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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1188/11761/PWayeJ.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1188/11761/AWayeJH171009.2.mp3
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Title
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Waye, John Harry
J H Waye
Description
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An oral history interview with John Waye (b.1923, 1803659 Royal Air Force). He served as an air gunner in the Far East.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-10-09
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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
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Waye, JH
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CJ: This is Chris Johnson and I’m interviewing John Waye today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at John’s home in West Malling, Kent, and it is Monday 9th of October 2017. Thank you, John for agreeing to talk to me today. So, perhaps we could start at the beginning and could you tell us, please, where and when you were born and what your family background was?
JW: Well, I was born [pause] at Wickham as far as I, on my birth certificate that’s it. Wickham Place, which is nearby Borough High Street. And the whole area was erased and new houses put up in that place. And most of my knowledge stems from there ‘til I was, most of my knowledge stems from living in Mermaid Court. That’s a courtway between London Bridge and the Blue Eyed Maid which you’ll find in Dickens’ book. And from there well I went to Snowsfield School, the local school, until I was ten. Now, you want me to, do you want to go through what whilst I was there? That period?
CJ: Well, perhaps you could tell us a bit about what you did. Did you have any hobbies? What jobs mum and dad had?
JW: Well, as far as I can remember I used to have to toddle around to the shop to get a loaf of bread. I know that because I used to eat the crust on the way back home. And in those days each shop had its own particular business i.e. if you went to a shop you could only buy a dairy, dairy products. The dry greengrocer, not the greengrocer, the dry grocer he only sold you, sold tins. But he did sell bread about the thickness of your little, of your forefinger. And there was a little ridge there which probably denoted where it came from, you see. There were a few pubs around there. I know two shut down.
CJ: Did you have a job before you joined up?
JW: Well, oh yes, but prior to [pause] I’m going through the early stages.
CJ: Right.
JW: And my mother used to write out the paper what she wanted. A penny packet of tea or a pound of, a pound of sugar. We used to get butter. But that was during the Depression. But fortunately, my father worked on the river, and he would do a little bit of work here and there according to how much came up on the ships. If it came up light well he only had a couple of hours work. If it came up say in the summertime or the springtime they’d load up with tomatoes. Dutch tomatoes. See that goes back to economics and tax. Prior to that, stuff would come in from Spain or Canaries. Tomatoes. But then on a certain date tax, fourpence tax as far as I know went on to the cost of those tomatoes and the produce, put it that way. That went on and I used to run around at the end of the street. The street was only two hundred yards long. There was two bookmakers and my father used to like a bet. And he’d look, he’d come out of work at 12 o’clock because his working day was eight ‘til five on the docks. He was slightly later than that on other jobs. Like longer hours. And he’d write out a bet and I’d take it around to the betting shops one way or the other. If there was any money to come he’d show me how to work out a bet and I worked out there three cross doubles or trebles. Anything like that. Knowing full well that when I went around to the bookmaker and the bet came to, say two and fourpence ha’penny he would keep that ha’penny which was the usual practice of business. He wouldn’t give it to him. Give it to me. So, when I got dad I’d say to him, ‘I’m a bit short here.’ He’d look at me. He did no more. He put his hand in his pocket and gave me a ha’penny because betting was illegal before the war, you see. That’s why we had street pockets. Those, those people who could afford big money they dealt with turf accountants, you see. That’s the difference like between tuppence halfpenny and a few quid or something. So, that’s how I got on. Well, when I was at school when it comes to arithmetic and I get this, I only had a sheet of paper because you’d write down and they’re putting the thing on the board. There was a sum on the board. You had to work it out. Well, I could work it out and it was dead easy. I was doing it every day on the bet or something like that. And I’d be sitting there sort of say scratching myself. The teacher sent me out to make the tea. Or if I, if I happened to be in the playground or something they’d put it out and say, ‘Oi.’ You had to go upstairs, they’d say, ‘Go over there and get some biscuits,’ or something like that, over at the shop. So, I made sure I didn’t go, didn’t get to school too often early. Like lunch hour. Because you’d get, took an hour and three quarters for lunch. But most, most of the knowledge I have is up until 1933 because when I was ten I went into Hither Green Hospital with diphtheria. I had a sore throat one morning or one night or something like that. And I, the next morning I told them I’d got a sore throat. My dad whipped me round to Guy’s because Guy’s, Guy’s is just over the road from us, and he probably went to work or something like. He came back at mid-day, had a chat and I was whipped out the hospital straight away. And I finished up on my back in Hither Green for about six weeks. Couldn’t blooming move. You can’t move. All you can do is your eyes moving. Like that. You’re dead stiff on your back. And each morning at 7 o’clock the cleaner lady would come along. Oh, before that, at half past five you’d hear the night nurse on. Only one nurse on a ward. And she would, would be sitting there in case anybody woke up or was disturbed or something. Then at half past five the cups would rattle, and you’d hear the cups rattling and you’d know tea was coming around. So you’d get a beaker or something like that. And then at 7 o’clock the lady came in for cleaning the, polishing and cleaning the — and she opened the door and said, ‘Hello,’ or ‘good morning,’ or something, and you were pleased as punch to hear something different. You know, sort of I’m still alive at any rate. (Laughs). Yeah. And then when I got up from there I started, well I tried to race about. A bit stiff but I was all racing up and down as soon as I could. Get down in the yard there. Only between these two, like the two walls like. Racing back and forth. But in the meantime, going back, I’d come home. I’d come home from school and my mother would say to me, ‘Here take the bowl.’ We had a big enamel washing up bowl with a handle either side. The mission was to come over from Billingsgate Market. Well, that was only over the bridge to where we were living. Just below, near Borough Market. Go over there and they would, and they would have a number of like silver metal, metal dustbins. Not aluminum but steel but highly polished. Obviously for food. And in those days, there’d be the samples of different things depending which, who was the supplier. And we’d go over there and might get salmon or fish or something and come back with a big bowl or it might be tinned fruit. Anything that come in tins which they’d sampled or that particular area in it would come. And there is a book in the library, in the Southwark Library in the Borough High Street written by a young woman who lived opposite me. I lived in number 14 Mermaid Court. I can’t remember her name. But I know her name. Single name was Winnup. But I don’t know the married name. She’s probably down as her married name. But they got it there because when I asked some years back any information, the chap who was in charge of the library, he took out a book and put the folder right in. Put the pages in the book on the machines. And of course some of edges when it’s reproduced is not up to scratch. So, a little while, a couple of years later I happened to go up to Guy’s for my annual check and I popped in there. And somebody had taken all the pages apart carefully and put them in the right way. As you would making a new page, this booklet. But I’ve been up since. That chap has gone, and the newcomers are a couple of women. They don’t seem to know anything about the paper. The book. It’s in a book form but I don’t know who the author is or the chap who copied it. All I know is the person’s name is Winnup. The woman who wrote it.
CJ: So, John you were saying how you’d been in hospital for diphtheria and then you were cured.
JW: Yes. Yes.
CJ: And came out of hospital.
JW: Yes. At ten I was in, in hospital. So, then I was, I’d got, I was, I got well. Because whilst I was up each time I asked the nurse, ‘When can I go out?’ Because I felt I was being detained and I was alright. Seemingly. But she said, ‘No. You’re still not pro — ’ [pause] See, I can’t. I know what, I can’t find the words.
CJ: So, you still weren’t clear of the disease.
JW: Yeah. That’s the long phrase.
CJ: Yeah. Right. Ok.
JW: But there’s one word which in pro, not prominent. Something like that. I forget. And eventually I went out. And my dad came in. He was in black. All in black. But I thought, I didn’t take much notice of it since it’s cold. So, we gets down to London Bridge Station. We probably caught the train from Hither Green down to London Bridge Station. Walked out. We’re not walking down to Borough. Borough High Street where we lived. We’re going around to my grandma’s house. So, we were walking down the street and my aunt was walking on the other side of the street coming towards us. And when she got almost opposite she walked over to me. Took her purse out. Took her purse out and giv e me sixpence. Cor blimey. Sixpence was a heck of a lot of money. Thanks very much. Been in hospital. So, I gets around, gets around home and there’s, they lived just off Bermondsey Street, my grandma, grandpa. Then they told me my mum was dead. So, my life just, I didn’t know what day, what they meant. So, I had no reason. I couldn’t reason. What? She’s gone? She’s not here. So, with that went on and then of course I realised that I was, my mother wasn’t coming back because I had to pack in with my family and my grandma. So, that was that. But I couldn’t understand. I had two cousins. They were a bit older than me and they never seemed to play. I always used to be out on my tod in the street. If I went out to have a game there were always kids all running around playing football together. But I just couldn’t understand it. Whether they were told not to get too close to me or something I don’t know. You see in those days it was prevalent. Unsurprising, the number of people in the present day who speak out and say they had diphtheria. Because down where I lived the only flowers we saw were flowers on coffins. That’s something. Now, you go along you see shops in every High Street or something selling flowers aren’t they? That’s, that’s tough that was but anyway that went on like that and I didn’t, as I said when I was at school I, I was quite good at arithmetic and that type of work. Not, not so much English because they didn’t put too much into English. I think because we were close to the City and it was all quick-thinking money, the Stock Exchange type, I don’t know. Anyway, I tried to get in the Stock Exchange but I couldn’t get in when I left school at fourteen.
CJ: So, what did you do after leaving school?
JW: Oh, I, I got a job as, in the in the clothing trade, and we, we were making up stuff. I was making collars and nothing in particular…… and carried on like that, and after, after a couple of years I asked for a rise. Oh, my dad was out of work because — going back, I was working then when the war broke out. And the governor told us not to come in for a fortnight because he didn’t know what was going on. No work coming in. And went back to work, only for a while then they switched over onto war work. No extra money or anything like that and I asked for some. I asked for a rise and the governor was willing to give it to me but the paymaster wasn’t. So, I didn’t get any extra money. I was getting older. I packed up because my, my dad wasn’t doing too much work. Simply the traffic wasn’t coming up the river. He was a stevedore. So, and as he was, as he wasn’t he was able to work like odds and ends. A few hours or a day to cut a corner, whether the ships came up light or laden. So, we was either doing well or we wasn’t doing well. And that’s how, that’s how these things went. And he happened to be out of work at this particular time so I packed up. They didn’t give me a rise. Because the point is during the Depression whoever was working, they had to stay in work to support the rest of their families you see. And you can’t get cabbages growing in the streets in London. You can get them down here. You can, you can see them in the hedgerows or something. Get something to eat can’t you? But not in London. So, there wasn’t any extra food forthcoming that way. But I used to go to the market over, across the road in the Borough Market. And I used to take a sack, a small sack with me to school you see and at night when we finished I would race up over to market there and see if there was any carts left behind. Because if, say there used to be a sack or something burst open, there’s odd potatoes or a cabbage or something fell out or onto the cart or something they just used to kick it out off the cart because they can’t take them or they’d get pinched for stealing. You see. And if I, if I happened to touch lucky any particular day I got a good bag full of vegetables, I’d take them home and take them around to — oh that’s going back a bit farther really, take them all home to my mum. She’d take out what we needed and, ‘Take them around to grandma.’ So, I’d take them round to grandma and get a penny. Things were tough. It wasn’t for the laziness of the people. Everybody was out of work. Whether you were say a labourer or that type or whether you were an educated chap. There was no work for anybody.
CJ: So, were you still working up to when you volunteered to join up?
JW: Oh, yes. I was. I was working any odd job I could get hold of a few bob. It was a case of surviving in that respect. And as there weren’t much work in certain lines of business, because everything was geared to war work, it was like, tough. And the wages were still kept bottom because the production workers keep a lot of people going on top. Once the production worker goes their jobs go.
CJ: So, could you, could you tell us a bit about joining up, please, and how you decided on going for the RAF?
JW: Well, I was, I was interested in the, in aeroplanes and I went to the ATC. Joined up the ATC. So, I was ready to go in the RAF as soon as I was eighteen which I did do. So, I signed on straight away at eighteen. And during that short period we used to do a bit of training and like theory. See I can always remember how to fire an engine. You see you can’t go one two three four because of the alternate. Things like that you see. Little bits. Only little parts of aircraft and so on. In the end I went into the RAF. I went to [pause] I went to St Johns Wood, off Grosvenor Park, Val, begins with V the house I was in. It was in a little cul de sac with about three or four houses osn but it was, it was a modern, a modern place. A nice big bathroom. And there was only about eight or ten of us in a room. But it shows you how big the room was. All the beds were packed together like that. But the main thing was when you looked at the bathroom and the surroundings you could see how well off the occupants were in the past. Anyway, to get back onto what I was saying.
CJ: So, was this for initial training that you were in St Johns Wood?
JW: Ah, yes. Initial training. Yes. I, as I joined up and it was just you were drilled. Drilling and general get you in trim like. But after say 5 o’clock you had been to tea you could, you were free to go till 23.59, not twelve hundred hours, 23.59. So, we used to go swimming over the Seymour Road Baths. That’s only, that’s just behind Oxford Circus. And we marched, marched down there. I don’t know. I forget how many. Probably maybe about thirty or so. Something like that. We’d do that. We’d go, we’d go to Lord’s for drill. Lord’s Cricket Club. Up and down the slope like there. Marching up and down and doing all the drills and getting ready. Oh, I got fitted out. Fitted out but they didn’t have enough clothing there for the newcomers. So, all I got was a pair of boots, a black tie and I think there was a forage cap. So, of course I mean I had to wear that outfit whilst I was in the, in the RAF at the time. If I’d have changed into, into Civvy Street I would have been contravening the rules wouldn’t I? So, I goes home like that. Get on a bus and I just went home each night. Well, one day I gets on the bus to come back to the unit. There’s a chap sitting in front of me. He turned around, he says, ‘You’re improperly dressed.’ Who the blooming hell is that? He was a corporal. And I said, ‘I’ve just joined up and this is the uniform I got.’ Now, when I told him where I was going he was probably going to the same place. And it transpired that he was a publican in a pub about three hundred yards away from where I lived. On the old area where I used to live. Somewhere. I never saw any more of him and I had no, no more than that. One day I was on, I went, being home or I’d finished. Finished for the day and they had Nat Gonella playing some concert in aid of the Royal Air Force. So, I thought well I might just as well go there and pay the, contribute to the Air Force funds. So, I went there and I came back. 12 o’clock. ‘You’re late on parade, airman.’ It was just 12 o’clock. ‘You’re on a charge.’ ‘What for?’ You’re supposed to be in 12 o’clock. ‘You’re supposed to be here at 11.59.’ ‘Well,’ that’s 12 o’clock.’ ‘11.59 Air Force.’ So, a few minutes was three days.
CJ: So, where did you go after you’d —
JW: And what — go on.
CJ: After your initial training.
JW: Oh [pause] Oh, they shipped me down to Newquay. School like. To continue through you see. Well, I walked to work through there. And when they give you these papers to sign and I couldn’t understand some of the mathematics. How, how, how could A+B - equal that? A’s got nothing to do with figures. So I was stumped. Anyway, I failed that there. Then from there they sent me to Brighton. They got the same type of teacher on the board. On the book. A = Y Z and all that paraphernalia at the time mind you. I didn’t, couldn’t understand them. They didn’t come around to me and say here’s the, there’s a right-angle triangle. That’s the, that’s the adjacent, that’s the opposite and that’s the hypoteneuse. And if you use this one it’s not the same as that one. Each, each side indicates a certain type of system. We can come back to that after. I was beat again simply because they used, they used the letters A B C in algebra rather than show you how the job’s done. This is all what I’m recalling in my head and reasoning which is true. When you get older and you work that out. So, I went up to Bridlington. Then did the training up in Bridlington. Then I was shipped off to the Isle of Man.
CJ: I think you said that before the interview that Bridlington was a gunnery school. So, you’d been selected as an air gunner by then had you?
JW: I expect so. Because I had no say. You don’t have any say in the, in the services. You were a number [background interference] [unclear]
CJ: You had no choice.
JW: Had no choice. No.
[background interference] [unclear]
JW: You see. Anyhow, I went over to the Isle of Man. Did my gunnery course there and came back. Came back. I went on leave. And after the course I did about a fortnight, about a fortnight’s leave I think we got. And I got my marching orders to go to Harwell for operational training. So, I went on to Harwell. Did the operational training there and then that’s when they said, well I’ve got my log book. Told me what to do. Not to put any names down. They knew where I was going shall we say. I had no idea where I was going. So, I just had my log and from there I went — trip, trip, trip. Hurn. Hurn. Then from there to Porth, Cornwall. Porth to Gibraltar. Gibraltar to Fez in Morocco. Fez to Tripoli in Tripolitania then to, B26 Cairo. That was the aerodrome in the desert by the Sphinx. And that was that. I remember the number. It’s 26 Kilo it was.
CJ: So, were you flying out in the aircraft that you were going to be flying operationally?
JW: No. No. We went out as passengers. Myself and Nick Johns who was a pilot. We scheduled to go east on any command shall we say. We didn’t go by ship or anything like that. They probably wanted aircrew probably specifically because they’d got the B24s coming into operation. And as I said we went out there. The crew who flew us out they stayed on in the new Wimpy 10s. They were taking a new Wimpy out to replace the old 3s.
CJ: Wimpys are Wellingtons.
JW: Wellingtons.
CJ: Yes.
JW: The crew, they stayed on. They stayed on and they stayed on into 355 Squadron as well, and we went out as their passengers. Then we went to Cairo. Stayed there for a, for a week or two. Oh, about a month, I think. Then got shipped over to Tel Aviv. The old Lod. The old biblical name of Lod. I remember there we were standing there waiting. Waiting. There was supposed to be a bus or coach coming along. Don’t know how long we were going to remain on the station. Just, there was about half a dozen other chaps there, standing there. And the railway track passed the gate, the entrance to the aerodrome at the time. So, I stand there and the road comes parallel with the railway track and then goes diagonally straight across it. So, as this comes along I jumped out of the little crowd there, grabbed the tailboard of the truck as it went past and it yanked me along. Managed to climb up. It was very difficult. Tapped on the cab. The chappie looked up. You could see the fear in his face almost. He slowed down and I got in the cab. Apparently the Arabs at that time were having a go at the Jewish immigrants and there was turmoil out there you see. Apart from our war. I didn’t know that. So, we went there. Went to Tel Aviv. I always remember Tel Aviv. These low buildings. Whitewashed. Just the odd stone building which was the proper prefect’s place or offices or something, and a stony beach. Yeah. Stones like that which you get down the Mediterranean. You see the pictures now you might as well be looking at New York with all the skyscrapers there now and the cars flying along. Then, from there where did I go? From there to — is it [pause] it’s in the Iraq neck — what’s the capital?
CJ: Baghdad.
JW: Baghdad. Well, the RAF had a station there on the lake. I think it’s about a hundred yards from Baghdad. Before the aircraft were going they had flying boats doing the run across to Australia. So those water points, those flying boats could get down you see. That was before the aeroplane was strong enough to do the distance. What was the name of that?
CJ: Baghdad.
JW: No. No. The lake.
CJ: I don’t know.
JW: Habbaniyah.
CJ: Ok.
JW: Habbaniyah. That’s it. Habbaniyah. Habbaniyah. We stayed there for a couple of days or so. Then we got moving again on to Sharjah. That’s on the Gulf. There’s a RAF station. Habbaniyah, Shaibah which is in, which is Qatar. And then from there, from Qatar we went to Bahrain. They used to call them Trucial States, there were about five little States along the coast there you see up to the Horn. And we had stayed. We had bases there. Well, well after thoughts and knowledge Winston Churchill bought into that oil at Qatar in 1911. So you see where we got our fingers in the pie there. He was smart enough to know about the oil. But whilst I was at, what did I call that ‘rain? Bahrain is it?
CJ: Bahrain.
JW: Bahrain. In the souk. There was Americans. Oil. Then they were prospecting for oil around the area at that time. We used to hang an earthenware chatti up on the door in the sunshine to cool the water. It was, you could barely move, you know. It was an effort to move because of the moisture. What do they call it?
CJ: Humidity.
JW: Humidity in the air. Terrible it was there. Luckily we were away after a few days from there.
CJ: So, where did you get moved on to next?
JW: Karachi. From there we went straight over the bay of [pause] it was the northern part of —
CJ: Bengal.
JW: Bengal into Karachi. Stayed there probably about, stayed there about a month or more because the monsoon was on. Cor, you could see the train lines were up there like a boned fish. Sticking up out the ground they were. Water everywhere. Flooded. Terrible that. Eventually we got to Salbani. Into Calcutta. Then out again to Salbani.
CJ: Salbani was the RAF base.
JW: And that was, as I say the permanent operating base.
CJ: And were you the, so you were in 355 Squadron there. Were you the only squadron there?
JW: Well, when I was there the remnants of 159, 159 had moved from Salbani to Digri which was about twenty odd miles along the railway. There was no road. Very little roadways out in the area because they get washed away with the monsoons and so on. So, most of the aerodromes were on a railway track. And they were at Digri, which was about twenty or thirty miles farther on from where I am. Where we were at Salbani. They were operating from there, bombing whilst we were being trained by the remnants. Or shall we say a working party of 159. Because 123 chaps who were training us were ex, well when I say ex they were 159 people. And then we came into force as 355. And whilst we were training it was only 355. And then as the crowds came in 156 were training but we were operational then. And then that was Royal Air Force India. We came under India Command. On the New Year they changed it to South East and Asia Command with Lord Mountbatten as the CO. And I’d finished my time on there and all the, most of the chaps who did their flying there seemed to be moved off because some went down to Kolar. Oh, first off all the Aussies were being shipped back, back to Australia. And I was in the crew like an Aussie crew. Half Aussie in ours. Captain, he was Aussie, navigator was Aussie. Very very good. Most of the navigators were ex-schoolteachers. They came from Sydney. Mainly Sydney and the other southern Australia. South Australia. The whole lot. They’d come a roundabout way through Nassau when they did their training and then went on to meet us in Burma and that’s where we come together. Oh, and incidentally they were shipping them home. Time expired, and they shipped off at what, about three crews to my knowledge were shipped out to other units. Well, I went from there to Jessore. That’s it. I went to Jessore. Our crew, or more like the remnants of the crew, went with some others on air sea rescue to 91, I think it was, squadron.
CJ: Can I just come back to Salbani? So when? When was this roughly when you arrived there for your training after this long trip?
JW: Well, it was maybe about August or September. I don’t know. It was —
CJ: Of which year?
JW: ’43.
CJ: ’43. Ok. So, you were, before the air sea rescue you were flying bombing operations after your training from Salbani.
JW: From, from Salbani we, we were trained on four-engine bombers with the remnants of 159 Squadron. When that was done we still remained on the aerodrome as 355 Squadron, and 355 stayed on after I’d gone for a year or two to my knowledge. And when they found that we were time expired after six months trips or learned the whole kaboosh seemed to be shut down. As I said some went down to Kolar on, which was down in South Central India. It’s a rich town. I can’t think of it off hand. Some went there and they were obviously training new recruits because I read after, in say in in the books that these people were coming from Kolar to South East Asia in 1945. So, the remnants of our squadron were down there training them. And we were shipped out onto, I think it was 291 Air Sea Rescue at Jessore. Then we went up to [unclear] I think it was. We went to another squadron and that’s where I got my, all of us got our pass home.
CJ: So, when you were with 355 Squadron at these different bases you were flying bomber, bombing operations then were you?
JW: Well, at that time if you put your fingers out like that across Burma that’s how the mountains were. Fourteen thousand feet and upwards. Very very steep. Like that you see. As if something like a concertina had been pushed together and they gradually get narrow. Well, that’s Burma and they work from the Irrawaddy River towards the coast. And there’s only maybe two or three passes whereby you could come through. Otherwise you’ve got to climb over fourteen thou. Well, what had happened, we probably controlled those passes but the Japs came over the top. They were, they came through the jungle. Hacked their way through the jungle. And that grass is as thick as that. It’s called grass but you needed a mach, we carried a machete to cut our way through. But there was the coast road. A road came up from Rangoon up the coast, you see. And as they were getting quite close to Imphal and I can’t think of the name [pause] the British were holding them back. The Japs were pushing and pushing. And it was a seesaw seesaw so we were coming over and coming down and bombing the positions of the Japanese if they were there. Sometimes we’d get up to the runway and they cancelled because the British had pushed the Japanese back down the line and that position we were due to bomb was British held. My mate now he complains that we bombed his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law tells them that the blasted Englishmen were bombing us. You see. See that was going. Well that’s all we were doing, and then gradually in the meantime we’d go over to Mandalay or Pegu or some of the railway junctions. Nong Pla Duk, that was out near Bangkok, that one on the Siam Railway. And we’d be doing all those trips and that was our, my term back on the station.
CJ: So, which aircraft were you flying then?
JW: I flew. I was flying mid-upper all the way.
CJ: The aircraft. I think you said they were Liberators. B24. Is that correct?
JW: Oh yes. We weren’t flying. That’s why we went out there. To fly on it. To fly on the B24s.
CJ: So what were the crew positions on the B24s?
JW: Well, when we were flying we flew, we were still flying, taking out the old Mark 3s with the four machine guns in the back and a mid-upper turret. That was the aircraft. And then after about six months in come Mark 6s. Well, they had a front turret on. Or they might have been an earlier type. I don’t know. They had a front turret on and a rear turret. In fact I don’t think I ever flew with a chap in the front. I can’t remember anybody flying in it. Then we had 6s come in which had a ball turret. And I flew in that once. That was enough for me. I didn’t want to know about flying.
CJ: So, the other crew positions. You had a pilot. Co-pilot.
JW: No. No.
CJ: Flight engineer.
JW: There was a rear gunner, myself, wireless operator, flight engineer, navigator and a pilot. Didn’t have a second pilot. We had just a seven man crew.
CJ: You were mid-upper, you said.
