1
25
83
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/150/1567/LBellinghamPF1397635v1.2.pdf
1fbc8b7942f76eed3db897aeedc910f4
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
Bellingham, Peter
Peter F Bellingham
Peter Bellingham
P F Bellingham
P Bellingham
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer Peter Frederick Bellingham (b. 1923, 1391638 Royal Air Force), a photograph and his log book. Peter Bellingham trained in South Africa as a bomb aimer and flew 30 Special Operations Executive operations in Halifaxes and Stirlings with 138 Squadron from RAF Tempsford.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Peter Bellingham and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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
2016-11-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bellingham, PF
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
Peter Bellingham’s observer's and air gunner's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
The log book covers the training and operational career of bomb aimer Peter Bellingham from 10 March 1943 to 21 February 1946. After training in South Africa he flew Halifaxes and Stirlings with 138 Squadron, taking part in 30 night operations over Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway. These were special operations involving the dropping of containers, packages and pigeons to agents, outcome logged either as ‘Joy’ or ‘No joy’. His pilots on operations were Strathearn and Flight Lieutenant Moffat. Landed with FIDO once, did a Cook’s tour over the Netherlands and Germany before becoming an instructor. Aircraft flown included: Oxford, Anson, Wellington, Stirling, Halifax and Warwick.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LBellinghamPF1397635v1
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
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
1946
1944-07-03
1944-07-04
1944-07-05
1944-07-07
1944-07-08
1944-07-09
1944-07-10
1944-07-11
1944-07-23
1944-07-24
1944-07-25
1944-07-26
1944-07-27
1944-07-28
1944-07-30
1944-07-31
1944-08-04
1944-08-05
1944-08-06
1944-08-07
1944-08-08
1944-08-09
1944-08-10
1944-08-11
1944-08-12
1944-08-29
1944-08-30
1944-09-28
1944-09-29
1944-09-30
1944-10-01
1944-10-04
1944-10-05
1944-10-15
1944-10-16
1944-11-01
1944-11-02
1944-11-07
1944-11-08
1944-11-26
1944-11-27
1944-11-29
1944-11-30
1944-12-24
1944-12-25
1945-02-21
1945-02-22
1945-02-23
1945-02-25
1945-02-26
1945-02-27
1945-03-04
1945-03-05
1945-06-19
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
France
Germany
Great Britain
Norway
South Africa
England--Bedfordshire
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Suffolk
South Africa--Port Elizabeth
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
11 OTU
138 Squadron
1657 HCU
17 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
animal
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
Cook’s tour
FIDO
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Manby
RAF Oakley
RAF Silverstone
RAF Tempsford
RAF Turweston
RAF Westcott
RAF Woodbridge
Special Operations Executive
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/186/3583/LMarshallS1594781v1.1.pdf
8560cff2a1aae43ff2cda4b6080884ba
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
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
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
2015-05-08
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. 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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AMarshallS150508
Access Rights
Information about who can access the resource or an indication of its security status. Access Rights may include information regarding access or restrictions based on privacy, security, or other policies.
Permission granted for commercial projects
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/.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LMarshallS1594781v1
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Atlantic Ocean
Denmark
Germany
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Atlantic Ocean--Helgoland Bight
Atlantic Ocean--Kattegat (Baltic Sea)
Denmark--Ebeltoft
Germany--Aschaffenburg
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Essen
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Kleve (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Koblenz
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Munich
Germany--Pforzheim
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Ulm
Germany--Wanne-Eickel
Germany--Wiesbaden
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany--Freiburg im Breisgau
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
1944-10-14
1944-10-15
1944-10-19
1944-10-20
1944-10-23
1944-10-24
1944-10-25
1944-10-28
1944-10-30
1944-10-31
1944-11-04
1944-11-05
1944-11-06
1944-11-09
1944-11-11
1944-11-12
1944-11-22
1944-11-23
1944-11-27
1944-11-28
1944-11-29
1944-12-03
1944-12-04
1944-12-05
1944-12-06
1944-12-07
1944-12-15
1944-12-16
1944-12-17
1944-12-18
1944-12-22
1944-12-23
1945-01-05
1945-01-06
1945-01-07
1945-01-08
1945-01-14
1945-01-15
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
1945-01-28
1945-01-29
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-04
1945-02-05
1945-02-07
1945-02-08
1945-02-15
1945-02-16
1945-02-18
1945-02-19
1945-02-20
1945-02-21
1945-02-22
1945-02-23
1945-02-25
1945-02-26
1945-02-27
1945-03-01
1945-03-02
Title
A name given to the resource
Syd Marshall's flying log book for navigators, air bombers, air gunners and flight engineers
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Description
An account of the resource
The log book covers the training an operational career of Flight Engineer Syd Marshall from 28 July 1944 to March 1945, with occasional notes added through 2008. He joined 103 Squadron at RAF Elsham Wolds on 27 September 1944, from where he flew in Lancasters on 8 daylight and 28 night time operations either over Germany or minelaying in the seas around Denmark: Aarus Bay, Helgoland, Kattegat, Ebeltoft, Aschaffenburg, Bochum, Cologne, Dortmund, Duisburg, Essen, Freiburg, Gelsenkirchen, Hannover, Karlsruhe, Kleve, Koblenz, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Mannheim, Merseburg, Munich, Pforzheim, Stuttgart, Ulm, Wanne-Eickel, Wiesbaden, Heimbach. His pilot on operations was Flight Lieutenant Morgan. Payload details are shown for some operations.
103 Squadron
1667 HCU
aircrew
Anson
bombing
C-47
flight engineer
Halifax
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
mine laying
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Hemswell
RAF Sandtoft
RAF St Athan
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/377/6709/LDawsonSR142531v1.1.pdf
6abbc58e3bc5bd55a8c78eafc9746dec
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/.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LDawsonSR142531v1
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
One booklet
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
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Pilots flying log book for Stephen Dawson, covering the period from 11 June 1939 to 30 March 1942. Detailing his flying training, operations and instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Southampton, RAF Hastings, RAF Hatfield, RAF Little Rissington, RAF St Athan, RAF Cottesmore, RAF Finningly, RAF Lindholme, RAF Swinderby, RAF Upwood and RAF Swanton Morley. Aircraft flown were, Cadet, Tiger Moth, Anson, Hampden and Oxford. He flew a total of 31 night operations with 50 Squadron. Targets were, Dusseldorf, Hannover, Bordeaux, Brest, Berlin, Keil, Lorient, La Rochelle, Copenhagen, Duisberg, Soest, Cologne, Bremen, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Magdeburg and Frankfurt.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
France
Germany
Great Britain
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
Denmark--Copenhagen
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Gloucestershire
England--Hampshire
England--Hertfordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Rutland
England--Sussex
England--Yorkshire
France--Brest
France--La Rochelle
France--Lorient
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Soest
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
France--Bordeaux (Nouvelle-Aquitaine)
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1941
1942
1941-02-04
1941-02-10
1941-02-11
1941-02-15
1941-02-21
1941-03-12
1941-03-13
1941-03-14
1941-03-15
1941-03-18
1941-03-20
1941-03-21
1941-03-23
1941-03-24
1941-04-08
1941-04-09
1941-04-10
1941-04-11
1941-04-13
1941-04-14
1941-04-15
1941-04-16
1941-04-20
1941-04-21
1941-04-24
1941-04-25
1941-06-02
1941-06-03
1941-06-11
1941-06-12
1941-06-13
1941-06-14
1941-06-15
1941-06-21
1941-06-22
1941-06-24
1941-06-25
1941-06-27
1941-06-28
1941-06-29
1941-06-30
1941-07-04
1941-07-05
1941-07-16
1941-07-17
1941-07-20
1941-07-21
1941-08-05
1941-08-06
1941-08-08
1941-08-09
1941-08-12
1941-08-13
1941-08-29
1941-08-30
1941-09-02
1941-09-03
Title
A name given to the resource
Stephen Dawson's pilot's flying log book. One
14 OTU
25 OTU
50 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Flying Training School
Hampden
Initial Training Wing
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Finningley
RAF Hatfield
RAF Lindholme
RAF Little Rissington
RAF St Athan
RAF Swanton Morley
RAF Swinderby
RAF Upwood
Tiger Moth
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/407/7070/MAnsellHT1893553-160730-01.1.pdf
bc52255c5b798cbee3f035a21d2b59d6
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
Ansell, Henry
Henry Ansell
H T Ansell
Description
An account of the resource
28 items. The collection concerns Sergeant Henry Thomas Ansell, DFM (b. 1925, 1893553 Royal Air Force) and contains his logbook, his release book, a school report, two German language documents and several photographs, his medals and other items. Henry Ansell served as a flight engineer with 61 Squadron and 83 Squadron Pathfinders.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Vicki Ansell and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-07-30
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. 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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Ansell, HT
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
LEBENSGEFAHR!
W.G.2.F.
[page break]
[underlined] Gibt es wirklich keine Brücken mehr …. [/underlined]
zwischen dem deutschen Volk und der freien Welt?
Die Antwort auf diese Frage bestimmt in diesen Stunden das Handeln oder Nichthandeln aller deutschen Menschen. Von dieser Antwort hängt DEINE Zukunft ab!
Goebbels sagt: [italics]„ Das Deutsche Volk hat alle Brücken hinter sich abgebrochen ...“ [/italics]
Für Goebbels, Hitler, Himmler und Co. ist das kein Problem. Für die besessenen Fanatiker und zum Untergang verurteilten Führer der deutschen Tragödie gibt es in der Tat keine Brücke. Weder eine Brücke zur europäischen Zivilastion – noch zu einer besseren deutschen Zukunft.
Für die Partei und SS-Fanatiker gibt es nur den UNTERGANG.
[page break]
Aber Hitler ist nicht Deutschland und der Deutschland ist nicht Hitler
[italics] Deutschland muss sich in dieser Stunde entscheiden[ /italics]
[illustration]
WEITERKÄMPFEN MIT HITLER BIS ZUM VERRECKEN UND NATIONALEN UNTERGANG
oder
[/underlined] SOFORTFRIEDE UND WIEDERAUFBAU? [underlined]
[page break]
Sie handelten, weil sie die wirkliche Lage Deutschlands besser kannten als irgend jemand. Sie wussten, dass der militärische Zusammenbruch des Hitlerregimes zum Untergang Deutschlands wird. Sie entschieden sich gegen Hitler und für Sofortfrieden, weil sie wollten, dass Deutschland lebt.
Jedoch: sie scheiterten und versagten im entscheidenden Augenblick, weil sie auf eigene Faust, ohne Verbindung mit der Masse des Volkes handelten.
Generalsrevolten allein können die Entscheidung nicht erzwingen. Die zum Sofortfrieden und zum Abbruch des verlorenen Krieges bereiten Führer den deutschen Wehrmacht brauchen die aktive Unterstützung der gesamten Nation – dass heisst: DEINE HILFE!
DIE AKTIONSBEREITSCHAFT JEDES EINZELNEN !
[underlined] Die Entscheidung des Einzelnen [/underlined]
Mit diabolischer Beredtheit sucht der Reichspropagandaminister Joseph Goebbels dem deutschen Menschen einzureden, dass jeder deutsche Arbeiter, Bauer und Bürger auf Gedeih und Verderb, auf Leben und Tod mit dem Schicksal der wahnsinnigen kriegsschuldigen Führung verkettet ist. Fieberhaft sucht er Dich zu überzeugen, dass nicht die nationalsozialistische Führung, sondern das ganze deutsche Volk die Brücken hinter sich abgebrochen hat.
[page break]
Das ist nicht wahr !
Nur eine Brücke ist unwiderruflich niedergerissen: Die Brücke zum deutschen Sieg.
Ob es Brücken geben wird aus der unsagbar grauenvollen Gegenwart des Hitlerkrieges in eine bessere deutsche Zukunft, das hängt nicht von Hitler, Himmler und Goebbels ab -
das hängt ab, einzig und allein, von der Entscheidung jedes Einzelnen – von der Entscheidung, durch persönlichen oder organisierten Widerstand gegen die Kriegsverlängerung das Schlimmste zu vermeiden.
[underlined]Das Schlimmste![/underlined]
DAS SCHLIMMSTE ist nicht die militärische Niederlage. Es ist auch nicht die geordnete Besetzung Deutschlands durch alliierte Garnisonen. Das kommt auf jeden Fall.
DAS SCHLIMMSTE IST KRIEG AUF DEUTSCHEM BODEN, Krieg in jedem deutschen Dorf und jeder deutschen Stadt, bis am Ende ausgebranntes, ausgeblutetes Deutschland in Chaos zusammenbricht.
[underlined] DAS [/underlined] IST DAS SCHLIMMSTE !
[underlined] Den Krieg überleben…. [/underlined]
Aber ist es nicht sinnlos, von einer deutschen Zukunft und einem deutschen Wiederaufbau zu reden, wenn noch
[page break]
mehr Millionen fünf Minuten vor Zwölf Gesundheit, Gut und Leben opfern müssen, und wenn die Nation physisch zusammenbricht, ehe die Zukunft beginnen kann?
Für jeden Deutschen, dem das eigene Leben – und das ÜBERLEBEN DES KRIEGES – das Leben seiner Familie und Kinder und die menschenwürdige Zukunft seiner Heimat einen Pfennig wert ist, kann es in diesem Augenblick keinen Zweifel und kein Wanken geben:
ER MUSS SICH DURCH DIE TAT FÜR DIE SCHNELLSTE BEENDIGUNG DES KRIEGES EINSETZEN, - DENN DIE ALLIIERTE INVASION DEUTSCHLAND HAT BEGONNEN!!
[underlined] „Ein Mann gegen die Macht des N.S.-Staats ...“ [/underlined]
[italics] „Was kann der Einzelne schon tun? Der Einzelne ist doch machtlos...“ [/italics]
Millionen Deutsche haben seit Jahren so gesprochen. Sagen es nicht immer noch Millionen?
Solange die Macht des Hitlerschen Diktaturstaates ungeschwächt war, solange deutsche Soldaten von Sieg zu Sieg marschierten, solange die Führung geeint und der Polizeiapparat mächtig war – solange konnte die Welt wenig vom Widerstand des Einzelnen gegen diesen verbrecherischen Krieg erhoffen.
[page break]
Heute aber ist das Hitlerregime tödlich verwundet. An allen Fronten sind deutsche Heere in Auflösung. Zu Zehntausenden haben deutsche Offiziere und Soldaten die Konsequenz gezogen und sich ergeben. Die Führung ist in sich gespalten. Gestapo und Polizei erweisen sich als machtlos gegenüber dem „unbekannten kleinen Mann“ des besetzten Europas. So wie die Bürgerarmee der französischen Maquis den deutschen Besatzungstruppen den deutschen Besatzungstruppen erfolgreich Widerstand leistet, so wie Millionen von einfachen Arbeitern, Bauern und Bürgen sich in allen Ländern Europas den nationalsozialistischen Machthabern erfolgreich widersetzen – so kann heute auch der „unbekannte kleine Mann Deutschlands“ wirksamem Widerstand leisten und dabei helfen, sein eigenes Leben, seine Zukunft und die Zukunft seiner Heimat durch schnellste Beendigung des Krieges zu retten.
FÜRCHTEST DU DEN N.S.-STAASTAPPARAT?
HAST DUE HEUTE NOCH ANGST VOR IHM?
Vergiss nicht: ER UND SEINE HANDLANGER HABEN VIEL MEHR ANGST VOR DIR!!
[underlined] „Unmöglich …?“ [/underlined]
Das Gebot ist nicht Revolution, Bürgerkrieg und Barrikaden. Das erste Gebot ist: HERAUS AUS DEN STÄDTEN! HERAUS AUS DEN FABRIKEN! Bringe DICH und die DEINIGEN in Sicherheit! Die
[page break]
letzte kommende Phase des Krieges bedeutet akute Lebensgefahr für die Bevölkerung der Städte und die Belegschaften der R-Betriebe.
Das zweite Gebot ist: ORGANISIERTER WIDERSTAND ALLER! PASSIVER WIDERSTAND ALLER ARBEITER IN DER KRIEGSINDUSTRIE!
Widerstand der Bauern, die Hundearttausenden von „untergetauchten“ Fremdarbeiten Unterschlupf gewähren können und so gleichzeitig, durch die zusätzliche Arbeitskraft, ihre letzte Kriegsernte voll einbringen können! Widerstand der Beamten, Angestellten und Spezialisten!
Jeder Einzelne kann an seinem Platz dazu beitragen, die Weiterführung eines verlorenen, sinnlos gewordenen Krieges auf deutsche Boden zu verhindern.
Die entscheidende Aufgabe fällt dabei auf die deutsche Arbeiterschaft!
[underlined] Deutsche Arbeiter! [/underlined]
Ihr wisst, das bereits heute Zehntausende von ausländischen Zwangsarbeiten in deutschen Betrieben in Aktions-Zellen und Widerstands-Gruppen organisiert sind. Morgen werden Hunderttausende – vielleicht Millionen - bisher passiver Fremdarbeiter in die Reihen der grossen Widerstandsbewegung strömen.
Deutsche Arbeiter! Übt Solidarität! Verbrüdert Euch mit Euren ausländischen Kollegen unter der Losung:
SCHLUSS MIT DEM KRIEGE!
STÜRZT DIE KRIEGSVERLÄNGERE!!
[page break]
BRÜCKEN BAUEN ZU EINER BESSEREN ZUKUNFT NACH DEM KRIEGE HEISST HEUTE ZUSAMMENARBEIT DER DEUTSCHEN ARBEITER MIT DEN WIDERSTANDGRUPPPEN EURER AUSLÄNDISCHEN KOLLEGEN.
[illustration]
[underlined] GEMEINSAME AKTION GEGEN DEN GEMEINSAMEN FEIND, GEGEN DIE KRIEGSVERLÄNGERER HITLER, HIMMLER, GOEBELLS & CO.[/underlined]
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PRENEZ CONTACT AVEC LUI
et par lui, avec ses camarades qui pensent comme lui.
Les ouvriers allemands anti-nazi seront des alliés de valeur.
Quant au Nazis, les vrais de vrais, les brutes et les bandits, les quislings et les corrompus – qu'Ils soient Allemands ou vos compatriotes – faites-leur savoir dès MAINTENANT que le moment des brutalités est passé.
Faites-leur savoir que les ouvriers français et belges en Allemagne n'entendent pas prolonger l'agonie de la lutte dans une guerre perdue.
Faites-leur savoir que VOUS n'entendent pas vous faire tuer cinq minutes avant la fin et que vous avez l'intention de survivre à la guerre et de rentrer chez vous sain et sauf.. Ceci est donc
VOTRE LIGNE GENERALE DE CONDUITE SI VOUS NE POUVEZ PAS ALLER A LA CAMPAGNE: ORGANISEZ DES CELLULES D'ACTION! RALENTISSEZ LA PRODUCTION! RESISTEZ A TOUTE EXPLOITATION PAR UNE RESISTANCE PASSIVE ORGANISEE! COLLABOREZ AVEC LES ALLEMANDS ANTI-NAZIS! OUVREZ UNE LISTE DES NAZIS ET DES QUISLINGS !
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REPANDEZ LA VERITE SUR LES DEFAITES ALLEMANDES SUR TOUS LES FRONTS ! ECOUTEZ LES NOUVELLES DIFFUSEES PAR LES POSTES ALLIES! OBEISSEZ AUX INSTRUCTIONS DU COMMANDEMENT SUPREME ALLIE !
[box surrounding text]
SURVIVEZ A LA GUERRE!
[/box]
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la tâche immédiate dan se dernier stade de la guerre. Ne l'oubliez pas: Les Nazis ont besoin de vous! Partout où ils soupçonneront, où ils sauront que les travailleurs français et belges d'une usine sont en contact organisé, ils accéderont à la majeure partie de vos revendications car ils craindront que dans la négative il se produira des troubles.
