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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1185/11757/AWarwickWA180313.2.mp3
14173efa673164b528b2194a74984bf9
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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Warwick, William Albert
W A Warwick
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with William Warwick (b. 1934). He grew up in North Lincolnshire and served in the Royal Observer Corps.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-03-13
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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Warwick, WA
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HD: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Hugh Donnelly and the interviewee is Bill Warwick. The interview is taking place at Mr Warwick’s home at [ buzz] Gainsborough on the 27th of February 2018. Correction on the 13th of March 2018.
WW: I was five years old when Britain declared war with Germany in September 1939 and lived on a farm in North Lincolnshire within striking distance of a dozen airfields. The nearest being Kirton Lindsey home of the American Eagle Squadron. Scampton, the Dambusters with Guy Gibson. Hibaldstow, famous for Margaret Horton and her ride on the Spitfire tail. Blyton with the Polish pilots. Sandtoft and Sturgate. So there was plenty of air activity. This formed the early part of my life. Also within two hundred and fifty yards was an anti-aircraft unit together with searchlights, machine guns and posts etcetera. This was a target for the German bombers. Mainly Dorniers. And they tried to demolish the camp by dropping incendiaries but luckily they missed the camp by a few yards. Most of the bombs were dug out by hand and defused and one stood at the back door of the farmhouse for years as a memento. When the Army lads first arrived they were billeted in farm buildings attached to our cottage. My mother baked pies for them and in return they felled birch trees from the local woods to keep the kitchen fire going. The soldiers also came around in the morning to shave with the hot water. Mugs of water balanced at every point convenient. Vivid memories of the Dorniers in the searchlights shining silver and trying to dodge the beam. Also in quiet moments the soldiers would shine the beam at us when we stood watching from the back door of our house. When I started school the first instruction was to take cover under the desks when I had to do so by the teacher. This was done when an aircraft passed overhead whether it was friend or foe. Bert Carpenter, the headmaster was a member of the Royal Observer Corps but I wasn’t aware of that until much later in my life. The next thing of note was one morning I went out to feed the chickens and the sound of machine guns blazed away. Greeted me. My mother dashed out shouting, ‘Come in. Come in. The Germans are here.’ This proved to be a barrage balloon had broken its moorings at either Hull or Grimsby and the Spitfires from Kirton Lindsey were trying to puncture the balloon so that it would sink to the ground. I have no idea how much shooting was carried out but when I came home from school the balloon was virtually down at Middlemoor Farm near Susworth about a mile away where it had either snagged on a farm implement or had been tied to one. During the war years double summertime was in operation to give the farmers better daylight working hours. As young lads this was to benefit to, to the three of us young lads to play cricket until dusk. This we did with an old oil drum for wickets, a piece of a five bar gate for a bat and a wooden ball from a coconut stall. This carried on until one of the lads bowling missed the catch and it struck his eye splitting it wide open whereupon we held him under the pump to treat the problem. Later he acquired, we acquired a rubber ball. Because we were out at dusk the Lancasters mainly assembled to the north of us. Somewhere in the River Humber Region to fly south and probably the Isle of Wight before dispersing over Germany to their allotted targets. The sight of the engine exhausts glowing in the gathering gloom is another outstanding memory. And later in life I was to trace the history of some of the aircrew for a friend who had lost track of a long gone uncles etcetera. Doodlebugs or V-1s were another intrusion. Mostly they were launched from France to the south of England but when the RAF destroyed their launching positions in France they sent them over to attack Manchester and Sheffield from Holland. One night we heard these V-1s with the motorbike noise and my dad had got out of bed to see what was happening. I said, ‘Get back to bed. It’ll only be the Mosquitoes coming home.’ But he said, ‘They’ve got a fire at the back.’ I heard that, I heard one that crashed on to a pig sty. Otherwise, I don’t know much about them in North Lincolnshire. Because of our proximity to the airfields quite a lot of aircraft crashed in the area and because I didn’t have a bike I had only heard about them. Most were under guard anyway until the RAF rescue vehicles took the remains away. Both human and material. Many aircraft around us were Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters, Halifax, Lysanders, Lockheed Lightnings from Goxhill, Whitleys, Wellingtons, Ansons and later Venoms, Vampires and Meteors. I can’t remember many German aircraft coming over. Only Junkers and Dorniers really. There wasn’t any time like street, there wasn’t anything like street lights or other lighting because it was complete blackout. Car lights were restricted to four candle power to shine no more than ten feet in front of the car with the hood to deflect the light. Even a cycle lamp had to be hooded to shine onto the front wheel. We must mention the Royal Observer Corps without, who played a major part in the outcome of the war. Their volunteer observers provided twenty four hour cover seven days a week. Stood out in the open in all weathers looking and listening under the supervision of Fighter Command. They’d fly, they identified friend or foe err stop that.
[recording paused]
HD: Recording briefly stopped and now started again.
WW: They were identified friend or foe. They crossed, across the British Isles for their work during the early war years in 1940 and they were granted the title Royal. So, I don’t know how that will finish off. That’s the end of it.
HD: That’s great. That’s the end of the recording. Thank you very much, Bill.
WW: Is that ok?
HD: Yeah. That’s brilliant. Thank you.
WW: Good.
[recording paused]
HD: Speak when you’re ready. Right. Bill is going to continue this with a short history of the Royal Observer Corps.
WW: And this is the forward from, just stop it a minute.
[recording paused]
WW: Right. This is the forward from, “Attack Warning Red,” and it was a book written by Derek Wood about the formation and the history of the Royal Observer Corps. So describing the early history of the Royal Observer Corps. So describing the early history of the Royal Observer Corps Derek Wood made the point in this book that the Corps did not fit neatly in to Service or Ministry. In a sense that was true. From the outset the Corps fostered a strong volunteer spirit coupled with a healthy egalitarianism which led in to resistance among its members to the concept of a paid service because it was voluntary. This total commitment to a volunteer ethic set the Royal Observer Corps apart from the formal organisation of peacetime services. Yet once it came under the wing of the Air Ministry in 1929 the community of interest was soon recognised and there sprang up a close and harmonious relationship with the Royal Air Force which continues until this day. In fact, the Royal Air Force Association have now took over the running basically of the Royal Observer Corps. Under a series of wise leaders the Royal Observer Corps expanded during the 1930s along with the Royal Air Force. It was all done on a shoestring and it is revealing now to learn that the sixteens group structure decided in 1935 was to cost no more than ten thousand pounds per year. Never before and I suspect never again could a nation obtain a vital arm of defence so cheaply. But it was when Lord Dowding took over Fighter Command that the Royal Observer Corps really achieved its highest purpose. Fully aware of the limitation of the primitive radars available to him he had a clear understanding of the Corp’s worth as a complement to them and of the vital role it would play in the struggle that lay ahead. Where others were dazzled by the price of new technology he stoutly defended the requirement for visual and audio tracking of enemy aircraft. When Winston Churchill dismissed the techniques of the Royal Observer Corps as stone age Dowding sprang to its defence and of course he was right. Derek Wood recounts fully and entertainingly in this book of the Royal Observer Corps in the Second World War and what a magnificent story it is. During the Battle of Britain and afterwards the Royal Observer Corps provided our only intelligence on aircraft operating below five hundred feet and because its members were well trained and as keen as mustard the Corps were not confined to low level reporting. The operation of the alarm within the alert, notification of bale outs and crashes and a wealth of other intelligence flowed from the Observer Corps posts. As the war ground on the Royal Observer Corps expanded in every direction. Helping home lame ducks. Assisting in air sea rescue. And taking an heroic part in D-Day fleet with its members dressed in hybrid military uniform as temporary Naval petty officers. The list of its activities is endless. It was all made possible by the ideal that, the ideal of selflessness freely given, volunteer service and, “Attack Warning Red,” provides us with a timely reminder of the worth and strength of that ideal. After the war came the anti-climax of stand down from ’45 to ’47. But Fighter Command would, Fighter Command expanded at the time of the Korean War. The Royal Observer Corps once again came to its assistance. Valiant efforts were made to regain lost ground but although it remained effective throughout the 1950s in identifying and plotting low level raids the advent of high speed, high flying jets could neither be seen or heard was to prove an insuperable problem. Thus it was the role of the Corps changed in the early 1960s to that of monitoring nuclear fall-out. As the field force of the UK monitoring organisation the Royal Observer Corps continued to play a vital role in the defence of this country and still maintains the close contact with the RAF which has become so much of its history. To all those who have served in the Royal Observer Corps or ever been associated with it this book was a joy to read. I count it a great honour to have been asked to contribute this forward and I take this opportunity on behalf of the Royal Air Force to salute the Royal Observer Corps and all its members past and present.” And that was Air Chief Marshal Sir Andrew Humphrey. Chief of the Air Staff. Will that do?
HD: Thank you, Bill. That’s lovely. And that concludes the recording.
WW: Yes.
HD: Thank you very much.
