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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/300/3457/AMcDonaldD151013.1.mp3
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Dublin Core
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Title
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McDonald, Donald
Donald Alexander McDonald
Donald A McDonald
Donald McDonald
D A McDonald
D McDonald
Description
An account of the resource
Five items. One oral history interview with Donald Alexander McDonald (1920 - 2021, 410364 Royal Australian Air Force) as well as two letters, a concert programme and notes on his interview. He flew operations as a pilot with 466 and 578 Squadrons.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Donald McDonald and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-10-13
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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McDonald, D
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AP: So this interview for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive is with Don McDonald who was a Halifax pilot during World War Two [DM coughs]. Interview’s taking place at Don’s home in Doncaster in Melbourne [DM coughs]. It’s the 13th of October. My name’s Adam Purcell [DM coughs]. Don, I thought we’d start from the beginning. Can you tell me something of your early life growing up [DM coughs], what you did before the war?
DM: I was born in Melbourne and at an age too young to remember, the family moved onto a dairy farm at Koo Wee Rup [?] which is about seventy k south-east of Melbourne. I was born in 1920 and my first recollection of the dairy farm was in early school years, six and a half, seven. It was a pretty tough life, tail end of depression, appallingly low prices for our produce and there was a family of seven children, three girls and four boys so it was a, a tough life [emphasis]. As the result of poor income, low income, low prices, I had to leave school at age fourteen and I was lucky enough to have a, get work in the local post office and general store which was very much a part of Victorian Australian life. My wage was ten bob, a dollar a week for a forty-seven hour week. After a couple of years of that, I entered for an examination for the Commonwealth Public service and, and passed the exam. The examination was held in the Wilson Hall, the old Wilson Hall at Melbourne University. When I say the old Wilson Hall, it was a beautiful building but it was subsequent, post World War Two it was burnt down in a fire which was quite tragic. There was about four-hundred entrants for this examination and there were about twenty positions available, typical of the depression era or immediate post depression, world war depression era. And I was lucky enough out of the four-hundred, I came in ninth, and I misread one question, otherwise I would have gotten third, and I was pretty up, up staged about that because having only got to grade eight in school I was pretty happy with that outcome. And then of course 1939 came World War Two. In about 1937, just after I’d passed the examination for the Public service, I had to move to Melbourne to take up the position and was staying with an aunt and her, and her family. By the time I paid fares plus board and lodging there was no money left for anything else, and another guy who’d paid the same exam as I had, also from the country and equally short of funds, suggested that we should join the 4th Division Signals, because if you attended a parade one night a week you got the princely sum of five shillings fifty cents and, but that was one heck of a lot of money to both of us in the situation which we were in, and so we joined the Signals and so I was in the part time Army. Bear in mind there was no war, there was no ‘your country needs you,’ no loyalty, call on loyalty, no drums banging or cymbals playing to get you to enlist, it was pure economic necessity [emphasis] that we joined the Signals. I was a terrible [emphasis] soldier, absolutely shocking [emphasis] soldier. I didn’t think much of the Army and I didn’t give the Army any reason to think much of me. We attended our once weekly parade round and learnt Morse code and then came the outbreak of war, and with the outbreak of war within a month [emphasis] of the outbreak of war, I found myself in camp at Mount Martha, a newly formed military camp in Victoria on Port Philip Bay. Everything was absolute rudimentary. They were just still building the camp and our tents, we were living in tents and some of those leaked because they’d been stored at a military depot out in Broad Meadows, a northern suburb of Melbourne since World War One, and so they were pretty daggy [?] believe you me. As mentioned I was a shocking [emphasis] solider, I couldn’t – if something could be messed up, I would mess it up, and I’d do right turn instead of left turn on the, out in the bullring, the parade ground. My Morse was okay, I didn’t have any trouble with that, but apart from that I could drop a rifle in the middle of present arms and God, if you wanted to send a sergeant major ballistic that’s a guaranteed way I can assure you. I, I didn’t, I detested [emphasis] the Army and applied for aircrew and was accepted, and of course having left school at grade eight I was really playing catch-up. Our first Air Force camp was at Somers, purely ground subjects, no flying whatsoever, and it was rather amazing. As I say, I was on catch-up but in the evening quite often a lot of us would go down to the lecture huts and instead of going down to a picture show or camp concert or something like that where all the gym [?] there was – and we would help each other out on different subjects, whatever our forte might be, we would help someone, and I got a lot of help and made the grade as a pilot. I’d been brought up in a very [emphasis] strong, very astute Protestant family, and any thought of dropping bombs on people would have been absolutely abhorrent in our home, yet wartime dictated that was how and where I would finish up. I, I – after Somers initial flying training school, elementary flying training school was at Western Junction, the civil airport for Launceston, Tasmania, where we flew the Tiger Moth. Said to be unprangable, however I failed [?] up that story on solo flight. I apparently came in just a shade low, clipped the post on the boundary fence and finished up in an ambulance and in hospital. When I was well enough that prang meant that I had to have a scrubber [?] test with the chief flying instructor. He gave me an incredible [emphasis] drilling, he found out exactly what I’d learnt hitherto in my Air Force training, but I think he also found out what I hadn’t [emphasis] learnt and that was the important. And got to the stage [?] – he was very fair, very fair, he got to the stage of flying test and I think I – ‘cause this was a scrubber [?] test. Any, any messing up on this and my days as a pilot were finished. We, he put me through a few exercises in the air and then said [?] ‘trip’ [?], said ‘take it in and land it.’ And I think I did probably the best [emphasis]landing of my career. I absolutely breezed [emphasis] it on, you hardly knew when we, whether we were airborne or whether we’d touched down. Years later when I would try and relate this story about the perfect touchdown to my crew on a squadron they would laugh like all hell [emphasis], because they couldn’t believe that I could ever have done a decent landing. I from there went onto Point Cook, flew the twin engine Air Speed Oxford and – which was renowned as having bad stalling habits but I never did have any trouble whatsoever with them. Life – speaking from the viewpoint of mere male, to me life in the Air Force is very like life in marriage. Best to do what you’re told most times, the quicker the better, and as I say, happened to do what I was told I ended up in Bomber Command in, in England. Flew the, flew the Oxford again for a few hours and then OTU and crewed up and flew the twin engine Whitely, which was outdated pre World War Two and yet some of our very early people in Bomber Command had to fly the jolly Whitley on operations. No wonder their life span was so short. Alright, carrying on?
AP: That’s a, that’s a very good start. Sorry I wasn’t sure if you were carrying on or not there. Alright we might, might go back a little bit. The enlistment process – so you’re in the Army at this stage and you’ve decided to join the Air Force, so you go and sign the papers, presumably that was Melbourne. Can you remember much of the process? Was there an interview involved, some sort of medical tests? What happened on that day?
DM: Yes the medical test for aircrew was very, very strict, very exhausting and I passed that, not that I was in any great physical specimen then or now, but I managed to pass it. There were several interviews, one heck of a lot of questions, some of which seemed totally irrelevant but they were, they were there and they had to be answered. And it was a result of passing those questions and what have you that I was accepted and went to Somers on initial training school.
AP: What sort of things happened at Somers?
DM: Somers was great. Quite an emphasis on physical fitness, a lot of PT, a lot of square bashing or we used to call them the bullring parade ground drill. I formed an opinion there and it might be a totally incorrect opinion but I still reckon that to be a good drill inspector, the two main or the main attributes are a loud voice and not necessarily much between the ears. That might be quite unfair on DIs because they’re very decent blokes really when you got them away from the program, from the parade ground but they could give you one hell [emphasis] of a time when you were on the parade ground.
AP: From your assistive [?], your service flying training, so your Oxfords in Point Cook, you then somehow got to the UK. How did you get to A to B?
DM: We passed out of Point Cook, got my wings at Point Cook which was quite a thrill. Somers where we posted as instructors around various schools, flying schools around Australia. Some were posted as staff pilots flying trainees around other trainees such as navigators and bomb aimers around, flying them around to give them experience in the air and experience of navigation. I was from Point Cook and this, as I say, we had no say in, in what, in what happened to you. I was posted to pre-embarkation depot which was at the Showgrounds which are in a suburb of Melbourne. We were there for some weeks, awaiting, awaiting a ship. Shipping was very limited, very, very secret due to avoiding enemy action, not giving any secrets away in case – there used to be the saying: ‘tittle tattle buggers battle’ and tittle tattle, you know, words, things said unintentionally, if they got into the wrong ears, you have to be in a pub or something like that, and there was a fifth columnist there, well he would relay the shipping movements and make you ready made for a submarine attack. We, we were at Showgrounds for about six to eight weeks and then one Saturday morning, I can remember it quite well, they said ‘pack up all your gear you’re on your way.’ And we had no idea what ‘on your way’ meant. We finished up at Station Pier Port, Melbourne, weighed anchor late afternoon. Down port full of boat [?] and of course there was a lot of conjecture, a lot of guess work, ‘where are we going?’ ‘Well we’re going to Canada’ because a lot of our fellows went to Canada to finish their training, or ‘we’re going to South Africa’ because quite a few went there to finish their training. We got outside the hedge and turned port, so it was pretty obvious that we wouldn’t be going to South Africa. We hit it off, it was into the dark by now and about three days later we came in sight of land, and it was the coast of New Zealand. We entered a harbour, somebody recognised it as Wellington. We docked there, took on a few Kiwis and headed off again, much conjesture, conjecture [emphasis] and guessing. We all reckoned we’d be going to Canada – would we go around the, the Cape of South America or would we perhaps go through the Panama Canal, and we were heading off in generally speaking a north-easterly direction and after a certain time we were calculating our direction by the watch, you know, point the twelve o’clock at the sun et cetera, et cetera. And after a certain time we reckoned ‘oh no we’re not going around the Cape, we’re too far north for that,’ and then after several more days now, well we reckoned we must be passed the Panama Canal by now, and so it was guesswork, ‘where the heck are we going?’ And one beautiful, bright, sunny Saturday morning we woke up, walked out on deck, and were under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Harbour. Oh we reckoned this would be pretty good, we’d be able to paint the town red that night and, and, and you know, thinking up things we were going to do and not going to do, and about four o’clock on the afternoon, they pulled us into a floating jetty, probably a couple of hundred metres long, and on each side of which, shoulder to shoulder, were big black American policemen with rifles, all with rifles so there was no hope of jumping, escaping, doing anything that we, we would like to do. We were marched up on this floating jetty, straight into a train and that night instead of painting San Francisco red we were heading off east across America. And we spent five days and four nights on the train and ultimately – I better finish this [AP laughs] – we had five days and four nights on the train trans-America, experienced some very kind and generous hospitality from ladies clubs and that sort of things at stations where we’d pull up to refuel with coal or top up the water on the steam engine train. Some extremely [emphasis] generous hospitality, and we ultimately arrived early in the morning at a place called Camp Myles Standish. It was a transitory camp just outside Boston, from memory about thirty miles outside Boston. The nearest town was a place called Providence. We were given – ah when we arrived at Myles Standish we were taken off the train onto trucks and then dumped inside the gates of the camp, and the Americans had a band there to welcome us and they played us into out billets to the tune, among others, of “Waltzing Matilda,” and that was pretty great, pretty special of them to do that. We were granted leave that night and we went into the local what they call Legions Club which is the equivalent of the Australian RSL, and we were made very welcome, given the VIP treatment. We had heard during our time at Showgrounds in Melbourne that it was worth collecting a few kangaroo pennies. Now penny was currency at the time, the second lowest denomination of Australia currency, and some of the nine, pennies in the 1930s were struck with a kangaroos on the back of them, on the reverse side, and we were told that these were in great demand, the kangaroo. And we were having a drink at the bar of the Legions Club and one of us produced a kangaroo penny. Well the Americans who were in the club at the same time went berserk [emphasis] for them, and most of us had kangaroo pennies, as I say we’d been given the mail [?] about them, and if you produced a kangaroo penny you couldn’t buy a beer for the rest of the night. There wasn’t a bloke who – the recipient wanted to shout it for the rest of the night, so that was pretty good fun. After about, I think about two and a half weeks in Myles Standish, there was nothing to do. A few of us shall we say got itchy feet, and five of us decided that we would go AWL down to New York. Fancy being within a few hours of, you know, the Big Apple and not getting there, the temptation was too great. So we sneaked out of camp undetected, got into Boston to the railway station, and thankfully, very, very thankfully bought return tickets. It was a bit over a four hour trip down to New York and we had a great [emphasis] time. The Americans, the Australian uniform, Air Force uniform stood out fairly well because it was known as Air Force blue and it had Australia on the shoulder pads and we, we had a great time. The one thing though which we did [emphasis] discover was that an Australian pound didn’t go very far in New York and a sergeants pay as we then were, a sergeants pay was not very great and after about I think it was fourth day the five of us were all stone motherless broke [emphasis]. We didn’t have two pennies to rub together, and so this, as I say, was the good thing about buying a return ticket. If we’d, if we’d bought a one way ticket we’d have been stranded in New York, so we, we thankfully as I say, had the return ticket. Went to the station about ten o’clock, caught a train about ten o’clock at night, got back into Myles Standish somewhere between two or three o’clock in the morning. Again undetected, and hadn’t been in bed long and we were shaken awake, ‘wakey, wakey, wakey, wakey, you’re on your way.’ Well as I say, the good – there is a wonderful [emphasis] virtues of being stone motherless broke, not having two pennies to rub together. The great virtue on this occasion was okay we were awoken as I say after a couple of hours in bed, on another train and we finished up in Canada, a place called Halifax, a port, and we were put on a ship on our way to England. Now, the beauty about having the return ticket was this: had we not been able to catch the train to New York back to Boston [emphasis], we would have missed the ship from Halifax to England, and would have been classed as deserters. Now, desertion is a very, very serious offence in the forces and instead of getting the ship to England, we’d have been put on a ship back to Australia and arrived in Australia in handcuffs and gone straight to jail, so don’t ever worry I suggest about being stone motherless broke, it can have its virtues [AP laughs]. The ship was the, the ship from Melbourne had been the New Amsterdam which in peacetime was a luxurious Dutch liner. It had been revittled [?] in South Africa and there was only about three hundred of us airmen and about another forty or fifty New Zealanders so it was a pretty comfortable [emphasis] life. We got onto the ship in Halifax, it was the Louis Pasteur which had been a luxury French trans-Atlantic liner pre-war converted to a, a troop ship. America was in the war by now, and there were fourteen thousand [emphasis] troops onboard the Louis Pasteur. It was just incredibly packed, we didn’t get anything, the bell would ring for mess and there was nothing that even resembled edible food. You couldn’t blame the cooks, trying to cook for fourteen thousand people, they didn’t have a hope [emphasis]. The ship, for the first couple of days out we had a Destroyer escort and they were incredible, the way they would charge around. You’d swear they were going to be cut in half, they’d just you know, clear the bow of the Louis Pasteur and the Louis Pasteur, bear in mind you’ve got some pretty big Atlantic seas once you get out of a little bit from the coast, big, big waves, and the Louis Pasteur changed course every seventh minute. Quite violent change of course, and the reason for it being every seven minutes was it took a German submarine eight minutes to line you up and shoot a torpedo at you, so by changing course every seven minutes you had the German subs pretty much at your, your mercy, but it was very violent change of course. That plus the mountainous Atlantic seas, you really were getting your money’s worth I can tell you, and at times fourteen thousand troops – there was no treatment for the sewage it was just pumped out, raw sewage pumped out, and with these violent waves plus the also violent change of course of our ship, it was quite possible at times to have waves break over the stern of the ship and you’re up, you’re standing there knee deep in raw, untreated sewage. Strangely enough we didn’t hear – there may have been but if there was any sickness, any outbreak of sickness it was kept a very, very clever secret because there was never any word of it or any indication of a, a sickness outbreak from this as I say, almost living in untreated sewage sometimes. But after, after about three days I think it was, three or four days, the Destroyer escort just disappeared and one day we saw a speck on the horizon and there was much conjecture, ‘is it one of ours or is it one of theirs?’ It was an aircraft in the distant horizon and it turned out it was a four engine RAF Sunderland flying about and it took over the escort until we got almost, almost into Liverpool and another Destroyer came out and met us, took us under its wings for the last few hours, and so we landed at Liverpool late in the afternoon. Most wharf areas that you go to are not terribly exciting. This far from being exciting was rather depressing because it had had its share of Jerry bombs dropped on it and there was devastation everywhere. It was a quite a depressing sight actually, yeah.
AP: So that’s probably one of your first impressions of, of wartime England, is the –
DM: That’s right –
AP: You know, bombing damage.
DM: Yeah.
AP: This is the first time you’ve gone overseas presumably.
DM: Yes, yes, yes.
AP: As a young Australian, what did you think of wartime England?
DM: It was interesting. We’d left here at the end of early, rather early March, early March at the end of a rather dry and harsh Australian summer, and we got on a train at, at Liverpool and the first hour or two was in daylight and the – having left the harshness, the brown harshness of an Australian summer – there of course it, in March, you’re into spring and the various shades of green on the trees, the far [?] leaves. There was such a contrast to what we’d left back here about six or eight weeks earlier, and if it was very, very impressive without a, without a doubt. Beautiful shades of, of green, it was very, very impressive. We went from Liverpool by train down to Bournemouth. There were a number of delays in the journey, and we got into Bournemouth getting on towards midnight and that was our, we were to have our, that was to be our first English meal, a meal of English rationed foods. Our mess there had been an indoor bowling green in peacetime. Bournemouth is on the south coast as you almost certainly know, one of the most popular holiday spots in England pre-war but it had been evacuated. All the women and children had been evacuated out to the country. It was almost like a service town. All the hotels which had been packed with tourists in peacetime were taken over and used as billets for the three services. We – that was actually on a Saturday night and we got up on the Sunday morning and there was a church parade. Those of you who have been in the services know what it was, the Catholics went one way, the Jews went another way, the Protestants went another way, off to your various denominational services. We came out of our church service – the Catholics had an earlier service than us and some of their guys had gone back to their hotel, got their ground sheets which were a waterproof sheet, multipurpose thing, and laid them out on the lawns and there were a lot of lawns in Bournemouth, and they were enjoying a bit of Sunday morning sun [emphasis], and we came back out of church a bit later than them, and all of a sudden there’s a clatter, clatter, clatter. Now we’d been in England just over twelve hours – clatter, clatter, clatter. It was machine gun fires and so we suddenly realised ‘boy oh boy, this is a warzone.’ And the clatter, clatter from machine guns was German, what they used to call ‘tip and run raids.’ They didn’t do a lot of damage [emphasis] as such but they did cause one hell of a lot of disruption, and they were German fighter planes which would come in low, low, low over the English channel. Low so that the radar couldn’t pick them up, and when they got into, when they got over land they’d up to about a hundred and fifty, couple of hundred feet and they were just shoot. I don’t, I think at times they weren’t shooting at anything, they were just opening up their guns and as I say, nuisance value rather than damage. But interestingly enough I was saying these fellows had come home and come back to the hotel and got their groundsheets. Two of them were lying on a groundsheet, probably not much more than a metre apart enjoying the morning sun and a cannon shell ripped the groundsheet in two but neither of the blokes were harmed, it was quite, quite an initiation to, to fire and to the fact that they were in a warzone. We were there for a while, and there’s nothing worse for morale than having a congregation of guys with nothing to do so the powers that be decided that they would send us to a battle course up just outside Newcastle, Whitley Bay, just outside Newcastle. Here we were to have our introduction to Pommy drill instructors. Now when they use the word Pommy, often it’s used as a sort of derisive type of word. Later on I was to have five Poms in my crew, and whenever I use the word Pom it’s not one of disrespect, it’s more likely to be one of admiration. And anyway, I might have mentioned earlier about the main qualifications to be a good drill instructor being a loud voice and not much between the ears – these Pommy drill instructors did nothing to change that opinion. Whitley Bay had concrete strips, concrete streets, and this was a battle course to harden us up. We were, you know, scaling fences, going into trenches, God knows what, and marching clip-clop along the concrete streets with Army boots which had steel toes and steel heels, and we just about drove the Pommy drill instructors nuts when it came too hot [emphasis]. They would sound like a machine gun, and they used to let us know this, instead of – hot, you know, everybody exactly the heel on the ground at the same time sounded like a machine gun, and they, the more – they would take it out on us, they would make us double, they would make us run with our rifle above our head, but then at night we’d get in the mess or one of the local pubs and have a beer together and laugh our heads off with the Pommy DIs knowing quite well it was going to be more of the same tomorrow. But it didn’t do us, do us any harm, and from there we weren’t back to Bournemouth and on to AFU, an advanced flying unit which was where we flew the Oxfords again. Got a few hours up, the flying conditions were just so [emphasis] different there from what they are back in Australia, though Pommy instructors, and they bet us that they could take us up in the air, fly us around for quarter of an hour and we would be lost [emphasis]. They won the bet. The conditions, particularly around, we were just outside Oxford, and there are railways lines going everywhere [emphasis]. In Melbourne, Point Cook, if you’ve struck a railway line, spotted a railway line going west it’s almost certainly going to go to Bellarat. If it’s going north it’s almost certainly going to Seymour. Here you had railway lines going everywhere, little paddocks about ten, fifteen acre paddocks, whereas here we used to paddocks of hundreds of acres, and the instructors, as I say, won the bet. We were hopelessly lost after a quarter of an hour in the air. Good fun, all good plain sport, we used to have some good laughs about it, and from there we went to OTU, operational training unit. This was where you crewed up, which was quite an interesting exercise. There were probably about twenty-five or thirty of us on the course, and so you were going to have a crew of five, so it meant you had about shall we say thirty pilots, thirty navigators, thirty bomb aimers, thirty wireless ops, thirty tail gunners, and we were put in a hangar together and told to, you know, see if you could pick out someone you liked, you thought you’d like to fly with, and I saw a bloke standing there and went over and spoke to him, and his name was Pat. He was a navigator and started off, mostly, most people started off as a navigator. Skippers, most skippers started off as a navigator, and I had a bit of a yarn with Pat and Pat was, as the name might suggest, an Irishman and he was a wild Irishman. He’d been in a mercenary in the Spanish civil war when they were overthrowing I think it was King Alfonso that was overthrown. Pat was pretty wild sort of a guy and we decided, had a bit of a yarn. ‘Okay well do you want to try, do you want to, do we want to have a go together?’ ‘Yep.’ So then we looked around and saw a few bomb aimers and walked over and had a bit of a chat, and ‘ah yes,’ same sort of thing. So by now we were a crew of three, and the three of us then looked, went over to where the wireless ops were assembled, talking around and what have you. Incidentally, as I mentioned, Pat was a wild Irishman, the bomb aimer was a Kiwi, a New Zealander, the wireless op was from, a Pom from Cheshire, it was culturally [?] often called Cheese, nicknamed Cheese, and, and the – so we were a crew of four by now, picked, like picking number out of a hat really, and then we went over and had a look at the gunners and picked up a fellow, Taz Mears, who was a Pom from Brighton, and so there was the five of us and we decided we would give it a go together. The only unfortunate thing that broke that crew up was Pat got pneumonia and the Bomber Command appetite for replacement crews was insatiable [emphasis] so we couldn’t wait, we weren’t allowed to wait for Pat to get back out of hospital and rejoin us. That might have put a week or two weeks delay on our availability at the squadron, and so the CGI, the chief ground instructor, got us together and asked us would we try another guy who had been separated from his crew. Well this other guy was very, very different from, almost the opposite to, to Pat. He was an ex-public, an Englishman, ex-public school, a bank clark, and our initial meeting was to say the best was quite cool, quite – and when I say cool, not cool the way kids use it today, it was cold, it was frigid. But anyway, we didn’t have much option but to give it a try and it turned out to be good, he turned out to be a top navigator. He, he was ten years my senior, I was twenty-two, he was thirty-two. There were times where he was a steadying influence on the whole crew due to that bit of extra maturity, and we finished up despite the frigidity of our initial meeting, we finished up great mates. We, I went to his mother and sister, the father was deceased. The mother and sister lived at Exmouth, just outside Exeter in Devon, and I went down to their place numbers of times on leave, and the way they treated me was embarrassing. The food rationing in England was extremely severe, like two ounces per person per week of meat, two ounces of either butter or margarine per person per week, one egg per person per week, and we used to say perhaps, but they would save some of these rations so that when Wally and I – his actual name was Philip, Philip Hammond, but the English opening bat test, cricket batsman at the time was Wally Hammond, so Wally, Philip became Wally Hammond as far as the crew was concerned. But we finished up as I say mother and sister would save a couple of pieces of meat so we could have a bit extra and it was embarrassing [emphasis]. They killed us, killed me with hospitality. From OTU we were flying the old Whitley aircraft, a twin engine thing that was out of date before the war started and yet in the very early stages of the war, airmen had to fly the things on operations over occupied Europe, and it is no [emphasis] wonder that the losses were so great. As I say, there were hopeless [emphasis] bleeding aircraft, heavy on the control, sluggish to respond, low air speed, nothing going for them really. But we finished OTU, had a couple of nasty incidents there, and then onto the four engine Halifax. We were stationed just outside York and here further crew selection went on. We had to get a mid upper gunner and a flight engineer, and the same thing as I mentioned at the OTU, you went and had a yarn with a couple of blokes and we finished up with a fellow Pom from Newcastle, his name was Bell, surname Bell. To this day I have not got a clue what his real Christian name was because from day one with the crew he was Dingle, Dingle Bell, and what his true name was, as I say, I hadn’t a clue. And the other was a just turned eighteen year old, in fact I think he might have put his age on a bit, Johnny Cowl, and Englishmen from Kent as our mid upper gunner, so we had our compliment of five for the, for the Halifax.
AP: You mentioned a couple of nasty incidents at OTU, can you expand a little bit?
DM: Yes, the, the worst incident was there were only five crews on this particular course at OTU all of whom had been selected at OTU the same way as I mentioned ours, and we were briefed one night to do a cross country. Now cross countries were meant to get you ready, really ready for ops, and they could last five, six hours and the weather forecast was absolutely shocking [emphasis], and take off was postponed several times due to the weather forecast, and then ultimately it was decided that we would go [emphasis]. And as I say, why it was decided I do not know, but anyway, five crews, one had a crooked motor and didn’t get off the ground, another one of the crew took sick and I don’t blame him in view of the forecast [laughs]. I wish I [laughing], almost wish I had decided that I was sick, so there was two that didn’t get off the ground. Three of us got off the ground, one of them hadn’t gone far when he had a faulty engine and had to return, so that left two of us to – and of course we didn’t know anything about the other three, what had happened to them, we just pressed on. And after a while the control started to get heavy and as I say, the aircraft ultimately [?] was slow to respond and, and this was making it a bit worse, and then we started hearing things hitting against the fuselage and we couldn’t make out what it was, and it turned out, it was decided after we’d gotten back after everything was analysed that it was bits of ice flying off the propellers and hitting side of the fuselage. Things got worse and I lost our air speed indictor. Now what had happened, the pitot head – in case you don’t know what that is, it’s a little narrow tube that protrudes, protrudes out under the wing and the pressure at which the air hits that is converted to the air speed indictor in the cabin, via which we flew. Now, we lost the air speed indictor, and it’s a pitch black night, pitch, pitch black and so how the hell do you judge the airspeed if you haven’t got an ASI? Well with one hell of a lot of good luck, is all I can say. But anyway, we finished the, the course and got back over the airfield. Navigator did a marvellous [emphasis] job, incredible job, and bear in mind we’re only trainee crew, and I call out and said to the flying control, and told them, you know, ‘we’ve got no airspeed indicator and the aircraft’s hard to handle due to the ice, the wings and everything being so iced up,’ and the, the fellow in chargr of flying for the night was a flight lieutenant who’d done a tour of ops and a good bloke, good bloke, and he took over from the airfield controller and said, ‘okay, come in high, come in fast.’ And, which was good [emphasis] advice, no doubting the wisdom at all of his advice but how the bloody hell do you know fast when you haven’t got an ASI? So we, I, by the greatness of God and one hell of a lot, managed to do that and touched down. And it was screaming along the runway because I had come in really [emphasis] fast, screaming along the runway, brakes starting to overheat, no reverse thrust of course in those days, and the human mind is a funny thing really, I believe. I had my hands really full trying to look after and control the situation and I must [emphasis] say, just diverting for a moment, I must say the crew were absolutely marvellous [emphasis]. There was never a beep out of any of them, they each did what they were asked whenever they were asked, they fed whatever information they could to me, and they were absolutely brilliant [emphasis]. But anyway, as I say, we’re charging along the runway, brakes starting to overheat and lose their effectiveness and the human mind, suddenly it dawned on me about the excavation at the end of this runway. I would imagine there had been excavation and they’d taken the stuff out to build the runway and the perimeter tracks and what have you, and so ‘oh my God’ [emphasis]. You couldn’t possibly think of going into that, so I jammed on hard, hard left rudder, going as I say quite fast, and we went into a magnificent bloody ground loop and ultimately shuddered to a, to a halt and you know, we were off the runway, up the middle of the patty [?], out the middle of the airfield somewhere. And we hardly stopped, hardly come to a standstill and this flying duty officer who I’d mentioned to you, who’d gave us the instruction, ‘come in hard, come in fast,’ he, he was out there and up in the aircraft beside me, and anyway he was saying, you know, ‘good show, good show’ et cetera, et cetera, and we went off and, and were debriefed and went to bed. And we got up the next morning and they took us, drove us out to the aircraft, drove the crew out to the aircraft, and there were some bloody great slabs of rubber which had been ripped off the tyre when we went into the vicious ground loop at speed, and we, you know, looked and thought what might have been, what could have been. But we were by no means the main topic of conversation because the other crew I mentioned, you know, three didn’t go, we were the fourth. The fifth aircraft, he lost control [emphasis]. He couldn’t control his aircraft any longer, undoubtedly due to the icing and plus he may have let his airspeed get a bit low and perhaps close to stall. But anyway, he couldn’t control the aircraft and he gave the order to abandon aircraft, jump [emphasis]. And his bomb aimer – it was the bomb aimer’s job, he was the nearest to the front hatch, that was the only exit in the Whitley was the hatch at the front. He, his job was to lift the hatch, jump, and the others in theory follow, that was the theory. He lifted the hatch and froze, he couldn’t jump, and worst still he was blocking the exit, and the skipper, you know, he gave the order again a couple of times, and nothing was happening so he jumped out, out of the pilot’s seat to the front hatch, virtually threw this bomb aimer bloke out of the way and said ‘follow me,’ and he jumped because he knew quite well how low they were getting, so he jumped. Another two jumped and got out, but the bomb aimer and probably the tail gunner went in [?] and were killed. And I, I fell foul of authority because this skipper of course, he was being castigated. You’re supposed, you know, skipper’s supposed to be the last man to leave the sinking ship type of thing. Well I had the greatest admiration for him, because I’ve said, and our crew was agreed, better two blokes killed than five blokes killed, and I was told that I had to give evidence at, at a subject court of, subsequent court of enquiry, and I was marched in with a corporal with a bloody rifle, almost as though I was a criminal [emphasis], and I got in front of the desk where the chairman of the enquiry and a couple of other blokes were seated, and saluted and was told I may sit. And the way, the way the chairman told me, I think put us at loggerheads straightaway, you know. We used to talk cattle dog on a farm [emphasis] nicer than the way he spoke to me, and when I sat down he said ‘you’re, you’re required to answer some questions,’ and I [laughs], ‘I’ll answer any questions you ask me provided I can first make a statement.’ Well, t’was not spaghetti what hit the fan I can tell you. He lectured me about insubordination and this and that and the king’s regulations and God knows what, stathan’s [?] standing orders, and when he’d finished I repeated what I said, ‘I’ll answer any question provided I can first make a statement’ [emphasis]. And he was about to light up again when one of the other fellows on the board of enquiry asked what, why was my attitude such as it was, and I said to him just what I’ve said to you, I, the, ‘the skipper of that aircraft should be congratulated not castigated in my book.’ And anyway, after that a bit of reason prevailed and I was able to make my statement and the questions came thick and fast, and so that was, that was a rather nasty experience at, at, on Whitelys at the OTU so that was what I referred to before. From, from there it was – oh yes I, from there it was onto four engineer aircraft, Halifaxes, at a place called Rufforth which is now a suburb of York, it was just outside York at that time, and I finished HCU, that was called the heavy conversion unit, conversion on the heavy engine aircraft, heavy four engine aircraft, and I was posted to the Middle East. 462, an Australian Halifax squadron in the Middle East, and I thought ‘crikey.’ Just digressing a bit, my father came from the north of Scotland and he still had a couple of sisters, and I still had a number of cousins up near Inverness, right up the north of Scotland, and I’d been up to visit them a couple of times on leave since I’d been in England, and so going to the Middle East I sort of reckoned ‘well, I’m not half way home, I’m a third of the way home from Middle East, so I’ll probably be posted back to Australia.’ So I thought I’d better do the right thing and went up and saw my two aunties and cousins up in Inverness. We had a fortnight’s leave and I, after about a week or so, life up there was a bit dull and the bright lights of Lomond beckoned, and so I said to my auntie, said that I was going to go back down to have a few days in London before I left and that was all a-okay. If you change your address while you’re on leave you had to notify the adjutant’s office back on the unit where you were, so I sent a signal, no email of course in those days, sent a signal notifying my address as chair [?] of the boomerang club in London. I got down to London okay and sort of figured there won’t be much to spend my money on out in the Middle East, might as well have a good time here so there was no show I couldn’t afford to go to, there was no pub I couldn’t afford to drink at. I had an absolute ball and ala New York, just like New York I was stone motherless broke and went back to Rufforth, the camp where I was, the station where I was, and there was a party on in the sergeants mess so I borrowed ten bob, a dollar off one of my mates so that I could afford a beer and I was just about to have the first sip out of this pint of beer, and the CGI, the chief ground instructor came up to me and said, ‘what are you doing here McDonald?’ I said ‘just back from leave sir,’ and he said ‘well, your crew’s been, Middle East’s been cancelled, your crew’s been posted, you’ve been, you and your crew’s been posted to a squadron. The crew have all been over at Burn for two or three hours, two or three days. Be at the front door here with all your gear at seven o’clock in the morning and you’ll be on your way over there too.’ So, what had happened, I’d sent my notice as I mentioned back to the adjutant’s office, but they, they hadn’t profiled it, progressed it, hadn’t put it through the system and so I didn’t, the rest of the crew were recalled. They’d gone, you know the five Poms had gone home and Murray [?] had given the key, we, I don’t know where he’d gone, but they all got recall notices whereas mine hadn’t been put through the mill, and my change of address hadn’t been put through the mill, and so – but that was a great streak of luck, I would say, because I got over to Burn. The, it was almost straight into the CO’s office and he told me to sit down. He proved to be the greatest leader of men I have ever met or am ever likely to meet. He, I was Mac from the moment he met me. ‘Sit down Mac, I know you’re late arriving. Your crew’s been here for two or three days, but I also know that you sent a notice back to the adjutant’s office, you did all the right things’ he said, ‘you’re not, you weren’t in anyways wrong. This is a new squadron,’ and I think we were, I think we were the fourteenth crew there out of squadron strength was normally about thirty, maybe about thirty-two if you were lucky. We were about the fourteenth crew, and among other things he said to me, he said ‘Mac’ – and he’d already done a full tour, and had been selected to form up this new squadron, and one of things he said to me, he said, ‘Mac, you won’t – the only thing we’ll ask of you here is that you give off your best, and you’ll know whether or not you’ve given off your best,’ and so, you know, ‘go and get the rest of your crew round so we can have a bit of a yarn.’ And as I say, he was the greatest leader of men that I’ve, I’ve ever met but very, very [emphasis] sadly, he finished his second tour, was selected due to his ability and compatibility and all his virtues, he was selected to head up a very special training school and went over there. He always wanted to know what was happening to the men under him, and he wanted to find out more about what was happening, what was the routine with these fellows at the special school when they got in the air, and so he said to the commanding officer at this station, ‘I want to go up with, with a crew and find out a bit more detail.’ And the command officer looked his – ‘well everybody’s booked out, they’re all full crews today,’ and he says ‘doesn’t matter I’ll go with somebody, I’ll sit on the floor.’ And that was the type of guy he was. Sat on the floor and the bloody aircraft pranged on takeoff and he was killed after he’d done two full tours of ops, and as I say, his leadership, ah, outstanding [emphasis].
AP: What was his name?
DM: David Wilkerson.
AP: Wilkerson.
DM: Yes, David Wilkerson.
AP: [Unclear] record –
DM: Won a DFC on his first tour and a DSO on the second tour when he was in charge of us. David Wilkerson DSO, DFC.
AP: So you’re, you’re at your squadron now. This is 578 Squadron, am I right?
DM: That’s right, yes.
AP: Where and how did you live on the squadron?
DM: Beg your pardon?
AP: Where and how did you live [emphasis] on the squadron?
DM: On the squadron – David Wilkerson I just mentioned, the greatest leader of men, one of the things he said very early in the piece, ‘don’t muck around with saluting and things insofar as I’m concerned, unless there’s a senior officer there with me. If there’s a senior officer there with me, well then salute because they’ll wonder why you don’t salute me as a wing commander.’ And life on a squadron, there was no bull dust [emphasis], there was no drill, you did what was required of you. There wasn’t, strangely enough, a lot of flying because the aircraft was wanted for ops. The only time you did non operational flying was to do an air test if the aircraft had been damaged and you as a skipper and a crew who were going to fly it were entitled to fly it after it had been repaired, so you’d do an air test. Might be half an hour, you might go on a cross country or something like that, but there wasn’t, very, very little non essential flying. As I mentioned, David Wilkerson didn’t want any saluting. He didn’t have to demand respect, he commanded it by his own example, by his own demeanour, as, as squadron commander. He had to seek permission before he could go on an operation, the reason for that being the losses were such, highly qualified blokes were pretty scarce [emphasis] and promotion on a squadron could come incredibly quick. I knew of one case where a fellow got his commission, was a pilot officer and six weeks later he was a squadron leader. In other words, he’d pilot officer, flying officer, flight lieutenant, squadron leader, everybody above him had been knocked off, hadn’t returned from ops, and so within six weeks from pilot officer to squadron leader. Impossible if it wasn’t for the chop rate, and now and we – life was, I wouldn’t say on the squadron, I wouldn’t say it was ill disciplined, but there was no bull dust, there was no parade ground, no square bashing. As I say, David Wilkerson didn’t want to be saluted unless a superior was there, so it, other than when you were flying, I suppose a bit lay back is the, would be a suitable word. A bit lay back. The aircrew, the close knittedness if that’s the correct word of aircrew I couldn’t describe and I don’t know that anybody could describe. You just relied on each other, you were part of a close knit team. As I mentioned in that icing incident, not a mumble or a grumble from any of the crew and they must have wondered what the bloody hell was going on at times, but very – and mutual respect and likewise [phone rings] the ground crew [phone rings], they would do anything [phone rings]. That’s it, you got it. Absolutely anything [emphasis] for their aircrew, and the close knittedness if that’s the word between aircrew and ground crew was so close to that between the aircrew that it didn’t matter. We were, we were issued pre takeoff with compasses and escape maps and that sort of thing, and also with a thermos of coffee, some glucose tablets for quick conversion to energy, molten milk tablets, and a, and some very, very [emphasis] dark chocolate, was almost back, terrible [emphasis] looking stuff, and we would always try, the aircrew, try and save a few bits of that for the ground crew because as I say they would do absolutely [emphasis] anything [emphasis] for us, absolutely anything. And one night, I mentioned Wally Hammond, the navigator, an Englishman. Wally had quite a large nose – now I’m the last one who should speak about a large nose but Wally put mine to shame [emphasis], and one night we were on our way home and, bear in mind that the aircraft thermometer went down to minus thirty-five degrees, the needle went down to minus thirty-five, and it would disappear right off the clock, minus fifty God knows what, and this night Wally wanted to blow his nose. He had a bit of a dew drop, and he pulled off his oxygen mask but before he could get his handkerchief to his nose, a big dew drop fell down onto his navigation chart and was immediately snap frozen. Now, as I say it was a big dew drop and as you would know, a dew drop is almost semi transparent, and as I say, when these, with these chocolate molten milk tablets and et cetera, we’d always try to save something for the ground crew, and some crews they’d, they’d hide them, they’d have the ground crew in and have them hide and seek. We never ever did that, we’d always try and have something for them, and this night, as I say, this giant [emphasis] dew drop, almost transparent, and one of the ground crew came up into the nose, the aircraft, the navigator’s area [?] and looking for his goodies, and Wally said ‘would you like a dewb [?] Jonny,’ because it looked a little bit like a clear, transparent clear dewb and [laughs] well, Jonny – and he’d almost got it into his mouth and Wally smacked his hand and knocked, knocked it out [laughs] and told him the origin of the dewb [?] [laughs].
AP: What, what happened in an officers mess in a squadron? What, what sort of things happened?
DM: Well I wasn’t commissioned until fairly late in my tour –
AP: The sergeants mess then [laughs].
DM: Sergeants mess, you can have some real [emphasis] good piss ups at times without a doubt, and the officers mess wasn’t any, the limited time that I was in there wasn’t any, any different. No, no formality as such as there is in the permanent Air Force mess. They could be very, very formal you know. The draw with the wine at the end of dinner was a port night, you would, the waiter would put a port glass down in front of everybody, and then the very strict rule was that the bottle didn’t touch the table until it was empty, you had to hand it on hand to hand to the bloke next to you, right to left, right to left and things like that. Very formal in the permanent mess, quite informal in the, in the wartime mess. Just on the subject of mess, I would reckon the best Christmas dinner I had – well okay, take the ones you can first remember, first Christmas you can remember, they’ve probably got to be your greatest. For those of us who have little kids, the next best Christmas you could have was when your little kids open their presents and sat up at the table. My third, my best Christmas other than those two and nothing can supplant them, my next best Christmas was when I was instructing after I’d finished my tour. We were at a place called Moreton-in-Marsh, in the Cotswold country of England. For those who don’t know the Cotswold country, on the corner of the Moreton airfield was the four shire stone, a stone denoting the joining of Gloucester, Oxford, Warwick and Worcestershire, the four shires all joined together there, and I was instructing there, and magically out of nowhere about two or three weeks before Christmas about six or eight geese appeared and it was much activity making an enclosure for them. We pinched bits of wire form everywhere and made an enclosure for them, and so the geese was the, there was no turkey but there were geese for Christmas dinner. This was Christmas 1944 and there were a lot of Australians on the station at Moreton-in-Marsh, and a couple of them gathered the rest of us together and suggested, ‘look, we can’t get home for Christmas. What about if we go to the CO, the commanding officer, and tell him that all the Aussies are prepared to stay on the station over Christmas and let the maximum number of Poms go home for Christmas dinner with their family.’ This was accepted and all we Aussies, I was commissioned by then, and we went to the airmens’ and the WAFs’ mess and waited on them for their Christmas dinner. Went and got the, the meal out of from the kitchen and took it and put it on the table for them, which was great and they appreciated that, and then the same thing happened with eh sergeants’ mess. We went over to the sergeants’ mess and waited on them which was absolutely great [emphasis]. It was absolutely marvellous and we got our own Christmas dinner I suppose at about four o’clock or something in the afternoon, but that was very, very, as I say, next to being a little kid and then having your own kids. That’s the, my most memorable Christmas, mm.
AP: Do any of your, your operations stand out in particular?
DM: I suppose whilst it was – we had a pretty easy trip, although we did lose our flight commander. D-Day was incredible. As skipper, you’re pretty preoccupied watching your instruments, flying your aircraft, looking up from time to time for other aircraft because there were bloody kites everywhere [emphasis], but the rest of the crew were – and we were a very strongly disciplined crew, very strongly disciplined in that we didn’t tolerate any unnecessary chatter, but the sight on D-Day was such that I take my eyes away from the instruments and other things from time to time and have a look out. But the rest of the crew, you know, the, the, the gunners and the navigator and bomb aimer down the nose of the aircraft, the engineer had a window beside him, as did the, the wireless op. They, you know, the sight, all [emphasis] those watercraft, God [emphasis] it was an unbelievable sight. As I say, we had a, a reasonably easy trip but we did lose our flight commander who was very experienced, he was on his second tour, and [phone rings] he unfortunately, as we used to call it, copped the chop [phone rings], mm. Now that would be one of the most memorable. Couple of the others weren’t as kind as that [laughs] was, but that was an incredible sight.
AP: Are they, are those other trips something that you’re – are you able to tell us something of some of the other trips?
DM: Er, yes. Our – Karlsruhe was very unpleasant, nasty weather, a lot of electrical storms. Very, very nasty and it was pretty hot over the target. They certainly gave us a, a warm welcome. We were lucky, only, only minor damage. Now look, yeah Karlsruhe was the most, probably one of the most – Essen, they certainly didn’t welcome you Essen, you know, the home of crops. Germany’s biggest armament manufacture, they, they let you know that you weren’t wanted. My – you, as a skipper you were sent with an experienced crew. You’d done everything in the way of training except being put under fire, and to try to give you some experience there, they would send the skipper to an operational squadron to do either one or two ops with an experienced crew. We, I took off with one of the flight commanders and we had an engine fault and had to return early. The target was Berlin and that was, that was, this was the first briefing of course that you’ve been to and you’ve got no idea what you’re in for. And when the squadron commander ripped the curtains back from the map on the wall and said, ‘there’s our target for the night, Berlin,’ there were groans, there were moans, there were some said ‘not again,’ others screamed out ‘the big city,’ and that was interesting for a first time. And as I say, we had to do an early return. Couple of nights later, experienced by then, I’d been to one briefing, so I’m into the second briefing, and it was Berlin again and indicative of how temporary life on an operational squadron could be is this example. There were two of us sent over to, to Driffield, the Australian Halifax squadron to do our second dicky trip with an experienced crew. The other fellow, Doug, Berlin the target again, was shot down just before they were to release their bombs, so his total experience on an operational squadron was about four hours, slightly less than four hours. Berlin was about a seven hour, roughly trip seven, depending on wind direction and whatever, and his total experience on an operational squadron, four hours as I say, it’s indicative of how brief it could be. The second time I took off with another, with a different crew and we – interesting, you know, you’re sitting there in the co-pilot’s seat in a Halifax, take it from me, no aircraft, no wartime aircraft in which I entered had any consideration of comfort for the crew, and indeed they seemed to have protrusions everywhere which, you know, as though they set traps for you to hit your head on or bump your shoulder against or some such, but as second dicky in a Halifax you pulled down a wooden seat from the side of the hall. It had no padding on the back of it, just timber, and precious little padding on the seat, and nowhere to rest your feet. You dangled your feet in midair a little bit like a very small kid in a church pew, just dangled his feet and that’s all you could do. And so, as I say, no thought of comfort and the guy with whom I was flying on this second attempt at Berlin was a fellow named Gus Stevens. Very experienced and very good pilot, and I can remember approaching or probably about half way there, ‘oh this doesn’t seem to be too bad,’ and bit further, ‘oh I’m getting close to the target. I’m not too sure this is all that good.’ Getting into the target area, ‘oh my God, there’s, there’s, I reckon there’s a few places where I’d rather be,’ and then over the target itself, ‘I know bloody well there’s a whole [emphasis] lot of places where I’d [laughing] rather be.’ And anyway, we got in and out of the target area okay and we’re stinting [?] along on our way home when all of a sudden a heap, a trace of bullets started flying everywhere and we had one of the inner engines were, were knocked out. The rear gunner didn’t spot him. Obviously if it was one of those German night-fighter aircraft where they had the upward pointing firing guns, which was a very [emphasis] bloody miserable trick in, in my book. God, talk about all’s fair in love and war, there’s nothing fair about, about that. Anyway, the – this was interesting, we’d done plenty of fighter affiliation at heavy conversion unit. They’d set up Spitfires and Hurricanes to, with us and the gunners both had camera guns so that we could, the aim could be assessed when they got back on the ground. But anyway, and with, you know, we’d thrown the aircraft round corkscrew port, corkscrew starboard et cetera, et cetera, and generally speaking the rougher and more violent your corkscrew, the more effective it was likely to be. Would you like a beer by the way, or anything like that?
AP: I’m alright thank you, but you’re happy to keep going? Carry on?
DM: No, no I hope I’m not boring you.
AP: Oh not at all.
DM: Anyway, the, one of the, I think it was the port inner engine got knocked out, but Gus Stevens, the pilot, the skipper told me to feather the engines so he could keep his both hands on the control column and put it into a steep dive. Well, there was almost like a deadly silence other than air swishing around, and Gus had, we worked it out later what he’d done, he’d put it into such an incredible [emphasis] dive, used such force that all the petrol, all the fuel was forced up centrifugal force off the bottom of the fuel tanks, and you had what was known as constant speed control on your, on your propellers, but the moment they were relived of any load [emphasis] they just went into runaway mode, and so, as I say, you had this short period when the fuel was off the bottom of the tanks and you just had air rushing by and then when he pulled it back in and the fuel went back onto the bottom of the tanks and entered the fuel allowance [?], entered the motors – the motors of course as I say, they had constant speed, like governors on them and, which governed the air, the air screw, the propeller speed to about three and a half thousand revs, but with this load moved, taken off them, I reckon they were probably at about four and a half thousand. And then when the petrol went back and into the – the bloody row [emphasis], the vibration of the – I didn’t realise what punishment a hellick [?] would take until that moment. You know, I thought I’d done some pretty rough and tough stuff on [phone rings] when we were doing [phone rings] our fighter affiliation in training, but nothing [emphasis] like [phone rings] this. Bloody vibration it shake [emphasis], I thought the thing would shake to pieces.
AP: I suppose that shows the value of the second dicky trip, going with an operational pilot [unclear] –
DM: That’s right, that’s right, yes, ah yes, yes, yes.
AP: It’s yeah, unreal.
DM: Yes, and interesting side line to that was back at the heavy conversion unit, the training unit again the next day, the CGI, chief ground instructor – there was a class in progress, I’ve forgotten what it was, and I was marched in and he said ‘I want you to tell your experience, your experience from last night.’ So I started, and he said ‘hold up Pilot McDonald, hold up. You don’t have to say any further. We’ve been in touch with the flight commander and the skipper concerned and we know almost as much about it as you do, so you can save your voice.’
AP: Very good [DM laughs]. Well I guess flying operations wouldn’t have been the most stress free existence. What sort of things did you do to relax?
DM: Give the grog a good nudge [laughs]. Yes, there was sports. You could have, there was tennis courts near the squadron and you could have a – we used to play a game that was a cross between AFL and rugby. There was you know, plenty of blokes from New South Wales and Queensland. They, they’d never heard of AFL at that time, and so we would, we’d have a game crossed between AFL and rugby. And of course the blokes, the rugby boys would tuck the ball under their arm and never think of bouncing it or anything like that, and that, that, that was a bit of good fun, and most, most messes would have table tennis facilities so you could have a game, and some would also have billiards or snooker to fill in time at night. And of course you’d have the odd game of cards here and there and those who liked to play poker could put their pay on the line.
AP: Can you – I gather you probably spent a fair bit of time at the local pub?
DM: Oh yes [emphasis], yes, yes.
AP: [Unclear].
DM: Yeah, not really funny thing, but the mid upper gunner of my second crew – when the war finished in Europe, I had just started a second tour. Indeed I only did one trip and the war in Europe ended. I – back at Moreton-in-Marsh, I, flying the twin engine Wellington which were a lovely, lovely kite to fly. As I say, twin engine. I’d had about three single engine, I’d had three single engine landings in about five weeks, and it wasn’t the fault of the ground staff. The motors were copped, cuffed out, they’d, they’d had it and no matter how good the ground staff had been, they would have had troubles keeping them airworthy. So I’d had about five single engine landings in about five weeks. The first two were highly successful. The last one, the third one, I was very lucky to walk away from. And the – sorry where were we up to when I digressed [?] –
AP: So we were – pubs.
DM: Ah yeah pubs. Yeah, and, and so we – I was very lucky to walk away from it. And on the sort of subject of pubs, as I say I was an instructor at this time, and I finished up in an ambulance and at lunchtime I was about to have a pint of beer because the flight commander had said, you know, ‘your flying’s finished for today.’ And so I thought I’d have a pint of beer at lunch and I was just about to have my first sip out of it when the MO, the doctor came up to me and said, ‘I think you can put that down, and, and you better come with me.’ And I didn’t realise but I had concussion, and he put me into hospital. Now, there’s two things outstanding about this. Some miserable sod got that pint of beer and drank it and never owned up to me, never paid me for it, never owned up to me for it, and so if I ever catch up with him I’ll, I’ll get my [AP laughs] money’s worth. The other thing was at night a couple of the other instructors, they were, we were all instructors at the OTU were ex-op fellows, and a couple of them decided they’d come down to the hospital, the sick quarters and see how I was, and they bought a couple of beers with them. So that was great, very good medicine, and the next night about four of them came down and finished up after three or four nights was about six or eight of them, and, and we were having a great old time grogging on in the station’s sick quarters, and lo and behold, who should come in but the doctor, and caught us all with our grog there. He ordered the other blokes out and said to me, ‘you’ll be in the flight office at eight o’clock tomorrow morning McDonald, and I’ll be there to make sure you’re there.’ And so that was the end of that medication, so that’s, you know. Looking back, looking back at him, I sometimes wonder and indeed think that possibly we were pretty much at the stage of eat, drink and be merry, tomorrow you may die, and I think that did tend to take over, yeah.
AP: We’re getting, we’re getting close to the end of [both laugh] –
DM: No worries.
AP: We’ve been going for an hour and fifty-seven minutes.
DM: Truly? Oh my God.
AP: Believe it or not, flown by –
DM: Yeah.
AP: It’s been great [emphasis]. I guess, well yeah, coming back to Australia. How did you find readjusting to civilian life and what did you do after the war?
DM: I reckon for the – I had been in the Public service, as I mentioned, when I enlisted and when I got back I took twelve months leave from the Public service, leave without pay, with a view to hopefully [?] adjusting or readjusting myself. I went back to the bush, back on the farm, and I reckon for about the first three weeks I got up and helped with the milking in the morning and then spent most of the day sitting under a big pine tree. I’ve got no idea what I would have been thinking, and the, the owner of the local general store and post office said, ‘what about coming and working for me? I need someone.’ So it was a bit more than ten bob a week at that time of course, and I accepted his offer which suited me really because I was, meant I had to be meeting people, getting out amongst them, them coming into the store, me getting out amongst them, and I think that was a good move. At the end of twelve months I resigned altogether from the public service and got married and went into business on my own. First one was a little grocery store, a newsagents and post office out at Fawkner, northern suburbs of Melbourne, just near the Fawkner cemetery. I sold out of that and worked for another guy for a few months and then opened a grocery store in Hampton, a beach side southern suburb of Melbourne. That was when self service first started to come in. Prior to that when you went in to the grocer’s shop you asked the grocer what you wanted and he put it on the counter and gave you the bill and then self service came in. We had one of about the first twenty self service shops in Melbourne and then frozen foods came in, and we had one of I think it was about the first six [emphasis] deep freezers in Melbourne. After about six, seven or eight years in that business I sold out, worked around for a while and went into radio communications. The neighbours said, ‘look, we want someone – our company’s just going into radio communications. You know a bit about it from your Air Force experience.’ And the job was virtually painted [?] there on a platter for me so I worked in that, and I could see a need for some towers. It was roughly line of sight communication – radios such as in taxis and in trucks and plumbers and electricians et cetera, communications, mobile communications, and I could see that to increase the range we needed some towers, and the company with whom I was working wouldn’t listen to me, so I said to them ‘okay, you won’t provide them, let me provide them.’ And I did and we finished up with about six of these around Melbourne, and then I, I started renting a few radios. I could see a requirement for rental and people didn’t want to buy, and once again the company with whom I was working were disinterested so I started renting radios which I owned. And then later on I saw a need for little hand-held portable radios for security people and crowd control and parking et cetera, and actually I just sold out of the last one of them in the last twelve months. But we finished up with roughly a thousand of them little hand-held ones, and we, we do some, well I’m out of it now but we did some quite big jobs. Probably the biggest was the spring carnival at Flemington in Melbourne. The Melbourne Cup is a world famous race and a big requirement for these little hand-held radios, not worth them buying them because they only need them for about two weeks of the year. The rest of the year they would be on the shelf and be knocked off or the batteries would go flat and so there’s the, you know, just a little inside there, there’s the parking, there’s security, there is crowd control, catering. Imagine what it would be like if the bird cage or some of those quite exclusive enclosures at Flemington ran out of champagne, so you’ve got to be able to engineer, develop a system so that they can get down into the bowels of the earth as it were, under the big grandstands and everything so that we could control the flow of champagne up there to marquees and the likes spread around the ground. Quite, quite an interesting, quite a challenging exercise, and, and it was, as I say, I’m sold out of it now but it was financially fairly favourable, and no Lord Nuffield or Rockefeller or anything like that but enabled a quite good standard of living.
AP: Excellent. I guess the final, the final question, perhaps the most important one. From your personal perspective, how was Bomber Command remembered and what sort of legacy do you think it’s left?
DM: A good question. A lot of condemnation on Bomber Command. If Bomber Command hadn’t done the duties they were called upon to do, and likewise many other branches of the service, if they hadn’t done the things they were called upon to do, goodness knows how much longer the war might have gone on. The French government just this year, seventy years later after peace was declared, seventy years later gave, made some awards. Now, one of the qualifications was that you had to be involved on D-Day. D-Day for a lot of the French people and a lot of the people of occupied territories was the first time for five years that there was any light to be seen at the end of the tunnel. That D-Day signalled in my book, the beginning of the end and Bomber Command were well and truly involved in D-Day and they were involved subsequent to D-Day, stopping Germany getting their troops and their supplies up to the front line. The V1s and V2s, the Doodlebug, flying one, call it what you like, if Bomber Command hadn’t put down the launching pads for those V1s, almost all [emphasis] of London and southern England would have been laid waste in my book, there’s not any doubt about that. And of course the V2, terrible [emphasis] weapon. There was no combating the V2 once it was in the air, there was no ways [unclear], and so what did they do? They sent Bomber Command over to the launching pads and manufacturing plants in Scandinavia. Some of those aircraft were in the air fourteen hours. Now, as I mentioned, there was no thought of comfort for the crew in a bomber aircraft. Temperatures, as I mentioned, the thermometer went down to minus thirty-five and the needle used to go right off the clock, right [emphasis] off the clock. The gunners had electrically heated gloves, other crew members had three pairs of gloves on: silk next to the skin, woollen to try and keep the warmth in and then the big elbow length, fleecy lined leather gauntlet. Bomber Command [phone rings] didn’t get, did not [emphasis] get the credit [phone rings] for which it was due [phone rings]. Almost sixty thousand people killed [emphasis]. Young men in their prime, fit, you had to be fit to be an aircrew. Fit, young men in their prime, almost – now for Victorians or Australians, almost sixty thousand, that is the equivalent to every man, woman and child, the city the size of Bellarat. There were eight thousand killed on training – I mentioned the icing experience before, eight thousand killed on training. Now, for any Victorians, that’s the equivalent of a provincial city the size of Bellarat or the size of Colac. Every man, woman, child in that city, killed. So as I say, the legacy of Bomber Command, the ruddy war might still be going on. It did not get its true dues in, in, in my book, and as I say, it would have gone on a lot longer. Yes, we’re finished I think.
AP: I think we’re done.
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AMcDonaldD151013
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Interview with Donald McDonald
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
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02:10:05 audio recording
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Pending review
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Adam Purcell
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2015-10-13
Description
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Donald McDonald grew up in Australia and worked for a general store before he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force. He flew operations as a pilot with 466 and 578 Squadrons. He returned to Australia after the war where he became involved in radio communications.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Australian Air Force
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Australia
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--Yorkshire
Victoria
Victoria--Mount Martha
Victoria
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Katie Gilbert
466 Squadron
578 Squadron
aircrew
coping mechanism
crash
crewing up
entertainment
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
mess
military discipline
military living conditions
military service conditions
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
perception of bombing war
pilot
RAF Burn
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Rufforth
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/601/8870/PLoosemoreLJ1501.2.jpg
711df538feec47125a25b5846c6510a0
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/601/8870/ALoosemoreLJ151116.1.mp3
8ef370350df4759aa45dc6ad864c2ddc
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Loosemore, Lesley Joseph
L J Loosemore
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Loosemore, LJ
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An oral history interview with Les Loosemore (3033406, Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a mid upper gunner with 61 Squadron.
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.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AS: My name is Adam Sutch and –
LL: Ah [emphasis], that’s a good idea.
AS: This is an interview with Mr. Les Loosemore, formally mid upper gunner in 61 Squadron, Bomber Command during the Second World War. My name is Adam Sutch, interviewer for the Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive, and the interview is being carried out at xxx Broughton Gifford on the 16th of November 2016. Les, thanks ever [emphasis] so much for agreeing for this interview.
LL: That’s alright.
AS: I’d like to set the scene by asking you to describe your life before joining the Air Force. Where you come from, your brothers and sisters, that sort of thing.
LL: Erm, well [emphasis]. I was born in Swansea, South Wales. Now, I can remember the address some. Left school, first job, first job I had was on a – well a scrap merchant, not [unclear]. This is all ship work [emphasis]. When the ships come in they’re bringing in shells and bombs and stuff, but they’d got to be packed in such a way that every one is above the other, and jammed on the side to stop them from swaying. And it was our job then to [unclear] all those ships and collect all that timber, then we used to store it in the dry [?] so the next ship that comes in, and takes its stuff over to [unclear] or over to Europe [?], you had all the stuff ready and you just put them all back [emphasis] in the same place. But you had to make sure that they stayed upright, so everything was right, a row of bombs, planks, but they had to touch the sides of the ships to stop them from going otherwise they’re all sinked [?] on the bottom. But by doing that, putting a layer of timber in between you kept them in the middle of the ship, yeah [coughs].
AS: How old were you when you started that job?
LL: [Coughs] that was the first job I had I think, yeah. I was only about fourteen, yeah, and – oh and I ended up in the, with the – oh hell, Old Barn Easton [?] was the old scrap yard. I got into somewhere, but I can’t remember where, but [coughs].
AS: Not to worry. But you left –
LL: Erm – I must have been fourteen when I left [inhales loudly]. I got a job [emphasis], sausage skin factory they called it. And you get all [emphasis] the sheep’s guts and get all the – it’s all frozen and it’s all dry and you got to rip all the fat off so you left with a skin which is used for sausages.
AS: Good lord.
LL: Yeah –
AS: That’s your first job.
LL: That’s the, the proper first job I ever had.
AS: Yeah. Were you living at home at that, at that time?
LL: Erm, I was, I was living at [emphasis] home then, yeah. And, where was that? Oh, that was at a place in Swansea, and, well, Treboeth they called it. It’s just on the edge [emphasis] of Swansea. And there was only about ten or fifteen minutes walk, so that want too bad there, yeah. That was an aunt, because I walked out of home, because too many arguments and all this and that. Conditions were better when I went and lived with an aunt.
AS: Oh okay.
LL: So, I haven’t had any, like a brother [?]. I did have that as my official address for many years, even when I was in the RAF, so you can say that was my second home really, yeah.
AS: Mm. Did you have, do you have many brothers and sisters?
LL: I got some, but they are too far away. I’ve only got some brothers. Oh [emphasis] sorry [coughs], I got a sister, she born 1936, that was about a, wrong again [?]. It must have been thirty-seven, mother died in 1937, how do I remember that? I used to play with two tins of World War One medals.
AS: Mm?
LL: Now, I usually, two tins laid right across the table. I never realised it until somebody mentioned it. ‘Why did you have two tins?’ One was is [?] some relative. I don’t think he had any brothers, he had sisters according to my sister. I lost my train of thought –
AS: The World War One medals.
LL: Yeah. I used to put all these medals across and – there were two tins. We discovered he had two tins. Why he had two I was asked by a certain person, and I said ‘I’ll find out.’ And it appears that he’d, he had a relative of some description, he didn’t have any brothers, but he [pause]. Yeah, he said that, well he asked if I had a brother who won a Victoria Cross, and ‘well sir I don’t know,’ and I said ‘next time I go down Swansea’ I said ‘I’ll ask about it.’ And apparently he had a relative as well that was staying with them. One tin was the old man’s and the other was the sister [?]. But he didn’t come back because I think he got wounded during the First World War and he passed away.
AS: Mm.
LL: So he left the old man with the two tins. In there was the square Victoria Cross.
