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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/610/8879/AMillerP150601.1.mp3
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Miller, Peter
P Miller
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Miller, P
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Peter Miller (3008496 Royal Air Force). He served as an air gunner and gunnery leader with 12 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
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2015-06-06
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
PM: You, you want my name or rank?
MJ: Yeah.
MM: Name and rank. Um I’m Peter, I’m [laughs] I’m nearly as bad as you. I’m recording this for Peter Miller, who is my husband, for the International Bomber Command Centre on the 1st June 20 -
MJ: ‘15.
MM: ‘15. We’re at Wragby in Lincolnshire.
PM: When I was called up. Is that alright?
MM: Ahum.
PM: 25th of the 11th ‘43. Went to Cardington. I was only there for a week getting kitted out and such. Was sent to Skegness, my home town, to do a couple of months foot drill. I was billeted about half a mile from home. So, when in the town I was the person sent by cycle on errands. Afterwards was posted to Halton on a flight mechanics course on which I was made AC1. Leaving Halton on the 29th of the 5th ‘44 I went to Digby, Lincolnshire, 527 squadron. Enjoyed time off, such, it was a Canadian station at the time. Then being posted to Bircham Newton, Norfolk, 695 squadron who were drogue towing. After a short while there I was sent to Blackpool in November classed as a PDC from which we went to Liverpool to get a boat. A Dutch ship called the [oanvan oldabarnevoort?] which after, after a late start we caught the convoy and going down the Med at Christmas Eve sailing past Gib onto Aden, then to Ceylon to drop some, some, some people off and then back up to Bombay to a transit camp. From Bombay we went to a place called Cawnpore [Kanpur]. That was our destination - 322 MU. Spending two and a half years in Cawnpore [Kanpur], returning from Bombay on the SS Somalia landing in Liverpool for being demobbed at a transit camp just outside Blackpool early July ’47. That’s, that’s my service career.
MM: What did you think to India?
PM: It was air, do you want the aircraft I worked on?
MJ: Oh yeah. I mean, well, that’s a, that’s a nice round off way of putting things how they are but yeah where, what, what, what did you do in Bombay because it seems a long way to be having an aircraft. I mean if you -
PM: It seems like a long way to what?
MJ: It seems to be a long way to go and play with aircraft so I just wondered what you had to do there.
PM: We were servicing them.
MJ: Yeah.
PM: Um Liberators.
MM: It was a big camp wasn’t it, Peter?
PM: A very big camp. Worked on Liberators to start with. About -
MM: Did you enjoy India?
PM: About five months.
MM: Did you enjoy India?
PM: Well yes. It was alright.
MJ: I suppose it was a good place to get a suntan.
PM: Yeah. Yeah but mainly. I had almost two and a half years on Dakotas.
MJ: So you mainly worked on Dakotas.
PM: Yeah, air frames.
MJ: Air frame.
PM: Air frame fitter.
MJ: Was it, was it very busy being in India fitting or was it -
PM: We were busy.
MJ: Quiet?
PM: Of course we used to service them from all over South East Asia Command.
MJ: So, so when people think that you were um in India probably having a quieter time than most you probably, you weren’t were you? You ‘cause
PM: Oh no, we weren’t living it up.
MJ: No. I mean that’s what people would think. I mean
PM: Yeah.
MJ: That’s what I’m saying. A lot of people don’t associate India with the RAF do they?
PM: Yeah. We weren’t living it up.
MJ: No. So, so how did you, I imagine it was very hot over there was it? Or -
PM: Very hot.
MJ: So -
MM: And you went up in the hills didn’t you on your leave -
PM: Pardon?
MM: You enjoyed going up into the hills didn’t you? On leave.
PM: We used to get on, we used to get our normal leave but also we had a, we used to go on hill parties, a month, probably fifty or sixty used to go by train to the foothills and then up by wagons to the place we spent the, spent the leave, the holiday. I had my twenty first birthday in Darjeeling.
MJ: That must have been interesting.
PM: Yeah. It was alright [laughs]. But the other places were, were very fair. They used to take us as far as they could by train, Then we had to go on, on wagons further up.
MJ: Did -
PM: We used to go by train to Darjeeling. Pre, pre, pre-war I think the moneyed folks had taken Darjeeling over and they weren’t all that keen on us blokes out there going to Darjeeling but er we made them happy.
MJ: Did um -
PM: But that’s a lovely spot that.
MJ: So even though the work was hard it was quite a nice place to be.
PM: Yeah. But, but regarding, regarding the weather it, it was very hot. During the hot season we used to go to work in the morning. There for seven and we used to work while one and after 1 o’clock the time was our own.
MJ: It was too hot to work?
PM: Yeah.
MJ: So, so, so in a way you were working nights really?
PM: [laughs] But we were we’ve had everything done I think. There was, it was a very big camp. There was three villages on the camp.
MJ: Was, was it more than just RAF then?
PM: Pardon?
MJ: Was it more than just RAF?
PM: Just RAF.
MJ: So -
PM: Yeah.
MM: There were locals. The villagers were locals.
PM: Local villagers. They were on, on the side -
MJ: Side.
MM: Doing your washing for you.
PM: Well they used to, they were our bearers and things were alright until the war finished.
MJ: What happened then?
PM: Until the Jap war finished. And then Pakistan and India were having a go at one another.
MJ: So you got stuck in the middle.
PM: Well more or less. We wanted to get home. They held, well, we believed they held our demob up for a while.
MJ: Why because of the conflict between the two -
PM: Well, in case there was going to be. Nothing happened. We got on the boat and came home.
MJ: So that, that was a better deal than you thought.
PM: Yeah. One of the biggest laughs we got was when we got to Liverpool on the way home. We were getting off the boat and a jet went over. Never seen a jet.
MJ: No.
PM: Only heard about them. You should have heard the cheer that went up.
MJ: That must have been, so you were probably one of the first people to see a jet flying.
PM: Yeah. In Liverpool.
MJ: You don’t -
PM: Vampire.
MM: Yeah.
[Tape paused].
PM: The cold season out there -
MJ: Yeah.
PM: Is about like this.
MJ: So it’s like having summer in the winter is it?
PM: Yeah.
MJ: So did you, you got warm -
PM: The, the snag is um these blokes that’s been in, in the desert and that, they reckon it goes stone cold at night. Not India. The sun, the sun sets and that’s it. Nothing else. Then the sun comes up and it’s daylight again and you’re getting warmer.
MJ: Yeah. So did you find you had to do more work in the winter per se or, or is it ‘cause, ‘cause the engine, or did you have to sort of -
PM: Yeah, in the, in the cold season we’d probably work another hour a day.
MJ: That, that doesn’t sound a lot but I imagine in those sorts of heats everything buckles including yourself does it?
PM: Yeah.
MJ: I mean, did, did you have to bring in, how did you get everything to where you were ‘cause you were saying you didn’t have any transport as such.
PM: When, when the war finished we, we were, they were sending in um Liberators to our place for scrap. We had a colossal scrapheap there. They were sending these Liberators there because - I don’t want it recorded because -
MJ: No it’s alright.
PM: Yeah well what we heard was that the Yanks wouldn’t take them back as returned lease-lend.
MJ: Well I mean that -
PM: And we just had to get rid of them but we weren’t allowed to sell them. That’s, that’s all we heard. They were wheeling them down to salvage and there was about seventy or eighty Libs there when I got posted home but on other places there was more Libs.
MJ: So I mean -
PM: And they just started destroying them. Took anything that, everything that was any use off the Libs and then, I can’t remember which station it was but there was one station in India was, had started to destroy the Libs. I, I don’t know what, well anybody that was in the RAF on aircraft would say it’s easier to build one then take one to bits. They um they took all instruments that were of any use out.
MJ: Right.
PM: Dinghies, first aid, everything like that. Armoury. All that out and then they took them onto the scrap, down to the scrapyard and drained all the oil out, out the engines and started the engines up and ran them flat out until they went bang.
MJ: So that they couldn’t be used again.
PM: No use whatsoever.
MJ: You know if -
PM: And then they recommended that what you did was have a, have a wagon or tractor fastened to the front of them and drive the tail unit up against a wall or something like that to break them up. Anything that’s riveted you see you can’t get it to bits by, by just undoing it.
MJ: It was built to last so -
PM: But that’s, that’s how it was but there was, there was about seventy at Cawnpore [Kanpur] when I came home that, that hadn’t been touched. Well, I say hadn’t been touched they’d been stripped but hadn’t been damaged.
MJ: I don’t think that was just yourself. I’ve heard things go, you know, because it’s hard to trans. Do you think it was hard to transport the stuff back? I -
MM: Distance.
MJ: You think -
PM: But the –
MJ: I would have thought it would be the pure economics of getting something, it was more expensive to -
PM: If the Yanks had taken them back they could have flown them back.
MJ: Do you think so?
PM: Yeah. I’m sure. They flew them there they could have flown them back.
MJ: Did, did any of the, anything else get left behind? Was it just the planes? Just, everyone leaves everything behind or did you bring most of it back?
PM: Well I don’t know what happened to them at Cawnpore [Kanpur] because they were still there when I left but there was a reunion at Cawnpore [Kanpur]. I was going on it but I got a new [motor?] and I couldn’t go and er the chaps said that the Indian air force wouldn’t let them anywhere near the salvage.
MJ: They wouldn’t let them anywhere near salvage. Well I’m surprised it’s still there.
PM: Yeah. They wouldn’t let them anywhere near salvage.
MM: But you used to go swimming didn’t you? You had a pool.
PM: Oh we’d go swimming. There was a swimming pool on the camp.
MM: A swimming pool and that. You enjoyed that.
MJ:: More than I can do.
MM: I can’t swim.
MJ: Yeah.
MM: So I mean there was some good times wasn’t there?
PM: Oh yes we had some good times.
MM: Good times. Friends. Lots of laughs.
PM: Off the camp mainly, the good times.
MM: Used to go down to one of the places nearby didn’t you? Villages, towns whatever you called it.
PM: Oh we used to go in, in to Cawnpore [Kanpur] itself.
MM: Yeah.
PM: The city
MJ: Well you say it’s a city. Was it sort of like -
MM: How big?
MJ: Was it a big place or –
PM: Oh it was a big place -
MJ: ‘Cause I mean -
PM: The city was. Yeah. The actual RAF camp was called, oh God - Chakeri.
MJ: Oh right. I thought -
PM: It was about four mile out of Cawnpore [Kanpur] but Cawnpore [Kanpur] was a city and we used to call the camp Cawnpore [Kanpur]. It was always Cawnpore [Kanpur].
MJ: Um maybe -
PM: Where were you stationed? Cawnpore [Kanpur].
MM: But you used to have meals didn’t you, in the city, when you went out?
PM: You what?
MM: You used to go for meals didn’t you? In the city went out -
PM: Oh could do. Yeah. Go in to the city. But we were only allowed in one part of the city. They um it was out of bounds to us.
MJ: It’s er so -
PM: It was, it was our military that put it out of bounds to us. They wouldn’t, wouldn’t let us in the -
So it wasn’t inflicted. It wasn’t, you weren’t put out of bounds by the city itself. It was the hierarchy of the military itself.
PM: Yeah. Yeah.
MJ: Saying you couldn’t go to certain parts.
PM: That’s it. Yeah.
MJ: Ah and did you, could you go out of uniform or did you have to be in uniform?
PM: We was, we were out of uniform most of the time. I mean when we used to go to work in a morning, 7 o’clock in the morning, you’d have a, a pair of shorts on, socks and shoes, bush hat and sunglasses and we used to go to work like that and at 1 o’clock when we, when we finished work we used to walk, we didn’t march back or anything. We used to walk back in groups, probably call at the swimming pool on the way back, used to go back and have lunch and then just loaf about.
MJ: Well I imagine it’s, it’s too hot to do anything else at that time. I mean -
PM: It was a funny old time.
MJ: Yeah I can agree with you there. You –
[Tape paused]
MM: Yeah.
PM: About the same height as I am now.
MM: Six foot.
PM: Weighed seven and a half stone.
MM: Rather slim.
PM: I got a demob suit and I kept my best blue. And I came home. The demob suit was slightly too big for me. ‘You’ll grow out of it’, that was that you see, which I did. Within, within a month my blue didn’t fit me. I didn’t care ‘cause I chucked it away and my demob suit was dead tight. I had to collect all the, all the family clothing coupons together and go and get measured for a suit, ‘Make it plenty big enough’ and I stopped growing then [laughs]. So I got one suit big and the other, other two too small.
MJ: So most people stopped growing and you took that many years to grow-
MM: His mother’s cooking that was. Put the weight on you. [laughs] Didn’t it?
PM: Yeah.
MM: Your mum’s cooking -
PM: Yeah.
MM: Yeah. Built you up again.
PM: My mother was in the first war.
MM: First World War.
PM: In the RAF. In Germany.
MJ: [That’s what?]
PM: Yeah. In the Royal Flying Corp.
MM: As it was then. Yeah.
MJ: So you inherited the job did you?
MM: Must have done.
PM: Yeah.
PM: When, when you were on about servicing, servicing aircraft we had to be there, we were in the hangars for 7 o’clock in the morning but if there were any aircraft either stuck outside or in the hangar that were going out you checked the tyre pressures before the sun got on them because you never know what the tire pressure would be after about an hour in the sun out there.
MM: And of course they couldn’t fly them till they’d got your little signature could they?
PM: Hmmn?
MM: You couldn’t fly them till they got your little signature.
PM: Oh no couldn’t. Well I was one of a team. I was the air frame rigger um on a Liberator four engines so there’d be four engine fitters, instruments, wires um guns and turrets all had to be checked and signed for before the pilot could have it.
MJ: How long did that take?
PM: Hmmn?
MJ: How long did that take?
PM: Well I mean if the aircraft was, was, was alright, if it had come out of the hangar after, after a major service it would be taken out on a test flight. One of each trade would go up with him if it was a bomber. Go up with him and you’d fly around and everything was alright. Come back. You’d check up again. Then before it flew again tomorrow it had to be serviced because between flights inspections on RAF aircraft if it, if an aircraft came, came up from London and landed on your airport there would be a between flights inspection before it could go again.
MJ: Oh I didn’t know that.
PM: Yeah.
MJ: How often did that happen?
PM: Hmmn?
MJ: Did that happen regularly?
PM: That was it. Between flights inspection. And being, being a rigger, that’s what I was, they were the last to sign the 700. The 700 was the aircraft manual and every, everybody that was concerned with anything on the aircraft had to sign and the rigger was the last one to sign because he was responsible for um the petrol cap being loose. Nothing, nothing to do with him normally. The um the blokes driving the petrol bowsers used to tighten them up but it was, it was his aircraft and he had to do something about it. So he used to tighten, tighten it up and any, any little panel that was loose he’d secure the panels and that before he signs and until he signed they couldn’t go anywhere.
MJ: Did you have a team of riggers or was it just you per plane?
PM: What?
MJ: Was it just you on one plane or did you have a few?
PM: Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah.
MJ: So -
PM: Didn’t, didn’t do a half a dozen planes. Just, just the one plane.
MJ: Yeah but did you work as a rigger on your own or did you have someone helping you?
PM: Was, was
MM: Was there more than one rigger on each plane?
PM: No. Only one rigger.
MM: Ahum.
PM: Yeah.
MJ: So that’s a lot of rivets.
MM: Ahum check them [laughs].
PM: Yeah well the aircraft, the framework of the aircraft and everything in general was alright. It was day to day um events um tyres and things like that. Brakes slipping. All those sort of things.
MJ: Do you think you had more trouble because it was hotter there than most would have?
PM: Of course being a rigger brakes were my job as well. [laughs]
MM: You said when you went to Halton it was a case of half of them for engines half of them for airframes wasn’t it?
PM: Yeah.
MM: So it just depends which side of the room you were on [laughs] you were telling me.
PM: [laughs] Yeah.
MM: You had some fun down there at Halton didn’t you?
PM: You what?
MM: Had some fun at Halton.
PM: Halton. Yeah. It was um water shortage. Halton camp is on a hill. The hill, the hill is that far and high that there’s two parade grounds on the hill.
MJ: Two?
PM: Two parade grounds on the hill. You go through the gates, you go up and, oh from here to the bridge there’s the bottom of the parade ground and it goes back into the hills and you carry, you carry on up the hill there and about, about another twenty, thirty foot up there’s another parade ground. It was a hell of a camp Halton was. It was a, um what’s it -
MM: Training?
PM: Oh God.
MM: Officer’s training do you say?
PM: No.
MM: No.
PM: Weren’t officers. They -
MM: Cadets.
PM: When you join, you join the RAF you -
MM: Cadets?
PM: You was a member. I was a member of the air force but I was only a sort of a temporary member but I, I, I didn’t sign on for ten years or owt like that but all the regulars they, they were right under the thumb. By hell they were.
MJ: So you think it was different for you. Was it ‘cause you -
PM: Yeah.
MJ: Because you were sort of part time if you like.
PM: Yeah.
MJ: For a better word.
PM: I liked Halton. It was a nice camp.
MM: Taught you how to shoot there didn’t there?
PM: Hmmn?
MM: Taught you how to shoot there didn’t they?
PM: Yeah.
MJ: This is um -
MM: One poor chap. Everybody dashed because -
PM: We had two, we had two Jewish lads -
MJ: Yeah.
PM: By God they were dim [laughs] and er they, they, they were on a, on a rigger’s course but everything, everything went wrong with them. On one day we had um rifle training so went up on the, up on the bus up the hill and there was um the targets. Perhaps six or seven targets.
MJ: Right.
PM: And a wall, a wall just below them and behind, behind the wall there was a trench so the blokes, blokes up there looking after, looking after the targets they were, they were safe and you had ten rounds and you just, you had your ten rounds and you got in front of one of, one of the targets and that and you’d been told how to fire them and everything. The corporal would shout, ‘Fire.’ And then down there on the range there used to be a flag on a pole come out and he used to stick on to the target where, where the bullet had gone through, if it had gone through. Well these two Jewish lads they couldn’t even hit the target never mind [laughs] and there was everybody else had to get off and let them pick their own target and everything. Our corporal was on the phone to them down there and, ‘Right. Fire. Take your time.’ Bang. Flag went like that. Bang. Next time it went [beuuuu]. Phone rang. Corporal said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘He hit my mate.’ He’d, he’d hit his tin hat. Hit his tin hat. This bullet and had gone off his tin hat.
MJ: So he was safe though?
PM: Yeah.
MM: Most of them.
PM: And then we had hand grenades. There was, there was this wall. All sandbanks and that and over the other side of the wall about there, there was a, there was a hole and behind this wall there was another wall and everybody used to get behind that wall and the corporal used to bring one bloke around and show him, show him everything, make sure he, he was holding the grenade right, then he used to toss it over to go in the hole. Everybody else was doing alright and this one he dropped the grenade the other side just on the top and it rolled down so the corporal grabbed hold of this bloke, pushed him down and more or less sat on him. Bang. ‘That was close wasn’t it?’ the corporal said. And, and, we, we went up into the, up the hills. Sten guns. They were deadly you know. If you dropped a sten gun it’d bounce about all over the place till it emptied and [laughs] there was two corporals that had never, never met these two. ‘Watch them. We know what we’re doing.’ Corporals, ‘Alright.’ Showed them how to go on and everything. Give these two a sten gun each, got them to load them, ‘Don’t do anything. We’ll have you one at a time so you come with me.’ So he fired. Nowhere near the target or anything like that but he got shot of the, the ammo. The second one went, spun around, he says to the corporal, ‘It won’t fire’ pointing it at the corporal. [laughs] God. He said, ‘Stand still. Let go of the trigger. Put it down.’ If there hadn’t been anybody else around he would have clouted him around the side of the earhole with the sten. Anyway, they got rid of them. I don’t know where they went to but they were no good as, no good on engines or airframes or anything like that. They were completely useless, the pair of them.
MM: They were only young though you see weren’t they? Eighteen and a half.
PM: Yeah they’d only be just over eighteen.
MM: That’s what I mean. Today –
PM: Yeah.
MM: They’re at school aren’t they?
MJ: Yeah. So it’s surprising you’re here.
MM: Yeah.
PM: Yeah.
MM: Then he come back to Digby, Lincolnshire.
PM: Eh?
MM: You enjoyed Digby in Lincolnshire didn’t you?
PM: Yeah.
MM: No calamities there?
PM: No. Come back to Digby.
MM: You used to go in to Lincoln didn’t you?
PM: Yeah. Used to go in to Lincoln.
MM: On time off.
PM: It was a Canadian station. Everything underground.
MJ: Underground?
PM: Eh?
MM: Underground.
MJ: Everything underground?
PM: Everything was built underground. It was a radio and radar station. We didn’t, we didn’t know that when we were stationed there but, but they used to work underground.
MJ: That’s -
PM: At Digby. It was good station. It was a Canadian station.
MJ: Was that better than the RAF ones?
PM: Well, they were better supplied than what we were.
MM: Food was good [laughs] Yeah.
PM: Yeah a lot better supplied.
[Tape paused]
PM: We were all, all air frame fitters and one of the station aircraft, we got two Dakotas belonging to the station. One had gone to Lahore.
MJ: Right.
PM: From our place and um next morning they were refuelling it and the chap drove the petrol bowser with the dipstick sticking out and tore the underside of the wing. Well that was it you see. He didn’t just tear the surface of the wing he, he buckled the main spar. So we, we had several Dakotas there that would probably never fly again and using them as spares and got hold of, got hold of my mate we did and get a, get a mainplane from, from salvage. Give him, give him all the gen on this one aircraft, ‘Go and, go and check if it’s alright.’ So he come back he said, ‘Yeah it’s alright.’ He said ‘Right. The three of you,’ he says, ‘You Miller’ and what his name, ‘Go and fetch it off.’ And we took, we took the crane down with us and we got the, got the trestles and everything and the jacks underneath it’s wing and we disconnected the wing and took it away completely from the engines you see. You’ve got the two engines there and a centre section between them and the fuselage but beyond the engines that’s the outer so we got that and we got a Queen Mary. You know the Queen Mary’s, we used? The um -
MJ: Ahum?
PM: The long, the long low loaders. Very wide, ten foot wide, that the RAF used to drive around you’ve seen them there their low loaders haven’t you? They’re called the Queen Mary’s. They’re ten, ten foot wide and during the war if, if you had to take anything with, with a Queen Mary through, through a town you had a police escort and they’d take you the best way through the town because of, because of the width of the vehicle. And we loaded this, loaded this mainplane and all the gear we wanted and everything and we cleared off to Lahore. The three of us. It took us three days to get there. Close on four hundred mile.
MJ: What were the -
PM: Well the roads in India were just like the roads down to the villages here and we got there and this Warrant Officer [Pryor?] said, ‘Goodness I’m pleased to see you lot.’ He said, ‘Get on with it.’ So we took, took this mainplane off and they carted it off to salvage there and um they got all the gear there, got all the gear and everything but they wouldn’t let them touch it.
MJ: Why was that?
PM: So we, we had to do it you see. The plane belonged to us so we, we, we got the mainplane off and everything, put the other one up got it all, all bolted in. Everything. Control cables, electrics, everything and got hold of Taf Bevan, ‘Right. Fly it.’
MJ: How long did that take you?
PM: Hmmn?
MJ: How long did that take you?
PM: Well three days overall. ‘Fly it.’ He says, ‘Alright. Sign.’ So we signed for it and everything. The warrant officer, the err engineering officer at whatsit, he said, ‘You’ve done a very good job you blokes have.’ The CO was there as well. At Lahore. He was, he was there as well. He said, ‘It looks very, very nice,’ he says. He said, ‘I’ll get on to,’ Oh I don’t know the name of our CO. He said, ‘I’ll get on to him and tell him what a good job you’ve done.’ And we went up with Taf and he, he said, ‘Nothing wrong with this. It’s alright.’ Taf Bevan, he was a bloody Welshman. We never did find out his name. His first name. Never. And he was a warrant officer. He wouldn’t, he wouldn’t take a commission. He just wanted to stay non-commissioned.
MJ: Did he say why?
PM: Warrant officer.
MJ: Yeah. Did he say why he didn’t want to take a commission?
PM: He said, ‘I don’t want to be with that crowd stuck in the officer’s mess and that. Better off in the sergeant’s mess.’ He said, ‘I’m away next morning.’ We said, ‘You’re bloody well not without us mate’ and we transferred the um the Queen Mary to Lahore and climbed in the Dak with him and flew home. Thirty minutes. [laughs]
[Tape paused]
PM: Now can’t you? Between you?
MJ: I think so. You should be able to.
PM: You just, you know, well why not do that?
MJ: Did you -
PM: What about that? [Oh bought]
MJ: Yeah. People don’t think that so that’s why your lifestyle is different to todays because people don’t realise what you did. I mean so -
MM: Things have changed so much haven’t they? So much.
PM: I know we were on a test flight one day with Taf and um Taf used to let us take control for a while. He used to sit there but he knew what was happening and everything and one of the blokes he said, ‘Do you want it Taf?’ Taf says, ‘No.’ He says, ‘Just carry on.’ He got it lined up. It was about three mile out from the end of the runway. ‘Go on. You’re alright.’ He said, ‘Shall I land it?’ ‘No you bloody well won’t land it’ [laughs] He said, ‘I’d be the laughing stock of the bloody sergeant’s mess. Come out.’
MJ: Yeah.
PM: We used to, on a Dakota there’s a cockpit and there’s a cabin and it’s the full length of the aircraft near enough. You go in, you go in the double doors.
MJ: Right.
PM: And you go up to the, to another door and that that’s the control. There’s navigator, radio operator, two pilots and we used to, about three, four of us used to get up near the door and Taf would be sat there you know, nodding away there to himself and that. ‘Right. Now.’ And we’d run to the other end to the tail end [laughs]. ‘Come up here you lot.’
MM: He knew what you was doing?
PM: We, we’d run to the tail end.
MM: Yeah and made it, realised.
PM: [Climb?]
MM: Yeah.
MM: Realised what you were. You had a laugh at East Kirkby didn’t you?
PM: Yeah.
MM: They were doing a Dakota up at East Kirkby.
PM: Yeah. They were.
MM: You went out to, to have look and you said to the lads there, ‘Can I have a look inside it.’ I think you managed to get in it didn’t you?
PM: Yeah.
MM: And anyway you said to them.
PM: ‘Do you know anything about them?’ I said, ‘Yeah a little bit. I used to be on them in the air force way back.’ ‘Bloody hell. When?’ I said, ‘Oh I came out in ‘47.’ ‘God, I weren’t even bloody well born then.’
MM: Made you feel very, very old didn’t it duck [laughs] yeah.
PM: They were a lovely aircraft to work on. Dakota is. No trouble whatsoever.
MJ: Didn’t bite back.
PM: Hmmn?
MJ: Didn’t bite back.
MM: No. [laughs]
PM: They were no trouble at all. Used to fly around with the doors off.
MJ: Why?
PM: You see there’s, there was a passenger door and a cargo door on them.
MJ: Yeah.
PM: Take one or the other or both doors off. It didn’t half whistle and that inside the aircraft.
MM: Was there any reason to take the doors off though?
PM: No. No.
MM: No.
PM: You either take it off before you fly or when you land. You don’t take it off while you’re flying.
MM: No, presume not.
MJ: Was there any reason why you took them off when you flew? Or was it just because they were in the way?
PM: The doors come inwards. Not outwards.
MJ: So -
MM: What reasons did you take them off for?
PM: Eh?
MM: What reason did you take them off for?
PM: Well.
MM: Can you remember?
PM: No particular reason.
MM: Oh. Good job it wasn’t raining.
PM: During the war, on the Dakotas, along the top of the fuselage there was little windows about that size, along. So that when they were carrying troops they could open one of those windows and fire at any aircraft that was attacking them.
MM: Ahum.
PM: If they were carrying troops.
MJ: Really?
PM: Yeah. Yeah, I’m not kidding.
MM: Never heard of it.
MJ: I wouldn’t have thought of that one.
PM: I’m not kidding. Liberators, you know, you used to get in and out through the bomb, bomb bay. Get in and out through the bomb bay. The bomb doors, the bottom of the Lib is only about that far off the ground and the bomb doors go up like that and there’s a cat walk right through. The cat walk goes to, to the rear where there’s a mid-upper gunner and two, two [waist] gunners. One each side. And a rear gunner.
MJ: So you always had -
PM: And if, if you go forward up a couple of steps you get on to the flight deck where the crew, the air crew go. You, if they’re flying around and they opened the bomb doors there isn’t a bloody soul would dare go across that cat walk. From the back to the front or the front to the back. There’s not a soul would dare go. It’s, it’s perfectly safe, there’s no, no danger whatsoever and there’s plenty to hold on to. Hold on to all the bomb racks.
MJ: But no one would do it.
PM: Nobody would go in. No one would do it.
[Tape paused]
MJ: So what was this about Fred then?
PM: He, he used to go out first thing in a morning, he’d go to bed at night about nine, but first thing in the morning, probably 5 o’clock he’d cross to the cookhouse to get his porridge before they put sugar in it. Yeah. He wanted salt in his you see. Yeah. Well he was always messing about with, with animals and that and he went out one morning for a walk and there was a narrow path, trees at each side and that. He was approaching this corner when around the corner there come this panther. He says, ‘It stopped and I stopped, of course.’ He said, and its tail was going like that. He said, ‘And we stood there for about three quarters of an hour. Seemed like it.’ He said, ‘And I thought if that bloody thing comes at me there’s a tree just behind me. I can leap behind hopefully.’ He said, ‘I daren’t look around.’ He said, ‘I was weighing all this up’ he said and all of a sudden the panther put the foot down on the ground, spun around and shot off back the way it came,’ he said, ‘ And I shot off the way I came.’ He said, ‘We were about twenty five miles apart in ten minutes.’ He, he was, he was always doing something like that. Always messing about with, with animals. There was an empty cookhouse and he went and there was a wild cat in the bloody cookhouse. ‘I’ll have that.’ He went in there. This wildcat was flying around the walls. He said it was going that fast it was on the walls. He said, ‘I didn’t know what to do with it,’ he said, but the windows, the windows were all shut except one. He said it took a flying leap at that and crashed straight through the glass and everything and away it went. He said it went out, missed, missed the veranda and everything and landed out in the middle of the road. [laughs] He said, ‘I wasn’t frightened of it.’ [laughs]
MM: And who slept on a snake? One of you lads found a snake under his mattress.
PM: Yeah. Yeah. Rum lad that.
MM: Who was that? Who found a snake under his mattress?
PM: Oh er who was it? One of the other lads. Fred said, ‘I’ll get that out for you.’ He outed it. ‘Cause you see if you found a snake out there you had to find the other bugger. Nearly always travelled in pairs.