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 William Albert Warwick
Creator
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Hugh Donnelly
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-03-13
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.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AWarwickWA180313
Format
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00:12:57 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
William was five years old when war was declared. He lived on a farm in north Lincolnshire not far from RAF Kirton in Lindsey, RAF Scampton, RAF Hibaldstow, RAF Blyton, RAF Sandtoft and RAF Sturgate. An anti-aircraft unit was also nearby. William remembers the aircraft overhead and an unexploded bomb landing near the farmhouse door. Some of the soldiers were billeted in the farmhouse next to their cottage. With there being a number of airfields in the area quite a lot of aircraft crashed in the vicinity. William then gives a short history of the Royal Observer Corps,
Contributor
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Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
anti-aircraft fire
childhood in wartime
civil defence
crash
home front
military living conditions
RAF Blyton
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
RAF Sandtoft
RAF Scampton
RAF Sturgate
Royal Observer Corps
V-1
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1033/11405/AMillinJR160126.1.mp3
ce6e5d1cf8f839a386755e45bf8ab79f
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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Millin, Jack Robertson
J R Millin
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Jack Robertson Millin (b. 1924, 2208997 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 12 Squadron South African Air Force.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-01-26
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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Millin, JR
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JM: I was born in 1924. The son of a World War One veteran who had been wounded on the Somme having joined up at eighteen to a local Manchester regiment. Transferred to the Royal Engineers because he was in the building trade and came home from the Somme via hospital in hospital blue. Instead of being shipped out to France he was part of the Balkan Expeditionary Force in Salonica in Greece. And he served there ‘til the end of the war because of course the Royal Engineers are the construction department of the army mostly. The officers were civil engineers or architects. So he was a corporal and he came out in 1919. And in 1920 he started his own business in painting and decorating. So I was born in 1924 and became his third apprentice. And I wasn’t able to go to a grammar school by passing a scholarship and he didn’t want to pay for my grammar school education so I left school at fourteen. So that was it. Evening classes. I was sent to evening classes when I was thirteen and continued doing painting and decorating evening classes until I went in the air force. Eventually, after the air force I became qualified with City and Guilds to became a part time teacher for sixteen years in painting and decorating. So that was my sort of background of how it all happened. And of course as a young boy I used to remember the KLM, or whatever it was called, the Dutch airlines aircraft coming daily into Manchester. And also an R-34 airship flying over and thinking that this must be great. I wasn’t into transport but my grandfather was a railway transport person. He was a carrier with a horse and so his job was, was as a transport person. He wasn’t involved in air or, and he worked on the railway. So that was where it happened. So when, I was fifteen when the war started. Remembering Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast that now we are at war with Germany we didn’t know what was going to happen. So all the things, we had a very quiet start with the phoney war err the phoney war until they started to drop bombs in our area. Eventually I volunteered when I was sixteen to become an ARP which was Civil Defence cyclist messenger. And I used to do duty every week on the basis of the, if the telephones went out of action we were able to take messages. So that was one of the things I did. But when I was sixteen the Air Training Corps started after the Air Defence Corps was its founder. So this was very attractive to me and joined with my future brother in law. And we attended and we were the founder members of the Air Training Corps in Ashton under Lyme. So I went through that and all the various training. Got promoted. Corporal. Sergeant. Flight sergeant. And then I volunteered for air crew as soon as I was coming up to eighteen. Of course it wasn’t the thing. You weren’t supposed to push yourself and volunteer too early. It was just wait your turn. So eventually I was called up after some delay which they called deferred service, via RAF Padgate where there was a selection of medical for aircrew. Passed fit all aircrew but because of my lack of education I didn’t qualify for the pilot navigator bomb aimer. They agreed I could be a wireless operator air gunner under training. Which I did. So there was a delay. Eventually I was called up and went to London to the Aircrew Receiving Centre. Lord’s Cricket Ground. We would go on then to Bridgnorth ITW. From there I went on to Yatesbury. Number 2 Radio School near Calne in Wiltshire. From there after long delays because of course the bad weather of the winter didn’t allow people to train or be killed so we couldn’t move forward. And eventually it was decided that in addition to signallers which was our qualification when I qualified at RAF Yatesbury as a sergeant signaller with an S brevet. There was something that was still needed as wireless operators/air gunners for Coastal Command where they had ASV training. And also for Bomber Command because sorry medium bombers because medium bombers had to be dual role people. They couldn’t be just signallers and specialists. So I was sent to a full Air Gunnery School at Evanton in Scotland. Number 8 Air Gunnery School. And I did the full training there and I remember the dates particularly because on VE Day I was just coming to the end of my training. So after we’d got another brevet, an air gunner’s brevet we were sent home on embarkation leave. No. To West Kirby on the Wirral where they sorted people out or kitted them out for overseas service [coughs] Excuse me. Then we had embarkation leave and went by Liverpool by ship. Monarch of Bermuda to Gourock in Scotland and then joined a convoy to have a week on a long sweep in the Atlantic to Gibraltar and then another week in the Atlantic err in the Mediterranean hugging the North African coast to Port Said. From there we were shipped by rail with sliding doors and spent a day in straw. And all us getting off at eating points via Ismailia up to Jerusalem. I do remember Jerusalem was the first place I had seen since 1939 with street lights on and a lovely temperature. The balmy air as we arrived there. And I spent six weeks in Jerusalem. Part of them under curfew because the Jewish Stern Gang, Irgun Zvai Leumi I think they were called had killed a police commissioner. They’d assassinated him. So we were kept inside after dark. We were confined to the place we were staying. It was an ex-German hospital. From there because of my name and this was one of the, the lucks of the draw. My name was Millin and all my courses were from A to L and M to Z. So I was Millin and the first of the group who went to Jerusalem. So when I had to go to, from Jerusalem after six weeks to Shander on the Great Bitter Lake I was given the pass to take this group of people — Millin, Mullin, Pearson, Stewart, these were all my contemporaries at that time to this Shandur on the Great Bitter Lake which was a desert air force bomber base with Nissen huts sunk in the sand. So we stayed there and we were, the day we arrived after being photographed we were told to go and find a South African aircrew because they were looking for a wireless operator air gunner. So I joined this crew of five South Africans to fly an aircraft I’d never heard of. The B-26 Martin Marauder known as The Widow Maker. The Martin Murderer. The Flying Prostitute — no visible means of support. Because it was a very advanced aircraft. Very fast. Very streamlined. Straight off the production line. Never had a prototype so it had lot of accidents and things. But of course it’s teething in the air force was number, RAF Squadron, Number 14 Squadron which operated from the Middle East. From the El Alemein area. And used to do torpedoes and bombing of transport ships. German ships coming to the North Africa. They stayed there until the Italian campaign. They were, I think based in Sicily at one time. And they came back to the UK. That’s number 14 Squadron. But the South African Air Force were equipped with lease lend aircraft. They first of all converted their Junkers 86 airliners which German aircraft were designed to convert to warplanes into bombers and they went in to East Africa and operated as [coughs] Sorry about this. They eventually were, equipped with the Martin Maryland and then they had the Martin Baltimore. And they and they took these to the Middle East from East Africa. And then they had a period, one period with Bostons. But the South African Air Force eventually had four squadrons of B26 Marauders in the Desert Air Force — 12, 21, 25 and 30 all came together as 3 Wing SAAF. But in addition to that they had another squadron, Number 25 which had been on Coastal Command around South Africa on the [pause] it’ll come back to me — the name of the, the name of the aircraft. But it was originally a Lockheed Hudson that was converted. And they, they came to the Middle East but converted then to Marauders and they went to fly with Balkan Air Force. The Balkan Air Force was set up to support Yugoslavia primarily in its attacks but it also had in its air force this squadron, this Balkan Air Force, Italians who were ex-prisoners of war and people who were in the south of Italy when we invaded and were captured but volunteered for aircrew. So, they flew in Baltimores and they had various other aircraft as well to make this air force that went into Yugoslavia and part of Greece. The idea was the Italians wouldn’t have to fly against their compatriots in the north. They were flying into Greece err into Yugoslavia. So, we were based then from various places that moved up. The squadrons only joined together when they were at Pescara. That was the first base when 3 Wing operated. And then they eventually moved up to Jesi where I joined them. And after the war they moved up to Udine which was in North Italy. After the surrender of the German forces in Italy. So this was the B26 Operations. They are all historically recorded. I have got all the books and all the history of their record both in America and in, in the British use of it which was quite a, quite an aircraft in itself. Very advanced. The details were in this Winged Chariots and all the other things I’ve done for the Imperial War Museum North to talk about its aircraft. So when I arrived in the late February my first operation I think was early March. We were flying in boxes of six or boxes of four on daylight targets. I’d never flown at night except one operation at night in that OTU where we