AS: My gosh.
LL: I used to play with that all on the table, two tins of them.
AS: Good lord.
LL: ‘Cause when I asked the old man I said ‘what’s all this then,’ he said ‘well they were all different parts of World War One.’ He didn’t say what they actually were, but it was only later on that I discovered through somebody else that it was a Victoria Cross.
AS: Goodness.
LL: And that was a bloke Loosemore in the First World War.
AS: Good lord. When you were in Swansea during the war – when, what, what, what year were you born in? What year –
LL: 1925.
AS: 1925.
LL: 5th of the 8th 1925.
AS: So, so when the war started you were fourteen [emphasis].
LL: When the war started, erm – I’d left school. Oh [emphasis], that’s when I was working over with the scarp merchant, the one unloading the timber off the ships. That’s the first job I had –
AS: Do you –
LL: And I ended up – actually, oh, a yellow metal mill. It’s a bit like a steel works with all the rollers and a great big wheel and all that material used to come off all bent and we had a machine beside it that would flatten it dead straight. That would then go to the girls, what they called the stamping machine, and they’d stamp out bits of brass the size about, just a bit bigger than say a fifty p. piece. They turned that m, m, into money [emphasis].
AS: Wow, okay.
LL: It was an interesting job [coughs]. Peoples, peoples good, that’s the main thing.
AS: As the war started –
LL: Yeah.
AS: Did you see much of the war in Swansea? Was it –
LL: Did I –
AS: Was it bombed at all, Swansea? Did you see much of the war in Swansea?
LL: Well I joined the RAF in – it’s the book, 1940, 1940, February [emphasis] 1943.
AS: Mhm.
LL: That’s when I signed up with them. I had volunteered – you had to register I think a year before hand so that you could join the ATC and learn something about whatever service you going to go into, Territorials if you’re going in the army. And with the, for the RAF you had the ATC.
AS: Did, is that what you did?
LL: Yeah, and so, I didn’t require all that much because my old man being in the Home Guard, he had a rifle, a three-o-three, and that’s all we wanted to know when we got in the RAF. Who could handle a 303 rifle? But, I’ll tell you one thing, an incident there, I was lucky. I was sitting besides a table, just like that, hand was on [?] there, and I’d been up to the place where there these – oh they had an exercise on, the Home Guard, I had to go up to the barracks and get the rifle. I put it on the bloody table, and the old man started stripping it down to get a good clean overall. He put the blooming [emphasis] rifle down there [emphasis], with the end of it, and the bloody thing went off. It missed my ear by about an inch, yeah, pshh. And it cut a groove in the end of the table, and the old man, when he did go back up on duty, he give them a great big bollocking, ‘cause [coughs] I could have lost an arm easy enough.
AS: Mm.
LL: Yeah.
AS: What –
LL: You got to be, you got to be very careful [coughs]. I wish this cough would go away.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Yeah, yeah carry on.
AS: The – before you joined the Air Force, did you see much of the war in Swansea? Was there bombing, or anything like that?
LL: Well, they had a Blitz in there, I know that. Where were we living then? Most of the time I think we were in, what did they call it? District Road [?] Swansea, Plasmarl, it’s slightly north of the main town centre, and we had our own air raid shelter and that, and [coughs] a good – it was nice and warm [emphasis], it wasn’t cold like a lot of people you see shivering like mad in the middle. Ours was built against another big building, and you used that as one blanket [?], filled it up with earth and built all around it. And that was quite warm in there, yeah.
AS: Mhm.
LL: So we weren’t too bad really [coughs]. Oh bloody hell, I wish – they can’t find anything to get rid of this phlegm I got on my chest, they’re worried if I sit like this ain’t too bad, but I could be dead upright and I got to do it on that bloody bed there. But if I lay down flat it’s worse, but if I can sit upright, dead upright, then phlegm sinks to the bottom –
AS: Yeah.
LL: And then I’m clear for a while, yeah. Anyway carry on.
AS: When you were in Swansea under the bombing, what was it like? Was it night after night or?
LL: Well, we didn’t live there all the time, we were on the outskirts they call it, yeah. Yeah, we moved to an area called Plasmarl and that’s – I’d finished school I think, yeah. Because when I left home I was living with an aunt and I had to walk about two miles [unclear] but [unclear] the mills [emphasis]. Yellow metal mills.
AS: Mhm.
LL: You used to use them as the material brass to make bullet shells, and all that sort of thing. A good job, good pay, so I was alright like that.
AS: Mm. What made you decide to join the Air Force?
LL: Well I had erm, I had two brothers and a sister. The sister was in the WAFs. I think the eldest, no the eldest one was in the army [emphasis] but the second eldest was in the – I would say, erm, what do they call them now? [Pause] oh what do they call them, they were, they were classified as –
AS: Were they sort of soldier, or?
LL: Volunteers, yeah. I forget – they had a special name for them [coughs]. When did he [?] join the services anyway?
AS: Okay.
LL: So that was, one’s in the WAFs and one in the RAF, so I thought ‘I might as well make it a third.’ So I joined the Air Force. But I didn’t realise it when I – I went up to Penarth [emphasis] for an interview and they passed me as a fit for air crew duty. Well flying [emphasis], first of all, then I had to go somewhere else. Oh, we had to do some, go to a place, stay overnight I think, done some exercises to see if you’re fit [emphasis].
AS: Mhm.
LL: ‘Cause you had to be fit to be in the aircrew, if you’re going to fly anyway. And I passed alright. So from then on life carried on like normal, yeah.
AS: So you went up to Penarth, did they give you –
LL: Well, what they do there, they give you a lot of information, like about ranks and things like that, and all the usual ground, what I call the ground work for anybody any service, I mean Navy or Air Force. They still got to recognise you as a cornel or a captain or a corporal, and all the general information about the service you were joining. And that’s what the ground work was, but the flying [emphasis], you start going up for gunners, we went up to somewhere round [?] Scotland, Castle Kennedy, and that’s – we were flying on Anson aircraft then, the Avro Anson. And that only had a turret, a mid upper turret, but it was an Anson towing on the windbags, and you’d have about, what was it? About half a dozen chappies in there. Everybody had a different coloured bullet, so when that bullet went through the bag, the windbag, it would leave some paint. You could tell, tell how many hits you had. So, so when you got back –
AS: Were you any good at it?
LL: When you got back they counted how many little holes and the colour [coughs]. They got your score then, yeah.
AS: Were you any good?
LL: Yeah [emphasis] I thought I was very good. What did I do? Something special up there one day. We changed instructors, who was it? It was laughable really [pause]. It made me laugh at the time, it made me laugh. I was very good with the side-by-side shotgun.
AS: Mhm.
LL: I discovered I think, thanks to listening to the old man talking about in the Home Guard when he was on exercise, what they normally do. You get the gun side to you other [?] and you pass it through, and there’s a time when it stops [emphasis] and then it starts to fall. You fire when it’s on the top, on the apex and then you waited every time. But [coughs] I done this four times out of five, and the [unclear] said ‘oh, we’ll change instructor, instructors,’ and we had a good one in the first place. But, what was it this bloke said something? [Pause] ooh heck, it made me bloody laugh at the time I know that [AS laughs]. Oh Christ – I used to hit for some reason or another, you’d have five [emphasis] bullets to fire through this gun, the turbo [?].
AS: Mhm.
LL: And I hit the fourth one, and he said ‘I bet you a pound you can’t hit this one.’ I says ‘put the gun up [unclear].’ I turned round and it says ‘offices and NCOs should not gamble’ and [laughs] he said ‘you’re a bloody poacher mate’ [AS and LL laugh]. I never [coughs], I never handled a gun before.
AS: Wow.
LL: And yet I was able to do that, you know. Four times out of five, and he looked at him and he says ‘you’re a bloody poacher aren’t you?’ I said ‘I never handled a gun before in all my life.’ But I was watching the old man when he was in the Home Guard and listening to him talking, when they were on exercise and you learn quite a bit that way, yeah.
AS: Mm.
LL: Anyway, what else have you got to go onto? Checked – 20:43
AS: Let’s go back [emphasis] a little bit, before you went to air gunner training –
LL: Well, problem was, six months ground work, what I call ground work, that’s learning all the ranks and all the rules and regulations going into any service. And then six months there ground work, six months flying training. Start off with the Anson, then you went onto the Wellington, Avro Wellington, then up to Winthorpe, Stirlings [emphasis], then you go onto the, what they call the LFS, the Lanc Flying School. That’s where, the first time you sit in a Lancaster. You’re up at RAF Syerston, and you there for – well you’re supposed to be there for a given time, but somebody was, somebody took ill [emphasis] and then they remembered that one of them was the engineer. You didn’t fly – well, you’re not supposed to fly unless you had a full crew, but I, I can’t remember why we – oh, they didn’t need anybody on the Wellingtons, not a flight engineer, he came when we went onto the Stirlings, and then onto the Lancasters [coughs]. And we went into Syserston for that, from there onto the squadron.
AS: Okay.
LL: ‘Cause it was just up the road from Newham [?].
AS: Okay. How did you choose, how did you choose to be an air gunner? Did you do tests?
LL: Do what?
AS: Did you do – did they give you tests to decide if you would be an air gunner or a pilot or?
LL: Erm, no. I think what it was, it started, it started off where they decide [emphasis] you’re in brilliance, you’re intelligent, you’re general [emphasis] knowledge and stuff like that. And oh, you got to be fit. You had to be one hundred percent fit, and I suited everything and they, they said ‘well you qualify for flying duties.’ So that’s what I did. I said ‘oh,’ I didn’t know what aircraft you got to fly in, could have been a tiger moth or, I don’t know. But anyway, we were told we were going to fly Lancasters eventually, on a squadron.
AS: Okay.
LL: Yeah [coughs].
AS: So you were on forty-two course at Castle Kennedy.
LL: Pardon? Yeah [emphasis].
AS: To learn to be a gunner.
LL: Yeah –
AS: And –
LL: And they had – you do your training facing the side of this hangar and on there, there was, you had to chase the path [?] and you had to train the sites of the guns on that path without making the bell ring, because as soon as you hit the line – they had like a roadway, a pathway. These rung the bell as a fault [?] but if you go through straight through it, the two lines, without touching the lines, you got a clear run. I had many clear runs, because you kept on practicing all the time, yeah. But great big, behind the hangars, great big building started at one end, all the bloody way along there, yeah. Shake it mad hoping you didn’t touch the bloody line [AS laughs]. [Coughs] yeah, and that was up at the, now where was that? Oh that was up in Castle Kennedy, Scotland I think, yeah. Somewhere up there.
AS: Okay. And then you, you actually sat in an aeroplane for the first time in your life I guess.
LL: Yeah [emphasis], that was the first aircraft was an Anson, yeah. And that’s the first time I sat in the turret. Although they did have a turret during the training, the groundwork, so you could get used to where the bits and pieces are, how, which way the guns were going to be going, how you line them up and all that sort of thing. That sort of ground work consists of, learning all the basics, I think you could call them, yeah.
AS: And you have to strip the gun and clear stoppages and things?
LL: Oh yeah, you – and, and the thing was this. In case you were, had a failure at high altitude, you had all these flying clothes on, thick gloves like gauntlets [emphasis] and how had to fiddle about wearing them, and if you had a middle of winter now you’d have gloves on. And you just imagine trying to strip that thing down, it was a small parts inside the gun, the 303 [coughs] and you had to strip them down and put them back together again, wearing your gloves.
AS: Where do you put all the pieces when you’re in a turret [LL coughs] at twenty thousand feet?
LL: Oh, this is when you’re in the classroom.
AS: Oh.
LL: You do it all when you’re in the classroom. But [emphasis] you got to shout all the way around you in the turret so you’ve got bugs [?] everywhere. It’s like, it’s like drying, riding a motorbike. You don’t, don’t move your arms like that, you just run handle like that, up and down, that’s all, that’s all there is. It’s all under control, so you just, you don’t move [emphasis], you just move your hands like that. Course looking around all the time.
AS: Is the turret electric or hydraulic?
LL: I think oil [emphasis]. I think oil was the driving force behind it, yeah. It must have been, because they were very worried about any oil leaks when, if you’d been attacked, anything like that. Because you can easily slide on it and injure yourself, ‘cause it is a bit rough inside the aircraft because of all the ribs [?].
AS: Mhm.
LL: And you can easily break an arm, break a leg or something when you steady [?] yourself.
AS: Mm. Did you actually like [emphasis] the flying?
LL: Mm?
AS: When you got into the Anson did you actually like they flying and think ‘this is for me?’
LL: I liked the flying a lot, I really enjoyed that, and especially in the Lanc up there, it’s very comfortable, the seat itself was a strap of fabric, no wider than that but a bit longer, connected from one side to there. And you sat on that thing for anything, eight to nine hours.
AS: Good lord.
LL: Now you’d think, well your backside must have been sore but that strap forms the shape of your backside [unclear] end, and we used to be sitting there for eight or nine hours, longer. I forget what the – I supposed it’s somewhere in there, the longest one, eight and a half hours I think, over Germany, that’s the longest flight we had I think. But you don’t’ feel tired [emphasis] and it’s a lovely feeling, sitting in a lot of bloody clouds, yeah. ‘Cause you don’t know what’s coming the other bloody way.
AS: ‘Cause you faced nearly always the tail?
LL: Yeah.
AS: Yeah, mhm, yeah. When you’d finished on Ansons, was that when you –
LL: Oh –
AS: When you’d finished on Ansons, is that when you, when you were qualified and you got your wings?
LL: Oh, wait a minute [?]. No [coughs] you got your wings when you finished your ground training. The last lesson you get, I forget what it’s all about, but then the old chap says ‘right, you’re now classified as sergeants. You’re, you’ve jumped all those ranks just because you going into aircrew, and also your pay goes up as well.’ So it makes a vast difference when you – that’s going from Bridgnorth in Shropshire which is the last of the ground [emphasis] training. You then go up to Castle Kennedy in Scotland for the, to start your, no, to start your flying, proper gun training then, yeah [coughs].
AS: Mm. When you got your wings and your promotion –
LL: Yeah.
AS: Was there a big parade? Did any – did your relatives come or?
LL: Erm [pause] and where was it? We were in Bridgnorth, I know that [papers shuffle]. Oh, no I think we were in the classroom in Bridgnorth, that was RAF Bridgnorth, yeah. And when the, when the ground course finished, the instructor, he then informed you that you were then made sergeant, you jumped all the ranks and you were made a sergeant and your pay went up as well. [Papers shuffling] so that was a good thing, yeah.
AS: Yeah, [laughs] absolutely. So you went then I suppose on leave for a while, did you?
LL: Erm, I think we might have had a, a long weekend or something like that. Ah yeah [coughs] ‘cause I went home that weekend when we passed out. Now who did I meet? I met somebody – unimportant anyway.
AS: Mm.
LL: Walking through town, a pal a long time ago, a school kid, yeah. I’d gone – I had a bit of a long, a long weekend [emphasis] I think they called it when I went home. And then from there we went from, I went from Swansea all the way up by train to Scotland.
AS: To Castle Kennedy, yeah. Okay, and when you finished Castle Kennedy –
LL: Yeah.
AS: It was round about the time of D-Day. When –
LL: Well, I was never going to teach [?] [coughs] but if it’s in there, mm.
AS: Shall we have a pause for a minute?
[Tape paused and restarted.]
AS: Right Les, we pick up again. I’d like to talk about the OTU and the Wellingtons and –
LL: Yeah.
AS: And crewing up. When you got to the OTU how did you form a crew? How did the crew all [LL laughs] get together?
LL: It was brilliant [emphasis]. You never, you never seen such a process – you couldn’t invent such a thing. I [unclear] gunner, Bill Jenkinson. I suppose – oh, I was behind the door, that’s my favourite bit, behind the door. And Bill was on that side. I said to him, I said to Bill, I said ‘oh, have you got anybody else with you? Why not grab a wireless operator or something like that?’ ‘No,’ I said ‘let’s go and have a look, see what we can see,’ and walked into all these chaps of pilots and navigators, and when [unclear] barracks, and when they were in this long line I saw a pair of feet sticking right out. I said ‘let’s have a look and see what that is, he looks a big bloke.’ [AS laughs] and that was the skipper, a New Zealander.
AS: What’s his name?
LL: And we walked up to him and said ‘you got any crew members yet.’ ‘No.’ I said ‘well you got two gunners,’ ‘oh that’s a good start’ [AS laughs]. We picked up like that [emphasis]. It was long [?], if somebody fancied you, it was – if you didn’t like them then you just passed on. But ‘oh, he looks a friendly’ – ‘I know him, I had a couple of pints with him,’ like that. That’s how you picked up a crew.
AS: So when –
LL: You wouldn’t believe – it was so lackadaisical the way everybody come together as a crew, and yet it worked beautifully.
AS: So you chose your skipper because of the size of his feet?
LL: Yeah [AS laughs]. It’s rather strange how seven people like that, complete strangers, can come together and form a crew. And all more or less you work and play in, with one aircraft, it’s brilliant. And yet you just knitted together and formed a complete crew, yeah.
AS: And when you’d done this dating [?], did you go out and socialise to get to know each other?
LL: Oh, oh yeah. Oh, I’ll tell you a funny thing happened, it’ll make you laugh. When the course – now what was that called? Ah [pause] –
AS: At the OTU?
LL: Upper Heyford.
AS: At the OTU, yeah.
LL: Erm, OTU.
AS: Mhm.
LL: We’d finished the course and everybody passed and we had a party in the sergeants mess, and the – we had lots of drinking going on and all that. And old Bill the rear gunner, he said ‘that bird from the sergeants mess, the cook, she’s caught my eye. I’m going to chat her up’ he said ‘when we finish.’ Well, it was sometime later on I did catch a glimpse of him. Of course he had to see her the following night or something, so I said to him, I said ‘oh, how did you get on last night?’ He just lay on the bed fully clothed looking miserable as sin. I said ‘what did you do?’ I said ‘what did you get?’ [AS laughs]. And he fell silent for a while. I said ‘you must have had some – you must have done something’ or another, similar comment like that. I said ‘what did you get?’ ‘That’s it on the table’ he said, chunk of bread and a chunk of cheese [AS and LL laugh]. I said ‘all that fuss for nothing,’ he said ‘a chunk of cheese and’ – right in the middle of the table. We enjoyed it anyway, we had, I think we had a bottle of beer hidden away somewhere, but it was enjoyable, yeah.
AS: Mhm. Was the flying at the OTU, was it very intensive? Did you do a lot of flying?
LL: Operation – yeah [emphasis]. There is – you do all sorts of trips, daytime and at night time. Short ones, ops, what do you call them? Bumping and something or another –
AS: Circuits and bumps.
LL: Ah yeah that’s it, good, circuits and bumps. You do a lot of that, day and night so that the pilot can get used to flying the aircraft. That’s more than anything else, because there’s nothing you can do from the gunner’s point of view at night time, you can’t see nothing. Not a thing, it’s completely black. You can look down, you can see one light or anything. And the only lights you see is the runway lights, and you can see them quite a distance away. But that’s the only thing to guide [emphasis] you, and it’s up to the navigator to know exactly where you are, so you learn from them, and I should imagine they got some beacons [emphasis] dotted all over the country so, and each one is tuned differently, so you tune, the navigator tunes into them. That’s how they guide you down a narrow alleyway because you’ve got flying, aircraft flying in all directions during the war. You could have a collision anytime [emphasis], you never know it, but that’s it, that’s what it’s all about.
AS: Mm. When you were at the OTU you were – were you straight away confident straight away that you’d chosen a good pilot?
LL: Erm, I think we did. We had a couple of rough landings, bumps, but like everybody else the more you do your job, the more efficient you become. Like you learn – I kept on missing [emphasis] when I was flying over the target, and fair enough the pilot of the, I think it was the Anson, he was very patient because they tell you off in a, a personal way, not giving you a good bollocking but advising [emphasis] you is a proper phrase, what you’ve got to do so everything goes along smoothly like that, yeah. Good enjoyable, I enjoyed it, sitting in there.
AS: Mm, okay. When you moved onto the OTU as a crew, where there many accidents among the other crews at OTU?
LL: [Coughs] Well [pause]. We were at – nearly every [emphasis] station, RAF station we went, we went with an aircraft went missing. Up at [unclear] Castle Kennedy, an Anson went missing over the, not the North Sea, the West Coast.
AS: The Irish Sea?
LL: Yeah, ah that’s, Irish Sea, yeah.
AS: Mm.
LL: He went missing up there. Next station – oh, then we, there was a Wellington. Oh, the Wellington went and crashed somewhere in mid Wales and it must have gone somewhere into a bog [emphasis] because it, it sunk out of sight, nobody could find it. So wherever it is it’s down there rotting. And then we got to – nothing happened up at Newark, Winthorpe. Oh, the Lanc finishing school, that’s the first time you’re in a Lancaster. Joining the circuit I spotted a black shadow on the ground of an aircraft, and you could practically recognise it as a Lancaster. But the strange thing about it was, as if some yob [emphasis] had been there with a spray gun, blood red, and gone all the way around it, framed it just like that. This black shadow on the ground, in line with the perimeter track. And just a line of red all the way round it. They reckon that the black was a plane, the red was the remains of a crew, yeah, when it exploded. There’s nothing, there’s nothing left to show, it was a crew there, it’s just that red mark.
AS: Good lord. We’ll pause for a second.
[Tape paused and restarted.]
AS: Lesley, you were talking about lights, or not having any lights at night –
LL: Yeah.
AS: Could you see the exhausts from your own aircraft, from the Wellington or the Lancaster when you were flying?
LL: I don’t think – I wasn’t aware of it –
AS: Mhm.
LL: But I don’t think, I don’t think we, no I don’t think we did bother with it. We never saw anything because [coughs] I think that the flame from the engine would pass through the back end of it and disappear.
AS: Mhm.
LL: So you did – I don’t think, I can never remember seeing any light or flame or, coming from the engines.
AS: Okay.
LL: And I think they had an extended exhaust pipe [coughs] and it goes under the wing rather than over the top. So it’s out of sight [?] anyway, yeah [coughs].
AS: Yeah. There were two of you as gunners, there was you and Bill Jenkinson.
LL: Yeah.
AS: How did you decide who was gonna be the rear gunner and who was gonna be –
LL: Oh, well, well we were in a bedroom like this, a long hut. A peace [emphasis] time building, brickwork. Bill was on that side of the door, I was behind it.
AS: Mhm.
LL: And I had a look around and Bill was the nearest and I said ‘you got anybody to go up with you Bill?’
AS: Mm, mm.
LL: ‘No not yet’ he said, ‘but I want to be a rear gunner.’ ‘Oh that’s alright,’ I said, ‘I’ll take mid upper gunner position then’ –
AS: Oh so you decided between you?
LL: Yeah.
AS: Yeah, okay.
LL: He said ‘alright, that’s [coughs] that’s what I want to be, rear gunner.’ So that’s how we decided.
AS: Mm, okay. So you did a fair bit of flying at the OTU on Wellingtons.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Were they good, were they good aircraft, or were they pretty ropey at that time?
LL: No, oh [emphasis]. They must have been reliable because I think [emphasis] now you come to mention it, a lot of them were [coughs] exit [?] squadron.
AS: Mhm.
LL: And that had to be kept in a good condition, especially going on operations. The good maintenance on that aircraft was carried on I think through the training sessions. So you did have reliable aircraft – I can’t ever remember us having, if we ever – well you have a stimulated three engine landing for practice with a pilot [coughs], see how it handles landing and taking off.
AS: okay. So you were on forty-four course at –
LL: Sixty, sixty one.
AS: Okay. The, the course you were on at 16 OTU that was forty-four course. Did you, did you pass out from there, did you have a passing out parade when you finished at OTU?
LL: Erm [pause] Upper Heywood.
AS: Mm.
LL: OTU, operational training – no [emphasis] apart from having this, this party at the end of the course when Bill and all this cook from the sergeants mess catching his eye [AS laughs]. That’s the only incident I can remember [emphasis] in there.
AS: Okay.
LL: It was a very quiet sort of a station, yeah.
AS: Okay. And then you went on leave [emphasis], did you?
LL: I think we must have because I remember – I went on, possibly a long weekend because I went home to Swansea and I had to get on, what do you call the, they call the Coastal Train down there. It goes all the way round the outside of Wales until you get up into Scotland. You didn’t go across the midlands, I think they were kept clear for munitions [?] and all so you go on this track [coughs], going through small village all the way up to go up to Scotland.
AS: That must have taken forever [emphasis].
LL: Yeah, it does. But it’s surprising how quickly time goes when you’re moving, you know. And you tend to remember [emphasis] places like that. You, you seen it in your school days on a map where certain places are, so like ‘oh this is so and so,’ ‘that’s so and so.’ You go, time soon goes, yeah. Oh take my tea away, too much, too much of that.
AS: Mhm. Then after the OTU you went onto Stirlings at the Heavy Conversion Unit at Winthorpe.
LL: Er, yeah, Winthorpe, that’s where we were Stirlings.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Very, very quiet, not much happened on that station to my, to my knowledge anyway.
AS: Mhm.
LL: No I can’t think of any [coughs] –
AS: But at –
LL: Winthorpe –
AS: Mm.
LL: Stirlings, no I don’t think much happened on there. Very quiet station.
AS: Okay, mhm.
LL: At Winthorpe, yeah. Near Newark, yeah.
AS: Mhm.
LL: That’s it.
AS: But then, then did you start doing exercises with fighter aircraft in the sky, on the Stirlings?
LL: Erm –
AS: The fighter affiliation [?] –
LL: We didn’t do it on the Wellingtons because it’s got no mid upper turret, so the Stirling would have been the first aircraft. No hang on. The Wellington would have been a job for the rear gunner, there’s no mid upper gunner turret, so I used to stand at the astrodome and looking out possibly [unclear] one of the navigator might want it or somebody want some information. You can see everything but there’s nothing to see, it’s all black. So what they expect you to see in the darkness like that I don’t know. But I had a sometimes it was a longish journey and other times it was just bumps, bumps and whatever, yeah [coughs].
AS: Mhm. So that’s just over a month on Stirlings from mid October to mid November 1944. I suppose pulling you together as a crew still.
LL: Yeah, well you go from Wellingtons which has only got one active turret, you go onto a Stirling then which has got the two.
AS: Mm.
LL: It’s got three turrets actually – one in the doors, mid upper turret and a tail gunner, yeah.
AS: Mhm.
LL: But there’s only two gunners there anyway.
AS: And so does the bomb aimer use the front turret?
LL: Yeah, Well sometimes if necessary he can [emphasis] get up there if you got time [coughs].
AS: And then you went on, for a short time to the Lancaster Finishing School.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Right.
LL: Yeah, yeah we passed away [?] – yeah the Lanc Finishing School is the last time, oh the first time you sit in [emphasis] a Lancaster, ‘cause then that prepares you for your next station which for us was just up the road in Lincoln. That’s the only place, the first place you sit in a turret of a Lancaster, so the Lancaster Finishing School. That’s the whole idea of it, introduce you to the aircraft you’re going to fly, yeah, which is a good thing really, yeah.
AS: And how did that feel? Did that feel –
LL: I rather liked it myself, yeah, quite pleasant. It was a nice steady aircraft when you were flying, you know, it was rather stable, and often you see them bumping about but that one, it seems to hold itself dead level the whole time. It’s pretty well set up. I think that applies to a lot of them during the war.
AS: And that was a really modern aeroplane then.
LL: Yeah, yeah. And according to the book, it was a mark three I believe that we ended up with up on the squadron, ‘cause you had all the latest radar equipment and all that stuff in it.
AS: Mhm. But nothing special happened at Lanc Finishing School that you recall?
LL: Erm, apart from seeing that shadow with the red painted on, that was a very quiet station, yeah. You do, you do day and night flying in it. But you can’t see a blooming thing at night, anyway.
AS: Even though you’ve got the best view at the top of the aeroplane?
LL: Yeah you can’t see – well, people don’t realise what a blackout is. A blackout is every [emphasis] light [emphasis] is out [emphasis].
AS: Mhm.
LL: It’s complete darkness, and if you happen to show a light it’s so quiet that you can hear somebody shout out ‘put that bloody light out,’ or so ‘shut that doors, shut that window,’ something like that.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Because it’s so black [emphasis] that you spotted straight away – you go ‘well what the hell’s that then?’ Or ‘some buggar’s opened the window’ or something like that.
AS: But when you’re airborne with the stars and the moon, could you see horizontally or above you? [LL coughs] Could you see other aircraft in the sky, for instance?
LL: [Pause] You could see the horizon, the dark earth and if it’s a moonlit light you could see the curve of the earth and the difference – the horizon [emphasis], you could see the difference. Now, an interesting thing happened there. Talking about UFOs, now this is true this. There was a starlit night; you could see the horizon and the end of the darkness and all of the stars. And I thought ‘that’s funny, that star’s moving faster than the others.’ I kept on coming around to it [coughs]. That one star, that I believe could have been one of these foreign things, a UFO I believe. I tell you why, [talking in the background]. Yeah, it’s rather strange, nobody speaks [emphasis] when you’re in an aircraft, everybody’s concentrating on the job. You’re a navigator you’re concentrating, engineer, and all that you concentrate on – and I was looking and I thought ‘he’s moving.’ And I followed that. As it got overhead, I heard – nobody speaks [emphasis] when you’re flying, and this voice, I heard this voice as clear as you were talking. ‘We’re of no danger to you.’ So where did that voice come from? Nobody spoke, you never speak unless you’re telling the navigator tells the pilot ‘oh we’ve got to turn right here, and our starboard’ or something like that, or somebody passing a message, that’s the only time you speak. And you see somebody spoke just [emphasis] as clear as if it was in the aircraft with you. ‘We’re of no danger to you,’ so where did the voice come from?
AS: Wow. Did you discuss this with your crew later?
LL: No, well the thing is, you never mentioned – and this is strange. You never mentioned anything inusual [emphasis] because you then put everybody on nerves end –
AS: Mm.
LL: Thinking ‘now what’s he on about?’
AS: Yeah.
LL: But then the next thing you know, ‘what the hell’s he bloody on about, silly, he bloody drunk again,’ something like that. But, so you kept everything to yourself, and this is why it’s so quiet in the aircraft, the only time you’d speak if you’re passing instructions to anybody.
AS: It sounds like you were a very disciplined [emphasis] crew. Did your skipper keep tight discipline and make –
LL: Erm, well it seemed that we were completely at ease. I can’t remember the pilot or anybody for that sort of losing their temper. It’s rather strange, as if you’re entering another world. It’s very calm [emphasis] in there, when you’re flying, whether it’s the quietness, the only sound you can hear is the engines, but then you got your helmet on and you got your earphones, so you blocked out all the sound, the external sounds. So the only thing you can hear is when anybody speaks inside [emphasis] the aircraft. Otherwise it was dead quiet. It’s like this place now, yeah.
AS: Can you hear your own breathing?
LL: Hmm?
AS: Can you hear your own breathing on your mask? Checked – 59:41
LL: Ah now you come to mention, you did sometimes if you got excited, yeah. You’re bound to, yeah, and oh, another time was if your oxygen tube, pipe got disconnected, then you can hear all sorts of things then. Bad connection [?] from you to the turret, it’s complete, you can’t hear nothing else ‘cause it’s all coming through there, and what goes there comes from the person who’s either flying it or the crew, other members of the crew, yeah.
AS: So did you have this then, did your oxygen come disconnected?
LL: Yeah, it did. Now what happened there then? [Pause] oxygen lack at high altitude is very dangerous. A lot of things can go wrong, you’re maybe doing things that you would not normally do [coughs]. But, so you do take care of all your equipment at all times, to make sure everything is working right, and every switch is in the right position sort of thing.
AS: Mm.
LL: You got to be very careful when you’re flying.
AS: Did you check on each other to make sure you were all –
LL: Oh, oh, I’ll tell you what, I used to regular but you do it in a manner that you’re not scaring them, not upsetting them. ‘You alright down there Bill? You warm enough?’ Some remark like that.
AS: Yeah.
LL: You didn’t agitate any problem or anything like that, you kept quiet. Because anybody under tension could miss things. But when it’s all quiet like that and you’re concentrating you were quite safe I think, yeah.
AS: Mm. When you were on the ground as a crew, did you practice your drills? Your dingy drills, your evacuation drills?
LL: Well, Bridgnorth was some of the ground staff. Oh we did some dingy [emphasis] drill up at [unclear] at Castle Kennedy in Scotland. You cling onto an imitation, well a platform which represented the wing of the aircraft, and you want to jump [emphasis]. You’re in a pond, and then you had to get to the raft. Now, with all the flying clothes on, everything, you’re heavy, and you’ve got to get there as quickly as you can, otherwise – well it’s not all that deep anyway just sufficient to wet yourself or so, all your clothes. And you just go in and sort of change and put dry clothes on.
AS: Mhm, when you finished, or any time really, did you really think about ‘well, I’ll be going bombing soon?’ Did you think that you were about to go to war?
LL: No, not to my knowledge. I never – flying was just flying to me, and you look forward [emphasis] to it, it’s getting you off the ground. You join the Air Force to flying an air, to flying in aircraft, not to keep marching on the bloody square all the time.
AS: So even on operations you were keen to go flying?
LL: Oh, oh yeah. Never where you are – you wanted to get away from the, from the monotony of class, in the classes, because quite often you get different instructors but the subject is always the same. They drilling [emphasis] it into you, they, and they’ve got to succeed in getting that knowledge into you because it could save your life, and not only you but the aircraft and the rest of the crew.
AS: So going on operations was almost a relief [emphasis] to stop –
LL: It was in a way [pause]. There was a – I forget what happened, but we were on a very heavy raid. Loads of bloody shells everywhere, exploding all around you. I found that – now this is stupid [emphasis]. I was in an aircraft with five or six tonnes of high explosive bombs. I was trying to stand up in the mid upper turret, shaking like a leaf on a tree, shivering, frightened like hell, and it, well. It’s like the noise is like flying in a thunderstorm, a very heavy thunderstorm. And then the bumping [emphasis] about of bumps from the shells [?] is like when they go on these rapid waterfalls, you’re bumping all over the place – what was the other thing? Very calm sort of thing. I suddenly – I was shaking like mad, and then as quickly as it appeared, the condition disappeared completely. Instead of being frightened or scared stiff and god knows what, I just sat down there in amongst all this noise and what have you, I just sat and relaxed. And as if somebody had said ‘welcome to the club, you’re a survivor. You lost the fear of death.’ And there it was, in exactly the same conditions, shaking like mad and all that, I just sat down like we are now, and as if I was on a training flight. And all this going on outside, just outside the door [emphasis], and I just sat down there as if nothing was wrong. How your brain bloody works I don’t know, but I just sat down there, still the same conditions, but I wasn’t worried.
AS: Mm.
LL: It’s funny really, yeah, ‘cause – just normal training flight and I must be bloody mad or something [AS laughs].
AS: And you were fine from then on?
LL: Yeah.
AS: Yeah.
LL: We were going on a raid, I forget where it was, somewhere, somewhere heavy [emphasis] I know that. And I know one thing that – in the, oh, we got a 50, 61 Squadron newsletter that comes out once every three months I think. Somebody wrote an article about what happened over at Hamburg on this – it’s on there, the raid during the 61 Squadron I think [papers shuffling]. Oh, some bloke describing all the anti-aircraft shells everywhere. And these German [papers continue to shuffle] jets in amongst the aircraft. What did he – and someone else wrote it, that’s what drew my attention to it. It was completely wrong [emphasis]. He made it up, because the day in question, the 9th of the 4th, not one anti-aircraft shell was fired, and the only aircraft we saw was a German jet, the 262, and that flew head on, straight through the middle, plonk. Right through this group, turned round and knocked down three aircraft. We didn’t see the fourth go down but you’re in a group of six sevens, forty-two, six across and six behind them below, and that fighter knocked down three on one, on our side. You got the, I think the bombing leader on that end comes up to us and it’s a tail end Charlie sort of thing [coughs]. You there [?] to form the six in the front. That thing went down, but that thing [?] got shot on the following day with the Yanks. They damaged this aircraft, they had to find a place to land, and when they was looking and doing something with the controls of the aircraft, he didn’t see the crater in the middle of the runway. Straight in and up he went. That was the following day.
AS: That was the German pilot?
LL: Yeah.
AS: So, so with your six sevens of forty-two aircraft, that was both squadrons flying together, 50 and 61?
LL: Well, it was the son of the late rear gunner, he [pause] – did he phone or ring, write a letter? [Pause] I forget now.
AS: Okay, we’ll, we’ll come back to that later.
LL: [Unclear] no we’ll come back to it.
AS: Mm. So you were forty-two, in daylight, flying in formation.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Okay, so that must have been the two squadrons together.
LL: Ah, ah I know, I know. In that logbook, that’s all the operations and all the flying we did as a crew.
AS: Mhm.
LL: No other squadron is mentioned, but the son of the rear gunner, he must have something, telly or something, internet. He found that the Dambusters are not mentioned in there, but the Dambusters and us were on the same raids.
AS: Okay.
LL: And how I know that, we were on the one raid and I pointed out to the – it was Bill started it first. He said ‘look at that light down there’ he said ‘down on the port side.’ And he said something about ‘possibly turn back soon because it looks like the engines were not coping with the load.’ And we followed this progress, you didn’t focus on it you just casually glanced – it kept on coming nearer and nearer. But when that thing came near enough, we thought it was an extra fuel tank you know, to set fire to buildings, but that was the latest bomb that the RAF aircraft would, could carry. What was it, twenty-two thousand pounds?
AS: Is it the, the Tall Boy was it?
LL: Yeah.
AS: Yes.
LL: And that’s what they called it. But we followed that and gradually, so it came level with us, and you know when people bail out of an aircraft they travel at the same speed as the aircraft, and same applies to your bomb load, because when that plane gradually comes up dead level with us, wing tip to wing tip, the release of such a weight, that plane disappeared. I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t bend my head back to see if they were overhead, but it just disappeared. And I was left with a view of this great big bomb flying level with our [AS laughs] wingtip. If we had a camera, nobody would have believed it was a fake picture, but it was the – I’d heard of [?] the people travel the same speed as the aircraft when they bail out, so that bomb load does and gradually [emphasis] it sinks. But for what seemed like an eternity it just stood there level with the wing and then it dropped. The size of that thing there, my gosh [emphasis], long as this bloody room nearly.
AS: Well I think [emphasis] the biggest one was twenty-two thousand pounds was it?
LL: Yeah that’s it, that was, that was this Dambusters aircraft [coughs] because a raid is made up of possibly a dozen or more squadrons all different ones, all with different purposes and all with different buildings to go to, stores or oil depots or things like that.
AS: Yeah, could you remember, could you talk me through a typical raid, from getting up in the morning to going to briefing, what was it like? [LL coughs] say a daytime raid.
LL: Well you get up in the morning – well more often than not your day, your own [emphasis] day starts about dinner time, because you’d been out, say, the night before, so you’ve had your kip and you go down to the sergeants mess for lunch. And then you got your briefing [emphasis] in the afternoon, and then similar, if it’s a late takeoff it’s normally about tea time or something like that.
AS: What was the briefing like?
LL: Erm, well they give you all the details, the name of the target – well it’s more for navigation than anything else. Bu you’re also advised that there are certain airfields about with various fighters in there. And at that point of the war [?] it was mainly German jets, the 262. And that’s the only time we ever – I’ve actually been that close it’s practically this distance away from here to the other side of the passage. And I should imagine that pilot, he would have knocked down the three outside ours, and that was I think two 61 Squadron aircraft went down and a 50, and I could imagine now [emphasis], I didn’t think of it then, I could imagine the bloke swinging his aircraft around and lining it up, and he weren’t that far away, he couldn’t have bloody missed us, and I should imagine that as he was able to press the button, I told him, the pilot, to take aversive action, and the pilot caught up and eighty-one [?] straight through, yeah. Carried on, he knocked down that three besides us and that was it, yeah.
AS: Mm. The luck of the draw.
LL: Sometimes it gets exciting but otherwise it’s boring [emphasis].
AS: Mhm.
LL: You’re just sitting there doing nothing. Nothing you can do about it, no.
AS: When you were flying on daylights –
LL: Yeah.
AS: Did you have fighter escort?
LL: No, never saw any.
AS: Okay.
LL: They might have been out of range, some distance away not to distract your attention, but I could, could never ever, 1943, forty-four, no forty-five –
AS: Forty-five.
LL: February forty-five was the first raid we’d done. Never had I seen anything there to protect us, you had to protect yourselves.
AS: So you weren’t, you weren’t told at briefing that there’d be –
LL: Yeah.
AS: You weren’t told at the briefing that there would be fighter cover or anything?
LL: Yeah, that’s all you, that’s all you relied on, whatever the squadron leader tells you during your briefing.
AS: Mm.
LL: Nothing else, target and all this and that, and they tell you the airfields with various aircraft, but at that time of the war, it ended a couple of days later anyway [emphasis], and [coughs] I’ll tell you what, in the areas [?] sort of thing, give you some advice, but you never took too much notice of it, because you know in about two, three days the war’s gonna end.
AS: So when you, so when you went on ops you knew this was just about the finish did you?
LL: Yeah, for us it was a limited period of time from the beginning of February I think it was until what was it, May?
AS: May, yeah.
LL: Yeah, that’s my wartime experience, that, the last three months, yeah.
AS: So –
LL: It was bad enough then –
AS: Yeah.
LL: When you consider fifty-six, fifty-eight youngsters lost, thousand [emphasis] lost like that.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Great number of men, and all youngsters, yeah.
AS: And still being killed at the very end.
LL: Yeah, yeah.
AS: Like your three aircraft.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Yeah.
LL: Yeah, practically the last, last day but one, down they went. I did see one of those Lancs splitting off. Either the pilot, mid upper gunner was sound asleep or something, or the bomb aimer above wasn’t with it because that aircraft broke right in half [emphasis], with [unclear] where the mid upper turret, mid upper turret gunner must have been killed instantly because the aircraft broke in half and the tail end gone down there swinging like a pendulum.
AS: Mm.
LL: And the whole front of it just went straight down. I don’t think any of them, anybody got out of it alive, I think they lost. Another aircraft was shot down further down and out of that, what was that, twenty, twenty, only a few survived, all the rest gone. There aren’t any survivors – once they start going down you can’t get out of them, yeah. That’s a big problem.
AS: Hmm. So still really dangerous with the flak and the fighters.
LL: Yeah you, well you did worry about it I think internally, but I think it soon passes over once you get used to it I think. You get accustomed to all this noise and bumping that goes on, and you accept it as part of the job, simple as that, yeah.
AS: Okay. We were talking about a typical mission. After the briefing you’d have your meal and then what would happen?
LL: Well erm [pause] first thing out to the aircraft. What you do there from then on, you were double checking all what everybody else had done. You check all your equipment, navigator and wireless operator, everything, everyone checks everything is okay. And then you just hang about, have a chat with the ground crew, discuss something like that. You just spending time until a tank [?] would takeoff. Comes on usually has after a meal or sometime in the afternoon, yeah [zipping noise].
AS: How did you get out to the aircraft?
LL: Oh, well we had transport [zipping noise]. We had one of these little round Land Rover things, you never walked because moving about on foot you’re sweating, and that’s the last thing you want to get into an aircraft and you gonna fly high and you’re sweating, because then you really get cold [emphasis]. It’s like when you have a bath in the winter, it’s not so comfortable as having a bath in the summer. It’s still having a bath [coughs] and you’re still flying but if you’re sweating you’re much colder. [Coughs] it’s a bloody nuisance this is.
AS: Did your flying kit generally keep you warm?
LL: Yeah, yeah. It was electrically operated, like yeah – oh it was like a pair of overalls [emphasis] you put on completely. Under your – oh, it was outside your trousers but I think you had your jacket – oh you had all your flying clothes on, thick, thick like sheep’s wool uniform –
AS: Mhm.
LL: All over you to keep you warm. And you wore mittens or gloves, gauntlets, they were plugged in as well. It was like an electric seat and that kept you warm when you were flying.
AS: Okay.
LL: So it wasn’t too bad.
AS: And some of your trips were quite long weren’t they?
LL: Oh yeah. I done eight and a half hours I think, or was it nine? But they’re not as long as some of these people have done, they’ve gone further and flying for ten or twelve hours.
AS: Mhm. And Nuremburg, that’s a long one.
LL: Yeah. I think eight and a half or nine and a half was the longest I think we done. It’s recorded in there anyway, somewhere.
AS: Mm. A really basic question is how did you use the loo, or did you, in the aeroplane?
LL: How did you?
AS: Use the toilet in the aeroplane? With all this suit [emphasis] on.
LL: Ah, now that’s a big problem. I never can remember, I never did do anything. Because the last thing you do, usually after a meal, you dive into the toilet and you get rid of all your problems down there [AS laughs]. And then – you got to be relaxed before you get in the aircraft. Remember you don’t want any distractions of any description.
AS: Mhm.
LL: That’s the only way I can put that, yeah.
AS: Changing tack a little bit, your skipper was commissioned.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Did that make a difference to the way the crew operated?
LL: No, he was still a skipper to us.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Mm, number – I think – well no, don’t forget you’re flying together, you’re practically living together, you don’t necessarily use the same sergeants mess because you’re not supposed to fly, what was it? A four engine aircraft, say a Stirling, a pilot must have – I don’t think the pilot was allowed to fly one of them unless he was a pilot or flying officer [coughs]. And when you got onto the Lancasters as if there was an unwritten law. You can’t fly in these aircraft unless you’re a flight lieutenant.
AS: Really?
LL: Yeah. And straight away, you move from one station to another and you gain all those ranks, and it’s the same as when we passed out at a training centre. You go from the lowest rank in the RAF to a sergeant, with an increase in pay which is a good thing, yeah.
AS: Did you, did you – what did you feel about bombing at the time? Was it just a job or did you feel sympathy for the people underneath, or?
LL: Erm, bear in mind that at that time I was living in Swansea and we were going through a Blitz over there.
AS: Mm.
LL: And they say that you dump [?] the bomb that’s going to kill you, you don’t hear that coming down. But you can’t get any nearer than about a hundred yards and you can still hear it, because I think it was at, what I remember, this chap must have been a doctor, and his wife and a son, and they were in a bungalow and that disappeared, and that was only a hundred yards away. But you heard this noise like a whistling sound, and that was it on its way down, the bomb on its way down. There was nothing left, there was a great big hole there and that’s all that was left of that little bungalow.
AS: In Swansea?
LL: Yeah, and that was during the Blitz, yeah. A bit of a noisy place down there. And we weren’t even in the centre of the town, we were on the edge of it, only about a well, a mile, maybe a mile and half from the centre of the town. Otherwise it was just a distant banging that goes on [coughs].
AS: Mm. And then at the end of May, operations, well, operations stopped. You finished operational flying in May 1954.
LL: Yeah.
AS: What happened to you after that?
LL: Interesting. The squadron got rid of its Lancasters. It changed over to the Lincolns. Now you might know, the Lancaster had a mid upper turret, the Lincoln hadn’t. So all the mid upper gunners had to remuster, and you had a discussion ‘where you going to go to?’ Sometimes the officers required certain people at certain stations, but more often than not they remuster to go to Marsham [?] to learn to drive [coughs]. Because don’t forget we were only kids at the time, only eighteen, so the more you learnt the better, and this is how I come to end up in Marsham [?] learning to drive.
AS: Okay.
LL: And that was a – what was I then? I left the flying when I was well, eighteen, I was still eighteen then, yeah. Yeah that’s when I went over to Marsham [?] and I’ve been in the air ever since, yeah.
AS: When you remustered, you kept your rank –
LL: Yeah, yeah you kept your rank and your pay.
AS: And your badge?
LL: Yeah, and the badge [coughs]. I never know, never knew where my wing went, my air gunner’s wing, and the length of ribbons like I got on the photograph.
AS: Mhm.
LL: Somebody must have thrown them out, I don’t know where. I used to keep a lot of the stuff altogether like we did with this.
AS: Mhm.
LL: But where they’ve gone to – they’ve disappeared now, anyway.
AS: Mhm. So you remustered as a driver in the Air Force.
LL: Yeah.
AS: And then where did you get posted to after that?
LL: Ah, where, Marsham [?]. I remember being interviewed with a friendly officer. He said ‘right, now’ he said, ‘we got to get posted now. What about going down to St Athan’s? That’s in Wales.’ I said ‘no good going down there, pubs are closed on Sundays’ [AS laughs]. That’s all I could answer, then he looked through some books around. ‘Bristol’ he said.’ ‘Ooh that’s alright’ I said, ‘I got a niece or a relative still down there in Bristol,’ I said ‘we could go down there.’ ‘Pucklechurch’ he said, that was a transport maintenance station and we used to do a lot of this, taking the vehicle, RAF vehicles from Pucklechurch and I think it’s up to Quedgeley [emphasis], place near Gloucester?
AS: Mm.
LL: I used to do that run quite often, and this is funny. Now then, what was required by the mechanics, whatever was on that list, you had to bring that vehicle in. You take the vehicle out that had been repaired and restored, and you bring another back, so you didn’t have an idle journey. And I came back, all sorts of private cars, officers cars, and all. And you know what those Queen Mary’s are?
AS: Yes, mhm.
LL: The long aircraft carriers. I had to bring one of them back [coughs]. You had a building – on the station, Pucklechurch, you had a building, car park was this side, had this, I had this car, this Queen Mary, and I must have remembered what the driving instructor had said. ‘Pause briefly, have a look what sort of route you’re going to take, if you’re getting the vehicle out [emphasis] of the car park. And you’d get so far and close round [?] to the bend, and then you start turning,’ so you were lined up ready to go on. And I thought ‘well briefly I did that’ but in reverse, and I paused very slowly and I thought ‘I’ve gotta go there, there, there, there.’ I levelled [?] then lined myself up – I didn’t move the vehicle, just looked. ‘Right go on then, right God, I’ve worked the route out how to go out backwards with this Queen Mary,’ I went all the way around and went all the way in. Never touched the side [AS laughs] and all of a sudden I heard this voice. ‘Loosemore you’re a liar,’ well I thought ‘how’s that?’ I looked round, couldn’t see anybody, and I heard this voice again. And there was this, I think it was the transport officer and he said ‘you’re a bloody liar, you tell anybody who’s just done that they’ll call you a bloody liar mate.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d never driven a Queen Mary before, and I just didn’t want to shut him down [?], go so far and backed up and that was dead [emphasis] in line. I could see the pillars of the windscreen, between the windscreen and it was all in, dead in line. And that’s what that transport officer was shouting.
AS: Mm.
LL: ‘You tell anybody you just done that,’ and I was dead [emphasis] in line. And he wouldn’t believe me, wouldn’t believe me.
AS: Brilliant.
LL: I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d never driven one before [AS laughs], mm.
AS: When, just as you left the squadron –
LL: Yeah.
AS: What was it like leaving your crew? Did they go on without you?
LL: Ah, no. That was rather strange that. I don’t think, no. It was proper procedure, because you were guided towards an office and all this rubbish, what I call rubbish piled on the floor. The officer then said ‘dump all you want to get rid of, take what you want,’ just like that. And there was all sorts of stuff, but your uniform, you didn’t want that, a lot of stuff straight on the pile. But if there was anything you wanted you just grabbed. I grabbed a couple of towels, that’s about all I wanted. Nice brand new towels, and I forget [?] what I didn’t want, but I could have had anything off that pile, he just said ‘take all you want.’ But I couldn’t for the life of me, well there was nothing I wanted really.
AS: Mm.
LL: Everything. But I did grab a couple of towels.
AS: Mhm.
LL: And all the other, the wrong number on it but you could always cross that number off and put your own number next to it, and name, yeah.
AS: What about leaving your crew, what did that feel like?
LL: Well as I said, I didn’t know they’d gone [emphasis].
AS: Oh okay.
LL: No, because I was sent straight to the dumping ground, the office.
AS: Mhm.
LL: When they went, I hadn’t seen then since [coughs] ‘cause they went possibly to another, to get ready to go to another station.
AS: Mm.
LL: Because I think they left, they left Skellingthorpe and they might have gone somewhere onto another squadron [coughs].
AS: Okay, so you didn’t manage to keep in touch?
LL: Oh, the only – oh I did with, oh I make [pause], did I see him? I might have had a letter or a phone call to say that the rear gunner who travelled from Ormskirk in Lancashire [coughs].
AS: Mm.
LL: He was with a fellow officer. I think we were all warrant officers by then. Oh they were at Crewe Station, and he said, he had to answer a call of nature [coughs]. And he was with this other bloke, I think a warrant officer, with his two kitbags [coughs]. When he came out his mate was missing and his kitbag. All his kit was in there. His family didn’t know what he had done during the war. The bloke disappeared, so did his kitbag with all his stuff like that in there.
AS: All his logbook and –
LL: I thought, he was telling me about it [coughs]. And when I was – I had a letter from his son telling me, telling me what happened, I thought ‘well, it’s not fair really.’ He’d got all this – it wasn’t too long back. His family didn’t know anything about his service life, not a thing. So been in contact with him, I thought ‘well, it’s only fair.’ You can change my name to any member of the crew, it’s exactly the same. All the flying you do is as a crew [emphasis], and all, no stranger amongst them. So if I take my name off and put yours instead, nobody could be any wiser because you all fly together as a crew and not as an individual with somebody else. So the recording on there is exactly the same, right the way through.
AS: Mm.
LL: All seven of us got exactly the same written on there.
AS: So you made a copy and gave it to –
LL: Yeah –
AS: The son.
LL: I did, I copied it I think.
AS: Yeah.
LL: You can have that if you want it.
AS: Thank you.
LL: It’s entirely up to you.
AS: Thank you.
LL: I think – oh, when I did the copying for Bill I done an extra one, in case I came across somebody else who wanted one, so I’ve always had – it’s been spare so I’m alright that way [?].
AS: Thank you. That’s been absolutely [emphasis] – we’ve been talking for two hours. Shall we stop now, I think?
LL: What do you want to do now, anything?
AS: I think we’ve pretty well covered most [emphasis] of what I was going to say, maybe we could pause now.
LL: Well what we could do, we could open that door there and when – you can unlock it and have a bit of air come through, it’s getting a bit stale in here, yeah.
AS: That’s what we’ll do. Thank you very much.
LL: Yeah.
AS: Cheers.
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 Lesley Joseph Loosemoore
Creator
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Adam Sutch
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
2015-11-16
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ALoosemoreLJ151116
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
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
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:41:32 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Les Loosemore describes his upbringing and employment history in Swansea before joining the war in 1945. He describes the Blitz in Swansea before training to be a mid upper gunner for 61 Squadron. He describes his rather intensive training, including his time at the Lancaster Finishing School, the crewing up process, the importance of maintaining equipment and the various aircraft he flew, including Ansons, Wellingtons and Lancasters. He articulates the atmosphere onboard an aircraft during an operation, recalling the silence as everyone concentrated on their own duties and the fear he felt on his first few operations. He recalls watching the aircraft next to him dropping a Tallboy (or Grand Slam) bomb, before likening the noise of a operation to that of heavy thunder. He flew operations for three months before the war ended, at which point the mid upper gunners were no longer needed. He retrained as a driver although missed saying goodbye to his crew.
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
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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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
Wales--Swansea
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-02
1944
1945
61 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
Anson
bombing
crewing up
fear
Grand Slam
ground personnel
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Me 262
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Winthorpe
sanitation
service vehicle
Stirling
Tallboy
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/132/1289/PTempleL1501.1.jpg
ef9ac290edf3a9346f92c6236f7c4df3
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/132/1289/ATempleL151027.1.mp3
7e68bfdea2e63e23d0c117e0dcb60971
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
Temple, Leslie
Leslie Temple
L Temple
Description
An account of the resource
The collection consists of one oral history interview and one warrant related to Warrant Officer Leslie Temple (b. 1925, 1893650 Royal Air Force). The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Leslie Temple and catalogued by IBCC staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
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Sound. Oral history
Text. Service material
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Temple, L
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AS: Yes we are, we’re ready to go. Okay, this is, we’re ready to start. The machine’s running I think. Yes okay, so this is Andrew Sadler interviewing Les Temple, Mr. Leslie Temple, at his home in Ilford on Tuesday the 27th of September 2015 for the Bomber Command Archive. Thank you very much for allowing us to interview you Les.
LT: Good.
AS: Can I start by asking you about your date and place of birth?
LT: My birth date is 12th of January 1925 you see. Now I was born in the East End of London, and I had an older – my parents who – my father had come from Poland when he was fourteen and my mother as a young baby when she was born, she came over to England with her mother, and my parents had my brother Arthur. He was four years older than me, Arthur, and he went into the Army. When the war started, he was conscripted into the Army and in 1941 he was sent to France and there lo and behold in France, he was captured and made a prisoner of war. He was a prisoner of war for four years [emphasis] in Germany, and there’s quite a bit of history in his name obviously. But in the meantime, whilst he was away I reached conscription age and living in the East End of London at that particular time – when I was born, I was born and my brother was a bit older [emphasis] than me, so he didn’t sort of used to do the same, same things [laughs] together. He went into the services and then we moved at the beginning of the war to Leyton [emphasis], E10, and from there I was conscripted at the age of eighteen and I was conscripted for the RAF because I had spent four years in the Air Training Core [emphasis]. I was in the Air Training Core, I was conscripted, and in effect I was happy to be going into the RAF and for air, aircrew duties. And I went in initially as a radio operator, wireless operator and in that time, before that time I had been at school in Leyton, E10, at which I was sorted out there because I was always receiving first place in class – and my father was a tailor, and in effect he [laughs] couldn’t afford for me to go on to higher sort of class, school when I reached the age of fourteen and he, I had to go to work. But the fact was, is that I had my school reports there [laughs] of which I have first place in every one, and in that respect the school wanted me to go onto higher school, Leyton County High School, and, but my father I’m afraid in this respect he wasn’t earning much as a tailor and he couldn’t afford for me to go on in school, and I had to go to work. And strangely enough my first job was for the London County Council, Mr. Charles Leyton who I worked for in the office when I left school at the age of fourteen, he was the principle of the London County Council [emphasis]. So he took me into the London County Council and I was worked, worked there for a couple of years. And I found that I couldn’t earn enough to satisfy my parents who it was rather shame that they, you know, things weren’t all that good in those days in the, in the tailoring trade and so on and so forth. So it went on that I found various jobs to improve my mode of being able to live and earn money and I went into the insurance business [emphasis], and I started at a pretty young age in the insurance business, learning the office work and so on and so forth, and then I went into, into the Air Force because the war started and I was taken in as a radio operator, and in effect I had joined the Air Training Core during that period, and I was four years [emphasis] in the Air Training Core, which I did, did quite well, and as you can see here, the history is even in here about me being in the Air Training Core, and they decided it would be good for me to go in as a radio operator into, into the RAF.
AS: Why did you originally go into the Air Training Core, what inspired you?
LT: Well it inspired me because my brother [emphasis] was going to be conscripted in the Army, and I felt that I was capable of handling the things required in the, in the RAF, and I was pretty good at the Morse code and one thing and another in the Air Training Core, and so I applied to, to go into the RAF, and that’s how I was conscripted at that particular time for the RAF. And in effect [paper shuffles] let me see now [continued shuffling, pause]. Ooh, yes [shuffling, pause]. [Reading]: ‘confounding the enemy, the RAF Jewish Special Operators of 101 Squadron, Bomber Command.’ Now in the RAF I was, I did all the examinations and so, learnt the Morse code pretty quickly and so on, and as it got in the book here, [reading]: ‘much of the history of the secret telecommunication of war, against the Germans during the Second World War is still classified and shrouded in mystery, including the radio countermeasures of RAF Squadron 101.’ Now –
AS: So you were in 101?
LT: I was in 101 Squadron you see. Now 101 was a particular – [reading]: ‘it was a great history of the advancement made of telecommunications in the RAF because we were using the special Morse code details for confounding the enemy and also learning what they were transmitting, and we’ – the normal – I went, I went into various [emphasis] stations – I’ll show you, just a moment [pause, papers shuffle]. Well I had it here before, it’s all down here. [Reading]: ‘confounding the enemy in the RAF Jewish [unclear] 101,’ right. Right, my number was 1893650, would you like to make a note [?]. [Pause, continued shuffling].
AS: Good, carry on.
LT: Now, as it says here, [reading]: ‘1893650, Flight Sergeant Leslie Temple, born in 1925 to Jane and Solomon in Stepney, joined the RAF in January 1943 aged eighteen, but has served in the Air Training Core from the age of fourteen. He received initial air training at Bridgnorth in Shropshire, on De Havilland Dominies and Proctors. Radio training at Madley, acclimatisation on B17s at Sculthorpe in Norfolk and a Lancaster Conversion Course at Lindholme in Yorkshire, before being sent as a full flight sergeant aged nineteen to join 101 Squadron.’ I don’t know whether you’ve heard of 101 before, have you?
AS: No, not really.
LT: No, well – [reading]: ‘to join 101 Squadron at Ludford. He’d learnt German at school and spoke fluent Yiddish at home.’ Well you know Yiddish was the language which the foriegn Jews used when they came to London. They couldn’t speak English properly so they were able to speak easily to each other. [Reading]: ‘but the SO work was so secret that they had no idea until he arrived at Ludford,’ – I arrived at Ludford Magna, that was the station that I arrived at. They used to call it not Ludford but Mudford [laughs] it was so, so bad. [Reading]: ‘until he arrived at Ludford why he’d been sent there. He completed thirty missions between 22nd of June against the Reims Marshalling Yard and 28th of October 1944, Cologne.’ So I did my air operations between 22nd of June and 28th of October 1944, on Cologne.[Reading]: ‘other raids from his still prized logbook including Essen, Frankfurt, V1 [?] sites, through concentrations after D-Day, Cahagnes [?], Hamburg and Sholven. Special operators worked intensely on the journeys out and home for several hours, but over the target could only watch. Once the bombers were near the target, it was obvious to the enemy where they were going, so jamming [?] was superfluous.’ When you got near the target you stopped jamming [?] you see, only when you was coming to the target and listening, listening into what the Germans were saying. [Reading]: ‘Leslie Temple explained that the rear gunner in Able ABC Lancasters,’ ABC is you know, Airborne Cigar, that’s ABC – ‘had heavier machine guns than usual because the planes were particularly vulnerable transmitting over enemy bombers.’ Now did you see a thing, Lancaster Bomb, Lancaster Bombers –
AS: Yes.
LT: Ah it’s under, under this book there.
AS: Yeah.
LT: You see now, Lancaster Bombers – the compliment for a crew for a Lancaster was seven, a long was seven. But 101 was the only squadron that had eight [emphasis], and we had eight because we were a special aircrew, squadron which was trans, doing the special operators work, interfering with what the Germans were transmitting to their fighters and so on. Now, the fact that I had a knowledge of the German language , the fact that I had a knowledge of the German language made me that eighth member of the crew, because when I was, when I went to, what’s her name at the beginning, my first squadron at Ludford – I, I had this crew, I joined the crew which I joined because it was time they arrived and I arrived you see, to make up the eighth, eighth member. I did six operations with them, but the skipper, he used to mess about with ladies and so on and so forth, and what happened was he, the crew was disarmed and so on, and taken off [emphasis]. And there was I, left at Ludford without a crew [emphasis]. And I, I had done six operations with them. Well when I was there on my own it was lucky for me that Eric Neilson came in with his crew, and he had seven members of his crew who came to Ludford Magna, to 101, to start operations. So they said to me ‘right, you join him as a special operator.’ Now aircraft in 101, their machine guns were point five. The normal machine gun in a Lancaster and aircraft used by the RAF were 303s. We had heavier machine guns in 101, and it was a wonderful reason that we had [laughs] point fives, because they were very useful on many occasions, and I joined them as a special operator. Now I don’t know whether you know, the Lancaster was converted to a special operation aircraft because when you got into a Lancaster, behind the door on a normal Lancaster was a bed. Well on our Lancasters, 101 Squadron, the bed was taken out and the place was made for the special operators. I had my recording equipment and my equipment to listen, listen in to the German transmissions, and I could hear the German language and I could understand what was going on, and I would transmit that to my skipper when anything was happening that was useful to us. And so we had eight in the crew. Our Lancaster was converted from seven individuals to eight [emphasis], and I was the special operator, and the whole [emphasis] squadron was this way. We all had eight in the crew [phone rings]. Oh, excuse me a minute, is that –
[Tape paused and restarted].
