it was this very shallow water so soldiers had to wade out to little landing ships. Anything that would go. Paddle steamers, anything that would get near, near to the shore. The soldiers could wade out so and then they’d be taken to Dover and of course England with having so many troops all over in France all had to leave all their equipment in France. There was lots of empty barracks in England so a train would just pull into, into Dover. They’d push as many soldiers onboard as they could and there would be these lovely pictures of ladies with trays of tea holding them up to the lads in the train and the trains would just push off to where there was some, anywhere in the country where there was an empty barracks. They brought these people back from Dunkirk so we were kept in touch with what was going on. And at the same time they decided that the RAF would publish a document that would say where every airfield was, Bomber Command airfield was going to be built the following year. But the secret documents were so secret that they’d never let anybody see it and the actual document that came from Air Ministry had given a list of the airfields that would be finished by the end of the next year. But because it was not told to the right people the Department and Record Office got the version that seventy two airfields that were going to be finished next year were all ready and they had to be manned immediately. Which meant of course places like Record Office where you had all the Air Force at your hands you had to suddenly produce enough people to go to these stations and when they got there of course the stations didn’t exist. We had this ridiculous situation where each joined the Air Force, one of the first forms you filled in was preference for first posting on completion of training and we all put down the airfields nearest home. I had one at Detling just four miles down the road. We had another one at Eastchurch just fifteen miles and they were all on the documents and suddenly this thing came down from Air Ministry saying the secret document which we weren’t allowed to see. But one morning we all got an envelope to say we were no longer apprentices. We were, the next day we were to parade outside on the parade ground and there there was four or five desks lined up and one desk had the counting officer had lots of money stacked up in front of him. Somebody else had bags and bags of food. The cook apparently on the station was allowed three and sixpence a day for food and so as everybody had had breakfast it was three and sixpence less worth of food. It was called the unconsumed portion of a day’s ration. There was a piece of cake, there was a big cheese sandwich, a Mars bar and something else in this bag and you were each given one of these. We were given an envelope but which for the Railway Station and it was sealed up so it wasn’t opened. And somebody came along with a big pair of scissors and as apprentices we had what they called an apprentices wheel sewn on our left part of our uniform and he very, not very carefully came along, was told to recover all these things. And the little flight sergeant in charge of us who weren’t having his boys looking not smart stopped it straight away and they got some of the wives came in quick and they quickly sewed up where the sergeant had cut these rings off. And little things like that that you remembered. And it wasn’t until we got to the Railway Station at Ruislip to take us to London to go to the, what we thought would have been the stations we’d applied for before the war we couldn’t make out and my one said, ‘Posted to RAF Station Worksop.” And we didn’t know anywhere an RAF station at Worksop. I mean as Records we knew where most places were. In fact, we all anticipated where we were going to go at the end of our training. We always made sure the two and a half year cycle of moving airmen on there was always going to be a vacancy that month you were due to pass out for you to go into. Instead of what, instead of my having one for an RAF Station Detling which was only just four or five miles from home here I was. All I could find was a Yorkshire one. A place called whatever it was near Doncaster. On the railway line between Doncaster and Sheffield. And we arrived at there. There was no, nobody on the station and we did talk if there was an airfield there how do we get to it? Where is everybody? Anyway, we sat on the station for a while and the station master come to us and says, ‘Can I help you laddie?’ I said, you know, ‘Where do we get the bus or transport out to the airfield?’ He said, ‘What airfield?’ I said, ‘Well, here’s my railway warrant. They sent us here.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve lived here all my life lad.’ He said, ‘No airfield here at all.’ So, oh dear, oh dear. So he said, ‘The best thing, I’ll ring up the local bobby.’ The local bobby in Worksop. It was only a little mining village so it had a pit nearby but policemen didn’t have cars in those days you had a bicycle and the sergeant came riding out and said, ‘What’s happened?’ And so the station master said, ‘Well, the lad here has got all his kit. Posted to an RAF station. We don’t know anything about that.’ So the policeman said, ‘Well, I don’t and I’ve lived here all my life.’ And at that stage it was the day after they’d brought the troops home from, from the beaches and all they did was packed them on trains and sent them off home to various barracks and it so happens that Manchester had one of these auxiliary stations where everybody that belonged to the squadron lived in Manchester or local volunteers and they’d given these lads to come home. They’d given them some, or they borrowed some lorries, I don’t know and they were making their home, their way home to Manchester when they stopped outside the station apparently and were in the pub having one or two beers or whatever they wanted to do and the policeman went across. He said, ‘Can you help us? We’ve got an airman on the, in here who’s lost. He’s lost an airfield and it doesn’t exist.’ They said, ‘Well, the bloody Air Force. It was typical of them. They left us on the beaches of Dunkirk and couldn’t fly, couldn’t help us at all so let him get on with it.’ So the sergeant came back and said, ‘Well, they’re a helpful shower and they’re not going to help us at all. Let’s ring up Air Ministry.’ But 4 o’clock or 5 o’clock on a Friday afternoon even early in the war everybody had packed up and gone home and there was always a just a recording saying if you have a query ring back on Monday morning. So the policeman said, ‘Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do with him. I’d give him a jail, a seat in our jail for, for the weekend.’ At that time there was a knock on the door and a little soldier came and said, ‘Excuse me officers.’ They were respectful to policemen in those days. He said, ‘I heard the sergeant being very rude just now to the, to your laddie,’ he said. ‘I live at, I live in Sheffield,’ he said ‘There’s a little airfield at Netherthorpe out there. It’s a little private one where three or four rich industrialists keep a little light aircraft there and they just fly from there now and again.’ He said, ‘And as I was passing yesterday I noticed that a new, a real aeroplane, an RAF one on the airfield, a new one we hadn’t seen called a Lysander. It was specially built for the Army,’ he said and, ‘There were some RAF lorries around and there was a flag post and a flying RAF so it looks as though the RAF were interested in that.’ So the policeman said, ‘Oh, well thank you, lad.’ He’d done us proudly. He got on his bike and cycled all the way across and when he got there he found that they were the advanced party for the City of Manchester Auxiliary Squadron who before the actual war had gone to France. The aircraft they were using, had been using weren’t, wasn’t much good and they left those behind and they gave the airmen all, they put them in parties of about one hundred under an NCO and said, ‘Make your way home,’ from the middle of France, ‘To the Dover coast and meet at a place in Kent where the squadron will reassemble.’ And it was those people. They were coming up to this airfield and taking it over and to us back came the policeman who said, ‘Well, you’re alright. They’ll put you up for tonight. All they’ve got there is an officer and an aircraft he’s flown in and four or five lorries. A cookhouse lorry and a guardroom. He said, ‘We’ll put you up for the night,’ and when he comes the morning the officer in charge said, ‘Look after this lad.’ He’d done this, the five or six days we were in England when we came back from France the RAF didn’t, couldn’t do much for us. They put us in this little village and the people in the pub they did us very very well indeed. And so much by a remarkable coincidence years and years later when I heard Radio Oxford and Radio [Cymru] the owner of the pub. The lads that had been helped was the son of the announcer and he said one night about this and they all wrote back in saying how well they’d been looked after by these Kentish people. They couldn’t. And I was just supposed to have been posted to one of the airfields there. So, back on the, back on the new airfield I couldn’t do anything wrong like. They, they’d been looked after so well and so it went on. The CO said, ‘I’ve got these new, new aircraft.’ The Battle of Britain was on and there were odd Germans flying around shooting at RAF lonely people. He said, ‘We’ve got, I’ve got this new, this new Lysander. It’s got a machine gun in the back but there’s nobody here to operate it.’ He says, ‘If you are just staying for a couple of days wait till I get sorted out and get people trained. Would you ride? Go in the back and operate the, the machine gun if necessary. Well, little boys had never seen a machine gun as much as had a real one to look at and so it was wonderful. And after the third day the CO sent for me and said, ‘Well, you did such a good job getting this place ready for me coming back. Got the officers to fiddle this,’ and he said, ‘Would you like to stay with us for a few more weeks until we get reformed?’ I said, ‘Well, yes. Very much so.’ And I stayed with them for two years. And during that week the first few weeks I had a mishap and they put me in the local hospital and it so happened the local hospital were trying an experiment for the Air Ministry that had discovered that Sheffield and Rotherham, two, two biggest steel manufacturing places in the country were just six or seven miles apart and then but that was heavily bombed. The docks. The coast of shipping firms, the merchant ships, Naval war ships were all built with Sheffield steel. It would be a disaster. At the same time the Army came along and said, ‘Well, we need Sheffield steel for our guns we’re building for, for all the munition that is being made and brand new tanks.’ So they suddenly said, ‘Well, we’ll take over a civilian hospital and put some nurses in there to train them up in case Sheffield was bombed and they had some trainee, some at least some trained nurses on the spot to do some rescue. And there that afternoon my good lady was one of the first party of nurses to be brought in to make sense and the sister said, ‘Well, all your Army forms are all different to our ones.’ There was no National Health in those days but each county Health Service had its own forms. They said, ‘Well, we’ve got to make this work somehow.’ And she divided these three nurses that came in with my wife and me and we just sat there right on through to midnight just putting matching up where one overlapped, one wherever we could change the number and the name and that. And I found that all I was doing for local people in Yorkshire there and all she was doing was for people who had come up from Kent with an airfield where we’d been assembling down there. So I learned more about Yorkshire in a few nights and she learned more about Kent where she’d never been in her life and so we had a lovely romance started right along as the war was just getting underway. And I was all of nineteen and my good lady was all of twenty and I was starting my flying and had another mishap and she did some nursing for me. And I joined Bomber Command and there was so many casualties in Bomber Command they encouraged you on our squadron to get as much if you were married, spend as much time as you could and you were probably this was where you’d come to reminisce the airfields in Yorkshire.