flew out to the Mediterranean and around by Cyprus and back again because we used to do — our bombing range was the Sinai desert where Sharm El Sheikh, whatever it is called, all these resorts are. We used to do all these bombing and courses there. And we flew up to the Mediterranean at that end. So that’s where we were up to there when we did our training. And I did twenty operational flights. Some to the bomb line where we were supporting the British 8th Army as they moved forward. And we used to fly and bomb ahead of T markers on the floor with anti-personnel bombs against the major part of the, when we were there the line was pretty stable where the Po River crosses was attacking that north of Italy to get into there and drive the Germans out of Italy. And we supported one day an attack by commandos. The last commando landing in Europe at Lake Comacchio, Porto Garibaldi where they used these landing craft that went in off the sea behind the Germans. And we attacked supporting that. By coincidence I met a commando some months ago who’s recently died who took part in that. I met him on the ground at a Manchester Historical Society. They got us together to talk about our — we above it and him getting wet below. So that was quite something. This Porto Garibaldi. Porto Garibaldi is named after Garibaldi and the Risorgimento where they, they came back to Italy to capture Italy again in the 1800s where Italy became reunited. And he was part of it. The Red Shirts I think they called them but that’s, you can look them up in history anyway. But that was fascinating in itself. It’s a lake, Comacchio and the Porto Garibaldi were a lot of marshes and they were attacked by commandos. They laid low. There were two VCs there during that attack. And I, first of all got the link with it at Eastleigh. The Royal Marines Museum when I went there since the war to visit and found out that one of these landings I’d done there was a VC awarded for that attack we were on. And it’s the same thing again I found that there was a second one eventually there. It was a quite a, quite a part of the war that not many people know about. This landing there. So I felt that I was doing something worthwhile. I had done something worthwhile. The other things was marshalling yards. We attacked a couple of marshalling yards in North Austria err in South Austria because we were flying over the Alps to attack these and of course we were bombing dumb bombs and we had to find the target and drop them on the leader. The bomb aimer was the leader and he dropped and we all dropped at the same time. Mostly between twelve and thirteen thousand feet. But when we went over the Alps nobody ever told, only ever told us to use oxygen then. We never used oxygen over ten thousand feet because most of the things were at ten and eleven thousand feet when we were attacking the North of Italy because these were at choke points in roads or railways we were always attacking. But one of the problems our squadron had and it lost two lots of aircraft with it was that there was a complication with the American bombs and leaving — British bombs leaving American aircraft. And those fuses were — they clashed with each other and they exploded before they left the aircraft too far and blew up other aircraft. Something I’ve only recently found out in my history. They had this. It brought other aircraft down with it. But also they lost other aircraft over one target called Udine where we were flying over predicted flak. Exploding one aircraft and took others down with it because they were in formation close together. And of course the whole thing exploded. So that was one of the things. Of the, I think five hundred odd aircraft we had a fifty percent, fifty seven percent losses by accident in the RAF’s use of B26. These figures I’m only remembering but of course I don’t have them all at my fingertips. But there were more losses with accidents than enemy action. So if you survived a B26 alone, without operations there was a high risk situation. Btu there we are. But having done all that and coming out of the air force early because of the B, of the Class B Release to come back to the building trade. Again, coincidence. I arrived back and had to register at the Employment Exchange for work of national importance to help build, re-build the country as a painter and decorator. I suppose they still wanted things finishing. I’d already escaped. Oh I haven’t told you about when I finished flying because the people in the South African Air Force who were Royal Air Force members were no longer needed. So we got, we were interviewed and offered various jobs. RAF regiment, clerks, motor transport drivers as well. As I couldn’t drive I decided I’d be a motor transport driver. So eventually I was allocated to 9 Supply and Transport Column in Naples. Their job, because during the desert you know there are no railway lines in the desert so all the bombs and all the support had to come up by road transport. There were special units set up by the Royal Air Force to transport these backwards and forwards in the deserts as the advance and retreats came. And they were 9 Supply and Transport Column and I was one of those. So they, they taught me to drive in a fifteen hundred weight truck, a three ton Dodge and a ten tonne mac diesel. So I flew, I drove these around Naples and across to Bari and Rome and different parts. So I became a motor transport driver. Whilst I was there they were advertising. The Royal Engineers. They wanted to build some accommodation and they wanted building trade members. So I was interviewed to become one of their team. And it so happened that I was due for three weeks leave. My three weeks leave was coming and then I got a call to say I was called to this support team so I ignored it and went home on leave. And then when I got back from leave they said I was going to face the consequences. They said, ‘Don’t unpack. Your release has come through. You’re going home on Class B Release.’ So I’d been home on three weeks leave via rail right from Naples. Came back again. All the way to Naples again. And then I went all the way back again to be released at RAF Hednesford with my demob suit and everything. That was early. So that, that finished my just three years in the Royal Air Force. Of course my contemporaries stayed in eighteen months to, twelve to eighteen months longer because of that and they did all sorts of things like were in charge of movements on the docks. In charge of leave centres or transport places. They were all given administrative jobs as senior NCOs but my job as a senior NCO when I was an assistant driver was to roll my sleeves up so that they couldn’t see my stripes. And I used to go in the airmen’s mess with the driver. So that was the way. But on some units they wanted us to take our stripes off you know. They didn’t want us to be sergeants although we went in the sergeant’s mess. There was a lot of, especially the regulars took a dim view of aircrew being given rapid promotion. And also when they, they started to sort out the regulars what they were doing after they didn’t want to know us. And of course that’s a bit like Churchill didn’t want to know us and neither did the Royal Air Force. There were too many of us. A glut of aircrew. And of course there was a glut of aircrew during the war because my brother in law was given labouring jobs on these things, handling bombs and things in between whilst they were waiting to be moved. And they were given a lot of labouring jobs. In fact when I went to Air Gunnery School I’d also been ill with a boil and I’d been in hospital so I missed my draft. But they sent me off on, and this was an interesting trip because I’d got my arm in a sling, sergeant’s stripes on moving on my own from RAF [pause] where was I moving from? [pause] Put it right, in the portion where it is. With an arm in a sling going through London on the rail, went to the RTO and I’d got a berth on the train. Everybody, wherever I went, because I’d got my arm in a sling and I’d sergeant’s stripes and aircrew brevet was given VIP treatment where ever I went thinking I’d been wounded [laughs] So that was quite a travel to travel with a sleeper up to Inverness. A couple of senior NCOs helped me in to my bunk each night with it. And when I got there the course had gone ahead so I had to wait two weeks whilst then so they give me a job amending all the code books. The log books and everything. And learning how to swing an aircraft around with its compass and everything like. I was a labourer. So these were various aspect things. The Royal Air Force had a glut of aircrew and they had, we had to put up with it. We were bored stiff a lot of times but I relaxed and I could, I could enjoy my life. In fact I was very comfortable in the air force because I conformed. I was smart. I was sharp. And I could have got on well. But my father persuaded me that I ought to be a partner with him in the firm. Which I did and on balance it was alright. I did sixty years part time teaching as painting and decorating until I found that I found more time keeping these day release people in evening courses after they wanted to get home. They were not interested in some respects. So when I could earn enough to do the things I wanted I did. I gave up that income. But that was the Royal Air Force summarised from 1943 ‘til 1946.
HD: Lovely Jack. Thank you very much.
JM: Put these in there. I’ve lost the thing —
[recording paused]
HD: This is a continuation of Mr Millin.
JM: Yes. One thing. On arrival at Shandur on the Great Bitter Lake I and nine other wireless operator air gunners were taken to a hangar and told of our South African Air Force crews who needed one extra crew member. The good news was that my captain was a twenty nine year old married man with a family. He’d been an instructor in South Africa. And that the observer was an ex-infantry soldier who had survived Tobruk before volunteering for aircrew. With such maturity and experience we had great assets in the survival stakes. It appears that some crew members were a bit hair raising. I remember well whilst at OTU having to squeeze through the bomb bay between the two bomb racks when approaching the target we were training to attack. This meant carrying my chest parachute whilst manoeuvring along a nine inch wide catwalk holding on to two rope hand rails. When I was right in the middle at twelve thousand feet the bombs doors were suddenly opened. A special treat for me planned by the rest of the crew. They laughed their heads off. And I recall at 5.30 in the morning calls for 6am PT sessions arranging for the time because of the high daytime temperatures in Egypt. After a while we conspired to give it a miss. At 6.15 all of us who were still abed had our names taken. On Sunday, our day off we were lectured on keeping fit and detailed to walk the two mile runway picking up empty cartridge cases and ammunition belt links which had dropped out of landing aircraft. Eventually we thought the job was completed. The South African CO inspected the runway in his jeep and sent us back again. Not, not, nor was that all. Had to walk right across a desert airfield to lunch were presented with overalls, forty five gallon drums of paraffin and long brushes and told to wash and clean our marauders. In the heat of the blazing afternoon sun no one missed PT again. That was what I’d put in there, you see.
HD: Right.
JM: And that’s it.
HD: Ok.
JM: Yeah.