AS: Okay, do carry on.
LT: Right, now I was up to this question – what, have you been over this question of why we had eight, eight members?
AS: Yes.
LT: You’ve been over this, and where they were situated and so on –
AS: Yep.
LT: And so forth. Now where were we up to –
AS: You just told me that.
LT: Yeah. Now when, when I had got my crew, Eric Neilson came in and I joined them. I had done six operations, you see when – you know the tour was at thirty, you were supposed to do up to thirty you see, so I did twenty-three with them, which is in my logbook and, for you to see, and in effect, we were getting on extremely well. I was, you know made[laughs], made right for them, but I couldn’t do the full tour that they were doing, you see. They would have to do the thirty and I would only have to do twenty-three to do. And in effect this, this situation developed where I did the twenty-three with them and I had to come off because I done thirty. I did six and I did another one with another crew, just one, to finish off my thirty [emphasis]. And Eric Neilson had to get another operator you see, so in effect as it says here in this history, that we got on very well together, we had a number of difficult situations to do, but the worst operation we had was on a raid on Kiel [emphasis], where we went to Kiel [papers shuffle]. We took off from Ludford just before midnight, at twenty-three fifty-five for the heavily defended German naval base at Kiel. The Lancaster was blown slightly off course over the North Sea so the bomb aimer had to ask that they, that they fly round for a second time over the target to ensure accuracy, which was always extremely hazardous. As we did not jam [?] over the actual target, I could watch everything from the astrodome. I used to go into the astrodome when we reached the target area, because I had to come off my, my equipment and we started doing our bombing [emphasis], and dropping, and dropping the bombs you see, and as it says here: [reading]: ‘there was a solid curtain burst and hellish flak, wall of searchlights across the sky. Other bombers all around waiting to release their bombs, and predatory German night fighters spitting canon fire. Finally we dropped our bombs on target, but were suddenly nailed by a master searchlight on the way out. Immediately, a dozen others combed us at twenty thousand feet.’ All these other searchlights, we got on a master searchlight caught us in its [laughs] light and the other searchlights came on and we were combed at twenty thousand feet. [Reading]: ‘extremely German flak opened up and we were scarred with shrapnel which simply passed through the airframe, over our two port engines and burst into flames. I feared the worst as I could not bail out over the North Sea at night.’ We were over the North Sea and we had these two engines caught [laughs] fire. [Reading]: ‘our quick thinking Canadian skipper, Eric Neilson, who was given the DFC from this operation, nose a Lancaster down and pulled out of the beam at five thousand feet. The pillar and flight engineer, the pilot [emphasis] and flight engineer managed to extinguish the flames over the North Sea using the internal extinguishers, and despite no power from the directional equipment because of the two cut engines, our skilled navigator used’ –. Now this is – he, our navigatior, he always carried a sextant. You know what a sextant is, for direction and so on and so forth, and [reading]: ‘stars trying to get us home on two engines. We crash landed at Ludford in Lincolnshire and our back at our aerodrome, a special crash landing base at about four a.m. with over a hundred [emphasis] holes in the Lancaster.’ We had over a hundred holes in it, and er – [reading]: ‘after debriefing, I laid on my bed and could not stop shaking for twelve hours. The MO said the best cure was simply to get back up again soon and of course we did.’ No counselling in those days, so that was a pretty difficult situation, which we [laughs], we got, we came back on two engines and crash landed [laughs] and so on and so forth. Now tell, I’ll tell you something that we haven’t written down. The way to get your wheels down in a Lancaster was through hydraulic tanks. Now, if you were out too long, or else [?] they were punctured, the tanks then you couldn’t get your wheels down. The only way you could get down was you had to crash land. So we couldn’t get our wheels down when we got back to our base [emphasis] and the pilot said to us ‘right boys, you’ve got to go and do business [laughs] to pee, to pee in the tanks, the hydraulic tanks.’ So we had to go and pee in the hydraulic tanks, and we managed to get sufficient water to get the wheels down, you know, and that was the only way we could get down safely [emphasis] by doing that. And we just [emphasis] got down, you know, it was a tremendous situation otherwise we were going to have to crash, crash land without any wheels you see, and that was, that thing on Kiel. And that really, on the 23rd of July 1944 was the worst possible trip that we had, and in my thirty operations that was the – because we got shot up and we had, you know, all the situations that developed, being involved with the Germans at that time, but anyway, we managed, managed okay. So is that quite clear to you?
AS: How many more trips did you have to do after that? Where was that in the –
LT: Er –
AS: In the order of them?
LT: That [papers shuffle] that was my twenty-third [emphasis] operation that was.
AS: So you got another seven to do?
LT: Another seven to do, yeah. And you know, it was very, very close. After serving in 101 I was told to take a long leave and thereafter working as ground crew, and [long pause] –
AS: So, so you did your thirty and after that you worked on the ground. You didn’t have to do anymore?
LT: I didn’t have to do anymore, no.
AS: Right.
LT: I worked on the ground –
AS: ‘Cause I read some people had to do another thirty and then –
LT: Oh well that is if you did a straight [emphasis] thirty you weren’t forced [emphasis] to go do a second operation, operational trip. They asked [emphasis] you if you wanted to go you could go, and you found a suitable crew you could go. But I’m afraid that doing thirty trips in a Lancaster at that particular time [laughs] it, it didn’t sit, make you want to go back and have another go [laughs], I can tell you that much.
AS: Were there many people who did thirty, I mean, I mean it was incredibly dangerous wasn’t it?
LT: Oh yes, oh yes.
AS: You must have lost a lot of comrades on the way.
LT: Well, I lost my best pal in the Air Force, a boy named Jack Whitely. We were on a raid going out, and we were circling off the coast, off the English coast, waiting to go out when we saw an explosion in the sky, and what happened was two aircraft had collided because when you were going out, you went to the coast and you all got into your positions. There might have been three or four hundred aircraft, but you all had certain times where you would take off for your target you see, which would put you in a certain position. Well, at some times you got there a little early, you couldn’t go, go off for your operation, so you had to wait. All you’d do is you’d go round and round and round, you see, waiting for your time to come up while you went on operation. Well, at times you were very, very close to other aircraft, especially at night and they were very much a number of collisions. And Jack, real name Jack Whitely who I went through radio school and everything, and as a matter of fact I’ve got information here from his family. They wrote to me, I think it’s in that file there. They wrote to me and you know, because Jack and I we used to be, go to each other’s homes and so on and so forth when we were on leave, and he got killed. They fished him out the, fished him out the sea. And this is the sort of life you had in the Air Force. You didn’t know where you – you made friends but you didn’t know what was going to happen on your next, on your next, next trip.
AS: Your thirty trips, how far, how far apart were they?
LT: Thirty – well in the winter they were further apart than in the, in the summer. A lot depended on, on the weather. I did my, my thirty took me about what, four, four, about five months it took me, yeah. And sometimes it took much longer, it took seven or eight months, and in the summer, if we were completely in the summer weather, well you were that much better off [laughs] as far as getting down quicker. But a lot of boys went back and did second, second tours. But I found myself that getting through one tour was heavy enough.
AS: You’d had your luck, and you were sticking with it.
LT: Yes, definitely [emphasis], definitely.
AS: So when you, then you became ground crew. What did you do with the ground crew, as a ground crew?
LT: Well, when I went back on ground crew I was teaching other boys, you know, carrying on, on various squadrons to teach other boys what you learnt when you [emphasis] were flying, and that’s, that’s what I did, and it, it was 1944 and we were getting towards the end [laughs] of things then. We were finding things that promised, made, we made promises [emphasis] to finish, finish the war then and it, it was a great life at the time because I’d never been abroad when I went into the Air Force. I’d never been abroad or anything like that, and it was a totally, totally different life. And since then it’s been seventy, seventy years [emphasis], seventy years since –
AS: Hmm.
LT: Finishing a tour.
AS: When you did the ground, when you were with the ground crew, was, where were you stationed then? Was that still in Lincolnshire?
LT: Oh yes, yes, Lincolnshire. I think I got [papers shuffle] something here [long pause]. Got here, [reading]: ‘there was little doubt that outside the small circle of 101 Squadron veterans, few knew, few know the important dangerous work of the special [emphasis] operators and their Lancaster crew comrades. Less still, the role of the Jewish SOs,’ special operators, ‘it is to be hoped that this study will bring deserved, if belated recognition to this brave band of brothers.’ Now where did I – [papers shuffle, long pause], hmm.
AS: So how long were you – was it ‘til you were demobilised at the end?
LT: What come off aircrew?
AS: Yes. I mean when you, when you left the RAF, when was that?
LT: I left the – well I was, what, in the RAF nineteen, nineteen, what – just a minute I’ll give you the details, are just here [papers shuffle, long pause]. Hmm, excuse me, looking this up. [Long pause] 24th [?] 1944 [long pause]. [Reading]: ‘from October 1943, Squadron 101 flew two thousand, four hundred and seventy-seven sorties with Airborne Cigar from Ludford Magna. They dropped sixteen thousand tonnes of bombs between January 1944 and April 1945 alone [emphasis], and flew more bombing raids than any other Lancaster squadron in Group 1, losing one thousand and ninety-four crew killed and a hundred and seventy-eight prisoners of war.’ Now, we lost more individuals in our squadron than any other RAF squadron –
AS: Mm.
LT: You know. [Reading]: ‘the highest causalities of any squadron in the RAF,’ 101 Squadron. It’s a good thing for you to have noted. [Reading]: ‘it dropped sixteen thousand tonnes of bombs between January forty-four and April forty-five, and flew more bombing raids than any other, than any other Lancaster squadron in Group 1.’
AS: Hmm.
LT: Yeah. [Reading]: ‘losing one thousand and ninety-four crew and a hundred and seventy-eight were prisoners of war. The highest casualties of any squadron in the RAF.’ It, we were a tough, a tough squadron.
AS: So what date did you, were you demobilised from the RAF?
LT: What date –
AS: Yes.
LT: Did I, excuse me [papers shuffle, long pause]. Well I finished my tour 23rd October forty-four. Now [papers shuffle]. Now, 28th of October forty-four – I started operations [continued shuffling] in June forty-four to October forty-four. That’s when, that’s my whole –
AS: That’s from your logbook.
LT: Yeah.
AS: But when did you actually leave the RAF?
LT: The RAF was in, in forty, forty-five I think. I can’t –
AS: Did you leave immediately after the war finished?
LT: Er, yes [shuffling]. I’ve got a note somewhere when I left the RAF.
AS: What did you do after, after you left?
LT: What did I do?
AS: Hmm.
LT: I became – I had one or two little business activities, but I went into insurance business. I was an insurance broker for many years. I had my office in The Temple. You know The Temple?
AS: Mm.
LT: Smiths [?], Selma [?] and Temple and Company, Temple Chambers, Temple Avenue, East E4, that was, that was what I was involved in –
AS: Did, did –
LT: When I came out the RAF.
AS: Did you find it easy to settle back into civilian life or?
LT: Well, the early days weren’t easy, the early days weren’t easy. But – because I did a lot of cold calling on businesses in those days, a lot of cold calling to build up a basic clientele. But then I, I got known quite well. I had an office in Shoreditch, and then I went up to Ludgate Circus, and then from Ludgate Circus we were doing well with the Norwich Union, and they said to me that ‘we’ve got offices in The Temple.’ They owned these offices in the Norwich Union and ‘we’d like you to come in there and operate [laughs] and we can do business together.’ So that’s the way – until my retirement at sixty-five. Really I retired too early [emphasis]. I could have gone on working and it’s, I mean when you look at it gently, I’m now coming up ninety-one. I’m retired, you know, twenty-six, twenty-six years ago [laughs], it’s, you know to fill in your time over those years it takes, it takes a lot of doing. And I’ve filled in a lot of my time with doing building for other people sort of thing, going, passing on my know how to other people, and that’s the, that’s the way it’s been.
AS: And tell me about your comrades in your crew. You told me you kept in touch with them.
LT: Yes. Well did you see that letter –
AS: I did yes.
LT: From my skipper?
AS: Yes I did. Your skipper Eric Neilson.
LT: Yeah.
AS: Tell me, tell me, tell us about Eric.
LT: Eric’s, Eric was a – well he had his own aircraft in Canada. He he had his own plane, and he wanted me to go out there but I missed it. I didn’t go out to Canada and then things, things happened that are just right. We were writing, phoning each other and so on, keeping, keeping in touch [emphasis]. I kept in touch with about four of my crew. The one you saw the card, just died, Stan Horne my navigator. Kept in touch with him, and with Eric, Eric died pretty early [emphasis] you know.
AS: Did he? And he was the one who was the deputy prime minister in Canada.
LT: In Canada, yes. And you can see in your, in the book there’s some very nice pictures of him.
AS: And this is his memories, his autobiography we’re looking at.
LT: Yeah [shuffling papers]. See there’s our, there’s our crew there –
AS: Oh yes [long pause, shuffling].
LT: Lovely man [shuffling continues]. Life moves very quickly.
AS: And after the war what – I mean how do you think that Bomber Command were treated? Have you got any opinion on that?
LT: On Bomber Command – well no not really. I haven’t got a lot of experience [emphasis] with Bomber Command.
AS: No.
LT: But I’ve kept together, yeah I’ve been going to the RAF club regularly. I still go there occasionally.
AS: In Pall Mall?
LT: In Pall Mall, yes.
AS: Yes.
LT: Opposite the memorial.
AS: Yes.
LT: And go up there and, you know, because it gets to the stage when you’re here, you know, you make friends with someone and then they’re gone, die [laughs] you see. And there’s a session, session, a procession [emphasis] of men dying now –
AS: Hmm.
LT: Because everybody, everybody will, we’ll all go. I don’t know when, how much longer [laughs] I’ve got, you see. But it’s been a great [emphasis] experience in one’s life, to have gone through, gone through all this. It’s – I could go on for, on for days [emphasis] going over, going over things that –
AS: Shall we, erm, well shall I stop the recording, and we’ll look at some of the –
LT: Yeah.
AS: Archival documents –
LT: Did you –
AS: Materials that you’ve got. The book that you’ve been reading from – can I just –
LT: Did you see this letter?
AS: I’ll have a look at it in a second. The book you’ve been reading from is “Fighting Back: British During Military Contribution in the Second World War” by Martin Sugarman isn’t it?
LT: That’s right, yes.
AS: Yes. Okay, thank you very much, I’ll turn the recorder off now, and –
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 Leslie Temple
Creator
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Andrew Sadler
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-10-27
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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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00:49:39 audio recording
Language
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eng
Identifier
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ATempleL151027
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Type
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Sound
Conforms To
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Pending review
Description
An account of the resource
Leslie Temple spent four years in the Air Training Corps before joining the Royal Air Force as a radio operator. He completed a tour of 30 operations with 101 Squadron at RAF Ludford Magna, as a German speaking special operator. He describes how having an eight man crew and extra equipment affected the interior of the Lancaster bombers. He reads from “Fighting Back: British During Military Contribution in the Second World War” by Martin Sugarman throughout the interview.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
101 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
B-17
Dominie
fear
ground personnel
Lancaster
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Proctor
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Lindholme
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF Madley
RAF Sculthorpe
searchlight
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/277/7906/PIronsH1501.2.jpg
62e8999adc6227a8e1dcf9d08e401fbc
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/277/7906/AIronsH150723.1.mp3
113b2cff64ef934152b89828f1ea404f
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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Irons, Harry
Harry Irons
H Irons
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Harry Irons (1924 - 2018). He was an apprentice tailor in London, but lied about his age and joined the RAF aged 16. He flew operations as a rear gunner with 158, 462 and 9 Squadrons.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-23
2016-07-30
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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Irons, H
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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AM: Okay so, this interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Annie Moodie and the interviewee is Harry Irons. The interview’s taking place at a hotel near Kings Lynn and we’re here for the 9 Squadron Association hundred year dinner.
HI: Yeah that’s right, yeah.
AM: And it’s the 23rd of July 2015. So, off you go Harry. Tell us –
HI: Er, actually I won a scholarship to go to a grammar school, but my father insisted that I left school at fourteen so I could go to work and earn a wage. So, being in the east end the only jobs you could get was either tailoring or cabinet making. There was a whole area that’s – it was a big Jewish area and the, most of the people were either tailors or cabinet makers, and they were good, very good, brilliant craftsmen. So I took a job on as a trainee tailor and I was doing that for two years until I was sixteen, nearly sixteen, and we lived in an area of London called Stamford Hill and one evening we, me and a few other chaps were on the hill, and we see the huge blitz on London, and we actually see the whole of the City of London literally ablaze. Enormous, as far as your eye could see was buildings all, all ablaze, that was the City of London. Actually, they weren’t after the City of London, what they was after was the Docks, and they just, their bombing, what we used to call creeping, crept back from the Docks into the City of London and once it hit the City of London course everything went up in flames so, two or three friends said ‘we’ll, we’re gonna join up.’ I was sixteen at the time, so we went up the recruiting office in Kings Cross, London, and I told ‘em I was seventeen and a quarter, how they believed me I don’t know but they said ‘alright you’re in,’ and that was at the end of 1941, and I was called up in January 1941 [unclear]. The blaze was – the bombing was in 1940 and we joined, we joined up at the end of 1940, and 1941 they called me up and I went to a place near where it was called Bridgnorth then six weeks square bashing [?] there and they said ‘you’ll have to wait to sele’ – they asked me what I wanted to be in the air force, I said ‘I wanna fly,’ they said ‘alright, we’ll put you down for either a pilot, navigator or an air gunner and we’ll sort that out later on.’ Anyway, I went to Bridgnorth, done my six weeks training, and they sent me to a RAF station, Wisbech in Cambridge and I had to do menial jobs there, in the cook house, in the stores, waiting for, to go on a course. In the mean while they told me I was gonna become a wireless operator air gunner, and I’ve got to wait for a course to come up, a vacancy for the course to come up, so I stayed at Wisbech ‘til August ’41, and then they posted me to Blackpool on a wireless course and everybody in the RAF went to Blackpool to do their wireless course, and you had to stay in a, all the border houses were commandeered, and all the aircrew used to live in these border houses and the thing was when you’re at Blackpool you got up to twelve words a minute which we all did, and then from there you’re posted to another sta, er, air force station to continue your study ‘til you become up to eighteen words a minute –
AM: When you say eighteen words a minute, doing what?
HI: Morse code.
AM: Morse code right, okay.
HI: Yeah, dit dah dit dah dit dah dit. Anyway, we was all queuing up to wait for postings and the sergeant came out just like that he said ‘you lot, over that side. You lot, that side,’ and fortunately or unfortunately I was in that lot on that side and we become airgunners. Not wireless operators, airgunners. Just airgunners. And the reason for that, I didn’t know at the time, was the heavy bombers, the Lancasters, were going on production, and there was, they were short of airgunners, because they had to carry another air gunner so they said ‘you lot over there, you become airgunners,’ and I went back to Wisbech – I was a bit cheesed off about it all anyway, couldn’t do much about it, and I waited another couple of months and then they sent me on a gunnery course, a place called Manby [emphasis] in Lincoln, it’s a big air force gunnery school there, and we done six weeks training there as gunners, gunnery, and I got the huge total flying hours of nineteen hours, that’s all I got, and they said – and from there you’re supposed to do a four month, five month operational training course, that’s getting accustomed to actually doing bombing raids on enemy territory. But then whatever happened they said to me ‘you’re being posted straight on a squadron’ and I tell you what, I was a greener than this.
AM: [Laughs] we’re sat on a green settee, for the record.
HI: Yeah, yeah. It was as green, I was as green as anything then. ‘Cause I got nineteen hours and I didn’t know what to expect. Anyway, I was posted to Waddington [emphasis] to Number 9 Squadron. And when I arrived there, as it was luck [exhale of breath] was in my favour because a flight lieutenant named Stubbs came up to me and said ‘you’re gonna fly with me as a mid-upper’ and I said ‘fair enough.’ They’d already, he was already on his second tour, he’d already done thirteen trips on Wellingtons [emphasis].
AM: So you didn’t do the usual crewing up thing?
HI: Never done anything like that, no.
AM: You just –
HI: No, no they just sent about ten of us to 9 Squadron, ‘cause I was just converting from Wellingtons onto Lancasters, and consequently they was one gunner short because the Lancaster carried a mid-upper. So he said to me, anyhow I didn’t know what it was all about actually, he said to me ‘the rear gunner I’ve got at the moment is a big Australian,’ he was about six foot three [unclear] ‘and he’s too tall for the turret’ he said ‘what we’re gonna do is you’re gonna do your first trip in the mid-upper and after that you’ll go in the rear turret, and the Australian will go’ –‘cause in the mid-upper you can pull your legs down, straighten you know, you’ve got plenty of room, so what we done then, we done – as time’s gone on, this was 1942, round about June 1942 and we started getting to used, well the crew getting used to flying a Wellington twin engine bomber onto a four engine bomber. And that, you use what they call conversion, and that’s pretty difficult ‘cause you learn how to fly an entirely different aircraft, land it, you got to find out all the different things, the different systems and the turrets, anyway we done about six weeks training, well not, training it was, well converting from the one engine to the Lancaster, and then September ’42 we was in a crew, we had a big crew and we used to lay and loll about smoking, swearing everything else [laughs] anyway, they said ‘ops tonight.’ So, before you went on operations you done what they call a night flying test [emphasis], you took the aircraft up, you tested the bomb site, you tested the, the bomb bays open and closing, you tested the turrets and you give a, you went outta sea and give the guns a little squirt, see everything was alright, the compass [emphasis], check the compass and the, the under carriage we’d dropped up and down a couple of time to make sure it was alright, and we landed, and as we landed, the bomb aimer had already done thirteen trips on Wellingtons, and this is vivid, and as we’d come out of the steps of the Lancaster, the bomb aimer’s behind me, and coming along the road was tractor carrying a four thousand pound bomb, and fourteen hundred incendiaries, and the bomb aimer said to me ‘oh, we’re going to Happy Valley tonight.’ He said ‘by that bomb load, we’re definitely going to Happy Valley,’ and I thought ‘well that don’t sound too bad, Happy Valley,’ I thought ‘well Happy Valley, that can’t be too bad,’ I didn’t know that that was a nickname for the Ruhr Valley. The whole of the Ruhr Valley was called Happy Valley, and I didn’t realise at the time but the Happy Valley, the Ruhr Valley, as you went in you got a brilliant [emphasis] reception and a better, a, what you say, a bye-bye on the way out, and I tell you what, right I’ll go on, anyway we – it was always ritual, always [emphasis] for bomber crews to have bacon and eggs before they went on ops, always. Didn’t matter where you were, all the time I was in the air force, I done sixty bombing trips, and every time we went on a bombing trip we got bacon and eggs [emphasis] and if we come back we got bacon and eggs. And that was a luxury in those, in wartime, and then of course the joke was, always the joke ‘if you don’t come back, can I have your bacon and eggs?’ you know. Anyway, we went to the, we got – there was a bit of a rigmarole getting ready, you had to, you had to have your bacon and eggs and you go down to – most, most aircrew wrote a last letter, most of ‘em. I think the majority of aircrew wrote a last letter home to their wives, and they used to put them on the bed, and I’m afraid to say, I seen many, many, many letters being collected by the padre, many, that’s why I never wrote one myself. Anyway, we had our food, our bacon and eggs, we were all laughing and joking, you know we were young blokes, and we went to the crew, to the briefing room and we all sat down to see who would come in, and the map [emphasis] had a huge sheet over it, and the CO always, always done it, come in, whipped the sheet off and there was the target. So the bomb aimer said to me ‘I told you.’ It was Dusseldorf, he said ‘there you are,’ he said ‘I knew we were going there’ he said, ‘we’re going to Happy Valley,’ and I still didn’t twig on, ‘oh well, that don’t sound too bad,’ thinking of German girls tryna start [?] kisses you know what I mean. Anyway, we went down to the crew room and the atmosphere changed completely [emphasis]. We went in the crew room and the whole squadron was in the crew room ‘cause we had cabinets for all our flying gear and used to get dressed in there, and as I walked in, all the crews were there, it was dead silence, and everybody was looking at each other, there was no jokes, no laughing, nothing. And there was simply a – the atmosphere was incredible [emphasis] to what it was in the mess having our egg and bacon. Anyway, we got dressed and it was – airgunners dressing was long underpants, pure silk, and a vest that was silk and then your shirt and then your pullover, and then a, over the shirt you put a, I think it was, no, before you put the shirt on, as we put the shirt on we put an electrical heated suit with gloves and electrical heated gloves and body and feet, which was really, really important. And over that we put our uniform ‘cause you had to wear a uniform, if you never wore a uniform, I never realised but at night if you’ve was parachuted out in civilian clothes you was likely to get executed, which many, quite a few boys did get executed, especially by the civilians. And over that we used to put a huge [emphasis] fur jacket and fur trousers, fur lined boots, and there we were –
AM: Fur trousers?
HI: Fur trousers, yeah [murmur from AM]. You know, thick, made of the same material as your jacket. Irvin jacket, you had Irvin trousers, thick Irvin trousers and they used to tuck them inside your boot, zip your boots up and there, you could hardly move by then, but – and I’ll tell you what, on a warm day you was walking out you was absolutely sweating [emphasis, laughs]. Anyway, we went out to the aircraft and everybody smoked, everybody smoked [emphasis] except the skipper, the skipper didn’t smoke, he never drunk, never went out with women, he was absolutely – they said in the officers mess that they couldn’t understand the man, he wouldn’t, he never swore, he never smoked. Anyway, he – a good pilot mind you. Anyway, we got in the aircraft and I was in the mid-upper, first time. And in the mid-upper turret of the Lancaster, I’ve got a picture of it, you had a fantastic [emphasis] view –
AM: Hmm, all round.
HI: All three hundred and eighty degree. You could see everything [emphasis]and I got in the mid-upper, and I never got, I was still raw, we done, only done six weeks training, and I plugged in the electricity for the heater ‘cause if we, even in the mid-upper the temperature was about forty-five, fifty below zero. Worse still in the turret, rear turret. Anyway, we got ready and then the crew room, nobody was talking, it was like that, nobody spoke, and off we went. We took off at Waddington, and the thing was at Waddington they had no runways at that time. There were two squadrons of Lancasters there and no runway. All we had was grass, and in the winter it was very, very difficult with full bomb loads to takeoff. Before that, when we arrived at Waddington there was a squadron there, 44 Squadron, a Rhodesian squadron, and apparently they was the first squadron in the RAF to be equipped with the Lancaster, in March, April, round about April. And what they’d done, they’d decided to do a daylight raid, a low level daylight raid on a town called Augsburg in Germany. They sent six Lancasters flying at zero feet right across France, right into Germany –
AM: At zero [emphasis] feet?
HI: Zero feet, I mean zero – well when I say zero feet, about half of these buildings.
AM: Right okay.
HI: Can you imagine six Lancasters –
AM: No [laughs] –
HI: At that height over, just ducking over the trees, going as low as low as they could, else they would have invade [?] the radar.
AM: Right.
HI: Anyway, what happened – unfortunately there was squadron of Messerschmitts flying, I don’t know if it was practicing or flying, and of course they see these six Lancasters, and they immediately they shot down five [noise of shock from AM]. So outta the six they sent, one come back badly, badly damaged, and his name was Nevillson [name unclear] and he got the VC. The other five that was shot down got nothing [emphasis] so, he was fortunate, he was leading the squadron from the front and they gradually cut the other five down and he managed to avoid and managed to get back badly damaged. So, I’m just telling you that because it deal with another operation I went on. Anyway, we all got ready to takeoff, and everything was quiet in the – nobody spoke, when we was on ops, very rarely we spoke. The only time we spoke is when we was being attacked, when the navigator was giving instructions to the pilot, or the bomb aimer or me or the mid-upper or the rear gunner could see something downstairs they could identify and then inform the navigator what we see, and that helped him to crack the course. ‘Cause in those days, 1942, we had no radar. We had what they called Gee-box up to the coast and once we hit the coast the Germans blocked it, so it was from then onwards it was the navigator used to have to go from one spot to another spot, estimate the time of arrival at the other spot before he made a correction to the course, and of course things improved later on in ’43, and the gunners helped a lot because they could, especially the rear gunner could see, or the mid-upper could see different –
AM: Rivers, train lines and stuff like that.
HI: -- objects, yeah. And sometimes that wasn’t possible, there’d be ten-Thames [?] cloud. And then navigation become very, very difficult. And don’t forget we didn’t have no radar help whatsoever, but we managed and we flew over, as we took off we flew over the Dutch coast and the bomb aimer, he used to lay pronged in the nose [very unsure about what was said here], he said ‘skipper, enemy air coast [?] ahead, flak, flak.’ Always gunfire was called flak [emphasis]. So I looked down and I see all these beautiful, indescribable [?] lights, every colour, reds, blues, greens, there all tracers [?] from what they call night flak. They went up to about eight or nine thousand feet and then it dropped down again. And that’s when flak –
AM: And how high were you at that point?
HI: We was about twelve thousand feet. So when I looked down from mid-upper and I see that flak below us and I thought to myself ‘if that’s flak, we’ve got nothing at all to worry about.’ So we flew over Holland, don’t forget this was the early phase of bombing. Before that the bombing was nothing ‘cause they had obsolete bombing, bombing aircraft and no idea whether they reached the target. It was only in beginning, half way through 1942 they was giving the apparatus so they didn’t really find the target. Anyway, you crossed the Dutch coast and I’m in the mid-upper, spinning it round, and for about, I should imagine it was about hour, hour and a quarter, then the bomb aimer said ‘target ahead skipper.’ So then I thought to myself ‘well I’ll have a look to see what this target is all about,’ and I swung the turret around and I had really [emphasis], really the shock of my life. In front of us, with no exaggeration, was one solid massive explosion of shells. Absolute whole area was full up of high explosive shell fire, and we gotta fly through that. And searchlights were creeping about, and they had one searchlight which was radar operated and it was a different colour, it was blue, very light blue. And that was a searchlight, never missed. It went up bang, like that, straight onto an aircraft. It was radar controlled [coughs] excuse me [pause to drink] so when I see this huge massive explosion ‘cause I had a beautiful view, so I thought to myself ‘cor blimey, surely we haven’t gotta go through all this.’ And I could hear it, and the plane was bumping up and down from the force of the explosions and the skipper said to me ‘mid-upper, keep an eye above you, because bombers above you will drop their bombs on you’ which happened many times. So I said ‘okay skipper,’ and – we called the pilot skipper, always called him a skipper. Doesn’t matter what rank he was, always a skipper. Anyway, we, I started looking up and there right above us was a Lanc, bomb bay open, ‘cause you know the bomb bays were enormous, I says ‘there’s a bomber above us skipper with his bomb bay open, dive port.’ We dived port, good job we did because he was ready to drop his load, so we slammed our bomb bay shut, because we was on a run as well and, and the bomb aimer said ‘we’ll have to make a correction on our way into the target.’ You must realise that all around us these huge [emphasis] explosions of shells, I’m telling you not few, hundreds [emphasis] of ‘em exploding into the sky. Anyway, as we were flying in, the skipper said ‘skipper, I’ve lost the target point,’ he said ‘we’ll have to round again.’ And I just told you, the skipper never swore. I’ll tell you what [laughs] he said to the bomb aimer ‘you are a silly chap’ [laughs]. There was a few more words. So we slammed the bomb bay shut, went right through that target, went all through that explosions and the plane was rocking about, could hear shrapnel hitting the bloody machine, in our machine, and we went round and we do a dogleg. We approached the target like that, and then we go like that, like that, in again. But you had to be very, very careful ‘cause when you left the target and you was gonna come in again, you was coming across the last of the bombers that was going in. And it was very, very, very dangerous. Anyway, when we went round, and by that time the German radar was on us and it was giving us a real, real shellacking [?] I’ll tell you. Anyway, we made our run round, opened the bomb bay, dropped our bombs, slammed the door, slammed the door shut and what we usually do then, you couldn’t – slammed the doors shut but you couldn’t get away, you had to stay straight and level for another forty seconds because the camera was turning around and at the same time you was dropping what they called a photo-flash [?]. That was in the fuselage. And as the photo-flash dropped down, the cameras turning over, and they took a picture, an actual picture, of you bombing the target, which was very, very important because if you didn’t bring back a picture the intelligence officers said to you ‘well it’s your word against mine that you went there,’ even if the aircraft was full of bloody holes, they still say ‘we don’t believe you,’ well, ‘not saying we don’t believe you but you’ve got no proof that you went to the target so it don’t count, so you can go all that way there and back for nothing,’ which happened several times. Anyway, we slammed the bomb bay down, we made a dived [emphasis] to the port, turned round and come back and that’s when your trouble started, the fighters. But that time they wasn’t so dangerous as what they were to be. They, we used to see the fighters flying about and straight away, I don’t know if it was instinct or not, when I see a fighter, I wouldn’t fire on him unless he was interfering with us, I let him go, because generally you’d find on a fighter he had huge [emphasis] canons and you had no chance, I tell you, you had no chance whatsoever.
AM: So you’re just causing trouble for yourself really –
HI: Yeah because they could stand off from two, three hundred yards and you couldn’t do nothing about it, ‘cause your 303 went about a hundred yards and started dropping what they called a gravity drop. They had canons and he could rake you [?] which happened a couple of times. Anyway, we slammed the bomb bay shut, and we started coming back, and the bomb aimer said to the skipper and the navigator, ‘skipper, we can’t breathe. We’ve got no oxygen.’ And what had happened, the shrapnel had cut through the oxygen lines, so the skipper said ‘alright, so what we have to do is dive down below ten thousand feet,’ which we did do, and coming home in the mid-upper I thought to myself, ‘if this is bloody Happy Valley, I hope we don’t go anywhere that’s miserable’[laughs]. And I’ll tell you what, it’s a terrible, terrible place. Anyway we got down to – we crossed the Dutch coast at about four thousand feet, and these beautiful lights we see were flashing past us like that, all over, and lucky enough we managed to get through a few bangs and we were damaged but not that bad. And we dropped down about two thousand feet and we headed home, and I thought to myself ‘dear oh dear, I got thirty of these, thirty trips to do like that before we get a rest.’ And we landed, and I was exhausted. Even at that age, at seventeen, I was exhausted. And we went into the briefing room and I stood there and we was asked a load of questions, and they said to me, it was only my first trip, they said to me ‘what do you think?’ And I said ‘I see four or five bombers exploding in the sky,’ I said ‘apart from that everything was alright.’ He said ‘you never seen no bombers’ – this was the officer, the briefing officer telling me that, he wasn’t even a flyer. He’s saying ‘you didn’t see no bombers blowing up, that was scarecrows.’ What the Germans were firing up shells to mimic a bomber exploding, and they kept this up right the way through the war.
AM: So it was true, you hadn’t, you’d seen the scarecrows, not a bomber blowing up.
HI: No, no they were actually aircraft blowing up in the sky. They did admit after the war there was no such thing as a scarecrow.
AM: Ah right.
HI: They admitted it, the Air Ministry, but they kept it a –
AM: So why did they say that?
HI: Well they – one of the reasons was they didn’t want us to duck and dive about. They wanted us to fly straight and level, ‘cause it was dangerous anyway, ducking and diving. But every time we went back we say we seen three or four, sometimes more than that, explosions, literally exploding in the sky. They said ‘no, that’s German scarecrows to demoralise you.’ Anyway, we got back and in the briefing room he said, he told me about the scarecrows so I thought ‘oh well, that’s it.’ Anyway, I didn’t know how exhausted I was, it was only a four and three-quarter hour trip. I went to bed and I felt absolutely exhausted. And I think the mental strain of the first trip. Anyway, we went back to the mess, we went to bed, and I think next morning we had a day off. The following day I think we went to Bremen, and the reason why went to Bremen, or Bremen [different pronunciation, shorter vowel sound] as they called it, they was building the submarines, the U-Boats there.
AM: Right.
HI: And we went across the Baltic that time. We didn’t see no flak until we hit Bremen, and the flak was unbelievable. It was worse than Dusseldorf.
AM: Were you in the rear gunner at this –
HI: I was in the rear turret, yeah.
AM: So you’d moved to the rear turret by this time?
HI: Yeah. And different position and the different visibility of the – when you’re in the rear turret you can see that way, see the bits you couldn’t see really above you or at the side of you –
AM: Or behind you.
HI: And at that time, the Germans were only attacking from dead astern, port over or starboard over . That was the method of attacking at that time [emphasis], things were getting much, much worse, but they had a little bit of a chance because if they come in close you had four guns here and you could – you had a bit of a chance, not a lot, but you had a bit of a chance. Anyway, I think it was after that trip, couple of trips, I complained to the engineering officer that the rear turret, that the oil for the Merlin engines was coating the Perspex in the rear turret, which obviously, the exhaust was coming out. So we was sitting in the crew room, the officer come in, he said ‘we solved the problem of the oil on the turrets,’ and I thought ‘well that’s good’ ‘cause after about two hours this oil used to go onto the Perspex, it was starting to be difficult to see outta it, and when we went out there [chuckles] what they had done, they had taken the whole Perspex out [chuckles]. So there we were in a rear turret with no bloody Perspex, and I tell you what, it was cold [emphasis].
AM: How did that – what so nothing between you –
HI: No, just – they took the whole of the front of the Perspex out. We used to look through, they took out because the oil.
AM: So it was just you [emphasis] and sky –
HI: Yeah, yeah.
AM: Nothing between you?
HI: No, no. Well the Perspex only stopped the slipstream but they took the Perspex out. Yeah, on all the Lancs, but they solved the problem [laughs]. Anyway, we –
AM: But the oil would just hit you in the face instead.
HI: Yeah, but it was, it wasn’t so bad because you could just wipe it with your glove with it [AM laughs]. But, we got rid of the – it wasn’t such a huge amount but it was enough oil to stop, to obscure your sight a bit, you know. And you had to be really, really on your toes all that time you was in that turret. It was bitterly cold in there, forty-five, fifty below zero, was nothing.
AM: Did you ever have an occasion when your suit didn’t work, or?
HI: Yes sometimes it, it didn’t work a couple of times. I burnt me foot ‘cause it was a new, new idea you know, they’d, after the war they made electric blankets [AM laughs] that was only through the electrical heated suits and it’s the short shirts – it’s like everything in the war, everything was crash, bang, wallop, get ready , but every gunner was issued with an electrical heated suit, and they were good when they worked. So I’d done my first op, and I thought I was proud of myself, but I had other twenty-nine to do. I mean, twenty-nine successful [emphasis] ones, so you can, you can go all the way there, and you get, you get engine trouble and you gotta come back, that don’t count. Even in respect of what you’ve gone through, it didn’t count.
AM: You had to drop your bombs on the target for it to count.
HI: Yeah, the gunner target, yeah. You see, what actually happened, I think at the beginning of the war, the few of them used to go to North Sea, drop their bombs and come back and say yeah they’ve, they’ve, and they – ‘cause they realised Germany wasn’t being bombed really, it was a, the most that we got to was five miles from the towns [?] so what they decide to put the camera in, and the photo-flash. And that stopped it all, ‘cause you had to bring back a picture. The first thing they asked for when you walked in, ‘have you got your picture?’ It was the first thing – [unclear] you’d land on the aircraft, there was a [unclear] photography unit come out and take the film out, and there’d be developed or they used to take it back to the crew, the, where we was being briefed, and they could see if we bombed the target or not. Anyway, so we went to Bremen, we gained a good shellacking [?] and we done a bit of damage there, and we come back, and I was blowing my chest out, I’d done two trips [laughs]. The following, following day, er day after that, we went to Wilhelmshaven, and that was worse. That’s where I was really in full, full strength of building submarines there, and we did – it was devastating the bombing we done there, it was very successful, they held up the submarine building for a long while, and then I’d done, I’d done three trips, and I was, you know, thinking to myself, well –
AM: Were you scared?
HI: Frightened outta my bloody life. The first one, I told you, that first one, Dusseldorf, I could not believe, I could not [emphasis] but everyone was the same –
AM: Did you talk about it?
HI: No, no we never talked about it, no. I’ll tell you one thing, we used to get crews coming straight from OTU into the squadron, ‘cause their losses were horrendous you know, we was losing so many aircraft, and they’d say ‘what’s the ops like?’ and we’d always used to say ‘you find out, you find out yourself.’ We never said ‘oh it’s terrible over there’ or nothing, never. And I don’t know if that helped them or not, but a lot of the crews only done one trip before they got shot down, hell of a lot of ‘em. Just one – in fact, what they used to do when a crew come from OTU, they used to let the pilot fly with an experienced crew on his first trip, so he’d understand what an actual raid was. Very often he never come back off his first trip, it happened time and time again. The crew used to be walking about the station with no, waiting for a new pilot. Yeah, happened many times. Anyway, after Wilhelmshaven we went back to Happy Valley again, and this time, I tell you what, I thought Dusseldorf was bad, we went to Essen [emphasis] and Essen was something out of this [noise of disbelief] something outta, I tell you what, it was absolutely ferocious. The flak was enormous, everywhere you look there was shells bursting, aircraft blowing up in the sky, aircraft going down in flames, and I had something with me because we just went through – we always got hit, always got hit with flak, big holes in the aircraft, but when we got back they used to bang ‘em and tap ‘em back and –
AM: Bodge [?] ‘em up.
HI: Yeah, that’s it [chuckles]. Anyway, we went to Essen, then we went to Munich, and I’ll tell you how my luck is, what happened, losses at Waddington on 9 Squadron, even those few weeks I was there, was horrendous. So they sent two scientists down from Cambridge with a new device to put into the rear turret so that when a fighter was five or six hundred yards away, which we couldn’t see, they could see us on their radar, this instrument was radar. It could pick up the fighter and warn us with a red light that there was a fighter in the close vicinity. Unfortunately the first time the squadron was equipped with them, we lost two aircraft and the Germans must have sorted the, must have examined the wreckage and seen this device in the rear turret and copied [unclear] a wavelength or whatever it was, anyway we went to Munich and that was a long trip, that was about eight and a half hours and we went over, and how the navigator found Munich I’ll never know ‘cause we went over in ten-tenths cloud, that means to say underneath you was solid cloud, but he found Munich as – before we reached Munich the cloud broke and there was Munich and we did, we did give it real good hiding.
AM: Is this day time or night?
HI: It’s night time –
AM: It’s night time isn’t it?
HI: Never, never done daylight.
AM: But you could still see it, so how come you could see it at night time?
HI: We could see it yeah because the – a couple of people had been bombing it and the searchlights –
AM: Right.
HI: And you could see the town anyway. You – but that’s why bombing – they, they said ‘well why did you bomb areas’ – the only way you can do night bombing was to, at that time was area bombing and in that area you probably got a load of factories you could destroy, but you couldn’t pick out – it was very, very difficult to pick out an individual target so you had to bomb an area, they used to pick an area out. This was before pathfinding [murmured agreement from AM] so we used to drop flares ourselves, we dropped a few flares as we was going in, or people before us would drop a few flares, and you’d sit and the bomb aimer would see the target.
AM: Who dropped the flares, the bomb aimer?
HI: The bomb aimer, yeah. Someone on the squadron [very unclear what was said here] would drop a few flares and then down they went, but that was the beginning, when we really first started bombing Germany, before that it was a joke. Anyway, we bombed Munich and we made a good frame [?] on it actually, and coming back the skipper said ‘I think we’ll fly through cloud’ because the fighter activity, we could see the fighter flares, and so he said ‘if we go through cloud we won’t meet any fighters,’ which we did do, so we was flying for about an hour in the cloud and all of a sudden the cloud broke clear, and believe it or not, right by my rear turret, as I looked outta my rear turret was a Ju-88. I tell you what he was no more than thirty yards [emphasis] behind us. And he opened fire with his cannons and the tracer went just above the aircraft, just missed us. The reason was that he was so close and we was up and down like that and I suppose as we went down he fired and he missed us. Anyway, we opened fire, me in the rear turret and the mid-upper ‘cause he was right close to us, and down he went, he spun over and down he went.
AM: So you got him?
HI: Yeah we got him, yeah.
AM: Which one of you got him, do you know?
HI: We don’t know, I think –
AM: Both of you?
HI: We both opened fire on him, and he was more surprised than what we were, he never expected it, and down he went. Lucky enough because usually once the night fighter got on your tail, it was very, very difficult. Anyway we, when we got back we told the intelligence officer that this night fighter had followed us through ten-tenths cloud for an hour ‘till the cloud broke. So they put two and two together and realised the apparatus they’d put in the turret was sending out a ray for the Germans to pick up and that’s what he was following us on. So what – immediately they took the radar thing out of the turret and I don’t know if it made any difference or not. After that we were talking and laughing about it and they said ‘you gonna do some low level formation flying in daylight,’ so we thought ‘well surely we’re not gonna have another daylight raid after the huge loss to 44 Squadron,’ and I mean we never even considered [emphasis] that they would do anymore daylight raids. So anyway, we done this practice formation, well it’s not formation flying – at that time there was over ninety Lancs in 5 Group, and there was ninety of us flying over Lincoln, around this area, right on the ground, well I don’t mean on the ground, as high as these buildings. Everyone was moaning down below because can you imagine ninety Lancasters flying about thirty or forty feet and they said ‘you’re gonna have to cut the squadron of Spitfires doing damning runs [?] on you.’ So I’m sitting in my turret, and the Spitfires come straight for me, and he was so close our slipstream hit his, hit his wings, and he turned like that, and being so low, he couldn’t, he couldn’t get outta the dive and he went straight in the deck. And I was ‘that don’t sound too bad, that’s gonna happen.’ Anyway –
AM: What happened to him? Crashed? Killed?
HI: Crashed, just crashed yeah. And when I looked along the road there was about three or four Spits on the deck, burning [emphasis] doing the same thing, come straight in –
AM: So they were killed?
HI: And the slipstream, they had no chance of correcting, correcting, ‘cause it’s too low on the ground. Anyway, on the Saturday they said ‘there’s gonna – report to your flights ‘cause there’s gonna be a daylight raid.’ So we went out to do the what they call a night flighting test, and when we landed there was the trailer, but all it had on it was six [emphasis] one thousand pounders. So we knew it was gonna be a long, long journey. We were – a bomb load like that was only a third of the weight of what we’d usually take to the Ruhr, so we were, obviously it was gonna be a long journey. We went to the briefing –
AM: Can I just ask, so why obviously, ‘cause that would conserve the fuel because you had a lighter load?
HI: Yeah we had to take more fuel and less bombs, so –
AM: Yep, okay.
HI: So actually we knew the distance when we see a big petrol load [emphasis] going in we knew we were on for a – we see a small bomb load we knew, the petrol, it was being loaded up for all the tanks and we knew we was on for a long trip. Anyway, we went and had our – even at that time, we’d already had breakfast, but they sent us out and said ‘we’re gonna have bleeding bacon and eggs’ [laughs]. That was always done, it don’t matter what time of the day it was bacon –
AM: Well what would happen if you didn’t like bacon?
HI: Well –
AM: What did they get, sausage?
HI: There were a few Jewish people who, they had to eat the bleeding bacon [laughs].
AM: Did they, they ate it?
HI: Yeah, well, by then I’d done five or six trips, and I thought ‘so I better eat the food, you never know what’s gonna happen.’ Anyway, we went to the briefing at about ten o’clock, Saturday morning, it was, in October, round about, I forget the date, about the tenth of October, and we went to the briefing, and the officer come in, pulled the blind down, and there it was. Place called Le Creusot. It was right on the other side of France, nearly on the Swiss border. It was a nearly ten and a half hour trip and we were looking at each other, and they said ‘you’re to fly as low as possible, even lower than that if you can,’ and they said ‘there’ll be two hundred Spitfires,’ or hundred, two or three hundred Spitfires ‘escorting you to the coast,’ but the trouble was the Spitfires went to the wrong bleeding place, we never see ‘em. So we crossed the French coast at about the height of these buildings, and then you imagine what a sight that must have been , ninety-two Lancasters flying –
AM: What a noise [emphasis] never mind a sight.
HI: Yeah, there was loads and loads of ‘em. And all we got was the French girls waving at us and I thought ‘that’s handy,’ and everybody was coming out and waving, it was a beautiful day, and we went right across France. I mean right across France, looking, wondering where the fighters was ‘cause there was thousands of by that time, ’42, there was hundreds and hundreds of fighters in France –
AM: German fighters?
HI: Yeah, German fighters in France. Anyway, we went right across France, there was no incidents, everybody was waving, and we approached the target [coughs] excuse me, and six of us had to break off and bomb the power station that was supplying the electricity to this huge armament factory in Le Creusot. It was a huge armament factory, nearly as big as what the Germans had, and they was producing armaments for the German army. So we broke off, telling you now there was six of us who broke off, Guy Gibson was with us, he was on our port side, and he was on 106 Squadron, Guy Gibson was on, and his second in command was flying the other Lanc, and on our starboard side was two Lancasters from 50 Squadron on the other side, we was in the centre and there was six of us. We broke off and went straight to this power station. Oh, and as we approached the power station, one of the Lancasters on our starboard side just went straight in the deck and exploded. We were – he had six one thousand pound bombs on it, and it literally went straight in the deck and exploded. What happened we don’t know.
AM: Don’t know.
HI: Anyway, the five of us carried on, Gibson was on our portside with his second in command and we was in the centre, and the last one of 50 Squadron was, was on our starboard side. Anyway, we bombed the power station and we absolutely flattened [emphasis] it. We was carrying six one thousand pounders, and we went and we climbed up a little bit and dropped ‘em, and we could see that the whole place was flattened. In fact, the factory was – actually I went back there last year, to the factory and it’s bombed, still bleeding bombed [unclear, laughs]. Anyway –
AM: Did you get your photo?
HI: Pardon?
AM: Did you get – not last year, I mean in 1942.
HI: No we didn’t, I don’t think we took a photo because it was daylight and everything –
AM: So they knew –
HI: Everyone was bombing the same target. Anyway, the ninety Lancs turned round, it was ninety-two ‘cause when we turned around there was only ninety-one, one had blown up in the sky, and we came back over the – by the time we’d got to the French coast it was getting dark –
AM: Still flying really low level?
HI: Yeah, and we started climbing when we got to the French coast, and as we passed the French coast it was getting dark, and we was flying for about another thirty or forty minutes, and all of a sudden the sky was smothered in bloody high explosive shells again. So the pilot said ‘where the bloody hell are we,’ so the skipper said ‘ I think we’ve, I’ve miscalculated and we’re flying over Jersey,’ and we were over Jersey with these huge explosions coming up, anyway the pilot called him a nice fella again, he said ‘stupid chap you are’ like that, and we branched out and come back, but that was a catch that, Jersey was very, very heavily armed, and anybody strayed off the course they wait for you. Shot down quite a few bombers over there. Anyway, we got back and went to the briefing, we were told exactly what had happened, and they confirmed that we done a good job there –
AM: Good.
HI: And I thought ‘there won’t be no more daylight raids after that.’ And we went to, in a week, we had a couple of days off and we went to Genoa [emphasis], and we couldn’t make out why we was going all the way to Italy, it was eleven hour trip to bomb Genoa, but we soon found out because on the Thursday [emphasis] they said, a briefing for Saturday, a daylight raid. So we said ‘surely we’re not having another daylight raid, we was lucky we got away with La Crusoe.’ Anyway, believe it or not, the target was Milan, and we was gonna bomb it, in daylight, taking it from a very, very low level ‘till we got to the Alps, we couldn’t go low level so we had to wander through the Alps, and there was ninety- two Lancasters, darting and diving through the Alps.
AM: Had the Spitfires turned up this time?
HI: No we never see no bloody Spitfires at all this time, and same again, we went right across France, no opposition whatsoever. We went through the Alps, and this is what I call a terror raid. We went across Lake Como about hundred feet then, we climbed to three hundred feet, and there was Milan waiting for us. No air raid shelter, no flak, they never expected British bombers to come all the way from England in daylight, never expected.
AM: Could you, were you low enough to actually see people in the –
HI: Pardon?
AM: Were you low enough to actually see people?
HI: It was, we was that low, we dropped down to about a hundred feet, hundred and fifty feet over Milan, we could see everybody in the streets, in the restaurants, we could see ‘em all. And we see ‘em started running about, there was no alarm given, and the city was completely open, and imagine ninety-two Lancs with six one thousand pounders on. We caused absolute havoc there, and a few of the boys I know were machine gunning, which I thought was wrong. Anyway, we climbed up again, came back, slid our way through the Alps, dropped down again to nought [?] feet and came right across France again.
AM: You missed Jersey that time.
HI: Yeah, we missed Jersey that time. We had our pullovers on [laughs].
AM: What did you feel about that then? The fact that you could actually see people?
HI: Oh we could see ‘em yeah, yeah because we –
AM: What did you, did you talk about it afterwards?
HI: No, we never talked about air raids, never mentioned it. Once you got back it was finished. No body, and same as the logbook, all we used to put in the logbook was the raid, the time, we never, what we should have done was put a little, exactly what happened, but when you put your books into the commanding officer to be signed once a month, [unclear] shooting, just put down what the raid was and that was it, that was what we used to do. But we should have done, we should have put the whole story of what exactly went on. And after that raid believe it or not the Ities [?] didn’t want to know anything more about the war, and there was huge – we had a big publicity the next day in the Daily Express, had a huge photo of Number 9 Squadron, coming back off the raid, and they reproduced it in Italy with, English Gangsters they called us, and there we are. I think we lost four aircraft that night, I don’t know where we lost them, might have been technical trouble, I don’t know, but, to go all that way in daylight and not see a German fighter was incredible. And after that we felt ourselves very, very, very lucky. It was about my ninth trip then, I was one of the top, experienced men then –
AM: And you’d shot somebody down by then.
HI: Yeah, yeah. But we’d, we were the top men in the squadron, we’d done about nine or ten trips.
AM: And you were seventeen.
HI: Yeah, yeah. And from then things got worse. Worse and worse and worse. The –
AM: In what way worse, Harry?
HI: The fighters got much more efficient, and their radar got much more efficient. Their guns got more efficient. Search lights got better, and more, and they had guns that fired with radar and they never missed. I remember later on in the year on my second tour we was bombing a place in the Ruhr Valley, and we was going in, our squadron, and as we was going in, there was people in front of us bombing, and they’d already turned starboard and coming out again, and for some reason, I don’t know, a Halifax [emphasis] I don’t know if it was in our squadron or the squadron beforehand, instead of going hitting the target, I don’t know what happened, he turned and joined the aircraft that was coming out of the, from the bombing run, which was in daylight, and there was a big gap between us going in and those coming out, and then he flew across, and as he flew across the flak went bang, bang, and the third shell hit him right underneath, and just exploded, yeah. Why he done that I don’t know, ‘cause we was all in the shadow of the silver paper we was dropping, and that helps with the – this one had got outta range with it going across and they shot him down straight away, yeah. And as it went on, we used to get leave every six weeks, and Lord [pause] what his name, Rank, Rank, wasn’t Rank, it was the er, the bloke that owned Morris, BMC, owned BMC, and he said, and he gave every aircrew bloke that was on ops, when he went on leave he doubled their pay, for a weeks leave yeah, he done that right through the war. Must have cost him a fortune.
AM: Every airman?
HI: Yeah, well it was in Bomber Command.
AM: In Bomber Command.
HI: Who was flying. He used to give ‘em – he used to, he used to double our pay, yeah.
AM: You know what, just going back to operations, you know the gaps between them, as in a day, a couple of days?
HI: All depending upon the weather. It was entirely dependent upon the weather. If the weather was, it was a bright – I’ll tell you one we went one, we went on one and I still think about it, it was a full light night, getting onto Christmas I think it was, and they said ‘there’ll be no ops tonight because there’s bright moonlight and no cloud,’ and it was suicide to go over there. Anyway, they said they’d picked out sixteen Lancasters, they’d picked out about eight from our squadron, four from 44 and I think four from another squadron, they said ‘we want you to do a low level night time raid on small towns just outside the Ruhr Valley.’ And the excuse they gave us was that the civilian population wasn’t getting any rest from the bombing raids on the Ruhr Valley and they was letting them come to these small towns to get rest. That’s why they wanted to go over there and liven ‘em up. So, it really was a terror raid and we carried sixteen one thousand pounders with a delayed charged of about half an hour, and we found this small town, we was after, just outside the Ruhr Valley, and we went right down, it was brilliant [emphasis] moonlight we were in, we went right down this village or small town and dropped the sixteen one thousand pounders right down the centre of the town. And I often wonder what happened about that, but I don’t, there was no need really to do that bombing really, but there you go, that was war.
AM: Well you called it a terror raid.
HI: Pardon?
AM: You called it a terror raid?
HI: Yeah, yeah, and that was Christmas, went home and had some leave, came back and we started again. And by that time, all the crews that I knew when I joined the squadron in June had all gone, they’d all gone. All been shot down.
AM: Every single one.
HI: Yeah, and they was all new recruits except us, and we was all NCOs.
AM: What do you think kept your plane – why your crew when all the rest of them got shot down? What can you say?
HI: I don’t know, I don’t know. I’ll tell you, shall I tell you?
AM: Go on.
HI: Well, what they used to do, before you went on a raid they used to give us a bag of sweets –
AM: Go on, keep going. I know the story, but keep going.
HI: Oh you know the story do you?
AM: You told me earlier on, but tell me again.
HI: And, we couldn’t undo the sweets with the cellophane, so we used to throw them out of the rear turret, and the Germans knew that and that’s why they never shot us down. ‘Cause they wanted the sweets [laughs]. That’s only a joke [both laugh]. I don’t know, I got no idea. Well, what actually happened, the crew I was with, I said they’d already done fourteen trips on Wellingtons when I joined them, they finished, and they finished, we finished our tour, was up to about sixteen, fifteen or sixteen trips, and I was left with no crew, and I was sitting in the mess, and a bloke walked in, I knew him as Sergeant Doolan, pilot, and he said ‘my rear gunner Robbie has just been killed, would you take his place?’ That was, that was luck really, so I said ‘alright, I’ll become your new rear gunner’ which I did do, and we was an NCO crew, and we was the only crew to, that I know of, all the time I was there, that finished the tour. And how many crews we lost, Lord knows.
AM: But you were the common denominator.
HI: Yeah, yeah –
AM: From the first sixteen and then fourteen and then the –
HI: Yeah, and then, we was all NCOs and we finished the tour, yeah. And I think the pilot got the DFM, and none of us got even a mention of a medal. And there was – but the thing was, what was happening by then was the Germans had come up with a new technique called Schräge Musik, that was what they’d come up with, they’d put two cannons at eighty degree, put the two cannons behind the cockpit at eight degrees so there was the aircraft, and these two guns stuck up like that –
AM: Okay.
HI: And all they had to do, they had radar, and all they had to do was coast [?] yourself underneath a bomber and just fly underneath him. You didn’t have to have no sight, no tracer, it just went underneath the aircraft, up to the petrol tanks, quick squirt, and we used to see ‘em blowing up but we couldn’t make out, we used to come back and tell ‘em that we seen aircraft blowing up in the sky, there was no flak and no fighters we could see, and the, and they literally shot down thousands [emphasis] of bombers, and not once did they ever mention what was going on at the briefing, not once. Never.
AM: Would there have been any way to avoid them if you’d have known about them?
HI: Well, if we knew and known about it, which they knew what we’d be doing, we’d start jiggling up and down, so they wouldn’t get a clean shot at us, but then when you think about it, you get five or six hundred bombers doing that in pitch darkness, you’re gonna get, gonna get a lot of problems. And that was it, but they were shooting them down, ah, unbelievable. Yeah, you had to be lucky really, because if you bowed out you had to be lucky, because if the civilians, you come out near a target and the civilians get hold of you they’d rip you to pieces. Yeah, and the Gestapo shot a few as well. If you was lucky the Luftwaffe got hold of you, was alright, but, or the army got you –
AM: But you never got shot down?
HI: No, I never got shot down, no.
AM: What happened at the end of your first tour, then?
HI: What happened then, finished my tour, didn’t get no bloody medal, don’t know why not –
AM: Even though you shot one down, ‘cause people got medals for that didn’t they?
HI: Yeah I know. Anyway, I went as an instructor, and then I realised how risky this business was, because all [emphasis] that was coming from OTUs were crews being trained in Canada. And when you think they were being trained on single engine aircraft in beautiful weather, all they had to do was follow the railway line from one point to another, everything was easy. Of course when they come to London, especially, and England, especially where, with the weather, and was OTU we had to train ‘em for three or four months before they went on operations, and hell of a lot of ‘em got killed on accidents, but they were very raw, they should have had much, much more training, but then again –
AM: And how old were you at this point? Eighteen?
HI: Yeah, eighteen, about eighteen and a half yeah. And I was an instructor, and apparently, I carried on for a little while and the, we had a bit of a go – oh they sent me up to a place up in Scotland to a gunnery school to do some – the instructors up there wanted to get on ops, don’t know why, but they said ‘you go up there and relieve them,’ about ten of us went up there, and we were in the mess one night, and we all got drunk and caused a bit of a havoc and we went in front of the CO next day, he said ‘I’ve had enough of you blokes, I’m posting you.’ So I thought ‘oh go on, I’ll be posted somewhere out in the Middle East’ or somewhere like that, and anyway I got posted to South End, about fifteen miles from where I lived, and I was thinking ‘be at home every night’ and while I was there, what we was doing there was flying drogues [?], the flak along the south coast, we had a big drogue pulled behind, and I tell you what, when I see that I knew we had no chance at all. They had these, we had to use a toeless drogue, and they used to fight, not at the drogue, a couple of degrees past the drogue, because they kept hitting the drogues and it was becoming expensive. So, but the flak [emphasis] to follow you, right, same height, would follow the drogue all the way along. Anyway, after a while they said ‘you’re posted,’ and this I knew was why the government knew what was going on in Germany with the fighters. They said ‘you’ve been posted to the 77 Squadron, Halifaxes.’ So I thought ‘alright,’ so and when I got up there –
AM: Where was that? Where was it?
HI: Er, Full Sutton I think, yeah Full Sutton. And when I got up there, the CO said he wanted to see me when I got up there, so I thought ‘that’s handy, the bloody warrant officer and the CO wants to see me, I must be important’ and he took me out to the, where the arment [?] officer, out to a Halifax, and what they had done they’d cut a big hole in the bottom of the Halifax and placed a point manual point five over the hole –
AM: Point five –
HI: Yeah, point five, point five machine gun.
AM: Okay.
HI: A much bigger shell than the 303. And they said ‘have you seen any German fighters coming, coming at you, you’ll be able to handle ‘em.’ So they knew what was going on. Anyway, we took off for Duisburg and I was sitting there – I was bleeding freezing, can you imagine there’s a big hole like that, about twenty thousand feet and –
AM: Hang on where’s this, is this in the middle of the plane?
HI: In the middle of the plane.
AM: Right, okay.
HI: A big hole.
AM: Where the bomb doors would have been?
HI: Er, it was different in the Halifax.
AM: Okay.
HI: It was different from the Lancaster. Most the bombs – up, further up and underneath the wings as well.
AM: Right.
HI: Anyway, they dug this hole, cut this hole in the Halifax and they had a point five there, and I sat there, and can you imagine it was about forty-five below, and it seemed the whole world was coming through that bloody hole. The pilot was moaning, the bomb aimer was moaning, and the – anyway, we’d done the bombing raid, come back and they complained bitterly about it, and that was the last that – and they said to me ‘we’re posting you to Driffield, to an Australian squadron’ and that’s where I went then, as a rear gunner at 462 Australian Squadron. I stayed there for a couple of months and I don’t know what happened there, I don’t know if I’d lost my logbook or – anyway, I done about eight or nine trips here and never even registered, and then they posted from there, from 64, er, 462 Squadron on Driffield to its other squadron which was at Driffield –
AM: Why did you keep, why did you keep getting posted to different ones?
HI: Well the pilot I went with in 462, bloke, Australian called Heurigen [unsure of spelling] – 462 they posted away completely [emphasis] but he, he stayed, he said ‘no I wanna stay here at Driffield’ and he went onto 466, and he took me with him. And when he finished, I was in, I didn’t know what to do, and they said ‘we want you to go to 158 Squadron at Lissett’ and that’s where I finished. I don about another ten trips there, and they said to me ‘you done enough, that’s it.’
AM: What was Lissett like?
HI: Nissan huts, terrible. Baking hot in the summer, freezing [emphasis] in the winter. And you come back off an op and you had to go in one of them bloody tin huts. The bedding was wet, yeah. But I survived.