SP: Driffield?
SB: Melbourne.
SP: Melbourne.
SB: Was one of the utility ones and 10 Squadron being a real good old peacetime one had a very comfortable peacetime airfield just outside of York. But the Americans, the Canadians came across and they moved us out. Gave us one of the new utility wooden Nissen hutted one which happened to be Melbourne and was just being finished by the, there were hundreds and hundreds of Irishmen that had come across and they were building. Still building parts for the airfield. And the squadron were assembled then with the new Mark 3 Halifax come in which made all the difference in the world. So all of a sudden they’d gone from a very comfortable station right on the outskirts of York to somewhere way out in the country miles from anywhere with literally nowhere to go or nothing much to do except the village pub. And there happened to be a windmill nearby but I don’t think the pub was called the Windmill but Patricia would know that one. And that was the only place for lads to go. And later on, a year later when I was, I had been caught and had been interrogated all they did, the German secret police wanted to know was what price was the beer, what type the beer was, what were the names of the bar maids, who were the easy ones and that. So that when anybody was shot down they could confound a lad. He was saying oh is so and so serving on the beer or on the bar or is so and so there and they were so shocked with this information they’d got that the pub became famous. So, the war finished and overnight the Halifaxes were disbanded and the Bomber Command didn’t want the Halifaxes anymore. For two days they just loaded them up with bombs and more bombs and you just flew out to the North Sea to this German island of Heligoland. It was, it was occupied but, parts of it but and dropped hundreds and hundreds of bombs there ‘til the third day, the second or third day when they ran out of bombs. They said come back, the squadron is being disbanded and you will be fly the aircraft over to this airfield at Shawbury there, near Shrewsbury and they parked it there. So, Melbourne had nothing there but when we went back there was a row of twelve brand new Dakota transports and they were a very popular American civilian aircraft. A DC2 too. It was just flown by two pilots and then where these pilots took over hundreds of them to tow parachutists and that in for D-Day and they had decided that all 4 Group which was all Lanc, all Halifaxes were to be converted on to these Dakotas and then flown out to India where of course the war was still on. It was a very secret about the nuclear weapons and overnight they blew the weapons, the war finished and nobody wanted anything. At Melbourne they said they’d disbanded all the crews. Just kept the pilots and the navigators and one or two wireless operators and disbanded the rest and sent them on leave. I’d been kept for seven weeks by the Russians until the war, after the war —
SP: Stanley, just before we go on to that bit we’re just going to go back a little bit to your time at Melbourne. So, obviously you got posted to Melbourne for your operations.
SB: Yeah.
SP: Yeah. Can you remember anything about the operations that you were on whilst you were based at Melbourne? Can you?
SB: Well, that’s, it was a bit of a, you didn’t really know. It was [pause] if I might say 10 Squadron had formed, had reformed with new crews at Abingdon and when we got up to Riccall where they were doing the conversion they found they had the aircraft but they didn’t have the ground crew. They didn’t know what to do with the aircrew so they sent us over to this abandoned airfield at Driffield and they gave us about twenty what we called rock apes. They were the RAF Regiment and the idea was to toughen up each crew with Battle School and generally give evasion and escape exercises and things like that. And there was no aircraft. There was aircraft waiting but nothing for us. Eventually because we did very well there we were recommended to go to Number 10 Squadron because that was the, considered to be the ace squadron. When we got there it was the start of getting ready for D-Day. We didn’t know it but D-Day was planned for the 6th of April.
PV: June.
SB: 6th of June 1944 and the weather was bad and it was put off from the 5th to the 6th and that and we had just the airfield. The aircraft would take off and they had to hit any targets along the coast between the Rhineland in Germany where they thought the invasions forces were to start to assemble. Right along as far as Paris and night after night after night they’d just pick up various airfields, various targets and they just bombed and bombed and bombed the railway lines as much as possible to make it difficult. And the first targets, in fact all the targets we did from then until D-Day itself were just railway stations, railway lines, railway assembly paths. Anything where the Germans would have to bring troops through and it was not operational flying in a dangerous sort of way because you were only just about twenty miles inside the country and if you were shot down you had friendly French people looking to help you. So it wasn’t like the Lancasters were all doing the long-distance trips then into Germany itself and they were getting the casualties, the Lanc. The Halifaxes were doing particularly well because a railway station didn’t have any anti-aircraft guns or anything like that. It was only just that unfortunately on the night of the 3rd of June they decided to have a large raid in Germany and a small raid just outside of Paris. And they assembled them to go off from the same departure point in Kent and the German radar apparently picked up that our small raid that was going to Paris because they set off first was the main force and they had assembled sixty five night fighters and kept them on the ground until they got the radar interpretation of where it was happening and sent them all down to Paris where this happened. A hundred and fifty RAF bombers were just getting the sky to themselves. And Trappes, Trappes became the signal for easy bombing and we had, being truthful an easier time in Bomber Command than actual Bomber Command itself and I, my logbook was not, the thing you will notice your son’s logbook is very neat and tidy. One of the problems during the war for some reason you could get any sort of ink you wanted but you couldn’t get red ink and your logbook had to be made up of all day flying in ordinary ink but night flying had to be in red ink. But you just couldn’t get it and usually one bottle was held by the flight commander and you’d make a note on a piece of paper or on a sheet of your trips and once a month then you’d, he opened up to say and bring out this bottle of red ink and you could make your logbook up then and that. And unfortunately I got shot down the week it was my turn to make a logbook up. So all they did was gave somebody else on the squadron the job of going through the flight commander’s previous months flights. Instead of my having nice, neat pages of day and night flights there was just somebody had copied out and some of it was wrong. I was flying with other crews when somebody was missing and that. It’s a complete shambles and in the logbook which you normally would have been very proud of. As for the targets we were right up from Christmas 1943 to when they decided they would start bombing the railways I can truthfully say and I wouldn’t like it published but —
[recording paused]
SB: In Germany without the Lancasters flying inland. The Halifaxes —
[recording interrupted]
SB: Night fighters suddenly attacked us. Raid. There were a hundred and twenty Halifaxes and out of that seventeen Halifaxes were shot down and the crews mostly dispersed around if they were lucky and had baled out. But so many of them like ours lost their pilots, lost their, they didn’t lose their navigators and our casualty rate was far less than anybody else at all. So it is something very difficult to talk about. And we had done exceptionally well at this so-called Pioneering School where we worked out our own way of dodging the [pause] you were put in a lorry, taken out on a dark night and tried to find your own way home and everywhere was guarded and that. All we did was found a Railway Station with a name on the station and went to the nearest, they had a thing always called the Auxiliary Fire Service and they were in four or five huts outside a town. So if there was any bombing on the airfields there was a lot of airfields in Yorkshire, you just went, when we just went to them and said, ‘Look, we’re on an exercise tonight. We’ve got to dodge this. We’ve got to dodge that and you being in with the lot would protect it if we showed you how we would do it and by flashing your light, pretending you were part of the rescue team you wouldn’t be stopped. I said we did that two nights in a row. Went, got straight through the defences and got back into the camp. Just went to bed all day and the rest of the people were still roaming around the countryside looking to find their way back in. And when we did it two times twice in a row the officer in charge was so impressed that he wrote to the Air Ministry, Yorkshire people and said, ‘I would recommend this crew for their initiative and for their good —’ whatever they wanted to be. So the name of Murray and crew were accepted as very good and I’m so lucky that I was an observer and our flight commander was also an observer so that we were very very happy. But when we didn’t fly we had a very sensible CO. He said, ‘Just go up and enjoy your families.’ It wasn’t a boozy squadron. There was the one pub and it was full but it was not overflowing or anything like that. And you just took the, somebody had bought a couple of cheap buses and about every hour or so run a bus in to York and in York there was cinemas in there. There was mainly also an awful lot of Canadians based there and you had nothing really back in Melbourne apart from the pub and you weren’t a pubby crew like ours wasn’t but more or less teetotal. We weren’t a miserable crew. We were a very efficient one and we had practiced these corkscrews and survival that when Sandy my pilot and the wireless op were very seriously hurt it was through his persistence in making us practice what to do quickly if he or somebody was hurt that when it did happen and he was very very terribly wounded but he held on to the aircraft. Held on to the aircraft in a steep dive with the engines cut to control it long enough for us to get this door open, a hatch door and for us to get out. In the meantime he had died unfortunately and I found myself as I told you before. I’d landed halfway up, up a tree and thinking it was a deep, it was a thick forest and I was way up high and I had to wait until about 3 o’clock or until dawn started breaking before I could realise I was only four or five feet off the ground. When I did fall, when I did just come I landed very heavily on one knee. I damaged it straight away and it got bigger and bigger and then I heard as I say the cockerel. So, then that gave me an idea how to get out of the wood and there was this old gentleman and he showed me this house across the other side of the wood, the valley where this English lady lived and I just couldn’t believe my luck. Here I’d been shot down. I was alive and here I [unclear] to an English lady and all he could say was, ‘She lives in a big house. She’s got it surrounded by heavy barbed wire heavy fencing and has got several very fierce dogs free. They can’t get out but they make a lot of noise if you try and get over the fence. Do not try it. Wait and go around to the one entrance at the front and ring the bell.’ Which I promptly did and at that stage well at that stage it was all over as far as I was concerned. The lady, I started speaking to her in in French and she said, ‘Look I’m English,’ she said, ‘But all I know is the Resistance have been ringing around to we people in the Resistance warning that there was a big air raid last night in Paris, at Trappes, the marshalling yards. There was a lot of bombers being crashed around here and today so to be very very careful. Germans would be out looking with dogs and all trying to track you down. ‘If any of you have got any of you that you are doubtful about pretending to be an RAF man shot down or better still somebody who was a Pole who spoke not good English but good enough English don’t be taken in because they were the ones that were giving your names away to the Germans and you would be arrested. So be careful. Ask awkward questions and see what they’ve got to say.’ And all the lady said, ‘Do you know much about Brighton?’ I said, ‘Enough.’ She said, ‘Well what part of the east coast is it on?’ I said, ‘Brighton isn’t on the east coast. It’s on the south coast.’ ‘Oh. Is there anything special that Brighton is noted for?’ And there again, all I could think of was its where traditionally if you wanted to go away for a naughty weekend with somebody else’s wife Brighton was the place to go. And she said, ‘That would fool the Germans wouldn’t it? They wouldn’t think about that. Can you think of anything else? What sort of sand has it got there?’ So I said, ‘It isn’t sand. It’s all shingles. And that’s got mines in and if you get any heavy weather the explosives of the mines on the beach and you were covered in shingles along the front.’ ‘Oh, they wouldn’t know that would they?’ And having convinced her that I was English then she’d locked these, tied these dogs up to a great long leash and took me into the house. This huge big house where she apparently in the First War had come across to France with an English nursing specialist team which was attached to the French Army and there she looked after for the whole of the war a French general who must have been quite a wealthy person because when the war finished she, they got married. But he was so badly hurt that he only lasted about a year and she inherited this huge estate and I was just lucky to be sent there. And, and that started things going completely. As far as getting on to the squadron was concerned well when they suddenly found enough ground crew to release the Mark 3s we came across to Melbourne as a crew being recommended by the people for our evasion and escape methods of dodging and getting, getting through that Murray’s crew was chosen as a very good replacement for this crew. And the fact that I was an observer helped with one of the flight commanders being an observer. So we were welcome on to the squadron but quite frankly every target —
