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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/945/9435/PSmithDS1801.2.jpg
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/945/9435/ASmithDS180921.2.mp3
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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
Smith, Douglas Stanley
D S Smith
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Douglas Stanley Smith (b. 1918, 41948 Royal New Zealand Air Force).
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
2018-09-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Smith, DS
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JB: Yes.
DS: I was eighteen years old, I think. Eighteen or nineteen.
JB: Ok. I’ll just need to —
DS: And when the war started—
JB: Could I stop, just stop you for a moment because I just need to do a little introduction to say who you are. This interview is being carried out for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jennifer Barraclough and the interviewee is Douglas Smith. The interview is taking place at Mr Smith’s home near Auckland, New Zealand on the 21st of September 2018. Now, sorry to interrupt you. Yes.
DS: I was —
JB: Let’s go.
DS: Educated at Thames High School which was a high school down at Thames. Thames was a town of about five or six thousand people, and it was the middle of the Depression in New Zealand anyway. I went down to the bank. I had matriculation or university entrance, and the bank manager said to me, ‘Have you got Higher Leaving Certificate?’ An extra year at high school. I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘My father can’t afford to send me there again.’ He said, ‘It’s a pity. The bank can’t employ you in that case.’ So, he said, ‘Go down to the Post Office. They may take you as a Cadet.’ So, I went down there and the next thing I am a Cadet. Cadets were the lowest of the low, but never mind it was a good experience. I learned to drive. I learned to do a little bit of Morse. Not much, but a little bit and I learned all about Post Office. You know, where you put your letters in. What do they call that? I can’t think of that now. Post Office. Did all to do with mails and things like that. I learned to go around all the sub-offices, of which in New Zealand there were many. But mostly adjacent to Thames so really, I was quite busy. I had my hat which I kept on my head. I was not allowed to put the telegrams in my hat. I had to carry them in my hand, and ride my bicycle, and fight off the dogs and all that sort of thing. I suppose it was a pretty mundane experience really, but I didn’t know any better. Anyway, I’m never ashamed of Thames High School. I think they taught me well, and it was a co-ed school so I was in first touch with girls, you know, for the first time really. I’d never had a girl and I never, I have said that at that High School for four, four or five years, and I never had a girl at the end [laughs] But I didn’t do particularly well. I was in the first fifteen and the first eleven in cricket and football and all that nonsense and I think the nicest thing we did really was to go and play other schools like Hamilton High School. We played them at rugby. We’d go up to Auckland and Auckland Grammar. We were lucky enough to play Auckland Grammar, and they were a good school and very good team. So, it was quite interesting really. And came the war of course, and about nineteen, what’s that? 1940. It began to be obvious to me that it was only going to be a matter of time before conscription was brought in to New Zealand because Mr [pause] what the heck was his name? He was a Scot, was very keen that New Zealand should follow the old country. Where they go I will follow with New Zealand sort of thing. In those days, you know, people made those sort of statements, and they expected the country without any sort of saying do you want to go to the war? We were all in the war and the Air Force took quite a while to get themselves organised but they did in the finish and I would have been in the tenths class perhaps. Classes were about sixty people so there were quite a few of us. We started off by going to school again because they didn’t think our maths were good enough but heavens knows we never used them anyway. And then we started to learn to fly the aeroplane and I was sent down to New Plymouth where we flew the Tiger Moths mainly, and the Gypsy Moth. I was given the old Gypsy to fly one day, and when I got in the aeroplane it had a big notice in front of me. I couldn’t help but read it, “Do not aerobat this aeroplane.” And I had practically no flying experience at all. However, it wasn’t my second or third flight that I thought oh, I wonder if it does a slow roll. Of course, it didn’t do a slow roll properly. Not with me at the controls. And I sort of got it over like this on its back and a great stream of oil came out of the engine and all over me because I’m sitting in the back of that and all over the aeroplane. So, I thought I’d better go back, you know to the hangar with the aeroplane and I was taxiing back when unfortunately, I met the chief of flying instructor. And he took one look at the aeroplane and me covered in oil and I can tell you that oil was hot, and I was quite badly burned about the face and things but he said, ‘Amongst the many attributes that you don’t have, Smith,’ he said, ‘I find that reading isn’t one of them. What does it say on that notice?’ And I said, ‘It says, “Do not aerobat this aeroplane.”’ ‘And why did you do that? What did you do? A poor slow roll I suppose.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir. That’s exactly what, what I did try to do.’ He said, ‘You will be taught that sort of thing in the fullness of time,’ he said. I’m talking a bit in the foreign language that we used in those days but there we are. So, I started off on the wrong foot and I don’t, I don’t think I ever got out of it [laughs] Anyway, I managed to, to pass through the initial flying training they called that, and I had Tiger Moth on my logbook. We did about fifty hours on the Tiger, and then we were sent down to Ohakea, which was a new station for New Zealand. It hadn’t been built long, and it had a different type of aeroplane. It had an aeroplane called a [pause] what the heck was that thing called? You know, I can’t remember these things. Could you get me a logbook out of the second drawer down over there? Now —
JB: Yes. Certainly.
DS: The aeroplane that I flew at Ohakea was a twin engine light bomber called the Airspeed Oxford. It was a nice little aeroplane to fly. It was quite a bit bigger than the Tiger, and of course it had many things that you weren’t allowed to do with it, and the first thing of course I was flying with a friend of mine, we used to fly in pairs and I said to him, ‘I wonder if this thing will slow roll.’ I said, ‘I tried to do it on a Tiger, and I didn’t have any success so let’s have a go.’ So over we go. We get this Oxford upside down and there was a terrible crash down the back of the aircraft and I said to my friend, ‘You’d better go and see what that crash was over there. I’ll keep it straight and level.’ So, I flew this thing straight and level. He went down the back and he said, ‘Well, the radio is in pieces all over the floor. You know they’re not going to be happy about that, Doug.’ I said, ‘I bet they’re not.’ [laughs] And I got in to terrible trouble that. I nearly got fired. I nearly got sent back to the Army. But anyway, they persisted with passing me out of there so [pause] but I still was out. I wasn’t out of trouble really. When the end of the course came we had an end of course party because we were all going to England. All that course was, and there were about twenty five in the course. So we had a party and we all got drunk of course. Stupid. I had a motorbike at that time. Now, Ohakea must have been four or five hundred kilometres from Auckland, and I lived in Auckland so about 10 o’clock at night I’m full of beer. As we used to call it, full as a boot. I don’t know why. And I got on my bike, and I started off for Auckland. I got as far as Huntly which was quite a way. I was lucky to be able to get petrol at Te Kuiti otherwise, I wouldn’t have had enough petrol. But I got enough petrol and the road from Te Kuiti to Auckland was sealed. There was white dots in the middle of the road. Well, I suppose I was on that for about a half an hour, and the white dots are flashing in front of me because it was about four in the morning. Flashing in front of me, and I went to sleep on that bike and I went off the road, into the railway crossing which had these big boards in it like that. The bike went straight in to that and got stuck, and the speedometer which was mounted on the handlebars hit me straight in the face and broke my nose, fractured my skull, and didn’t me any good. And I should have been knocked out and killed really but I wasn’t and the, I managed to stagger out on the road covered in blood and all dressed in uniform and everything, and a man was coming to work, must have been a sharemilker, I suppose. Milking cows, you know. So they, he took me in to Hamilton Hospital where they patched me up, told my parents what had happened and of course my mother was secretly pleased. She thought, well look at him they won’t take him like that. He can’t fly anymore so he does not have to go to the war. I was an only child you see, and she was terrified I’d have to go to the war because my father went to the First World War so that’s where I was born in England. And so there it was. I, oh I spent up ‘til Christmas and, doing nothing and then I got a posting. I had to go to a medical board and they looked at me and they said, ‘Well, you’re a bit of a mess. You won’t have much fun with the girls will you, with that face?’ [laughs] I said, ‘No. I suppose I won’t.’ Anyway, I said, ‘I don’t fly the aeroplane with my face.’ Well, I said, ‘It’s only part of me.’ So there we are. So I got on a boat and we went through Curacao, and Panama. That’s right. We went up to Halifax. We waited for the convoy to take us across the Atlantic but the convoy left us behind because we were so slow. That boat was a First World War freighter so you can imagine. But we all had to go on watch all the time. We watched for that, for the U-boats that were sinking us but luckily we didn’t get any. So that’s how we got to England. We landed at Liverpool. I don’t know what happened then. Oh, we went, the two of us went in to a fine looking hotel in Liverpool which was called the Adelphi, and it looked pretty good to us. So, we went in there and they had big containers with biscuits and cakes and things in them and of course you had to pay for them. We didn’t know this so we just helped ourselves and there was a terrible fuss over that because we didn’t have much money and we found out that we had to pay for everything we had eaten [laughs] And of course, we were hungry. And of course, we were sergeants you see and the place was full of admirals and goodness knows what and one admiral said to me, ‘What are you doing in this place, boy?’ He said, ‘You don’t belong here.’ I said, ‘No sir. No sir, I do not belong here. I’ve just arrived from New Zealand.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘That’s different. Have a drink.’ So, he gave me a drink and he said, ‘If I were you, I’d better go out and find another hotel where your class will be welcome.’ He said, ‘You won’t be welcome in here.’ Oh, he said, ‘The Navy don’t drink together. The officers drink apart from the men.’ So, we had to go there and then we were sent down to Brighton. Brighton, which you might imagine is a nice beach but of course it was mined and everything like that and it’s full of stones in the first place. It’s a terrible beach really. And then we went on to Bournemouth which was much nicer and there, we were there for about, oh quite a long time. I don’t know how long we were at Bournemouth. July. Well, it must have been half way through the year, and we’d started off so yes, we got a posting to Grantham. See it here. And we were flying Oxfords again. And then, when we flew those for quite a while again. They didn’t seem to know what to do with us. And then we got posted to — where the heck was that? [pause] Oh, Upwood. We were sent to Upwood which was an Operational Training Unit, and they were flying Blenheims. Bristol Blenheim, which was a twin-engined light bomber again. Terrible aeroplane but still, it was an aeroplane and we used to use that for going over the Channel in daylight. Two of us would go over in daylight and if anybody got back, they were lucky. Very lucky indeed. Most of them were just shot down by, by the German fighters because they were no match for the German fighter. So, we spent quite a while doing that ‘til we ran out of Blenheims. And then all of a sudden we were out at the airfield one day watching and I said, ‘Hey, there’s a couple of new aeroplanes coming in. They don’t look like anything I’ve seen before.’ I said, ‘They look like they’ve got nose wheels.’ And I said, ‘No aircraft in the RAF has got a nose wheel so they must be American. I wonder what they’re doing here.’ Well, of course they were for us. So, the two girls landed both aircraft, you see. One, two and they said, ‘You’ll be flying these boys.’ ‘What?’ I said [laughs] ‘How will we learn to fly?’ ‘You’ll learn to fly when you have to fly them. If you’re going to crash, you know you haven’t learned enough. You be careful of them as they’re a bit tricky for you. But if you read the books and don’t do anything smart, you’ll be all right.’ So, I said to Doug, ‘You’d better stop, your, your light ways of getting in to trouble all the time. These aeroplanes will kill you.’ So, I read the books from cover to cover, and I talked to people that had flown them and the CO said to me, ‘Right, Smith, have you read the book?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘Have you talked about it?’ I said, ‘Yes, I talked to the chief flying officer. He’s flown them.’ ‘Right,’ he said, ‘You’ll find them quite easy to fly in the air.’ He said, ‘They’re a nice aeroplane, and they’re quick.’ He said, ‘They’re almost as quick as the German fighters.’ ‘Almost,’ he said. ‘If you get a start on them you’ll out distance them on the way home. Remember that. Break off the fight early and go for home. Don’t stop and try and shoot them down because the German fighters will get you.’ So, I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ So I flew those for about maybe a year and a half. I did about eight or nine trips on those over Germany. Over Northern France really. And those were, my operations started there. So, I’d done about eight or nine trips when I did something stupid again. I came back from a low-level cross country. I hope you know the technicalities I’m telling you.
JB: Some. Some of them —
DS: Yeah. Some of them anyway. But I came back from a cross country, you know they used to send you out on cross countries low level, and we were up at fifty feet. About as high as these buildings. And we used to go around all of northern England and that sort of thing. And I did one of these and I came back and I thought, oh I’ll give the boys in the officer’s mess, I’d been made an officer by then, in the officer’s mess a bit of a shake-up. So, I came over the officer’s mess and I didn’t know that Viscount Trenchard who was the chief of the Air Force was sitting on the other side having a cup of tea. And of course, as the Boston came over it was noisy and low and he spilled the tea on his number one blue uniform and he was not amused. He said, ‘You will know what to do with that young fool. Send him up to Sheffield.’ Now, Sheffield was what they called a Glasshouse. In that they meant that it didn’t matter whether you were an officer or anything. You marched around all day with a pack on your back. All that sort of thing. In other words, they were going to break your spirit there. Well, they didn’t break mine, but they very nearly did. But I didn’t. I didn’t give in. I marched around until I dropped. I literally fell on the ground. Fell on the ground with just marching around, you know. So, they thought oh goodness me. We’ll have to send him to the sick bay. See whether he’s kidding or not. They found out I wasn’t kidding all right. My legs had given way and, and I was off duty for quite some weeks really. So, so they sent me back to my squadron, said I was cured [laughs] But there we are. Just made me more stupid I suppose. No. But I wasn’t completely stupid. What happened then? Oh, no. I’ve got it all wrong. When I, when I flew over the mess when Viscount Trenchard was there he said, ‘You send him up to do, fly the heavy bombers.’ Gee. The [pause] what was the bloody thing called? It must be in here somewhere.
JB: Not the Lancasters?
DS: Oxford. Wimpy. Wimpy. I don’t know where he is. A York. I can’t find that aeroplane. Must have lost it [pause – pages turning] And I’ve got Wimpy here. [pause] Yes. That’s it [pause] I can’t find that aeroplane.
[recording paused]
DS: The Wellington.
JB: Wellington.
DS: Not the Wellington.
JB: The Lancaster. It was Lancaster.
DS: Lancaster.
JB: Lancaster.
DS: Yeah [laughs] Four engine bomber. And it was quite a good old aeroplane to fly. I sat in the front there, you see. The gunners, the bomb aimer sat, no, that’s the navigator. No, he isn’t. He is. The bomb aimer sits there, and he’s got a little hatch under here. The wireless operator and the navigator sit in the wing area there and the two gunners sit there. Yeah. So, we were lucky to get on the old whatever it was called [laughs] What was it called?
JB: Lancaster.
DS: [laughs] You know your memory’s gone. Lancaster. Yeah. That’s right. So, we did the, we’d done about ten I think on the Boston so our crew, that was my navigator and my engineer, my radiator officer, radio operator and myself we went on, on rest when we’d done thirty. Thirty trips. So, the [pause] most of those were Berlin, I think. Where the heck was that? [pause] Chapelle. That was our last trip on Brunswick. Stuttgart. Frankfurt. Frankfurt. Berlin. Essen. Nuremberg. We were on that Nuremberg raid when they shot down a hundred of us that night. Now, that was too many for us to take. We couldn’t take more and that was just before D-Day. So, there we are again. Berlin. Berlin. Berlin. Nuremberg again. Berlin. Berlin. Leipzig. Stuttgart. Schweinfurt. Augsburg. All the big German towns we were bombing. So, there we are. We got away with that and I don’t know how we got away with it really. So, after we’d done thirty trips they sent us away. The three of us. And we just parted. We never saw our previous crew members again until after the war had finished when we all met when the squadron held a, you know, a reunion, and everybody came so we met our crew members again and were able to talk with them and we made friends with them this time. So after that we were given I think a six months rest period when we taught the new boys coming from New Zealand how to fly which was just about dangerous as going over Germany I can tell you. They were pretty dumb [laughs] same as we’d been. And, and I think that’s, that’s when the war finished. D-Day came. I, I did one of the raids on Paris where we dropped our bombs right in the middle of the railway yards in the middle of Paris and all the bosses were frightened. They thought that we were going to kill a lot of Frenchmen with that but we did well that night. We didn’t kill very many people at all. Then we bombed this, this marshalling yard which was going to be used when D-Day came. The Germans were, had all their trucks and all their trains and things in there so we destroyed a lot of them. It was a good raid really. I did a couple of those, and then we were sent to what? A, an OTU which was a New Zealand OTU. OTU. Operational Training Unit. Well, I think I was there for well over a year and then — no. The war came, that’s right the war finished. The war finished. That’s right. Do you think you could put that thing over my —
JB: Yes. Is that right?
DS: Yeah. That’s ok.
JB: Ok. So, what did you do after the war?
DS: So, the war came to an end you see, and I got a note to go down to headquarters in London. And I met Air Commodore Gill down there. He was a good Catholic and he was nasty to me. He said to me, ‘You have a wife and two children have you not?’ He said, ‘I found that out.’ ‘Yes sir. I have.’ He said, ‘Are you married?’ I said, ‘No sir. You can’t get married in a wartime easily. In fact, you’re very lucky to get married at all. We shall probably have to wait until the end of the war.’ ‘I’m ashamed to talk to you,’ he said. Good Catholic you see. It didn’t matter how many Catholics had got English girls in to trouble. And I know one of my friends did that and they, and they adopted the child and he was married you see so they just sent him back to New Zealand. So, he was treated right but I wasn’t because I was a heretic I guess [laughs] Anyway, I was lucky. I found someone in the headquarters that said to me, ‘You flew Lancs didn’t you, Doug?’ I said, ‘Yes, I did.’ He said, ‘Do you have you anywhere near five hundred hours?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ve got close on that.’ He said, ‘Would you like to fly the Avro York?’ I said, ‘What does it do?’ he said, ‘It’s Transport Command. They fly all around the world with very important people.’ ‘Oh,’ [laughs] I said, ‘Am I experienced enough?’ ‘Yes, of course you are.’ He said, ‘People with five hundred hours flying is very experienced in this war.’ So, they sent me to a like [pause] now I’ve forgotten that word. What’s the squadron called? Wasn’t it —
[pause]
Transport squadron it was and we went down the south of England. We were based down there quite close to Reading and we flew from Reading. I did a year and a half on that. And my last flight really was, with the Royal Air Force I came from Singapore to Calcutta on to Palam, which was Delhi in India with fifty prisoners of war. Ex-prisoners of war of the Japanese, and they were very poorly fellas, you know. They were. They were knocked around something awful. So, we had to treat them very gently. So, there I am taking off from Palam in India to go to Calcutta. We sort of just had big steps like that to go until we got to England and halfway through the take-off the undercarriage, or the wheels, you know the wheels. It had four wheels on each, two on each side. I think it did. Anyway, there were enough. We were taxiing on the take-off run, and we had about eighty five miles an hour which wasn’t quite enough to make it fly. It would have to be about ninety before it actually got into the air ‘til the pressure of the wind on the top of the wing lifted it up. And about, just before that I heard this undercarriage come past my ear like that and looked at the panel and on the panel were two green lights for the undercarriage. Well, there should have been two green lights but as I looked at them they went red meaning that the undercarriage was slowly coming up. So, the aircraft had to be two things done to it. It either had to pull the undercarriage up completely and crash it on the, where it stood or it had to be flown and I chose to fly it. I made an instant decision and it was the right one because I got it into the air and we flew it. And we had to fly it around for four hours to get rid of the fuel so that we didn’t have that much more fuel to burn us and the aeroplane. And we did that. So, we flew around Taj Mahal. That was in, and what was the other place. There was a triangle. We flew around there. Flew around for four and a half hours. I went and talked to all these people. These fifty boys. One fella said to me, ‘You’re going to kill us aren’t you, sir.’ I said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘The war is finished. Why would I kill you for goodness sake?’ I said, ‘I’m living. I’ve got two children, a wife.’ I said, ‘Why would I kill you?’ I said, ‘You just sit there with your head in your hands like that,’ and I said, ‘You’ll be alright. Now, don’t go jumping up and down and trying to get out of the aeroplane until it stops.’ I said, ‘Wait ‘til it stops. If it’s not on fire then you can get out easily.’ And there it was. And I stood. Of course, I had to fly the thing so I put it down. And it wasn’t a bad landing, you know. It was pretty good without an undercarriage and everybody got out. Nobody got hurt. So, they gave me a green endorsement in my logbook for that. I think I’ve got that somewhere up the back here.