Le réseau des cellules d'ouvriers français et belges doit s’étendre à travers toute l'Allemagne. Tous les trous doivent être bouchés; les travailleurs français et belges qui sont rendus volontairement en Allemagne au cours des années de 1940 à 1942 – et même plus tard - doivent maintenant être recrutés pour joindre le grand mouvement de la résistance passive et de la défense organisée. Faites bon accueil dans vos rangs à ceux qui désirent réellement coopérer. Mais fermez vos rangs à ceux qui sympathisent ouvertement avec les Nazis. Avertissez le Gau et les Kreisverbindungsmaenner et leurs petits collaborateurs quislings au moyen de messages directs ou anonymes que toutes dénonciation ou que tout mesure prise contre les ouvriers français ou belges sera notée et vengée.
[underlined] DEENDEZ-VOUS MAINTENANT![/underlined]
Les ouvriers français et belges déjà organisés en cellules ou en groupes doivent dès maintenant inaugurer une vaste campagne d'agitation et de propagande parmi leurs compatriotes. Ils doivent leur expliquer que la résistance et la défense DES MAINTENANT et la protection et le rapatriement après la défaite de Hitler ne peuvent être
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efficaces qu'au moyen de l'organisation massive des cellules d'ouvriers français et belges dans tous les établissements industriels du Reich.
Mais quoi que vous tentiez de faire – LE CONTACT ORGANISE avec vos camarades, la confiance mutuelle, l' information mutuelle et L'ACTION ORGANISEE ET COLLECTIVE SONT LES SEULES GARANTIES DU SUCCESS. LE TRAVAILLEURS ISOLE EST IMPUISSANT.
[underlined] VOUS ET L'ÁLLEMAND A VOS COTES [/underlined]
Un problème est soulevé. Comment tout ce qui précède affectera vos relations avec les ouvriers allemands ordinaires qui travaillent à côté de vous? Il n'y a pas de règle générale. Peut-être est-il bon gars … qui en a tout autant marre que vous. Peut-être même est-il un anti-nazi endurci. (Comme vous le savez il existe de nombreux anti-nazis parmi les hommes plus âgés). Mais peut-être es marre-il simplement un salopard, un lâche, qui s'est servi de tous ses privilèges aux dépens de ses camarades étrangers. En conséquence il n'est pas possible de donner de règles générales sur la façon de traiter vos co-équipiers allemands.
IL Y A CEPENDANT,
[underlined] UNE REGLE: [/underlined]
Où que vous trouviez un ouvrier allemand qui a clairement démontré son attitude anti-nazie et son honnêteté personnelle par sa conduite et ses actes
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[underlined] COMMENT S'Y PRENDRE? [/underlined]
Une condition du succès C'EST L'ORGANISATION.
Dans la défense de ses DROITS, ou dans la résistance passive contre la continuation d'une guerre perdue … tout homme agissant seul sans le soutien de ses camarades ne peut obtenir que le maigres résultats.
Vous serez d'accord avec nous: l'action individuelle est, la moins efficace des formes de la résistance; et la défense individuelle offre le moins de protection.
[underlined] VOUS N'ETES PAS SEULS! [/underlined]
Un homme qui combat une puissance supérieure comme celle de la police d'état des Nazis a besoin d'alliés. Chaque ouvrier étranger – sont vos alliés naturels et VOUS êtes un allié des forces combattantes de la Grande-Bretagne, de l'Amérique et de la Russie, ainsi que toutes les Nations Unies.
[underlined]TOUS POUR UN ET UN POUR TOUS [/underlined]
Une alliance ne tombe pas du ciel. Elle doit être négociée et conclue. Elle comporte l'action. Elle comporte surtout le contact mutuel, la confiance mutuelle et l'information mutuelle avant que les millions d'hommes isolés, qui ont tous le même but, puissent agir ensemble en une grande fraternité.
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[underlined] VOUS SOUFFRIREZ [/upnderlined]
Si vous ne reconnaissez pas ce fait au dernier moment possible.
[underlined] QUEL GENRE D'ORGANISATION? [/underlined]
Ne vous effrayez PAS du mot ORGANISATION. Il ne signifie pas la création d'une organisation vaste et compliquée de tous les ouvriers étrangers; ni la création d'un mouvement syndicaliste illicite. Le temps nécessaire manque pour cela. La fin de guerre est trop proche. Le devoir de passer à l'action immédiate et à la protection d'heure en heure, est trop pressant. A l'état actuel des choses l'organisation et l'action organisée signifient l'action d'accord et en combinaison avec des collègues sur lesquelles vous pouvez compter. Elles signifient que vous devriez discuter de ce que vous entendez faire avec de trois à cinq camarades en qui vous pouvez avoir confiance. Il est possible qu’ils pourront vous aider, il est possible qu’il pourront participer et agir comme vous. Il est possible que l'un d'entre eux aura un meilleur plan.
[underlined] CELLULES D'ACTION [/underlined]
Il existe déjà de milliers de cellules d'action d'ouvriers français et belges mal organisées dont on ne sait rien. Au cours des semaines qui vont suivre tous les ouvriers français et belges doivent soit former, soit se joindre à des cellules de résistance passive de protection. Voilà
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prendre " les instructions qui vous sont données, ou bien veiller à ce qu'un article presque achevé soit abîmé "accidentellement", - peu importe pourvu que vous parveniez à abaisser la production. "QUE PEUT FAIRE UN SEUL HOMME CONTRE LA PUISSANCE ARMÉE DU RÉGIME NAZI?"
UN SEUL HOMME PEUT FAIRE BEACOUP.
Cela peut sembler de faible envergure et insignifiant mais l'action de dix, de onze, ou de douze millions d'hommes et de femme peut briser les reins à Hitler.
IL N'EXISTE AU MONDE AUCUNE PUISSANCE QUI PUISSE AVOIR RAISON DE VOTRE FORCE COMBINEE.
[underlined] ROMPEZ ISOLEMENT! [/underlined]
Le "Betriebsleitung", le D.A.F., l'ensemble du régime nazi entendent vous maintenir dans l’isolement. Ils peuvent avoir raison de vous tant que vous êtes SEULS. Tant que vous êtes seuls ils savent qu'ils peuvent vous bousculer. Mais ils ont la frousse dès qu'ils sont confrontés par votre force combinée.
LA RESISTANCE PASSIVE DOIT ETRE UNRE RESISTANCE ORGANISEE. Pour votre propre protection il faut combiner, dès aujourd'hui et partout, la résistance passive avec la DEFENSE COLLECTIVE DE VOS DROITS EN TANT QU'OUVRIERS FRANÇAIS ET BELGES.
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[underlined] RECLAMEZ VOS DROITS [/underlined]
Le slogan PROTECTION PAR L'ORGANISATION veut dire que vous devez défendre vos DROITS dans toutes les usines, les camps, les ateliers, et où que vous vous trouviez. VOS DROITS concernant.
LA NOURRITURE DANS LES CANTINES: LES RATIONS: L'HEURE DES REPAS: LES AMENAGEMENTS DES CAMPS ET DES CANTONNEMENT: LES HEURES DE TRAVAIL: LES CONDITIONS SANITAIRE: LES SOINS HYGENIQUES: LES MESURES PREVENTIVES CONTRE LES ACCIDENTS: LES PERMISSIONS: LES CONGES DU DIMANCHE: LES ABRIS CONVENABLES CONTRE LES ATTAQUES AERIENNES: VOTRE DROIT DE VOUS RENDRE AUX ABRIS, NON PAS SEULEMENT QUAND IL Y A DANGER AU-DESSUS DE VOUS, MAIS AUSSITOT QUE L'ALERTE A ETE DONNEE DANS VOTRE REGION.
Tous ces DROITS doivent être vigoureusement défendus car en raison du manque désespéré de main-d'oeuvre les Nazis tenteront le liquider TOUS ces droits aux dépens de VOTRE SANTE ET DE VOTRE SECURITE.
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ET POUR CEUX QUI POUR UNE RAISON OU UNE AUTRE NE PEUVENT PAS S'EN ALLER? VOUS AUSSI, VOUS POUVEZ VOUS PROTEGER !!
[underlined] COMMENT? [/underlined]
Parlons tout d'abord de sabotage actif industriel et militaire. Toutes les formes de sabotage sont un moyen de faire la guerre. Le saboteur doit agir avec le même courage et la même discipline qu’un troupier de choc.
Dans cette brochure nous ne donnons pas d'instructions de sabotage. Elle ne s'adresse pas aux cadres clandestins des mouvements actifs de résistance et de sabotage. Cette brochure s'adresse à tout travailleur français ou belge en Allemagne.
[underlined] QUELLE ACTION PRENDE ? LA RESISTANCE PASSIVE !
Chaque ouvrier français ou belge en Allemagne quels que soient son âge, son sexe ou on [sic] métier, peut pratiquer la résistance passive – qu'il soit membre d'une cellule dans dans [sic] une usine, d'une organisation secrète, ou qu'il soit indépendant.
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Chacun d'entre vous peut contribuer à réduire la puissance et l'efficacité de la machine de guerre de Hitler de mille façons en pratiquant la RESISTANCE PASSIVE. Dans l’intérêt de votre propre protection et de votre survie; LA RESISTANCE PASSIVE EN MASSE est l'ordre donné a tout ouvrier français ou belge en Allemagne à partir de maintenant et jusqu'à la fin de la guerre. Mais nous n'entendons pas vous donner des instructions précises concernant ce que vous avez à faire – comment vous devez le faire et où. Tous ce que nous vous demandons c'est de vous servir de votre intelligence et de votre bon sens, d’étudier les conditions et les possibilités de résistance passive dans votre usine, dans votre bureau ou là où vous travaillez.
Nous allons vous donner une définition très simple de résistance passive. La voici :
TOUT CE QUI PEUT ABAISSER LA QUALITE OU LA QUANTITE DE LA PRODUCTION
[underlined] LA FAIBLESSE DE HITLER [/underlined]
La puissance combattive [sic] de Hitler peut être décisivement affaiblie par les tactiques de le résistance passive. Dans toutes les catégories d'usines ou dans toutes les branches de l'industrie il y a toujours mille et un moyens d'abaisser et la quantité et la qualité de la production. Vous pouvez faire ''la grève perlée'' ou ''mal com-
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phase cruciale de la guerre qui pourrait amener le combat au coeur du territoire du Reich.
SOUVENEZ -VOUS: Que de nombreux fermiers allemands et qu des paysannes allemandes isolés seront prêts à vous donner asile et nourriture en échange de quelques semaines de travail sain en plein air. Des milliers de FERMIERS ET DE PAYSANS ont tellement besoin de votre travail qu'ils ne parleront pas et qu'ils ne vous dénonceront pas.
Mais souvenez-vous aussi de ces principes généraux.
1. Préparez un ALIBI avant de quitter la ville. Dites par exemple, que vous avez entendu parler d'un vieil ami à vous qui travaille comme ouvrier agricole dans une certaine région. Dites que vous avez passé votre journée de repos à essayer de le retrouver. Tout ALIBI est bon – mais vous devez avoir une histoire convaincante à raconter. Servez-vous de votre bon sens.
2. Quand vous croisez un Allemand, soit dans une ferme ou dans un village, ne manquer pas, de faire ''votre récit''. PRETENDEZ TOUJOURS avoir perdu votre chemin, - avoir manqué votre train, etc., etc. Demandez asile et nourriture et offrez de payer en travaillant pendant quelques jours sur la terre. Si votre offre est acceptée demandez le jour suivant à rester encore quelques temps.
3. Soyez très prudent et tâchez d'être courtois quand vous rencontrez des femmes seules. Elles s’effraient
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facilement car on leur a dit que tous les ouvriers étrangers sont des meurtriers, des voleurs, et qu'ils violent des femmes. Essayez de prendre contact en premier lieu avec des vieillards.
4. D'une façon générale évitez les grandes propriétés ou les grandes fermes. Elles sont susceptibles de renfermer trop de témoins et d'espions.
5. N'oubliez pas que vous devez rester à même d'entrer en contact avec vos camardes de la libération.
Bref : La terre allemande a besoin de bras. Elle a besoin de vous ! Il y a de la place et la SECURITE pour des centaines de milliers d'ouvriers français et belges dans les villages de l'Allemagne. ALLEZ-Y POUR VOTRE PROTECTION ET POUR RACCOURCIR LA GUERRE. DES USINES DE GUERRE ET DE MINES VIDES HATENT LA FIN ET SAUVGARDE DES VIES
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[underlined] QUITTEZ LES VILLES !! [/underlined]
'' Il est souvent arrivé... ''
… (écrivait en juillet un journal allemand – le NDZI 21.7)
…'' [italics] que des ouvriers étrangers qui ne parlent l'allemand se sont perdus accidentellement et sont arrivées là où ils n’avaient rien à faire. Des gens – des gens allemands – ont profité de cette occasion et ont tout simplement permis aux ouvriers isolés de travailler dans leurs entreprises ou dans leurs fermes. Nombreux sont ceux qui croient qu'il y a là un moyen facile d'obtenir de la main-d’œuvre supplémentaire. [/italics]''
Eh bien, voilà un moyen facile à adopter ! Camarade, vous pouvez '' vous perdre accidentellement '' tout aussi facilement que des dizaines de milliers d'ouvriers étrangers qui, suivant des déclarations allemandes officielles, '' ont tous simplement disparu ''. Beaucoup d'entre vous se souviennent de camarades qui un jour travaillaient avec vous et le lendemain – pour ne jamais revenir. Betriebsleitung, Betriebsverbindungsmaenner, Werkscharführer et les S.D. locaux s'agitèrent, maugréèrent, posèrent de nombreuses questions qui ne reçurent aucune réponse … et le tour était joué. Un autre ouvrier étranger avait rejoint les '' UNTERGETAUCHTEN ''. Les déclarations officielles ou semi-officielles allemandes ne concordent pas quant au nombre de cette population flottante d'ouvriers étrangers '' UNTERGETAUCHTE ''. Elles
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parlent de 60.000, de 80.000, de 100.000. En vérité leur nombre a été beaucoup plus important au cours des dix-huit derniers mois.
[underlined] UNE GRANDE OCCASION SE PRESENTE A VOUS ! [/underlined]
Peu importe les statistiques . Ce qui importe c'est que l'occasion ''de se perdre accidentellement '' est mille fois plus favorable aujourd'hui. La dernière mesure désespérée '' de mobilisation totale '' a eu pour résultat, entre autres, de diminuer les effectifs de la police, des S.D., de la Gestapo, du personnel du D.A.F., et, par la même occasion, ce dernier appel d'urgence a encore augmenté la disette incurable de main-d’œuvre dans les régions agricoles.
'' Disette de main-d’œuvre '' est devenue aujourd'hui une expression sans signification. La vérité c'est qu'il existe à peine un seul village à travers l'Allemagne qui dispose d'assez de bras pour faire la récolte cet été et pour faire les préparatifs les plus élémentaires en vue de l'ensemencement de l'automne. Les vieillards, les femmes et les enfants triment jusqu'à ce qu'ils tombent de fatigue. Les paysans allemands ordinaires et les grands propriétés clament pour avoir de la main-d’œuvre - ET NE PARVIENNENT PAS A L'OBTENIR.
Telle est la position. En ce moment il se présente une occasion in espérée à des dizaine de milliers d'ouvriers français et belges de '' se perdre ''.
DONC – PERDEZ-VOUS ! ! Quittez les villes ! Cachez-vous et mettez-vous en sûreté pendant la dernière
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Ils vous craignent …
Les Nazis le savent bien. Ils CRAIGNENT les travailleurs français et belges, sachant parfaitement que chaque heure de la continuation de la guerre dépend autant de votre obéissance du peuple allemand.
… et ils vous menacent
Du fait que le régime de Hitler vous craint, les dirigeants allemand feront tout, et toute méthode leur sera bonne vous effrayer, pour vous terroriser, pour empêcher que vous vous protégiez en vous organisant.
Les dirigeants nazis sont au désespoir et ils agissent tel un rat pris au piège. Pour eux, la paix équivaut à la mort. Des êtres tels que Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler et ses bandes meurtrières de S.S. n'ont que faire de votre vie.
[underlined] NOUS VOUS DISONS DONC : [/underlined]
SI VOUS VOULEZ SURVIVRE A LA DERNIERE PHASE DE LA GUERRE, LA PHASE LA PLUS DANGEREUSE ET LA PLUS VIOLENT, AGISSEZ DES MAINTENANT ET ASSUREZ VOUR VOTRE PROTECTION.
Nous savons fort bien qu'il n'existe pas de protection complète contre le danger des bombes ou contre la terreur nazie, MAIS NOUS SAVONS AUSSI QU'IL EST POSSIBLE D'ASSURER UN DEGRE ELEVE DE PROTECTION - PROTECTION PAR L'ORGANISATION.
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[underlined] QU'ALLEZ-VOUS FAIRE ?
QUE POUVEZ-VOUS FAIRE ? [/underlined]
Si vous voulez survivre à la guerre, eh bien c'est maintenant qu'il faut vous en sortir! Nous savons parfaitement que 99% d'entre vous n'ont que peu de chances de s’évader de l'Allemagne actuellement . L'invasion alliée de l'Allemagne a commencé. Mais nombre de vous on cependant l'occasion de
SORTIR DE LA GUERRE
ce qui revient à dire QUITTES LES CENTRES INDUSTRIELS – mettez-vous HORS DE PORTEE des bombardiers alliées EN VOUS RENDANT A LA CAMPAGNE.
Si vous ne pouvez pas effectivement vous esquiver, le moment est venu pour faire tous les efforts possibles pour vous protéger, vous et vos camarades dans les camps et dans les usines, contre la violence croissante de la guerre et contre la furie croissante des gangsters nazis battus.
Dans les deux cas vous prendrez certains risques, mais ces risques seront insignifiants comparés aux dangers que vous serez appelés à confronter au cours des jours et des semaines à venir si vous vous contenter au cours des jours et des semaines à venir si vous vous contentez de rester passifs sous les ordres des bureaucrates du D.A.F., sous la corruption les Verbindungsmaenner ou sous les espions couards et les brutes de la Werkscharen.
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pour combler les rangs ravagés de la Wehrmacht vaincue. Des milliers d'hommes, qui ne sont pas ressortissants allemands, ont déjà été précipités sous la mitraille des canons et des escadrilles de bombardiers britanniques et américains. Beaucoup d’entre eux n'eurent même pas l'occasion de se rendre.
Comme du bétail vous pourrez être contraints à construire à la dernière minute des fortifications le longs des frontières menacées de l'Allemagne où les S.S tenteront de ''maintenir l'ordre et la discipline'' en fusillant des otages et en passant à tabac et à la torture les ouvriers français et belges dans des camps spéciaux de concentration.
HEURE PAR HEURE ET JOUR PAR JPOUR CES DEUX DANGERS QUI MENACENT CHACUN DE VOUS GRANDISSENT. Et ces dangers grandissent au moment même où la FIN de la guerre et de toutes vos souffrances approche.
Mais [italics] vous-même [/italics vou pouvez contribuer [italics] à hâter la fin [/italics] de la guerre.
[underlined] VOTRE FORCE EST IMMENSE ![/underlined]
L'action organisée de millions de travailleurs français et belges pourrait mettre fin à la guerre demain. Des grèves en masse et une résistance organisée ont fait crouler la régime de Mussolini avant que les armées alliées n’envahissent l'Italie en 1943.
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Une grève générale des ouvriers de Copenhague déclenchée en juillet 1944 a forcé les Nazis et les armées d'occupation allemandes à s'avouer vaincus et à donner satisfaction à toutes les revendications de travailleurs.
[underlined] COMMENT VOUS POURRIEZ AGIR ! [/underlined]
Vous êtres environ douze millions de travailleurs étrangers en Allemagne aujourd'hui. Si seulement la moitié d'entre vous prenaient la décision demain de faire la grève et de refuser, à tout prix, de continuer la guerre de Hitler.
VOUS POURRIEZ TOTALEMENT L'EFFORT DE GUERRE ALLEMAND, VOUS POURRIEZ IMMOBILISER TOTALEMENT TOUTE LA PRODUCTION ET LES TRANSPORTS ALLEMANDS, VOUS POURRIEZ EN QUELQUES JOUR METTRE FIN A LA GUERRE DE HITLER – BIEN AVANT QUE LES RAVAGES DE LA BATAILLE NE DEFERLENT CHEZ VOUS.