JW: I was mid-upper. Yeah. But as it transpired later on they put other, as I say, ball turret gunner. A front gunner in. Then they put side gunners in from what I gather. From what I’ve read in a book. But that’s in 1945. Well, I’m home here.
CJ: So how many of these bombing operations did you do then against the Japanese positions?
JW: I don’t know, honestly. It never, it never bothered me. All I knew I was alive. So, I didn’t care where. I wasn’t in England. Would I like to get home? I was out there, so it didn’t make much difference how many trips. But I was tour, tour expired and they probably take in the number of trips plus the distance you had to fly on some trips. So say you do twelve, fourteen hour trips, you’ve got to keep your eyes open all the time to see, and you’re on, as I say you’re on your nerves with anytime someone could take a pot at you.
CJ: So did, was there much opposition on these raids from fighters or anti-aircraft fire?
JW: Not, not the, not on my particular trips, fortunately. It was other people who had the attacking by the aircraft. Now, most of ours was ack ack. We got caught in, over Rangoon. And oh, Joe [pause] Murdoch was second in command of the unit and he took over from Ercolani when he, not Ercolani, Dodson when he moved out. That’s right. And he took over the crew. And [pause] what were we talking about? Oh —
CJ: You were saying that when you’d been tour expired that they took into account the number of trips but also —
JW: Oh yeah. That’s it.
CJ: How long those trips had been.
JW: That’s right. And I suppose they just wanted the old, the old crews out and then the new lot were coming in. I’d read that they were already training. The Canadians already had a place out in Canada where they trained them on B24s, so there was no need for them to be trained up from two-engine to four-engine job because they were already experienced on it. Any rate, we we was over Rangoon and got caught in, the searchlight caught us, and it caught all the searchlights which were waving about. The whole lot. You couldn’t see a thing. You see that. See that edge. That’s all you could see. You can’t see the pictures on the wall. You can’t see yourself or anything. All you could see was a hairline of the outline of whatever the object was. The gun was just the shape of a hairline shape. A box. You couldn’t see what was inside that. It never denoted the frame or any bullet marks or anything on it.
CJ: So, when you were coned by the searchlights then they started shooting at you.
JW: Oh, they started shooting. We come straight down like nobody’s business. We got out of trouble, fortunately, but Joe was one of those chaps who wanted to be first home. And in the mean, in the meantime, I was sent to Bhopal on a course in central India. So I know the chap named Murphy. He was a rear gunner but he took over my place for the trip. And Joe, they come home and Joe ran out of gas over the Sundarbans. The Sundarbans are the mouths of the Brahmaputra River. Massive river that is. And it’s all like fingers of water going out. Some are deep and some are shallow. Well, he came down there and they all got out, but he went in with the aircraft and he got shot through the Perspex and it scalped him and, what I heard, that he was the first bloke who had penicillin in India. The first man to get it. I don’t, we don’t hear much of what goes on. Not much information what happened to him, but all those little things crop up. They’re not in a sequence to say it. Just something that reminds you during the conversation and you have to keep backtracking.
CJ: So, then, then you said you’d been sent on to another squadron for air sea rescue. This was still before the end of the war, was it?
JW: Oh yes. I’m still, I’m still in SEAC. I’m in SEAC now. And they trained, they seemed to clear the squadron out of the old hands. In the meantime, new crews had been coming in and a I suppose they were trained up, and it seemed to me that about a half a dozen crews had been shipped out. As I said some went to Kolar. We went, two crews went down to Jessore and another crew went up to Shillong on different units. But it was whilst we were in the, whilst we were in those squadrons, we all got notification that we were on a boat being shipped home from Bombay. But from the time we got notification till the actual move was a couple of months. As if someone got on the phone and said, ‘Five crews. Send them over. We’re sending them over to England.’ And when word goes around you expect you’re on your way. But no, it took a long time for papers to come through. Then we were at Bombay about three months waiting for a ship. Just hanging around. There’s no, no drills or anything. It was just a place to sleep. Somewhere to eat. Or if you’ve got the money and can afford the fare up to Bombay. Don’t forget the money was, was a pittance. God, it was terrible. And the army controls India at the time, and their monetary system was so poor they must have been about two hundred years back. You got, you want a week’s, a week’s wages to buy a cup of tea out there.
CJ: So, eventually a ship arrived to bring you back to England.
JW: Yeah. It was, it was a pleasure to come back on that ship. It was nice and sunny. See the flying fish coming along. And see that blue sheet? That was how the water was. Nice.
CJ: And did you know when you were on the ship what you were supposed to be doing when you got back to England?
JW: No. You’re just going back to England. You’re in the Army, in the Navy or the Air Force you was a number. Whatever it was. And you were being shipped from one place to another place.
CJ: So this was — when was this? It was still before the end of the war. Yeah.
JW: No. I was [pause] we were laying off. We came through the Suez and we were lying off Gibraltar. And I woke up this particular morning, looked out and saw all these ships. All these American ships out there. I said, ‘Gawd crikey.’ They must have sent them a convoy down towards the Mediterranean, right up to Gibraltar then come up that way to England rather than come in the northern. But it wasn’t until after a couple of days that they got the information that President Roosevelt had died. So I’m not sure what date it was. About 1944 I should think. But I do know where I was when President Roosevelt died. I was, I was just coming up the Bay of Biscay somewhere out of Gibraltar.
CJ: And then what happened to you when you got back to England?
JW: Well, we laid off. We came into Glasgow. Glasgow. And Burn, something Burn. The first bridge up in Glasgow was as far as the ship could go. Because you could stand on the ship and there was the bridge maybe hundred, two hundred yards away. It’s the centre of Glasgow. So we waited there and we were there a day or a bit more than a day. Then come late evening eventually we were told a train pulled in alongside the dock. We just walked down the gangplank and got the train. It was during the night. We were going through to Wirral. West Kirby. That’s in the Wirral. We gets there. We gets there at night time. No idea of the time. Didn’t have watches in those days. We were given, we were given, given something to eat, a meal, and packed off. Had some equipment and we went to bed. We got up the next morning. On parade. They took us up to, across to Liverpool. Jumped on wherever you were going. I, myself and the other chaps going to London or south got on the London train and that was that.
CJ: So, that was you being demobbed was it?
JW: No. No. No. This was 1944.
CJ: Right. So you were still in the RAF.
CW: Still in the RAF. Yeah.
CJ: So you were put on a train. You didn’t know where you were going.
JW: No. Not yet. Oh, we had a pass when we left the Wirral. They’d given us a fourteen-day pass. Call it leave, you see. Of course we went down there and I got a letter to report to — Harwell, was it. No. No. Somehow or other I was —I had to go up to (Shrivenall?). Up north of Shropshire. A squadron there. It was Rednal or Ridnal or something like that. An aerodrome, yeah. A nice wooded place it was, and I was put on flying control. So, I was up there for a couple of months and then the squadron was moved out from there to Wiltshire. Near Trowbridge. The aerodrome was near Keevil. Keevil. That’s Trowbridge. We was there a few months. Myself and another chap, Titch, and we were shipped [pause] shipped up to Newcastle. Now, what was that aerodrome there? It was north of Newcastle. Acklington. Acklington. That was the station there.
CJ: And what were you doing there? Was that aircraft control again?
JW: Aircraft. Aircraft. The two of us. And I was in charge of the ground aerodrome, you see. And one day, one evening Titch and I were in pairs and in control of the shop, and we needed a tractor so I said, said to Titch, ‘Go down and get one of the tractors, Titch’. We had a big Edsel Ford and it was useless it was. It had no guts in it at all. It just went along, put it that way. One day I got on and all they had was a piece of wire to stop it and start it. You pulled the wire out and it kicked over. You pushed it back it stopped. So, I had to go around the aerodrome and I’m driving around and down to, like the aircraft. They were putting it off the aerodrome. Turning it around and pushing it in to the, the hangar. And I’m coming along and I can’t stop this damned thing or do anything to slow it down. Luckily, they had to push it up. I went underneath them. That was a good job I didn’t hit it otherwise I’d have been up, right up the creek. And then I asked Titch to go down and get, to get a tractor and he went down there. I thought, ‘Crikey he’s a long time, isn’t he? I wonder what the heck’s happened to him.’ Couldn’t find out what was wrong. Where he was. Why it was. The next morning gets onto the sick bay again. ‘Oh, we sent him to hospital, Hexham.’ ‘Oh. Ok.’ Then we got information that he’d, they’d sent him to hospital which was at Hexham, that’s near Carlisle. Right across country to Carlisle, and I went in and I said, ‘What happened to you?’ He said, ‘Well, I swung, I swung the handle to start her up. It kicked back and smashed me — .’ Took two inches out of his arm. They had to shorten his arm. Take out all the smashed bone out and put that on. Never saw him again. Suppose when he got better I suppose he was demobbed. And I’ve heard nothing since.
CJ: So, were you doing aircraft control until the end of the war?
JW: Yeah. And then I was left there on my tod. The other, the officers, the two officers they never turned up. Well, I didn’t see them, put it that way. And I thought to myself, I never got a breather because it was a three, three shift system. By the time you got home and had a sleep and got up again it was time to get ready and go out again. And somebody wanted, somebody lived up north, was stationed at Tangmere and, and he wanted to shift up north. Well, I heard about it so I said, ‘Well, I’ll have it. I’ll change over. See if I can change my job or something, you know beside being nearer to London as I thought. Didn’t realise Tangmere was still seventy miles from London [laughs] So, we changed over and I finished up at Tangmere. I was demobbed from there up to London. Demobbed.
CJ: So, do you remember what you were doing, what the atmosphere was like when the end of the war came?
JW: I didn’t —
CJ: How you got the news?
JW: How the what?
CJ: How did you get the news that the war had finished? VE Day.
JW: Well, to be quite honest it had no effect on me personally. It did on some people. And you see them depicted in the paper or the news. Everybody enjoying themselves. I didn’t because I happened to be on leave and I’ve never seen such misery in my life. I went home. There was nobody there, only old women. And they didn’t have coats. Some of them had shawls. You see they moan about these, what do them call them? Muslims with these —
CJ: Hijabs.
JW: I’m not saying the ones with the high side and the hat and the pin underneath the chin. Well, some of the women dressed like that. Because they never had the money to buy. They were expensive. Women’s clothing. And I came home and I seen these elderly people walking about. Neighbours. No lights. And unlike India and places like that where there’s thousands, millions of stars up there just like lights shining down you could see your way about everywhere. You had lampposts and things like that on, in front of you. I went into a pub and there was only me and my father in there, and my stepmother. And I think the old-fashioned oil lamp on the counter. No noise. I thought, bugger this. I was glad to get back.
CJ: So was there a lot of bomb damage as well in that area?
JW: Oh, at Guy’s Hospital. They counted fifty six bombs in Guy’s Hospital. Where that Shard is at London Bridge Station. A bomb. On this particular night I went to the pictures. The Troc-ette up in Tower Bridge Road with my mates at the time. We went in there and when it finished we came out. My mate, he said, ‘Well, my mother and sister, are down in, down under London Bridge Station, in the shelter.’ And they had a huge massive steel door. You went through the front and behind. In the tunnel itself there was a massive door. They went down there. Myself and my best friends, we went home. We didn’t know until the next day that the bomb had hit that shelter and killed so many people. And also the secondary bomb which was dormant temporarily had exploded and killed the nurses and doctors who were out from Guy’s looking after the children, the people in there. So that part laid derelict, laid derelict until they built the Shard. That’s fifty years isn’t it? In the meantime the, the Post Office used, used the top to take their mailbags up. They made a path, a road up from the ground and they came up that way from, from the street. And I was opposite, in bed in Guy’s and I used to look out and on Saturday nights the bottom, bottom part there they used as a dance club. Rented it or something like that. And usually crowds of youngsters up there bawling and shouting because there was a dance on. We used to see that. Well, then they cleared them out and they put the Shard up there.
CJ: So, when was it you were demobbed, and what did you do after that?
JW: I went back on tailoring. That’s all I knew. If I’d have known [pause] If I’d had knowledge of what was, what to do through experience, as I said to you I was quite hot at arithmetic and figures. I’d have gone in, I’d have been better off going in the air in one respect. Because after going to school through the RAF I learned further education, you see. Which the children don’t get. Next higher up levels as you go up. So, in one respect I’ve never been lucky on raffles and things like that. You see. But, I’m still alive. Now, my mates we went to the pictures on that particular night. He went home. John. John Rose he was. My mate’s name. He went home. He joined up the RAF just after myself and he joined up as a aircrew. Volunteered for aircrew and you’d got to be able to pass an exam to get into aircrew and be fit. And he went to Pembrey. There’s a gunnery, a gunnery school there down in Pembrey in South Wales and so on. Then he was posted to 76 Squadron, Linton on Ouse. I had a couple of letters. I had them here. And he wrote back and he said, “Well, I don’t mind going to Berlin.” Now, Berlin was always splashed in the paper as a terrible place to go to for aircraft. I suppose it was just reassuring news that to the public at large. But he said his squadron were doing like the dirty work. The — what’s the word for it? Diversionary. And he got shot down and killed over Magdeburg. Don’t know. There’s no name of where he went. He’s one of the nine thousand odd missing. So, all I can figure out is that they’ve gone in to bomb. The shell’s done that. I only hope that he didn’t get damaged and come down in the North Sea because he’d just freeze to death in the North Sea.
CJ: So, did, did you carry on tailoring until you retired?
JW: Yeah. Yeah.
CJ: Or did you have any other jobs?
JW: Yes. I was tailoring. And [pause] some clothing if it had silks woven into it. Stripes, bottoms. Hundred percent tax. There was no turn ups. They were all straight bottoms where before the war they were turn ups. That’s one of the things that made it hard for tailoring to make a good profit. Also, if the cost of the primary object was increased all those people who get a cut all the way to the retailer, put the price up. So, it was to their interest that they kept the price down, so the tailors were always, as different jobs came in sometimes you were rushed. You would be working late into the evening and half the night with jobs. In that particular trade people would, businessmen would come in. Business people would come in. And they, they would make arrangements say for next year or sometime next year. Well, if you get one or two people come in at the same time and want, you’ve got the job half done. Like prepared. Not finished. Three of them come in and say well shall we say and all wanting in the one day or two you’re working half the blessed night. You see. That’s the, that’s the point when the chap works on his own on a business.
CJ: So, coming back to the RAF. Was there a Squadron Association that you joined and you went to any reunions? Or did you manage to —
JW: I was too busy.
CJ: Keep in touch with anybody?
JW: I couldn’t. The job itself, my job itself wasn’t a regular nine to five job. So, therefore I couldn’t. I couldn’t say well I’ll be in such and such a place at 6 o’clock three months’ time. I don’t know, I might be busy. And if I’m busy and I’m working there and I don’t do the job there was no work. You see. Whereas the chap who, say for instance the chap who works for the government he’s a salaried person. He walks, well he gets to work at a certain time, does his jobs and walks out. Finished. At the end of the week in those days, or a month there’s his cheque. If he goes to buy his house — ‘Who do you work for?’ ‘Oh, I work for this government place,’ so and so, and so and so. Income and all that. They’re guaranteed to get their money back in a sense because as long as you’re alive they’ll get their money back eventually and the profits on it. On the other hand, the manufacturer or the person working in manufacturing he could get the sack, the sack with an hours’ notice. There’s no, I can’t think of the word. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be working next week. He signed up today. He might be out of work next week and can’t afford, hasn’t got the repayments. So, they’re not going to take chances on him and they couldn’t give it. It’s only when that, do you want some money lark came in and they allowed people to buy their house it was like chancing it. It’s all changed.
CJ: I think you told me earlier that you’d been up to the Bomber Command Centre a couple of years ago. Was this the opening?
JW: Yes. That’s. Now, did I have it here? I don’t know whether I —I went up there. I don’t know how I got, I may have got it through the club. Oh, here we are.
CJ: But this was for the opening of the Spire was it?
JW: Yes. It may have been sent through them. I can’t remember but —
CJ: So, did —
JW: My mate. He’s mad on aircraft and anything and he’s, he’s in this here, the club at Shoreham.
CJ: The Friends of the Few.
JW: Yeah.
CJ: At Shoreham Museum. Yeah. Ok.
JW: You see. And through him he probably may have put my name down or something or the other. Anyway, I got that information and he himself was going up there so he said, ‘I’ll take you up.’ So, he takes me to Biggin Hill and, because I can’t get out of here. I’ve got no car and I don’t drive.
CJ: Did you get to see some other, to meet other veterans when you went up to Lincoln?
JW: No. No. I didn’t. I didn’t meet any, any there when I went to Lincoln. Well, that’s another point. I went to Lincoln. As I said there was this big marquee where all the ex-aircrew were and there was seating there for four hundred and only three hundred odd turned up. So, I’m sitting here, and my granddaughter took me up. She’s sitting there on my right, and there was an empty seat opposite me and a chap came in and he sat down opposite me. That’s right. I said, ‘Good morning,’ or made, to make a conversation. But he was dumb in a sense. Alright. We get our dinner. We’re getting through our dinner and my granddaughter, she’s asking him and talking to him and so on and so forth. I can’t hear because I’m partially deaf, and then the noise, the hubbub going on. And then I saw a woman slide in, in that empty seat opposite my granddaughter, and she put a paper in, about that size. A4 folder. Opened it up, and it’s something or the other and he started crying. Put his head down weeping. I thought, well what’s happened here? Well, it transpired that he’d have been involved in this Croix de Guerre or something which the Frenchmen put out. He’d been flying over Paris or somewhere in France and got shot down. He was captured by the Partisans but he managed to get away. The Partisans got shot by the Germans but he managed to get away. And then he, he got through somehow or the other. He got back to England. He went over again and he got shot down again. And something serious really upset him. Whether that was the first time he was manhandled by the Germans or second time, something like serious upset him and he was just shaking and crying there. His head was almost on the table. You couldn’t console him. Just let him go out. And she gave him this. She showed him this citation and the paper and she read it out to him. He was in no condition to read it all. And, I don’t know, I can’t remember whether she gave him the medal or if this was just the citation before the medal was presented. But I said to my granddaughter, ‘There you are. That’s, you’ve seen it with your own eyes what these blokes went through.’
CJ: So, how do you feel Bomber Command were treated after the war? Aircrew?
JW: Well, quite honestly I was too busy trying to make a living. I didn’t have a secure type of job. So, I was like in and out of work short time, because once you finished your job you were paid and that’s that. There was no, no signing on the dole or, or things like that which people get. That’s the difference between my way of thinking of the past, pre-war to those who were born after the war and always get these freebies. Think they’re hard done by if they have to work or something. But otherwise every time I have a flash, sometimes I might be half asleep and I have a flash come through and it reminds me of where I was or sometime or the other or what we were doing. But not just reading it off, like from a book. It’s gone out the back of my head. That’s why these are patchy like when the, as I’m talking. I’m talking at the present and something’s happened before that in in the past leading up to the present or the future. But I’m just my, the crux I have when I think of the children. How they’re not getting an education that they should be getting. Because there won’t be any work now when those ships come here from China with a million tons on board. Come up the Thames. Were they going to come up here with cars? You see Chinese cars on the market, or like pictures or films of them? We’ve been led to believe that the Chinese are a poor country or something. But when you, when you see the traffic around Beijing. Those places. It’s always us who are behind. Not them.
CJ: Well, thank you very much indeed, John. That was a fascinating interview. Thank you for talking to us today.
JW: Well, that’s quite, I’m glad to have a chance to talk about it. I’ll probably remember a lot of things when you’re gone. But that’s one of those things.
CJ: Well, thanks very much. You remembered an awful lot.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with John Harry Waye
Creator
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Chris Johnson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-10-09
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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.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AWayeJH171009
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Format
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01:31:46 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
John Waye grew up in London. He was ten years old when he was hospitalised with diphtheria. When he was discharged he discovered his mother had died while he had been in hospital. John was working in the retail trade and was in the ATC before he volunteered for aircrew. He trained as a gunner and was posted to 355 Squadron at RAF Salbani. As a member of 355 Squadron he and his crew were involved in operations against the Japanese. He was then posted to air sea rescue duties from Jessore.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Chris Johnson
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
India
Iraq
Israel
England--London
India
Iraq--Ḥabbānīyah
Israel--Tel Aviv
Bangladesh--Jessore District
Bangladesh
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
Requires
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John was born at Wickham Place, London, and went to school at the Snowfield School until he was ten. His father worked on the river during the Depression. John tells of his live during that time including some illegal betting.
After leaving school he worked in the clothing trade until the Second World War broke out when John joined the ATC with the intention of going into the RAF as soon as he became eighteen. He was sent to St. Johns Wood for his initial training, with drill at Lord’s Cricket Club. John was sent to Newquay, Brighton and Bridlington which was where he learnt to be an air gunner.
In his logbook (not in the collection), he recorded the places he went to before arriving in Ciro, Egypt, and seeing the Sphinx. John He travelled as a passenger together with a pilot, in a Wellington 10. He finally arrived at RAF Salbani where he was in 355 Squadron. Here he was trained to work on four-engine bombers and flew B-24 Liberators operationally.
John describes the various crew positions and that they were a seven-man crew. He was a middle-upper gunner working to bomb the Japanese positions. Sometimes an operation would be cancelled because the British had already taken to target area from their opponents. John describes the opposition he faced both from enemy fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft fire. One of the returning trips involve the aircraft running out of fuel and the rear gunner seriously injured.
He was in India Command, which became Royal Air Force India, then Southeast and Asia Command. While there he met many Australians returning home. John was in an Australian crew, and they were sent to Jessore to go onto 91 Squadron – air sea rescue (SEAC).
John was shipped back to England before the end of the war (VE). He learnt that President Roosevelt had dies while between Gibraltar and the Bay of Biscay. 1944
Once in England he had to report to a base in Shropshire. John’s Squadron moved to a range of bases before working in charge of ground control at RAF Acklington Northumbria. John worked aircraft control until the conclusion of the war.
VE Day had ‘no effect on [John] personally.’ But there was much deprivation with the devastation from the bombing and the lack of money to buy clothing. John returned to tailoring after the Second World War, from which he retired. He didn’t join a RAF Squadron Association or go to any reunions because his was an unsecure job, so John didn’t have much time to think about how the members of Bomber Command were treated after the war.
John has been to the International Bomber Command Centre and was there at its opening the Spire). He found it difficult to talk to other veterans as he’s partially deaf now. He sometimes has flashbacks to his time in the RAF and feels that they should be learning much more of the Second World War.
Claire Campbell
air gunner
air sea rescue
aircrew
B-24
training
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1123/11614/PSimmondsJE1701.2.jpg
618f3494008f7e19b194a907f9ca6882
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1123/11614/ASimmondsJE171114.1.mp3
75368cc2130c56e3cb7dcd43cae774fc
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Simmonds, Jack Edward
J E Simmonds
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Jack Simmonds (1920 - 2020, 67595 Royl Air Force). He flew operations as pilot with 77 Squadron until he was shot down and became a prisoner of war.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-14
Rights
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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
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Simmonds, JE
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CJ: This is Chris Johnson and I’m interviewing Jack Simmonds today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We are at Jack’s home and it is Tuesday the 14th of November 2017. Thank you, Jack for agreeing to talk to me today. Also present at the interview is Jack’s son, Paul. So, Jack, first of all perhaps could you tell us where and when you were born please and what your family background was?