[pause]
DS: Oh yes. There it is. There. But I don’t think it will come out.
JB: No.
DS: Green. There’s another green there. So, I got two greens [laughs] And this one here, “Gross carelessness. Taxiing accident.” So really that was all my, that was all my career really. If you want to take this disc, have you got a player?
JB: I haven’t. I’ll just switch this off now.
DS: My last flight with the Royal Air Force. After that they said, ‘It’s time you went home. You’ve been here for six years and — ’
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Douglas Stanley Smith
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jennifer Barraclough
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
2018-09-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ASmithDS180921, PSmithDS1801
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:42:08 audio recording
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Language
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eng
Description
An account of the resource
Douglas Smith grew up in New Zealand and on leaving school he joined the Post Office. He joined the Air Force and he flew Tiger Moth, and Gypsy Moth aircraft at New Plymouth. On one of his flights there was a warning note in the cockpit not to do aerobatics. He slow rolled the aircraft and was covered in hot oil from the engine and was advised by the chief flying instructor, that he would soon get his chance later on to do aerobatics. He was posted to Ohakea flying twin-engined Oxfords. He arrived in the UK to commence training and was posted to RAF Upwood, an OTU flying Blenheims. He completed thirty operations. Whilst flying in Transport Command in India, he was carrying former prisoners of war from Delhi to Calcutta and his undercarriage developed a fault so he flew around the area to burn off fuel, and he crash landed the aeroplane, with no injuries to his crew or passengers. He was given a green endorsement in his flying log book.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
India
New Zealand
Germany--Berlin
India--New Delhi
India--Kolkata
New Zealand--Auckland
New Zealand--New Plymouth
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
207 Squadron
88 Squadron
aircrew
Blenheim
Boston
crash
Lancaster
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Upwood
Tiger Moth
training
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/951/9529/PPetrieIFP1801.1.jpg
603fc627e20cb4957ccaccc321b96fc9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/951/9529/APetrieIFP180926.2.mp3
c9c02b67bd9df95a599e70b6c9a17f06
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
Petrie, Ian
Ian Fabian Prosper Petrie
I F P Petrie
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Ian Fabian Prosper Petrie (1919 - 2019, 425170 Royal Air Force). He flew operations with 101 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-26
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Petrie, IFP
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JB: This interview is being carried out for the International Bomber Command Centre in the UK. The interview is Jennifer Barraclough. The interviewee is Mr Ian Petrie. The date is the 26th of September 2018 and the interview is being done in Mr Petrie’s home near Auckland, New Zealand in the presence of his son, Robert Petrie. Ok. Mr Petrie, thank you very much for taking part. Could you tell me just a little bit about your life before you joined the RAF? Where you come from. A bit about your childhood.
IP: It was the end of the Depression. The end of the Depression and I was, it was hard to get work and I was only sixteen and I got a job through family in Newmarket doing, cleaning cars. Keeping cars spotless for sale because cars didn’t sell much these days. And this day a boy that I went to school with went past and saw me and he, I called him and he said, ‘Oh, how much do you get?’ And I said, ‘Oh, two pounds a week.’ ‘Oh.’ He said, ‘Out where I am we get a basic rate of 5.10.’ Five pound ten. ‘But,’ he said, ‘We make up to twelve, even fourteen dollars with overtime. And he said, I said ‘Do you think I’d get a job there at the end of the day?’ He said, ‘Oh, give it a try anyway.’ So, I went out and I got the job. I was getting quite big money but it was a very bad environment. They were, you know gambling and real, real hard lot of people that you worked with. So, I stayed there for a while but it’s a long time ago to recall. The [pause] Oh, that’s right I [pause] With all the carry on I had, I had developed a drinking problem. Drinking too much. And anyhow, the big outfit that I worked for, the medical man there, he sent me in to a specialist in town and they said to me, they said, ‘Well, you —’ They said, ‘If you don’t stop drinking alcohol you won’t live until your fifty.’ So, I had to make a decision then to make a complete break and cut out drinking altogether. So, I did that. I gave up the job with the big money because I was wasting it all and I went to work out of it bit cutting tea tree firewood in the bush. And from there went from one sort of job up to another and I saw the, you know, something about the Air Force that you know the, they were recruiting people as flyers and I thought oh God how unbelievable if you could, you know, fly in an aeroplane. You didn’t, I didn’t know anybody in those days that had even been up in an aeroplane. So, I thought oh, I’ll, I’ll volunteer and see how I get on. So I volunteered for the Air Force and they put us through a lot of different tests and I was, for some strange reason I was selected and I did my, you had to do fourteen hours before you got, went solo and I did my fourteen hours and it was just coming up lunchtime and the, I reported in and the, the head man of the station was there. ‘Oh, you’re, you’re ok. You passed.’ He said, ‘Come back after dinner and we’ll give you your next posting.’ And anyway, I told everybody I’d passed but went back after lunch and he said, ‘Look, I’m sorry. You just missed.’ And there was one, one instructor that I knew that I’d, didn’t do well with him because I didn’t like him and we weren’t getting on and I was flopping the plane down and [unclear] And he put in a bad word so I missed out. I felt, oh so disappointed. Anyhow, most of the course were, only a few were selected and I was put in charge of the group that was sent back to Rongotai and I was pretty upset and I thought, oh I’m going home. To hell with this. So when I got to, to Wellington I got all the, everybody’s papers out and I gave them away to the other bloke. I said, ‘I’m going home.’ So I, I just hopped on a train and went home. So I was absent without leave for two weeks and then a telegram come to my parent’s home saying I was to report immediately to Rongotai. They, they knew what had happened. I’d gone AWOL, you see with disappointment. But unfortunately, or it could have been fortunately, you don’t know because it, it put me back in the selection and you know, going on to next step. So the boys that I got on with they all went ahead. And, I was then, you know slowly coming, coming behind them. So that was it, and it was, it just went on from there. But there was a lot to it but I’m not going to talk about that. A lot to it. Anyway, the only thing, the one thing that, the one thing that counted was that I actually survived. I did. I was there, you know, when the war finished. I was, I was, I think I did my last, my last trip the day the war finished. I I when you, when you were on a bombing run and you dropped our bombs you took a photo. Everybody kept back and that photo was there and it gave them an idea where you, gave you an idea where the bombs actually dropped. Some of them were a mile away. But they didn’t want them all dropping in the one place anyhow. But anyhow the, I got back and we just went on from there. And you went at that, at that point they established the Empire Training Scheme where you were trained over a period as, and you started in Canada and you went to do a course and you went through the course but finally about three months or three weeks or something and when you finished you then waited until there was another one opened. So, you could be waiting for six weeks or a couple of months just, just on the station. You know, just working around the station doing the odd thing. And I did a lot of running in those days. I was a very fit man, running and weight lifting and other [unclear] So we went on from there and I eventually ended up in this particular flight and the, there was a sergeant in charge of it. His name, I’ll never forget it because he was part Yugoslav like myself. Ivan Yanovic and he, he went on to become quite an outstanding flyer. Well, one of the men did nearly fifty, over a fifty trips. But Ivan did, Ivan was on his, you did thirty. That was a tour of operations. Thirty trips. And then they asked for volunteers. They were short of crews and they asked for volunteers to do an extra five trips. So, Ivan volunteered like a lot of us did and he got, right on the thirty fourth he got shot down. It all started when someone went missing. It was strange how they, how the news went around so quickly that so and so had had it, and he was, he was lost. And had all sorts of stories about him. How, that they’d hung him and all sorts of things because you know you could understand the people that were being caught in the bombing how, how targets were all industrial targets that were, that were manufacturing for the war but the, poor Ivan he got it. So, Ivan Yanovic. A really fine man. Yeah. But there we go. That’s how it went on from there. You were, it was, it was just sheer luck. Every man I’ve spoken to that went through it they agreed with me that it was just sheer luck whether you got caught or not. You went over in a, in a group and the, you had every, every twentieth flight you had to do what they called, it was a line overlap. That meant you had to fly straight and level to take three photos and they put them together and that told the story of what was done in damage. But you, nobody wanted to line overlap because they knew that the people on the ground were looking for them. If they could get, get a person in their, their sights for just a short time they could bring them down. So that was it on my last one. My last one on Berchtesgaden was a line overlap so it was, that was like that and it was sheer, sheer luck or bad luck. Nothing different. But there we go. It was, that was the, the way it went and it was spread over quite a long period as I say waiting for a course that had to take a stand and doing its operational training. So you always think of it and it always comes back in memories how, how lucky you were. Just plain. Just plain luck. That was all there was to it but we, we had a, we had a fairly good career really, I suppose. And it was wonderful too. To have done that at all. The day that it finished I got up very early in the morning and I went down to what we called the flights. The bomb aimer’s section. I went in and all over the walls were the photos you’d taken because you took one automatically but the, as I say there was that one, one day in the month and that the twentieth day you did three in a row. A line overlap. Which meant flying straight and level between photos which was a dangerous, a really dangerous time because they could pick you up on the ground and they were waiting for that. So, ours is the, our last, our last trip was a line overlap. And I went to the flights this day. I took about seven or eight photos that I’d taken, they were just stuck up with, there were drawing pins on the all over the walls and I ripped out about seven or eight of mine and took them down and I, I kept them and, but the next day all of that stuff was destroyed. Everything was destroyed. They burned it all straightaway. And so I, I didn’t know but I had one of the few, few photos of the actual operation. So, it was, I didn’t learn about it until I was applying for a job and, I think it was in Panama or somewhere and they asked me if I had any flying experience. And I said, ‘Yes. I was with Bomber Command in the war and I have some photos.’ And they said, ‘Oh, could we see them?’ And they, I said, ‘Yes, I’ll go —’ I brought, I brought them in and I gave them to him but he happened to be, him and another man were writing a book on Bomber Command and this was the only photos they ever, ever got. Yes. So, I didn’t know. I gave them over to him and I got some of them back but some of them I don’t think I got back. But they couldn’t believe their luck that some of them hadn’t been destroyed. I’ve got them. I still got them. Still got the line overlap because those were, those were the days of, you know you, you just took things as they came. You knew that when you went down we were, in the morning as we were going out and we usually went at night but, but you would go down on a cold bloody morning and you’d be carrying all your junk with you. You’d get there and you would then put on, put on an outfit. Where you had slippers that you put on your feet and they had wires running up in to a tunic that you put on. And when you got in to the aircraft you plugged that in to the aircraft system and that kept you warm. They were heated otherwise you were bloody well frozen. So it was, and then in the air it even went down to your hands. Yeah. So you were, you were and of course even with that it was all open, you know. The air was pouring in. You had a chute there that you were to drop the Window in. They called this paper that they, silver paper, they called it Window. Have you ever heard that expression?
JB: No.
IP: Window. When it burst open it would have hundreds of these little sheets of, of silver paper and each one would show up on the on the screen and the people that were defending the place and whereas if you didn’t have it they could pick you up and send, you know probably eventually get you. And it was a risky business. But anyway, with Window it made a huge difference so you, you sat there and tried to put all your settings on. Oh, you had I think two big screens with all sets of switches and all a purpose to try and, you know get everything straight. And you had to put all these settings on to hopefully deliver your load where it was supposed to be but it was a hazardous bloody thing. So, you, you [pause] that was how it went. You went down. You had to, you had to be as you went down you’d be, ‘I wonder if this will be the last one or —’ ‘How, how we’ll get on tonight?’ They would, because the, at that time the, the old aircraft weren’t, weren’t that reliable and they could pack up and if your, if your oxygen packed up you didn’t know you were passing out. Didn’t know, it was just like going to sleep. The aircraft would then just fly on [pause] What’s that Rob?
RP: Just water for you dad.
IP: Pardon?
RP: Just water to clear, clear your throat.
[pause]
RP: There you are.
IP: Thank you.
RP: I’ll put it there.
IP: Ok.
IP: It was a wonderful feeling when you came back and you were able to have the run down the runway and you knew it was behind you. You’d get out and I’d sometimes, I’d sleep. On one occasion I slept for twelve hours. I slept for twelve hours. I was so tired and I suppose it was nervous tension as well. Another time I passed out. You don’t know it’s happening and I’d, I thought, I thought it was fear. I actually thought it was fear. I felt this strange feeling coming over me. I kept saying to myself, ‘They will never get me up here again. They’ll never get me up here again. They’ll never get me up here again.’ And immediately after that I passed out. So it was quite dark and the next thing I knew something was hitting my hand. I opened my eyes. It was daylight. I’d passed out when it was dark. It was daylight and I’d, I’d actually lost consciousness and laid there and when they got well clear they were on the home run and they were clear of it. They went, they went down to about ten thousand and I I recovered. I recovered at that ten thousand feet. I was probably breathing oxygen but it was, it was a strange, strange, strange experience. Especially, you see you never knew it was happening. You didn’t know it was happening and it just just happened but the [pause] but that was it. It was a, it was [unclear] you went up because that was your job and occasionally you’d get somebody would refuse to go back. Just occasionally. And the, they would then had take them out. So he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t be punished in any way. They would just take them out and get somebody else in but, they didn’t, they tried to keep the crews together because you all knew each other and that sort of thing. But it was a strange sort of existence. So, you got, you got over it and you were [pause] there were big losses but a lot of them were accidents. A lot of accidents and others they don’t know what happened. They just, they just disappeared but perhaps they were flying over the, you know in training flying over Northern Canada. Oh God. A vast area and even if they had found them they they couldn’t have reached them. But it was a pretty, pretty risky job. There you were you were lost in with the others and as I say they didn’t, there was no, no punishment if they, if you didn’t fly. If you refused to go. They just put you aside and you’d be, you’d eventually lose all rank and everything. But there it was. We, we stuck at it and did, worked to the end of the war anyway. Yeah. So that was it. That was the, that was the story really. So, I don’t know if that’s what you want me to tell you or —
JB: Definitely.
IP: Hey?
JB: Thank you.
IP: Yeah.
JB: That was lovely.
IP: Yeah.
JB: Yes
IP: So, we, we were lucky. We survived and you wondered how. I think of the real, the fine men that, really fine men that you know went missing and you know there was at the time they were, they made a lot of it but in no time they were soon forgotten. There was nothing. Nothing to be gained from it. Just to hopefully stay alive and you know, get on to another way of life and I, I don’t know what to say about it. There was a, an experience that I’d had and I I just wonder what about the poor kids. The poor young people, you know that were growing up. And I sometimes wonder why. Why they sent the young ones that had only turned twenty one. Why they sent them away quickly first. It seemed to be bloody unfair to me. They had no say in who was to go but they were, they were the first to be sent and if you didn’t, didn’t go you were sent to a special camp and you served a punishment. But it was so, to me looking back now it was so unfair that the young ones that had nothing to do with who was to go were the ones, the first to be sent. Only twenty one. Yeah. So, there we go. There it was. So, and of course with myself I didn’t. That was only after a while that I thought of flying and I thought gee it must be wonderful. You know. To fly. So I, I volunteered for the, for the Air Force. I’d already passed for crew of a Lancaster. But anyway, I applied and they gave me a, an opportunity to train as a pilot and as I say I only, I only just missed out. But anyway, if I’d have been successful I’d have been there within, dead within a year so what, what happened was I ended up still alive at the end of the war. I’d survived it. All those years. All those different places where you, you know where we went to and you had any had special travel and all that. So that was it. I think of it but I guess there’s a lot more to it than what I just told you. The, the doing the paperwork was, was an effort for me. For a lot of young people who were, you know trained in [unclear] they got through it very quickly but I had never had that training. I never went. I never went to what was called a secondary school. I left school Class 6. I never went to school again. Left school at fourteen had had no other [pause] I went to, went to a, oh do you think [unclear] accounts. I had no other education at all. It was, I guess at the, at the time they were, they were I had met before and interviewed who, oh somebody said to me, ‘Oh, why don’t you apply for pilot?’ I said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be no hope.’ They said, ‘Yeah. Give it a try. You don’t know unless you try.’ So, I thought oh well, I’ll try. So I, I applied and I went to this interview and the, that’s right I was married and they said, ‘Is your wife expecting a child?’ And I said, ‘No, she’s not.’ And the chap who was interviewing me said, ‘Oh, we’ll give you a call and let you know how you got on.’ And I went away I thought not a hope. That was it. Then I got a call to say that I had passed. Yeah. So I went, even though I’d never been to even a secondary school. And so I went on from there and I had to probably work a lot harder on it, on the book work part of it but from there you went, went to a flying training and once there quite a number of steps that you took. You would go on for bloody years because you were put in, put in to, in to a class or a group or and they would you had to take your turn where there was a vacancy for that particular group. Sometimes it would be two or three months. But, you know. So you’d be on the station just doing, you know just doing work around the station before you went back on to the flying again. So that was it. It was, it just you know happened and I don’t know. I can’t tell, I wouldn’t say whether I wanted it or didn’t want it or had thought of getting out of it but that that actually never entered my mind. Except the one occasion when I ran out of oxygen and I thought they will never get up here again [laughs] but that was lack of oxygen. But there we are. So that was it until the end and the, the last one, my last operation was the end of, right the end of the war and I did what was called a line overlap. And that was when you took those three photos and you had a real good picture of everything that was going on. But there we are. You, you do think of it at times and wonder about it. There we are. I hoped, I hoped it would never happen but we couldn’t do anything about it. But there we are.
JB: Ok.
IP: So that’s it love.
JB: That’s about it. Thank you.
IP: There’s nothing much I can tell you.
JB: Thank you very much. That was perfect.
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 Ian Petrie
Creator
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Jennifer Barraclough
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-09-26
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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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APetrieIFP180926, PPetrieIFP1801
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Pending review
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Format
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00:38:14 audio recording
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Language
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eng
Description
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Ian Petrie found himself struggling to find employment in recession hit New Zealand when he saw the advertisement to fly with the RNZAF. He couldn’t contemplate the thrill of flight at a time when opportunity for such travel was rare. He was unsuccessful in his attempt to become a pilot and went absent without leave out of disappointment. He eventually rejoined the training programme and was posted to the UK. He was very aware of the casualty rates and the fact he survived purely by luck. On his last operation it was his aircraft that took the line overlap photos. He went to the hut the next morning where the photos were displayed and took his own as mementoes just before they were all destroyed.
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Great Britain
New Zealand
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
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Julie Williams
101 Squadron
aerial photograph
aircrew
bomb aimer
bombing
RAF Ludford Magna
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/716/10111/ABolesKM180212.2.mp3
4e6a9c0d8cfebbf06b6789683fe7fd69
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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Boles, Keith M
K M Boles
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Keith Boles DFC (b. 1921, 413017 Royal New Zealand Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 109 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-02-12
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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Boles, KM
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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JB: Ok. We’ll make a start. Ok, this is Jennifer Barraclough interviewing Squadron Leader Keith Boles on the date, what’s the date [laughs] the 12th of February, thereabouts, at his home at [ buzz] Howick, Auckland. Ok, Mr Bowles. Thank you very much for talking to me. Could you tell me a little bit about your early life and how you came to join up with, with the RAF, please?