MJ: Do they?
PM: Ahum we had a, we had a snake in our billet one night. We got it and finished it off and we were looking around for its mate. Couldn’t find its mate anywhere so that was it. Wasn’t going under the mossie nets. Next morning this bloke got up and er there was this snake laid, laid in there. It had been crushed. He’d crushed it. You see the beds out there were wood. They were just a wooden frame and then there was like string across and then what they called a dhurry. It was like, just like an [asbestos] sheet the size of your bed. When you went anywhere you know on guard at night or something like that you took whatever you wanted in your dhurry. Got it all wrapped up in the dhurry. Then you had your mossie net and your mossie net was you had four, four bamboo canes that used to go inside the legs across the back of the bed like that and your mossie net went on the top and your mossie net was shaped, was shaped just like, just like a box. The box was down, the box was that way up and the things, the sides of the net came down you see and these, these four bamboo canes they went up behind, behind the leg and up the inside of the nets so it was all sprung out. That was how your mossie nets went. There were times when we’ve taken the mossie nets down and inverted them and then put the bed inside, inside it.
MM: But this snake that you was talking about.
PM: It was an open top.
MM: This snake you was talking about was underneath this here mattress thing wasn’t it?
PM: Underneath the dhurry.
MM: Yeah.
PM: Yeah.
MM: I didn’t realise he’d been sleeping on it all night.
PM: No. No.
MM: No. Oh horrible things.
PM: Well it was dead anyway. Fred says, ‘Poor little bugger. You’ve been laid on it all night.’
MJ: I’d like to thank Mr Miller on behalf of the International Bomber Command project on the 1st of January no oh June 2015 for his interview and, and for myself I’d like to thank him. My name’s Michael Jeffery and this is the end of the interview.
MM: My name is Mavis Miller, recording this for the International Bomber Command Centre on the 1st of June 2015. We live at Horncastle Road, Wragby, Lincolnshire. Yeah. I was at Minting, school at Minting, during the war. We lived about four miles from Bardney aerodrome so we saw a lot of the RAF lads and the WAAFs who used to come to the Sebastopol at Minting. My father also worked at the Bardney aerodrome so we were involved quite a bit. He always used to come home very distressed when, at times, the bombers would come back with the air force lad’s uniforms having to be burned because they were blood stained. Another small happening during the war was I was with my friends down Hungerham Lane about a half a mile from my home when we saw two of our fighters firing at this German fighter and it was brought down at Baumber, again only about three or four fields away from where we were. Unfortunately, no one got out the plane. We were told that it went up in flames. The farm workers couldn’t get anywhere near it but I was pleased to get home that night safe and sound. I think that’s about the end of my experiences.
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command Historical Unit I’d like to thank Mrs Miller for her stories of when she was a child and on the June the 1st 2015 I’d like to end the interview.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Peter Miller
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Mick Jeffery
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-01
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Sound
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AMillerP150601
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Pending revision of OH transcription
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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01:02:55 audio recording
Description
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Peter was called up in November 1943 and after basic training was sent to RAF Halton to be trained as a flight mechanic. Whilst there he had several dangerous incidents during small arms training.
Initially posted to 527 Squadron, which was Canadian, at RAF Digby and then to 695 squadron at RAF Bircham Newton working on drogue towing aircraft.
Posted overseas, he arrived at RAF Chakeri near Kampur where he worked on servicing B-24 and C-47 aircraft for South East Asia Command. He recalls that as an airframe mechanic he had to sign the Form 700 certifying that all the other trades had carried out their servicing correctly.
The local town was largely off-limits and only certain parts were allowed to be visited. The weather was very hot and in the summer hill parties were sent to the hills to escape the heat. Peter spent his 21st birthday at Darjeeling. When hostilities ceased the spent its time dismantling and scrapping B-24s aircraft. Whilst India was partitioned, Peter's demobilisation was postponed in case of tensions between India and Pakistan.
After two and a half years he was sent home via Liverpool, where he saw his first jet, and was demobilised in July 1947.
Temporal Coverage
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1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1947-07
1943-11
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
India
India--Kānpur
India--Darjeeling
Pakistan
Contributor
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Terry Holmes
B-24
C-47
fitter airframe
flight mechanic
fuelling
ground crew
petrol bowser
RAF Bircham Newton
RAF Chakeri
RAF Digby
RAF Halton
service vehicle
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/657/8930/AWorralJR150603.2.mp3
1b1651498a905ee755fa3b740b1b30f5
Dublin Core
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Title
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Worral, Ray
Joseph Raymond Worral
J R Worral
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Worral, JR
Description
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An oral history interview with Flying Officer Ray Worral (Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 44 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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My name is Raymond Worral, I am usually known as Ray and I joined the RAF in nineteen forty three as an Aircrew Flight Engineer. Sorry do you want more information about my name?
MJ. No, just that you are doing and interview for the Bomber Command thing .
RW. I am doing this recording for the Bomber Command, Historical Centre is it? And em em this is what my career is. I em joined the RAF in nineteen forty three, I was an Aircrew Flight Engineer, I volunteered, and I em I went on training. I joined up at the RAF Receiving Centre in January nineteen forty three and from there on I began my training as an Aircrew Flight Engineer. I stayed at the receiving centre for a few weeks, then after that I was posted to an ITW Initial Training Centre, Initial Training Wing at Bridlington in Yorkshire, where I stayed for about three months I think. From January, from the end of January until the end of March and we were kept busy at the Centre there. Square bashing em on parade, learning all the things we needed to know about, basic morse code, we had to know about the Aircrew discipline procedure and everything to do with the RAF. We had a lot of marching up and down the front, it was in cold weather. We were on parade at half past six in the morning on the front at Bridlington towards the end of January in freezing cold weather and then we marched about and did some square bashing and then we went to have our breakfast. Then after breakfast we were on parade again and then we went on various courses which we were told about in em, various places in Bridlington. That continued for about three months I think, em, I should think until the end[pause]. I should think it was till about the end eh, probably lasted about six weeks, so that would take me till about April, when I went down to St Athen on the Flight Engineers training course. This was all ground training and we learned all about aero engines. There was a big RAF Station there, a very big RAF Station in St Athen in South Wales. We went to lectures every morning in the workshops and we learned all about the construction of an aircraft, the framework and the engines. We learned particularly because I was designated to go onto Lancaster aircraft, we learned about the Lancaster. We learned all about the engines and all about the framework. That course lasted for about nine months I think. In the middle of it we were sent on a week’s course to Manchester to the Manchester factory at Ringway just outside Manchester to have a weeks course there. We were talked to by the people who actually worked on the aircraft. After about nine months on the course we were given a test and we graduated in November about the middle of November nineteen forty three.
From there I was posted to RAF Scampton which was a waiting centre and em, eventually I was posted to em, I think it was, Winthorpe which was a Lancaster Conversion Unit. There I met the rest of the Crew, the rest of the Crew had completed their training just as I had completed mine. The Crew of a Lancaster consisted of the Pilot, the Flight Engineer, the Navigator, the Bomb Aimer, Rear Gunner, Mid Upper Gunner and the Wireless Operator. We met in the Mess at Winthorpe and got to know people. Eventually we got together in a room and we got ourselves Crewed up. The others, apart from me had already been Crewed up and already done some training so we sat about and talked to each other and one of the Pilots came up to me and asked if I would like to join his Crew. He seemed a nice sensible sort of Chap so I said yes I would like to join his Crew and so I came to join his Crew. He was an Australian and I met the other members of his crew, the Navigator, an Australian, the Bomb Aimer and Australian and then the em, Wireless Operator, two Gunners were Englishmen and then we started out training at the Conversion Unit at Winthorpe. I think we were there for about two months doing cross country flights, practice bombing flights and em, all the other things we needed to do and getting to know the Crew. After we had done about two months, probably a bit more, probably about ten weeks we were then posted to what they called an RAF Finishing School, sorry a Lancaster Finishing School which was at RAF Syerston near Nottingham. Posted together from the time we were crewed up at Winthorpe we stuck together as a Crew completely. Did everything together even very often went out together to the Pub together and that sort of thing. So we left Winthorpe and went to the RAF Finishing, Lancaster Finishing School which was at Syerston near Nottingham. Continued out training there, special training as applied to a Lancaster Bomber. We had about six weeks there probably a bit more where as a Crew we were posted to the RAF Station at Dunholme Lodge, just outside Lincoln. Dunholme Lodge to 44 Squadron, Bomber Command it was a Rhodesian Squadron in those days and it was RAF, 5 Group Bomber Command. We joined this Squadron as a Crew, all in the same bus, we went in, and we went into the Mess, we were all Sergeants and we went into the Mess and em, It was just before lunchtime on a day before February, I forget what day it was. About the ninth of February and we got into the Mess. I can remember what happened then, it was the day after the well know Nurenberg Raid and eh,the Squadron had been out on that Raid the night before and there had been very heavy losses. When we got into the Mess they were all very, all the people there were silent and quiet and not very friendly and rather gloomy because there had been serious losses. It was not a very bright start to our joining an Operational Squadron. Anyway we had to continue and it was probably I should think, a month to six weeks until we had to do an Operation. We continued to practice doing cross country flights, air tests, bombing runs out on the North Sea off Skegness off the Coast there and a large number of cross country flights day time and night time.
Then at the beginning of April we got our first Operation to do. We were [Pause] I’ve got plenty of notes, I just need to look them up.[long pause] I’m sorry, Winthorpe I was sent to to meet up with the Crew, or did I say it was?On the thirty first of March nineteen forty four and over the following five months em. We entered the Sergeants Mess the atmosphere was cold and unfriendly, little was said. When the one o’clock news came on the Radio we discovered why people were so quiet and so unfriendly because the Squadron had taken part the previous night in the Nurenberg Raid.One of the Bomber Command disasters when seven hundred and ninety five aircraft were dispatched and ninety four were shot down and many others severely damaged. And em, had serious losses and em[pause].
We were briefed for our first Operation. It was a month or six weeks of non Operational flying at this stage and then on the twenty sixth of April we were briefed for our first Operational Target which was Swinefurt in Germany. We went to our briefing and we were told all about what would happen over, on the flight.Went through all our checks. I as Flight Engineer went through a detailed selection of checks. There was the aircraft, before we moved out and em straight and level to the Target and then we dropped our bombs and came back, so we had quite a good trip.
Then two nights later we went on a Bombing Trip to Oslo, in Norway. It was a long trip but it was quite a safe trip because we were flying over firstly the sea. Then on the night of the nineteenth of May nineteen forty four, I came back from leave we’d been on leave, and I came back and we went on a Bombing Trip to Amiens in France, then to on the twenty, no the twenty second of May we were off to Kiel in Kiel Bay to drop mines. Know as a Gardening Operation and so we carried on through our tour. We did twenty five trips successfully. Slight damage on some occasions, we got back. We had done twenty five trips, which was pretty well a record for the Squadron. The average losses, the crews lasted about ten trips so we done pretty well. Then we were briefed to go to Stuttgart on the night of the twenty fifth,twenty sixth of July Nineteen Forty Four. We set off for Stuttgart, it’s a big industrial town in Germany and our target was the Mercedes works, aircraft works in the centre of Stuttgart. We had been the night before, there were heavy losses but the raid had not been a success so when we set off on the twenty fourth, twenty fifth July, we were, I was going to say something. We were on our second trip in twenty four hours back to Stuttgart. On this trip we set off and normally we would fly over the Coast, the French Coast across the anti aircraft defences. All along that Coast was absolutely deadly and we always lost an awful lot of aircraft crossing the Coast. On this particular occasion the Allies had already, as I say this was the twenty fifth, twenty sixth of July,by then the Allies had landed in Normandy and they had built a Bridgehead in Normandy. So we didn’t have to cross the Coast on this particular occasion we were able to go over the Normandy Peninsula and miss out the anti aircraft defences all along the Coast. So we able to go over the Normandy Peninsula and missed out the anti aircraft defences all along the Coast. So we crossed over onto the Normandy Peninsula, flew up the Normandy Peninsula and then turned because we were flying over allied territory for about half and hour or so and we turned and headed for Stuttgart, unfortunately on the way to Stuttgart we were hit, bombs from another aircraft, so the Rear Gunner said. Aircraft got out of control, Skipper said “bale out,” we had to bale out, we had proper procedure for bailing out. The Bomb Aimer was first, he took the hatch of and em, em, baled out into space, then the Flight Engineer, that was me and then the Navigator and finally the Pilot and the Bombers and Radio Operator baled out from the rear, the rear exit. So we got the Bomber, the Pilot decided when we were hit, he asked me to help him with the flying controls. The Control Column was jammed, two of us pulling of it, pulling on it didn’t have any effect, he decided to bale out and it is a good job he did. If he had taken another thirty seconds to bale out we would have all been killed, he made up his mind very quickly and gave us the order to bale out. I went down into the Bomb Nose, saw the Bomb Aimer bale out, I baled out and fortunately my parachute worked and I landed, I don’t know, might have been about ten thousand, I don’t know between eight and five thousand feet when I baled out. When I left the cockpit I could see the altimeter and it was at about seven thousand feet, so it was probably about five thousand feet by the time I got down into the Bomb Bay, and em I saw the Bomb Aimer bale out into space and I hesitated a bit, I got scared, fortunately the Navigator came down behind me and said “bloody well get a move on” and gave me a push, so I had no choice and baled out. So I reckon it was about five thousand feet when I baled out, parachute opened thank God and I landed in Enemy Territory. I landed in a ploughed field, and em, I was in the parachute for a few minutes and em, landed in a ploughed field. I was lucky because it was fairly soft. I didn’t hurt myself. There was a road running alongside the field if I had landed there I might have broken a leg or back or whatever, so I was lucky. I picked myself up [garbled] and I was ok, I had a few bruises and scratches and that was it. So I hid my parachute as a drill, first of all em, first of all, the parachute is a tremendous thing on the ground and there was a gust of wind and it caught my parachute, a parachute as big as an English Bowling Green, filled with air, pulled me right across this field and I hang onto this parachute, it pulled me right across this field, got very grazed across one side of my face and when the wind dropped I managed to haul the parachute in and collected it all up and did as I was told to do, hide it, which was to hide it in a ditch. Then I, I well before that I had to of course hit the button which released the harness, the harness and the parachute went into the ditch.Then I was left, there I was in enemy territory all on my own, don’t know where the others had got to, very scary but I done as I was told and run off as fast as I could. Had to run off as fast as I could because I’m afraid you would do nothing. It had been found that after you had gone through that experience when you landed and did nothing you didn’t do anything until someone came and found you, until they collected you and you finished up as a Prisoner of War. So act quickly and get moving, so having buried my parachute I ran as fast as I could, don’t worry where you are going to, just get away from the scene of the crash, from the scene of where you dropped as quickly as you can. If someone has seen the parachute come down and they get there, you are some distance away and you have a chance of hiding. So I ran, I was fairly fit then, ran for nearly an hour I think and I was eventually tired, got down and began to walk. All very quiet and eventually I came to a little village and em there was a church in the village. I was fairly tired then I thought “I will get into the church if its open and collect my thoughts” So it was well after midnight I should think, don’t know what the time would be. Think it was about midnight when we were hit actually, it would probably be about one o’clock in the morning. I walked into this church and the door was open, so I went in and sat on a pew and collected my thoughts and rested, rested for about half and hour and then I thought “I had better get away.” I moved out and continued my walk right through the night and em, er just walked and then as dawn, well just before dawn I heard the sound as I was walking back, walking the sound of heavy bombers. They must have been our bomber squadrons going back having bombed Stuttgart. Anyway I continued walking and as it came to daylight I crept under a hedge and fell asleep er, Daylight came and I thought I had better hide myself. I hid under this hedge on the hard ground and er, early dawn just come daylight. I fell asleep, I was very comfortable and I slept until about one o’clock. I remember waking up at about one o’clock looking at my watch, I was woken up, slept all that time. When I woke up I could hear voices in the field next to me, so I didn’t show myself, I thought they might not be friendly. So I stayed where I was wondering what to do. I thought that the best thing I could do was to stay here hidden all day and when it gets dark will continue on some sort of a journey. So I lay all day under the hedge, could hear these voices in the field and then when it was beginning, it was late afternoon, beginning to get a bit dark and the people left working in the field. So before it got dark I thought well, “it’s no use staying under the hedge here, I’ve got my escape kit, got my escape map I have no idea where I am but I might be able to find it with a map. So I will get out before it gets dark and see if I can have a look at my map.” So I, before it got dark I walked out, the people in the fields had stopped working and gone home. When I got onto the road, just a narrow country lane I walked along and there were a few people about and I walked along and to my surprise, to my great surprise they took no notice of me. Well what was I wearing at this stage? Well I was wearing my Battle Dress over the top part of the Battle Dress I had a linen, sort of a brown linen jacket which you could plug into the aircraft and it was electrically heated but I didn’t need to use it, but I thought I would just use it as something to wear in the aircraft. It covered me from the hip upwards so it was, it covered the top part of my Battle Dress and the only bit of my Battle Dress that was showing was my collar and tie. But in those days the French farmers wore a grey shirt with a black tie invariably, so that was ok. My Battle Dress trousers well they were like a pair of scruffy overalls. The boots, the flying boots were made that so that you could cut the fitting off round the ankle, through the leg part away and to all intents and purposes it was just like an ordinary shoe. Very clever I thought the Air Force were pretty good at doing these things. I passed people looking like that and they took no notice of me, in fact I thought I heard one say “alez mons” I think that’s German, I think they thought I was a stray German that got in. They took no notice of me, I was very impressed, I thought this is good news. So I walked in, walked in, kept walking and passed people and it was ok. Then I came to a village, there were a few people in the village, and em and I thought well. Another thing is as I walked into the village there was a sign post, what a wonderful give away. I remember thinking at the beginning of the War when we had the invasion scare in nineteen forty all our sign posts and and everywhere, all the names of the villages were sealed off. If you went into a village and it had Fulford Post Office on it, Fulford was crossed out because they were scared of German Parachutes’ in nineteen forty four we didn’t want to give them any help and of course the Germans didn’t have time to do this during the War. So there were these sign posts, so I thought “right I will have a look at this sign post and see where it is pointing to.” I picked one name and see if I can find it on the map. So I walked through the village and got into a quiet field, got the map out, and sure enough this village Langur was marked on the escape map, pretty good. So I could see where I was and roughly where I wanted to go, so em, er I had done fairly well so far and so I thought I will continue to walk. I em, I felt as it got dark as it began to get dark I felt rather sick, I think it was reaction, I felt rather weak and so I saw a haystack and I crawled into it and I spent that night in the haystack. I was quite comfortable and woke up at the break of dawn next morning very, very cold and I decided to walk on. So I got out of the haystack and I must say I hadn’t had anything to eat since the time we had left Dunholme Lodge in Lincolnshire I had nothing to eat. I couldn’t do anything, there was an escape kit, very well done but I didn’t but I hadn’t, I didn’t there were things in it, chocolate, bars of chocolate, sugar sweets all that sort of thing. I got out of the haystack and I walked on The next period of excitement was when I, it was early morning and I came to another village and there was a road leading through it, all was quiet, very early in the morning. So I thought em, well I have two choices, I don’t want to be seen in the village so I will walk round it but it was a long way round. I wanted to conserve time and energy, I’ll risk it I’ll walk through the main village street, there is nobody about. So I began to walk through the village street, when it got to the cross roads in the centre to my horror I heard the sound of very heavy vehicles and I thought to myself “this isn’t good news” [Laugh]. One thing it could be; Germans. So I thought “well” I turned round and a few yards behind me was a walled garden with a gate so I managed to run like mad and jump into a bush inside that gate. I looked out from the bush and eh em, no sooner had a got there than one big German lorry packed with troops, came up to the cross roads, turned right in the direction I had wanted to go and it was followed by about five others all packed with German troops so I’d only just missed being caught so I had been very lucky. When they’d gone and disappeared I thought best thing now is to get out of this garden and get moving on my way. I didn’t know if the occupant of the farmhouse or whatever were friendly or not. So being a pessimist I thought he will probably be. Oh they were at great risk these civilians I mean if they were help to them they would get shot. So em there was a great temptation to hand us over to the Germans so I walked on through the village. I got to the other side of the village and to my horror I saw, I heard the sound of heavy lorries again. I thought “goodness me not again” well again I was lucky, there was a farm building across the fields and no hedges, so I run like mad and hid behind this farm building. When I looked round it I could see there were several lorries, I think they were the same ones, there were no troops in them this time. There was a driver, machine gunner on the running board, on the running the board the chap had a machine gun pointing to the sky and there was the driver, and em. I saw this from behind this farmhouse that I’d reached and they hadn’t seen me, there was about another four or five of them. They disappeared and I walked back onto the road. Until this day I cannot understand why they did not see me running across that field to the farmhouse, it was just one of those miracles. So I continued walking and em, it was quite amazing that they did not see me. I can only think that the driver had his eyes on the road, machine gunner was looking up to the sky, don’t forget there were RAF patrols flying over that area at that time of the War and em they might have been straffed, so I think they, he was watching the sky and just didn’t see me. So I walked on, I continued my journey getting hungrier and very tired and I passed other people and they did not take any notice of me, I thought this is marvellous and then em. The next worrying part was having walked most of the morning, I came up to a tee junction and the tee junction was about quarter of a mile or more ahead of me. Everything was quiet except that up to this tee junction came a Vaux wagon camouflaged German army car. I could see it had four soldiers in it and when it turns and goes in the opposite direction I’ll be lucky. If it turns right and comes towards me I am bound to be caught. So no chance to hide, they could see me from where they were. Just carried on walking, put my hands in my pockets, looked miserable, kept my eyes on the road. We were warned in escape drill don’t make eye to eye contact and this car came towards me, I thought the games up, comes to me, if I had put my hand out I could have touched it, it was travelling at twenty five thirty miles per hour and it came past me, waiting for it, expecting it to stop to come and get me. Didn’t stop, didn’t dare look round, looked round about ten minutes later, the car was gone. How they missed me I can’t imagine, I just can’t imagine, it was absolutely wonderful they just didn’t see me. I can’t believe it now when I look back on it all it was tremendous. So I carried on walking. The more I think of it these incidents are absolutely incredible. I continued walking until about lunchtime as far as it would be. I was getting rather desperate actually and I was walking along, em, just outside another village when a lad on a bicycle passed me, “Oh dear” I thought “what is he going to do?” Take no notice of him again, but he passed me and I heard him get off his bicycle and stop, I continued walking but I heard him call, so I thought “I have no alternative, I can’t run now” so I went over to him, he said “are you RAF” I said “yes” he said “well I can help you, follow me.” So I followed him, he took me off the road and led me up a bridle path and said “hide under this hedge, I’m coming back, I’m going to get help for you.” So again I lay under the hedge and waited, not quite sure what was going to happen and em, after about half an hour. Anyway it might be interesting to say why he say me when others didn’t and this was because I was foolish enough to be chewing some gum. The French didn’t get chewing gum during the War we got it in our escape packs and we were given it when we went out on a Bombing Mission, so we had chewing gum and I shouldn’t have been chewing it, he saw me, gave it away, gave the game away. So I waited and then a car, after about half an hour a car came up the bridle path and stopped and the lad, he would only have been about fifteen I suppose was in the drivers seat, was in the passenger seat and the driver got out. He was a tall man and he got out and he shook hands with me, spoke perfect English and said hello and all that and shook hands with me. He said put this overcoat on and get in the back of my car. So I did as I was told and he backed out and we went and backed out onto the road and drove off. The driver explained to me, he spoke very good English that he was the local Doctor and was aloud to have some petrol so that he could see his patients and occasionally he was able to pick up and help and Airman, I was one. He told me his wife was English, they got married in Brighton before the War and em, they came to live in France. We drove on and came to another village and the lad who picked me up left the car, thank you very much and all that sort of thing and I never saw any more of him. And that’s the way the Resistance works, I don’t think that lad would know where the driver, the doctor was taking me. If he was caught he could not give any further information away. That was the sort of way SOE and the Resistance worked. And em, drove on and I came to a farmhouse. Excuse me I must take a break.
MJ. This is the first recording of Raymond Worrall on the third of June two thousand and fifteen for the Historical Unit.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Ray Worral
Creator
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Mick Jeffery
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-03
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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Worral, JR
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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00:40:41 audio recording
Language
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
An account of the resource
Raymond (Ray) Worral joined the RAF in 1943. Ray completed his initial training in Bridlington and then St Athen for the Flight Engineers training course and learnt the technicalities of the Lancaster. After being crewed up at Winthorpe, Ray attended Lancaster finishing school at RAF Syerston and describes being stuck with the crew completely and often went to the pub them. Ray along with his crew was posted to RAF Dunholme Lodge, doing practice cross country flights before doing 25 operations. Ray then details on being hit on the way to an operation in Stuttgart, and then remembers the bailing out procedure and parachuting into a ploughed field. Ray then talks of his experiences of evading capture and hiding away from a column of German military trucks filled with soldiers. Ray also describes walking down the road past civilians and an enemy vehicle and was amazed for not being spotted. The interview finishes with Ray being helped by a French doctor and ending up at a farmhouse.
44 Squadron
aircrew
bale out
bomb struck
crewing up
evading
fear
flight engineer
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF St Athan
RAF Syerston
RAF Winthorpe
Resistance
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
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McClements, Robert
Robert McClements
R McClements
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. Two oral history interviews with Robert McClements (-2022, 1796607 Royal Air Force) and one with his wife, Iris McClements (b. 1926). The collection also contains his log book, service documents, photographs and a model of his Halifax. He completed a tour of operations as a mid-upper gunner with 10 Squadron from RAF Melbourne. The log book belonging to L Kirrage, his flight engineer, is also included.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Robert McClements and catalogued by Barry Hunter and David Leitch.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-09-21
2015-10-21
2018-02-25
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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McClements, R
Requires
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1943: Volunteered for the RAF
19 December 1943 -11 February 1944: RAF Pembrey, No.1 AGS, flying Anson aircraft
23 April 1944 - 20 May 1944: RAF Lossiemouth, No. 20 OTU, Flying Gunnery Flight, flying Wellington aircraft
8 July 1944 - 23 July 1944: 1658 RAF Ricall, 1658 HCU, flying Halifax aircraft
30 July 1944 - 18 February 1945: RAF Melbourne, 10 Squadron, flying Halifax aircraft
July 1944 - February 1945: served on 10 Sqn as a Flight Sergeant Air gunner.
3 March 1947: RAF Kirkham, Released from Service, having attained the rank of Temporary Warrant Officer
Chris Cann
Robert McClements was born on 6 December 1924, in Belfast. He left school at the age of 14 and worked various jobs to help support his family. While there was no conscription in Northern Ireland, in late 1943 while working at the Harland and Wolff shipyard he volunteered to join the RAF, as aircrew.
Following basic training at RAF Bridlington and then initial gunnery training at RAF Bridgnorth, he was posted to RAF Pembry to join No 1 AGS and train as an air gunner. Air gunners course · IBCC Digital Archive (lincoln.ac.uk)
He completed the gunnery course in February 1944 and was posted to No 20 OTU at RAF Lossiemouth and then on to 1658 HCU, at RAF Ricall, to train on Halifax aircraft. In July 1944, with all training finally completed, he began his operational flying with 10 Squadron at RAF Melbourne flying Halifax aircraft.
His early operational trips passed without incident, but on one operation the aircraft experienced heavy icing, causing it to lose all lift and go into an uncontrolled descent. With the aircraft going straight down the order to ‘Bale out’ was given, Robert managed to get out of his gunner position, but then found himself forced to the floor unable to move. In the cockpit, the pilot engaged full power and he and his engineer battled with the control column to pull the aircraft out of its dive. The flight home passed uneventfully although the engineer reported that the aircraft never ever flew again.
Throughout the rest of his tour there were other eventful sorties. On one, two of the bombs ‘hung up’ and they had to release them from the carrier units using an axe. On another, the bomb aimer forgot to press the bomb-release button so they had to go around again. Luck was again on his side when, on a night raid, another aircraft on a turning point swung across the top of his Halifax, narrowly missing the top of his gun turret. Robert went on to complete a full operational flying tour of 38 operational sorties over Belgium, France and Germany amassing over 200 flying hours. PMcClementsR1503.2.jpg (1600×1299) (lincoln.ac.uk)
After his operational tour, Robert was released from flying duties. He remained at RAF Melbourne and trained as a Unit Fire Officer and he and his flight engineer took charge of the station warrant officer’s office. During a routine site inspection, he met a German prisoner of war who was making a wooden model of a Catalina aircraft for the officers’ mess. Robert asked him to make a model of his Halifax aircraft for him. The aircraft, remarkable in its detail, has been a treasured memento of his time served in the RAF. Robert McClements and his model of Halifax ZA-V · IBCC Digital Archive (lincoln.ac.uk)
Robert met his future wife, Iris, on a visit to the Observer Corp HQ at York where she was a serving member. He left the RAF in 1947 having attained the rank of Temporary Warrant Officer. He and Iris settled in England where they worked with her father, in York. Latterly, he and Iris set up their own business in Wakefield selling motor vehicles.
Chris Cann
Iris McClements (nee Dobson) remembers, at the age of 11, being issued with a gas mask before the war had started. When she was about 13 years of age, her family moved to Eldwick to avoid the bombs.
She was a member of the Home Guard before joining the Women’s Junior Air Corp where she attained the rank of sergeant. She recalled wearing a grey uniform, being issued with a bucket, stirrup pump and helmet for fire watching and learning the theory of the internal combustion engine.
In 1944, she passed the entrance exam to join the Royal Observer Corps and was based in York, as a plotter. Her role was to listen to information from the spotters via headphones and place it on to the plotting table. This included the number of aircraft, direction of travel, height, and whether they were friendly or hostile. This was to give warning of enemy operations or to track operations heading to Germany. She worked eight-hour shifts which changed each week. The spotters in the outposts were also watching for aircraft that were going to crash-land, so that the crash sites could be identified. Iris visited a couple of these sites. She met her husband to be, Robert, on one of his visits to the Royal Observer Corp HQ in York.
She lived on an ex-World War One motor launch in York that the family had used for recreation. When off duty she would often travel into York to go dancing, swimming and to the cinema.
After the war she and Robert worked with her father in the motor trade. She then set up business with Robert in Wakefield.