L'ACTION ORGANISEE POURRAIT ATTEINDRE TOUS CES BUTS EN QUELQUES JOURS
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[underlined] Aux Travailleurs Alliés en Allemagne ! [/underlined]
La guerre tire à sa fin inévitable.
L'Allemagne sur le territoire de laquelle vous avez été déportés doit bientôt devenir un champ de bataille.
Ceci implique des dangers encore plus grands pour vous si vous continuez à obéir aux ordres de vos négriers et si vous leur permettez de vous envoyer là où bon leur semble.
Mais ceci vous fournit des occasions plus grandes que que jamais pour la fin de votre captivité.
Le travail de vos compatriotes dans les mouvements de résistances à l’intérieur a apporté une contribution de grande valeur au succès de nos armes.
Vous, également, avez une contribution à apporter si vous suives leur exemple.
Gardez présents à l'esprit les trois points suivants :-
1) Il est de votre devoir de dérégler la machine de guerre allemande.
2) Il est de votre devoir d'aider à la libération de votre propre patrie.
3) Il est de votre devoir de veiller à ce que vous soyez sauvegardés pour rentrer chez vous le plus rapidement possible et ainsi aider au travail de reconstruction qui nous attend tous quand la victoire sera gagnée.
Dans cette brochure vous trouverez des directives qui vous indiqueront comment vous pouvez atteindre ces trois objectifs.
Vous recevrez de nouvelles instructions par voie de la T.S.F. et par tracts.
LE HAUT COMMANDEMENT INTERALLIE
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[underlined] UN APPEL AUX TRAVAILLEURS FRANCAIS ET BELGES EN ALLEMAGNE [/underlined]
L'Allemagne a perdu la guerre !
La fin de la plus grande guerre de l'histoire approche – mais ….
[underlined] VOUS ETES EN DANGER ! [/underlined]
A mesure que la guerre tire à sa fin le régime nazi deviendra de plus en plus impitoyable. Chacun de vous dorénavant est sous le coup d'UN DOUBLE DANGER. Le DANGER émanant des terroristes nazis qui, pour obtenir le maximum de rendement de votre part, useront contre contre vous de tous les moyens. Et le DANGER – chaque jour plus grand – des ATTAQUES AERIENNES.
Vous serez contraints à vivre et à travailler dans les régions qui renferment les plus dangereux des objectifs choisis par les Force Aériennes Alliées – tandis que les adolescents allemands de seize ans et les vieillards de soixante ans et de plus seront dirigés vers le front pour servir de dernières réserves de chair à canon dans les batailles de Hitler acculé. Ne dites pas: Nous savons ce que sont les bombardements.
[underlined] VOUS N'AVEZ ENCORE RIEN VU À MOINS D'AVOIR CONNU L'EXPÉRIENCE DES NOUVELLES BOMBES INCENDIARES QUI ONT ÉTÉ LANCÉES DNAS LES RÉCENTES ATTAQUES SUR DARMSTADT, FRANCFORT ET D'AUTRES CENTRE ALLEMANDS. [/underlined]
Vous serez versés de force dans l'armée allemande
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DANGER de MORT!
[underlined] et comment l'éviter [/underlined]
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
Lebensgefahr
Danger de Mort
Description
An account of the resource
The first part is targeted at the German population and argues, with illustrations, for passive and active resistance against the regime. It uses the image of Germany’s many broken bridges to argue that the only bridge open to the German people is that leading to peace and reconstruction.
The second, much longer, part warns foreign workers in Germany (particularly French and Belgian) that they are in grave danger as the final conflagration of the war is inevitable. Urges them to take action to lessen the danger and hasten the end of their captivity, and gives guidance and instruction as to how they should proceed.
It says that workers are in danger from Germans and from air attack from Allied Forces, the like of which they have never seen before. They will be forced to live and work in areas where Allied attacks will be at their fiercest (such as Darmstadt and Frankfurt), sent to the front, or forced to work on the fortifications. Hostages are likely to be shot or beaten and tortured in special concentration camps.
Claims that workers are in a powerful position, and should consider the successes of the Resistance organized against the regime of Mussolini before the Allies invaded in 1943. A workers’ general strike in Copenhagen in July 1944 had similar success and the workers triumphed in their demands. The 12 million foreign workers in Germany could paralyse the production of goods as well as all transport links and all this could be done in a few days.
Workers should get out the industrial centres - which are likely to be bombed by the Allies - and go to the countryside. They can hide there taking advantage of widespread labour shortage. Workers should have alibis ready, pretend to have lost their way, avoiding to rouse suspects, and steering clear from big farms as these may have spies.
Stresses the importance of sabotage and passive forms of resistance which will reduce the quality and quantity of production, either by deliberately misunderstanding instructions or damaging an almost finished article. The combined effect of these actions may be massive.
Workers should band together to ensure that their rights in the camps, workshops, or wherever their work is, are meticulously protected. Rights include food in the canteens, rations, mealtimes, facilities in the camps and cantonments, working hours, sanitary conditions, hygiene, accident prevention, permissions, Sunday leave arrangements, protection from aerial attack, and the right to get to a shelter.
Stresses the importance of acting together forming or joining cells of passive resistance or protection rights; also claims that some anti-Nazi Germans can be valuable allies provided their intentions are sincere. Concludes urging foreign workers who cannot go to the countryside to organize resistance cells, slow production, resist exploitation by passive resistance, collaborate with anti-Nazi Germans, set up a list of Nazis and their minions and spread the truth about German defeats in battle on the different fronts. They should also listen to the news broadcasts from Allied sources and obey instructions from the Allied High Command.
Format
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One printed booklet
Language
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deu
fra
Type
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Text
Artwork
Identifier
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MAnsellHT1893553-160730-01
Coverage
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Civilian
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
France
Belgium
Denmark
Denmark--Copenhagen
Italy
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Darmstadt
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
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Gilvray Williams
Frances Grundy
Creator
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Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
Conforms To
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Pending review
bombing
Goebbels, Joseph (1897-1945)
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
propaganda
Resistance
shelter
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/495/8384/ACollerAS160803.1.mp3
43ced8a4a3e4ad4ee6eba1afb7b2925c
Dublin Core
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Title
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Coller, Allan Stanley
A S Coller
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
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Coller, AS
Description
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17 items. An oral history interview with Allan Coller (1924, 1874018 Royal Air Force). Also a number of other items associated with the Air Cadets and his service in Sri Lanka and India including a scrapbook of photographs.
The collection has been licenced to the IBCC Digital Archive by Allan Coller and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today, I’m in Golders Green, London with Alan Coller, who was busy with the RAF with munitions during the war, and we’re going to talk about his life in London but then also in the Royal Air Force and afterwards. So, Alan, what are your first recollections of life?
AC: As a child? Well, I was, I had a, what do you call it? A very, a childhood of the best nurses you could get, from, and the best pram and I was looked after very well as a, as a child. I had quite a happy childhood until, and then holidays in Margate at Cliftonville, and there were holidays for maybe five or six weeks, and they were very happy holidays. And how will I put it? Have I gone too far up on the thing? But as a child, I was very well looked after. Oh, school. Now, my first school, if you could call it a school, was a Montessori in Cazenove Road in the Stamford Hill area, and my nurse took me there. The first time she took me there and left me, and I was in there and played with things, and I happened to pick, on the wall was a bow, and of course being a nosy child, I looked at the bow and I pulled it and it opened up, and the teacher came in. She, ‘Oh, you opened the bow. Now you can put it, you can do it up, can’t you?’ I said, ‘I can’t’. So, she said, ‘Well, you’ll stay here till you can’. And then I thought to myself, Alan, she can’t keep me here all night. There’s a nurse coming for me, so jolly well don’t do it, and I left the darned thing. The nurse came in and this lady said, ‘Oh, your child is very rude. He wouldn’t do what I told him’. Anyway, that was the end of my Montessori. A one day Montessori. So they took me away from there and then, then I didn’t go to school until I was old enough to go to the older school, and then my trouble started. Another lot of trouble, because they took me to school with a nanny. A council school. Now, first of all, I saw everybody looking. A nurse in uniform taking me to a council school. So, the first thing I did when I went to the toilet, I was in the toilet, and suddenly two boys, one on each other’s shoulders, started spitting over it and pouring water down over me, so I came out soaking wet. That was my next school. So they took me away from that school [laughs], and then luckily enough, they moved. Not long after they moved from Stamford Hill to Golders Green, emigrated I call it [laughs], to Golders Green. Then I was put in to a school, Wessex Gardens in, I think it was off, how do I explain Wessex Gardens to anybody? It was on the 226 bus, that’s right, I remember going on this 226 bus with a nanny to this school, which was also a council school. I get to the council school, and a boy comes up to me and says, ‘My father hates your mother’. I said, ‘What do you mean he hates my mother?’ ‘She’s, my father washes your mother’s windows in [unclear] Avenue and she’s horrible to him’. So, I said, ‘What’s it to do with me?’ ‘Well, I’m going to tell you and I’m going to make you sorry for it’. So, he gave me a biff and he knocked me down. He trod on my neck and I went to, I didn’t go to hospital, but I went home and the doctor came, and he said, ‘Your son’s got to stay in bed X amount’. Well, in those days, they didn’t, they didn’t go back and say, ‘we’re going to take the boy to accuse him of assault and battery’, but anyway that was that, and then I went back to the school again. And then there was a master there called, well the name, the name is gone a little bit, Elliot, I think he was called. I think the master was called and he used to cane me, every week I got caned. So, I couldn’t understand why I was being caned. He said, ‘You don’t, you’re not doing your work well. You’re not doing this’, but then I found out, he’d asked my father for a loan, because he, my father had him come to me privately, to help me to read and he didn’t say much, but when I went back, he caned me because I hadn’t done my homework properly, and I reckoned, and then my father told me, as I said, maybe I said it too early, he, he asked my father for a loan and my father wouldn’t give him, and that seems to be the way of him getting his own back on me, so I was not doing very well at that school. So, my father took me out that school, and sent me to a private school, which was heaven, and that was in Golders Green, called Woodstock and the headmistress was a Mrs De Vries. A Dutch lady whose kindness I could not believe. How kind she was. And one day, a little girl said to her that I was, I was chasing her, and the headmistress, instead of shouting at me, got the little girl and me together, and she said to the little girl, ‘Well, little boys chase little girls. Did he hurt you?’ ‘Oh no, he didn’t hurt me.’ She said, ‘But that’s how little boys behave. As long as he didn’t hurt you. I’m sure he didn’t want to do you any harm’, and it was so nice to hear, and I became friendly with the little girl, and that was my school there at Woodstock. Then she sold the school, a beautiful school, and I went to another school in Frogenham, in Hampstead, an also private school, where it was a little bit mad this school, because the headmaster was called The Owl. That wasn’t his real name but I can’t remember his real name, but we called him The Owl, and he believed, he believed that if there was any problems, you go in the boxing ring. Well, I’d never boxed in my life, but there was a pupil there called Charlie Burrman who didn’t, who said to me, ‘I don’t like you and I’m going to take you, you’re going to go into the boxing ring with me’. Well, I couldn’t box, but I could jump about, I was pretty agile. So, Charles gave me what he thought was going to be a real smack in the face, and I jumped beside him, and he went right over the ropes, and I felt so good. So there was no more boxing there, but at that school, as I was a good runner thanks to my father chasing me when I was younger to put a shirt on, I won three or four cups for my running, so I did a bit of sports. My daughter’s got hold of the cups, she’s got those cups. So that was my story about that school. I didn’t learn a lot, but I had a master there which never hit me, but he used to, used his desk as a battering ram. He’d shout out ‘Lord man’ and shove his desk into me like that. Didn’t hurt me, but everybody couldn’t believe it because my Latin was no good. I could do the first two words in Latin, and then they’d say, ‘go to page one again’, you know. So Latin wasn’t my subject, but the master that taught, taught maths liked me. He said, ‘You’ve got a bit of life in you, Alan’, he said, and he made me feel good. The master. But this was a very funny school because of that but then the war came, the Second World War, which to me was a blessing. It seems funny to say it was a blessing, because my life was not exactly a happy one, but I knew that maybe I was, I think I was thirteen or fourteen when the war started, but I, when the war started, I was farming, because my, she wasn’t a nanny at that time, but I have a picture of the lady up there on the corner, was my, was my governess, and she said to my mother, ‘Children should not go to stay at hotels. They should go to farms for their holiday’, which was the best thing she ever said, because I went to this farm, Berry Barns, in Hertfordshire, and there I, I was taught. Not only that, I was eleven, and I was even taught to drive a tractor when I was eleven. It wouldn’t be allowed now, but I had the honour of learning to drive a tractor, understanding about the, how even to use to, what we called a hand start on the, what do we call it the, swing the engine. And I learned that, and I learned to pull, pull a trailer and I learned to help to climb a ladder, which I was frightened of generally, but because I didn’t want to show I was frightened of a ladder. I had to do it to do the haystacks. And there I learned, that taught me about general life. Then the second war came. I know I’ve gone around a little, around a bit in a circle there. Then the second war came in 1939, and believe it or not the, what’s the plane now, the, what was the name of the plane that came over, that flew over from Bassingbourn? I’ve got a senior moment at the moment. It wasn’t a Lancaster because they hadn’t, they didn’t have a Lancaster at that particular time.
CB: How many engines?
AC: It was a Blenheim. The Blenheim. The Blenheim flew over from Bassingbourn and what it, and we had on the farm, there was a searchlight. A searchlight company. Auxiliaries. They weren’t full soldiers, they were the auxiliary, and this plane came over, and instead of them sort of running for cover when the plane came, they waved at the plane, and of course, they got into trouble, because they were supposed to show that, what they would do if an aircraft came low over. They were in real trouble, but it was a bit of a laugh, but not for them. And then that was 1939. My, I, I was told that I had to go to a place in North Devon to be evacuated, and I was nearly fourteen, so I left my, my governess stayed on the farm, because she found the farmer next door, they fell in love. She fell in love with the farmer next door, so that was good for her on the farm, and it was also good for me to be on the farm. Anyway, I was sent to Braunton in North Devon, and when I arrived there, there was a school called Challoners School, and I wasn’t very good at schools as I’ve been talking about, and the headmaster was one of these headmasters that said to a pupil, shouted at a pupil, ‘Your father owes me money. He’s overcharged me for the meat’. And I never heard this before, that a headmaster would be shouting at one of the pupils, to tell him that they owed him money. I thought, this is a funny sort of headmaster. And then the headmistress suddenly said to me, ‘Alan, I’m going to bath you tomorrow’. I says, ‘You’re not. I’m fourteen years of age. I don’t need you bathing me’. ‘Well, I’m going to bath you’. I said, ‘You’re not’, and I told her to take a running jump, and, and she rang up my mother and father to tell them, ‘Take your son out of this school because he’s been rude to me’. She didn’t, she didn’t tell them why, and what I said, I got sent to a hotel called the Swords and Sands. Well, that was a wonderful hotel, and I was sent there. I don’t know if it was wintertime, I can’t remember, and I fell in love with the, with the manager’s daughter, and he wasn’t too happy, but anyway, my mother came down to collect me from there, but at least I had, ended up with a little love affair and back to London again. 1940 which, I couldn’t care less about the Germans dropping a bomb, I thought, well, they can drop a bomb on me and I don’t think, they’d miss me but I’m sure they’d miss me. But anyway, my father had built, in 1938, my father had built an underground shelter. I think it was fifteen foot under the ground. He did it in 1938. He got, he thought war was coming, so he’d already built this shelter. Well, I wouldn’t sleep in the shelter, because he wouldn’t sleep without the light, he had to have a light on all night, and I can’t sleep with a light on all night, so I slept in the garden, under a tent, with the shrapnel coming down, because they were firing the guns, but I lived to see the day and then that was, that was in, yes, and that was until nineteen, we stayed there till 1941, when my father had to move from Golders Green because his factory, his hat factory had been bombed in the city, and we moved to Luton in Bedfordshire. And then I worked for him, unhappily, until I was called up in the Royal Air Force when I was eighteen. Before I was eighteen. I was called up for my medical in, I think, October, yeah, October 1940, er, wait a minute.
CB: One.
AC: It can’t be. It must be -
CB: 1941.
AC: No, it wouldn’t have been 1941. I didn’t go into the Air Force until 1943, so I’m just trying to work that out, but anyway, I was called up and I had my interview. I’ve got, I think I’ve got the date somewhere hidden away, and I then went into the Royal Air Force. It must have been in nineteen, early 1943 where I was sent to Skegness, Skegness, for my initial training, and I stayed in there. The food was terrible but I managed to live, I managed because the food was, was cooked by trainee WAAFs, and the only time you got a good meal, was when the WAAFs had taken their course and had their test, their test to see if they, and that was the first good meal I had. In eight weeks, I had two good meals. But the training was rough, was quite a tough training I was pleased to say, because we’d lost, because the Royal Air Force had disgraced themselves in Crete, and they more or less waved to the Germans landing the parachutists when they came down. They didn’t know how to fire their rifles or anything, so they literally, so they, they’d got the idea when I went in, I’m pleased to say, for a tough training and I loved [unclear], I enjoyed it. Others were moaning and groaning, but I enjoyed the running and jumping and crawling under barbed wire, and I was always the first, as a good runner, I was always the first one back, back to the camp to get a nice tea, so that was my, I was treated very good at Skegness. And then came the move to Royal Air Force Barnham, near Mildenhall, which was part of Mildenhall, and there I got the, I mean, I was working more or less hour after hour on the, what do we call it? The ordinance. On the ordinance. And then, because what they did there was, anybody living near, near an area where they were going to deliver the fuses for the bombs, they would send you, so I got sent. The first one I got sent to, was RAF Henlow. I don’t know if you know it. I had to deliver some detonators. Detonators. I’ll get the word right now. And then I went home, because my father, my parents were in Luton and I had a day’s leave there, and then I went back to RAF Barnham. Now, RAF Barnham, there was a problem there I had. A big problem. The flight sergeant, Maddox. Flight Sergeant Maddox. I can’t forget him. He was from Liverpool. Hated Jews. And he made my life, if I had a pass, he would say, ‘Excuse me. Can I see your pass? I’m going to check on it’, and that, what he called check on it, was meaning that he would take half an hour or an hour with it, and then I could go. That was the start, but I was a lucky boy, because, I didn’t know it, there was somebody working in the guardroom that knew me from Luton market, and I was friendly with him. He didn’t, he didn’t meet me, because he was, he had to work in the back, but he would send me, he sent me, one day, a little note, ‘Please hide your shirts’. That was all it was. And this note came to me, and I knew what it meant, because I’d bought an officer’s shirt, exactly the same colour as the officers. Lovely collar and tie for when I went out to leave, so, I thought, Alright, I’ll hide my shirts, and when I came back, 2359, I thought, I’ll keep the Sergeant Maddox waiting till the last minute, so I came back 2359. ‘Hello. Good evening, Sergeant Maddox’, and I said, ‘I’m just about to walk out’. He says, ‘I want you to come over here’. I said, ‘Is that an order, Sergeant Maddox?’ ‘Yes, it’s an order’. So, I walk over. ‘Yes, Sergeant Maddox’. ‘Open your greatcoat’, which I did. ‘Is that the shirt you were wearing this morning?’ ‘Well Sergeant Maddox, I change my shirts. The other one’s in the laundry’. And I closed it up. I said, ‘It’s rather late, Sergeant Maddox. Can I, can I go now?’ ‘Yes. You’re dismissed’. So, I went out, went back to my barracks, back to my hut. Hut ten. And that was Sergeant Maddox calmed down there. Now this went on for quite a time this, but I wasn’t going to complain, because I’d already made my mind up, that wherever I was going to shut up, and take the trouble as it came. Now, I had a Rabbi visit me, who came very nicely, talked to me. He said, ‘You can have this holiday and that holiday. You can have kosher food, you can have that’, and I said, ‘Excuse me, Rabbi’, I said, ‘Do you want me to be happy on this station? I’m the only Jew here. Do you want to make me out even worse than some of them want to treat me?’ I said, ‘I’m going to have exactly the same food as the men, I’m going to have exactly, have the same duties as the men, I’m going to have the same holidays that they will. I’ll give my Christmas holiday up for, for, so that somebody that’s got a child can go on leave, and I’ll take my holiday after Christmas’. ‘That’s alright’, he says. ‘I agree with you’.’ He didn’t start, he didn’t start giving me the whole rigmarole, but, ‘I’m going to give you a prayer book’, he said, which I still have. ‘You keep that. You keep the prayer book in your pocket’. The Lord’s Prayer and all that, which came in useful later. So that was that, and now, how do I get after that. I’m still there and then, and then, of course, I went on leave, and I think the leave, I get a telegram from leave, ‘Come back immediately. You’re wanted for service’ or something or other. So, I went to a wedding, and I left the wedding, straight back to camp, and I found out I was being transferred from, from Barnham to, where was it now? I can’t remember where I went after that. Oh, I went to a place in Lincolnshire. I may have written it down. Let’s see if I wrote it down. Not Skelling. It was between, it was to a station quite close to Skegness. Quite close to it, but it wasn’t Skegness. I went there. That was a holding station, where I stayed until I was then sent from there to Skellingthorpe. That’s right, to Skellingthorpe, where the Australians were, and the Canadian squadron was, and there we had a, the Canadian sergeant or officer. I’m sorry, it must have been an officer, shouts out, ‘you’re going to be sent to a place where, where powder doesn’t mean the powder of a girlfriend. It means the powder of a real war’. And we reckoned it was going to be Okinawa. Had the feeling. Everybody said it was going to be Okinawa. Well, so I stayed there until the, until I was going to be embarkation at Liverpool. It must have been Liverpool, yeah, I think I went to Liverpool, and I went on a ship called the Royal Mail ship, Cynthia, which sailed from there, and we were supposed to be going, the atom bomb had been dropped, so it wasn’t, we wasn’t going to Okinawa. We were going, they were sending us to some. I’ve got, I’ve got this here which is useful. Can I -
CB: I’ll stop for a mo.