[recording paused]
The back of the house where the gardener used and it was just a metal bed and a washbasin where the lady insisted he always washed and cleaned before he brought the vegetables into the house. And there was a knock in the morning about 7 o’clock and it was the tap. Two dots and a dash, two dots and a dash of Beethoven’s whatever it is and it was the correct signal. All I had was a hand towel to hold in my hand and open the door and lo and behold there was the little wee madame, little madame and her very very not so wee maid both in just in their night dresses and the night, and the maid holding a big tray with a large bottle of champagne and three glasses. And there’s a sixteen year, an eighteen year old boy sitting on the bed trying to hold the flannel in the right place, drinking champagne that I’d never drank in my life before but the maid that was very well shaped and she was helping me put my eyes back in again I think at the same time as drinking champagne. I should never forget that morning and thinking what about my poor wife up there? If she knew I was sat starkers on a bed with two French ladies in their nighties drinking champagne she’d never want to speak to me again. It’s one of those things you remember and forget to tell your wife for a while.
SP: So, this was the day they brought the champagne in because the invasion had happened as on D-Day. So you got —
SB: Sorry?
SP: You got the champagne because they had heard D-Day had happened. So whilst you were being held —
SB: I was actually —
SP: By the Resistance. Yeah.
SB: D-day was only, the actual [beach head] we had was only about thirty miles away
SP: Yeah.
SB: But we were in a valley with leading up to the beaches and troops had to come forward all the time and on the hill opposite where madam lived they’d put in anti-aircraft defences so that when the RAF aircraft came up the valley the fighters used to come to attack the two airfields there. Madame’s room, house was a little bit too vulnerable with the anti-aircraft guns firing opposite there that they thought they’d better move me to another house. When it came to eleven, about 11 o’clock that morning Madame said the maid would take my, what little bit of clothing I had in a bag and to get to her house there was a little river and it was very shallow. It was full of weeds but it led into the main lake which was deep and there’s a lake between us and the guns, and the anti-aircraft guns. And when these three fighters came up the valley and the guns started firing they dropped their drop tanks and where it’s the same drop tanks they had either for petrol or fuel or for comforts for the, come for the Resistance. And when they got to the tank it was obviously had fuel in and they just threw it down and went back up the hill again. But Madame thought I’d better move on so the maid took my, I had a little few things in a bag and she took me around through the woods and there on the road top was the new lady who was Madame Oriel. Now, Madame Oriel had a lovely lovely bungalow on the other side of the hill, on the sheltered side but it backed on to a woods so you had three or four houses in the village and she was on the edge of it. But you could get into the house by going around the back through the woods and in and out. So if you wanted to hide somebody well the house had a big garden on the slope and you can sit inside it but it had this wall, a big very high wall and you could see over the top but people couldn’t see in. And for four or five, maybe about three weeks, that’s right the D-Day was going slower than they wanted and they had to go and help the Americans go that a way and I didn’t know it but Madame was Number 2 in the General De Gaulle’s section of the Resistance where he was getting information passed back to him because he wanted to plan his own place where they’d land in France. Not where the British wanted to tell him and he was gathering material like that there but apparently had ready and at lunchtime Madame said, ‘Sorry. You’re going home tonight.’ And she, the lady was in tears and she took me around the room and she had a beautifully furnished house and an artist had six views all around you saw from the garden and the sixth one was from the garden looking at the bungalow and she took this one off the wall and said, ‘Take that one home to your dear lady.’ She’d grown very fond of my wife during that time and she had it wrapped up very well. And this gentleman came along I hadn’t seen before, didn’t see again but apparently he was the head of the tech, of the intelligence side of General De Gaulle’s people in France and there was an aircraft, special courier aircraft coming across that evening to pick up these things and they said there would be two seats vacant. Would I take this package back? Make sure it went only to the pilot and nobody else at all. It was special. And on the way unfortunately we got waylaid by, well there was a traitor in their midst. Patricia would tell you more about, about the driver and whatever. Instead of driving us to where the aircraft would be they drove us into Paris where they hid us in what they called the Hotel Piccadilly which was just right at the foot of the Eiffel tower. The other side, the smart side of the Champs-Élysées on the one side and on the other side was the poorer side and this hotel was in fact an officer’s, it wasn’t a brothel it was a maison de liaison where you could take a lady for an hour or half a day or something like that and it was just there. And they kept, you there thinking you were still part of the Resistance being hid and they were taking a note of what you were saying and that information was being passed to the Intelligence Centre to make people uneasy when they were talking about things that they’d overheard you talking about. And it was very clever. On the third day they took us out and handed us across to the German Intelligence and they were very very unpleasant indeed wanting to know who had been hiding me, where I’d got the material from and they opened up all these packages and they were bridges and things that I didn’t know what they were but well this part below they did a lot of damage to personal parts of your body and it wasn’t nice put it like that and I had no treatment for it. And for not cooperating and giving them the names they wanted instead of handing me over to the German Air Force or the German Army for their prison camp they sent me to one of Hitler’s three concentration camps in Germany. At Buchenwald. One outside Sachsenhausen just outside of North Berlin and Ravensbrück was up in the north by Lubeck where they put all the ladies. And they sent you there to just to be well the fact you weren’t given a tattoo meant that you weren’t expected to be, to escape. You were, on your documents it had a big letter DIKAL, darf in kein anderes lager, not to allowed alive in any other camp. So it was the German way of saying this man is to be executed. And we recovered these documents afterwards but they never told our government. So all of the time we were in this wretched place nobody was getting any information at all. So it was, well that’s I’ll leave that side to Pat after. But Madame le Fevre, when the war, when the war was over the first thing to do, that I wanted to do was to go back with my wife. I knew where the aircraft had crashed. We knew that from the Resistance that they had recovered two bodies but they said there was so much petrol on board there was an hour and a half flight home they allow as a reserve flight. It had burned for quite a while and the lad’s bodies were very very badly burned as well. But we each had as you see on the wall of my room all airmen, all soldiers, all servicemen had two discs. A red disc and a green disc. One was waterproof and one was fireproof and they gave you these when you joined the Air Force which had your service number, your date of birth, your religion and that. And they gave it to you. All you could do was put it on a piece of string, a piece of ribbon and hang it around your neck instead of doing as the Americans did where they made this fireproof very fine chain and had their numbers on that. So if their bodies were burned in the aircraft the chain stayed intact and you had these tags on giving their details. The RAF didn’t do that. As a result of which when the fire burned the aircraft the two discs separated themselves from the ribbon and they were never picked up so they were buried as two unknown Englishmen. And as one was a very proud Scot and the other was a very proud Welshman it was not a very nice way from their point of view to be buried as unknown Englishmen but that’s another story. And we spent two weeks, there were no motor cars then this was straight after the war. I still had twenty odd years to do in the Air Force. I was now still a flying officer, a flight lieutenant but the Air Force would not let me go back officially because politics was such that and as they wouldn’t recognise the fact we’d been in a concentration camp we just packed up and we put, made our own way across to France and there to see this wonderful look on Madame Oriel’s face and her, the gentleman that we’d been protecting they were there at this Railway Station to meet me and they were so very very very generous. That night they had a little banquet and they did to the person that through his not giving our details we are now alive today. It was a very memorable occasion except the fact that we had eight courses of food, we were both very young, we hadn’t drunk very much before and my good lady didn’t feel well and how I had to ask the good lady who had given us this wonderful meal what the French was for, ‘Can I have a bicycle please?’ Or, ‘Can you give me some bicarb of soda?’ And you didn’t get taught that sort of thing at school. So they had to take me down to town to a chemist and took me in there and they soon gave me a jar and everything was alright. It was silly little things like seeing the two wonderful people that were appreciative of you not giving them away that made it rather dramatic afterwards because he was the leader of a very powerful Communist cell and when after we had this meal he took me upstairs to the bedroom which I was a bit worried about ‘til he said, opened, he had a key. He opened it all and there was this big wardrobe and he turned another lock there and that opened the back up into the room and there was shelf after shelf after shelf of mines, bomb disposal kits, pistols. Everything. Everything that the British had dropped for the Resistance during the war they had gathered up themselves and there was all this material all locked up for the Communists cell and he was still the head of it. So when that got back to Air Ministry they were very well not pleased. So Stanley Albert decided I wouldn’t tell them. I wanted to go back to Eastern Germany which is in the Russian zone because I knew they had the details of all our lads that had been killed in the camp and they wouldn’t allow me to go. So all the while I was in the Air Force and we were stationed in Germany and doing another job altogether and when the day came and I left the Air Force I had a medical examination for a, for a pension and they put on there a fully identified the damage. The damage they’d done to my personal parts on there. This officer did, ‘But he has no physical proof of of having been in the concentration camp and therefore they could not pay me a pension.’ And I was a little bit not happy. So we had a brand new Honda car, we went up to London, we found the East Germans had a proper tourist agency for visitors. Not that they encouraged many to Eastern Germany and I had to leave my passport for them to have a visa put in and they promised me the passport would be back by the Wednesday and on that Friday we had booked to go back into Eastern Germany, back to the camp to get the proof that I knew was there. Unfortunately, the postman called at a Post Office, left the registered post on this bicycle whilst he was serving in a house. When he came back that bicycle was stolen and so was my passport which very conveniently had the visa for Eastern Germany which was going to take me to the camp. The government wouldn’t admit it was a mistake so all I could do was to get on the train in the morning and stand outside the Passport Office until they opened up and that was getting on for nearly lunchtime before my place in the queue to apply for a visa. They said, ‘Well, if we’d have known you were going back to Eastern Germany we’d have done a special run around.’ It was al, it was all a load of bunkum. Anyhow, they got me across to the East Germany Embassy. They gave me a visa for Eastern Germany which didn’t please the RAF one little bit and we got in the car and we drove back and there we were made very welcome indeed. My wife and I, this was 1982 were the first British people to go back to the camp after the war and there as I knew the Germans had made records of everything that happened in there we knew where they stored this thing and the Russians couldn’t have been more helpful. As Pat knows again that we had a very good liaison with the Russian Underground in the camp and they helped us where they could as a result of which I got copies of the execution order of each of my friends that we saw taken away and killed. And on the shelf as you go back again you’ll find the letter of appreciation from the French Ambassador thanking me for giving the details of each of these men that had come to England at the time of Dunkirk, had stayed with general, in there with General De Gaulle and now had details for what their parents knew. Where they died because we saw them being taken and executed in the crematorium. So we knew that had happened and we were able to get photographs of it and Pat shall show you on the wall there’s the pictures of each of the Frenchmen just before he died and they made me, as a result of it a Commander of the Legion d’Honneur. Made you in the French light in other words which was quite an honour. But it’s there on the wall if you want to see it. It’s interesting. But I haven’t made it known because the, my experience with the radio, with the BBC or any papers if you don’t give them the juicy gory nasty things they make them up and its very very hard to unmake a lie so I’ve avoided, strictly avoided anything to do with radio appearances, television anything like that where I’ve been asked time and time again would I give advice on this or would I give advice on that. I didn’t mind getting mixed up in it but Pat on the other hand has acted very sensibly. Controlling the police, the press and giving them little things that would help or big things that would help. Kept them off my hands. This is why I would ask you please if you are giving any talks or anything like that would you please not mention I’m here because —
[recording paused]
SP: So on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre I’d just like to thank you Stanley for the time today to share your story. It’s been a real honour and privilege especially as a navigator on 10 Squadron, the same squadron as my own father. I know you started to talk about your time at Buchenwald and your search for justice for you and your fellow POWs and Pat is going to share with us more information on that in a separate recording because I know it’s difficult for you to talk about. I think Pat will also share with us about the important job you did after the war within Military Intelligence. So once again thank you Stanley for your time today. Thank you.
SB: Being a typical schoolboy with love of things mechanic and to do with things the Army, or the armed forces, everything like that at Chatham we had everything. We never knew for instance that Nelson’s famous Victory which everybody knows is one of the most famous ships going was actually built of Kentish oak in Chatham Dockyard. Apparently Kentish oak was the most beneficial for shipping and he had that built at Chatham and then everything that followed on. Trafalgar and all that. But we never knew at school that happened. But there was everything for boys. They built the warships in the dockyard from, from the days of using oak until they graduated through to steam. At that stage they found that they were training people to build the ships. They weren’t training people to sail in them. So they opened up a Royal Naval barracks. It was then found that the British Navy was such a good example after the various conflicts we’ve been in so they always carried a party of Marines, Royal Marines on board and the Royal Marines were only soldiers in Naval uniforms or the Naval people in soldier’s uniforms. The main thing being that they found that gunnery became so accurate they could fire a cannon ball not so much to hit the woodwork and damage the ship but to hit the main mast and if you could hit the main mast meant the sails all fell down. If the sails fell down the ship couldn’t operate any further. At that stage your little party of Marines leapt aboard with a horrible thing called a cutlas and they would produce it and slaughter anything they could see and that was a cheap way of getting a warship and bringing it back. So Chatham then became a Training Centre for Marines as well. Lovely for little boys. Then they started the Royal Engineers who had all the campaigns overseas when we had a mighty empire and the British Army occupied everything from North Africa right on through down through Egypt. Down to Sudan. Right down to, to the very bottom. And they found that sailing down the Nile was a long lengthy process. Why not have your own railway? So they brought the Royal Engineers who could do anything that they were told to do. They did it. And they took a big piece of land near Aldershot and there they formed the Locomotive Training School for the [how to lay] track. So when they had an overseas campaign they took their own trains, their own track and they got to the destination that much better. So that’s even more for little boys to get involved in. Each would have his own training area in the Medway towns and for little boys that meant things that moved. Things of action. Tank. Well, tanks really hadn’t been invented then but there was new, new things coming out all the time which the engineers practiced on. The various bridges, various types of construction. They had an Officer’s Training School there where they had the grounds outside. Where they had demonstrations of this. Demonstrations. Everything that the engineers built and they had an Open Day once a year where you could go down and wander around. Ask questions. You had the wonderful Flying Boat station nearby. Short’s. Short’s Brothers. They’d been initially training. When the Navy thought they needed more reconnaissance they put, Short’s put floats on aircraft for them and then they put them on the, on the ships. They had ships then with the catapult. They’d catapult the ship, the aircraft off but with the floats they could come and land in the sea and a big crane would haul it back on again. So for little boys there was the dockyard, there was the actual Naval barracks, the Royal Engineers side and even more so that every warship that sailed from England overseas it wasn’t generally known that they took along one set of armament for, to a campaign. They had, they to go to war in the Middle East. They had that but held back at Chatham was the largest ammunition depot enscooped in the hill and there was four sets of complete ammunition for every ship in the Royal Navy. So if a ship needed a replacement or something like that there were somewhere there was a pack made up and this was all bits of information because five of us, there were five of us little schoolboys. When it came to weekends Saturday morning couldn’t come quick enough. On to our bicycles. And we each had fathers that were in interesting jobs and could drop little secrets out that we shouldn’t know about and one of them was the fact that every ship that came up as far as Chatham had to stop by two big forts in the middle of the river and then they would offload little [pause] all the ammunition from every ship that had got that far and it was taken down to a place called Upnor Castle. The castle they built after the Dutch one night did what the Japanese did to the Americans. Sailed up the Medway and sunk half the British Navy. But they weren’t taught about that at school. It was told that we’d built this castle and the ships then put the ammunition away. It was tucked away in there and people didn’t officially know it was there. But we had somebody who had a father there and we knew where this went and where that went. But as far as the Flying Boats were concerned the lady next door had a boyfriend who was working in there and when we knew they had a new seaplane or Flying Boat in we were down there always watching it. If you had some secret equipment on a, on a new Flying Boat which they didn’t want the public to see if it was published in the book it was scribbled over and obliterated. Yet if anybody took the trouble to walk along the sea front by the factory there would be one being towed out and they’d run up the engines and whilst they were running up the engines you could see then that all the guns and you could see how. Be wondering how did the Flying Boat manage to open its bomb doors and not get all the water come in. It didn’t have any bomb doors. It had sliding things under the wing where you could slide out with the bombs on it. Little things like that. And then this wonderful little scale model of a four-engine bomber started flying around the area. It was a complete scale model right down to the turrets, the gun turrets and little engines were made in the nearby factory and this, this thing we didn’t really know was the prototype for the first RAF four engine bomber. The Stirling. And every day, every week, Saturdays long we’d be up there and were they going to roll a Stirling out this week or whether they are they going to roll this week. Just hoping it would happen and something would go wrong. All little boys wanted a crash. You could see a crash or something. And the very week that I joined the Air Force on my seventeenth birthday I was posted to the Royal Air Force Records Office. Records Office at Ruislip near Uxbridge in Middlesex. We were posted there. That very weekend they wheeled out the first time the new aircraft out of the hangar. The crew got on board. They flew two circuits around the airfield, came in to land and the undercarriage collapsed and there was this lovely shiny new bomber we’d been waiting all this time to see and I was the one in the Air Force and missed it. My other four pals there never ever got over the sight of this great bomber tumbling across there. There were little things like that that just made the Medway towns for little boys’ attraction. There was Navy Week. Then there was always the same submarines that were built there were to turn up. The same crews as would have built them would turn up and then the Navy would sent some aircraft to cross and do a dummy attack. That happened every year on Navy Days. So you had a week with the Navy competing with the Army who they put on an Army display of bridging and everything they could like that. So the Royal Air Force then stepped in and they built the first Sunderland Flying Boats which we officially didn’t know anything about but somebody’s father worked there so we had the inside information on where they could fly and what they could do and what they didn’t have. Where the gun turrets worked. All little boys delight. Everybody’s father had something to contribute.