JS: Yes. Yes. Firstly, I was born on the 8th of December 1920 and I was born in Gillingham in Kent and my father was a serving officer in the Royal Air Force. We, he had moved around a great deal and at that particular stage my mother had bought a house in Gillingham and that’s why I was born there. Otherwise we have no connection at all with that particular area. Fairly early on, when I was about five or six my father was posted to Egypt, and we moved out there and I stayed there for six years. I went to school in Victoria College in Alexandria and came back to the UK. As I said I was about six years, and we came back to Gillingham in Kent. I went for a short period to King’s, sorry to the Mathematical School at Rochester and when my father was posted again as also as people do we wondered around the UK following, following the parent. And my father was posted to Halton near Aylesbury and I spent about a year at Aylesbury Grammar School. Subsequently he was posted down to Worthy Down in Hampshire and we moved down to Winchester. I spent really the rest of my schooling at Peter Symonds School in Winchester, and I boarded there for a while when my father was posted away from Winchester to Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. I left school at the age of eighteen from, from Winchester and at that time was 1939 and the war was just about to start. After some discussion with my parents, I didn’t want to get conscripted into the Army or the Navy so I went to Oxford and volunteered to become a pilot. Now, it was difficult at that stage to select what category of aircrew you wanted to join but I was fortunate that, presumably because of my connection with the Air Force, they agreed that I should be nominated for pilot. Now, after that very little happened. I spent nearly six months at Selwyn College in Cambridge where they, I suppose tried to indoctrinate us in what the Air Force was about and doing some odd things like stripping down a machine gun and that sort of thing. And after that I was posted to — I can’t remember my number. I think it was 11 Elementary, Elementary Flying Training School at Coventry, and I obviously learned to fly and was taught flying on Tiger Moths. Now, at that stage of the war where the air force was extremely short of pilots, they were being shot down and killed all over the place, and for some reason or other I was not sent from Elementary Flying Training School to Flying Training School. They for some reason decided that they would try and see if they could avoid the elementary, the Flying Training School stage. So we were sent, about six of us from, from Coventry — or not. No. We weren’t all from Coventry. They were from, I think around the country, down to Abingdon. To the, I think it was number 11 Operational Training Unit. I’m not quite sure of the number. And we were taught, we were then presented with the fact that we were going to go straight on to the operational aircraft. the Whitley. From the Tiger Moth straight to Whitley. And we spent, in fact really we were quite an embarrassment because we were just airmen. We weren’t NCOs. We weren’t officers. We couldn’t use the sergeants’ mess, couldn’t use the officers’ mess. So, eventually they cleared a couple of married quarters and gave us those and allocated us a corner of the sergeant’s mess to eat and so on. I stayed there until I was qualified and in that same time I got my wings. And I stayed at Abingdon for probably about four months, I can’t remember exactly until I was qualified as a, as a Whitley pilot and then posted to 51 Squadron in Dishforth. I did my first couple of operations. My first operations were from Dishforth, and after about, I don’t know how many months — probably two or three months, I was commissioned. I was — by the way when I left Abingdon I was then made a sergeant. So I was a sergeant at Dishforth and then suddenly I was commissioned and moved, posted to Topcliffe, 77 Squadron. They also, of course had Whitleys. There was two squadrons there. 77 and 102 I think. The — I started my operational flying there obviously and on about my seventh or eighth one, I can’t remember, operation I was shot down over the Ruhr and we had a little bit of a problems maintaining our — by the way my navigator was wounded when we were caught by anti-aircraft fire. He got a lump of flak through his chest and so we obviously couldn’t bale out because he was flat out on the floor. And we went on for about half an hour or so on one, on one engine and eventually we, that failed and we crash landed in a sort of a swamp, about, I don’t know how many miles, about, about twenty miles short of Eindhoven I think. The, the swamp itself was not quite deep enough to sink but nearly, and I remember getting out and going around the back, getting the back door open and trying to smash the IFF thing that we were told to try and destroy if we had a chance. And during this period we got the navigator out and sat him on the top of the fuselage. He was still alive, and by that time there were Germans who apparently, we subsequently found had been following us by radar, Germans coming up the road which was about, probably about a couple of hundred metres from where we landed. And they took us to a radar station and then I went off to jail in Rotterdam. And I was there for — I don’t know really, probably three, two or three weeks. And the interesting thing about that was we were, I was interviewed by a so-called Red Cross person who offered me cigarettes and things and then tried to, to find out where I came from and me and my squadron who — you know. Trying to interrogate, and then after about three weeks in jail I was sent down to Frankfurt to the — I think it was a reception camp. And I remember being quite, I suppose shocked by the fact that some of the inmates there had settled into the, to the arrangements in the camp and were apparently cooperating I suppose with the locals. The only chance, the only time they tried then to, to interrogate me was at, for some reason they removed all my clothes and I was in this room and this, this Hauptman, a major [pause] He was a Luftwaffe major, immaculately dressed in white and boots and all that and tried to investigate where I came from and who I was and where, you know what the names of my crew were, and what my, my target for that night was and so on. Just generally tried to, to find out information. The next thing that happened about six or eight of us were shoved on a train and sent down to Salzburg. We were in — I can’t remember the name of the — I think it was Oflag something 6. I don’t know. So, it was army. It was army officers there and they were again a bit settled in their ways. They were a little bit resentful of, of half a dozen young and feisty aircrew coming in. We stayed there for, I can’t remember, say three months. I don’t know. And then we were sent to Leipzig. Now, Salzburg to Leipzig was a long way [laughs] and we went unfortunately by cattle truck, and I think we took seven days, and it wasn’t a very pleasant time as you imagine. When we got to, to the camp at Leipzig it had just been evacuated by Russian prisoners of war and was really derelict. There was nothing there. Virtually. And I know one thing that I had obtained when I was down at Salzburg was that I met a friend of mine who was an army officer who I had known some couple of years before. And he managed to obtain for me a nice blanket. A pale blue blanket which, I enjoyed mine. And I got to Leipzig. The first thing they did, one goon said, ‘That’s mine.’ and whipped it. The only thing that really strikes me about Lubeck was that it was bare. You know, it was very, very austere. We, we were very, very badly treated there. Very poor food. In fact we managed to catch the camp cat and cooked that. We went from there to Warburg to another army camp. That was about, Warburg was about the centre of Germany somewhere. I’m not quite sure. I know a lot of army, army people there. They were all, of course they were all officers and most had been, been there since, since 1939/40. That sort of time. We were there for, I don’t know probably six months at least when we upped again and were sent off to Poland. We went to a place called Posen (Poznan?) I think it was in Poland. Which was not very far from Danzig. About forty miles south of Danzig. The, the terrain there was very, very soft and sandy, and I know that particularly because digging tunnels was very, very difficult. You, you were going through the ground and you had behind you had [unclear] and that was very scary. We stayed there for perhaps [pause] perhaps a year. I don’t know. But we were posted or were posted, sent off to Stalag Luft, Stalag Luft 3. Now, people first, everybody says to me, ‘Did you go to Stalag Luft 3?’, and I said, ‘Yes’, and they said, ‘Were you in the big escape?’ And people didn’t understand that in Stalag Luft 3 there were two camps. The North Camp and the East Camp, and I was in the East Camp, and the big escape took place from the North Camp. The only escape of significant importance I think from our place was the two that got away in the horse. The — we used to take it out every day and pop it in the middle of a field and little did they realise that when we carried it out we had two people in them, and we put it down in the same place and they were digging a tunnel out and —
CJ: This was the wooden exercise horse if I remember.
JS: The wooden horse. Yes. And we were fairly, it was fairly easy to dispose of all the tunnels there because when we carried the, the wooden horse out to the playing field the, there were big paths through sort of sacks we’d made of our bed blankets and we could walk around the perimeter track and sort of let this go. So all the rubbish that they had dug from that tunnel was disposed around the camp. These two were successful. They got out and I think both of them made, made it to Sweden, I think. I think, and I think one was Swedish at any rate. We stayed there. I was in Stalag Luft 3 for about two years, and one night they, because by that time the movement of the war the Russians were, were approaching from the east. And incidentally in where I was in the, in Stalag Luft 3 we had what we called JH which stands for Jimmy Higgins. Anybody who’s been in Stalag Luft 3 East camp would know who that is because we’d arranged — we had a boffin who had got, bribed the guard to bring him bits of wireless equipment and we’d built alongside a table a radio. And so we knew exactly what was going on from UK, and every night, at whatever time it was we used to close down the place. Make certain there were no, no ferrets underneath there. People. Ferrets who wandered around looking for tunnels, and they used to give us an update of the UK news. So, although the Germans were, were propagating all the news over the biggest tunnels we actually knew what was really going on. We left there one, I think Friday night in, in February I think it was when the Russians were approaching, and the Germans decided to walk us out and we walked from there to [pause] I’m trying to remember the name of the place. A place called Luckenwalde which was about, I suppose about thirty kilometres south of Berlin. And we hadn’t been there very long and again I don’t know how long that was before a Russian small tank group probably consisting of six Soviet tanks arrived, and we fortunately had a Russian speaker. Somebody within, within our group. No matter what you wanted. Could speak Swahili or whatever. There was always somebody there because you know they gathered the aircrew from quite a wide range of, of population, and he was dealing with the, with the young I suppose. He was a lieutenant and I can remember being very amazed that all the tanks, these six or so tanks covered with people, Russians, and he said half of them were females and you couldn’t tell. And he said, one of the things he said was that he had great trouble in in communicating with his troop because they didn’t all speak the same language. Some came from Uzbekistan or somewhere. They spoke, didn’t speak Russian, and so he had great trouble. I know we had great difficulty with one of their, the Russians who decided he wanted to take watches, and he went around some of the officers and sort of said, ‘Your watch’, and we complained to this young lad, this young officer, and he said [unclear] and so he called this fellow. This fellow had a whole heap of watches at the time. And they took him out and shot him. Bang. One of the things that was extraordinary that happened that one of the tanks decided to go around the camp taking down all the barbed wire. Just tore the lights and the communications, everything with them. The lot. So, we really were, we were really a bit concerned whether the locals were going to be friendly or not, and I can remember one morning when we were sort of, we were free really. We could have gone anywhere. We went off to a building we could see about a half a mile away and it turned out to be one of these army stores and I could have picked up all sorts of gorgeous things there. Like, do you know the lovely, those lovely red flags they had in Germany with the big swastika on the bottom? But they were much too heavy to carry. But I did pick up a few, a few German — not medals but they were, they were campaign things, and I’ve still got those somewhere. We, we stayed there sort of really in limbo for a while. And I was down on the gate. We tried to maintain a semblance of, of a gate when some Americans arrived in a, in a, I think it’s a scout car, you know. One of the things that you drove. You drive one way or the other. And so two of us got on that one and they took us back to their base and then took us up to Brussels, and I flew from Brussels back to the UK. And that was sort of my war.
CJ: Very interesting. Thank you. So, what happened to you when you got home then and what did you do following on from that?
JS: Well, the end of the war I was sent up somewhere. I can’t remember where. Up in the Midlands. Really, I suppose to rehabilitate myself. And they put us all around the place like down a coal mine and up a and up a steel mill and those sorts of things. And eventually I decided that I would attempt to stay in the air force. And they sent me to, to Cairo. And I was at the headquarters in Cairo for about six months and that started to fold up and then I was sent to, to Lydda which is now Lod, in Palestine as the station adjutant. And I stayed there for about — oh I don’t know. Six months. Until they decided, the Air Force decided to give me a permanent commission in the Air Force. And I went from there to the army really. I was sent as the adjutant of an army cooperation squadron, air squadron which was flying Oxfords. And so I spent about three — oh more than that I think. Probably a year or more with the army. Flying officers all over Palestine and it was very fortunate really in a way because you had your own private aeroplane really. I used to fly off to Oman for the weekend and down to the Canal Zone for the weekend. You know, that’s as if I had a taxi of my own. Then I was very, very sports minded at the time and I was playing hockey for the squadron against another army unit and the Irish Fusiliers I think it was, and the goalkeeper smashed me across the face and knocked my front teeth out. And they decided to send me home to try and get that fixed up. And so that ended my, my time in the Middle East. And when I got back to the UK having been fixed up with some teeth, they sent me up to somewhere. Wyton or somewhere, to fly Wellington, Wellingtons, Wellingtons. Well, I converted on to Wellingtons then. Having done that they sent me to up, further up to Yorkshire to convert onto the replacement for the Lancaster which was the Lincoln, and of course the Lincoln was never introduced into the Air Force. Although I did about a hundred hours or a hundred and fifty hours on Lincoln. That’s really, they withdrew it for some reason or other. And I was sent down to, to Calshot to convert to flying boats and I flew Sunderlands. I converted on to Sunderlands there. Then after conversion was posted to Pembroke Dock. 201 Squadron. And I stayed there for a couple of years I suppose when we, we did a Cook’s Tour of, of America in the flying boat. We went to Newfoundland and Iceland and Newfoundland and Virginia and Jamaica and so on just going really on a jolly. Whilst I was at Pembroke Dock I was flight commander of the squadron because our squadron commander had had gone a bit — he, taking off one night he hit a, hit something with, with his throat and knocked that off and he went a bit queer so I was flight commander of the squadron and they one day they came in about, about Battle of Britain time asking for an aeroplane to go up to the Thames. So being flight commander I said, ‘That’s mine.’ So, I went up there and met the Port of London Authority and they drove me up and down the Thames awhile on one of their boats and I selected somewhere to land down near Greenwich. And I landed for Battle of Britain weekend at Greenwich and this [unclear] from the Port of London Authority met me and led me all the way up to Tower Bridge and they opened Tower Bridge for me [laughs] And they’d already put a buoy just outside Queen’s Gate and I moored up there and stayed in the Tower of London with the, the commander. I can’t remember what they were. The Scots Guards, I think. I can’t remember. Stayed there for six months. Sorry, six days, and then we, then all we did was return I think. We just about turned and drove back down to Greenwich and took off and straight over Buckingham Palace. Right down the Mall. And then I went back to, to Pembroke Dock. And after Pembroke Dock I was promoted there, and sent to St Mawgan as the chief ground instructor of the Maritime School there. And I stayed there for [pause] I don’t know, six months, a year, and then I was posted to the Navy in Portland. They had what they called an Access B tactical teacher. Which our job, our job was to work out the, the destroyers for the Navy. And we had a large building in which we laid on games and I had a — my colleagues were a submariner and task officer torpedo anti-submarine and myself as the airman. And we used to play games for them and had a great screen and projected all the activities while they were closed up back somewhere in the, in the back of beyond. And then having run games for them we would then give them what’s up, what they should have been doing and that was — I spent again a year, two years at, at Portland doing that job. Then I went to Saffron Walden which was part of the Royal Air Force Technical School. I spent a year there doing a signals course, and the object of the exercise was to, to produce a band of officer who could act as, as a liaison between the technician and the aircrew. And so we went for a year. We wandered all around the country and halfway around the world too looking at radars and communications systems and all that rubbish. And then, then I was posted to, to a job at Northwood in Middlesex, and I stayed there for probably about four months or more. Maybe six months. How long were you, were we at Northwood?
PS: We missed, we missed out Cyprus dad.
JS: Oh God. I went from — no went from —
PS: We went from Medmenham to Cyprus.
JS: Medmenham. We went — just a minute. We went from Portland to, no we went we went from Debden the school, Technical College, to Medmenham and then Medmenham we went to, to Northwood.
PS: Cyprus. Medmenham to Cyprus.
JS: Cyprus. Cyprus. We stayed there for what, two years?
PS: Two and a half years. Yeah.
JS: Yeah. And I came back from there, and —
PS: Did six months in West Malling.
JS: Yeah. Well, I wasn’t posted there.
PS: No. It was just a stopover.
JS: I was only there for accommodation because we got a married quarter there. And then from there I went to, to Northwood. Stayed in Northwood for a while.
PS: That was two years.
JS: Was it two years? Yeah. And then I was posted to the Air Ministry to, to be sort of a PA to the, he was an army general who was head of the Joint Services Communications.
PS: We went from Northwood to Lindholme.
JS: No. I didn’t. No. I didn’t. I went to this job in the, in the, in the Air Ministry which was, really it was a [unclear] I didn’t like at all and I got, I got on to the, to the Air Ministry, the people in the in P staff in the Air Ministry and said, ‘I want out’, and they said, ‘You can, if you wish to, retire.’ So, I said, ‘Right. I’m going.’ And I retired from my job in the Air Ministry and I came, we bought this house. I came down here. I got a job. Incidentally, before I decided to leave the Air Force I decided to find out a little bit about business and, you know trying to get a job. And so I went to, I think it was the South West College to do an HNC in Business Studies and just after that the, I think it was Wilson started the Open University and I joined that as well and got a Bachelor of Arts and that in Sociology and Economics. And later on when I was again working down in Maidstone I joined Kent University and got a Masters in Management. But I jump from leaving the Air Force to getting a job. I joined a management consultancy in London and spent probably nearly six months or more than that. More like three years wandering around the country doing jobs for them. All sorts of investigatory things like, for instance I went to, to a, an architect in London and they said to me we want to set up a new salary scheme. And so I spend my time, you know interviewing all the locals and deciding what I think [unclear] I did some work in local authorities. I worked in a number of, of — I worked down in Brecon. I worked in many of the London boroughs and after I’d been there for a while I was getting a bit fed up with moving around again like I’d done in the Air Force and I found a job in Maidstone as the personnel manager of the Borough Council down there. I stayed there for five years I think and I retired completely from there.
CJ: Very good.
JS: Then I played golf for a while.
PS: For a long time.
JS: For a few years. And then I became too old to play golf.
CJ: One question about aircraft. Coming back to your RAF times, given the experience you had on the later types, how did they compare with the Whitley that you were flying during the war?
JS: Oh. The Whitley was antediluvian. I mean it was so slow. It had no, no navigation device at all. No Gee. No H2S. Nothing like that. So, you were relying on DR really. Dropping a flare out and taking a drift and trying to calculate where you were on your course and speed calculator. You could carry a four thousand pound bomb. With that on board you could get to probably ten thousand feet. Twelve thousand feet perhaps if you were lucky. You could get about a hundred knots out of it [pause] downwind. No. It was, it was a terrible aeroplane. Awful. And it was so vulnerable you had a, you had a rear gunner, you had an upper gunner but night-time you couldn’t see a night fighter, you know. The, the defence. You were absolutely defenceless really and the attrition rate was very high.
CJ: And after the war were you able to keep in touch with people you knew from your squadron?
JS: No.
CJ: Or from the prisoner of war camps?
JS: No. No. I tried once to go to a Prisoner of War dinner in London. And it was really a failure because they’d all dispersed to other things and you had nothing in common anymore.
CJ: Was there a Squadron Association?
JS: I didn’t follow it up at all.
CJ: And how do you think Bomber Command were treated after the war for those — ?
JS: I never had a problem personally but I think that one of the things that one understood about Bomber Command was that they felt that they were sort of aggressive rather than, rather than defensive. But I mean Fighter Command are completely different or Bomber Command were. Well they’re not — I don’t think they appreciated what we were trying to do. Anybody. I never had any trouble personally.
CJ: Well, thank you very much for speaking to us today.
JS: That’s alright.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Jack Edward Simmonds
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Johnson
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-11-14
Rights
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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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ASimmondsJE171114, PSimmondsJE1701
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:49:41 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Egypt
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Poland
England--Yorkshire
Poland--Żagań
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Simmonds was the son of an RAF serviceman. As a result his childhood was spent moving around a great deal including a few years in Egypt. He joined the RAF and began training as a pilot. He joined 51 Squadron as a Whitley pilot at RAF Dishforth before transferring to 77 Squadron at RAF Topcliffe. Coming under attack the navigator was injured and so was unable to bale out forcing Jack to crash land. The surviving crew became Prisoners of War. He was sent to Stalag Luft 3 where he took an active part in the Wooden Horse escape.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Chris Johnson
51 Squadron
77 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
Dulag Luft
Lincoln
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF Abingdon
RAF Dishforth
RAF St Mawgan
RAF Topcliffe
shot down
Stalag 3A
Stalag Luft 3
Sunderland
the long march
training
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1120/11611/PShackletonH.2.jpg
0790563fc62e7b551572d27dce6b2e22
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1120/11611/AShackletonHL170629.2.mp3
deffa07f6b04fde87f3d4c28d76b63c3
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Shackleton, Henry Leslie
H L Shackleton
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Henry Shackleton (b.1922, 68185 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 405 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-06-29
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Shackleton, HL
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CJ: This is Chris Johnson and I’m interviewing Henry Shackleton today for the International Bomber Command Centre's Digital Archive. We are at Henry's home in Kent and it is Thursday 29th of June 2017. Thank you, Henry for agreeing to talk to me today.
HS: It's a pleasure.
CJ: So, first of all Henry could you tell us please where and when you were born and what your family background was?
HS: My father and indeed my elder brother and I are all civil engineers. So when dad came back from Canada with my brother and my sister and he and mother landed in England, I was born in Hailsham which is on the outskirts of Eastbourne. So I’m English but my brother and sister were Canadian.
CJ: Okay. And did you go to school in Hailsham when you were old enough?
HS: When I was a year old mother took me up to Heysham. My father had decided to no longer be a civil engineer but looked at Butlins Holiday Camp and thought, ‘Ah. I'll compete.’ So he bought a castle in Heysham where he had the Morecambe Bay Holiday Campers. And therefore I grew up from the age of one to the age of ten with all the happy campers around me with my mother saying, ‘Darling, if they offer you a sweet you have to say no thank you twice. If they offer it a third time you can have it.’ The number of times I said, ‘Ah. Ah.’ And they went off, but I did get some sweets.
CJ: And did you have an interest in your early years in aircraft or flying?
HS: Just once. Mother and I went down to Blackpool where Gracie Fields was on show and there was a chap there who said, I can't believe it, ‘For ten shillings two of you can come up in a plane over the bay.’ I believe, certainly we did it, mother and I in this plane. And I said, ‘This is thrilling, isn't it?’ But that was the only bit I’d ever done before the war.
CJ: And when did you volunteer for the services? And why did you choose the RAF?