KB: My early life? Well, it was difficult because I ran straight in to the Depression as a youngster and thereafter it made life not funny at all or not even pleasant. And as a consequence to that it was find yourself in employment when you can leave school which I left when I was fourteen. And I took an apprenticeship in engineering as they used to have in New Zealand in those days and that was a five year duration and I completed that with a little bit of makeup time because of the, a few items of no help particularly during those five years. And just before I finished this period our big worry started and it was all sorts of things and, ‘What are you going to do? You’re in the Army, Navy, Air Force.’ Well, with all the words of, ‘Don’t join the Army, son,’ from my father with a lot of expletives to illustrate it, no way did I want to join the Navy. Couldn’t see that at all. And Air Force? I’ll see if they want a technical tradesman which, so, I asked and they came back and said, ‘No vacancies for the qualifications you appear to possess.’ Of course, at that time I’d just passed the first examination of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London and they came back and said, ‘No vacancies for the qualifications you appear to possess.’ Would I like to be aircrew? Well, aircrew was the thing for wee lads and I didn’t think I was qualified but however I was accepted with the provision from my parents that I wouldn’t be called up ‘til the latter end of next year. The latter end of ’41. It seemed to be perfectly ok. I’d finish my apprenticeship and I’d get called up then and, end of ’41. Well, it didn’t quite happen that way. By the end of ’41 I’d been called up with permission of my employer because I’d just finished my apprenticeship as I said, and I decided to go in to the camp. And by the end of ’41 I’d finished my twenty four weeks training in the RNZAF and in December 1941 I was in Singapore which became rather peculiar to say the least. And my stay in Singapore lasted ‘til about the 9th of February and if it hadn’t been for, how shall we say? [pause] Wondering what on earth was happening because nobody was talking to me, telling me, and people were disappearing so I went to see our new CO. Our previous one had created a big mistake and shot himself so that was most. So, the new CO, I said to him, ‘What am I supposed to be doing, sir?’ And in a voice that you could hear from here to there, he said, ‘I don’t know. What’s your trade?’ And I said, ‘Oh, pilot sir.’ Well, when he said, ‘What?’ I thought he’d spoken loudly before but when he said, ‘What?’ You could hear it [laughs] ‘All aircrew, you’re not supposed to be here. All aircrew are supposed to be evacuated.’ So, in due course I was told to go and catch a boat. I went down to go down 62 and the one and only gangplank was guarded by a major, an Army major complete with arms and he said, ‘You’re not on the list, Skedaddle. You’re not getting on board here.’ So, the traffic from that time on meant and this was just at dusk and my driver managed to get me back to Tengah Air Force at 4 o’clock the following morning. It was hellish. And then, I’ve not repeated it so often I’m almost forgetting it. I was sent to catch another boat on Sunday morning. Well, that was all right. I was let on board and there was about a hundred and fifty New Zealand aerodrome construction personnel also evacuating plus I understand a certain number of Asiatics in the far end of the boat and we set sail. But not for long. We sat all night out on the stream as it’s called, listened to the shelling going on and the following morning we disembarked for whatever reason. That evening we were re-embarked and sailed without stop there. But halfway to Batavia we halted, allegedly for wait for Naval escort. It didn’t turn up but the Jap’s bombers did so we got a shower of their contribution. So from there on we just went on to Batavia. I was there for about a week and then I was told to get on board a very large boat which I found out had about five thousand Australian troops from the Middle East, plus other civilian personnel and we sailed to Columbo. And we were there about forty eight hours if I remember rightly and then it turned out the boat I was on was one of a batch of four. They were cruise ships immediately pe-war and had bags of accommodation because as I said there were five thousand Aussie boys because the Australian government said, ‘Bring them home and we will to defend Australia from here from the Japs.’ And yes, Columbo. Left there one afternoon. We, the rumour was we were going to Australia because the troops were there. The rumour was one of those silly things that you hear. Everybody said, ‘What the devil are they talking about?’ And I happened to feel something funny about the boat movement two or three nights later. So, I dashed up on deck and sure enough the boat had done a a right-angled turn. The others that I could have seen in daylight I picked up one. He had done a right-hand turn going the other way and it turned out the convoy had come of four troopers and the Naval people, everybody separated. We got down to Adelaide and we disembarked for a day. Catch another boat down to Lyttelton and then what? Oh yes. We were granted three weeks survivor’s leave they called it because what had happened Iin Singapore was apparently very nasty and we were lucky. Very lucky to get out. I was anyway. From hearing of others my case was get off your bottom and go and ask. Find out. And at the end of that period we were called back to camp for a refresher course because virtually none of our, the people that came back from Singapore had done any flying because ninety nine percent of the aircraft had been sent to the Middle East as you can imagine because there was a lot of stuff going on there. And [pause] hence our refresher course. Well, about ten days later I’m in the link trainer and the sergeant in charge says, ‘Please sir, you’re wanted on the phone.’ I said, ‘By whom?’ And he said, ‘A flight lieutenant.’ And I said, ‘What does he want?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ So, I answered this chappie and he said, ‘Ah, Boles. We want two volunteers to go to the UK.’ I said, ‘Oh, come off it, sir. We’ve just come back.’ He said, ‘I know. So has everybody else.’ And I said, ‘Who have you got?’ I said, ‘What do you want them for anyway?’ ‘Oh, to take charge of a draft of LAC trainees who you will take to Canada for this further on training. And [pause] you will go on to the UK.’ I said, ‘Well, who else have you got?’ He said, ‘Oh, nobody yet.’ And I said, ‘What are you going to do about that?’ He said, ‘I haven’t asked them yet. You’re at the top of the alphabet.’ I said, ‘Alright. Count me in.’ I asked him what he’d do if there were two or three or four of us and he said, ‘Oh, the usual thing. Draw for it.’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah. Count me in as I said.’ Didn’t need to count me in. I was the only one. So off I go to Canada with ninety nine LACs and we picked up another pilot, sergeant pilot who had, had for some reason missed his earlier despatch and we dropped the LACs off in Edmonton I think it was and the sergeant and I went on to Ottawa. They gave us a week’s leave which we spent in New York because there was a New Zealander providing entertainment and looking after New Zealanders as they, if and when they went through there. And they were quite pleasant. In fact, very pleasant. A week down there. Up to Halifax. Catch a convoy and we were lucky. It was a convoy and we didn’t hear a thing. Well, if we did I must have been very deaf because we go to Glasgow and arrived in double British summertime and sunshine about ten or 11 o’clock at night up in, as I say in Glasgow. Train down to Bournemouth. Bournemouth. I’ve forgotten how long we were there and then we were sent on leave and I could tell you funnies about him too but he was a good, good chappie that. Manor house, manor you could call it and his manor house was very nice as well. And any rate, normal training took place then which was in the, I know it as the AFU which is the Advanced Flying Unit which was purely to make people trained elsewhere from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, you name it to become acquainted with all the thises and thats of English weather and English map reading which even when I began to learn it I still got lost a couple of times and had to find myself out again of course. But so that was of some six weeks I think. I can’t recall. And they asked us what were we going to do next. I said, ‘I don’t know. What can we do?’ And somebody suggested that we should take an instructor’s course around something I never thought of but because of what I’d just had I said now if I learn to instruct that means I’m a better flyer. Now, that would do me a lot of good when I go operating. I think that was my line of thinks. So, I went on the instructor’s course and, of some weeks and, and then went instructing on Tiger Moths first and then, and that was cold in Scotland in an open-air aircraft and [laughs] I can still remember it. It was over Christmas, New Year. January. And then we went in to Oxfords. A twin-engined aircraft and just normal, I went to an AFU and did unto others what I had had done unto me. And though apparently I scared the proverbials out of one bloke his mate said, Jimmy or whatever his name was hadn’t have told me I would have been scared too. One of my silly exaggerations apparently and oh, this went on to the beginning of ’44 and then I got transferred in to a beam approach flight. That being a beam approach batt flight and the idea was there to teach people to learn how to do it yourself and then teach people how to do an approach and landing in ten tenths fog or similar. And enjoyable too. I quite enjoyed that and, but while so doing I’d still got to analyse my attitude, my thoughts because I said to me, ‘I’m in a nice Training Command job. This is not what I was supposed to be doing I don’t think.’ Shouldn’t we fear some operations with the other lads, a lot of whom I knew had been killed and after much I tried to analyse my thinking. I just couldn’t and, however I went off to London and went to see the adj and told him I should go on to ops and he said, ‘Oh, no way. We’re short of flight lieutenants in Training Command.’ And I said my usual expression. ‘Bulldust.’ And I said, ‘We’ve got —’ so and so, ‘On our station alone.’ And I said, ‘Any rate, have you any idea how I happen to be here?’ He said, ‘The same as everybody else.’ And I told him about my volunteering business when I took the lads to Canada and he said, ‘Oh, that’s different. Go and see the liaison officer at RAF.’ So off I went to see squadron leader somebody or other and related to him that I’d been to the adj seeking transfer to bomber groups, or Bomber Command and he said no. And I said, I told him the story. ‘He said come and see you sir.’ He said, ‘Alright Boles. What’s your story?’ And I told him. He said, ‘Right. Bomber Command Mosquitoes do?’ Well. That was, as far as we knew, number one job. So I said yes and duly went to the Mosquito Training Unit, MTU and whilst there I found that they used Mosquito pilots particularly most of them for a large area in 8 Group which was, turned out to be the, I didn’t know all about it then as much as I learned obviously Pathfinder Group and that was the Light Night Strikers. And the balance, I think the balance went on a task called Oboe and Oboe was a controlled flight to target and controlled dropping point of the target indicators. Now, up to [pause] August, I think it was ’42 they were happy, or unhappy because the ordinary Bomber Command if they got within five miles of the target they were, at least they’d been to Germany. But with this Oboe stuff we could get, could get, had to get, supposed to get a zero error. Well, the Oboe was a matter of a ground station sending out a radar, you can call it a radar beam or just a beam which was picked up by the special equipment in the Oboe aircraft. It was relayed back to base and from that relay they could tell whether we were flying on the exact distance that they required. If you went too far you got dots or if you didn’t go far enough you were getting dashes depending whether you were going north or south. I’ve forgotten. And of course, the dot was, shall we say one long, the dash was nine long. So, if you marry nine and one you get ten and that gave you a steady note which meant you were then flying right on the beam. Now, I’ve read and I’ve heard figures of how wide that beam is. We always understood it was roughly about fifty three feet which happened to be about the same width as a Mosquito. But I’ve read since that the width of the dot and the width of the dash were the fifty three feet so the whole thing was a hundred odd feet wide. Well, a bit late to tell me now that, and from that you would go and we were employed to drop markers for the bombers and we were supposed to be, our accu errors I always understood was supposed to be within three hundred yards. Well, the size of the bombing and everybody wasn’t going to be that accurate even if they could see our marking and so it was far better than five miles and [pause] we initially, when we went to squadron we went and dropped bombs anything up to a four thousand pounder on the target selected by somebody and it gave us training, experience, call it what you will and it also enabled the people back in the base to gauge how good or bad we were. And I must have been enough to stay in the group because I then went on to marking and in the extent of my tour and a bit I virtually had one third bombing things and one, two thirds target marking with target indicators. And I wish, I wish I’d taken more notice of, of my efforts but I happened to have heard [coughs] excuse me, that one night I got a zero error. And many years later post-war I’d always wondered how good everybody else was and I got in to conversation with one of the squadron people, obviously at a reunion who had been looked upon as one of the best on the squadron. And I said to Charles, ‘You know all those trips I did I only once got a zero. Once got a zero error.’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s alright Keith. I only got once one zero error.’ So it must have been fairly rare. And as an illustration of how this error was [pause] on, and I don’t know the target. I didn’t bother then. I wish I had. I said to my navigator who was, I think was the about the best on the squadron, he was good anyway thank goodness. And I said to him this night, ‘Haven’t seen a sausage. I’m going to turn around and we’ll have a look. See what the target looks like.’ So, I did a hundred and eighty degree turn. I should have said we were on our way home when I made this decision hence the hundred and eighty degree, took us back towards the target and there was a large diameter of target indicators which are little flare things that burn for I think three minutes or something. I wish I could remember all that and I don’t seem to be able to get the data nowadays at [pause] however they were relatively short burning because they were backed up by other aircraft so that the bomber boys didn’t lose sight of where the target was because they could have been still approaching and some of the target indicators were before they were due to land. Before the heavy bombers actually got there and that is to say to lead them to the right place without them leading themselves astray. And as I looked at this large circle of target indicators burning there was another clump appeared in the sky gradually spread into a large diameter and appeared to me to land right on top of my lot. I said, ‘Blow me down,’ or words to that effect and turned round and came home. The following day I went to the radar section and I said, ‘What was my error last night please?’ And, ‘Oh, hang on. We’ll look it up.’ Dah dah dah and they came back and this I do remember, ‘Two hundred degrees. A hundred and ten yards.’ So, a hundred and ten yards nearly due south of the target point. And I said, ‘And who was following me?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ And I said, ‘I’d love to know because he appeared to be on top.’ And they said, ‘Oh, ok. We’ll find out.’ And he must have been from another, the other Oboe squadron because as I said they were falling right on top and they said, they were a bit surprised, not as much as me, ‘Two hundred degrees, a hundred and ten yards.’ Same error as my lot [laughs] And so we turned around. We kept on going home. What else? The [pause] this business of speaking glibly about it and doing that as though we were then competent but, and I think I was a good average. To get there was quite a headache and you worried if you were doing it rightly. You were apprehensive and hoped there wouldn’t be too much flak or anybody else to worry about and our casualty rates were very low. So we might have worried more than we should have done as emphasised by when in briefing one night in the crew room. Well, at the briefing the crew room was [pause] other people came in and they had just been to the target that we were going to the following occasion and they had had all whatnots shot at them. And here we were. Going. We, about five of us I suppose because we were all just small groups. It depends how long the bombing raid was. And so with a degree of apprehension shall we say we took off and headed for this place where the the wingco, as it happened had been shot at like the devil the night before. And we had a lovely cross-country flight. We didn’t see a thing. So, there’s no telling what you’re going to meet up with. Other nights are a bit different. What can I say? I think we got very keen to help. Help. To get complimented I think would be from what we heard about the heavies afterwards. They were doing marvellous jobs of work and we had heard reports of large areas and the one that we heard about first were the Ruhr which was the engineering centre of Germany. All that was, I think it just became, I’m pleased I’m doing something proper. If they can call it proper. And there was that certain amount of apprehension all the way from various aspects and you, as I had a nasty bit of five minutes one night when Geoff my navigator said, ‘Where’s the spare helmet?’ I said, ‘Oh, behind me. Usual place. Why?’ He said, ‘I’m not getting any oxygen.’ I looked and I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I must have the helmet.’ He turned in his seat which in a Mosquito was sort of one body thickness back and to the pilot’s right and so, and it was a bit lower than a pilot’s seat. And as he turned to reach for the helmet he passed out and fell more or less across my upper legs and thighs and I tried to lift him up to try and find out what bit of the tubing had come undone. I didn’t have any strength. He was about five ton and apparently this is what happens. You lose your strength. Of course, it was an awkward lift in any case so, I took my safety harness off to help me with freedom for lift. No better. I took my parachute off so I’d got freedom and I squirmed around in the seat on the parachute to try and lift Geoff up. No. No good. So, hell. What do I do now? Well, I was told by the throat noises coming from Geoff’s microphone, I’d heard of such a thing as a death rattle. I didn’t know whether it existed or not but that rattle that Geoff had developed it sounded very throaty. Very throaty indeed. I said, ‘Well, I’ve only got one thing to do.’ And the one and only time I rolled the aircraft over and down we went. I think we exceeded maximum permissible. I’ve got no idea but I know it was bloody fast any rate. And I knew from experience that, and we’d exercised at fifteen thousand feet without oxygen with no trouble. So I, with the aid of my trimming tabs on I pulled the aircraft out in to the straight and level and it was just seventeen thousand feet. So, from the breathing noises that ceased I knew Geoff was coming round and he came to and it just shows you what the human brain is. I don’t know how to put this. Geoff said, ‘Have we been called in yet?’ And I said, I was astounded. He'd been right out but his brain was still ticking and I said, ‘No. We’re down to seventeen. We’ll have to go up again.’ So, I climbed as rapidly as I could and we weren’t far from the target. Sorry. Say that again. We weren’t far from the start of the Oboe beam which I forgot to mention was fifty miles long and we got to roughly, according to Geoff and his, oh incidentally he found out where his oxygen was all awry. He got it all together again and he was quite ok and he got us to near to turning off point but lapse time we got beyond that. What they thought I can’t remember but they knew we weren’t going to operate. So, I decided, right. Off we go home, and a bit frightening with Geoff though and we were at thirty four thousand when that happened so there’s not much oxygen floating around at that height [laughs] And that and the funny noise in the throat I didn’t like. So however, what else happened? Oh, we lost an engine one night too. And I thought that that would, oh the COs came to me the following day and said do you know so and so and so and so that had broken. Come unclasped or something, and I said, ‘But that’s supposed to be wired in.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but the wiring had broke.’ Well, as far as I knew the ground staff, that was part of their daily duties so you never know when things break which means I’d lost an engine at thirty thou or something and I couldn’t maintain height on one engine so I had to turn around and come home on one fan and [pause] which I managed all right. And I think my previous experience when I was at MTU when we did a total of about four hours Mossie flying before we moved on because all we were learning about was not how to fly but just understand the Mosquito before we went to squadron on the MTU. But I lost an engine there because the plug in the propeller spiller, spinner came out and the oil in the spinner end just let all the oil out and I could see it drifting back over. The engine was sailing over the wing. So, I looked, initially looked and it was the pressure was sixty PSI. I said, ‘Ok, but I’m going home.’ And found out where I was because I’d been enjoying summer flying over Cambridge and I looked back in and looked at my pressure was only thirty PSI so I feathered. That is to say turned the engine off completely and feathered the propeller so it was the least resistance and went back to station. Landed at MTU because I couldn’t find the VHF controller and, and as we had been flying, I was flying a, an aircraft modified for dual instruction the VHF controller was not near the, the pilot was near the instructor but if he’s not there it’s still a long way away. But however, I landed safely and ran off the end of the airfield, of the runway on to the airfield proper to get out of the way of anybody else and then called up. And I said, ‘Could I have somebody to turn me home please? Turn me in.’ And they said, ‘What’s the matter, x-ray?’ And they said, ‘Have you burst a tyre?’ I said, ‘Oh, no. I just lost an engine.’ Well, pupil pilots aren’t supposed to lose an engine so there was a great kafuffle of cars and things coming around and they towed me back. So, I knew a little bit about single engine flying so when I lost it when I was on the squadron I didn’t worry too much. I knew I could do it and as I say did. The difference being when I was on squadron it was at night and whereas the Training Command MTU was daylight you could say it was a subtle difference. But I liked night flying so [pause] Always had. Bomber Command was a pleasure to have served there and I think we did a good job for the war effort. Shall we put it that way because it enabled the bomber boys to improve their abilities and when you, I saw parts of Germany some months after the war finished. I couldn’t believe my eyes of how much damage mile after mile and this was, in particular I was in Hamburg. I’d also seen memory, a town from two thousand feet because we did a Cook’s Tour in the Mossies to see what we’d done to various targets and the places I saw were, and we didn’t go too far into Germany then for some reason but we could see the damage. And, but when I went to, later on I’d taken a, I was taking an Oxford to Denmark and called in Hamburg at Fuhlsbüttel, the airfield there, and we stayed overnight in Hamburg. But the, and the, had a transport from there back to Hamburg proper where the one and only hotel they told us that hadn’t been ruined the RAF had taken over as [pause] nothing permanent or was permanently for the RAF but people who were passing through like ourselves. And then we went on to Denmark and oh, don’t mention that. That trip home [laughs]. They’d were supposed to send an aircraft and pick us up. Went on day after day and we drank the Danish mess out of beer, we smoked the Danish mess out of cigarettes and one Friday afternoon I think it was, one of the thirty two of us, sixteen aircraft had been over there, sixteen pilots, sixteen navigators were waiting a trip home and the bloke comes in to our bunch and said, ‘Any of you blokes heard anything about —' so and so, ‘Coming to pick us up?’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No. No. Where did you hear this?’ ‘Oh, the CO just mentioned it. He thought he’d heard something about it.’ And I said, ‘Well, did you question him?’ ‘No.’ I was out of my seat in two seconds flat and I went to see the Danish CO and I said, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ And such and such and about I don’t know how it was thought of but they whistled me up again and said, ‘Can you go down to, would you go down to Copenhagen? Copenhagen, and see your people down there?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ And I was flown down there by a chap and his mate. The Danish pilot was a chap named Paul [Schilling] and we talked about this and that and one of his comments was if I ever met a Dane that couldn’t speak English don’t bother about him. So, I went in to see the air attaché and we had a a funny conversation about what was I going to do about the thirty one people because I had in effect established myself as CO of them. And he mucked about. He said this, he said that, he said the next thing. And I said, ‘They haven’t got any money, they haven’t got this beer, they haven’t got cigarettes.’ Dah dah dah. ‘And they haven’t got any change of clothing.’ Not funny at all. I’ve forgotten how I empathised that now. And so and so and so. And I said, ‘But sir you said —' such and such, ‘A minute ago.’ Out went his arm with a finger pointing and he says, ‘Get out.’ So as a group captain I got out and he had a liaison sort of officer, a flight lieutenant who was the biggest scrounger I think I’ve ever come across. He was not doing anything for the Air Force. He was enjoying himself no end. He said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do —' so and so, ‘This morning. I’ll see you later.’ And all this sort of this thing and so, he was useless but any rate I got a summons from him later. ‘We’ve got thirty two hundred krona for your people and we’ve arranged for them to come down and they’ll go from here, or come down from a place called Viborg.’ Which was on the [pause] A Danish peninsula but I can’t remember the name of it, but a place called Viborg. And so, they came down by road and then they were duly monied. Given their tickets to catch the train to somewhere and they got, half of them got as full as the proverbial and spent all their money. And I didn’t bother about them. I just let them be and I went from, oh there were two or three of us together but there, was there a train first and then boat, then so and so something or other or it was a boat to a train and then we got to the, a German port where we caught a boat and travelled overnight to Hull. And that was our delivery of the Oxford to Denmark. That wasn’t the end of my delivery services because I then brought a Mosquito out from the UK to Ohakea. That was, there were twelve due that all took off on Friday the 13th. No. Six on the Thursday, six on the Friday the 13th of December. I was one of the six however and we were the first of about eighty that the New Zealand governor had purchased for post-war establishment and we had fun and games. UK to Sardinia I think it was. Sardinia to Cairo. Cairo to somewhere in the, I’ve forgotten. Then Allahabad. [unclear] And I might have missed somebody out. Or did I go in to Karachi on that trip? Yes. I think I did. Karachi, Allahabad, Calcutta [pause] And the big town up northern Malaya. I can’t think. Then down to [pause] I think. Oh no. Any rate, down to Singapore. Singapore to Dutch East Indies. Sumatra. Or was it Java? Java, that’s right. And Java to Darwin. Darwin to Townsville. Townsville to [pause] Sydney, I think. Must have been. Then Sydney to Ohakea. Took us six weeks would you believe. However, everybody was ready for us and no hold ups at all much and hence the six weeks. So, I went back as a passenger to UK and was offered the job of bringing another Mossie up and I said, ‘No. Thank you.’ So, I came home by boat and that was the end of my Air Force career. Whether that’s enough of Bomber Command for you dear I don’t know.