HD: Apologies. I meant to put a header on the last recording and sorry it seems to have slipped my mind. The last recording is from Mr Jack Millin who was an NCO serving as a wireless operator air gunner with 12 Squadron South African Air Force in Italy. The interview was conducted at Mr Millin’s house in Stalybridge near Manchester. Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Jack Robertson Millin
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hugh Donnelly
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-01-26
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMillinJR160126
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:25:13 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
South African Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Jack Millin was working for his father as a painter and decorator before he volunteered for the RAF. He was a Civil Defence bicycle messenger and joined the ATC. When he joined the RAF he trained as a wireless operator/air gunner and was posted to 12 Squadron, South African Air Force flying Marauders, Bostons and Marylands. He left the air force under Class B release because of his building trade experience.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Egypt
Italy
Middle East
South Africa
Middle East--Jerusalem
Egypt--Sharm El-Sheikh
Italy--Porto Garibaldi
North Africa
Egypt--Suez Canal
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
B-26
bombing
Boston
crash
RAF Evanton
RAF Yatesbury
training
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/866/11107/AHeathRB180313.2.mp3
8617314bcb769f3762451755cf09698a
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
Heath, Richard
Richard Bingham Heath
R B Heath
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Richard Heath. He grew up near RAF Faldingworth during the war.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-13
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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Heath, RB
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HD: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewee is Hugh Donnelly and the interviewer is Richard Heath. The interview is taking place at Mr Heath’ s home [buzz] Hibaldstow, Lincs and on the 13th of March 2018. Present at the interview is Mr Heath’s wife. That’s it. So —
[pause]
RH: Standing in my back yard we could see the Lancaster bombers flying over the house. I can remember one moonlit night when there were high patched white clouds the black bombers seemed to be silhouetted against the clouds as they made their way east. As a young lad it seemed to take hours for them to pass and for, for the constant hum of the engines to fade into the night. I don’t remember anyone trying to count them. There just seemed to be so many coming from all the corners of the sky. They were all spread out as if nobody wanted to bump in to the others. One morning I remember we were woken early by the sound of what seemed like fireworks exploding in the fields and behind the house and down towards the wood. When we looked out of the window we could see balls of red fire shooting in to the air and we knew they were signal flares. I think my dad got dressed and went to warn the village policeman and Home Guard. He was exempt from military service because he worked on his uncle’s farm but he belonged to the Auxiliary Fire Service and was on call. By the time daylight had arrived we could see what all the fuss was about. A bomber had crash landed in the fields and by then recovery teams from the camp had arrived and were surrounding the crash site and all the crew had been taken to the camp. We did hear that none of the crew had been hurt and very quickly the plane was taken away. I do remember it left a long trench cut into the field and ploughed up a length of hedgerow before finishing up in the next field. A popular [pause] Start again. A popular occupation among the village lads was to cycle out to bomber crash sites around the area and sift through the bits that the recovery teams had left behind.
HD: Can I just interrupt for a second? This was at Faldingworth.
RH: Yeah. This was at Faldingworth.
HD: Sorry.
RH: And sift through the bits that the recovery teams had left behind. The main finds which my brother and I would take home were bullets. We would trap them in the garden pump handle then and using a pair of old pliers take out the pointed bit, pull up one or two strands of cordite, set light to them and stand back and watch the fireworks. That was until our mother caught us and put a stop to this dangerous practice. On one occasion my brother who was two years older than me had gone to a crash site and while searching through the debris had moved a piece of charred cloth and found a human hand. He was so upset by this it took all the excitement out of the game and brought home the reality of the deaths of so many of the airmen. But I don’t think we went searching again. I don’t think as young lads we had any idea what the war was about. Living in the Lincolnshire countryside it was such a long way away and it became exciting to see aeroplanes flying over and rows of soldiers passing through. Sometimes they would be in lorries or Bren gun carriers. And when the Yanks as the American servicemen were known arrived they would throw us sweets and chewing gum. As I got older I began to understand more about the Blitz and the destruction of towns and cities in Britain and the continent. That probably made things more frightening. And towards the end of the war we would sit in the kitchen and listen to Doodlebugs passing over heading for our towns and cities further west. In fact, one night we heard the spluttering of the engine which sounded like a plumber’s blow lamp suddenly stop, and we held our breath waiting for the explosion. I think it must have glided further on because the bang when it came sounded a long way off.
HD: That’s super. Ok. Yeah. Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Richard Heath
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Hugh Donnelly
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-13
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHeathRB180313
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:05:56 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Description
An account of the resource
Richard Heath remembers watching Lancaster aeroplanes flying in the skies above him from his back yard and listening to the sound of them fade into the night. One morning he could see red flares exploding in fields nearby where a Lancaster from nearby RAF Faldingworth had crashed. His father, an auxiliary fireman got dressed and went into the village to warn the Home Guard and policeman. The crew of the plane were safe and the plane was removed from the site. Richard and his brother would sift through any crash debris and take it home but one day while sifting through items on the ground he found a human hand. Richard and his family listened to V-1s flying over, and on one occasion the engine of one spluttered and it crashed some way off in the distance.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
childhood in wartime
civil defence
crash
home front
Home Guard
Lancaster
RAF Faldingworth
V-1
V-weapon
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/322/3478/AReedD151015.1.mp3
3a2e4cbfe06a01d1f1b16fe159e1d6ac
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
Reed, Douglas
D Reed
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Douglas Reed (1620813 Royal Air Force). He flew operations with 166 Squadron from RAF Kirmington and with 156 Squadron, Pathfinders, from RAF Upwood.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-15
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Reed, D
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
HD: This is an interview being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Hugh Donnelly and the interviewee is, is Doug Reed. The interview is taking place at his home at [deleted] Wolverhampton on the 15th of October. Interview commenced.
DR: Yes. When I left school, like many of my school mates I was going to be apprenticed in Goole Shipyard. Because apprentices from the shipyard would go on to Trinity House in Hull to be trained as Merchant Navy officers. So, if you were apprenticed in the joinery shop in the shipyard you went off to Trinity House to be trained as a Merchant Navy deck officer. If you went in to the coppersmith’s shop as an apprentice in the shipyard you went off to Trinity House to be trained as an engineering Merchant Navy officer. And so that was my planned movement until, out of the blue my history master sent, ‘Would you please come and see me?’ So I trotted off to see the history master and he said, ‘There’s a vacancy in the Town Clerk’s Department at Goole and I want you to apply for it.’ So I’m saying to him, ‘Sorry. No can do. I’m going to be apprenticed in the shipyard to be a deck officer in the Merchant Navy,’ and so on. ‘Just to please me,’ he said, ‘Go and apply for it.’ So all nonchalantly and uncaring I go in to the Town Clerk’s department and say to them, ‘I understand you’ve got a vacancy. I’ve come along to apply for it,’ in a couldn’t care less attitude. And so they sit me down and they give me a few maths to work on and write, write a letter applying for the job. Being fresh from school that didn’t take very long. And they saw me sitting there and said, ‘Are you stuck?’ I said, ‘No. I’ve finished.’ So they gathered up the papers and the next thing I know I’m ushered into a large room with a big bay window and walls lined with all kinds of books. A big open fire. And, to me, was an old gentleman wearing pince nez spectacles sitting behind this desk who I later found out was the town clerk. He looked at the papers and said, ‘Very pleased with these. I want you to start in my office.’ So I said, ‘No can do I’m afraid.’ And told him the story. All about being apprenticed etcetera. And he says, ‘Well, I understand what you say but I want you to start in my office on Monday. So go home and speak to your parents about it.’ So, I did that and my parents listened to me and didn’t say anything and said, ‘Well, it’s up to you. You want to go into the shipyard or do you want to go into the Town Hall?’ Neither of them offered anything. But I looked closely at my mum and I thought I could detect a sort of a look that she didn’t fancy the idea of her son eventually going off to sea. And she didn’t, couldn’t look into the future of course because this was about ’37, ’38 and of course the war broke out in ‘39. And a lot of my school friends who had been apprenticed and gone off into the Merchant Navy they were killed and lost through enemy action. But she wasn’t to know that. And I thought I detected she didn’t like the idea of her son going to sea. So in the end my father said, ‘Look, if you want to take up the Town Hall job I will square the apprentice thing with the shipyard.’ So, in the end I decided yes, that’s what I would do. And therefore I started working in the Town Clerk’s Department at Goole. And so time wore on and war was declared in September ’39 . And I just carried on working but I realised I was of the age when I would have to go into one of the services as soon as I was old enough. And I worked it out in my mind that I didn’t fancy the army. I’d taken my father as an example of that. He’d been badly wounded in the First World War through his army service. I wasn’t too keen on the navy. And by process of elimination I decided that yes I would like to go into the air force. Particularly if I was flying at least I would get a parachute to look after myself with. So, off I went to the Hull Recruiting Office in Jameson Street in Hull. And there a rather beefy flight sergeant says to me, ‘So you want to join the air force.’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Hmmn hmmn. So you want to fly do you?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Right. You want to fly and fight in the air.’ I said, ‘Oh I don’t know so much about that.’ [laughs] He didn’t say much but in the fullness of time I was called up to go to the, the, not the Aircrew Reception Centre but where they give you a three day examination and so on and so forth before you’re accepted for the aircrew training. And after the three days yes, I was. I was going to be aircrew. And that’s how come I, I started. Eventually I was called up and went off to Initial Training Wing etcetera like most air crew had to do. And that’s how eventually I finished up as aircrew doing flying duties. But in, in those days it all seemed to be very adventurous and perhaps even satisfying but it’s because people like me were naïve really. Just had a vague idea that flying, especially the operational flying something might happen to you. You might get killed. But that’s all it meant really. You didn’t know any details. We had no experience. And so it transpired that having been through all my training and finished up with a good pal of mine Pete le Guard and one or two others. We were all in the same crew and off we went doing our bits and pieces. We went to Operational Training Unit at RAF Peplow in Shropshire. And after OTU we went off and converted off twin-engine Wellingtons on to four-engined Halifaxes. And then having converted we went off to Lancaster Finishing School at RAF Hemswell. And having completed that we were ready to be assigned to a squadron. And I looked at my RAF records afterwards, at the end of the war and I saw that we were being posted to 12 Squadron, and I’d no idea where 12 Squadron was. I knew it was in Lincolnshire somewhere. But then they said, ‘Sorry. Not 12 Squadron. You’re going to 166 Squadron at RAF Kirmington.’ So, off we went and we arrived at Kirmington on the 30th of March 1944. And we’d hardly booked ourselves in when they said to Pete, who was my pilot, that he was going to go as second dickie on a, on an operation that night. That operation proved to be Nuremberg where we lost eighty or ninety aircraft. And unfortunately Pete, as second dickie with a so-called experienced crew who had done at least five ops — they never came back. And so the first day on a squadron I needed another crew. And eventually yes, I was. I joined another crew skippered by Bill Biddell who was a bit of a character himself. Having been in the Kings Royal Rifles and been evacuated from Dunkirk he’d remustered in to the Air Force and become a pilot. So I was to fly with Bill. By the time I’d done three ops with Bill he’d done about seven. And it was quite, quite an educational, if that’s the right word, experience. He began to fill in some of the details that you hadn’t been aware of when you were glorifying what it would be like to be aircrew. I, in my first op from Kirmington, which I think from memory was [unclear] somewhere in Germany there I bombed my first target Turned for home and away on the starboard side there was a sudden explosion which drilled into my mind what it was like seeing an aircraft explode. But just accepted it as one of those things that happens. And that was my first op. The, the second op was on my twenty first birthday. And I spent the evening of my twenty first birthday bombing Essen in the Ruhr. Which I found out subsequently was the most heavily defended place in the Ruhr. So, and then my third op from 166 Squadron was to Frederikshavn on Lake Constance. And as we were, I think we were the fourth to take off and as we took off the fifth one behind us blew up on the runway. It swerved off the runway and blew up. Anyway, we carried on with our task and went to the target which was on the shore of Lake Constance. And having got there it was ablaze. But one had to be careful to locate the target because half of the blaze was reflected in the water of the lake and it would have been so easy to bomb the edge of the lake. And so we, we did that target and when we came back to Kirmington a WAAF — we called up, we were flying L-Love as, as it was called then. We were flying that and we called up to land and this female voice said. ‘Hello Love. Land left.’ And we’d never had an instruction like that before. We said, ‘What does land left mean?’ Do they want us to land left of the runway? Could be a bit dodgy on a grassy airfield in a Lancaster. But if that’s what they want us to do we will do. Perhaps the runway got damaged in that aircraft that blew up as we took off. Anyway, we lined up to land left of the runway which triggered off all kinds of sort of red verey lights from the caravan and from the control tower. So we realised that wasn’t correct. So we called them up again. We said, ‘What’s this land left?’ And she said, ‘I want you to land on the runway and turn left at the end.’ And we thought to ourselves why the hell didn’t she say so? And, however, having gone around again and landed safely we turned left at the end and said, ‘L-Love clear.’ And this female voice said, ‘Goodnight Love.’ And all the crew in chorus, not, not wireless protocol at all, in chorus we said sarcastically, ‘Good night, darling.’ And that was that. And that proved to be my last op at Kirmington. And I was rather sorry because the funny thing about Kirmington it was such a spread out large aerodrome that everybody but everybody was issued with a bicycle so you could get from A to B quicker than walking. That’s an outstanding memory I have. Anyway, Bill, having done seven trips by then, the squadron commander called us into his office and sort of invited us to think that we might like to go on Pathfinders. And sort of, if you know what those invitations were like [laughs] they were coupled with the idea of — pick up your travel warrant as you go out of the door. And that’s how we came to be eventually on 156 Pathfinder Squadron at 8 Group. Having attended the Pathfinder Training Unit in the first instance. And it was with 156 Squadron that I did the rest of, of my operational flying duties and which I, I’d completed and I was still twenty one. But having done my tours with the Pathfinder force I was, I was quite unceremoniously [pause] well, stood down I suppose. But nobody ever said that to me. I was just getting on with the job as usual and someone said, ‘I think you’re posted.’ So I said, ‘What?’ And they said, ‘Yes. We think you are.’ So I thought I’d better go and find out. So I go up to station headquarters at Upwood and I say, ‘Am I posted?’ And they looked it up and said, ‘Yes. I’m afraid you are.’ Which was the unceremonious way of saying you’ve been stood down. And I said, ‘What’s the posting?’ And they said, ‘Oh, it’s an Air Ministry posting.’ Which shattered me because if it was a squadron or a station posting it left room for you to negotiate a little bit but with an Air Ministry posting no negotiation. You just had to do it. And that’s how my operational flying came to an end. As I say you couldn’t argue with an Air Ministry posting. But during that time the initial experience that I’d picked up at Kirmington developed with the Pathfinder squadron. And if people didn’t know about what we did at Pathfinders it’s because Air Vice Marshall Don Bennett who was the CO of 8 Group — he didn’t like publicity. In fact, he refused to appoint a public relations officer. So we just used to get on with the job. It’s only afterwards when you’d finished operational flying that the realisation of what might have happened to you through the experience you’ve gained on the way more than suggested that you had been very lucky indeed to get through a couple of tours with the Pathfinders. We did some very long trips. When I first started flying with 156 I didn’t do many German trips before it was D-Day. That was kept very secret. We as aircrew had no idea it was D-Day but we were out at the dispersal point. We’d already been briefed to bomb a coastal battery and we thought this was an unusual target but ok if that was what they wanted us to do we’d do it. And we were out there at the dispersal point long before midnight. Time went by and it got around to 3 am in the morning. We’d never taken off so late for a night operation. Anyway, we, they let us go at about 3 am. And we located Fougeres where the coastal battery was and did our stuff. And as we climbed to come away, flying home, through a break in the clouds I saw dozens of ships heading in the direction from which we were coming. And it suddenly dawned on me this is, this is the invasion of Europe. It, it’s D-Day. But that’s the first indication we had of D-Day. And then after that we got several trips backing up the army. Strategic bombing trips. If the army had got bogged down somewhere we had to go and, I think they used to be called totalised targets. And on one of the occasions because the Germany forces and our forces were so close together and they wanted the German forces loosened up a bit we asked them to fire from their Bofors guns red star shells over the position that they wanted us to bomb. And this they did. We were able to pick out these red star shells bursting and we bombed accordingly. I hope we did a bit of good but that was a, an unusual Pathfinder job. And it brought home to you that although in the briefing you were given a route to follow sometimes a deviation route to throw off the enemy defences and leaving until the last minute almost for you to line up on your target. To fool the enemy defences. Oh incidentally that’s one of the things that didn’t happen on the Nuremberg raid. I learned afterwards that AVM Bennett argued with the people who’d set the course, which was direct to Nuremberg. He wanted a variation but he was overruled and hence I’m afraid we paid the price. But anyway, we used to follow the route that we’d asked to. But it was up to you how you got to the target and indeed how you got back because you might be diverted because of the enemy defences or you might be chased by a fighter or the, you might meet headwind which was slowing you down. You might have a wind up your tail which was making you early. So you had to alter course to suit your own navigation. That’s what I mean by saying it was up to you how you got there. And as long as you got there on time to do the Pathfinder job you’d been given to do because there were several different jobs you could do with the Pathfinder force. You started with the easiest and you worked your way through to finish up as master bomber. You probably start off as an, as an illuminator. Dropping about twenty, twenty odd flares straight and level every eight seconds. And you’d work your way through the more advanced jobs until you finished up as the top job which, which involved supervising. Staying in the target area all the time and supervising how the raid was going. And principally we were, you could either be a visual marker or a blind marker. Blind marker was on radar but if you got to the target and it was visual ok the visual markers marked it and you backed them up. If it was obscured you, as blind marker marked it and the visual boys backed you up. And then somewhere halfway during the raid you could pick up a job as a visual centre where you would go and see how the raid was going and perhaps in conjunction with the master bomber you decided that the, the target needed centering which you would mark and then tell main force or VHF for example to ignore reds and bomb greens. And as I say you did these different jobs and you picked up some, some long targets. And eventually, well in no time at all, perhaps cheekily we were doing more daylight bombing then night bombing and that’s on German targets too. Cheekily going into the Ruhr in daylight. And one time we did this, I think the target again was Essen and main force, we were there on time, main force was late. There was no sign of them. So there was about five, five Pathfinder aircraft circling in daylight over the Ruhr. And I think all the towns in the Ruhr were saying, ‘We’ll pick him. You pick him. You pick up.’ And we were getting flak all around us. Right, left and centre. And then on the distance main force came into view. Straggling along towards us. And when they were near enough we marked the target. It’s no good doing it too early because the flares would probably wear away before they got there. Anyway, we marked correctly. By which time our aeroplane was in a bit of a sorry state. We’d had one right close to the nose which had blown the front off the aeroplane and made it extremely cool with a two hundred plus knot wind whistling through, apart from other damage. We used to pick up quite a bit of damage. Flying home on three engines instead of four. One time when we limped home that way our ground crew, God bless them it was their aeroplane really. They only lent us the aeroplane so we could do the operation. But we used to return it them to them sometimes in a very sorry state. But God bless those aircrew they did us, those ground crew, they did us a good job. But one time we got back there and they told us afterwards they’d had to patch up forty four holes in the aeroplane and that there was a piece of shrapnel about the size of half a beaker if you know what a beaker is. A mug. About a half split down the middle. A piece of flak about half that size lodged in the petrol tank. On the, on the starboard wing. And they’d said if that had come loose we would have lost all the fuel out of the tank. But it acted as a cork for which I was duly thankful. Another time was unusual. We were ordered, a daylight job as well, way down ooh in sight of the Pyrenees. Well, this was an oil refinery. So we were ordered, as I say it was daylight, we had to be down at five hundred feet and we flew out over Looe in Cornwall. You could see people on the beach enjoying themselves at five hundred feet. And we were down there crossing Biscay at five hundred feet and lo and behold we came across a German mine sweeping flotilla doing its stuff. So lat and long was radio’d back to base and afterwards when we got back we, we were told that they’d notified Coastal Command and Coastal Command had gone out and, and dealt with the mine sweeping flotilla. Anyway, at five hundred feet we were over Biscay and then we had to climb to bombing height. Up to about eighteen thousand. And it were pretty cold after that. Most of us were just in shirt sleeves and it was a bit cool. Anyway, we did our stuff on the oil refinery and just in the bargain there had been a tanker alongside the refinery at the time. And as we cleared the target and looked back through the smoke and what not I don’t know what we’d done to the oil refinery but we couldn’t see the tanker any more. And so that’s how we, we came back. But we got quite a few, quite a few jobs of a different kind of nature as I say. Most cheekily in Germany in daylight. And, as I say, we, we copped it once or twice. I do remember an early morning daylight on Duisburg. The same night, Duisburg again. And we lost an engine to come home. And then again Willhelmshaven. We did three German trips in thirty six hours. So we got very little time for a kip but we made sure that the aeroplane was serviceable and so on to do it’s stuff and we managed even to get something to eat in between times as well. Oh incidentally I do remember that when you were going off on an operation the mess always dished up egg and chips. This was your aircrew meal before you went off. But egg and chips was a godsend in those days. It was another manna from heaven job because eggs were scarce, if not rationed. But to us that was a good meal. And also for a sweet [laughs] we had, week after week, day in day out stewed prunes. And oh dear. You got so tired of stewed prunes. So we said we’ll alter this. So we go in to the kitchen. We said, ‘Have you got some bread? A slice of bread?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Have you got some jam?’ ‘Yes.’ Put the jam on the bread. ‘Now, have you got some batter that you use when you’re doing the chips?’ They’d got some batter. So you dipped your jammed bread in the batter, put it in the, in to the deep fryer and lo and behold you’ve got another sweet. A lot, a lot better than the stewed prunes [laughs]
MR: Apricots. Were they apricots? Not prunes.