AC: Sorry.
[machine pause]
AC: That, that, now this I’ve got it here. I’ve got it here.
CB: Right. So, you’re at, you’re on the Cynthia.
AC: My first day at sea. October 1945. Yes, that’s right. How can it be 1945? Yes, it must have been 1945, because I went in, in ‘43. That’s right. The first day at sea, October 1945, from Liverpool, England. Our first evening meal. The one blessing about being in His Majesty’s forces, was they made you so hungry, that any food was welcome, and so we were served up with salted pickled beef. Now the luck of the draw for me was, being a four by two, which, as you know, is a Jew, I was used to a type of a dish. Salt beef it was called, and so I found this, to my very hungry appetite, fulfilling but approximately ninety percent, ninety five percent of the rest, owing, of course, by the rough weather, were in no uncertain term, very sick, while I felt in good form as long as I got quickly up on deck, away from the sickly stench. My bonus was collecting as many empty lemonade bottles, and taking them to the kiosk, and receiving back two pence, old currency, per glass, per bottle. Another bonus, in the two or three days of bad weather, was helping a seaman lying on the floor. I helped him to sit up and asked his name, which was George Waller, and then I replied that I had a cousin by that name, and he said, ‘where did he live’, and I replied, ‘Golders Green, London, Northwest 11’. With that, with a large grin on his face said, after I told him my name, ‘You’re my cousin, and I am the purser on this ship’. I must say, I never went hungry or disappointed at the quality of the food for the rest of the voyage. I, of course, kept schtum. Do you, can everybody know the word schtum?
CB: Yeah.
AC: Even though my close acquaintances kept on asking why I was not having my meals with them. As to sleeping arrangements, this was actually on the mess, on a mess. Sounds good, doesn’t it? On the mess deck, and we slept in hammocks, which each hook was connected to the next hammock. The fixed tables were under the, the fixed tables were under the, under, anyway, under the fixed tables. The, the reveille was 0630 hours, and my, and all hammocks had to be taken down and folded up, but one morning, the next hammock hook went over mine. I knew I could not fold it up, so not wishing to wake the poor soul up, thought I was capable to hold and lift his hook off mine. Well, believe it or not, his hook off mine. Well, I was, I lifted his hook off his, off, his weight pulled me across the table, pulling my trousers down past my knees. He then got up, luckily not hurt, but gave me a punch I have never forgotten, leaving me with quite a bruiser, which I justly deserved. He saw the situation after calming down, and got, we, we got on for the rest of the voyage. My next faux pas was when I was organising a singsong after lights out, when suddenly, somebody shouted out, ‘quiet’, and I answered, ‘Wrap up’. The next thing I remember, was a torch beam shining in my face, and suddenly shouted out, ‘I’m the company sergeant major’. And to amazement out of his mouth, thundering tendering roar, followed by the words, I was going to be charged with insubordination to an officer, and to hurry up, get dressed, to be taken to the brig. I was taken there, and there was one other person who, in my opinion, did not look a friendly type, so I spent the night awake. At 0630 hours, I was watched over while I shaved, and then the company sergeant major arrived, who in no uncertain terms told me, that, crumbs, that he was going to make sure I would march smartly into the court. He then put his hand on my shoulder, and I then said, in no uncertain terms, Kings Regulations, by which he took his hands off my shoulders. I then said I want to be represented by an RAF officer, as I had horrible feelings that the Army was not too much in love with the RAF. This was granted, and I was marched in to the, in to the room, and after removing my forage cap, and my defence officer asked the duty night Army, the officer that charged me, ‘Did you announce yourself?’ And the officer answered, ‘No. But my voice of authority should have been, should have been enough’. The case was dismissed on the grounds that the duty officer should have announced himself when entering. I was told, after my defence, officer to, ‘Don’t do anything like this again, or you won’t be so lucky next time’. The ship eventually reached Bombay. We got to Bombay, and my next beginning, and the next beginning read what was it, I wondered as we, yeah, I wondered, when we docked in Bombay, what type of transport awaited me, as to getting to, to the, getting to the handed out booklet which, yeah, the handed out booklet which was, was supposed to have gone to the Andaman Islands and Nicobar Islands, which was quite different from the strong rumour at our holding camp at Skellingthorpe. The rumours was, before the atomic bombs were dropped, that Okinawa was going to be our, roughly that was the rumour. My next feeling was, what was India going to be like? This came as soon as I disembarked, and reached the monument of the gateway to India. This was surrounded by beggars. Example, women with maimed children, as well as maimed men, etcetera. There was a smell hanging over the area, not very pleasant. There were troop buses parked not far, and those of us in the RAF were transported to a place called Worli, about twenty minutes drive from, and allocated to a hut, which were not too uncomfortable, to stay there until further orders. In memory, my memory is not too good as to how long it was, but as Worli was not too far from Bombay, I had time to visit the nice air-conditioned cinema, which was open late into the night, and kept me from excessive heat of the day.
CB: Ok. I’m going to, we’ll just stop there for a mo.
[Pause]
CB: We’re just picking up on the fact that you got to Bombay as a holding camp.
AC: Yes.
CB: Where did you go, and what did you do after that?
AC: Well, the holding camp. Then I went from the holding camp to -
CB: Madras.
AC: Madras. Yes, to Madras, and waited there to then get on the ship, to take me to Ceylon. I can leave the name Ceylon there. When I got to Ceylon, I stayed, I was in a hut, in a place called Ratmalana. Now, Ratmalana, I was told when I was there was, you had to be very careful. You slept, because there used to be raids on the, because there used to be raids, and you had to be very careful when you were sleeping, that you were aware, that you could be, the, the nets could be cut and they’d drop on you, and you’d be robbed, so I, I found a stray dog. I made friendly with the dog and I had, the dog used sleep under the bed, and he would wake me up if anybody, if there was anything wrong, and that dog stayed with me until I was going to move away from this. Ratmalana was not my final camp. Ratmalana was quite, was not very far away from Colombo, so one could get in. There was a place there, a rest camp there, and I can’t remember the name, but it was so lovely. We went there. We were allowed to stay there one or two days if we had, if we had leave. I got sunburnt. I went with somebody down there and went to sleep, by mistake, in a deckchair, and got sunburnt, and I went to the doctor, and the doctor was very good, because the doctor said to me, ‘For goodness sake, don’t tell your base that you’ve had sunburn, because they will charge you with self-inflicted injury’. So we suffered a bit, and we managed to hide it, and we managed to get the sunburn calmed down, because we would have been charged with self-inflicted injury. Now we stayed there, and then we moved from there. I went to Negombo, which was the air base not far from Colombo. I went there, and then they didn’t know what to do with us there. We just messed around there, but then they sent us to KKS, which was Kankesanthuai, right the north of Sri Lanka or Ceylon. There we, we did our, we were told to, we had to, we did our discipline there, but it was mostly telling us what to do to clear, for clearing up for the, when 1947 came, to break away from, from Britain. They were going to be independent so that was interesting, but the best bit was when I was sent from, I was sent from Sri Lanka, from KKS to Kandy. Now Kandy was a pleasure. Beautiful place. And there, I also did anything they told me to do. There was very little there to do. Again, it was just a matter of waiting until they found something more for me to do, and I made a, I had my girlfriend there. I met a WAAF, a very sweet lady, and she kept me busy, and then, what was it now? Yes, then I did a guard duty in Kandy. They put me on guard duty, and suddenly, an officer comes in with a car, with his car to show me. I was on guard duty, and he brought a car, and the car, the card said, ‘This car cannot be taken out of this area after 5 o’clock’. Well, it was after 5 o’clock when he brought the car in so I said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but this car cannot be taken out’. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘Are you trying to be funny with me?’ I said, ‘No sir. This is what it says. I’m not funny. This is what I’ve been told to do’. ‘Well, I’m going to, I’m not taking any notice of you, and you’re the type of person that’s causing a problem, and I’m going to stop you if I ever catch you making lifts, taking lifts on these trucks, because I’m the officer in charge of transport’. I said, ‘I understand, sir. I understand’. And this went on, and I thought, Alan, Alan, what can you think? And then I thought of Kings Regulations, so I said, so I said to him ‘Excuse me, sir, but there is a way out, sir’. ‘What is it? What is it? What is it? Hurry up’. I said, ‘You can give me an order, in front of the sergeant in the back, in the back of there. I will call the sergeant out, and I want him to hear you give me an order, sir. If you give me an order to release the car, the car will be released. Are you going to do it, sir?’ So he did. I called the sergeant out. I said, he said to me, ‘I order you, LAC Coller, to release the car’. ‘Yes, sir.’ Boom, boom, boom, and the car was released. Two weeks later, I thought, I’m going to be in trouble. I got promoted to a corporal. Now, it’s was a bit of a muzzle. I thought you’d be interested in that one.
Other: Yeah.
AC: Is it still working?
CB: Keep going.
AC: Anyway, so I, I go back. Then they send me back, then they send me back to KKS as a corporal, in charge of about, well, there was about fifteen or twenty men went back to clear up, to get the base cleared, and we had an officer there, and he was from, an ex-Singapore, and he was a silly officer. I can be rude about an officer. He didn’t want the men. We could not, because it was such a small amount of men, we could be, he tried to make us that I had to sit on his table, and all the others had to sit at all the other tables. So I said to the officer, ‘Sir, excuse me, but as we’re such a small group, wouldn’t it be good if we could, we don’t, we’re not under, we’re all doing, you give us work to do for the clearing up, and we can all be near one another’. He wouldn’t do it. So, anyway, I said I wasn’t going to sit on his table, and I didn’t. Now, one day, one day, he had a few drinks over the top, and I had to go out to find him, and I found him. I found him in a terrible state, and I got him back and he was a friend of mine. He said, ‘You keep quiet’, and he was a different man, so that was a little bit of what I did. And then we spoke about labour. He said, ‘we’re not having anybody from local, to work on the camp’, so I said to him, ‘Leave it with me, sir’, I says, ‘because we, if we’re going to have trouble with the neighbours, if we, if they come to get work here, and we tell them you can’t have them, there could be trouble, sir’. ‘You handle it. You handle it’. So, what I did, I met the elder of one of the villages, who was wanting to get work on the camp. I said to him, ‘Look’, I said to the work, I said to them, ‘I found someone that could speak English’. There were a few people there who could, and I said to them, ‘Look, I want to give you a chance of having a job on the camp, but you’ve got to do what your told, and, and, and there should be no taking money from one another. Your pay will be given to you on the Friday, and I don’t want to see, if I’m doing you this favour, I don’t want to see you taking money from anybody to get the job. We’re going to have it nice and clear’. So, I managed that and he was quite pleased, the officer, that I’d cleared this up, and I said to them, there was no trouble, and I managed to keep it, and then my lady friend, my girlfriend in Kandy, rang me up.
CB: The WAAF.
AC: The WAAF rang me up to tell me, ‘Alan, you’ve got your’, what we call it?
CB: Demob.
AC: Demob. ‘You’ve got, your demob’s come through, but don’t tell your officer. We will tell him, but I thought you’d like to know’. So, I, well, that’s good. So I stayed there, and suddenly, I got my demob, and I went on the, I came back on the Duchess of Bedford. Sounds a nice boat. From Bombay and landed in Liverpool. I can’t remember the dates, and I, they put me into, I had, I had I think they, I stayed in, I stayed in Blackpool. They put me into a, paid for a home there, but I had to be in at, I mustn’t, I mustn’t come after ten. She would lock the door. So I thought to myself, well, this is not much good, because if you went to the cinema, it finished, it finished maybe at ten past ten or quarter past ten, but then I made friendly with the lady upstairs. I said, ‘If I tell you some stories, will you open the door for me?’ [unclear]. And she opened the door for me, and the lady said to me then, ‘Where were you last night?’ I said, ‘Well, I was in my room’. ‘You wasn’t’. I said, ‘I was. Did you try to come in to the room?’ ‘No I didn’t, but I know that you wasn’t there’. I says, ‘Well I am’. And that was my little story from, from there. And then, I think, then I got the troop ship, took me, took me to, back to Liverpool. No, I done the troop ship. I know I’ve spoken about that but, and when I actually, the funny part was, I came back with a tin box, a tin, ‘cause you couldn’t have any wooden boxes in, in Sri Lanka, ‘cause the worms and God knows what, would bite into the wood, so we all had tin boxes. Now, these tin boxes weren’t supposed to be taken, but I had one I could pull along the road, and when I got to, I think, when I got to the station, to come off the station, it was icy like mad. It was, it was freezing cold in London.
CB: This is 1947.
AC: Yes. January 1947.
Other: Yeah.
AC: And I pulled, I pulled the, I pulled this blooming thing all the way from the station, because they wouldn’t let me on the taxi. I pulled it all the way along the street. I was knocked out by the time I got it back to [unclear] Avenue, but I had presents for my daughter, like things you couldn’t get in and that was my trip back. I’ve landed now in England.
CB: Yeah. So where did you actually get demobbed?
AC: Well, I got demobbed in Blackpool. Well, [unclear]. There’s a base north of Blackpool, and I got demobbed itself where I went, I know I went to Marks and Spencer when I got a beautiful brown striped suit. I was quite proud of it till my daughter threw it away. And I, I mean it was lovely. I could go and get a job or -
CB: So, what job did you go to then when you became a civilian?
AC: Ah, now, I wouldn’t work for my father, so I went to, I want to go on a catering course, and I thought, well, Alan, get into catering. There’s always work and you can always earn money, and if you don’t like it one day, you’ll find something you do like. So I got, I went to a place near Vauxhall Bridge. There was a place that taught, and a Mr Vincent was the teacher. Now, when I went there, Mr Vincent told me that there was no place for me. There was no room for me. So he told me to go, ‘If I were you’, he said, ‘Go to J Lyons and Company, and they have, they have hotels. They have a hotel, The Marble Arch and Strand Palace’. He said, ‘They may be able to give you, you may be able to go in as a trainee manager’. So I listened to them, and I went to there, and they gave me this, they gave me a job at the Marble Arch Hotel in, well in Marble Arch. Now, I worked there and my job was to start from the bottom, which was just washing dishes. Not washing dishes, washing, washing vegetables, and then you moved up to the fish department, where I was cleaning fish and boning. Then when you’d done that, you moved up to the, to the meat department, which was quite interesting because we went to Smithfield Market to look at meat, and ask questions, whether you liked the meat, the colour of the meat and so that was that. Then from there, I think then we went on serving, learning to serve at the tables, which was quite interesting, and I did that right up to 1951. That’s right. And I looked at the ones that were working with me. They were all part of the family, of the Lyons family. I think they came under, they had another name, which my senior moment again, I can’t remember their maiden name, but there were five or six of them, and I thought to myself, if there’s five or six of them, I’ll never be the manager. I’ll always be either, I could end up by being in charge of the serving, the tables, but I’ll never be a manager. So I said, Alan when you go on holiday, I’m going to go to Denmark for a holiday, so that’s when I, I went on a holiday to Denmark in 1951. Because of what King Christian the tenth had done for the Jews, I thought I’d honour them with my company. And when I went there, somebody said to me, ‘Would you take a parcel?’ Well, I wasn’t thinking like the days now, if you take a parcel, did you pack it yourself? It wasn’t happening in those days, but I was allowed to take a parcel, so I took this parcel for a Mrs Rosenberg, to take to her. So I had a friend with me, that went with me called Neville Throp, and I said, ‘Come with me. We’ll go to see this Mrs Rosenberg, and we’ll have lost nothing’. It was a Sunday and we’re not losing any of our holiday. See what we can. Well what we got to the front door, my little nose was good at smelling, and I could smell beautiful chicken soup. Really good chicken soup, so I thought we must be at Mrs Rosenberg’s house. I could smell something good, and it even smelled better when she opened the door. I said, ‘Hello Mrs Rosenberg, I have a parcel for you. We have a parcel for you’. ‘Come in. Come in’, she said. So she said, ‘Would you like to stay for lunch?’ Well that was, I looked at my friend, I said, ‘well, we’ve got our feet under the table, so let’s take advantage of it’, and then she introduced us to her son, and her and her husband and her daughter, and we got on very well, and we were staying in a hotel in Copenhagen, near the station, and I said to them, ‘I’d like to make, we’d like to make a party for you. Would you like to come to a party?’ Well, they said, ‘Yes. We’d like to’. ‘Cause we, they gave us, we were very lucky, Neville and I, we got a lovely place in this hotel. They gave us a suite. So they came, but they said, ‘oh, by the way’, the sister said, ‘I’m engaged to somebody’. So I said, ‘Well bring him as well’. And the other one said, ‘Well, we’ve got two girls we can introduce you to. Can they come?’ ‘Yes’. So, when they, when they came to the hotel, this beautiful looking girl came along. I was supposed to be with a, I wasn’t supposed to be with this girl, and the one I saw was called Cilla. Now I can say that. The other one was called, all’s fair in love and war. I let my friend have the other one. Well, when I met Cilla, this lovely girl, she couldn’t speak a word of English, which didn’t worry me because we could make, we sang a little song, “I thought I saw a pussycat”, and she was singing it in Danish, and I was singing it in English. Anyway, I made a date with her, and I ended up marrying her. Not that time, but we fell in love. She learnt to do English in three and a half months, which I couldn’t have learned Danish. I’m still learning Danish, and she was told at the school, her Jewish school, it wasn’t up to scratch as far as I was concerned. They told her she was dyslexic, and she’d never be able to learn a language. Well, she learned. Boy, did she learn, and she came to England in, I married her in 1952, at the Copenhagen Synagogue. My father was angry, because he wanted me to marry her in London. I says, ‘No you don’t. Her father’s given me permission to let her come to England, and so that I’m going to give him the honour. He should have the party in Denmark’. And my father reluctantly came there the last minute. Didn’t, thought he could come like Lord Fauntleroy, and he couldn’t find a hotel, because he was too late, but we found him one in the pouring rain we were, just the thought that we were getting married, we went out to look for a hotel for him, and we found one, which he didn’t like, and he drove them so mad they sent him to another hotel, which he liked. But that was my, to do with my marriage. Now do you want me to stop now?
CB: We’ll stop there for a mo.
AC: Yeah.
[machine pause]
CB: That’s really good Alan, up to your wedding, and we’ll cover the other bits later.
AC: Yeah.
CB: But first of all.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Can we just go back to early days? What did your father do as a job and -?