Chris Cann
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
My name is Robert McClements. I volunteered for the Royal Air Force at nineteen. I trained and finished up at Melbourne with 10 Squadron, on Halifaxes. Two points stand out in my memory which was nothing to the do with the Germans. But one was on a turning point. I believe it were Reading, during a night raid, we had another aircraft. I’m not sure whether it was a Halifax or a Lanc swung across the top of us on a turning point. Missing the top of my turret by six inches. This was rather upsetting at the time [laughs] Needless to say we got over it. The second point was coming back from a raid, I don’t know where, we iced up. And of course that means the aircraft loses flying direction and goes straight down. Our pilot seemed to have the presence of mind to drop us through to full power and dive down rather than fall down and consequently he pulled us out of the position we were in and get straightened up and flew home. That was worst part of the trip. During the bombing runs we had a few nervous squeaks one way or another with mainly with other bombs falling down over us and searchlights. And we were trapped in searchlights on two occasions. And fortunately, fortunately we got out. The rest of the trips were reasonably easy apart from the usual ack-ack and what have you. And night fighters. Cut it there.
[recording paused]
RM: My wife keeps talking about the time I was on leave and when we got back our kite had been on a trip with some, another crew obviously and didn’t come back. Consequently we got another aircraft. But my wife seems to worry that it was our aircraft that was missing.
IM: No. You didn’t like to go to another aircraft.
RM: Well when we were flying V Victor we were flying it. That was alright. But once it went missing. What? We got another one. Another V Victor. So it made no difference.
IM: It was like having an old car.
RM: No. No. No.
IM: To keep you happy.
RM: Not when you’re flying aeroplanes in a bombing raid. They’re all made for a job. There’s no comfort. That’s it. You get what you have and you do the best with it. That’s it. Didn’t want to do that [laughs]
[recording paused]
RM: When I finished the tour which was thirty eight trips I was invited out to the Observer Corps Headquarters at York to see how they handled the aircraft. That’s where I met my wife. Consequently, I came back to York after I’d finished my tour from Ireland and went to work for her father. Go on then. I’m going to go on as long as you want me to go. I’m not going to start Paisley. I’m not going to go Paisley [laughs]
MJ: Go on.
RM: Go on. Consequently, after I’d finished flying my engineer, or our engineer and the other gunner Reg Webb were kept back at Melbourne to do all sorts of jobs. Engineer was sent to the warrant officer’s office. And I was there for a while. And consequently I was sent on a fire officer’s course and came back from that after six weeks as a fully blown fire officer. For what was left of Melbourne which was slowly being closed down now. The war had more or less finished within reason. I met my wife in York who consequently I married and helped her father to start a business in York which was mainly concerned with motorcycles. And my wife spent a bit of time running around the country on a motorbike buying and selling. And that was the finish of the air force for me and consequently the end of the war. Thank you.
On behalf of the International Bomber Command I’d like to thank Robert McClements on the 21st of September 2015 for his recording for the Bomber Command Archives. And once again I thank him with great pleasure.
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Identifier
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AMcClementsRAG150921
Title
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Interview with Robert McClements. One
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:05:25 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Mick Jeffery
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-09-21
Description
An account of the resource
Robert McClements flew operations as a mid upper gunner with 10 Squadron.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
Contributor
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Julie Williams
10 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bombing
Halifax
RAF Melbourne
-
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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
Hill, Roy
R Hill
Roy Ernest Hill
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Hill, R
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Roy Hill (Royal Air Force). He served as a wireless operator / air gunner with 207 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-07
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
RH: My name is Roy Hill and I was, erm, I’m aged 92, rather ancient for air crew [laughs] but, oh dear, I’ve lost it.
Other: In 1941, when was it?
RH: 1941 I joined up yeah [laughs] and, er, and oh crikey [pause] I was a wireless operator, air gunner on Lancasters and we were shot down over the Ruhr by a German night fighter. It’s rather unusual in as much as I know the name of the chap who shot us down. It was Karl Friedrich Mueller, that was the name of the chap who shot us down flying an ME 109 G, that was the type of aircraft he flew in and but unfortunately I never had the pleasure of meeting him because he died in in 1989 I think, yeah [pause].
MJ: Roy can you tell us who you are.
RH: My name is Roy Hill.
MJ: Yeah.
RH: And, er, I was in the RAF throughout the war.
MJ: Right.
RH: And er, I, I joined up when I was eighteen years old and I was in the RAF right through the war and, er, when we were shot down by Germans and incarcerated in Stalag Luft 1 in Germany. But at the end of the war I was very, very lucky in that so much as I was repatriated to England.
MJ: So Roy you got caught up in a prisoner of war camp, what was that like?
RH: [pause] [laughs] well it’s not a very good subject for conversation is it, because it was, I mean your, your freedom is taken from you and, er, you have to make the best of things while you’re there, but I was lucky because I was only there about six months and then we were, actually we were flown home by the Americans in their Flying Fortresses that’s what the chaps who flew us back and, er, that was of course the beginnings of a new life for me after the war.
MJ: Roy, you were, which squadron were you put into and how did it work through to when you got shot down, did you do long sorties, short ones or
RH: Mostly long.
MJ: And er, did you get to fly with the same crew or?
RJ: Always, yeah.
MJ: So, erm, how did that work, I mean I don’t know anything about this?
RH: No.
MJ: So if you could explain how.
RH: Well we were so very, very fortunate, we had, we got on very well as a crew. I’ll show you pictures. We were a band of brothers really, we er, some of us very young, two, two of the crew were only aged eighteen and I was only nineteen and at the time, of course and we had three of the chaps were in their thirties so we had a quite a wide [pause]
Other: Age range.
RH: age range [laughs].
Other: Then you’ve got Australians as part of the crew?
RH: Yeah we had three Australians in the crew and er I took them all home to see my folks and it was a great, a great occasion.
MJ: So you did everything, dancing, fire-fighting?
RH: Yeah, yeah we did yeah, we lived together, we were
Other: A crew.
RH: A crew, yeah [long pause]
MJ: Roy could you tell me who you are please.
RH: My name is Roy Hill [laughs]
MJ: Yeah
RH: I’m 86 [laughs] get it right. I was a flight lieutenant in the RAF during the war where I was a wireless operator air gunner and we flew in Lancaster’s and we were shot down on our eighteenth mission.
MJ: So how did you get into the RAF in the first place, did you -
RH: Volunteered, yes. When war, when war came I had the option of going flying in the air force so I applied to go in the air force and I was one of a group of four we all tried together to get into the air force and I’m the only survivor of those four. The other three were all killed subsequently.
MJ: Right, erm, did you plan to be a wireless operator or did you want -
RH: No, I, you see this was, this was all in 1941, the year after the Battle of Britain. Of course I wanted to be a pilot, everyone did, but in my case when I volunteered for air crew the only thing I was, I could qualify for was wireless operator air gunner and er that’s what I eventually became.
MJ: Did you erm meet your crew at the squadron or did you….
RH: No, no we got together at a place called Silverstone, that’s where they have the car racing now. It was when we all got together as a crew. It was wonderful really because the RAF they used to put you in an enormous hangar, hundreds of you, hundreds of you, all mixed up and they used they said ‘here we are form yourselves into crews of seven’ and er it’s amazing really it worked, it really worked, we were volunteers all of us and we got together as a team and it was one of those magic moments really.
MJ: So, erm, how many missions did you say you flew together?
RH: Oh well [unclear] we were shot down on our eighteenth mission, yeah.
MJ: So can you remember your first one?
RH: Very well, yeah.
MJ: Could you tell me a little bit about it?
RH: [laughs]
MJ: Because this was your first flight with your own crew I just wondered if you could sort of tell us what it was like please.
RH: It was a very hair-raising, hair-raising experience to be flying towards Germany with a full load of bombs for the first time and er, it was quite something, [laughs] but er, we were. We flew to, the target was Brest in France for that particular mission, and were bombing two battle ships which were there at the time in dock and I mean we obviously we survived much to our own relief [laughs] and er we took it from there. That was our first trip, mmm [pause]. At the end of the war I was a photographer and I was stationed at Farnborough where they have a school of photography. While I was there I had the job of giving orders to no less than a hundred and fifty chaps who were all NCO crew members, who’d, who’d, they’d all ended the war in on the squadrons and they were, all they wanted to do was go home, I’m talking about a hundred and fifty NCO’s and I was the chap in charge of them.
MJ: Yeah.
RH: And er all they wanted to do was, it was demob, they wanted to go home and I had to make it easy for them, which was a heck of a job [laughs]
MJ: So how did you do that?
RH: [laughs] Well, I had to organise games and things, anything that would, to keep them occupied and er it’s not a, it sounds easy but it wasn’t [laughs] when you’ve got a hundred and fifty blokes to please and all they had on their minds was they wanted to go home because their war was all finished and they were ready to, they had been repatriated.
MJ: Why did you have to send them back in sections?
RH: No I had to send them home to their various homes [sighs] not a nice job [laughs] [pause] Home! They wanted to go home, they were, the war was finished and all they wanted to do was go home and that applied to all a hundred and fifty blokes, they were all NCO’s, they had all completed a tour of operations and all wanted, for them the war was over.
MJ: So what did you have to sort out for them so they could go home?
RH: That’s right.
MJ: So what, what sort of things did you have to sort out apart from keeping them happy?
RH: No that was it.
MJ: That was your job, to make sure they -
RH: To keep them occupied until they could go home virtually, yeah, so I did that for some time and er course eventually I finished up at the school of geography and er that was it. My home was Leat [?] so I was able to live at home and er go to work at Farnborough, it was wonderful [laughs] There you go. [pause]
MJ: So you’ve been a prisoner of war?
RH: Yeah, in Germany, Stalag Luft 1, mmm.
MJ: Did you get caught straight away or did you have a bit of a run around first?
RH: No I was, I was free for a couple of days that’s all, then they caught up with me [pause]
MJ: How did they catch up with you, just in the wrong place at the right time or
RH: Me I was sitting in the forest going along and then all of a sudden a chap said halt, halt as the Germans do [laughs] and that was when my war ended virtually. [pause] mmm.
MJ: Were any of your other crew caught with you or?
RH: Yeah they were, no they were, we were all separated, we all went out various ways, I did, I did meet the pilot and the bomb aimer and the navigator in the Stalag, they finished up there in, in in the Stalag and others who were killed.
MJ: Oh.
RH: Mmm.
MJ: When you were incarcerated how did you keep yourself busy, like you said when the crews were demobbed you had to keep them busy, how did you keep yourself busy while you were incarcerated?
Other: Writing poetry.
RH: Ah, you see in those days I could write, I used to love to write, wrote all sorts of stuff but it’s all gone I can no longer write.
Other: It’s only because of his hand, I’ve just thought, in the book isn’t there some of your poems in it?
RH: No, that’s
Other: Towards the end [pause] everything’s in here really what you want to know about Roy, there he is prisoner of war with his number on him and everything. Would you like your cup of tea now? [pause]
RH: Hello my name is Roy Hill, I was a flight lieutenant in the RAF during the war and er I joined up in 1941. I had hoped to fly in the Battle of Britain but that was all over then. It, the Battle of Britain was fought in 1940 and I was, I just missed out on that one, and I joined up in 1941 the year after and er, of course I had subsequently had quite a long time in the Air Force right through the war until the end of the war when I was a photographic officer in the at the school of photography in Farnborough in Hampshire and it was, there, it was, sorry.
Other: That’s alright.
MJ: On behalf of International Bomber Command Digital Archive Unit, I would like to thank Roy Hill at his home at Woodpecker Cottage, for his recording on the 7th July 2015. Many thanks.
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 Roy Hill
Creator
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Mick Jeffery
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-07-07
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AHillR150707
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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00:19:28 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Roy Hill joined the RAF wanting to be a pilot but became a wireless operator air gunner. On his eighteenth operation in a Lancaster flying over the Ruhr he was shot down by a German night fighter. He was captured and incarcerated in Stalag Luft 1 for about six months. He wrote poetry whilst he was a prisoner of war. He was repatriated by Americans and flown home in a Flying Fortress. At the end of the war he served as a photographic officer and was in charge of NCOs waiting to be demobbed.
Contributor
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Carron Moss
Carolyn Emery
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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Germany
Great Britain
England--Northamptonshire
Germany--Barth
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1944
1945
aircrew
crewing up
Lancaster
Me 109
prisoner of war
RAF Silverstone
shot down
Stalag Luft 1
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/492/8378/PClarkRR1601.1.jpg
cfc262183491ab3732116457df06de8d
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/492/8378/PClarkRR1602.1.jpg
926bef149a72ca9f608b070e920d51b4
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/492/8378/AClarkRR160331.2.mp3
69c4781f76297eb3a85b75b194dd000a
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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Clark, Royston
R Clark
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Clark, RR
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Royston Clark (b. 1922). He flew operations as wireless operator with 101 Squadron.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Diana and Royston Clarke and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
(DC) My husband’s name is Robert Royston Clarke and he joined the war in 1940 –
(RC) Yeah
(DC) - and he did all the training and took up flying on Lancasters, eventually he was shot down over Germany. So you can carry on, yeah?
(MJ) Yep.
(RC) I was shot down over, over Germany. What, what else did I do?
(DC) You erm, you were shot down over Berlin, weren’t you?
(RC) I was shot down over Berlin –
(DC) And er, you came down by parachute.
(RC) Yes, yes –
(DC) You thought you were, you thought, you thought you were too light to come down by parachute –
(RC) I did.
(DC) You thought you were going up –
(RC) That’s exactly –
(DC) And you looked up and it was just like going up to heaven. And –
(RC) Yeah
(DC) And you eventually came down to the ground, alright?
(RC) Yes.
(DC) Can you carry on from there?
(RC) When I, when I bailed out of the parachute and after being shot up by the Germans. When I I was parachuting out, I looked up and it looked as if I was coming down -
(DC) [Unclear]
(RC) Coming out the parachute coming down it wasn’t very happy –
(DC) And what happened when you got down?
(RC) What did?
(DC) That the – all these people grabbed you and took you down an air raid shelter, didn’t they?
(RC) Oh yeah. Hmm, they did.
(DC) And they going to cut your limbs, they wanted your clothes. They were arguing who was going to have your clothes.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And they were going to cut all your limbs off and throw you in the fire.
(RC) They was going to cut me fingers, me feet off, me toes. Silly bastards.
(DC) [Unclear]
(RC) Silly blighters.
(DC) You got your Mae West on, hadn’t you?
(RC) Yes.
(DC) And it had a light on it that flashed.
(RC) Yes
(DC) And as it flashed it, it flashed all of a sudden for no reason and the, the Germans thought it was a pistol, didn’t they?
(RC) Yes they did.
(DC) And they shouted in the language, ‘Pistol. Pistol’ and they all shot back, and you ran out up the steps as fast as you could and you got under a train in the railway station.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) Alright?
(RC) Yeah, this er, when they were trying –and what was it? Shouting ‘Pistol, pistol’.
(AC) The people in the air raid shelter that had got you and they were going to throw you in the fire. Didn’t - weren’t they?
(RC) Yes, because the - yeah.
(DC) You got out, under the train, and as you, you got underneath the train, and as you were going along, you were getting cold and wet from the steam and all that sort of thing, and you got up and gradually they pulled in at a station and you sneaked in and you got on top of a carriage, didn’t you?
(RC) That’s right.
(DC) A freight carriage.
(RC) Yes.
(DC) And then as you started off, you were going along and along, and you didn’t realise at the time that you were laying on top of poles, weren’t you? Metal poles.
(RC) That’s right.
(DC) And it was trudging along, you were gradually going down and down in these tru -poles. So you had to get out of that and lay across them the other way. And then, eventually, you, you were on the run a little bit, weren’t you? But eventually you were captured.
(RC) Yeah. The Germans didn’t like me.
(MJ) Why didn’t they like you?
(RC) [Chuckle]. The Germans and I were not very good friends during the war.
(DC) What he did – he er, he got a bicycle and –
(RC) I did.
(DC) Was [unclear] before he was captured, and he was going along and then he saw the troops coming towards him, and he went round the island the wrong way and obviously, they stopped him and found out – he said he was French. And the chap he spoke to him in French and it was the Vichy, Vichy French.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And it was the Vichy French uniforms, and they captured him then and you were put in prison after that, weren’t you?
(RC) They didn’t like me.
(DC) You were interviewed by a German officer. Wanted to know all the details of his camp –
(RC) Yes.
(DC) His crew and different things and you wouldn’t tell them anything. And they was - they got guards who come marching in and he said, ‘You will be shot’, and er, and he wouldn’t tell them anything. He said, ‘I should tell you nothing’, he said, ‘If you shoot me now -‘
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) He kept trying to get information out of you, didn’t he?
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) But you wouldn’t give any of the information and –
(RC) They kept asking me questions about this, and I said, ‘Actually I can’t say anything about it’. He - they said, ‘So we’ll shoot ya’. He said, ’If you don’t –‘
(DC) You said, you said, ‘If you were in my place, would you say anything?’ He said, ‘I’m not in your place’. And he says, ‘So we are going to shoot ya’. And then -
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And then he marched the guards out. He shook his hand, and he says, ‘You are a good solider’. And gave you a cigarette and a drink.
(RC) He did indeed, yes.
(DC) That was one little bit, wasn’t it?
(RC) Yeah. To, to have a cigarette off a bloody German, and the German didn’t like me at all.
(DC) Another incident he was – he, he escaped once or twice but he got a friend. He was on his own most of the time, but he’d got a friend at this point and they were in Poland –
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And he joined up with the Polish Resistance.
(RC) That’s right.
(DC) And he, he lived at a farm with family and there was a young girl there. I can’t think of her name now – and he – and they were in love, and they were a couple at the time, and then the Germans – something happened. They’d done something and the Germans came round looking for the Polish Resistance, and this girl, they got her and he was shouting, ‘No, No, she’s on the farm, working’, ‘cause they made out they were out working on the farm. And they just shot her in front of him. Lynkska was her name, wasn’t it?
(RC) Yeah, Lynkska.
(DC) And they just shot her in front of him, and the lady from the farm she came out and slapped him round the face and said, ‘Come on, get on with this work. We’ve got so much to do’.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And he got, he got away from that, but then you were escaping again and this particular time it was up through Lithuania, Latvia was it?
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And –
(RC) Lithuania, Latvia yeah.
(DC) And he – there was some people hanging. They were hanging them. I don’t know whether you know this story? With the Latvians, Lithuanians – have you followed it a bit? He, he saw all these people and they were just hanging from poles and trees in the street where the Germans had, had hung them ‘cause they wouldn’t go over to the German side. That was that and before he went into Latvia and Lithuania, you were in with Poland there was all the people on the streets just little kids starving and dying on the streets and all that.
(RC) It was awful. Awful.
(DC) And then the – around about the same time he was going along, escaping, and there was this cattle wagon train and – no, it wasn’t, it was a building this particular time – a building.
(RC) Yep.
(DC) And there were loads of people in it and they were shouting, ‘Mia water, mia water’ or something like that. I don’t know how they say it. ‘Mia sand’.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And they wanted water to drink and sand to put on the floor where they’d have to go to the toilet to cover all that up. And they were people that they were taking by train to the, the concentration camps. It was terrible. Then -
(RC) To the concentration camps.
(DC) Then you got so far up – I’m going, I’m getting mixed up with the different stories actually, but they are all stories. He was in Poland and with the Polish Resistance, they wanted to – they heard that [sigh] Hitler was coming along on the train, so he went underneath the bridge and set a explosive to blow his train up. And as it happened, the troop train came along first and they blew the troop train, train up and Hitler got away with it, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be here now if they had known it was you? [laugh].
(RC) No, I had, I had a bloody rough time, but the fact is that I could speak a good language and I –
(DC) Actually he could speak fluent German.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) That’ll do for now, won’t it?
[Restart of recording]
(RC) I had a - I didn’t have a very good war, but I did – I –
(DC) What made you go into the RAF? You wanted to fly was because you were in Coventry the night it was bombed, weren’t you?
(RC) That’s right,yes.
(DC) With a friend.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And straight away you said, ‘I’m not going in the Navy, I’m going in Bomber Command’.
(RC) Yes.
(DC) And you and your friend, you got a little baby out. You thought it was alive, but by the time you got it out it was dead, wasn’t it?
(RC) Yes.
(DC) And that really upset you, and from then on that’s what you said you would do, go in Bomber Command. All right?
(RC) I didn’t have – I mean wars are bad but I didn’t have a very good bloody war. I had a bastard of a war against – the Germans didn’t like me and I certainly didn’t like them and –
(DC) Another incident, you were escaping with your friend at this time, weren’t you? And the, they, the Gestapo were onto you with the dogs.
(RC) Yes.
(DC) So you went into the –
(RC) Bloody Gestapo.
(DC) the river. And you went into the river, didn’t you?
(RC) Yes, I did.
(DC) To hide. And you went in and then you went, kept under water, went up the bank so the dogs couldn’t scent - do your scent. And they never did find you, did they?
(RC) No.
(DC) They kept shooting in the water, but you were up the river more because you’d got up further and under the bank, and the dogs couldn’t scent you ‘cause -
(RC) That’s right
(DC) ‘cause you lost your scent in the water.
(RC) It was awful bloody water.
(DC) And then eventually you, you swam the Rhine, didn’t you?
(RC) Swam the Rhine, yeah.
(DC) With your friend –
(RC) Swam the Rhine, yeah.
(DC) And he said, this friend came from Poland, he said, ‘I can’t swim. I can’t swim –‘ so Roy said, ‘You can’t swim?’ And you come from Hull?’ So he had to have him on his chest, didn’t you?
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And you swam on your back -
(RC) On me back.
(DC) To get him across.
(RC) On me back.
(DC) And he said, ‘Look, I can’t cope any more’. He said, ‘I can’t get you across’. He did so bad swimming, so hard swimming, and he said, ‘Oh, don’t leave me. Don’t leave me’. So he had another go, and they finally got across, and got the other side of the river and it was the wide part of the river.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) So, that was a good thing. The only thing is you saw him after the war, didn’t you?
(RC) Yes.
(DC) Then you lost touch. When we went to find him, he’d passed away, hadn’t he? Syd.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) Yeah.
(RC) I had a –
(DC) It’s sad.
(RC) I didn’t have –
(DC) Another time there was a – this is towards the end of the - he, he, they escaped off of a forced march, and I don’t know whether it was the main one, I really don’t know, but they escaped off a forced march. And then they went into this farm to stay for the night, ‘cause they were so cold, and there was three Germans there and they got the two of you, didn’t they?
(RC) Hmm.
(DC) And they were tie – they were going to tie them against a cartwheels and bayonet them –
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And so you, you let them get close to you, didn’t you? And when you shouted to Syd, he said, ‘Now!’ And Roy knocked his chap out and Pete – Syd knocked his person out and then you got the third one, didn’t you, and you bayoneted them all.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) Syd had got dysentery so he had one of the pair of trousers off them.
(MJ) [Chuckles].
(RC) [Chuckles].
(DC) Then you carried on, didn’t you? And you were so cold and you didn’t know what to do, ‘cause Syd was almost dying, wasn’t he?
(RC) He was.
(DC) And –
(RC) Syd Caldwell.
(DC) So –
(RC) He was - he almost died. Sad.
(DC) You were some vehicles, didn’t you?
(RC) Yes.
(DC) And you stopped, you left Syd for a while to recover a bit, he couldn’t get anywhere, could he really? And you went off to see if you could see who it was and it was the 11th Army Division was there.
(RC) Yeah, 11th Army.
(DC) From Lincoln.
(RC) Yeah. The Lincoln -
(DC) And you went up and put your hands up and they – you know – a bit dubious of you, weren’t they? But once they realised you were an escaped prisoner –
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) They made such a fuss. Got you warmed up, hot drink, got – they went and got Syd in –
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And you travelled with them for so long, didn’t you?
(RC) Yes, I did.
(DC) And he was actually fighting with them as they were travelling. Roy, but they wouldn’t let Syd, would they ‘cause he wasn’t too well and you, he was shooting at them and then all of a sudden a bullet came straight past his ear and just missed ya, didn’t it? And it - oh it got the officer, didn’t it?
(RC) It did.
(DC) Yes.
(RC) It went whizzing by me.
(DC) [Unclear]
(RC) The bullet went right by my ear, which I –
(DC) And you sort of fell on him to make out it got you as well, didn’t ya?
(RC) Yeah, it killed the officer, [indistinct].
(DC) And he’s going round, going to the houses, ‘cause it was a village and there were trying to clear it out. And he went to this one vill – house and an old lady came and she was crying, and she said, ‘My husband is tort’, meaning dead –
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And Roy went got her some corned beef and bread that they’d made –
(RC) Yes.
(DC) Off the army lads and she was so grateful, wasn’t she? So it wasn’t all wicked. Were you? [Chuckle]
(RC) [Unclear] My mother’s tort is died. Got killed.
(DC) Yeah.
(RC) [Unclear]
(DC) And then you got back to Belgium –
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And you were flown home in a Lancaster, weren’t you? Yeah.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) From there. But so much else happened in between, didn’t it?
(RC) Everything –
(DC) It was –
(RC) Everything happens in war, doesn’t it.
(DC) He was, Syd was a little bit impatient, I think, at times.
(RC) Yes he was.
(DC) And you couldn’t be impatient. And he, you were going and he said, ‘No, come on. Let’s go’ They’d come in to all these soldiers and they were all resting. I think they, were they Hitler Youth?
(RC) Was they what?
(DC) Hitler Youth?
(RC) Hitler Youth. Yes, they were.
(DC) When they put the guns up –
(RC) Hitler Youth. That’s what they were.
(DC) They were all resting and in the middle, they’d stacked all the guns up, like this. And Roy went in and talked in Germany, telling them off saying they shouldn’t be messing about like that and all this, and he said, ‘What about these guns here?’ You weren’t sure how to use them, were you?
(RC) No.
(DC) So he got one of them to show him how to use it and he went round the lot and shot the lot.
(RC) Yeah, they showed me how to use the gun, which I could use the gun. And I said, ‘Well, stay still. Stay still’, and I shot the bloody –
(DC) And another incident, they were on a forced march and there was chickens about the yard, so this lad come up to you, didn’t he and you said, ‘There’s some eggs under there’. And you said, ‘No, don’t touch them. They’ll have you if you take those’.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And the lad went away and, they, him and Syd grabbed them both. Oh, didn’t ya? But you gave this lad one and you had all the rest with your mates.
(RC) Of course.
(DC) [Laugh].
(RC) What’d ya expect?
(DC) Another one was, they were still on the march and they grabbed a pig, him and Syd.
(RC) [Chuckle]
(DC) And you squealed like anything, and you hit it on the head and all sorts. Couldn’t kill it could you? A little pig. A baby pig.
(RC) Yeah. A little pig.
(DC) And it squealed and you shut it up in the finish anyway. And the farmer had told the Gestapo about this, and they’d got this pig all sorted out and under the potatoes. They’d got potatoes on top of it. And the Gestapo were going round smelling the pots to see if they could smell it, but they never did. Did they?
(RC) No.
(DC) [Laugh]
(RC) No, no I had, I had a awful war. No wars are good.
(DC) [Chuckle]
(RC) But I had a bloody hard war.
(DC) Another time you spoke, Syd was with you, wasn’t he, yes and you were, you went by this, I think it was a farmhouse, I can’t quite remember now, but these Germans were laying asleep very early morning, and one was a officer, and you put your foot on his chest, didn’t you? And he says : ‘Photo, photo’, to try and get a photo out to show you and it was a gun he got, hadn’t he, so you shot him.
(RC) Well I had to.
(DC) He would have been shot.
(RC) He made out he just taking – he said, ‘Photo’, making out to taking the photo and he took a gun out. I mean I gotta shoot him. I mean it’s war, it’s war. War is war and you couldn’t have a photograph to shoot a bloke with you had a proper gun and I shot him which I had to do, but it was, it was just one of those things, and it was war, wasn’t it?
(DC) Hmm.
(RC) My last [indistinct] bloody shot down.
(DC) But that didn’t grieve you so much, did it? It was the 50 pound you’d left at the pub at Ludford Magna for your celebration. [Chuckle] He’s never got over that, have you?
(RC) I haven’t.
(DC) [Chuckle]
(RC) I had 50 pound when I was escaping –
(DC) Well it was all the crew put towards it, didn’t they?
(RC) And left it at the pub. And 50, and that was a lot of money then. It bloody is now. We lost it didn’t we?
(DC) Eh, hmm.
(RC) We had problems.
(MJ) How’d you lose that then?
(RC) Some thieving blighter.
(DC) Sshh.
[Both chuckle]
(DC) You got shot down, so you lost it.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) Yeah
(RC) The Germans were using real bullets and they shot us down. Rotten sods.
[All laugh]
(DC) Arh dear.
(RC) It was – for me, the war was a bit – wars are not good very good, are they?
(MJ) No, they’re not very good.
(DC) We –
(RC) Eh?
(DC) He suffered terribly with Post, Post Traumatic Stress and after the war he worked on the railways as an accounts clerk, and he would sit at the desk and he’d face the wall – bare, a sort of a wall and all of a sudden a Lancaster came through, straight at him, through this wall. And he went to the doctors and the doctor said, ‘Oh, take a couple of aspirin’. Well, you know, he said just had to put up with it from then on and –
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) Then you had problems, didn’t you? He fell out of bed while trying to bail out of a plane a couple of times, didn’t you? And you were always restless, so the doctor sent you to see Mr Horner, the psychiatrist and he went through everything with him and he said, ‘You know, you shouldn’t be going through this’. He said, ‘You know, what about compensation.’ And, he got, Miss Drawner got him compensation for his stress. Well, well it’s a war, war thing -
(RC) War –
(DC) Monthly you get it. And through Mr Horner, he went into it seriously, ‘cause I - when we were first together he – when we first met - we were going – we – there was nothing to do when we were young, was there? So we sat in this pub and we went in there from work at six, half-past five and we sat in there all night, just the two of us. I had a drink, he had a drink. We never drank our drank, drink at all. We sat there all night, he just opened up and told me everything – more of less everything about the war. And he was saying how he suffered from this stress. Well throughout, you know, we got five children and I was saying, you know, to Miss Drawner, and I said, ‘The thing is –‘ I said : ‘There’s no way that a person can go through what he went through and not suffer stress’. And Mr Horner was writing it, all this down, and it’s since that incident that all this Post Traumatic Stress has come out through Mr Horner bringing it to light, isn’t it?
(RC) Hmm.
(DC) That’s how it’s all come about. Post-Traumatic Stress -
(RC) Yes
(DC) ‘Cause you never heard of it before, did you?
(RC) Never heard of it, no.
(DC) You know and he did a good job. And that was in the, about the mid-80s I think. Mid 80s it would have been.