JB: That’s splendid. Just tell me briefly what you’ve been doing since.
KB: Hmmn?
JB: What you’ve been doing since then.
KB: Oh.
JB: Back in New Zealand.
KB: The New Zealand government
[pause]
You’ll have to excuse me.
JB: Yes.
KB: I don’t know but I’ve got to go [laughs]
KB: Alright.
[unclear]
JB: That’s ok.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Keith Boles
Creator
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Jennifer Barraclough
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-02-12
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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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ABolesKM180212
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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01:03:30 audio recording
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal New Zealand Air Force
Language
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eng
Description
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Keith Boles left school at the age of fourteen and took an apprenticeship in engineering. He was called up to the Air Force at the end of 1941 and was in Singapore when the Japanese invaded. He arrived in UK via Australia and Canada and after a refresher course he trained to be an instructor. He decided he wanted to go on ops and joined the Mosquito Training Flight and flew Mosquitoes on OBOE operations as a Pathfinder. On one occasion his navigator lost consciousness through lack of oxygen so he flew his aircraft at low level so he could recover. He also lost an engine on one operation, returning to base safely. At the end of the war he flew a Cook’s Tour to see for himself the bomb damaged cities. He also took part in the ferrying of Mosquitoes to New Zealand for the RNZAF.
Temporal Coverage
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1941
1942-02
1945
Spatial Coverage
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Denmark
Germany
Great Britain
New Zealand
Singapore
Germany--Hamburg
Contributor
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Julie Williams
109 Squadron
8 Group
aircrew
Cook’s tour
military service conditions
Mosquito
Oboe
Pathfinders
pilot
target indicator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/985/10256/ATaylorDP181017.2.mp3
12a6910f0d074fe6c0d64967444e7110
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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Taylor, Doug
Douglas Pinning Taylor
D P Taylor
Description
An account of the resource
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-10-17
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Taylor, DP
Creator
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An oral history interview with Doug Taylor (b. 1925, 176685 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as an air gunner with 57 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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JB: This interview is being carried for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jennifer Barraclough. The interviewee is Mr Douglas Taylor and we are at Mr Taylor’s home near Auckland. The date of the interview, the date is 17th of October 2018. Ok, Mr Taylor, thanks for seeing me. Could you tell me just a little about how you came to join up with the RAF?
DT: Flying. Certainly, better than the infantry marching [laughs] I had a private pilot’s licence anyway so the obvious thing was to join the Air Force. But there was an eighteen month delay in call up for pilots because there were so many of them, and then they had to wait until there was a ship going to the United States where they did the training, got their wings then wait for another ship to get back to England. I reckoned the war would be over by then so I volunteered as an air gunner and trained in England. In the west of England. It was only what six months training and then joined a squadron. 57 Squadron. Quite a happy one.
JB: Good. Right.
DT: [unclear] amount of that.
JB: So, tell us a little about your experiences during operations.
DT: Oh, I only did nine because the training took so long and we were never attacked by fighters but the enemy flak was a bit worrying. Quite often you would feel the aircraft give a jump when a shell burst a bit too close. But we were never hit. Not seriously. There were one or two small bits in the fuselage but nothing serious. I only did nine over Germany.
JB: Right.
DT: But all the years of training, one station to another and we only did nine. The tour was thirty.
JB: Yes.
DT: But anyway, that’s many years ago. Long ago and forgotten.
JB: Yeah.
DT: East Kirkby. That was it. That’s where I was stationed. 57 Squadron. A happy squadron.
JB: Good.
DT: But that’s all a long past thank goodness.
JB: Long past.
[pause]
DT: I’d already done first year [BOC] when I joined up. So the generous government paid the other two years [BOC] after I’d served which was very nice of them.
JB: What, what subject was that?
DT: Agriculture. Which of course includes chemistry, geology, fertilisation and animal husbandry. All sorts of things concerned with agriculture. A three year course and ex-service so the government paid. Paid the fees.
JB: Great.
DT: You made a hit with her.
JB: I have haven’t it. The dog is present.
DT: She’s a nice dog. She’s not even ours. Neither of them are.
JB: Really.
DT: They’re my son’s but he parks them on us during the day [laughs]
JB: Right. So, what about your life after the war? What did you do?
DT: Pardon?
JB: After the war what did you do?
DT: Well, I went back to [unclear] and completed the two years of the degree.
JB: Yes. And after that?
DT: Heck. It’s a long time ago. I was doing some advisory work advising farmers.
JB: And you moved to New Zealand. A long time ago. You came to New Zealand.
DT: Oh yes.
JB: Yes.
DT: Yeah. I bought a farm in south Africa and I farmed there. Mainly maize. And then I don’t know. I ended up in New Zealand.
JB: Yeah.
DT: Couldn’t go much further south. South Africa was a lovely country until the black gentry took over and then it wasn’t so good. I had ten years in Kenya. That was a beautiful country because although it was on the equator it wasn’t hot because it was five thousand feet, most of it. I had a farm there. That was, that was a lovely country. But then again it was given back to the Africans and everything went downhill.
JB: And did you continue flying?
DT: I had a private pilot’s licence. Yes. Then I had two years as a senior inspector in Bechuanaland. What is it? Botswana is it now or something or other? It was Bechuana. Bechuanaland then anyway. I could have gone in to the Service in England but that was pretty dull work. Anyway, it was much nicer in Kenya. It was a lovely country, Kenya. Most of it was five thousand feet above sea level. Although you were on the equator it was never too hot. Pleasant climate. Very pleasant. And there again the Africans took over. They wanted our jobs. Well, they didn’t really they wanted the pay and not the job [laughs] So things were going downhill. Hopefully, they’ve picked up since then. What am I doing this interview for anyway?
JB: It’s for the International Bomber Command Centre.
DT: Oh, I see.
JB: In England. Yes. Can you think of anything more at all to say about your wartime service?
DT: Not really. No.
JB: Not really. What, what was it like being on on the operations as a gunner?
DT: Well, the Germans were very short of fuel so we never saw a fighter but they still had plenty of anti-aircraft shells and every so often the plane would give a little judder if it got too close. We had one or two pieces of shrapnel through the fuselage. Not many though. And anyway, if they hit you it was just the luck of the draw.
JB: Yes. So, did you never have to fire a gun?
DT: Never.
JB: Never.
DT: Well, yes. But not in anger.
JB: No.
DT: I had to fire them under training but not —
JB: Just in training but —
DT: No.
JB: Not on operations. Right.
DT: What were they? Each gun was a eleven fifty rounds a minute.
JB: Right.
DT: The rear gunner had four. I sat in the mid-upper and had two. But even then that was a heck of a lot of bullets going out. Thank goodness those days are over.
JB: Yes.
DT: There was a wonderful spirit on the squadron though. Everybody worked together. Just as well. We shared the station with another squadron. That was 630. But there was no antagonism between us at all. We shared it amicably. Thank goodness those days are over.
JB: Did you keep up with any of [pause] did you keep up with any of your friends after the war?
DT: Yes. We had a round robin and one crew member would write a letter enclose it, send it to another crew member. The other crew member added one, took his original one out and it went around and around around until members started to drop of their perch. No. We kept in touch alright. Your bag is being well and truly sniffed. [pause] Are you being kept busy?
JB: With this? Moderately. Yes.
DT: Thank goodness those days are long past.
JB: Yes. Ok. Is there anything else you’d like to say at all?
DT: Well, not really.
JB: No.
DT: You just sprung it on me so I’d have to think about it. I don’t think so.
JB: No.
DT: We said the station. East Kirkby. 617. Not 617. That was the Dambusters. What the hell was it? I can’t remember their number. I’m sure there was six something.
JB: Right.
DT: But two squadrons on a station and we hardly saw any of the other squadron. And then we had leave. Was it every six weeks? I think it was. A week’s leave. Plus travelling time. I’m pretty sure it was very frequent anyway. Those days are long past thank goodness.
JB: Ok. We’ll finish there then.
DT: Right [laughs]
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Doug Taylor
Creator
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Jennifer Barraclough
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
2018-10-17
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ATaylorDP181017
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:12:57 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Doug Taylor already had a pilot’s licence when he volunteered as RAF aircrew. However, he considered the prospect of lengthy training ahead to join the RAF as a pilot and thought the war might end before he’d had a chance to join and so he volunteered as an air gunner. He undertook nine operations with his crew while based at RAF East Kirkby with 57 Squadron. After the war he went on to farming in Africa and New Zealand.
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Kenya
New Zealand
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
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Julie Williams
57 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
RAF East Kirkby
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/725/10725/ABrandonJP180302.2.mp3
03e83eb935f3c68e6ca7bede2207ffe2
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
Brandon, June Pauline
J P Brandon
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with June Pauline Brandon (b. 1923, 8382 Royal Air Force). She served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-03-02
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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Brandon, JP
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JeB: This is an interview, is being carried out for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jennifer Barraclough, the interviewee is Mrs June Brandon. The interview is taking place at Mrs Brandon’s home near Warkworth, Auckland. The date is the 2nd of March 2018. Okay, Mrs Brandon could you tell us, thank you very much for taking part. Could you tell us a little about your early life and how you came to join the Air Force, please.
JuB: As my father was with the Ghurkhas I was born in India, in the Himalayas and we had a wonderful life out there, riding twice a day and father had to go up the North West Frontier at regular intervals, we just wanted to keep the Afghans north of the North West Frontier so they didn’t come down into India, and they took tours of duty. We got leave in England every three years and when I was nine, my, the Gurkhas themselves are only about five foot three. Wonderful, loyal, great fighters, but the Afghans pick off the big ones cause they know they’re the officers. Father was brought back from the Frontier wounded, unfortunately got another bout of malaria and died, so we had to pack up. I was nine, at the ten, time, my brother was seven. And so we packed up, came back to England with mother who was widowed at twenty nine. And I can remember coming up the Suez Canal, I hated the topees, which were cork hats, and mother said to us, “come on you can throw your topee into the sea, you won’t need it again.” And I stood at the rail, threw the topee over and burst into tears and mother said what’s the matter. I had a pet donkey in India, I adored her and we just had a lovely relationship and I said, “I’ll never see my father or my little donkey again.” We came back to England and I was sent to boarding school. It was a school for all permanent officers’ daughters in Bath. I loved it there, they were great people and when the war started, the Navy, because we were on a hill above Bath, took over the school because they wanted to signal ships in the Atlantic. So we were moved to a beautiful country house where they built classrooms. We used to sit on the stairs and have lectures with ancestral portraits peering down at us. We had science lessons in the stables and art lessons in the Orangery. And I was, took school certificate there and I left school at seventeen. I looked around for what I should do and thought of nursing, but it looked like too many bedpans, [chuckle] so we weren’t allowed to join the Air Force till we were eighteen, so I put my age up a year, went up to London with mother who had some business to do, and whilst she went, I went along to Kingsway House and enlisted. They asked me for my birth certificate and I said, “oh I was born in India.” She didn’t seem to know. Father would obviously have registered me at Somerset House, so I got away with it. [Laughter] Well the next thing I know I’m on the train with a crowd of girls and the Germans didn’t bomb, this was after Dunkirk. They didn’t bomb Morecombe or Blackpool cause they thought they’d be there themselves in a few weeks. So first of all it was Morecombe and this endless marching up and down for drill. I found the shoes awful, I think they had slabs of concrete on the bottom, and I got chilblains. It was very, very cold. Well one morning the sergeant said to us tomorrow morning put on your overshoes. These were a kind of a galosh thing that came up to your ankles and did up with two buttons. So that morning I was doing great, I was marker cause I was the tallest, and at the end of the parade the sergeant said now take off your shoe, your moccasins, for inspection. I took them off, and everybody burst out laughing! I was standing in the middle of the Morecombe parade with a pair of red moccasins on. The officer looked at me, she couldn’t charge me with not being dressed on parade cause I had been. She just shook her head and walked away. [Laughter] The next thing I knew, I was posted to the Photographic School because I told them I had played with photography at home. And it was a six month course, and we started, it was lovely because you suddenly realised the class system had gone. In the desk next to me was Rachael Tennyson, Lord Tennyson’s granddaughter. Next, the other side was little girl that had worked in a chemists shop. We were all in it together, didn’t matter what our background was. We started off with the properties of light, then we went on to different lenses on cameras. We had an exam every two weeks, if you failed an exam [whistle sound] you were off. They couldn’t waste time on you. There were eighteen of us, our only trouble was we were billeted in Blackpool and there were bed bugs in our. Some people were moved three times, luckily I was only moved once. Some of the landladies were lovely, others were awful. Well, we got through the course, and they decided we must have a passing out parade. Well there was wide driveway with a wall down one side and suddenly the officers decided they had to be elevated to take the salute so they got on top of the wall. I was glad I was marker and they couldn’t see me grinning cause we did eyes right to five pairs of black polished shoes, [interference] we couldn’t see anything else. Well after two weeks leave I was put on camera guns [/interference] and these would, guns, synchronised with the real guns and they took a photograph of anything the Spitfires would shoot at. I was sent up to Newcastle to a fighter station. And there was only one other photographer, a corporal, he was a lazy thing. So my job was, I was given a bicycle with yellow and black stripes, given a satchel with the magazines and I had to cycle round all the operative Spitfires and test the cameras every morning. Well, I was always very careful going across the end of the runway if they were using that runway cause the Spitfires used to come in very low and very fast and I realised they weren’t going to stop for me! So I got up to the squadron and a sergeant came out and said, “what are you here for?” and I said I have come to test the cameras. And the whole lot of them burst into laughter. They’ve sent a girl! They were slapping their knees and dancing about and I thought what a greeting! So I grabbed a wheel chock; they were big triangular shapes of wood, with a rope through them and they put them in front of the Spitfire wheels so they didn’t move. Now the Spitfire wing is quite high and I had to look down. So I gathered the chock, took it to the port wing between the canon and the fuselage, took a screwdriver out of my pocket, undid a little panel in the wing, checked that there was, and then I said to one of them, the mechanic, could you jump into the cockpit and just give a quick burst to the camera only button. So, being a bit surprised, he did that. Then I took the magazine out to make sure there was enough film, put it all back together [interference] again and went to the next aeroplane. Then I had to sign a Form 700 [/interference] which was everything was checked, every morning and I had to sign for the camera gun. Well, there was a bit of fighting up there and several times the Spitfires went out and I got a call one day: “One of the pilots is sure he hit something, come out and get the magazine.” I cycled out there, I couldn’t believe it. There they were, with the film like this, looking at it and I said you’ve just ruined the film, you’ve put it to the light. They wouldn’t believe me! So I said come with me back to the dark room and I’ll show you. And I wound it on a big frame and developed the film for them. And they saw it was black, cover to cover. I was surprised pilots didn’t know about that. Anyway, a little later on I got a terrible pain in my stomach and the sergeant was roaring at me to get out of bed and get going. And I said I just can’t move. A friend of mine came over, realised I had a temperature and went and got one of the medical staff: acute appendicitis. So I was put on a stretcher, loaded into an ambulance. They couldn’t find mother because she was driving an ambulance in London. And I was taken down to the hospital, bumping over the tram lines, which was extremely [emphasis] painful. We get to the hospital and the nurse that came with me was carsick, so in the middle of an air raid with all ack acks going off, she was taken in as the casualty leaving me lying outside. They at last realised they’d got the wrong people, came with a stretcher on a trolley, put me on it. As we were going in to the hospital I said to the orderlies, don’t hurry the pain’s gone. They immediately started to run, my appendix had burst. No penicillin in those days, I didn’t realise how sick I was till I came to and found mother sitting beside my bed, she’d come all the way up from London. Well, I recovered and got, all told, four weeks sick leave. It was beautiful. I went to some friends of ours in the country. They were so kind to me, and this beautiful countryside, and you could forget the war. Well, when I was told I was fit enough, I was sent to RAF station Benson. Now we only [emphasis] took photographs, that was the sole purpose of the place. There were two cameras loaded behind the Spitfire cockpits and we had some um, Mustangs, not Mustangs, it’ll come to me. They were all painted blue and, making it hard to see against the sky. And the cameras were placed so that there was always an overlap this way, cause they didn’t turn over fast enough and this camera overlapped that way so if there was a damaged negative you could make it up with the other two. They were lovely girls there and we had a common room and the men had a common room. We used to have to change the chemicals at regular intervals so they gave us - because the hypo rotted our shoes - they gave us clogs. They are the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever worn. And we used to clatter about sounding like horses on a hollow bridge. Because you had to change the chemicals by buckets. You had to fill the bucket and go up the thing and change the, in these big machines we had. And I was always the one in the dark room. I don’t know why. You went through double doors into the dark room and there was a red pan light. You had a spool here with the film on it to be developed and it was threaded through the machine as just a spare piece of film, so you’d cut the film like this with a razor, pull out a piece of red tape, which always amused me, press it down and fold it over and cut it again with a razor blade, then you’d turn the machine on. And there were these rods that went down into the chemicals, and you slowly lowered them, there were two for water to get the film really wet, then it went into the developer. There were six, this was all in the dark, then there were two of water and two of neutraliser and then the film went through a little rubber letterbox, and was finished in the open. There were three of us in a crew working these machines. The one in the middle saw that everything was developing correctly and washing correctly. There was a viewing chamber as it went up onto the dryer, which was long fluorescent lighting with warm air being blown through it and it would go round this and someone at the end would see that it spooled up properly. Then it went through to the printers which had similar machines, but just printing, only. When that was finished all the films were bundled up and sent over to Intelligence for a quick look at what we’d got. It was nearly awaysl of bombing raids to see the damage we’d done or not done. Then it was sent to Medmenham, which was the Central Intelligence Unit, for final analysis. We used to have in the hall a huge what we called the Sortie Board, which listed the sortie number and its ETA so that we had an idea and when it arrived it was put down as arrived, when it went into the developing, when it went into the printing and when it was finished was all noted down. The sadness comes if someone came down and drew a line right through it. Plane was missing. Sometimes they landed at another airfield, sometimes: the inevitable. I always admired those pilots because they had to fly with no guns because the cameras were so heavy. They had to get to the target, fly up and down, taking photos, then scoot for home, and they knew that the Germans gave their pilots a bonus if they shot down a reconnaissance plane. We used to get a lot of requests for shipping movements, troop movements, where things were. We found in one stage the Tirpitz in a Norwegian Fjord and they got her when she came out. We also found the Bismark, took photographs of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau that were bombed. And all together it was an extremely interesting but stressful job because you couldn’t make mistakes. The girls were lovely, I never had any argument, none of us did, and when there was no flying we’d all sit in the common room and do beautiful needlework or knitting or something. We were in a separate hut, the photographers. Well, one night the sirens went and it was freezing, I was a corporal then, and I said to the girls, do you want to go down the shelter, which was what we were meant to do. No. So I said stay here, these shelters were very nice concrete but there’s steps going down and water run down and when you got to the shelter you were sitting ankle deep in ice cold water! So we stayed where we were, suddenly after a lot of running round in the thing, the door burst open and a sergeant covered in mud started to curse us. “Who’s in charge here?” And I said me. “You’re on a charge for disobeying an order!” Cause they’d opened up the shelter and found nothing. So next morning I was in front of the CO, so he said to me – after the usual charging - why didn’t you go down there, and I said I had a feeling. So he caught on and put it down to women’s intuition. Actually, my only feeling was it was too damn cold” So I got off. [Laugh] So, well I was there for about four years I think it was, and then I was sent to Medmenham. That was all enlargement work and specialised work, but there were no aeroplanes, I really didn’t enjoy it. So I got a commission and I was sent to the usual training. By this time the Americans were in the thing and you know what we thought of them. You’ve heard the saying [chuckles] and I was disgusted when were sent on a talk to learn how to public speak, and the Americans just took us as, for popsies that they could pick up! Me and my friend were asked were we staying the night? We said certainly not, we’re going back to camp. They turned their back on us and went and talked to the others because we weren’t going to sleep with the devils! So that was fine. And then, I can’t remember why, I was on Windermere station and a train came in, doors flew open, this was near the end of the war, and a troop of soldiers jumped out carrying rifles and they lined up all the way down to outside the gate where there was a staff car. Two more carriages opened and two officers jumped out with their hand guns in their hand. Next thing you know the middle door opens, Rundstedt walked out. We’d captured him. He looked magnificent [emphasis] with that red general stripe down his trousers. I noticed that her wore the Iron Cross, but no [emphasis] swastikas. They put him on an island in the middle of Windermere Lake, as a prisoner. I can’t remember what happened to him in the trials afterwards. Well. Can we stop this? During the bombing, when I was in London, you think it was never, ever going to stop, just noise, noise, noise and you didn’t know what was going to happen. I used, if possible, to curl myself into a ball and recite poetry which I loved. I was always terrified of getting an arm or leg blown off and they’d feel sorry for me. Usually the bombers went home about three o’clock in the morning. And then we had the start of the doodlebugs. I was at home one day on forty eight hour leave in mother’s flat in London and the sirens had gone nine times. You forgot whether it was all clear or what, and mother always used to go into the hall of the flat cause there were no glass. I had a very interesting radio programme on – National Velvet about a horse. And she was shouting at me to come and a doodlebug went past the window. We were only on the fourth floor. There was a bit of a silence and then a great big explosion and mother said come on, we’d better go and see if we can help. We went round to a little square that was near us, all built by people that had escaped the French Revolution and it was all built in that lovely French style. The doodlebug had gone straight through one block house right down into the cellar. The house was completely gone, but standing on a landing on the top, with absolutely nothing underneath her, was a woman screaming her head off. Luckily the firemen came along with a long ladder and rescued her. And then we had the V2s coming and it was very, very difficult to find where they were coming from. And we kept taking photographs round Holland and round the coast and finally one of the intelligence girls found it at Peenemunde and she got the MBE for that, and we bombed that, which stopped quite a lot of the V2s. And then the war did end.