DR: Oh, I beg your pardon. Yeah. Apricots. Stewed apricots. Yes. Yes. Stewed apricots. Yeah. Yes. And as I say Bennett appeared to be a hard man. And indeed he was only hard because he’d got a job to do and he was to make sure that you helped him to do that job. And I’m sure that when he was losing his crews he was as heartfelt as anybody else. But as I say he had a job to do and he gave all the appearance of being strict. Which of course he was. If you couldn’t do your job there were examples where people had been told, ‘You’re not Pathfinders,’ and sent back to wherever they’d came from. So he used to make sure that we knew what we were doing. But there was one incident where a German target, we must have been going in mid-way in the raid because the target was well ablaze. Lots of fires, lots of smoke, lots of flak. And on the, our bombing run I always used to make sure that there was none of our boys up above us dropping his load. And so it was that in the target area I was searching up above as well as below and there was a Junkers 88 about a couple of thousand feet below us flying on a reciprocal. But it wasn’t bothering us so didn’t bother the rest of the crew. Just let them get on with the job. However, when we got back to Upwood, whenever we came back from an op on the table waiting for us in the debriefing room there used to be Walters’ cigarettes, navy rum and hot coffee. So you sat back there with hot coffee and rum to thaw the chill out of your bones and, and a Walters’ fag. And there was a delay in debriefing during which time leisurely we’d consumed three rum and coffees. Sank back and enjoyed them. So, anyway, when we were called in for the debriefing we told the intelligence officer all he wanted to know. And as we finished he said, ‘Was there enemy fighter activity in the target area?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. I saw a Junkers 88.’ And a voice behind me, over my shoulder said, ‘How do you know it was a Junkers 88?’ And the rum answered, ‘I know a bloody Junkers 88 when I see one.’ And looking over my shoulder there’s the two steely eyes of Air Vice Marshall Bennett looking at me. Oh dear. I thought that’s it. And he looked at me and he said, ‘That’s alright lad,’ he said, ‘But we had Mosquitoes on that target tonight.’ And the rum wanted to say, ‘I know a bloody Mosquito when I see one.’ But I restrained. But as I say AVM Bennett often used to be around in, in the debriefing. Many a time. But I thought I was going to get the chop then for being rude [laughs] Anyway, as I say probably if I flicked through my logbook I could see other, other things that had happened to us. But it was quite a full, a full time because in addition to operational flying you were airborne every day without fail. Sometimes two or three times a day. If not operational you were on air tests or practice bombing raids. Fighter affiliation. Navigation cross country trip. You were kept on tip toe all the time. So that you were, you were aware of course that you were part of Bomber Command but not impressively so. You were more impressed with the fact that you were on 156 Squadron. But moreso with your own crew because you, you slept, you ate, you flew, you went on leave with the same people. The crew. So that you built up this strong bond and you hoped that they relied on you as much as you relied on them. And you were vaguely aware that there were other crews on the squadron doing the same job more or less as you were doing. But life was so busy that — and sometimes unfortunately because crews went missing you didn’t get any time to make friends or acquaintances. As I say you just, you just knew one or two here and there. Possibly because you’d been at OTU with one or two of them. But otherwise you were so busy. But there were two other, two gunners who had been at Operational Training Unit with me and they’d both, they’d both [pause] Barclay Felgate was a Rhodesian and he was in my first crew. And he appeared at 156 Squadron, Pathfinder Squadron with another crew. And Bob Heatrick, an Irishman, he also flew with me and he was on 156 Squadron Pathfinders. And I’d known them previously from OTUs so you did pick these up. But you did get a giggle from time to time. It depends how things struck you. Sometimes and seriously some people were stricken religiously almost. And there was one pilot who was like that but he was conscientious. And the guys used to call him Dinghy Dan because sometimes when it was reasonable he used to have the crew practicing dinghy ditching positions. Which of course was, was a good idea in case you needed it for real. But on one particular occasion they had a chap, another Irishman with a hell of a sense of humour and they were getting knocked about a bit in the target area and this Irishman said, ‘Come on skip. Let’s get out of here.’ And Dinghy Dan said, ‘It’s alright. The stick is in the hands of the Lord.’ And quick as a flash the Irishman says, ‘Well give him a hand then. He can’t do it all by himself.’ [laughs] As I say we used to pick up the odd, the odd giggle now and again. And my flight engineer Baz, Baz Butterfield, bless him. We were twenty, twenty one as I say. I’d finished operational flying and I was still twenty one. He’d got a son twelve years of age and we used to look at Baz as Uncle Baz and we used to go out to the aeroplane ready for an op and climbing on board Baz, usually he used to say, ‘We’re going to have a good trip tonight.’ ‘Oh do you reckon so Baz?’ ‘Yeah. I’ve got a feeling in my water,’ he used to say. He was a good lad was Baz. Nearly lost him as I say when we, when we lost the nose of the aeroplane that time. He was very close. Yes. As I say if I was to going to fish out my logbook I’d probably think of other incidents. But mostly the German trips. But as you got experience you were trained to do, do your job in the air. You were given an aeroplane that was the best that could be provided. You were trained but they couldn’t give you operational experience. You had to earn that the hard way. And it was a hard way. Sometimes it was quite devastating. It brought home reality. Not only what could happen to you in a flash but what might happen to you. For example if you baled out. You only had what you stood up in. If you’d landed in a German urban area God knows what might happen to you. There were stories of aircrew being lynched. And certainly you wouldn’t have been received very kindly once they found out you were RAF aircrew. You could have landed by parachute in the water, in the sea and hope to God you could rescue yourself. Or the aeroplane itself might have to ditch. All these realities came home to you through realisation after. Afterwards. It was afterthoughts really. And made, made you realise as good as your training had been and as good as your equipment had been you had been very lucky. Because people of the same experience of you and higher rank than you, rank didn’t count for anything. The chopper chopped when it needed to be. That’s at RAF Kirmington. There was a pub there called the Hand and Cleaver and to the aircrew it was called The Chopper. Hence a crew that didn’t come back had got the chop. Yes. Yes, they, you didn’t write off the German defences. The urban targets were well defended. Flak and fighters. You’d got to watch out for fighters. They knew what they were doing. They got very wise. Operating in pairs at times. One would fly on a beam and deliberately show a light and hoped you would focus on him so the other one could come in from the blind side and knock spots of you. But fortunately we were wise to that little trick. Sometimes they would follow you home to your home aerodrome and as you were coming in to land, in the most vulnerable situation, flaps and undercarriage down they would nip in behind you and shoot you down over your own airfield. So you didn’t write them off lightly. Indeed I remember coming back one evening. Well, it was still dark coming back. And as we came across the English coast there was a light. And I thought it was an aircraft showing a light. And we immediately thought it was the German fighters trying the old duo trick. But this light seemed in a steady position and I watched it go astern of us. Anyway, in the debriefing I mentioned this. That it was an apparent fighter showing. And the intelligence officer was highly interested in this. Wanted to know all about it. Where, where we’d seen it first of all and that. How we’d lost sight of it and was it a steady light? Yeah. And in no time at all, within a day or two we’d seen one of the first of the buzz bombs coming across. And that, that was the flames from its tail that we’d seen. And, and then afterwards they were coming over frequently and everybody knew about the buzz bombs. But we therefore got the job of trying to put paid to some of the buzz bomb sites. And later on the V-2 rocket sights. We got the job of trying to put paid to them. And the job was twelve Lancasters flying in pairs. Two, two — six pairs flying astern with the wing, tucked in wing. As close as we could. And we had a Mosquito who was on the Oboe beam or supposed to be on the Oboe beam flying ahead of us and when he picked up the beam and picked the target up he would open his bomb doors and drop a red, a red flare and then we twelve would open our bomb doors and twelve lots of bomb loads used to go down. Hopefully in the one position. But more often than not the Oboe beam wasn’t working so the Mossie was no good. So we had to do it ourselves and as I said drop twelve bomb loads all together. And we did this several times on the buzz bomb or rocket sites. So some of our daylight flying at home was tucking a wing in to the wing space of another Lancaster. So, we got some pretty interesting jobs to do. I’m running out of things to tell you. As I say without picking up a logbook [laughs]
HD: Lovely. Thank you Doug. We’ll call that an end to the interview. Thank you very much.