HS: Mother and I, just mother and I alone, my brother and sister were away at work or school just before the war. We were living near this house here at a place called Holmlea, Rhodes Minnis, and I was in the garden and mother called me in from the garden on September the 3rd 1939 and said, ‘Darling, come in. There's something on the radio.’ This was in the days before television. And on the radio there was a voice saying, and, ‘I am Mr Chamberlain and I have to tell you as the Germans have refused to withdraw from Poland consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ So I turned to my mother and I said ‘Hey, I’ve seen Spitfires above Rhodes Minnis. Do you think I could be a Spitfire pilot?’ And she said, ‘Darling, you're far too young. You're only seventeen.’ Anyway, I enquired and they said, ‘You can join The Air Force in Canterbury when you're eighteen and three months’, and I joined exactly when I was eighteen and three months saying, ‘I want to be a Spitfire pilot.’ ‘Oh no. You've got to do various other things including marching.’ A thing I found quite interesting in that first half year before I started being trained as a pilot we had to march to teach us what people did in the Air Force. Obeying orders. But we also were down in Torquay for a weekend break and there I was told that an RAF officer wished to interview me while I was down there. I didn't know it but it was to be an interview to see if I was of officer of material. But I didn't know it but boy did I say the right thing. I went in there and he said, ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘You arrived here yesterday in Torquay.’ ‘That's right,’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘What did you do? Just go swimming?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘As a matter of fact I paid ten shillings for a ride on a horseback.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I have two horses. I’ll tell you I have this model and I have another one here,’ and he told me all about his horses and I got a commission [laughs] Anyway, on we go to the next one. Such was life. Anyway, we did the roundabout and do our duties and I rose from aircraftsman second class to leading aircraftsman to go to Meir, Stoke on Trent where a Flight Sergeant Raffley was to be my instructor on Miles Magisters which is still my favourite little monoplane. Lovely little thing. He said, ‘I’m in the back. You're in the front. You’ll do what I bloody well tell you.’ So I did what he told me. After six and a quarter hours he said, ‘You can go solo.’ And then it rained. So you can't. And it rained for three or four weeks. He said, ‘You can't go up now,’ he said, ‘With that interval you've got to come up with me again.’ So I had to go up another three hours with Flight Sergeant Raffley. ‘Off you go on your own,’ he said. I went up, thrilled to bits, all on my own. And I waltzed around thinking gosh this is wonderful. Oh blimey, where's the airfield? And there was nobody with me to tell me and for the life of me I couldn't find that grass strip. Oh, there's a railway line. And I remembered there was a railway line near it so I went to the railway line and I got on it. And then to my horror above me I saw barrage balloons with wires going down on either side of the railway line to keep the Germans away from bombing it and me in the Miles Magister going where the Germans shouldn't be. And I thought, well I can't turn left or right so I carried on straight. Oh, there's the field. Thank heaven for that. Went down and landed. Thank God for that. So that was me solo. I was then sent to the RAF station. What is the head office? And there my instructor was a far more superior man. It was Flying Officer Raffley MC. Went to Cambridge University, ‘Shackleton, take your seat. And before you do anything else there's one big error the Royal Air Force people have. They insist upon saying, when they take over an aircraft, ‘you've got her’. I can assure you there is no need for the word ‘got’ in the English language so with my pupils, you ‘have her’. What he didn't realise, and nobody could ever tell him, noisy aircraft require a virtual ‘Got,’ which you could hear. If you said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn't quite get that,’ at which point you've crashed. Anyway, while we were with him we had to say ‘you've got her’. and I said ‘got’. He said, ‘Right. You qualify. You can get your wings now at RAF Cranwell College’, and I said, ‘Oh good. Spitfires?’ And I’d been trained on an Airspeed Oxford, a twin-engine bomber. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘No. No. You and I together are going to be instructors. I'll be doing more. You'll begin. You have qualified as a flying instructor and we're going abroad I can't say where we're going because I don't know but we've to get in a train next week.’ The train doors were locked and we went from Middleton St George all the way up through England. Got to Glasgow. We were released from there, put on a boat and before we knew where we were we were in Iceland where I was in charge of the censorship. All the letters that were written there, and we were there three weeks I had to check as a nineteen year old and there was some, ‘Darling, I can't say where we are but it's an enormous clinker.’ So I had to put a line through it and tear it off. And we were there three weeks because there were three U-boats outside wanting to kill us. We had to wait ‘til they left. Then we were put on a huge vessel and where did we go? Canada. Where in Canada did we go? Where my brother and sister were born. And I was there a year and a quarter while my dear mother was being shelled in, near Lyminge. Well, Lyminge in Folkestone. She suffered from Doodlebugs. The house opposite was wrecked and four people killed. But not me. I was in Canada with pupils. Taking some pupils on a navigational trip up north to an RAF station. Well, it was a station up there at North Battleford. Have I got that right? Where my brother was born. Then turn right and go down to Regina where my sister was born. Then back to the base for Regina. I mean, I found it incredible. Now, I’m not going to record any of the things I said in confidence because the Royal Air Force wouldn't like it. Can I give you a tip off? Two of my pupils say, ‘Sir, can you loop an Airspeed Oxford?’ I am not going to tell you on this recording what my reply was. So on we go. We're released from that and I’m back in England. This time told although you're RAF and you've got a commission and you're now a flight lieutenant you are going to be with the Canadians with an English crew. And the thing I thought was first rate about the Royal Air Force and probably other air forces when you're building up your crew you as a pilot with other pilots are sent to a hangar in the square, in the squadron. And you stand in a group slightly separate from the other pilots and you look across the hangar and there's one group. They're rear, they're rear gunners, they're mid-upper gunners, they're navigators, they're pilot engineers, they’re engineers, there's the front tail gunner err the front gunner and, ‘You're the captain, get your crew.’ So I looked at one bloke and I said, ‘Will you join me tail gunner?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Can I take Bert because he's a mid-upper gunner? He's a pal of mine.’ ‘Yep. Come on Bert.’ So I took them on. I looked around. There was one bloke with a large forehead. I said, ‘Would you like to be my flight engineer?’ No. Flight navigator, that's it. Because of the forehead I thought the navigator. And Bert Ashford said, ‘Certainly, would be delighted.’ So he came and joined me. But the important thing was, and I did eighteen bomber trips with them and later on Pathfinders with them, I had chosen them so I could never complain. But one of them was chronic. He was the flight engineer whose job was not in any one place. He had to walk around the aircraft while we were on our bombing trip plugging in saying, ‘Skip, fuel okay.’ Walk a bit further, ‘Skip, water okay.’ ‘Skip, altitude seems to be alright, Skip.’ But every time, wherever he was, plug in and, ‘Skip.’ And if he didn't I'd say, ‘Oh, Dick where are you?’ Silence. I haven't heard a Dick in. Nothing. So I thought the heck with this. ‘Look, crew, forgive this but I’m going to try and alert him,’ So I waggled my wings like mad. Click. ‘Oh. What's wrong, Skip?’ I said, ‘It's you that's wrong. You’ve to keep in touch.’ ‘Oh. Sorry Skip.’ So, click, ‘I’m here now. Tail gun.’ That's all right. We were flying along and we did eighteen bomber trips with not one problem. Not one. Apart from one. We were at twenty one thousand feet which is the normal altitude for bombing and suddenly I saw a dark object which was very clearly a fighter. Without any warning at all to the crew I dived like mad. Dived down to earth, and halfway down, ‘Did you want me, Skip?’ [laughs] Oh boy. I said, ‘Just avoiding an enemy aircraft for God's sake.’ ‘Well, you waggled your wings. I thought you wanted me.’ [laughs] I said, ‘What did you do before the war, Dick?’ ‘Oh, I was delivering groceries on a bicycle.’ Oh God [laughs] Anyway, our crew held together and we got away with it no trouble at all on eighteen bomber trips. So I said to the crew, ‘Look, I'd like to be a squadron leader. Wouldn't you like to be a flight sergeant instead of a sergeant?’ ‘Oh yeah.’ I said, ‘Well, if we all volunteer, and I’ve been told we can because we've done so many trips now and I have so many flying hours.’ Normally the pilot has about two hundred flying hours. I had about eighteen hundred because I'd been training people. So, yes we volunteered and we went down to head office. Is it RAF Wyton, I think? Where the head office. But this time it was with the Canadians and it was great. We did four trips. Instead of dropping bombs we dropped a white flare where our Master Pathfinder had dropped his. We would have to follow. If there were a thousand bombers bombing his flare about eight hundred would probably achieve that but by that time, fifteen minutes later than his flare, the flare would be moved by wind. So my job was to go and drop another white flare where his had been, and I can assure you it's the rottenest and most dangerous job in the Air Force. What is it? You arrive fifteen minutes after all the main body. You drop a flare which illuminates you. The fighters of the enemy are all up by then. The searchlights are all focused. The guns are all poised. And Henry arrives, ‘Can you see me?’ Sure as eggs, fifth trip, fighter on starboard, fighter on port. I’m told later by my flight engineer who survived, that ‘You yelled out, “Abandon aircraft,” as the first fighter fired across the top of your cabin. I saw your cabin and the top of your cabin was wrecked.’ He'd got the Perspex at the top and wrecked it. ‘But you ducked your head and missed the bullets which went right along the leading edge of the port wing’, which meant the port wing had no lifting power. So it just sent me on my port down to Berlin. It was our fifth trip bombing or dropping flares on Berlin, and I dived down there and just sat there. I thought well you know this is hopeless. Suddenly the whole of the cabin gave way and I was sucked out into mid-air. Thank God. The wireless operator, no, the bomb, the who was it now? Bert Ashford the yeah the wireless operator air gunner. Anyway, he said he'd heard me say, ‘Abandon aircraft,’ and he thought well what's the, and he was suffering like all of us then without oxygen, what's the point of jumping out if you've nothing to eat? So with me going down to Berlin he took off his parachute in his cabin, undid it, opened a drawer, he told me this later when I saw him, took out a bar of chocolate, put it in his tunic, put his parachute on, ‘Oh. The Skip’s gone out of that bloody great hole.’ So, he jumped where I'd gone. He said he wasn't one minute before he was in the main street in Berlin with a German on either side, ‘For you the war is over.’ And that was him captured. Me, who's always been remarkably fortunate, I don't have horrid things like that. Where do I land? Well, what's the nicest place? A park. Yes. But where? Oh, in a bush for a soft landing. You know. And my parachute was trailed all over the bush. So I pulled in my parachute. It was two o'clock in the morning. Freezing cold. January the 31st, 1944. A year and a half before the war ended. So there was me in this bush thinking well I can't start moving now because it'll be light at about six o'clock. I think I'll wait over a day ‘til it's nighttime and then I'll go for a walk. During the day two dogs wanted to get me. They were on leads and the two Germans said, ‘Kommen sie mit’, and they just walked past me. The dogs saw me but the two Germans didn't. So I just sat there waiting till they'd gone by. First night, right, Henry, you're on your own now. Now you make for the Baltic. So I walked out of the park, went through a village, that was fine. Saw a railway line, thought, ‘Well, if I get on that and the truck goes to the Baltic I’m on. Dead easy.’ And the bloody thing taxied and it landed up underneath the signal box and I had to spend the whole of that day when daylight came lying on a, an oil tube, an oil pipe frozen to bits with a guard just above me, keeping out of his way. He didn't see me. The following night they shunted a little bit, then they stopped again. So I thought well I don't like this. So I got out and walked through my second village, and I got away with that. Ah, while I was stuck in my tree wondering how to pass the time I felt around. Oh, take the zipper off your trouser leg and put the, felt there in front of your chest. Take the other one put it behind you to keep warm. Oh, and there's a little booklet. I’ve never seen that. So in it, it said, “Where have you landed?” If it's France it's, ‘Bonjour. Comment allez vous. Vous avez [unclear].’ But page four is Germany and I'd landed in Berlin, and I’m not all that bright but I thought it must be there. So it said, “Guten morgen.” “Guten tag”, and down at the bottom with no pronunciation but down at the bottom, very odd thing was it, “Ich aber in eile” or was it, ‘Ich aber as eile?’ But it says, ‘I’m in a hurry’, and it worked. I walked through my second village. Passed a German. He said, ‘guten tag.’ I said, ‘guten tag.’ ‘til the end. Blinking cul de sac in Berlin. There was a, a wall across the road, so I had to walk back passing this chap again. ‘Oh ja’ I said, ‘Ich aber in eile.’ ‘Oh ja,’ he said and off I went. So that got rid of my second night. Third night my dear friends started bombing Berlin again which meant the alarms went and everybody went down their shelters. And I’m not too bright but I thought if I go down and be sheltered with them they're not going to like me very much. So I carried on walking, then the all clear went. Out came some children, saw this bloke all alone in the main street, walked round me and captured me. So I was captured by the school children and I walked with them. They took me to the mayor's house, and I do like recording the fact that the German women in particular were charming. Here was a young man, slightly injured. They bathed my face, they gave me coffee, they gave me — what was it? Something else they gave me. Oh sandwiches, and I said to them, ‘Danke schön. This is very good of you, and I hope in England when your sons are in my country I hope my ladies give the same to your pilots as well.’ And they said, ‘Ja, it's good.’ Then the door opened. In came a pompous little drunken German officer, ‘Heil Hitler.’ Two great big thugs with him with rifles. ‘Kommen sie mit. For you the war is over. Ha ha’. So, I went outside, got into this saloon car with a gas tank above it. They put me in the back seat with a revolver into each side of me. He was in the front roaring with laughter, happy as Larry he’d got a prisoner. And off they went through this park. As it happened to the city of Berlin. And do you know I said I’ve seen the film. I remember that film. You're halfway through then I get out, go into the woods and they kill me. I know it. The guns are waiting. So I waited. They must. They didn't. Not with me. Oh no. They take me there. Put me in a cell with a radiator. Lovely. But they won't speak to me for four days then. The idea is if they do nothing with you you'll be so keen to talk you'll talk. So when my turn came to be interrogated I went out there. There was a bloke sitting behind a desk and I went in. I said, ‘Flight Lieutenant Shackleton 68185, sir.’ So he said ‘Yes. Yes. We know that.’ ‘Where was your station?’ I said, ‘68185. Flight Lieutenant Shackleton.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘You're one of those. Call in the other one.’ So the other door opened and there was Red Williams. ‘Blimey, skip. Oh. Sandwiches.’ He went straight to the sandwiches, bashed into them and the officer said, ‘I think you go. We have good material here.’ So as I walked away I said, ‘You speak very good English. Where did you learn it?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I played tennis in Bournemouth before the war.’ I said, ‘Oh, lovely. Did you enjoy it?’ ‘Oh yes. Very, very pleasant. Off. Off. Yes, my friend what are you going tell me now?’ Little Red, with his sandwiches, happy as Larry.
CJ: So, Red was from your crew.
HS: Oh yeah. He was one of my crew. The only one who lived. The tail gunner and the mid-upper were shot dead, and we heard about that. They, one was never found and since the war I’ve now three times been to the three graves in Berlin of that crew. I was there this year putting not only wreaths on each one but because the squadron, when we left them with the bomber lot gave me a whisky flask, the best of British luck. I poured whisky over each grave thinking they'd prefer it. And the interesting thing this spring when I did this some Germans came up to me and they said, ‘May we have the honour of shaking your hand,’ So I said, ‘Why on earth do you want to do that for?’ ‘You killed Hitler. We didn't and we should have done.’ So that's how the Germans are treating it now.
CJ: So was that —
HS: So that, they had me away from there I, you know, went to visit them. The war was over. Oh, I ought to tell you hadn’t I. I was then sent to Stalag Luft 3 in Poland where I was there for a year and a quarter. I could go into detail but it just overdoes it a bit. I’m in the bottom of two beds. There was always one bed above the other and when I got to mine, twelve of us in one room with, with an oven in the middle for cooking food. Jolly nice blokes, all RAF officers. The Red Cross were wonderful. We got food and we got books and things. We were treated well. And I studied geology. And it was all very pleasant. The only thing I didn't like too much above me every morning I would see “Pilot Officer Buchanan, 17 Liberton Street, Glasgow. WC2.” And that was his name. And I said, ‘Why have you put your name on all of these boards?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘If you don't put your name on they'll pinch them for the tunnels. And they give you a string. Oh no. They're not having my boards.’ So, I know his name. Way after the war, years later, married. We were in Glasgow and with my wife I went to 17 Glasgow, Wimpole Street Glasgow WC2 and out came George. Wonderful. He was the chief librarian in Glasgow. Anyway, that was me there. And I'd been there fourteen, fifteen months; suddenly the Germans who were very elderly old boys, the guards, one was called Fingers because he'd only two fingers. They were, you know old crocks really, but they had a rifle and knew how to fire it. And suddenly there was an announcement, ‘Raus. Raus. You have two hours to go. The Russians are advancing. Anything you carry you can have but two hours no more here.’ So after two hours with food and one darling, I’ve got it upstairs, a darling little bible which was given to me when I was in Canada by a cousin who said, ‘You keep this, it will help you.’ On every bombing trip and every long dangerous trip of any sort, car or whatever, I’ve always taken this little bible. And I also take the whisky flask. So there are two things I’ve always remembered and are still with me. Anyway, we start marching and I have a great sense of humour. I turned to one of the guards and I said, ‘Is that rifle heavy?’ ‘Ja,’ he said, ‘Me carry it?’ I said. ‘No. Maybe later. But right now I think I carry it.’ [laughs] And we had to make our way a hundred miles to Berlin, but part of the journey we did on a train. But we got to a camp and in that camp it was horrific. There were thirty, I’ve got it on the screen to show, I think it was thirty-eight thousand prisoners on the outskirts of Berlin behind, behind two rows of barbed wire. No hope of getting out. I saw a pile of potatoes. A man went to take one and he was shot dead. So I thought, ‘Right. You're not having potatoes lad.’ So I just wondered what the devil are we going to do? There were Poles there, there were nationalities. There were French, British, Canadians all stuck in this huge camp on the other side of the river from Berlin. And then a Russian tank appeared and on it was a Russian woman machine gunner. She was on the top of it. The tank went through the barbed wire, went along the inside and out again and four hundred of us got out immediately, crossed the bridge and was in American hands. Two lunches, one after the other. When I’d finished my second lunch all by myself, where the others went I don't know, but I was there and one of the Americans said, ‘Say, what were you flying?’ So I said, ‘A Lancaster.’ ‘Oh. Would you like me to take you to the Lancs?’ So, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Get in the back of my van, chum. Got your two loaves of bread? ‘Yep.’ So in the back of that he drove down an autoroute onto an RAF station, said, ‘Say fellas, I’ve got one of your pilots here.’ They said, ‘Great. We're going back to England this afternoon. Would you like — ' I said , ‘Would I like?’ I was back in England that afternoon. Wasn't that fabulous? With nobody else, there were no other prisoners or anything [laughs] and I’ve often said if I can meet that German (Russian) machine gunner I would really like to appreciate what she did. She let us out. So there you are. That gets me home. Pictures of the village having celebratory meals. What do you do? You go to university because you hadn't gone before. So I went to Leeds University and to the first meeting there I went to the Freshers’ Ball and able for the first four months or so to wear my RAF uniform. But all the competitive males were in civvies aged eighteen. In walks the president with his lady friend and says, ‘You shouldn't be in here, you fellas. You're supposed to be in the ball dancing.’ So I said, ‘I will if I could dance with this young lady.’ And the young lady said, ‘That is not the idea. I am with the president.’ Who did I marry? Her. Took three years but working on it, Bobby White married me. Which was very nice. And she said, ‘Well, I’ve got my honours degree. I’m going to Downing Street.’ And she, we always used to joke in our family that we all suffered from BO — Bobby Organizing. She was a very positive lass. And down in Downing Street the head man there said, ‘I don't understand it, I thought we had some people from Poland.’ They said, ‘Oh yes. Yes. Oh, they've all been sent off to Bradford, I think it is.’ ‘Well, who sent them?’ ‘Oh, this young lady down below.’ And they, ‘Bloody hell. Call her up.’ He says, ‘I’m running this place, not you.’ Anyway, Bobby was down there for a year and she said, ‘When you get your degree I will then marry you.’ I failed the degree. So her parents said, ‘He's failed the degree. You don't need to marry him.’ ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I’m marrying a man. Not a piece of paper.’ So we did get married, and a year later having been married to Bobby with a son I then got my degree. It took a bit of doing but I got it. So there you are. That's the end of my story I think.
CJ: Well, what, what work did you do after the war?
HS: Oh, my brother was a civil engineer. My father was one. And it's a lovely career. I enjoyed it thoroughly. And just for a joke I say, ‘Well, I’ve wrecked a dam so I’ve built a dam. I’ve wrecked an oil refinery so I’ve built an oil refinery, you know. I’ve wrecked many houses and I built several hundred.’ But it's been a good life. My wife loved it as well, and when our children went to boarding school we travelled the world. And I couldn't recommend a better career. So there we are. That's it.
CJ: And how do you feel Bomber Command were treated after the war?
HS: Well, you didn't want to make a fuss. You were glad to be alive. Five of your crew were dead. But yes, they were the glamour boys. And we just had to say, ‘Oh well, if I'd been a Spitfire pilot I'd have been one of them.’ But we were, we kept quiet. And then somebody said, ‘Look, have you got a few hundred quid, old boy?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ So I said, ‘What would you like?’ They said, ‘Well, two hundred and fifty quid. Something.’ You know. Two. What was it? Two hundred and [pause] two thousand five hundred quid I think it was. I said, ‘Would that be okay?’ ‘Yes. We may be back for more. But if we can get all Bomber Command to give us that we can have our own monument. And we will have one.’ We got one and the Queen came to open it. So we said there we are, we've got one now. But we had to arrange our own. It's fair enough. They were the glamour boys. And I mean a lot of ours were killed too. It's just the way of life.
CJ: Can I just recap on your squadron? So, your first squadron where you did eighteen ops at Middleton St George was 419.
HS: Moose squadron. Yes. A Canadian Moose squadron.
CJ: Yeah. Okay. And which aircraft were you flying there?
HS: Oh, Halifaxes.
CJ: Halifaxes.
HS: Which I think you'd probably like me to say, I mean it was the only bomber I knew. I’d been in a Whitley and I’d been in a little trainer, the Airspeed Oxford. So, you know, the Halifax was okay but when I got onto the Lancaster it was lively. It was airborne. It was mobile. With the Halifax it was a tank. You got airborne, you drop your bomb and you come home. There we are. And then I went to another squadron which is also Canadian, and they were, the Canadians were very good. The only thing is on my fourth Pathfinder trip one of the things they did in the Air Force stations almost every night, they cut us off from the outside world by telephone at 6pm. They didn't just do it when we were bombing. They did it most nights so that the Germans didn't know what we were doing. If they only did it when they were bombing it would be useful. So 6pm couldn't ring home. And there was another night, 6pm, ‘Oh you’re wanted in the squadron room.’ You go in there. There are the rest of the air crew all with our leaders being told what we're doing. And, now what was it? The Australian who was the group captain, Don — Harris I think it was. Was it? I think it was that. Anyway, he was the officer commanding. The Australian Group Captain. Gordon Ramsay? Oh lord. This is bad for this isn't it? Let's say Donald Harrison. Hope for it. Anyway, he said, ‘Any questions?’ So, I said, ‘Yes. I’ve been on four trips and this is our fifth with Pathfinders and we go on the darkest of nights with no lights. Surely there's a risk of collision.’ ‘Oh yes. Yes. I expect to lose twenty of you out of a thousand but I can assure you if you had lights on I'd lose the whole bloody lot of you. Any other question?’ Yeah. I said, oh thanks a lot.
CJ: And did you have any adventures?
HS: Don Harris, I think it was. What?
CJ: Did you have any adventures with the Canadians on the squadron when you weren't on operations?
HS: Oh, you're talking about the car, aren't you? Yes. My darling mother. When I was in the Air Force, after I'd gone home on leave once, she said, ‘Darling, I can't get any fuel for our car’, and it's an Austin 7. It's BV 3252, “Barkis is willing”, I call it. ‘Would you like it, because in the Air Force you probably get some fuel.’ So I drove from Rhodes Minnis down in Kent all the way up, way up to Middleton St George. And the Canadians were thrilled when they saw it. They had never seen a car so small. I was in bed one night in the squadron, with the Halifaxes and they said, ‘Shack, I think you better come downstairs.’ Two o'clock in the morning. Past the lesser rank, into the main lounge. Mother's car was there dripping oil on the carpet. The wing commander was in the front seat pressing the horn which was damn nearly flat. An HP Sauce bottle in the radiator. A picture off the wall in the back seat and the squadron, in pairs all behind saying, ‘Tally ho.’ And I said, ‘Oh, great,’ I said, ‘You will put it back in the morning.’ ‘Oh yeah. We'll put it back in the morning.’ The following morning the group captain in charge of the squadron said, ‘Would that chap Shackleton come and see me.’ So, I went in. I said, ‘Flight Lieutenant Shackleton.’ So he said, ‘I take it you know there's a war on.’ So, I said, ‘Yes. I understand that.’ ‘Well, will you see that bloody Austin 7 is out of the hangar. It's getting far more attention than any of the Halifaxes. Out.’ ‘Sorry sir’. And that was that. But mother's car made us a very happy crew. We would go pub crawling when we weren’t bombing. It was a lovely present from her and we never damaged it. That's it I think.
CJ: Well, thank you very much for talking to us today.
HS: Blathering but isn't it a —
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Henry Leslie Shackleton
Creator
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Chris Johnson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-29
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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.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AShackletonHL170629
Format
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00:39:25 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Description
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Henry Shackleton listened to Chamberlain’s speech on the radio and hoped to be a Spitfire pilot. He began his training and was selected as a flying instructor and was posted to Canada. On his return to the UK he was posted to his operational squadron 419 at RAF Middleton St George. He then went on to join the Pathfinders. He was shot down over Berlin and became a prisoner of war at Stalag Luft 3.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Chris Johnson
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Poland
Poland--Żagań
England--Durham (County)
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
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1944-01-31
405 Squadron
419 Squadron
aircrew
crewing up
final resting place
Halifax
killed in action
Lancaster
Magister
Oxford
Pathfinders
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF Middleton St George
shot down
Stalag Luft 3
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/932/11290/PLongmateMS1601.2.jpg
0417378173cfc02a7d22050c960c569d
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/932/11290/ALongmateMS161019.1.mp3
d889ed2d888d5147c9cae51f6ffd27bf
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Longmate, Margaret Sinclair
M S Longmate
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Margaret Sinclair Longmate (b. 1925, 2150950, Royal Air Force). She served in Flying Training Command.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-10-19
Rights
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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
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Longmate, MS
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CJ: So, this is Chris Johnson and I’m interviewing Margaret Longmate today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at Margaret’s house in Sandwich and it’s Wednesday the 19th of October 2016. So, thank you for talking to us today Margaret. Could we start the interview perhaps by you explaining your background? Where and when you were born and your family background?
ML: Well, I was born in Edinburgh on the 30th of March 1925. Just very much an Edinburgh girl. I was at school, Girl Guides, Youth Club at St George’s West Church with a marvellous minister there, Dr Black. And, and then after school into the WAAF when I was eighteen. And a large chunk of time, well in the WAAF ‘til 1947. My only connection with the Air Force before that had been my uncle, my mother’s brother, who had been in the Flying Corps, and I believe he had made his age to be older than it was. He was sixteen when he went in, I believe. But anyway, when I was young I used to think that he was quite a hero, Uncle John. But he was in the First War, and he also spent a long time with 603 Squadron in the Second War. But he was a flight sergeant, a chiefy armourer. Anyway, that was the only connection with the RAF when I was a child. And I’m trying very hard to think about things in Edinburgh. I played hockey for the school, and I played for the school FP hockey team. And I always had a love of hockey which went on until I was about fifty when it became golf was [laughs] But I don’t know what else you wanted to know about Edinburgh.
CJ: Well, perhaps you could tell us what you were doing at the start of the war and how that affected you and how later on in the war you, you came to join the WAAFs.