SP: Stanley —
SB: In a, in a way that just made going to school something you did for four days of the week but Saturday morning despite belonging to the Scouts, the very active Scouts we had a Scout Leader who was the school, one of the schoolteachers who during the war had served in the Royal Engineers. So he, we had permission to use all the exercise area which the Army used and the Army was sometimes careless with what they left around so there was always pairs of pincers and things like that. Or if they were doing explosions and you were warned and something attracted. What you did on a Saturday was just sheer adventure. And then you’d get down as far as the entrance to the Royal Medway and Medway and the Royal Thames where the two met off Sheerness the big warships couldn’t get any further up the river because it was so shallow and they’d moor off there and then they’d do their practices. And then you see them offload their, all this ammunition on to the little barges and into another railway which didn’t exist. That just went all the way down the Isle of Sheppey and it was just marshland and you ended up by these two huge airship sheds, airship sheds which in the First War were used by the Navy to do reconnaissance and they’d just fly ahead. So the ships would send messages back. Well, they replaced those by the actual Flying Boats but there was all the more information we had. So it was. Altogether it was a dream. And I was in the Air Force then but on a non-operational station but it was near RAF Northolt and Northolt of course was the first station to get the new Hurricane fighter and they chose a day when there was a tremendous gale blowing and they made the headlines on the paper Britain’s first six hundred miles an hour winged aircraft. And then it flew from Northolt to Edinburgh in some amazing speed because the wind was actually stronger than the engine that took the aircraft. But we led the world. Britain led the world now in the Hurricane. It had the Spitfire and then things got a little more lively. They found that most of the Spitfires, well, all of the Spitfires in fact were made in the one factory down in south, Southampton and they said they thought if one day they bombed that there would be problems. So they had to find alternatives like that and all sorts of motor factories were able to turn out spare parts for this and that and they made Spitfires on four or five different locations which people didn’t realise. That’s how they did it. But we, they just thought if they bombed that one factory then we were in trouble. So, there was all, in fact we were in the Air Force we didn’t see many aeroplanes until D-Day. Until the time came for, the war broke out and we had to bring all the soldiers back from Dunkirk and this was hundreds and hundreds. Well, according to the statistics there was three hundred soldiers brought off the beaches at Dunkirk and it was this very shallow water so soldiers had to wade out to little landing ships. Anything that would go. Paddle steamers, anything that would get near, near to the shore. The soldiers could wade out so and then they’d be taken to Dover and of course England with having so many troops all over in France all had to leave all their equipment in France. There was lots of empty barracks in England so a train would just pull into, into Dover. They’d push as many soldiers onboard as they could and there would be these lovely pictures of ladies with trays of tea holding them up to the lads in the train and the trains would just push off to where there was some, anywhere in the country where there was an empty barracks. They brought these people back from Dunkirk so we were kept in touch with what was going on. And at the same time they decided that the RAF would publish a document that would say where every airfield was, Bomber Command airfield was going to be built the following year. But the secret documents were so secret that they’d never let anybody see it and the actual document that came from Air Ministry had given a list of the airfields that would be finished by the end of the next year. But because it was not told to the right people the Department and Record Office got the version that seventy two airfields that were going to be finished next year were all ready and they had to be manned immediately. Which meant of course places like Record Office where you had all the Air Force at your hands you had to suddenly produce enough people to go to these stations and when they got there of course the stations didn’t exist. We had this ridiculous situation where each joined the Air Force, one of the first forms you filled in was preference for first posting on completion of training and we all put down the airfields nearest home. I had one at Detling just four miles down the road. We had another one at Eastchurch just fifteen miles and they were all on the documents and suddenly this thing came down from Air Ministry saying the secret document which we weren’t allowed to see. But one morning we all got an envelope to say we were no longer apprentices. We were, the next day we were to parade outside on the parade ground and there there was four or five desks lined up and one desk had the counting officer had lots of money stacked up in front of him. Somebody else had bags and bags of food. The cook apparently on the station was allowed three and sixpence a day for food and so as everybody had had breakfast it was three and sixpence less worth of food. It was called the unconsumed portion of a day’s ration. There was a piece of cake, there was a big cheese sandwich, a Mars bar and something else in this bag and you were each given one of these. We were given an envelope but which for the Railway Station and it was sealed up so it wasn’t opened. And somebody came along with a big pair of scissors and as apprentices we had what they called an apprentices wheel sewn on our left part of our uniform and he very, not very carefully came along, was told to recover all these things. And the little flight sergeant in charge of us who weren’t having his boys looking not smart stopped it straight away and they got some of the wives came in quick and they quickly sewed up where the sergeant had cut these rings off. And little things like that that you remembered. And it wasn’t until we got to the Railway Station at Ruislip to take us to London to go to the, what we thought would have been the stations we’d applied for before the war we couldn’t make out and my one said, ‘Posted to RAF Station Worksop.” And we didn’t know anywhere an RAF station at Worksop. I mean as Records we knew where most places were. In fact, we all anticipated where we were going to go at the end of our training. We always made sure the two and a half year cycle of moving airmen on there was always going to be a vacancy that month you were due to pass out for you to go into. Instead of what, instead of my having one for an RAF Station Detling which was only just four or five miles from home here I was. All I could find was a Yorkshire one. A place called whatever it was near Doncaster. On the railway line between Doncaster and Sheffield. And we arrived at there. There was no, nobody on the station and we did talk if there was an airfield there how do we get to it? Where is everybody? Anyway, we sat on the station for a while and the station master come to us and says, ‘Can I help you laddie?’ I said, you know, ‘Where do we get the bus or transport out to the airfield?’ He said, ‘What airfield?’ I said, ‘Well, here’s my railway warrant. They sent us here.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve lived here all my life lad.’ He said, ‘No airfield here at all.’ So, oh dear, oh dear. So he said, ‘The best thing, I’ll ring up the local bobby.’ The local bobby in Worksop. It was only a little mining village so it had a pit nearby but policemen didn’t have cars in those days you had a bicycle and the sergeant came riding out and said, ‘What’s happened?’ And so the station master said, ‘Well, the lad here has got all his kit. Posted to an RAF station. We don’t know anything about that.’ So the policeman said, ‘Well, I don’t and I’ve lived here all my life.’ And at that stage it was the day after they’d brought the troops home from, from the beaches and all they did was packed them on trains and sent them off home to various barracks and it so happens that Manchester had one of these auxiliary stations where everybody that belonged to the squadron lived in Manchester or local volunteers and they’d given these lads to come home. They’d given them some, or they borrowed some lorries, I don’t know and they were making their home, their way home to Manchester when they stopped outside the station apparently and were in the pub having one or two beers or whatever they wanted to do and the policeman went across. He said, ‘Can you help us? We’ve got an airman on the, in here who’s lost. He’s lost an airfield and it doesn’t exist.’ They said, ‘Well, the bloody Air Force. It was typical of them. They left us on the beaches of Dunkirk and couldn’t fly, couldn’t help us at all so let him get on with it.’ So the sergeant came back and said, ‘Well, they’re a helpful shower and they’re not going to help us at all. Let’s ring up Air Ministry.’ But 4 o’clock or 5 o’clock on a Friday afternoon even early in the war everybody had packed up and gone home and there was always a just a recording saying if you have a query ring back on Monday morning. So the policeman said, ‘Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do with him. I’d give him a jail, a seat in our jail for, for the weekend.’ At that time there was a knock on the door and a little soldier came and said, ‘Excuse me officers.’ They were respectful to policemen in those days. He said, ‘I heard the sergeant being very rude just now to the, to your laddie,’ he said. ‘I live at, I live in Sheffield,’ he said ‘There’s a little airfield at Netherthorpe out there. It’s a little private one where three or four rich industrialists keep a little light aircraft there and they just fly from there now and again.’ He said, ‘And as I was passing yesterday I noticed that a new, a real aeroplane, an RAF one on the airfield, a new one we hadn’t seen called a Lysander. It was specially built for the Army,’ he said and, ‘There were some RAF lorries around and there was a flag post and a flying RAF so it looks as though the RAF were interested in that.’ So the policeman said, ‘Oh, well thank you, lad.’ He’d done us proudly. He got on his bike and cycled all the way across and when he got there he found that they were the advanced party for the City of Manchester Auxiliary Squadron who before the actual war had gone to France. The aircraft they were using, had been using weren’t, wasn’t much good and they left those behind and they gave the airmen all, they put them in parties of about one hundred under an NCO and said, ‘Make your way home,’ from the middle of France, ‘To the Dover coast and meet at a place in Kent where the squadron will reassemble.’ And it was those people. They were coming up to this airfield and taking it over and to us back came the policeman who said, ‘Well, you’re alright. They’ll put you up for tonight. All they’ve got there is an officer and an aircraft he’s flown in and four or five lorries. A cookhouse lorry and a guardroom. He said, ‘We’ll put you up for the night,’ and when he comes the morning the officer in charge said, ‘Look after this lad.’ He’d done this, the five or six days we were in England when we came back from France the RAF didn’t, couldn’t do much for us. They put us in this little village and the people in the pub they did us very very well indeed. And so much by a remarkable coincidence years and years later when I heard Radio Oxford and Radio [Cymru] the owner of the pub. The lads that had been helped was the son of the announcer and he said one night about this and they all wrote back in saying how well they’d been looked after by these Kentish people. They couldn’t. And I was just supposed to have been posted to one of the airfields there. So, back on the, back on the new airfield I couldn’t do anything wrong like. They, they’d been looked after so well and so it went on. The CO said, ‘I’ve got these new, new aircraft.’ The Battle of Britain was on and there were odd Germans flying around shooting at RAF lonely people. He said, ‘We’ve got, I’ve got this new, this new Lysander. It’s got a machine gun in the back but there’s nobody here to operate it.’ He says, ‘If you are just staying for a couple of days wait till I get sorted out and get people trained. Would you ride? Go in the back and operate the, the machine gun if necessary. Well, little boys had never seen a machine gun as much as had a real one to look at and so it was wonderful. And after the third day the CO sent for me and said, ‘Well, you did such a good job getting this place ready for me coming back. Got the officers to fiddle this,’ and he said, ‘Would you like to stay with us for a few more weeks until we get reformed?’ I said, ‘Well, yes. Very much so.’ And I stayed with them for two years. And during that week the first few weeks I had a mishap and they put me in the local hospital and it so happened the local hospital were trying an experiment for the Air Ministry that had discovered that Sheffield and Rotherham, two, two biggest steel manufacturing places in the country were just six or seven miles apart and then but that was heavily bombed. The docks. The coast of shipping firms, the merchant ships, Naval war ships were all built with Sheffield steel. It would be a disaster. At the same time the Army came along and said, ‘Well, we need Sheffield steel for our guns we’re building for, for all the munition that is being made and brand new tanks.’ So they suddenly said, ‘Well, we’ll take over a civilian hospital and put some nurses in there to train them up in case Sheffield was bombed and they had some trainee, some at least some trained nurses on the spot to do some rescue. And there that afternoon my good lady was one of the first party of nurses to be brought in to make sense and the sister said, ‘Well, all your Army forms are all different to our ones.’ There was no National Health in those days but each county Health Service had its own forms. They said, ‘Well, we’ve got to make this work somehow.’ And she divided these three nurses that came in with my wife and me and we just sat there right on through to midnight just putting matching up where one overlapped, one wherever we could change the number and the name and that. And I found that all I was doing for local people in Yorkshire there and all she was doing was for people who had come up from Kent with an airfield where we’d been assembling down there. So I learned more about Yorkshire in a few nights and she learned more about Kent where she’d never been in her life and so we had a lovely romance started right along as the war was just getting underway. And I was all of nineteen and my good lady was all of twenty and I was starting my flying and had another mishap and she did some nursing for me. And I joined Bomber Command and there was so many casualties in Bomber Command they encouraged you on our squadron to get as much if you were married, spend as much time as you could and you were probably this was where you’d come to reminisce the airfields in Yorkshire.
SP: Driffield?
SB: Melbourne.
SP: Melbourne.
SB: Was one of the utility ones and 10 Squadron being a real good old peacetime one had a very comfortable peacetime airfield just outside of York. But the Americans, the Canadians came across and they moved us out. Gave us one of the new utility wooden Nissen hutted one which happened to be Melbourne and was just being finished by the, there were hundreds and hundreds of Irishmen that had come across and they were building. Still building parts for the airfield. And the squadron were assembled then with the new Mark 3 Halifax come in which made all the difference in the world. So all of a sudden they’d gone from a very comfortable station right on the outskirts of York to somewhere way out in the country miles from anywhere with literally nowhere to go or nothing much to do except the village pub. And there happened to be a windmill nearby but I don’t think the pub was called the Windmill but Patricia would know that one. And that was the only place for lads to go. And later on, a year later when I was, I had been caught and had been interrogated all they did, the German secret police wanted to know was what price was the beer, what type the beer was, what were the names of the bar maids, who were the easy ones and that. So that when anybody was shot down they could confound a lad. He was saying oh is so and so serving on the beer or on the bar or is so and so there and they were so shocked with this information they’d got that the pub became famous. So, the war finished and overnight the Halifaxes were disbanded and the Bomber Command didn’t want the Halifaxes anymore. For two days they just loaded them up with bombs and more bombs and you just flew out to the North Sea to this German island of Heligoland. It was, it was occupied but, parts of it but and dropped hundreds and hundreds of bombs there ‘til the third day, the second or third day when they ran out of bombs. They said come back, the squadron is being disbanded and you will be fly the aircraft over to this airfield at Shawbury there, near Shrewsbury and they parked it there. So, Melbourne had nothing there but when we went back there was a row of twelve brand new Dakota transports and they were a very popular American civilian aircraft. A DC2 too. It was just flown by two pilots and then where these pilots took over hundreds of them to tow parachutists and that in for D-Day and they had decided that all 4 Group which was all Lanc, all Halifaxes were to be converted on to these Dakotas and then flown out to India where of course the war was still on. It was a very secret about the nuclear weapons and overnight they blew the weapons, the war finished and nobody wanted anything. At Melbourne they said they’d disbanded all the crews. Just kept the pilots and the navigators and one or two wireless operators and disbanded the rest and sent them on leave. I’d been kept for seven weeks by the Russians until the war, after the war —
SP: Stanley, just before we go on to that bit we’re just going to go back a little bit to your time at Melbourne. So, obviously you got posted to Melbourne for your operations.
SB: Yeah.
SP: Yeah. Can you remember anything about the operations that you were on whilst you were based at Melbourne? Can you?
SB: Well, that’s, it was a bit of a, you didn’t really know. It was [pause] if I might say 10 Squadron had formed, had reformed with new crews at Abingdon and when we got up to Riccall where they were doing the conversion they found they had the aircraft but they didn’t have the ground crew. They didn’t know what to do with the aircrew so they sent us over to this abandoned airfield at Driffield and they gave us about twenty what we called rock apes. They were the RAF Regiment and the idea was to toughen up each crew with Battle School and generally give evasion and escape exercises and things like that. And there was no aircraft. There was aircraft waiting but nothing for us. Eventually because we did very well there we were recommended to go to Number 10 Squadron because that was the, considered to be the ace squadron. When we got there it was the start of getting ready for D-Day. We didn’t know it but D-Day was planned for the 6th of April.
PV: June.