(RC) Hmm
(DC) Yeah
(RC) What was that Post Traum- [indistinct] –
(DC) When you couldn’t sleep and used to shout out at night, ‘The Germans are coming’. And –
(RC) Oh yeah.
(DC) And things like that and you bailed out of bed to get out of your plane and that sort of thing.
(RC) Post Traumatic –
(DC) You used to do it often.
(RC) Hmm.
(DC) That was a bad time, wasn’t it?
(DC) Hmm.
(RC) Dreaming about the Germans and jumping out of bed, making out – thinking I was shot down when I was in bed. And I was thinking I was shot down and I bail out of bed, and I had a horrible life through that flying. Still here I is.
(DC) [Chuckle]
(RC) And there is – oh – and we love each other, don’t we?
(DC) Course we do.
(RC) And we got a good friend here.
[Indistinct]
(DC) There were coming round ready to land at Ludford Magna, and all of a sudden, they had a German that had followed them back and was shooting. You’d managed to get your wheels didn’t it, and you swivelled round on the on the runway and as they was shooting at the plane. They - a bullet went into the wall of, is it the White Hart opposite?
(RC) Oh yes.
(DC) Opposite it, isn’t it? And they, they recently patched it up in the last few years. But the hole was in the wall the wall for ages. And then the, was it - were they WAAFs that shot it down? WAAFs? They shot the plane down at the –
(RC) The WAAFs. The WAAFs did.
(DC) Yeah and they shot it down, and they were buried in Ludford Cemetery, but I think it’s been – they’ve been moved because we looked, didn’t we? A few years ago and there was nothing there, was there? So, that was another thing. You got away light there, didn’t you?
(RC) I always got – I always got away bloody light.
(DC) [Chuckle]
(RC) The Germans didn’t like me. I didn’t like them and whatever I did, I always got away lightly.
(DC) What when – when you were escaping that time and they said you were the person they were looking for.
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) Yeah, you could speak your German, couldn’t ya? What did- what did they say to ya?
(RC) They said [chuckle], he said [indistinct], what’d he say to me?
(DC) ‘You dis Englander?’
(RC) [Indistinct] ‘Englander’ I said, ‘Englander? Nien. Ich bein Deutsche. Ich bein Deutsche’. I had to make out I was bloody German.
(DC) You said you were an officer, didn’t you?
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) But you’d been wounded.
(RC) Yeah. And I had a bloody hard life. Yeah. I had to speak English and German at the same bloody time –
(DC) And previously you’d had a crash in a Wellington bomber in training and you had a - not through the crash, you’d had also been shot up and you’d had a piece of shrapnel go in your leg –
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) and left a bad scar. So you showed them that where you’d been injured, didn’t you?
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) And they believed you then, didn’t they?
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) They you were a off – a German officer had been injured.
(RC) I had a - I had a very, very hard war. And I had, had to make out I was a bloody German officer when I was killing as many Germans as I could. ‘Ich bien Officer. Yah. Deutschlander’. And then they [chuckle] I had to make so much – bloody hard –making out I was a German officer. It was a hard world, wasn’t it Chook?
(DC) It was. Yes.
(RC) Yeah, but here I is. Here is oh [indistinct] [chuckle].
(MJ) How did you learn German?
(RC) Eh?
(MJ) How did you learn German?
(RC) I learnt German –I learnt German quite easy because when I knew what I was going to go through, I practiced German and I learnt German quite easy. I could speak it quite well, could I?
(DC) You could talk it perfect.
(RC) Eh?
(DC) When we went on holiday in Morocco, a good few years ago, and he was talking to this Moroccan in German, and the Moroccan said to him, ‘You can talk good German but rubbish English’. [Laughter]
(RC) Yeah, yeah. He said, he said, ‘Ich bien Englander’. And they said, ‘Englander?’ I said, ‘Englander. Deutschlander’. So he said, ‘Oh yeah, Deutschlander. Deutschlander is you. Englander is not you. You speak Duetschlander because that’s your life. Englander, you don’t speak it very well’. [Laughter] I – he had a bloody job to – he says –
(DC) Funny.
(RC) He was a German and I could speak fluent German, and I I can always speak [indistinct] fluent English, but he said, ‘Do not, you do not speak English. Nein’. He said, ‘You be Englander. Nien. You be Deutschlander’. And I had to be English, German and I had to be every bugger. I had a bloody hard life, but I enjoyed it. I got over the war. Just about.
(DC) [Chuckle]
(RC) I got about – I got about mark here. Have I got a face - mark on my face?
(DC) No, people don’t notice it now darling.
(RC) No, they don’t. I do they -
(DC) He had all his face smashed up in the – what the – can’t think of the plane now. When you had your plane crash in this country –
(RC) Yeah.
(DC) and your face was smashed, wasn’t it?
(RC) We had a plane crash and my face got all smashed up. And I couldn’t –
(DC) In the Wellington.
(RC) In the Wellington, that’s right. And I could only see out one eye. One bloody eye, but I got over it, didn’t I?
(DC) Hmm.
(RC) I had a very, very hard war but nobody has an easy war, do they?
(DC) No.
(RC) But I did have a hard war ‘cause the Germans didn’t like me. I didn’t like them. And [indistinct] had a hard war, but I’m still alive. And I still got a nice wife, haven’t I?
(DC) I don’t know, am I? Only you can decide that. [chuckle].
(RC) I had a hard war, but no war really is easy.
(DC) No, there shouldn’t be such things as wars. It’s a terrible thing.
(RC) No. They shouldn’t –
(DC) You just make you wonder why there has to be wars. The way people think it’s – it’s just you know. Just impossible really. Everybody’s at war at the moment, aren’t they?
(RC) Picture. You want a picture, don’t ya?
(DC) [Unclear]
(MJ) Yeah.
(DC) I was only 5 when the war started, and I always remember my father standing at the front door watching what was going on, and we used to sometimes, we used to go down in the cellar for protection or under the strong kitchen table or in the air raid shelter. We lived in the country on the Tamworth Road, just outside Sutton Coldfield, and we didn’t see a lot of the war at all really. When the, when the aeroplanes used to go over, my mother never did know, but I was absolutely petrified of the planes, and I’d either run in the house or into the farm buildings. It wasn’t until later I, I remembered things going on and my father said to my mother, ‘Mother, these Coventry’s getting it tonight’. And he said, ‘They’re really getting it badly’, and then a bit later we had a big bomb drop, we had a big garden so it was way away a bit, but we had a big bomb drop at the top of our garden in the field and they came to get it out. They tried pumping it out with water, and all sorts and to my knowledge, that bomb is still there. They couldn’t get it out. Then, the next thing I remember going in to Birmingham and seeing all the houses bombed and all up Aston and all through Birmingham, and all bombed out. It was a terrible sight.
(MJ) On behalf of the International Bomber Command, I would like to thank Warrant Office Royston Clarke and Mrs Diane Clarke for their recording at their home near Lincolnshire on the date of the 31st March 2016 at 4 o clock.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Royston Clarke and Diane Clarke
Creator
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Mick Jeffery
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-03-31
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Sound
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AClarkRR160331, PClarkRR1601, PClarkRR1602
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Pending review
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Format
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00:33:37 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Warrant Officer Robert Royston Clarke joined the Royal Air Force in 1940 and flew in Lancasters.
He joined Bomber Command after seeing the bombing of Coventry.
Robert tells about bailing out and being manhandled by the local inhabitants before escaping and hiding under a train.
He was arrested by the Vichy French and tells of how he was then interviewed by a German Officer.
He escaped on a couple of occasions, linking up with the Polish Resistance on one occasion and hiding from the Gestapo who were searching for him with dogs. He tells of his experiences ‘on the run’.
He then found himself with the 11th Army Division and was flown home from Belguim after the war.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Vivienne Tincombe
animal
bale out
bombing
childhood in wartime
crash
escaping
evading
Lancaster
lynching
Resistance
shelter
shot down
Wellington
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/310/3467/ANoyeR151022.1.mp3
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Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Noye, Rupert
Rupert Newstead Noye
Rupert N Noye
Rupert Noye
R N Noye
R Noye
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history with Rupert Newstead Noye DFC (1923 -2021, 1332761 Royal Air Force).
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-22
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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Noye, R
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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RN: My name is Rupert Noye. I was born in February 1923. When the war started I was, er, sixteen and in 1940, when Churchill formed the LDV, I volunteered for that. We were renamed later Home Guard and it came in useful when I eventually went into the Air Force because we had learned a lot of rifle drill, marching, things like that. And in, after just a few days after my eighteenth birthday I volunteered for the Air Force as a wireless operator air gunner. I was accepted in April ‘41 but then put on deferred service and eventually called up in September ‘41 and, er, went to Blackpool on a s— a radio course, failed it miserably and re-mustered to air gunner. We were posted to Hendon then and at Hendon for about six months and then I was posted onto Scotland to take the gunnery course. After gunnery course we did OTU on Whitleys at Abingdon. When that course was finished we were posted to St [unclear] attached to Coastal Command, where we were doing sweeps over the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay, and one day we did actually see a submarine and attacked it but we never knew of any definite result. After that we were posted on to Wellingtons, went to Harwell to convert from Whitleys, and we were then to posted 166 Squadron at Kirmington and our pilot disappeared one day and we had another pilot, an Australian, starting his second tour. He was very, very good and, er, we finished our first tour at Kirmington when they converted to Lancasters in September ‘43 and I was posted to Operational Training Unit as an instructor. I was recalled in April ’44 to 12 Squadron at Wickenby to replace a rear gunner who had been injured and they, the crew, had already volunteered to join the Pathfinder Force so I went along with them. We went to Upwood and started operating with Pathfinder Force. You had to do so many marker trips before you got your Pathfinder badge and, er, but due to an incident of — we, the crew was broken up. I stayed at Upwood as a spare gunner and during that time I flew with quite a few different pilots and eventually finished up, er, in about September ‘44 with, er, Tony Hiscock. He was what we called a blind marker. He bombed on radar or dropped the flares on radar and we did quite a few, well we did about nineteen trips together, and the last one was over Hamburg, a big daylight raid just before the end of the — 31st March actually, 1945. After that we were all made redundant, went to various stations and different jobs and I volunteered to stay in the Air Force for another three years and eventually was posted back to Upwood on 148 squadron, again on Lancasters, and I stayed there until I was demobbed in 1949. That’s about it. I was very lucky during my time in Bomber Command. I did three tours of ops and was only once was attacked by a fighter. That was on the 5th of January 1945. We were coming back from Hanover and I saw [bell rings] a fighter, a single engine fighter, approaching from starboard side. I told the skipper and he started to corkscrew but the aircraft did fire at us and we were damaged in the tailplane and the wing. The damage to the wing disabled my turret completely because of the hydraulics were damaged and the — but there was no real serious damage. We got back to base quite happily but we did lose about three hundred-odd gallons of petrol. Then in March ‘45 I was again rather lucky and I was awarded the DFC and Tony Hiscock, the pilot I flew with, he was awarded a bar to his and, er, he was a very good pilot and we got on very well together as a crew, which was one of the biggest things you needed, to be a happy crew. I think that’s about enough. When you flew with Bomber Command you were in a crew and the crew — you were trained as crew and you got, generally speaking, you got on very well together and at times, er, when me as a rear gunner would have given instructions to the pilot, having seen possibly an enemy aircraft, instruct the pilot to dive or corkscrew and he would do that without any hesitatation, although I must say we were — that I was lucky in my time that we didn’t have many times when that was necessary but the crew, the crewing up system was a bit haphazard. When you reported to OTU you were all at one time, a varying number of pilots, wireless operators, navigators, bomb aimers and gunners were put in a big hangar or big room and told to crew up, which seemed very haphazard, but the system seemed to work. Later on, if you went on heavies as a crew, you went to a Heavy, Heavy Conversion Unit and got a mid-upper gunner and a flight engineer and, er, I never had that because as I joined from a place of rest to a place as a rear gunner. I think that’s about it. We got up to about to, er, on our training and we went into these Defiants and the — firstly you couldn’t, not allowed to work the turret until the pilot says so, and so he said, ‘OK.’ So, I turned the turret round and you have to raise the guns first, turn round and looked at the tailplane and there’s this little tiny tailplane behind you and you think, ‘That’s all that’s holding us up.’ [slight laugh] But it wasn’t, we had wings built the right way round and a good engine [slight laugh] but it was funny really because I mean that was the first time the vast majority of us had ever flown when we were on training because, I mean, you didn’t fly much in those days unless you paid five bob ride with Jack Cobham when he came round to a local airfield and you could go and have a short trip for five bob or seven and six or something. Alan Cobham that was. He started off doing refuelling in mid-air didn’t he, er, down in Dorset? But funny ‘cause when we were at Blackpool we went to the Pleasure Gardens there had they had what they used to call in those days the scenic railway and got on this thing and then down in almost vertical swoops and up the other side. And I think that was designed to put you off flying. [laugh]
MJ: Did it?
RN: It didn’t. No, Not really. Not when you got on a bit on bigger aircraft with the rest of the crew, you were alight, you were quite happy because you couldn’t do much with a Whitley [slight laugh]. It was quite good fun.
MJ: People don’t realise it was good fun.
RN: Well, it was as you steadily, as you, after you crewed up and got steadily got to know a bit more about the rest of the crew because, er, that pilot we lost when we got on the squadron because I think he went LMF. And — but he was married and had a young daughter. He was a Welshman and later on the wireless operator went LMF. There must have been something wrong with us because the navigator and the bomb aimer and myself finished the tour eventually on, on Wellingtons. But we had a nice picture of the Queen, didn’t we, for our 60th wedding anniversary? And I must get a frame for that. Put it up. But it’s a nice picture.
MJ: That’s the point. It’s — that’s how it works. That’s how you remember things.
RN: On Pathfinders, um, they were all volunteers from various squadrons but we used to have talks on the squadrons from, er, Hamish Mahaddie who was one of Don Bennett’s leading men and he used to come round trying to talk people into joining PFF and, um, he must have been very successful because they were never short of volunteers.
MJ: Did — what sort of training did you have to do for that?
RN: Well, when we went to PFF you went to Warboys because Warboys was the Navigation Training Unit for Pathfinders and you went there and you did so much, about a week or ten days’ course there, training, mainly training for navigators and then you were sent to the squadron and did the ops and marking as the time came [background noises]. You didn’t mark straight away because you were, weren’t considered experienced enough or trained up to the, the standard that they wanted.
MJ: Did you have to go with another crew then?
RN: No, you had instructor pilots that went with you mainly but, of course, all the navigators’ logs were sort of checked by the navigation officers after you came back from every trip whether it was training or an actual operation. [background noises throughout sentence]
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command I’d like to thank Rupert Noye DFC for his recording on the date of — I forget what it is now, 26th? 27th, ah —
RN: 31st is Saturday.
MJ: I’ve got — I’ll see this is on and stays on. 27th of October 2015. Once again, I thank you again and even though I got the date wrong. Thank you.
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ANoyeR151022
Title
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Interview with Rupert Noye
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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00:12:40 audio recording
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Pending review
Pending OH summary
Creator
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Mick Jeffery
Date
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2015-10-22
Description
An account of the resource
Rupert Noye completed two tours of operations as a rear gunner with 166 and 156 Squadrons.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Coastal Command
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Lincolnshire
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
12 Squadron
148 Squadron
156 Squadron
166 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
civil defence
crewing up
Defiant
Distinguished Flying Cross
Home Guard
Lancaster
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Abingdon
RAF Harwell
RAF Hendon
RAF Kirmington
RAF Upwood
RAF Warboys
RAF Wickenby
submarine
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
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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
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Davis, Sidney Lawrence
S L Davis
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Davis, SL
Date
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2015-12-02
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sidney Davis. He flew operations as a wireless operator with 617, 619 and 9 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SLD: I’m Laurie Davis. I was a wireless operator in 619 squadron based at Strubby in Lincolnshire. I joined at Lords Cricket Ground at 10 o’clock in the morning on the 17th of May and found out that evening, when I went to St John’s Wood, the billet, that it was the morning that 617 returned from the Dambusters raid which brought back memories at the end of my squadron career but like all air crew we did our training. I was a wireless op and eventually I found myself at Silverstone and we went into a massive room and we were just told that you would come out the other end as a six man crew and this was somewhat flabbergasting but I wandered around and coming towards me was a chap, sergeant, we were all sergeants in those days, with wings up and we looked at one another and I said, ‘Are you with anyone?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And we introduced ourselves. Johnny Taylor from Bristol. And we wandered around and we found a chap, a navigator Jack [?] he came from Bath. We joined up. We thought, well, we’re halfway there and then we saw a chap with his B brevvy up. A bomb aimer. And he was Norman [?] a Londoner. Came from Potters Bar. So we were almost there. We thought we only wanted a couple of gunners now and we saw these two chaps coming along together. Compared with me being just twenty they were mature men to say the least but probably they were only in their mid-thirties but it turned out they were both married. Joe Crossland turned out to be the mid upper gunner. He was from Wakefield and Tommy [Klines] who was the rear gunner, he was from Warrington. So we all joined up finished up the other end of this room with a cup of tea or a coffee and it was then that the skipper as we called him, Johnny, John Taylor, said, ‘We’ll call you Red,’ because at that time I had bright red hair. So the rest of my time with that enjoyable crew was I called Red. We moved on there for a couple of weeks, three weeks I think, on Wellingtons. A noisy, rattly old thing and then we went on to Syerston on to Stirlings. Again, just familiarisation and that and that was then we picked up another member of the crew. An engineer and he came from St Helen’s and I must admit he’s the one fellow that I can’t recall a name all the time and to this day I still try to find out his surname and Christian name. Anyway, we then went on to Lancasters and to conversion and then finished going on to 619 squadron in Strubby at Lincolnshire and we did some flying around for a week and lo and behold we knew that to go on operations the pilot always went with an experienced crew and that caused a bit of sensitive humour because there was always some wit thrown in and Johnny Taylor came back from his office one morning and said, ‘I’m flying tonight with a crew,’ so we joked we’d sort out all his personal possessions and share them out if he didn’t come back because we knew that sometimes that’s what happened, unfortunately. So later in the afternoon I get a call to go to the wireless office to be told that I was flying with him and of course that caused more humour and we went off and with Flying Officer Whitely, a senior there and, believe it or not, it was the longest trip I did of the twelve raids. We went to Dresden. Nine hours twenty minutes and quite something in my memory to see the vastness of the fires as a first time on there because when you finished and the pilot and bomb aimer were doing a run up to the target, about a mile and a half or two miles away, my job was to stand up in the astrodome and keep a lookout above mainly because as I found out on the other raids you saw aircraft on other raids with their bomb doors open above you left and right so interrupting the bomb aimer who was calling to the pilot, ‘Steady. Left. Left. Steady. Left,’ I would say, ‘Johnny, there’s one at 11 o’clock’ or, ‘one at 2 o’clock,’ and he’d try and move over to save the bombs coming down through us. It was successful, that Dresden trip and we came back and we were very privileged and lucky to get through eleven more as a crew.
[machine paused]
MJ: It’s on.
SLD: Having, having experienced, pilot and I, our first raid which was horrendous as has proved over the years with Dresden we settled down to training flights and then successfully got through eleven more. One, one that again focusses in my mind of how lucky you are to be here today is we went to an oil refinery called Harburg just outside of Hamburg and as I experienced on the Dresden raid you flew in some two miles away with a straight course for the bomb aimer and the pilot but on this occasion all I could see over the target was a series of ten and fifteen searchlights and we were a mile or so away but I remember at least three aircraft were caught in the lights, hit by the barrage and exploded into a ball and down they went. And I can think, think now to myself thinking well I hope they don’t pick us up before we’ve got rid of ours but we managed to get through, drop the bombs and come out the other side and that’s the hairiest one I would think apart from the Dresden. The dramatic scenes of fire. But the raids, we were lucky and successful and as I say we did eleven as a crew. Twelve in all and they were great colleagues. When the European war finished we were switched to Waddington. 617. And we were involved in what they called Dodge and Exodus and that was flying POWs, our POWs from Italy, Naples and Bari back to England and we used to take twenty four soldiers out, sitting in the fuselage and fly them out and then do a return trip and the humorous part was, I suppose it’s humorous at our age of twenty, twenty one, I was still not twenty one but on the way back they wanted to go in to the mid upper turret so we used to say, I think we used to say, ‘Don’t go around one side more than twenty times otherwise it’ll unscrew,’ but they loved to and to see the patchwork quilt that was England really. They would go up forward by the navigator, the engineer or the bomb aimer and see it so the joy on their faces was worth every second of those flights, being POWs for years and came back. And then towards the end of ‘45 we’d been waiting to fly out to India as nine, with 9 squadron as part of the Tiger Force intending to bomb Japan from the isle of Okinawa where the Americans had made two runways. One for them and one for us. Anyway, it got postponed night after night. We went for a few drinks into Lincoln, came back and the whole station was alight. We said, ‘What’s happened?’ He said, ‘You’re taking off at 4 o’clock,’ and this was about 12 o’clock [laughs] so we packed all our gear, pouring with rain, and flew off to Tobruk then to Cairo and then Karachi and then down to a place called Digri just outside of Calcutta and we were there for a few months practicing different types of bombing and that with 9 squadron and of course the Japs surrendered so we came back. We landed at St Mawgan and we were given a rail pass and four days to get back to Waddington and that was the end of our crew as a unit flying. I was posted to Woodbridge in Suffolk where I found myself as a warrant officer looking after, with twelve men, three hundred polish chaps who were waiting to go home and I’d only stayed there about six months and I was posted to RAF in Germany, Bad Eilsen and stayed out there for just over a year at Signals Headquarters but to me the experiences that I had before and the company with friends was just a holiday really because I was very active in running and football and cricket and that’s what I toured around with the RAF team and we won the RAF Inter-Services, well the British Forces Inter-Services football match at Cologne stadium. Again, as a highlight because it was the army that was going to win the final. They had every army person there, senior level, we beat them and the whole reception afterwards went down like a lead balloon.
[machine pause]
SLD: Right. Laurie Davis, otherwise Red, from there, from the 619 squadron. When I left the Germany in November ‘47 I’ve kept in touch with various groups through my son and until this year I’ve done six marches at the cenotaph on Armistice Day but this year there was insufficient members to march so they didn’t lay a wreath on behalf of Bomber Command but on the 31st of October I meet up with the squadron and adjoining that group was a bomb aimer, Joe Dutton, he’s treasurer and secretary of 619 and we meet there and have a meal and go over and have a look at the statue and lay a wreath and it always amazes me that people that look at it and say, ‘Why are people raising their hand above their eyes?’ And I said to several, ‘When you came back off a raid three or 4 o’clock in the morning and left your aircraft and waiting in the layby waiting to be picked up to go for debriefing and then you hear in the darkness another flight coming in and you just automatically put your hand up to look, see, ‘Oh I wonder who this has made it back again with us?’ And that’s it and that is the feeling that goes on that you were lucky and you respect the fact that you’ve made it back and I was talking to Joe Dutton only in October that, I think I said to him that if we weren’t going on a raid tonight we’d probably go into the village and have a drink and I said here it is seventy one years ago and we’re lucky to be able to do that. Just mentioning something people often said, ‘Didn’t you feel anything of bombing the targets?’ And I go back to fifteen and a half years of age in Portsmouth when they had the biggest raid, the 10th of January 1941, fire watching with my dad outside the house and experience this whistle and continuous whistle and getting closer and closer. Little did I know that it was a bomb and then everything went black, covered in dust and our house had disappeared and that for me thinks, not apportioning blame but they did start it and Plymouth and London and Portsmouth and Southampton but it’s one of those and I’m very grateful and fortunate to have gone through the friendship and association throughout with that crew. Yeah.
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command I’d like to thank Laurie Davis at his home in Portsmouth for his recording. Otherwise known as Red. May he travel on well. Thank you very much.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Interview with Sidney Lawrence Davis
Creator
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Mick Jeffery
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-12-02
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ADavisSL151202, PDavisSL1501
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Format
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00:15:46 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Laurie Davis trained as a wireless operator and first went to RAF Silverstone where crews were formed. Because of his bright red hair, he was then known as ‘Red’. The crew worked on Wellingtons for a few weeks and then Stirlings at RAF Syerston. They then went on to Lancasters and to conversion and finished going on to 619 Squadron based at RAF Strubby in Lincolnshire. Their first operation was on Dresden, the next operation was to an oil refinery just outside Hamburg. At least three aircraft got caught in the searchlights, were hit by the barrage and exploded into a ball. The crew did twelve operations together. Towards the end of 1945 they flew out to India with 9 Squadron as part of the Tiger Force; with 617 Squadron (RAF Waddington) he took part in operations Dodge and Exodus. Laurie was posted to RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk as a warrant officer. After about six months he was posted in Germany. He then toured round with the RAF team for football and cricket, winning the British Forces Inter-Services football match at Cologne stadium. Since leaving Germany in November 1947 he has kept in touch with various groups and has done six marches at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day. He meets up with the squadron every October when they laid a wreath.
Contributor
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Sue Smith
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
India
Germany
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
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1945
1947-11
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
619 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
crewing up
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
RAF Silverstone
RAF Strubby
RAF Syerston
RAF Waddington
RAF Woodbridge
searchlight
sport
Stirling
Tiger force
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/186/2434/PMarshallS1513.2.jpg
df6f6cc8ff0327e30fb6a0b48ae46145
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/186/2434/AMarshallS150508.2.mp3
cfb718b423c94b1acd547feb3a16e437
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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Marshall, Syd
S C Marshall
Description
An account of the resource
Ten items. The collection contains two oral history interviews with Warrant Officer Sidney Charles Marshall (1924 - 2017, 1594781 Royal Air Force), his decorations, training notes, photographs and a photograph album. Syd Marshall was a flight engineer with 103 Squadron and flew operations from RAF Elsham Wolds.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Syd Marshall and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-05-08
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Identifier
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AMarshallS150508
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Permission granted for commercial projects
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre the interviewer is Mick Jeffries, the interviewee is Mr. Sidney Marshall. The interview is taking place on 8th May 2015.
SM: My name is Sid Marshall, I’m recording this for the International Bomber Command Centre on the 8th May 2015. I live in Boston, Lincolnshire, right then? I left school in 1938 at the age of fourteen which most people did in those days, this was about a year before the outbreak of war, so when that started I was still only fifteen, and I had gone to work with a local engineering, agricultural engineering I should say, we were repairing tractors and all kinds of agricultural equipment, and of course this I suppose was considered in war time to be extremely er important, farming, farmers were never called up and that sort of thing, and when I got to be eighteen I er discovered, in conversation with my boss that I was in a reserved occupation, which simply meant that my job was considered more important than me joining the forces, but I think there is a bit of peer pressure comes into it here, everybody keeps saying to me ‘when you joining up, when you joining up’ , and eventually I got a bit fed up with this and I discovered that if I volunteered for aircrew I could get out of it, this was about the only thing I could er go to do, er, which would get me into the forces and away from me civilian job. It’s quite a performance getting in as well, I had, I went one day I was out on the job and I knew the recruiting officer was at the local, [coughs] excuse me, was at the local Job Centre and er so I thought I would go and see them and to my surprise when I got there it was a young lady, and she looked me up and down and I was in my greasy overalls, I suppose I didn’t present a very good picture really, and she said you know I told her I wanted to volunteer for aircrew, and she said, ‘ you know you have to be absolutely fit for aircrew’, and she was sort of trying to be put me off I thought anyway I insisted, and of course that’s how it all started. I didn’t say anything to my boss about it for a start, but I had to tell him when I got called for a medical, I started off, I had to go to Lincoln and this was the same medical that was used for any kind of military service, they used to jokingly say if you had two arms, two feet, and you were felt warm, you were all right, [laughs] you’ve heard that before.
MJ: Yes
SM: Er, anyway I, eventually came round I had to tell him when I went to Lincoln, I said look, tell the boss ‘I said look I’ve volunteered for aircrew duties and I’ve got to go for a medical’, so I went and this was pretty simple really, and er, I there was then a break of probably a couple of months, and I then had to go to Doncaster which was the full aircrew medical. You had to go and be prepared to stay there for a couple of nights, so the thing was spread over three days really. So anyway I got myself to Doncaster, and I found the Selection Board and all that were in the top floor of a multi-storey shop, and er, the first thing you had of course was the medical because if you didn’t pass the medical then you didn’t go any further, and they were very very strictly, they didn’t exactly turn you inside out but very nearly, you had to blow up columns of mercury and hold them, and you had to do various exercises, you were given a much stricter medical then had been for you know for what I call ground crew job. Anyway I passed the medical okay and in fact if you didn’t that was as far as you went, if you hadn’t passed the medical you were sent home again, that got the first day over. The second day [coughs] because I hadn’t been to Grammar School I had to sit a maths and general knowledge sort of test, anyway as an engineer I had been taking lessons in er [coughs] excuse me, in science, er maths and technical drawing, and of course that had boosted my education enough and I managed to slip past the exam okay, and that was about the last thing on that day. The third day you went before a panel of officers and they asked you what you wanted to do, they interviewed you and er, I realised the fact that I hadn’t been to Grammar School was not going to help me and they said ‘what would I like to do?’, and of course I think everybody wanted to be a pilot originally, anyway I told them I had been studying at night school and that and they said ‘ oh I think you’ll just about make it’, but to try and put me off they said ‘we have got such a lot of applications we probably won’t be able to take you in for seven or eight months’, I think it was just a gag really to put you off. Anyway they then asked me was I what work I had done and as soon as I mentioned that I had been working in engineering for four years, ‘oh your just the chap we want you can become a flight engineer’ and I’m afraid my sealed, fate was sealed at that, so that’s how it all came about. I went back home anyway and told my boss that I’d be going shortly but I was another, I should think another two or three months before they called me up, and er, anyway that was it, he never got on to me about it I think he understood how I felt, and he did say, ‘well your job will be there when you come back’, which was fair enough wasn’t it. Anyway the time came round for me to go and I found myself on Boston Station early one morning with my little suitcase bound for Kings Cross. I got on the first train and er, when I got to Kings Cross there was an NCO working there, waiting I should say, and by that time there were seven or eight of us who were all going to the same place, we had to report to what they call the er, er, oh dear, RTO, that’s the Rail Travel Officer, and er she gathered us all up and then we set off on the underground to St. John’s Wood Tube Station. We got off the station there and there was a corporal there waiting, marched us in some sort of disorder to the holy, holy place, Lords Cricket Ground, that was where it all happened. The first day we got there, we were booked in, they took our names and that sort of thing, and then we were given a card with a number on it and told to go and sit in the grandstands until we were called, of course there were hundreds of other lads there, and er, eventually my lot was called, and you went in and you had another er medical, it was only brief, it was what they called, it had all these er initial letters in the forces, this was an FFI, free from infection, I don’t quite know what they thought what we’d had picked up in the interim, but anyway it wasn’t very severe that one, and we went on, and then er, the next then we got to er [coughs] we went and got kitted out, we were given a kit bag and you went down the line, and I was fascinated by how they got the size of uniform right, there was a sloping line on the wall marked off in feet an inches, and as you walked by one bloke called your height out [laughs].