ML: My, my cousin Elma, my mother’s sister’s girl, she was in the WAAF. Joined as an electrician and my, her brother Lawrence volunteered for aircrew. He was, he was very bright career ahead of him as an architect. In fact, he won a scholarship to go and study architecture in Italy for a year. But of course came the war. He volunteered for aircrew and that, that he went in to the, he went into the RAF. And of course now I remember as a schoolgirl I’d been, I’ve got masses of cuttings and I’ve got the names of all the crews in 603 Squadron. The City of Edinburgh Squadron. I’ve still got the books with all the bits about these crews and pilots. And I’ve kept it right up to date to when some of the Memorial Services not very long ago. But I was very interested in them and of course once Lawrence had gone into the RAF. And as a Guide I had two lovely friends who were in the Scouts. One of them went into the RAF and became a bomber pilot, and his brother was a Fleet Air Arm pilot. Sadly both of them went in 1944. One died in a German prisoner of war camp. The bomber one did, and the other one was Fleet Air Arm. He died at an accident or something the same year. So poor Mrs Anderson lost both her sons in the one year. But they were great friends too. I also had a friend of our family called Wilson and oh, family gatherings in those days we all did our own thing. My little sister sang. I always had to recite something by Robert Louis Stevenson, and my cousin Lawrence was a good pianist. A good classical pianist. But he was always being pulled up when he was practicing. His mother would suddenly shout upstairs because there he was playing eight to the bar on the piano. Boogie woogie had just come in so, but he was a very good classical pianist too as well as going to become an architect. So these were all people involved in the Air Force so everything was, everything was interesting. Well, you couldn’t help but be. What they had weeks. I can remember. I can remember a Lancaster bomber being out on Bruntsfield Links, and it was Wings for Victory or something week and everybody was allowed to look at it. And I can remember thinking this huge great plane. But these things struck me but then as I say I went into the WAAF. When it came to eighteen everybody was being called up. Several people had been put on the land and then to munitions and I thought if I’m being called up I would rather go in the RAF because everybody else in the family’s there. So, that’s more or less why I went as a WAAF, and went to Wilmslow in Cheshire. I had never been out of Scotland in my life before then, and things were very limited because you couldn’t, you couldn’t get north of Perth. The whole of the Highlands was shut off to the general public. So I longed to get up to the Hebrides and Skye and these areas that I’d read about in books. But it was many years later before I got up there, in 1948. So, that gave me a hankering to seeing the Highlands again. And so I went to Wilmslow in Cheshire. And it was, well it was an education as I say. I had never been outside Edinburgh. Outside Scotland. And we were a real cross section of, of WAAF from all over the country, and we had this six weeks together. And I met good friends there too. And two of them — one of them went on the same course as me to, to become a wireless mechanic and they were, we were sent to London, to Woolwich. Civilian billets. On the day I arrived in London and went across London in a lorry and then was sent out to this billet. And the family there had an Anderson shelter in the garden and the day I arrived was the first Doodlebug raid. And we used to be in this shelter night after night. It was at Plumstead, and I think the, the family, they were so afraid for their children I think they, they left the house so we had to go to another billet at Eltham. And the week after we went to Eltham our billet was blown up by a Doodlebug, so it was, it was, I don’t know, meant to be. But I used to walk from the top of the Eltham Way right down to the foot of it to get a bus into Woolwich to go to the Woolwich Technical College where we were doing our course. And it was right outside the door of Woolwich Arsenal. And of course, it was the hottest year. One of the hottest years they’d ever had. I wore full WAAF gear. It was trousers and a jacket and a gas mask and a huge bag of books and a tin hat and a collar and tie, and I walked the whole length of Rochester Way they called it down to the bus stop. And I’d never experienced heat like it. I always remember how hot it was. The other thing was that right outside between the Arsenal door and the college was a fruit market and it was usually plums I think and the WAAFs used to go out at lunchtime and buy fruit and we used our tin hats as baskets. We had the plums in our hats. Well, one day the siren went, something went when we were out in the market and a Doodlebug came right down behind the door of Woolwich Arsenal. And I’ve still got a bit of Woolwich Arsenal roof that fell on top of me. And we all dived under the stalls, and when we went back in we were severely admonished by a WAAF officer because we had not had our tin hats on. But they were all full of plums. So that, that was at Woolwich. And also at Woolwich I used to travel up into London. I’ve mentioned this before in some record. I went to what they called the Queensbury Club and they had a concert. It was broadcast on the BBC at night. I think it was Alvar Lidell. But the forces got in free and it was lovely. You sat at little tables. You felt civilised. It wasn’t billets or anything. And they were all different ones coming over from America. Stars at that time. And Bing Crosby was there singing with Anne Shelton. And they come out and said, ‘Before we start this broadcast don’t react to something Bing is going to sing,’ and he said, ‘Because remember this broadcast will be heard all over Europe. There will be other ears listening to this.’ And of course he, he did sing, “I Didn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night.” And of course it was the worst Doodlebug raid of — and he said afterwards it would have given the Germans an idea how bad the raid was if we all sort of maybe roared with laughter or something. But I was impressed with Bing Crosby. He was marvellous. He just came out. He didn’t have a mic. He sat on the edge of the stage and just sang, and his voice was marvellous. I always think ever since then Frank Sinatra didn’t even compare with him [laughs] So, that’s why I like Bing Crosby. Anyway, the raids became so heavy they moved the WAAF out of London to Yatesbury and it was a matter of weeks really there while they decided where on earth to put us for the next bit of the course. But there was a concert at Yatesbury and it was Humphrey Lyttleton and his band, and it was a real jazz concert. And it was on a Sunday. Well, it shows the difference. I phoned home and I said, ‘Mum I’m going to a concert,’ and it was Sunday. And that’s not a thing I used to do back in Edinburgh on a Sunday. But I told them about it because everybody else was going. But that was a huge people, it was a huge camp with all sorts of people in transition really at Yatesbury. Yatesbury to Bolton. In civilian billets there. And that’s when I realised just how bad it was for civilians. I knew it was in Edinburgh with rations. My mum with the ration books and things, but at Bolton it was so cold and so wet and they couldn’t heat the house. The only fire was in the kitchen, and everybody sat around that fire. And there were three WAAFs. One from Yorkshire. Another one from outside Edinburgh and myself. And there was this, a widow and her daughter lived in the house. And you couldn’t, to wash anything, your underwear, you couldn’t get anything dry. There was no means of drying things. I’ve also recorded this before I think. And we had thick lisle stockings. If you washed them you just had to go to the college classes with wet stockings on. And, and at night we used to put our greatcoats and everything we could think of on top of the bed as well because it was so cold. There was no heat in the bedrooms. And if you got a photograph from home if you put it on the wall it had curled up by the morning. I was so cold and wet and these people had to put up with that all the time, with the ration of coal and their food ration. She was very good with the way she looked after us. Was a very strict, real Lancashire lady and but she was, she was very good. They accepted all the WAAFs, and Hazel the other WAAF from Yorkshire, Knaresborough, she was made welcome. But it was very difficult to billet the Londoners. They were, they didn’t want anybody from London. Scots went right away. Yorkshire, yes they were acceptable, but London no, and it was very, very hard for them to billet a Londoner. I don’t know. Anyway, they were, in those days very anti Londoners. But after that spate at Bolton we got to a certain stage when they put us on again to Bishopbriggs in Glasgow. Bishopbriggs was on the outskirts of Glasgow but we were in RAF huts there. But what was so interesting there were the, the airmen who were all Jamaican. All from, from white Irish ancestry with red hair to absolutely what they called hill boys, and they had all volunteered as aircrew. And by the time they came over they weren’t needing the aircrew so much and they put them on wireless mechanic courses, the same as us you see. And I saw then how much the ordinary aircraftmen there resented them and yet they were, they were wonderful. There were lawyers amongst them and others that their people owned a lot of land in Jamaica. They’d all just volunteered to do something for Britain. It was the attitude they were treated in this country. I felt very strongly about it. Even instinctively one of them must have been of Scottish ancestry because his name was Crichton. And I remember getting in touch, writing through to my mum and saying about I could bring him home for a week and mum wasn’t very sure when I said Jamaican. She immediately thought, ‘You shouldn’t be going out with a Jamaican.’ And I said, ‘But mum, he’s not black. He’s not quite white but he’s not — but anyway,’ I said, ‘But he’s a very cultured man.’ But they couldn’t accept that so much in this country, but they all volunteered and came and they were bitterly disappointed about not [pause] they’d volunteered as aircrew. All of them. That was a point I’d forgotten. And then I went from Bishops, Bishopbriggs. I went to Cranwell for the rest of the course. I was at, I was at Cranwell. Cranwell at VE day because there was an all ranks dance. All the dances were all ranks and they were marvellous dances at Cranwell. And they always had a good orchestra, and it was always Glen Miller music they were playing. And they just had the first few bars of, “In the Mood,” and there was a hundred people up on the floor dancing. It was, it was wonderful at Cranwell. And I can remember it was, there was a heatwave there too. Yes. Anyway, I passed out at Cranwell. I got my sparks at Cranwell and became a wireless mechanic, and they posted me from Cranwell to Errol in Perthshire. And they were all Fleet Air Arm pilots. They were all Canadians. And that was — they were charming people. That was the first time I really learned or tried to learn to jive because they all jived, and that was at Errol. And I was only a matter of weeks at Errol when I was posted to Ternhill. And I was there, there quite a while at Ternhill in Shropshire and that’s when I started in the way I liked. I used to, I was out on B Flight most of the time. I was their wireless mechanic. And when the instructors took their planes up beforehand for an air check or a night flying check I would be checking the radio. So I got to know them well and and they were ever so kind. They used to let me land. They were Harvards. We always — and they let me land the Harvard. I always remember landing at ninety miles an hour but, and I used to enjoy going up. I was also wireless mech for Test Flight. There was a Flight Lieutenant Martin there. He was a test pilot and of course he took the planes up after a main plane change or something major. None of the aircrew would go up with him after a main plane change [laughs] Anyway, I would go up with him. So, I would go up and he had a warrant officer on the flight with him who also tested and, and we’d go up and have a dogfight in the clouds with the Harvards, and that was thrilling. I used to enjoy that too. But all these instructors that I went up with on, on night flight training tests, I got them to sign how many hours I’d done. So, I got several hours of landing Harvards. And I’ve got the list of all the, all the pilots that I had. So, that that was very much what I remembered at Ternhill. Also at Ternhill it was my twenty first birthday and with another two WAAFs I cycled, it was about fourteen miles to a place called Calverhall. A lady had a little country tea room and we went there and we had poached egg on toast. We had real eggs, and that was my twenty first birthday celebration because only the aircrew got eggs. We had dried eggs of course, but the fact of finding fresh eggs. So I think that meant more to me than a great big cake that they have nowadays and thousands of pounds worth of party. The three of us just cycled there and had poached egg on toast. That was my twenty first birthday celebration at Ternhill. And then they moved the whole of the 5P AFU they called it from Ternhill to Kirton in Lindsey in Lincolnshire. And there I had a lot of, well at that time, ’46 ’47 a lot of sport. I played a lot of hockey, and there was a Highlander from Islay. Yes. Jock, another wireless mech man. He played shinty of course coming from the Highlands, and they used to have mixed hockey matches. And one day he tackled the ball a la shinty. In hockey you don’t raise it above your shoulders in those days but he swung it right back and caught me between the eyes and I ended up in sick bay. I got knocked out. And my husband to be, my fiancé had been three and a half years in the Far East of course, out in the Cocos Islands and Ceylon, came back on leave and I met him with a black eye as a result of hockey. So, that was, that was Jock MacAuley from the Highlands who did that, but we always played in mixed hockey together. But they had a very good PE sergeant at, at Kirton and he encouraged the hockey and the running and we had a very good — I’ve got the shield still. Our group athletics. We had a little team of four, and we had all the big teams. Scampton. I’m trying to think of all the other ones in Lincolnshire. Had huge big teams of maybe thirty or twenty. And we went, I really honestly can’t remember where it was, whether it was held at Scampton. But we went, our little team we went there and stayed the night and we all went for a little walk round the villages outside. It was nice to see. And all these other big teams were out training. Anyway, the next day when it was the actual group athletics, to cut a long story short our little team of four won. I, I was good on hurdles and running and the four of us were good with the relay. Lynn was excellent on the, the half mile, and the other two did things like throwing the hockey ball and obstacle races and nippy races. They were, we were excellent and all these great big teams from the other camps. So, Lynn and I were picked to go down to Uxbridge again for the Flying Training Command Athletic Team. They had the finals at Uxbridge, and that was, I think early in ‘47. And we ran in that and I can remember running in the relay and I was the last man of our team, and it was such an exciting race. Lynn was always first off. She was an excellent runner. And I kept saying, ‘Don’t drop that baton.’ Anyway, we won our relay and that as a result of that we won the Flying Training Command and they came out with this great big cup and somebody poured champagne in it. And that was the first time in my life I’d tasted champagne. So, that was a very happy memory too. And, of course that’s the memory of going down to Uxbridge for hockey trials for the WAAF team and running with the Flying Training Command Athletic Team. I don’t think I’ve said about that ending up in Piccadilly, at Lyons. Well, we went there for supper on the way back before, before we went back to Kirton Lindsey. And you stayed overnight at the Salvation Army and got the train in the morning. Coming out of Lyons Corner House after our supper, it was winter and of course I had my great coat on and I was buttoning it up and my hat under my arm and just as I came out of the door an RAF military policeman put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Corporal, you’re improperly dressed.’ And it didn’t dawn on me that I hadn’t put my hat on yet. And it was most embarrassing. When I got back to camp I was called before the WAAF officer who asked, ‘What on earth were you doing? I have a report here that you were improperly dressed in Piccadilly after 10 o’clock at night. What were you doing?’ So, I explained and then I was most irate really and I said, ‘Well, it wasn’t, couldn’t possibly have been after 10 o’clock at night because we all had to be signed in at the Salvation Army Hostel by ten, so my signature’s there.’ So, I got off on a technicality. But if I hadn’t remembered that, the Salvation Army, that would have been on my WAAF record which sounded dreadful. And it was because I didn’t have my hat on. So, that was discipline in those days. So that, that was more or less that. And as, as I say we used to go to all the demob parties at the First and Last, which was the pub on the way up from the station to Kirton. Everybody stopped there halfway. Well, if you’d been sitting all the way from London on a kitbag and you were carrying a kit bag up that hill it was very — so people stopped there. So a lot of people have memories of the First and Last. A few, some years ago anyway when, when the landlord was retiring he very kindly gave me this big print that was hanging on the wall there as a memento. So, I’ve still got it hanging here. I had lots of, lots of fun there with all the demob parties where Morag the other wireless mech and I at Kirton used to drink a small glass of cider to last the whole evening while everybody else was getting a bit too merry [laughs] But it was nice to say goodbye to them all then. And that was more or less it. I was demobbed in ’47. My husband didn’t get demobbed ‘til forty — they were kept back out east and of course they were all very bitter about it as you know, they almost mutinied. Lord Mountbatten came out to speak to them and they were all turning their back on him, taking their hats off, doing everything to be put on a charge. He was telling them. They had been out there so long and people who had gone into the RAF with them had been home, demobbed and got jobs. Several of them got jobs in teaching and things like that. They got back and they were still at Wyton and still not demobbed. So they were very, very bitter about it all. These people that had been in Ceylon and the Cocos Islands. They felt very neglected and far from home. And Mountbatten was saying what grand men they were and he was booed. They thought they were going to have a riot on their hands. So, you don’t hear so much of that side. But they were, they were just stuck out there. They’d forgotten about them. But they used to fly. He was a radar mech but their planes flew over Burma and dropped leaflets [laughs] and he used to go with them and heave the leaflets out. But I don’t know. They were out there and they got all these horrible malaria, sprue, all these tropical diseases and they weren’t well. And a lot of them were very unhappy about the fact that the others who had joined with them were demobbed and in jobs back in Britain because they were in the European area. And of course the VE day was one thing but it was VE day. The Japanese war went on a little bit longer. So, that’s what kept them out there. Anyway, that’s all I can think of in that line. And I’ve always kept in touch. I kept in touch with Kirton in Lindsey, with this map group at Kirton Lindsey were very good. They did a lot of research. They’re the ones who told me eventually about the Bomber Command Memorial going up and when I wrote to them about my cousin Lawrence who had been [pause] he had done his initial training in this country. I’ve got all his letters that he wrote me because we were very close in the family, like brother and sister almost, and he always teased me about going into the forces. He was saying, ‘They want real he-men in the forces, not women.’ Joking letters. I’ve still have his fun letters, but he, he loved flying and his first initial training he remembered writing and saying he had flown down the Wye Valley, wasn’t it? What’s the gorge in the Wye? And looking down and thinking how beautiful it was. It was really beautiful from the air. And then I’ve got letters from Canada where he did his further training. And the descriptions there of the heat and the flying and of course by then I think they were in — well I’m trying to remember now. It wasn’t. He started off in a Tiger Moth in this country and then eventually graduated to all the different planes and then eventually to Harvards as everybody does. But America wasn’t in the war then but they went on tour. They got a weeks’ leave and they hitched all the way around America. They got, they got, they were made very welcome and they thoroughly enjoyed it. It was like a geography lesson the letter I got back about that. But he had an exciting time there. And then of course when he came back here they were put, I think to Waddington. The initial one and then sent to Scampton, and Scampton of course had, was having, I don’t know runways laid or something like that and so they moved the squadron over to Dunholme Lodge. And the farm there was made a, and I think it was I’ve got all the history of Dunholme. I’ve got everything about Dunholme Lodge. The farmer there [pause] it’s another long story but anyway Lawrence flew from Dunholme Lodge. And it was his twenty first birthday and he never came back. He flew out to bomb Krefeld in the Ruhr and they never know what happened. It’s no, it was never known. His name’s on the Memorial at Runnymede. And then I heard about the Memorial, the Bomber Command Memorial going up at Canwick. And I got, I was invited to that through being a relation of Lawrence’s and the Andersons and the other. Wilson who used to be at our Christmas parties. He was another one who did three tours of ops and on his very last tour disappeared over the Alps at Italy. He was a navigator so he went too. He was another one I used to remember. So I used to write about a lot of them. So, that was my connection with Bomber Command, but I was in Flying Trainer Command, and of course my husband was in Coastal Command. So, after the Canwick one I heard about Dunholme Lodge. David Gibson whose mother and father were very, belonged to this map group, he’s been one who’s done a lot of research for that and he’s, was very good. Sent me a lot of information which I had about my cousin. But still it was good of him. And he took me down. It took a long time to get up there here, from here, changing trains. It was quite a journey. But anyway he took me out to Dunholme Lodge and I met Mr and Mrs Wicks whose farm it is and it was their father’s farm then and they’re lovely people. And, and the, when I met them I heard, I got a letter later to say that the ’44 Squadron which was the squadron Lawrence was in was having a Memorial Service. They come down and have it on the airfield, what was the airfield, about every two years and would I like to go? So I said, ‘Yes please’, and I got this lovely letter from the farmer and his wife saying would I like to come and stay the weekend with them in their beautiful farmhouse. And they made such a fuss of me. I had a wonderful time. They were lovely people. And this little Memorial is down the end of the farm. I’ve got photographs of it and they’d got little plaques on it with, there are a few, they’d put this little Memorial there. And so I thought well my sister and I thought that we would contribute to have a plaque put on for Lawrence and the crew. And so they got that done just before this Memorial Service. So, I went to see that actually dedicated. So, that was very, very moving but oh I was, I’ve never met such kindly folk. Aye. It was. Anyway, so that wasn’t so very long ago now. About a year ago, but anyway at that time I wasn’t too well and they didn’t realise it but I wasn’t but it was like a holiday. Just being there and made an absolute fuss of. And also they opened the garden of that farm to the National Garden Scheme once a year. They open it, and it was the day, the weekend they were opening for, the day after it was open to the public. And the weather was beautiful. And I went down the night before in the evening after everything had happened and gone. Down to this little Memorial that they’ve got, in the sunset and it was all very moving. And it’s, it’s amazing who’s done it. They’ve got their own VC, 44 Squadron of course. He’s there with his crew on, on that Memorial too. So that was a very moving day and a very lovely memory. I was so glad that at least Lawrence’s name is on that and remembered. I know it’s, I’ve got a photograph of it on, it’s on the little plaque. It’s on the big memorial at Canwick. And but I was so glad I’d been to both but the little one on the farm is special in our family anyway. My sister was very pleased because she couldn’t get down. She’s, she’s permanently in a wheelchair and trouble with her knees and things so I had to write reports to her about it. But that’s more or less up to date [laughs]
CJ: So you were demobbed in 1947.
ML: ’47.
CJ: And your husband.
ML: Was demobbed the beginning of ’48. And we were married in June 1948. And of course his family came from Chiswick. His father and he were members of Kew Cricket Club actually, before they went into the [pause] but so I moved down to live in Chiswick, Gunnersbury Park area really. And our, my daughter Margaret Ann, my elder daughter was born in 1951. Oh I [pause] apart from doing all that I did a lot of Scottish country dancing at Fetter Lane with the Caledonian Society, and of course I joined St Columba’s Church at Knightsbridge. I’m still a member. I must be one of the oldest. I’ve been there since 1948 and I went up every year. Every year for the communion services. And it’s been a real, I don’t know, a haven for me. St Columba’s up in Knightsbridge over the years. And my, both the girls were christened there. Rosemary was born in ’58. She was seven years after Margaret Ann, and she was christened in the London Scottish Chapel which is in St Columba’s and Margaret Ann was, well she thought the world of the minister there. He was another one who was a padre. Decorated. Dropped with the troops and dropped with them and she was very inspired with him. But anyway, she became confirmed at St Columba’s and as I say Rosemary was christened in the London Scottish Chapel. St Columba’s was bombed during the Blitz and was burned to the ground, and they raised the money to build it up again. And we used to go to the Jehangir Hall in the Imperial Institute. Services there, and then they built the lower part, the hall. The underneath bit of the new St Columba’s and the Queen who was the queen mother it was, the Queen Elizabeth then came and she laid the foundation stone and as it built up as I say seven years later. Margaret Ann always said, ‘It’s not fair. Rosemary was christened in the London Scottish Chapel,’ she said, ‘And I was christened in the church house around in Cadogan Square.’ They hadn’t got the church built by then. But very happy memories of St Columba’s and they’ve been very thoughtful with me over these last months. They’ve been up to see me and I took them up to St Bart’s here which is a lovely little pilgrim’s chapel. I go there because it’s nice and quiet and rather peaceful and a little simple service, rather like a Scottish service. And they’ve been over the years. They’ve been very kind too.
CJ: And do you keep in touch with any of your former comrades?
ML: I don’t think there’s any of them alive now.
CJ: No.
ML: I seem to be the only. I seem to be the only one that [pause] especially as I say the WAAF. I think they’re all gone. But I joined the WAAF Association and I joined the Thanet group and they were all lovely ones. I’ve got masses of photographs of things we’ve done with them. But I think there’s one of them I know is still alive which I’m due to phone. She’s in a home in Canterbury, I think. But all the others have either gone over the years or gone to, there was two of them there who were in about 1939. They were wonderful. Kay, who ran the group, she was very good person but they laid up their colours and they’re in the church in, in Ramsgate. And after that just a few who were about used to meet sometimes over in Margate and have some lunch. But that sort of came down to about [pause] came down to about two or three and then of course I was very involved with golf, and it was always a Wednesday and Wednesday was the golf day. So these are the ones I had known but most of the people as I say it’s a matter of anno domini. The years go and I’ve got happy memories of lovely folk but there’s not a lot left.
CJ: Well, thank you very much indeed for talking to us today Margaret.
ML: Yes. I jumped about a bit, but I can’t remember it all in order.
CJ: That’s not a problem. We’ve got it all recorded. Thank you very much indeed.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Margaret Sinclair Longmate
Creator
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Chris Johnson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-10-19
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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.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALongmateMS161019, PLongmatemS1601
Format
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00:42:44 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Description
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Margaret Longmate from Edinburgh came from a family with long links to the RAF. Her uncle had been in the Flying Corps in the First World War and various other friends and family joined the service during the Second World War. Therefore, it seemed obvious that when it came time Margaret would join the Women's Auxilliary Air Force. She began her training as a wireless mechanic and her first day in London she experienced a V-1 attack. For her twenty first birthday Margaret and three friends had the ultimate celebration feast of poached eggs on toast which made a welcome change from the dried eggs that were otherwise on offer. The cousin to whom she was very close was with Bomber Command. He was killed on his twenty first birthday.
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Julie Williams
Chris Johnson
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Shropshire
England--London
Temporal Coverage
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1944
entertainment
ground personnel
Harvard
memorial
RAF Cranwell
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
RAF Ternhill
sport
V-1
V-weapon
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/726/10726/PBridgesCH1701.2.jpg
8240dd1ff09882d4b4866a93efc69914
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/726/10726/ABridgesCH171013.2.mp3
444cd10fe0ae2456ea567945abe0a2f7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Bridges, Cyril Henry
C H Bridges
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Cecil Bridges (b. 1922, 1654795, 183040 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 115 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-10-13
Rights
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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
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Bridges, CH
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CJ: This is Chris Johnson and I’m interviewing Cyril Bridges today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at Cyril’s home in Ramsgate, Kent and it is Friday, the Thirteenth of October 2017. Well, thank you Cyril for agreeing to talk to me today, perhaps we could start with your story and if you could tell us please where and when you were born and what your family background was.
CHB: Well, I’d be pleased to do this, I, my name is Cyril Henry Bridges and I was born in Ramsgate and my father and my mother, my father was a very brave man, he served in the First World War, he was a deep sea fisherman had a [unclear] in Hull in Grimsby and he signed, I got records of his signature on a parchment when he took his indentures brought up apparently in a [unclear] work home, he and his two brothers were then apprentice to the sea, I’ve got this big manuscript, he’s joined it, his joining and at sixteen he decided he had enough of the sea and wanted to join the army when all the villagers were joining the army, so he absconded from the sea and went to France where he was wounded with a shot gun through his, top of his shoulder, and came out of the bottom of his shoulder and he eventually was sent on into, back to England after having treatment and he joined, there was this port at Richborough near Sandwich where they were shipping troops and ammunition and returning stuff that had been used from the battlefield and where he met my mother who was a waitress and she worked at, on munitions at this place at Richborough and they got together of course and he went back to, after the war, he went back to his Grimsby as where he lived and he corresponded with my mother and eventually he decided to become local. In the meantime, he joined this, the fishing fleet and got this document endorsed on the back that he had deserted his fishing trawler in the beginning and then they had, he’d come back to complete his apprenticeship. He did that and when he’d done that after a while he’d come to Ramsgate cause we had steam trawlers then, just the trawlers and he was able to join those and he married my mother, my mother and father had four of us, there was, I’ve got three sisters, I was the first born and I had three sisters born after that, at three year intervals. Anyway, I lost most of my family at the moment, father, mother and two of the, two of the sisters. Anyway, I joined, as a schoolboy, we had nothing, very poor, we were a very poor family, I’ve done a lot of errands for people to make up my father’s his shortfall on his money which was only thirty shillings a week, I then, I joined, collecting coke from the coke house to neighbours and working at a butchers, I was a butcher’s boy, then I got sort of a job that I could better myself, didn’t want to deliver meat anymore, I joined The Maypole, The Maypole was the sort of old fashioned superstores, there was Maypole, there was Home & Colonial, the international stores in perks, they all belonged to this one which I joined, which was The Maypole; I joined The Maypole for a few years, started bringing in a little bit of money my mother, prior to this my schooling had to end at fifteen, I was in Kent, class six, at St Lawrence School and then I then had to sort of go and earn some money to keep me in trousers, slippers, plimsolls etcetera. After a while I decided to join The Maypole as, when at first I started as a cellar boy looking after the cheeses and things like that and then after that on the counter serving butter and groceries. Then the next step I got was when the troops were being evacuated from Dunkirk and my father was on his way to Milford Haven, they used to spend three months fishing in local waters, the rest of the time in the western waters in the Irish Sea etcetera, he was on his way to Milford Haven or Padstow I think but I think Milford Haven was his [unclear], the place he got to in the end and having got there or before he got there they’d taken the boat as far as Dungeness and from Dungeness he was ordered to go to the beaches of Dunkirk to pick up soldiers. He did several trips, this I understand, to pick up soldiers and return them to Ramsgate and I recall the trains, the troops marching from the dock, the high street to the station and that was, [coughs] excuse me, that was that one little episode and my father then eventually got to Milford Haven, subsequently they were sunk by a Condor and they evacuated the boat which had beached in the Barry Islands, Lundy Island I mean, Lundy Island and they launched the boat to try to get away, get ashore with the boat, and he, the German come back and one sailor was, one fisherman was killed, he then spent a few days on this, on that island before they discovered that he, people discovered that he was on there. Anyway, he then got ashore and returned [unclear] in Milford Haven. My mother said to me, I don’t like your dad being on his own, she said, in these times cause by then two of my sisters were evacuated to the Midlands somewhere and the other sister, the younger sister was left with my mother and she said, I’ve got the [unclear], she said, and you go down and comfort your dad. Anyway, I got a transfer from The Maypole to The Maypole in Milford Haven and after spending some time at Maypole, my father says, do you want a bit of a leg up? What sort of a job do you want now? He said, I said, well, I’d like to go on the docks, see what I can do in the war effort, because we constantly had the warships coming in there for repairs and the dock was Milford Haven, it was Peter Hancocks, I was then there [unclear] and was still sending money home for mum and I was a poor kid really but I wanted to make a name for myself and I got fed up with doing mundane jobs for the dock, so I volunteered for the navy. I had a letter back saying that they weren’t recruiting and in any case I was stuck in a job that I couldn’t leave, so I said, what could I leave? They said, you could join the Air Force, they are looking for crews, [coughs] excuse me, I then, I then got a stop with this on the docks, as a shipwright apprentice, and after a bit of that, of boats going back in, being repaired, I thought, got a bit, just got, just going to be, I thought, better be doing a bit for the service if I can, so I decided to join the Air Force. I joined in the Air Force on Swansea, my first posting was, first place I got the uniform, or part of it, was Penarth, I joined a train at Penarth and it got underway and I thought I get a go on it, was issued with the tropical gear, and I thought, well, I’m going to, overseas, so the train travelled by night and at daytime was pulled into a station and in the end we ended up at Blackpool, so I’ve done my share of square-bashing at Blackpool and then I was transferred then down to a place in [unclear] Wales which was, I don’t know the name but, I’m sure, I can’t remember the name, it was near Cardiff anyway and that was for introduction to flight engineer, we worked with [unclear] hat, then I done that course and then I went on to the squadron and then I started servicing Spitfires, that was in Andover, and after that I was sent to at Cosford, where I’d done a flight engineer’s course at Cosford but that’s near Wolverhampton and then after that I went on, back on the squadron again and started working, went back then to a place called Innsworth which was in Gloucester where I had to choose what I wanted, they wanted me as a fitter or as a rigger but I had no choice but they said, oh, you got to go as a flight engineer, so then I went to Innsworth as a flight engineer and having completed my ops, I went to, transferred to a squadron which was, it was 115 Squadron. I got a notice sent to report to squadron and having reported there within a short time, I was booking into my flight sergeant’s building or room and he showed me that I was on that night, that was the first day I joined the squadron, and he said, I said, oh, that’s good, that’s what I’ve been training to do, so then he said, you won’t like what I said, I said, he said, do you want the good news or the bad news? I said, oh, I want the good news, he said, well, you’ll be on ops tonight, said, the bad news? You’re going as a spare flight engineer. Engineer’s gone sick on me and I put you in as a replacement. That was to Schweinfurt. And it was with a chappie, with a Canadian pilot, and it was a successful trip and it was a long trip and we’d come back all the better for it. In the meantime, I heard that my pilot had already, on the night I was doing the Schweinfurt trip, he was going as the second dickey to get used to the bombing. After that, I, well, I don’t, I just done what I was told and completed the tour. I’ll tell you a bit more about that later.