AC: Well, my father was a hat manufacturer. A ladies hat manufacturer in Aldgate, Aldgate, Aldersgate. One of the, one of the two, and then I worked for, I didn’t work for him then, in the factory and then he, he moved because of the bombing. They bombed his factory in Aldersgate.
CB: He moved to Luton.
AC: And he moved to Luton.
CB: Why was he difficult to work for?
AC: He was difficult to work for because, when he took me, when I was sixteen, he told, he said to the staff, he’ll do anything for you. He’s my son, but he’ll, if you need the floor sweeping, he will sweep the floor. Well, that was alright. Or he will do this, he will do that. He will cut the hat. Anyway, I did that for him and, and I never got promoted, if you know. I was always going to be doing that as far as he was concerned, but the war came and saved me from him.
CB: Ok. So why was he such a controlling personality?
AC: Well, he had a bad life as a child. He was thrown out of his home, but normally, when you’re thrown out of a home, you don’t do the same thing to somebody else, but he’d got this attitude he, what I did in the factory, I, I always, he didn’t know but I was doing all, if the lights went wrong, if the lights went wrong, I fixed them for him. If the, if the machines went wrong, I fixed it for him. I did a lot of mechanical things there, that would have cost him a lot of money if he’d got, but I just did them, and, and, but when I came out the Air Force, I had the fun of saying to him, ‘You know dad, when you’re, when you’re in the military, you get promoted if you’re any good. You won’t. You don’t promote me’, because he said to me, when I came back, he said, ‘Oh’, he said, ‘That’s good. Are you going to come and work for me?’ I said, ‘Dad, I got promoted in the Air Force. I never get promotion with you, so you can stick it’. And I went and sold china and glass. I went up to the potteries and, bought, bought glass and pottery with my brother-in-law. We had a van. We used to go up and load up, we had to buy from the floor. Everything that was on the floor, you had to buy. That was in the potteries. But they were, they tried, you could not get saucers, because they earned more by selling cups, because they could get more money when they were doing it. If they started selling saucers, that was dearer for them. They would charge you so much so you had, you ended up with lots of milk jugs, and things that you didn’t want, but you had to take them, because that was the way they did it, so what we used to do, when we sold the things to the markets, we used to say, ‘Come on. Come on, take a few of these, and then we’ll give you this lot at that price, and this lot’, we had to bargain with them. We made a profit but it was tough work.
CB: Where did you sell all this material?
AC: In the markets mostly.
CB: Where?
AC: I went to the biggest market, was the one down in Shepherds Bush market was a big market, Luton market was a big market. Any, any big market.
CB: So how many markets did you do in a week?
AC: Well, we did four or five markets. Early morning, we used to get a stall, and sell from the stall, and then then my brother, my brother-in-law, he got, his father bought him a shop in Greenford, and then I went to work for him. He was a bit better to work for, but I couldn’t see anything there, but I think I was married by then. I can’t remember how my marriage came in because then I, so that’s really that’s as far as I went, but then I got a job in the textile, working for the clothing trade. I can’t, can I stop there for a minute?
CB: Yes certainly.
AC: Before I get them mixed.
[Pause]
CB: Now, Alan, the bit that we could usefully go into more detail.
AC: Yeah
CB: is the handling of munitions.
AC: Yes, fine.
CB: So, your trade in the RAF was one that was unusual.
AC: Yeah.
CB: But what exactly did you do? So, when you were originally at Barnham, what were you doing there?
AC: Well, we, we, we had, we had, for instance any, we had mustard gas on that was secret then. Mustard gas. Now we had to check the mustard gas, there was no leakages on the mustard gas. They were clad in leather. They were American ones. Five hundred pounders.
CB: Right.
AC: So, we checked them, we had to check them. We didn’t have any gas mask or nothing, but I was pretty, I could smell if there was any gas. They had to be loaded up. Any ones with any leakages had to be taken especially on the wagons. No warnings to anybody. They were taken to a special area for destruction. Don’t know where the destruction area was, but they were taken. That was one job we had which wasn’t very comfortable.
CB: Where were they stored on the airfield?
AC: They were stored, not on the airfield, because that’s why we were, Mildenhall and Barnham was separate. They were stored in the woods and they were in the trees. And then we had, we had, what would we call it? There were incendiary bombs that could drop down. They would drop them down in glass cases. They weren’t the ordinary incendiaries that we normally do. They were also dangerous. They had to be lifted and loaded. We had -
CB: What were they loaded into? Because -
AC: I can’t, well -
CB: They were phosphorous in water, were they?
AC: They were in glass.
CB: Yeah, so the glass container had water and then phosphorous inside -
AC: Well, whatever -
CB: Was it?
AC: Yeah. Well, I know they were for incendiary work.
CB: Right, but what were you loading them into? Into bomb containers or into storage units.
AC: Well, I can’t remember what they were put, I think they were put into crates.
CB: Right.
AC: And taken away.
CB: Yeah.
AC: That was that. And let’s think of what else, because we had the most, yeah, and then we had ones that were already ammunition. Quite heavy boxes of ammunition for rifles. For -
CB: For the machine guns.
AC: The machine guns. They were in boxes.
CB: Yeah.
AC: So, I knew that they, but they were very heavy. They were no cranes, we didn’t have any cranes for them. They were all hand -
CB: Manual labour.
AC: Hand, manual. That didn’t hurt me, because I was quite strong in those days. I can’t think of anything else.
CB: Well, how, so this was actually an ammunition dump.
AC: That’s right.
CB: And what was the design of the dump, because clearly there was a blast problem if there was -
AC: Well we -
CB: Explosion. So what was the layout?
AC: The layout was the bombs had to be so many feet apart. All the bombs were not, they were in stacks, but there was distances between of course. As you say, if one lot went off, they would have set the whole lot off. They were well spaced because the forest was quite a big area. It was quite a big camp.
CB: And what sort -
AC: And they were bombed, because they bombed the line. I wasn’t there when, I wasn’t there when they bombed, but they showed me where a German plane had come along and followed the rail track along, and then dropped the bombs. Luckily not on the bomb dump itself, but on the railway line. They cleared it up by the time I got there, but I was told about this, and we had the, I think it was the ones, the bombs that were in three layers. We screwed them. They were all screwed together. We had to screw them together, but the tail units, they used to tell us what type of tail units to use, because they had to be a special shape for different, for different – we didn’t ask why, what or when. And that’s what we used to do. The hoisting, we had hoisters for the, and if you wasn’t careful, they’d spin around and give you a real -
Other: Crusher.
AC: Crusher in the stomach but I mean we, that was really what we were doing there.
CB: So, the bomb sizes were what? Do you remember?
AC: Well, the ones we used to do were in three different, in three different layers. They were called a special name.
CB: Ok. So, the thousand pounder bomb was one of the standard ones.
AC: A thousand pounder was on its own, yeah.
CB: And then?
AC: We didn’t screw them.
CB: The five hundred pounder.
AC: The five hundred pound ones, we didn’t have to screw anything on those.
CB: Right.
AC: It was only when it got to the big twelve thousand pounders, say. They were in, they weren’t all in one piece and they were screwed, everything was screwed. It was screwed on.
CB: Those were the tall boys.
AC: Yeah, the tall boys.
CB: Right, yeah.
AC: Yeah.
CB: So how much of this was above ground, and how much was underground?
AC: No underground, all over ground.
CB: And were there blast screens?
AC: No. No. It was plain. It was, there was no special -
Other: Ground work. It was, it flat, was it?
AC: All flat. Yes.
Other: All flat.
CB: So bombs came in to be assembled, then you were sending them out -
AC: Yeah.
CB: To the stations, were you?
AC: Oh yes, we did
CB: What were them being loaded on to?
AC: They were on trailers. They used to come up on the trailers.
CB: Lorry trailers.
AC: Yeah, the big ones. They were the proper ones. They were about, quite the 20 or 30 foot long ones. They would come in and we would load them.
CB: Right. And they’d go off to the stations.
AC: To the, but, but the detonators, I don’t know why they never went with them, but we had, well maybe ‘cause it was dangerous to leave the detonators. We took them. Especially, I had, I was lucky. I went to Henlow. I went to Henlow. I’ll tell you the places, I did make a list of where I went to with them. I went to Henlow and I went to Waddington, and I went to, yeah, well I went to three or four places with them. That’s all.
CB: With the detonators.
AC: With the detonators, yeah.
CB: As a delivery,
AC: As a delivery, yeah. Strubby was where I also went to, but that was also, Strubby was the one near Skegness.
CB: Near Skegness.
AC: Yeah. The one -
CB: Yeah.
AC: I couldn’t remember.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Yeah, everything else. Yeah.
CB: So when you were on a station -
AC: Yeah.
CB: You weren’t delivering, you were receiving.
AC: Yeah, that’s correct.
CB: The ordinance. So what did you do there, because that did have a bomb dump. Every airfield had a bomb dump.
AC: What do you mean, what did I do? Which? At the station.
CB: Well, when you were at Skellingthorpe for instance.
AC: Well, Skellingthorpe, I wasn’t doing anything with the bombs.
CB: Right. What were you doing there?
AC: Well, that was, that was ready to go. Skellingthorpe was ready to go.
CB: Abroad.
AC: To so called Okinawa.
CB: Yeah. Ok.
AC: But I didn’t go.
CB: Right.
AC: But that was a Canadian. That was quite interesting.
CB: Good. Ok, good.
Other: The glass. Can I just ask?
CB: No. Hang on. Just a moment.
[machine pause]
CB: The question about incendiaries is interesting.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Because it sounded as though they were pretty delicate in glass. How big were they? And what did they look like?
AC: What I remember was they were about that high.
CB: That’s a foot, yeah.
AC: Yeah, something like that.
CB: And diameter or -
AC: Well, I would say almost like a bottle.
CB: Right.
AC: Almost like a bottle. I’d never seen them before. It wasn’t like an ord, I’d seen incendiary bombs but we never had that kind of -
CB: But were there many of them, or was there just -
AC: There was quite a number, but whether they used them, I mean they were, I don’t know if they dropped them first or if they dropped them after the main bombs.
CB: But did you move many of them out or did you only receive them?
AC: I moved them out more than received. Well, if I had received them, I would have had to, of course, have had to take them to stack them, but I remember taking them out.
CB: And they were, they how were they packaged?
AC: They went out in like little crates, like you would with bottles.
CB: Because, were they, what colour was the glass.
AC: White.
CB: Oh, so you couldn’t see in.
AC: No.
CB: What was inside?
AC: No, but I think, how they worked, I don’t know.
CB: But you thought they were incendiary.
AC: Well, I presumed they were, I couldn’t see what else they were.
CB: Ok.
AC: They weren’t, it was not a poison gas.
CB: No.
AC: The poison gas ones, I knew by the smell of, I was surprised at those. They were our American ones. Five hundred pounders they were. But this base, Barnham was a secret, was one of their secret camps.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Lucky I didn’t get anything, anything on my lungs.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Because there was a certain amount.
CB: You could smell it.
AC: Oh, you could smell it.
CB: And where did it leak from?
AC: Well, it leaked from the actual bomb I presume, but they were leather clad.
CB: Right.
AC: That’s what I remember very well, and I think we had to wear gloves when we were picking them, when we lifted them, but the five hundred bombers we had to lift.
CB: Did you?
AC: Yeah, not exactly -
CB: No crane.
AC: Not that I can remember.
CB: Right. So how many men would be doing the lifting?
AC: Well, I think there had quite a number of men on the station.
CB: I was thinking of how many people need to lift a five hundred pound bomb.
AC: I think three, but it would take, I think, I don’t know how we lifted them actually. I was going to say that.
CB: Because a man isn’t going to be two hundred pounds.
AC: No, no, no.
CB: In those days.
AC: But there were no cranes there, if I remember. The cranes were over with the main, with the main bombs. These were, these bombs, these, these, these ones that were -
CB: The chlorine gas.
AC: The ones that were, what did we call it? The poison ones.
CB: The chlorine gas.
AC: The gas ones.
CB: Yeah.
AC: They were kept right away from everything. There were no cranes up there.
CB: No. Not even hoists.
AC: No. So there must have been, unless we did it by pushing something under and lifting the bomb up. That’s how I -
CB: Jacking it up.
AC: Yeah, ‘cause it would, it slid on, if you slid it onto a truck, then we could have lifted it and then put it on to a trolley.
CB: Right.
AC: And then taken it.
CB: So when you went abroad, were you involved with munitions there?
AC: No. No. That was, that was completely, we didn’t touch -
CB: Ok.
AC: We didn’t touch munitions.
CB: Right. Now going back pre-war.
AC: Yeah.
CB: One of the points you mentioned, was Mosley.
AC: Oh, Oswald Mosley.
CB: So, what, how old were you, and what were you doing?
AC: Well, they were days when I was young.
CB: How young?
AC: I must have been about twelve or thirteen.
CB: Ok. So, tell us the story of Mosley.
AC: Well, we heard that Mosley, Oswald Mosley, had his marches from Ridley Road, and I knew my auntie was living in Stamford Hill, but, and I also knew that the station would be asking me where I was going, because, that’s because they didn’t want me to, and I knew the taxies, so I knew what I was doing when I went.
CB: This is to do with the Mosley rallies.
AC: So what we did, we were illegal. We shouldn’t have done it. Technically, I mean to throw bottles at his, at his vehicle, was against the law, but I had to work out in my mind, what does one do? Let him get away with it? Or one has to do these things. The police were busy. More busy where he was going to stop at South Tottenham.
CB: This is Oswald Mosley.
AC: And South Tottenham was an area where Mosley had a following. He didn’t have such a following in the Dalston area, because it was more of a Jewish. The ones in South Tottenham, I don’t know how he got a lot of his votes he got there. But I’m sticking my neck out. I mean, I could have gone there. If a policeman had caught me throwing a bottle, he would have charged me.
CB: So what did you do exactly?
AC: [unclear]
CB: So, you left the house.
AC: I left the house, got on the train to go to, I, I, I mentioned the station, where was it now? I had to go to, I think I mentioned the railway station, it was a tube station. It’s in the notes.
CB: Right. Ok.
AC: I think I recorded it.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And then from there, the police were there. Where are you going?
CB: Oh, I’m going to my auntie. Auntie Hetty.
AC: Where does she live? Stamford hill. So that, when I got to Stamford Hill, I didn’t, I didn’t, I went further. I went to go to where I mentioned. Ridley Road.
CB: Ridley Road.
AC: And everyone was there, but I had a taxi. When I went out of the station, there were so many Jewish taxi drivers, I hailed one and said, ‘I want to go Ridley Road.’ ‘Right. Get in’. So, I stayed on the floor so if the police had come along.
CB: So, what had you got with you?
AC: I had no weapons with me. Just when I went down there, we, we, we got hold of what we could do.
CB: Oh, you didn’t take bottles with you?
AC: Oh no. No. No. No that would be with intent, wouldn’t it?
Other: Yeah.
AC: But that was all we could throw at him. We, we -
CB: Well, where did you get the bottles from?
AC: Well, they seemed to find bottles.
CB: When you got there.
AC: When I got there.
CB: So, did you, you met up with people you knew, did you?
AC: Well, when I got there, of course, they were all waiting, and Mosley, Mosley was still there. He was giving a talk before he went, before he went, he was shouting to the, and the women were shouting out. ‘Oh, you shut up, you Jewish mother’, you know. They were shouting out. ‘I’m a Jewish mother, but I can give you some lip’, you know. They knew how to hammer them. And just to see these, I mean, he wasn’t having a happy journey. I don’t think he reached Tottenham somehow or other, because it was all the way along, there was people waiting for him, but I thought I’d start at Ridley Road. I thought, I’m not going to be dangerous. I’ll be worse off to follow, I knew where he was going to go to. This was, he was telling us they were going to go to South Tottenham. To his meeting.
CB: So where did you get these bottles?
AC: Well I didn’t throw many bottles, I must admit, but I had a chance. I wasn’t the one that stopped, I couldn’t be the one man army as we call it.
Other: If you could just clarify that, it would help the tape.
CB: Mosley was an agitator.
AC: Yeah.
CB: And so, what exactly was he saying? What was the message?
AC: He was saying that Jews were no good. He was trying to say that we’re going to clear the country of the Jews. They are, they’re taking, they’re grabbing, they’re making money. They’re, and, and we, we the people are losing by having Jews. It was really anti-Semitic and was more or less as Hitler. He spoke as Hitler would have spoken, and to me, that was, I felt very touched by it, that he shouldn’t get away with it, and shouldn’t upset people. If it was a true story, I would have left it alone. It wouldn’t have been my, if it was a political thing, somebody wants to be labour or liberal or whatever, it’s none of my business. I accept what the law says on those things, but when it comes to anti-Semitism, I didn’t want, because I knew from 1933, as a boy, I read about what Hitler was doing, and I see Mosley carrying out Hitler’s wishes and that’s what I was against, and if I’d got caught throwing a bottle at him, I’d have taken the, if I would have been put in prison for it, I would have gone to prison. I know maybe my parents wouldn’t have liked it, but I would have felt better to do it than not to do anything.
CB: Ok. Now changing the subject again.
AC: Yes. That’s alright.
CB: When you were in the RAF, you were with a variety of people from all sorts of backgrounds so -
AC: That’s correct.
CB: How did you see the variation in their abilities?
AC: Well, the abilities for the persons like me, putting things together, lifting things, was of a low grade. Now, there were people there that, for instance, they couldn’t fly or they got what they called it, frightened.
CB: LMF.
AC: Of flying, yeah, and they were there. Well, there was a difference between the ones that were, or the ones who had never seen a Jew before, or thought, what the hell’s a Jew doing? I was the only Jewish airman on this particular station. Now -
CB: This is Barnham.
AC: Barnham.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Royal Air Force Station Barnham, but I’d made my mind up that whatever was said and done, I would handle the situation. I wouldn’t go crying to the, to my commanding officer, these are talking about me, these are doing this or that. I took it. But I was very, very lucky that my flight sergeant at the end, before I was demobbed. Can I say what the flight sergeant said? When I was demobbed, there was a party that they’d invited me to, because this was 1947, and the first thing that my commanding officer, that my flight sergeant said, Flight Sergeant Evans. I can’t remember his first name but I remember his surname. ‘Alan’, he said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful I can call you Alan’. I said, ‘Yes. Yes, flight sergeant’. He said, ‘You don’t call me flight sergeant, you call me by my Christian name’, which I can’t remember. ‘I want to tell you something’. I said, ‘That’s nice to hear’. ‘I’ve followed you through your service in RAF Barnham. I was your flight sergeant. And when I, when you once had a black eye, I said to you, how did you get your black eye?’ I said, ‘I fell out of bed flight sergeant’. I says, ‘I fell out of bed. That’s how I got my black eye’. He says, ‘I knew you were telling a lie but I appreciated what you told me and’, he said, ‘I had faith in you’. And I said to him, ‘Do you know, do you know, I’m so pleased I met you because you’ve taken a lot of things off my mind now. You’ve given me something that I knew that whatever I did on that station, you knew about, and flight sergeant, Sergeant Maddox won’t have the pleasure of knowing what you said to me’. So that’s how I, that’s how I left that. I got really what I wanted to hear.
CB: Yeah. What about the abilities of the other people?
AC: What do you mean? The –
CB: Well in terms of their intellect.