MJ: [laughs].
SM: Another bloke put a tape measure round your chest and that’s why, that’s how they decided the size of uniform unit. So you finish up with arms full of stuff and a kit bag, and we stowed all that lot in there and that’s about all we did the first day, and of course the next day we had to kit ourselves up in uniform and something else that really tickled me was [coughs], we decided that, you’ve seen Poiroit on the television haven’t you in these very posh block of flats, well we were in one of those, mind you it wasn’t very posh, there was nothing much on the floor and each room just had a double bunk each side and that was it there was nowhere to hang your clothes up or anything else, if you aren’t wearing it, it lives in your kit bag [laughs] or hung on the end of your bed, and we er, and we were there in all for about three weeks, and when I wrote home my address sounded very good, and it was er, the house was called Grove Court Mansions and it was in Grove End Road, St. John’s Wood, London, which is a very posh address isn’t it, and of course when my mother wrote back, she said ‘ [unclear] lad you’ve got such a nice place’, I didn’t disillusion her, [laughs] I let her think if she was happy I would leave it at that [laughs], and we were there for about three weeks altogether, we started to drill, we had another full medical, we were divided up into swimmers and non-swimmers, and we started er the you know we had our meals by the way, the zoo of course was closed in those days, London Zoo, not being too far away we used their canteen that was our cookhouse, we had our meals there, and anyway time passed pretty quickly and we got to know er some of the other lads, there were four of us in this room and er, I, and we managed right the way through our training to keep together [coughs]. As I say in all we were about there for three weeks and then one night we were packed up and we were put back on the underground again back to Kings Cross Station, and they never tell you where you were going, and when you got to Kings Cross, I thought if you are going to Kings Cross you are going North. We got to er, overnight, we travelled at midnight, I think they put troops and that on the train at night to leave the trains free for the civilians in the day time, imagine that was the idea. Anyway we found ourselves in the early hours of the morning at er York, clambered out there and we were put on another train and er we arrived quite early in the morning at Scarborough, and here’s another posh address the place we went to there was called The Grand Hotel, and of course the forces used these places, they were empty in those days, nobody taking holidays were they, but it wasn’t very grand, but we didn’t have to worry us too much, because we had our breakfast there and then we were all drawn up outside and we were ticked off where we gonna’ go and they found there wasn’t room for us all at er Scarborough, so my flight which consisted of something like thirty of us were put on a train again and went to Bridlington, and this is where I did my, we got these letters again, this is ITW, Initial Training Wing, and when we were in London it was ACRC, which sounds a bit queer but it was Air Crew Reception Centre, you get used to all these letters don’t you. So this was where our initial training was going to be and in all I think we were there for about eight weeks, and it was the middle of winter and we used to do PT on the beach in the snow with the spray blowing off the sand, and do you know you never catch cold because you are fit aren’t you, and er when we went into the er Ex’, we were based in the Expanse Hotel, which I’ve seen since it’s still there, it is one of the top hotels, but of course they took us to these places ‘cause there was accommodation available didn’t they. We lived on the ground floor of the hotel in my particular case, and we were told when we went out to leave all the windows open get some fresh air in, well the sea was rough and the spray was blowing as well [laughs] which didn’t help matters. Anyway we were introduced then to our er instructor, a drill instructor, Corporal Horrocks, I won’t tell you what we called him, because would it be rude to mention it?
MJ: If you want to.
SM: [laughs].
MJ: It’s up to you.
SM: I won’t mention it, but you can guess what it was, he was a very nice chap actually, and er the only trouble was he was, we got lads there some of them from London, some of them from all over the country, and he was a Geordie, and you just couldn’t understand what he said a lot of the time, his favourite thing we used to drill in the streets, and of course along the seafront, no traffic about in those days as nobody had any petrol did they, and we used to be marching up and down there and I remember one occasion we came out of a side turning up to the promenade and he said something, he said ‘hey up [?]’, and we didn’t know if he said right or left and we parted company like that you know, one line went left the others went right, and there was a group of women coming up there with their shopping bags laughing their socks off at us [laughs], and of course he bollocked us as they say for that [laughs], but he was actually a very nice bloke he didn’t mess us about too much, and er we did, we had lectures in the Spa which is a sort of dance hall place there isn’t it, and we were, and I think the main thing was getting us fit, we sometimes we’d go jogging in just of a pair of shorts and if you like a vest if you like, and I remember on one occasion, while we had it I don’t know we had a rifle, a bayonet, a tin hat and all that and a gas mask, we never used any of those things did we? Anyway we, they took us one day, I’ve forgotten the name of the place there, seaside on the coast near er, and we all got out and er we had to march to the far end which was probably three or four miles and then we this lorry followed us up, we had to chuck all our kit in the back of the lorry get stripped off and run back, [laughs] this is all part of the getting fit process, and we had lectures as I said in the Spa, er it’s surprising we did drill instruct, drill we had to do shooting, we then started using, do clay pigeon shooting which was shooting at moving targets which I think was more akin to aircrew than anything else wasn’t it, anyway we were you know there in all for about eight weeks, and then we got at the end of the time we, it happened to be Christmas, we were very, very, lucky, we were sent home we had a ticket wherever you were going to get home and then we had to go back to London, so I was home for Christmas so that was very nice, I had a full week at home, and then I was back to Boston Railway Station again and down to Kings Cross and we had to return, and again we had to report to the RTO, that’s the Rail Travel Officer, they had these offices on all the main stations to you know supervise troops travelling about telling them where to go and all that sort of thing, and this time we were put on a train we knew were we were going, er we were put on a train to Wales, and we rode at first of all, I think we got as far as Cardiff and we had to change onto a slow local train then and this was taking us to our final destination for that, we pulled up er, went through Barry, and er we eventually stopped on the little wayside station it was at the bottom of cutting and it was one of those places where there was only about one man there he was the station master, the signal, the porter, and everything else, and er we got off the train there and er we then marched up there was a corporal, there always corporals aren’t they, corporal met us, with all our kit and that we were marched up to the RAF Station at Saint Athan, this was where we were to be for the next, I don’t know seven or eight months. In the war time you know the courses get shortened, I think the engineer’s course at one time would probably be nearer eighteen months, at the time I got there it was down to about seven or eight months, and er, if you had er, some people had engineering experience like myself didn’t find it too difficult, but some of the lads had never touched it and they of course you know an exam about every fortnight and if you didn’t get on very well you got put back a week, and I think if you got put back more than twice you were kicked off the course [laughs]. Anyway we were there for, let me just get my book, I’d only really got to er we’d just arrived at Saint Athan hadn’t we, for our training, I didn’t realise then how long it would be but we actually, er training of flight engineers lasted about seven months, and it covered all aspects of the aircraft, we had to know a little bit about everything, we had to know about the hydraulics, I mean the undercarriage and the bomb doors and all that sort of thing are all hydraulic, so then we had to learn about brakes because they’re pneumatic, and we had to learn about the engines and how to get the best out of them and keep in in an eye in view the amount of fuel we were using, if you opened the engines up too much the fuel consumption went up drastically and if you did that too much you might think you hadn’t got enough fuel to get home with again [laughs], this is the sort of things you had to you know get used to, but this is what we were taught to do, we had at the end of it we had actually we had an exam about every couple of weeks and if anybody was not quite up to scratch they were put back and did that section over again and you could do that twice but if you did it more than twice you got chucked off the course for taking too long [laughs]. All in all I was at Saint Athan for about seven months, you can’t really go into detail about it, it’s too technical and too complicated, but we had a [unclear] a list of all the things we had to do anything mechanical or anything that worked was my option, and my most important job really was in a Lancaster you know you got four engines and you got six fuel tanks and normally the two sides of the aircraft are separate, there is a valve in the mains bar[?] where you can open so you can transfer fuel from one site to the other, [sighs] but normally you took off on the middle tank, there was a tank between the engine and the fuselage, another one between the two engines and the third one was out in the, out part of the wing, so you’ve got, your wings are full of petrol and the floor underneath you was full of bombs, it’s not a very good situation really to be in is it, you don’t really want to get hit, and er, the most important job I had to do was, ‘cos an aero engine uses a lot of fuel er, anywhere between about twelve hundred and fifty horsepower each engine, in fact to put it an easier way a Lancaster did about one mile to the gallon, which is pretty [unclear], not far is it, and if you had a full load of petrol you could go out somewhere there and back and do two thousand miles and that was about your limit, you always had to keep at least a hundred or nearly two hundred gallons er back for landing you don’t want to be landing on your last gasp of fuel do you, and when of course they were arranging operations they took the weight of the aircraft and er then they [coughs] I had to look at the plan and calculate how many miles it was there and back, shall we say if was probably fourteen hundred miles there and back, and without going into decimal places the Lancaster did about one mile to the gallon, so okay fourteen hundred miles you want fourteen hundred gallons of petrol and they gave you two hundred gallons extra that’s your safety margin, so if all goes well you should arrive back at base with two hundred gallons of petrol, but it does allow for the fact you might get delayed, you might have a head wind which might make it take a bit longer to get back home again, you might not be able to land at your own base because it’s probably fog bound, so you have the hours grace, and I remember of one occasion we had to, we came over, got over Britain and we set off, er the bomb aimer, sorry, the navigator gave the pilot his last course back to base, we hadn’t been going long before we had a radio call through to say that we couldn’t land at base because it was covered in fog, and er we were to land I think it was somewhere in Norfolk, anyway that’s fair enough so we made a slight alteration of course and we are heading towards this not long after that we got another message to say we couldn’t land, it was Langham in Norfolk, can’t land there it’s now fog bound as well, so we start to circle around and they said to stand by, so did a wide circle round, we went round a couple of times, and I said to all of them [unclear] ‘we soon want to be landing somewhere because we are getting down on fuel’, and almost at the same time the wireless op, the mid upper gunner came on the, on the intercom and said ‘I can see a glow in the sky skipper it might be FIDO’, you know fog dispersal, so we made our way over there and we’d been told to stand by but we never got any further instructions I think they were struggling to find us anywhere to land, so we went on and we circled round over this and your call log if you were in trouble you called dark here, that was your trouble, it mean’t you were in difficulties, and our, our call sign was suedecoat, aircraft was C-Charlie, so you called ‘darkie darkie from suedecoat charlie’ and we got an immediate call back the usual lady’s voice, WAFS, ‘are you over an airfield with FIDO burning?’, so we think we are because we could see the glow in the sky so we came down a bit lower and er we called em again and they gave us landing instructions, and it was quite, I say it was a bit scary really, because do you know what FIDO was made of there were pipes laid down by the side of the fuselage, the runway, not too close to the runway, they were blocked off at one end and then holes drilled, a bit crude really, holes drilled in them and at the upper end near the entrance to the runway was a pump and a fuel tank and they were pumping neat petrol into these, and I don’t know who did it some brave guy must have gone out and lit it probably used a flare or something like that, and they only did about half the length of the runway but when you got lower you could actually see the flames and you usual drill was, er ‘yes Charlie you are clear to land call down wind’ that’s when you are coming down wind, so we called ’Charlie down wind’, you’ve got your wheels down, got your flaps down, [?] down, you then turn and say ‘Charlie Roger call funnels’ and your lights from the high up looked like a funnel that tapered into the runway, so they guided you onto the runway, in this case it was the flames, so we got on funnels they called ‘Charlie funnels’ they said ‘Charlie [?] mission is a Charlie pancake’ that means land, so we landed and there was a bar of flames and when we went over the bloody aircraft went ugh like than [laughs], like a kick up the backside, because tremendous heat from these flames literally lifted the aircraft, anyway we came in and we landed, I had my fingers crossed ‘cos I knew we’d got some damage, I said to Luke[?]the skipper ‘I hope to Christ we haven’t got a flat tyre if we swing off into that lot it will be unfortunate’, anyway we landed all right we taxied to the end and er a vehicle met us there and we followed it round, they took us round into a spare dispersal and of course you went through your drill close your engines down everything else, shut everything off, and er you can’t really leave anything in the aircraft so we went out loaded up with our parachutes and everything else which, we were then taken to a room where we was briefed, debriefed, and we discovered that the aircraft there were Mosquitoes, because one or two of them took off in that lot to go and bomb, so that’s they were using the flares to guide them, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it, we heard this roaring come along, said ‘Christ it’s a Mosi’. Anyway we were debriefed, then we were given a meal and then we were given an armful of blankets and pointed toward a hangar, a Nissen hut, you go in there and there was Buckaroo [?] on the floor, it’s like dark brown lino on the floor usually isn’t it just so you can sweep it up, and you make your bed up and I think we was that ruddy tired, we just chucked the, we had three biscuits you know what biscuits are? Three padded squares that you put end to end, tuck a blank around it and that’s your base for your bed, I don’t know if we even bothered to do that we were that ruddy tired I think be then we just crashed out and went to sleep, we couldn’t get undressed ‘cos you’d nothing with you, trouble is when you got diverted like, you got no shaving kit, you got no ‘jamas or anything like that, you just had you were in what you were. Then we slept the sleep of the just there and next morning we went we found out, found the sergeants mess and had some breakfast, very much do it yourself isn’t it [laughs], and then we got, er we went to see, I think we went to see the CO or the squadron leader anyway, and he said ‘well you chaps look as if you are stuck here we can’t er, you’ve got some damage which your aircraft has got to be repaired before you can take it off again, you might even need an engine change’, and we discovered it was two days before Christmas and we knew we’d got Christmas festivities on at our base, ‘that’s bloody handy we are going to be stuck here over Christmas’, anyway our skipper went to see the adjutant and they had a bit of argy bargy with him and he came back and he said ‘we’re going home on the train’, we did we got [laughs] he’d got a , he’d got a ticket for the lot of us, so we the truck took us to the, I can’t remember where the nearest railway station was, um it might have been Cambridge even, I don’t know, I can’t remember now it’s a long long time ago. Anyway we got on there and we had to get on the train I think it took us to Norwich, then we had to go across to Peterborough, and then when we got to, we went through Boston and er we went back we got back to Grimsby, and then we had to get on a packed line from Grimsby to Elsham, now that railway train ran through Elsham that was still about three miles away from the camp, anyway we rung up and they come and picked us up, and you do, you don’t ‘cos we took our parachute with us and everything, and when you get on a train with your flying kit carrying your parachute you get some very funny looks off people [laughs], that was one of the most interesting things that ever happened to us, and anyway we had our ‘cos when you went on ops you emptied your pockets you’d no money, you’d nothing have you, you couldn’t even go in the sergeants mess and buy a pint as you’d no money. We had our Christmas there, and I, shows you in my book anyway, em I think we had Christmas and it was about four days after Christmas eventually one of our other crews flew us back to Graveley to pick our aircraft up, so we didn’t do anything for nearly a week [laughs] is that the sort of thing you’d be interested in?
MJ: Yes
SM: That’s a bit unusual and er.
MJ: Yes
SM: That was, we were halfway through a tour when we did that, but it’s just something that came to mind. I think er the first time we ever went out we got hit, I’m going backwards now. When you got the you’d finished your full training, ‘cos we did some further training after we got posted to a squadron and er we thought well we’d only done about nine and a half hours flying on a Lancaster, we did our ITW that’s interesting our heavy conversion[?} rather on Halifaxes, which wasn’t very good for me because I’d been trained to go on Lancs’ so I had to learn about Halifax a bit quick we did about sixty seven hours flying on heavy conversion unit[?} and then we went to Lancaster Finishing School and we went to Elsham we’d only nine and half hours flying on the Lancaster which wasn’t very much was it? We found out when we got there the reason was though because we’d, know you know what H2S is now the down [?] scanning radar and not all squadrons had it. The reason we went to the squadron was we were nearly there for nearly a fortnight before we did any operations because we’d never seen this apparatus before and the bomb aimer was the set operator so he had to learn all about the H2S and then we had to go on cross country flights using it to get the hang of it and get used to it so we were a fortnight really before we did any operations and of course we eventually we were ready [laughs], and that was I think it was the 14th October 1944, and er, the first, did I had already mentioned when we got, no I haven’t, um, so no I was going to say we got hit on our first trip didn’t I. We went our first trip was to Duisburg and er over the target we were going lined up you got, once your bomb aimer has taken over you can’t diverge you have to do what he says, he’ll say ‘left, left, steady’ and ‘right, right, steady’ and then when you dropped your bombs you also drop a photo flash and you take a photograph, well of course the photograph doesn’t want to happen until the bombs have hit the ground does it, so you going along straight and level over there you’re being shot at but you can’t do anything about it because you have got to keep straight and level and er then a light comes on on the dashboard telling you that the photographs been taken, and then you can open the throttle, put the nose down and get the hell out of it [laughs], and while we was over Duisburg I was also we used to have another job had to do was throwing bundles of Window, you know strips of silver paper, there was a chute in the nose of the aircraft and this stuff came in bundles with a bit of string looped through a brown paper wrapper, pull the string, tore the wrapper and you put it out the chute and it scattered all over and it caused blips on the radar which they couldn’t pick out the aircraft from the rubbish if you like, and I was down in the, down in the nose doing that, and of course er this pilot shouts out he said ‘come and look at this engine’, and I scrambled up and there were flames coming up out of the side of the end [?] port engine, and you remember to do your drill, the first thing you do is shut the fuel off, close the throttle, wait while the engine slows down then you know what I mean by feathering it, you know what I mean by feathering it , but if you don’t feather it the windmill will keep turning, so you have to turn the blades of the air screw so that the edge on to the wind so it’s stop turning and then and only then you can fire, fire extinguishers in the engine cowling, there’s two extinguishers in each engine fastened on the back plate and er you just press a button and er ‘cos there was flames coming out of the engine but we didn’t know what it was at the time and it went out, but we discovered afterwards if it had been petrol it probably wouldn’t have gone out, but a piece of shrapnel had gone through the side of the engine, smashed a hole the size of my palm in the engine casting and of course the oil spilled out and got on the red hot manifold [?] it was the oil that was burning fortunately for us not petrol, so that was our first time out we came back on three engines [laughs]. Just by way of introduction. Switch it off a minute. - Is it ready?
MJ: Yes.
SM: Well on this occasion I was asked to speak at a meeting which was a fundraiser aimed at raising funds for the new spire to go up on Canwick Hill, and I said I was wondering really what I could talk to you about, something I’ve often been asked about was what was it like to fly in a bombers stream at night, I said when you took off of course from your station you circled round over your own base until you had a time to set course, and I said there were several in er problems arose there because you’ve got people going right and people met head on an all this and collisions, so we had a special arrangement where we went from our base to Goole to Crowle to Scunthorpe and then back, all the aircraft in that area went round this big circuit instead of meeting other head on and that kind of thing and when it was your time to set course the navigator would tell you and you’d cut across and er so you set course at the right time, and well on this occasion I’m thinking about we often flew down to Reading and of course if there was no enemy activity over England you could keep your navigation lights on, you’ve got a red and a green light on your wing tip and a tail light that’s all you have got in’it, you don’t have any headlights or anything on car on aircraft, I said to you we flew down to Reading we changed course and then we [coughs], excuse me, we headed towards the coast and as we crossed the coast everybody starts to switch their lights off ‘cos you going in to over enemy territories and over the sea, so as up to then you can see one another ‘cos you’ve got lights on, now it’s all gone dark and it’s dark outside, I said the nearest thing I can give it to you is, you imagine you are driving down a motorway and everybody has their lights on and all of after time they start switching their lights off, first this one and then that one, and you finish up you are still bombing along there at about seventy miles an hour and now you can’t see one another, and I said you’ve got your eyes peeled you are looking in the dark because in an aircraft you you’re going a good deal faster er even with a bomb load on you probably cruising at about hundred sixty five or hundred and seventy mile an hour, and I said you find that er we used to have, I would sit beside the pilot, the pilot’s looking out in the front and over to his wing tip, I’m taking that side from the front round to the wing tip, the gunners are taking a quarter of the sky each at the back and if he is not doing anything else the wireless operator probably stood in the astrodome he’s keeping a look out as well, so you’ve got have five pairs of eyes looking out, and I said you see people sometimes coming when you get to a turning point everybody doesn’t always turn exactly the same you find somebody drifting towards so you have to go up a bit and he goes underneath you and then you turn and then you probably find you are chopping somebody else off, I said it was a bit scary, it was, that’s about as much as I told ‘em [laughs], and that was gonna’ last the rest of the trip wasn’t it, you didn’t put your lights on again until you were back over friendly territory at er it was a bit scary really the er you can imagine if it [unclear]. Anyway I er – I think that’s about it, was that any good? I remember being asked at a meeting some time ago to speak for a short amount of time I was at a loss to know what to talk about and I suddenly thought about to mention what it was like to fly in a column of aircraft at night, there could be three or four hundred aircraft all going to the same place, and er there would be spaced out of course, each aircraft had a time to be over the target and that sort of thing and it really meant that a raid that was gonna’ last er probably twenty minutes the aircraft flying at hundred eighty miles an hour roughly I mean, twenty minutes so that means that you’ve got a string of aircraft probably sixty miles long and that’s [perfectly fine until you get to a turning point when you find that er you’ve got you’ve got no lights on of course and er you might see a little bit of exhaust flame, but they carefully put some covers over the exhaust because it gave your position away to the fighters but also it mean’t so you couldn’t see one another either [laughs], it’s do debatable which is the worst situation, but getting along talking about what it was like at night if we were flying over England you could keep your navigation lights on providing there was no enemy action and I think on one occasion we flew down to Reading and then turned across head towards the coast as we got approached the coast everybody switched their lights off and of course you could see one another with your lights on so now we’re going along, your flying along at about hundred and sixty, hundred and eighty miles an hour and you can’t really see where you’re going, and on top of that you can’t see the other people who are going with you, er all you might get is a flicker of light now and then from something and er and I know it was the case of the pilot looking out the front and across to his wing tip and I’d be doing sitting at the side of him providing I wasn’t doing anything else keeping a look out, the gunners had got a quarter of the sky each er which they’re looking out for aircraft coming up behind you and er[coughs] excuse me – getting lost – I’m sorry I’ve lost my track.
MJ: That’s all right.
SM: The nearest thing I can tell you to flying along in a group of aircraft at night with no lights on, I want you to imagine that you probably driving down a motorway at night and everything is lit up as usual, headlights, sidelights, a bit of street lighting, you imagine what it would be like if suddenly the all the lights went off gradually, first one switches their lights off and then another, and you finish and you are still buzzing along probably sixty seventy miles an hour but now you can’t see one another and it was exactly like that in the air, unless somebody got very close to you, you couldn’t see them you had to keep a really good lookout, and er it was certainly the worst point was when you reached the point where you’re changed direction and you’ve got people cutting across the front of you and you went up a bit and let them go underneath or dived under or went underneath and so you could keep an eye on them and it really was quite exciting, never muind exciting it was ruddy dangerous really wasn’t it [laughs], but er that was what it was like, and er you had everybody provided everybody kept on time it wasn’t too bad but it was still a crush when something like three or four hundred aircraft all going to pass over the target in the space of about twenty minutes and er it really I think that was one of the most dangerous things apart from enemy action of course which er hopefully you’d avoid. – You asked me what I did on VE Day as it happens I was home on leave and of course as you can imagine there was great excitement everywhere and add to that we were very fortunate in Boston that the annual May Fair was there and of course this gave us something to do and I remember me meeting up with some of my friends I mean er a lot of them were away in the Far East and all over the place but there always seemed to be somebody you could meet up with, we’d got a couple of pals and then we got along with some er local people we had also one of my pals who was in the Navy joined us and we came across a I think it was a sergeant in the American Air Army and he seemed to be on his own a bit so we adopted him as well, and you know how it goes on these nights you [unclear] you pick up until you’ve got a little group don’t you and I remember particularly that we er went into one or two of the pubs and of course beer was always short in those days it wasn’t very long before they ran dry we came out of there and went somewhere else, there was a lot of toing and froing in that respect and by the end of the evening we had er several sufficiently to put is in a good humour I’ll put it that way, and I do remember particularly towards the end of the evening we had the sudden idea that we would swap clothes and I think I finished up the day with this American chaps tunic I think he was a sergeant actually, and one of my pals had got his sailors hat on, and we were all mixed up and we were going round, it was really very jovial and thoroughly I think we had a jolly good time and nobody considered the fact that we were improperly dressed or anything [laughs] silly like that it was just a jolly old night and a really memorable occasion, and it’s not the sort of thing that it happens every day very often is it?
MJ: No.
SM: Was that all right?
MJ: Sidney Marshall let me thank you on behalf of the International Bomber Command History Project, this is the end of the recording taken by Michael Jeffries on the date of the 8th May 2015 at three thirty. Thank you very much.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Syd Marshall
Format
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00:44:58 audio recording
Type
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Sound
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Creator
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Mick Jeffery
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-05-08
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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eng
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Pending review
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AMarshallS150508
Description
An account of the resource
Sidney Marshall grew up in Lincolnshire and worked as an agricultural engineer. He volunteered for the Royal Air Force at eighteen and trained as a flight engineer. On his first operation to Duisburg one of his Lancaster's engines was hit by shrapnel and they returned on three engines. Returning from another operation they had to divert and land at a station in Norfolk with the help of FIDO, as the aircraft was nearly out of fuel. He also discusses what it was like to fly at night over Germany as part of a stream of hundreds of aircraft, and his experiences of VE day celebrations in Boston.
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Wales
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Duisburg
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
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1944-10-14
Contributor
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Jackie Simpson
103 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
FIDO
flight engineer
H2S
Halifax
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Mosquito
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF St Athan
recruitment
training
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/625/8895/APeckE150708.1.mp3
2334991e37d6d1fee23c0e693d5cd7de
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/625/8895/PPeckE1508.2.jpg
37e199c70bc1aa7c8a7bef490b07177f
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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Peck, Ted
Edward Peck
E Peck
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Peck, E
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Ted Peck (Royal Air Force). He flew operations with 622 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Date
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2015-07-08
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.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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MJ: It’s on.
ETBP: The name is Edward Peck. Everybody calls me Ted and have done ever since I was fourteen years of age so I’ve got used to it by now. My family called me Eddie which I didn’t like very much so I’m quite happy with Ted and I’m an ex RAF warrant officer who flew in Lancaster aircraft. Thirty operations without a scratch that’s showing. I’m ninety years of age and still fairly active which I’m very thankful for and I do get to meet some nice people in talking about my days in the RAF and Mick just happens to be one of them. I suppose the first thing that worried me when I was introduced to flying in the Lancaster that the engineer’s handbook says that all flight engineers should be taught to fly straight and level. So once we were on the squadron, 622 squadron I reported to the link trainer section and I had ten hours, not every day, ten hours just straight, a couple of hours a day maybe in the link trainer and eventually I was, I didn’t have to have an examination or anything it was just the fact that the instructor was satisfied that I could do what it said in my handbook and that was fly straight and level. So at the first opportunity we were flying on a a course at, over near Skegness on the bombing range and coming back from the bombing range the pilot said, ‘Right. It’s your turn in my seat and I almost froze but bravado being what it is he got out of his seat and I got back in it. He watched me for a little while and after, after perhaps about five or ten minutes he just gave me the thumbs up to tell me that I was ok, doing fine and he started to walk to every other crew station in the aircraft. So he started off with the bomb aimer in his, in the front, the navigator just behind me, wireless operator, mid upper gunner and they all said, ‘Who’s flying and the answer came back to them, ‘Ted.’ And then he went down to the rear gunner and he was a lad from Gibraltar and he was a little bit, he’d got a little bit of, I think, Spanish flare in him somewhere because the skipper banged on the back doors of the turret and the turret door, they slid them open from inside and said to the skipper, ‘Who’s flying?’ He said, ‘It’s Ted.’ And I can’t put on this tape what the, what followed because we understand from the skipper that it wasn’t printable. Anyway, he came back, back up the fuselage and he was giving me the thumbs up again and I got out of the seat and let him do his own job but I’d done the part of the training which was, which I was detailed to do. I could fly straight and level. So that was done so that at least somebody was close to the skipper. The pilot. If he was injured I could have taken over and flown straight and level but for how long I don’t know.
[machine paused]
ETBP: I suppose my interest in the RAF started when I was just turned sixteen and I wanted to join the Air Training Corps so I asked my father’s permission to go and volunteer in the, in the ATC and he refused and I was rather put out. But through the good offices of one or two uncles I managed to get them to talk to my dad and they, he afterwards said that I could join so one Sunday morning I joined the 1014 squadron ATC who were based at North Weald airport, air, air airfield and we used to go up there perhaps on a Sunday and if there was any flying going on it was great to see the squadron of Spitfires often taking part in the Battle Britain, taking off from this particular airport, airfield, all in vic of three formations, shining in the sun and you never knew how many came back so that was, that was a good sight. But the ATC did me, did me proud they really tuned me up for joining the RAF to the extent that I didn’t have to think twice when it came to drill parade or putting kit out for inspection so I had no problems at all with that. The only problem I had was if there was a swimming lesson going on somewhere and the ATC were involved in it because I was a non-swimmer and I didn’t like the water. I had an unfortunate thing happened when I was at school. In the swimming baths we were all sitting on, around the edge of the swimming baths and we got the order to jump in. I wasn’t the biggest of lads so I was a bit slow in jumping in. The instructor came behind me with a bass broom and pushed me but I don’t have many last laughs but I had the last laugh then because he had to come in to get me out.
[machine paused]
ETBP: We were talking about swimming a few minutes ago and I can remember, my wife was an ex-WAAF and, my late wife was an ex-WAAF and I can always remember the unit that we were on we used to have a little meet at one of the local pubs and all the lads and the lasses got together for a few drinks and back to, back to camp again but the route back to camp was, on this particular station, the quickest way was to go by the canal tow path and I’d had as many drinks as I could carry satisfactorily and I was at the end of a great big long queue all walking single file down the tow path and there was a young lady behind me and all of a sudden she came up beside me and said, ‘You’re not very steady and if, if you fall in the canal I will have to come and pull you out so I’d better get hold of your arm.’ And that belonged, that started something that lasted for fifty eight years.
[machine paused]
MJ: It’s on now so.