CJ: So, could you tell us, as a flight engineer please, what your responsibilities were? How you’d prepare for an operation and what you actually did during the operation?
CHB: Yes, what we did when we went to the mess and saw that we were on ops, we were never told, told where we were going by a map on the wall, marked with blue and red, comings and goings, what was here and what was there in a way of navigation, lights, the searchlights, and fighter areas that should be avoided. You go into the room where they are doing the, they give you a “gee-up” course with the CO and then the navigator, navigator officer does his bit, tell you all about what to avoid and what not to, you sit on a row of seats with your crew of seven and you all get a, one big bag with seven little bags in it so you filled your little bag and it went into the one big bag, that was for safekeeping, was made sure you took, nothing with you in a way you could be identified, apart from the medals you wore around your neck. What we get as an engineer, when I [unclear] in the mornings before we went to the assembly, they told us that we were on and I used to go up to my aircraft and go round the aircraft and check everything, checked with the groundcrew what needed to be done, what they felt was needed treatment, and normally the groundcrew was the same groundcrew that served you all the time, you got to know him, and he [unclear] to tell you any difference, any differences that [unclear] or any repairs that they had done in the meantime. I used to check, the ailerons, checked the pitot, schecked the tyres, checked that we had, on board we had the fire extinguishers, checked that we got an axe and generally checked the engines, but mostly came from the fitters on the ground to tell you the state of your aircraft. They made an awful sacrifice in doing this because the job was never ending and there was always repairing or checking. Anyway you got quite used to your crew when you went to the assembly in the evening, you were told then where you were going and it was all mapped out on the board, you weren’t allowed to leave billets and it was just a question of being available with the rest of the crew, the crew of course slept together, some were talkative, some did talk, some didn’t talk, but it’s just the question of getting in the aircraft and the engineer then, he’d already checked the fuel that was going aboard, he already checked how much it was and he used to put, check that the engines, [coughs] excuse me, engines were in good nick and after I’d satisfied that the Perspex in the windows and the door closed properly and one or two other things, he went back to billet and didn’t speak to anybody, just wrote a little note to your family and then, when you went out on the runway, to go at night time or in the early evening, you [unclear] up the crew, you make sure you got fuel in the body, two tanks in the body and in the case of the Lancaster, [coughs] excuse me, there’s two in just outside the fuselage, make sure it was in the right, you made sure you, when you took off, you took off with the inner tank, which had the most fuel in it, you took off with that and then you switched to the other, if you were in the air and one was punctured, you switched to that tank to empty it before it ran away. When you got out on to the runway I’d already, when I walked out to the aircraft again, checked that [unclear], the cover was off the pitot head, cause that was covered, that was and checked that everything was [unclear] in the morning and there we go on the end, we taxied to the end of the runway and gradually took off. I took off with both hands on the throttles, assisted by the pilot giving a nod, and I go to, [coughs] excuse me, go through the aircraft, the checks before we took off you go through the engine checks, run them up and test the magnetos and carburettors and things like that, got both my hands on the throttles, the pilot had already run down the fairway with it and I took over from him because we had to go to full boost, so I pushed them through the full boost, got the aircraft half way with the load and got to circle the aerodrome and I just throttled back to running throttle and it seems, when you are waiting for the time to start our bombing run. Well, we took off and I had a spare, I was sitting on a reversible seat, I could change it from looking out the front where I, where all my buttons were and a lot of [unclear] also on the right hand side of the fuselage, which was of course the starboard side, and I had gauges and throttles there so I could never [unclear] static is that the view rolled over. Anyway we then took off, the navigator giving the route where we going and we never, in our aircraft, we never said anything to anybody unless there was something to be said, eyes everywhere and you had to report anything that was heading your way but flying was another thing, it’s odd experience, cause when you took off, you got up to top speed and of course the undercarriage, you lifted the undercarriage up, you lifted the undercarriage up, and on the Lancaster the rear wheel was fixed but on the Stirling of course it was retractable, well you had to go back and check that it was up and locked, so, didn’t have to do that on the Stirling, on the Lanc. Anyway we, well, I think it’s another, I think, I am going another way now, did you [unclear] want me to
CJ: Perhaps you could tell us what it was you were as an engineer you were doing during the flight? I presume you were checking engines settings and fuel use.
CHB: Yes. One had to as engineer, we had to fill a form in, and rank the periods and that we [unclear] that we’d have enough petrol and done an awful lot of calculation as well we, we had instruments but we didn’t depend solely on the instruments, we had to do stuff mechanical [coughs], anyway, that, in the flight we said nothing to nobody, as I say, nobody talked to anybody, there was one particular, do you want me to go through into, the one particular and bombing trip which we had of the thirty or twenty nine trips we had done, the most hairy was the one that we was on the Stirling, and it was quite early in the days of joining the squadron, we went on a diversion to try to force somebody I don’t know who but I know we never got informed but we then tried to land at our base, our base was fogged up, we couldn’t get into our base, so we had to fly on to Downham Market by then from there to and it wasn’t as bad as we were expected from our own aerodrome so we, we went to land and I’d done these usual checks with the pilot and we had a [unclear] to tell to check things and I used to make sure that we was in the correct m gear as opposed to s gear cause there was two gears over your head, make sure that the thirty degrees of flap so that we could land, I went all through the checks and the undercarriage, [unclear] as I said, in the, in the other aircraft, we had to go back and check that the rear wheel was up and locked or down and locked, whichever, which way we go, up or down. Anyway we went to Downham Market and the first thing we did, we flew along the runway which we thought was the runway but it was a roadway that ran parallel with the runway and I had to cut the engine off, the starboard outer, I think it was the starboard outer, anyway it was playing up so I put it into no motive and with no motive, the propeller stopped and we went round again, the pilot on three wheels, on three engines, went round correctly into the fog very fast I had to, while we, when we, he said we are going to land and I had to check that the, I checked that the wheels were down and thirty degrees of flap and full flap but when you get it down, what I said to him, I think we are not on the runway, we’re on a roadway, [coughs] he said, I’ll go round, so we went round and ideally pulled the undercarriage up, pulled the flaps up and adjusted the engines, we went round again and I don’t know if it was the second or third time of trying, he turned on the dead engine and the aircraft just slid along and hit the ground and he was an Australian pilot and he got all of us clear and he was the only one that was barely injured but he never flew Lancasters, never flew Stirlings again ever. They sent him to the Middle East on canvas twin engine jobs, [coughs] I since been, a word [unclear] lucky to have a word with the pilot later years and he apologised for the and he said, I nearly killed you, I nearly killed all of you, I said, no, you didn’t, you saved all of us, he was the only one who really suffered from it but when you, when you were flying, went full boost, get off on the runway which just staggered off sometimes and then you sort of back to about 120 or whatever you did, the navigator determined what you needed to get to the target on time. We got then into a circuit to gain height and before you set off to the target, so the time to set off was fixed, so you might have done one turn or two turns, two or three turnings on your airport to gain a bit of height, cause you had to get to, get over the target by eighteen thousand feet else they’d shoot you down so you made a stab to get to the coast, get over the coast, then you, the next one is the, get over the enemy coast and you get up to whatever the bombing, bombing height got to be. [unclear] Aircraft, some were good, some were bad, some you couldn’t make it was like hitting a ceiling, tried to get higher than the aircraft, anyway the rest of, target [coughs] sorry got the lack of oxygen [laughs] anyway we, then, when you get to flying at night time, all you feel is the air, your comrades are there cause the aircraft, it’s the back lash of another Lancaster and got every eyes peeled to see what’s about, you couldn’t see much but you could see the Jerry if they come on you, anyway they, everybody had their eyes peeled to what, you had to see what aircraft were around us, and you were always able to [unclear] when one stirred, one Lanc there and a Lanc there and a Halifax here and a Halifax there, and you carried on to your bombing, on to your bombing run, and then it’s up the doors to keep us steady on one course, that was up to the, up to the bomb aimer, who was selecting the target, and then, we keep as steady as we possibly can, everybody with their eyes out, but aircraft cutting across in front of you, and underneath you, a lot I should think were [unclear] throwing bombs flying underneath, but you got on the target then you got out as fast as you possibly could, you got into a circuit, come back on track again, and you did it all over again the next day, until you completed your tour.
CJ: So, how did the crew manage to keep the aircraft straight and level if you’re flying through anti-aircraft fire?
CHB: Well you ignored the anti-aircraft fire because there’s nothing you can do about it and as regards the aircraft flying with you, there’s nothing you can do about it them either, providing they all held their breath, if you like, the pilot [unclear], out the [unclear] if you like, done the correct thing, and the pilot if you had a good pilot, which I had, best pilot in the world, he was an elderly man but a very, very good pilot, I owe my life to him and only had one bad incident that when, my life was saved by the bomb aimer, we’d gone down over the target, and he’d done his work and he got up, he looked up and he saw that I was lying on the floor of the aircraft and he come over and put the oxygen mask on me again, I was right as ninepins after that, the only bad incident I had [coughs]. All the bombing trips were all different, you couldn’t say one was the same as another, if you got a long trip to Friedrichshafen or somewhere long, it was just mundane but if you went to the Ruhr, you’d do it there in no time and there and back, the trouble with the Ruhr is that they were so gallantly manned by the Germans who would let nothing through and if you get the odd German captured the bomber flying in your lane, the detail in the instruction to his fitters, his fighters and that was the thing that I don’t know. You don’t know how you get through it, you just get through it, you just sort of fingers crossed, nothing you can do about it, if you [unclear], we had several incidents when the bombers were on your tail, the fighter was on your tail, and you have the corkscrews to deal with, you know that he is faster than you are and that sometime someone has got to give away [unclear] the fighter, you either go to his right and down or left and down and then you had a great chance of undergoing him because you were doing, you started doing a corkscrew then on your downstroke you had a chance to get at him and on the upstroke you had another chance to get at him and if he, if you tackled them they went, they had so much to pick, so much to choose, that if you started, you just showed him that you were aware that he was there, he would leave you alone and that’s what we found, was the best thing to do but we did keep straight and level so that we get a photograph of what we just done and in the latter part of course when you the Pathfinders, their chaps in Mosquitoes at zero feet telling you well now bomb the red, then bomb the, now bomb the green and you straight knew all the time where you wanted the bombers to fall over the cities and they were very fine people, in fact all the boys were good, lost too many of them, didn’t we? I think that’s the [unclear] all I can remember.
CJ: Then did you ever discuss between you what you might do if you were shot down and got out of your aircraft? Did you have escape equipment with you?
CHB: Yes, we had a dinghy in the wing, when we were at sea, we had, a bit of a problem in as much as we lost a few people. We lost the mid upper gunner, that left us while we were being attacked, he thought we wouldn’t going to make it, so he left, he leapt out of the door, but he survived the parachute, apparently, I never saw him after, nobody could ever find him after, apart from a NAAFI girl that says he got down safely and then you had, I had certain things that I couldn’t do, they limited what a parachute couldn’t do when you’re flying, you hear tales of people getting out on the wing and all that sort of thing, in my opinion that was not possible. I, at one time, there were [unclear] the rods, the aileron rods within the aircraft had to try and turn them together that’s a bit of a [unclear] didn’t’ get [unclear] but you get used to it, it’s something that you take it for, you don’t take it as for granted, you are on the alert all the time, that never leaves you but I didn’t worry too much about whether I was going to make it or not. I was with a band of boys and it’s something we had to do, it’s as simple as that, but we couldn’t do an awful lot when we was in the air, I at one stage there when this particular chap that bailed out, we’d been chased by Germans to a [unclear], and we were, do you use that petrol? Because you didn’t get too much extra petrol, and we eventually thought, we started to, thought about it a bit, the engine [unclear], the engine got out of control the engines which I had to fill out and we started to stagger home and we were very short in petrol and I said to the pilot, we want to get down as soon as we can, he said, well, we don’t want to be taken as prisoners, no, not that, I said, I’d rather jump in the Channel, so we did that and landed at Manston. We got off, were serviced, I went to the engine and borrowed four bikes which got to our mother who said to me, what are you doing in all that Air Force gear? I said, well, we just come back from a place, she was taken by surprise I must admit, but Manston was a lovely, lovely runway there, we landed on that but we had crosswind, we took off crosswind when we joined our squadron the next day but no, I had a good run really, I got [unclear] wonderful, this particular occasion I was talking about was this chappie bailing out, we got into trouble and when we was clear that this fighter or two fighters there we got away from them, our pilot was a clever pilot, clever, clever, he, we got, he got, the little bit of, pressure off us, and he said, go back and see what you can do, so I went back and I saw the rear gunner was on his way up to me, so I said, what’s the matter? He said, I thought you would have left them, he said, that’s what the mid upper gunner must have thought, I said, well, get back in your turret and see, ok, was nothing wrong, anyway as I say, that was the mid upper went out. Another time when we were chased about all over Germany and the navigator was asked, this was a different navigator, he was asked to give us a course home, so he said, I can’t find a course, you’ve lost me, he said, it was all over Germany, you lost me, so the pilot said to me, go and give him a map, fine, so I got a map, and we come back via Manston aerodrome that was the time, we landed after being attacked but the another occasion was so that navigator was lost. When we were landed he was in trouble, he was just passed off, I never saw him again. Then the rear gunner, he tells me he had a fighter in his sights and he started to take the fighter and he got a jam with his belt, his ammunition belt, so he took off his gloves and it stuck to the gun and he got frostbite so we lost him, he went to another squadron and after being hospitalised he went to another squadron and completed a tour of ops with them. He’s still about, I’m in contact with him, but he’s the only one, I lost the wireless operator which was the same man we had all the time, the navigator was changed, we had two navigators besides the one we started to, and we had two pilots when we started to, bomb aimer, he’s the same bomb aimer, the pilot and the navigator were both awarded the DFC, and the bomb aimer and myself were given the ranks of officers. I tell you it was our reward to, it was good, was interesting. After that, if you want me to go on after that? We were sent to, we were sent to Scotland for a break which I enjoyed very much. After that I went to Farnborough for [unclear] and [unclear], we picked up Wing Commander Winfield and used to pick him up out of, by Anson, we got an Anson converted with a winch and used to dive to [unclear] the men on the ground, sort of goal post to sit between and we had an arrester hook sort of what the navy had on their fighters when they can land on airship (aircraft carriers), boats but used to pick him, pick this chappy up him up [unclear] dinghy and off land. I was based then at White Waltham so we used to travel between White Waltham and the base where the aircraft was.
CJ: So, this was a new method for rescuing airmen who were downed, is that it?
CHB: That’s right. It was, they then they brought in the helicopter then. So we was, they discontinued then and then they sent me to Hereford to the admin school, didn’t like it very much, it’s where the, I think it’s an army unit that’s trained airborne or something at Hereford and I’d done a bit there but halfway through the course, they said to me, we want you to go and up to Dishforth and talk about going onto Yorks. So we done this short training course there at Dishforth and two other places in Scotland which were close to each other and then we went, then I was transferred to Ossington where I spent a very good part of my life and we were on Yorks training, this was after the war, we were training ex pilots, ex RAF pilots getting them ready, I think, for Civvy Street and I used to electrics and carburation and fly as flight engineer on Yorks and done that for a long time and then I sent to, when I finished, I was sent to Manston as currency officer, few places in between but I can’t remember for the moment.
CJ: So then were you demobbed after that?
CHB: I was demobbed after Manston. Yes, that was in ’46.
CJ: What did you do then?
CHB: Then I enjoyed my freedom for a bit and met the ladies of course. I then had about a fortnight off I think and a man said to me who I found, I was in the pub one night and a man come up to me and he said, I see you’re in uniform, I said, yes, he said, well, I’ve got a business in London, I’m moving down to the coast, would you like to come and work for me? So I said, well, what do you do? He said, well, I am an engineer for a die sinking company PDS tools and there were two companies he owned and he said, we are bringing these, all their equipment down from London, setting it up in an old skating rink in Thanet, so he said, I’d like you to be there when they bring their machines down and install them, so these machines, shaping machines and mills and lathes and capstans and all sorts of the machinery that had come down and was installed in this old skating rink and I, he said, well, being as you done that, work for me, I’d like you to make progress, engineer in charge of progress and I said, oh, that’s fine. So I got it up on his feet, done very well, the owner of the firm was a chap by the name of Gutteridge, Mr Gutteridge and he was then associated with Haffenden, rubber people that made hats and rubber caps, swim caps and mats and rubber mats and electric plugs and hot water bottles and they were in Sandwich and they employed a couple of thousand people and I went in and we started engineer work, we moved from, we moved from the skating rink and moved to Sandwich, moved with all our equipment into Sandwich, so we operated then under W. W. Haffenden which were the people that owned the rubber works. We operated as their, as their tools, made their tools, made their hot water bottle tools, electric plugs, made all their tools, and also had a good clientele outside where we made other people’s tools as well so on the engineering side, we employed about fifty registered toolmakers and the light machinist toolmakers and I was there about thirty five years and I got myself up to director, this auxiliary Sandwich engineering and Haffenden Richborough I was on the board there, well, it wasn’t a board, it was a collective board, but the main owners of course were the real bees’ knees but I was there thirty five years and they said to me, we are going to make some changes on in the tool, we are going to do various bits and pieces and wondered if you wanted to stay in, see it through. I said, well, what’s the alternative? I leave, they said, yeah, you leave with our blessing, and with a salary introduced, that was I was sixty then, leave with a pay until you are sixty, next five years at sixty five, we can give you a golden handshake, and we will make it so that if you are ever called into work, a question to be asked we pay you thirty quid an hour, so anyway, I decided that I would take the money, and I was out of work for a week and I then went as a manager of another tool company, Steven Garlotty, I was there for about five years, then I had enough then, and that was all my work until I finished. I’m still here.
CJ: Coming back to the period after the war, did you encounter any bad feelings at all towards Bomber Command aircrew?
CHB: Yes, really, and they all stem from some chap in the, an MP, he was an MP for the West End in London and he, I’ve been reading the books, he put bosh on it, he wouldn’t have anything to do with the Air Force and it brought bad feelings towards the Air Force, they couldn’t [unclear] weren’t entitled to have a medal and [coughs] for the number of people we lost, I thought we would’ve been better treated but we weren’t, I’m trying to think of the man’s name but he was the one that stopped us getting medals and went to drag this down to bombing innocent people. I agree that bombing innocent people wasn’t the thing I liked doing but they [unclear] bombing [unclear] to kill me, it was a thing to do, we did the right thing, Germany was doing the wrong thing, taking people and gassing them and I was against that lot so it never come hard to me to dislike what had been done to that. I joined these things like Aircrew Europe and lucky I got the Aircrew Europe Star and the France Germany Star but you don’t wear the France Germany, you just have a clasp, you’ve got the Aircrew Europe, and I got on various committees locally from there, I never really done much and
CJ: And I believe you had an award from the French recently.
CHB: Yes, I did, I was lucky to be recognised by the President, then President of France, I always say it’s the Croix de Guerre, but unfortunately it wasn’t the Croix de Guerre, I don’t know what they called it now.
CJ: The Legion d’Honneur
CHB: That’s it, the Legion d’Honneur and I was very pleased to get it, we never did anything like that, I always got my [unclear] bit was in the First World War I’ve got all my Dad’s medals and his name and rank and his identification all along the rim of the medals that he’s got but just compare that to what the medals we’ve got, you can go in a shop and buy as many as you want without being asked what you want and we were never recognised and that always bothered me. They never gave the thoughts of the people that were killed, I think it was a hundred and twenty six flight engineers, and fifty two of them were dead, but I think, don’t quote me on the number, I don’t think that’s right
CJ: And did you join a squadron association, go to reunions?
CHB: Yes, the Aircrew Association has a, the local branch, I went there and also I went to the French one, the Normandy vets, I went to both associations, kept that going and of course I joined the museum in London, got a free life pass there
CJ: Is that the RAF Museum?
CHB: The RAF Museum, I belong to that. I belong there in Piccadilly, I’ve been a member there from when I left Haffenden’s and my wife was a member there too, but she has since passed away, but I still am a full member of the Piccadilly Club, I’ve only been there once in a lifetime I think. But apart from that I went merrily along and enjoyed my golf, never got it [unclear] but enjoyed it [laughs]. That’s about it I suppose.
CJ: Well, thank you very much indeed for speaking to us today.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Cyril Henry Bridges
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Chris Johnson
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-10-13
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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.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABridgesCH171013
PBridgesCH1701
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Pending review
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01:04:43 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
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Cyril Henry Bridges was born in Ramsgate and served as a flight engineer in the RAF. He tells of his father, a deep-sea fisherman, who fought in the First World War and later helped evacuate troops from Dunkirk. Remembers his early life, taking on different jobs, as a butcher’s boy and working in a shop, to help his mother. After initially wanting to join the navy, he joined the RAF and trained at Penarth and Blackpool. After further training, he was posted to 115 Squadron. Remembers flying an operation to Schweinfurt as a spare flight engineer. Explains his role and duties as a flight engineer before take-off and landing and during operations and vividly describes the circumstances under which they were flying. After the war, he worked for a company making rubber mouldings and electronic accessories.
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Peter Schulze
Chris Johnson
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Hampshire
Wales--Milford Haven
115 Squadron
aircrew
flight engineer
fuelling
RAF Farnborough
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/664/10068/PAbrahams.1.jpg
5ca2f683b76f7fd1b5a8ca2fca3e7ad4
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/664/10068/AAbrahamsGJ170617.1.mp3
cef749f37d6d36193023692dcf3c2847
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Abrahams, Gerald Joseph
G J Abrahams
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Gerald Joseph Abrahams (1923 - 2023, 1850566). He few operations as a wireless operator with 75 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-06-17
Rights
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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.
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Abrahams, GJ
Transcribed audio recording
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CJ: This is Chris Johnson and I’m interviewing Gerry Abrahams today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at the Spitfire Museum at Manston and it is Saturday 17th of June 2017. Thank you for agreeing to talk to me today, Gerry. So, first of all perhaps you could tell us please where and when you were born and your family’s background?
GA: I was born in London in 1923. And my father was in textiles, and I suppose we were a lower middle-class family.
CJ: And did you go to school in that area?
GA: I went to school in London. Yes.
CJ: And so did you have any part time jobs or — ?
GA: No.
CJ: You were helping father or —
GA: No. Nothing at all. No.
CJ: Ok.
GA: No.
CJ: And so when did you — how and, did you come to volunteer for the RAF and when was that?
GA: Well, when I was sixteen the war was declared, and I decided I had to leave school and do something for the war effort. So, I got — I joined Vickers Armstrong and I was based at Newbury which was a specialist Spitfire experimental factory. It was, we were working on the contra-rotating prop which later came on the Griffon engine, and the retractable tail wheel which gave you a knot or two extra. It was hard work. It was twelve hours a day or twelve hours a night six days or six nights a week. But one morning the air raid siren went which was very unusual for a sleepy country town and we all trooped to what they laughingly called an air raid shelter. And I looked out and I saw the Heinkels coming very low to get rid of this very important Spitfire factory. But they missed for some reason, I don’t know how and they bombed a school nearby and killed a lot of children. So next day I went to Newbury Recruiting Centre and said I was an engineer and I wanted to join the RAF as an engineer. And he said, ‘Where do you want to? Where do you work?’, and I said , ‘Vickers Armstrong’. He said, ‘We can’t take you then,’ he said, ‘You’re a reserved occupation.’ And I said, ‘Is there no way I can get into the air force?’ He said, ‘Well, there’s two things you can do. You become an artificer on a submarine or aircrew.’ Well, it took me about a microsecond deciding I wasn’t going on submarines but I quite liked the idea of aircrew. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I said, ‘Yes. I’ll become aircrew’, and that was how I joined up.
CJ: And so did you go — so that was at age sixteen. So —
GA: No. This was, I was seventeen and a half by this stage.
CJ: Right. So you actually went straight into the RAF or you had to wait until eighteen?