AC: Well, I made a friend with a man, friend called Bob Emery. Bob Emery. Robert Emery. And he was a very intelligent boy. I don’t know why he was there, he didn’t tell me, but he, he was quite clever because they had a Spitfire at Thetford, and he showed people around. I’ll put my glasses on till I, yeah. Excuse me, ‘cause my eyes are. Yeah. He, there was a spitfire came to Thetford where they were getting money for the wings or whatever they called it, the wings, and he was showing people all the instruments and everything on this, on this Spitfire. Now, he was a friend of mine, but I don’t know really, I don’t know if he is still alive anymore, but he married a girl from Bury St Edmunds during the war, before we went abroad. He was very nice. And then there was a fellow called Joe Frazer. He was my friend. He was from Scotland, and I took him home to, when I had leave, I took him back to Golders Green with me, because he didn’t want to go back to Scotland but, ‘cause we had a Scottish maid so he got on very well with the maid, and he had a nice time. So that was a little bit of goodness I could do. So, I had two friends, and they didn’t like the way Sergeant Maddox was treating me, but I said what can I do? I just have to take it, and I’m not going to start going to the commanding officer, saying and saying, ‘Do you know sir…’ because, but if anything went wrong on this station, they blamed me. Alan’s whistling, like wolf whistles and things. It wasn’t me wolf whistling. So, they’d take, what they did, they had a film, if we went to see a film or a theatre, they’d take me in at a special time and they’d take another one in. Now the other one, was the one that was wolf whistling, not me. So, this was coming all the time, a terrible thing I was doing this, I was doing that. Well then, on one of the airfields, I’m walking along, across. I was an LAC then, and these two fellas came, two airmen came along. ‘We’re going to teach you a lesson. You’re a Jew, aren’t you?’ I says, ‘Yes. Anything about that? You want to do something about it?’ I loved saying that. ‘Do you want to do something about it?’ ‘Yes, we’re going to make you kiss our feet and say sorry to Jesus’. ‘Oh, are you?’ I said. ‘Are you?’ So they came along, and one got the back of my arm in a half nelson, and the other looked on. I said, ‘Come on, break the f’ing thing. If you break it, there’s going to be a fantastic court martial, you know’. ‘What are you talking about?’ I says, ‘if you break my arm, you’ll see’, and he took his arm away, put it down. I said, now excuse my language. ‘F off’. You see, a little bit of knowing the, knowing the King’s Regulations was a great help to me. I wasn’t a very clever person, but if you knew King’s Regulations, you could get away with things.
CB: Thank you.
[machine pause]
AC: This is, this is where a woman’s intuition comes in.
CB: So now we’re, if we could just go fast forward.
AC: That’s alright.
CB: To your later years. So, you’re out of the RAF, you’ve done your catering and hotel stuff, which you decided not to pursue.
AC: Yes. That’s right and I did.
CB: You then worked in London for a bit. So, what did you do there, and what have you done the rest of your life?
AC: Well -
CB: In civilian world.
AC: Well, my wife suddenly says, I was doing the travelling for, well, my father upset my wife by being rude to her, and I said to dad, ‘You don’t be rude to my wife. Be rude to me, but not to my wife, and if you do it again, you’ll see what’s going to happen’. Well, he did it again. So I says, ‘Thank you, dad. I’m leaving the country. I am going to Denmark, taking my wife with me where she’s loved. I couldn’t, the rudeness that you’re giving her is not helping her. She’s a lovely lady and I’m not having her upset’. So I got a job in Denmark, as working for Polly Peck dresses. It’s not the Polly Peck that you know now. And the job was, I was agent for Denmark, Norway and Sweden for the clothing, Polly Peck’s clothing, and I went to Denmark. I got my, through the, I got the papers signed that I was an agent, and I started and I got, I got, I was selling for some of the big stores in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and I was doing quite well until Polly Peck, one day, did not deliver the goods and they were going to sue me for loss of profits. So, what did I do? I thought, Alan, time to go to the embassy. British embassy. So I went to the embassy, and I introduced myself, and I was introduced to the, the, the member that is in charge of commerce. The commercial -
Other: Attaché.
AC: Attaché. And he said to me, ‘Nice to meet you. I’ll do you a favour if you do me a favour’, and so I thought, well, how can it go wrong. So he said to me, ‘If, if you take an hour and a half or a couple of hours every time you visit [unclear], or parts of Copenhagen or Aarhus or around Denmark, will you give me the time to take a few samples? I’ll give you the samples and will you show them?’ I said, ‘Yes’. What could I to lose? So he, he, I, I, I took that, and he gave me samples, and one sample was of a rug. A car rug. And this car rug was beautifully made with a story. When they sold it, there was a story of the mills [unclear] in Manchester. One of the places near Manchester. I can’t remember the name of it. And I got a very big order from Magisin du Nord, one of the biggest stores in Copenhagen. A very big order. And that gave me a beautiful living. I was, and he gave me the agency for it. I had the agency even when I left Denmark, that agency kept on paying me and that was one thing, and then I did, still did, still did the Polly Peck things, ‘cause Polly Peck got a very nice letter from Her Majesty, er, His Majesty’s government. I think it was the King was dead. It was her majesty then. I think the King died. King George the sixth died in –
CB: ‘52 yeah.
AC: ‘52. So I was in Denmark after that, with my wife. So, I got, so how am I doing now? I’ve got to where?
CB: You got the agency for this.
AC: Yes, I got the agency, which gave me and also, he said to me, ‘You know, Alan,’ he said, because we were on terms of like Alan and whatever his name was. You know, there’s a slack season in the, in the fashion business. I have a friend that runs a [unclear] brewery, he runs a place making bottles. Now if you’re stuck for a job, you just give my name, and he’ll give you work. Well, there was a time I went down there, and I says, ‘I’ve been sent by the British embassy attaché for, - and my name is Alan Coller’. ‘Oh yes, we know about that’. ‘Can I have work?’ So they gave me work sweeping the glass to put into trailers and then take it away. It was really rotten work, and then they gave me a job of when the, when the molten glass goes down into the, if it went wrong, the glass would then go into the basement into, into water. Well, if you’re not quick getting it out, it gets solid glass, so my job was for half an hour, going down and pulling the molten glass out of it into a barrow, into a barrow, into a barrow, before the molten glass starts to climb.
CB: Yeah.
AC: Terrible job. Right. That was that job, then, I had to do, if there was nothing to do with the molten glass, I had to check the compressors to see that the compressors were working. So, I then went to the compressors, made the notes, and then one day, I felt very, very tired and I thought, Oh Alan, for God’s sake, how are you going to stay awake? ‘Cause I was on nightshift on that particular one. I really felt tired. How are you going to stay awake? I said, ‘I know. I’ll clean the machines’, because they were filthy. The compressors were absolutely terrible. So what did I do? Better to do than do nothing. I cleaned them, and I brought the polish up and everything, and in the morning, I go up. I think I finished at seven in the morning. The foreman said to me, ‘Did you, by any chance, clean the compressors?’ In that tone of voice. I thought, I’m in trouble here. The union, you know. I thought, oh bloody hell. What have I done? I said, ‘Yes, I did.’ ‘Well you made a very good job of them’, he said, ‘and I’ve got a better job for you now’. So I got a better job being a [unclear] it’s called. The [unclear] is Danish, for it’s a long line that goes along with eighteen bottles on it one beside the other. If the machine goes wrong, all the bottles fall down, and they’ve lost a shift, so my job was to be there to watch the bottles going down, which was a nice easy job. I could wear a, I could wear a suit. So I was good at it, because I’m not being rude about the Danes, but the workers, there would have a drink, a good old drink, and they were not capable of looking straight. I never took a drink at night. My idea of work, was to work and keep my head clear, so I did this, and that’s the job I got, and I was being well paid. Well paid for the job. And so, between that, and bits and pieces I was earning, so I got a flat for my wife. She was staying with her mother and father. I got a flat. I got enough money to pay for a flat to live in in a nice part of Denmark. Beautiful flat, and I stayed there for nearly two years, and then my father, he got unhappy and he wrote me a letter, to say please come back. I want to see. And I had a baby by then, took the baby with me from England, and the baby was nearly two years old when it came back to London, but I still got money from the, from the I’ll show you one. I’ve still got one of the blankets.
CB: Right.
AC: That I sold.
CB: So, when did you retire from that? Well, you came back to Britain after that did you?
AC: I came back to Britain and I then, then my wife, this is where my wife comes in, bless her. She said, ‘Alan, I’m fed up with you travelling all over the country and coming all around. I never see you. I’ve got an idea’. I said, ‘What’s the idea?’ She says, ‘I want you to be a driving instructor’. I said, ‘But I can drive, but I don’t know if I can teach to drive’. I mean, teaching and driving. So, and she said, ‘What I’ll do’, she says, ‘Alan, I’ll take a part time job while you do the course. I’ll take a job’, ‘cause she was a hatter. She was also a milliner. ‘I’ll take a job, and that will pay for the money that you’ll lose’, by not, so I went to the British School of Motoring, who then sent me to a course, a two weeks course, and I did the two weeks course and I passed, and then they sent me to Swiss cottage, where I started to work for them, but I had to work, I had to work for two years for them, because I wasn’t paying anything to them. They taught me, so they were paying me, maybe a small ten pound a week or something, something ridiculous, but anyway, I’d learned how to teach to drive. Not the way BSM wanted me to teach, because I learned from BSM, their idea of teaching, was to get money for lessons. Not so much as to teach them and get rid of them, which I thought was the right way of doing it, was to teach them and say goodbye to them. Not keep them because the money was coming in. The manager did it, because he had to do so many, a car had to do so many hours per day, for him to keep the car, but I couldn’t give a damn about that. I wasn’t going to do, my pupils had to be treated, so anyway I then, after the two year period, I went on my own, and being honest, I didn’t advertise. I said to the pupils, ‘I’m leaving the company, and if you want my name, it’s in the telephone book’. No cards, no nothing, so I wasn’t disobeying the rules, and then I, the first week I worked, I was earning three hundred pounds. First week. I had twelve pupils said they’d go with me, and I think eight went with me. Those eight snowballed. That was wonderful, I couldn’t believe it. A little bit of whether God was having a nice time with me, and I earned a living, and I did that right up until 1989 or something like that I worked, and then I, I became I retired.
CB: Amazing. Thank you.
[machine pause]
AC: But the -
CB: Alan, we’ve skated over a bit about when you got attacked from the air. So what circumstances did you know of, or get bombed?
AC: Well the circumstances, they dropped bombs in Highgate, I knew. They had a Messerschmitt 109 brought down near Highgate, and it was before we moved to Luton. Must have been in 1940, and we heard suddenly, it was at night time, it wasn’t a daylight one, and suddenly I heard a screaming. You couldn’t miss it, the screaming bomb, and I wondered where the hell it was, is it going to land on me, or was it going to land - it landed about, I would say, from where I’m living now, would have been about a fifteen minutes walk towards Temple Fortune.
CB: But then how close was it to you?
AC: Well, that was about fifteen or twenty minutes.
CB: When you were on the, in the war.
AC: In the war. Yeah.
CB: You heard it coming.
AC: I heard it coming. I wondered where it was going. I didn’t run under a table or nothing. I just heard – scree - and then it hit Hoop, between Hoop Lane, the top of Hoop Lane, and the Finchley Road.
CB: Right.
AC: So there’s the pinpoint.
CB: Yeah.
AC: And I think the house was demolished. Demolished completely. And shrapnel had hit the church. So, the shrapnel, if anybody wanted to go, I’d say look, these marks here, they’re shrapnel marks. So that’s the only thing I can say about this bomb, and never in my life, I’ve heard the noise on, when they’ve had it on the television. A screaming bomb. I never thought it would come near me.
CB: No.
AC: But then in Luton, when my father moved to Luton, he was bombed again on the Monday. He arrived on the Friday, and was bombed on the Monday, but it hadn’t put him out of business. It had just damaged a few windows, which they repaired. But he took his whole staff down there, and he bought a house and put them in.
CB: How many people did he employ?
AC: He employed about thirteen people, but he had to, he had to, to keep the factory going, and they stayed, and they came to Luton and, yeah, they lived, they had to live, I don’t know whether it was two to a bed, or three to a bed. It wasn’t easy. Some of them managed to find a friend or so and stay, but most of them lived -
CB: These were women workers, were they?
AC: And they had a few men, yeah. The blockers were the men. The one that did the blocking, you know.
CB: What’s that mean?
AC: The hats had to be put on blocks. Very hot. And it steams comes down. The shapes. They had them made. My father used to have the blocks made for his style of hat, and then they’d take it, and then it used to be on a machine.
Other: A press.
AC: A press, yeah. Steamed. He wouldn’t let me work there. Well, I’m pleased he didn’t, ‘cause he said it was no good to your health. I did everything else. He was worried about me there, and he didn’t let me work
CB: No. And in the RAF? What experience did you have of bombing there?
AC: Um, well, that was the only. Let me think of the bombing in the RAF. Oh yes, it’s in, when we went to Skegness, we were told that we mustn’t march, we must not be too close to one another, because they’d had a bomb in there. We were told that, but when I was there, there was no bombing at all, so I was lucky to that extent.
CB: Yeah.
AC: They had strafed the, and machine gunned the troops, so we were told we must scatter. We couldn’t keep, if we marching anywhere. We did do, what we did, one of the by things, and I was pretty good at it, we did what we call a sixteen mile march, but they didn’t tell us it was sixteen miles. They showed us, they showed us, they’re clever you know, they showed us this pylon, I could see and we’re going to march there. I thought, that’s nice. They didn’t tell us how we were going to get there. They didn’t go like that - they went -
CB: All the way around.
AC: All the way around and that was eight miles.
CB: Was it? Right.,
AC: Now a lot of the boys, they hadn’t been in the, they hadn’t joined the Air Training Corps, weren’t used to the boots, and they took their boots off after about five or six miles. I said, ‘Don’t take them off. You won’t put them on again’. They didn’t listen. They got charged. They had to be picked up by the ambulance, because they weren’t, they didn’t, I said to them, ‘Don’t take your boots off’. And I was used to playing in a band of a sort. I used to play the triangle in the Air Training Corps, and I could make a little tune up, and I kept them in, left and right, all in order. Now when we were marching, I put a cheeky little song on, you know, to cheer them up, and then march, and the corporal was happy. The sergeant was happy. They didn’t mind what I did, as long as they were, but the ones that didn’t listen to me, that took their boots off, were in real trouble.
CB: So that’s in the RAF. When did you join the ATC?
AC: Ah.
CB: And what did you do?
AC: I joined the ATC in 1941, which is on my thing there and I built myself up. I don’t know what rank I got there. I didn’t get to corporal. I think I got to, like towards the LAC, but Mr Waller, who was the commanding officer there, one of the office, one of the main officers was a Mr Waller, and Mr Waller used to buy hats from my father. Yeah. And my father tried to tell him not to let me get in the, in to any fighting or anything.
CB: No.
AC: But I said to Mr Waller, ‘whatever my father told you, forget it for goodness sake’. He thought, you know, I’ll give you the hats at a special price if you do. It was a little bit of that, but I wasn’t pleased with that.
CB: Right, no. So, finally, what about when you were in civilian life?
AC: Yes.
CB: And you joined Associations. What did you join?
AC: Well, the first one I joined automatically, was the Royal Air Force Association. I never even thought about the Bomber Command, until I met a friend who was in Bomber Command. I thought, he said, ‘Alan, you were in a bomber station’. I said, ‘Yes’. He said, ‘Well, why don’t you join Bomber Command?’ Then I joined Bomber Command.
CB: Right. Association.
AC: Association, ‘cause I thought that’s really what I was.
CB: Yes.
AC: And he’s died now, but he was one of the clan. He was an, he was, he went on bombing raids, which I appreciated. I didn’t. I went up flying. I’ve been up flying. I told you. I’ll tell you I went up in a Whitley.
CB: Oh, right.
AC: I called it, we called it the flying coffin, ‘cause it was so slow, that a German could even put the gun up and find out, if it was over there, he’d be ready to shoot it when it got to there. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the, you’ve heard of the -
CB: So, what did you do on the Whitley?
AC: The Whitley I was taken, I don’t know, I was taken somewhere.
CB: Yeah.
AC: I wasn’t on a, it wasn’t a joy trip. I did a joy trip when I was in the Air Training Corps. I did the, I hiked a ride on a Tiger Moth. Where they did the loop the loop. I wasn’t to know he was going to do the loop the loop. We all went on, you know, we went on from our station in Luton.
CB: Yes.
AC: To, I’ve forgotten the name. It’s in Oxfordshire. Some airport, and we had to hitch a ride, so I called, I saw this officer walking, and I said, ‘Excuse me sir, can I have a lift?’ ‘Yes you can’. He says, ‘Go and get your parachute’. So I get my parachute, come back. In this Tiger Moth, I didn’t know what he was going to do. All of a sudden, I was tied in, all of a sudden, he does this loop the loop, and the pressure on my neck. He could, he could have warned me.
CB: Yeah.
AC: He didn’t. But at least they said, when I came down, ‘Was that you up there, Alan’. I said, ‘Yes, it was’. ‘Oh, you lucky sod’, you know.
CB: Right. I’m going to stop there.
AC: Yeah.
CB: Thank you very much, Alan.
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Interview with Allan Stanley Coller
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Chris Brockbank
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2016-08-03
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Sound
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ACollerAS160803
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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.
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
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02:03:54 audio recording
Description
An account of the resource
Alan Coller joined the Air Training Corp in 1941 and eventually joined the Royal Air Force in 1943 at the age of 18. He was sent to RAF Skegness for his initial training, after that he was transferred to RAF Barnham, near Mildenhall where he was assigned to work with ordinance.
Alan worked with mustard gas canisters, checking them for leaks, loading ammunition for machine guns, and looking after bombs of all sizes, He explains in more details how they were stored, where and how they were transported.
He tells of his experiences working at RAF Barnham, including incidents on site because of his Jewish heritage, and being called back from leave before going to RAF Skellingthorpe.
Alan was sent abroad on the RMS Cynthia, sailing to India before an onward journey to Ceylon. He tells of his experiences on board ship, including being put under arrest and meeting his cousin.
He was demobbed in January 1947, and in civilian life got a job with J Lyons and Company, working in the Marble Arch Hotel. He tells of his encounter with Oswald Mosely and holidaying in Denmark, where he met his wife.
After the war, Alan got a job with Polly Peck, becoming a salesman for the Company working in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Suffolk
England--Lincolnshire
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka--Ratmalana
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
India
animal
anti-Semitism
faith
military discipline
RAF Skegness
RAF Skellingthorpe
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/552/8816/AMaddockLyonR160321.2.mp3
a595d15f2a53dcbc9fb8c503f4160890
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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Maddock-Lyon, Roy
R Maddock-Lyon
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MaddockLyon, R
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. An oral history interview with Roy Maddock-Lyon (- 2023, 2205669 Royal Air Force), his log book, service material, silk escape map and an album. He served as a flight engineer with 10 Squadron from RAF Melbourne until he was shot down on his 18th operation over Denmark 14 February 1945. Two of his crew were killed but he evaded with the help of the Danish resistance.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Roy Maddock-Lyon and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
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2016-03-21
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.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
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CB: Right. My name is Chris Brockbank and we are interviewing Roy Maddock-Lyon today which is the 21st of March 2016 at Lee House in Weedon near Aylesbury. And Roy was a flight engineer and he’s going to talk about his life and times. So, Roy how did it all start in your mind?
RML: Well when I was born I suppose. But yes, I was born. I was born more or less in the time of the Big Depression but my father continued, was working. He was an accountant and he’d served in the First World War. And from then on I went to Runcorn Grammar School. It was then called technical college but it became changed to a grammar school and I was educated there until the war broke out. And Runcorn was an evacuation town so all the young kids were evacuated to Blackpool. I was one of them. I didn’t like it there so I came home but my school up was at Blackpool so I went out to work and I took an engineering apprenticeship and I enjoyed that. And I wanted to be a chemist but there was no vacancies at ICI for a chemist apprentice so I went into engineering apprenticeship. That, I studied, got my Ordinary National and I started getting my Higher National but I’d, it had just developed that the RAF and I thought I’d like to join the RAF. I didn’t think of the army. In fact I didn’t think it was my sort of cup of tea. Neither was the navy. So I went in to the RAF but during that I had an interesting experience. I was with the Civil Service, as it was then called, and I was a messenger in the Civil Service. The role of the messenger you did one night a week and you were there in case of messages, an air raid, and you lost communication and then I had to know where to go. You know, the post office, the police and that. And the interesting case was because Liverpool had been badly bombed there was an organisation known as the Queen’s Messengers. Have you heard of it?
CB: No. Never.
RML: Well the Queen’s Messengers was a relief organisation run by the government and it was stationed in Birmingham and it was a fleet of coaches and lorries carrying relief to wherever there was a damaged area and it was called the Queen’s Messengers. And as the roads were all in blackout and the road signs had all been taken down the messengers had to know the area. So I had to go from the, well the relief convoy was coming up from Birmingham to go to Liverpool and I had to cycle to a place called Helsby outside Runcorn and to get in the front vehicle and guide it to Runcorn and then hand over to the next one because they knew the road and they went on. So it was an interesting exercise and not many people probably know about the Queen’s Messengers.