ETBP: Yeah. I suppose that the one of the things that in my flying days, in the early flying days we were still under training and we were flying a Stirling with 1657 Heavy Conversion Unit. That was immediately before we went on to training with the Lancaster and we were doing our final training flight. We went down to the south coast, along the south coast and up the coast of Cornwall and we got a little way up the coast and we were hit by a most terrific storm. It was really, it was black, the lightning was horrible. We’d got was what was known as st Elmo’s fire around the propellers and some of the instruments weren’t working too well, the flying instruments and we were in real difficulties and there’s, so much so that all of us were looking out for some reference point to get our bearings again but it was very very difficult and the rear gunner suddenly piped up on the intercom that he could see a red light in the sky and this was amazing. Why is there, why can we see a red light in the sky? And without, without having told the pilot what to do he, he absolutely put the engines in full power, pulled the stick back and we just, I don’t know what speed we were doing but it was a good speed for a Stirling and we gained some height and when he, when we got to the top of the climb he called Mayday which was, it’s a call for immediate help and we got a call back from St Eval which was an RAF base in Cornwall and we flew in to St Eval and found out that we must have been within feet of being in the sea. It was so, this red light was actually on the top of a cliff.
[machine pause]
ETBP: During the course of training the pilot had got another pilot with him who was a trained bomber pilot who was doing a course of instruction and we were, we were flying within the, within the bounds of UK. It was my job when the pilot was wanting to land was to make sure that the undercarriage was down and also the tail wheel was down, that used to, that used to be my job when it was coming in to land, or in the circuit. So one day we were up there going through the drill, coming in to land, the skipper calls for wheels down so I put the wheels down and then I had to run as the aircraft was coming down. I had to run back to the tail and wind the tail wheel down. Now, that took about twelve turns on a crank handle and I chased back up the aircraft, called up on the intercom again, ‘Three wheels locked down skipper.’ A voice came back which wasn’t the pilot’s voice, it was, it was the instructor and it said, he said, ‘You’ll have to be quicker than that engineer. I’m just about to put the wheels on the tarmac.’ [laughs] It’s surprising that perhaps not many people realise how a bomber command crew is made up and how ad hoc it can be. When, when I was ready for joining a crew the station that we were based on took you through final crew training for each of the, each of the crew stations but when it came to forming crews it was just completely ad hoc. We were all, everybody was told to mingle outside of the room where we were taking our final tests and we were outside in the nice June sunshine and everybody was talking to everybody else until somebody came, one of the officers came along and said, ‘Right. It’s time to form crews. Please do not re-enter the building until you have a crew of seven. Will all pilot’s start to form their crews.’ And from that on, that point on it was, it only seemed like minutes before there were little bunches of seven people all together. You never knew whether you were going to get on with everybody or whether everybody could speak, basically speak the same language and it was, it was completely hit and miss and it worked wonderfully well. Nobody could understand it but it was done purely on the choice of the first man. And when I, when I was selected our wireless operator was chasing around looking for an engineer who was spare and wanted to be part of a crew and he spotted me and the first thing he said was, ‘You looking for a crew mate?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Come on I’ll take you to meet our lads,’ and that’s how it started.
[machine paused]
ETBP: During my time on 622 squadron we had a change of squadron commanders. The, the group the wing commander that was in charge for most of the time I was there was a chap called Wing Commander I C K Swale. S W A L E. And he was, by all reports, one of the finest wing commanders that they had at Mildenhall in war years. He would make sure that all the newcomers, air crew newcomers were ok and that his officers knew that he was a chap that would stand no shilly shallying and wanted the job done according to the text book and his attitude towards us was that he immediately got his wish. Unfortunately, or more fortunately for him he’d reached the stage where further promotion took him away from the squadron and we had a new wing commander come who was a totally different kettle of fish altogether. We were sorry to see him go so the only way we could express our gratitude for the way he’d looked after us was by giving his time to attend a little party that we set up and he agreed to serve all the drinks. So one of the, one of the mess halls was decked out with decorations. Union Jacks. Blondies. His name, he was, he was a fair haired chap so we called him Blondie and he’d got a big blonde moustache to go with it. So that, he turned up in his full dress uniform and was immediately it was immediately suggested that he might go back to his quarters and dress more comfortably. So he came back in, still in, still in reasonable dress but with his shirt sleeves rolled up and he stayed until everybody had drunk enough or [laughs] or nobody else wanted serving with drinks and then he went back to his quarters but he was, he was a great man and the pictures show that there was a lot of feeling, a lot of big smiles that didn’t indicate that they were glad to see him go but they were happy for him.
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command Archive I’d like to thank Warrant Officer Ted Beck for his recording on the 8th of July 2015 at his home. My name is Michael Jeffery and this is another thank you from us all.
Dublin Core
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Interview with Ted Peck
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Mick Jeffery
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2015-07-08
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Sound
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APeckE150708, PPeckE1508
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Pending revision of OH transcription
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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00:23:23 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Description
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Ted joined 1014 Squadron Air Training Corps at North Weald, then became a flight engineer and warrant officer. He flew 30 operations for 622 Squadron.
Ted describes an incident which occurred in bad weather in a Stirling at the 1657 Heavy Conversion Unit before he trained on Lancasters. He also discusses the ad hoc nature of forming crews and a well-respected wing commander at RAF Mildenhall.
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Great Britain
England--Suffolk
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Sally Coulter
1657 HCU
622 Squadron
aircrew
crewing up
flight engineer
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
RAF Mildenhall
RAF North Weald
Stirling
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/603/8872/PMarchantT1501.1.jpg
7633a576a05d3d628f8ab4f5aab3c311
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/603/8872/AMarchantT150715.2.mp3
a088003f0ff9542450c26653477e41c9
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Marchant, Thomas
Thomas Chas Marchant
T C Marchant
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Marchant
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Thomas Marchant (1604589 Royal Air Force). He flew operations in Transport Command and Bomber Command as a flight engineer with 101, 7, and 582 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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My name is Tom Marchant I was a Flight Engineer on Transport Command as well as Bomber Command. (slight pause) You may wonder why and how I got to be a Flight Engineer. I was only a young lad eighteen or nineteen , nineteen when I was actually operating, eighteen when I actually joined up. I couldn’t wait to get to fly. Now if I go back, I saw the Zeppelins fly over and I saw other aircraft flying around and I always wanted to be up there. I knew that as a working class lad from a working class family I could never afford to fly. I used to make my own aircraft, model aircraft, that flew from plans and with balsa wood and tissue paper and I used to fly my own aircraft and used to wish I could go up with them. I am just dying to fly, I wanted to fly. So actually when the war came along I was, em, I was er, what? fifteen or sixteen when it started and I couldn’t wait till my eighteenth birthday so I could volunteer for the RAF.
I hadn’t much education, just a basic education and I left school at fourteen without any qualifications, because I used to play about and play Jack the Lad and all the rest of it. So I thought I wouldn’t have a chance to get in the RAF but I thought I would have a go. I went, I was about seventeen and a half. I went and thought I could get away with saying I was eighteen. They started by asking me questions , how many degrees in a circle and things like that and of course I didn’t even know how many degrees there were in a circle. So I thought I had to do something about it. Suddenly I woke up, I went and got books from the library, I bought books, which you could do in these days for aircrew instruction and I got my head in these books and really started to educate myself and by the time I went, em, when I was just gone eighteen I volunteered again. I knew a lot more than when I first went and to my utter joy I was actually accepted to be aircrew. You can’t believe, to me it was almost like saying you can go to heaven and I just couldn’t believe it. Anyway em, I was eventually called up after about three to four months and em, (pause) I was sent to em, er, a camp under canvass, somewhere outside Warrington. From there we went to er, Blackpool. We went into digs at Blackpool which of course there were plenty going on in these days no em, holidaymakers, so that was the place and I went to Squires Gate airfield where I was trained, say training, er.
I ought to go back really because I did not have any formal education it was a problem getting a job. My parents weren’t very, they weren’t very helpful to me. I had a stepmother because my real mother died of consumption as it was called in these days, eighteen months after I was born. So I had a stepmother who never had any other children so I was a loner in effect, which in a way was a good thing because, em, I learnt to stand on my own feet so that helped in one way. When I went into the RAF I was quite happy to be amongst em, other lads which I didn’t have very much in my younger days em.
Any way well get back to, we went to Squires Gate and I was enlisted first was accepted as a em, Wireless Operator Gunner em, but before I was actually called up and joined the RAF I was re delegated to be a Flight Engineer because em, the four engined aircraft, bombers, were taking two Pilots and they were loosing two Pilots in one go, so they introduced the idea of Flight Engineer and I just had a basic training at Squires Gate airfield. While I was there I had to be on guard duties and I was out on the airfield on guard duty em, with a rifle and all the rest of it and I saw these ATC kids getting in an a a Anson aircraft and being flown off. So I said to the Sergeant who was on charge of us when I came off duty “can I get in there and get a flight, I have never been up in an aeroplane and I am supposed to be a trainee aircrew?” and he said “yeah you go over and join them.” So I did and I had my first er, en, flight in an Anson which are normally used for training Wireless Operators and people like that. Anyway we took off from Squires Gate and we flew round Preston Cathedral, I’ll never forget it and it was the first, I was on cloud nine. Anyway so I had more impetus in my er, my studies and I eventually, after I did my square bashing at Blackpool and er, em, the introduction to well what you call engineering. I think we filed a few bits of metal and whatnot and were shown bits of engines.
Anyway I went to St Athan where all Flight Engineers went to I understand. I er, em we learnt a bit more there I suppose and then I was passed out as a Flight Engineer.I couldn’t believe it, it was incredible really from being a hall boy in private service, scrubbing floors and then, then eventually footman in private service serving meals to people I’m suddenly in the RAF, I’m flying. I can’t put over, I can’t even think how it affected me, I just couldn’t believe it. I didn’t care if I was going to get shot at. I was only nineteen and em, I just couldn’t wait em, and eventually I passed all the Flight Engineer training and I was posted to an operational squadron. Oh no, sorry, go back. Was posted to an OTU Operational Training Unit at Dishforth where we flew in Halifaxes at first and then we flew in Lancasters, em. I think I’m missing something else out here. Of course we had to join up with a crew who had been flying Wellingtons,er, which is just a five crew aircraft and,er, this crew before they could go onto four engine aircraft had to pick up their,er, mid upper gunner and Flight Engineer and I don’t know how it was sorted out. We all got together and we got together and formed our crew and I had,em, I had an Australian pilot,(slight pause) no we had a Canadian navigator later on. So we had an Australian pilot and all the rest of us were British, English er, em, then we went onto Dishforth where we did our training on Halifaxes and then Lancasters. I just fell in love with the Lancaster, I was loving every minute of it, absolutely loving it. We went on cross country and I, it, I can’t describe. I’ve always loved flying, always will do eh, to get into the air and got through the clouds and then at night time you go above the clouds and you see the brilliant stars. . I never forget the stars that are in sky, you never see them now. Although he was an Australian he wasn’t your archetypical Australian, he was a sober sort of lad he didn’t drink and he didn’t smoke, all the rest of us did em, but that was his strength in a way, he was very level headed and he was very and he was strong as an ox. We was very lucky. I think it helped a lot, you have got to have a lot of luck but you have to have a certain amount of skill and he as we started flying with him, we got to know him and put our trust in him and he was a very good pilot.
Anyway comes our first op, all slightly nervous and apprehensive. I remember it well it was to the Happy Valley as they called the Ruhr in those days, far from happy for some and em Gelsenkirchen we went to, industrial town in the heart of the Ruhr. We did get shot up a bit, we got a little bit of flack holes and em, er, one of the pipe lines got broken but it was nothing much, no problems, all the engines working properly and we got back ok. That was a start of a series of raids on Germany, they were all on Germany I didn’t get sent abroad at all. So we went on, from 101 squadron this time from Ludford Magna we used to call it Mudford Magna because it was carved out of the Lincolnshire Wolds and made into an aerodrome not long before we got there and it was mud. I always remember the hut we were given, we were given hut number something or other and when we got there, there was a big painting of a chop, chopper there and we all knew what chop meant well you can imagine that did not inspire us very much. Anyway it turned out not to be true for us anyway. We quickly learned that a few people had been in there and not come back again, it all helped to make you cheerful when you went on you first op I suppose. Em, we survived the first op which was Gelsenkirchen that I have said and we went on. The next really impressive one was Hamburg, now Hamburg was the one where there was a fire storm. The first fire storm that was created and that was done I think on the first raid. There were three raids on Hamburg and we went on all of them and I always remember the one because the met said there was a front and it would clear Hamburg before we got there but we all knew what met was in those days they did not have satellites in the sky em, it was just by guess and by God to a certain extent. Anyway when we were approaching Hamburg on the second night er, we couldn’t get above the clouds and er, we could see sheet lightning and all sorts of lightning, anyway Bob decided to press on er, and we started getting lightning flashes right across from one engine to another, big flashes it was absolutely frightening, much more frightening than flack, em, electric lights going all around the canopy. It really was frightening and we still pressed on but we and we got into this culo, cumulous nimbus we started getting thrown all over the place.Bob decided to jettison the bombs and turn for home, but when he opened the bomb doors and we dropped we were thrown sideways and the bombs dented up the bomb bay doors and so we got quite a bit of draft in the aircraft going back. Anyway we survived and we got back home again (slight laugh) and that was another experience with something different that the sky can throw at you, probably more frightening than flak actually.
Eh, anyway the next one, the next sort of notable one we went to was Peenemunde, which was er, its up on the Baltic, on the side of the Baltic where the Germans were developing a rocket, eh, rockets which were eventually going to hit us later on. As opposed to the, eh, and the V1s which were the buzz bombs that went brrrrrrrr, you could hear them coming, I was in London when they first started using them. Anyway they were developing rockets there which were going to be the first rockets that anyone had used er, in warfare and this Peenemunde place was the place where they were er, developing them. We didn’t know this, we, it was highly top secret we weren’t told that this was a rocket place, we were told that it, that they were developing new types of radar which could home onto us. A story which eh, we all swallowed but it made us very determined to get of this place em, because it would make it easier for them to shoot us down, that was the sort of story we were given. We were attacking it in moonlight, it was the first trip we’d been in moonlight, we didn’t normally fly in moonlight and em, er , we were going to bomb it around six or seven thousand feet which was a long way lower than we normally bomb, from normally twenty one thousand feet and em, a full moon but the Germans didn’t really know that we knew about this place I don’t think and it wasn’t very heavily defended, there was just one or two searchlights. Er, I did a picture of this which shows one searchlight which is pretty well accurate. Anyway that was a reasonable success, it wasn’t as big a success as they thought, it did get rid of a few people and and it did slow up their production of these weapons for about five or six months. They eventually moved it all to a place in Germany, underground. Er, em, anyway then we started to what has been called the Battle of Brit, Berlin and we went to Berlin and er Nuremberg. I’m just going to read you from my Log quickly. We went to Berlin, Berlin, Manheim, Munich, Hanover, Munich again and then, and then after that we volunteered to go onto Pathfinders because I hadn’t really mentioned it, but our Navigator at that time wasn’t really up to the job. He took us back over London once from one of the raids and we got, we saw balloons going past us. The Mid Upper Gunner said “Hi skip I have just seen a big balloon” and we were amongst the London barrage balloons and ah, anyway I just remembered, that was frightening that was, anyway, full boost, full throttle ‘cause we were starting to come down for base. Anyway we thought if we volunteered for Pathfinders the Navigator wouldn’t be up to it and we were right. We landed up with a Cambridge educated whizz kid, little, we used to call him Brem. He was a little fellow but he was a fantastic navigator and I think that is another reason that we perhaps survived when we did. So we were lucky to have this navigator and eventually we went to Berlin, we actually went there fifteen times but we set off times but em, on two occasions we had engine problems or we had some sort of problem which made it not really feasible to carry on, so, so.
When we joined Pathfinders of course we had to do extra navigation, we had to do a lot of cross countries at night time and I used to love these cross countries jomits because we could see all the stars and on odd occasions we would see the Northern Lights. Oh, and going back when we went to Peenemunde we went right up north and we could see the lights of Sweden, Stockholm or is it Oslo, my geography. Anyway we could see the lights in Swindon(think he meant Sweden), I had forgotten that. Talking about the Northern Lights of course they are fantastic thing em, so I was still enjoying my flying. I was scared wittless actually over the Target but the target areas themselves were fascinating, there’s flares, there’s searchlights there’s puffs of black smoke all over the sky from flak, it’s, I’ve done paintings of, of raids but you can’t capture it, you really can’t capture it. The sight is incredible and em, er as far as firework shows they leave me cold, I’ve seen the biggest firework show on earth and I don’t know what else I have to say. You see, other than the fact that being aircrew I didn’t have to work on aircraft. The ground crew had a horrible job they had to patch up the aircraft when they came back and when they were at the, on the eh (pause) the perim, eh “what’s off the perimeter?” (someone suggests dispersal) dispersal, they had to work on dispersal points in all weathers. Freezing cold in the winter and we were tucked up in bed then. I mean providing you didn’t get shot down or you didn’t get injured and you came home safely, it was a dawdle. You just em, got scared to death on the op but when you were nineteen, (laugh) “that was a long time ago” it’s all an adventure er, em, it’s exciting in a way. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve been em, but can you imagine as a nineteen year old lad who has had a very boring life before and dying for something different, that I got it in mega bucks and it was a great. Em, and I am sorry to say this, to me, ok there were things that you tend to overlook. The odd nasty things that happen and discomfort in nissen huts and er, that sort of thing but to me I, I, just loved it. I’m sorry but that is the way I say it, I can understand how lots of other aircrew didn’t and they had a terrible time and when I see and read about other peoples’ experiences er, I had a walk in the park really in comparison.
Anyway on the last trip we had was what we thought was going to be a dawdle, which was marshalling yards just outside Paris. This was on the day, the night, the night, of D day and we were bombing marshalling yards and lots of other people were bombing gun emplacements on the south, the north French coast and that sort of thing, but our job was to blow up this marshalling yard just outside Paris called Juvisy . We were Master em, going to be acting Master Bomber which meant we did Master Bomber em er, a few times once you got well into Pathfinder. Being a Master Bomber you direct the bombing and you stay over the target till it all, till it’s all over and telling people not to bomb certain TI’s or certain markers. There wasn’t much doubt about this, it was well lit up and we again. It was one of those low level attacks I think we went in at six or eight thousand feet and I can remember seeing em,er, trucks going up in the air and whatnot and I did feel for any French railway workers down there which I’m sure there were, but that’s war. Anyway we thought that’s great we’re on our way home and we just about left the target when suddenly this ME110 appeared right up beside us, incredible, and before the Mid Upper Gunner could peel round on him he just peeled of. Of course after that we were waiting for the coup de gras. We thought and Bob really started throwing it about like the Spitfire he always wanted to fly. He was a real beefy bloke and he started throwing it about and em, we started doing this for about twenty minutes or so and we thought we hadn’t seen him again and we settled down again and he was just doing a bit of a weave and suddenly, pow! We got hit, feel everything juddering and em, we suddenly went into a dive. He’d hit the, he’d hit the elevators, the Rear Gunner, very lucky chap, he survived. He said “all the elevators have been hit” well we didn’t have to be told that(slight laugh)we felt that. The plane went into a bloody dive and I thought “bloody hell we’ve had it now.” Anyway old Bob being a beefy bloke he really held it back and we tried em, what did we try. Anyway we used the trimmer but it didn’t make any difference em, er, I was helping him pull it back and I remember I had my tool, all Flight Engineers had a tool bag with them, don’t know what they were supposed to do with them half the time. We weren’t going to crawl out onto the engine and start doing things. Anyway eh, I got a piece of thin nylon rope in my tool bag, I don’t know how it be or was there. I don’t know why I should carry this but I had it and we tied er, we tied, or tied a piece of it round one of the circles in the formers of the aircraft. There a lots of holes of course and we put it in there and put it round the yolk, round the upright part of the control column and that gave us quite a good purchase. Then just as we sorted that out we noticed the outboard starboard engine had started to smoke and flames started to come out of it so we eh, feathered that, pressed the fire extinguisher and fortunately the fire extinguisher worked, which it apparently didn’t on Paul that Just Jane from East Kirby. Anyway our fire extinguisher worked so everything was, but of course when all this was going on we were expecting to get the coup de grass, we though he would be back to finish us of. Somehow or other our luck as a crew held and we got back to Manston which is right on the edge of the Kent coast. Em and the landing of course, we weren’t sure if the wheels would go down em but em, he tried the flaps and the flaps worked and he tried then just before, he said “we could do a belly landing if necessary” with the wheels up and everything. We tried the undercarriage and incredibly the undercarriage worked, then the other tricky bit was the pressure required to flare out and hold it on a proper approach er angle and flare out. It wasn’t one of Bobs best landings but it was, you walked, they say if you walk away from a landing that it, your lucky if you walk away from a landing that’s a good landing, and it was. After that we should have done another couple of trips to make up for the two that were aborted but they stood us down and we all went our different ways.
I eventually went up to Lossiemouth and I em er I did instruction on dinghy drill which fortunately I never had to do myself but I had to learn how to do dinghy, I had to learn dinghy drill and then I showed it to operational people, OTU people who were going to have to go on ops. Well we never had that when I went to OTU. But em.and that was at Lossiemouth swimming pool, I always remember that, I enjoyed that. I got to fly, I still wanted to fly they had Wellingtons up there I think and they had other aircraft and I used to get flights er, when they were doing test flights, on any aircraft I would go up in it, I still loved flying, always have done and em er. After that I had to revert to what I was supposed to be which was an Engineer, but all they gave me was changing all the plugs on a Napier Sabre which was about forty eight plugs and that kept you busy for a bit. They didn’t let me loose on anything that was em very important. Em but and I always wanted to and I kept applying to go flying again and I got a job on transport, I got posted to Transport Command and it was a period when we thought we might have to, oh no sorry, the Far Eastern war was still going on. The Japanese war the er the Yanks hadn’t er yet bombed with the Atom Bomb and the Japs was still fighting and we was going to have to send Big Wigs out to the Far East and they were going to be flown over by a civilised version of the Lancaster, called the Lancastrian and for that you had to learn how to load certain loads. It was like civil aircraft, you had to load the aircraft properly with certain loads and whatnot, so we had to do a course on that. Then we eventually flew a Lancastrian and only a month or so after that after we got into this the Japanese war just stopped. The er the Yanks dropped there second Atom Bomb and they surrendered and so there was no more use for these Lancastrians to go out to the Far East.
So then I got, then was trouble flaring, possible trouble with Russia because they had overtaken Berlin and all the rest of it and everybody knows about the Berlin Airlift which I wasn’t on. I would like to have been on that. I was em then put onto Halifaxes and we were towing we were towing gliders and dropping parachutists over the Salisbury Plain we also had to drop ten pound guns and a jeep and they were all strapped under this Halifax, they took the bomb doors off and they strapped these thing on, and you had to drop them on the Plain. Those were the dodgiest piece of flying I think I ever did I think I would liked to have gone back on ops actually. Because they struggled off, off I think it was ridiculous really, they struggled off the end of the runway and if you had anything like a cross wind with all that underneath you sticking out. I can remember being really frightened on take off with that stuff but I must have been a very lucky bloke. I had another good skipper he was a Scot er. Anyway that was Transport Command, you are only interested in Bomber Command aren’t you?
Question by interviewer. “So when you were on Pathfinders?”
Yes of course before we were on Pathfinders, before we actually operated as a Pathfinder we had to do a lot more cross countries and night time cross countries which I used to like. It’s so lovely looking at that starry sky and em everything and very often it was semi moonlight because we did not operated on moonlight towards the end of the war. We did not operate on moonlight because you would get shot down so easily which we demonstrated when we went to Paris but em (pause)oh I get er, and when were on those cross countries that was when I used to get into the driving seat, the skip he’d put it in, you could put the Lanc into automatic you know it could fly itself but of course that is not quite the thing to do when you are operational. He’d put it in automatic I’d get he’d swap seats and I would fly it and I would turn, I knew how to control and aircraft anyway because I was so keen when I was a lad I learnt all about airplanes and em at first the crew said “hey you are not letting him in the seat are you?” (laugh). I took to it quite well and the Navigator would give a course to turn onto and I would turn onto the course and everybody was happy. I was happy, I was happy as Larry because I was flying the airplane, you know, hands on. Not many people have had hands on, on a Lancaster so it has always been one of my things.
From that when I came out I wanted to carry on flying but I had got married and em we were paying a mortgage on a house and you can’t afford to fly. I got a job, not a very not a well paid job, I had a job with Lucas actually in the press shop, not in the press shop actually, doing, getting materials up for them and everything. Then I went in the gas board, kids came along, eventually grew up and once I got, I started getting promotions and a bit more money I still got this feeling I wanted to fly and I wanted to fly the aircraft myself. The next thing the cheapest way of doing that is join a gliding club and er, I joined a gliding club near Grantham at er, Saltby where Flying Fortresses had taken off if you remember, didn’t they, from Saltby and there was a gliding club there which I knew from a friend. I went there and I started gliding. In no time at all I was sent off solo. I done quite a bit of gliding I got the Silver C which is staying up for five hours and er doing fifty K , it was all the fives. It was making a height of five thousand feet and fifty kilometres and five hours up and fifty kilometres and making five thousand feet, that’s right. I went beyond that but got my Silver C in gliding but there are days when you can’t fly anyway, you can be launched and you can take a launch up to fifteen hundred two thousand feet but if there are no thermal or anything at Salby anyway you just came down again. Anyway some friends of mine said “why don’t we get a motor glider?” he heard about a motor glider that was going, a Faulke motor glider he said “you can fly anytime then” and they do thermal as well. I have stayed up for three or four hours in a Faulke you know. We em went to so, and from there this was over a period of a few years, five six years and em you had to pass a test to fly the motor glider which was half way on to getting your private pilots license, but to do that you have got to have a proper single engined aircraft like a 150, Cessna 150 and em, of course that costs, that costs money. Then I was flogging my pictures and whatnot and got a better job. I got a company car that was another thing, I got a job with a company car in advertising driving all over the place and em, I got a company car and they were very easy about, they paid for all the petrol whither it was for me or not. I mean you would not get a job like that these days. (laugh) I was very lucky and from, from then you may not know Burnaston it’s where they make the Toyotas now and that’s just outside of Derby on the A38. That was an aerodrome during the war. They had all sorts there, it was a primary trainer, it’s only a grass strip, it’s a good sized grass strip and they eventually flew em what it’s names off there, didn’t they Pete? “Argonauts” yeah and Dakotas and things and it was sort of Derby, it turned into Derby Airport of course. Then it closed down for a while and Jack, what’s his name, Jones he opened it up, didn’t he? I helped, I just retired then when they started opening up Burnaston as an aerodrome again and I went and helped mark out the runways with a concrete,no it was a white, white chippings to line the runway to mark out the runway to make it commercially acceptable again for flying. They got em (pause) “terrible loose my words.” Em Cessna 150s which are a two seater private aircraft which are a very popular aircraft who want fairly cheap flying. Of course to fly one of those, to hire one out and fly it you have got to have a proper pilots license. That is the first step on flying really a PPL as it called and em er, I started flying these Cessna’s but I couldn’t afford to fly them very much as it was quite expensive to hire out an aircraft and I had got my share in this motor glider anyway. I wanted to add to my flying experience in effect I would like to have gone and done instrument flying so you could fly at night but it all costs money and time. When you are a family man you have to consider your wife and what not so. You are restrict, restricted to a certain extent. I did what I wanted to do to a, you know and I have been very lucky really, very lucky.
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 Thomas Marchant
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mick Jeffery
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-15
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AMarchantT150715
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
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.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:51:12 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Tom Marchant had always wanted to fly and at eighteen joined the RAF as a Wireless Operator Air Gunner but was remustered as Flight Engineer after his initial postings to Warrington and Squires Gate Airfield, Blackpool. He describes his very first flight in an Anson aircraft from Blackpool. His next posting was to St Athan where he passed out as a Flight Engineer and was posted to an Operational Training Unit at Dishforth in Yorkshire where he flew in Halifax and Lancaster aircraft and met the crew he would fly with. On completion of the OTU he and his crew were posted to 101 Squadron based at RAF Ludford Magna where they completed a number of bombing operations over Germany. The crew successfully volunteered for Pathfinder duties and had to complete further training in navigation and cross country flying. On these training sorties he actually flew a Lancaster.
On completion of operations Tom went onto instruct dinghy drill at RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland and from there went on to join Transport Command flying Halifax aircraft. After the war he left the RAF but continued to fly gliders and motor gliders from Salby (ex USAF bomber station) near Grantham. He eventually went on to gain his Private Pilots License.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Hugh Donnelly
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
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
101 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
fear
flight engineer
ground crew
Halifax
Lancaster
Lancastrian
Master Bomber
Me 110
military living conditions
military service conditions
Operational Training Unit
Pathfinders
RAF Dishforth
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Ludford Magna
RAF St Athan
training
V-2
V-weapon
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/482/8365/ABryanWA151028.2.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
Bryan, William A
William Bryan
W A Bryan
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bryan, WA
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Sergeant William Bryan.