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 June Pauline Brandon
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jennifer Barraclough
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
2018-03-02
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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ABrandonJP180302
Format
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00:30:18 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
June Brandon was born in India, returning to England when her father died. She joined the WAAF and went into the Photographic Section, loading cameras on Spitfires then carrying out development of the films. She served at several RAF stations, telling stories of conditions in various places as well as experiences she had in service and on leave.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Pakistan
England--Bath
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Lancashire
England--London
England--Oxfordshire
Pakistan--Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
England--Somerset
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
Bismarck
bombing
ground personnel
RAF Benson
RAF Medmenham
Spitfire
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/732/10731/ACammishHS180501.1.mp3
335573b368d310af0483cc6bbc3fd591
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
Cammish, Harrison Stanley
H S Cammish
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Harry Cammish (b. 1923, 1624536, Royal Air Force).
He flew operations as a flight engineer with 50 Squadron and evaded after being shot down.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-04-18
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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Cammish, HS
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JB: That should be recording. This interview is being carried out for the International Bomber Command Centre. The date is the 1st of May 2018. The interviewer is Jennifer Barraclough. The interviewee is Mr Harry Cammish. The interview is being carried out at Mr Cammish’s home in Orewa near Auckland. Ok, Mr Cammish. Thank you very much for taking part. Can you tell me a bit about your earlier life? How you came to, and then how you came to join up?
HC: Yeah. Well, my name is Harrison Stanley Cammish. I was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1923. I was the youngest of a family of four. I had three elder sisters. I was the only boy. Two of my sisters actually joined the WAAF during the war. When I was fourteen years of age I was apprenticed as a carpenter and joiner in Scarborough, and was happily learning the trade when war broke out in 1939. I joined the Air Training Corps and I also joined the Home Guard. And the Home Guard gave me a rifle and forty rounds of ammunition and I had to patrol the coastline and keep England safe from the enemy. My mother would never enter my bedroom once I’d got the rifle and forty rounds of ammunition. That was it. She wouldn’t come in to my bedroom anymore. When war broke out in 1939, as I say, I joined the Air Training Corps and the Home Guard. And when I turned eighteen I, I volunteered for aircrew duties and I was sent down to a place in Bedfordshire. Cardington, I think the place was, for a three day course, selection board, and health and testing type of thing and they sent me home with an Air Force number. I was in the Air Force from that, from that day onwards. Sent me home to await call up. I was called up late, in the middle of 1942, and I went to a place called Padgate in Lancashire where we got kitted out with all our Air Force gear. From there we went to Blackpool where we had foot drill, bashing up and down the promenade there, learning how to march in time and one thing and another. And after that I got sent down to St Athan. St Athans in South Wales, where for the first time I learned that I was going to be trained as a flight engineer. The rest of the section that was with me, we’d never heard of flight engineers before but it appears that it was, we took place of the second pilot because there were so many instruments and gauges to watch that they needed another pair of eyes. I didn’t, we all, first of all did a flight mechanics course which lasted quite a few weeks. And at the end of the course, they decided to give us forty eight hours leave which was no good to me. No way could I get up to Yorkshire from St Athans in South Wales in forty eight hours so it was a case of just staying on the camp ‘til the next course started. Some of the boys that I was with didn’t want to go through all this technical training. They wanted to be flying so they volunteered to go as straight air gunners which was only a six weeks course. So, we lost a few of our section over the period of training. On the completion of the flight engineer’s course I was posted to a Heavy Conversion Unit in Lincolnshire where for the first time I met the other members who I were going to crew up with. There was a Canadian, there was two cockneys and a couple of Englishmen and we made up the crew and having done a few circuits and bumps we were posted to the operational station, 50 Squadron at Skellingthorpe. The procedure when a new crew arrives at an aerodrome is for the pilot to go with another experienced crew for a little bit of know-how but to my horror I was told that I was going to take the place of an engineer who was sick. So, I was the first of the crew to fly on operations. So, I had one, I had one op above the rest of the crew. On our third operation we were about to take off with a full bomb load and tearing down the runway the pilot lost control and we skidded off the runway and slammed into one of the hangars. Now, from this moment onwards I, I don’t have any recollection of what actually happened, but from what I was told afterwards I got out of the aircraft and took off across the airfield, climbed over the perimeter fence, went down the country lane, and the first cottage I went to I, I knocked on the door and there was an elderly couple lived there. And I told them that I’d just come from a crashed bomber and it was going to explode any minute which must have put panic in to the old couple. Anyhow, they sat me down on the settee and made me a cup of tea while the elderly gentleman went and told the policeman that there was an aircrew member in his house that had just come from a bomber. A crashed bomber. Well, the next minute the ambulance came flying down from the station and picked me up and they’d been looking for the, they’d been looking for the engineer. They’d got all the others in to the military hospital but there was the engineer missing. Then of course when they got the call from this local body, bobby down in the village that was it and I duly arrived at the military hospital after all the other fellas had been. Had been in there. When I sort of regained my full mind I,I was in the same ward as the rear gunner was and unfortunately for the poor chap he’d suffered terrible burns and all I could see was his two eyes and his fingertips peering through the bandages. And with it being a military hospital anybody that was capable of walking and that had to look after the other members in the ward and it was my job to attend to his toiletries and one thing and another. Anyhow, I, I recovered sufficiently to go back to the station and the wing commander said to me, ‘Well, Cammish, I suppose you want leave.’ And I said, ‘Well, sir, I haven’t had any leave for nine months. My mother’s never seen me since I left home.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Before you, before you go,’ he said, ‘We want you to go up for a little flight.’ And I thought oh dear. And he said, ‘There’s a crew about to take off on a night flying test and we want you to go down there and join the crew.’ So, I, I went to the dispersal unit and the crew was waiting for me. I think it was a bit of a put-up job myself. The crew was waiting for me and, and we took off and the pilot said, ‘Come up to the front,’ where the engineers are, ‘Come up to the front. Take up your position.’ And I said, horrors upon horrors we were taking off on the same runway as what we’d crashed and over to the left was this wrecked hammer line with a big hole because it had exploded after we, after we left and left quite a big hole. So anyhow, I went. I went home on leave and here was, here was a mother’s son. I’d put on about another stone. I was a sergeant in uniform. It took her all her time for mum to recognise me. I had a nice leave and reported back to the squadron and I thought I’d be sent back to the training unit to pick up another crew. But the commanding officer thought no I’d stay on the squadron as a substitute engineer for any other engineers that weren’t fit to fly. It wasn’t a very pleasant job because the crews, a crew is like a family. They rely on one another and trust one another and the stranger amongst them isn’t quite accepted by them. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t a very nice job. I had three different crews in a very short time. Anyhow, on the sixteenth operation I, well I wasn’t, I wasn’t posted for this sixteenth operation. I was getting set to have a night out in Lincoln and I got the call, ‘You’re needed to get into your gear. There’s an engineer been taken sick,’ or something. And, ‘Get into your gear.’ And it was such short notice it was, and I went to pick up my flying gear and I had a premonition. I had a funny feeling in my stomach and I had a premonition. I thought I’m not very happy about this but there’s nothing you can do about it so I joined the crew. I didn’t even know the names of the crew. I only knew the pilot’s name because it was such last minute orders. Anyhow, we, we got airborne. Everything seemed to be going all right. We weren’t far short of the target when we got attacked by a night fighter and the first thing we knew was the whole aircraft shuddered and we went out of control in a dive. The pilot’s controls were useless and the port wing was, was burning like fury so it was time to leave the aircraft. The bomb aimer, who was in the nose couldn’t get the hatch open and the pilot was kicking me on the back, ‘Hurry up. Hurry up,’ but I couldn’t do much about it. I had to wait for the bomb aimer to go. The next minute the shaft opened and out went the bomb aimer and out went I after him. And from all the bangs and rattles and crashes and fires and one thing and another it was absolute peace and quiet floating down in the parachute. I did hear the fighter droning around and I saw the bomber explode on the ground. I landed in about two feet of snow because it was winter time and took off the parachute, bundled it all into a heap and took off because our escape lectures always told you to get as far away from your landing as possible. So, I took off and headed in a westerly direction and I came across a railway line and I thought well it’ll be easier walking on the railway lines than, than through the fields and paddocks. But in those days, we had the early type suede flying boots and there’s no way you can walk long distances especially on, on a railway line. And I heard, I heard the toot of a train in the distance and I thought well if this is a goods train, a slow-moving train now’s my chance to get as far as possible from it. But it was an express train and it went past me about ninety miles an hour so there was no chance of getting on that. Anyhow, I kept walking for a several of hours and I eventually came to a small station. I didn’t know whether we were in Germany or in France to be quite honest but I saw the name on the board. Embermenil it was. Embermenil. And I thought well that doesn’t sound German and I peered through the window and there was a fellow in uniform sitting over the desk and he didn’t look German either so I thought well, I’ll risk it. So, I went in to the, opened the door and went in to the office and he looked up at me. You can imagine his surprise seeing an Air Force man in flying gear standing at the doorway and I told him, ‘RAF. RAF.’ And he put his finger up to his mouth and he said, ‘Shhhh Bosch. Bosch.’ So, I gather there was some Germans somewhere in the vicinity. And he, he took me in to the village, knocked on the door of the cottage and the door opened and he said something in French to the fella and they dragged me into the house and he went back to the station. And this was, they looked, there was only two rooms, it was a small cottage and they were obviously a farm labourer of some sort and the wife wanted to know where I’d left my parachute. She was after the silk obviously, and I couldn’t tell her where it was. My French lessons had long, long since vanished but she made, she made the expected, ‘Parachute.’ Anyhow, they took, I took all my flying gear off and I had a nice silk vest underneath and silk pants and the three of us shared the same bed ‘til the next morning [laughs] And I was, I was, the next morning the farm labourer went out and he, he came back and, and he was, I, I got the message that one of the crew was dead. One of the crew was dead. More, more, more. One of you more. And there was also he brought a poster back which the Germans were pinning up all over the place, “Ten thousand franc reward for any information leading to the capture of any airmen.” So, ten thousand francs was a lot of money to a poor hardworking labourer. Well, to anyone in France but nobody, nobody gave me away and I was there for a couple of days and then a fella came riding up on a bike and he came in to the cottage and he spoke good English and he wanted to know, A my full name, B my number, C where I was stationed, D what the target was. He wanted to know everything under the sun and then of course when he came to asking me the names of the crew I said, ‘I don’t know the names of the crew. I only knew the name of the pilot.’ Which was a bit dicey. I mean they were very suspicious. The Germans it appears had a habit of dressing someone up in Air Force uniform and then pretending they’d been shot down and then follow the escape routes right the way through and then turn around and capture the whole escape route. So, so they were, they were very, so the name, rank and number disappeared in the thin air. I told him everything I could. Even where I was born. And they must have been in touch with London because he came back a couple of days later and said, ‘Right. We’ll be escorting you to the next line.’ And he said, what, ‘We’ll send you a guide,’ and he said, ‘The guide will never walk alongside you. He will always be ahead of you and if he gets caught you get away and if you get caught he gets away.’ Which seemed fair enough to me. So, in the main time the railway man give me one of his spare uniforms. A thin railway porter’s uniform and here it was the middle [laughs] the middle of winter. I was never warm from that day onwards. I, anyhow, the guide duly arrived and we, we caught the train to the next, the next place, and it was Lunéville. Lunéville. And I was, I was billeted with a couple of old ladies that had, looked like a millinery shop to me and in this place, I was taken out and photographed and an identification card was given to me and I was, I was supposed to be a painter that’s on war work [laughs] The photograph was good but the rest of it was all foreign to me and from there, from that place I was escorted to Nancy. Nancy. And believe it or not I was, I was living in a policeman’s, a high, he was a high-ranking officer because he was taking me around in his car which had got a gas balloon on top of it in those days. And he which, when you come to think of it from a lowly labourer to a big high-ranking officer in the police force it just goes to show that there was a lot of Frenchmen who were prepared to put their neck out to help. To help us Air Force blokes get away. And from there, from his place I went out on to a farm. Mazerolles. Mazerolles. Named that. I went out on to the farm and the farmer, he was the head of the Resistance movement in that area and his wardrobe was full of guns and hand grenades and everything under the sun. And the Germans used to come daily to collect their meat and milk from him and I’d be sitting behind the curtains watching them and, and, he, he used to say to me, well funnily enough his boy could speak a little bit of English. They were teaching them at school. And, and he said he wouldn’t be taken alive. No way. He’d and he said that funnily enough he said all the Germans in this area are the oldies. The retired ones. They don’t, they don’t want to fight and they’ve told him that when the second front starts they’ll all surrender. They don’t want to be killed. They’ll all surrender because they knew very well he had something to do with the Resistance. And I helped him kill, kill the pig for the black market while I was there. The thing that they fed me most on was potatoes and milk. Potatoes and milk. I’m fed, I was fed up of the sight of potatoes and milk by the time I left the farm. From there, let me see. Oh, that’s right from there we went, went on to Paris and I was stationed in a very nice house overlooking, well, I could see the Eiffel tower out of the bedroom window and I was moving around Paris. One exciting incident, I was moving around Paris and I was on the Underground, Metro and the guide was at the front of the train coach and I was at the back and keeping my eye on him and horror upon horrors four German soldiers got in with rifles slung over the shoulders and I’m standing behind one of them and his rifle butt was hitting me in the stomach. And here’s me trying to do everything possible to not attract attention when this little old lady that was sitting down wanted to know the name of the station that we passed through and I knew she was asking me the name. She was pulling my jacket and [unclear]. And I was doing, that was the first time I’ve ever felt like hitting a little old lady. Luckily enough the guide got out and I jumped, I jumped out with him and, and everything turned out alright. And then the next, the next trip was from Paris to Toulouse in the south of France and I duly, I duly followed the guide. He gave me the tickets and I went and sat in this compartment and he went and sat in one further down. It was, it was a corridor train and right inside the train itself, at the entrance was this German soldier with his automatic machine gun slung across his chest. He was obviously on railway duty and I’m sitting in the compartment when the ticket collector came around. What, what the performance was you got into a corner and you pretended you were asleep. You didn’t look at anybody. You just kept yourself to yourself. And the ticket collector came in and I gave him the ticket and obviously there was some, something not right, I don’t know what it was and he started speaking to me and of course I didn’t know what on earth he was on about. And before I could say boo the guide who was, must have been watching all this he popped his head in to the compartment and he said something like. ‘Anglais aviateur.’ And the ticket collector snapped the ticket, went out, shut the door and all these people, there was about another eight people in the compartment they never said a word from Paris all the way down to Toulouse. They never said a word. They never looked at me. The never did anything and they could have opened that door and called the German in and collected the ten thousand francs reward if they’d wanted. Anyhow, I, we eventually arrived at Toulouse and we, we took, we took a train. Well, there was another guide came along. I’ve got to think about this. There was another guide came along and we went on another train tracking down the foot of the Pyrenees. We stopped at a little small place and he told me to get out and I got out and there was, there was a group oh about twenty or so people hanging around there and I saw these, these guides with their sten guns over their shoulder and they, they ushered us all together and we went for a short walk up the mountains and into a big shed. And they more or less told us that first thing in the morning we’d be off over the mountains and they gave us something to eat which was very rare. I’d had very little to eat and drink. And so we were, we were sitting. I’d taken my shoes off because they were quite uncomfortable and it was dark but I could hear American voices talking and I thought oh there must, it must be a whole group that’s going over the mountains. And I don’t know how long it was but the next minute there was bursting of automatic fire. Bullets flying everywhere and one of the guards came in and said, ‘Bosch. Bosch.’ You know, ‘Get out. Get out.’ So, everybody started running for the door and I’m trying to get my shoes on. I was, I think I was, I think I was the last man out. Out of the shed. I didn’t know where I, which direction I was going. I was just running and there was one or two of them sitting around, you know with their hands up. And I thought, a little voice said, well Harry, you’ve got this far. You might as well go the rest. So, I kept pounding on and I don’t know what happened to them. The rest of them got caught of course but I don’t know why they missed me. They had dogs with them. Anyhow, I was in the mountains for, that was one day, one night. Two days. Two nights. Three days and two nights I think it was before, and course walking up mountain after mountain you could look back and you could see your foot prints in the snow. And I’ve often thought afterwards why on earth didn’t the Germans catch me? You could look back and see your footprints right the way miles back. But somebody was looking after me alright that time. And I’d gone over one mountain and down below I could see the green fields and I thought oh this is it. And it takes as much to get down a steep hill as it does to climb up them and especially if you keep sinking in the snow all the time. In the morning the snow would be quite slippery and you’d take one pace up and two paces backwards and by mid-morning you’d be up to your calves in it and then by late afternoon well you were really trying to struggle to get ahead. Anyhow, I got, I got down the hill and there was a, there was a fella looking after goats by the, I really have to try and think about this. Was it goats or sheep? It doesn’t really matter. He was looking after them and I said, ‘Spain?’ And to this day I remember him saying, ‘Mais oui, monsieur. Spain.’ And I thought I’ve gone around in a circle. I’m still in France. I thought, horror of horrors. Anyhow, on one of the brick walls I saw this big painting of “Viva Franco.” So, I knew very well I’d, I’d made it to Spain and I staggered. He didn’t bother to help me or anything and I staggered down in to the local village there and the policeman with his big black hat came out and took me in to the cells. So, I was inside the jail but obviously the condition I was in my lips were swollen, my fingers were all swollen. I had frostbite in my feet. He, he got somebody in to look after me but I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t do anything. I was stuffing snow in my mouth over the mountains just to keep from getting dry. And anyhow I, I spent about three days in this little village. What was that? Viella. Viella. That was it. Viella, in Spain. I spent three days and it was a village that was snowbound from the rest of the country by all accounts. But someone must have got in touch with the English Consulate because I was, from the jail I went to live in the only, stay in the only hotel in the place and I was told that you know whatever I wanted I could have. They always had plenty of wine to give away so, and I wasn’t a wine drinker in those days but I am [laughs] I soon learned. Diamante and Monopole was the best two wines [laughs] and, and I gradually, oh and there was, in the village was, was a couple of German deserters and they followed me about like sheep because they didn’t have any money and I didn’t want them anywhere near me because a lot of the Spanish were very pro-German. Especially the higher up. The officials. The working class people were like the working class people everywhere. They’d give you help and this, that and the other and I spent I don’t know how many days it’s so long ago now but I spent a few days in [pause] And I remember one incident. I took the bottle of wine down to the, to the river and I dropped off to sleep with siesta time and when I woke up again the wine was still intact, the money I had, pesetas was still intact. Nobody, nobody would touch it and the policeman, he came to me and he said, ‘We’re walking out now. We’re going. The snow has thawed enough for us to get over the top.’ So, I said, I said. ‘Oh righto. Righto.’ So, we’re, I’m trudging behind him still with this porter’s uniform on, still will these patent leather shoes on which [laughs] I’m, I’m coming up over the hill and I wasn’t too happy with him. He didn’t smile or anything like that and I wasn’t very happy and I got the impression he might be going to pop me off in the snow and just forget about it you see. You get all sorts of impressions. So, I kept close behind him because he was smaller than me and I’m sure I could have overpowered him and, and he took off his rifle off his shoulder and I thought get ready, and he offered it to me. He’d seen a rabbit and he wanted me to have a pot shot at the rabbit [laughs] So once that happened I was quite happy then. I knew I was quite safe, and we got over the mountains in to, oh I forget the name. I forget the name of the first place I got to and here was, here was a representative of the British Embassy waiting for me. And of course, he looked at me [laughs] and we went shopping and I had a real nice outfit. Shirt, trousers, sports coat but they had difficulty finding a size nine shoe [laughs] Yeah. Anyhow, there I was dressed up to kill and he took, he took me out for a meal. We went out for this meal and I’m thinking these, these little bits of meat’s lovely. It wasn’t until afterwards I found out I’d been eating snails [laughs] but they were, they tasted very nice. Then I went down to [pause] where was it? I forget the name. It was, it was, it was a sort of a holding place and that’s where I met some Americans that had come over the top and there was a whole group of them in, in this hotel and it was the first time ever that I think that an RAF man had more money in his pocket than the Americans had [laughs] But the pay clerk at the British Embassy said to me, ‘How long is it since you’ve been paid?’ And I said, ‘Thirteen weeks.’ And he said, ‘Oh, and what is your pay?’ And I told him and he said, ‘Well, when, when you’re wanting a bit of cash come in and see me.’ And he was a, he was a man from Hull which is just a few miles down below Scarborough and he was a Yorkshireman and I think he had a bit of a guilty complex that here he was in a nice country because there was lights, there was food, there was fruit. There was everything you could dream of and I think he had a bit of a guilty conscience that he was living like that and here was us in England suffering bombing and such like. So, I used to go regularly and collect my two hundred and fifty peseta and I, I’d go out, go out with the Americans and we would go into a bar and the only thing I can order was, ‘Cerveza. Cerveza.’ ‘Beer. Beer. Beer.’ Anyhow, I thought I’d better take some souvenirs. I’d better take some souvenirs home with me. So, I, I got some cigars for my dad. I got some 4711 for my mother and then I thought well, stockings. Silk stockings is always, is always wanted so I went into this lady’s shop and the two young assistants bustled me out, ‘No. No. No. No.’ Spanish men never went in to women’s shops. In fact, the ambassador said to me, he said, ‘Whatever you do,’ well not the ambassador but his representative, ‘Whatever you do,’ he said, ‘Don’t stare at the women and don’t wink at the women,’ you know. Don’t do any. ‘Don’t attract attention at all. Just keep a low profile because there’s quite a lot of people don’t like the British in here.’ In one case what actually happened Franco I think was coming up by train and they made sure I stayed in the hotel that day. Didn’t go outside the hotel. But getting back to the shop, these two assistants tried to shove me out and I said, ‘No. No. No, Senorita. Stockings,’ and there was a glass female leg on the counter with a stocking on it and I said, ‘This is what I want.’ And, ‘No. No.’ They, they weren’t having anything of it. And then an old assistant, she’d be in her forties I should think she came out and she said, ‘Inglesi?’. And I said, ‘Si Si. Inglesi.’ And she must have said something to the girls about these Englishmen are all mad or something because the girls started giggling and the old lady got me the stockings that I wanted, I wanted out. So, so that then from, from Madrid, I went down right to the south. A place called La Linea and there was the border to crossing to go to Gibraltar and it was just a case of jumping on a bus and going across the crossing and I, on this side there was, there was Spanish soldiers armed to the teeth. They were everywhere. Soldiers. And I got on the bus and crossed over. When I got out of the bus at the other side there was a kilted Scotsman with a rifle and a fixed bayonet and I said, I said, ‘There’s a whole platoon of Spanish soldiers over there.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’m up to that. I’m up to that,’ he said [laughs]. Anyhow, Gibraltar. I got, I got kitted out again in uniform and I had this little kit bag where I had all my, all my loot in there. All the thingamybobs. And I got priority to fly back to England and I’m, I’m in this Dakota with several high-ranking officers and such forth. Probably wondered what is this fella coming on here for? We eventually got to Whitchurch I think it was. Near Bristol, and I’m going through the customs and one of the customs officers said, ‘What are have you, what are you doing amongst this, all this high brass?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m an escaped prisoner of war.’ He said, ‘Oh, is that right?’ and he put a big chalk on my bag and I walked through without any inspections at all and the others had to open their bags and be inspected. And I had more loot than all those put together, I think. Anyhow, as I get through the customs there were a couple of nice gentlemen waiting for me and they said, ‘Oh, we’re escorting you back to London.’ I said, ‘Can’t I send a message home telling them — ’ ‘No. No. No. No. You can do all that after you’ve been to London.’ Now, my mother had never heard a word from me from that day until I landed in Gibraltar and she hadn’t a clue if I was alive or not so you must, you can see what she must have been going through. Her and dad. And I got, we got to London. I think it was MI6 or MI5 I forget what they were and they interrogated me. Wanted to know, you know questions like, ‘What’s the name of the cinema in your home town?’ You know, just general intelligence questions. Well, of course I sailed through those questions and I, I had to report to a WAAF officer and she said to me, ‘Alright,’ she said, I’m, I’m the pay. I’ve got to give you the pay for, when were you last paid?’ And I said, ‘Thirteen weeks ago.’ I didn’t tell her I’d been to told the fella in Hull it was thirteen weeks. Thirteen. ‘Oh, you haven’t.’ ‘No. No.’ So, she worked out what thirteen weeks pay was and this, that and the other and then she said to me, ‘And did you lose your wristwatch?’ And I said, ‘No. No. We didn’t carry wristwatches. Only the navigator.’ And she said, ‘Oh, I’m sure you must have had a wristwatch so we’ll put ten pounds down there. And what about shoes?’ I said, ‘No. No. We had flying boots. Didn’t wear shoes.’ And she was quite right in one respect. She said, ‘Weren’t you told to take a pair of shoes with you when you wore suede boots because of the walking?’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, but I never did.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘We’d better put something down for a pair.’ And she boosted my pay up by another fifteen pounds which I thought was very nice of her. And I went home. I went home for three weeks. Three weeks leave. And when I reported back again there was no counselling in those days but I did have to go and have a talk with, we used to call them trick cyclists but I think it was [laughs] trick cyclists we called them. And I had to go and have a talk with him and I thought it was a bit odd. Anyhow, the next thing I was, I was posted to, back to St Athans on a refresher course. So, I thought well that’s quite good so I went back to St Athans on the refresher course and I’d only been back about three or four weeks when I got posted to a Mosquito training unit of all things. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing there and I reported to the officer I had in the Training Command and he said to me, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘We asked for someone to come up. These pilots have all been flying Beaufighters. Radial engines, and we needed someone to tell them about inline. The Merlin 21 engine. So, we’ve asked for an instructor.’ And I said, ‘I’ve never instructed in my life.’ You know. ‘Oh. Well, you know about Merlin engines.’ I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ ‘And we’ve got the charts to hang on the walls so it’s just a case of pointing out.’ And I soon learned that these fellas, they didn’t want to ask any questions. All they wanted to do was get flying so they never asked any awkward questions. Quite the opposite. If they saw me in the local village pub they’d buy me free beer. And, and I was a flight sergeant and some of these blokes were flight lieutenants with decorations. DFM and that. But the officer in the training said, ‘As soon as you put that white jacket on you’re the boss in that classroom.’ So, from me being very hesitant it turned out to be quite a cushy number. But I made the fatal mistake in criticising some of the way things were done which I shouldn’t have done. But in those, I mean I’m an ex-flying man. I’m ex-Bomber Command. These are only training bods, you know. So, I felt a bit superior to them which proved my undoing because it got back to the officer in charge and he said, ‘Well, if you don’t like the way we do things, Cammish,’ He said, ‘We can soon fix that.’ So, from Shropshire I was posted up to Inverness. Right in the north of Scotland and they said [laughs] I got there, it was a Coastal Command station, they didn’t know why I was doing there. What I had come from. They hadn’t flown for several days because of the icy conditions. So here was me stuck up in this Coastal Command station for about two weeks before somebody thought we’d better get rid of him again. So, I went from there down to [pause] from the north of Scotland I went down to South Cerney in Gloucester which was very nice. And then they decided that I really should go on a flying control course. I weren’t doing engineering any more. So, I went from South Cerney to Charmy Down near Bath to train on a, on a flying control course which I did and that’s where I met my dear wife. We were married in Bath Abbey and had a happy fifty five years of married life. But getting back to that, I’m at Charmy Down and we did the flying control course and what we finished up doing was as the Americans were leaving the country we, we were a skeleton crew that had to go and shut down the station. No aircraft were allowed to fly. You know. And that was a very cushy number too. We, there was about sixty of us and we put down rations for about a hundred and sixty so we were fed well. In fact, the last, the last few months in the, in the Royal Air Force was very, very relaxing for me. Very relaxing. I went from flying control to Snaith in South Yorkshire. And that was another funny thing. When I was stationed in Bath, in Charmy Down they asked me where I’d like to be stationed and the old trick is you put the opposite side of the country because that’s where they’ll point you to. But this time they got it right. I asked to go to Yorkshire and I got posted to Yorkshire and here I had to leave the wife in Bath. So that was a big boo boo, but never mind. I was at, I was at Snaith for several, several weeks and then I went to Dishforth and Dishforth was the last port of call. That was the last station I was on before I was demobbed. And at Dishforth the, of course the, your record, my records anyhow never caught up with me on the station. They were always one or two stations behind and at Dishforth you had to wait for your records to catch you up. And some of the fellas that were getting ready for demob were called in to the Pay Accounts and they came back saying, ‘They want another five pounds for mess.’ And this that and the other. Crumbs. You know. And I’m thinking blimey what’s going to happen to me? I’ve been claiming thirteen weeks pay in Spain, thirteen weeks pay in London [laughs] And, and with shifting so quickly as I say they just used to say to you, ‘What’s your rate of pay?’ Well, I was getting fifteen and six pence you know. Which was, which was good money and they’d work it out and say, ‘Well, we owe you this.’ And righto. I thought, blimey. I thought when I go up to Pay Records they’re going to say to me, ‘Mr Cammish,’ Well, I was a warrant officer then, ‘Warrant Officer Cammish, we’ve got three thirteen weeks pay [laughs] pay you owe us.’ And anyhow, I went. I went in to the Pay Section and of course when I went into the Pay Section and of course when I went missing there was a line drawn across my record, you know. And then there was another line when I come back again. And that had them bluffed a little bit and, well he said, ‘You just about, we owe you so much money by all accounts.’ And I said, ‘Oh, is that right?’ Yeah. So here I am, all those three thirteen weeks pay and I don’t owe them any money. So, I thought, well that’s great. So, I sailed down to Wembley and got my [pause] oh no. That’s right, before I left, before I left, one of the stations the commanding officer said, ‘Well, we spent a lot of money training you. You’d, you’d like to stay on the Air Force, wouldn’t you?’ And I said, ‘No. Not really.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll guarantee you’ll only drop two ranks and then you’ll, you’ll — ’ and I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘You’ve made up your mind.’ It was so nice at the start but when I kept saying no his voice definitely turned nasty and he said, ‘Alright then. Clear off.’ And I said, but some, some of the fellas I knew, especially one, he was a warrant officer gunner, air gunner and he fell for this malarky that he wouldn’t drop because he wanted to fly. He loved flying. And I said, and I found out he never flew again. They put him in the Air Force Regiment. That’s like the ground crew, you know and he never flew again and he couldn’t get out of the Air Force quick enough after the war. But I wanted to, I wanted to get back to civvy life. The old bullshit was coming back. Fifty yards before headquarters you marched to attention and fifty yards after and all the rocks around the blinking place was going to be painted white and, and of course the, the regulars which, which put up with us at the start of the war started getting the better of us in the finish so life wasn’t very nice. So, I got out. Got back into Civvy Street. Got back in to the building trade. Didn’t like the way things were in England at the time so I emigrated to New Zealand in ’56 and I’ve been here ever since. I’m ninety four years of age and I’ve never regretted a day coming to New Zealand. That’s it.
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 Harrison Stanley Cammish
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jennifer Barraclough
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
2018-05-01
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
ACammishHS180501
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:50:33 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
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Description
An account of the resource
Harrison Cammish was born in Scarborough in 1923, and when he was fourteen, he became an apprentice carpenter and joiner, and when war broke out, he joined the Air Training Corps, and the Home Guard, who gave him a rifle and forty rounds of ammunition. At the age of eighteen he joined the RAF for aircrew duties and was sent to RAF Cardington for selection and training. He was sent home with his RAF number to await call up. He was sent to RAF St Athan via Padgate and Blackpool to train as a flight engineer. He did his heavy conversion and was posted to 50 Squadron at RAF Skellingthorpe. On his sixteenth operation he had a premonition that as he was called to do the operation at the last minute that he was not going to be happy with the flight. They were just short of the target and their aircraft was hit by a night fighter. He baled out and landed in occupied France. Heading west along a railway line, he came to a small station where he knocked on the office door from where he was taken to a nearby cottage. After arriving at Toulouse ready to cross into Spain he and his comrades were attacked by the Germans. After a narrow escape over the mountains, he made it into Spain and was put in contact with the British consulate. He was repatriated back to the UK via Gibraltar, and after leave and a refresher course he was posted to a Mosquito training unit to train crews on the Merlin engine. He ended up at RAF Charmy Down near Bath to do a flying control course, where he met his future wife. His last posting was to RAF Dishforth and he was demobbed from there. He decided not to remain in the RAF but to go back into civilian life, eventually emigrating to New Zealand in 1956.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Great Britain
Spain
New Zealand
Gibraltar
England--Bedfordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
England--London
France--Toulouse
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
50 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
civil defence
evading
flight engineer
Heavy Conversion Unit
home front
Home Guard
Lancaster
Mosquito
RAF Cardington
RAF Dishforth
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF St Athan
Resistance
shot down
training
-
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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
Davenport, Ernest
E Davenport
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Ernest Davenport (b. 1923, 1237998 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a bomb aimer with 7 Squadron before being shot down and becoming a prisoner of 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
2018-05-23
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Davenport, E
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JB: This interview is being carried out for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jennifer Barraclough and the interviewee is Mr Ernest Davenport. The interview is at his home in Manly near Auckland and the date is the 23rd of May 2018. So, thank you very much Mr Davenport for taking part. Perhaps you could start by telling me a little bit about your early life and then how you came to join up.
ED: Very well. Yes.
JB: Thank you.
ED: Well, I’ll start by introducing myself. Ernest Davenport is my name. I was born on the 4th of January 1923 in Tattenhall, Newton, Chester, Cheshire England. Soon a place in my life. The family moved to Wallasey, Cheshire in the 1930s. I was sixteen at the outbreak of war. I joined the Home Defence Volunteers in 1940 when invasion was imminent. Later the Local Defence Volunteers name was changed to Home Guard. My experience of the German blitz on Merseyside which was quite severe made me decide to join the RAF as a pilot and I hoped to become a night fighter pilot. How I came to Bomber Command is after being accepted in to the RAF Volunteer Reserve in January 1941 when I was eighteen and I commenced flying training in July 1941 and completed a course at RAF Elementary Flying Training school at Watchfield, Wiltshire. In November 1941 the weather being very bad and not much flying going on a group was formed. A group of pilots, pupil pilots was formed to go to the United States who had volunteered to train RAF personnel in the US Army Air Corps in Florida and Alabama. At that time the Americans were not in the war. Eventually we arrived in the USA in January 1942, and by that time the Americans were in the war and the situation was slightly different. Prior to that we were supposed to be going in civilian clothes but of course we now went in uniform and the Americans issued us with American uniforms which was a bit peculiar but this was the way it was to be. The course wasn’t altogether a success. The, the Americans were still on a peacetime footing and with ample manpower they were quite selective and more than half of our class was eliminated. Many for trivial reasons. The RAF reinstated many of these pupils to pilot training in Canada. By July 1942 I’d completed the US Army Air Corps primary and basic course and had about two hundred flying hours as a pilot. I was then posted to their Advanced Flying Training School in Dothan Alabama. After my second flight in a new type of aircraft with my flying instructor I was taxiing back to park when a strong gust of wind caused the aircraft to swerve and one wing touched the ground scratching the paint. That was the end of my pilot training in the USA. I was told to make my way to the Royal Canadian Air Force station at Trenton, Ontario, Canada and report to the RAF senior officer. The reselection board at Trenton interviewed me when I arrived. I was hoping to be admitted to pilot training in Canada but I was informed that there was a need for navigators and that I could resume my pilot training after completion of a tour of operations with Bomber Command. I was returned to the UK after qualifying in the observer role which included navigation, bombing and gunnery. The usual procedure was to post newly qualified personnel to Operational Training Units where they were formed into crews and did further training before being posted to operational squadrons. I was posted directly to 7 Squadron, Oakington, Cambridge. An operational squadron in the Pathfinder Force equipped with Short Stirling aircraft. The Pathfinder Force was used to mark targets for the main force to bomb. On my arrival at Oakington I reported to the squadron adjutant who took me to see the squadron commander, Wing Commander Mahaddie, who far from welcoming me demanded to know what I thought I was doing there. He went on to tell me that the, that he could have the pick of the finest crews in Bomber Command and that the minimum qualification he required was a commendable tour of operations over Germany. After I let him know the facts of my experience in the RAF he relented and told me that I could stay on his squadron for one operation and that if I was satisfactory I would be accepted. He further said that he would arrange that I could join a crew who needed a replacement for ops that night. As he was conferring a huge favour I was then introduced to my skipper to be, flying officer Ince DFC, and crew members Flying Officer Winfield, Pilot Officer Collins, Flight Sergeant Fray, Flight Sergeant Stokes and Flight Sergeant MacDonald. All of whom had completed a tour of operations before joining 7 Squadron. We went to briefing as a crew and learned that we were to attack Turin that night, the 4th of February 1943. The crew were very good. Very good. Very good natured about having such a raw recruit foisted on them and gave me a lot of help. I’d never flown in a Stirling. Didn’t know where anything was. For example, when we reached twelve thousand feet altitude climbing on course I didn’t know where, where to find an oxygen point. When we crossed the enemy coast and were fired on I had no idea how much danger we were in until I heard one of the gunners call the skipper on the intercom and say rather disinterestedly, ‘A bit of flak about ten miles on the port beam, skipper.’ The Stirling was fitted with four Bristol Hercules engines which had the handicap of not functioning well above about twelve thousand feet, so navigating the Alps was a bit tricky. It was a beautiful night but one engine, but one engine failed over the target with the result we could not maintain altitude on the way home so it was necessary to keep more than usually a keen lookout if we were to avoid the alpine peaks. There was a huge explosion in the middle of the night in Turin during which, during the raid which we heard later was due to a direct hit on the main armoury. But otherwise nothing of note. My second operation was to Cologne on the 14th of February. A much shorter trip but much more hazardous I was told by the old timer crew. How right they were. A few miles before reaching the target we were, we were to drop a navigation marker flare at a turning point for the main force. After dropping the flare we turned right on to the new course. At that moment a German night fighter who must have been following us coincidentally opened fire. Fortunately, most of the cannon shells missed except for some which damaged the petrol tanks in the port wing. Again, most fortunately the petrol did not catch fire. Being so close to the full intensity of the burst of tracer shells was a sight not to be forgotten. The gunners were highly embarrassed at not having seen the enemy fighter but their task was extremely difficult. We assessed the damage. Mostly we thought petrol leakage. It was trickling down from the main spar and puddling on the floor of the fuselage. The skipper decided to continue to the target where we had to drop markers for the main force. After successfully marking the target we turned for home. The flight engineer then announced that with the petrol loss we might not have enough fuel. We altered course for RAF Manston which is in Kent and was nominated as an emergency airfield. Arriving at Manston we found that the electrics for the undercarriage had been damaged and so it had to be manually lowered with a hand crank. Eventually the skipper landed and the slight jolt caused the port wing to sag. We travelled back to Cambridge by truck. The skipper was awarded a bar to his DFC and the flight engineer a DFM. So it went on until the 21st of June when having completed twenty operations we were forced to abandon our aircraft. Sadly, our skipper Flight Lieutenant Ince did not survive.