AM: You did.
HI: Yeah, I really survived, yeah. All, most of them, all my friends went there, yeah, a lot.
AM: Was the DFC then for the number of operations you went on?
HI: Number of trips I done, sixty trips, yeah. Yeah, I done more now actually, but –
AM: Well the ones that didn’t yeah, didn’t get counted.
HI: Yeah.
AM: And then so from that point, when you did your last tour, sorry your last operation, then what happened, were you sent to demob?
HI: No, they said to me ‘what was your trade?’ The war had finished, and they said to me ‘what was your trade before the war? What did you do?’ and I said ‘I was an apprentice tailor,’ they said ‘we’ve got the job for you’ I thought – they sent me down to Newmarket on the racecourse, in charge of about eight or nine WAFs on sewing machines. I don’t know why they thought I was – they were making lorry covers on these machines, and they put me in charge of ‘em. Oh, when I was there.
AM: What was that like Harry?
HI: [Laughs] had a little giggle [laughter].
AM: So what, how old are you at this point you’re about twenty –
HI: About twenty, yes. Yeah, about, getting on for twenty.
AM: So go on, you had a little giggle [HI laughs], tell me [HI laughs] go on, tell me some stories.
HI: Yeah I was charge of them, that’s it [laughs].
AM: Right, alright then.
HI: Yeah and then I stayed in Newmarket – oh blimey, it’s, oh it’s only twenty past.
AM: No, we’re alright.
HI: Newmarket was a bombing station if you believe it or not. The Rowley Mile was a runway for 75 Squadron, a New Zealand squadron, and after the war they turned it into a Prussian [?] depot. They was dropping all the aircraft into Newmarket and crushing ‘em.
AM: Crushing them?
HI: Crushing ‘em. Hundreds of ‘em. Into this big machine they just went pfft like, just crushed ‘em up, piled ‘em up. As far as we could see was one huge pile of aluminium.
AM: Going back to you though, so you’ve had your giggle with your WAFs –
HI: Yeah.
AM: Then what? Did you get –
HI: I had a couple of giggles [laughter from both] but it was handy there because we could get up to London from Newmarket, they had a railway station –
AM: How long was it before you were demobbed then?
HI: Er, got demobbed in forty, 1946, August ’46.
AM: So quite early, a lot earlier than a lot of ‘em then? ‘Cause you’d been in the whole –
HI: I’d been in the whole, since [unclear] yeah. I come out, about to find a job, I couldn’t go back to tailoring, I’d missed it you know. Anyway, I tried, went back to tailoring and learnt a little bit. Things were very difficult when we come out, we had no houses, you can imagine London, there was all bloody roofs off the buildings, and then we had to wait for a house. I was married then.
AM: I was gonna say, where did, where did you meet your wife?
HI: I knew her from the, from the blackout. I was sitting on a seat in the blackout and she came along with her friend and we started talking and that’s how it started, and I, it was only when I [unclear] and we got married in forty, 1945, Christmas 1945, and I remember we, we done a couple of trips, and I remember I bombed Dresden, we bombed Dresden just after Christmas, February, but we got married on the Christmas, and I shouldn’t have got married ‘cause we had nowhere to bloody live, better than living with the mother-in-law for a little while, got fed up with that.
Dublin Core
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Creator
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Annie Moody
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-23
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01:15:35 audio recording
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eng
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Sound
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AIronsH150723
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Pending review
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Germany
Great Britain
Italy
England--Lincolnshire
Title
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Interview with Harry Irons. One
Description
An account of the resource
Harry Irons left a tailoring apprenticeship to join the Royal Air Force and trained as a wireless operator but actually became an air-gunner. He describes the uniform he wore and the unreliability of heated suits. Discusses the invention of scarecrows which crews believed were sent up by the Germans to distract and demoralise them. Also describes a number of operations including to the Ruhr Valley and a number of daylight operations including Le Creusot (17 October 1942) and Milan (24 October 1942). Goes on to discuss the removal of Perspex from Lancasters to prevent oil from exhausts from affecting visibility, the introduction of radar into the rear turret and it’s quick removal after it was found as used by Germany and Schrage Musik. He returned to tailoring following his retirement from the Royal Air Force.
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
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.
Temporal Coverage
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1942-10-24
1942-10-17
158 Squadron
462 Squadron
5 Group
50 Squadron
77 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Bombing of Augsburg (17 April 1942)
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
briefing
Distinguished Flying Cross
fear
Gee
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
Halifax
In the event of my death letter
Ju 88
Lancaster
military living conditions
military service conditions
Morse-keyed wireless telegraphy
Nissen hut
radar
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Driffield
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Lissett
RAF Manby
Scarecrow
Spitfire
training
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/150/1571/PBellinghamPF1602.2.jpg
249a7f80083ee604a3acfc4b9e41b2c6
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/150/1571/ABellinghamPF161121.2.mp3
927964b5233017d1c89457d142da31c4
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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Bellingham, Peter
Peter F Bellingham
Peter Bellingham
P F Bellingham
P Bellingham
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer Peter Frederick Bellingham (b. 1923, 1391638 Royal Air Force), a photograph and his log book. Peter Bellingham trained in South Africa as a bomb aimer and flew 30 Special Operations Executive operations in Halifaxes and Stirlings with 138 Squadron from RAF Tempsford.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Peter Bellingham and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-11-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
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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Bellingham, PF
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: And it’s now rolling. So my name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 21st of November 2016, and we’re in Whitfield near Brackley speaking with Peter Bellingham about his life and times before, during and after the RAF. So, what are your earliest recollections, Peter?
PB: Well, I was born in Charlton in London, SC18, at three – believe it or not I can remember, 3 Kinveachy Gardens [CB laughs], and I left when I was three years old. My parents bought a house in Welling in Kent. In those days it was in Kent, I believe it’s part of Greater London now, and it was very, very agricultural. We were part of a large estate, but our house actually overlooked a farm and you could not, not see another house at the rear. My father was at Siemens [emphasis] the electrical company, and he unfortunately died when he was fifty, just before when he was going to be made a director of Siemens. He had a very – he was in the First World War in the artillery, in the Territorials, and he stopped in the Territorials and was commissioned, and then he joined the Home Guard and ended up as a Lieutenant Colonel, Honorary Lieutenant Colonel after the war. In fact he led the parade of the Home Guard at the march past of the Victory Parade in London. Unfortunately he developed a brain tumour, they don’t know why, but it killed him in 1947 when he was fifty. That’s really enough about my parents. My mother carried on, she never married again, and she died when she was about eighty, I can’t honestly remember off hand. I went to school in Welling in Kent, which was in Kent then, and I spent the last two years at a Iris [?] technical college. I was destined to be an engineer because [laughs] I was good with my hands, and that, in my father’s view made me an engineer. But unfortunately, I left school in July of 1939, sixteen years old, and war broke out on the September. It wasn’t my fault incidentally [GG laughs] and I really, I was going to be a student of engineer, but all of those things stopped in the war, and I never got round to doing it, but I went into the Post Office Engineers for a short while. And I remember the Blitz very well, from the outskirts, and I remember walking home one afternoon, late afternoon, and watching the first daylight raid on London, and seeing all the fires from, on a wide arc, ooh something like about forty-five degrees I expect, and then making a resolution that I was going to be a Spitfire pilot. I didn’t as I say, I joined the Post Office Engineers as a makeshift job really, and in 1941, I’m not sure exactly when, but the government or the Air Ministry decided that they would recruit pilots and observers who had reached the age of seventeen and a quarter [CB laughs] and then they would attest them and then send them back in civvy street and call them up when they were ready for them. I was a bit over the seventeen and a quarter mark, but I did volunteer and went to Adastal House I think it was, in London, where I was – I didn’t have to move to London, I travelled to London each day for three days, and I did my attestation there. That was very simple for anyone just left school, mathematic test, intelligence test, and an essay on a choice of subjects, which I chose the importance of Gibraltar, a medical and I was duly accepted into the RAFVR, RAFVR [emphasis], as a pilot under training. Was given a little lapel badge RAFVR and a number 1391635AC2, pilot under training and sent home to be called up [emphasis] when necessary, when ready. In the beginning year, I’m not sure as, I think it was January of forty-two I was called up and went to Aircrew Receiving Centre, I think it was Number 1 Aircrew Receiving Centre, headquarters was at Lourdes Cricket Ground, and we were there for just short of three weeks. We ate and dined in the zoo [emphasis] [GG laughs] and we lived in the high class hotels [CB laughs, clears throat] overlooking, or near St Johns, in St Johnswood, very near the Lourdes Cricket Ground. But of course, instead of one bedroom for one person or two, there was about ten or twenty in it [laughs] but we slopped around there for nearly three weeks, and we were in flights of thirty, and then on the Thursday of the third week we were paraded out, and we were assigned to ITW, initial training wings. There was about ten or twelve of us that was left standing with nowhere to go and Corporal Speller, I remember his name [CB laughs], Corporal Speller, probably even an acting corporal [laughs] and he said ‘look,’ he said, ‘I’m not allowed to tell you this,’ but he said ‘you’re going to Southern Rhodesia, but don’t tell anyone I’ve told you.’ So sure enough, we were sent home to report to Blackpool on the Monday at the beginning of the fourth week in the Air Force. We did a bit of square bashing and getting inoculated and one thing and another at Blackpool, and then after a little while we were shifted up to Liverpool and kitted out – I can’t remember whether we were kitted out at Liverpool or whether we were kitted out at Blackpool, but we kitted out with tropical kit and had ATT and TAB injections and blood tests and whatnot, and then we were told by a very, very gnarled group captain that just because we’d got our tropical kit ‘means that you’re going to the tropics, it’s all done to fool the enemy’ [emphasis] [CB laughs]. So eventually after a week or two of medicals and one thing and another, we went off to Liverpool where we were stuffed almost into a boat, and we wallowed around for a week [emphasis]. After a week we sailed up to Scotland [emphasis], I’m not sure where, where we formed a huge convoy, and we left after about a week, and we headed north-west, more north I think than west, and it got very, very cold, and we began to think the group captain was right and we were going off to America or Iceland or somewhere [laughs] but we gradually turned south and we ended up after a while at Freetown. Incidentally, the convoy I counted I think it was over seventy ships, it was a huge [emphasis] convoy. In the middle were the troop ships, so there were all the Empress boats, the Empress of India, the Empress of Australia. I was in a uni, a Union Castle liner, the Arundel Castle, and that was pretty grim. We had a mess room, which I suppose there must have been about thirty people in, and then above the tables we had our hammocks which we strung. Well, as I say, we arrived – I could, I counted, did I say I counted about seventy ships [emphasis] I think it was. Huge [emphasis] convoy, the aircraft carriers and all sort of things, and lots of crumps [?] in the night and various rumours that floated around, and we arrived at Freetown. I can’t remember whether it was Sierra Leone but its Freetown [emphasis] and we were there for a week. It was jolly hot, and then we went off again south, and we ended up at Cape Town after about six weeks [emphasis]. And we spent a couple of nights at, days, nights, at Cape Town, and then we took a wonderful [emphasis] train journey up through the Hex River Mountains, to Southern Rhodesia in Bulawayo. We went to ITW I think it was, Initial Training Wing, which was completely different from other ones in Canada and England, in that you did six months at Bulawayo just on the ground course and went up to the wings exams, and I graduated from there. Had a wonderful holiday at Victoria Falls and then went up to EFTS, Elementary Flying Training School which was at Belvedere, which I think is now Harare [?] Airport. But it was the main airport in Salisbury in those days. But unfortunately I didn’t make the grade as a pilot – the old story you know, that they either had to ban everyone else from the air or ban me [CB laughs] so they banned me, but I, I did, I was very disappointed when I failed my, my flying. And then I was called in front of somebody and they said ‘but we have a marvellous new category. They’re splitting the observers into navigators and air bombers, and as an air bomber, you will continue your flying lessons and you will end up with a double wings brevy with a B in instead of RAF, and you will be the second pilot.’ So I thought that sounded good so I said ‘yes.’ So I went down to South Africa and went to East London, I can’t remember the name of the school. It was groundwork, very, very simple because I’d done it all before it was very simple stuff. And then went to Port Elizabeth, that was 42 Air Squadron, it’s all in here [bangs hand on something, presumably his book]. And then graduated as an air bomber [emphasis]. It was a bit early in those days for air bombers, and we were presented with the old O [emphasis] brevy, and we didn’t get that changed until we got back to England. Well we messed about in Cape Town which was a wonderful holiday, and then we sailed for England in the Moritania [?], and whereas coming out we took about six weeks, I think we took about ten days to get back to England. Very, very wonderful. I will say that when I was at East London I think it was – Port Elizabeth I think it was, I’m not sure where it was – anyway we, it was very much like a peacetime. We never did any work at weekends and we used to spend a lot of time at the sea. Beautiful surfing, without a surf board, we didn’t have a surf board in those days, and they had a boom [?] across the bay, a shark boom, which was supported by a big steel metal cable, and we used to, flew out to this cable and have a rest and then swim back. And this was I think for me the most scariest time for me in the war. I’d swam out once to this cable, by myself, and I was sort of hanging on resting and there was three fins, so I thought ‘oh my God I’ll get back inside.’ So I swam back inside and to my horror I found these three fins were circling me [laughs]. Course they were dolphins, but to me they weren’t dolphins [CB laughs] they were sharks [laughs]. And I swam like hell and clambered up the beach, and that was I think that was one of the most, if not the [emphasis] most scary time in the war believe, believe it or not. So anyway, we graduated, came back to England, went to Harrogate to wait for our kit, the CO of the unit there was Squadron Leader Legames [?], the English and Kent wicket keeper, and then we went off to Millom AFU. I don’t remember the number. The AFU is Advanced Flying Unit I think, I don’t remember what it was called. Millom is just opposite Coniston, and we had a lovely month or six months there, but we could get into Coniston in the Lake District there, beautiful. And it was there that unfortunately I found out that my brother was shot down, eventually became a prisoner of war. But then from three we went to Number 11 OTU, operational training unit at Westcott, with a satellite at Oakley. And I will just mention, you probably are aware but I’ll just mention, that’s where the individual aircrew, apart from the engineer, were pushed into big hangar or room, and told to sort yourself out and become air, a, a crew. And someone came up to me and said ‘are you crewed up yet?’ and I said ‘no,’ and they said ‘well come and meet who we’ve got.’ And there was a pilot, who was ancient [emphasis], he was about thirty-two [both laugh] and he seemed a very decent chap, and the others, so we were crewed up with a pilot, navigator, air-bomber, wireless operator, and two gunners. Six is that? Is that six?
CB: Mhm.
PB: Should be anyway. And, so we bombed around there, and did our flying training. We had several episodes. We had one particular episode where as we came into land, the Wellington, the radial Wellington was subject to pushing out flames from the engines – it was a radial engine. And this time we decided that it was more than usual and that the engine was on fire. So he called, the pilot called up and we were told to land on the runway and come to a halt and switch everything off and we’ll be sorted out. Well we were sitting there thinking ‘oh thank god we’ve made a nice safe landing on one engine,’ and there was a great war [emphasis], roar, and [laughs] Wellington [?] took off and sailed overhead. We found out afterwards that it was an instructor pilot thank God and we dived out of the aircraft but before we could get very far away the blooming Spitfire took off [laughs]. The wing commander and the squadron leader ops [?] whatever he was called, they came flying [emphasis] out and they, they blew their top and they said ‘you knew very well that it pushes out flame,’ and we said ‘well no it was more than that, it was the engine was on fire, and you press the gravendor [?] switches and you know, that kills the engine and ruins it.’ So anyway he said, more or less, ‘I’ll have your guts for garters [laughs] if you, you’re wrong’ and we weren’t wrong, but I should imagine someone really got called over the coals for it, because obviously the caravan that they have at the end of the runway which gives you a green light to takeoff, and the flying control weren’t in control [emphasis], and we never heard anything so we presumed it was on fire. Well we’re convicted it was on fire. Another little episode we had – we had many a sort of scrape with single engine landings and what thing or another. It was notorious [emphasis], the Wellington at an OTU, officers, operation training unit, for accidents. But one of them which was damned nearly my demise, was that some boffin at Air Ministry decided that it would be a good idea for air crew to have a sort of maintenance exercise, so if they were shot down in the middle of Berlin they could patch up their aircraft and takeoff. It’s a wonderful idea but absolutely useless I think [CB laughs]. Anyway, one very, very foggy day, we were sent out to, what do they call them now, the dispersal units, and there was this Wellington and we went round and did our job. I finished mine, and I went round to the rear gunner, and of course the Wellington rear turret was right on the ground, I mean the aircraft in those days did three point landings, they didn’t have tricycle things. And the two guns were sticking out, and I was leaning against this machine gun, a Browning, right into my ribs, and I suddenly thought ‘well that’s not a very bright thing to do.’ So I moved across and because it’s all open at the back, and I had the two guns either side of my ribs, and I was just about to speak to the rear gunner and the damn thing went off [both laugh]. There was a huge whine [emphasis] as the bullet travelled and we knew we were somewhere around the houses, and we thought ‘my God.’ And the mechanic saw the machine gun is if there’s one up the spout, if the breech goes forward it goes off bang and that’s it, and someone had obviously left one up the spout, which is a thing you shouldn’t do. But we kept very quiet and no one was reported killed [laughs] so we thought we were alright [CB laughs]. Eventually we were messed around a bit, I won’t say where we went, I can’t honestly remember, but we ended up at 17 HCU, a higher conversion unit at Stradishall, and there we converted to Stirlings [emphasis] which was a great thrill, wonderful aircraft to me. And the very, very remarkable, not remarkable, memorable [emphasis] thing of that place was we were, took off once on some night trip, and – I can’t remember now, perhaps it wasn’t night. But anyway, took off and one of the wheels, the tyres burst, and the distance on the ground to the cabin was about twenty-six feet I think on a Stirling. You’re nodding, I think, I think that’s right. Anyway, we were fortune with the squadron leader, the flight commander and instructor, and he said ‘well that’s it,’ he said ‘we’ve got to do a belly landing’ he said, ‘we can’t land because if you try to land on one wheel, you’ll just, as your speed decreases to about eighty you would just drop a wing and you’d cartwheel and that would be the end of that.’ So we went to Woodbridge –
CB: Mm.
PB: Have you heard of Woodbridge? Woodbridge was a particularly designed aerodrome. I think, I think [emphasis] it was about a quarter of a mile wide and about four miles long. Now that’s probably an exaggeration but it was a huge [emphasis] airstrip basically, and it was designed for shot up aircrafts to come and land on it, you know if they got people who were injured, or the aircraft. So we were told to go and land at Woodbridge and go get rid of our fuel. So we bummed [?] around and dropped our load of fuel and then we went in. And I say, fortunately we were with a, with a squadron leader and he did a wonderful belly landing, and of course the danger is that if the props are milling around, or even the sparks, and ‘poof,’ you know, you go up like anything. But I can remember seeing a blood wagon one side and a fire engine on the other. Whether or not they operated the fire engine I can’t remember, but anyway we came out and we were okay, it was wonderful [emphasis]. So eventually, we were to be sent to a squadron. Now, as I said my, my pilot was a, I think he was a journalist but his father was the equivalent of an MP, and he had a lot of clout and he was a great mate of the High Commissioner, would his name be Fraser? Memory’s – but anyway, he came back from, from a leave once, a weekend or something, and he said ‘ooh’ he said ‘I’ve met an old friend of mine that’s just finished a tour of operations with a special duty squadron.’ Now he said ‘I can’t, he won’t tell me what it’s all about but,’ he said ‘for God’s sake try and get on that squadron. It’s 138 Squadron.’ So as I say, this chap had a certain clout and he came back and he said ‘how do you feel?’ And we said ‘oh yes, anything’s better than the bluming’ old coffin run or whatever you’d call it,’ so sure enough we got posted to 138 Squadron [emphasis]. Well we had a wonderful welcome, Wing Commander Burnett, he was a Canadian, and there was another crew with us, and he paraded us, well we went into his room and he said ‘well,’ he said ‘I’ll be honest with you’ he said ‘the sooner I can send you back the better, because’ he said [laughs] ‘I don’t want Stirling pilots, we operate Halifaxes,’ but he said ‘don’t mose around or anything and keep your head on the ground.’ And he called us in the next day and said ‘well I’ve been told that I’ve got to accept you because we’re going to transfer to Stirlings’ [CB laughs]. So that was [laughs] quite a start but we did. And we had to do a certain amount of training obviously because it was a different type of operation. The air, mid upper gunner was made a dispatcher. He didn’t get a different brevy but he was called a dispatcher, they did away with the mid upper turret on the Halifax and later on the Stirling, and he was sent on a parachuting course, and I had to go on a map reading course for about a month [emphasis] I think it was. And the pilot had to transfer onto Halifax, which was quite easy really. And we, that’s what we did. Oh, to go back [emphasis], it was quite true to start with that I did do a lot of pilot training, a lot of link [emphasis] work, you know, the link trainer, and on a, on a Halifax I was a second pilot, and on a Stirling that was wonderful – I liked the Stirling that was wonderful. We had great armour plating seats and there was dual control it was really lovely. But later on, the Lancasters of course the engineer was the second pilot, so we started off on ops. I, my first op, the navigator, the bomb aimer and the pilot had to do an op with an experienced crew for the first op so we did those and then we started doing our normal ops. And a very strange thing happened to me, and it was after somewhere around five ops. We used to get bacon and eggs, we were very privileged, we got bacon and eggs before we took off, and I went down after several ops and I began to feel awful. My head felt it was imploding [emphasis]. I can’t describe it but I just couldn’t, I couldn’t, couldn’t do anything. And so I got up and paced around, and then we went out to the aircraft and believe it or not when we got in the aircraft I was perfectly alright. And it happened for two or three ops, and I really don’t know what it was but I think it must have been an anticlimax. My father being in the Great War, and sometimes unbeknown to him I sometimes used to hear some of his stories with his friends, and I had a great worry that I would not be able to make it, and I think it was all to do with that, I don’t know. Unfortunately it only happened a couple, three times and I was alright ever since then, perfectly alright. We had more or less a trouble free, more or less a trouble free tour of operations, and I finished, but I tell you that the squadron, in fact the whole, whole, both squadrons, 161 was the sister squadron, we were very lax in our discipline. We, we didn’t have parades and our type of mission was the fact that there was very rarely more than one aircraft on a target. I think there was sometimes two but I don’t think there were more than that. And believe it or not – well we couldn’t have a general [emphasis] briefing like they do on the films and things, we had individual briefings, and the pilot, navigator and air bomber, they went in and we discussed our route, and we chose our own route [emphasis]. I mean it doesn’t sound possible but we did. We used to say ‘right, well from experience from both us and other crews, we don’t want to go over that place, and we don’t want to go there,’ and we used to choose [emphasis] our own route to the target. And we used to fly low, I mean how low to give you an example was that once the rear gunner said to the pilot, ‘oh skipper, can you please go up a bit, I’m getting absolutely soaked with the slipstream.’ And I can remember going across Denmark once and seeing, I think it was a bungalow I can’t remember exactly, but seeing a house or a bungalow lit and the woman cross over and then the lights went out. That’s, I mean that’s how low we were. And I think that’s really what saved our bacon, being so low, because we were unexpected and too low for the radar and various things. We used to navigate mainly by map reading. Very, very difficult to get fixes whether they were radio or G-fixes, but the ideal thing was bends in rivers of course and woods [emphasis], and the woods on the continent were absolutely perfect [emphasis] on the maps and we used to plop from a corner of a wood to a bend in a river and – so we would arrive and the targets were invariably lights, three lots of lights a hundred metres apart, obviously, you know, downwind. And we would approach and they would signal up and we would – obviously each, each target had a different signal, an A, a B or something, and we used to go in and we used to drop our load and the dispatcher would push the parcels out, whatever they were, at four hundred feet, and if we had any what we called Joes [emphasis], agents onboard, that was six hundred feet, and they jumped with a static line, and the dispatcher used to make sure they went – I don’t know if they used to kick them out the back door or not [GG laughs]. I don’t think they had to they were wonderful people. And that was it. We got shot at once or twice but nothing to worry about. One day we were told that we couldn’t make base, and we’d have to go to Woodbridge, and that was quite an experience because the whole place was covered in fog and they’d brought out a new thing called FIDO, have you heard of FIDO? Basically I think it was cans of fuel [emphasis], kerosene, diesel, something, each side of the runway, and they’d generate so much heat that the fog would lift. Well I think we must have been one of the first crews to do it, because when we went in we were on a Stirling and we had dual control, and when we went in, we went in and obviously we couldn’t see the land but, at that stage, but we were tossed around like a cork in the ocean. I mean one minute there was nothing on the clock and the next minute there was eighty and – anyway we got down and we were okay and that was at Woodbridge and then came back. Erm, we had, as I say, no real discipline [emphasis], no parades, nothing like that, and one day we, we were stood down – I mean the fortune [emphasis] thing as regards us was we only operated I think it was about ten days, ten days either side of full moon for obvious reasons, and this was during the operational period, but we used to do two nights on ops and then one off, and on our night off and the next day we weren’t flying, we took our ground crew out for drinks which we did regularly, and we got a little bit too much to drink. We were all NCOs at the time, the crew, and we went to sleep and then someone came rushing in and said ‘God you’re in trouble, they been tannoying [?] for you from the flights, you’ve got to report to the flights,’ which was almost unheard of. Anyway we, we went down and the Squadron Leader Rothwell, he was as mad [emphasis] as hell, and he said, you know ‘I’ve been looking for you, you’re in front of the wing co.’ And we went in front of the wing commander, who gave us a bit of a ribbing, and said ‘right’ he said, ‘I’m sending you to Sheffield,’ and that was a discipline course of three weeks, and it was where Spitfire, well [emphasis] where fighter pilots who landed with their wheels up – I mean we were far too valuable [emphasis] to get court martialled but we had to be punished [emphasis]. But after about three or four days, we got returned to base, and there we learnt that the whole trouble was that our flight commander, Squadron Leader Rothwell, he was about twenty-two I think, or twenty-three, and he was like a, you know, like a big school boy. And he thought it would be a brilliant idea to post the, we were A flight, B flight commander to the Far East, but unfortunately the Squadron Leader Brogan, he was married and got a little baby and they lived out, probably unofficially, but he was very, very upset, and he did it officially through the Orderly Room. I mean you don’t argue with a squadron leader, or you shouldn’t do [CB laughs] and a lot of friends, and probably the same rank as him said ‘look, you just coming [?] yourself too long, it’s no good it’s gone beyond a joke,’ and they told this Squadron Leader Brogan and they almost, I hear, they almost came to fisticuffs. We didn’t learn this until we got back. Now the reason we got back after three days was [laughs] because Rothwell, he went on an op – now it’s conjecture that he might have taken the op that we should have taken because the squadron leader was only allowed to do so many ops a month and a wing commander so many, and it’s conjecture that he might have taken our place. But anyway he, he went down on his, I think it was about seventy ops he did, seventy, seventy-two, and he went down by hitting the cables of balloons just off the coast of Holland, and he was taken a prisoner of war. And of course he gets to a PW camp, POW camp, and it’s [?] the flight commander [laughs]. My brother [emphasis] was under him but he never, isn’t it coincidence [emphasis], he never –
CB: Phshhh –
PB: Admitted to my brother that I was, you know, on his squadron. But anyway, perhaps it would have been best if wing command, if Squadron Leader Brogan had gone to the Far East because he was appointed CO [phone rings]. Oh, would you excuse me?
CB: I’ll stop it for now. [Tape is paused]. Brogan should have gone to the Far East.
PB: Pardon?
CB: Brogan should have gone to the Far East.
PB: Yes, I think he should have gone to the Far East, because he became wing commander of 161 Squadron and was shot down and killed shortly afterwards. So – and we had a habit of that. We had a – Watson, Squadron Leader Watson was a flight commander, I think it was, he took over from Rothwell, and he was made wing commander of 161 and he was shot down and killed so, it seemed to be a death warrant, going to wing commander 161. So anyway, what happened. So we were commissioned. In fact, our pilot, his commission came through before he actually went to Sheffield and he went to Sheffield as an officer, which was a bit better. My commission came through a couple of months later. What else happened – well we – it was a wonderful squadron, wonderful squadron, and I went through and finished my ops, did thirty ops. Went to France, Denmark, oh we did a trip to Germany, that was a bit out of the ordinary. That was in the Battle of the Bulge, you know, the Ardennes campaign. And our squadron and 161 Squadron were sent off to a just inside Germany to do a spoof attack, and we dropped dummies and fireworks and things to, you know, spoof attacks. So that was, that was, yes, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, went to Norway several times. I think the longest trip I did was ten hours fifty-five minutes. We, we used to take off and go to the target if we could find it, and then we’d come back to Lossiemouth or Kinloss and come back from there. Well them, then in, right at the end of the war, it was March – oh we did about the last op, with others, different [emphasis] targets, to Norway. No I think I must have – my last op was Denmark [emphasis], but anyway in March, I was finished my thirty ops, and the squad – 138 Squadron was, went to onto Lancs, and they retrained on Lancs, but they didn’t, I don’t think they ever did much after that because it was the end of the war. And I came to, up here Turweston. That was 17 OTU. And, well Turweston was the satellite of Silverstone, and I came as in instructor. I took an instructors course, a group instructors course, a Bomber Command’s instructor course and then a bombing leaders course, and saw out my time up here and then at Silverstone. They shut this place down and then I went to Silverstone and I was demobbed in 1946. I had a chance of a short service commission but by that time I’d got engaged to my present wife and I wouldn’t take the risk, I thought ‘do you know, there’s not the huge future for me,’ and I left the Air Force. I went back for a short while into the Post Office but I wasn’t at all happy and I came farming. My father-in-law had quite a large farm in those days, here in Whitfield, Manor Farm, and we got married and I, I worked on the farm. Do you want to know anything more of what I did?
CB: Yeah sure.
PB: Erm –
CB: Because farming’s a pretty varied experience in itself.
PB: Well that was, I thoroughly enjoyed farming – in fact of my son till carries on farming, and his son. I became chairman of the parish, I think mainly because no one else wanted to do it. I became church warden and we, the rector, he retired, and me being church warden, I had to take over the duties of – and I, they, we were priests in charge of Mr Payne at Sareshom [?] and he didn’t want to be, he said ‘I’m not going to be the chairman of the parochial church council’ so I had to be the chairman of the parochial church council, and eventually I, I left being church warden, and I went into Rotary, I became president of Rotary, Brackley, and I’m a [coughs] I’m an honorary member of Brackley Rotary, and I took up golf [emphasis] and I was a member for many years at Buckingham, and then a member at Silverstone, and I’m actually [coughs] an honorary member of Silverstone, and I got two sons. One’s coming up sixty-seven and one’s coming up, what would he be, about sixty-five in October I think. Got four grandchildren, one grandson and three granddaughters, and five great-grandchildren – what have I got? Three, three great-granddaughters and two great-grandsons. And my son, my eldest son still carries on the farm. But unfortunately the HS2 is going to go straight through his house. And my wife unfortunately, about four years ago, she got Alzheimer’s and she’s in a home now. She’s, she’s struggling, put it like that. I’ve got erm [pause] authro, no – what do you call it?
CB: Osteoarthritis?
PB: Arthri - that’s right [pause] osteo – one of bones. Anyway, arthritis in the knees, I’ve had a cataracts operation in the left eye, I've got material, material degeneration in the left eye and bleeding, bleeding in the right eye, and bleeding in the right eye, which I have injects for so [laughs]. You know [laughs] I’m struggling –
CB: And you’re only ninety-three.
PB: Pardon?
CB: And you’re ninety-three.
PB: I’m ninety-three.
CB: Yes [laughs].
PB: I’m ninety-four next birthday, yep. And I think that’s, that’s all –
CB: What kind, what kind of farming was it, arable?
PB: No, no it –
CB: It’s livestock is it?
PB: I had a mixed farm, but my son’s turned it into a very large dairy farm. He’s got five hundred head of cattle and he’s got a milking herd of two hundred cows, but it’s all going to stop I think in a few months time. I don’t know what’s going to happen [coughs]. Which is rather a shame really. My in-laws came here in 1914 [CB laughs] and [wrapper rustles] it was a big farm then, it was about five hundred acres [continued rustling]. But that’s, that’s, I think about it – would you like a sweet?
CB: Thank you.
[Tape paused and restarted. Rustling continues]
PB: Shortly [?] I was –
CB: So where, where did you meet your wife?
PB: Well that’s what I was saying –
CB: Yes –
PB: My wife, Stella –
CB: Yeah –
PB: I, I met her at an officers mess party up at Turweston here, in about April of forty-five, and erm, we hit it off straight away [zipping noise] and we got married in 1947. [Puts something, presumably a sweet, into his mouth.] Sixty-nine years ago, isn’t it?
GG: Mm.
CB: Quite a while.
PB: Pardon?
CB: Quite a while.
PB: Quite a while.
[Tape paused and restarted.]
CB: That’s very useful because it’s covered right through your working life, but going back to 138 Squadron, what were the crew members like, individually?
PB: Erm –
CB: So the pilot was quite old.
PB: What, what my crew –
CB: Yeah, yeah.
PB: - In particular? Well there was one [emphasis] one, erm, odd one, and as I said before – I didn’t mention actually, what I didn’t mention was that when we went to Stradishall [emphasis] to pick up a, to train on a Stirling bomber, we picked up a flight engineer. And he was always [emphasis] the odd one out. He was married, but we know that he had a girl in the village [CB laughs] and he was the odd one out. Otherwise all the other crew we were very close, we used to – right from our Westcott days, our OTU days we used to go out to out to the pub to drinking together and – we did drink too much in the war, there’s no question at all. But another very interesting thing which I might add, was I had a friend there who was a, a Lysander pilot on 161 Squadron, Bob Large. I don’t know whether that name’s cropped up at all.
CB: No.
PB: But Bob Large was an ex-one squadron [?], fighter of, erm, what – Battle of Britain pilot. And his wing commander was a chap called Boxer, who ended up air marshal or very high rank indeed. He’s dead now but he’s very high rank. And he wasn’t terribly popular this Box, Boxer, but Bob Large, he was a very popular chap. Flight Lieutenant Battle of Britain pilot, and he was, erm, what’s the word – framed [emphasis] if you might like to put it, by Boxer because one night when birds were grounded there was no flying at all, Boxer knew that Bob Large had gone off to the pub, local pub, and he put out a tannoy for him, and of course he didn’t turn up, so he court martialed him. And the rules of court martial are the court can’t have people that are on the same squadron on same unit, so the way they got over it, they posted the court, several of the senior officers, to other stations for the court martial. But he was found guilty and the facts were there and he was sentenced to be cashiered [emphasis]. And he told me afterwards – I’ll tell you why, he told me afterwards that he, he told me afterwards that he was the only one as far as he knew that was reprieved [emphasis] by the king, and the king stepped in and said ‘no.’ So he was, he lost two years seniority which was, didn’t mean much at all to him, but I didn’t learn this until after the war, and the reason I learnt this, going back to Peter Westcoombe [?], he invited me to, to Bletchley when they opened an SOE section, and he introduced me to the director who was a woman, I didn’t catch her name, but afterwards I was chatting to her. ‘Oh, my father-in-law was at Tempsford,’ I said ‘oh yes, when was he there?’ such and such. ‘Oh I was there then, what was his name?’ ‘Large.’ I said ‘good gracious me,’ I said ‘I know Bob Large very well, I knew him very well,’ and he gave me his, she gave me her telephone number and I rang him and we had a long conversation and he told me that he, he said ‘I’m sorry,’ but he said ‘I did deserve to be cashiered,’ you know, ‘I knew I was wanted for, I should be available,’ but of course as I said the birds weren’t flying. But anyway, he, he went back and lost his seniority for two years and ended up flying commercially for different people [CB laughs]. But, and he bought back that, what was her name? Violet, Violette Szabo?
CB: Szabo.
PB: He bought her back once –
CB: Mm.
PB: From France. And in this book – you should, I’m not going to let you have this unfortunately, I don’t want this to leave my – but if you, if you want [emphasis] you should be able to get it from the library –
CB: This is “By Moonlight” –
PB: And, erm –
CB: - Is the name of the book.
PB: In there it said that, which is unbelievable [emphasis] but I’ve read it and it said that only two Lysanders were missing on ops in the war. Incredible [emphasis] isn’t it?
CB: Extraordinary.
PB: And one [emphasis] of them was almost certainly shot down by a Mosquito [CB laughs] in mistake for a Fieseler Storch. And you remember, course the last pin point of it, well they knew when it was shot down, but when the Mosquito reported that it had shot down a Fieseler Storch at such and such a place, there was no doubt the Mosquito shot it down. You can’t really blame the Mosquito I suppose, but, yeah.
CB: And it was in the night.
PB: Well there are – if you look at the history of 138 and 161 – 138 in particular, the, the heroes, illustrious people that were associated, it was, they were, the chap that did the Amiens prison break out –
CB: Mm, Pickard.
PB: What was his name?
CB: Pickard. Pickard [emphasis].
PB: Yeah Wing Commander Pickard. He was on, I think it was 138 Squadron.
CB: Mm.
PB: ‘Cause 138 Squadron were started as a flight, and it was the King’s Flight. The group captain, who was still a group captain when I was at Tempsford, was chap called Fielding, Mouse Fielding. And he was the King’s Pilot, and there was all the different squadron officers and people. They were all on, they all wore, they all wore scarlet [laughs] lining to their jackets. And as I say, it started as a flight, it, it really – you really, I’m not going to lend you this because things go astray –
GG: Mm.
PB: But if you can get a copy, then it’s quite interesting reading.
CB: Hmm, mm.
PB: But, erm. It started off as a flight and they flew these two engine things to Poland and places and then gradually they got more sophisticated and they were landing Hudsons as well in the war. That was 138 Squadron, one, one, 161 Squadron I mean. But, and then they split one, 138 and 161 they made, and all the landing people like the Lysanders and the Hudsons were 161, and the heavies were 138.
CB: Now when you arrived at Tempsford, you didn’t know what you were in for –
PB: No –
CB: You said earlier –
PB: No.
CB: But 138 and 131 had a specific –
PB: 161.
CB: 161, sorry – had a specific requirement to re-affirm [emphasis] their –
PB: Well as Churchill said ‘set, set’ er –
CB: Official –
PB: ‘Set France alight.’
CB: Yes but Official Secrets Act you had to go through that again, so what was that? Tell us what that was.
PB: The Official Secrets Act?
CB: No, no. You had to reaffirm it because of what you were doing.
PB: You know I don’t remember that.
CB: Okay.
PB: I don’t remember, but we were, as I say it was very, very laid back, and when the wing commander Burnett said ‘well I’m afraid I’ve got to accept you, I, we’re going to re-master with Stirlings soon,’ so –
CB: Mm, [laughs].
PB: ‘I’ve been told that, you know, I’ve got to accept you.’ And he didn’t say, you know, ‘keep your head down’ or anything, he just said ‘welcome to the squadron.’
CB: Yeah.
PB: And we went our separate ways, we, as I say I had to go on an intensive map reading, low level map reading round England [CB clears throat]. The mid upper gunner was, lost his guns, lost his turret, and he went on a parachute course to Ringwood I think it was. And [pause] it was, looking back it was amazing really how informal [emphasis] it was.
CB: Mm.
PB: And I mean it was unbelievable when you hear about it and when you see these big briefings where, you know, ‘your target for the night is Berlin, urghhhh,’ [CB laughs], I mean we had nothing [emphasis] like that at all. We, we just used to go into a room, pilot, navigator and air bomber [CB clears throat], and they’d say ‘your tar’ – and there again [emphasis] I don’t know whether you realise this, I haven’t mentioned it, but your target was given a code name, and all of France was part of a horse, have you heard that?
CB: No.
PB: Yeah, the – it was Saddle One or Girth Two or Stirrup One or Denmark, I don’t remember what Denmark or Norway were, but they were never anywhere [emphasis], not in my logbook, it’s just Operation France or Operation Denmark, there’s never any mention – there must be some records in the Ministry somewhere of where these targets were.
CB: Mm.
PB: I remember we were in the South of France and that was no problem at all [emphasis]. There was a great big bonfire and we had a thing called S-Phones, which was new to us, and it was a walkie-talkie thing from about fifteen miles, and also it had red and green direction finding onto the target. So we went and dropped our goods, and then this voice said, oh it said ‘when you go back to England, will you look my sister up?’ [CB laughs.] ‘She lives at such and such a place,’ and we said ‘there’s no way we’re gonna look his sister up’ ‘cause if that got out we really would [emphasis] be for it, you know. So I’m afraid his sister never got the message, but erm, it was – I mean we used to drop our, we used to fly [emphasis] and then ascertain with the signal that it was the target and then we’d continue and drop our load and we’d go [emphasis], not because we were frightened but because it would give the enemy a clue if an aircraft was circling around.
CB: Sure.
PB: Erm –
CB: So if you missed a target what did you do?
PB: I’m afraid you just came back.
CB: Right.
PB: I didn’t, I didn’t lose many, I think of the thirty I did I probably didn’t, didn’t make six or something like that.
CB: Mm, so –
PB: I mean several of them were in Norway. I don’t know whether you’ve been to Norway but it’s a lot of snow [emphasis] in Norway –
CB: Mm.
PB: And if you’re given a target in Norway believe you me, it’s very [laughs] it’s very difficult to find.
CB: Identification points are very difficult aren’t they?
PB: Pardon?
CB: Identification points –
PB: Yes.
CB: Are very difficult.
PB: Yes.
CB: So could you just, can we just look at the briefing and how the sortie went? So at the briefing, how would that go?
PB: The debriefing?
CB: No, at the briefing itself, beforehand, so –
PB: Well as I say it was the pilot, navigator and air bomber and the others weren’t really concerned, they were just concerned with their job.
CB: Mm.
PB: And if there was any new things with gunnery or new things with signalling they would be told, but the actual trip, we sometimes had an agent [emphasis] who’d come back and he’d tell you what the business was like, but no, we were told that ‘this is your target, there it is, here’s your maps and which way do you intend to go?’ so you know, we’d say ‘well from past experience and what other crew have told us, it’s no good crossing the coast there, we think we should cross here,’ ‘yes,’ you know, ‘we agree with you,’ ‘and then we’ll go to this bend in the river, or this edge of a forest, road junction, avoid towns of course,’ and we’d get there.
CB: What – how would you plan the heights that you were flying at?
PB: Just low [laughs]. Damn low, as low as you could.
CB: Mm.
PB: And I think that’s what saved us a lot.
CB: Mm.
PB: That’s not on is it?
CB: It is, yeah.
PB: Pardon?
CB: It is now [emphasis], yes.
PB: Oh –
CB: Yeah.
PB: Oh, I won’t say anything more –
CB: What? Well I can stop for a moment.
PB: Well I just mentioned that we had a shortage of crews once –
CB: Yeah.
PB: And you can check it up, but erm, we had a shortage of crews before I got to the squadron, not sure when it was, it was something like, could have been June or something 1944, but they said ‘well obviously the best squadron is to have three aircraft from the Dambusters Squadron,’ and they sent three aircraft that promptly shot [?] the place up, marvellous flying marvellous pilots and everything, and everyone stared in awe, and they parked their aircraft and our ground crew went and said ‘oh no you can’t go in here we’ve got secret equipment,’ great fuss you know, so they said ‘alright, we’ll refuel and here’s your, what you’ve got to do.’ But unfortunately for them out of the three only one got back. And – is that on?
CB: Yeah.
PB: I got my theories and I’ll probably be court martialed [laughs] or something for this –
CB: Not now you won’t [laughs].
PB: [Laughing] I’ve got my theories that the reason that the 617 Squadron lost so many planes on the dam raid and also for a short while afterwards they, they really come, came unstuck was because low level to them was not low level what I call –
CB: Mm.
PB: And I mean the most vulnerable [emphasis] place to be is about three-thousand feet. I’m not saying they flew at three-thousand feet but I think that if they’d have flown a bit lower – I don’t know about this I’m talking a load of rubbish I know, but I think if they’d have flown a bit lower they might have got away with it, you know, but that’s – but they certainly came to us and, and out of the three only one got back.
CB: And what were they doing when they were with you?
PB: Pardon?
CB: What were they doing when they came to you?
PB: Well they’d just done the dam raid –
CB: Yeah but those three [emphasis], what did they, what, what were they doing?
PB: [Pause] what when they came to us?
CB: Yes.
PB: Well they were doing just the normal job that we did, because we were so short of crews we wanted, you know –
CB: So they were dropping supplies as well?
PB: Yes, yes.
CB: Right.
PB: Dropping agents, I don’t know about agents, I don’t think they dropped agents, there’s no mention of agents being killed, but they certainly were dropping supplies –
CB: Mm.
PB: And two of them, whether they were shot down or not I don’t know, but it said that only one returned to base, which, I think Cheshire was the wing commander and he wasn’t very pleased about it, but erm, yeah.
CB: So when you were on your ops then, what was the division of labour? Because you were right out, right out at the front, you were – were you feeding stuff back to the navigator or were you telling the pilot directly where to go?
PB: Erm, I was mainly in the second pilot’s seat, I did my map reading from the second pilot’s seat. And then when we were over the target obviously I was in the nose, but I didn’t have a bomb site, we just flew down the, the lights, bonfires or torches or whatever they were, and dropped, as I say, it was four hundred feet for parcels and the canisters and six hundred feet for agents.
CB: So at what stage from the target would you be moving to the bomb aimers position? How many miles out?
PB: Well when we were probably on the circuit. Just before we went, just before we, we – I made sure if possible that we were at the target and check that I was sure we were on the target I think we got the signal, then I would go into the bomb aimer’s position.
CB: Mm.
PB: But it wasn’t a question of getting anything fixed up. All you did was select the bomb switches and then press the button when the pilot flew down the –
CB: So the stores are all in the bomb bay –
PB: Pardon?
CB: The supplies are all in the bomb bay, and –
PB: Yes, and in the fuselage –
CB: Right.
PB: Packages.
CB: And could you drop the lot at the same time or did you have to have a sequence?
PB: Well there was a sequence which was automatic on the, on the –
CB: On the release.
PB: On the release –
CB: Mhm.
PB: I mean, I think it was almost instantaneous you know, one one one one, wasn’t a question of the whole [emphasis] lot together and it wasn’t a question of many seconds in between. It was a question sort of one two three four five, like that.
CB: Were they just dropped as they were or did they have parachutes?
PB: [Pause] they had parachutes [emphasis].
CB: Right.
PB: Yeah [laughing] yeah. For a minute [laughs, GG laughs] I couldn’t remember, but no I do remember they had parachutes, yeah, yes.
CB: Including the ones that were pushed out by the dispatcher?
PB: Oh do you know – I would imagine so but I don’t know [emphasis].
CB: With a static line? [?]
PB: I think if they’d have landed [coughs] without, they’d have smashed when they hit the ground.
CB: Mm.
PB: [Coughs]. But [pause] but –
CB: So you’re going over the target and you’ve dropped your supplies. How did you proceed back from there?
PB: Well the navigator had already worked out a course for home, and I don’t think I took much of a part. I, I think I’d checked obviously on what was going on –
CB: Mm.
PB: But I think the navigator gave the courses and we got back home [emphasis]. But the unfortunate thing was that after the V1s started we were ordered, all aircraft were ordered to come back into England over ten-thousand feet, and that was a damn nuisance. I had a friend that was shot up with the Royal Navy, and he was flying at a nice comfortable ten-thousand feet and the – that’s, that’s the story – is that on?
CB: Yeah, yeah.
PB: Well this is the story – I can’t remember the pilot’s name now. He was a New Zealander and he got shot up by the Royal Navy and he said ‘fire [?] the colours of the day [emphasis].’ Well the colours of the day were in a varied [?] pistol above the signaller’s head, in the roof. And he didn’t know what to do, and when they landed, the pilot was absolutely mad [emphasis] and he said ‘you stupid idiot,’ or words to this effect, probably more tastier than that [CB laughs], but he said ‘look,’ he said, ‘here’s a pistol, you just press it.’ [Laughs, GG laughs]. And he pressed it and set fire to the aircraft [all laugh]. And I don’t know whether it was a – I think it was probably superficial damage but, erm, yeah.
CB: So, the point, am I right in saying, of flying above ten-thousand feet was so that the people on the ground would not be shooting at higher level aircraft? Because they were shooting at the V1s.
PB: Yes, yeah. But, erm, we were, we were shot up by the Americans once as we, as we were going into the tar – well not going into the target but crossing our lines, and I suppose you can’t blame them really if they hear or see any aircraft they’re going to take evasive action, but – there were lots of instances. I remember a friend of mine he became a roommate of mine when I was first commissioned, and they couldn’t make the, the height [emphasis] above the clouds, the cumulonimbus, and the pilot went underneath and they got struck by lightning, and he was blind for a week. He walked around with the dark glasses, but he got his sight back. But he ended up with a DFC, he shot down two one-nineties [emphasis] which was very unusual.
CB: Was he mid upper or rear gunner?
PB: He was a rear gunner. He – and there again, coincidence and everything, he, he was my roommate, we were both commissioned together and he finished his tour just before me, and he went away, I lost touch with him. And years later my brother had returned from being a prisoner of war, and he was made CO of a, of an aircrew reclassification unit in Hereford I think it was, where the, all the redundant aircrew were put other jobs, you know, administrative jobs and various things, and who should be one of his pupils but this flying officer Dunning? Very strange.
CB: Hmm.
PB: But a story about him which is perfectly true and a modern person wouldn’t believe it I don’t think, but we used to go, about a flight of thirty, and have our different injections, TAB and ATT and blood tests, and he was a Liverpudlian, or near, near Liverpool, and he lined up and he had his injection, I don’t know which one it was, and within milliseconds [emphasis] he collapsed, and they said ‘oh my God,’ you know, ‘another wimp.’ Put him on the couch and then someone happened to look and said ‘my God he’s gone the colour of crimson’ [emphasis]. So they called, you know, the hospital, and called his mother [emphasis] actually, his father was in the army. But he was touch and go, and what had happened was, you, I don’t know about in your time, but in those days the doctors just used a needle until it was blunt. I mean there was no question of use once and throw away, but unfortunately for him the doctor had changed shift and put his syringe down with the serum in it and the next doctor picked it up and gave this friend of mine the lot, and this previous doctor had put about five doses in the syringe [emphasis].
CB: Jeez.
PB: And the doctor that took over didn’t realise this and he gave this friend of mine the whole [emphasis] lot.
CB: Jeez.
PB: And it damn nearly killed him.
CB: Mm.
PB: I mean, I know that’s true because he told me, but.
CB: Mm. Hm.
PB: We had another crew that – if they were right down in the South of France, I never did have the luxury of doing it, but if they were right down in the South of France, very often they would fly through to Northern Africa, Algeria I think it was, Blida [emphasis], is Blida North Africa?
CB: Mm.
PB: And they would refuel and everything and then come back, and I think probably drop some more supplies on the way back, but this crew, they started back and they’d got all the goodies which you’d never see, oranges and things [CB laughs], and they started losing height, and I think that part of Africa, I think was a thousand feet above sea level, but they gradually lost height until throwing everything that was movable [emphasis] over board, they said ‘it’s no good’ and they’d seen a, a ship which was lights on and they landed by it. And it turned out to be a, a Portuguese ship, neutral ship, and in the ditching, this friend of mine who’s an air gunner, he got a DFM for it, he rescued someone, but one of them was killed. I can’t remember who it was, and they came back to England and they, they were landed somewhere in Portugal and they flew back. But talking of that sort of thing, is this on?
CB: Mm.
PB: There’s a friend of mine who’s well tabulated, he’s, he’s in Max Hastings’ “Bomber Command” book – did I say a friend? He was a brother-in-law actually, my [CB laughs] wife’s sister’s husband, chap called Bill McGrath. Have you heard of him?
CB: Nope.
PB: Well he’s in the official history and everything. And he was a pre-war observer, and he was on the Blenheim Squadron, eighty-seven I think it was. Anyway, he was on the squadron and the Battle of France, before the Battle of Britain, Battle of France, and they used to go out in formation in Blenheims at about ten-thousand feet, and really get messed up, and he went out one trip and he was the only crew to return, and the next trip he went out the whole lot were shot down. And this is absolutely true, it’s, you know, it’s in the official recordings, and he was, he ditched [emphasis] and he was badly injured. He lost the sight of one eye but he never lost the eye, and he was injured but he was made a prisoner of war. He escaped [emphasis] three times [CB laughs]. And the first time, or second time he was recaptured, and the second time he gave himself up, the two of them because they were so cold and hungry, and the third time they made it from Paris, all the way down through France, over the Pyrenees and he got a [pause], what do you call it, erm, a military medal for it. But he carried on flying [CB laughs]. He was instructing [emphasis] and carried on flying, but he hadn’t got sight in one eye, he’d lost it. But he used to memorise the sight chart, and one day he, they changed the sight chart and they said ‘my God you’re blind’ [CB laughs] and he said ‘yes,’ so they says ‘right,’ and he was Irish, Northern Irish actually, or Southern Irish, Irish, and they said ‘right, you’re –’ he was a warrant, I think he was a warrant officer, sure he was a warrant officer. Anyway, he was, erm, reduced to a ground duty job and lost his seniority, and so, being Irish he wrote to his mother [emphasis]. He said, knowing that the letter would be, you know, scrutinised –
CB: Mm.
PB: And he said ‘I’m seriously thinking of leaving. I’m, I’m, I’m Irish so I can [emphasis] leave,’ said ‘it’s disgusting treatment,’ and the CO got to hear, course, course it was –
CB: The censor read it.
PB: Pardon?
CB: The censor [emphasis] read it.
PB: Censored, yeah. And he went in front and he said ‘what’s this McGrath,’ and he said what had happened, and he said ‘oh well don’t do anything,’ he said ‘we’ll see you’re okay.’ And he got commissioned in the [coughs] what was called Flying Control. But that’s the way they treated them. If he’d not been Irish he would have lost all his flying pay and his rank and he was, it was, yes he was – and he’s quoted in I think it’s Max Hastings’ book “Bomber Command,” Bill McGrath [emphasis]. We used to call him Mac but he’d referred to as Bill McGrath. My brother, they [laughs], they say that all air crew are volunteers. I don’t think that was strictly [emphasis] true to be perfectly honest, probably ninety-nine percent, but my brother did the same as me and he was older, and he was attested and they said ‘yes okay,’ you know, ‘pilot under training. Now do you want to come in the Air Force or do you want to wait to be called up?’ ‘Oh no’ he says ‘I want to come in the Air Force,’ so they called him up and put him on a wireless operator course at Yatesbury, Wiltshire, and then when he passed his wireless operator course he said ‘well,’ you know ‘what about my pilots course?’ And they said ‘oh God no,’ they said ‘you’re a wireless operator flying, and you’ve got to do fifteen ops’ or something so he was I think an LAC when he came out of the radio school, and he went on about a six week air gunners course [laughs] and came in as a sergeant, wireless operator air gunner, and then eventually he was told that he’s got to do fifteen ops and unfortunately I think he was shot down on his fifteenth op, but he was a POW, but, yeah.
CB: How did he get on with that?
PB: Not at all well [emphasis]. He’s, he’s one that just didn’t – he was, he was I suppose only [emphasis] sounds awful, but he was about two years as a POW from August forty-three until about May of forty-five, and he stopped on the Air Force for a little while, for about three or four years, and he left the Air Force and got quite a nice job in the city and then he was, they used to go and have a ploughman’s lunch and he suddenly got up and he was vomiting blood in the gutter, and he got a burst ulcer, but he recovered from that. But the POW business really [emphasis] upset him and he couldn’t go on the top flight of a bus [emphasis] and all sorts of silly things. He held a job, but lived on drugs and then eventually they killed him, you know, the drugs were just too much, and –
CB: Mm.
PB: And, he was in his sixties when he died, but [pause] he was just one that didn’t take to being shut up.
CB: Mm.
PB: Incidentally, he said that they were, erm, what’s the word [pause], released [emphasis], that’s the wrong word. I can’t think of words nowadays, by the Russians [emphasis].
CB: Mm.
PB: And they all started to go out of camp and the Russians were really [emphasis] nasty, and the senior camp officer went to the Russian colonel and said, you know, ‘we’re on your side,’ so he said ‘oh yes of course’ and so he said ‘okay, now is there anything you want?’ and he said ‘well we’re very short of food,’ and my brother said they were terrible [emphasis], they were barbarians [emphasis], they used to go round to the farms and places, and they said ‘oh we want that pig, we want that,’ and if they said ‘oh no,’ bang [?] they’d shoot them, and when he came back, and he wasn’t the only one, he said to me ‘we should go straight [emphasis] into Russia now,’ and he was convinced [emphasis] that there would be trouble with Russia. He wasn’t far wrong but it didn’t develop into anything, but he, he was convinced [emphasis] that Russia wanted tackling straight away –
CB: Mm.
PB: But, erm, yes. I’ve been prattling on – I don’t know what you, probably –
CB: When you –
PB: Edit a lot of this [laughs].
CB: Well, you –
PB: [Laughing] cut it out.
CB: When, when you were on, on an operation [clears throat], what were you actually doing most in the – how were – what was your task during the flight?
PB: Map reading. Very intensive, I mean it’s, it’s like if, it, well it’s a bit more intensive obviously, but if you go from here to Scotland all with a sat-nav. They call them sat-navs?
CB: Mhm.
PB: You know, you sort of concentrate, ‘oh you turn right here, you turn left here, go over the roundabout,’ well I mean that was my job, I never had time to – unless they said ‘there’s an enemy aircraft’ or ‘there’s an aircraft’ or something I never, I never left the map, I was, you know, concentrating on the map, making sure that we were on track.
CB: And you could do that perfectly well from the co-pilot’s seat could you?
PB: Yes, yes. You could see pretty well. Yes I didn’t, I didn’t very often get down in the bomb bay until as I say, until we’d got right near the target, and identified the target. And the target was, each target had its code name, which sometimes was a lovely audislamp [?] and sometimes seemed to be a candle [laughs] yeah.
CB: And, er, it was only in the later part of the war that you had the walkie-talkie link?
PB: Yes we only used it once and that was getting on for the end of the war in the South of France.
CB: Yeah, so apart from that, how were you identifying your target when, say, the outside visual, immediate visual distance, so at twenty miles how would you be getting close to be sure that you were on target?
PB: Well you, you, you got as near as you could until you saw the fires or the lights, and erm –
CB: ‘Cause we’re in the dark aren’t we?
PB: Pardon?
CB: We’re in the dark all the time.
PB: Oh, well [emphasis] it was moonlight –
CB: Moonlight.
PB: And believe you me, flying sometimes like ten days each side of the moon, full moon, it was almost like daylight.
CB: Oh, right.
PB: And once they could hear you coming, and it didn’t take much to set fire to these bonfires –
CB: Mm.
PB: Or to have a light and flash the light –
CB: Mm.
PB: And they were always, you know, downwind, upwind, wind was – and there would be three of them, a hundred metres apart, and at the downwind end there was someone would be there, with a bit of luck it would be a nice audislamp [?] and if you were a bit unlucky it would be a dodgy flashlight [emphasis] which would [pause]. But it was remarkably [emphasis] efficient actually. I don’t know – I suppose somewhere along the lines someone could find out what the percentage of successful drops were, but I think they were fairly high.
CB: Mm.
PB: I’m not sure but I think I missed – I could do it now if counted them, but I think out of thirty I think I missed the target about six times.
CB: Mm.
PB: And as I said, two or three of those were in Norway, and that was, that was –
CB: Mm. Very difficult.
PB: Really horrendous [emphasis]. Flying over that snow, it was very difficult indeed.
CB: Erm, how often was the aircraft attacked [emphasis] during your operations?
PB: We were very lucky, we were hardly attacked at all. Very [emphasis] lucky indeed, I mean – in fact I think, I think you’ll find that if you were attacked you’d usually had it, because there’s no way of bailing out at that height.
CB: Mm.
PB: So I mean you’d – and if you’d crashed you’d – like this squadron leader chap, flight commander, I mean he hit a balloon cable the story is there –
CB: Mm.
PB: And he was, I think all the crew was safe [emphasis], but erm. If you were actually shot down at that height there was very little chance of [pause], yeah.
CB: But it was quite difficult for the night fighters to get down to you because their radar wouldn’t work against you close to the ground.
PB: No, no that’s [coughs] their radar?
CB: Yeah.
PB: No, no their – and of course unfortunately our radar [laughing] didn’t work when we were close to the ground.
CB: Mm.
PB: But –
CB: And did you have Monica?
PB: Hmm?
CB: Did you have Monica to test, to check if anything was following you?
PB: Did we have –
CB: Did you have the Monica receiver?
PB: No. No, we never had them. No, all we had was G.
CB: Yeah.
PB: And, and just on the one trip we had these things called S-Phones.
CB: Mm.
PB: But they only operated about something like fifteen miles away from the target –
CB: Mm.
PB: And it was a walkie-talkie thing, and then it had red and green and you could home in on the red and green [pause]. Yeah I personally don’t think there’s enough credit given to the resistance, I mean when you read of – you see that, what was his name, the armaments boss of Germany?
CB: Oh, Speer [emphasis].
PB: Speer.
CB: Mm.
PB: And he said that, erm, many more attacks and Germany were finished.
CB: Mm.
PB: And yet –
CB: Particularly after Hamburg.
PB: Yes, but you see I never – I, I, I’m a great admirer of Churchill, but he was a politician, and I’ll never [emphasis] forgive him for what he, his action [emphasis] he took after the Dresden raid.
CB: Mm.
PB: Now, I’ve got the official history of the RAF, three or four volumes of it, and it’s all [emphasis] tabulated there, letters and memos and things, and Russia wanted Dresden bombed [emphasis on last four words]. And they told Churchill and Roosevelt they wanted Dresden bombed. And Churchill said ‘yes, yes, okay.’ And the chief of the air staff did as he was told, and they said to Harris, Bomber Command chief, ‘we want you to bomb Dresden.’ Now it’s documented [emphasis] that Harris said ‘there’s no point [emphasis], absolutely no point, it’s civilian [emphasis] sort of population and it’s a lot of rubbish to say that’s it’s a complication of troops coming,’ and for two weeks he stalled, and then – I’ve got all this in print [emphasis]. And Churchill said ‘look, if you don’t do as you’re told you’re out.’ So he was an officer, he did as he was told and bombed Dresden. Within a short while, I don’t know whether it was days or weeks, days I think, Churchill was up in parliament condemning the raids on unnecessary civil populations. And of course, another thing which I won’t forgive him for which is all the same thing, was that he never gave Bomber Command a campaign medal.
CB: Mm.
PB: I mean, there was the Italian campaign, there was the Burma campaign, but never [emphasis] Bomber – I got a clasp, I got a Bomber Command clasp [coughs] a nice fibre [?] campaign [laughs] clasp.
CB: Did you get your French Legion of Honour?
PB: No, no, never got that. I never said I deserved it, I don’t think I did anything more than what hundreds of other people did. But I do think that the French should, perhaps they have done, honour the French Resistance more, I think they – and I think our government should have recognised the French Resistance, definitely. I mean there’s a story, one of the stories I remember – I used to read a lot of war books after the war, and there was a great big unit, regiment or something, from the south, and because of the French harassment, the resistance, Maquis Resistance. They took not days but weeks [emphasis] to get up to Normandy, and they, these things aren’t recognised [emphasis], you know, there’s –
CB: Mm. When you got to the end of your tour of thirty, how did you feel?
PB: [Pause, laughs]. Believe it or not, I applied to carry on with the squadron that were due to go out in the Far East [laughs]. I must have been mad [laughs] I think, I must [laughing] have been mad. But, my, my pilot as I say, he had a bit of clout, and he stopped on, on the squadron when it changed to Lancasters, and he got a job as an instructor, or a coordinating chap, but my, the present, the flight commander at that time, he asked people that were in the know, our bosses, if I could go as his bomb aimer but they wouldn’t let him, they said ‘no, he’s done his thirty ops and that’s it, he’s finished.’
CB: Mm.
PB: Tony Darsefton [?], and I read after the war that he was killed in a civil air crash. He became a civil airline pilot and was – I saw in “The Telegraph” obituary that he was killed.
CB: Mm.
PB: But, oh life is full of ifs.
CB: What would you say was your most memorable point about your RAF service?