He was a flight engineer with 102 Squadron.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by William Bryan and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
WB: My name is William Bryan, I was a flying engineer on (unclear) onwards during the war, on a hundred and two squadron, at Pocklington, and we had one or two rather dodgy moments. Um, the first one when we were flying to Kiel Bay, to lay mines in Kiel Bay, which was quite a fair distance. Er, everything went fine, you have to cross Denmark, and everything went fine. You come down to four hundred feet to drop your mines accurately, and then you have to climb back up to eight, ten, twelve thousand feet. So coming over Denmark we were flying in a rather dark, very dark night, and er, suddenly our rear radar Monica started to tick. You usually get this ticking when an enemy aircraft passes by fast, you'd get one tick, but this particular time the ticks started coming faster and faster and faster, and I could hear our gunners saying, 'can you see this fighter, can you see him, can you see him?' And I thought, 'well, if they can't see him, we've had it'. And so I got down as low as I could behind my, my control panel, and er, because I thought there was no point in me getting injured if I need to do something for the aircraft. So, I thought (coughs), 'well, I've got about three seconds to live here', because they hadn't seen this fighter, and it's coming in on us, and the next minute, our pilot, he flipped the plane over, into a dive, just flipped over, and down it went. And the German fighter pilot, he'd apparently turned up the wick too much on his engine, to catch us, and when we got to the bottom of this dive my pilot called out, 'come and have a look at this', so I went to the front, and the German was on fire, his engine was on fire, and he was going like a bat out of hell back to his base. Er, I've told my family (laughs) that our gunners shot it down. They might have done, but I don't think they did. I think he had an engine fire, and I did er, I looked up the history of these fighters, and the Germans had used ersatz material for their gaskets, and the gaskets used to blow on quite a number of them. The RAF used to get fires now and again, but no, not in the same way as the Germans got them. So we got away with that, and came home and reported it, but the thing that worried me at the time was our Monica rear radar is supposed to pick out only the enemy, and we feel, at least, I feel, that they've got our secret, they picked up our secret and used it to find us, which I think they did. Anyway, some months later Air Marshall Harris ordered all the Monica radar to be taken out, because they were death traps, the Germans knew where we were all the time. So, so that's that one trip. Another trip which was similar mining trip (coughs) in Kiel Bay. We got off course, somehow, and we were flying over Sweden, and the bomb aimer called up um, 'Ted, Ted', the navigator, 'we're flying over Sweden!'. Ted said, 'no we're not.' 'Yes,' he said, 'they're firing at us'. So Ted, Ted was then convinced (chuckles), so we got out of there fairly quickly. We laid our mines and came back over Denmark. But we'd been warned on briefing that the Germans had two flagships on the coast, right on the coast, we should be aware. And strangely enough, not for his fault, the navigator took us right across these flagships. We got badly shot up. Er, I asked the pilot after (unclear), I asked him how did he manage to evade the gunfire, and he said, 'well, it's predicted fire the Germans use, and you fly into the last shell burst', he said, 'and that confuses them. So if you fly into the last shell burst, they don't know where you're going to be next.' Eventually they stopped firing because we were too far away, and we went into a dive to get away from it, and landed safely. But not without some damage, we had a, a hole in the windscreen, with the air coming in through, and in the morning after breakfast I went up to the hanger to see this aircraft, and they told me that it was a right off, it was too badly damaged to repair. So that was the sum title of the, er, my dodgey times flying, although, there are times when you're pretty scared that there'd be fighters around at night with searchlights playing around, and you certainly wonder whether you would get back alright. (Pause) So for the rest of my tour it was a reasonably quiet time. It consisted mainly of the preparations for the invasion. And we were (unclear) of a lot of bombing in France, erm, marshalling yards, places like that, to disrupt all the trains so the Germans couldn't use it. Now this is approximately three weeks before D-Day. (Pause) So, we actually finished our tour about a week before D-Day, and I must admit, I was glad to see the end of it, of, of flying, and as for going back for a second lot, well, I always think that some of the crews had an exceptionally quiet first tour, went back, and got killed the next lot, on the next one. So, that's my story.
(Woman's voice): Carry on.
WB: Well, I don't think, at least I'm not sure whether our pilot reported at de-briefing, that the engine fire was caused by his gunners. He might have done, he might not. But I don't think the gunners would take credit for it, anyway. Er, and, by and large, I think there's a, it was pretty well a good job done that night. We did our job, and we got back alright. (Pause and noises off). When I finished flying I was posted to an operational training unit, where I became a member of the airmanship staff who were supposed to teach these crews coming on, airmanship, and how to handle things in the plane, which included parachute jumping, although we never went up to do that, um, dinghy drill. Now, with dinghy drill, we would take a crew, or sometimes two crews, in a Bedford truck to Cowley baths, in Oxford, and, I would tell them what was going to happen, 'you're going to do dinghy drill, you're going to have to jump into the pond, er into the pool, and you're going to have to turn this dinghy upside down, as you would in a heavy sea, so I'll blow the dinghy up', which I did, and turned it over and tossed it into the pool, and then they took their turns at jumping in, and turning the big dinghy, it was quiet a big dinghy, dinghy over. Er, I did some time at that. And then some years later, er I was posted to an RAF station in, up North, and er, unfortunately, after one leave, I missed some train, and I arrived at Peterborough, where they said there would be no train until the morning, but, they said, we have a post office van who has to go at four 'o' clock, he may give you a lift. So I asked this chap if he would give me a lift. 'Yes sir, jump in'. He took me up towards our camp, a long miles away, and he dropped me, this is dead, middle of the night, and he said, 'if you take that road, it'll lead you down to that camp'. And, where was I? I just managed to find my way round and I very happily took the right forks and the right bends in the right places, and eventually I came along a road, and I looked at the side off the road, there were some sheds (unclear) with lights on. And I thought, 'well, why do farm buildings have lights on at night?' And I suddenly realised it was the RAF camp I was looking for, so I walked in, up to the guard room, and booked in.
Woman's voice: And you got there in time?
WB: So all RAF places. The memory's gone. I can't remember.
MJ: That doesn't matter.
WB: Well, I can't remember. I should. It was North Luffenham, which is Rutland, and right by Rutland Water, you know? So as I'm finding my way I could hear the water, so I knew I couldn't be too (interrupted).
Woman's voice: So tell the story about when you were invited to this do, and this do, (WB talking across) yes, tell them
WB: Oh that one. I was invited. ER (pause). Yes ok. While I was at -
MJ: Is this right?
WB: Is it on?
MJ: Mm!
Woman's voice: It is on, Bill, it is on. Leave it alone.
WB: While I was at (pause) (unclear) Training Unit I met some of our H Squadron gunners, and we went out for a drink. And, one of them, one of them was a chap named Kelly, and he, he told us a story about, he was playing cricket at camp, and the CO was watching. And the CO came up and spoke to him, and said, 'where did you learn to bat like that?' And he said, 'at Sherbourne College'. 'Oh, really? So, why aren't you commissioned?', (chuckles) 'I never applied, sir'. He said, 'you apply for a commission right away'. (unclear) (woman's laughter in background) and that was that story.
Woman's voice: (laughter) Is that the one where someone came down all dressed up?
WB: No, no, yeah, there's more. And these, this Kelly and his rear gunner friend, the gunner was a rough lad from Birmingham, he said, 'Kelly's invited me to his home, for dinner'. He says, 'I'm going to go'. And he told me after, he said,' I dressed in my best blue, and I arrived at a stately home (chuckles), and I was ushered in by a butler. And I was offered a drink, and after a short while was asked to come and sit down for dinner. So I went and sat down, waiting for my friend to come down, and I turned, he was coming down the stairs in full gentleman's gear. The, the evening dress, the whole lot'. And he said, ' I was most impressed, but it made me feel rather inferior.' And that's the story.
Woman's voice: Carry on then. You don't have to do anything.
MJ: It's alright, it's on.
Woman's voice: Just say.
WB: Pilot Officer Bill Wood was the pilot of our group, and (coughs) I didn't know about his history, or how much flying he'd done before, but some months after we'd finished flying I met a chap who'd been an air gunner on Bill Wood's machines, er, a man from Whitworth Whitley, which was on Coastal Command down in Cornwall, and it was supposed to be flying out to attack submarines on the surface. Over the Bay of Biscay one day they found a U-Boat on the surface, and went in to attack. However, the U-Boat captain decided he would stand and fight, so their gunners got up on the their deck and started firing at the Whitley until they knocked an engine out and it caught on fire, So, our pilot, who was in actual fact at the controls although he was the second pilot, he decided they'd have to ditch. So they ditched down in the Bay of Biscay, and after about twenty four hours they were picked up by a Spanish trawler, who took them to Gibraltar. The strange thing about that is that I lived with our pilot for many, many months, and he never whispered a thing about this. I thought that was amazing. (Tape machine noises) Standard Rank.
MJ: Yes.
WB: And they brought in Standard Rank because they wanted to, all the temporary ranks, they wanted to cut those out, and so my substantive rank was sergeant, so everyone was knocked down one pip, at that time, to a substantive rank, which is what they would have been if they'd carried on and signed on in the Air Force. So, meant you had your own room, or shared with two of you. And the other guy, another Flight Engineer, he got promoted, he got commissioned, and he said, 'I'm going, can I leave this for you'. I said, 'yes, sure', so I put it in the bottom the the kitbag and forgot about it.
MJ: That's how you got your Halifax?
Woman's voice: Oh, that's how you got it?
WB: Put it in the bag and forgot about it. Well he meant, he said, ' I won't need this any more, going to leave it with you'. You know.
MJ: And that's how you got it.
WB: And anyway, it was a Lancaster station, North Luffenham, was a Lancaster station, not Halifax, so it wouldn't have been any good to them. Unless a Halifax had landed.
Woman's voice: And Halifax didn't land there?
WB: No, not usually, not usually.
MJ: Well, thank you for that, I'll tell-
WB: If they'd landed and got damaged, they'd have probably sent a crew from its home station to, ground crew from its home station. Sent a (unclear) and everything to see what's wrong with it, see if they could do something with it. But the main gear for lifting it up, trolleys and that to cart it around, that would have been supplied by the home station.
MJ: Well alright. On behalf of the International Bomber Command, I'd like to thank Bill Bryan on the twenty eighth of October two thousand and fifteen for his recording at his home in Southampton. Once again, we thank you with great thanks.
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 William Bryan
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mick Jeffery
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-28
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABryanWA151028, PBryanWA1501
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
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
Description
An account of the resource
William Bryan reminisces being hit by a German fighter and anti-aircraft fire while mine laying the Kiel Bay. The rest of the tour was a reasonably quiet time, consisting mainly of operations in the run-up of the Normandy campaign. Describes bombing in France on marshalling yards, trains and other targets. William's tour ended a week before D-Day. He then was posted to an operational training unit at RAF North Luffenham, where her taught airmanship, parachute jumping and dinghy drill. Reminisces a meeting with meeting Pilot Officer Bill Wood being shot down in the Bay of Biscay while attacking a U-boat. He was then picked up by a Spanish trawler and dropped off in Gibraltar. William discusses ‘standard rank’ adjustments when some were promoted and obtained commissions, while others ended up with a lower rank.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Rutland
England--Yorkshire
Atlantic Ocean
France
Gibraltar
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Germany
Atlantic Ocean--Kiel Bay
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:23:52 audio recording
102 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
ditching
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
mine laying
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
pilot
promotion
radar
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Pocklington
Resistance
shot down
submarine
training
-
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/477/8359/ABrileyW150522.1.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
Briley, William George
George Briley
W G Briley
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Briley, WG
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. An oral history interview with Warrant Officer William George Briley (1586825, Royal Air Force), his log book, service material and a sight log book containing <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/987">18 target photographs</a>. After training in South Africa, George Briley completed 39 bombing and supply dropping operations as a navigator with 40 Squadron flying Wellingtons from Foggia in Italy. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by William George Briley and catalogued by Barry Hunter, <span>with additional identification provided by the Archeologi dell'Aria research group (</span><a href="https://www.archeologidellaria.org/">https://www.archeologidellaria.org</a><span>)</span>
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-09
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
MJ: Now.
WB: My name is Warrant Officer Briley. I’m recording this for the International Bomber Command Centre on 22 May 19 - 2015. And we - where I am is at Ruskington in Lincolnshire. I’ll try and see if I can. Well, my first big run to get to a training place was down to South Africa where I stayed for five months and picked up my brevet. And then, where I, I came back down by flying boat which took four days from Durban to Cairo. From then onwards, I was doing all around that area until they had vacancies up on the training field where the temperature of 150 – 120 was very warm. Then we got back down to Cairo and for - picked up me flight to Italy where I went through Naples and out then to Foggia where I stayed with the 40 Squadron the whole time until I’d finished my term, and then I went back to Naples and they gave me a [unclear]. That gave me a lot more places and also I was sent up to Athens where I was a gunner on on private Wellingtons that had been stripped with passengers and freight all over the Middle East. Then then I was – land – I was - oh sorry. After we done all that I was land down – I was down on the ground there until they got me a job back on Egypt where they sent me up to Udine in northern Italy. No no way of getting up there, but I went out and a British army driver took me all the way, which was very good of him, and the little – when I got up there they hadn’t a clue what I was doing up there for, although they knew themselves, 39 Squadron it was and they gave me a leave over the weekend when I got there and there’s a chance I had of seeing and being in Venice in the holiday part of the RAF they had out there. We came back by a big – by a big plane from Bari having had a train journey all the way back. And that landed me on besides the besides the canal on the Suez Canal and from there we were doing I was doing quite a lot of driving which I wanted to do until they found a place for me which was in El Alamein[?] Back to Cairo and on to the flying the flying out to El Adam [?]. And I stayed here that’s where I picked up my WO. And I and I was put in charge, once I got away the driving they put me in charge of a sy – system well, well in in in an where the people going through and also the pilots and that. I had to, had to sign them through. Some didn’t want to do that and but then they had to. They got no signature otherwise. Anyway, from there that’s when I was sent – I was on leave then at the end and I made out. I picked up my brother who was in Cairo or rather he was up in – he was up in Palestine. Picked him up, we went to Haifa and stayed a fortnight. We enjoyed ourselves. I, I was lucky in that ‘cause I – that’s one brother. The other brother I picked up on the way in at Cairo. So I doubt if there were many other brothers who met du – met during the war. So [unclear] in the end it – we came by boat from Alexandria to Toulon. Waited there for the train back to England. And came – got back in June. One of the coldest Junes I think I knew at that time, especially when you’d been at a temperature of a hundred-and-twenty and that. Now the temperature here went across that boat was really ferocious. And then we was sent up to Wednesbury for discharge. They had to make a suit for me I was so ruddy small and out of all proportion and today I’m even worse. The trouble is I aint going in. I was dead on the lowest figure. When I was on the Foggia we took off from Foggia and went down the Corinth Canal or to it, where we had been told there was a big storm up. It’s too high to go over. Too low to go under. So we were given a height which was about the best. As we came into it. Here we go, the thing is we went up like a ruddy express [mumble] express lift, and stopped and went down straight away, and oh my head hit the blooming geodetics. It, it was so loud the pilot put - turned put it hard head round. He said: ‘What was that?’ I said ‘That was my flipping head.’ [Chuckles] It was yeah.
MJ: Yeah yeah.
WB: Yeah, we got through it and carried on. [Chuckle]
MJ: Well, well that’s the sort of thing –
WB: Yeah
MJ: - that you got to remember, you know.
WB: Hmm. [Chuckle].
MJ: What was it about the bridge?
WB: Eh?
MJ: That one about the bridge? You said about the [unclear]. Can you repeat that?
WB: Yes.
MJ: Please.
WB: [Sigh] [Background noise] I done that one.
MJ: So, so what was the story about that one?
WB: No, it’s not. It’s this one. The one with the four-thousand pound bomb. Kitzscher [?] And – our – well I was quite, quite surprised, you know, you see, where this bomb was. It was only a big hole that was there and they – one of the Italians came about and said ‘What you looking at it for?’ I said ‘I got an idea that’s our bomb.’ ‘Oh,’ he said – he said ‘What has happened?’ He said ’There were two trains on that bridge when you dropped it.’ He said ’One of them went into it to– [unclear] into reinforcements and one coming out. He said: ‘The one coming out got the bar –part of it. The whole the back of [unclear] train and that other one run into the hole that was there. [Chuckle] He says: ‘So you done a damn good job.’ [Laughter]. I’ve never been seen anybody about that - the crew I could tell to.
MJ: Well that’s -
WB: Yeah.
MJ: That’s the good part about it.
WB: Apparently in the Blitz –
MJ: Yeah.
WB: The eight months Blitz. Every night. [Chuckle]. And, it’s so much so I managed to get it out of – but other people commanding me. ‘I can’t go on the back of this bike.’ I said ‘Why not?’ He said ‘Well, I’m out in the open.’ I should have sat on mine all the time. [Chuckle] Any rate, in the end, a number of them complained about it and but, they were more or less protecting me. [Laugh]. I can see their point and any way, they said – they asked me whether I’d like to learn how to drive. I said ‘I would very much.’ And so they brought a driver in from a local gas company depot and he said ‘Now, let’s see. What do you wanna learn?’ I said: ‘Anything I can drive. I was able to – so lorries and that.’ ‘Ah, so you want double declutching.’ You know to this day, and that was in the war. To this day, I still use, I didn’t realise it, part of the double declutching.
MJ: Hm.
WB: Right the way through, and it was only my sister who told me that my changing up and changing down and that was smooth, and I can’t see how it – how it can be smooth? And I worked it out. The – I wasn’t doing the whole double declutching, what I was doing – now with double declutching you use your feet as well. That’s all I wasn’t doing. [Mumble] Step in here.
MJ: Here. It’s good. What – what –
WB: What?
MJ: What – what sort of ops and things did you actually stand out for one reason of another?
WB: What you want me to do?
MJ: I’m here.
WB: Supplied it and then I went and got – I went there to be of service there. [Laughter]. All on one aerodrome. We called it Kalamaki Avenue[?]. It was –
MJ: So – what ‘s that bit of paper?
WB: Yeah. [Unclear]. Can’t hardly read it now. [Unclear] Penetration. Frontal conditions. Last night your bombers carried out their mission with excellent results. This attack which – which you carried out [unclear] or in the port of crews participated. Please convey to all ranks under your command my opposition – appreciation of this noteworthy effort. That was from the Group Captain commanding 263 Wing.
MJ: What did you have to do in that?
WB: Hm?
MJ: What what what was the op? Operation? What operation – what?
WB: Oh these aerodromes.
MJ: You say you had to bomb them? Or –
WB: No, it – thing is they were all bombed on one night by different – they sent out the squadron. Three or four to one – three or four to [unclear].
MJ:
WB: I don’t think that was the one that hit me on the head. I hadn’t been given my flight badge then. I was just a Sergeant. [Pause]. 9th to the 10th of October 1944 [turning of pages] 9 10 of October –
MJ: What was that op?
WB: Hm.
MJ: What did you have to do for that one?
WB: [Pause] On the – on the 4th – 4th of October ’44 we went to the Danube and put a mine – two mines down there. Have having had to fly there at thirty foot and then there was a a – I think there was haystacks even higher than we were. So I was expecting anytime that we – that we should get a gun from behind them. Then the next one we went on the 9th we went to Athens, we did that and they were put for us they were pretty long trips. Athens six hours and the Danube was five fifty-one.
MJ: So what – why did you that one to similar to the Dam Busters one. Why?
WB: It was the [unclear] valley. There’s the valley. South, it was south of one of their big cities. I forget which one it was. Began with a B, I know that. [Laughter].
MJ: So what did you have to do that made it similar to the other dams? Did you have to go lower or was it just too hot or what?
WB: While we kept low was to get underneath their mining thing and also we were down there so as we could get in underneath it and without them noticing it, and we didn’t – did manage it seems ‘cause nobody came to try and have a go at us. Then five days later we went over there again. Not this to the Danube which was up south of a – a big city beginning with B, I think it was. And this this second one, our eleventh was on Kalamaki operation bombed over flares. So we had two long ones. [Pause] I know that we bombed one of the American bombings. They gave us a photo of what they had left. When we got there it hadn’t even been touched. So we had to do all the bombing for them. That’s the Americans all along, which I never did quite like.
MJ: [Unclear]
WB: [Unclear]. More modern, modern aircraft and that. I mean the Wellington was a pre-war, but we had it all the way through the war out there.
MJ: So did you fly different aircraft more often or just one particular one? ‘Cause you got –
WB: You could hardly see the blinder[?]. All I know is it was going off track and I couldn’t I couldn’t get the thing to go in at all. In the end, when he when he went ran out of [unclear] I expect and well that’s that. He said ‘[Unclear] Which way you going? I said ‘No, you’re too late to go the back.’ I said ‘So turn on and face, face Yugoslavia.’ And I said ‘When you get - as soon as you’ve seen the mountains over there, turn south. Don’t wait for me.’ I said ‘Then we’ll sort – start sorting out some.’ Anyway I got ‘em back in.
MJ: So what happened when you got to base then?
WB: Then – then I was a bit late when I got, of course, when we got in. But after that on three occasions I got them to go another route because there was a blooming eight-hundred – and sent us out on our own valley, there was a hill eight-hundred foot high and quite often the clouds comes came down so they forced them under the thousand so I sort of – ‘What’s the matter Briley?’ I said : ‘There’s a hill in that valley eight hundred foot.’ Said ‘Yeah.’ So he turned round to his thing[?]and said ‘Go and see if he’s right.’ The bloke said when he came back he said : ‘He’s right.’ ‘Oh, sent him round the end of the peninsula.’ That happened three times. I had to – ‘cause I knew where it was. I was coming in through the valley at two-thousand in the cloud dived down at the end where I knew it’d be.’ ‘Didn’t you – didn’t you see the target?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well how come you came back here half-hour before any others [unclear]. I said ‘’Cause I used the valley.’ ‘But you told us.’ ‘But yeah I know where it is.’
MJ: So you took a short cut?
WB: Yep. You see the second time he was sending me down for – I I didn’t do much on that. I knew it – I knew how it was. So so we had a look down at it and found this thing this hill. ‘Right we can use that.’ I did on three occasions. Got back in. Nice time I was the only one on breakfast. [Chuckle]. Everybody else came in half-hour later. Every time ‘Missed it again.’ I said : ‘No we did not miss it.’ Berh, that was another bleeding officer and then, and I gather from one of our other, one of the crew I saw in Cairo. He said ‘You know what has happened up at up at - up at Foggia?’ I said ‘No.’ ‘ See they sent out those big aircraft, up our valley at a thousand feet.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Three crashed into that hill you told them about.’ I said ‘That’s bloody murder.’ And if I had my way I’d have had him but they took no notice of me, but it was them that - I mean the big aircraft, American aircraft has about twelve people on board. The Wellington only had five. You think it. Three aircraft. Thirty-six. Dead. Before they’d even started.
MJ: ‘Cause they took the wrong route.
WB: Yeah. I wish I could have done but you supposed to be a – on their side. [Laughter]. Yeah. And one or two people told me about it and I said that ‘I said I quite agree with ya. But we daren’t do it.’
MJ: Yeah.
WB: Whether they learned after that when they hit this hill there’s one way to find out. Not the [unclear] of the bleeding crew though.
MJ: Was there any more situations like that you had before? Was it a lot like that?
WB: Yeah well. This is how it is.
MJ: Yeah.
WB: Another time she came down to – oh blimey – begins will L.
MJ: Well –
WB: Yeah.
MJ: Yeah. Well anyway yeah.
WB: Yeah. Anyway, she came down there. I was [unclear] been on there a fortnight and she said ‘That comes off.’
MJ: So you had to lose your –
WB: So my mate said ‘Are you gonna?’ ‘No,’ I said ‘I’ve got home. I’ve worked it out. I want us to have three weeks to see what it’s like.’ Anyway, I didn’t get any in the end. Wasn’t for her, it was for myself. It itched though underneath. [Shudder].
MJ: Yeah I know.
WB: So I –
MJ: Yeah. Don’t go good with a uniform. So I put that on. Ok I’m gonna take a photo. You in 40 Squadron.
WB: That’s 40 Squadron in 3 Group with Wellingtons in 1940 or ‘41. Towards the end of ’41, 40 Squadron moved toward Malta. Moved to Egypt early in ’42 into 205 Group. Moving to North Africa and eventually to Italy. During – I joined 40 Squadron in Foggia Italy in August ’44. First flight 30th of August ’44 and first op 1st of September ’44. And last one 39, 21st of January 1945. Book says last, last 13th of March. Hmm, it’s wrong. Otherwise how was I doing it in ’45?
MJ: There’s there’s –
WB: It was a remake Manchester. Found that the Manchester were two Merlins was like the blooming Wellington Mark II was Merlins. They’re useless, so they took it back, extended the wing, put in two more engines and extended other things, call it the Lancaster, and it was a success. Makes you wonder doesn’t it?
MJ: It does yeah.
WB: I’m lying. I don’t think it’s been made public much ‘cause the Manchester was a dud.
MJ: Yeah.
WB: Hmm.
MJ: This is Michael Jeffery on behalf of the International Bomber Command Historical Project Unit. Thank you to William Briley for his recording.
WB: It won’t. Make it George, George Briley.
MJ: George Briley, it is.
WB: George, it’s what I’m known as. You’ll find on here that no one knows about a Duckworth[?]. It’s George everybody.
MJ: Well that’s good.
WB: Yeah.
MJ: Well, it’s very nice to meet you George. Thank you very much for you co-operation and your photographs and such like and I hope to meet you again. On behalf of the International Bomber Command, thank you again. On the 22nd of May 2015.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with William George Briley
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Mick Jeffery
Date
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2015-05-22
Format
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00:28:49 Audio recording
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABrileyW150522
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Pending review
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Temporal Coverage
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1944-10
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Gemma Clapton
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Description
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After training in South Africa, William Briley flew operations as a navigator with 40 Squadron flying Wellingtons from Foggia, Italy. One of his operations involved the dropping of a 4000lb bomb which derailed two trains. He was also involved in mine laying in the Danube.
Spatial Coverage
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Egypt
Greece
Italy
Italy
Danube River
South Africa
Greece--Zakynthos
Italy--Foggia
Greece--Corinth Canal
Danube River
40 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
mine laying
navigator
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1048/11426/ANeilsonW151116.2.mp3
98c9bdf26e9131b0392322666ce6b3a1
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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Neilson, William
William Arnott Neilson
W A Neilson
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flying Officer William 'Bill' Neilson (1923 - 2021, Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-11-16
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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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Neilson, W
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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WN: Yeah.