[recording paused]
HD: Doug’s wife Margaret would like to tell you a little story of what happened in Goole. Here you are Margaret.
[pause]
MR: [unclear] This is Margaret Reed. I have known Doug since we were three and a half. We went right through school together. And he went away in to the air force. I went away to college. And we got married when we were both free. I don’t mean, mean free. When we were both able to get together and be in the same part of the country. I was sitting with my parents on the outskirts of Goole. In the bungalow that we had there with my two brothers and my mother and father. And we were sitting in the evening, a beautiful evening. It was April. And just one of those evenings you get sometimes. And we had deckchairs. The old striped deckchairs. And in the back garden we had chickens. I had white doves. One of my brothers had guinea pigs and my mother had chinchilla rabbits which we ate. One a week. So we kept having, on having young ones to make sure we had enough for one rabbit a week and they are fairly big. So she, after the war she had the most beautiful chinchilla coat made.
DR: Say Goole was surrounded by airfields.
MR: Goole was surrounded by airfields. And as we sat there we watched the planes going out on a raid. All the same way. And quite close together. And suddenly my father said, ‘Oh. One’s touched wings with another.’ And we said, ‘Where?’ And we stood up and in the distance there were like two very very small aeroplanes circling down. One coming towards Goole and us and the other going in the opposite direction. And we watched and we watched as it circled around. And we counted out seven crew so we knew there was nobody in it but it was coming in our direction. And suddenly my father said, ‘It’s getting too close. Run in the house.’ We all ran in the house and dropped under the kitchen table. We all scrambled in there. And then there was the most terrific bang and everything shuddered and peculiar noises. And we rushed around into the back garden again and there was a hole where the lawn had been and water filling up in this massive hole. It was the width of the garden. And there wasn’t a feather from the chickens, my doves had gone. Everything had gone. The chinchillas. And we, we then wondered what would happen next. And an RAF kind of lorry with men in it were there within ten minutes and told us to get out of the house. The bungalow. The bungalow at the back was covered with mud out of this hole. There was about six inches of mud over the brickwork. The roof. Really it was just a grand mess at the back. And these men came and shoved us out of the way. They said they didn’t know whether there would be any other bombs that had gone off. And the one near the back, towards the back door was the tail fin, was just across the door. We had to step over it. And I went back in to the bungalow because I knew in my bedroom I’d got a bag of those tiny little silver threepenny bits and I’d got a bit of jewellery. I mean at that age you don’t have jewellery but an aunt had left me a pair of diamond earrings and they were in the, in the paper bag with the threepenny bits. And as I climbed over this bomb, the tail of the bomb near the back door so of course the bag, the paper bag burst and they were all over the drive. And they wouldn’t give me any time to pick them up. They just said, ‘Get out. Get out.’ And we went down to our grandmas. And instead of her little two bedroomed, well not a town house even, a small house. We had to live with her for a week. You can imagine what it was like. Five of us going to live with her. Anyway, the funny story about it was my mother had had new false teeth that, that she’d collected them the day before and of course they were on the, what was the bathroom window ledge. But the glass had blown out and the teeth, the new teeth, top and bottom were on the floor. But the next day we retrieved them. So her Yorkshire instinct of not having to pay a penny more than she should and collecting them well she won in the end.
HD: Lovely. Thank you Margaret.
MR: Well that was that.
HD: That was super. Thank you very much.
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AReedD151015
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Interview with Douglas Reed
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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
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eng
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01:08:23 audio recording
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Hugh Donnelly
Date
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2015-10-15
Description
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Flight Lieutenant Douglas Reed worked for the council before he joined the Royal Air Force. He flew operations with 166 Squadron from RAF Kirmington and with 156 Squadron, Pathfinders, from RAF Upwood. His aircraft often suffered damage. On one occasion the ground crew reported they had patched forty four holes in the aircraft and a piece of shrapnel had been lodged in the fuel tank.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Nuremberg
Temporal Coverage
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1944-03-30
1944-03-31
1944-06-05
1944-06-06
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Pending review
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Julie Williams
156 Squadron
166 Squadron
8 Group
aircrew
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
bombing
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
bombing of the Normandy coastal batteries (5/6 June 1944)
crash
ground crew
Halifax
Ju 88
Lancaster Finishing School
Master Bomber
mess
military ethos
Mosquito
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kirmington
RAF Peplow
RAF Upwood
take-off crash
target indicator
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/276/3429/AHutsonB171030.2.mp3
2ac848ab085e8dc708490c52520aca2e
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Title
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Hutson, Brian
Brian Hutson
B Hutson
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Brian Hutson (b. 1935, 22887820 Royal Air Force).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2017-10-30
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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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Hutson, B
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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HD: Right, I’m Hugh Donnelly for the International Bomber Command Centre, interviewing Mr Brian Hutson at his home in [redacted] Waltham. The date is the 30th of October 2017 and present at the interview is a Mr Barry Wallace who is also with the International Bomber Command Centre.
BH: Hi folks, you must bear in mind that I was only a boy at the time. I was born in 1935 and war started in ‘39 so I was only about four and a half years old when it started. But I can remember being out, staying outside the house and waiting for eleven o’clock for the Prime Minister to announce that the war had started. What my parents must have thought then: we had three children and they must have looked at us in wonderment, see what was going to happen. We as children, of course, soon as the war started we were, there was Germans and English, and we had made our own guns and bayonets and so on, to play Germans and English with our, the rest of our pals. I used to go with my father, when he was working on the airfield, helping to carry bricks and rubble to make the runways, et cetera and it was interesting to see the airfield develop and I can remember taking out air raid shelters around the village and so on, with the horse and carts and delivering these air raid shelters to the houses, which, looking back, it must have been quite a big effort on their part. When the airfield became operational, we as children would lie in bed [clearing throat] and would count the aeroplanes going out and then would count them coming back again. At that time we had two families living in a two bedroomed cottage, so space was not very available. So we had to sleep in the air raid shelter, four of us children, two at the top and two at the bottom, you know, and then we thought we were safe in there, but how safe we were we don’t know, and then the rest of the people were spread around the two bedroomed cottage. Night time you could hear the planes going out as I said, and you had to have, all the lights had to be out, curtains drawn, not a speck of light and the warden used to come round shouting, ‘Lights Out!’ at a certain time and then he would go right round the village, searching round the village and seeing, seeing if he could see any light. That was a worrying time. As far as I can recall, when the planes was coming back in, as far as I remember there was a red light on a hill, on a house on top of the hill, and that was the only marker there was for the planes that was situated at the end of the runway, and that was the only marker the planes had as far as I can remember. I, when I left school at the evening, I would call at my auntie’s house and she would save me the crust from the end of the loaf and she’d spread home made jam on it - that was delicious. And then I would go to the blacksmith shop and get warm, by the fire, by his fire and at the back of the shop there was a pan with a Lancaster bomber on it and we were able to stand at the back of the plane and watch the airmen getting it ready for the night-time raid. In those days we only had short trousers so when the plane tested the engines the grit from the pan would cut into your legs. Eventually there was, they had balloons, erected out on the shore, I believe they were on, out like Humberston, about that places, and one day one came over, must have been a storm in the night or something, and it came down not far from us, and we as children, being children, managed to cut some of it up and we made kites, and to fly in the sky, but that was a no-no, and my father panicked, and he always used to get up about five o’clock in the morning and he lit the fire and put this barrage balloon on the fire, this barrage balloon material, on the fire, which was like putting petrol on the fire really and it just set fire to the chimney stack, and the soot and everything, and the smoke and this was at lights out as well, five o’clock in the morning, and the soot was coming out the chimney and the flames was coming next and massive, massive big panic going on, you know. [Throat clear] Anyway, that’s how that, and he tried to get rid of the evidence, but he didn’t do it in a very nice way really, or the sensible way. And then of course along came the Home Guard. Well, if you watch “Dad’s Army” today that’s just how it was, just how it was, perfect, they couldn’t have done it better. And my father, [throat clear] when they were on exercises in the, at Grainsby Park, about five mile away, he used to cycle there, the others used to go on the lorry but my father used to cycle there, and then at four o’clock the war had to end, because me father had to cycle back to milk the cows. [Laugh] Oh we had to laugh. He did, and that was the end of the war until he returned back again about six o’clock at night, and then we used to watch the Home Guard practicing drilling, shooting, throwing hand grenades, on a Sunday morning, and that was interesting. And then also, there was an old ambulance there, in the