PB: Most memorable [emphasis] point [pause]. I can’t answer that, you know, I, I’d have to have an hour to think about that I think. I suppose it must be when I did my last op. I suppose it must [emphasis] be really, to think that I’ve – and then again you see ,the war when I finished was nearly over, so I’d got every chance of surviving the war. Sounds melodramatic but, erm. But one never, one never actually thought about dying or getting shot down or anything, or, if you – I mean one or two friends [emphasis] were killed, but a lot of them were ships [?] in the night, ‘oh hasn’t that one returned tonight?’ and that sort of thing, you didn’t, you didn’t know too many people intimately.
CB: And after the war, did the crew keep together, in touch?
PB: Well [coughs] the short answer to that is no [emphasis], but, erm, I did have one of my, the mid upper gunner, dispatcher [coughs] he came to my wedding, and the rear gunner, he came and brought his little daughter, but it didn’t last long, just the one visit.
CB: Mm.
PB: And there were two squadron reunions I went to, but I’d grown so away from that sort of life and the majority of people that I’d met from the squadron were sort of used car salesmen [both laugh], and I just, I just lost touch with them really. And I lost touch with my actual crew members, even the one that came to my wedding, and the one that came and visited us when we were both married and had children.
CB: When you were commissioned just after the pilot, what effect did that have on the social events of the crew?
PB: None at all. No, I mean, I was still a Christian name and we were Christian names, and – in fact, erm [laughs] to get commissioned I was called into the, well not called [emphasis] in that sounds a bit haughty, but I was, called, well called, I can’t think of any other word, to the orderly room and they said ‘oh your commission’s through’ [CB laughs]. I said ‘oh, okay, what do I do?’ They said ‘oh just report to the, the officer, the mess officer’ or something, so I went up to the officers mess and said ‘oh, commission,’ ‘oh yes,’ they said, ‘this is your room now,’ and [pause], I don’t know, but I mean, I just took my, I was a flight sergeant, I just took my stripes off my battle dress and put the ring on my shoulder [laughs]. And I was fortunate that my brother [emphasis] his uniform was at home, and I was easily, it was easier to go home for me from Tempsford in Welling, to Welling, and I used his uniform, and I went to my tailor in London, and I had my uniform made by my tailor, you know, who made my suits and things.
CB: Mm.
PB: An, but that was being commissioned [emphasis]. I mean the, I think the naval and the army people will be horrified [emphasis, laughs]. As I say, one minute I was a flight sergeant and the next minute [laughing] I was an officer.
CB: Mm. And was the navigator also commissioned?
PB: Eventually yes.
CB: But not then.
PB: No he was, he was [pause] – he must have been commissioned when were on the squadron. Oh I – he was about three months after me, that’s right, ‘cause I was commissioned probably in about the August [emphasis] of forty-four.
CB: And the engineer?
PB: No, none of the others were commissioned.
CB: Right.
PB: And again [emphasis] I don’t – you see, as a pilot, navigator and air bomber, you were automatically a flight sergeant after twelve months. But I don’t know whether the air gunners were or whether they have to do – I think they had a bit of a hard task, you know, they probably had to wait a couple of years.
CB: Mm.
PB: I don’t know how long you were between flight sergeant and warrant officer. Might be twelve months, or – but I was never a warrant officer, I was, I went from flight sergeant to –
CB: Rigjhy.
PB: And my pilot [emphasis] of course one day he was a flight sergeant, on the next day he was a flight lieutenant [emphasis].
CB: Oh.
PB: Acting flight lieutenant. Well, not on the next day but within a month certainly.
CB: Mm.
PB: But he was never a pilot officer. I think he was a flying officer from flight sergeant and then a, then an acting flight lieutenant.
CB: Why would that be do you think?
PB: Pardon?
CB: Why would that be?
PB: It was a pilot’s Air Force [laughs].
CB: Now, Tempsford was a wartime constructed airfield. What were the facilities like?
PB: Very good really, very good. I mean, as a, as a flight sergeant I think there was just our crew in the Nissan hut, there might have been a couple of crews. But when I was an officer, I was given a room with this chap I mentioned before, who had the injection and – in a house called Hassles. And it was a country house which the group captain lived in, and he entertained a lot of these important agents, and we had a room, ooh I think it was bigger than this room, with twin beds, above the stable block. And the group captains batman [?], we shared a batman [?] and we shared him part time, and he used to give us the odd gooses egg from the group captains [laughs] flock of geese. But it was very comfortable, it was a bit bigger than this room I think, very, very comfortable.
CB: Hmm. This is about eighteen square.
PB: I think this is [emphasis] about sixteen square, yes, I’m not sure but yeah, it was bigger than this room. Bit, bit bigger than this room and it was very comfortable, and we had – it was about a mile away from the ‘drome, and the, erm, this – he was made the flight commander after Rosswell [?], no after Watson moved onto to – Watson followed Rosswell, and Watson was 161 Wing Commander and got killed, but the chap that followed Watson was Tony Darsefton [?], and he used to live out at Hassles, he had a separate room, and he used to give us lifts in and it was, we’d always be able to get RAF transport if we had to go into the, well we had to go in. But it was, the discipline [emphasis] was almost non-existent, it really was. It was very laid back, but we did our job.
CB: The aircraft went of individually presumably, rather than in pairs or more?
PB: Well, well you couldn’t [emphasis] – I mean you couldn’t, obviously [emphasis] you couldn’t have a mass briefing because you’d have on the squadron alone you might have twenty different targets. I mean each flight consisted of about twelve aircraft I think, and twelve crews, but of course they weren’t all on the same night, but erm, but it was a very [emphasis] exciting time, and of course we got a lot [emphasis] of leave, we got a terrific amount of leave. We used to get I think it was something like ten days one months and six days the next. I was always [emphasis] home. And you used to get, as an officer, as a pilot officer, you used to get a first class travel warrant. In fact it didn’t apply to me, but most [emphasis] of the people [coughs] lived [coughed] up north, they used to put an aircraft on for what’s called a night flying test [CB laughs]. And they’d take them off to York or Scotland for their leave, and then lay on an aircraft to pick them up [emphasis]. Bloody selfish I suppose really [CB laughs], but it was done, I mean they –
CB: Mm. And they could have flown you to Biggin Hill.
PB: Hmm?
CB: And they could have flown you [emphasis] to Biggin Hill.
PB: Yes [laughing], yes I’d have more job to get from Biggin Hill to Welling [both laugh] than from Tempsford. The train was very good from there, yes. Very –
CB: Final –
PB: Very exciting times and –
CB: Right. So what was the most exciting thing do you think?
PB: The most what?
CB: The most exciting [emphasis] event that you had.
PB: In the Air Force? [Pause.] I don’t know.
CB: ‘Cause they were all exciting.
PB: Erm, some of them were boring. I mean the, the trips to Norway, I mean they were five hours there or so and five hours back, they were very [emphasis] boring. And we didn’t have any television or – I suppose we could have got the radio, I don’t know, never tried, but – they used to give us wakey-wakey tablets.
CB: Mm.
PB: I don’t know whether they worked or not –
CB: Benzedrine.
PB: Hmm?
CB: Benzedrine tablets.
PB: Was it?
CB: Mm.
PB: I don’t know whether they worked – I never, never gave them a chance to work. We used to do as we were told a lot. Not always, as I say I got into trouble for oversleeping. You see, going – is this on?
CB: Mm.
PB: Oh perhaps I –
CB: Go on.
PB: Well you can cut it out if you don’t want it –
CB: Yeah.
PB: This, this engineer, flight engineer, he wasn’t [emphasis], he’d gone to flights, and he wasn’t affected by our absence from flights when we went up to Sheffield, and yet you’d have thought he’d have said ‘ooh my God that’s my crew, I’d better go and wake them up and tell them that’ – I don’t know, very strange. But he was a real loner [?][emphasis] sort of chap, you do get them I suppose –
CB: He was the only one married, was he?
PB: He was married.
CB: He was the only one of the crew?
PB: No [emphasis], no, no the wireless operator, wireless operator air gunner was getting on a bit, he might have been twenty-eight or something [CB laughs], he was married with a child, yes.
CB: So you returned from an operation, and had a debrief.
PB: Yes.
CB: How did the debrief go?
PB: Erm, very simple really. I mean you’d – we had to fill out air bomber – one of my jobs to fill out a weather report. Mostly, obviously, the only thing you could report was well, fog I suppose, but was the cloud formations and different heights, and in those days I, I knew what the cloud formations was. I can’t say I do now. And what interference we had, erm, whether, whether it was easy to find, whether there was a good reception or whether it was a terrible reception. There were lots of stories – one story that floated around, I don’t know how true it was, but I think there might have been two crews, but there was one crew that went to this target, and they flashed their identification but it wasn’t quite perfect [emphasis] for some reason, and they thought that they’d best to not drop their load. I thought ‘this is a bit suspicious,’ and after several attempts this signal didn’t come through clear, I mean if it was dot dash dash dot they’d get the dot dash and then they might not get the dash dot. So they decided to bring this stuff back, and – this is rumour [emphasis] as I say I don’t know how true it was, but the story was that these resistance were surrounded by Germans, and every time they went up to, you know, press the signal, they were shot and killed, and if they’d have dropped the containers they would have stood a good chance of putting up a resistance. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, you got all sorts of things.
CB: Mm. Could have worked all ways.
PB: But the stories that are true and I’ve read in a couple of these resistance books – I used to get a lot of books after the war. And it was terribly [emphasis] laid back, gosh [emphasis]. In some cases there was a chap that was dropped, and he went to his safe place and the thing is you don’t walk in and rap on the door and say ‘hello, I’m here,’ you sort of observe the place and, and sure enough he kept an eye on it and it looked safe. So he went in and they said ‘oh come in’ in English you know, ‘come in,’ and they were talking in English [laughs] and he was absolutely flabbergasted [emphasis] at the lax security, but –
CB: Did you ever get to talk to the agents, you were dropping?
PB: Yes, yes. We had – on several of the drops we had an agent that had just come back, and he would give you a few tips, I can’t remember what they were but he could have told you that so many miles south west of the drop there was a German fighter unit or an AK-AK battery or something, which you know, did prove very useful.
CB: Mm.
PB: We did – yeah we had quite a lot of – and sometimes they were a bit of an organised talk by an agent who to tell you what was going on, but of course the tragedy was, I think it was the Dutch [emphasis] – don’t know whether you’ve heard of this, but the Dutch resistance was penetrated [emphasis] –
CB: Mm.
PB: Did you know this?
CB: Yep.
PB: So I’m, I, if I tell you –
CB: Go on, keep going.
PB: I’m only repeating –
CB: No keep going, keep going.
PB: Well as far as I know, they have a call which if they don’t use it, the signallers, then they know that they’re captured. And this signaller, he didn’t use his call sign, and the chap the other end he said ‘oh he’s just forgotten, don’t take any notice,’ and there was one chap at Baker Street which was SOE headquarters, who said ‘I don’t like this at all’ but he was more junior, and they said ‘no,’ you know, ‘everything’s alright don’t worry.’ And unfortunately they were just pitching agents right left and centre into the hands of the Nazis.
CB: Mm.
PB: And it wasn’t until sometime afterwards that they closed the whole circuit down.
CB: Mm.
PB: I, I never did do a trip to Holland.
CB: Mm, tragic.
PB: It was, it was infiltrated.
CB: Now you talked earlier about your later contact with Bletchley Park. To what extent were you aware of any contact while you were in 138?
PB: Was I [coughs], sorry, was I –
CB: Aware of contact with Bletchley Park?
PB: None, none at all. Well, funnily enough, the only contact which we had, and I didn’t realise the significance of course, but when I met my wife up here at this officers mess which would have been about April 1945, they’d imported a lot of Bletchley Park girls, and these two girls were standing by the fireplace there, and a friend of mine said ‘they fancy you,’ and I said ‘oh don’t talk such nonsense,’ you know, I said ‘go on’ I said ‘you’re a lady-killer, you go and ask them for a dance.’ [Laughs] so he went over and he came back and said ‘no they want to dance with you.’ I said ‘oh well you don’t know to treat women.’ So I went and it happened to be my future wife, and erm, I said, you know ‘would you like to dance?’ And they said ‘well, we’ve got the tip that the food’s coming up,’ course my brother-in-law’s, you know, here, the chap that was escaped from POW. So, but that’s how I met Stella. But what, who I thought [emphasis] was a girl, civil servant from Bletchley Park was actually Stella. But that’s the contact I had with Bletchley Park but I didn’t know exactly, I just thought they were evacuated civil servants, but, we didn’t, we didn’t know an awful lot to be perfectly honest. I mean, I met a chap in Rotary, I went to a, what do you call it, a district do, and this chap said he lived at Sandy, I said [CB laughs], ‘oh’ I said ‘I was stationed at Tempsford,’ he said ‘ooh were you?’ I said ‘yes,’ he said ‘well,’ he said ‘do you know, when your aircraft flew out they used to come found and padlock all the telephone boxes.’ I couldn’t really see the point of that but he assured me it was true. But it’s – they never, the Germans never attacked Tempsford. I’m sure they must have had some clue about it, they must [emphasis] have done. But, they, they never attacked Tempsford. They did have one huge raid in about March I think it was, in forty-five, and it was really like, like picking cherries off a tree for them. Because they sent a whole lot of fighters and they followed the bombers in as they landed and they were absolutely sitting ducks and they did do a lot of damage that particular time.
CB: Mm.
PB: But they never actually singled – as far as I know they never singled out Tempsford at all.
CB: Mm.
PB: You never know what dealings went on in war. There’s so much going on. I mean it’s a well known fact that we were dealing with Sweden and Germany were dealing with Sweden, and [laughs] you know it was sort of like this.
CB: After you’d finished your tour you went to the OTU, so how did that –
PB: Up here?
CB: Yes. So how did that work? What did you do there?
PB: I didn’t like it to start with, I didn’t like it a bit. But of course I met Stella shortly afterwards, my wife, and that made life very agreeable. I spent most [laughing] of the time playing tennis down here. But far as the work was concerned it was very good because I did a lot of flying instructing, I didn’t do much ground instructing. To be perfectly honest I didn’t know much [laughs] about the ground. I couldn’t very well say ‘when you get over the target you do this’ [laughs] because I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about main force bombing.
CB: So you went up with the trainee crews in the Wellingtons?
PB: Erm, only with an instructor pilot. I never went up with just a trainee crew. I went up – sometimes on the cross countries where there was a bombing attack afterwards or a, what do you, a bullseye [emphasis] they used to call – where you went to London and you took an infrared photograph of the target. But I don’t think I ever flew with, with a trainee crew there was always an instructor pilot with me.
CB: So what were you doing as an instructor at the OTU?
PB: I often wonder [laughs] ‘cause I couldn’t tell ‘em how to operate the bomb site. Erm, I don’t know, it’s just one of these things that, you know, you’ve got to have an instructor. Well I can understand having a pilot instructor. To a certain degree I can understand having a, a navigator instructor, but why you need an instructor to, to – ‘cause you should know how to use the bomb site on the ground before you fly up. They had, I forget what it was called now, but the bomb site that I trained on was called a setting bomb site. A very, very primitive thing which you set the course, the air speed, and told the pilot to fly on a certain course, and a certain speed, and you dropped the bombs and they were miles [emphasis] away [CB laughs]. They really were miles away. Well I don’t know about miles but – the story, there’s one story which was round, going around, and this Polish [emphasis] crew, and you did a – last trip you did was a cross country, and you ended up from an OTU, a training point of view, you ended up in the Severn or one of these bombing ranges and you dropped a couple of five-hundred pound bombs [emphasis], and the story is that this Polish crew went up and they said ‘to blazes with this, we’re not wasting this on the sea’ [CB laughs] ‘we’re going to take this off to France.’ Have you heard?
CB: No.
PB: And the – I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but the story is that they went off and they dropped their bombs over in occupied Europe. And I think they got told off a bit but they were Poles, and I met several Poles and they were great people, really great people, really were. And good pilots come to that.
CB: I think we’ve had a good run, thank you very much.
PB: Well I told you a lot of –
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Peter Bellingham
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ABellinghamPF161121
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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.
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2016-11-21
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02:05:02 audio recording
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Pending review
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eng
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Sound
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Peter Bellingham worked as a post office engineer before volunteering for the Royal Air Force. He trained in Rhodesia and South Africa and completed a tour of operations as a bomb aimer, dropping supplies with 138 Squadron from RAF Tempsford. He describes the different roles each crew member was given, the briefing, the lights which signalled the target, the release of the parcels, supplies and agents, and the debrief. He then became an instructor and after demobilisation in 1946 he worked in agriculture.
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Great Britain
South Africa
Zambia
England--Bedfordshire
England--Cumbria
England--Suffolk
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
11 OTU
138 Squadron
17 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
briefing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
crash
crewing up
FIDO
Flying Training School
Initial Training Wing
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
RAF Millom
RAF Silverstone
RAF Tempsford
RAF Turweston
RAF Woodbridge
Special Operations Executive
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/531/8765/AStachiewiczM170119.1.mp3
9b44028290cd64310d035dadb1aa336b
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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Stachiewicz, Mieczysław
Mieczysław Stachiewicz VM KW**
M Stachiewicz
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Stachiewicz, M
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer Mieczysław Stachiewicz, Virtuti Militari (b. 1917, 1625, Polskie Siły Powietrzne), and his log book. He came to the UK after the Nazi invasion of Poland and flew operations as a pilot with 301 Squadron from RAF Hemswell.
The collection also contains an album of photographs, newspaper clippings and papers relating to his escape from Poland and his tour of operations.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Mieczysław Jusef Stachiewicz and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-01-19
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
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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CB: Right, my name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 19th of January 2017, and I’m in Acton with Mr. Stachiewicz and we’re going to talk about his experiences both in Poland and then coming through France –
MS: [Unclear].
CB: And into the RAF. So what were your earliest recollections?
MS: Well first I finished my secondary school –
CB: Yeah
MS: In 1937 [doorbell rings]. Oh that’s probably Artur.
CB: Right I’ll stop just for a mo.
[Tape paused and restarted.]
CB: Right so we were talking about your secondary school.
MS: Secondary school. Do you want details?
CB: Yes.
MS: My [speaks Polish].
AB: Subatory [?] school which was a –
CB: A military school?
MS: No, no, no.
AB: No this is a normal primary school, yeah.
CB: Right, okay.
MS: And then all the corporals [?] come in.
AB: And join the core [emphasis] of cadets.
CB: Yes.
MS: That was a military school but we had full training at secondary school.
CB: Right.
AB: Yep.
MS: Plus military training.
CB: Yes.
MS: My –
CB: Like, like in –
MS: And then after that, when I, I [speaks in Polish] final examinations –
CB: Yes.
AB: O levels, like O levels.
MS: That was in the school, that was nineteen, oh dear, thirty-seven.
CB: Yes.
MS: And then I had one a year national service.
CB: Right.
MS: On that your first three months were in the infantry –
CB: Yep.
MS: For [speaks in Polish].
AB: Yes.
MS: And then I volunteered for the Air Force –
CB: Right.
MS: And for the rest of the year was spent in the Air Force. First couple of months was the theory and general Air Force talk, and what is it about –
CB: Yes.
MS: And then we started flying training in [Polish area] –
AB: Yep, [repeats place name] it’s a famous area for training, still a training camp [?] –
MS: Well we spent the first few months in Demlin [?] –
AB: Demlin [?].
MS: Which was Air Force training and schooling centre and some –
AB: Yes, it’s the equivalent to Cranwell.
MS: Sorry?
AB: It’s equivalent, equivalent to Cranwell here in England.
MS: Yes, that’s correct.
AB: Yes.
MS: And then I spent less than a year training. First simply training and then more advanced.
CB: Yes
Other: [Quietly speaks Polish to AB].
AB: [Quietly replies].
MS: Yes, so we started first on, erm, teaching plane Bartor [?]. Each was already withdrawn from the Air Force, but somehow they got [unclear] between [Polish place name] and then you went to more advance training [?] and then [pause] –
CB: Can you remember which type of plane it was?
MS: Just trying to remember –
AB: He’s just thinking –
MS: PWS. P, W, S.
CB: Oh yes.
AB: PWS [speaks in Polish]. PWS-20?
MS: Yes, the twenty and then twenty-six.
CB: Right.
AB: They’re, they’re very good planes, they’re –
MS: Yes, very good planes.
CB: Right.
MS: Twin, single engine but –
AB: Biplane, yeah.
MS: So that’s – and then I qualified as a military pilot.
CB: Mhm.
MS: [Speaks in Polish] –
AB: Yes, so –
MS: Where we had our flying training.
AB: Eradone [?].
MS: Eradone [?]. And then what – the war was approaching. All the [?] reservists I was mobilised to my unit.
CB: Yeah.
MS: Which was the Fourth Regiment, ‘cause in Poland the whole Air Force, the main, main groupings were regiments –
CB: Yes.
MS: [Someone prepares food in the background] same as any other military thing.
CB: Same as the army.
MS: Same as the army.
CB: Yes.
MS: And then I was called to my unit when I joined Rzeros [?] Squadron. Apart from taking some planes to [Polish town] aerodromes, non military, no Air Force flying at that time. That was September 1939.
CB: Yes.
MS: Then when Germans were approaching we evacuated from [Polish town]. Went by goods train, general direction of due west, because the Germans were approaching from the, from, in the direction of the east. The Germans were approaching from the west [?]. The first by train then we were cut off by some German troops so we simply left the train and walked the last sixty, about sixty kilometres to Warsaw. And after waiting for our group, or our squadron, we reassembled in Warsaw, and after a few days waiting we were given [speaks in Polish].
AB: They got, erm, they got – when the army takes over something they –
MS: Yes.
AB: Confiscate, try to –
CB: They requisition.
AB: Requisition [emphasis]. So requisitioned the cars and the vehicles.
MS: So we were put into requisition the cars, and went further west. At first in the, each car [unclear] and then reassemble not far from the Romanian border.
CB: Oh right.
MS: And the Germans still advancing so we got finally to the Romanian border, and when the news came that the Russians joined the Germans and crossed the border not far from us. The, the supposed to be Russian armed unit. We’re just at the border, so instead of waiting to be taken either by German, prisoners of war, either by Germans or Russians we crossed the border to neutral Romania.
CB: Right.
MS: When our unit was, now what would that be?
AB: [Speaks in Polish].
MS: [Pause, then speaks in Polish].
AB: They were interns I think, interns?
MS: Yeah interns, yeah, yeah.
AB: Yes.
CB: Interns, yes. You were interned there, yeah.
MS: Interned there.
CB: In Romania.
MS: Still they ask the unit. It was military papers and civilian papers with us so we interned there. Germany were watching the Romanians very carefully. They were afraid, very afraid of Germans, so escape from the camp was organised and in small groups we got first through Bucharest and then Polish authorities, Polish embassy and so on. And then we got civilian papers, and with civilian papers we officially left Romania. Single group or single person and then through Yugoslavia, Greece to France. In France the Polish forces were already been reorganised, including Polish Air Force, but [emphasis] also came to France at that time, we just put in the waiting counts [?], reserve any duties so assembly, assembly air camps. And there, when Germans attacked France and at the first month at the end of June 1940, when German troops were approaching the place where we were, we crossed to England [emphasis]. Actually there was small – we went first to Mediterranean of course, [unclear] boats there, and then again by train to a small port, French port [gives name]. It was just on the border to Spain, and then already there was – we arrived into England on the last day of June, but already there was passenger ship, British [unclear] escorted by one Destroyer. We were all loaded there, embarked there, and we crossed to Liverpool. So it was at the beginning of the, about the third of July 1940, forty-one.
CB: Forty, forty.
MS: Oh no, forty.
CB: Mm.
MS: And we landed at Liverpool. They put us into several – also several hundreds of us, ‘cause the first Polish Air Force men came in 1939, and first training started I think in early 1940.
CB: Mm.
MS: But most of us were just in assembly camps and we crossed to England at the very [emphasis] end of June, June 1940, June [unclear] 1940. So we landed at Liverpool I think of the first or second of July and we were put into several camps in mostly in Blackpool origin, standard camps. I think they were built there by RAF for training personnel, so we got one camp there. And well, it started with some English lessons and basic training and what the Air Force, Royal Air Force looked liked. And, 1941. After some time, we were one of the first groups which started training on Tiger Moths, and [unclear] Polish Air Force and RAF. And my number, RAF number was 1625, I don’t remember Polish name, number, and then of course there was the usual training. We training – we’re mostly in my groups reserve pilots. So we’ve – but we’re retrained from the very beginning. So we had a course on Tiger Moths. I can’t [?] remember the name of the aerodrome and the camp, somewhere near Blackpool. Then we went secondary course and after that I got my commission, Polish and British as a pilot officer. And in 1941, I found myself being trained on Wellington one in eighteenth OTU, operational flying, operational training unit, and there we formed crews because I was training, I was retrain [emphasis] again as a pilot but then all the other members of the crew were trained separately, so we assembled there and start assembling crews. So I had second pilot, I was in the, in the crew. The first pilot in the cockerman-dral [?], or the crew. I had second, second pilot, navigator, radio operator and two air gunners. And after training there we were posted to 301 Squadron. It was the, in November 1941, to 301 Bomber Squadron as a full crew. The only difference was ‘til then, the crew consisted of two pilot, first and second, and I was the only one directed in commanding [unclear] of the crew, because they changed it. There was still the crews flying with two pilots, first and the second, usually one with the new crew without any training or any experience in all flying, the first pilots they are the second pilots, and a experienced pilot [unclear] the crew or just commanding as on our first flying. So that was the end of nineteen – it was in December, November I think, 1940, 1941. So we were training at the OUT, eighteen OTU as a crew and then in, in December 1941 we qualified as fully trained crew and joined a couple of other crews training with us, 301 Squadron. [Pause] and then it started. Our first flight was in my book, Stuttgart I think it was. But then I was flying there as a second pilot with a very experienced first pilot, and inexperienced crew. So we started with Stuttgart and then our second flight must have been [?] Cologne, thousand, thousand planes on Cologne. I think it was thirties [?].
CB: The thousand bomber raid.
MS: Sorry?
CB: The one thousand bomber raid.
MS: One thousand – well the first one thousand bomber raid. That will be in my logbook.
CB: Mm.
MS: I think that was the first day – December nineteen – and then after that we, few others. Another one was the, oh [pause, papers shuffle]. I got my, in my logbook –
CB: Yep.
MS: There was Cologne. Still, still when we entered all the duties in the book, we’re told we must not put the name of the target, so my second, second flight was without naming Cologne, and then I think the next one was Essen which was really beating up severely [?] ‘cause Essen was one of the industrial parts of Germany, so most of Essen was very heavily defended, and we had the biggest losses during our raids on Essen. And I was still flying as second pilot. My first flight after the first one – shall I have a look at the book?
CB: Yeah, we’ll just stop for a mo while we look at the logbook.
[Tape paused and restarted.]
CB: So let me just put that in. So the service flying unit that you were on to convert to twins was number sixteen SFTS at Newton. Then you went to the OTU where you crewed up, is what you said.
MS: Yeah.
CB: You finished at the OTU in April –
MS: Something like that [?] –
CB: April forty-two and then you went to 301 Squadron.
MS: That’s right, that’s correct –
CB: Right, okay. And the whole crew –
MS: Actually, we went to at the end of 1941 to the squadron because we’re –
CB: Ah.
MS: Because we were already November –
CB: Right, okay. So –
MS: And then we train crew –
CB: Yep.
MS: And our first operation was I think there must be a date there under the name of the target.
CB: Yes your first operational bombing at Stuttgart [emphasis] –
MS: Stuttgart, yes.
CB: Was on the 4th of May 1942.
MS: Er –
CB: Operation, May forty-two, operational bombing.
MS: May forty-two?
CB: Mm. The operation bombing, it said [papers shuffle].
MS: My memory is [unclear]. Because we didn’t start operational flying immediately after –
CB: Right.
MS: Transfer to forty-two [unclear].
CB: Right. And then you went to Saint Nazaire.
MS: [Unclear.]
CB: And your alone trip was the 30th of May.
MS: [Unclear].
CB: Yeah.
MS: I think the thirtieth of –
CB: Yeah, 30th of May –
MS: May
CB: Yeah, 30th of May 1942 was your Cologne bombing, thousand bomber raid.
MS: Yeah, yeah.
CB: Okay, good.
MS: That was the – experienced [?] pilot as a first pilot.
CB: So –
MS: If you wanted the names you find them –
CB: So we’ve got the names here, and –
MS: That was Freschinski [?].
CB: Yeah, Freschinski [?]. So you did a, an operation bombing raid on Dieppe [emphasis] –
MS: Yeah, yeah.
CB: That was the port was it?
MS: Yes, I think – I don’t know the exact place, you’d have to take –
CB: That’s the 3rd of June.
MS: You’d have to take it from my logbook.
CB: Yes, 3rd of June.
MS: You’re not allowed to put the name of the target.
CB: Right, yeah.
MS: So sometimes I put the name of the target after [emphasis] –
CB: Oh right.
MS: In –
CB: In red.
MS: Mostly in pencil.
CB: Yes, okay.
MS: And then there sometimes my area [?] target was Essen –
CB: Yes.
MS: We were very badly beaten up but survived that and got back to our station.
CB: Was the aircraft damaged?
MS: It was damaged.
CB: By flak or fighters?
MS: All flak.
CB: Yep.
MS: We were caught in safe flight [?].
CB: Yeah.
MS: From twenty or more stations at the same time.
CB: Right.
MS: And then I don’t remember what the next one after Essen. We’re quite – were experienced [emphasis] by the Essen raid.
CB: Then, then you went onto Emden.
MS: Emden, yes. Emden was mostly mine laying –
CB: Ah.
MS: Because apart from bombing our squadron did a lot of sea mine against [?] the U-boats mostly near the end after the port. And that was called – the code name was gardening [emphasis].
CB: Oh yes. And what height did you drop the mines from?
MS: Under, under one thousand feet.
CB: Phew, so did you get hit each time by flak?
MS: Not really but sometimes – in one occasion I wandered [?]from there across by land and they’d got [unclear] big operational defence of Germany, on the ports. But we got through alright.
CB: So by now you are the first pilot, but you’re, are you flying with a second pilot or was the –
MS: Always. Never flew with one pilot.
CB: Okay.
MS: So even flying somewhere as the first pilot, and in the logbook on the page where all the crew on that operation was mentioned, the first of us, the first pilot and the second pilot and the navigator and so on.
CB: Yes, right.
MS: And then we flew every few nights. We had one crash but I don’t really remember the exact date.
CB: Were you flying as the pilot on that day?
MS: I was flying as the pilot –
CB: Yes.
MS: But I had engine trouble, and we called, came back to – dropped the bombs into the sea, came back to this country calling ‘mayday’ and for a long time had no help at all. Then they switched the flare path for us. We followed, I followed the flare path to aerodromes and to the rounding [?] point, and at the moment, when I was, touched the ground, they switched off [CB laughs] all the Air Force, and the station lights, including the flare path. So I landed, yeah I landed blindly [emphasis] into darkness and crashed the plane.
CB: When you said you crashed it, did you land it heavily or overshoot the runway?
MS: Well I was trying to land and it was quite a heavy landing, so I broke the undercarriage and the plane was badly damaged by dragging [?] on the ground.
CB: Did the undercarriage collapse?
MS: Undercarriage collapse.
CB: And which – one of the engines was faulty was it?
MS: One of, one of the engines was faulty. That was our first experience of flying Wellington four. It was Wellington with the American engines.
CB: Right.
MS: Which we ended up with a lot of trouble from those engines.
CB: So it hadn’t been hit by flak, it was that the engine had failed.
MS: No, no it was not hit by flak. It was just simply the engine had collapsed.
CB: Right, right. And was anybody injured in that?
MS: No, not really. Slight injure –
CB: Mm. And could the aircraft be recovered or did they have to scrap it?
MS: No, I don’t think so, I’m not really – but I just know my first crash.
CB: Mm.
MS: And from then on, flying on, on ordinary bombing raids –
CB: So on that particular operation had you had to turn –
MS: [Unclear].
CB: Pardon?
MS: We were but not the plane.
CB: Yeah, yeah. And did you have any other crashes?
MS: I had another crash with the, started with the undercarriage. Late on, and that was the end of my tour.
CB: Yes, and what went wrong then?
MS: As far as I can remember, there was a collapsed under, grounding gear.
CB: As you landed?
MS: Mhm.
CB: So you didn’t know that it was faulty?
MS: No, well there was some, some irregularities. So broke all my trip and dropped the bombs into the sea and came back.
CB: Mm.
MS: Grounded [?], grounded [?] without doing my duties but, but crashed the plane.
CB: And this was all at Hemswell?
MS: That was, well, all my flying, operational flying was from Hemswell.
CB: It was? Right. So looking at your logbook then, you went to Bremen, what was that like as a target?
MS: Well, which one?
CB: Bremen.
MS: Bremen, it was quite a heavy firing but not the worst one. Always the one which really frightened everybody was Essen, ‘cause that was the centre of troops –
CB: Yeah, the crocks [?] works.
MS: Yeah, the crocks [?] works.
CB: And what sort of height would you be bombing from in a Wellington?
MS: Usually about seventeen or eighteen thousand feet.
CB: And this is –
MS: So normal bombing was at about eighteen thousand feet, but mine laying was under one thousand feet.
CB: Right. And going to Essen, were you more likely to get damaged by flak or was that a hazard everywhere?
MS: Well, all depends on the target. Some were very heavily defended, like Essen, and all the industrial towns in the Ruhr district. Remember which ones [pause]. Then I did, twenty-nine – at the end I did thirty operational –
CB: Thirty ops.
MS: Which was the – that was the one was supposed to do in one go.
CB: Mhm.
MS: In the Turin [?].
CB: Yes.
MS: When I landed again I had some trouble, engine trouble. Going to Italy to Turin and started from one of the aerodromes at the very, very south of England and when I had to drop my bombs into the sea, came back on eighty-one [?] engines then and when I landed I was surrounded by my friends, say ‘oh, that was your last operational flight, you are posted to Liverpool University.’ And that was my last flight ever.
CB: So what did you do there?
MS: From there, they posted me to Liverpool University and what happens, I think was some arrangement between British and Polish government. Polish authorities were worried because there was no professional training in Poland under general probation. So they were trying to – they opened few schools which were essentially attached to one of the British, like, but I was posted to Polish School of Architecture, Liverpool University. But the same time there were medical schools at Cambridge, actually that was the London, London School of Medicine at London University, evacuated to Cambridge. And then I spent a couple of years of being a student, ‘cause my – they didn’t call me back to the Air Force duties. I was released after I done all my duties, posted to Liverpool School of Architecture where I qualified in 1940, forty, forty-four I think.
CB: Well you went – the end of your tour was 21st of November 1942 according to your logbook when you were flying on that trip out of Tangmere going to Turin –
MS: And then, then –
CB: Then you were posted to Liverpool.
MS: Posted to Liverpool School of Architecture –
CB: Yes. So two years from there.
MS: Spent two years –
CB: Yes.
MS: Then I got my full Polish architecture qualification –
CB: Yep, so that’s the end of forty-four.
MS: That was forty-four. And then, then I married another student from the Polish School of Architecture, and we stayed together after we got our qualifications we moved to London looking for a job [emphasis]. And then changed one job after another [?].
CB: So the war was still running when you qualified –
MS: Yeah.
CB: What did you do because you were still technically in the Air Force?
MS: Well I was, I don’t know whether I was officially, I was released [emphasis] from the Air Force.
CB: Okay.
MS: [Unclear].
CB: And did they give you a particular role?
MS: Sorry?
CB: Did they give you a particular task [emphasis] after you were released from the Air Force, because of course London was badly damaged at the time.
MS: No but – although some, yes but there was not very much work.
CB: Right.
MS: ‘Cause most of the work at the time, especially in London was war damage.
CB: Yes.
MS: There was few offices where they could offer me there – most of it war damaged. Few buildings – married in forty-four.
CB: So who was this lucky lady who you married at the end of 1944?
MS: Alena [?].
CB: Right. And you met her at the university.
MS: At the university, and we qualified around the same time –
CB: She, yep.
MS: Actually she lived in Liverpool at that time because her father, medical doctor and consultant was working for the Shipping Federation.
CB: Oh right.
MS: So she, she lived with her parents.
CB: So what job did you get in London?
MS: [Unclear] sometime I worked for NCC [?].
CB: Mhm.
MS: For housing. Several other jobs, some connected with the Festival of Britain.
CB: Mhm. This is all for London County Council?
MS: For London County Council.
CB: Festival of Britain –
MS: I didn’t stay there very long, up there on the County Council. I found more interesting work in a more private firm.
CB: Mhm.
MS: And then there’s changing form the usual thing – when you wanted to have more interest in work, or firm you’re working for getting more jobs, you look for another firm where there is better pay.
CB: Yes.
MS: And we were just at the end of the war, I think I was generally released from the Polish Forces in forty-three, or forty-four.
CB: Mm.
MS: And that was the end of my war service, and then worked as an architect for a different firm, different firm, and one of them [unclear] new town, which was quite a new thing, and then at the year 2000 I retired completely because I started losing my sight.
CB: Mhm.
MS: And of course, nobody wanted to employ an architect, blind architect [CB laughs] so that’s –
CB: Difficult isn’t it.
MS: The end of my professional work.
CB: Right.
MS: I did some jobs from time to time but – then in 1940 – when I was fifty, seventeen –
CB: That’s only seventeen years ago so you’d been going a pretty long time.
MS: Yes, my wife died three years ago.
CB: Right.
MS: We had three children, and from the end of nineteen –
CB: 2014.
MS: Yes – from January nineteen, what was it, forty.
CB: 2014, yeah.
MS: That’s about all.
CB: Now when you were a student, people used to have secondary roles outside their jobs or their studies. Did you have to do fire watching or –
MS: No.
CB: What sort of jobs did they give you?
MS: Nothing at all, no.
CB: Right.
MS: We were full time students, and that was all.
CB: Was there a Polish military association in Liverpool for Army, Navy and Air Force?
MS: No, no, there was nothing down [?] there, we just members of the Polish School of Architecture.
CB: Right, and –
MS: And then I about the time I finished my studies there I was released from the Polish Armed Forces and the same time from the RAF.
CB: Yes, mm. And in the later years, did you have any links with the Polish Air Force or the RAF associations? Squadron associations or other?
MS: I, yes I was a member of the Polish Air Force association for sometime even in the in the, in the governing council.
CB: Mhm.
MS: And that’s about all.
CB: And now you’re in the Polish Airman’s Association –
MS: In the Polish –
CB: ‘Cause that was the successor of the Air Force Association wasn’t it?
MS: No, I don’t know – Artur will be able to tell you more –
CB: Okay.
AB: There –
MS: Actually there, are you registered anywhere else, association?
AB: We essentially have taken over, but the Air Force Association was turned into a trust –
MS: Okay.
AB: And then the trust was closed down. We’re what remains from that.
CB: Right, okay.
MS: But then you have just friendly relationship.
AB: He automatically becomes a member. All [emphasis] the veterans automatically become members.
CB: Right.
AB: You don’t have to register you on the system.
MS: I, I joined the Polish Perskewsky [?] Institute which was a, the historical [emphasis] association, and when you joined us as members –
AB: Yes, certainly.
MS: When, well –
AB: Ooh –
MS: Polish, when they were one Polish, Polish Architecture Association Awards [?] as well.
AB: Yes, well I, I joined several years ago, yes.
MS: Yes.
AB: About seven, eight years ago.
CB: Right.
MS: So they was a few of them, hidden [?] in the corner of some office.
CB: Yes, always need an office.
MS: That’s about all.
CB: Let’s just stop there for a mo, thank you very much.
[Tape paused and restarted].
CB: Question –
MS: That was the question for us coming from [emphasis] –
CB: Poland.
MS: Poland, directed towards here.
CB: Yes.
MS: Because our all war service, and when you were, the war stopped, we were more or less, not in prison here, but unable to go back to Poland –
CB: Yes.
MS: To Communist Poland.
CB: Right.
MS: For sometimes, in some cases also a bit dangerous. I [unclear] carrying on.
CB: So did some Polish people return to Poland, or was the fact that –
MS: Some went back to Poland but very few.
CB: Yes, because of the Russian takeover?
MS: Because of the Russian takeover, or new system, new government there. And there, I think that there were more Poles from Poland coming here –
CB: Yes.
MS: For work than the other way.
CB: Right. Now when you came to Britain, into Liverpool –
MS: Yes.
CB: You were being, you were then put into training on the Tiger Moth and then the Oxford and then onto the Wellington [clears throat], you were trained by Polish people and British people, where you?
MS: And British. We were doing – I joined – I had one year training in architecturary in Poland before the war.
CB: Oh did you, right.
MS: I started on my second [emphasis] year here –
CB: Yes.
MS: Until I qualified.
CB: Right.
MS: So the – but as I had no experience of civilian British life.
CB: Right.
MS: Expect for the time when we were at the School of Architecture, and then that’s simply getting on.
CB: So we’re, so we’re talking in Acton [emphasis], is that, is this where you started your married life here? Or did you live somewhere else?
MS: I first, no, I first started simply staying in digs –
CB: Yes.
MS: When we were studying in the university there and then my wife then was my wife joined Polish School of Architecture, because Polish School of Architecture was becoming very well known in the architectural world.
CB: Right.
MS: Because we were probably the most modern school, architectural school, where most of the, the university faculties were still in the eighteenth century [MS and CB laugh].
CB: Right, were the instructors, the professors, were they Polish?
MS: Only Georgian architecture and so on.
CB: Yes, but –
MS: But we, we were – the training important, and later here [emphasis] in modern architecture. But we had for the first and second year here, we had to join all the lectures for full time students of the, of the first year and second year of the London, er Liverpool University.
CB: Right. And the instructors, were they, the teachers, were they Polish or were they British or what were they?
MS: Well we had, we had to attend all the lectures –
CB: Right.
MS: Or the second, and first and second year, but we had also our Polish lectures, so our main and most important lectures were Polish, and on the much higher level, than for our English friends who were working under the –
CB: Right.
MS: English professor.
CB: Mm. Now when you came over, you had, to Britain through Liverpool, you said that you went into English classes. How long did that take and how easy was it to learn English?
MS: I think it wasn’t very easy but it was our first time learning English while waiting for our training [emphasis] in the RAF in 1940.
CB: Yes.
MS: So I think us, we, our camps were mostly near Blackpool –
CB: Yep.
MS: So all, a lot of my friends got the girlfriends [CB laughs] in Blackpool, and also some business say some higher school were ever created from London to Lancashire, so we had good contact, especially with the girls.
CB: Ideal [laughs].
MS: Friend of mine, when we were together in France, he was simply unable to learn any [emphasis] beginning of French, but when we were associated [?] into this country, still in this period of our being near and in Blackpool, he got the girlfriend and learn very good English [CB laughs] in very short time. He only died – then they married and he died about two or three years ago.
CB: Oh.
MS: Completely living English life.
CB: Mm. So after – how did they decide that you knew enough English for you to go onto the training? Did they set you an exam or what did they do?
MS: Do you, do you mean the RAF?
CB: The RAF, yes.
MS: Well, I think we were trained in groups or squadrons, and we had a series of lectures and also examinations. More or less, some run by RAF, some additional Polish one. So when we finished the one training on Tiger Moths, we transferred to the next one –
CB: Mm.
MS: And most of us had some training of flying before the war.
CB: Yes. So then you got onto the OTU and the squadron. As it was a Polish, they was Polish units –
MS: Those were, that was actually completely Polish unit.
CB: Yes, and so –
MS: 301.
CB: Yeah.
MS: But we were under the Number 1 Group, Bomber, Bomber one –
CB: RAF, yeah, Bomber Command, right. And what was it, what were the living conditions like? Did you have Polish food or, how did they feed you?
MS: No we were simply normal – I was already officer so I lived in the officers mess.
CB: Yes.
MS: Was fed the same as our English friends.
CB: Yes.
MS: Our – at that time our link with the British people were mostly during our holidays, because the squadrons were completely Polish.
CB: Yes. And when you were flying –
MS: Oh yes flying – the only thing we had to communicate was the instructions, and then communicate with the ground but that was part, part of our training, to be ready for operational flying.
CB: So your radio communication when you were flying would have been in English –
MS: In English, yes.
CB: But did the crew, did the crew speak to each other in English or in Polish?
MS: No, most cases were in English, but in the squadron, some staff in the communication section spoke Polish –
CB: Right.
MS: And some Polish [unclear]. The thing is [?] my Wellington, we have, probably can see on photographs, was recognised by the letters written on the plane.
CB: Yes.
MS: My squadron was I think RG and then my plane, personal letter was O [emphasis]. The one you reported which was any, any RAF station, not necessarily our [emphasis] station, you know emergency calling wasn’t, it was ‘mayday.’
CB: Mm.
MS: So you could ‘mayday’ calling and then in our case, I don’t remember –
CB: Did you use Oscar or Orange?
MS: Sorry?
CB: Did you – to say O did you say Oscar or did you use Orange?
MS: I think – I [unclear] tell you, Orange [emphasis].
CB: Right.
MS: But sometimes when we were known in our own squadrons and all the people, that was my area [?] I started calling – I don’t remember the first letter, the squadron letter, I think RG or something. And then instead of calling Orange, I started calling it Ola [CB laughs]. It’s the Polish girls’ surname.
CB: Right.
MS: [Unclear] the girls, English girls operating the radio on the ground answer me calling me Ola on my plane. [Unclear] you can run [CB laughs]. And that’s what it’s all told [?].
CB: And there were a lot of people who came from Poland, but the ground crews in the squadron. Were they Polish or were they a mixture –
MS: Mixed.
CB: Or what were they?
MS: Mixed, very mixed. In my squadron the ground crews and mechanics were all Polish.
CB: Mhm.
MS: Evacuated from Poland during the war.
CB: Mm. But the rest of the people on the station would have been British, would they?
MS: Sorry?
CB: The rest of the people on the station would not be Polish?
MS: No not necessarily, but mixed.
CB: Yeah.
MS: They were mixed. Sometimes we had some sections like radio, radio sections and whatever else, parachute section were mostly run by English.
CB: Mm.
MS: So we had to use our limited, limited English, but it was good for our girlfriends [CB and MS laugh]. You had to be good for [unclear] our squadron. But I said, at the time when we beginning our training when we first got near Blackpool, and Blackpool’s holiday place for people in Lancashire, all some [?] ever created from London, so some of our people learn English very quickly and very soon by getting girlfriends in Blackpool.
CB: [Laughing] right.
MS: Other than that, it’s about all.
CB: So you did thirty operations –
MS: Sorry?
CB: You did thirty operations. When you got to the end of the tour, how did you feel?
MS: I felt – I didn’t realise. I knew that soon, quite soon I finished, and then when I landed after the last trip which we didn’t complete because we were called back of the operation, it was second operation in Turin. So I was getting out of the plane, there was a group of my Polish friends, they said ‘oh that was your last operation, you are, you are posted to the university.’ We lost life in the squadron, I did feel that, but on the other hand you felt safer because less young people were lost in the university than serving in the RAF.
CB: So the crew was six, how well did they get on?
MS: Well the crew – somebody experienced first pilot took over my crew, but at that time there’s quite a lot of interchange between different crews because some were wounded or killed.
CB: Mm. How many crew members during your tour were killed in your plane? Or wounded?
MS: In my – none, nobody was seriously wounded or killed din my [emphasis] crew, but when I joined the squadron we had I think fifteen crews. When I, during the time I served in the squadron in, we lost sixteen crews. We were losing old crews, new crews were coming, we’re losing them as well. So the losses were quite high.
CB: So what we’re talking about is a tour before the heavy bombers really started to be important in the RAF wasn’t’ it, you were in the lighter bombers, the medium bombers.
MS: Well when I got to the squadron, the squadron was fully operating as a bombing squadron for perhaps a year.
CB: Mm. What was the most dangerous position in the aircraft to be flying in?
MS: About the same, ‘cause if they’re not shooting [pause] person, person but shooting plane. So simply we were flying, one night we were flying full crew, sometimes this crew didn’t come back for something. It was known, there was some communication, radio communication, either badly damaged or simply – one of my last operations was port mining, dropping sea, sea mines against [?] the U-boats, and that night there was only three, three crews were sent for that operation, mine was one of them. Each group had six members of the crew, so there were altogether eighteen, eighteen crew members, and when we came back after operation when we landed, we learnt that one of our crews was missing but they managed to send a signal that they were badly damaged and ditching in the sea. And then it makes sense [?] the first pilot and the commander of one crew and another one of the three and of the three crews two came back.
CB: Right.
MS: So we pressed our squadron commanding officer to let us go and search the sea, because one of the first could simply send a signal that they are badly damaged and there are ditching in the sea.
CB: Yep.
MS: And they have no dingy, been damaged. I said to the commanding, or the other remaining crew, we pressed our squadron commander to let us go and look for that crew. He said, first he disagreed because he said ‘you will go there and you will be lost.’ After all they allowed our two crews to go and search for the third one which signalled that they were going down to sea, and we didn’t find them but another time I found two members of French crews in the dingy [emphasis] and we were flying over them until they rescue unit came to fish them out.
CB: You just circled the down, the dingy did you?
MS: Sorry?
CB: You flew round in a circle above the dingy?
MS: Yes, well all the time I was warning the gunners over [?] the sea and over [?] the sky.
CB: Mm.
MS: Because that part of the sea was in the reach of the German fighter planes.
CB: So it was a dangerous thing to do?
MS: All of the work we did [?] was dangerous.
CB: Yes.
MS: But out of three crews, two came back and one was missing.
CB: Mm.
MS: After all, they were our near friends and crew.
CB: Yes.
MS: So we didn’t initially like leaving them alone there was a possibility that they were in the dingy or some parts of the plane floating in the sea.
CB: Mm.
MS: And I found two in the dingy and the flying around them for a few hours until they were fished out by the rescue unit, and then it wasn’t our crew.
CB: [Laughs] oh. Was the rescue unit a flying boat or was it a launch?
MS: For the rescue?
CB: Yes.
MS: They used the ordinary plane that came to look for the ones that we found. The plane was had some [?] which was a passenger plane –
CB: Yeah.
MS: And then they, they used the, what they called? The boats that are normally used by the Navy.
CB: Yeah.
MS: [Unclear].
CB: To rescue them? Yes. Changing to a brighter note, when you went on social events, was there – did you go out to local entertainments or was it all on the airfield?
MS: Well it depends where we were at the time, ‘cause when we were, during the training when we were near Blackpool there was a lot of entertainment in [emphasis] Blackpool.
CB: Yep.
MS: But then, then there was one or two Polish theatre groups in the Air Force.
CB: Mhm.
MS: And they visited one camp after the other [sneezes]. So after we came back we ended up out of this room [?]. Three crews, one was missing, and when we finally got permission from our commanding officer to get on looking for it, missing crew, there was a Polish theatre in military [unclear] performing in our, in Hemswell. So from time to time we were visited by professionally run and professionally group theatres.
CB: Mm.
MS: But when we had a day off, used to go to different places in Blackpool, like Liverpool. And I, after one of my crews – nobody was even wounded but very shaken and we needed a rest, and I had visit the central medical Air Force station in London and the doctor there. Well, ‘you need some good holiday now to break from your duty. I suggest I send you for one month to the Polish Air Force resting house in Scotland.’ I protested, ‘I can’t leave [emphasis] my crew entirely [?].’ So finally I got two weeks holiday. It was a place in Scotland. What it was, directly under the Polish Air Force I don’t know, but it was run by two Polish ladies and they went there [?], so there were some places where you could rest. Also you all have some English friends whose home you can stay. Also sometimes Polish family.
CB: Now you were commissioned as soon, almost as soon as you landed here. How did your rank change during the ops? You were a pilot officer then what happened?
MS: Well I was – when I was in the squadrons I was, I got flying officer, the rank of flying officer, and that was all.
CB: And did you have an equivalent Polish rank at the time?
MS: Yes, actually we were completely commanded by RAF, same ranks, same duties.
CB: Right.
MS: And same pay of course.
CB: Right, yeah, okay. What would you say was the most memorable part of your service during the war?
MS: Probably at the squadron.
CB: Right.
MS: Sometimes we had very dense periods of flight, flying a few days apart, but I remember a time when we were flying operations twice during three nights, you know what I mean.
CB: Mm.
MS: We did two nights, one after a night –
CB: Yes.
MS: Then one in bed.
CB: Mm. And then off again.
MS: And then off again.
CB: Now, navigation aims were, aids [emphasis] were pretty rudimentary at that stage. How accurate were you able to be in your bombing raids?
MS: How, how we managed to do – first we have all the information we needed from our briefing before the raid.
CB: Mhm.
MS: When all the – special crew room and we were told there was an operation tonight. They released, released all the crews to be used on the operation, and all were briefed by a first station commander or citizen [?] by our own officer, and given all the information there before flying. I think we were quite – as we were informed about our duties and we would be performing them, equally were as our English friends which most of them we don’t know them because the stations in different squadrons and different stations. Did you get your tea and coffee?
AB: We did thank you.
MS: You did?
AB: Yes, yes thank you.
CB: Okay I’ll stop there.
[Tape paused and restarted].
CB: Couple of other things –
MS: Yes.
CB: Here you are, in a country that has been invaded by the Germans and you are able then to contribute to the war effort against Germany.
MS: Yes.
CB: How did you feel as a crew, and yourself, about what you were doing?
MS: Well we were quite pleased or proud [emphasis] of having some practical fighting –
Other: [Speaks in Polish].
MS: Against our occupier.
CB: Yeah.
Other: [Speaks in Polish].
AB: [Whispers in Polish].
CB: So when you went on the raids how did you feel? On the operations?
MS: Er, normally always feel that something might happen to us but it wasn’t the [unclear].
CB: Right.
MS: ‘Cause sometimes using evasive [?] action like spent about fifteen minutes in the reflector [unclear] over Essen. That was very hot then. And then after we got out of the reflectors and the guns we went ‘phew.’
CB: Mm. A sigh of relief.
MS: Exactly [?].
CB: So when you had dropped the bombs, which way did you turn?
MS: We were simply went one way or the other, mostly in the direction leading us later to our base [emphasis]. But simply even right there that one before even dropping the bombs I was using avoiding [emphasis] action.
CB: Mm. What type of evasive action would you use?
MS: Change, change, changing the course, the direction.
CB: Mhm.
MS: So I, one minute I was staying, flying at one direction and then action, action turn ninety degrees or something
CB: Right.
MS: Just not too big because if you were flying on the same course, we were measured by German radio.
CB: Mm.
MS: So they were not aiming at us at that moment – they were – they expected us to be –
CB: Yeah.
MS: In – it was about twenty seconds for measure our position, loading the guns, aim and then sometimes for the shrapnel to leave the, after, after firing from the gun to reach the position of the aiming hut [?].
CB: Mm.
MS: So my opinion was always not [emphasis] to be there in the point in the sky on which they’re aiming or they’d be aiming at me twenty seconds before.
CB: Mm. Did you vary your height much, or was it just direction?
MS: Well changing direction and height as well.
CB: Right.
MS: Trying to mixture everything.
CB: So you’re in a bomber stream here, rather than formation. To what extent was there danger also from your own aircraft?
MS: Not really, not really because they’re not flying near each other, but from the moment takeoff at the station, each crew was completely independent. So we would recommend [?] the type of the aircraft you can see [emphasis] somewhere over Germany.
CB: What was the night fighter activity like? Was it quite intense or very –
MS: In some fire in sometimes yes. Sometimes find [?] the night fighters more dangerous than the anti-aircraft [?] guns.
CB: But when you got into the flak area, the night fighters would not be working there would they?
MS: Not there, no. When you go into the fire, down fire [?] – their own fighters were trained to avoid to be there.
CB: Right. To what extent did the flak find your height effectively?
MS: A rate [?], a rate [?] to measure. Same as the navigation to a great extent, depending on the radio navigation.
CB: Mm.
MS: We simply during – when there was quite a dense, we were in a dense defence, we were not to be in the point of the sky, which according to an enemy gun measure or calculation when we were flying without any avoiding [?] action, to be there.
CB: Mm. Right, thank you.
[Tape paused and restarted].
CB: Just one final question. The losses in 301 on Wellingtons was exceptionally high.
MS: Very high.
CB: And the squadron was disbanded in the end as a result, so what was the reaction of the crews to the high loss rate?
MS: Taken for granted.
CB: Right.
MS: ‘Cause we had no influence of the losses. I have to show you some photographs.
CB: We’ll have a look, thank you.
[Tape paused and restarted].
MS: His stole [?] my squadron.
CB: American researcher?
MS: Sorry?
CB: Did you say an American researcher?
MS: I said Polish researcher.
CB: Oh it was Polish researcher?
MS: Yes, not America. Where are all of my papers? Are they there?
AB: There are some papers, there’s some books or whatever. I’m not sure, we have all –
CB: Mm.
AB: The time [?] books.
MS: Is, is one book which is simply called “301.”
AB: I’m not sure –
[Tape paused and restarted].
MS: There’s near Hemswell there was a pub.
CB: Yes.
MS: Large pub. And one day I invited all the members, flying members and ground, and we went to the pub there. And we went – in the pubs you had usually all the rooms you have in the pubs, in the main drinking room –
AB: And so on, yeah.
CB: The main bar.
MS: So I got with all my flying and ground crews there and they refused to serve us because there were non-commissioned airmen in between us.
CB: The NCOs, they wouldn’t serve?
MS: Not the NCOs, ordinary airmen.
CB: Yes just the airmen. What was, just tell me again would you? What was the relationship between you, the aircrew and your ground crew?
MS: Good. Friendly, but not, but not meeting them too often when they were taking over the plane or after landing, they’re taking the plane from us, and of course whatever went wrong whether it was our fault or not –
CB: So they weren’t too pleased if it had holes in it?
MS: Mm, sometimes very –
[Tape beeps].
MS: The pilot’s badge.
CB: Yes.
MS: But then you, you got green –
AB: Wreath underneath –
MS: Under –
AB: He’s [?] holding it so it’s –
MS: After, after you had two operational flying. So there’s –
AB: So there’s, there’s clutching a wreath in its beak.
MS: The same, the same eagle was carrying the green –
CB: So the, the flying badge is an eagle is it?
MS: [Unclear].
AB: It’s an eagle, there’s –
MS: Anybody had a –
CB: Coming into land. I’m recording again.
MS: There’s –
CB: But there was a clear difference between the flying badges of the other crew, how different were they?
MS: Well the, the pilot had a clear [emphasis] badge.
CB: Right.
MS: Now, the navigator had a badge with a green things and [speaks in Polish] –
AB: Oh lightning, lightning.
MS: And the lightning.
CB: And the wireless operator?
AB: He had the lightning –
MS: I don’t remember exactly what, what, when [unclear]. But they had either clear badge which was pilot.
CB: Yeah.
MS: But there was a green thing that was after that was for operational flying.
CB: Right.
MS: But the navigator had a badge with the flower [?], flower [?] –
CB: Forks [emphasis], sticking out.
AB: Arrow.
CB: Oh arrows, yes.
AB: Yes, arrows.
CB: And the wireless operator had the lightning.
MS: He had the same, he had two lightning.
CB: And what did the air gunners have?
MS: I think they had, they have one. Anyway, you could recognise faction [?] of the member, but how many writings [?] they had to the badge. And only the pilot had a clear badge.
CB: Right, so you had two flying awards. The highest award for bravery is the Virtuti Militari. How did you wear that as a badge on your uniform?
MS: Here in the –
CB: Underneath the wings or –
MS: In the flap [?].
CB: On the, on the collar, right, okay.
MS: On the collar.
CB: Okay.
MS: And the same with the other, other one. There only difference was a different number of lightnings.
CB: And when you had the RAF wings you said were worn later, where would they be worn?
MS: On the, on the other side.
CB: On the right hand side?
MS: On the right.
CB: Okay, good.
MS: But I’m not quite certain how legally we are wearing them.
CB: [Laughing] right. Okay.
[Tape paused and restarted].
MS: Have to avoid going all the way round the peninsular, had to end [unclear] ‘cause all the fire they had, I don’t know how many guns, machine guns [unclear] and the searchlights [?].
CB: This is on the raid to Saint Nazaire.
MS: [Pause] Saint Nazaire, I don’t think I can see very much.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Mieczysław Stachiewicz
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-01-19
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Sound
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AStachiewiczM170119
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Pending review
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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.
Description
An account of the resource
Mieczysław describes his military training from his Polish secondary school before volunteering for the Polish Air Force. He was evacuated to Warsaw but the railway lines were cut by the Germans. His squadron reassembled on the Romanian border before spending some time within Romania. Escaped across Europe and crossed into England, entering via Liverpool. Housed in Liverpool where him and his unit were taught English and retrained on Tiger Moths, Halifaxes and Wellingtons. Despite his Polish nationality, Mieczyslaw was fed, paid and ranked the same as a British pilot. Flew thirty operational flights with 301 Squadron, and was involved with mine laying, bombing of Essen and the thousand bomber operation to Cologne. Describes the badges worn by each aircrew member. Following completion of his operational flying, he was posted to the Polish School of Architecture in Liverpool University and spent the rest of his life in England.
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Polskie Siły Powietrzne
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Poland
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Essen
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1944
Format
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01:41:47 audio recording
301 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
fear
forced landing
mine laying
pilot
RAF Hemswell
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/337/3501/PTaylorEC1701.1.jpg
acbcb633c679d09f01c94a0f7e54d530
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/337/3501/ATaylorEC170928.2.mp3
9a15f4d3f4e54369b0747cf28be0b8eb
Dublin Core
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Title
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Taylor, Eric
Eric Charles Taylor
Eric C Taylor
E C Taylor
E Taylor
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Squadron Leader Eric Charles Taylor.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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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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Taylor, EC
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: So this is David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre, interviewing Squadron Leader Eric Taylor at his home on the –
BT: Where are we?
DK: 28th of September 2017. So if I just put that there, put that that there –
ET: Yeah.
DK: Put that there. I’ll keep looking down, I’m just making sure that it’s working.
ET: Yes.
DK: That looks okay. So if we leave that, yeah that looks okay. Well, what I wanted to ask you first was what, what were you doing immediately before the war?
ET: School.
DK: Right, so you went straight from school to –
ET: I left school in the June forty-three –
DK: Mhm.
ET: Sorry, [pause] –
DK: It would be 1943 wouldn’t it?
ET: Yeah it is forty-three.
DK: Yeah, yeah. So you went straight from school, straight from school to the RAF?
ET: Yes.
DK: So what made you want to join the RAF then?
ET: Because I, I joined the, the LDV I think they called it –
DK: The Home Guard.
ET: The Local Defence Force.
DK: Mhm [BT laughs].
ET: And they put me through hours of drill [laughs], and I didn’t like that very much. I thought I’ll probably better join the Air Force, and you used to get all these magazines of course, you know, with all the things about the –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Battle of Britain and that type of thing. That’s what encouraged me to, to join. I went to Edinburgh for a testation [?] which was delayed for six months, so I actually went in, in the February –
DK: Is that on? Yeah, okay.
ET: Forty-three.
DK: Right. So –
ET: That was wrong, I told you –
DK: You’re right, it says forty-two in here.
ET: Must have been forty-two [emphasis].
DK: Right.
ET: Twenty, 1923 and something.
DK: That’s 1940 isn’t it? Okay, don’t worry, don’t worry.
ET: 1940.
DK: Yeah.
BT: 1940, you’d be seventeen.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Must have been forty-one then.
BT: Forty-one was it, okay.
ET: Left school.
BT: Yeah.
DK: So forty-one.
ET: Yeah, because it was forty-two –
DK: That you joined the Air Force.
ET: That I joined the Air Force.
DK: Yeah, yeah, okay.
ET: That’s right.
DK: You left school in 1941 and then joined the Air Force –
ET: Yeah.
DK: In 1942. So what, what was your first posting in the Air Force then? Where, where, can you remember where you went to?
ET: Well the first , well I went to London, and the – ooh we attended several lectures, you know, mainly about venereal disease [all laugh] and all the rest of the things.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And the, from then on I went up to, I trained at Staverton, Gloucestershire, Number Six AUS [?].
DK: Right.
ET: And that took about a year.
DK: So at this point you were already training as a navigator?
ET: Yeah, oh initially I did a small six hours course. I went in as a PNB.
DK: Right.
ET: Pilot, navigator or –
DK: Bomber aimer.