[pause]
WN: I’m William Neilson. I was born in Fife in 1923. And my elder brother Jim and I were raised by our mother, Jessie. My father and my mother’s two brothers had all emigrated to America in 1925 to escape the post-war depression in the UK. My mother stayed here to look after my grandmother as it was the duty of the daughter in those day to do so. Grannie died in 1933 at the age of seventy three. There were some photographs at home of my Uncle Willie who had been a pilot in the Flying Corps in the First World War. Among the aircraft he flew were a Sopwith Pup. A Sopwith 1 ½ Strutter and a Bristol fighter. When war was declared in 1939 I still had another two years to go before I could sit my final exams and would be free to leave school. I finished my Scottish Highers and with my mother’s reluctant permission I went to Edinburgh to join the Air Force in 1941. On the morning of the first day there were about thirty five to forty volunteers of whom nineteen were soldiers. These nineteen were all hoping to be accepted as air gunners but none were. By late afternoon on the second day only five of us were sworn in for aircrew duties, one of whom was Alex Steadman from Dunfermline. We kept in touch with each other during the next six months of deferred service and became friends. We remained so for the rest of our lives until his death in 2008. I was best man at his wedding in 1944 and he was mine in 1945. We were duly called up in March 1942 and had to report to Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. We spent the next three weeks being kitted out, learning to march, being shouted at, inoculated and learning about beer. Our first payday took place outside the Monkey House in London Zoo. After all this I was posted to 12 ITW at St Andrews. That’s only thirty miles from my home. Alex Steadman was posted to Scarborough. We did the usual ITW things but navigation, Morse code, transmitting and receiving, using the Aldis lamp, aircraft recognition, assembling and stripping down a Vickers K machine gun. More marching. And swimming lessons in case we got shot down on operations later on. The North Sea in April and May was very cold and I’d never done it in all my life until then. After a fortnight we were told that two forty eight hour passes would be on offer every fortnight. There were only two Scots in our fifty strong flight so we got them until the end of the course. I’d only been away from home for five weeks before I came home on the very first weekend pass. Later my one time school friend said I was in the BEF — back every fortnight. All fifty Cadets were interviewed by our CO during the training period. When I asked, when I was asked about my father’s job I said he was professional golfer. When asked what I could tell him about golf my answer was that it was a game invented by the Scots for the torment of the English. Now, the CO was a Scot. He was vastly amused. The pilot/navigator/bomb aimer scheme was introduced during my time at ITW to split the observers work into two separate categories of navigator and bomb aimer in the new four-engined bombers coming into service. After three months at ITW I was posted to 11 EFTS at Perth for pilot training. I went solo after six hours. I learned, I did all my flying from a big grassy field owned by some farmer out in the sticks. The trainees were bussed out there and back every day because Perth Airfield wasn’t big enough to cope with the number of trainees coming through. I know for certain that five trainees from my ITW flight got their pilot’s wings because I met them by chance years later. All these trainees were disbursed to Canada, Rhodesia and America so we lost touch with each other. I had two months waiting in Heaton Park in Manchester between August and September 1942 and met up again with Alex Steadman. We were both posted to 31 Personnel Depot in Moncton, New Brunswick in Canada knowing that we were going to America to continue our pilot training. From Manchester we took an overnight train to the Clyde and embarked on the Queen Mary which had had a collision with the cruiser Curacoa on a trip from Canada. Her bows were all stoved in and been filled with concrete to make her watertight. After five days at sea we docked at Boston, Massachusetts where the Queen Mary was to be repaired. We then had a wonderful rail journey up the east coast through New England and the vibrant colours in the Autumn trees was magnificent and unforgettable. We spent another month at Moncton before getting on a train to Oklahoma — to a place called Ponca City. That took four days. All the instructors there were civilians employed by the Darr School of Aeronautics. My course was the eleventh to be trained there since it opened in December 1941. With a hundred and sixteen members it was the largest to date. There were twenty Americans included and they were all required to have a college education and at least a hundred hours flying experience. It was said that their superiors in the American Air Force didn’t want their trainees to suffer by comparison with us RAF trainees who had come in off the streets with whatever education they had and only a few hours flying at grading school with a maximum of fifteen hours. I went solo again after seven hours on a Stearman PT-17 and went on to a total of seventy hours. Next step up was to the AT-6A or Harvard as the RAF named it, for another hundred and thirty hours. We flew during the course on either the morning or afternoon with ground school during the other half of the day. We were free to roam the skies when we flew solo and could dogfight or chase horses at ground level or fly at trains to frighten the passengers. I never heard of any complaints from the train company about this latter activity. We flew day and night across country and all of us were hoping to fly at the required standard and thus avoid being washed out. That meant being sent back to Canada to be trained as a bomb aimer or a navigator. One of our more curious pupils on my course found out that the flying instructors were prone to leave the door of their rest room unlocked at the end of the day. We were thus able to find out what sort of marks we were being awarded for our flying ability. All recorded on coloured cards with the highest being on white cards. I was pleased to see that most of mine were white which did wonders for my self-esteem. There was no entitlement for leave during the course but mother nature intervened with a heavy snowfall which stopped all flying. There were four courses going through training at any one time so there were about three hundred pupils affected. We were given a week off and five of us who used to hang out together decided to head south for Texas. We got a hundred miles down to Oklahoma City and found out that the snow extended down to Texas as well. So we stayed in Oklahoma City. There was drinking and dancing and dates at 11pm with girls who didn’t finish work until then as well as sightseeing and taking express lifts to the tops of sky scrapers. We were photographed by, many times by Americans who wanted to know, ‘What outfit we belonged to.’ They were confused by our RAF blue uniforms. During the last week in April 1943 all the pupils on my course were sent on a long cross country with another pupil. I was paired with Don McCready. There were seven legs between airfields to the [unclear] so we tossed up to see who would get to fly four legs and navigate three. And I lost. The route was from Ponca City to Amerillo in Texas. Then to La Junta in Colorado. Albuguerque in New Mexico. El Paso, Midland and [Hensley?] in Texas and then back to Ponca City. We spent the night at Midland and were lined up waiting to take off the next morning when three trainee pilots from an American flying school came in to land on the main runway in a cross wind. One after another they all ground looped. Schadenfreude. I didn’t do too very well with my navigation and did a bit more map reading than I should and Mac wasn’t much better but when we got back to Ponca City no one in authority seemed to mind. Maybe they were just relieved to see us back safely after eighteen hundred miles. All the other pairs got around safety except one pair who ground looped at La Junta and were sent back on a twin-engine Beechcraft. The wings exam came at the end of the course in May 1943 and a pass in all subjects was mandatory. I failed in meteorology so I had to re-sit. I hadn’t really got my head around the way the first meteorology exam had been structured so I was very happy to find the format for the next was more to my liking. Ten percent was knocked off because it was a re-sit. So the maximum I could get was ninety percent. I got eighty nine percent. We left Ponca City during the last week in May 1943 and returned to Moncton. The successful Americans went to fly Dakotas in the US Transport Command and eventually DC4s. Twenty three RAF trainees and three United States trainees were washed out during the course. That was a failure rate of fifteen percent for the US and twenty five percent for the RAF. We boarded the train for another four days travel to Moncton and spent another month waiting for a boat back to Britain. My [pause] we sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia on a French liner called Pasteur heading for Liverpool. The Pasteur broke down in mid-Atlantic and took the best part of the daylight hours to mend. We feared the appearance of U-boats while we wallowed in the swell but after the war I learned that there were few U-boats in the mid-Atlantic. The ones on the American side were being refuelled by long range tankers and those in the European side by calling into ports in Germany and France. On our return to the UK we were billeted for six weeks at the Majestic Hotel in Harrogate. I was then posted with Alex Steadman to 40 Advanced Flying Unit in Banff where I was converted to flying twin engine Airspeed Oxfords and added another hundred hours to my flying time. I was expecting that the next posting would be our usual progression to OTU but instead was posted on the 1st of November to 1 Air Armament School at Manby in Lincolnshire as a staff pilot to fly Blenheims. Alex Steadman came as well. He had been posted to fly Ansons at a wireless op school on the Isle of Man but he wangled a change of posting to come with me. From a book I bought in 2014 I learned that in 1941 at 1 Air Armament School the station commander was Group Captain Ivans with the nickname of Ivan the Terrible. He followed regulations to the letter. Every week there was a station parade at which uniforms had to be immaculate and the staff, men and women, were expected to be perfectly groomed. Some engineering and ground staff worked from 6.30 in the morning till 10.30 at night so they didn’t take kindly to being disciplined for being poorly turned out. At the following week’s parade the entire base personnel were assembled in full uniform to salute the raising of the flag. As soon as the lanyard was pulled up a large pair of WAAFs nickers unfolded and started fluttering at the top of the flagpole while a wave of laughter spread across the parade ground. Group Captain Ivans was apoplectic with fury. He demanded to know who was responsible. Only to be met with a stony silence. He then announced that everyone was confined to barracks for seven days. There would be a colour parade every day and after normal working hours all personnel, including WAAFs would march around the perimeter of the airfield in parade dress. This would continue until the culprit confessed. It was clearly an outrageous punishment but within a few days he was replaced in 1943 but when I arrived in 19 [pause] In 1943, when I arrived he was back in charge as station commander once more. Three, three weeks went by before our instructor thought the weather was suitable to fly. I went solo on a Mark 1 Short Nose Blenheim after an hour and a half. I then had another six hours circuits and bumps on the Long Nosed Mark 4 before I was let loose with two bomb aimers to drop practice bombs on the beach north of Mablethorpe. There were four bombing ranges. Each separated by five hundred feet distance from the next. For obvious safety reasons. We flew a clover leaf pattern to drop bombs. That became my working life for the next five months. Weather permitting we were expected to bomb as high as possible up to ten thousand feet. Something went wrong on one occasion and two Blenheims collided over the target area with a total loss of life of all six crew members. Only one body was ever recovered and that came ashore in The Wash. In the Blenheims we practiced low level bombing at two hundred feet to educate bomb aimers destined for Coastal Command. Normally low flying was banned so we made the most of our legal opportunities. I remember low flying up the Yarborough Canal which runs from Louth in the direction of Grimsby. Our low level bombing target was set in a farmer’s field near the canal. So it was a temptation to fly up along the canal after we’d finished bombing. Temptation for me that is because the bomb aimers didn’t have any say on the matter. The swans on the canal would take off in an attempt to escape and would look back at the plane as it got near them. They would never fly out the canal but would land with a great splash of water. Great fun. In May 1944 a Wellington 13 arrived and all pilots were converted to fly it. I had an hour and a half instruction before I went solo and another three hours solo before I was let loose on the bombing ranges. This time with three bomb aimers. I flew both types until the end of July 1944 when the Blenheims were withdrawn. I only had two troublesome occasions with a Blenheim. On the way back to base after an exercise I noticed smoke coming from the port engine. Both engines were throttled back as I was descending to circuit height and the instruments didn’t indicate any engine trouble. There were no visible flames and I had to keep the engine going for safety reasons. I landed with no further problem and ran off the runway on to the grass to leave the runway clear. There had been an oil leak which dripped on to the exhaust and that had caused all the smoke. That was all. On the second occasion I had, had to fly two engine fitters with some spares to Bardney near Lincoln where one of our Blenheims had landed with an engine problem. After dropping off my passengers with their spares I left. I was very interested with the close-up views of so many Lancasters that I forgot an essential part of pre-flight check and off I went. At a hundred and sixty miles an hour I still couldn’t get the aircraft off the ground until I wrenched the control column hard back and raised the undercarriage to reduce drag. I was flying but not gaining height and all the time I was checking for a reason. I discovered I’d forgotten to close the cowling gills. This had spoiled the lift from the upper wing surfaces. The response was immediate and I was up and away. When the pilot of the other Blenheim came back to Manby he met me in the mess and said he’d watched my take off from the control tower. He admired my, ‘Lovely low take off.’ I advised him not to try to emulate me and told him the reason. It was decided to try night bombing. So, in August two other pilots and myself were sent to Catfoss to practice night flying on Wellingtons. The weather turned nastier and nastier and we were sent home after two days. In September we returned to Catfoss for another go and managed to get five nights circuits and bumps before being recalled. Since the Wellington was a heavier aircraft than the Blenheim it was decided that low level bombing in a Wellington should be carried out at four hundred feet. Some of the bomb aimers had trouble getting used to the low level bombsight for, that was used in Coastal Command and they asked me to drop the bombs for them. On the run in to the target I would watch for the triangulation target to disappear under the nose of the aircraft, count to three and use the master switch in the cockpit to drop the bomb. It was dead centre every time. The bomb aimers learned by observation when to drop their bombs at the correct [unclear], so it really wasn’t cheating. It was just a different way of helping them to learn. In November I had another sessions of circuits and bumps at Strubby. Only seven miles south of Manby. For some unknown reason the night bombing proposal was dropped but it was useful experience for me. I found out after the war that my wife’s brother in law, also a pilot, had done his operational tour of thirty ops from Strubby but was on leave in London when I was night flying there. I had only one problem with a Wellington while I was at Manby. I was on a wind finding exercise with three bomb aimers. One was in the nose measuring drift. One was seated at midship and the third was standing in the cockpit just looking about. He looked out at the starboard propeller which had started to vibrate massively. He thought the propeller was about to come off and then would come through the fuselage where he was standing. He’d pulled out his intercom plug and dived into the back of the aircraft. What I then saw was the spinner and the propeller both wobbling about in a very unsafe manner. I promptly pressed the feathering button and throttled back on that engine. Just before the propeller stopped the spinner came off and disappeared over the starboard wing. I felt it hit the tailplane before it fell clear. The prop stayed on but I concluded it was the spinner vibrating loose that had caused the propeller to vibrate. I didn’t restart the engine again in case some damage had occurred that I couldn’t see. I cancelled the remainder of the exercise and flew back to base to make my second single-engine landing at Manby. A policeman on his bicycle eventually found the spinner. I did only once have a bomb aimer who wasn’t keen to fly in a Blenheim when he saw the mag drop and wanted to use another aircraft. I explained my point of view. We could transfer to another aircraft but in any event they would all have the same five hundred revs drop. I said I flew them every day despite the mag drop and was happy to do so. It was normal. He accepted my reassurance and off we went. I flew Wellingtons there until I reached the top of the operational posting ladder. And on the 24th of April 1945 I was posted with Alex Steadman to 10 OTU at Abingdon with an additional four hundred and twenty six. [pause] Is that somebody at the door?
[recording paused]
April 1945 I was posted with Alex Steadman to 10 OTU at Abingdon with an additional four hundred and twenty six hours flying time. I was certainly a more experienced pilot than if I’d gone straight to OTU from AFU. And the first question one asks at a new station was usually about the local beer. Where was the best pub? In Abingdon it was the Lion in the High Street that got the vote. I duly made my way there. By 6 o’clock we were standing in the doorway when I was hailed by an old friend from my Ponca City days. He was there with a WAAF to whom he had just said he had just seen my name on the arrivals list and wondered if he’d see me. We spoke for about a half an hour and he introduced me to the WAAF. He had to go for his last cross-country to complete his flying programme and off he went. I never saw him again. So obviously he’s [unclear] I got myself a crew and started training but after a few weeks I was pulled out and given a more experienced crew from the course ahead of me who had lost their pilot througFh illness. I did another seventy hours flying. Forty by day and thirty by night. I was then posted to 1668 Heavy Conversion Unit at Cottesmore in Rutland. I remember one daylight cross-country in the western extremity of the UK and the second leg was along the south coast. A very strong wind was blowing and had blown all the usual smog away and we could see for miles. Down in to the Bay of Biscay. All along the northern European coastline as far as the Frisian Islands. We could see the east coast of the UK past the Thames Estuary. Past The Wash and up as far as the Humber Estuary. The Lancaster was a delight to fly and so easy to take off and land. I once put a Lancaster down after a cross country to Wick and I couldn’t feel the slightest transition from flying to landing. I was sat there with the stick in my lap and the throttles closed. I glanced at the speedo that showed I was doing fifty miles an hour and could no longer be flying. That’s the best landing I ever made in all my flying career. I was told during the course that our night navigation exercises were going to include astral navigation because we were to be posted as replacements to the ten Lancaster squadrons known as Tiger Force. These squadrons were to be sent to Russia to bomb Japan from the north to supplement the bombing campaign being carried out by the Americans. Luckily for us the war ended and the plan was abandoned. We were, I was then posted to 16 Ferry Unit in Dunkeswell in Devon with a view to ferry aircraft to the Middle East. That proposal fell through and we were informed we would be flying aircraft to the Far East instead. That scheme was also cancelled because our demob numbers would be coming up before we could really be used for a useful time. My remaining few months in the RAF were just frittered away in a holding unit at Bruntingthorpe near Leicester. And I was demobbed in 1946 with four and a half years’ service. 6 BFTS turned out fifteen hundred pilots during its existence. I left the RAF as a flying officer on a salary of six hundred pounds per annum. Started at the Ordnance Survey on two hundred and twenty three pounds ten per annum. For the first year I was paid weekly but thereafter monthly. So we had to save hard in that first year so we could survive for a month before being paid monthly in the second year. I joined 14 AFS at Hamble in 1949 and flew Tiger Moths again and then Chipmunks until the year it closed in 1953. I joined the 6 BFTS Club with annual meetings, the Aircrew Association with local meetings in Southampton and Project Propeller with an annual flight in June in a civil light aircraft to various airfields around the country. That’s still ongoing. The first two Associations have now disbanded due to a lack of members as we all become older.
[recording paused]
WN: Civil pilot. We went out to Canada. I went on down to America. Came back and when I came back we were back at Moncton. And the fellow I’d been going around with at ITW, I hadn’t seen him since he’d left ITW, he comes in to the washroom where I was having my morning, doing my morning ablutions. We had a brief five minute conversation and he went out the door. I never saw him again. But there was five of us went around together in the American Flying School. They were all civvies. And Johnny Thompson got washed out. He went back. Became a bomb aimer. The rest, the other four of us we got our their wings. Albert Slade went on to a squadron and he got killed on his first. He was shot down over Denmark. They were on a mine laying operation. He was shot down over Denmark on the night of the 14th 15th of May 1944. So Alex Steadman and I survived because we’d both gone to Training Command for a, for a, it took me seventeen months to get to the top of the operational posting ladder. And he stayed in as I say. He would have been, he was eligible for a group captain’s post but he, he got caught up in one of these financial rearrangements that the Labour Party were so found off. You know, they were cutting money. Cutting money for that. So he was certain there were too many wing commanders you see. So he got, and he had, I think he had four pensions. He had his old age pension [laughs] He got an RAF pension. He’d got, he’d become a civil servant and he worked for the Air Force. He knew the duties of a flight lieutenant, a squadron leader and a wing commander. When these fellas were coming, being posted at the Group headquarters he was able to advise them. Keep them on the right track. Right. And then he got a [pause] he’d, he’d got a, the odd thing is that we were so keen to fly and we got the wish but sitting in the middle of four Merlin engines it made us deaf. You see, that’s the sting in the tail. So your pension. He got a, no he didn’t — yeah. He got a pension for that ,see. So, I went and had my ears examined but it was a nineteen percent reduction. So I didn’t get a pension. I got, I got, I think a lump sum of I about three thousand odd quid which of course was a windfall but with all windfalls you spend it on something you wouldn’t normally spend money on. So, I, I was a warrant officer by the time I got to OTU which pleased me greatly because it tells anybody who wants to know that you’ve been up at least, at least two years flying experience in your, in your pocket you know. But they started then, at OTU they started commissioning pilots so I’m a pilot officer. Could have, could have come straight from a flying school and nobody would know. Then after six months I was a flying officer so that stayed until I came out, yeah. I’ve had a good life. And that, when I was posted to Abingdon Dave [unclear] sitting there talking to this WAAF and he introduced me to her and away he went. He did a night cross-country. I never saw him again. But I was very much taken with this WAAF so I chased her for ten weeks. Used to say I chased her until she caught me and at the end of ten weeks I was waiting for her coming off her shift work at midnight and asked her to marry me. She said yes. I didn’t go down on one knee. I didn’t get a kiss to say seal it with a kiss. She said, ‘I’m starving. The girls have got my supper ready for me. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Of course, the girls said, what did, ‘What did he want?’ She said, ‘I think I’m engaged to be married.’ The girls said, ‘You can’t marry him. You’ve only known him ten weeks.’ They all worked together. They all knew intimately the others lives you know. Well, she said, ‘Oh, I’ll ask him to wait for six months.’ But being a man I went off and saw a minister and arranged for the wedding to be in, call the banns for three weeks, you see. And get the wedding to the fourth week. So, fourteen weeks after I’d met her we were married. Sixty eight years it lasted. Sixty eight years. We were made for each other. Two and a half years ago she went. So, now as I say my mother looked after me for eighteen years. The air force looked after me for four and a half years. My wife looked after me for sixty eight years. And the last two and a half years it’s been, I’ve been going solo. It’s quite an illuminating experience you know. Because one thing I have learned — never to be afraid to speak to anybody because you never know what you’re going to get back in return and it’s sometimes quite surprising. Yeah. Anyway, I was bloody near killed at Shoreham back in the summer. You know it? Do you know about Shoreham?
MJ: On behalf of the International Bomber Command Archive Unit I’d like to thank Bill Neilson at his home in Southampton for his recording on the 16th of November 2015. Once again I thank you.
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Interview with William Neilson
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Mick Jeffery
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2015-11-16
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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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ANeilsonW151116
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
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00:31:20 audio recording
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eng
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Training Command
Description
An account of the resource
William Neilson grew up in Edinburgh. After training as a pilot in Canada and the United States he served as a staff pilot at Number 1 Air Armament School RAF Manby. He discusses low level bombing practice. He was demobbed in 1946 and became a civil aviation pilot.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Canada
Great Britain
United States
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
New Brunswick--Moncton
Oklahoma--Ponca City
Oklahoma
New Brunswick
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
10 OTU
1668 HCU
6 BFTS
aircrew
Blenheim
bombing
British Flying Training School Program
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
love and romance
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Abingdon
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Manby
Stearman
training
Wellington
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/475/8357/PBoyntonS1512.1.jpg
b8f48f9aeb2acc9b01ed571e88e5da23
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/475/8357/ABoyntonS150624.1.mp3
0ed41bfbe8c8db1cab395ef730cc5b81
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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Boynton, Stuart
Thomas Stuart Boynton
T S Boynton
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Boynton, S
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Stuart Boynton (1622415 Royal Air Force), He served as an air gunner with 103 Squadron.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Stuart Boynton and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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TSB. 1923,19,1939 I left Bridlington Grammar School eh, then, which I didn’t join the RAF straight away I joined the Air Training Corps, I was in there for about a year and a half. The war had already started after about a year and a half I thought well I’ll volunteer for Aircrew, which I went down to London, passed with flying colours, as I think and after that I was eh. I am trying to think where I went after various placed in the RAF in England. I was in Harrogate, I was in, up at South Shields. Then, I am trying to think of it, dates. That’s 1939 so, in after I had been in the RAF a few months I was posted to South Africa and my first wife and I then decided, ‘shall we get married and save the money until the war’s finished?’ Which, I got married when I was only twenty it was in the February ’43. And eh, the next within a week of being married I was transferred to South Africa where I, where I was on the Ansons, flying in the Ansons. On returning from South Africa about a year afterwards I as posted to LLandwrog in Wales. While in Wales there was quite a lot of flying the Anson again and eh just before my birthday which was 21st of March 1924, 1924 yes my first birthday my I was, my was transferred, I was transferred and posted to Finningley which is now Doncaster Airfield. So, so in February 1923, I was born in ’23, 1943 I was flying to South Africa which I say after South Africa I went to LLandwrog. Getting to Finningley which is on 21st birthday which was 1944 I was travelling from LLandwrog to Finningley with a kit bag over my shoulder, that was my 21st birthday. So consequently I flew from Finningley, I was on the Wellingtons for a short time. Eh, a leaflet trip to Holland dropping leaflets then from Finningley I went to Lindholme just down the road onto Halifax’s. While there I had a leaflet trip again to Holland and then from Lindholme I was posted to Hemswell onto the Lancasters. From Hemswell I was posted to Elsham, that’s where I did my first operation. I am only guessing now, Elsham I should say get to Elsham some time in September which was ’44. Our first operational trip was early I should say early November and I you ask me what that was like I can only answer [unclear] It was absolutely horrendous. The flak and everything else was shocking we were caught in the eh, eh the searchlights. Anyway with a bit of luck we got home safely. I just said to skipper ‘I am pleased were back from that,’ I said ‘ thirty trips like this we will double grave before we get to thirty trips.’ Anyway that was all right, we went into land, as we landed we flew straight off the airfield. The plane went up on its side we were straight off, all flat tyres. so that was the first one. After that most of our trips was over what we call the Happy Valley which was the German Steel places, Essen, most of mine was to Essen. Anyway we flew to Essen, we was very pleased to get back. Anyway we did about another ten trips after that ten or eleven trips after that. A couple of pretty bad ones after that but the biggest majority were what you call very easy. The last one we never made as we were coming on our way back, we had a very easy trip, a very quiet trip. The Rear Gunner said ‘We got a; fighter on our port side Skipper.’ Anyway he tried to do the evasive did a bit of a mm a mm, tried to get rid of him anyway. Consequently after about ten minutes, half an hour. Oh I thought we were on our way home. The next thing I knew was the Pilot saying ‘Abandon aircraft were on fire.’ I said, I was I went off in rotation. Just as I was going I saw, three [unclear] last thing I remember saying to my Skipper ‘I’ll see you down stairs Phil.’ With that I was pulling me ‘chute, just as I was pulling me ‘chute, I just heard on intercom the Rear Gunner say ‘Christ I’ve pulled me ‘chute.’ With that I’d gone, I didn’t know what happened after that. But what happened after that I was, only left on the plane was the Pilot, the Rear Gunner and the Mid Upper both the Gunners were Canadians. The young lad I thought I was the ablest, the youngest twenty one. Eddie was only just turned eight, nineteen for all I know he panicked and wouldn’t jump with the Mid Upper, Canadian, wanted him to jump with him, but he refused to jump. ‘No I’m not jumping.’ So all the Pilot said to Mid Upper ‘Get yourself off I’ll try to land the plane.’ The Mid Upper said, he jumped, as his ‘chute opened, all he saw was the wing dropped off with that the plane went straight into the ground, both killed. I have always said, I have always tried to find out to find out why this time, he was a bit older than me but had got two daughters. His wife had left Jersey, she was living in a hotel. Where ever he went she was living in hotels. So what she was left with was two daughters, no home to go to. I said I’ll, I always said he should have got decorated but he never did. So that is about all that I can say about that. So anyway when we was, when we were shot down we were taken to just a little village near from where we was shot down. They had seen us coming down so we had no chance of escaping. So they put me into a billet a Nissan hut with about thirty young Germans in. As I went in I was the only one of the crew that at the time, they found. I thought ‘well I am going to get knocked about here with all these lads.’ I had been in there about half an hour, one of them sidled up to me ‘there you are,’ gave me a bit of their ersatz bread. I thought it was awful, I put it in me pocket. Anyway about another half hour went by another young lad came, German lad, could speak, he could speak a bit of English. He just said ‘ me was a prisoner of Americans me look after you.’ With that he gave me a couple of blankets for the night. That is about all I could say about them, they were very good. But even today I still think now that would be December 1944 we were shot down. Even today he said, ah that is what he did say to me, ‘We have,’ when I was in this Nissan hut, ‘you have broken our lines we are now going to push you back.’ I never thought anything more about that at all until after the war. It must have been what you called ‘The Battle of the Bulge.’ So automatically now I often think ‘ I wonder if there are any of these young lads still living today?’ That’s all, that’s all I can say about that one. So after that we, we I was posted to eh, I can’t remember the name where was it, posted into Poland and one night, one morning woke up, right evacuating the camp. The Russians were coming very close to where, to where we were, so we had to, as the Russians were advancing we had to march away from them. So we were on, in the middle of winter, we were marching until about one or two in the morning carried on might have been one or two weeks, I don’t know. But there again I was one of the lucky ones, the last morning we were on the walk we’d get into farm, I’d went into the farm I were in the barn. I was one of the last in the barn and this would be one o’clock in the morning. When I woke up, whatever time it was, I don’t know all I can say it was light, it could have been five o’clock in the morning. There I was laid outside where it was twenty degrees below. I went, I couldn’t, me hands were, I couldn’t get me hands together, me feet was frozen, I said ‘ the only thing if the lads lit a fire.’ Got warmed up within two or three hours we were back on the wa,march again. So consequently we marched and again for another week, how long I don’t know. Once again I was very lucky one day they just piled all our section, our section were piled into rail trucks and how many were in the trucks I don’t know how we got on for weeing or whatever I don’t know how we got on about that. All I know before it took us about a day a day and a half on this truck, finished up somewhere near Berlin. That is when the Russians liberated us which was what I gather, I don’t know. I don’t know [unclear] prisoners. Once again I would be guessing but it was sometime in April time, May. I don’t know when the war finished. But once they, I always remember the Russians coming through our camp knocking all the fences down. There were men and women on the tanks, just the same and I must admit at the time I thought ‘well they are just like a pack a bandit these lot.’ We got on well with them, they didn’t bother with us, we didn’t bother with them. They would not, we were there two or three weeks at least, the Americans sent a couple of Troops to move us and they said ‘ you are going when it is out turn, we will let you know when you are going.’ So we got fed up of waiting, one day we set off from the camp ‘we will make our way to the Elbe to get across ourselves.’ So we [unclear] a mile down the road next thing we got, the Russians were in front of us back to the camp ‘ you go when we tell you.’ Consequently eh why I know a bit about the time there eh when they did allow us to go we got to Brussels, we got a bit of money, we got showered and everything, money we had a night out in, in Brussels. Consequently when I got back home my second birthday was May the 23rd 1945, So but, so consequently I didn’t get back for me twenty first, I didn’t get back until after me birthday which would be after the 23rd 1945. Consequently I was one of the last prisoners back so I got indefinite leave. So indefinite leave I was posted, well I was in Bridlington, got posted to Scarborough so I was backwards and forwards from Brid to Scarborough for about three or four months. Finally when the war finished they decided aircrew you could [unclear] aircrew but you could only go as ground crew. I just had to come out, I came out of the forces. So that’s about all I can tell you, that’s about it in a nutshell. That’s about all I could say. My Pilot was one of the last to leave Jersey before the Germans occupied Jersey. He was on the last boat to leave, his wife went with him, a young girl, went with him. They got married before they [unclear] over to England and where ever he was posted, Phil, she was in the hotel somewhere. She followed him around so there she was when he got shot down she was stood there on her own with two kids and that’s why I think he should have got married. The main thing of all so consequently I knew Phil only five months of my life and for seventy odd years I have never forgotten him [appears upset].
MJ. You shouldn’t you don’t have to worry, that’s part of it you see.
TSB. Yeah and all that I can say is that a marvellous lad, man, fellow.
MJ. Do you remember his full name, do you remember his full name, do you remember his name?
TSB. Phillip.
MJ. Do you remember his surname?
TSB. Picot that all it was and consequently I mentioned the two daughters and his three aunties all the rest of the family have all died. But the daughters have married very well they are very happy. Two lovely families two and two and eh three aunties I think they have all lost their husbands. But they are all lovely people, lovely people.
MJ. Went to London for your medical ?. [?].[unclear]
TSB. Yeah I can’t think [unclear] I know I went from Kings Cross [unclear] I walked from Kings Cross I can’t remember where it was now but I nineteen, as I say about eighteen to nineteen I was twenty three ‘40 to 1942 I should think would be when I came in forces, long time [laugh]. But eh no at least I have often said eh you have got your memories haven’t you, they are worth a lot your memories. That is why I get so sentimental with Phil my Pilot because as I say I only knew him five months. We were very friendly, we were very very friendly. Not many days gone bye without I think something about him.
MJ. What made you so friendly, what what ?
TSB. I don’t know, just the crew, I think during the war you you, fact, you you made up as a crew, seven of you and I think they tried to keep that crew as separate as they could. So in other words eh anybody lost they weren’t missed as much, they look after themselves because each crew was more or less, they look after themselves. So whenever we went down to the pub the seven of us went out together eh at least most nights of the week, five or six but we always stuck together all the time we were flying. Your mates, you were what you call mates as simple as that. In other words at the end of the day unless you were lucky, you died together. But eh I say I have these thoughts many a time but I am very happy and [unclear] I have had a marvellous life, marvellous life. As I say one of my old aunties I used to see her ninety five or so, she fell down stairs, I have not forgot she turned round to us and she said ‘Stuart I don’t want anybody to live as long as I have lived,’ she said ‘ I am not ready for going yet’ she lived till ninety seven well I got to ninety two now and she was definitely the eldest of all of my family. If I could get to ninety eight whither I do or not, grace of Gods is that. Eh but if I get to ninety eight I shall finish up as the eldest one in the family that’s it.[laugh]. But she was a right battle axe was my auntie, she taught me a lot and I still think of her at ninety seven anyway I’ve got to ninety two whither I get to ninety five by the grace of God, you don’t know, you don’t know. One thing certain and a betting man and I used to like betting on the horses and that as a betting man one certainty is we all know we have to die sometime. It’s a good job we don’t know when. We do we all know we have got to go sometime. And I say when I talk about luck if I get to a hundred very good but whither I do or not you don’t know. There is a lot of luck in life as well you know some people are born lucky and some are [unclear]. And I don’t know about you, you had an accident didn’t you. Was it motor accident you had then?
MJ. Em I’ll make sure this is on, go on.
TSB. After the war my mother, well during the war my mother got a telegram eh, just missing. So she went berserk, demented, crackers then of course shortly after that, presumed killed. So that she is worse than ever then about a month after that somebody came dashing into mums shop at Hilderthorpe Road End Bridlington saying ‘Nellie, Nellie, Stuarts alive, Stuarts alive.’And how they got to know that, not from the Air Ministry it was given over the news by Lord Haw Haw that Flight Sergeant Boynton is now a prison of war in Germany. That’s the first time my Mother new I was living. And it wasn’t, she didn’t get it from the RAF or the Ministry, Lord Haw Haw made it over the news one night, one day that’s first thing, first time she knew I was living. [laugh] killed presumed dead, it was a totally different thing when she knew I was still living you see.
MJ. On behalf of the International Bomber Command I would like to thank Warrant Officer Stuart Boynton on the date of the 24th of June 2014. Thank you very much my name is Michael Jeffery.
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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Stuart Boynton Interview
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mick Jeffery
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-06-24
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABoyntonS150624, PBoyntonS1512
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Language
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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
Description
An account of the resource
During 1939 Stuart left grammar school and joined the Air Training Corps. After about half a year he volunteered for air crew and was accepted. He and his girlfriend were married in February 1943. Stuart was posted to South Africa working on Ansons and about a year later was posted to Llandwrog in Wales. His next postings were to RAF Finningley, flying in Wellingtons and to Holland dropping leaflets from a Halifax. From RAF Finningley he went to RAF Lindholme, RAF Hemswell and RAF Elsham Wolds. Stuart described his first operational trip as absolutely horrendous. Most of the crew’s trips were then to the Ruhr and the German steel works in Essen. After that they did another ten or eleven trips. During the last trip the crew had to abandon the aircraft when it was shot down and burst into flames. All but two of the crew (one being the pilot, Phil Picot) baled out before the aircraft hit the ground. Stuart was captured and taken to a hut which housed about 30 Germans, but he was treated well. Stuart was detained in Poland. Their camp had to evacuate during a winter night as the Russians were advancing. They were marching for two or three weeks before being taken to a camp in Berlin by rail. They were liberated and eventually Stuart was posted to RAF Scarborough. He came out of the at the end of the war and said he had had a marvellous life.
Contributor
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Sue Smith
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Poland
South Africa
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Essen
Wales--Carmarthen
Netherlands
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1943-02
Conforms To
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Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:23:24 audio recording
aircrew
Anson
bale out
bombing
Halifax
Lancaster
love and romance
military ethos
pilot
prisoner of war
propaganda
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Finningley
RAF Hemswell
RAF Lindholme
RAF Llandwrog
the long march
training
Wellington