CB: No. No.
RML: And they was probably there for a couple of days and the next raid, where ever it was, they went off to there and it was a very good relief. So that was all I had to do was sit in the, in the front vehicle and put my bike in there and wait until they got to where I had to hand over and there was this continuous movement. There was about three or four Queen’s Messenger convoys going. All radiating from Birmingham. I think that’s something that could be developed you know because not many people, as you say, nobody knew about them and it was essential to get relief supplies because we carried medicine and doctors and things like that. And so after that I used to do one night a week and then I got a request calling up for an interview and they interviewed me for RAF ordinary and they said would I like to go into aircrew? And I said, ‘Of course I would.’ [laughs] And so they said, ‘Right. Well you’d better go home again,’ because they weren’t recruiting at that building for aircrew. So, I was then called up about a few weeks later. Had to go to Padgate and, where they assessed me for whatever. Pilot. Engineer. Gunner. And I passed with flight engineer and then I eventually was called up to go to Lord’s Cricket Ground and, where I had a fortnight’s equipping and getting into uniform. Inoculations and that. And that, once I passed that at Lord’s I was sent to [pause] yes, Sunderland. Just outside. In a place called Hetton le Hole and I did an amount of training there and then I went from there I went to Bridlington where I was, had other training including parachute dropping. How to get out and open a parachute and drop on the ground. How to fall and do the normal roll. And then I was sent home on leave. And after doing the square bashing and that at Bridlington I was then posted to St Athan where I did type engineering training and then I got type training. I couldn’t go into Lancasters because I was too short. You had to be five foot, over five foot six for an engineer. I don’t know why. But they offered me Flying Boats or the Halifax and so I took the Halifax and I did my type training on the Halifax and I passed that and then was allocated to a squadron. Oh no I wasn’t. I was sent to HCU and that’s where I eventually met my crew of five and then made it seven and whilst at Acaster Malbis I did commando training in case I was shot down and various other exercises and then I was squadroned. Yeah. No I wasn’t. I was sent, sent to HCU then to do my initial training. That was, they was using the very old Halifaxes which were flying coffins because they invariably crashed. So It was a mark ii. Mark i and Mark ii Halifax. I went on the Mark iii eventually and it was a good experience. I had one dust up with the police because I was cycling home. We’d gone out to a party and my navigator was on the cross bar and a policeman stopped me and that was not allowed. To have a crossbar. So, he took my name. I got called up and got prosecuted for that and the magistrate said had I got anything to say. I said, ‘Yes [time that blinking plod?] was in the air force. Not punishing us.’ ‘Right.’ He’d already given me a ten shilling fine. ‘Another ten shillings. [laughs] Have you anything more to say?’ I said, ‘No.’ Blinking — I said he should be in the army or the, yeah, instead of stopping — anyhow, so then I went. So that was my brush with the law. In fact, in the squadron they all thought it very funny. Including the CO. [I hope that bloke had] had some more disasters. Anyhow, I went to my squadron and I’ve written a book here on what I did including photographs. So you can borrow that.
CB: Thank you.
RML: I can get these back wont I?
CB: Yes. Absolutely.
RML: And there was lots of things. The Halifax was a good plane but as a — well fortunately I’d written to the Hercules who made the Bristols, who made the engines and they sent me a calculator how to measure your fuel consumption. So as a result, all the other engineers hadn’t got that. So as a result, I had a good fuel record.
CB: Oh.
RML: One raid I was on using that and we’d got hit with shrapnel and all and I’d had to do the necessary fuel change and we came back to the squadron and we said, have permission to land and we got a, we were damaged, and, ‘Can we have priority landing?’ ‘No, you can’t land here. Go to Carnaby.’ ‘No, we haven’t got enough fuel to go to Carnaby.’ ‘Well too bad. Go to Carnaby.’ And we turned from York on to Carnaby which is Bridlington and as we come in to land two engines cut out. We were just on the, we planted down on two engines. Out of fuel. Thinking I’d have a lot to say about that if it wasn’t recorded because we should have been able to land. But anyhow the two engines cut out and when we taxied around another one went. So, we lost three engines. It wasn’t, wasn’t funny and, you know, all the other planes were there and as we taxied around and we got nose to tail so we stopped our plane in front of another plane and were getting out and as we were getting out there was a heck of a noise and two planes farther back — they were doing the same. The engine of one went into the rear turret of another and just chewed the rear gunner up like spaghetti. It was terrible, and we were walking, you know, got our equipment back to the reception and we saw all this, you know, damage.
CB: Yeah. Frightening.
RML: If the pilot had kept the plane going straight it would have been ok. But no, he tried to accelerate to turn the plane away and that’s what happened.
CB: Dreadful.
RML: The engine, you know, the propeller just churned him up. It was a heck of a mess. It was a bit disheartening.
CB: I bet.
RML: But we, we had other raids to go on. And then one other raid. My pilot was a bit of devil. Having flown the Tiger and other, we came — we was out doing, we were training like Barnes Wallis wants. Low level flying. And we came over Bridlington beach and the holidaymakers dropped to the ground because they thought they was going to be cut up but we carried on from there over the Yorkshire Moors and I don’t know if you’ve been up that area.
CB: Not recently.
RML: Well they’ve got pylons there.
CB: Oh yes. Yeah.
RML: They’re quite high aren’t they?
CB: Yeah.
RML: Yeah. Well what do you do with a pilot that wants to go underneath the wires? At about fifty or a hundred feet. Which is what we did.
CB: Amazing.
RML: He had, he got a severe reprimand for that.
CB: Really.
RML: So, anyway, but yes we did low level. We was training for low level flying. You know a lot of people think that the Lancaster was the only group that could do low level flying. They weren’t. There was other squadrons that was capable of doing a low-level attack because they had to. There was lots of cases. And so when I, well I was eventually shot down. Done eighteen raids and on the eighteenth I was shot down in Denmark. It wasn’t very pleasant because it was February. It was a bit cold. So, when I landed I’d got the old fashioned flying boots which is a disaster because when my parachute opened my shoes decided to continue. You know the ones I mean. They were just sleeves –
CB: Fell off. Yeah.
RML: Oh, they went down so I landed in bare feet. When I didn’t, I looked around, blew my whistle and I couldn’t hear anything because I think I’d gone deaf, you know, with dropping from twenty thousand and so if anyone had blown their whistle I didn’t hear it. But I looked up and I could see there was a farmhouse there so I started walking in bare feet to go to the farmhouse and then I realised that going to the farmhouse I’d be leaving my trail because it was soft ground. So when I got to the farmhouse I walked, turned right at the farmhouse and walked down the road and I came to another farmhouse and it appears that the next day the Germans went to the farmhouse I’d been and there was nobody there. I wasn’t there. The farmer took me in and gave me ham and eggs and I’d got my escape kit and my escape money and I slept in his house that night and he was absolutely panic stricken because he’d got a young daughter and if the Germans had known I was there they, that would have been the end of their life. So anyhow the next morning when I got out of bed the milkman called and the woman was in tears apparently and she said she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to give me up but she was worried about her daughter. So, the milkman said, ‘Right. Put him in the hayloft,’ which is what I climbed up in to the hayloft. Burrowed down about two or three feet because the Germans, if they was looking for anybody they’d bayonet the holes to check. I was down deeper than that and at 6 o’clock at night when it was dark the milkman came and brought me some shoes. I take size seven and he took size ten or eleven [laughs]. Not funny. And so, I put those on. Went with him across the fields because he only lived about half a mile, a mile away and the house where I’d stayed the farmer there followed me with a rake levelling off the ground where my footprints had been and so that he was giving me cover and it turned out then this new bloke Johan Helms, he, it’s in the book, he thought, his wife got me clothes because I’d still got RAF uniform on. So, he got me some shirt and trousers, shoes and we went next morning. He said we’d got to get out quickly because there was a train coming and we had to get on the train. So he took me down. Instead of going down the road we went down field-ways because he knew the area, being a milkman. And we get to this station. I just forget the name of the place. [Toulouse?] that was the name of the town. And he — I’d got the money so I gave him my money. He got the railway ticket and to go on the train which we did but as we were waiting for the train there were a couple of SS officers come stalking up and they got on the train with me. In the same compartment. They were talking, yabbering to each other. They’d probably had a girl the night before and they weren’t interested in passengers on the train. So and the train was going from [Toulouse?] to Copenhagen but in Denmark they’ve got an underground system like London Underground and so, we got off at a place called Roskilde. Oh no. The SS officers got off at a place called Roskilde which was German headquarters and then we went on a little bit farther. A few miles. Ten, twenty miles and the train stopped again and we got off because it turned out that we, he put me on to, or we both got on to the Underground which was going around Copenhagen and so, we got on that. When it gets to Copenhagen the train which we’d been on was in the platform and the German troops were searching it and we were on another train and what they, we all thought, and I agree with that the Germans probably realised when they got off the train at Roskilde that what was sitting next to them was one of the RAF people that was escaping. So that was why the train was stopped and, but we didn’t need it. So, they never found me, and I went to a place called Charlottenlund which was, the owner of it was the warden of the equivalent of Kew gardens and it was called the [Forest Botanski Garden?] and this man, who was the brother of the milkman because he’d rung up his brother to say he’s got, got some nice chocolates and I was traded as a box of chocolates. And so, we got there and he er [pause] yes, his daughter, the owner didn’t want me around for obvious reasons so his daughter took me around the wooded area where the trees were and we were walking around there and suddenly two German soldiers come up and she put her arms around me and started kissing me. Not that it meant [laughs] and the Germans probably thought I was her boyfriend so they just walked on, and I was left, and I was then later that day handed over to Professor [Eyg?] I don’t know if his name is familiar. He was the leader of the Underground. The Danish Underground. So, he took me to a safe, a safe house where they took my identity, my photographs and gave me a false identity and, I’ve still got it here. And I just well yeah they gave me, and then again I became another box of chocolates because this group who interviewed me of Danish ladies handed me over to another bloke and his wife and I just went and I had a bath and had a good wash and a shave. And he took me for, he said, ‘I want to take you around Copenhagen in the morning,’ so he did and as we were going down one of the side streets there’s a German road block. So they were checking everybody for their identity. So there was a cinema next door there so we went into the cinema and saw some film which was — I don’t know what it was. And after about a half hour we came out and the road block had gone so we were free so he took me around Copenhagen, around Gestapo Headquarters and that was, and he didn’t tell me what he wanted me to see but he showed me what I could see and that was Gestapo Headquarters and also there was doing, the Germans were doing something. Do you know what Copenhagen looks like?
CB: I’ve been to Copenhagen. Yes.
RML: Well there’s four lakes coming down and at the end of the fourth one is Shell House and what they were doing they was putting trees down next to the lakes and he said, ‘Take a note of that,’ and I just did that. Apparently, when I got back, it’s skipping the order to tell this bit, Air Ministry made one terrific blunder because they were planning a Gestapo Headquarters raid which went a complete success but a disaster because one of the pilots on the Mosquito, I don’t know if you know it, missed the, went down the wrong lane and hit the school.
CB: I know about that.
RML: And wasn’t supposed to
CB: Right.
RML: Because I’d gone back to tell them that the Germans expected it and they hit the school because the pilot, that one pilot had gone sick when I did the briefing and he didn’t know about the alteration and as a result he went down what he was been told, trained for, which was the wrong direction and that was how a whole load of school children were killed.
CB: Yeah. Very tragic.
RML: About a hundred children. More. Killed because of a pilot who didn’t go to the training. Anyhow, I felt very angry to say the least. But because the Gestapo headquarters, they hit it as they wanted to. I don’t know if you remember what they did. They hit the ground floor with the rockets.
CB: Yeah.
RML: And all the Gestapo and SS who were on the ground floor were killed and all the Danish government officers who had been put on the top floor escaped. It was a wonderful success that. And anyhow eventually they decided that I had to get out because I’d got, I didn’t know I’d got this information because for obvious reasons they didn’t tell me. But they got me out and as I said it was February and they put me on a ship that was leaving Copenhagen that night to go to Bornholm and on to Germany and what it was doing it was taking German troops back to Germany. So I had to be on that boat before the German troops came on so and so they put me on the outside of the life boat which was just, the water was down there and when the ship started to sail I had to crawl from outside the lifeboat to the inside of the lifeboat. The lifeboat was sitting on the deck and they put the searchlight on and they couldn’t see me because I was on the inside now. Beforehand when they were searching the ship I was on the outside. And eventually when it had gone out of the port they came and dragged me because I was frozen. Very cold. And they took me down to the captain’s cabin and he was a double agent because as he pointed out to me on the last voyage he found a German revolver and he took it down to them and said, ‘Look. You must have left this.’ And he said it may have been a trick. But anyhow he was, he said, ‘I’ll have to leave you now.’ But he gave me [egg and ham?] lots of food and I was eating that all night and he was entertaining the Germans down below. And after the war I had to go to Denmark to identify that he had actually been a double agent.
CB: Yeah.
RML: Because he was under, the Danish people thought he’d been a traitor. So anyhow, I get off the boat and the Air Ministry or the government had sent somebody down from Stockholm because they were expecting me. They got a message across to say that I was on the boat and the Danes, the escape route — I think — I forget the name of the route, but it had to be closed down because it had been compromised but it was too risky not to take the chance because they had to get me back to Stockholm to Air Ministry urgently. So, the Danes took a terrific risk in getting me on a route which had been blown because the Germans insisted on identities of people going on. It’s in this book it’s described and so they got me off and it was and then in the morning as I say the Air Ministry, the air attaché had come down from Stockholm, met me, took me to his flat and I had a wash and a shave and one memorial episode. He said, and it was night time now, he said I’m going to give you a shock. I said, ‘Well what?’ He went to the window and drew the curtains back and I’ve never seen anything as — you can imagine when we’d had a blackout for four years. Nothing. No light. And Malmo, where we’d landed, was just like Piccadilly Circus. You — the lights were terrific. It was mind blowing. And so that was a shock to me. He then took me to the station and he didn’t come with me. I don’t know why but he put me on the train to Stockholm and I’d only been on, it was a sleeper, night sleeper. I’d only been on the ship er on the train about ten minutes and somebody else came to get in the top bunk and he spoke to me. He said something in German. ‘You’re not German.’ ‘No.’ ‘What are you? American?’ ‘No.’ ‘British?’ Well you couldn’t argue with the fact I could only speak blinking British, so he said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to give you up.’ He said, ‘I’m the German courier from Berlin and I’m going to the German Embassy.’ It’s nice that they have got some people that’s friendly. And so, we sat there and he said that Germany wasn’t so, this was February ‘45. Getting towards the end. And we had a little chat. In the morning he shook me out of sleep and he said, ‘Where are you going to now? British Embassy?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I’ll get you a taxi.’ So, he got me a taxi, ordered, told him to take me to the British Embassy. This was a German courier. And I got to the German Embassy, er British Embassy and it was fine. So I’m there and then one of the staff at the Embassy said, ‘Do you smoke?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Here’s two hundred gold flakes from the British Red Cross.’ I said, ‘Oh thank you.’ So, I got those and I got sent to a hotel. The Grand Hotel in Stockholm which is quite a good one. It’s a big one. It’s like The Savoy. They put me in and when I’m, I decide to go out and I’d got some cigarettes in my pocket and I was in plain clothes now because they’d taken me to like Harrods or somewhere where they equipped me with a suit, tie, shirt, everything and so, and shoes, everything. I’d got everything I needed. So, I went downstairs and was sitting outside and a Swedish girl came up to me, a blonde and said, ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Can I have one?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Ok.’ I was naïve. Stupid little boy. So she said, ‘You haven’t got a spare packet have you?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Oh, I’ll see you in a minute.’ ‘I thought that’s the worst, you know, she’s taken my cigarettes and gone and buggered off. About ten minutes later she came back and said ‘It’s all fixed.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘The room.’ The packet of cigarettes was getting you a room for the night. So anyhow to be honest it didn’t materialise. So, and so I didn’t take her up on her offer. I was only in Stockholm two or three nights, so I went to the Embassy and it was interesting. The air attaché had got two daughters...
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 Roy Maddock-Lyon
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Chris Brockbank
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
2016-03-21
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AMaddockLyonR160321
Conforms To
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Pending review
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.
Contributor
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Julie Williams
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Great Britain
Sweden
Denmark--Copenhagen
England--Yorkshire
Sweden--Stockholm
Description
An account of the resource
Roy Maddock-Lyon was born in Cheshire and when his school was evacuated at the start of the war he began an engineering apprenticeship. He was a part of the Queen’s Messengers, a relief organisation that travelled to bombed cities to take emergency medical and other supplies. He later volunteered for the Royal Air Force and was selected as a flight engineer. When he joined his squadron, he recalls a time when they were refused emergency landing at an airfield and had to fly on to RAF Carnaby. He then witnessed a tragic accident on the airfield. He was shot down over Denmark and evaded to Sweden with the aid of the Danish resistance. He discusses the operation to bomb the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen.
The interview is incomplete and ends abruptly.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-02
1945-03-21
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:40:07 audio recording
10 Squadron
aircrew
evacuation
evading
flight engineer
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
home front
RAF Carnaby
RAF Melbourne
recruitment
Resistance
shot down
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/673/9225/PAndrewsPF1701.1.jpg
f2ebdb590ad02e6bdbfb783df0b1cbcd
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/673/9225/AAndrewsPF170911.1.mp3
b75333e621a6c4095f4c7e868ae7b6f5
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
Andrews, Andy
Peter Frederick Andrews
P F Andrews
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. An oral history interview with Andy Andrews (1924 - 2022, 1811552 Royal Air Force) and his log book. He flew operations as a wireless operator with 10 Squadron before he was shot down on a mine laying operation 14 February 1945 and became a prisoner of war.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by 'Andy' Andrews and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-11
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Andrews, PF
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
SP: This is Susanne Pescott and I’m interviewing Peter Frederick Andrews known as Andy Andrews, today for the International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archive. We’re at Andy’s home and it’s the 11th of September 2017. So, first of all, thank you Andy for agreeing to talk to me today.
AA: Quite alright. Yeah.
SP: So, Andy, tell me about life before the RAF.