SB: 6th of June 1944 and the weather was bad and it was put off from the 5th to the 6th and that and we had just the airfield. The aircraft would take off and they had to hit any targets along the coast between the Rhineland in Germany where they thought the invasions forces were to start to assemble. Right along as far as Paris and night after night after night they’d just pick up various airfields, various targets and they just bombed and bombed and bombed the railway lines as much as possible to make it difficult. And the first targets, in fact all the targets we did from then until D-Day itself were just railway stations, railway lines, railway assembly paths. Anything where the Germans would have to bring troops through and it was not operational flying in a dangerous sort of way because you were only just about twenty miles inside the country and if you were shot down you had friendly French people looking to help you. So it wasn’t like the Lancasters were all doing the long-distance trips then into Germany itself and they were getting the casualties, the Lanc. The Halifaxes were doing particularly well because a railway station didn’t have any anti-aircraft guns or anything like that. It was only just that unfortunately on the night of the 3rd of June they decided to have a large raid in Germany and a small raid just outside of Paris. And they assembled them to go off from the same departure point in Kent and the German radar apparently picked up that our small raid that was going to Paris because they set off first was the main force and they had assembled sixty five night fighters and kept them on the ground until they got the radar interpretation of where it was happening and sent them all down to Paris where this happened. A hundred and fifty RAF bombers were just getting the sky to themselves. And Trappes, Trappes became the signal for easy bombing and we had, being truthful an easier time in Bomber Command than actual Bomber Command itself and I, my logbook was not, the thing you will notice your son’s logbook is very neat and tidy. One of the problems during the war for some reason you could get any sort of ink you wanted but you couldn’t get red ink and your logbook had to be made up of all day flying in ordinary ink but night flying had to be in red ink. But you just couldn’t get it and usually one bottle was held by the flight commander and you’d make a note on a piece of paper or on a sheet of your trips and once a month then you’d, he opened up to say and bring out this bottle of red ink and you could make your logbook up then and that. And unfortunately I got shot down the week it was my turn to make a logbook up. So all they did was gave somebody else on the squadron the job of going through the flight commander’s previous months flights. Instead of my having nice, neat pages of day and night flights there was just somebody had copied out and some of it was wrong. I was flying with other crews when somebody was missing and that. It’s a complete shambles and in the logbook which you normally would have been very proud of. As for the targets we were right up from Christmas 1943 to when they decided they would start bombing the railways I can truthfully say and I wouldn’t like it published but —
[recording paused]
SB: In Germany without the Lancasters flying inland. The Halifaxes —
[recording interrupted]
SB: Night fighters suddenly attacked us. Raid. There were a hundred and twenty Halifaxes and out of that seventeen Halifaxes were shot down and the crews mostly dispersed around if they were lucky and had baled out. But so many of them like ours lost their pilots, lost their, they didn’t lose their navigators and our casualty rate was far less than anybody else at all. So it is something very difficult to talk about. And we had done exceptionally well at this so-called Pioneering School where we worked out our own way of dodging the [pause] you were put in a lorry, taken out on a dark night and tried to find your own way home and everywhere was guarded and that. All we did was found a Railway Station with a name on the station and went to the nearest, they had a thing always called the Auxiliary Fire Service and they were in four or five huts outside a town. So if there was any bombing on the airfields there was a lot of airfields in Yorkshire, you just went, when we just went to them and said, ‘Look, we’re on an exercise tonight. We’ve got to dodge this. We’ve got to dodge that and you being in with the lot would protect it if we showed you how we would do it and by flashing your light, pretending you were part of the rescue team you wouldn’t be stopped. I said we did that two nights in a row. Went, got straight through the defences and got back into the camp. Just went to bed all day and the rest of the people were still roaming around the countryside looking to find their way back in. And when we did it two times twice in a row the officer in charge was so impressed that he wrote to the Air Ministry, Yorkshire people and said, ‘I would recommend this crew for their initiative and for their good —’ whatever they wanted to be. So the name of Murray and crew were accepted as very good and I’m so lucky that I was an observer and our flight commander was also an observer so that we were very very happy. But when we didn’t fly we had a very sensible CO. He said, ‘Just go up and enjoy your families.’ It wasn’t a boozy squadron. There was the one pub and it was full but it was not overflowing or anything like that. And you just took the, somebody had bought a couple of cheap buses and about every hour or so run a bus in to York and in York there was cinemas in there. There was mainly also an awful lot of Canadians based there and you had nothing really back in Melbourne apart from the pub and you weren’t a pubby crew like ours wasn’t but more or less teetotal. We weren’t a miserable crew. We were a very efficient one and we had practiced these corkscrews and survival that when Sandy my pilot and the wireless op were very seriously hurt it was through his persistence in making us practice what to do quickly if he or somebody was hurt that when it did happen and he was very very terribly wounded but he held on to the aircraft. Held on to the aircraft in a steep dive with the engines cut to control it long enough for us to get this door open, a hatch door and for us to get out. In the meantime he had died unfortunately and I found myself as I told you before. I’d landed halfway up, up a tree and thinking it was a deep, it was a thick forest and I was way up high and I had to wait until about 3 o’clock or until dawn started breaking before I could realise I was only four or five feet off the ground. When I did fall, when I did just come I landed very heavily on one knee. I damaged it straight away and it got bigger and bigger and then I heard as I say the cockerel. So, then that gave me an idea how to get out of the wood and there was this old gentleman and he showed me this house across the other side of the wood, the valley where this English lady lived and I just couldn’t believe my luck. Here I’d been shot down. I was alive and here I [unclear] to an English lady and all he could say was, ‘She lives in a big house. She’s got it surrounded by heavy barbed wire heavy fencing and has got several very fierce dogs free. They can’t get out but they make a lot of noise if you try and get over the fence. Do not try it. Wait and go around to the one entrance at the front and ring the bell.’ Which I promptly did and at that stage well at that stage it was all over as far as I was concerned. The lady, I started speaking to her in in French and she said, ‘Look I’m English,’ she said, ‘But all I know is the Resistance have been ringing around to we people in the Resistance warning that there was a big air raid last night in Paris, at Trappes, the marshalling yards. There was a lot of bombers being crashed around here and today so to be very very careful. Germans would be out looking with dogs and all trying to track you down. ‘If any of you have got any of you that you are doubtful about pretending to be an RAF man shot down or better still somebody who was a Pole who spoke not good English but good enough English don’t be taken in because they were the ones that were giving your names away to the Germans and you would be arrested. So be careful. Ask awkward questions and see what they’ve got to say.’ And all the lady said, ‘Do you know much about Brighton?’ I said, ‘Enough.’ She said, ‘Well what part of the east coast is it on?’ I said, ‘Brighton isn’t on the east coast. It’s on the south coast.’ ‘Oh. Is there anything special that Brighton is noted for?’ And there again, all I could think of was its where traditionally if you wanted to go away for a naughty weekend with somebody else’s wife Brighton was the place to go. And she said, ‘That would fool the Germans wouldn’t it? They wouldn’t think about that. Can you think of anything else? What sort of sand has it got there?’ So I said, ‘It isn’t sand. It’s all shingles. And that’s got mines in and if you get any heavy weather the explosives of the mines on the beach and you were covered in shingles along the front.’ ‘Oh, they wouldn’t know that would they?’ And having convinced her that I was English then she’d locked these, tied these dogs up to a great long leash and took me into the house. This huge big house where she apparently in the First War had come across to France with an English nursing specialist team which was attached to the French Army and there she looked after for the whole of the war a French general who must have been quite a wealthy person because when the war finished she, they got married. But he was so badly hurt that he only lasted about a year and she inherited this huge estate and I was just lucky to be sent there. And, and that started things going completely. As far as getting on to the squadron was concerned well when they suddenly found enough ground crew to release the Mark 3s we came across to Melbourne as a crew being recommended by the people for our evasion and escape methods of dodging and getting, getting through that Murray’s crew was chosen as a very good replacement for this crew. And the fact that I was an observer helped with one of the flight commanders being an observer. So we were welcome on to the squadron but quite frankly every target —
[recording paused]
The back of the house where the gardener used and it was just a metal bed and a washbasin where the lady insisted he always washed and cleaned before he brought the vegetables into the house. And there was a knock in the morning about 7 o’clock and it was the tap. Two dots and a dash, two dots and a dash of Beethoven’s whatever it is and it was the correct signal. All I had was a hand towel to hold in my hand and open the door and lo and behold there was the little wee madame, little madame and her very very not so wee maid both in just in their night dresses and the night, and the maid holding a big tray with a large bottle of champagne and three glasses. And there’s a sixteen year, an eighteen year old boy sitting on the bed trying to hold the flannel in the right place, drinking champagne that I’d never drank in my life before but the maid that was very well shaped and she was helping me put my eyes back in again I think at the same time as drinking champagne. I should never forget that morning and thinking what about my poor wife up there? If she knew I was sat starkers on a bed with two French ladies in their nighties drinking champagne she’d never want to speak to me again. It’s one of those things you remember and forget to tell your wife for a while.
SP: So, this was the day they brought the champagne in because the invasion had happened as on D-Day. So you got —
SB: Sorry?
SP: You got the champagne because they had heard D-Day had happened. So whilst you were being held —
SB: I was actually —
SP: By the Resistance. Yeah.
SB: D-day was only, the actual [beach head] we had was only about thirty miles away
SP: Yeah.