implement shed, the old, what did they call it, Blue Cross or something, anyway this ambulance, we used to play in there, we made it our den. Also remember there was, all the driver had a little tiny slit to look through, about nine inches by two inches, that’s all he had to look through to, driving. We used to wonder how on earth he saw where he was going really. And then eventually along came the KOYLIs, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. They were based on, opposite the Public House now, which is now Holton Mount. I remember the big shelters there, the big billets there, the wooden ones, they had a big stove in the middle, big round stove in the middle, and they were in there and we used to watch them practicing bayonet practice and there was sacks on stakes, stuffed with straw, and they was charging, all “grrr”, and charge, and stick the bayonets in the sack, you know, and practice. It was frightening really, for children, but we never used to watch it. And then just by us there was a searchlight, on the brow of a hill, just behind where the red light were, where the planes used to come over, and just below there was a big searchlight and it used to swing round, had a swivel chair and they could swing round looking for, looking for planes in the sky - the enemy in the sky - and that was manned by soldiers. And then I used to go to visit soldiers, bearing in mind I’d only be about five or six, seven, and they used to get me on this swivel chair and whizz me round and round and round, until I, when I got off I was dizzy, you know. Of course they were only young children, only young kids then, eighteen, nineteen, and they used to be laughing their heads off, cause I went dizzy, my legs had gone, you know, and then they used to give me, the NAAFI wagon used to come round and they used to give me a cup of tea and a biscuit, I think that’s why I went really, and that was that, you know. But then one night, one night my father worked on the farm and they were harvesting, we were playing in the farmyard, you know, and the soldier, it was a lovely summer’s night, and the soldier came running across the field, I can see him now, coming, and he was: ‘Get down, get down, get down!’, and there was an enemy airplane had come under the radar, about two hundred yards, about two hundred foot up in the air, and you could see these tracer bullets going, firing the plane, and we had to hide in the barn, you know, as children, get in undercover until it we got the all clear, and yeah, that was a frightener, that was a lovely summer’s evening and he came under the radar. I think they shot him down in the end like, but. That was something I shall always remember, seeing this soldier, he must have been brave, to walk across, you know, run across, he had about two hundred yards to run across this open field, he did, and the enemy plane and then also I can remember there was two barriers, one was placed just around what they called Clay Lane corner out at Holton le Clay, one was there and the other one was the other side the village prior to the runway coming in and they would, obviously they would stop traffic when planes was coming down. I remember that and I remember a big convoy of bren gun carriers coming through, one day, must have been about fifty, sixty bren gun carriers coming through, and it, yeah, they were coming through. Now they was all interesting. And bombing raids, we used to listen to the bombing raids in Hull and Grimsby, and then one night, one night there was this big raid on and they tried to bomb the Grimsby to Louth railway line, and they missed by about fifty yards, the plane must, must have been coming straight down, it missed by about fifty yards or so. Bombs were dropped, there was one at New Waltham, one at North Thoresby and I remember that night my mother was hanging her coat up on a hanger, on the door, and boom! It blew her right across the air raid shelter, you know. Luckily she didn’t get too hurt like, but the blast was, it was that close. That was close. It was, and then we actually moved then from where, from that cottage, to about five miles down the road near to the old to the station at Holton le Clay, on the old Chetney rail station and so we moved away from that really, but then, coming on to that, towards the end of the war we used to, the prisoners used to come. We used to have three prisoners come, to work on the farm, and they would, it was hard work and they would come with maybe two cheese sandwiches or something and my mother used to have tea and sugar and milk to make them a cup of tea at break times, and bearing in mind they were only young nineteen year olds, and we got, we got plenty of food then, unofficially I suppose, off you know the farm, potatoes and turnips and eggs and things like this and my mother used to bring them, ask them in, we used to sit round the table she used to say ‘they’re all somebody’s children’, you know what I mean. They were only eighteen nineteen and yeah, and they used to work really, really hard, but course they knew they got well tret so, they used to come on the bus and drop so many off at each farm and when we used to have same three drop off, they knew they was on a good thing, you know. [Laugh] We used to look after them. And then of course there was the end of the war and I remember that, my uncle, he was a prisoner of war, he got captured in Crete, when Crete fell, so he was a prisoner of war with the Germans for about five years and he came home and you know, it was the best thing he thought he’d done, getting caught like. He was out of it, but anyway the Germans apparently looked after him really well, so it works both ways, don’t it. The airfield closed down, we managed to get to that, to a hangar. Oh yeah, the existing hangar what’s there now, when we became teenagers then, a few years later, it all closed down but that one hangar, what’s standing now, we used to just, we could get the door open about two foot and sneak in, there used to be about thirty of us in there on Sunday afternoon playing football, massive big undercover pitch, you know, now that was, that was good. But as I say that’s all I can remember really, ‘cause I was only a boy at the time. But, well, other things I can remember about existing on the airfield now is like the board outside telling you how many members, how many people flew from there and never came back and then there’s the site’s still there of the CO’s house, where the air raid shelter is still there, the Flying Control still there, and some of the runways are still there, the main runway’s still there, which is used now for training learner drivers. So that’s more or less all I can remember as a boy. But if there’s any questions, please ask them.
HD: That’s absolutely super, Brian, thank you very much indeed. Did you ever keep in touch with these prisoners after the war?
BH: No, no we didn’t, I know.
HD: You didn’t, nothing like that.
BH: No, we didn’t actually, but, they was close like, you know, they would say they became family, but you know they were prisoners at the end of the day. They were from Donna Nook, you know, to bring them from Donna Nook, North Somercotes there, but some weren’t so good. When some of the eyeties came, they weren’t so good. Because I mean when you think about it some of them was office workers, you know, and then come, brought on the farm, I mean in those days it was catching the corn sacks, weighed sixteen, eighteen stone, you know, I mean now you’re not allowed to lift more than four! And they were doing it all day. Well they couldn’t do it, I mean they used to get about three stone in the bottom of the sack and put it on and were running to try and keep up and they couldn’t do it because they had to carry the sack, on their shoulders, normally our farm workers, my father and so on, about, I don’t know, twenty, forty yards and then up about fourteen steps to the granary, you know. Can you imagine doing that all day long!
HD: Hard work.
BH: That’s how, how much work, how hard work it was, but they were good, yeah. We survived anyway, we survived to tell the tale.
BH: Lovely Brian, thanks. That gives us an insight into sort of village life and what happened, especially so close to an airfield. How did you get involved, did you get involved at all with the airmen?
HD: Well, they used to, they were only obviously on the airfield there was football pitches and things like this. We used to go and watch them playing football, they used to let us, sneak us in, you know. I remember going past the guardroom on this guy’s handlebars and he stopped at the guardroom and had a few words, and he was actually refereeing, this bloke was, this soldier was, airman, airman, he was refereeing that day. [laughs] We used to watch them. Of course then there were dances and that in the village, you know. We’d get a lot of the airmen and soldiers at the dancing, you know, things like that, but as I say we were only boys. [laughs]
BH: That’s great, thank you very much indeed. Right, we’ve just got another little addition that Brian’s going to add, about the air raids over Hull et cetera, and the butterfly bombs. Sorry, Grimsby, I do apologise. Grimsby that is.
HD: Right, yes well, what I can remember is waking up one morning and there was all this commotion going on and, because what they called butterfly bombs had been dropped at Grimsby, anti personnel bombs, and they were in the shape of pens and pencils and lighters and things like this, and people would obviously pick them up and they would blow their arm off and blow their leg off and there was you know quite a lot of damage done. In fact I had a friend who was going to school and one went off near him and for years and years and years the marks was on the wall where this bomb, this anti-personnel bomb had gone off, so it was very, very frightening and Grimsby was maybe the only place to have these anti-personnel bombs and if you look on Google now you can bring it up and it will tell you all about it.
BH: That’s great, once again, thank you very much.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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AHutsonB171030
Title
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Interview with Brian Hutson
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.
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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00:18:48 audio recording
Creator
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Hugh Donnelly
Date
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2017-10-30
Description
An account of the resource
Brian Hutson was a child during the war. He remembers his father, who worked on building airfields and delivering air raid shelters. He remembers his childhood, sleeping in a shelter and listening to aircraft, air raids, blackouts, playing with friends, helping in the village and watching men train for combat. He was on the farm when it was attacked by an enemy aircraft, as well as times working with prisoners of war, who his mother treated fairly. Brian also recalls anti personnel bombs dropped on Grimsby and their devastation.
Coverage
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Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Grimsby
Contributor
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Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
bombing
childhood in wartime
civil defence
home front
Home Guard
Lancaster
prisoner of war
shelter
sport