[recording paused]
JB: Ok. Would you like to start?
ED: Right. On the night of the 21st of June the target was Krefeld in the Ruhr Valley. After we had marked the target and were on, on course for home the mid-upper gunner reported a fire in, in the port wing. The flight engineer had a look from the astrodome and he thought that it was the petrol tanks between the, between the engines. The skipper thought possibly he’d try diving the aircraft to see if the fire would go out. So he had a try at that and the fire was, became more intense because of the velocity of the air going past, and so we levelled out again. One of the gunners came on the intercom and said, ‘Perhaps we should put our parachute on.’ So the skipper thought that might be a good idea and then he said, ‘Well, you’d better bale out boys.’ And so I went down and opened the escape hatch in the nose and somebody came down the steps and went out and I thought perhaps I’d better go too. So I sat on the edge of the, of the escape hatch and dangled my legs out and pushed off and fell out of the aircraft and then pulled the rip cord of course. And my next impression was of complete silence because the aircraft had vanished in the night and I couldn’t see anything but blackness. And so little by little I could hear noises and realised that they were distant guns going. And I found this going down in the night a bit boring so I, my ears were creaking a bit so I tried to get some chewing gum out of my trouser pocket but I couldn’t because the, the parachute harness was too tight across my body so I [pause] suddenly hit the ground and that was the, that was my introduction to Germany. So I was in some sort of a, the middle of some sort of a crop of either wheat or oats or something and I, I had a big knife which I had in my, in my waist belt for protection so I dug a hole and buried my parachute and tried to make myself look like a civilian by pulling my trouser legs over my flying boots and started walking thinking I might reach the Dutch border which wasn’t I thought too far away. But I, then I realised that the, there was a big river to cross in that direction so I just carried on walking and it was about 2 o’clock in the morning I think, and of course being mid-summer’s night it started to get light quite early. So, I came to a main road and decided perhaps I’d better not cross it in case I was seen, so I doubled back in to the field and by this time it was, it was fairly light. Pushed my way back through the hedge and suddenly I realised there was a farmer with a big scythe about to start cutting his crop. So he started shouting, and the next thing I knew some troops were running towards me with rifles, and there was an anti-aircraft gun in the corner of the field so that was it. I capitulated, and was taken into the farmer’s house and he got on the telephone and, and a vehicle arrived and some German troops took me to a German barracks nearby and I was asked for the usual things — name, rank and number and so forth and then locked in a room. And I was pretty tired by this time so I, I went to sleep. Of course I was awakened about 11 o’clock in the morning and given some food which was the last thing I felt like really, but then I was taken to a [pause] I was interrogated by a German officer who then locked me back in the room again and a little later an Air Force officer came and took charge me, and he was quite a pleasant fellow. I think he was probably aircrew and he, he [pause] no I’ve missed a bit out. I was marched by the German Army people down the road and they had six of them, three in front and three behind and I thought it was all rather amusing. I realised afterwards that the troops were really protecting me from the populace not the other way around. But quite a lot of our people had been murdered by civilians and of course the Germans didn’t want to appear in a bad light relative to the Geneva Convection so they were protecting us.
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 Ernest Davenport
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jennifer Barraclough
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
2018-05-23
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
ADavenportE180523, PDavenportE1801
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:20:34 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
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Description
An account of the resource
Ernest Davenport was born in Tattenhall, Cheshire in 1923. He joined the Local Defence Volunteers in 1940 and after witnessing the bombing of Merseyside he decided to join the RAF as a pilot. He was accepted into the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and commenced flying training in July 1941 at EFTS at RAF Watchfield. He continued his training in the USA in 1942 and after a slight mishap on landing during a training flight he was sent to Canada for reselection as a navigator. He returned to the UK as a qualified observer which included navigation, bombing and gunnery. He was posted directly to 7 Squadron at RAF Oakington equipped with Stirling bombers, and was told on arrival by his CO, Wing Commander Mahaddie that he would be accepted providing he completed one satisfactory operation. On an operation to Krefeld his aeroplane suffered a fire and the crew were forced to bale out. After burying his parachute in enemy territory he eventually became a prisoner of war.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Wiltshire
Germany--Krefeld
Italy--Turin
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943-02-04
1943-06-21
7 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bomb aimer
bombing
civil defence
Home Guard
observer
Pathfinders
prisoner of war
RAF Oakington
RAF Watchfield
Stirling
training
-
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d7cdd125daadfc734bce7f179423743d
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
Dunbar, Reg
R Dunbar
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Reginald Dunbar DFM (b. 1921, 50747 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator / air gunner with 37 and 100 Squadrons.
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
2018-06-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Dunbar, R
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JB: This interview is being carried out for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewer is Jennifer Barraclough. The interviewee is Reginald Dunbar. The date is the 24th of June 2018 and we are at Mr Dunbar’s Apartment in Albany near Auckland. Ok. Thank you very much Mr Dunbar. Could you start by telling us a little about your early life and how you came to join up with the Air Force?
RD: Yes. Of course. It’s a pleasure. My name is Reginald Dunbar. I am a wing commander retired. I think I’d best start with when I was born. I was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and moved across to Liverpool when I was six months old. I wouldn’t say that I was thrown out of Ireland but it felt like that [laughs] I attended a normal sort of school. Nothing particularly clever. Just normal schooling until I was seventeen and a half. But during that time I moved around a bit because my father was a baker on the White Star Line that used to go out to America and he stayed out there for a while at one stage to my mother’s rather disappointment. But however, I got a, I left school at fourteen and got a job in a shoe shop which was situated in Liverpool city. I persevered in that job until I was seventeen and a half and at that stage I was at the time a member of a church choir in Liverpool, namely, Emanuel Church. And while there I joined the Church Lad’s Brigade and although you may not heard of it, it was a sort of semi-military affair and they were issued with rifles of all things at the time which we marched off to church with at this, whatever the attention was. What it was called? Anyway, when I reached the age of seventeen and a half I was a bandsman in the Church Lad’s Brigade and used to sort of do a lot of work with my colleagues in the band doing, doing sort of training really for armaments which seemed strange for a church organisation. However, a colleague of mine named Norman King decided he would leave the Church Lad’s Brigade and join the Air Force. Now, he was six months older than me and he decided to leave and I followed him after, about six months after he’d left and left. And when I arrived at the recruiting office in Liverpool I asked if I could be a pilot and they checked on my background and said well, no. They thought something less [pause] less difficult than that and they suggested I join as a wireless operator with a six month training session. So, anyway I did that and left and joined up via a place called [pause] a place called, what was the name of the — ?
Other: [unclear]
RD: Where the R101 were based.
Other: Cardington.
RD: Cardington. That’s right. Cardington. And that’s where they had their recruiting set up and there was nothing in there apart from rows and rows of tables with plates on the table. Six plates on each table. This was for recruits and they had these sort of well, odd looking meals on board. They were sort of cow heels I think they were called. They were white, you know. Obviously the way they’d been cooked. However, sufficient to say at the end of a meal we found that the bins outside the buildings were full of these cow heels [laughs] Nobody had touched them. Anyway, we went from there to our training unit and my unit was, training unit for training was Yatesbury. Yatesbury was down in [pause] where was Yatesbury? Down in the south of England anyway. And I always remember the place because it was hilly around there and they had on the hills these white horses printed you know, and I used to spend a lot of my spare time sitting up on the hill enjoying life. You know, when I didn’t have to be doing any training. I seemed to be sort of by myself a lot. I didn’t make a lot of friends there to be quite truthful. I was by myself most of the time. I met a lot of people that lived local and they seemed to take a lot of care. They’d invite me out for meals and things you know when they saw me in uniform sitting doing nothing there. However, it was quite a comprehensive training they gave you including of course the Morse Code, everything and taught you all about training. And I had a good six months training and when I’d finished I was posted to a place. Where was it? I think it was over in Lincoln as a, on ground, ground equipment. Actually, I was posted to train on teleprinters. They’re the things like a printer, you know and that was shortly before the war broke out. Well, when the war broke out I was, I had volunteered for wartime training for Bomber Command. They were after, they were after volunteers and at that time I was only, what was it? Seventeen and a half approximately. And I went to South Wales to do my gunner training because you couldn’t be a wireless operator by itself. It had to be with the training as a gunner, an air gunner. Well, I went down to South Wales. I’ve forgotten the place it was but I remember doing my training down there which consisted of training on aircraft which was, which trailed a sort of a what would you call it?
Other: Kite? Kite?
RD: It was trailed. A sort of a target. It was a target. It was sort of a round sort of [pause] the idea was you hit it as many times as you could from a distance of over two hundred yards. And I remember the pilot putting up that aircraft putting in a bit of a complaint about me as a gunner as he didn’t know whether I was trying to hit him or the drogue. That’s what it was called. It was called a drogue. I don’t think he was too, he was too happy with me. Anyway, things mellowed and I did, let’s see, I suppose two months training as a gunner and we were trained from an open, open, an open [pause] an open seated. It wasn’t closed in or anything. We were just firing from the, from the side of the aircraft. It was a two seater. A very early one. Anyway, we’ll pass over that one but when I, when I had finished I was posted to Number 37 Bomber Squadron which was a Wellington aircraft. A Wellington aircraft was a two engined aircraft, and it was a geo traffic, a sort of cross of [pause] what was it made of? Aluminium and it was made in crossing and it was covered with fabric and two engined. And it sounds as though it was a very frail aircraft but believe me it was one of the workers of the Air Force. It was a very good aircraft. When you got, if you got a hit, if you got a hit and it made a hole in the side of the aircraft you got back alright because the whole sort of, the whole sort of make of the aircraft held together and sort of stuck together. You know what I mean? And so it sort of saved you from crashing or anything. So that was very helpful. But I, I was consigned to the rear gunner’s position because the crew that I was assigned with, when I was assigned to them had already done fifteen raids on Germany, and a number of raids that they did before they were sent home for a month’s rest was thirty, and they had already done fifteen. So when I’d done fifteen they had already done their thirty. You see what I mean. And the captain was a Flying Officer Warner who’d a big system of clothing shops in England, and I was his rear gunner because the rear gunner that he had at that stage had been dismissed from the Air Force because he had medical problems. Well, of course being at the start there I didn’t know much about it but I soon learned because the raids that we took part in were over Moers, the Ruhr Valley, Dortmund, Leverkusen, Black Forest North, Bremen, Waalhaven, Emden, [Gottensburg?] Hamburg, Munchengladbach twice, Sonnendorf, Soest, [Rossel?] and Rostock. And if you want to know why I remember those it’s only because I took them from my logbook which I haven’t got to show you because my eldest son has it and he’s sent it to me but it hasn’t reached me yet. So I have to apologise for that.
JB: Ok.
RD: But luckily I had made this. And from there I was transferred over to another squadron because I’d only done fifteen raids and I went to a squadron, same squadron of Wellingtons only it was commanded by a Squadron Leader Golding. Squadron Leader Golding was a regular officer and he was a very sort of experienced man and I was very pleased to have been allocated to him. With his aircraft I was posted not as a gunner but as a wireless operator which was my basic trade of course and he must have been quite pleased with me because he gave me an instant first operator’s job and I guided the aircraft by wireless over Hanover, Black Forest twice, Emden. I don’t know whether you want to know all this do you?
JB: Yes.
RD: Flushing, Berlin, Bottrop, Rotterdam, Hamburg, [Benroth] Hamburg, Berlin, Cuxhaven, Hamburg and Kiel. And after this that was my fifteen. So altogether I’d done thirty ops so I had to leave that squadron. They had to do another fifteen before they had it but I was sent on my way to do a month’s rest. So with, I was a sergeant at that time and I packed my kitbag and went to Euston Station on my way to Liverpool, but while I was on the station platform waiting for my train a message came over the tannoy system, ‘Would Sergeant Dunbar please report to the station master’s office on platform 1.’ So I thought to myself well what the heck would I have to report that I’m on my way for a leave.’ However, I made my way across to see what they wanted and the station master said, ‘I’ve had a report from — ’ I’ve forgotten my station. Feltwell. RAF Feltwell, where we were stationed. The squadron were stationed — ‘Asking you to return back to base.’ I wasn’t very pleased with that of course. So I got the train back and when I went back there and I saw the wing commander in his office and he said, ‘I don’t want you to be worried, Reg.’ He called me by my first name so I thought there was something funny. So I sat down on the chair and he said, ‘37 Squadron is going out to Middle East to operate there in North Africa and your erstwhile captain, Squadron Leader Golding asked me to contact you to see if you would be his wireless operator to go out to Middle East with him. And if you don’t want to go you just say so.’ So, I just quickly thought to myself the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know, because if I had gone on my leave when I came back I’d have to be put on another squadron see, and I knew him and he knew me and we got on well together. And so I said, ‘Well, all things being equal, sir.’ [unclear]
RD: It’s ok.
JB: ‘All things being equal, sir I think I’ll go out with the squadron as first wireless operator.’ And I trotted around to the squadron commander’s office and shook hands with Squadron Leader Golding who welcomed me like a long lost son. And we had to do some sort of training where, sort of radio training, you know where we would go away from base and he’d ask me to sort of guide him back to the middle of the airfield. Which I did by using my own sort of loop and everything and he was very pleased with that. So, anyway we were all set to go and we set out in January. January ’41 I think it was. Excuse me if I’m a little out on the dates.
JB: That’s ok.
RD: But out to Middle East. Right. Now, I was first wireless operator. Now, we went from Feltwell and we flew by night and we got to Malta where we were, Malta was our first stop. Malta. RAF Malta. And from there the station commander was a group captain and he was a little concerned at the times the Italians had attacked Malta and seeing the local population being housed in the caves in Malta because there were lots of caves there and they were pushed in there when there was a warning. And he asked Air Ministry I presume if he could hold on to 37 Squadron to get a bit of their own back on Italy. And from there we were, we attacked Taranto twice. That was the Naval base. And Naples which was effective of course, and Castel Benito and they were the total. And then we went and we were released from there. He let us go after that and we went on. We went on to our base at Shallufa which was on the [pause] I was based on the, there as the [pause] excuse me while I just —
JB: That’s ok.
RD: What do they call the canal?
Other: Suez.
RD: The canal. You know the —
JB: The Suez Canal.
RD: The Suez Canal. The Suez Canal that was, yeah. Well, that’s where Shallufa was built. It was an air force base and it was built solely to meet the needs of the Air Force and they were, we were, we were stationed in Shallufa, the squadron and we were used as a sort of heavy bomber squadron to bomb bases on the north, north of the, the [pause] you know the, the north shore of the north. You know where. Oh, well if I give you these actual targets you’ll probably know where it was —
JB: Yes, don’t worry.
RD: Hmm?
JB: Don’t worry.
RD: Yes. Well, we were sent out in a bomber. From there we bombed Bardia, twice. Bardia is a port on the north coast of North Africa. So we did two on Bardia, Derna which is further along the coast. Tobruk, Benghazi, Fouka, Benghazi again. Tobruk again. Rhodes and Fouka again. So we did our fair share of that. After that just the bottom [unclear] I was recalled, personally recalled to the UK when I was sent back by ship. When I got back I was posted to the first, 15. I thought that was first. It was 15. Number 15 Operational Training Unit and that was training people coming on to bombers which was at RAF Harwell. That’s where they later had the chemical —
JB: Yeah.
RD: You remember that.
JB: Yeah.
RD: Right. Well, that was on the 30th posted there to train others. Well, on the 30th of May 1942 we were in our bomber. The bomber that we were allocated to. Oh, I’ll tell you the background of that. The prime minister who you know. The prime minster wanted to get his own back a little bit on Germany and decided he would like to have the Air Force hold thousand bomber operations over Cologne. Just to give them a bit of their own back. To do that he had to shut down the operational flying of the RAF Bomber Command while they got the aircraft serviced because it would have to include training aircraft as well. He wouldn’t have enough otherwise. And so they had to have a sort of a competition and you had to have a sort of a pick, pick, pick [pause] You had to have all these aircraft of one squadron put in a hat, their numbers and you picked one. And some got operational flying Mark 2 Merlin engine modern Wellingtons, and others got aircraft that were old ones and only being used for circuits and bumps. That’s training pilots to, you know land. And unfortunately the one that we picked for the Cologne operation was one of the old ones and the sergeant, the flight sergeant who was the pilot of this first thousand bomber operation to Cologne was a bit, well fed up with it because when we were doing training for this operation he couldn’t get it to fly higher than eight thousand feet which isn’t very much. Anyway, the way he overcome that was on the operation itself. Instead of taking the aircraft to the city he kept it on the outskirts and instructed the bomb aimer to drop his bombs when he did a split, if you excuse my language split arse turn around and, to let his bomb go when his [unclear] And of course the super thing carried the bombs into the centre of the city or as near as he could get them because he wasn’t going to check. He wasn’t going to take any risks with the aircraft because he was too low. So anyway, we got back alright obviously. Well, we went on training. Training the, and in the, what was the prime minister’s name in those days?
Other: Churchill.
RD: The prime minister’s name.
Other: Churchill.
JB: Churchill. Winston Churchill.
RD: Churchill.
JB: Winston Churchill.
RD: Yeah. He was, he was so pleased with the efforts of this that he decided he’d like another one. So they’d done a second thousand bomber operation to go to Essen. Not all that far from Cologne. That’s where they had all the armaments. Well, we were sitting, and we went on this Bomber Command operation, a thousand bomber. It was successful and we did it and we got a few holes in the aircraft to satisfy us. Or satisfy the Germans I should say. We got back alright, and would you believe it that was on the 11th of June 1942, only a month later. Well, would you believe it there was no satisfying the prime minister was there? He decided he’d like to try a third one if you remember. Anyway, we were sitting in the briefing room. I remember sitting next to my friend who was also a wireless operator, a fella named Harry Jordan, and the chap came on and they had a big briefing room for these things you know and they tell you what the weather’s like and what the targets are. It was a typical Bomber Command briefing room and when this chap he got up to start his briefing another chap came on from the Ministry, the Air Ministry and he excused himself and obviously they had arranged it between them because it was his job to put to the audience volunteers for special duties of just wireless, and young pilots. Young pilots. I’ll tell you why in a minute. So I turned to my comrade and I said, ‘How do you feel about volunteering for special duties? I’m fed up with these thousand bomber raids.’ He said, ‘Yeah, alright.’ So we were two of the volunteers, and we went up to a place. I won’t bore you with what happened afterwards but eventually we were sent up to a place called RAF Drem which was a little south of Edinburgh, and we were briefed there. And we eventually, we were posted on to [pause] oh the aircraft there were Defiants. They were fighters. Now, the reason they happened to be fighters, Defiants was because they had been used as night fighters originally but the Germans had soon, they were fighter aircraft with a turret in the top and Germans had learned how to get at them coming underneath. So it didn’t take them long for the RAF to discount them, and so they gave them to us. They had nothing else for them and so they used them to, used them for daylight operations called Moonshine and this, how they did this, the Defiant squadron they had usually around about twelve aircraft, and they had the pilot and the likes of me who was acting as a wireless gunner. If we were attacked we attacked them from the, from the turret. But our wireless job was in the back of the aircraft. We’d have to get down out of the turret and work our way in to utilise our skills on the radio stuff. Now, how it worked was this, you might like to know. I think this is still secret. How it works was this. When we got, when we got up to about a thousand or, how many was it? I think it was about eight thousand feet. Around about that. We were, we were over the south coast and we were met by a squadron of Spitfires or some fighters, and we were waiting there and at that stage we were flying out over the German coast, and we would have had the information to turn on our electrical stuff which comprised of equipment which gave the impression when switched on of there being a sort of a wing of bomber aircraft going out there. It wasn’t of course. It was only us. The Germans, hearing this would take off as a squadron of fighters to attack this incoming lot, which we weren’t and they would be flying this way and when they were over here where we were the Spitfires, who were on a higher level would take up with them, and would sort of have a dogfight with them I suppose. And in the interim period the American squadrons would go out from where they were arranged to go from on the daylights. Now, that’s about all I’m going to say about that but they were, but we went to France, Holland, France, Belgium, France calibration, calibration. That’s where we had to do calibration. Make sure that the equipment was still right. Holland, France, Germany, France, calibration, Holland, France. Oh, and then we crashed at Heathrow [laughs] We got back alright but France and Holland and that was all we did on the daylight. Then we did night operations. Now, a night operation were absolutely different. Dutch, French coast were divided into eight positions of ten miles. It doesn’t matter how long they were, but they were limited and each aircraft of ours —
[knocking on the door - recording pause]
JB: Carry on.