SB: But we were in a valley with leading up to the beaches and troops had to come forward all the time and on the hill opposite where madam lived they’d put in anti-aircraft defences so that when the RAF aircraft came up the valley the fighters used to come to attack the two airfields there. Madame’s room, house was a little bit too vulnerable with the anti-aircraft guns firing opposite there that they thought they’d better move me to another house. When it came to eleven, about 11 o’clock that morning Madame said the maid would take my, what little bit of clothing I had in a bag and to get to her house there was a little river and it was very shallow. It was full of weeds but it led into the main lake which was deep and there’s a lake between us and the guns, and the anti-aircraft guns. And when these three fighters came up the valley and the guns started firing they dropped their drop tanks and where it’s the same drop tanks they had either for petrol or fuel or for comforts for the, come for the Resistance. And when they got to the tank it was obviously had fuel in and they just threw it down and went back up the hill again. But Madame thought I’d better move on so the maid took my, I had a little few things in a bag and she took me around through the woods and there on the road top was the new lady who was Madame Oriel. Now, Madame Oriel had a lovely lovely bungalow on the other side of the hill, on the sheltered side but it backed on to a woods so you had three or four houses in the village and she was on the edge of it. But you could get into the house by going around the back through the woods and in and out. So if you wanted to hide somebody well the house had a big garden on the slope and you can sit inside it but it had this wall, a big very high wall and you could see over the top but people couldn’t see in. And for four or five, maybe about three weeks, that’s right the D-Day was going slower than they wanted and they had to go and help the Americans go that a way and I didn’t know it but Madame was Number 2 in the General De Gaulle’s section of the Resistance where he was getting information passed back to him because he wanted to plan his own place where they’d land in France. Not where the British wanted to tell him and he was gathering material like that there but apparently had ready and at lunchtime Madame said, ‘Sorry. You’re going home tonight.’ And she, the lady was in tears and she took me around the room and she had a beautifully furnished house and an artist had six views all around you saw from the garden and the sixth one was from the garden looking at the bungalow and she took this one off the wall and said, ‘Take that one home to your dear lady.’ She’d grown very fond of my wife during that time and she had it wrapped up very well. And this gentleman came along I hadn’t seen before, didn’t see again but apparently he was the head of the tech, of the intelligence side of General De Gaulle’s people in France and there was an aircraft, special courier aircraft coming across that evening to pick up these things and they said there would be two seats vacant. Would I take this package back? Make sure it went only to the pilot and nobody else at all. It was special. And on the way unfortunately we got waylaid by, well there was a traitor in their midst. Patricia would tell you more about, about the driver and whatever. Instead of driving us to where the aircraft would be they drove us into Paris where they hid us in what they called the Hotel Piccadilly which was just right at the foot of the Eiffel tower. The other side, the smart side of the Champs-Élysées on the one side and on the other side was the poorer side and this hotel was in fact an officer’s, it wasn’t a brothel it was a maison de liaison where you could take a lady for an hour or half a day or something like that and it was just there. And they kept, you there thinking you were still part of the Resistance being hid and they were taking a note of what you were saying and that information was being passed to the Intelligence Centre to make people uneasy when they were talking about things that they’d overheard you talking about. And it was very clever. On the third day they took us out and handed us across to the German Intelligence and they were very very unpleasant indeed wanting to know who had been hiding me, where I’d got the material from and they opened up all these packages and they were bridges and things that I didn’t know what they were but well this part below they did a lot of damage to personal parts of your body and it wasn’t nice put it like that and I had no treatment for it. And for not cooperating and giving them the names they wanted instead of handing me over to the German Air Force or the German Army for their prison camp they sent me to one of Hitler’s three concentration camps in Germany. At Buchenwald. One outside Sachsenhausen just outside of North Berlin and Ravensbrück was up in the north by Lubeck where they put all the ladies. And they sent you there to just to be well the fact you weren’t given a tattoo meant that you weren’t expected to be, to escape. You were, on your documents it had a big letter DIKAL, darf in kein anderes lager, not to allowed alive in any other camp. So it was the German way of saying this man is to be executed. And we recovered these documents afterwards but they never told our government. So all of the time we were in this wretched place nobody was getting any information at all. So it was, well that’s I’ll leave that side to Pat after. But Madame le Fevre, when the war, when the war was over the first thing to do, that I wanted to do was to go back with my wife. I knew where the aircraft had crashed. We knew that from the Resistance that they had recovered two bodies but they said there was so much petrol on board there was an hour and a half flight home they allow as a reserve flight. It had burned for quite a while and the lad’s bodies were very very badly burned as well. But we each had as you see on the wall of my room all airmen, all soldiers, all servicemen had two discs. A red disc and a green disc. One was waterproof and one was fireproof and they gave you these when you joined the Air Force which had your service number, your date of birth, your religion and that. And they gave it to you. All you could do was put it on a piece of string, a piece of ribbon and hang it around your neck instead of doing as the Americans did where they made this fireproof very fine chain and had their numbers on that. So if their bodies were burned in the aircraft the chain stayed intact and you had these tags on giving their details. The RAF didn’t do that. As a result of which when the fire burned the aircraft the two discs separated themselves from the ribbon and they were never picked up so they were buried as two unknown Englishmen. And as one was a very proud Scot and the other was a very proud Welshman it was not a very nice way from their point of view to be buried as unknown Englishmen but that’s another story. And we spent two weeks, there were no motor cars then this was straight after the war. I still had twenty odd years to do in the Air Force. I was now still a flying officer, a flight lieutenant but the Air Force would not let me go back officially because politics was such that and as they wouldn’t recognise the fact we’d been in a concentration camp we just packed up and we put, made our own way across to France and there to see this wonderful look on Madame Oriel’s face and her, the gentleman that we’d been protecting they were there at this Railway Station to meet me and they were so very very very generous. That night they had a little banquet and they did to the person that through his not giving our details we are now alive today. It was a very memorable occasion except the fact that we had eight courses of food, we were both very young, we hadn’t drunk very much before and my good lady didn’t feel well and how I had to ask the good lady who had given us this wonderful meal what the French was for, ‘Can I have a bicycle please?’ Or, ‘Can you give me some bicarb of soda?’ And you didn’t get taught that sort of thing at school. So they had to take me down to town to a chemist and took me in there and they soon gave me a jar and everything was alright. It was silly little things like seeing the two wonderful people that were appreciative of you not giving them away that made it rather dramatic afterwards because he was the leader of a very powerful Communist cell and when after we had this meal he took me upstairs to the bedroom which I was a bit worried about ‘til he said, opened, he had a key. He opened it all and there was this big wardrobe and he turned another lock there and that opened the back up into the room and there was shelf after shelf after shelf of mines, bomb disposal kits, pistols. Everything. Everything that the British had dropped for the Resistance during the war they had gathered up themselves and there was all this material all locked up for the Communists cell and he was still the head of it. So when that got back to Air Ministry they were very well not pleased. So Stanley Albert decided I wouldn’t tell them. I wanted to go back to Eastern Germany which is in the Russian zone because I knew they had the details of all our lads that had been killed in the camp and they wouldn’t allow me to go. So all the while I was in the Air Force and we were stationed in Germany and doing another job altogether and when the day came and I left the Air Force I had a medical examination for a, for a pension and they put on there a fully identified the damage. The damage they’d done to my personal parts on there. This officer did, ‘But he has no physical proof of of having been in the concentration camp and therefore they could not pay me a pension.’ And I was a little bit not happy. So we had a brand new Honda car, we went up to London, we found the East Germans had a proper tourist agency for visitors. Not that they encouraged many to Eastern Germany and I had to leave my passport for them to have a visa put in and they promised me the passport would be back by the Wednesday and on that Friday we had booked to go back into Eastern Germany, back to the camp to get the proof that I knew was there. Unfortunately, the postman called at a Post Office, left the registered post on this bicycle whilst he was serving in a house. When he came back that bicycle was stolen and so was my passport which very conveniently had the visa for Eastern Germany which was going to take me to the camp. The government wouldn’t admit it was a mistake so all I could do was to get on the train in the morning and stand outside the Passport Office until they opened up and that was getting on for nearly lunchtime before my place in the queue to apply for a visa. They said, ‘Well, if we’d have known you were going back to Eastern Germany we’d have done a special run around.’ It was al, it was all a load of bunkum. Anyhow, they got me across to the East Germany Embassy. They gave me a visa for Eastern Germany which didn’t please the RAF one little bit and we got in the car and we drove back and there we were made very welcome indeed. My wife and I, this was 1982 were the first British people to go back to the camp after the war and there as I knew the Germans had made records of everything that happened in there we knew where they stored this thing and the Russians couldn’t have been more helpful. As Pat knows again that we had a very good liaison with the Russian Underground in the camp and they helped us where they could as a result of which I got copies of the execution order of each of my friends that we saw taken away and killed. And on the shelf as you go back again you’ll find the letter of appreciation from the French Ambassador thanking me for giving the details of each of these men that had come to England at the time of Dunkirk, had stayed with general, in there with General De Gaulle and now had details for what their parents knew. Where they died because we saw them being taken and executed in the crematorium. So we knew that had happened and we were able to get photographs of it and Pat shall show you on the wall there’s the pictures of each of the Frenchmen just before he died and they made me, as a result of it a Commander of the Legion d’Honneur. Made you in the French light in other words which was quite an honour. But it’s there on the wall if you want to see it. It’s interesting. But I haven’t made it known because the, my experience with the radio, with the BBC or any papers if you don’t give them the juicy gory nasty things they make them up and its very very hard to unmake a lie so I’ve avoided, strictly avoided anything to do with radio appearances, television anything like that where I’ve been asked time and time again would I give advice on this or would I give advice on that. I didn’t mind getting mixed up in it but Pat on the other hand has acted very sensibly. Controlling the police, the press and giving them little things that would help or big things that would help. Kept them off my hands. This is why I would ask you please if you are giving any talks or anything like that would you please not mention I’m here because —
[recording paused]
SP: So on behalf of the International Bomber Command Centre I’d just like to thank you Stanley for the time today to share your story. It’s been a real honour and privilege especially as a navigator on 10 Squadron, the same squadron as my own father. I know you started to talk about your time at Buchenwald and your search for justice for you and your fellow POWs and Pat is going to share with us more information on that in a separate recording because I know it’s difficult for you to talk about. I think Pat will also share with us about the important job you did after the war within Military Intelligence. So once again thank you Stanley for your time today. Thank you.
Collection
Citation
Susanne Pescott, “Interview with Stanley Albert Booker,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed February 19, 2025, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/51356.
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