GA: No. I had to wait a few months. About three months I waited. Yeah.
CJ: And where did you start your training?
GA: I went, well, we started at aircrew, ACRC London, St Johns Wood. And then I went to Bridgnorth for ITW.
CJ: Sorry. ITW?
GA: That’s your square bashing thing. Initial Training Wing I think it means. Yeah. And then I went to Madley in Hertfordshire.
CJ: And what was the training you were carrying out there?
GA: Oh. I trained as a wireless operator. Yeah.
CJ: And how long was that training then before you went to an operational squadron?
GA: About a year. Yeah. And then after that I went to AFU which is another training thing, and then to OTU where you all crewed up. And this, I crewed up and was sent to a New Zealand squadron.
CJ: And how were the crews made up?
GA: There was one, two — four New Zealanders and three English.
CJ: So , how come the English were in a New Zealand squadron?
GA: The New Zealanders just didn’t have enough to fill the posts. And they had the gunners and a lot of the pilots but the rest they couldn’t fill.
CJ: And how was the, your crew made up? Did you choose each other or were you allocated to a crew?
GA: Well, it’s, it’s hard to tell. It’s — OTUs are very strange places. There’s one mess, one bar. You talk to people. You judge people and in my case I got into a very big poker game and after the poker game we decided that we ought to stay together.
CJ: And so did you train together as a crew before you went on operations?
GA: Oh yes. Yes. Quite a crew. Then we went to — we trained on Wellingtons first of all. Then we changed to Stirlings. And fortunately we didn’t do any damage in Stirlings because they changed us to Lancasters at the last minute. And I did thirty one operations. I did one extra you see.
CJ: So, the operations started when? Was it the beginning of —
GA: ’44.
CJ: ’44. Right.
GA: Yeah.
CJ: Ok.
GA: Yeah.
CJ: So the — and when you were going on operations how, how were you told and how did you prepare for it and what was the routine?
GA: Well, there was a thing called a Battle Order which was a sheet of paper. You got up in the morning. You looked at the Battle Order to see if you were on it. You could either — because there were a lot of daylights in 3 Group I was in, so it was either a daylight that day or one that night.
CJ: And how did you — how did the crew prepare the aircraft, and how did you get your information about the target and the route and so on?
GA: Well, you had a briefing. We were all in one room and the, all the various people — the met people, the bombing people and all the rest of them told you where the target was. What the ack-ack’s likely to be, what the fighters are likely to be, and the navigators got their winds and the wireless operators got their secret codes, and everybody got their information they needed. Then if it was a daylight you usually had lunch or you may have gone off an hour later. If it was a night one you tried to get some rest and then you always had the, the egg and bacon before you flew and away you went.
CJ: So, you say you did thirty-one operations.
GA: I did.
CJ: But a tour was usually thirty.
GA: Thirty. Yeah. I had to go with another crew and they were brand new. The target was Munich which they never found, and they killed themselves on the next op.
CJ: And how did the crews pass time between operations?
GA: Well, if we were free at a weekend we’d go to a pub and then go to a dance. Or if you were in the mess I suppose you had a drink and it [pause] you needed a lot of rest. That was the thing. Yeah.
CJ: And what was the feeling amongst the crew when you were going on an operation? Did you have to put worries aside and concentrate on the job?
GA: Yeah. I can’t say that [pause] — you hear so much about strain and worry and all the rest of it. I can’t say we experienced that. I think that we knew there was a job to be done and the sooner we got it over the better. We knew the odds. Four to one that we wouldn’t come back. We were aware of that and we got on with the job.
CJ: And what were the typical targets that you were on operations against?
GA: Oh, German.
CJ: And bombloads?
GA: Oh, we usually, I looked the other day and there was a lot of marshalling yards but I — we went on the famous Dresden raid and Chemnitz the following night. We did our last op which was, the last op’s always frightening and we thought it was going to be a doddle because it was gardening which means mine laying. But we were caught two flak ships, and when we got back we had thirty eight holes in the fuselage.
CJ: So, did the aircraft systems suffer any damage?
GA: No. No.
CJ: The hydraulics. No?
GA: No. We didn’t. We had another incident on a daylight when we were hit and we lost an engine. And of course we were in formation but all the formation went because they were faster than us and there were American fighters overhead that were supposed to protect us but they didn’t. They went too. So, we were all alone in daylight over Germany but we got away with that as well.
CJ: And are there any other raids you particularly remember? Any operations?
GA: We went to Wesel when they were crossing the Rhine and we used to bomb on a specialist radar called GH which was very accurate. And we got a letter from the Guards. We didn’t see the ground at all. We bombed on the GH. And we got a letter from a Guards officer thanking us for our accurate bombing and that. And another one was Saarbrücken. We saw lots of motor boats leaving the island as we bombed. We didn’t, but some of them went down and strafed them.
CJ: And I think — sorry, on operations what was the procedure then if you were attacked by a fighter?
GA: Well, you corkscrewed. We actually shot a Focke Wulf down. You dived and rolled and then you climbed and rolled the other way. I picked up the — they had a thing called Fishpond which was a radar which worked off the H2S and you could see any fighters on there. And I picked up a fighter and the gunners shot it down.
CJ: And I think your last raid was shortly before VE-Day. Do you remember what happened on VE-Day? What everybody’s feelings were?
GA: I was on leave, and I sent a telegram to the squadrons saying that, no I wasn’t on the squadron then, I was on Bomber Command Instructor School. I sent a telegram saying I wouldn’t be returning that day [laughs] Received a telegram back saying, ‘Fine.’
CJ: So, lots of celebrations.
GA: Oh yeah. Yeah.
CJ: And where were you posted after VE day? Did you continue with the squadron?
GA: No. No. I went, first of all I went to Bomber Command Instructor’s School and then I was made Commanding Officer of a signaller’s unit. And while I was there we received a notice saying that BOAC was starting up and they wanted crews to be seconded. And they said only those with a first class CO’s reference would get it. So, I applied and I hoped they didn’t notice the applicant and the CO had [laughs] had the same signature. And I was accepted so I joined BOAC for a while. Didn’t like it, and when I was demobbed I left BOAC and I joined a firm called Airwork Limited.
CJ: At BOAC what aircraft were you flying?
GA: Yorks.
CJ: And what routes?
GA: Yorks. From Hurn to Africa. Yeah.
CJ: Wow.
GA: And then I started training, pilot training then and I got my commercial pilot’s licence. And after that I flew right for many many years as a pilot.
CJ: And, again what aircraft were you flying and what routes were you on?
GA: Well, I flew Ambassadors. I flew Britannias. I flew Viscounts. I had about twenty different aircraft I flew and the very Ambassador that I flew is on show at Duxford. The very one. And then I came down here and flew DC4s for Invicta Airways.
CJ: And did you have a favourite amongst all those aircraft types?
GA: Oh yes. I loved the Britannia. Yeah. A beautiful aeroplane. Yes. Yeah.
CJ: So, why particularly the Britannia?
GA: It’s hard to tell. It was, it was a big prop jet and it was very responsive. Lovely to fly. And you could go at thirty thousand feet for twelve hours, you know and, you know with two hundred people on board, and it was a beautiful aeroplane.
CJ: Right. And when did you stop flying?
GA: Well, in about — I can’t remember. About ’70 I suppose I had a routine medical and they found that I had type 2 diabetes so I lost my licence. If I’d have got it now I wouldn’t have lost it because it’s not a failure anymore but it was then, and so I had to stop flying.
CJ: Oh.
GA: Yeah.
CJ: I’m going to step back a bit because I believe we’ve missed 622 Squadron.
GA: Well, 622. When I flew for Airwork the RAF couldn’t cope with trooping and all the rest of it, so they asked Airwork to form an auxiliary squadron which was 622. And we had Valettas and we took part in the Suez Campaign. That was 622.
CJ: Ok. Thank you. And after the war were you able to keep in touch with any of your crew? Did you have any reunions or —
GA: Yes. Yes. I, the navigator and I were very close. The engineer went to America. All the rest of them went home but they’ve all died except Buzz Spillman. But I kept in touch with him up ‘til last year. But he’s getting dementia now so we’ve stopped.
CJ: And did you have, were there any squadron reunions organised?
GA: Well, they were all in New Zealand. What — it was strange. The navigator and I did a caravan holiday because we wanted to visit the old Mepal where we were based. And we went there and they said, ‘Are you coming down for the reunion next week?’ And we said, ‘What reunion?’ They said, ‘75.’ That was a hell of a coincidence but unfortunately neither of us could do it, you see. So —
CJ: And do you have any feelings about the way Bomber Command was treated after the war?
GA: I’m disgusted the way it was treated after the war. Yeah. To get [pause] recent I was very fortunate. When they gave out the clasp, I was one of the twenty that was invited to Downing Street to be given it to by the Prime Minister. And that was nice but to have that nasty little clasp instead of a medal all those years later was, was very, very upsetting. Yeah.
CJ: And have you been to the Memorial at Green Park?
GA: Yeah. I have. Several times. Yeah. Yeah.
CJ: Were you, were you invited to the opening?
GA: I was there.
CJ: The unveiling.
GA: I was there. Yes.
CJ: So did you manage to meet any dignitaries?
GA: No. I met a couple of New Zealanders that came over for it. But yeah it was a lovely day.
CJ: Ok. Well, we’re holding this interview at the Spitfire Memorial Museum at Manston where I think you’re a volunteer. Would you like to tell us how you became involved with that?
GA: Well, some years ago I wanted something to do and I’d always been interested in the museum. I’d visited it for years. And I said I’d like to become a volunteer and so recently I’ve been made a trustee and my job is to get the money together because we want a Spitfire simulator. And my job is to get the money together and to date I’ve got, within a few weeks this, I’ve got five thousand three hundred pounds. It’s not enough but it’s a big start for it, and we visited other simulators to see what they were like and what we should get. And the cockpit’s arriving on Monday so we’re getting there.
CJ: And what’s the, what sort of questions and comments do you get when you have school trips here?
GA: Oh, they ask all sorts of things. ‘What was it like?’ is the one which you can never answer [laughs] You know, you get asked everything and I like the school kids coming. I had, I had the party of Dutch and English last Saturday come which I took around, and I go out to schools and they come here.
CJ: Well, thank you very much for talking to us today and for giving us this interview.
GA: That’s a pleasure.
CJ: That’s a great insight. Thank you very much.
GA: Ok.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Gerald Joseph Abrahams
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Chris Johnson
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2017-06-17
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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.
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Sound
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AAbrahamsGJ170617
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Pending review
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00:19:02 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Gerald Abrahams was sixteen when war was declared. He volunteered for the RAF the day after the Armstrong Vickers factory where he worked was targeted by the Luftwaffe who bombed the local school resulting in the deaths of many children. He trained as a wireless operator and was posted to 75 Squadron at RAF Mepal. He and his crewmates were very aware of the poor odds of survival. On their last operation they came under fire from an anti-aircraft fire ship and found on return to base that there were thirty-eight holes in the fuselage. Gerald continued flying after the war and ultimately became a commercial pilot. He flew about twenty different aircraft including Yorks, Britannias, Viscounts and DC4s.
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Julie Williams
Chris Johnson
622 Squadron
75 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
crewing up
Fw 190
Gee
Lancaster
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
RAF Mepal
Spitfire
training
wireless operator
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/617/8886/PPackmanDE1601.2.jpg
ba8928c4bf42a6031477dbdbb826e776
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/617/8886/APackmanDE161130.1.mp3
f2b524bbfce27b88bedbdd2f83f4cea3
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Packman, Doug
Douglas Ernest Packman
D E Packman
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Packman, DE
Description
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An oral history interview with Warrant Officer Doug Packman (1925, 1866208 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a fight engineer with 630, 57 and 44 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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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.
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CJ: This is Chris Johnson and I’m interviewing Doug Packman today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s digital archive. We’re at Doug’s home in Tankerton in Kent, and it is Wednesday the 30th of November 2016. Thank you, Doug, for agreeing to talk to me today, and also present in the house is Barbara Masters, a friend of Doug’s. So, Doug, perhaps you could tell me first of all please your date and place of birth and your family background?
DP: Yes Chris. My date of birth was January the 10th 1925. My parents Lucy and Ernest Packman had their one and only child, that of course was me. If my parents could have shown me the beautiful night sky due south at nine fifty-five pm, we would have observed the most wonderful sight. I refer to the Orion [emphasis] nebula. The first star to pass by this, in this constellation was Rigel. Standing at approximately 30, 25’ due south, approximately 188 magnetic. I of course, just newly born, would know nothing [emphasis] of this. My only interest would have been in the warm arms of my loving mother. We, that is mum, dad and I, lived with my grandparents at Coxett Farm, Hansletts Lane, near Ospringe, Faversham. I will give you its actual [laughs] location [emphasis]. North 51 18’, east 000, 51.116’. I very often pass by this lovely old farmhouse on my way to church at Stalisfield. I look on this as my place of birth and where my life and adventures began. When a few months old, my parents decided I must be christened. One fine Saturday, Sunday [emphasis] afternoon, my mother, grandmother and an aunt were all prepared for the short journey to the church of St Peter and St Paul at Ospringe. They looked around for my dad and found him clearing, cleaning his motorcycle [emphasis]. ‘Come on Ernest’ said my mother, ‘have you not yet thought of another name to give our lad besides Ernest?’ ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘call him Douglas.’ ‘Why Douglas?’ asked mum and grandma. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is the best motorcycle I have ever had’ [CJ laughs] ‘so why not?’ I was so grateful in later years to my old dad, but I am very glad he did not own a Rudge, B.S.A. or Matchless at that time [CJ laughing]. My parents and I very often laughed about this. We move. Some two years after my birth in nineteen, in 1927, we moved to St Marys in the Isle of Grain. I always remembered it as remote and desolate, but I suppose it did have a certain beauty. And I must say during my childhood, my father taught me to ride horses at an early age, for I have loved horses all my life. He also taught me how to handle guns and shoot in a responsible manner. When I was ten [emphasis] I could drive a car around the farm, also help repair stationary engines. I have a photo of me driving a Standard Fordson tractor at the age of thirteen [CJ laughs]. World War Two. As we all know, World War Two started in 1939. When I was fourteen I worked as a boy messenger for the GPO, both at Ashford and Chatham, and by the time I was fifteen my parents had both decided that I should work at home on the farm. I was just over fifteen when I decided to join the LDV, or home guard. I will be honest, this was not, certainly [emphasis] for patriotic reasons. I wanted a stout pair of boots for farm work [CJ laughs] so what better than British Army boots? On my sixteenth birthday, I was, I was given my first driving licence. I, it covered all groups, so now I could drive a five ton Bedford lorry, and just about everything else. I might add I have never passed a driving test [CJ laughs], it was not needed in wartime. I led a busy life. I studied for two evenings a week under the guidance of Oscar George, our rector. He was a brilliant man, he had patience with me and I soaked up all [emphasis] that he gave me to do, maths, science, history etcetera. I owe him a great deal, for without his guidance I would never have passed my aircrew exams. Long distance running was also taken up, along with boxing and unarmed combat. Being in the Home Guard meant guard duty at times. Looking back, I suppose I was very lucky for as you might know, there was a complete blackout during that time. The sky could be observed without the distraction of streetlights etcetera. I think it might have got me interested on the beauty of the night sky, and it’s always been there for me. Those times, times can never come back. When I reached my seventeenth birthday, I went into the recruiting office above Burtons’ buildings at Chatham and asked to join RAF aircrew. A few weeks later I went to Cardington and passed my medical A1 and two or three days of examinations. I knew I might have difficulties for I was a farm boy and in a reserved occupation, however after almost a year I finally wore them down. I suppose they got fed up with me, and at eighteen walked into Lords cricket ground and so started what was for me the great adventure of my life.
Watching the stars again. I suppose it was around August 1944 that we visited some part of northern Germany. I remember we delivered our presents and, there being rather a lot of flak, Alec told me to put on climbing power. I adjusted my engines to twenty-eight thousand, two-thousand eight-hundred and fifty rpm and boost pressure to +9lbs/sq. in. We entered dense cloud and about ten minutes later, emerged from this dense cloud at about ten thousand feet. The effect was truly amazing for the night sky was just brilliant [emphasis]. It was a moon and just about every star at its best. I can only describe it as like entering from a complete darkness into a brilliant theatre full of light. It has forever stuck in my mind. I well remember Claude, our navigator, coming out of his small office behind me and pointing at the Plough and Pole Star. I have, if I’d had my planisphere with me at that time I could have told the time by the star Dubhe or the Plough, pointing to the star. It was all so [emphasis] exciting. It was the wrong time of the year to see Orion in the northern hemisphere, but many years later, after Pegs and I got married, I purchased a 4½” Newtonian reflector telescope, so that we could both enjoy many evenings of watching that beautiful night sky. But of course, one could not enjoy the full beauty, for there are so many lights from our towns and cities throughout the world and it does [emphasis] affect the viewing. But I will ask the reader not to be put off. Sometimes maybe around January the 10th next year, if you are fed up of watching the box, and some silly parlour game, get up [emphasis], go to your south aspect door and just look up [emphasis] and with a bit of luck you will be rewarded with the Orion Nebula. You can always [emphasis] make the excuse that you are putting the empty milk bottles or the cat out [CJ laughs]. God bless you all.
CJ: Well thank you Doug, that was great. Could you perhaps tell me now – you said you’d been to the recruiting office and joined up and that you went through the medical, so perhaps you could tell us about your time during training and going up to joining an operational squadron?
DP: Yes. I, I was very anxious to join up, simply because we just wanted to give Hitler a bloody nose [emphasis] [CJ laughs], and, er, I, I arrived at Lords cricket ground on the, sometime in March 1943, and there I met up with a wonderful fellow who I would like to tell you about. His name is John Mannion, and John was one of those who did not [emphasis] come back. So I would like to say, to tell you about him now. Is it there? [Pause whilst shuffling paper.] I first met John at Lords cricket ground one sunny morning in March 1943. ‘Good morning, my name’s John Mannion, what’s yours?’ ‘Doug,’ I replied, and we shook hands heartily. We attended lectures and training sessions at St John’s Wood, Torquay and St. Athan’s engineering school in Wales, until the Christmas of that year when we passed our final examination and emerged as sergeant flight engineers to fly in the mighty Lancaster. John was posted to No. 1 Group. I was sent to 5 Group Bomber Command. We would sometimes meet up in Lincoln, go to dances, chase the girls, for we were young [emphasis] and the world was our oyster. No two young men enjoyed life more. Full of enthusiasm, we went to war in order to give, as I say, Hitler a bloody nose. By June 27th, 1944, I had completed about eight operations when I had one of my letters to John returned to me. John had been killed on the 25th of June 1944, somewhere over Europe, whilst flying a Lancaster with 576 Squadron. John was never to reach his twentieth birthday. My first wife Alice Ida and I went to RAF Bomber Command War Memorial at Runnymede to see his name carved in stone. It all seems like a dream now, but I shall always remember the great adventures we had in that short time together. I shed a tear. Who knows, John and I might meet up again when I depart this life, then we can resume our chatter and thoughts. Rest in peace John.
CJ: Aw that’s lovely.
DP: That is my dedication to all of those, and John, who died and never made it back.
CJ: Mhm. Thank you. So could you tell me please, which was your first squadron and how many operations you did, and the sort of operations you were doing?
DP: Yes Chris, I did thirty-four operations in total, and that was on 630 Squadron at East Kirkby in Lincolnshire. There was another squadron there, 57 Squadron was out sister squadron. Erm, we took, I suppose, about five to six months to complete that tour of operations and then we were rested and went to, I went to the Lancaster finishing school at Syerston as an instructor. I served at Syerston and flew many operations training people and then my pilot and I, the late flight lieutenant John Chatterton DFC we returned to 630 Squadron again as squadron engineers. Squadron instructors [emphasis] rather. And the war ended in Europe. We were all destined to go to Japan, or fight the Japanese, but the bombing of Hiroshima settled all of that and our squadron was disbanded [emphasis] and then John and I were transferred to 57 again as squadron instructors, and we took the place of Mike Beetham and Ernest Scott who was his flight engineer. Incidentally, Mike Beetham became Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Michael Beetham and he died two years ago. But then we moved from East Kirkby to Mildenhall in Suffolk where we joined John’s old squadron, 44 Squadron, and from there we flew operations out to Italy bringing back prisoners of war, so that was, that was it.
CJ: So when did you actually leave the RAF?
DP: Er, I left the RAF in around about March 1946 and then I was told to go to the Adjutant and said ‘go home and if you can get a job I will secure your release under Class B.’ I didn’t know much about what Class B was but I was looking forward to going home and getting married, but under Class B I was restricted to farm work until 1953/54, which wasn’t a very good move [laughs].
CJ: And looking back on your operational missions, were there any that you remember for the right or wrong reasons, when you, you thought you’d done a particularly good job or you had any close shaves?
DP: Well there was one close shave I had, and I think this piece of the aeroplane peller, propeller – [paper shuffling] I’ll show you – it might be of interest. It was at Revigny and it was on the 18th or 19th of July I think. I’m not sure I’ll have to check about that. Anyway, that night we went to Revigny and it had been bombed [emphasis] four times previously and I think [emphasis] we all thought it was an easy run for we went in, there was very little flak, we dropped our bombs and then there was just setting course for home when all hell let loose. Er, the mid upper gunner screamed out that the plane was alight [emphasis]. There was holes that appeared all over the place and I rushed back to see if I could be of assistance but he was enveloped, or rather that part of the aircraft was enveloped in fire, sizzed my eyebrows a bit and I reported to Alec, our pilot, that she was well [emphasis] alight. He then gave us instructions to bale out, and by the time I got back the navigator and bomb aimer had taken the escape hatch out of the bomb aimers compartment and we had a routine of getting out. I went, was going to be first, the bomb aimer, navigator, pilot, wireless operator would follow, the other two if they were lucky would get out the back, the two gunners. I, I’d dropped through the hatch as I thought, but the aircraft was in a spin and I was promptly, promptly dumped back [emphasis] in it again [laughs]. And there was no escape, all three of us were penned in that small area. I obviously was not on the intercom but the navigator or bomb aimer was still in contact, and Alec said ‘get him back up here to help me pull her, see if we can save her.’ I got up those two steps with their assistance – it was like climbing a mountain [CJ laughs]. So I got hold of the control column with Alec and we tugged and tugged [emphasis], and eventually she came up, but I remember seeing the top of Alec’s head, because I was laying on top of the canopy looking down onto him, or up at him, whichever the case may have been, and the next moment I was on the floor by his side. Alec got the aircraft under control, but he said afterwards that he looked at the speedometer and we must have touched four-hundred miles an hour in that dive, and it was pretty horrendous [emphasis]. Anyway, we got back, how we got back we never knew, but we got back and we were only ten minutes behind time, so it was – we were very [emphasis] lucky. But as we got out of the aircraft at East Kirkby I picked up a bit of the propeller which had hit my right leg and that’s it there. I’ve kept it ever since. I must say, as we got out the aircraft there was really no need to go to the rear door, we could have all walked out the side of it. It was just shattered [emphasis]. No tail planes, very little of the fuselage and yet we all [emphasis] got out of there, we were all [emphasis] extremely quiet, and there was not much laughter. But we went on operations the following night. But the aircraft I thought at the time was a write-off, but afterwards I found out that it had been patched [emphasis] up and it got lost I think on Stuttgart a few months later. But that was quite a hairy situation.
CJ: So the piece of propeller that you showed me – that was from your own aircraft?
DP: Yes, it came from starboard inner propeller. I feathered the engine, I had to stop the engine afterwards but we came back on three and, the Lancaster being the brilliant aircraft that it was came back no trouble whatsoever. So that was it.
CJ: Wow. And did you have any other missions that were memorable for good –
DP: Well –
CJ: Or not so good reasons?
DP: Well, at St Nazaire, the submarine pens at St Nazaire springs to mind. The Pathfinders had gone in and marked the target. It was brilliant [emphasis]. The sky – I was able to write [emphasis] my log and my engineer’s log without any assistance, just from the reflection of the, of the searchlights, it was enough, and as we were going in, we could see that they’d – that Alec our pilot said, ‘there’ll be fighters, so when we get straight and level over the target that will be the danger point.’ He instructed me to get in the front turret, so I stood in the front turret with Walter, the bomb aimer with his head between my feet, sighting up the target, and Alec gave the two gunners and myself instructions – ‘do not [emphasis] shoot unless you know that they’re coming for us.’ I think that was good, but all of a sudden I saw a dot [emphasis] in, on the horizon, and it quickly got – as it got closer I could see that it was a Focke-Wulf 190, and it was coming straight [emphasis] at us, point blank. And at the last moment it veered off over our port wing. It was so close that with the lights from the searchlights, I could see the shape of the pilot and also the oil streaks under its belly showed up. And I never want to see a Focke-Wulf or any other aeroplane quite that close again. It was a narrow, narrow day. And just recently, I’ve read in the “Daily Telegraph” obituary column of a German colonel, a friend of Hermann Goering, who ran the Wild Boar Squadron, so called, and he gave instructions to his men that if they ran out of ammunition and they couldn’t bring them down, just ram [emphasis] them. All I can say, I think that man was very kind. He either lost his nerve and we lived another day, so that was it. But that was very, very hairy that one. But apart from that we had the usual. Sometimes it was not easy, but we always [emphasis] lived to see another day, yes. But there we are. I think we were very, very lucky and out of thirty-four operations, there was no-one [emphasis] suffered at all. We weren’t hit, so God was with us [laughs] and, you know, it was marvellous. I would like to add this, that when we used to go to, down to take off from East Kirkby, each night or sometimes in the day, we would stand at the end of the runway ready for the green light and I would open up the engines, taking over from Alec, to give it full power and when I’d got full power on I’d always say, or murmur to myself a silent prayer. And that was to, to ask God to look after my parents and Jean my girlfriend and above all, would he let me see the sun rise in the east in the morning. And I used to say that every day, and I must say that it was good because my parents lived to a ripe old age and Jean, and I, are now almost ninety-two years of age. So, thank you God [both laugh].