ET: Bomber aimer. Didn’t quite make the pilot stakes [?] so I became a navigator.
DK: Right.
ET: And then I went to the CUS [?]. That was the first straight navigator course, because before that they had the air observers, they called them.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Yeah, so we didn’t do any bombing aiming at that time. Course I went through them very quickly [emphasis], it only took about a year.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Then from there I went to Stratford-on-Avon to the OTU.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Operational training unit.
DK: Yeah. Just going, winding back a bit. What, what was the training as a, as a navigator? Were you actually flying [emphasis] at the time then?
ET: Yes, yes.
DK: So what sort of aircraft were you –
ET: Anson
DK: Ansons, right.
ET: Anson mainly. And then we came onto the Wellington when we came onto the OTU.
DK: The operational training unit.
ET: Yeah.
DK: Yeah, so that was Number 16 Operational Training Unit?
ET: That’s right.
DK: Yeah, and that was at RAF Upper Heyford?
ET: No.
DK: Oop, sorry.
ET: It’s at, it was at, it, just past Stratford-on-Avon.
DK: Stratford-on-Avon, right, okay.
ET: Yeah.
DK: So that’s 16 OTU at Stratford-on-Avon. And, and what aircraft were you training on there?
ET: Wellingtons.
DK: And is that where you met your, your crew then?
ET: Yeah. Well we all met [emphasis] –
DK: Mm.
ET: And just somebody would say, ‘would you like to fly with me?’ It was very, it wasn’t a rigid [?] thing at all, you know.
DK: No. So how did that work then? Were you all pushed into a hangar and you all had to work –
ET: Well we’re in a big hall, yeah, and the pilots were there and [laughs] –
DK: Right. How did you think that worked, ‘cause it’s quite unusual for the military. Normally you’re ordered to go somewhere.
ET: Well that’s right.
DK: This was quite an unusual way of where you –
ET: Yes.
DK: Picked your crew.
ET: Anyway, that’s how they did it and it seemed to work out there pretty well.
DK: And you found your, your pilot there then did you?
ET: Yes.
DK: And can you remember your pilot’s name?
ET: Yes, Cyril Pearce.
DK: Right.
ET: I think he’s no longer with us –
DK: Yeah.
ET: I don’t think any of the crew are with us now, you know.
DK: So you would have met your pilot?
ET: Yes.
DK: And –
ET: I met them all, the bomb aimer –
DK: Bomb aimer.
ET: And the wireless operator.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And the gunner.
DK: Mhm. And, and did you all get on well together when you –
ET: Yes, we seemed to, yeah.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Yeah. And I – the navigator didn’t do a lot of the pilot training on the aircraft, you know, the local flying circuits and mops and that.
DK: Yeah.
ET: But on the cross countries of course, we, we all went on those.
DK: Mm.
ET: Some had a dual instructor and others smaller [?].
DK: Yeah. What did you think of the Wellington as an aircraft?
ET: Actually quite good after the [laughs] – it was a bit bigger. The big thing I remember is – I think the model’s a 1-C that we trained on.
DK: Right.
ET: At the OTU, but then we got a mark three I think. ‘Cause we took an aeroplane out with us when we went to Tunisia.
DK: Right.
ET: And that was a long flight.
DK: Mm.
ET: We had to go miles out to sea to avoid the Bay of Biscay, you know, ‘cause all the Germans –
DK: Yeah, yeah.
ET: Were there, and we flew from Portreath to a place called Ras el Ma –
DK: Right.
ET: On the west coast of Africa. The big thing I remember there was there was always an enormous amount of flies [DK and ET laugh]. You had a plate of soup, had a quick swipe [DK laughs], put your spoon in quickly [laughs]. And from there we just, we went on through Blida and then ended up at the Kairouan.
DK: Right.
ET: With aircraft – 142 Squadron and 150 had both just gone there. There was nothing, there were no facilities at all. There wasn’t even a latrine initially [laughs].
DK: So, so out your training then, you’ve done the operational training unit and really cross country flights around England.
ET: That’s it.
DK: And then your posted to your squadron and you’re posted out to Africa.
ET: Yes [emphasis].
DK: Oh right.
ET: Actually we just cleared [?] Africa, North Africa. Well we arrived there –
DK: Right.
ET: And when I was, we were there, we had the invasion of Sicily of course.
DK: Mm.
ET: And Italy. And most of our bombing were, they were to, you know, targets in Sicily.
DK: Right.
ET: And several, going up the coast to Italy.
DK: Right, and this was with 142 Squadron?
ET: 142 Squadron.
DK: Yeah. So can you remember how many operations you did in the Middle East and Italy?
ET: Yes I, thirty.
DK: Thirty [emphasis]? Oh right.
ET: That was a tour then.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And I came back to UK. Oh I went with a journey from Tunis to Algiers –
DK: Mm.
ET: By train, and on the carriage I’ll always remember it said, ‘forty orm [?] or five [laughs], what were they, sivar [?] horses’ [ET and DK laugh]. Took five days, the journey, and then you got on a boat, came back to Liverpool.
DK: Right.
ET: This was at the end of forty-three –
DK: Uh-huh.
ET: And the – I thought I’d move to Scotland so I went all the way up to a place called Edsoff [?] where I used to live and the last bit I had to do by bus, you know, train then bus.
DK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ET: Then I met this girl on the bus and she said, ‘what are you doing?’ And I said, I said ‘I’m going home [emphasis], what did you think?’ She says ‘I think they’ve moved’ [laughs]. Ah, I had then to go and search where they’d gone to.
DK: And this was your family?
ET: That’s my family –
DK: They’d moved while you were away [laughs].
ET: My parents – well I didn’t get the letter of course to say they were moving.
DK: Oh of course.
ET: And they’d moved to Woodhall Spa would you believe.
DK: Oh right.
ET: In Lincolnshire.
DK: Yeah, yeah, know it well [DK and ET laugh]. So when you were in Africa then, your parents moved from Scotland –
ET: Yes.
DK: To Woodhall Spa.
ET: Yeah.
DK: And you didn’t, you didn’t know [laughs].
ET: Didn’t know.
DK: No. If I could just go back a bit, your operations in the Middle East. Did you find navigating something that came to you easily or –
ET: Quite difficult.
DK: Difficult? Right, because –
ET: Actually, we did have one, one navigation error which a very lucky to get away with it in many respects because coming back from Italy, we hit this land [emphasis] and I thought it was the north coast of Africa –
DK: Right.
ET: It turned out to be the north coast of Sicily [emphasis], going along.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And, course there’s some very high mountains there. Our signaller, our wireless operator finally got a , what we’d call a QDM –
DK: Mm.
ET: You know, a course to steer.
DK: Yeah.
ET: So we turned on that. Of course we’re getting short of fuel and all sorts of things, and we threw out the guns onto the turret to make the aircraft lighter, and coasted at quite a low altitude –
DK: Mm.
ET: Thinking of the mountains there –
DK: Yeah.
ET: And landed , there was an emergency airfield right on the tip of, which we landed at.
DK: On Sicily?
ET: No, no, in North Africa.
DK: Oh North Africa was it, right.
ET: Right at the top there.
DK: Right, oh right.
ET: So that was a real bit of luck there.
DK: Did you, did you get into any trouble for navigating?
ET: Not really.
DK: No, good [DK and ET laugh].
ET: What I remember is my pilot got in trouble because there was a taxi accident.
DK: Right.
ET: That’s the worst thing that can be done, you know. I think the wing hit it [unclear] on one and knocked [?] it up and twice, and I remember the station [?] commander at briefing for an operational trip. He’d see [?] pilots in front of him and say, ‘look at these men, traitors to the cause.’ I always remember that.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Terrible thing to say really.
DK: Bit harsh isn’t it?
ET: They felt bad enough as it is.
DK: Yeah. And one of those, one of those was your pilot was it?
ET: Yes [emphasis].
DK: Stood up – so he had to stand in front of everybody and get told off?
ET: Well there was three of them.
DK: Three of them, right.
ET: Yes, two’s [?] being blamed for the trip, you know –
DK: Yeah.
ET: That night. And this came out.
DK: Oh dear. It’s not very good is it? [Laughs].
ET: Very unsympathetic.
DK: No. Were commanding officers like that then? Were they a bit tough?
ET: This is a copy, what’s it? [Papers shuffle]. Is there something in there called “Blida’s Bombers?” A book. Oh yeah, it’s about him.
DK: Oh right.
ET: There’s something in [papers shuffle, pause]. All this mail, that’s Kairouan [laughs].
DK: Right. Just for the recording, it’s a magazine or a pamphlet called “Blida’s Bombers.” B-L-I-D-A, Blida. That’s, that’s in Algiers isn’t it?
ET: That’s right.
DK: [Unclear].
ET: That was a big base, as the Army. We started going in with the first army –
DK: Right.
ET: [Unclear].
DK: I actually went there many years ago, to Blida in Algiers. And just for the recording, this is “Blida’s Bombers” by Eric M. Summers. Did you know Eric M. Summers?
ET: No.
DK: No, no.
ET: But there was a Group Captain Powel, his photograph was in there which I was trying to, to find.
DK: Right.
ET: He was a man that –
DK: Oh, Group Captain Powel –
ET: Yeah.
DK: Here he is.
ET: Yeah, but there’s a picture of him with his –
DK: That’s in there.
ET: Fly [?]. He always used to fly [laughs].
DK: So he was your commanding officer was he?
ET: He was the station commander actually –
DK: Station commander, right.
ET: Group captain, yeah.
DK: And was it him who told your –
ET: Yes.
DK: The three pilot off?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Well that’s for the recording then, Group Captain Powell [laughs]. Ah there he is, there is he is.
ET: That’s him.
DK: Yeah.
ET: That’s exactly with his – yeah.
DK: Oh, so just for the recording here. It’s Group Captain Powell, briefing for Radan Recina [?]. And it looks like he’s got a fly swat there.
ET: That’s right. He always used that as a pointer [DK and ET laugh].
DK: He looks like he must have been a bit of a character. Oh wow.
ET: Quite a forceful –
DK: Forceful, I can imagine [?].
ET: Yeah.
DK: So there’s the Wellingtons –
ET: Probably [unclear], that’s him, yeah.
DK: You were flying.
ET: Yes, yeah.
DK: So this is all – the book itself is about the Tunis campaign then?
ET: What I can remember is when we got later [?], the power, the whole, the whole instruments used to shake and [laughs].
DK: [Unclear] my phone’s on. Sorry about that. So you got Noel Coward’s poem [?] there, ‘lie in the dark and listen.’
ET: Yes.
DK: Yeah, ah. So while you were in North Africa then and you’re bombing targets in Italy, were you, was your aircraft ever hit at all or, can you recall?
ET: Er, not really. Should they call it sometimes [?], few peppered.
DK: Right.
ET: But nothing direct.
DK: Nothing serious.
ET: Direct hit.
DK: So you never got attacked by German aircraft –
ET: No.
DK: At all?
ET: No.
DK: Right. So what did you, what sort of targets were you hitting there in –
ET: Mostly airfields.
DK: Mostly airfields.
ET: There, [papers shuffle] here you are –
DK: Right.
ET: I don’t have the – oh [unclear]. That’s how we got there.
DK: Right okay, so that’s, for the recording here, that’s your logbook.
ET: That’s my logbook, yeah.
DK: So –
ET: Number one.
DK: Your pilot then is Pearce.
ET: Yes.
DK: Sergeant Pearce, and you’re the navigator down on here.
ET: We’re all sergeants –
DK: You’re all sergeants, right.
ET: At the time. There was very few, very few commissioned there on the squadron.
DK: Right, so the whole crew was sergeants then?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Yeah, so from the logbook then, so you’ve gone from Portreath to Ra –
ET: Ras el Ma.
DK: El Ma. Ras el Ma to Blida.
ET: That’s right.
DK: Then Blida to Kairouan.
ET: Kairouan.
DK: And I’ll spell that for the recording. It’s K-A-I-R-O-U-A-N. And so your base was Maison Blanche?
ET: No the base was Kairouan.
DK: Kairouan was it?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Right okay.
ET: It looks as though someone must have taken an aeroplane or something up there.
DK: Oh right [something pings in background].
ET: And I don’t know how we came back but it –
DK: Right. So you’ve done operations then to Nissena [?] –
ET: Yeah.
DK: And that’s in a Wellington, 19th of June 1943. So Nissena [?] seems to be a regular target, hmm. So Nissena [?], Italian airfield, Syracuse.
ET: Syracuse, yeah.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Masala [?].
DK: So quite a number of – so you said you did thirty operations there in North Africa?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Hmm, the Nissena beaches I noticed [page turns]. So what were the, what were the briefings like in North Africa? Were you sort of in a tent and – what were the facilities like?
ET: Yes, was all under canvas, the whole thing. The food was corned beef –
DK: Yeah.
ET: For everything. In fact, I got an attack of jaundice –
DK: Oh right.
ET: Through that. I went into hospital and they gave me tinned fruit –
DK: Rivht.
ET: And I thought this was a most wonderful thing to, to get. In fact, there was a big American camp near us and they – we used to trade whiskey [DK laughs] for tinned fruit –
DK: Yeah, yeah.
ET: You know, that they had.
DK: [Tape moved] I’m not sure that that’s such a good spot now [laughs].
BT: No.
ET: Not now [laughs].
DK: Not now, no. Oh right.
ET: I suppose thank goodness for corned beef otherwise the [laughs] –
DK: So at, at the briefings then, presumably you’re sort of sat down and told what the target – were you told what the targets were?
ET: Told what the target is, yes.
DK: Right. So in North Africa, were they mostly military targets, airfields and –
ET: Yes.
DK: I noticed here you’ve got here [reading from logbook]: ‘30th of September 1943, ops. Port engine caught fire on takeoff [emphasis].’ Do you remember that?
ET: Not really [both laugh].
DK: Well it says you landed okay after twenty-five minutes.
ET: Yeah we always – obviously we’d have just gone –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Round and there –
DK: And landed again.
ET: And landed again.
DK: So then you’ve had, got several places in Italy then. I noticed you’ve got Pisa is one, ops to Pisa.
ET: Yes.
DK: Yeah [paper turns].
ET: I remember the vehicles [?], I remember we were on that night, bobbing and the beaches, you know, before the army got in.
DK: So that’s 142 Squadron then, and you’ve done two hundred and forty-two hours, fifteen minutes operations then.
ET: Is that the end?
DK: Yeah that’s the end there, yeah.
ET: Yeah [page turns].
DK: So you’ve, you’ve come back to the UK then, you’ve come back to England. What, where –
ET: I was an instructor then.
DK: Right [laughs].
ET: Or so – we didn’t have half the instrumentation that the UK aircraft had.
DK: Right.
ET: So it was like an idiot teaching an idiot really [laughing], until we got used to –
DK: Right. So you, you went onto training then did you? You were –
ET: Yes.
DK: Right.
ET: It, I did a year –
DK: Right.
ET: Mainly at a place called Barford St. John –
DK: Right.
ET: Which is not far from Oxfordshire. Oh it’s about three miles away from, what’s the name of the town [pause], starts with a B I think.
DK: Bedford?
BT: Bicester?
DK: Bicester?
BT: Bicester, yeah?
ET: B – well down that way, yeah.
DK: Right. And that was in Oxfordshire was it?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Right.
ET: And then the –
DK: So what, what aircraft were you flying doing the training there?
ET: Wellingtons.
DK: Wellingtons again, and that, you said they were better equipped than the ones you were flying in the Middle East?
ET: Yes [DK laughs]. There’s a thing in navigation called G [emphasis] –
DK: Yes.
ET: Which we didn’t have out there, you know. It was a wonderful aid, very accurate –
DK: Mm.
ET: But I had to learn [laughs], I had to learn that, you see, when I came back .
DK: So although you were training people, you yourself didn’t know –
ET: Well [laughs].
DK: Oh right.
ET: You know radio, you know, out there, about thirty-five miles was the range of our radio. You know –
DK: Mm.
ET: If you did want to call our base [laughs] –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You had to be within thirty-five miles of it.
DK: So not very far then?
ET: Not very far at all, no.
BT: Banbury, it was.
DK: Banbury.
ET: Banbury [emphasis] was the place –
BT: I just looked it up.
ET: Yeah sorry, Banbury, Banbury’s where – it was just outside Banbury. And anyway, at the end of the year they changed from Wellingtons to Mosquitos.
DK: Right, okay.
ET: So I just stayed there and did the course, met the pilot. He was a very good pilot. He, when he finished training in Canada they kept him on as an instructor.
DK: Right. So you’ve come – I slightly misread this earlier and I want – for the benefit of the tape, your initial training was at Number Six Air Observation School at Staverton.
ET: That’s right.
DK: And then you went to 21 OTU, Morteon-in-the-Marsh.
ET: That’s correct.
DK: Then [emphasis] to North Africa.
ET: For operational training –
DK: Then to North Africa –
ET: North Africa.
DK: Sorry I misread this, with 142 Squadron.
ET: Yes.
DK: Which we’ve just covered.
ET: That’s correct.
DK: So you’ve come back then and you did a year’s training –
ET: Yes.
DK: Instructing, and that was at 16 OTU, Upper Heyford [?].
ET: Yes, that was the main base –
DK: Main base.
ET: But as I say, I spent it all at Barford –
DK: Right okay.
ET: St. John.
DK: Right. So then in early 1945 then, you’re now converted onto the Mosquito?
ET: That’s right.
DK: Can you remember your pilot’s name on the Mosquito?
ET: Yeah, Green, Dave Green.
DK: Dave Green.
ET: We didn’t have a – he was married, the chap in the, well obviously [unclear] he met a girl out there and married her, and so we didn’t spend a lot of social time together at all.
DK: Right.
ET: He didn’t drink at al so l [laughs].
DK: Was that quite unusual in the Air Force then? [Laughs].
ET: Well a bit. But yeah he was a good chap.
DK: Right. And would he have been a pilot officer or –
ET: He was a flight lieutenant.
DK: Flight lieutenant, right. So that’s Flight Lieutenant –
ET: I expect –
DK: Dave Green
ET: If you, if you finished top of your course –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You were normally commissioned, the top. So as he did well, kept him on as an instructor, I suspect he was –
DK: And you say he was an Australian?
ET: No, no, he was English.
DK: English, right okay. So, and you’re in the Mosquitos then. What did you think of the Mosquito as a aircraft?
ET: Oh it was great [laughs], with so much speed.
DK: Mm.
ET: Amazing aircraft because to carry that load, to carry one four thousand pound bomb, was like a big oil tank, you know.
DK: Mm, yeah.
ET: Oil drum, for the business. And course we’d overload tanks on the wings as well, so she was pretty heavy.
DK: Yeah.
ET: But it was wonderful. We used to bomb at twenty-five thousand feet.
DK: Right.
ET: And when the bomb went of course you shot up about three [DK and ET laugh], three hundred feet.
DK: And this was at 571 Squadron?
ET: 571, yeah.
DK: And –
ET: It was very short lived – each squadron, they were created [emphasis], you know, and of course the war, the war finished –
DK: Right.
ET: And they disappeared again.
DK: Can you remember, can you remember where you were based with 571?
ET: Yes, Oakington.
DK: Oakington, right okay.
ET: Which is a big –
DK: Housing estate now [BT laughs].
ET: Oh is it?
DK: Yeah, afraid so. It’s all been knocked down.
ET: But did it, did have all these refugee, I don’t know what they were, refugee centres?
DK: It was for while, yes.
ET: Yeah.
DK: It was a refugee centre –
ET: Yeah.
DK: After the war.
ET: Oh but, but I haven’t mentioned that I – when the war finished, they asked for volunteers to ferry the aircraft back from Canada.
DK: Oh right.
ET: SO I volunteered for that. I got out to Canada, went out by boat, and they said ‘oh you’re not wireless trained’ [laughs].
DK: Mm.
ET: ‘So you can’t do that.’ So I ended up doing about thirty hours in Dakotas.
DK: Oh right [DK and ET laugh].
ET: And I was there for about three months, and came back in a BUAC [?] Liberator.
DK: Right.
ET: [Laughs] to Prestwick, I remember that.
DK: Just, just going back a little bit to your time in the Mosquitos.
ET: Yes.
DK: Can you remember how many operations you did on Mosquitos?
ET: Yes, I did twenty.
DK: Right, so that was thirty operations, Wellingtons in North Africa –
ET: Yes.
DK: And another twenty –
ET: When we were operating on the Mosquito, we had sort of two nights on and one night off.
DK: So what was your role with the Mosquito, because you weren’t really flying with the main Bomber force were you? Were you separate to them?
ET: Well, it was diversionary [emphasis] normally. We went to targets to make them think that the –
DK: Right.
ET: Main force was going there. You had your sneaky little – I went to Berlin thirteen times [laughs].
DK: Right. What was it like flying over Berlin?
ET: Well it’s quite, quite intense. The flak was, you know, they had these predictions, the marshal [?] –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Predicting –
DK: Predicting flak –
ET: You’re very happy if you saw it bursting a bit beneath you, you know, thinking ‘oh they haven’t got it right.’
DK: Mm.
ET: And they had these incredible searchlights, and a marshal would come on you, and then all the sleeves [?] [unclear]. It’s a really lovely feeling [laughs] being all lit up at night.
DK: So when that happened, what did your pilot do? Did he –
ET: He couldn’t do much at all really –
DK: Right.
ET: For that. Because with that height, you know, it would take a long way to –
DK: To get out the searchlight. So you’re, you’re being fired on all the time while you’re in the searchlights?
ET: Well, you might be or you might not, you know. It didn’t – we had a little indicator on the aircraft, a light it was, which was supposed to switch on if you were being attacked.
DK: Yeah. So you, did you fly out with a number of other Mosquitos?
ET: Yes.
DK: And could you see them at night, or –
ET: Well that’s the amazing thing is, there’s all these aircraft together –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You suddenly see, if another one gets lit up by the searchlights you think, ‘I didn’t realise he was there,’ you know.
DK: Mm.
ET: You were like a loose formation I think, you weren’t in flying formation.
DK: Right, so you never saw other aircraft then?
ET: Not very often.
DK: So your role was then, the main force would go off to one target and you’d attack somewhere else to, to draw –
ET: Yes.
DK: Their defences there –
ET: Yes.
DK: Presumably.
ET: Of course, we had the Pathfinders.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Who would – now this, well a secret as it was at the time, called Oboe.
DK: Mhm.
ET: And they used to drop on that, and this thing was amazing. Two different aircraft flares go down, you go down one on top of the other. You’d think it was out of one aircraft, you know.
DK: Right.
ET: This was getting towards the end and –
DK: So when you saw these two flares go down, what was your, what did you have to do then?
ET: Well, I’d, it would tell you, or, if it was some apart [?] it would tell you which one to go for. Well, I had to get down into the bomb bay, and, well about ten, you had a ten minute run in when you had to stay rock steady, you know, and I had to get down into the front and set up the bomb, bomb site.
DK: Right.
ET: ‘Cause one night, an incident was that I got down there and I wasn’t making sense about it to my pilot, and he was very quick at knocking my oxygen off [laughs].
DK: Oh.
ET: And he quickly catched on what was wrong and put the switch –
DK: Right.
ET: Back on.
DK: So he switched the oxygen off then, right.
ET: Yeah just getting, getting down into the – I had a harness [?] on, you know –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Just to –
DK: So, so although you were navigating then, on the Mosquitos you actually acted as a bomb aimer as well then did you?
ET: Yes, I did both jobs.
DK: Right.
ET: Yes, I did a small bombing course with a Mosquito conversion. We did a course on –
DK: Right.
ET: With Oxfords [emphasis] it was this time, which was a training aircraft.
DK: Mm.
ET: Used to bomb in the Wash.
DK: Mm.
ET: You know, the target.
DK: Yeah.
ET: The Wash.
DK: Yeah, so, so you said you went to Berlin thirteen –
ET: I think it was about thirteen –
DK: Thirteen times.
ET: Times if you –
DK: So for the recording, I’m looking at the logbook again so, so 1st of March 1945, Mosquito. You’ve gone from ops to Erfurt, E-R-F-U-R-T.
ET: Erfurt, yeah.
DK: So you’ve got one four thousand pound bomb.
ET: That’s a bomb we carried, just one.
DK: And then 3rd of March forty-five, Wurzburg, one four thousand pound bomb again.
ET: Yeah.
DK: And then it says here Berlin on the 5th of March, the 7th of March, 9th of March, 11th of March, 13th of March. So every other day there for about a week, you were going to Berlin.
ET: Yeah.
DK: So each time it’s one four thousand pound bomb. So those trips to Berlin, can you recall, were those diversional then, or part of a, a main attack on Berlin?
ET: I, I don’t think it was a main attack because we didn’t see other aeroplanes there really.
DK: Right, so the main force has gone off somewhere else?
ET: It’s more a nuisance, you know, morale type thing I think –
DK: Right.
ET: On that.
DK: So you’re also going out there then to, not as diversions as such but to just keep the defences alert?
ET: Keep it going, yeah.
DK: So then 15th of March, Erfurt again [page turns]. [Laughs], and then here 21st of March, Berlin, 23rd of March, Berlin and the 24th of March, Berlin [page turns]. Think the people in Berlin must have got a bit fed up of you turning up [all laugh]. So your, and it says here, so the same pilot, Flight Lieutenant –
ET: Yes.
DK: Is it, was it Dave Green? Dave, Dave Green, was it? Green?
ET: Dave Green, yeah.
DK: Dave Green. And just reading for the recording here –
ET: Yes.
DK: So 4th of April, Magdeburg, and then 8th of April, Berlin, 10th of April, Berlin, 12th of April, Berlin [BT laughs], 13th of April, I’ll spell this out for the recording. It’s S-T-R-A-L-S-U-N-I, or S-U-N-D, Stralsund I think it is. 17th of April, Berlin, 20th of April, Berlin again, 23rd of April, Flensburg [page turns]. So the end must be coming to an end here then. And finally, 25th of April, a power station at Munich.
ET: That’s right, that was the last one.
DK: Mm.
ET: It, I had a son out there [laughs].
DK: Right.
ET: He worked with the, what’s it called, you know, the –
BT: Eurofighter.
ET: Eurofighter.
DK: Oh right, oh okay.
BT: After the war you want to add [DK and BT laugh].
ET: After the war, oh yes.
DK: Yes.
ET: But I said, ‘I probably passed this part,’ I said, ‘I probably bombed [emphasis] that part’ [all laugh].
BT: Yeah.
DK: So years later, your son was working on the Eurofighter in Europe?
ET: He was in the Eurofighter, yeah.
DK: So can I, if I just add those up [page turns]. Where are we, that’s Berlin. One, two, three, four, five [page turns], six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Yes as you say, thirteen.
ET: That was –
DK: So out of those twenty operations in Mosquitos, thirteen of them were to Berlin.
ET: Yeah.
DK: And your trips to Berlin, it’s obviously quite a long way. I mean, are you fired on all the way or is it mostly quite dark and quiet?
ET: Bits and pieces.
DK: Mm.
ET: Sometimes flak would come up, you know, you could see it at – you just hoped they hadn’t predicted you, your height.
DK: Hmm. But in a Mosquito you’re a lot higher than another aircraft.
ET: Twenty-five.
DK: Mm, twenty-five thousand feet.
ET: We were, and sometimes we used to get to thirty coming back, you know.
DK: And can you recall, were you ever attacked by German aircraft at all?
ET: Not that I know of.
DK: No.
ET: No.
DK: So as you’re, as you’re approaching the target then, you’ve got down into the –
ET: I get down into the, the bomb bay –
DK: So –
ET: And set up the wind and that –
DK: Yeah.
ET: On the – in fact, so that we could keep together more of the navigation, you’re trying to navigation –
DK: Yeah, yeah.
ET: The leading aircraft might pass back the wind, so as we’re all using the same wind to, to part [?] with our drift and that –
DK: Right.
ET: So as we’d keep –
DK: ‘Cause presumably wind change can really affect your navigation?
ET: Oh yeah, well effects your drift and everything you see, so if you get different winds you could be offsetting differently.
DK: Right, what was it like, if I can ask – you’d obviously have a briefing beforehand –
ET: Yes.
DK: And, and this is in the building at Oakham. What were your feelings like when you saw what your target was going to be?
ET: Well you think –
DK: Presumably they have curtains and they put it back and –
ET: Well they tell you where it is. Oh, the routine was, you take the aircraft up for an air test –
DK: Right.
ET: Up there about fifteen minutes, see it’s alright in the morning, and then, this being the morning, then the afternoon you would go to briefing. Told you where it was, you had to make charts up, you know –
DK: What was your thoughts when you saw Berlin again? Were you –
ET: [Laughs] yeah, ‘can’t you find somewhere else to’ –
DK: So you now know the target, so you’re now doing your charts presumably as the navigator?
ET: Yeah.
DK: So you’re, you’re told the winds and –
ET: Got to put a tracking of where we’re going and that, all these sort of things. Oh yeah, you get briefed by the MET officer of the winds and the weather.
DK: Mhm.
ET: And after that, you had a meal, and then you went back. The worst thing I found was you went back to your billet and then you’d devour [?] away these hours –
DK: Right.
ET: Until, ‘cause it’s always at night of course, you know, until you’re ready for takeoff.
DK: So it came as a bit of a relief then, when you got to the aircraft to takeoff?
ET: Oh yeah, once you get going, you’re too busy really to think about anything else, provided you didn’t swing. It was quite a nasty aircraft to swing in on takeoff –
DK: Mm.
ET: Mosquito, you know, the propellers going the same direction –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Until they got the tail up for a bit of –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Control.
DK: And your pilot then, Dave Green, was he a good pilot?
ET: Yes [emphasis]. But just as I say, he was a quiet chap so I didn’t really see much of him –
DK: Right.
ET: Apart from work which, which was fine [laughs].
DK: But did you – I’m presuming you’d have to work well [emphasis] together then.
ET: Oh yes.
DK: So you worked well together?
ET: Yeah.
DK: We’ve covered what you did over the targets, so you’ve come back after the operation and your landing. How did you feel then as you got back?
ET: Relieved once you got down but of course you’re coming back, you’re all coming back together aren’t you? In these airfield, the seconds [?] they overlapped.
DK: Yeah.
ET: So it was a bit dodgy at times. We landed once at the wrong airport [laughs].
DK: Really?
ET: You know, the wrong way, direction was the same.
DK: Yeah.
ET: We ended up at Wyton [laughs].
DK: Right.
ET: Anyway, they just briefed us and, and that was it. I think we took off in the morning to get back to base [DK and ET laugh].
DK: So you, once you’ve landed then, what’s the procedures then?
ET: Oh you go for a briefing.
DK: Right, a debriefing [emphasis].
ET: De –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Debriefing.
DK: And, and who would take that?
ET: Intelligence.
DK: Mm.
ET: Officers.
DK: Mm, and what sort of questions did they ask?
ET: Did you hit the target, did you think you hit the target?
DK: Right.
ET: We used to take a, a film [emphasis]. Some were better than others, you know –
DK: Mm.
ET: Of the target area and when it happened.
DK: So a photo would be taken when you –
ET: A photo when you pressed the plunger for, to release the bomb a photograph would be taken –
DK: Oh right.
ET: A little later.
DK: Right. So you’ve got back then and you’ve got feelings of relief. What happened then, you just went to bed?
ET: No.
DK: Ah.
ET: Went for a meal.
DK: Right, okay [DK and ET laugh].
ET: And a beer.
DK: Mm.
ET: And a few beers [DK laughs], otherwise I never slept really, you know.
DK: Right.
ET: It’s all night [?], but oh, it was a relief [emphasis] –
DK: Mm.
ET: Really. I mean we were very lucky in the Mosquito, we didn’t have near the number of losses –
DK: Mm.
ET: That the – the loss that I saw, well, the loss that I saw was at – one aircraft completed [?], he was up on his air test and of course he came and tried to beat up the, what we called the flight hock [?] [emphasis], you know, where our ground crew were.
DK: Yep.
ET: And these, these overload tanks in the wing. He hit a tree and knocked one tank off, and the aircraft just [unclear].
DK: Cartwheeled.
ET: I watched this –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Just rolling [emphasis].
DK: Yeah.
ET: And it went straight in the front of the, the sick quarters.
DK: Mm.
ET: That was a complete waste of lives. Another accident we had was at the – one chap lost an engine and he came roaring in far too fast. Oh no sorry, he spun [emphasis] in and of course, they were killed. It happened a second time to another person, and he thought ‘I’m not going to stall’ [laughs], so he came rolling in too fast and [taps four times] wasn’t able to stop at the far end. And then the disciplinary thing at Sheffield, so they sent them to Sheffield. [Unclear] fly –
DK: Right.
ET: But just for discipline [laughs].
DK: But at least he survived that one.
ET: He survived that one, yeah.
DK: But got into trouble for it, yeah. Okay that’s, that’s great. Just ask you, after all these years how do you look back at your time in, in Bomber Command? How do you look back on that?
ET: I don’t really look back on it all that much nowadays.
DK: Mm.
ET: I think – well I was occupied, of course seeing an Air Force and getting in transport we had the Berlin Airlift –
DK: Right.
ET: For a year.
DK: So you got involved with the Berlin Airlift then did you?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Yeah, so –
ET: I did three hundred lifts on that.
DK: Oh right. So you’ve, let, you’ve – so just reading here, that’s three hundred and two lifts –
ET: Yeah.
DK: To Berlin.
ET: That took a year.
DK: And, and what aircraft were you flying?
ET: York.
DK: Right, the Avro York. So what, what was Berlin like when you, you went there after the war?
ET: Oh they were very, very grateful that we’re keeping away from the Russians I think was a big thing, you know, there.
DK: Mm. ‘Cause it’s, it’s kind of strange ‘cause one moment you’re dropping bombs [BT laughs] and then the next –
ET: Three years later, yeah.
DK: You’re giving them food.
ET: That’s right. It’s amazing when people have nothing, you know. If anybody had a bar of soap or something like that –
DK: Mm.
ET: It was like a gold [emphasis] to them, you know.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Things like that.
DK: So what kind of stuff were you carrying in the Avro Yorks then?
ET: Oh you name it, everything.
DK: Food and –
ET: There was coal.
DK: Right.
ET: Actually the aircraft – I forget they were a lot heavier when they finished, it was all this coal dust.
DK: Mm.
ET: They erm, hay for horses, all the natural stuff that people eat.
DK: Right.
ET: Anything like that.
DK: So flying into Berlin then, did you have to stick to certain routes or –
ET: Yes –
DK: ‘Cause you’re flying over –
ET: The Northern – we used to go up north and then go down from a northern corridor, and come back at a centre corridor.
DK: Right.
ET: ‘Cause basically, Onsturfrun [?]
DK: So you went to Onsturfrun Gateaux [?].
ET: Onsturfrun [?] to Gateaux [?] yeah, yeah that’s right.
DK: Right.
ET: And –
DK: So they’re just continuous flights then, going –
ET: Yeah.
DK: In the northern route and coming out the southern route.
ET: Oh it was a shambles in this case. We had lots of different speed aircraft, you know. There was, there was Yorks, there was the Dakotas –
DK: Mm.
ET: Valettas, and what was happening, supposed to go off on waves but one wave was [laughs] overtaking the other wave, you know –
DK: Right.
ET: And things like that. It’s amazing there weren’t more accidents than there were, but after they got it settled it worked very well. You just went along, you got in. If you missed, if you couldn’t get in you came straight back, you didn’t, you couldn’t go round again, you know –
DK: Right.
ET: To Gateaux [?]I mean.
DK: So you, you had to land first time?
ET: You had to land, that’s right.
DK: Yeah.
ET: But it worked very well. And we went down to two lifts. Initially we had to do three lifts. It was a tremendously long day ‘cause you had to wait for the aircraft to get ready and complete your three lifts.
DK: Mm.
ET: That was it, but they put it down to two [emphasis] so we did a night shift or a day –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Day shift. It was well organised towards the end.
DK: Was it easier for you as a navigator, doing that then, because they –
ET: Oh I didn’t do very – there wasn’t very much navigation at all.
DK: Right.
ET: For – you just, it was a corridor, you know –
DK: Right.
ET: And took me an hour coming back ‘cause you flew over quite a bit of Russian territory coming in.
DK: Mm.
ET: The only, the odd fighter used to come and have a look at you [laughs]. Think ‘I hope you go away again,’ you know.
DK: Oh right [ET laughs]. So after that then, you’ve remained with transport and –
ET: Yes.
DK: Yeah. Just looking, so you were in Valettas, Varsitys, the Beverlys?
ET: Yes.
DK: So that was, you went out to Aden then, and –
ET: Yes.
DK: And Iran? Yes.
ET: Yeah, did two years in Aden.
DK: Was that during the conflict out there or –
ET: There, there was a bit of conflict –
DK: Yeah.
ET: But [coughs] there was a lot of trouble in – what do you call that country?
DK: Yemen?
ET: Yemen.
DK: Yemen, yeah and Aden, Aden is Yemen I think, isn’t it? Oman?
ET: There’s another one I think, further east.
DK: Right. So, so what were you doing there? Was it supplying –
ET: Oh just loads of [?] – it was wonderful, a place called Macierz [?] –
DK: Mm.
ET: Which was about eight thousand feet high, and from Aden was very steamy, you know [laughs], and you get up there, your stockings fall down because it’s so dry up there.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Byt they’ve got stuff in there you didn’t know if you could get before, you know.
DK: No.
ET: Like quite big trucks and that type of thing.
DK: So what was, what was the Beverley [emphasis] like as an aircraft then? They’re quite big, quite bulky things aren’t they?
ET: Oh dear [DK laughs]. It was slow [emphasis], it was noisy [emphasis]. In fact the navigator’s table used to be on an angle, you had to, you had to [tapping] flatten it and you had to [tapping], they tried to [?] bounce on it, you know [DK laughs]. And that had a fixed undercarriage, and if you got into icy conditions, these legs used to ice up which meant you even go slower [emphasis] than [DK and ET laugh]. But it had this great capability of short landing in –
DK: Yeah.
ET: In getting into these airfields, you know.
DK: So then you’ve gone onto the Britannia.
ET: That’s right.
DK: So what, what was the Britannia like?
ET: Oh it was lovely.
DK: Yeah
ET: Yeah, I did five years on.
DK: And what was that, mostly trooping flights was it? So whereabouts did you use to go to?
ET: All over the place [coughs]. Did a lot to Norway because the commander was a not [?] – always went there from January to March –
DK: Mm.
ET: They go for their winter training –
DK: Right.
ET: So we’d lots of flights there and back. That was an adventure [?]. We had a lot of flights out to Woomera –
DK: Right.
ET: You know, the atomic –
DK: Oh right, the atomic bomb tests.
ET: It was a little box.
DK: Oh.
ET: Didn’t know what it was [DK and ET laugh]. But we used to go down to Adelaide.
DK: Probably best not to ask [all laugh].
ET: Well, quite a lot.
DK: Yeah.
ET: When all these tests were going on.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And just [coughs] –
DK: You, you didn’t witness any of the tests then did you?
ET: Oh no.
DK: No, no.
ET: We used to use an Edinburgh field recorder, it was a RAAF base. That went on quite a lot. We did trips to Singapore and back –
DK: Mhm.
ET: But when it first started, you know, there was no slipping [emphasis] crews –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You just had a – everyday it took five [emphasis] days to get to Singapore, you had two days off there and five days to come back. And I think what a waste of aircraft it was really [DK laughs]. I suppose we had so many we didn’t bother. That was on the Yorks [emphasis] then.
DK: Yeah [ET laughs]. So finally you’ve become ATS navigator instructor.
ET: That was on Belfasts.
DK: So you’re, you’ve – and then 53 Squadron on the Belfasts?
ET: That’s right.
DK: So, so what was the Belfast like as an aircraft?
ET: Oh it was nice, nice. Well lovely, very palatial for the crew.
DK: Mm.
ET: Just the pilots could get in from the outside of the aircraft into the seat, you know, being a big aircraft –
DK: Right.
ET: It was very palatial for the crew.
DK: So what sort of loads would you have on the Belfasts?
ET: All sorts, helicopters.
DK: Yeah?
ET: Tanks, just stuff like that.
BT: You took the Concord engines didn’t you as well? Concord engines.
ET: Oh I had a big, yeah. Oh my big flight was I went – we carried an engine for Concord once. It went on a world tour.
DK: Oh right.
ET: Well, went to Far East sales pitch. It never needed the engine [laughs].
DK: Right, so it was just a spare –
ET: But it was a few pictures somewhere of that. Is it in there [shuffling].
BT: Yeah that’s the one, that’s the Concord.
DK: Ah.
ET: There’s one with the tours [?] on.
BT: I’ll have a look [ET laughs].
DK: That’s the original prototype isn’t it?
ET: Yeah.
DK: DBSST.
ET: That’s right.
BT: Oh wow.
DK: Okay, so I’ll just finish this off. So you retired in 1978 as a squadron leader.
ET: That’s right.
DK: Ah.
ET: They eventually decided to promote me after [laughs] –
DK: So they promoted you just before you retired?
ET: Yes.
DK: Ah [laughs]. Okay, well I’ll stop that there because I’m conscious of you talking for a whole hour there, but thanks very much for that. I’ll switch that off now.
ET: Well –
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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ATaylorEC170928
PTaylorEC1701
Title
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Interview with Eric Taylor
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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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:54:10 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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David Kavanagh
Date
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2017-09-28
Description
An account of the resource
Squadron Leader Eric Taylor joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 and served as a navigator. He served in North Africa and completed a tour of operations against targets in Italy before becoming an instructor in England. He describes the differences in instrumentation between the North African and English aircraft, such as the Gee navigational aid. He flew nuisance and diversion operations in Mosquitos over places such as Wurzburg, Erfurt and Berlin thirteen times. He was involved in the Berlin Airlift and then spent a couple of years serving in Aden and the Middle East, and remained in the Air Force until 1978 when he retired as a squadron leader.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Algeria
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Tunisia
England--Cambridgeshire
Algeria--Blida
Algeria--Râs el Ma
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Erfurt
Germany--Würzburg
Tunisia--Qayrawān
North Africa
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
Temporal Coverage
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1940
1941
1943
1945
142 Squadron
16 OTU
571 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
civil defence
crewing up
Gee
Home Guard
Mosquito
navigator
Operational Training Unit
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Oakington
RAF Upper Heyford
training
Wellington
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/222/3364/PCarrollT1601.2.jpg
6dcf778874a17c8eddc32754f15ef8a6
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/222/3364/ACarrollT160418.2.mp3
6fcf0cd59fbdbb3b017155d7d3cae483
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
Carroll, Thomas F
Thomas Carroll
Tom Carroll
T F Carroll
T Carroll
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Thomas "Tom" Carroll (1923 - 2019, 184755 Royal Air Force).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-03-07
2016-04-18
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
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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Carroll, TF
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Julian Maslin. The interviewee is Tom Carroll. The interview is taking place at Mr Carroll’s home, near Tarpoley in Cheshire, on the 18th of April, 2016. [Pause.] Tom, good morning. I wonder if you could start by telling us a little bit about your background, where you were born and brought up.
TC: Good morning to you. Yes, I was born in a place called Woodlands, Doncaster, in 1923, 5th of August 1923. It was a model village, and the king and queen came along and declared it to be so. I lived very happily there, with loving parents. My father was a miner, he came from Ballinasloe [unclear] in Ireland. And my grandfather – we all lived together in the same house at this stage – my grandfather worked down the mine when he was eight years of age. I think it’s – I’d like to say a little about him, because I asked him ‘wasn’t you frightened?’ when I was a little boy and we went walking with him around the village and so on, ‘weren’t you frightened, Grandad, at eight years of age working down the pit?’ He said ‘well I was at first.’ And I said ‘well what did you do Grandad?’ He said ‘well they put a piece of rope in my hand, and told me to pull it down, until I couldn’t pull it down any further.’ ‘And then what did you do?’ He says ‘they told me to release it.’ I discovered later on of course this was part of the fresh air that would be brought into the mine. [Pause.] He did, he did this, and I suppose – ‘were you allowed to, when you’re allowed, were you allowed [emphasis] to work down the mines?’ Well he said in those days there was a lot of poverty around, and if you got a letter, you could send a letter to the head teacher, and say that if you had a job they would allow you to go. So that’s how he worked down the mine. Grandad and I became very good friends, and on one of our little walks, he suddenly said to me ‘you know life Tommy? Life is nothing but smoke, magic and dust.’ Now I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but there was something about the words ‘smoke,’ ‘magic,’ and ‘dust’ that stayed in my mind until I began to write books. And then I thought, that’s a title of a, I gave to my novel ‘Smoke, Magic and Dust.’ Because, when I grew up, and had lived through the war, smoke, magic and dust made sense [emphasis] to me somehow. I’d been living a life not knowing where I was going or anything, and then, some magic came along and I realised that that was all part of it. And then Hitler, himself, became dust, towards the end of the war. And I thought to myself, really, life is smoke, magic and dust. We all I’m sure can say to ourselves at one time of our lives ‘where’s life taking us to? What is it all about?’ And then we experience some magic, perhaps we fall in love and get married, and that’s magic. But at the end of it all, of course, it all comes to an end in dust. Anyway, that’s how I came to write a novel later on, I’ll talk about that later on. But, everything was happy. We were living a simple life, walking out with my friends, and everything was farmland around the village. We would walk out, bluebells gathering, nuts we got from the trees in the little woods around the place, and then, we, when we were a little older, life began to change [emphasis]. Because of this man called Hitler, and what he was doing, and how he’d invaded this country, and yet another one, and by this time, my mother and father were getting very concerned, because my mother had lots of brothers who’d been in, not only in World War One, but Uncle Bernard had been in the Boer War as well [emphasis], and I remember sitting at his feet at our house and listening to his stories about the Boer War. One of them I’ll mention. At night time, they used to throw barbed wire entanglement around the troops because the Boers would perhaps attack them, and so they hung metal tin cans to the barbed wire which would sound an alarm if they were attacked, and they stacked the rifles ready just in case. And they were attacked, or at least they thought they were one night, the cans rattled on the fence, everybody leapt up, grabbed a rifle and began shooting in the direction of where the noise came from. And everything went quiet, and in the morning, when dawn broke, they found out what had happened. The mule that carried the water for them had somehow stumbled into the fence, and now it was dead, shot dead. But, later on in life I realised what these camps, prison camps were like. When the Jews were later imprisoned in camps. But at that stage, [shuffling] we just [unclear] going from there. [Beep.]
JM: Tom, could you tell us what it was that lead to your enlisting in the Royal Air Force?
TC: Yes. When I was, when I was fifteen and a half, I left school. I learnt to do shorthand and typing, and I thought it would be jolly nice if I could become a newspaper reporter. But, I didn’t. I became, at that early age [chuckles] an assistant cashier for an inter, an international company. Erm, the erm, I’m just trying to think – [Beep.]
TC: I was working for this international mining company, and the war had started, of course, and we were all speculating, young people working there, what would we do when our time came to join up. Immediately I wanted to join the Air Force. The prospect of flying was far more interesting to me than firing at people from a trench [emphasis]. So I must confess, it was excitement of the prospect of flying in aeroplanes that I thought of. And, it sounded much cleaner and scientific and everything else. That’s why I wanted to join the Air Force. And, when I went to be interviewed, by the authorities when I approached them I was eighteen years of age, they rather talked – I wanted to be a pilot, but they said ‘we’ve got a better job for you in the Air Force than being a pilot,’ I said ‘oh, how’d’ya work that out?’ They said ‘well you sit next to the pilot, you won’t be called the pilot, you’d be called a flight engineer, but you’ll be able to take part in operating this aeroplane, and you’ll be an engineer as well [emphasis]. So, that’s a very important role.’ So I said, ‘jolly good, I’ll do that.’ Up till then, the only thing I could do was mend punctures on a bicycle. But they said ‘don’t worry about that, you’ll be trained.’ So in due course of course I was called up, and I was trained at, I remember going to [pause] to, I think it was, it was, I think it was Mablethorpe I think it was, were we did our ground training. Drill and all that sort of thing. And this was where I met a guy called Ken Cameron, who became a friend of mine, a wartime [emphasis] of mine. Dear Ken was killed in the Air Force later on, but we were in it together. Everything [emphasis] we did together, Ken and I, Ken Cameron. He came from Scotland, he came from, he lived in Scotland, and [pause] we were at a dance I remember, at Mablethorpe, it was a very hot day, and we had the ice cream man outside. So we went downstairs to buy an ice cream, and ran slap bang into the arms of a, Warrant Officer Bloomfield, a flight sergeant, a sergeant and a corporal. Well, the outcome of all of that was the warrant officers taking the name of flight sergeant, taking the names of the flight sergeant, taking the names of sergeant, and the corporal, and took our names, and we were marched in and put on jankers for a week, scrubbing pans and all the rest of it. And Ken and I were also having to march up and down and round with a log held on one shoulder each, [unclear]. Anyway, it was a very interesting period. And eventually we went down on the first course of training, which was to be [pause, beep].
TC: So, after the misery [emphasis] of scrubbing all the pans clean, then it became the business of getting us prepared us for flying. And we, we did a course down at RAF Locking, in Holton, and then onto the actual course itself, down at South Wales, at, erm –
JM: [Whispers] St Athan. [Louder] St Athan.
TC: Holton.
Other: St Athan.
JM: St Athan.
TC: St Athan, rather. At St Athans. Erm, [pause] I must say this about the training, if I may. The training in the Royal Air Force, and all the other services I guess, must be the best training in the world, because if you didn’t understand a certain thing, they stayed with you until you did understand it. And in the end, of course, came the day when passed out, and we were sewed on our sergeants wings. That was tremendous. Tremendous. After that we were given some leave, and Ken Cameron, my friend I mentioned earlier on, instead of going all the way up north to Scotland in those forty-eight hours, he came home to Yorkshire with me, and spent a weekend at our house. That was tremendous. And our friendship blossomed [?]. We went back to, we trained then, as, with a crew – we had to be crewed up then. And we went to a place in Yorkshire called Lindholme, and I remember entering this room – how we even saw [emphasis] one another I don’t know. It was absolutely filled with smoke, everybody was smoking their cigarettes, and I was smoking too. But this guy came in, this officer came in, and said he would leave it to us to get crewed up. There were pilots in the room milling around, with air gunners and navigators, and they were all looking for a flight engineer to finish the, to finish the crew off. And a pilot came to me and said ‘would you like to be flight engineer in my crew?’ And I said ‘yes.’ I joined with them and it was terrific, that we were allowed to choose to fly with the people we wanted, we felt we wanted to fly with. So, I said ‘who’s that guy then?’ And someone says ‘oh it must have been a shrink’ [chuckles]. But it was very clever, I think, to be left to choose our own friends to work with. So, that’s how I became part of a Lancaster crew.
JM: What did you think of the Lancaster as an aeroplane to fly in?
TC: Well, we originally trained on a – it was a Halifax, which I thought was a very good aircraft. And then, halfway through the course on the Halifax, we were told we were going to fly Lancasters. And I thought the Lancaster was absolutely terrific [emphasis]. I was so interested, I knew every [emphasis] nut and bolt in that aircraft. I really, I really did. In fact, that’s how I gained my commission through knowledge of the Lancaster. I remember, we were posted then from this place to 100 Squadron at Waltham, and I remember the name of the group captain, Group Captain Newbiggin, and Wing Commander Patterson was the wing commander, I remember them both, and after – it’s very interesting to recall how, what happened when we arrived on the squadron. The [unclear] said ‘you go and see the [unclear – maybe wing commander] now boys,’ he said ‘you give us a buzz and you can go in and see him.’ Okay, we waited for the buzz, and eventually the buzz came, and we marched into his room and saluted. But to our surprise he wasn’t sitting down there to welcome us, he was lying flat out on a long table, and he was wearing, on this hot day, it’s true, he was wearing his overcoat [emphasis]. Somebody said to me, whisper, ‘he’s flak happy.’ Flak happy? [emphasis]. So he said – he told us he was going to take us on our first trip – second dicky. And we duly left. And the [unclear] saw us coming out with these long faces. Second dicky was – he was suffering from, obviously, flak happy, he laughed, he said ‘he’s not flak happy at all,’ he said ‘the reason he’s lying on that table is occasionally because he had a crash landing after doing so many ops, it’s affected his back and he has to lie on his back for a while,’ and the reason he was wearing that overcoat, he says ‘it’s just arrived this morning for him, and he was trying it on when his back went’ [JM laughs] ‘so he really is very, very good.’ And he says ‘the last time you’ll see Wing Commander Patterson flying around on his bicycle,’ and truly that did happen. But nevertheless, after a period of small cross countries to check out our navigator, who incidentally was a Canadian, we were declared fit to go. I was very happy with my pilot – I remember my first time we did a most wonderful landing together in training. The way that he looked at me and I looked at him, it was smashing, it was. So we went on our first op. I just can’t remember what [unclear]. Anyway, it was, it was somewhere in France I think, just my memory, and I remember the wing commander was flying in my skipper’s seat, he was sitting next to me. My skipper was sitting in my [emphasis] seat next to the wing commander, and I was sitting on a little rumple [?] seat at the side. Anyway, I reminded him at twelve thousand feet that he had to put oxygen on, so we all did oxygen, and everyone said yes they were receiving their oxygen, and as we approached France I saw, it was like kiddie’s sparklers, up in the air, and the wing commander says ‘don’t worry about that, light flak is, is, only goes up about twelve thousand feet, don’t worry about it.’ So we didn’t worry about it, and he said ‘I’ll explain what the heavy flak looks like when we get there.’ And, on we went. And suddenly, a searchlight came on, and began, and swept towards us, and he said ‘now, if a searchlight comes on like that to us, you have to do a corkscrew,’ and he described what to do, and he said ‘this is what we do,’ he says ‘you dive through [emphasis] it, you don’t run away from it, you dive through it.’ And then he had difficulty finding it again, well we dove through it, and the searchlight went out, it must have been faulty or something, but anyway we got the idea that you did a corkscrew through an aircraft beam, and you dived through it not away from it. So we thought that was very good training, I was very pleased with Wing Commander Patterson, by then. ‘Cause what we’d done, we’d called him Harpic, you know [JM laughs], clean round the bend [both laugh]. His nickname was Harpic as far as we were concerned, and he never, never escaped that name, but he was known with affection from now on as Harpic. Eventually, we saw what he’d been talking about, this heavy flak, I was rather frightened I must say, because the heavy flak, it lit up the sky with a flash as big as a motorbus. A fla – but out of it you can see big black pieces flying out of it, so we said ‘that’s heavy flak.’ Yeah. Well we had to keep on, with flying [?] and we got to approach the target with the heavy flak pounding away. I didn’t see any aircraft actually getting hit that night, but I thought, as bombs went, you know, I heard ‘bombs away,’ my foot [foot shuffles on the floor] felt peculiar [emphasis]. It had been hit up and down, I thought ‘God, I’ve been hit already,’ first trip! I didn’t tell anybody, I took off my flying glove, I put my hand down my flying boot and stocking, and tasted my hand to see if it was blood. Nothing there. And it wasn’t till a moment or two later, I thought ‘I know what it is.’ I’d been standing on a bomb slip cover. A bomb slip cover is a small piece of metal with a clip that you could pull out with your hand in case the bomb wasn’t released mechanically, you could release it by hand, and this had rattled of course under my foot when bombs were released. So I never told anyone about that, I kept that to myself. Then, on, on our – we landed back safely of course, and we were debriefed, and after briefing we went back to our place, and we were all sergeants at that stage apart from Jack Slater, the Canadian, ex-mounted [?] policeman, a bomb aimer, Goody navigator, a Canadian, he was an officer, pilot or flying officer – both, they were both flying officers, and our pilot, he was a flying officer as well. So our mid upper gunner was a chap called Robinson, and when I say we called him Robbo, we did, because he was a Czecho-Slovakian Jew I think, we could, nobody, nobody knew exactly where he came from, but he was a fantastic gunner, and we put up with him because of that really, although he couldn’t speak. We said ‘why [emphasis] Robbo, did you call yourself Robinson?’ He says ‘well, if we were shot down,’ he says,’ I give ‘em my name, rank and number, my name’s Robinson,’ he said ‘they’d think I was an Englishman.’ [Chuckles.] A Britain, oh dear, oh dear. Anyway, that was Robbie. But he had a little grammar phone, did Robbie, that he carried about with him, and in this Nissan hut where we were sleeping, it was a thin walled hut, made of metal, thin metal war hut, and you could hear the rats moving around in these thin walls, and Robbie and, erm, well he didn’t sleep very well to begin with bemuse, well we were still thinking about the trip, but eventually we, everybody fell asleep except Robbie, who got out, took out his little grammar phone and sat beside the stove in the, the stove in the middle of the room, and began to play records. ‘Shoo Shoo Baby’ was one of them, and what was the other one now, ‘Shoo Shoo Baby’ and [unclear], and another one, ‘Let’s Take the ‘A’ Train.’ And as the ‘A’ train went faster and faster I have to say it inspired the rats [emphasis] to move faster and faster [laughter] it’s amazing really, its true. The rats seemed to wake up and run faster as the ‘A’ Train was playing. Eventually Robbie got tired too, went to bed and fell asleep. I don’t know how long we’d been sleeping, but we were awake at – I woke up, I could hear somebody moving about the room very quietly – this is true – and what it was, there were people coming in, and there was one crew who hadn’t come back, and what they were doing, they were cleaning the bed spaces out from that and making it ready for the crew who were coming in the next day [emphasis] to take their place. So, that made me think, I’ll tell you, because I never ever [emphasis] thought I would die. I was – and all the young people I’m sure who flew, thought the same as me, they were too young to die. And so I was never really frightened very much. I always thought I’d get out of it. But anyway, we did a couple more ops, and by that time, we were legendary [chuckles]. We were the people who’d done three operations, and Group Captain Newbiggin, the group captain said to my pilot ‘do you mind if I borrow Sergeant Carroll and the wireless operator? I got so many hours to do every month to keep in touch, and I’d like to borrow them.’ So, the pilot couldn’t refuse the groupie [chuckles]. So off we went, and he was a nice, he was a lovely station commander [cough, followed by beep]. Group Captain Newbiggin was a, was a marvellous fellow really, I thought he was terrific, and we did about an hours’ training together, and we came back alright, and we said ‘we’ll have to do that again.’ And I thought ‘yes, if we’re not, [laughs] if we’re still here.’ At least, that’s what Mitch said to me, ‘that’s if we’re still alive.’ But we didn’t mean it seriously, we thought we’d go on forever. Anyway, I went up with him this next time, and we’d been flying around doing all sorts of [uclear] flying and all the rest of it, flying one-three [?] and all the rest of it, and then I noticed that our air pressure was going down, very rapidly [emphasis]. ‘Oh.’ He said ‘what’s wrong, Sergeant Carroll?’ I said ‘there’s something wrong, sir, our air pressure’s going down, we’ve got to do something about it because we’ll go off the runway be – we can’t land without any air pressure.’ He says, ‘can you do anything about it?’ I said ‘if I find where it is that, I can repair it.’ I was confident I could fix it. So I thought ‘I’ll check, I’ll check it first of all on the source,’ so I swung down into the bomb aimer’s compartment, and in the bomb aimer’s compartment on the port side was a container for compressed air, and I could hear, even with a flying helmet on, I could hear it’s ‘ssss,’ ‘ssss.’ The noise coming out, escaping. And it was, there was a loose connection on the pipe as it turned into a curve. A little gland had become adrift. So I did as all good flight engineers would do, I took out the chewing gum from out my mouth, stuck it round, I got some binding tape out of my bag, wound it round and that was a job done [emphasis]. So I got back again into my seat, he says ‘that was quick work, what was it?’ And I told him, he says ‘well that’s a story I can tell the wing commander flying tonight.’ And it was a short while after that I became a flying officer [laughter]. And, or I’m pretty sure it was because of the chewing gum and this tape.
JM: Would I be right in thinking it would have been quite unusual to have a commissioned flight engineer?
TC: Oh it was, yes. I was, I didn’t know any.
JM: No, I’ve never heard of any others.
TC: No, I was. There were others though, of course. But, later on in the war there were quite a few. But I was probably one of the first, I think. So [pause], oh there was Mitch, the wireless op who had been with me, he spread it about he said, ‘if it hadn’t have been for Tom,’ he said ‘we wouldn’t have been here today, we would have been off the end of the runway.’ So he said ‘we’re gonna take him out tonight, and we’re going on the razzle.’ And it coincided that – there had been a clampdown, and it coincided with a very special girl appearing on the stage. And she was the girl who appeared in all the new, in one of the newspapers, of Daily Mirror fame. Jane.
JM: Jane.
TC: And she was there at this theatre [emphasis] in Grimsby. Well, we all got there after several – I must say, I think we were a bit sloshed, and they came on the stage, she came on the stage, and of course the spotlight fell on us because we were in uniform, she’s, she said she wanted someone to help her, and of course the crew grabbed me, threw me onto the stage [laughs] and I was, I had to do a high kicks competition together with the rest of these, along with these little legged girls. And I with my short fat legs couldn’t kick very high. But nevertheless she gave me a huge big kiss afterwards as a reward, and it was a big greasy patent [?] kiss [JM laughs]. My lips and everywhere were smudged red. I got back to my seat and I began to wipe my face with a handkerchief, and the crew said ‘don’t you dare throw that away’ [JM laughs], you see. And the flight engineer was always the last one to get onto the aircraft. He got the final checks to do before takeoff. So the bomb aimer got on first, wouldn’t go up the steps until he’d kissed the handkerchief belonging to Jane. And that became the ritual, the whole of our trips. First he did it to Bill the pilot, then the navigator, then the wireless operator, mid upper gunner, then there was Mitch, the rear gunner. They all kissed this, we wouldn’t do anything – it’s crazy [emphasis] I know [JM laughs] –
JM: Not at all. A little.
TC: But that’s what kept people going during the war, these crazy things. So that was that –
JM: That –
TC: I don’t know what happened to that handkerchief in the end. But somehow it disappeared. I don’t know where it went, but it was, sometime after the war I think, sometime [chuckles].
JM: By now you’re operating in the summer of 1944 and it’s about the time of D-Day.
TC: Oh –
JM: Could you, could you tell us a little bit about –
TC: Yes.
JM: Your experiences of operating around D-Day?