RD: Each aircraft of ours was, was sent to a different position. So we were stationed at, what’s that RAF station near London?
Other: Northolt.
RD: Hmm?
Other: Northolt.
RD: Northolt. We were based at Northolt. But on the days when there was going to be a big bomber attack at night we were sent to the forward landing grounds that we’d been allocated to. Refuelled. Did everything right. And that night when the Bomber Command, the bombers were going out there we were allocated to our different positions and we switched on our equipment from, but we didn’t switch it from, we were sitting in our turret and when we were given the instruction swe lowered the seat which was just a crossbar and got in to the back of the aircraft and switched on our equipment, and this equipment was just jamming equipment. It jammed the German radar and when it, we didn’t do that until we knew the RAF were going over. But when they were going over we switched on and it stopped the Germans being able to sort of get on to our people who were coming out. It’s a very vague way of explaining it, I’m sorry.
JB: That’s alright.
RD: I’ve forgotten most of it.
JB: That’s fine.
RD: And they did that. All I’ve got here is eight positions which were the positions we were in. Position 7 6 7 1 1 1 8 5 7 7. Just all the numbers on the different nights that the Bomber Command aircraft were going out there. And in the end they took me off it and sent me up to Scotland to train others which I didn’t like particularly but then I think it’s in that thing that Richard’s got.
Other: Dumfries. Dumfries.
RD: Dumfries, that’s right. RAF Dumfries. We used to go out taking pilots and crew. Training them, you know. And we, it was while we were up there we heard about the landings in France, you know. We didn’t take part in those. We were probably told that we had done enough. And that’s about it.
JB: That’s about it.
RD: And from there I was taken on as a flight lieutenant in the RAF, given a permanent commission and what did I end up as? Wing commander wasn’t it? Wing commander. And I left the Royal Air Force when I found that I couldn’t get any further, and I went in to the Australian Air Force and did some manpower planning for them which I in the meantime had become expert in. And from there I did a short term engagement with them. I extended a couple of years. They asked me if I’d stay on for a while in Australia which I did. My wife didn’t mind, in fact she was a real wonder isn’t she? She’s a wonder. She stayed. She didn’t mind. And yeah, and from there I came back to England. And from England we went out oh [pause] and we came out to New Zealand and stayed out here. We got permission to stay out here. So that’s about it.
JB: That’s it. Thank you. That was splendid.
RD: [unclear]
JB: It was excellent. I really enjoyed that.
RD: Oh, well I’m glad you enjoyed it. I’ve got —
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 Reg Dunbar
Creator
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Jennifer Barraclough
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
2018-06-24
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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ADunbarR180624, PDunbarR1801
Conforms To
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Pending review
Format
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00:48:26 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Reg Dunbar enlisted for the RAF in Liverpool and it was suggested that he join as a wireless operator. He went to RAF Cardington initially and then to Yatesbury for training. He also trained as an air gunner, and after training was posted to 37 Squadron flying Wellingtons. When he had completed thirty operations and was heading home on leave he received a message at Euston station to return to base. His pilot requested that he join his crew that they were being posted to the Middle East, and flew to RAF Shallufa via Malta to commence bombing operations. He was recalled back to UK and was posted to 15 OTU at RAF Harwell and it was from here that he took part in the first thousand bomber operation on Cologne in 1942. Reg volunteered for operations at RAF Drem flying in Defiants as part of Moonshine operations to jam enemy radar. He was given a permanent commission and joined the RAAF attaining the rank of Wing Commander.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Egypt
France
Germany
Great Britain
Malta
North Africa
Egypt--Suez Canal Region
England--Bedfordshire
England--Oxfordshire
England--Wiltshire
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Libya
Libya--Bardiyah
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-05-30
1942-06-11
100 Squadron
15 OTU
37 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
Defiant
Operational Training Unit
RAF Cardington
RAF Drem
RAF Dumfries
RAF Harwell
RAF Shallufa
RAF Yatesbury
training
Wellington
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/917/11159/PLambertRW1801.1.jpg
50acb4821fe24c967c2fcc3a49e4e7f9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/917/11159/ALambertRW180820.2.mp3
7d38449922f636d635cac0250fdd78b3
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
Lambert, Richard William
R W Lambert
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Richard Lambert (b. 1925, 1850934 Royal Air Force). He served as a flight engineer with 101 and 15 Squadrons.
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
2018-08-20
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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Lambert, RW
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RL: Ok. This interview is being carried out for the International Bomber Command Centre. The interviewee is Mr Richard Lambert. The interviewer is Jennifer Barraclough. The date is the 20th of August 2018 and it’s taking place at Mr Lambert’s home near Auckland in New Zealand. Ok, Mr Lambert.
JB: Right.
RL: Thank you very much for —
JB: Ok.
RL: Taking part. Could you tell us a little about your early life and how you came to join up?
JB: I couldn’t wait to join up and at that time the recruiting age was seventeen and a quarter whereas in the Fleet Air Arm it was seventeen and a half so had to go to the seventeen and a quarter. On that day I cycled in to Guildford in Surrey to, to volunteer and the office was closed. Here we are with a war on, and a volunteer and they’re closed. Anyway, I went, went back on the Monday and volunteered. That was at seventeen and a quarter and a couple of days. So I always wanted to join the Air Force anyway, and so there was a scheme. PNB. Pilot, navigator or bomb aimer. And the initial part of that training was that you would be, you were all about the same intelligence but you’d be graded at a Tiger Moth flying school which was one of the three things you could be, a pilot, navigator, bomb aimer. So if you went solo the chances of getting a pilot’s job were enhanced. If you didn’t obviously they sent you off to Canada to be a navigator or whatever. So that was ok. But then the work for D-Day was well on the way even in 1943. And so, yes having volunteered the first thing we’d do of course is sit around and do nothing because the training was already catching up with surplus to requirements virtually. So we reported to Lord’s Cricket Ground to be uniformed and pick up all your gear and so on. Then off to the first course, the ITW which was in a place called Cannock Chase in, in the Midlands. And that was a six months course but basically having read about it since then it was just a time filling exercise because we went, after six months we went up to Scotland for an ITW, Initial Training Wing which was part of the normal training. So we lost six months already. So down to the Grading School on Tiger Moths. Then around about that time well we went down to London. No. That’s not true. We went to London for regrading and they, they had V-1s and V-2 bombs dropping on us. Dropping on us from Regent’s Park. Anyway, after all of that I was once again declared redundant and we were in London. We did aptitude tests and I became a trainee flight engineer. And then that went to the Technical Training Schools in Locking and St Athan’s. Big places. All part of the 1933 expansion and yeah so I became a flight engineer in those, in those days you didn’t do any flying at all. You just did technical work. So then of course once more I was redundant and I became a ground engineer. Flight mechanic’s course at Cosford. Cosford was the holding place for the returned prisoners of war so they became, they had priority to go in to Cosford. Cosford’s accommodation. And we were shipped to Hereford. And then we were redundant once more. We went up to Lossiemouth of all places. And then from Lossiemouth they started a new scheme for people that could sign on for a three year engagement for just three years and a bounty. Anyway, I was lucky at Lossiemouth. I found favour with the group captain even though I was just a scruffy redundant flight engineer and he got me on the next course to, back to St Athans. So that was about 1947 or something like that. And finally I went to Lindholme which was a Bomber Command base and finished my training as a flight engineer. And then I went to, all the bomber bases in those days were commanded by ex-prisoners of war. The squadron I went on was 617, not that you would recognise it as 617 with a Squadron Leader Brodie who had been a prisoner of war. And of course some of the pilots were flight, were chaps who’d decided to stay on and they became, Peter [Dunstall] was an escapee from Colditz. Although I don’t think he’d escaped from there but anyway Peter was in charge of 101 Squadron which during the war was a radio counter measures squadron, and I believe the shot down rate for that was higher than the rest of the, of Bomber Command. Anyway, I soldiered on in Bomber Command for a little bit longer and then they started, by then it was, the war was off and but they, the Cold War was winding up. We were still flying Lancasters and Lincolns, Lincoln and, but they started pilot recruiting. So this is what I really wanted to do in 1943. So after various aptitude tests in North Weald I went on a pilot’s course and finally became a pilot and rejoined. I could have gone anywhere after that course. I could have, I didn’t have to get back to Bomber Command but I thought well I’ve done all this time with Bomber Command I’d go back because I was familiar with it. So I went to a place called Hemswell and stayed there for quite a long time, 97 Squadron which was a Rhodesian squadron. And then I did some, did some flying for the Dambuster film which, which was fun. And then, then I was grounded. I had a bit of trouble with my ears so became a station adjutant at a place called Tern Hill in Shropshire, and I stayed there two or three years. And then what did I do? What happened then? I can’t think. Oh, I went down to Thorney Island as a, I did a jet conversion course on Vampires and Meteors training navigators and that was a pleasant stay because I had a house further along the coast in a place called Rustington and so I was, I was living at home, commuting to work, it was all very pleasant. So I was there for a couple of years and then I became a bit disillusioned with, I had passed all my promotion exams but the chances of getting a squadron was a bit remote and so I, I resigned and I was going, I had some property to build in a boatyard but the government changed and the money was not available and so on and so on. So I then went down, I had a contact with a chap who had an executive aeroplane and I went to, went to see him and he said, ‘Oh, that’s alright. Come and see me.’ So I flew. I was initially going to say, ‘I’ll fly for you for nothing,’ because I just needed the experience. Not the experience. The time. So, I then worked in [pause] doing executive work and then living at my, I just carried on living at home which was all very pleasant. So I was just like an airborne chauffeur which after a while I didn’t really want to do so I joined British United Airways. And then I stayed with them for eight years, something like that flying various aeroplanes until we, it became jet conversion on BAC 111s. Then my first wife got ill, but she had relatives out here so I thought it would be a good place for her to be. So we came out here and I joined, luckily Air New Zealand. So I was a ground instructor with Air New Zealand. Stayed with them for quite a few years and then retired. And that was me more or less.
RL: Fine. Thanks. That’s really interesting. Thank you.
JB: It’s a tale of perseverance to become a pilot and enjoying the piloting. It was fun working for this, as an executive pilot had its fun sides but my wife was ill, and it was all sort of a bit all downhill for us then. But anyway, there we go.
RL: Thank you.
JB: Oh I could tell you something about —
RL: Yes.
JB: Around Scampton was obviously, it was Bomber Command, but Scampton and Lincolnshire was Bomber Command. Apart from Yorkshire. But there was, there was a pub just down the hill called the Dambusters. And that’s where we did the flying for the Dambusters. They resuscitated four Lancasters. Three of them they put dummy bombs on so they could take them on, take them off which showed some close up pictures of the bomb which was in plywood. And yeah, I can’t remember then when that was but rationing was still on in England and they had, for the film unit they had a mobile caravan canteen. And so rationing as I say was still on and so we ate with the, with the film people. I can remember big T-bone steaks and stuff like that which was fun. And we did all the all the crowd scenes. They used RAF people to do the crowd scenes and the Lancasters were flown by me and four other blokes, and Richard Todd would come on. He would, he would go on the leader, the flight commander’s aeroplane and I went with, it was supposed to be Micky Martin, the Australian flight commander. So that was, we took off on the grass airfield which was at Kirton Lindsey which, Scampton at the time of the war didn’t have any runways. So they took off in a three and they ran at that two or three times to make it look more than it actually was. And then we did the routine flying which was identical to the 617 Squadron briefings, and the same accommodation. Same airfield except they had runways which we were at Kirton Lindsey for no runways. And yeah, we flew late afternoon or early evening over all the reservoirs that they could find and Derwentwater was the main one of course. And yes, so finally of course the film is repeated over and over again. It’s been on, it’s been on the Chaser. You know, which aeroplane of Bomber Command which of course it was a fantastic exercise to do and successful but of course they lost a lot of chaps. Yeah. And they lost the reminder on a raid on the Kiel Canal I think soon after that. And they lost the chaps on the way back across the North Sea. So having survived the Dambuster raid they were shot down. Terrible time and I have found since then of course that all the things I volunteered for as a young person were absolutely suicide jobs. In desperation when I was on the ground I volunteered as a parachute instructor. So I went to Ringway and jumped out of a, out of a barrage balloon and that sort of thing. But one of the chaps on the course got spinal meningitis so we were all quarantined and then I was sent back to Lossiemouth. Yeah. It’s crazy what you do. What else can we say?
[recording paused]
RL: Ok.
JB: One of the Bomber Command exercises that we did which again was good fun was again to go out to Egypt. Their detachments were called Sunray and the idea was to fly out through Castel Benito and into the Canal Zone and we’d stay there for a month. So we’d do bombing and gunnery exercises. It was just like a camp that they used to have before the war. So we’d stay there for a month and fly home again. On the way back once, Peter Tunstall who’d just been released from prisoner of war camp and so on got in to trouble with the storm clouds in the south of France. And of course he went so high he didn’t check that the, an airmen that, we were carrying passengers home subsequently died because he was ill. They landed at Tangmere but it was a bit late then. That was one of the exercises. And then of course the film thing. That was, that was pretty good. Yeah. I can’t get over the fact that we were still flying wartime aeroplanes that were long gone. Although the V-force aeroplanes were just coming in. Valiants and so on. Fran, has just, this is going to be edited I guess. Fran just mentioned that.
Other: [unclear]
RL: The, there was, well one of the biggest things that influenced my life in the Air Force was I was so lucky. I was overpaid on a pay parade. This was when I was on Lossiemouth. Over paid ten pounds or something like that and at the time I didn’t realise it but after lunch I went back to my room and realised I’d got ten pounds more than I should have. Lossiemouth was a long way from home and I thought now, I could go home, see my mother with this extra money. Buy a ticket and so on. But common sense said go and report it. So I went around to the accounts office and said, ‘I think I was overpaid,’ and the, the accountant was so pleased to see me because he was responsible for the ten pounds. He would have had to find ten pounds. Anyway, he came and said, ‘Thank you very much.’ And they said, ‘Just a minute,’ and I was taken in to the group captain. And this is, I was working outside at the time on aeroplanes so I was pretty scruffy I guess. Anyway, we talked together and he then said, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve just signed on for three years but I’m not doing a refresher course.’ And so he obviously, he didn’t promise anything but a few days later I was on the refresher course at St Athans that I mentioned earlier. So that was, if I hadn’t been there I would have done the three years on the ground and never flown. But then I did, and of course I got a civilian licence when I left the Air Force so that was lucky. Yeah. So there was something else I was going to mention.
[recording paused]
RL: Go again.
JB: Yeah. I said, I mentioned about volunteering for things. These chaps in in Bomber Command there was a Flare Force. That’s right. I remember. Bomber Command had closed down after the end of the war and the Pathfinders and all those top class people were just let go. And they suddenly realised that Russia was getting nasty and that they needed what they subsequently called the Flare Force and a lot of people might not have heard of that. So we went from the Pathfinders to Flare Force and the squadrons were 97, 101, two Mosquito squadrons 103 and 197. I think that was it. So, and then we just did exercises. People get killed on exercises. Mosquitoes crashed once or twice. Yeah. And of course, most of the people, most of the people became instructors and or either left, and left the Air Force. But it was hard times in those days. If you came out of the Air Force the chance of getting a job was a bit remote. And if you weren’t selected for a commission or, I was, again I was lucky. I was junior chap on the squadron and I always liked to fly the communication aeroplanes which might have been an Anson or an Oxford or something. So I would go and volunteer to get checked out on that aeroplane. So on, on 15 Squadron which was flying B29s we had some, they called them Washingtons. They thought I was going, it would be a good sort of Joe job, ‘Give it to Dick. He’ll do it.’ Anyway, the phone went and it was this group captain who was Gus Walker who’d had his arm blown off during the war. Gus Walker wanted to fly so I, I could fly the Oxfords and he wanted to fly so, and he was a major winner of some golf. One armed golfing champion. Gus Walker. Anyway, I said I’m going to go to with the group captain with his one arm and I’d operate the throttles and generally keep a look out. So that was quite pleasant. So, it was good to have lots of Brownie points when you’re doing that. When you’re a junior and so on. So that was, that again was lucky. And then as I say with my ten pound win that was a good introduction to the group captain and so on. Yeah. I can’t think of any other Brownie points that I achieved at the time. You need Brownie points. Yeah. What do I say then? Bill French was my wireless operator who was, I think he’s anglo-Indian. I’m not sure. But anyway he was Indian of some kind. A jolly good wireless operator. So we’d operate doing that. I kept in touch with the crew initially but they all seemed to die very young. My navigator Roddy Williams, he died ages ago. And a chap called Coffe. C O F F E. Coffe or something like that and he was a a navigator. And my crew, I went to be a station adjutant but my crew went to, out to Christmas Island to do the initial bombing with the atomic bomb for the RAF. Yeah. That was, but I missed that. Yeah. I did do a very hush hush photographic exercise in, over turkey which is I don’t know what that was about. Anyway, there you go.
RL: Ok. Thank you very much.
JB: Ok.
RL: That was great.
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 Richard William Lambert
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jennifer Barraclough
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2018-08-20
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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ALambertRW180820, PLambertRW1801
Format
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00:21:41 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Herefordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Shropshire
England--Somerset
England--Staffordshire
England--Sussex
England--Yorkshire
Scotland--Moray
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Description
An account of the resource
In 1943, when Richard was 17 and a half, he cycled into Guildford to sign up to volunteer for the Royal Air Force. He reported to Lords cricket ground to collect his uniform and gear and then went for training at RAF Hednesford for a six-month course. After that he went to the initial training wing in Scotland on Tiger Moths. He became redundant, but then went to technical training schools in RAF Locking and RAF St Athans and became a flight engineer. After becoming redundant for a second time he became a ground engineer, doing a course at RAF Cosford, before going to RAF Hereford and then RAF Lossiemouth where he signed on for a three-year engagement. Richard was posted to RAF Lindholme and became a flight engineer with 617 Squadron. After various aptitude tests and a pilot course he finally became a pilot and went to RAF Hemswell with 97 Squadron. He then stayed in RAF Ternhill, Shropshire for two or three years before going to RAF Thorney Island for a jet conversion course. After leaving the RAF he joined British United Airways, staying for about eight years. When his first wife became ill, he joined Air New Zealand as a ground instructor before retiring. Richard was involved in the making of the Dambuster film.
Contributor
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Sue Smith
Julie Williams
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
101 Squadron
15 Squadron
617 Squadron
97 Squadron
aircrew
entertainment
flight engineer
ground crew
Initial Training Wing
pilot
RAF Cosford
RAF Credenhill
RAF Hednesford
RAF Hemswell
RAF Kirton in Lindsey
RAF Lindholme
RAF Locking
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Scampton
RAF St Athan
RAF Ternhill
RAF Thorney Island
Tiger Moth
training