CJ: Hmm. And did you go on to marry Jean later?
DP: Er, no. I married Alice Ida, partner and, in 1946, and we had eleven years of marriage and then, one Christmas she was, she went to hospital and she was diagnosed with leukaemia and they told me she’d got eleven, no, eight months to live, and she did indeed die on 8th of August 1958. So that was indeed hard, and er, it was hard in many ways because I lived in a very nice council house, an agriculture council house, but she died on the Saturday and on the Monday the rent collector informed me that, having no children, I would be required to vacate the house in a fortnight. So, I lost my wife [emphasis], my house and my job all in that fortnight, which wasn’t good.
CJ: And what did you go on to do after that? Did you carry on farming?
DP: Well I, I stopped on the farm, and I started keeping a few sheep and pigs myself, and I did that for a little while but I, I became ill and I was told to go on sea cruise and I did something that I never thought I’d do. I signed on the P&O liner Himalaya, and she was about to do a world cruise. And so I went away for six months, and in that time I saw Australia, New Zealand, the States, Canada, er Japan, New Zealand, and we did forty-four thousand miles, and I came back and Peggy, Patricia Penfold, who I’d known for many years, and although she was twelve years older than me she, we were in love and we married on that, when I came back. And we had forty-one [emphasis] years of lovely marriage. She died Christmas 2000, and that was it.
CJ: And you said that you were lucky that you and your crew survived the war. Were you able to keep in touch with them and attend reunions?
DP: Well yes [emphasis], I was able to keep in touch with my last pilot John Chatterton, he was a farmer in Lincolnshire, and also my pilot Alec Swain, he was a big industrialist in Manchester, and we kept in contact right up until Alec died [emphasis] and I was able to meet also the bomb aimer and the wireless operator, and Walter is still alive now and he lives in Kettering, and he’s indeed full, full, no he’s one year older than me, so he’s ninety-three. But it’s, so he’s the only one left now, yes.
CJ: And how, how did you feel that Bomber Command were treated after the war?
DP: Well I, I think it was a bit rough. We got criticised and I think it was quite unnecessary because at that [emphasis] time I think we were the only – it was the only defence we’d got was the Air Force flying, but we got shouted at and abused for Dresden and all that sort of thing. But I always thought that, you know, the Germans were bombing Coventry and the docks of London and all [emphasis] these other places, and I thought it was a bit unjustified. But yes, I suppose we didn’t get a medal, a campaign medal, but I’ve never been, I’ve never been, never been very interested in medals anyway so it doesn’t make much difference to me. I met, I never had any brothers or sisters, but being in an RAF aircrew, in a Lancaster, member of a Lancaster crew I had six wonderful brothers, and that [emphasis] to me was worth every, every operation I did. They were lovely men, marvellous people.
CJ: And have you been inside a Lancaster since you left the RAF?
DP: Yes [emphasis]. I was lucky enough to – when I was seventy years of age, John Chatterton my pilot had a son, Mike Chatterton, and he was flying the Lancaster at Coningsby and they were doing a flight from Coningsby to Wittering and he said that I could join them, and so we, we all assembled at Coningsby, John Chatterton, Dennis Ringham our gunner, Bill Draycott the bomb aimer and myself [emphasis], and we all took off with an escort of two fighters for Wittering [emphasis]. But the big surprise that Mike spread, sprung on us was that at briefing he said to the two pilots of the fighters, ‘when we leave Wittering, I will be handing over the controls to Doug Packman, and so give him a bit of airspace please.’ I was dumbfounded [emphasis], I thought he must have been speaking of somebody else but no, it was me, and it was [emphasis], I was so [emphasis] – I was over [emphasis] the moon. Anyway, true to his word, when we left Wittering, he allowed me to take over controls because it was dual control in that Lancaster, and I must have had a smile like the cat’s got the cream [emphasis], [CJ laughs], ‘cause as we flew on I thought of all the operations, I thought of my other crews and the boys, and I was really [emphasis] very happy, and after a few minutes Mike took over to do a beautiful landing back at East Kirkby. And a few years, a couple or three years later he allowed me to start up at the J-Jane at, which is at East Kirkby, it belongs to the Panton brothers, and I was able to start that up and, without any instructions, so indeed, I had my lessons learnt during the RAF had not left me, and that was it. So I’ve been very happy.
CJ: Well thank you very much for talking to us today Doug, that was excellent –
DP: Well it’s –
CJ: Thank you very much indeed.
DP: Okay Chris, thank you [emphasis] very much.
[Tape paused and restarted.]
CJ: Doug, could you just explain please how you came to have this bit of propeller with you?
DP: Yes. The, as the, this explosion, this terrific [emphasis] explosion came, I found out later it was from the Schrage Musik from possibly a JU88 had fired straight up, and they used to aim at the mid-section, which was the petrol tanks, and in this case what they did explode was the ammunition drums, and everything. That’s what caused the, the fire. But the propeller I – the starboard engine which I had to feather because it was running rough, had made a hole the size I would imagine from memory, much [emphasis] larger than that, it was about, ooh it was about a six inch square hole, this small piece had made, and it had been – it hit my leg as it came in but my well cushioned flying boot and thick socks, it didn’t hurt me at all I just felt [emphasis] it, and there it was, laying beside this hole. And looking at it, one can tell that it is [emphasis] propeller, or bits of a propeller because there was holes literally everywhere [emphasis]. Not large holes, the one, this one I’ve described was probably the biggest, but that’s it. And I’ve shown it to many people and they all say, you know, that’s it, the starboard propeller.
CJ: And the JU88 that attacked you, that was, that had special armament?
DP: Yes, they had upward facing guns which they could – that was one of the weak parts of a Lancaster, they didn’t have a downward firing gun or no way of observing, and they could come up underneath [emphasis] you, slightly come up underneath you, and then the pilot of the JU88, he could focus his guns right underneath you and it’s well known and documented that they used to aim for the mid-section, i.e. to get the fuel tanks really and, of course, the ammunition. And this is just what it did, but very [emphasis] lucky for us, it was just the ammunition drums that exploded and I suppose the incendiary bullets on that would have caused, you know, caused all this fire. And in fact, in that area it was just devastated [emphasis]. We didn’t stop to look at it, we just wanted to get out of it when we landed. But it was just naked framework if you understand.
CJ: Okay, thank you for clarifying that Doug.
DP: Yes.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Doug Packman
Creator
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Chris Johnson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-11-30
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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APackmanDE161130
Conforms To
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Pending review
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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00:38:48 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
France
France--Revigny-sur-Ornain
France--Saint-Nazaire
Temporal Coverage
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1943
1944
1946-03
Contributor
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Chris Johnson
Sally Coulter
Description
An account of the resource
Doug grew up in Kent. He joined the Royal Air Force at 18, as a flight engineer for 630 Squadron at RAF East Kirkby in 5 Group Bomber Command, flying Lancasters. He carried out 34 operations, followed by time as an instructor at RAF Syerston, returning to 630 Squadron. He describes two hairy situations over France with their ammunition tanks being hit by an upward-firing Schräge Musik from a Ju-88 over Revigny, and a very close encounter with a Fw 190 at Saint-Nazaire. They survived both situations. A move to 44 Squadron followed and he flew operations to Italy, bringing back prisoners of war. He left the RAF in March 1946. Doug describes his love of the night sky.
44 Squadron
57 Squadron
630 Squadron
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
civil defence
faith
flight engineer
Fw 190
Home Guard
Ju 88
Lancaster
memorial
Operation Dodge (1945)
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Syerston
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/606/8875/PMayBJ1601.2.jpg
67eb022aee54727f792c196613e31254
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/606/8875/AMayBJ161123.1.mp3
bca779d86d0b95dbcb09fc34a07901c7
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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May, Ben John
B J May
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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May, BJ
Description
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Three items. An oral history interview with Ben May (1925 -2018, 1894955 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 420 Squadron. Also includes a short memoir and a photograph.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Ben May and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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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.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CJ: This is Chris Johnson, and I am interviewing Ben May today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at Ben’s home near Canterbury and it is Wednesday the 23rd of November 2016. Thank you very much Ben for agreeing to talk to me today. So, we’ll move onto the first er question Ben if we may. Perhaps you could tell us where and when you were born, please, and what your family background is?
BM: Well, it’s my birthday today, and I’m ninety-one today. So, I was born in 1925 at Birchington in Kent. Now the family lived in East Kent, because my father worked for the local gas company, and er, as I grew up I tended to go that way and my first job was in the forge in the gas works, blowing the bellows, for fifteen bob a week. [laughs] I sort of grew up in the gas works atmosphere and I worked there until I was called up. I was a fitter’s mate there and we did all sorts of things. All sorts of maintenance, on all the equipment in the gas works, which is not terribly interesting but, er, very dusty and dirty. However, I was called up in, er, when was it. [turning over papers] Can you stop for a minute?
CJ: So Ben you were, we got as far as you telling me when it was you were called up. What happened then?
BM: I was a member of the ATC for many years.
CJ: So you were called up when was it?
BM: I was called up in 1944 as a flight engineer under training. I volunteered as a flight engineer and er, the first posting was to Locking, in Cornwall. Sorry Locking in Somerset after ITW in Cornwall. That was very interesting, standing on the cliffs doing signalling [laugh] in the wind. And then my next posting was to St Athan, number 4 School of Technical Training, where I started on the one-year long flight engineer course. Um. At the end of that I passed out on my nineteenth birthday and, er, I can’t read that [?] I’ll do it from, and, er, went down to— I am sorry I got stuck.
CJ: So Ben you were telling me about your training period?
BM: Yes after a couple of years in the ATC in Margate I found myself, I had volunteered for aircrew by then of course. All aircrew were volunteers and, er, I was called up in 1944 and went up to the Recruiting Office in Chatham. [laugh] Where they gave you a cup of tea and a biscuit and said ‘Well done, we’ll call you when we’re ready.’ So they called me up in 1944 and I was sent down to Locking in – down to Cornwall, for initial training, and then onto Locking in Somerset for the first part of the course, and then eventually onto St Athan in South Wales for the 4 Flight Engineer Course, which lasted about a year. There we were taught not only the fundamentals of flying, but also about engines and all the other equipment. You would be amazed the amount of different pieces equipment that are on a bomber. Learned about compressors and filters, and all sorts of bits of gear you wouldn’t even think about. One little joke I play on people. I ask them if they’ve ever heard of changing gear in an aeroplane, and they laugh at you, they say ‘You can’t change gear in an aeroplane.’ But the fact is you can, because there is the two-speed gearbox on the, on the supercharger of the Hercules engine which we flew with, and as you climb the air pressure outside drops away and then you have to change gear on the supercharger. So it always raises a smile when you say you’re changing gear on an aeroplane. Anyway, we learned all about the different systems. Can I stop a minute and start again?
CJ: So Ben you were posted to St Athan for more training. Would you like to tell us what happened from then on?
BJ: That was No. 4 School of Technical Training. It’s a one–year course for flight engineers, and you go through just about every part of the aero – by then you were what they called type cast, type trained. You were selected for one of the four aircraft. There was the Halifax, the Lancaster, the Stirling and the Sunderland which we were being trained for. So you were selected for one of those and in my case it was the Halifax. So, everything on the Halifax was of interest to you and we went on this one–year course, which took just about every part of the Halifax aeroplane and explained it to you. Not only explained it to you, drilled it into you, you had to learn every part of it. What every bit was for and how to maintain them and so on when you were away from base and what to do, you know. There was an awful lot to learn and, er, that took about a whole year to learn that, and, er, and, er, after which I was posted away to a squadron which was Number 420 Squadron which was one of the Royal Canadian Air Force squadrons. It would come over here, they’d brought over a lot of aircrews which were, which were short of a flight engineer, because the Canadians didn’t train any flight engineers, and so as, when the crews came through they selected some of us. They literally dumped us in it, they said, about twelve of us and this bunch of Canadians came along and started crewing up with somebody you know. Very embarrassing that was sitting around waiting for somebody to pick you. But this tall guy came along, asked for me. He’d been reading the notes I think, [laughs] the examination notes and saw something he liked. And so he came and asked for me. I said ‘Well I don’t know any of you, it’s all the same to me so I might as well join your crew.’ And I’m glad I did because they were marvellous, absolutely wonderful guys. And so, we were crewed up and went to further training then. Eh, [pause] I’m sorry I’m getting lost. When we got our crew we embarked on a load of long flights, long training flights. Like a flight from Yorkshire up to Edinburgh and then back down to Cornwall then back home again. So we got some really good experience on long flights, which entail an awful lot of different things to a short flight, where you have to manage the fuel because on the Halifax there were fourteen fuel tanks, and fuel had to be used in a certain order and then some overload tanks pumped from one tank into another and so as to make it go as far as possible. So it was, it was a busy, flight engineer was a busy job, you were always on the go doing something. You had to read all your instruments every twenty minutes, record them or every half an hour. All the oil pressures and the fuel pressures and the cylinder head temperatures and so on, keep a good eye out on your engines. And er, you know, we gelled together as a crew, and we became very good friends. In fact they’ve all been to my house here, all my Canadian friends and I’ve been to all their houses in Canada. So we were really good friends and I suppose that helped us get through the war really. Anyway we were, after a bit more training we were posted to a squadron which was the same as the Canadian squadron, and we went on operations from there. Our first operation was a little town in the Ruhr. We got through that alright and we felt a lot better then, after the first one. But we carried on flying to the end of the war, managed to get – must have been eleven or twelve flights in over Germany, and, er, you know, well we got, looked forward to life out of the flying. I’m sorry I’m not doing very well. [Appears to be a little upset]
CJ: It’s alright.
BM: Life on a squadron is quite different from anything else in the service because there’s a different atmosphere about it. And eh you all know that you’re doing a dangerous job and you might not be here tomorrow was the general feeling, but eh, we settled in quite well, because the Canadians were very hospitable people. They never left me behind when they went out for a drink at night, I was always there with them and they were good mates. We em, [pause] we, we spent a lot of time [pause] talking about, about home. Because home for them was Canada, it was quite different from anything else I’ve seen at that time and er. [pause] And I will tell you something about a typical day on the squadron, eh? Life on the squadron was ruled by daily routine orders and you had to go down to the notice board every day and have a look because woe betide you if you missed something. If ops were on there was an almost palpable atmosphere around the Station because everybody knew that we would be flying that night, so we’d go to the briefing and er, depending whether it was a day or night operation could be late in the day or at mid-day sometimes, and you’d go back to the hut and have a, write your last letters home. [laugh] Write a letter home to your mother always and er, and then you go up to the, to the mess and have a flying breakfast. We were very privileged actually aircrew, whenever we were flying or on an operation we got egg and bacon for breakfast. That was unheard of during the war; we were very, very lucky. [laugh] But er, I suppose we earned it. So you’d go to, you’d go to the mess and have your break, have your flying breakfast, and then you’d go and wait in your huts until we knew what briefing time was and er, then you’d all go into the hut. In the briefing hut there was a very distinct atmosphere about, because the CO would, or the intelligence officer, would pull back the curtains on the target over the, on the stage. There was a pink ribbon stretching from your flight all, following your flight plan it would show you where the target was. And er it was a bit er, you know but you knew it was serious so you got on with it. But we, we flew operationally until just before the end of the war. One particular flight was notable because there was a –, it was a long, long flight to the island of Heligoland which is off the German coast, and, er, [pause] while we were flying over the sea there was a collision between –. Well we don’t know what happened really. Some people say that this particular Halifax pulled the jettison lever, dropped all his bombs together and they – some of them banged together and it went, the bombs went off underneath his aeroplane, but I’m not quite sure that’s true. However the aeroplane blew up in front of us and we flew through the pieces, but we, we only got one crack in the Perspex so it wasn’t too bad. And, er, [pause] Another thing was that we noticed when we were coming back one day early in the morning. We watched a V2 rocket being fired from somewhere in Belgium. So we weren’t the only ones in danger because, that, that rocket landed in England somewhere. Killed a lot of people I imagine. Anyway, the um, the operations were pretty straightforward, because you’d been trained how to use the, all the equipment on the aeroplane. Lots, lots of different systems, lots of things to look at. My job of course was to monitor the fuel system because the Halifax had fourteen fuel tanks, and er some had to be used in a certain order so that they balanced and then the overload tanks had to be pumped into the normal tanks and what with that and doing all the other things. Like the other bits of equipment. Dropping flares and, and all sorts of little jobs that you wouldn’t even think about the flight engineer’s job was quite busy, um, [pause].
CJ: I think you mentioned on the Heligoland raid you saw a Lancaster dropping a Tall Boy bomb?
BM: Oh yeah, yeah I did, yeah, one thing, one notable flight was when we were going in over , over em ‒ . Now let me think where it was. We were going in over one target and there was a Lancaster, a Pathfinder Lancaster, Number 19 Group I imagine. Came, flew alongside us but below us about, about a thousand feet below us. He was carrying one of the first Tall Boy bombs, one of the very big bombs. A twelve thousand pounder I think, wasn’t it? Yeah it was a twelve thousand pounder and we watched, we watched that bomb go, we watched that bomb go down. It was absolutely amazing, it went right smack in between the runway. It was on the –, the raid was on the airfield in Helgoland and the bomb dropped right on the, the er, intersection of the two runways. There wasn’t much runway left when that, after that had gone off. That was quite spectacular. And er, we had to [pause/ a little confused] hold on. So one way and another we, we totalled up a, a total of eleven operations over Germany while the war was still on, because I mean I was only thirteen when the war started so I’m surprised I got into it at all. [laugh] Anyway the war finished and the flying finished and I was made, made redundant and so had to retrain, and, and er, the, the trade, I chose was, was um, [pause] oh God – . I retrained as a, as a fitter marine on the rescue boats. So it was, it was much the same job as the flight engineer’s looking after the fuel and all the equipment but on a rescue boat. So, but we were supposed to be going out to, to join the air sea rescue people but the war finished before we could go out, before we could get there. So, anyway I carried on in the Air Force until I was demobbed in 19 – , when was I demobbed? 1944 was it,
CJ: ‘47 was it, you said?
BM: hang on a mo. [Looking through papers] Yeah I remustered and retrained as fitter marine, with the intention of joining the Air Sea Rescue Services in the Pacific with the expected invasion of Japan, but that didn’t come off, because the atom bomb put an end to that, and so I finished my service in 1947 on marine craft. I, I retrained as a fitter marine and they sent me out to Singapore so I had a year in Singapore which was quite interesting. And er, so I came back home and got my demob suit [laugh] and er, re-joined civilian life. Which wasn’t easy because I hadn’t got a job and er, oh dear – .Anyway [pause], I’d always been interested in photography so, after the war, I got a job with one of those companies on the seafront taking walking pictures and er, I did, I did a year of that. Just kept the, kept the rent coming in and er, found it very interesting actually, especially when you get down on the beach chasing all the girls, you know it’s quite good fun and, anyway I packed that up. I got interested in photography and because the company I worked for said ‘what else can you do?’ So I said I’m, I’m quite handy with a tool kit, so they put me in the workshop repairing cameras of all things. But these cameras weren’t, weren’t like, like your little snapshot cameras. They were great big postcard size, negative reflex cameras, and they were quite complicated and er, the chap in the workshop there was very clever. He got me, got me making spindles on the lathe. I used to make the little roller spindles for him on the lathe and er, that was quite interesting. But then the workshop was next door to the commercial department where they did what we call proper photography. Real commercial photography, not the beach stuff, and I used to go into there and I got interested in that and in the end I decided to take my exams as a, as a, as a photographer. So I genned up and went to night school, went to, and I learned about photography proper, and er, then I joined [little confused] joined a company doing, doing all sorts of commercial photography, and er, managed to get some aerial photography in too, which was quite good. And er, I got really interested in it so in the end I went to night school, took my exams in photography and started my own business. So [pause] I kept, I kept the family, I was married by then and kept the family in groceries. [Slightly confused] I’m sorry I am not very good. Since the war my life has been in photography, professional photography and er, [pause] I, I tried to do as much aviation work as I could, but um, apart from the SR53 which was – I’ll go back ‒ . I went to work for a [pause/looking through papers] I’m sorry.
CJ: You said you were doing some aviation work and you were on this SR53 project, I think, which is a prototype aircraft?
BM: Yeah I went to work for er, I went to work for Saunders Roe, who had, who had launched the SR53 which was a rocket. Which was a, a twin jet with a rocket engine and a jet engine, and I did the air to air pictures of that flying in a Meteor. [laugh] And eh ‒ .
CJ: I think you mentioned some Concorde shots as well?
BM: Yes, I managed; I managed to get some air to air shots of Concorde one day. I dunno how I got that job but I did, I got some nice shots of Concorde in mid-air, and er, sold a nice lot of those. [laugh] But other than that my work’s all been in commercial photography. But of course, any time, any chance we get near an aeroplane. I go to air days, I go to air shows and so on and er, it has all been very interesting.
CJ: You mentioned that you have been over to Canada to see the crew and they have been here. Did you have regular reunions?
BM: Yeah, well my Canadian crew of course all went back home and they were glad to get back to Canada, but it wasn’t long before they invited me over there. And er, so I took a trip over there one day, and er, [pause] [unclear] I went two or three times to Canada. And my, my crew all came here, they all, they all visited me here. And we had some, had some, jolly good booze ups I can tell you, [laugh] as one does. But um, I am still in touch with one of them, all the (others), they have all passed away I am afraid. [pause] I am the last one of the crew left. [laugh] There’s one or two people that I know in Canada, but er.
CJ: And how do you feel about the way Bomber Command was treated after the war?
BM: You ask any one of the thousands of Bomber Command people, they will all tell you the same thing. It was treated rather shoddily. But er, I went up to the, to the big day when the Queen came and um, unveiled the Memorial. I spent a happy day in London doing that – and er, [pause] oh well. It is all part of life isn’t it, these things. [pause]
CJ: So were there any big squadron reunions that you went to or were the reunions just with your crew?
BM: No the only, only RAF reunions I went to were with my crew but, as I say, they have all been here to visit me here, and er – .[pause] As I say, I, I wrote to them for years and years and years but as I say I am the only one left now. Our skipper was in the timber business. He went back to running two big timber camps in Canada, chopping down trees. [laugh] [pause] er, [looking through papers] Yeah, we got through the war. We were quite surprised really, we, we got through without any real damage to the aeroplane. Our rear gunner got a piece of shrapnel in his, in his forearm. That was about the only thing that happened to our aeroplane, we were very lucky and er ‒ . Flying out of a little field in Yorkshire a place called Tholthorpe in North Yorkshire. The local people there were very kind to us. There was always someone to mend your socks for you. You know have a little word when you got a bit upset sometimes, and er, of course the village pub in that village, pub did a roaring trade with the, with the aircrew blokes. But er, I have been back to the airfield since actually, it’s still there, and the runways are still there and the perimeter track’s still there. Somewhat overgrown of course but er. [pause] Funnily enough my hobby by then was flying radio-controlled models, and I, I took one up to the runway and flew it off the runway. [laugh] That is how sentimental I am. [laugh] Yeah.
CJ: I think you mentioned one operation where you got, the aircraft was damaged by ack, em, anti-aircraft fire.
BM: Oh yeah we got some, we got a few holes in the aeroplane yeah. We got – on operations we got quite badly shot up one night with, with anti-aircraft. In fact when we got down there was, there was, seven large holes in the aeroplane. And er, I went, I went down to change, change fuel tanks. At that time when you have been out, and almost back home again, you, you, you use every bit of fuel that’s in the tanks so, I was draining this tank and you, to drain the tank, you, you switch the engine to that tank, and you, you leave it until the little warning light comes on. The little red warning light flickers and then it stays on steadily. You nip up quickly and change, change the tanks over then. But I was waiting for this to happen and er, all of a sudden one of the engines started to splutter a bit, so I changed tanks quickly and went forward to see what was wrong. Only, only found out later that the, the fuel pipes for that tank had been shot away, so I would have waited all night and it wouldn’t have come on again. Anyway, that is the sort of thing that happened, that’s why they put you on there.
CJ: Well, thank you very much for talking to us today Ben, that was really interesting and we’ll end the interview there.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Ben John May
Creator
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Chris Johnson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-11-23
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMayBJ161123
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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00:32:39 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
Wales--Glamorgan
England--Cornwall (County)
Germany
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Singapore
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Chris Johnson
Terry Holmes
Description
An account of the resource
Ben was born in 1925 in Kent and his first job was in the gas works. A member of the Air Transport Command, he was called up in 1944 and after initial training at RAF Locking he joined No.4 flight engineers course at RAF St Athan for one year. He relates about the number of items of equipment in a bomber that he received training on. He then specialised on the Halifax and was sent to 420 Squadron where he crewed up and flew long flights as part of his training. Ben explains in detail the duties of the flight engineer and how much work it entailed. Posted to RAF Tholthorpe, he relates on life in bomber command on a typical day.
The first of his eleven operations was to the Ruhr valley which was uneventful, unlike the one to Helgoland where the aircraft in front of them exploded and they flew through the debris virtually unscathed. On another op, Ben had a grandstand view of the release of a Tallboy bomb and its devastating effect.
At the end of the war Ben retrained as a marine fitter and spent a year in Singapore before being demobbed. After a year as a photographer, he spent time in the camera workshop repairing commercial cameras and became a qualified photographer. Moving to a commercial photographic firm and then Saunders Roe, he specialised in air to air photography, including the SR53 experimental aircraft and Concorde and still retains his interest by visiting air displays.
Ben has had exchange visits with his Canadian former crew and feels, like most bomber command veterans, that they were treated shabbily.
420 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
crewing up
flight engineer
Halifax
military living conditions
military service conditions
RAF Locking
RAF St Athan
RAF Tholthorpe
Tallboy
training
V-2
V-weapon