TC: Yes. Well there were two things really. What we were really, we were a bit afraid of was the Ruhr. The Ruhr, we called it Happy Valley because there were fighters waiting for you before you went in, fighters waiting when you went out and on either side of the Ruhr there was big eighty-eight millimetre guns, and we were told on this occasion, oh we knew it was the Ruhr again, ‘don’t worry boys, we’ve got a crew going up the side of the coast dropping window. The night fighters will be there, and by the time they find it’s a ruse, they’ll be short of fuel and they’ll need to go back again, so you’ll be okay.’ Not on, somebody must have told the Germans about it, and I saw more aircraft shot down that night – there must have been about twelve [emphasis] I think I saw, and what, what was happening was, they were waiting for us approaching the Ruhr, what they couldn’t shoot down they somehow – well we had to get into the Ruhr to go – shepherd us, it was like shepherding us into a pen. And we went on like this, and we were supposed to be radio silenced of course, from the crew, but honestly this is true, a little voice spoke up, and it was of a Lancashire or Yorkshire voice I couldn’t tell, and it says ‘please God, let me get back from this one, and I’ll be good to Ethel.’ That, well, we don’t know who it was, we don’t know who Ethel was, and we don’t know whether, if he got back to be good to her or not, but that’s what I remember of that one. I remember some very, very brave things too. But, let me tell you about a couple of things then I’ll get onto D-Day. There was one time we were flying, and I remember Wing Commander Patterson telling us about doing a corkscrew through the, through the searchlights, and on this occasion, a searchlight took a lucky strike on an aircraft. We were at twenty-thousand feet, this must have been a bit higher, and it fell flat on this Lanc, illuminated this Lancaster, seven people in it, they knew all about diving this way and that way and corkscrewing, but it was like slow-motion [emphasis] in this searchlight, and then climbing up this beam, was MU109, and just, it got so far, you could see it, and just like a kid’s sparkle came from it, and the next thing was, the poor old Lanc blew up, never to be seen, a dark [emphasis] space where it had been, seven people in a Lancaster had been, and that was the end of that. That really did make us think, that one. And the other one that I remember vividly, was we hadn’t got H2SR, radar in our aeroplane at the time, and the MCs, Master of Ceremonies, were marvellous people, they were like commenting on a cricket match. ‘Right-o chaps, that’s bang on, lovely, now, instead of bombing the reds, bomb the greens, bomb the greens [emphasis], lovely, spot on.’ And off they went. And these people were fantastic in the, when they were marking a target, they were so brave [emphasis], I thought. This Lancaster, it was a Lancaster, because I heard him afterwards bailing his crew out, they were flying about twelve-thousand feet, they were shot at from every direction, and they were hit, and he bailed out his crew, and the engineer went last out of it, [unclear] was going out of it, but he was still talking when the plane blew up. And the deputy then came in and he [emphasis] then started talking just as though the other chap had been there. Yeah I’ve never ever experienced such bravery as I’ve seen in the Air Force. People just ignoring death completely. It was, it was, things I could never forget it, never ever forget it. So, that was that. And I’m going to explain about D-Day. It was decided that the thing to do, we’d been bombing all the railway tracks, marshalling yards, all that sort of thing, and we’re doing this on this particular occasion. And we seemed to be getting no flak hardly, no night-fighters, it was dead easy [emphasis]. Anyway, amazing, ‘keep a good look out for something, something’s going to happen.’ So we headed back home and then we were looking down into the early hours of the morning, I saw a number of ships, I’ve never seen so many ships in my life. They were, it was, you know, it was D-Day I was witnessing, fantastic. And off we went, and we were told at debriefing that was what it was. The other thing I remember about flying are the V-Bombs, you know, and we could see our fighters fling past us, to go and shoot down these [unclear]. Fantastic, well just before, just towards the end of the war, of course, you’ll remember the [pause], Holland was flooded. The dykes had been opened, and the poor people were flooded up to the rooftops, practically. And the RAF Bomber Command was asked if we could help. And 100 Squadron was taking part in, it was called Operation Manna. Oh off we went, I’d been twice, and we flew, we seemed to be just grazing the rooftops, dropping parcels of food and water, and children no older I would say than eight or nine, they were running along the rooftops like cats [emphasis] catching these, and having fun and catching these things before they could fall, drift into the water. And I remember the bomb aimer Jack Slater saying to me, he says ‘one thing Tom,’ he says ‘it’s far better dropping food and water than dropping bombs isn’t it?’ And I had to agree. And I thought about that when I was with him a short while afterwards. The war was over, and we were doing a three day trip to Germany to see the extent of damage. We didn’t want to go really, but somehow or another we had drawn lots or something and we had to go. And, it was, we were staying – we landed at Gatto [?] airport, we were duly met by a German chauffeur who drove us to, I think it was a Yugoslav Embassy really –
JM: This was in Berlin?
TC: In Berlin. And it was a magnificent, I had never been in such an opulent place. It was wonderful [emphasis]. And the food, drink, everything, fantastic. There was even someone there who looked and sang like Lili Marleen, woman who sang like Lili Marleen. And there was a member, there was an army officer there, I knew, I got to know him, he was a French Canadian I think, and he was sitting at a table, there were no other girls there, and we were all young and wanted to dance to the little orchestra that was there, and he was sitting with about eight most beautiful [emphasis] looking girls, they were all French or, different nationalities, they were all in opposite uniforms, but they were all beautiful. So Jack said to me and Goody, ‘you’re, you’re a good dancer Tommy. Go and ask him, ask him if he can, if we can dance with the girls.’ So I had a couple more drinks and I ventured over to him, and I said ‘excuse me sir, do you mind if I danced with one of your retinue’ or something, he said ‘yes,’ he looked at me, he was about six-foot-seven I think, a big heavy looking fella, and he said ‘but you will bring her straight back won’t you?’ That, it was the way he looked at me frightened me to death [laughter from TC and JM]. More than all the trips I ever done [laugher]. Yeah, so I danced with this girl, and I do declare that I, that the space between my hips and her hips was about three foot [laughter]. I was dancing away from her. All I, and she said to me, ‘excuse me,’ she says ‘but have you been wounded?’ [Laughter] in a French voice. I took her back, and he said, he told me to sit next to him, and I did, I couldn’t really stop it and he had, I never tasted brandy before. And he had this big goblet there and he topped it up with brandy, and he drank that. He kept me there talking, took me nearly, told me what he was going to do, he said he’d make sure that Berlin was alright and turned around,’ and I thought ‘I bet he does too.’ [Laughter.] He was so fierce, I thought ‘it’s bound to do what he wants.’ And that was, the first night |I think we’d stayed there. And on the second day Jack Slater and I decided to go down to the Birches [?] Garden, to try and see the Reichstag rather because that’s where the Germans were going with their valuables to try and get the new currency to try and buy food with. So Jack and I went along there with our packed lunches, and on the way we saw this girl, she had a baby in her arms, and she was so young looking and frail, and she indicated she was hungry. Jack and I promptly gave her our sandwiches for which she thanked us profusely, and then I remembered I had a tuppence-ha’penny bar of Fry’s chocolate in my pocket, which I took out and gave to her, and she give a bit to her baby, and I’ll never ever [emphasis] forget the look in that baby’s eyes, when it reached out for more. And I vowed [emphasis] at that time to myself ‘I’m never going to talk about war or have anything else to do with war after this lot, not now,’ not after seeing what happened in Germany, you know, what war had done. And I never did. I didn’t register with 100 Squadron, or 626 after this, or anything, I kept quiet, until I think we were talking about the war memorial in London.
JM: The Bomber Command memorial?
TC: Yes. And the Dutch had already done it for the, for us, but Winston Churchill or nobody else had ever done it for Bomber Command, which, that didn’t suit me at all. But anyway, the Gibbs brothers were very important, gave a lot of money towards it. And we went there, to the war memorial in London, and in fact I wrote an article about it which I sent to a colleague of yours about it, but on the way away Joyce was wheeling me in a wheelchair at the time, and one of the WAF officers said ‘oh, you mustn’t do that Mrs Carroll, plenty of big strong men here who can do that for you.’ And this fellow, he was about six foot odd, tall, and he had more medals than most of the RAF people there had on, and that’s because, although he hadn’t been flying, he’d been to Afghanistan I think three times, or was it six, I forget. And, as he wheeled me away, we stopped under a tree because it was very hot to get a bit of fresh air, and he says ‘my father was in the Air Force, you know, Flight [unclear] Carroll,’ I says ‘was he?’ ‘Yes, he was in Bomber Command.’ ‘Oh, what squadron was he on, do you know?’ ‘Yes, he was on 100 Squadron.’ Well, I says ‘really?’ And he pulled his bit of paper out of his pocket, and on the four, was it the fourteenth of March I think it was in 1944, he says he’d been on an operation, and Joyce, my wife, she pulled my operation book out of her handbag, and on the same date, we’d flown in different aircraft of course, to the same target. Well, he asked if he could take a photograph of me, and I strongly maintain, I know that the photograph he took, who he saw, was not me, it was his father. And he cried, we all cried didn’t we? Anyway, that was, that was the end of the war memorial there, and then I said that I wasn’t going to do anymore towards the Air Force or the RAF ever again. But, I thought later on, something at home happened –
Other: It’s okay – [beep]
TC: And then we came out, change of squadron. My partner [?] became squadron leader attached to 626 Squadron, Wickenby. We didn’t fly many operations there, we went, before war began, close to the end. I remember we went to Ludwigshafen, that was the twenty-fifth op that we did was Ludwigshafen, and we went to Dortmund in February, February of forty-five, [pause, shuffling papers]. And Cologne, we were at Cologne from 626, and then it, towards the end of the war, it became, the Dutch requested, they said the dykes had been opened, the rooftops were almost reached by floodwaters and would the RAF help. So we dropped, we went on the third of May 1945, we went to drop food in Holland. And again on the, I forget, it’s the second and third we went there dropped food for Holland. And I remember, we were flying over the rooftops, almost skimming the rooftops, and the kids were on the rooftops like cats [emphasis], just between the ages of say five and eight years of age, trying to grab the things before they landed in the water. Tremendous. And Jack, the granddaddy of the crew saying to me, ‘it’s far better dropping food and water than dropping bombs Tommy.’ And I had to agree with that.
JM: Did you take part in the operations to bring back the prisoners of war? Operation Exodus?
TC: Never brought – no, we didn’t take part in that, no. It’s after that, after we’d finished the operations, 626, the next thing I remember is being trained – what would it be after that? Oh no, yes, after we’d, the war ended, all I remember is everybody leaving and going to various homesteads. The Canadian people went back to Canada, Bill, he went back to Wales, still playing rugby [chuckles], breaking more bones I would have thought. I went – what happened to me? Eventually I went up to be trained as, I retrained as an air traffic control officer in the Air Force. And I was sent up to Scottish Command. That was a very interesting situation. All I remember was that we were responsible in the RAF for any, for the safety of aircraft, [unclear] air traffic control centre, Prestwick. We were responsible for the safety of all aircraft, military, civil, up to ten degrees west. Any other distance further west than that, that was the responsibility of America. And I remember, this particular room we had, we had our set up, it was fascinating really. It was about the size of this living room, and the wall I am facing now wasn’t a plaster wall, it was etched in glass. And on that glass was etched every airway and RAF station, main master airfields that we had, such as Kinross, Lochenrouse [?] and Leuchars and so on. And they had special equipment at these airfields, they had long runways to begin with, that was important. But they had a piece of equipment, that if an aircraft called ‘mayday’, or any other emergency, a light would shoot out, and it would emit a signal, would make a light shoot out on this etched glass board we’d got, and where the aircraft was deemed to be was where the light crossed in the cocked hat [?]. So there I was on this Saturday morning, sitting at my desk in charge of everything, on a Saturday, everything quiet, everything – nobody flew in the RAF on a Saturday in those days. And I was reading the Scotsman, feet up on the table, reading the Scotsman, having my coffee, I’d checked all around, the master airfield, everything fine, nothing to worry about. ‘Pan, pan, pan.’ This is so-and-so-so-and-so. I’ve got a flame out. I’m at thirty-thousand feet, heading from Abbotsinch up to Lossiemouth.’ Splash, coffee flew all over the place. I switched on what we called a gun in front of me, as a light shot out from, to form this cross up on the board. And what I’d got – we called it a gun but it flashed on there three hundred and sixty degrees of the compass on the board, which I could get a bearing on either transmitting into a course to steer, or they’d ring you showing distances, separating each wing with their [unclear]. So I was able to flash this gun onto the cocked hat [?], and see that this aircraft was in fact thirty miles from Leuchars, and he said, he was plunging down like a stone, it was no, it was a youthful voice, and I’m over forty of course by this time, experienced, he thinks ‘if I just get in touch with air traffic control, they’ll tell me what to do and I’ll be safe’ [emphasis]. He didn’t realise these things could go wrong. So ‘pan, pan, pan,’ so I get back to him, I forget his call sign, I said ‘you’re thirty miles east of, west of Leuchars. Turn right on the heading of zero-nine-zero,’ and he did that, and I knew the runway of course zero-nine-two-seven, main runway, and I pressed a switch on the controller at Leuchars came on, ‘what is it Tom?’ I said ‘I’ve got one for you, a flame out,’ he said ‘oh crikey.’ He says ‘I’ve put people on painting the runway.’ I says ‘well you get them off, quickly else because he’s got a flame out and he’s gonna,’ – ‘hang onto him if you can.’ So ‘I’ll hang onto him as long as I can’ I said, and of course the lower the poor chap got, the less these lights shone out from these respective airfields, until the end of it the only light I’d got on was the one from Leuchars. And as he approached Leuchars of course, he’s now getting low, he’s twenty-thousand feet descending, less than that, and then the light at Leuchars began to twiddle and, oh. I knew it was hoped, he was over the top of Leuchars by this time. So I maintained his heading out onto zero-nine-zero, timed him for a few seconds, turned inbound [?] two-seven-zero, and he broke cloud at seven thousand feet and saw runway straight ahead, he said [emphasis, JM laughs]. And the controller came in at that point and said ‘runway clear Tom.’ I said ‘well, he’s just landing now.’ That little chap phoned, he phoned back to thank me afterwards, but little did he know what a close shave he’d had. And I remembered a similar thing in Germany, I was doing air traffic control in Germany, and I was at Gutersloh, which happened to be Herman Goering’s airfield [emphasis], and you’ve never seen anything like that airfield. Perfect. No running around bits and pieces there boy, fifteen hundred weights and things like that, all by railway. Bomb dump [?], fuel, everything [emphasis] by rail. And I was sitting in the control, doing approach control on this particular occasion, with a CRDF tube in front of me, you know what I’m saying don’t you?
JM: I did, yes. Say it, would you say it for the, for the recording?
TC: Yes, yes. CRDF tube it’s – whenever an aircraft speaks to me on the frequency that we’re on, a light will shoot out from the CRDF tube and it will point to, and I can get either a steer for it to come to our airfield, or I can tell him where it is, where it is on the tube. Whereabouts it is. So that’s a CRDF tube, I hope I’ve explained that alright.
JM: You have. All these experiences that you’ve had as an air controller were after the war?
TC: Yes. Yes, this, this was after the war. But the RAF was strong, was very strong in Germany at this time because the Cold War on [?] with Russia. Anyway, there’d been a clampdown on at, I forget what squadron it was, but they’d been operating fighters from there. We were opping Canberras from where I was, there were Canberras. They took part in Suez, the Canberras from [unclear] airfield. I mean I could go on for hours about what happened there. But anyway, what happened was they diverted, I think it was eighteen, or was it twenty-four aircraft, to Gutersloh, where I was sitting in the chair there, and that was the most fantastic job. The people in a caravan at the end of the runway at that stage could talk them down, but it’s a longer job. You had to be really smart and quick to get people down in a hurry. So, it, I was absolutely thrilled by this opportunity to get them down. It was, I forget what it was, there was a green flight, a red flight and whatsoever [?], so many aircraft in each [unclear] stacked up, all above one another all coming in. And I took one after the other, one squadron after, one flight after another to bring them in. And I brought them in over, overhead [?] turned them out [?] parked them in [?], smack down the middle of the runway, then the second lot did the same. And of course, while you got this sort of thing going on, you’ve got the group captain to wing commander flying, all the, all the high persons [?] there, and of course I was congratulated afterwards by everybody. That was a tremendous thrill.
JM: That’s a, that’s remarkable. But I know that there’s another remarkable element to your career, which is that you’re now an author, writing about your experiences. Could you tell us a little bit about that please?
TC: Well, yes. I, I used to tell my grandchildren stories at night. I used to go, if I was babysitting with my wife, I would go and take, lie on the bed next to them, falling asleep myself [laughing] and make up a story to tell them. And they were so impressed by these stories, that in the end they said ‘Grandad, why don’t you write them down?’ And of course I did, and I wrote a story about wizards first, ‘The Angry Witch,’ ‘Witch’s Revenge,’ and ‘Witches on the Run.’ And they were the first three, and the next one I wrote about was ‘Somebody’s Kidnapped Santa.’ And the last one I wrote about is a solar powered dog, and that’s waiting for, I’m doing a sequel to that one, and I’ve got to do a sequel to another [emphasis] one I’ve wrote as well, which is ‘Smoke, Magic and Dust.’ Now ‘Smoke, Magic and Dust’ means something to me. I was out with my granddad, I mentioned him earlier on, and he said to me, on one of our walks, that life was only smoke, magic and dust. I was too young to understand what he meant by that, but the words ‘smoke, magic and dust’ remain with me, and always will remain with me.
JM: And that book is about your RAF service in part?
TC: Part. In, in book two it’s, yes. It leads up to the part where I joined the Royal Air Force. And everything in it, about the flying, training and the operations are all true, absolutely true. The only thing that’s slightly different is I’ve had to change the names slightly, about Jack Slater and Goody because, well, they did certain things and it’s better that they were private. So, some of the things I wrote about them aren’t true. Everything else is true, except when I went to college, there was a German girl that came to visit us at this college, this is true, and she spoke about Hitler and Germany and all the rest of it, she was a beautiful girl too, I fell in love with her, I was fifteen, and I wondered how on earth I was going to get her to talk to me. And I knew that if I could, and she was staying over Christmas, she would come to the Christmas Dance at the college, we always had one. So I thought, ‘well I wonder how I’m going’ – and then I remembered the Hitler planes, and the other fascist planes that had bombed Guernica. So I said to her ‘what did you think about Guernica?’ And the teacher at that time, he was called, he was called – he was a nice guy, but he was, he was annoyed with me. He said ‘you mustn’t ask questions like that Carroll. I’m surprised at you.’ Because, she didn’t answer. I knew she is [unclear] at home, and it turned out, so I kept quiet. But I knew she looked at me and she knew what I’d said about Guernica, and it came out that she was going to serve at Christmas and come to our dance, and she did come to the dance, and I got her to dance with me. All the boys were lined up one side of the gym, and all the girls along the other, and the teachers I know were putting bets on who would move with her [?]. And they said ‘well nobody will move,’ so I thought ‘well I’ll move,’ when they said, and they told us what to say, ‘please may I have the next dance with you?’ [Laughs] Joyce, my wife will tell you about that later. But, so I went, I broke ranks walked over, and said ‘please may I have this next dance with you?’ So we danced together. And we became quite friendly all the time she was there. But when, then when it was over she went back to Germany, and that was the end of that. But in the book, I kept her in my book that we kept in contact with one another, and, she came back on a further holiday and became more than friends. And so, during the war I never mentioned this to the crew. But in the book, I’m so concerned about ‘are we bombing her?’ Wondering if she’s alright and what will, what will happen to her. But you’ll, it’s all mentioned in the book.
JM: Tom, thank you very much. I think that would be a very appropriate place to finish the recording. Tom Carroll, thank you so much for sharing with us all your memories so clearly, so vividly, it’s been a very, very interesting interview. Thank you.
TC: Thank you.
JM: Wow.
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ACarrollT160418
PCarrollT1601
Title
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Interview with Thomas Carroll
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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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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:14:31 audio recording
Creator
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Julian Maslin
Date
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2016-04-18
Description
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Tom joined the Royal Air Force as a flight engineer. He did his ground training at Mablethorpe, followed be a course at RAF Locking and RAF St. Athan. Tom speaks highly of the training he received. He went to RAF Lindholme where they crewed up as part of a Lancaster crew, although they originally started on Halifaxes.
Tom was posted to 100 Squadron at RAF Grimsby. He pays tribute to the wing commander and group captain. The former taught them to corkscrew and dive through a searchlight, reassuring them about flak. Shortly after sorting out a problem with the air pressure, Tom became a flying officer. He recounts the crew’s ritual on each flight with a lucky handkerchief.
Tom explains how they were anxious about the Ruhr and how they observed a Lancaster shot down by a Me 109. He also describes the bravery he witnessed. Tom noticed a huge number of ships coming back from a raid on marshalling yards and railway tracks; it was for D-Day. He was involved in Operation Manna, dropping food parcels in Holland.
Towards the end of the war, Tom moved to 626 Squadron at RAF Wickenby. They flew to Ludwigshafen, Dortmund and Cologne.
When war ended, Tom retrained as an air traffic controller in the Air Force. He was sent up to Scottish Command and describes a couple of incidents. He became an author, writing children’s books and about his RAF experiences.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Cologne
Netherlands
Temporal Coverage
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1944
1945
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
Sally Coulter
100 Squadron
626 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
crewing up
flight engineer
Halifax
Lancaster
Master Bomber
Me 109
memorial
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
promotion
RAF Grimsby
RAF Lindholme
RAF St Athan
RAF Wickenby
searchlight
superstition
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/624/8894/APearsonL150531.1.mp3
2e81594e171226151401afeeccd944e1
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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Pearson, Leslie Robert
L R Pearson
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Pearson, LP
Description
An account of the resource
Six items. An oral history interview with Leslie Pearson (d. 2018, 1397838 Royal Air Force), a photograph and service material. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 153 Squadron from RAF Scampton.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Leslie Pearson and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Date
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2015-05-31
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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SB: This is Shelia Bibb, interviewing Les Pearson on the thirtieth of May 2015 at his home at Lowestoft. Les –
LP: Yep.
SB: Before we start talking too much about this, can you give me a little bit of background about yourself. Where you were born, something about your family?
LP: Yes, I was an only child, I was born in East London, I have, my father was a chief shaftsman [?] master engineer. I went to Westham Grammar School, I started an apprenticeship in general mechanical engineering and then I joined the Air Force. This will be what, about 1942 when I joined them, having been through the London bombing and getting some sort of feeling about wars [emphasis] and things in general, and felt that I had to do something about it.
SB: Okay, so, when you decided to join, did you go straight to the Air Force?
LP: Oh yes, yes.
SB: Okay.
LP: Yes, I, as I say, I started an apprenticeship as a general mechanical engineer and as such I was in a reserved occupation. After the three years was up, because they concentrated at wartime, I joined the Air Force in London. I went along and joined in London, and volunteered for aircrew [emphasis], ‘cause that was the [laughs] only branch that would accept me as a reserved occupation.
SB: So where did you report?
LP: Oh my lord [pause]. I don’t, do you know I don’t really remember the name and address of where I went. It was head, sort of a head office in London, a recruit, a definite recruiting centre in London. I don’t recall [laughs] its address as such though, don’t recall it.
SB: Where did they send you?
LP: Initially to St John’s Wood, which was Air ACRC, Air Crew Receiving Centre, and they sort of prepared us for life in the Air Force. We had loads of injections and things like that, but basically they set us up, started our life in the Air Force.
SB: And what sort of training did you get?
LP: First class [laughs]. Let’s try and think this one through [pause]. I think the first one I can recall was being sent to Ludlow [emphasis], on a general toughening up course, sorting out and, you know, yes from Ludlow that was the start, right, yep.
SB: And how long did your training last?
LP: The – oh the whole training was over a year [emphasis]. I’m trying, I’m trying, you know, I’m trying to recall the early parts of this. Erm, we did, what was it, a trip to Brough in East Yorkshire on Tiger Moths, where we were given a day to learn to fly, and those of us who qualified managed to get solo in a day. We then went on to ITW, Initial Training Wing, did mine at Scarborough, which, I’m having to rack my brains on this one a little bit, could of done with notice I bet [SB laughs] but there you are, from ITW, that’s right yes, we went on a holding course in Manchester, and then from Manchester we went to Canada, Canada where we carried on with the pilots course which I’d joined in on. We were flying Cornells there, and then the information came back that there was a surplus [emphasis] of pilots, that the system was working too well [emphasis], so quickly we were [unclear] at something else and we went “ooh, let’s go as a bomb aimer, that’s as good as anything.” Did the bomb aimer’s course no trouble at all. Back to the UK. They had us at, just outside Ludlow, I think it was Clanberick [?] where there were, there was an aerodrome there, and they put us there and they said “well look, you’re a mixed bag but you’ve done an awful lot of the training, we’re going to finish off your navigation course,” which they duly completed. From there, now then, I can’t recall the actual or can’t remember [emphasis] the names of the actual stations, but went initially to I think it was an AFU, Advanced Flying Unit, where we were crewed up. The system there was that the pilot had a wander round and looked at various people and said “you look alright, come and join my crew.” It was very informal, very casual but it worked very [emphasis] well. As a crew we then went on to operational training – I think I skipped something there but it doesn’t really matter. Operational training unit, initially on Wellingtons and then on I think it was Stirlings, and finally on Lancasters. At this stage we were doing various trips – it was an operational training unit as such and we were expected to do various operational training exercises [emphasis] which we did. Eventually we went on to RAF Scampton to 153, where we joined 153 Squadron, which was operational, fully [emphasis] operational. At the end of the war we were then posted to Special Duties. They decided that the squadron as such was of a high standard and we were given the flying test trials on H2S mark four. They gave us six months to do it in and that was done at twenty-thousand feet. Along the line, half way through this exercise, 153 Squadron was disbanded [emphasis] and so they kept us together and transferred us over to Binbrook to do, to be attached [emphasis] to 12 Squadron. I stayed with 12 Squadron right until the end, we finished the exercise we were on there, that was a success and then we would do various bits and pieces afterwards. They didn’t know what to do with us really, disposing of certain bombs out into the North Sea and that sort of nature. I think that just about sums up my life in the Air Force. There’s probably quite a few bits missing but [laughs] I don’t recall [emphasis] it all at this stages now.
SB: Okay let’s –
LP: It was a long time ago.
SB: It was indeed and that was a very good overview. Can we now go back to the war itself, and can you tell me a little bit about your experiences there, some of the operations you took part in?
LP: Mm, they weren’t very exciting really. It was just a job –
SB: Mhm.
LP: We were, I wouldn’t know where to start – whether we were going to Keele and bombing a battleship there, went to Berchtesgaden, which was Hitler’s home, bombing that one, or a little place called Paulson [?] which made ball bearings. That I suppose would sum it up generally, yes, yeah, yeah.
SB: So you can you remember how many operations you flew?
LP: Oh yes. We did six out of Scampton, yes. There was another thirteen variables on training command where they prepared us for full operation duty.
SB: So, can you tell me a little bit about that it was like when you were on one of these operations? What was it like beforehand, during the flight? How did you feel?
LP: To start off with, we were a crew, that was the whole set up of the Air Force, that we went around in crews [emphasis]. We worked together, we played together and we had confidence in each other. We knew exactly [emphasis] what we were doing and if somebody wasn’t well or up to it we knew exactly and that was taken care of. Once we knew we were on operations that day, then everything else stood down and we got prepared for it. There was the briefing, preparation, navigation side of it was drawing up the various routes and things, the bombing side of it was checking the bomb load at the bombers, that the ground staff, who we had every confidence in incidentally, had done a good job, it was a matter of preparations for the actual operation itself. We had, I think it was a late flying supper, that’s a bit hairy that one, I’m sure we had something to eat [emphasis] before we went. Once we were on route well that was it. Everybody had got a job to do. We worked as a team [emphasis] once again, we had a straight navigator in the crew as well as myself, and I assisted him. I spent my time out in the nose map reading, highlighting various pieces, information back to the navigator. That more or less sums up the operation. I mean once we were on target I took over control of the plane, gave instructions to the pilot, “left-left, right-right steady, hold it, bomb’s gone. That’s it, let’s go home.” And the navigator would take over, give the pilot the course to fly and off we went. It – we were pretty well occupied. Your Lancaster was a cold [emphasis] aeroplane, a noisy [emphasis] aeroplane, but one we had every confidence in, so you know. It was just a job and we just did it [emphasis], you know.
SB: Mm.
LP: When we got back, we landed, debriefing, and then after debriefing there was night flying supper, usually eggs and bacon and things like that, and off we went.
SB: As a bomb aimer did you need any particular preparation before you went on one of these?
LP: The only preparation I would have would be to check the bomb load, which was the ground crew had attached to the aeroplane, that it was the correct load, because weight was of paramount importance, for the engineers to be able to maintain the aircraft to its height and it wouldn’t run out of petrol and things like that.
SB: Yep. So did you ever have any problems with the Germans?
LP: No, no.
SB: No, clean run.
LP: No, everything was, as far as we were concerned went according to plan. The loading was correct, the aircraft was fully serviceable and that was it. It got a, once we were over Germany it got a bit hectic from time to time, but we took various evasive action [emphasis] and things of that nature and we got there and back alright.
SB: Good. So you had those operational runs during the war. Once the war was over I gather you stayed on –
LP: Oh yes.
SB: Still doing other tasks.
LP: Yes.
SB: When did you finally come out of the Air Force?
LP: E [pause] forty-six, forty-six, yeah –
SB: Okay.
LP: Forty-six yeah, yep. Yep.
SB: Did you miss it?
LP: Initially yes [emphasis], because it was a family. As I said, you live together, you play together, that was it, your life was as a crew [emphasis], and you each had got every confidence in the other. So yes, initially I did miss it, yes.
SB: Okay. Did you keep in touch with these members of your family? [Laughs]
LP: Yes. I forget, what was the date of the first one, forty-six, forty-seven, forty-six, year. 1946 we had a sort of farewell party in Grimsby and we decided that it was all over and we got to make a fresh start, and we’d met once a year ever since. Last one was what, about a fortnight ago.
SB: And are you all still there [emphasis]?
LP: Yes [emphasis], yes. There was only a handful of us left fully active, one, two, three, I can give you four names of them that are fully active, the rest have fallen, either fallen by the wayside, or they’re not very well.
SB: Mm. Good record though [both laugh]. Okay so, let’s get back to thinking about your experiences. Would you change anything?
LP: I don’t think [emphasis] so. As far as we were concerned it was a success definitely.
SB: Hmm.
LP: The initial training scheme PNB, that was pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, was a hundred-and-one success. It was Canada, America, Africa, I think they were the main three areas where trainee, cadet aircrew were sent to learn to either fly or navigate or bomb. That was the pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, PNB system. That was a hundred – that worked almost too well. As I say, there was a, at one stage there was a success, an excess of pilots.
SB: Okay. So are there any other personal details, things that you were involved in?
LP: [Pause] not that I can think of.
SB: Set any records at all?
LP: We broke the station height record with a Wellington when we were on training command. We got a bit high there, I think we got up to about twenty-six-thousand feet and everything froze up [SB laughs], but apart from that [laughs] not really. We worked hard, we played hard. We got attacked a couple of time whilst on ops. But, took various evasive actions, but the gunners worked more than well but. No, no. I wouldn’t say much about it really.
SB: Okay. Now you mentioned Berchtesgaden –
LP: Yep.
SB: Which is an interesting target. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
LP: That was a long one. Oh lord, from memory I think it took about fourteen hours. I think we had – the bomb load had to be reduced slightly to account for excess fluid, petrol to normal. We went out with pathfinder. As you know, in the Air Force we all flew in what was known as a gaggle [emphasis]. In other words we all [emphasis] made our own [emphasis] way there, regardless of who was flying alongside you. The Americans flew in formation with a master navigator, master this, master that, and they just kept in formation. We didn’t, we flew individually [emphasis]. We were, actually we were running parallel to pathfinder. They were about ten miles off track, but still parallel to us. Consequently, there was a bit of confusion on the target and we went round again so that we had the correct heading to bomb on. Think that was about the only confusion there, but it all, it sorted itself out. We all knew exactly [emphasis] what to do, we did it. Coming back [emphasis] we were well on the way home by this time, and I said to the skipper, “can I give Dave a break?” and he said “yes of course.” Dave being our rear gunner who’d been sat out in the turret, miles from anybody for quite a few hours, so we brought him back to life [SB laughs] and I sat out in the turret for a couple of hours to see he we was alright until we were nearly home, and we all resumed normal flying positions. We landed safely and that was it.
SB: So you accomplished it alright?
LP: Oh yeah. Yes, yeah.
SB: Good, okay. Were you married when you joined up?
LP: Not in the Air Force no.
SB: Right.
LP: That was just one thing, my wife – we were associates together but not married, and the thought was “we don’t get married until the war’s over because it would be wrong.”
SB: Mhm.
LP: Really, so. When the war finished, well then we were able to get married, and we were living out in the village of Binbrook. We had a little cottage there, and we lived in Binbrook [emphasis].
SB: And during the war, where was your wife to be? Was she –
LP: Ah.
SB: In London, or?
LP: She was in East [emphasis] London yes, Plaistow again –
SB: Mhm.
LP: And they were bombed, and they lost their house and everything that went with it. It’s remotely [emphasis] possible that I helped to evacuate them, because at that stage I was working with the local ARP, air raid precaution thing, and I was one of the few people who could drive [emphasis] and we, we was just evacuating people out, driving the three tonne [unclear] flat-packed truck of all things [SB laughs]. Just pile these people onboard and got them, got them out of London, into Epping Forest. So it’s possible [emphasis], it’s not, we can never prove this one that I actually evacuated my wife and her family –
SB: Mhm.
LP: From Plaistow, but well they lost everything.
SB: Hmm. Okay, so let’s move onto after the war –
LP: Mhm.
SB: For a little while. You left the RAF in forty-six –
LP: Mhm.
SB: What did you do at that point?
LP: Purely as a stop cap [?], we were living down in the village and we were thinking “oh, what do we do now?” I didn’t really [emphasis] want to go back into London and mechanical engineering, so we ran the village taxi [emphasis]. The garage had got a licence for a taxi and I, initially I worked with him, and after about a year or so, I bought the licence off him and I ran the thing, I [unclear] on my own. My wife was assistant, she took all the phone calls, and that was our life.
SB: Do you think you would have done something like that if you hadn’t had the RAF experience?
LP: Ooh no [emphasis], no. I never even thought about that. This was purely an extension of our life in the Air Force, because by this time, living out in the village, my wife had got to know a load of my colleagues in the Air Force, we were still one big family [emphasis] and the silly sort of thing which would happen, was when they were on a PT run or something like that, they would run down into the village, through the back door of our house [laughs] and sit in there and say “can you make us a cup of tea?” Or “can you boil us an egg?” It was part of our life extended. Is that – there you go.
SB: Do you think the war impacted your life in any other way?
LP: [Deep breath followed by long pause.] That’s a, that’s a difficult question to answer. I just took life as it was [emphasis] in those days. I mean, I hadn’t gone into life with any fixed ideas of what I wanted to do [emphasis], where I wanted to go, be [pause]. I think the Royal Air Force completed my education [emphasis], no doubts on that. But other than that there’s not a lot I can say in that respect I don’t – no, ‘cause I never really thought about it.
SB: Okay. I’m now going to ask another question, which I don’t know what it means, but too many carrots.
LP: [Laughs.] Oh dear me [SB laughs]. How right you are there [laughs], yes. For many moons after leaving the Air Force, I couldn’t look a carrot in the eye [SB laughs]. It was purely a story which was put out to cover our radar system which were working very well and we didn’t want the Germans to know about it, so they said they said that they discovered that by feeding us up with an excess of carrots [emphasis], as such, it gave us extra eyesight [emphasis] which enabled us to see those [?] things which they couldn’t see. It was purely a story [laughs], it wasn’t fact. But as I say, we were dosed up with carrots left, right and centre, even though we didn’t believe it ourselves. But there you are.
SB: Right, let’s move back again to after the war. Are you the only two daughters?
LP: No –
Other: No there’s five of us.
LP: There were five children altogether.
SB: Mhm.
LP: We, when we were in Binbrook, my wife became pregnant there, and we thought “now, we’ve got to, we’re not going to live in a little village for the rest of our lives, we’ve got to do [emphasis] something,” you know. We had friends who were living down in Torquay at the time, and he, we made contact with them and he said “look, I can get hold of you a taxi licence down here to start with,” but he said “there’s bags of scope you can tow a caravan and things like that, bags of scope. Come down here and we’ll sort you out” which we did, and we developed quite a good caravan towing business [emphasis] believe it or not. I managed to get established with a company there who got the rights for just about every caravan manufacturer [laughs] in the world, and everything which was sold in Devon and Cornwall went through his books, and I was involved in [laughs] delivering an awful lot of these caravans. That took quite a few years that. His company changed hands and a company which had got offices, well offices, a garage and business in North London, they took over there, and after a time, I forget the number of years, wasn’t very long, a year or so, the London office contacted me and said “look, there’s a job for you here, we want someone as a garage manager, we’re doing car and caravan sales and maintenance and all the rest of it, you got all the appearance, all the qualifications, come up here and see what we can do,” which we did. So we sold up down in Devon, moved up to Waltham Cross [emphasis] in North London. [Pause] and –
SB: At what point did you come to Lowestoft?
LP: Sorry?
SB: What point did you come to Lowestoft?
LP: Oooh, now then, we stayed, worked at that garage, I think for about three years, could have been longer, time’s difficult to work, I’d have to research that now. During that time I learned to be a driving instructor as part of the set up of the garage, it was an asset to the garage, so I qualified as a driving instructor. Did that for a spell purely as a break, and then Rumbellows is a company you may have heard of, formally owned by Thornley Electrical [?] were just setting up a business, they got lots of people who were in debt to the Thorn Organisation, and they didn’t just want to close it down and just lose it, they took over the various businesses [?] and ran them, and I joined Rumbellows then, and I finished up as senior buyer for them, we got over five-hundred branches. We were the biggest company, business in the country and I actually took an early retirement from them. But this time we’d been down to the Isle of Wight a couple of times, really [emphasis] liked it down there and decided we were going to move down to the Isle of Wight while I was still young enough to do something about it. And we were negotiating to buy a bed and breakfast house [emphasis], quite a large house, with a couple of taxis and a bus, a minibus, so I took my PSP licence as a bus driver, and somebody had to, and we were on the points of moving down there when problems developed with the roof of the property. We couldn’t negotiate with the owner, he was adamant there was nothing wrong with the roof. Our surveyor had said “don’t touch it with a barge pole” [laughs] “you won’t get a mortgage or anything on it.” So we’d already sold our house in North London, so my wife’s sister was living here in Lowestoft, said “why don’t you come here, it’s a nice place to live and it’s cheap,” which we did.
SB: Hmm. So you certainly took off in a different direction after the war.
LP: Oh lord yes.
SB: Hmm.
LP: Yes.
SB: Yeah.
LP: Yes.
SB: Okay, so, I’d like to throw in a quick question to you two now, if I can. You’ve mentioned your association with 153 Squadron. Have you always been involved with your dad’s role in the war, or has it affected you –
Other 1:No –
Other 2: I think he’s always had acquaintances –
O1: Yeah –
O2: He’s always – his friends have been friends that you’ve had since you were in the RAF.
O1: Hmm. Always been aware of it.
O2: Hmm.
O1: It’s been something that has been a constant particularly with the –
LP It’s sort of –
O1: The annual reunion made it a –
LP: It gradually built up along the line, I mean, this has gone on for seventy years [laughs] now, which is a long time. Initially we used to meet up at the Grand Hotel in Lincoln, that went on. As time went by, I think it was with Bill, your husband, where it was a matter of getting somebody who would come up with me, and drive and things like that, I think that possibly started it.
O2: But you’ve never spoken of your emotions during the war, you’ve just seen it as a [emphasis] job, you went out and you did it and –
LP: Oh it was a job to do, I mean, we – don’t forget I was in London during the bombing, rescuing, or, not rescuing [emphasis], recovering my wife’s family and many [emphasis] other families, simply driving them out Epping Forest and getting them somewhere safe [emphasis]. I saw the damage, I remember one time I cycled from Eastham, East London where we living to Euston Road in North London to tell them that I couldn’t get into work today because the place had been bombed. I just thought I had to do [emphasis] something specific [emphasis], and although we were doing specialist work where we in the engineering side, we were on research of plastics and all that sort of thing, but I wanted to do something more. Hence basically I wanted to be a pilot [emphasis] and shoot them down. But it developed from I didn’t get into Fighter Command I got in Bomber Command instead, which I never regretted [emphasis], because that was a different life altogether.
SB: And did you feel better by doing [emphasis] something –
LP: Oh yes, yes. Yes I –
SB: How did you feel about the Germans?
LP: Quite bitter, because I saw the wanton [?] damage they did to London in the early stages, where there was no reason [emphasis] for what they bombed. It was just random bombing of London as such, and I think I got a bit cross over that, I didn’t like it.
SB: Hmm. [Pause.] Did you ever meet up with any of the flyers from the German [unclear]?
LP: Yes, oddly enough, yes. Many years ago when I was a member of the local Aircrew Association, with a colleague who lived just outside Norwich, we attended one meeting there, and a German pilot came and gave us a talk [emphasis]. He was welcomed, and we got on very [emphasis] well with him, because basically he was part of the family [emphasis]. We were just doing a job and that was it. It wasn’t, I don’t think there was anything personal about it whatsoever.
SB: Do you have any idea how your parents felt about you joining up?
LP: Oooh [pause]. I don’t think – well my mother was obviously very worried [emphasis] about it. My father accepted it, I think they just accepted it. Because it was the sort of thing that went on, families did that sort of in those days, it wasn’t pleasant [emphasis], they didn’t like [emphasis] it for one minute, but I think they accepted it.
SB: Had your father been in the First World War?
LP: No.
SB: No.
LP: No, he was, he was slightly disabled, and as such he wouldn’t have been in the service at all.
SB: Okay, so, any other thoughts at all about that period and how it might have affected your life later on?
LP: [Pause.] All I can think of is that it completed my education, gave me a different outlook on life, which initially might have been quite restricted [pause]. And I suppose really it gave me a wider outlook on life [emphasis], not just do one thing and that’s it, but try other things as well, you know.
SB: And you say you’ve just had your annual reunion?
LP: Yes, yes.
SB: Where was that one held?
LP: That was at the Bentley [emphasis] Hotel. Wonderful story there, we stayed at the Grand Hotel in Lincoln for many, many [emphasis] years, quick guess, fifty years, round figures. And we got to know the staff and the owners there, it, they became part of the personal family because it was Lincoln [emphasis] and they were used to aircrew, and eventually the Grand Hotel as such got involved with health and safety because they were two, originally two hotels side by side, adjoining, and they became one, but they were on slightly different levels, and, well it got involved and they decided that they, it couldn’t run as a hotel anymore and it would have cost too much to bring it up to the necessary standard. So they moved out to the Bentley, they moved out to, they had a place built at the Bentley just outside Lincoln, and we stayed with them. Because mainly the family connections, they’d known us for many years, it was our second home [emphasis] you know almost, to go back there every year, so. Yeah, we recently, couple of weeks ago we had a reunion where we went to the Bentley Hotel, we were due to go to RAF Conningsby on the Saturday morning but the Lancaster had a problem and she caught fire on the starboard outer, not it was port outer, but got home safely, but covered in foam, so it’s, so she’s not flying at the moment. So we had to quickly reassemble [?] what we were going to do, had a chat with the bus driver, who the coaches have always done us proud for many years, and we went to RAF Scampton [emphasis], to the museum where they welcomed us and people came in on days off because it was a Saturday [emphasis] and these places only run five day week now. And from there we went to Scampton Church and met up with the vicar, she was more than pleased to see us I think. We had an organ recital there by one of our members, because by this time we acquired, I think that’s the best way of putting it, lots of honorary members who were part of the family in other words, fathers and sons and daughters, as Valerie is to me, a member of the family. We got something like thirty odd people at the Scampton Church. We’d already been to RAF Scampton, to the museum as I said, yeah we had a dinner there at the pub in Scampton village and then our bus driver took us for a tour round Lincoln, showed us the site of the new Bomber Command Memorial, where it was to be built and all the rest of it, and also the Cathedral to see the grounds, which the people from Holland [emphasis] had set up to commemorate, commemorate Operation Manna, where there, all the flowers were there, that was very nice. Incidentally, that one, the Operation Manna, that was one of those trips that you did that you felt you’d achieved something [emphasis], when instead of dropping bombs and killing people, you dropped food and fed [emphasis] people. That felt good, that was an achievement definitely. Not a lot more I can say really, you need time to rehearse these things and look them all out.
SB: I think you’ve done fairly well so far.
O2: The Bentley Hotel still has the photos of the original 153 Squadron on display in one of their meeting rooms don’t they?
LP: Oh yeah, several bits and pieces, yeah.
SB: Well thank you very much, I’ll stop it at this point.
LP: Mhm.
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 Leslie Robert Pearson
Creator
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Sheila Bibb
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-05-31
Format
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00:47:02 audio recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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APearsonL150531
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.
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
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
Germany
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
Germany--Berchtesgaden
Temporal Coverage
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1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
Description
An account of the resource
Les Pearson was in reserved occupation as an apprentice in general mechanical engineering, but he volunteered as aircrew. He initially trained as a pilot but was remustered as a bomb aimer. He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 153 Squadron from RAF Scampton. He describes the crewing up process, the preparations of the crew before an operation and his duties during the flight. He was posted to Special Duties after the war, and describes his family life after the war.
12 Squadron
153 Squadron
aircrew
bomb aimer
crewing up
Lancaster
military living conditions
RAF Binbrook
RAF Scampton
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/307/3464/PMooreWT1506.2.jpg
ba450a2587f7d4bdd809b39eda3c5fa9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/307/3464/AMooreWT160703.2.mp3
6fa0b673061052f9a9f442da1a4176b2
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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Moore, Bill
William Tait Moore
William T Moore
William Moore
W T Moore
W Moore
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. Three oral history interviews with William Tait "Bill" Moore (1924 - 2019, 1823072 Royal Air Force) and five photographs. He served as a navigator with 138 Squadron.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-28
2016-03-18
2016-07-06
Rights
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Interview Agreement Form - Moore, WT, William Moore-03
Identifier
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Moore, WT
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
TO: Right, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, whatever the case may be. This interview is being filmed for the International Bomber Command Centre. The gentleman I’m interviewing is Mr Bill Moore. My name is Thomas Ozel and we’re recording this interview on the 3rd of July 2016. Now, could you please tell me what year you were born?
WM: 1924.
TO: Mhm. And when you were a child, were you interested in aircraft?
WM: The first time I was introduced to the aircraft was when I was taken to Guyun [?] Southern Highlander’s annual camp and that was when I came in contact with my, my first aircraft. And at that time, I was a drummer [?] boy in a band [?], and at that time my father had made me eighteen month older and I was supposed to be because otherwise I would have been too young to have went to the camp with men. As a matter of fact, that eighteen months stood by me for the rest of my life.
TO: And whereabouts did you grow up?
WM: I grew up in a town called Dunoon which is on the Firth of Clyde in Argyllshire in Scotland.
TO: And were your parents involved in the First World War?
WM: My father was, yes. As a matter of fact I just told somebody the other day, that I knew where my father was a hundred years ago. In other words, he was right through the whole of the First World War. He was a great battles, the Battles of Boulogne [?], first and the second one, and also the one that was also celebrated this week. And then he was actually taken prisoner by German forces and he was taken to Poland, and he worked in Poland there and that was, and that was until the armistice came along. In other words, he had about, he about between six and nine months as a prisoner of war, mm.
TO: And what was your first job?
WM: My first job, all depends how you mean your first job. If you mean your first job when you started doing [emphasis] something and getting paid for it, well I was delivering milk and newspapers in the morning. Later on I delivered butcher, butcher meats and I delivered the evening papers, and among one of the most famous characters I delivered to was Sir Harry Lauder, who was a very famous Scottish singer and comedian. And every time I went there I got a farthing [emphasis] each time, which meant that I got a fully penny in one day, but that was four farthings. And I did that from, from Monday to Saturday. And anyway, after that of course I left school, but I left school when I was thirteen. The reason I left school when I was thirteen was because it was during the Great Depression years and every penny my family could earn was to be encouraged because people needed it to survive [emphasis], although my father was always in work, but that was about it because I used to come in. And that was what my mother saved the money so that I could have my school books paid for, instead of, instead of waiting for someone to pass on second hand books to me.
TO: And in the 1930s, did you hear about Hitler’s aggressive behaviour?
WM: Well yes. As a matter of fact, of course I did, but it was quite, quite strange. Go back further than that, when I was a young boy, I was in what we called the Boys Brigade, which was just an organisation but it was started, it started way back in 1883 by a chap called William Smith, and the uniform they had then [emphasis] was, was taken more or less from the Third Lanark Rifle Volunteers in Scotland. It wasn’t military but the idea was for discipline, because in those days Scotland, Scotland and discipline was two things that people wanted, although with me, that was many years later. I did not meet Sir William Smith himself but I knew both of his sons who carried on the Boys Brigade after him, and also I met Mrs McVicker in Belfast in Northern Ireland when I used to take the Boys Brigade myself [emphasis] over there, and that, that was, she was the, she was the wife of the founder of the Boys Brigade in Northern Ireland. When I joined the Boys Brigade it was through the Life Boys, which was a genuine organisation. I went through there and I went right through the Boys Brigade, and at my age, I’m still a member of the Boys Brigade Greater World Fellowship.
TO: Would you mind if I just closed the window?
WM: No, carry on, yeah.
TO: Is that okay?
WM: Oh, you might get the traffic, yeah.
TO: Yeah, is that okay?
WM: Yeah, carry on [pause while window is closed]. That’s okay.
TO: Okay, thank you. And what did you think, what did you think of Chamberlain?
WM: Well first of all, going back before Chamberlain’s time and before he was making speeches, what I was saying is we used to look at news reels and we used to see about all the equipment that the German boys and girls were getting, and at times we were quite envious of it, because there was gymnastics, there was gymnastics, I was swimming, I was hiking, I was doing all these same things as, as a, the German Youth were there. Maybe not so severely [emphasis], but that was where the Boys Brigade, as I’ve just said.
TO: Mhm. Sorry, there’s a noise coming from the kitchen. Is it okay if I shut the door to there as well?
WM: Yes, yes, yes –
TO: Sorry [door closes].
WM: Can you stick that through?
TO: Sorry.
WM: You could get a nickel [?].
TO: Yeah [pause during continued background noise]. Sorry about this, sorry. And what did you think of the Munich Agreement?
WM: Well, put it, put it this way. What did happen was that I think growing up at that particular time, we weren’t really interested too much in politics, but then we began to gather that things were getting rather serious. And the big thing that was going around at that time was, was people sincere? And there’d been so many promises broken that, and I’m talking about Scotland now, was the people in Scotland at that time just said, ‘well if, if these people keep on breaking promises, what’s, what’s the Prime Minister going to do? Is he going to be leaving it [could be believing it].’ And of course, it seems, it seemed to us at that particular time that he was being foreborstered [?], brainwashed and as if he was being used as, as they all were in those days was, is a patsy.
TO: And what did you think of Churchill?
WM: Well, Churchill in the early days was quite a hero [emphasis] because he was a type of fellow who had been through the Boer War, he’d been through the, through the First World War and of course he was still a fiery rebel as far as politics were going as, at that time in the UK.
TO: And do you remember the preparations that were being made for war?
WM: Well, it all depends on who’s side you mean, because the big thing that we noticed, and that was that where, where the German forces were going over [?], taking over different places. Some of them were, were considered to be German lands of former times, but, but even when they came to Austria and they were welcomed into Austria, at times we wondered whether there were other people there who weren’t quite happy about it, with this, you know? But it wasn’t ‘til, it wasn’t ‘til as we say, clouds [?] are going that, and horizon, as if the, all the promises that were given, made were just null and void. The reason we said that was at that particular time was because the fact was that even, even being with Chamberlain, trying to negotiate [emphasis], and of course France as well were negotiations to see if they could actually bring about a more sensible [emphasis] approach, ‘cause people like my father said that the terms of various things that had been laid in after [emphasis] the First World War were so severe that it was almost impossible for the, for the German people not [emphasis] to revolt against these conditions, and of course this is what people were thinking in the UK at that particular time, was that that’s what they were trying to do was just to regain what had been lost. But of course later on when it came into the, these negotiations that they had, nobody was very sure [emphasis] whether that Chamberlain was playing for time or not. It could have been, it could have been a great strategy on his [emphasis] part. Many people think it was, many people think that he was quite gullible. But if one reads on the history of the Royal Air Force, well the Royal Air Force was starting an amalgamation between the, the Fleet Air Arm, or the Naval Services. The Naval Service became the Royal Air Force and that was 1918. Now, with that coming on, we noticed as young people, we noticed that there was different things happening [emphasis], and also, I remember at one time I noticed that the, the talk was about different types of aircraft, ‘cause that was through the magazine I used to subscribe to. And then of course what happened, I was in the school cadets in my grammar school in Dunoon and we, we were the Army cadets, and of course we wore the kilt et cetera, the same as the local Hern [?] Division, and the Guyun [?] Southern Highlanders. Anyway, I, I started thinking about aeroplanes and there was an organisation just started up which was called the Air Defence Cadet Corps. Well this Air Defence Corps, Cadet Corps, the nearest place to Dunoon where I was, was at what is now Glasgow Airport, and I had to find a handout, to find the money for to go in the boat and train and go up there and attend the lectures et cetera what was necessary to do to be a member of the Air Defence Cadet Corps. Anyway, of course along came different aircraft that we saw, and the, the first of the new [emphasis] ones that I saw and touched was the Wellington Bombers, and that Wellington Bomber came up to me, to Abbotsinch, which is, as I said, Glasgow Airport. Abbotsinch I managed to walk through it and I was absolutely taken with it. As a matter of fact I felt as if I’d fallen in love with it. And then of course what happened, things went from one to another, and then of course along came, along came the Polish incident and with that Polish incident of course it was followed very closely in Scotland because the people of Scotland, people of Poland were always very close [emphasis]. A lot of people don’t realise [emphasis] that but it was a fact, because I always remember that they used to send boxes of eggs from Poland and what we used to do, we used to buy these boxes, these crates, and we’d turn them into canoes that we, that we lined with canvas, and we used to sail in the Clyde. But that, you know, that was, that was our knowledge of in Poland on that day, apart from what I’d been told by my father. Anyway, what happened was along came, along came, as I say, with the trouble in Poland, and of course, then of course the First World, the Second World War started and at that time, being in the Boys Brigade and being in the Air Cadet Defence Corps, I was nominated as a member of the ARP, the Air Raids Precautions people, as a messenger. Then that was fine, that was alright but I still had to go to my lessons with the Cadets, but that was alright, everybody carried on. That carried on and then of course along came, along came 1941 [emphasis] and that was when the Air Training Corps started, and I, I went along. I had to say I was finished with the Air Defence Cadet Corps which everybody else [emphasis] was, and we signed up for the Air Training Corps. That was quite strange, that was on a Monday night, and I went back along on the Friday [emphasis] night at the first official meeting, and we fell in and we fell in ranks according to sizes et cetera, et cetera, and I was made a flight sergeant. And the reason was that, I asked them and said ‘oh no, you’ve had training [emphasis] in the Air Defence Cadet Corps, so you know probably more about it than instructors do,’ because they were all school teachers who had volunteered to do that cadet work, and of course being made a flight sergeant, without uniform of course, it took a wee while to get uniforms, but that was it, and that was, that was me well and truly a part of the Royal Air Force. Anyway, that went down very well and I passed all the examinations. My aim was to become a member of aircrew. I fancied that, not just the glamour of it but there was a practical side. Anyway the, along came a day when I went along to Edinburgh and I took all my papers, exam papers and everything else, and bearing in mind that I was a year and a half older than I was on paper than I was supposed to be, and when I got into Edinburgh the chap says to me, ‘are you sure [emphasis]?’ I said ‘yes.’ He said ‘what you were doing?’ So I told him, he says ‘oh, that seems alright,’ he says ‘alright,’ he says ‘we want you to go along to this hotel and you stay there and you come back here in the morning, and you go there and you find that you’ll be registered and et cetera, et cetera.’ So I did that, go back there the next day and there were one or two other chaps around that I knew, and we, we went in again [emphasis] and we had exams to take and tests to take and, a by the time the day was finished I was a member of the Royal Air Force, and what they did to us was that they gave us a little silver badge that we, we had to wear at all times. And that was to show that we were a fully fledged member of the Royal Air Force, and all we had to do then was just wait until they were ready to take us in [emphasis]. And it wasn’t, it wasn’t being called up for National Service, we were all volunteers of course, which is a big difference because we were already members, voluntary members, and of course the, joining the Air Force like that you volunteered. But as I say, after that, once you’re in, you didn’t get to volunteer again [laughs]. You, you’re then volunteered [emphasis, laughs].
TO: And do you remember what you were doing on the day the war started?
WM: The day the war started, yes [tape beeps]. It was a Sunday morning and I was at a bible class in Dunoon, and shortly after that the sirens went and we all had to go to a post. And with us at that particular time, as I say, I was with the ARP. So we had to go there and be ready for to, for to be messengers. That was what, that was what my job was then, to be a messenger [emphasis], so I had to go to my post, which we all knew where we had to go to, and that was it. But after the all clear went then we stood down again, no, mm. But of course there was, was times when there were raids on the Clyde and all the rest of it later on, and my compatriots had a lot of hair raising activities. Most of that by that time I was, I was in the Royal Air Force.
TO: And was there much bomb damage or bombing around where you lived?
WM: Well, not so much on my [emphasis] side of the Clyde but across the water on the Firth, right from Greenock and Glasgow, Greenock and Port Glasgow, right up the Clyde, right up to Clydebank into Glasgow itself. Oh yes, all the industrial areas. There was quite a lot of very heavy damage, yes.
TO: And when the war started, were you, were you expecting that German bombers would be coming on the first day?
WM: Oh yes, well that was, that was it. It wasn’t, it wasn’t long after that there was a couple of raids that was, that was, that came across Scotland before there was even, even them in England, yes.
TO: And how did you actually feel when you heard the war had started?
WM: Well, put it this way, with having quite a knowledge from my father about his experiences, and what we had, what we had actually seen on the news reels about Poland, and I really mean about Poland, that was when we realised what could happen, yeah.
TO: And did you watch news reels a lot at the cinema?
WM: Oh yes, oh yes. Yeah, when you went to the, when you went to the cinemas there was always, always a portion for the news reels at the beginning of every performance, and that was very good. The news reels were very good, they, they brought everything to you, mm [papers shuffle].
TO: And so when you volunteered for aircrew, what kind of medical tests did they give you?
WM: Well, you had, you had a full medical. You know, you had blood, heart, you had all sorts of things done and then, you even had a type, a place where it was called up [?] on night vision. We never knew about night vision in those days and we were told, told about that and you had a test to see whether you could, you could see and come back again and your vision – you had, you were taken into a darkened room and they had various sort of tests they gave you in there, including different things and different numbers and the results was in different colours [emphasis], and if you, if you, if you could identify these things through these different colours then that meant that your, that your night vision was quite good, and you passed and you could identify then, then you’re dropped out. ‘Cause that was one of the main things at that particular time, was night vision.
TO: And what role did you train for aboard, in aircrew?
WM: Sorry?
TO: What, what position, as in, were you trained for?
WM: Well you see, when I went to Edinburgh I was classified PNB, pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, you know, the idea being that you selected for that term [?]. Anyway, what happened then was that I was called, called to the colours, not called up, I was called to the colours which once again, as I say, was different from being called up for National Service, very proud of that of course. Anyway, I, I got a notification to go to London and there I went to, to Lords Cricket Ground and, with many other people. There was one or two people that I’d met on the train, met down there before, went inside and some of these fellows I still know today, which is quite amazing. Anyway, what happened there in, in, at Lourdes, you – and there is a big plaque there today, big black plaque indicating that was where the aircrew was at that particular time. Going back to that, we had further [emphasis] tests and, I suppose to see whether anything had happened in between times, and then we, we got all the usual jabs for left and right, two arms up together and that one and that one going along r at the same time and, and then you had FFIs and things like that, and then of course you came along to another [emphasis] big room and that’s where you started getting your uniform. And there was a system [?] what you’re gonna get, when you’re gonna get, and by the time you got to the end you wonder if you’re able to carry everything, you know. Anyway, we all managed to get there, and at the end of that we were introduced to a corporal, two stripes. Now, we thought that was a high rank [phone rings], oh –
TO: Is that a phone call?
WM: I’d better take it. Sorry about that [tape beeps]. It’s a bummer [?] –
TO: Hmm, anyway –
WM: Anyway.
TO: So you spoke to her [unclear] –
WM: So anyway, as I was saying, we, we were then under this corporal [laughs]. He, he told us that he would be looking after us in more ways than one [emphasis] for the, for the next few days. Anyway, we went along in London to a place called Avenue Close which was a new block of flats in St. John’s Wood which had been built and never been occupied, and the Royal Air Force used that for all their new recruits, and, but there’s no, there’s no canteen facilities there, no mess hall, and we went across to Regent Park’s zoo where we dined. The animals had been evacuated and we were there in place of the animals [laughs].
TO: And did you train to be a navigator?
WM: Put it, put it this way, what happens, all depends how deep you want me to go into this, I don’t know. Anyway, what happened was that we had to, we had to pass more, several tests there. They were very strenuous, very strenuous, extremely strenuous, you know. And then of course we were there for about a week, and we were all setting off to different places and the group that I went with was up into the north east of England, to a town called Scarborough where they had quite a number of initial training wings. And what they were, they were just like boarding schools [laughs], certainly a little bit different but that’s what we took them to be. It was just like going back to school or college and starting all over again, and my one was number seventeen, and I was in what we called the Odelpha [?] Hotel, which is a hotel right opposite the Italian gardens in Scarborough. Now, there we studied navigation, theories of flight, engines, just about everything, even how to use a knife and fork in the mess, and that is quite true [laughs]. That seems quite a thing but that was quite true [laughs]. But that was a little on the side [?] there. But we actually studied all of these things, and at the same time we had to do guard duties and various other things like that, and there was two or three times when we were there, there were air raids go on and even a time when there was suspected that we might have had a German couple of U-boats in, about eight boats coming along and they expected them to come up and be looking for certain people that were there on that shore [?] there, people who had been at a conference and we were all turned out for that. They didn’t tell us very much about it but later on we heard it was Churchill and the cabinet members in the Retreat as they call it nowadays. Anyway, but that was, we didn’t know anything, why it was [unclear]. Anyway, what happened was that we had to sit the final exams and everybody in there was doing the same exams, you know? Anyway, what happened after, I passed, I pass through that quite successfully and I was waiting a posting. My posting then was a place called Scone [pronounced Scun], not Scone, Scone [pronounce Scun, emphasis], which is just, just outside of Perth in Scotland and that was where you got to learn to fly on Tiger Moths. Now, when you flew in Tiger Moths up there, we had already been classified from ACs to AC1s and when we, we went up to Scone, actually passed Scone in the Tiger Moths and we thought we could be trusted to do a couple of circuits and you came back down. They didn’t give you wings in those days, they gave you a propeller, always a propeller on your left sleeve, and then we became a leading aircraftsman, which was your first step up. Anyway, what happened after that, I, I was sent from there all the, all the kit bags and everything, and I was sent to a place called Broughton-in-Furness. Broughton-in-Furness, it was like a commander course, only the Royal Air Force calls it an escape course, and you did everything on there that you could possibly do if you were trying to escape. It was always put down to you in the Air Force that you had to try and escape if you were taken prisoner. That was, that was a thing. It was always drilled into you, if you could get back, so much the better. Anyway, that was, that was all about. When that was finished I went to a place called Heaton Park in Manchester. Now, Heaton Park in Manchester, it was mostly Nissan huts, the old corrugated iron ones, you know? And sometimes you also got billeted out with the local people, sometimes you’re lucky and you did both. Well we, we were quite lucky. We were billeted out, and just within a stone’s throw off Heaton Park [laughs], and we, we were with a landlady whose husband was in the Middle East at that time, and we used to pay her half a crown, was two shillings and sixpence in those days and that was for, to leave the snub [?] off the window so that we could lift the window sash up and crawl in after half past ten at night. Well she used to make, she used to make a cup of bronzer [?] up for that [laughs], because she had let out two rooms and that was eight of us in her house, yeah. Anyway, the, everybody knew it happened, but you’re [unclear] to be in by eleven. It was just in case you had trouble getting back you know. Anyway, if you were in the main camp, you had to make sure you were in at half ten at night [laughs]. Anyway, after that we were, we were taken back into the camp, and this was a big camp. There was hundreds of people in there and guesses – we didn’t do a lot of paperwork there but we did a lot of physical training, marching, all that sort of thing, and every time the, every time the Royal Air Force tunes went up you had to march to attention. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you had to march to attention. Anyway, what happened after that, you got your uniform. Now, if you were going to, to South Africa, we, we began to learn these things, you went to South Africa you get tropical kit but long [emphasis] trousers. If you were going to Rhodesia, you get tropical kits with short [emphasis] trousers. If you’re going to America, you more or less get issued with civvies, as we called them, and if you were going to Canada then you were alright. Anyway, what happened to us was that we got issued with short trousers and we said ‘oh no, we know what we are [?], we’re going to Rhodesia. That’s pilot training,’ et cetera, et cetera. Good, anyway, we got shipped out, we were on a ship called The Andes [emphasis]. You’ll see a little thing there –
TO: Oh yes.
WM: Andes, you know, ship.
TO: Oh right.
WM: And I’ll show you it afterwards.
TO: Yeah, show me it afterwards.
WM: But what it was, was this ship, The Andes was brand new in the Clyde in nineteen, 1939, and it disappeared then came back again all painted grey, but where we [emphasis] met it, we met her in Liverpool. And this friend of mine, Alec Care, we must have joined up, helped each other, and we were on the ship and we said ‘bye-bye’ to Liverpool. There’s the – ‘bye-bye, bye-bye,’ you know, and we sailed down the Mersey. Anyway, a while after that we, I judged that we had been round the head of Northern Ireland, go down the west coast, and now they could, well according to roughly the speed of the ship and that, and we’d be near the Bay of Biscay. All of a sudden night fell and I said to my friend, ‘Alec, this boat’s going the wrong way.’ He said ‘you and your Clyde navigation.’ I said, ‘this boat’s going the wrong way [emphasis], we’re now going back north.’ So we ended back up in the Mersey again. Then what happened, we got in there because I suppose they got word there was a pack of U-boats around, you know, and that’s why they changed us. Anyway, we got up into the Mersey and looked across and I said to Alec, I said, ‘there’s the five-three-four over there.’ He says, ‘what’s a five-three-four?’ I say, ‘I’m not telling you, you might be a spy.’ He says, ‘euch.’ I says ‘oh, that’s a five-three-four.’ He says, ‘come on Bill, what is it?’ And I say, ‘that’s the Queen Mary.’ ‘Oh.’ Anyway, we admired this big ship because, well I knew her from the Clyde right from when one of my great uncles was helping to build here. Anyway, there she was. Anyway, we, we had a meal there, and the next thing we heard was the whistle went, ‘all RAF personnel so and so and so and so,’ went ‘oh that’s us, what’s happened now? Oh.’ ‘Get all your kit together, assemble here in, in fifteen minutes.’ ‘Oh boy that was, that was quick.’ ‘Cause you hadn’t, hadn’t taken in any kit bag, was just us, you stood up so it was just a matter of taking your kit bags and going to deck. We were then taken across onto the Queen Mary, and we were weighed [?] down so far in I thought we were going to go to New Zealand or somewhere, and [laughs] – anyway, the Queen Mary set off and a few days later we were in New York [emphasis]. We didn’t see a lot of New York, we had a bit of leave time on the promise that we wouldn’t be late coming back, so that was good, and we got on a train and we went up to Moncton, New Brunswick. All the way up to Canada by train which was a great experience for us, ‘cause the first thing we noticed was the food. Now, there was nothing rationed, this was American trains and we were getting the best of everything. Anyway, we got to Moncton, New Brunswick and the, and we were not given any winter clothing because we were still in this kit that we thought we were going to Rhodesia, so anyway [laughs], for two or three days we walked about up there and they used to call us ‘Scors’ because we were walking around with blankets on us to keep us warm, mm [laughs]. Anyway, that was, that was all part of the trials and tribulations. Then of course was, we were told to fall in and you, you, you’re told that you’re now going to a training station. They didn’t tell you where you were going, they just told you’re going to a training station. So we got on a train, and this was the Canadian national railways and we said, ‘well, Canadian pacific goes that side and nation [?] is that side, mm, oh well, fair enough.’ So we landed up in Winnipeg, went all the way through to Winnipeg, then we got off that [emphasis] train and we went up to another [emphasis] one, up past Portage la Prairie and then the railway finished so we got, we got on we’ll call it a bus [emphasis], and this took us up to Dauphin, Manitoba and then we, we were at Paulson and Dauphin and there we did bombing and gunnery training. We did all these sort of elements again that, that everyone had to go through the same things, and then the next round of course we did, we did flying training and, and then of course we did the navigation, another step up. That was fine and we were still all together, no deviations. Then of course we passed all that and I had a, I had an excellent, I had an excellent bombing record, really excellent one if I say so myself, you know. Anyway, next thing we knew, we graduated from there. You had to pass, it was a hundred percent pass, you know, there was always people dropping out and, but we carried on and we went, we went down, down [emphasis] the line to Portage la Prairie. Portage on the Prairie, that was – now that there [emphasis] was the school for air observers, you know? That was number seventeen air observer school, Portage la Prairie, and there of course we, we got changed around a bit. I was told that I was a good candidate for, to be air observer. I said, ‘how about piloting?’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘if you’re an observer you’ll get to fly as well. You’ll get to pilot as well,’ you know. I said ‘well that’s okay.’ He did really ‘cause you were told [emphasis], you know? Anyway, I graduated from there. I got my wings there, and eventually, eventually ‘cause we [coughs], we went back to Moncton, New Brunswick and we got on a ship to come back to the UK and that ship I recognised as [laughs] the Empress of Japan. I said to my friend, I said ‘I don’t like that name, Empress of Japan,’ you know. We got up beside it and it’s now called the Empress of Scotland [laughs]. They had changed its name. Now this was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, so we come back, we come back across the Atlantic, the North Atlantic, and we sailed up the Clyde and eventually we went to a place called Harrogate. So Harrogate we were more or less brought back to earth again. Rations of course still, instead of the food we’d been having in Canada and that, you know, America. And we, we then – well the [laughs]. It was quite strange, they gave us another FFI to see if we’re alright and we’re okay that way, and another medicals to see if we’re alright, you know? And the next thing I knew, I was, I was in a detour [?], so my friend went that way and I went that way, so that was it. Anyway, I landed up at a place which is just outside of Wolverhampton, and this was an advanced navigation and low flying school called Halfpenny Green. Now, quite a number of years ago they made a film there and then called it “Halfpenny Field,” but it was Halfpenny Green [emphasis], and today it’s been nominated to be Wolverhampton Airport. Anyway, what we were doing there is that we were taught low lying pass flying, landing on beaches, landing on small areas and we wondered why this was all about, you know? But anyway, we didn’t ask any questions, you just did as you’re told and [laughs], ‘cause you’ve already volunteered [laughs]. Anyway, that was it and we [unclear] was successful, it was, it was excellent. We [tape beeps] treetops. We were making bomb, making, making bomb attacks on the railway bridges across the Severn and even, even the RAF stations that knew we were coming but of course they weren’t open up at us ‘cause they knew it was an exercise, and all various target like that. And also as I say, we were learning to land on short, short runways or grass and beaches and all sorts of fancy things like that. Anyway, this was all preparation because what you didn’t realise that you were, you were being selected there, and that was, that was when I was, I felt as if there was something, something strange [emphasis] about all of this because everybody was going to do different things, and that was where, where, where we were taken aside one day and told out where we were going to, you know? And some of the, some of the chaps went one way and I went another way and I landed up in this aerodrome which the first thing I had to do was sign the Secrets Act all over [emphasis] again, because you’d always, everybody signed it but this was what they called a double one, extremely secret, you know? Now, with that all I could see around this place was a multitude of different types of aircraft [laughs]. So we wondered what this was all about. Normally you went to an air station there would be two different types or something like that but on this particular one there was several, you know? And, and of course [laughs, pause] what we, erm, I’ll bring it back [pause], hmm.
TO: Was this for the SOE?
WM: Yeah, this is, this is, this is really the beginning of the training for that, you know? Well the, we had been doing the training, you know, and of course, as I say, when we were, what we were doing this sort of thing, you see, the secrecy that was coming up, we really wondered what we were, what we were doing [emphasis], you know? Anyway, we were told then that we had joined 138 Squadron, you know? Now, just like everything else, nobody ever knew what 138 Squadron was doing or any other squadron, but we soon began to find out what it was. And it always seemed strange at the beginning that no one would tell us much and we began to wonder what we were doing there, and we were, we were confined to the station. We were confined to the station for at least two weeks [laughs]. Anyway, that’s what we, what we were doing then was we were, we were learning to fly once again low level at night time. We had to do all sorts of things and [pause] we just – oh we were introduced, we were introduced to people who were pilots and, and aircrew and to us, you know, they were a bit rag tag and bob tailed by the looks of them, they were, they weren’t exactly all spick and span like we expected us to be, you know [laughs]. Anyway, excuse me a minute.
TO: It’s okay [tape paused and restarted].
WM: We were introduced to groups of people and we were told that ‘you’ll fly with this one and fly with that one, but you might fly in two different ones on the same night.’ ‘Oh, that’s alright.’ ‘So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to introduce everybody, but just remember that when you do get introduced is that, remember what you’re signed [?].’ ‘Cause there was a secret come out, we were at Tempsford. That was the home of the flights for the SOE, and of course there again that was the reason why all these different odd aircraft was lined [?] up, was that they were used for different purposes. Later on what we used to say, we used to say that Bomber Harris used to send over there all the old junk that he didn’t want on Bomber Command [laughs]. Anyway, what happened then was as I say, you got to know the different colours ‘cause by that time, as I, as I, as I say, I was, I was classified and reclassified into what I was doing and this was observer, and that was what I graduated as, and of course I still kept up my flying skills. That’s another story, I’ll come back to that. But anyway, there we were and we, we had one or two short flights with different pilots [phone rings] and we got to know – [tape beeps].
TO: No problem.
WM: No, when we, when we flew with these different chaps, they got to know us, we got to know them and each had their own specialities, and what used to happen then was once, once the powers that be realised that you could do [emphasis] what you’re supposed to be able to do on paper, then they would trust you with an operation. The reason being was that we were using the fields or pieces of, strips of roads or even, even old glider fields, we had to land, and it wasn’t always the best of territory ‘cause we did this with Lysanders which was the single engine one, you know? I got lots of pictures of Lysanders over there somewhere, mm, and the idea being there’s, is that when – you were given a map reference, and you had to study that map reference very carefully. And we never [emphasis] tried to find out how our passengers were, and they didn’t try and find out who we were. There was no communication. The reason being is if we got shot down, or either of us got taken prisoners you couldn’t, you couldn’t tell them about the other ones, alright? ‘Cause the ACA [?] people were considered to be a different category from what, even what we were, and we were a different category from them entirely, and we were a different category from normal aircrew, and even – that was known in Germany, that was known. Don’t tell me how they got to know but that’s another story. Anyway, we did, we did several of these operations. We were taking people out and sometimes it was a matter of taking two people or three people about. Squash, it was a bit of a squeeze in the, in the Lysander but we weren’t [?] gonna enjoy the ride, and all I could say was all the trips that I made was very successful, and I flew with certainly [?] different pilots from time to time on that. Then of course likewise they had different observers, you know? But we had great faith in each other, and the navigation aids that we had was elementary map reading, night flying et cetera. We didn’t have the joy of T and all the other things that came up later on. We were actually doing it like the old time pilot, many, many years before.
TO: I don’t know how much detail you can tell me about this, but when you brought these agents over from Britain to Europe, did you have a certain, were you, did you have an arranged landing field?
WM: Oh yes, when we, you know, same thing [?] we left, we left Tempsford. Well, I knew where we were going [emphasis], I had to know where we were going, and the pilot knew where he was going but I took him there, you know? I took him there, passengers there. Well these passengers were known to be coming. There would be a reception committee ready for them to whisk them away as soon as they were on the ground, oh yes. There was a good communications, yes.
TO: And did you ever see any German aircraft when you were flying on these missions?
WM: Oh yes, yes. There’s – oh we, well, put it this way. In those days we were flying low [emphasis], very low, and we weren’t too bothered about it. Now and again you run into a bit of trouble, but the night fighters was mostly come to different bits, I’ll tell you more about that, alright? But the, even, even by all the secrets that we had, there was a terrible tragedy that happened through the London office where somebody infiltrated into the London office SOE, and they, they gave away people on the ground, and they were just massacred. But you know, that was one of those terrible things about that, and that was country man to country man, and I’m sorry to say that was in Holland, mm. But we, we, we never knew exactly how our people got on, alright, or if we were picking somebody up and taking them back to the UK, as soon as we landed back at Tempsford they were taken away and we never saw them again, but they were taken away to their different places like that. Quite strange to say there was a big house just quite near here where, where they used to go back you, you know? Did –
TO: Did you, sorry.
WM: No.
TO: Did you – it’s an odd question, but did you get a sense of pride knowing you were helping secret agents?
WM: Oh yes [emphasis], yes. Well as a matter of fact, we, we felt we were doing a good job that way, because the thing was nobody, nobody heard about it, but we knew what was going on, sometimes by results. We got, you know, we got to know back, back on the station how well the people that we had delivered had reacted to what was going on, ‘cause there was just a matter of them infiltrating back into populations and we never heard anything, but if it was a special operation they were going to do, someone would say well, ‘well done chaps,’ or something like that, you know?
TO: So what, what, do you know what year it was that you started helping SOE with this?
WM: 1942.
TO: And was it just western Europe you went to?
WM: Well, well put it this way, what happened after, after a while, we started getting different aircraft, ‘cause in our station we used all the old stuff, Whitleys and things like that and various other ones like that, vintage. Then of course we got, we got one or two of the American ones come in, you know? And there was one time that we were delivering stuff to the Maquis. Now the Maquis was different from SOE, Maquis’s French. So what we were doing, we were delivering guns and ammunition, there was a full load in a Hudson. Now the Hudson was an American aircraft that was designed to land in the prairies, naturally [?] on good tarmac runways, but anywhere a farmer would put up a windsock, that’s where they were designed to for, and one particular time we, we had this load of stuff, full load, and we had to land on this area and it turned out to be, it was an old glider drone where people used to learn to fly gliders [emphasis] in France, you know? ‘Cause where we were [?] about a hundred and eighty kilometres north east of Colonia [?], you know? As near as I can tell you about that one, ‘cause a lot of stuff’s still secret. Now that is fact.
TO: Mm.
WM: Anyway, what happened was that we, we landed safely, we turned around and as we turned around to face to go out again, we began to sink. Anyway, I said to Nobby who was the skipper, I said ‘Nobby I don’t like this.’ He said ‘aye, you’ll be alright Bill, we’ll get rid of all this rubbish, we’ll be alright.’ So anyway, the Maquis came out the bush, as I call it, took all this stuff away. They disappeared and then the, the lady who’s in charge of that section, she came and she says, ‘what’s troubling you?’ I says ‘I don’t think we’re going to get out of here.’ So we got the sticky bombs ready for, to stick it to the aircraft and blow it up, and she said ‘ah, I’ll see if I can get the villagers up, push you out,’ you know, just like that. Anyway, she went back to the village. Now, normally we were aware on the ground about fifteen, twenty minutes at the most ‘cause anything after than that was dangerous, yeah, you know? She went down and she got the villagers up and it was quite a way away, but anyway, I asked [?] too many questions about that. Up she comes with the villagers, but on their way back they met the general sergeant who was in charge of the village, and he turns round and says to them, ‘now, all you people, you’ll be in trouble. You’re out here, it’s after curfew, you’re supposed to be in the village.’ And of course the idea was that she turned round and said to them, ‘but your big black aircraft is stuck in the mud and we’ve got to push it out, and the Gestapo says if we don’t push it out they’re going to shoot us all and you.’ So he says, ‘I’ll go and look after the village, you go and push the aircraft out.’ So in the end they got us out. We didn’t need to blow it up.
TO: So just to clarify, were you stuck in the mud [emphasis]?
WM: Aye, just going down, like that.
TO: And how big was this aircraft?
WM: Hudson.
TO: And how –
WM: Twin engine aircraft, hmm.
TO: Were you ever scared during these missions?
WM: Of course, yeah. But they, you don’t go like that you, you, gung ho, you know what I mean by gung ho? We weren’t gung ho. We prided ourselves on being professional.
TO: And is there, are there any other occasions from your time with SOE that you are allowed to tell me about which you recall, a lot?
WM: Oh yes, lots of things that we – as a matter of fact, during, we didn’t bring them all [emphasis] back, but during the time that we were there [emphasis] we brought back four chaps, four men, Frenchmen, who actually in later years turned out to become prime ministers, prime ministers of France, hmm.
TO: And sorry, did – when you, what happened when you left SOE and started back on standard bombing missions?
WM: Well anyway, what, what happened was we were always alternately from time to rime on different missions. It wasn’t as if we, we just jumped from one back into that one, but we were always, was always in the, always doing the missions. Sometimes it was only a few aircraft going out for a special mission, or sometimes, sometimes we joined up with the, a bomber stream. It all depends on how, how we were required, and we, a lot of our chaps became leading lights on the Pathfinders, because of our highly successful rates in navigating to targets.
TO: And do you remember your first bombing mission?
WM: Yeah, first, my first bombing mission was to Kiel, Kiel Canal, mm. And that, that, that was also for – the idea there was to try to block the canal from time to time. We, in the early days there wasn’t anything that we had big enough that could do [emphasis] it, but the idea used to be that if you could bomb something, you know, bomb ships or something like that, that would make traps in the canal, you know, then of course that, that would be a help on keeping stuff from going through it, you know, hmm. But, no we covered a high variety of trips, you know, oh yes.
TO: And what aircraft were you in for these bombing missions?
WM: Well first of all I was in, I was in Wellingtons, you know? We did a lot of Wellingtons and then of course we were onto Lancasters. We converted [?] onto Lancasters, mm.
TO: And could you please describe the conditions inside a Wellington?
WM: Well in the Wellington there was, it was rather cramped but we still considered it a good aircraft. And by that time we had six in the crew, and we, we had crewed up and we were flying together, but you know, it was just, it was just, there was no comfort, there was no comfort. Each person had their own little cubby hole or section [coughs] but that was all. But once you got up over ten thousand feet, then of course, then it gets a bit uncomfortable, you know? You’re always [?] trying to keep warm was the thing, you know? Then of course you’d all sorts of wires for – you had your air com [?], you had your oxygen masks, you had all these sorts of things, you know? And as I, as I say, it was, it was a lot, a lot colder than it was later on in the Lancasters and even the Halifaxes and Stirlings, mm.
TO: And as an observer, what were you duties for the mission?
WM: My duties – we were highly skilled navigators then. We were, we were a step above the, we were a step above the normal navigators, mm, yeah, because we did, we did everything. We did the whole job. It was the same thing as – at one time, what happened was that the, every aircraft had two pilots. Anyway, there came a time when they took one pilot away and then it was the observer that was the backup pilot, you know? Anyway, after that, after that when the big four engine jobs come out, the, they brought in the role of flight engineer, and the flight engineer was supposed to be able to fly, but the way I’d seen it right from very beginning was that I reckoned that I knew enough about flying, and I told people ‘as long as I can take her home and land it, that’s good enough for me’ [laughs].
TO: Slight side story, a few weeks ago I interviewed a man who was a flight engineer for Lancasters, and he said he was taught how to fly the plane but not how to land it.
WM: Yeah well [laughs], well that’s the – my, my big thing was I was taught how to land them, yeah. And I had a good, had a good background in flying and piloting in the lighter aircraft, but then of course between the Wellingtons and the Lancasters and the, we had a – well we did it quite often. We did it as part of an air, sometimes, sometimes you went up for, to test your engines. You did that, you did that pretty often, or to see the rest of the aircraft, and I always took the opportunity to be able to land the aircraft.
TO: And can you tell me a bit about Halifaxes?
WM: Not a great deal. I didn’t do a lot of trips on Halifaxes but you know, she was also a good aircraft, but I know there’s, there’s friends of mine who, if you have an argument they say ‘ooh, it’s far better than a Lancaster’ and blah, blah, blah, but that’s only, the Halifax was a good aircraft. It couldn’t fly as high [emphasis] as a Lancaster and it wasn’t as fast as Lancaster but that was just about it, mm.
TO: And what’s your take on Halifax versus Lancaster?
WM: Oh [laughs] to me it was the Lancaster [laughs].
TO: And was the interior of a Lancaster different from that of a Halifax?
WM: No, much the same, mm, much the same. It’s just the skin.
TO: Mhm.
WM: Just the skin, you know? You know, you know, everything was for bomb loads.
TO: Mhm. And you mentioned something about Stirlings earlier.
WM: Yeah.
TO: What’s your take on them?
WM: The Stirling was, she was the first of the heavies, and she was, she was quite slow [emphasis] and didn’t have a high ceiling rate, you know, but she did a good job in her day [?], oh yes. There was many, many a crew that did great work in Stirlings, oh.
TO: There’s a D-Day veteran I spoke to a couple of years ago, his glider for D-Day was towed by a Stirling.
WM: Oh yes [emphasis]. Well there was a lot of that. Halifaxes and Stirlings did a lot of glider towing, yeah, oh yes.
TO: And what bombing mission of the war do you remember the most?
WM: Er [pause]. Just, just before, just before the war finished we [tape beeps] there were two big ones, and that particular night our wing commander, Wing Commander Murray, who I’d known from Tempsford days, you know? He, he came along and he said he wanted to fly with us that night and be the captain, and he said, and I said ‘no, you can bugger off.’ It’s not we wanted [?] coming into aircrew, you know, taking over. ‘Cause I could say that to him because we’d flown together a lot. Anyway, he says ‘what happens if I don’t sit in the pilot’s seat.’ I said ‘alright then you can come along, that’s my seat’ [laughs]. I mean it was my seat when I was needed, yeah. I said ‘no you can come along and be second pilot,’ you know? But it was, it was, it was quite a thing. It was a place called Magdeburg, it was of the big ones that we were on, but several other big ones as well of course. I could, just hold that a minute? [Pause, tape beeps]. Now there was several big ones but the last, the last big one was Potsdam. That was a real big one, yeah. As a matter, matter of fact, that one was in the, in the fourteenth, fourteenth, 14th of April, so that was one of the last big ones, you know? And that was a night one, and there was another was on the 13th [emphasis] of April was another time we went to Kiel, and what had happened was the night before we went to Kiel, and we put this battleship and we sunk it, we turned it over, mm. And it came back but they wanted us to go back again, but one of the retorts was that night, one of the crews was, ‘I hear you don’t want us to put it back up again’ [laughs]. But that was a, and that actually blocked a canal, that actually blocked a canal, you know, ‘cause then of course one of the, one of the last of the big ones we did was to Bremen on the 20th and 22nd of April, you know, yeah. And course there was places like Merseburg and various other ones like that, you know? But this is something I keep to myself.
TO: Okay.
WM: You know? Because I got, you know, I’ve got – the way I look at it is, it’s not, not a thing we brag about, you know? It’s, it was wartime and that was it. And today I’ve got, I’ve got, I’ve got many friends across Europe and across Africa and they come from all sorts of walks of life and all sorts of countries.
TO: Sorry, can I ask what happened to the wing commander who wanted to be on the flight?
WM: Oh yes, oh well he came in the flight with us there and that was it, Wing Commander Murray. We were flying F for Freddie, yeah, and of course, well anyway, he was in charge of the squadron, you know?
TO: Mhm.
WM: And he stayed on the Air Force for a while, you know, and I lost touch with him, you know?
TO: Mhm.
WM: Because we’d been, we’d been quite good friends there, mm. But after the war, after the war was, you didn’t really go out of your way [emphasis] to keep in touch, although with my own crew [emphasis] in the Lancaster we have done. As a matter of fact even, even now [emphasis] one of my chaps in aircrew, a fellow called Jimmy Dagg, a New Zealander, his great grandson plays rugby for the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team. His name is Israel Dagg, mm.
TO: And are, just in raids in Germany in general, how much anti-aircraft fire was there?
WM: Oh plenty. As a, as a matter of fact, what a lot of people don’t realise was that the amount, the amount of German troops, and specialised German troops that had to be contained within Germany because of what the, the Bomber Command was doing. Now as a matter of fact, that was, it was, it was a surprising, there must have thousands upon thousands had to be retrained in Germany who could have been going somewhere else, and they were all very highly trained people, mm.
TO: And did you ever encounter night fighters?
WM: Oh yes a couple of times, but we were quite lucky. We, we managed to corkscrew away, but the night fighters, what you had to watch even more carefully than over, over a target area or on the way back was just before you landed, because there used to be quite a few of them that used to prowl round about aerodromes and airfields in this country, and waiting for people to come in ‘cause that’s when you’re, you’re, you’re most vulnerable, when everything was shut down. And there was quite a number of people that got shot down just before they landed.
TO: And could you please tell me how this corkscrew evasive manoeuvre worked?
WM: Well that’s, that’s just what it was, a corkscrew. You might have been flying more or less level or up and down a bit, and then the corkscrew was like that. That was a corkscrew, yeah. They got away, yeah, mm.
TO: Did anyone in the crew ever get sick when that happened?
WM: Oh yeah [emphasis], my mid upper gunner used to get sick as soon as he put his foot inside the aircraft [laughs]. Once we were still fly, still take off he was alright.
TO: Mm. And did you ever, during the, did you ever find out how much, whether you’d hit the targets during the raids?
WM: I know we did [emphasis]. As I say, one of my specialities was, was bombing.
TO: But could you see photographs of it later?
WM: Oh yes, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, mm, yeah.
TO: And were you ever on raids to Berlin?
WM: Yeah, mm. Oh yes, as I say, that was, that was, that was one that would come up quite often, mm [pause]. Hell [?], mm.
TO: Sorry, you still okay for me to ask questions?
WM: What?
TO: Are you okay for me to ask questions?
WM: Yes, yes.
TO: ‘Cause just let me know if you want to stop.
WM: No, no.
TO: Okay. And what did you think of the German aircraft of the war?
WM: Oh very good, excellent, yeah, excellent yeah. As a matter, as a matter, as a matter of fact, at the end of the war there was one, one German one, you know? And I thought, I thought at first it was a shooting star, you know? And it wasn’t, it was a jet, and it flew past me just as if it was a shooting star and when I went back to report on this, and they said ‘ah, it probably was a shooting star you saw.’ I said ‘no, no, no, no, this is an aeroplane.’ That was one of the areas [?] ones that we’d seen [?] and spotted, yeah, ‘cause, you know, you got debriefed after every, every trip.
TO: Was there any ever occasions where you had to turn back from the target because of bad weather?
WM: No, I was, we were alright. No, we didn’t, we never, we never turned back. Ground crew were every bit as good as our aircrew.
TO: Mm.
WM: They kept our aircraft in excellent [emphasis] condition. We never had any [emphasis] complaints about our ground crew, mm.
TO: And you explain to me how the briefings worked for the missions?
WM: Right, well what, what happened was that when, when you landed, when you landed you’re taken from the aircraft back into wing on, it was trucks, we used to call them crew trucks. So in other words you didn’t split up, you’re taken in, in a crew truck, and there you’re integrated and say how the trip went. And of course you had your version of what went on and then of course your cameras that you had in your aircraft also their versions, and we always seemed to marry, marry up on tours exactly the same, no. But we had a, we had an excellent [emphasis] crew. We had two New Zealanders, two Scotsmen, two Englishmen and one Londoner [laughs].
TO: And what about the briefings that you had before [emphasis] you went on a mission?
WM: Well the briefing was, what happened, they assembled. Now first of all they had an all-in briefing where the, every member of the aircrew was there, and then after that was, that briefing was done and that was more or less told you where you were going and et cetera, et cetera, and you split off into different sections. The gunners was going to see about their guns and talk to their gunnery officers and the flight engineers, they went to see the air officers. The air observers and navigators would go in together and the pilots and the, and the observers were together, you know? That’s, that’s how it went ‘cause you know, we, we had to make sure we were exactly correct at all times between the pilots and observer, the pilot and the navigator, mm.
TO: And when you, were you sitting in the cockpit during the mission?
WM: Yeah.
TO: Could you, could you actually see anything below you during the mission?
WM: From time to time you could, yes, mm. From time to time you could, yes, mm.
TO: And what sort of things could you see?
WM: Well it all depends. The more water about the place the better it was, better reflections and things like that.
TO: And could you see what the Pathfinders had left?
WM: Oh yes, it all depends – well that was to be able to recognise, make sure that you had taken the right targets.
TO: Mhm.
WM: Because the Germans were, were quite sophisticated because they could try to imitate your Pathfinder’s TIs, what they put down, no.
TO: And were you involved in raids to other cities like Hamburg?
WM: Oh yes, mm.
TO: And what do you remember from those missions?
WM: Well a lot of them, well the big, the big one in Hamburg was a big fire raiser. But that happened to be that the wind conditions, everything was just right or wrong [emphasis] as regards which way you’re looking at it. As far as we concerned that was right, as far as the Germans were concerned, it was a big disaster because at that time a lot of the buildings in Hamburg were wooden, mm.
TO: And were you surprised when you heard how successful the raid had been?
WM: Not surprised, ‘cause that’s what we went for. Most successful it was, well, the better the raid was, mm.
TO: And was, were you involved in the raid on Dresden?
WM: No I wasn’t, but we were on standby, but I wasn’t involved in that one, no.
TO: Mhm.
WM: The, some, some people on the 90 Squadron were, ‘cause at Tuddenham 90 Squadron and 138 Squadron ran alongside each other, you know?
TO: Mhm.
WM: No.
TO: And when did you, when did you react, or how did you feel when Churchill announced that they would start bombing Germany?
WM: Start [emphasis] bombing?
TO: Yeah.
WM: Oh that was right at the beginning.
TO: Yes but how did you feel?
WM: That was [sigh], well put it this way, we had already had casualties our side, so it was just war, no. It was war, yeah.
TO: Mhm. And was your aircraft ever damaged by anti-aircraft flak?
WM: Oh we had, we had, but we had nothing really serious, mm. No, we had holes all over the place from time to time. Some very close to the occupants was [laughs] but –
TO: Mhm.
WM: No, we always managed to get back.
TO: And were you ever given, did you get new bombs as the war went on?
WM: Oh yes, yes. We, we dropped just about everything that was going, yes. Oh yes, no.
TO: Did you ever, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. Did you ever get any of the massive bombs that Barnes Wallis had developed?
WM: Well, there were different ones yes, yeah we did. We went on a couple of trips to Bordeaux and things like that, yes –
TO: Might be –
WM: But, I know for a fact that even Barnes Wallis’ bombs, and the big ones, big ones that were dropping there, the German’s fortification of the submarine pens was, was terrific. Now they even today you can have a walk through them and see what it’s like, oh yes. But there [emphasis] is what I say, is that the – sorry I, there’s what happens is what – the amount of German personnel that had to be employed because [emphasis] of the Bomber Command raids was tremendous, tremendous [emphasis]. It wasn’t just one or two round the village or something like that. The number of people they kept back within Germany itself was properly, oh it must have been millions.
TO: And what do you think was the most important battle of the war?
WM: Well it all depends what you mean battle. Do you mean aircrew or land or –
TO: Any, anything.
WM: Or the ships.
TO: Well most important campaign then.
WM: Well, they’re all different, all different. You know it all depends, you know, if you say that – well the thing that lead up to the retention and taking back over Europe, and that was D-Day.
TO: Mm. And were you involved in that?
WM: Oh yes, yes.
TO: Can you tell me about any of the missions you went on?
WM: What, what we were doing, we were, we were, we were on the mock, one of the mock raids further up the coast. And a lot of the stuff that we were dropping that night was, was like aluminium foil, and that was showing them, well came up on the radar where there was massive amount of aircraft flying around, you know? And [laughs] of course at the same time we carried a lot of bombs, but we tried as much as possible to use them away, away from where we’d be flying over, as if it was again going further afield in. But at that time what we were trying to do was trying to keep away from human habitation because that was, that was just something that we were asked to do, because keep it away from the towns and cities and northern France, mm.
TO: Mm. And on, in bombing missions in general, what kind of targets were you actually given at the briefings?
WM: Well it all depends, you know, because no two briefings were the same, no. Yeah, you had factory towns, all sorts of things that you’re going after. You know even, I wasn’t, as I say, I wasn’t in on Dresden but there is a book called “Dresden,” and if you want to know anything about Dresden, get hold of that book. Now, it’s about that thick, and it goes back into the old days of Saxony, and it goes all the way through from the different things all the way, right through, right up until modern times. But that explains exactly what happened in that city. It’s very [emphasis], very complicated. It’s, but it tells the whole story of Dresden, not just one side of the, it’s the whole story, mm.
TO: And, I’m sorry to ask this but did you suffer heavy losses on your missions?
WM: Oh, well, from time to time we had losses, but we never, we never had what we considered a heavy loss, mm.
TO: And what did you think of Arthur Harris?
WM: Oh, we supported him. He was, he was our, our chief. We looked up to [could be after] him, yeah, we did.
TO: And what do you think of his tactics and strategy?
WM: Well I thought they were alright, because if you go back, go back in time that was his instructions that he was getting from the Air Ministry. That, that what a lot of people forget about, was that he [emphasis] was getting told by the Air Ministry what they wanted [emphasis], and that came from the cabinet meetings.
TO: Mhm. And do you think Bomber Command was treated unfairly after the war?
WM: No [emphasis]. They were not treated fairly. It was completely unfairly. As far as I’m concerned, even, even it took, it took for recognition, it took over seventy years [emphasis]. Now, on my, my medal bar, I’ve got the ‘39-‘45 Star, but also I wear [tape beeps] a little brass mounting [?] which says ‘Bomber Command,’ you know? That took seventy years for them to give it to us. Have you seen it?
TO: I think I saw it briefly when I met you last Sunday.
WM: It was in the middle.
TO: Yeah [paper shuffles]. And could you ever see fires below you on the ground?
WM: Oh yes, oh yes, definitely.
TO: Mhm, were they large or small?
WM: All depends, all depends what area and what you were doing. Some time you knew, you knew, you know, you had raging fires. Sometimes, sometime, see it all depends what the target was.
TO: And do you remember seeing fires when Hamburg was bombed in 1943?
WM: Well that’s what I said to you, I said to you already that that was a big one, you know.
TO: Mhm.
WM: But that was – then again, you’ve got to read the story about Hamburg, because what happened was that all the conditions for a bombing raid was right. The wind and the target and the structures of the building and everything, it all came into it.
TO: Mhm. And what did you think of the thousand bomber raid on Cologne?
WM: Well that, that was one of the best adverts that Harris could have. I won’t tell you what the thousand bombers were because nobody knows, but what he did was he got all the aircraft that could fly and return from there and used that. You know, right down to, there were some of the Blenheims [emphasis] that were in there to make up a thousand bombers, you know? That was a big propaganda one. And not only that, you say something about Harris and doing that, but there again, all of these things came from the War Cabinet. You know, this is what people forget or don’t know, there’s War Cabinet and then you come down to the Air Ministry, and the Air Ministry would then passed it onto Harris. And Harris was, alright at times Harris was dogmatic about what we were doing, but you think of Dresden. The Russians were fighting like hell coming our way, and at the same time the amount of German troops and everything else that was passing through, through Dresden, and what was happening in Dresden, what they were actually manufacturing [emphasis] for the, for the German, erm –
TO: War effort?
WM: Well, the German war effort [emphasis] was terrific. There was everything from stuff for the U-boats and aircraft and everything like that, it was all over the place. And this is admitted in this book, this book is, is called “Dresden” and it tells you street by street what they were doing, mm.
TO: And do you remember hearing about the attack on the Ruhr damns?
WM: Oh yes. Oh we were also, we were also on standby for that mission. We were sat, you know – the idea was that if it didn’t work that night, we were going to go the next night. There was, there was another three squadrons ready to go the next night –
TO: And –
WM: But it actually came through.
TO: And did that improve morale a lot?
WM: Oh yes, definitely.
TO: This is going to be –
WM: Scampton, were the, were the, were the Dambusters squadron was, we were also stationed at Scampton for a while, mm.
TO: This is probably going to be an odd question, but what was your least favourite aircraft to fly in?
WM: A Bolingbroke.
TO: Mm.
WM: A Bolingbroke was the American Canadian version of a Blenheim. She was underpowered and if you lost one engine, you had trouble trying to make it back to your base. But in Canada, a lot of chaps were lost over the lakes in the wintertime when they lost one engine, they went down through the ice.
TO: Mm.
WM: But that was, that was my one, a Bolingbroke. But as I say, I flew them and we were alright.
TO: And what was your favourite aircraft?
WM: Well I started off, I had a love for the Wellington but of course, later on it was the, it was the Lancaster. But old Lizzy, she never let us down and Lizzy was the Lysander. But the other thing, there’s one that’s hardly ever mentioned and that was the Anson, and of course the, the amount trainees that was through on the Lysanders was amazing. Everybody praises the Lysander, the Anson, mm.
TO: Mm. We’re actually out of battery on the camera, so is it okay if we have a break while I charge it up?
WM: Yeah, yeah, sure [tape paused and restarted].
TO: Okay so, can you tell me a bit about how you came to be involved in Operation Manna?
WM: We, we were stationed at RAF Tuddenham and we, we’d actually been on ops and we were called forward to stay and we thought ‘oh, well it’s another op,’ and this was on a Sunday.
TO: Mhm.
WM: And we were told that we were going to have stuff loaded on and we were to drop it, but it wasn’t bombs. It was in our containers, the containers that we’d used for dropping the stuff into the, into the Maquis as well, when we used to drop stuff. And that, that was alright. And when we got in the air, of course we didn’t know the whole [emphasis] story but it’s like a very good friend of mine says, her grandmother told her to hide under the table because she thought this was a message [?] they were gonna come and do some bombing [emphasis] round about there. Instead of that of course we were dropping the food. Well that was, that was the plus the operation started, but I suppose you know the story about that, about the two Canadians who went – can I tell you that one? Well what happened was Operation Manna came about because there was two young Canadian officers who had permission to go over to the German lines and speak to the German commander if it was possible and advise them that they could arrange for, to have food dropped into Holland because all the people there were starving, and that included the German troops that was there. Anyway, after negotiations, they had managed to get to them and they managed through the negotiations, the fact that we would be flying in Lancasters [emphasis] and dropping the food and we would not be dropping bombs. And of course the Germans advised that their anti-aircraft guns wouldn’t be firing at us, but they forgot to tell a lot of people with a rifle that what was happening, so it wasn’t impossible for us to get a few pot shots aimed at us with people on the ground with rifle fire. But anyway, we landed, we didn’t land [emphasis] of course, we just went in and we dropped it and certain food dropped and that was it, but later on, on the second or third day, by that time they’d got a bit organised and we were dropping food into, into football grounds. And what had happened, they got the local people to put big white crosses on the football grounds and that’s where we had to drop into. And one of the, one of the trips we were doing was at, we were flying in, and this, all the Lancasters said ‘ooh, a sprog crew.’ And this came, become across us and we had to veer quickly and let him come in, and when we were dropping our stuff, one of them went outside and landed on the railway line. Anyway, I could see lots of people round about it ‘cause it was taking quite a while to get into it of course, but by this time they’d realised it was, it was food in it and not bombs. Anyway, many years later in Africa when we were reopening a new rugby field, and in the pavilion later on I was telling the story, and I said ‘yes, it was, we were dropping the food to Holland’ and there was one of these things, a fellow, and I said ‘it was just like a lot of little ants round a sugar lump.’ And all of a sudden, somebody put his hand on my shoulder and I looked round, there’s this big fellow, a youngster, must have been in his early twenties, and he said to me, ‘you nearly killed me.’ And I said, ‘what do you mean I nearly killed you, I’ve never seen you in my life before.’ He says, ‘I was the first of these little black ants to get there’ he says, ‘because I saw it falling outside and I rushed to it, and all the other people came and dived on top of me’ [laughs]. So you see, it’s a small world there. But also I’ve got, I’ve got a large number of friends in this area, Dutch people, who actually received the food and they also still have services where, where they bless Manna, and there’s one particular family who come here into our court here, our Debbie’s [?] court and one, one Wednesday a month, and she was five years old when we dropped our first lot of food, and she’s always been thankful, thankful all the time, and she does tell people that ‘oh, Mr Moore, Uncle Bill here, he saved my country from starvation’ [laughs]. So you see that that was a real pleasure to do that, and I was actually awarded the Dutch Medal on that one, and very earnestly I consider that one of the finest medals and for the finest properties [?] that I received during the war.
TO: So would you say that’s the mission you’re most proud of?
WM: Yes.
TO: And when you first learned about Operation Manna, were you surprised that you’d be dropping food and not bombs?
WM: Oh yes, no, no.
TO: And could you, what do you remember most about Operation Manna?
WM: Well, the amount of aircraft. Well after, after the first Sunday, after the first Sunday it was well organised, ‘cause the first Sunday and Monday it was a trial run to see what happened really, but after that we, we had several squadrons that was dropping the food, and of course even, even some of the Americans were dropping food as well. But there were dropping food further afield than what we were, you know.
TO: And –
WM: At the beginning the war was still, the fighting was go on. It wasn’t, you know, it carried on afterwards but the first, the first few days of it that was still when the war was going on, you know.
TO: And what about, could you see if any Dutch civilians on the ground were waving British flags?
WM: Oh yes, well you could see them waving [emphasis]. You’re not always sure what they were waving but they were waving and clothes and waving anything at all when I realised on the second wave what we were doing, ‘cause it wasn’t, wasn’t bombs we were dropping.
TO: Mm. Well Bernie, the veteran, other Manna veteran whose number I gave you, he told me that flying so low he could see a Dutch boy waving a Union Jack.
WM: Yeah well, he must, he must have been very lucky to have – ‘cause it maybe that someone dropped the Union flag –
TO: Mhm.
WM: And then he got it, but not a Union Jack [emphasis].
TO: Mhm.
WM: It’s a Union flag. Do you know the difference?
TO: No, please explain.
WM: Well the Union Jack [emphasis] is flown in the brow of a ship –
TO: Mhm.
WM: The Union Jack is the one that’s – Union flag [emphasis] is the one that’s flown everywhere else.
TO: Oh right, I didn’t know that. Thank you.
WM: Mm, the Union Jack is the small staff in the front of a ship.
TO: Mhm [pause]. What kind of, when you were sat in the cockpit, what kind of equipment did you have in front of you?
WM: I know, I know that this is [?] navigational equipment that we could use. We had, we had G, we had Oboe, we had all sorts of different ones, yeah, mm.
TO: And how did G work?
WM: Well G was, G was in two, two, two beams, and where these two beams crossed, that’s where you were. It’s as simple as that.
TO: And did that improve navigation?
WM: Oh yes, yeah, mm. Well the H2S was a different story entirely. The H2S was you were beaming down and the more [?] water that was around the clearer the river [?] became, but your only trouble about that was the German fighters used to vector onto the, what we were, we were projecting. Sometimes that could become a hazard.
TO: And how many occasions do you think you deployed Window?
WM: Oh quite a number, even, even when we were doing training operations we were dropping Window, which we never counted, it didn’t count as operations as such. But we, we were dropping Window many a time, yeah, during training flights, mm.
TO: And when bombs were dropped from an aircraft, did the plane become noticeably lighter?
WM: Oh it came, you rose, you rose slightly yes, mm. All depends on how much, how much stuff you’re actually carrying or dropping.
TO: And could you please explain what the procedure would be for, in terms of what the crew would do, each crew member would do and say when you got over the target?
WM: Well each person had their own to do. The pilot, he was taking instructions from whoever was doing the, the lead onto the target. Sometimes we did that with myself, quite a number of times of course, and sometimes, sometimes it was the wireless operator, sometimes it was another, we had a radar operator as well, they used to use that over the targets ‘cause as I say, we were, we were still on special duties. Of course your gunners were always on the left and as I say, engineer, he had to be very careful then making sure everything was alright on his side, yeah. But everybody was active.
TO: Mhm. And were there ever any times on a mission when you could more or less relax?
WM: No [emphasis]. If you relaxed you, it was wrong. There’s many, many a time, many a time – what happened with us was that, and I’ve said this before, we never really relaxed until we were home. Can we give that a break for a minute? I’ll show you something.
TO: Yes, certainly [tape beeps]. Mhm. And did you or anyone else in the crew have a special name for your own aircraft?
WM: Yes, well we, we called our one after the Loch Ness Monster, that was it, yeah, mm [laughs]. It was, it was a favourite of ours you know, especially with two Scottish men was there [?] and we adopted, we adopted the rest of them, you know? Mm.
TO: [Paper turns] and when you were on missions, could you, or rather night missions, were there other British planes flying near you?
WM: All depends, all depends on what type of mission you were on.
TO: Mhm.
WM: Now, if you’re in the stream, well – at the beginning the squadron took off but you had a rendezvous point. A lot of rendezvous points were like Beachy Head, you know, and they used to assemble in that area and then they took off. And of course the thing about that was that the Germans also knew we were assembling at different places, and they could actually send out their night fighters if, if they did, you know? But there was, there were umpteen different places and they couldn’t, they couldn’t get to them all [emphasis] because often there was more than one raid on one night, on the same night. And that was deviations to keep away from maybe the real big one of that occasion, you know.
TO: And how many times a week would you go on a mission?
WM: Well sometimes it was night after night, three nights in one week [emphasis]. Sometimes according to the weather, it might be about eight days, maybe a week.
TO: Mhm.
WM: The weather had a lot to do with it you know?
TO: And were you ever escorted by fighters?
WM: We, well we, we were escorted ‘cause we did quite a few daytime raids, yes, we were. But we, we were quite, we were quite happy with that, mm. ‘Cause we used to see them, we used to see them on the verges of the, of the streams, you know, mm.
TO: And do you remember what kind of fighters they were?
WM: Well the ones that we saw was Mustangs, mm. All depends on how far in you were going. If you were going a long way in that was, that was a Mustang. Sometimes, sometimes it was a Hurricane, sometimes it was a Spitfire, mm. But they were only used as short flights, mm, whereas a Mustang was built for long range, mm.
TO: And was it cold aboard the planes?
WM: Oh it was never pleasant [laughs]. At one time everyone used to have a different [?] suit. It was like a fur jacket and things like that. But once we got onto the heavies they took all that stuff away from us, saying we didn’t need it. Well that was alright for these [emphasis] people, they weren’t flying [laughs], mm.
TO: And did you ever carry food with you aboard the plane?
WM: Ever carry?
TO: Food with you?
WM: No, all I carried, used to carry was five, five barley sugars, sweets.
TO: And what sort of entertainment did you have back at the airfields?
WM: Well all depends on what the, if it was, if it was one of the pre war stations there was generally a building that was used for dances and things like that, and concerts. If it was the war time ones then sometimes all you did was make sure there, there was an empty hangar and you had something in there. But, you know, that was how it was done, no. But that, that, that was the main thing of entertainment, you know, ‘cause the picture shows and things like that within the camp always started off as I say with propaganda [laughs], mm.
TO: When you saw those propaganda things, did you ever wonder whether they were being truthful?
WM: Well, the things we used to say ‘woah, woah, woah, woah’ [emphasis] and things like that, you know, the British sense of humour, you know, mm. And that’s a fact, mm.
TO: And were there any particularly popular songs?
WM: Oh yes there was all the, all the, I’ve got, I’ve still got all the tapes here of all the popular songs, mm, oh yes, I have all them, yeah. All of the artists at that time, yeah, and these artists I have, I have run [?] many a concert here and had the same ones come performing for me.
TO: And was there anyone that you knew of who refused to go on bombing missions?
WM: I never met anybody who refused to go on a mission, but I always remember there was two people who graduated and got their wings and then they, then they refused to go on ops. But that’s the nearest I ever came to it. But they never did any ops, they never were in, they weren’t even on a bombing station. And I’m sorry to say that we heard later on that they’d transferred to the Pioneer Corps and both of them got killed [pause].
TO: You mentioned that there was a raid where you had to attack a German warship in Kiel.
WM: That’s right.
TO: Do you remember its name?
WM: Not off hand, no.
TO: Would it be the Hipper?
WM: Oh it’s quite possible, it’s quite possible it was, yeah. I’ve got the date there, I told you the dates of it the other –
TO: Mhm.
WM: Yeah.
TO: I think I remember, I remember the sinking of the Hipper though because it was sunk on the 9th of April which coincidently is my birthday.
WM: Oh [emphasis].
TO: So –
WM: Oh [emphasis], 9th of April?
TO: I think I kind of have a selfish reason for remembering that if you see what I mean. Or maybe it was the Cher [WM laughs], I’m not sure. I do know though that –
WM: No, no, no. 9th of April [pause], 13th, 13th of April.
TO: What does it say was the target, or –
WM: That was in Kiel, mm, yeah. That was the 13 of April.
TO: Mhm.
WM: That’s what that was, that was the target.
TO: Mhm.
WM: That was the one that I told you that we, that we we bombed it that night and knocked it down and we had to go back again and make sure, one of [?] the chaps said ‘are you sure you don’t want us to put it back up again?’ [TO laughs]. ‘Cause you’d obviously got somebody –
TO: Mhm.
WM: Who [laughs] would give you an answer for something [laughs], mm.
TO: And were there ever any occasions were you could, where you ever flew over neutral territory and could see the cities all illuminated?
WM: There was one night we were, we were coming back from a trip, and the next thing I saw was these lights, and I thought ‘well what the hell is going on?’ And what had happened was that the [laughs], we were almost sent to Dublin, and what that was, was that the wind speed was ferocious and what we thought we’d found out was that we were nothing near [emphasis], we were nothing near the wind speed, what the actual wind speed was, and of course as soon as we saw that we turned round and we were on the way back.
TO: Mm.
WM: But that was the nearest I’ve been to being on neutral territory, you know.
TO: Mm.
WM: From that point of view, mm.
TO: Mm, and were there ever any occasions where you were accidently fired at by allied anti-aircraft guns?
WM: Well, what we, what we had was that we had the Junkers 52-53 aircraft, and we used to do special missions on that and we used to fly low [emphasis]. And what had happened was that that one had been liberated in the desert and we were using it on special duties, but there was no esigners [?], painted black, and going out was fine. Coming back [emphasis], it wasn’t until we got into our own territory that we used to get a few pot-shots at us, you know? Probably because [laughs] we were flying without the proper identification and things like that, that’s why we get into trouble. But we never actually, never actually had anything serious happen to us.
TO: Mhm.
WM: But that was under secret risk [?].
TO: Mhm. So was it, so you were trying to use, you were using German aircraft for the missions over France?
WM: Yeah.
TO: For the SOE.
WM: Yeah, SOE, yeah.
TO: So it wasn’t always Lysanders then?
WM: No we, we used many, you know, the Lysander was for the agents.
TO: Mhm.
WM: But as I said before we used to use other aircraft for taking other stuff in, for Maquis and things like that, you know.
TO: Mhm.
WM: Oh yes, mm.
TO: And did you ever meet any senior commanders during the war?
WM: Well every now and again you had a parade where we didn’t actually, we didn’t actually get to meet [emphasis] them as such. Not like, not like last Sunday, no.
TO: Mm. And were some missions much more dangerous than others or were they more or less the same?
WM: Well, what we used to do, we used to classify every mission as dangerous, because if you didn’t and you dropped your guard, that’s when you would have been in trouble. I don’t say they weren’t, but we never loaded [?] to be.
TO: And were there ever any times where you, where your missions were just taking photographs of areas?
WM: Oh yes, we had that [emphasis] from time to time, yes, mm.
TO: Could you tell me about any of those?
WM: Well they were, they were done by 138 Squadron and that was, you know, the idea behind that was sometimes it was targets, that they had been bombed, and sometimes they might have been targets that we flew past. We passed them as if we were going somewhere else and we might have been taking them then. But we got a lot of practice in that, because that’s another story I can give you, mm.
TO: And did you hear how other events of the war were going?
WM: Oh yes, we were kept up to date, we were kept up to date. As I say, between the news reels and bulletins, you were kept up to date, mm.
TO: Were you ever worried that Germany might win?
WM: Well, we, I would never say that, that I was frightened of them winning [?][emphasis], but we always worried every now and again where it might have been something that was going the wrong way, but not, not for an all out win no. No, no, no.
TO: And what was the most feared German night fighter?
WM: The Junkers-88, ‘cause she’d a cannon on her, and she, she actually fitted onto her guns that would fly, fire upwards and try and get under the bellies of the Lancasters. And that’s where we lost quite a number of Lancasters, firing guns from the, from the JU28, JU88s, yeah, mhm [pause].
TO: And did you ever feel any animosity towards Germany?
WM: Well, that’s a difficult one because, you know, there was people who lost friends, relations and all the rest of it. Some of them got quite bitter but on the whole people just took it as war.
TO: And how do you feel today?
WM: Ah, what I can say is that I have been involved in promoting rugby, football all over Europe and all over Africa, that’s my answer to that.
TO: And how do you feel today about your wartime service?
WM: It was something – when I had to something and that’s what I did, mm.
TO: And do you think the war was worth the price?
WM: I think yes. I think yes, because that’s another story I can tell you, that you haven’t asked me about.
TO: Yes, tell me, yeah.
WM: Well after, after the war finished, we still had special duties to do, and one of the first was to bring, bring back prisoners of war which were British, well there was all sorts involved but most of the ones we brought back were British, and a lot of the stories that they related to me including two of my uncles who were prisoners of war since 1940. Some of the stories they had to say was horrific. Anyway, when we finished that job bringing back the prisoners of war, we, we then went onto ferrying people from parts of Germany down into a place called Eastridge [?] in France and we had camps there where we took the refugees into, and a lot of these people thought that we were going to lock them up, same as they’d been before. But it was trying to tell them that it was to help them and that the, the camp was just secured so that the local people wouldn’t be coming in to try and get what they were getting, ‘cause this was to try and build them up again, you know. But then of course after that, the next big thing after that, we, we were put on photograph and the whole of Europe. We started off with photographing the likes of London from about two thousand feet, and then towns like [unclear] Woking here, from about four thousand feet and then the countryside was from, anything from ten to twenty thousand feet. We did that for the whole of Europe, mm. And that was 138, 138 Squadron again, because what we did, we’d started doing it at Tuddenham and then when they realised that we were quite successful, they transferred us over to RAF Benson and we did that over at Benson. And then of course we, we had several substations, substations in Norway, substations in France, we had substations around the country here at different places where we would load [?] to land and fuel up, and we had special signal recognition that we could, we could use and that went on for quite some, quite some time, ‘cause that photographing Europe was one of Churchill’s ideas that he left behind after he was out of office.
TO: And during those photography missions, could you see the damage from the bombing?
WM: Oh yes that was the idea, mm. Anyway you done it at two thousand feet you could see right down, no [unclear] of course, mhm, mm. That’s where we, well that’s where we started [emphasis] photographing, mm, but it was the while, the whole area was done, mm.
TO: Are there any other missions of the war that stand out a lot to you which you’d like to tell me about?
WM: Personal ones?
TO: Well any, any ones you were on from, that were missions that, but only if you’re willing to talk about, don’t if you –
WM: No.
TO: If you don’t want to talk about it it’s fine.
WM: No, as I say in general, in general we, we carried out what we had to do, and as I say, 138 Squadron of special duties, we were doing all sorts of things and there’s lots of things that, that we still should not talk about, because we are sworn to secrecy about them, because that was in conjecture [?] with SOE, ‘cause there was lots of people who maybe still, maybe not in favour of some of these operations.
TO: Mhm. What about some of the other bombing missions? Are there any others that you’d like, any others that stand out that you’d like to tell me about?
WM: You know, you know, the big, a big, a big thing was that there was missions we knew [emphasis] –about and there was other missions that people were on that we got to know about and [tape beeps] I can assure you that once the reason, these missions – people said ‘oh that could have been us,’ you know? ‘Cause even the Dambusters, ones we were a back up squadron for that. It wasn’t a method, it wasn’t just a method of a few fellows doing that, there was back up squadrons as well.
TO: And when did you hear about the Holocaust?
WM: Well that, that’s hard to say because we, we, we got, we got to know in bits and pieces. As I say, I started to learn a lot of that from our own prisoners of war that we were bringing home, and then of course we found out from other people who, who had been there in the camps. And, course the big thing about it was you didn’t realise just how widespread it was. I don’t think anybody did at that particular time. I know there was some friends of mine who visited Belson and visited the other ones in person and as I say, they were horrified how the treatment that people was getting. But that’s a different category all together you know, that was someone away from, away from a normal war. That was, that wasn’t the same.
TO: Were there ever any times when you were tasked with dropping leaflets?
WM: Oh yes we had that from time to time, mm, we had that, mm. We were never sure whether the leaflets were doing any good or not.
TO: Arthur Harris said after the war that never engaged in those leaflet dropping exercises because it only accomplished two things. One, it gave the German defenders practice in getting ready for the real thing and two, it supplied a substantial quantity of toilet paper for –
WM: That’s right.
TO: The Germans.
WM: That’s more or less correct, yes, mm.
TO: Mm [page turns]. Did you ever wish you’d been in something other than the Royal Air Force?
WM: I had been in the Guyun [?] Southern Highlanders –
TO: Mhm.
WM: But not, not an active service, no. But I never, never felt as if I should have been there, no.
TO: And did you ever wish that you hadn’t been an observer or a navigator? Did you ever wish that you’d been a different position on board the aircraft?
WM: Well we did, on aircrew we went around the different jobs in case anything happened to one of us up there. We actually flew in different positions [emphasis] from time to time [emphasis].
TO: So did you ever fly the Lancaster yourself?
WM: Oh yes, yes. Oh yes.
TO: But the pilot would always do the takeoff and landing?
WM: Well that was the idea, although we had to do, I had to be able to land the aircraft.
TO: Mhm. So would you consider yourself a flight engineer as well as an observer?
WM: No, observer, my observer, my observer – I covered all these courses –
TO: Mhm.
WM: As an observer, mm. The flight engineer came into his own with the four engine bombers, mm.
TO: And you mentioned you were on Wellingtons for a while.
WM: Mm.
TO: Were they generally reliable?
WM: Oh course [emphasis]. They were the most reliable bomber that we had.
TO: And did you hear about the, how the early bombing of the war was progressing?
WM: Well the thing is, everybody hoped that it was for the best because there’s everything else. There’s, the accuracy improved. Obviously the saturation bombing was started by the Germans. They started saturation bombing. Our people tried to go for individual targets and alright, after that there was [emphasis] saturation bombing, you know.
TO: And were your airfields ever attacked by German fighters?
WM: Not to my knowledge no.
TO: Mm. And I’m sorry to ask this, but were any of your friends killed during the war?
WM: Yes. A lot of school friends, school friends and friends from the Boys Brigade, oh yes, mm. School friends were the younger ones but the older friends were the ones I’d made through the Boys Brigade, and they were, most of them was on aircrew [emphasis], different categories.
TO: How, how was morale in Bomber Command throughout the war would you say?
WM: Good, it was good. It was excellent.
TO: And why do you think it stayed so high despite the losses?
WM: It was the camaraderie of sticking together, yeah, oh yes, mm. We were all volunteers, and we’re still volunteers [laughs].
TO: And you know after Dunkirk, was there a general fear of invasion?
WM: Not fear [emphasis] of invasion. There was, what did I say, there was – people didn’t think it was imminent but [phone rings] it could happen, you know? Hello?
Caller on the phone: Hello.
WM: Hello dear.
Caller on the phone: How are you?
WM: I’m very, very [tape beeps].
TO: And what did you think of the atomic bombs that were used against Japan?
WM: Well the big thing about that is that it could have happened to us, because as we know from hindsight, that the Germans had been working on that, and that could have been us. And of course, if the development of the V2s had come, could have come, come all the way across the Atlantic into America [emphasis]. As far as I’m concerned it’s, it’s one of these weapons that it could, it could obliterate mankind if it went on too long. And of course we noticed what happened with the aftermath of these things, but our war was nothing compared with that. I also, also think that if it hadn’t been for the, for the ones dropped in Japan that millions of troops would have been massacred, and it doesn’t say how far on everything else would have went if they hadn’t been dropped because that may have gone on for years and years and years, so it may have been at the time was a good thing.
TO: And, just going back to the crew that you were good friends with –
WM: Mm.
TO: Did, did they talk much about their lives before they joined the Air Force?
WM: Yeah, we all had that, but yeah. The pilot, pilot was a sheep farmer in New Zealand, our radar [?] man was an accountant in New Zealand, our wireless operator, his father had a joinery business across in Lanes [?] Bay, across the water from where I come from. The, the rear gunner was an, a surveyor for the [unclear] down the water here and the mid upper gunner his, his family had got a hotel in Canterbury in Kent, and that’s quite strange was that I got married on a Friday night in Scotland, and we had another party in the Fleur-de-Lis Hotel in Canterbury on the Wednesday following, because the crew was all going home to New Zealand and places like that. But no, we did, and as I say, Jimmy Dagg, his great-grandson is playing rugby as Israel Dagg for the All Blacks, [unclear] rugby, mm.
TO: And did you ever actually, I know you could see them from the sky, but after the war did you ever go through any of the cities like Berlin or?
WM: No I didn’t. All I did was flew, flew over them you know, mm.
TO: Mhm. And what’s your opinion on Britain’s involvement in recent wars like Afghanistan?
WM: Well there, there again the – that’s an entirely different thing. It all depends how far back you get. It’s always been said that, that nobody ever wins a war in Afghanistan, ‘cause even going back to even before Christ [emphasis] there’s been, been wars and people trying to take over and trying to settle Afghanistan region. But some, some of the other, some of the other wars that goes on, you just wonder why, no, because – on the other hand you don’t really get down to it, you know. The likes of Korea was quite a war, and also the McArthur at the time, he was right up to the Chinese border and he was, he wasn’t defeated or anything but the American government told him to come back, and of course that was reintruded when the, when the two states were formed, Northern and South of Korea. Now, if you talk about Sing, Malaysia. Now in Malaysia there was thousands of troops and everything in there, and where I was from in Africa, there was African regiments in there from, from Rhodesia, from Kenya, from Tanganyika. They were called the King’s African Rifles and they Rhodesians, the Rhodesian regiment, they were all involved in there, no. And then of course you got these other skirmishes up, was up in Europe and there again, they all seemed to arise from either petty politics or religions. If you, if you go into some of these other ones where there’s still fighting today, and you turn around and you say to Syria, but what is it? It’s one against one, it’s a civil war. That’s really what it is, but why can’t they get together on it? You know, there was a civil war in Spain pre-1938. Now that was a vicious war as well, but 1938, thirty-nine it came to a close and a person who took over Franco and the nation was brought together again. Before Franco died, he brought back the king and that was, that was brought back and that settled both people, both lots of the people in Spain. Now you see all these other ones that’s gone on, skirmishes and even in the South American countries, that’s all about drugs, that’s not really about people, it’s about drugs and things like that which is entirely [emphasis] different thing entirely [emphasis]. Now holy wars as I call them can never be settled, ‘cause one, one against the other they will never, never change [emphasis]. What happens with these things is they just goes on and on and on, and that, and that’s been going on for centuries, or one country wants to take over the other one and it’s through, it’s though their, their type of religions it happens, which is wrong.
TO: And one of my last questions now, what’s your best memory of your time in the war?
WM: When I met my wife [both laugh]. I came, I came back from a raid, a raid on Bordeaux and I was given three days leave. Instead of that I got it made up to ten days and I, I went home and I got a lift in fish truck. I was never sure if it was real fish or scrap fish for [laughs] for to go for manures or something like that. But anyway, I got there and the first thing my mother did was put all my clothes in the boiler and she’d have put me into the boiler if I hadn’t got into the bath. Anyway, that night I, I went along to the local dance, the big pavilion, the big high balcony and all the people up there spectating, and I was dancing with this young lady, and my friend wanted to dance with her. ‘Come on, come on, this is my one, you go and pinch your own lady,’ you know, ‘your own girl,’ you know? Anyway, what I didn’t know was that her mother and father, two sisters and sister-in-law and some kids were all up on the balcony, and every time I danced, being in the Air Force they were shouting ‘hooray,’ because their son Walter was in the Air Force in India, and my friend Vann Muir [?] was in the Navy, so I was winning according to them, and I did [laughs]. That was my happiest [emphasis] that was my happiest [emphasis] occasion in the whole war, mm.
TO: Mhm. Well that’s all of my questions –
WM: Alright.
TO: Do you have anything at all that you want to add?
WM: No, it’s just [unclear] want to say this, I’ve had another two of these interviews, there might be a little discrepancies or differences but –
TO: That’s fine.
WM: It’s all going from in here you know.
TO: That’s fine, your memory’s been great –
WM: Oh.
TO: And I’ve really enjoyed what you’ve told me.
WM: Oh, no.
TO: So thank you so much for telling me.
WM: Oh okay, thank you, welcome, thank you very much.
TO: Thank you so much for your wartime service as well.
WM: I must see you from time to time somewhere –
TO: Yeah.
WM: Along the line. You come to some of these gatherings from the Royal Air Force, I’ll be there.
TO: Mhm, thank you.
WM: Yeah.
TO: It would be great to see you.
WM: Thank you very much indeed.
TO: Thank you.
WM: Anyway –
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AMooreWT160703
Title
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Interview with Bill Moore. Three
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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.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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02:50:38 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Tom Ozel
Date
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2016-07-06
Description
An account of the resource
Bill Moore grew up in Scotland and volunteered for the Royal Air Force. He completed 36 operations as a navigator with 138 and 161 Squadrons.
Please note: The veracity of this interview has been called into question. We advise that corroborative research is undertaken to establish the accuracy of some of the details mentioned and events witnessed.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
Netherlands
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Suffolk
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kiel
Contributor
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Katie Gilbert
138 Squadron
161 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
Bolingbroke
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
briefing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
displaced person
fear
Gee
H2S
Hudson
Lancaster
Lysander
military service conditions
navigator
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
perception of bombing war
RAF Halfpenny Green
RAF Heaton Park
RAF Tempsford
RAF Tuddenham
Resistance
Special Operations Executive
training
Wellington