AA: I left school at fourteen years of age which was the time that you left education in those days and I went to work as a, in a tailoring, a tailoring shop in Tunbridge High Street. And I was there until such time as I got an interest in flying and I joined the Air Training Corps and they brought my education up a bit by giving me more maths training than I’d had before. And I, in, in those days at seventeen and a quarter you could volunteer for the flying duties in the RAF because it, all air crew were volunteers during the war. And I was, I went into the RAF. As I say I was in a gent’s outfitters and I was there until such time as I went into the RAF at seventeen and a quarter which was the end of 1941, and started. Kitted out at Cardington. Went from there to Blackpool and at Blackpool we did Morse training in the Winter Gardens. And we were there in the winter period and if weather was too bad for physical training we did it in the Tower Ballroom which was quite an experience because the organist on the big organ was usually rehearsing and it was quite, quite an experience. And once we finished at Blackpool we, we went to Lossiemouth in Scotland which was the Operational Training Unit. And the method of crewing up in the RAF in those days sounds a bit chaotic really because you were all in a giant hangar. Air gunners, navigators, bomb aimers, air, wireless operators and pilots and a pilot somehow collected the people that he had spoken to and well, you knew briefly. And he knew one of the gunners because he had, he had been an instructor when the gunner was, James Petre when he was trying for his pilot’s licence which he didn’t manage. Hence the fact he ended up as an air gunner and he picked up him and his mate up as crew. And then they latched on to me and got me as a wireless op and the navigator, whose name was Berry he had red hair so he naturally got nicknamed Red. Plus the fact that the red beret, I mean it was quite obvious why he got the name but, and we formed a crew. We were flying in Wellingtons, training in Wellingtons and we completed, completed our OTU training and from there we went down to York and we went to a Conversion Unit just outside of York called Rufforth. 1663 Con Unit, and we converted on to the Halifax Mark 2 with, with the inlined engine and once we’d, we’d converted successfully on to the Halifax we were sent to a, the squadron which was 10 Squadron. A little village called Seaton Ross or Melbourne and we, we flew in the, they were equipped with the Halifax Mark 3 which was a marvellous aeroplane and we converted on to that. And we had one little hiccup. The bomb aimer that we’d picked up was, he got cold feet and he, he told our pilot Johnny that he wasn’t going to be able to go on ops. So, John told him to go to the medical officer and state his case which he did and he was classed as LMF which is lack of moral fibre and he had his insignia, RAF flying insignia and rank taken away and he was posted off the squadron. But we were very successful in his replacement which was, I’ll be eternally grateful that he came to us because he was so useful to me at a later date when we were prisoner of war. But he was, he come from Liverpool and his name was Stan and he was an ex-docker built quite solid. Again, which I was very grateful for at a later date and he had, he had done a tour in Wellingtons in the Middle East so he’d already done thirty operations when he came to us. He slotted into the crew quite well as one of the senior crews but he was senior to all of us as far as operations are concerned but we started our operating and we did German targets which consisted of the Ruhr which we did a couple of dozen operations. Well, no about twelve operations on the Ruhr which was known to aircrew as Happy Valley and the flak was quite extensive over those areas. Anyhow, we got through nineteen operations and we were feeling confident that we were going to be able to complete our tour without any bother. We’d done a couple of mine laying operations which was code named gardening and was given a, a code name. The one we were on, on, we were briefed to go on was, “Forget Me Nots.” And it was just off the coast of Denmark in the shipping lanes. We were due to drop mines and we took off about 5.30 on the February the 14th, St Valentine’s Day and headed over the coast of Yorkshire heading for, we flew out at five hundred foot to get a bit below the radar so the Germans didn’t pick us up too quick. The, the rest of the squadron, there were just three aircraft on the mine laying which we were one of and the rest of the squadron went to a target called Chemnitz on the 13th of February which was to drag some of the fighter opposition away from Dresden which was the target that night. And they were going to Chemnitz. We were going to drop mines. We took off, flew across to the mainland of Denmark and then climbed to a height of eighteen thousand feet. Headed towards Copenhagen which we were due to, is the island of Zealand and a little farther on we came to the, we would have come to the coast to drop the mines. The bomb aimer had come down to the front to prepare the mines for dropping but unfortunately a JU88 fitted with all the latest equipment had latched on to us. He’d been vectored on to us and once, the method of attack is once they’ve got visual contact with a bomber they flew to the rear of it and slightly underneath so it made the rear gunner couldn’t get a, couldn’t depress his guns far enough to reach them. And then he had a fixed firing .5 gun which actually targeted the front part of the plane. And the part that always fascinates me is the fact that his first burst caught the port wing which was fully alight and the flames were trailing out behind and he he he had another burst which must have killed the pilot because he was sitting immediately above me and I had blood on my battledress which must have been his. And the navigator who sat by my right knee almost within touching distance he had been caught by a cannon shell as well. So, they were both dead. I was in the middle and got away with it apart from superficial cuts and bruises. I stood up, clipped my parachute on and the aircraft was all over the place because the pilot was obviously dead or dying and there was no control and it was flying all over the place and as everybody knows if you’re all over the place in an aircraft it’s difficult to do anything. I was making to move forward to the escape hatch by which time the pilot and the navigator were dead. The mid-upper gunner, the flight engineer and the rear gunner got out of the main escape hatch or the one that you normally come, come in to the aircraft on and they’d gone out. They baled out and just after they had baled out the aircraft blew up and we figured that the nose must have separated from the main fuselage and Stan, who was the bomb aimer he was up in the nose and myself who was about six foot from him must have gone through a gap. And fortunately, as I say I was unconscious and I came to in a silent world because your ears have blacked out. You fall at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. And I looked up and saw the parachute pack but the parachute hadn’t been deployed so I reached up and pulled it. It appears to be in the nick of time because it was only seconds and I hit the deck and in the middle of a field in Denmark. And as I say the, the exiting from the aircraft the flight engineer and the mid-upper gunner got out without any problem at all. Jim, the rear gunner, Jim Petre he turned his guns to, to port because there was, the flames were, were streaming back on the port side and he jettisoned the back doors and fell out backwards. But unfortunately one of his flying boots got caught in the guns so he was trailing out the back and in, with his parachute pack and he realised that he’d got to get away from the aircraft because it was burning and so he pulled the ripcord which yanked him out like a cork out of a bottle and opened the chute. It took him a long while to get down because from sort of eighteen, sixteen thousand feet, whichever we were to the ground takes quite a, quite a number of minutes to get down whereas I was the last one out I reckon and Stan and I we were the first down. And as I say I approached some houses that were alongside the field where we were and I approached some people that were standing out at their gate. They had maps and torches and things to illuminate and whatever, and the first group that I got to said they didn’t want to know because obviously if the Germans, if, if you were a Danish citizen and you helped English aircrew or allied aircrew then you were shot. You were killed. So, they directed me over to another house and I went and knocked the window and that’s when I knew that my hands were quite badly cut and bruised and the blood was running down the window. And they, they took me in and sat me in the chair and dressed my head wounds with paper bandages and I got the escape kit out and the silk map and the currency and all the stuff that goes with it and they pointed, they pointed out where we were in Denmark. And whatever plans I’d got, I was forming in my mind was to get out. Anyhow, they sent for an ambulance and they came along and they picked me up and took me out in a stretcher. Put me in the back of the ambulance. We went down the road, hundred yards not much more I shouldn’t have thought and the back doors opened and Stan was wheeled in. He looked a shocking sight because he was, where Perspex is embedded into his face. It looked a lot worse than what it was. It looked like he was, his whole face was blooded and I suppose mine was must have been the same and I said, ‘You look a shocking sight.’ And he said, ‘Well, you don’t look much better.’ They took us to a hospital which they changed, they put us in an examination room with two benches where we’d laid there and the doctors were checking us over and doing what was necessary and they brought a couple of members of the Resistance in who the doctors interpreted for. One of the doctors could speak really good English and they had said that if we were fit to travel the next day they’d got, they would get us away and we’d get across to Sweden which the other three members of the crew managed to do and they got back to England quite quickly. But unfortunately, somebody in the hospital had blown the whistle on us and said there was two fliers and although they were changing us from ward to ward to keep us out of the way the Germans marched in and took us. And they took us both out on stretchers and they put us in some unbelievable dungeon like place and Stan was one, there was a couple of bunks in there and Stan was in one and I was in the other. And later on that night they brought their girlfriends down to have a laugh at our expense. And as I say Stan was a very forthright ex-docker and he gave them some Liverpool [laughs] swearing which if you, whether they recognised it but they must have known that he wasn’t very happy. And he’d got broken ribs and fortunately the next day the Luftwaffe who had heard that we’d been taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht came and claimed us as their own which they were in the habit of doing because, and they took us to an airfield in Denmark and put us in sick quarters where we were quite well looked after for a few days. I had [sunray] treatment to take the bruising which I was black from just below the thighs up to the chest where the harness was a bit slack and with my delayed drop it did cause quite a bit of damage. But, and Stan also with his broken ribs he had, he had quite a lot of attention and anti-tetanus and all kinds of things and the doctor who could speak, the Luftwaffe doctor who could speak good English, him and Stan had long conversations and argued against the merits of us fighting the Germans and we should never have got into a situation where we were at war with Germany and Stan was saying just how, giving his version of it and it got quite heated. At that particular time Stan had noted or we’d both noted that there was a JU52, one of their transport aircraft was parked not far from the window and they used to take it up for an air test every, every day. And Stan come out with the bright idea that if he could get out to it he’d get us off the ground which I thought might have been a good idea in, in boy’s books but it didn’t sound very convincing to me that he was going to do all that with him with two broken ribs and me strapped up with severe bruising. Anyhow, it came to nothing and we were transported by ship from [pause] from Denmark across the, going over the shipping lanes where the mines had been dropped by other aircraft and we were right in the bowels of this ship and we, but we got away with it. We got to Rostock on the north coast of Germany and then we entrained from there. I had a dodgy experience as we went in to Hamburg. The compartment was reserved just for us and two guards because we had two guards with us and, but the civilians had pushed their way in. In other words, they’d have probably done the same in this country, why should enemy aircrew have a reserved when they were standing in the [laughs] Anyhow, they got that they piled into there and one of them had got me against the door and we were looking out at a part of Hamburg where there wasn’t a stone on a stone. I mean it had been completely obliterated and he was saying, ‘Your comrades,’ and he was trying to undo the door to push me out. Fortunately, the guards with their guns forced them back and put Stan and I up in the corner out of the way and we didn’t have any more trouble from them. But we went from there down to Dulag Luft near Frankfurt which was the Interrogation Centre for all allied aircrew and we were immediately shoved in to solitary confinement and taken out. I think we were there for four days before they were convinced that we’d got no useful information to give us. But we were taken out and chatted to by, or interrogated by German officers who could speak perfect English and offered us cigarette and, ‘Would you like a sandwich?’ And were very nice to us but they had got so much information about 10 Squadron they even knew we’d got a new CO which we’d only had for three weeks, Wing Commander Shannon and they even knew about that. And once they realised that they knew more about 10 Squadron than what I did they released us on to the main camp where we were, I inherited a pair of GI boots which were quite comfortable and we were kitted out and the biggest tragedy as far as I’m concerned we were given a shower and they came along and said I’d got lice so they shaved my head right down to the bone which is the customary mode of hair cutting nowadays but it wasn’t in those days and I was very proud of my mane of hair. And being as we were only short-term prisoners we weren’t there that long. By the time we got back I still only had about half an inch of fuzz on my hair. So, I wore a glengarry all the time, indoors and outdoors. Anyhow, the whole point is that we marched from Dulag Luft down to Nuremberg and that’s where we, we had the unpleasant sight of a B17 had been hit and one of the crew had landed quite near our [pause] we were stopped at that particular time. There was thousands of us but there was also a lot of guards with guns. We couldn’t do anything about it but they’d, the civilians got this American and strung him up to a lamp post. And it’s something that I’ll never forget because I remember his feet twitching as he gave in to the rope and he was killed. But as I say we carried on down to Munich. A big prisoner of war camp called Moosburg and we, night after night if you were lucky you had some kind of accommodation that you stopped at where you had a roof over your head. Apart from that you just slept where you stopped. And we eventually got to the prisoner of war camp and there was far too many people. They were erecting tents, big marquees for people because they had run out of legitimate places. The huts to put us in. And I think there was more people there because they were funnelling in from all over Germany. There was some talk at the time that, the general gossip on the, on the march was that Hitler was going to use us as, as [pause] some kind of reckoning with the allies to get better terms for ending the war but it didn’t happen. But it was one of the things. The funniest thing I ever saw was we had people, guards approaching us with bits of paper saying they’d committed no atrocity. It was that near to the end of the war that they wanted us to sign. And we was, this was at the very end of the march and there was a group of Yanks had got what bits and pieces that they’d got and they’d found an old pram and they piled it all in the pram and they’d got the guard that was guarding their part of the march to put his rifle on the pram and push the pram. And as I say it was that near the end of the war you could get away with quite a lot although things weren’t that good because we were attacked. Fighter Command was sending the American’s Thunderbolts and Mosquitoes and they were having a go at, they were having a go at anything that moved in Germany in those days and when we were on the march they just attacked us and killed five people I believe and wounded quite a few before they realised that we were ex-POWs. But from there we [pause] we were liberated by General “blood and guts” Patton who came in on a jeep with his pearl handled revolvers and we were flown by, after a wait of two or three days at an airfield we managed to get aboard a Dakota and we were flown to Reims in France where Lancasters were coming in nose to tail and we were just piling aboard. We looked a disgusting sight because we were filthy dirty. We wore the same clothes that we were shot down in and I’d had dysentery and we weren’t very nice people to be near. But anyhow, I got aboard a Lancaster and I managed to climb in to the mid-upper turret and as he come over the Channel it was quite a sight to see the white cliffs of Dover. Although we hadn’t been prisoners of war more than three months it was three months that I could have done without. Anyhow, we landed at Cosford. They deloused us which sticking, which is sticking a gun of DDT powder down the front of your blouse and firing it off so that you got white DDT powder coming out of everywhere. And then we had showers, medical examinations, they, they had tables loaded with food which I’d got down to seven and a half stone in that short period and we weren’t able to eat a lot. But we did start to eat again and they gave us money to take on leave and also food coupons which we were told to take home to your family so they could fatten you up a bit and travel warrants and they just sent to the railway system and go home you know. We’ll contact you when you’re ready which was quite a few weeks. I think it was about five weeks and we, I got back to Tunbridge and by which time they hadn’t, they didn’t know that I’d made it and so when I walked down Priory Road, Tunbridge the last communication my father had got was a telegram saying that I was missing from night operations and there would be a letter to follow which he didn’t appear to have got. But they, they were quite convinced that I’d had it and then I put just put in an appearance. And it was the usual kind of festivities. My sister, two sisters were cooking and sitting me down and trying to stuff me with food that I couldn’t eat. Not that vast amount. But over a period of time I got back to normal and went back to the RAF and I ended up as understudy wing warrant officer at Cranwell College which was quite an experience. And that was it. From there I was demobbed and came back. There was no way that I was going to go back to being gentleman’s outfitters so I started doing, learning upholstery and started a business in Tonbridge which is still going to this day. As —
SP: What’s that called? What’s your business called? What was it?
AA: It’s called Botten and Andrews. I had a partner called Botten. Well, he, he’d, he’s died. His son is running the business now and he’s making quite a success of it and. Apart from the fact that I have no financial interests in it he still kept my name over the door. And that was the end of it.
[recording paused]
SP: Ok, Andy. Thanks for, for all that information there. So, you were talking about your base was Melbourne in Yorkshire. Do you want to tell me a little bit about —
AA: Well, yeah, we were a wartime airfield dispersed with huts all, all the way around the perimeter of the airfield and we as a crew had a small hut which we, our two gunners who were senior in age to me, I was the youngest in the crew and they used to forage for fuel for the stove. And the local farmers they bartered their way into getting some eggs and stuff like that and we could do a bit of toast on this tortoise stove and one way or the other where you, as young men we had quite big appetites and although we were fed quite well in the mess but anyhow, we subsidised it with whatever we could get from local farmers and what have you. But as I say Melbourne was one of the few airfields that had FIDO which was fog dispersal and we used it because the two previous mine laying expeditions that we’d been on we’d taken off with the aid of FIDO because it was quite foggy. And the other big experience we had with FIDO was in ’44 just before Christmas lieutenant colonel, the film star, James Stewart came in with a flight of B17s and they had quite a time in the mess with us which was primitive by their standards but they thoroughly enjoyed it. And we used to go out to, if we had a stand down we’d, and there was time there was transport provided to go in to York which was round about twelve and a half miles from Melbourne to the centre of York and we’d chat up the local girls. And we went to a place, we used to go to a place called De Grey Rooms which is still there and they had dances and you used to totter in there after drinking in the local hostelries all evening and subject the local girls to our drunken whatever. Anyhow, the point is that we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and at the end of the evening there was a small hut by York Station that used to keep open all night I think and you could get a mug of tea and a wad of, of roll with cheese in it and sit there and wait for members of your crew to turn up so that you could share a taxi to get back because you’d missed the last transport. The other thing was, talking of transport Wing Commander Shannon who was the CO of 10 Squadron he, somebody had picked up a bus from York and managed with their information which they must have gained through being either on the buses or mechanics they got it started and took everybody back to 10 Squadron which was quite good. But they parked it outside and he was, he had us in to the main briefing area and he said that he would get to the bottom of it and in the meantime he was going to smarten up the aircrew. No more would they be coming in to the mess for breakfast in their pyjamas underneath their battledress and he was going to have us trotting around the perimeter track to get fit. To make us a lot fitter than what we were. But anyhow, it didn’t really work and he had to give it up in the end. Hence the fact that one of the songs of 10 Squadron was a song that went to the best of my knowledge, “There’s A Flight and B Flight and C Flight you see. But the best of them all is the WT. Fly high. Fly low. Where every go, shiny 10 Squadron will give a good show. Now, old Wingco Shannon he raves and he shouts and he talks about things that he knows nothing about. Fly high. Fly low. Where ever you go, shiny 10 Squadron will give a good show.” And as I say, I think it goes on from there but that’s as much as I can remember and I can’t think of any more that I can tell you. I’m very glad that I got in to Bomber Command although I look back and think that we did a good job and it was great I won’t admit, I won’t admit to saying that I said a lot more religious prayers just before take-off on ops than what I’d ever thought that I would get around to and the feeling in the stomach before you got aboard was unbelievable. Anybody says that they flew over Germany and faced flak and night fighters and weren’t scared I don’t think they were ever there. But it was an experience that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. Well, I couldn’t have missed for the world. I was there and you did it. But I was very glad in hindsight that, that Bomber Command was the place where I’d like to be. So, thank you very much.
SP: Yeah. Well, Andy, thank you on behalf of International Bomber Command Centre’s Digital Archives. I’d like to thank you for your amazing story and also we got some singing on there.
AA: Yeah. Yeah.
SP: Some amazing singing as well.
AA: Yeah.
SP: Ok. Well, thank you very much.
AA: Yeah.
[recording paused]
SP: I’ll just check it rather retake it than drive all the way back down.
AA: Well, quite.
SP: But we’ll be fine, I’m sure.
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 Andy Andrews
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Susanne Pescott
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-11
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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AAndrewsPF170911, PAndrewsPF1701
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
License
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CC BY-NC 4.0 International license
Spatial Coverage
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Denmark
Germany
Great Britain
England--Lancashire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Denmark--Copenhagen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Oberursel
Germany--Rostock
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1944
1945-02-14
Description
An account of the resource
Andy Andrews worked in a gentleman's outfitters shop and volunteered for the Air Force in 1941. He trained at RAF Cardington and Blackpool and after crewing up he flew operations with 10 Squadron from RAF Melbourne. He discusses the members of his crew and describes being shot down by a Ju 88 on his 19th operation during a mine laying operation. His pilot and navigator were both killed and he discusses how he and the rest of the crew baled out before their aircraft exploded. He landed in a field in Denmark badly wounded to the face and hands and was taken to a hospital. He had met some members of the resistance and was preparing to evade when he was captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war. He discusses his medical treatment and interrogation and witnessing the lynching an American airman during a forced march away from the advancing allied troops. After he was liberated he returned to Great Britain on board a Lancaster as part of Operation Exodus. His family had believed he was dead. After being demobilised he started his own business. Towards the end of the interview he talks about a visit to RAF Melbourne by the actor James Stewart, nights out in York, and Wing Commander Shannon, his Commanding Officer. He also sings a song about 'Shiny Ten Squadron'.
Format
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00:48:09 audio recording
Contributor
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Julie Williams
10 Squadron
1663 HCU
aircrew
B-17
bombing
crewing up
Dulag Luft
evading
FIDO
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
Ju 52
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
lynching
military living conditions
mine laying
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF Cardington
RAF Cranwell
RAF Melbourne
RAF Rufforth
Resistance
shot down
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/747/9291/PColingE1801.2.jpg
97e5d0f04aa9913fabe0372cf5d19013
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/747/9291/AColingE180110.2.mp3
f279c932578c3e2113a72ab674384a53
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
Coling, Eric
E Coling
Description
An account of the resource
10 items. The collection concerns Eric Frederick Coling (1921 - 2018 1481171 Royal Air Force) and contains his memoir, photographs, log book, service documents, letters and an oral history interview. Eric flew operations as a bomb aimer with 50 Squadron before ditching, drifting for several days and time and becoming a prisoner of war.
The collection was catalogued by Lynn Corrigan.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-01-10
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Coling, E
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
This is Gary Rushbrooke for the International Bomber Command Centre on the 10th of January 2018 and because of illness I am going to narrate the story of Warrant Officer Eric Coling with his permission. When Eric was four his father who was a London Midland Scottish Railway guard died leaving Eric’s mother to bring him up and his sister Muriel who was eight at the time, on her own. Eric’s mother’s railway pension was ten shilling a week and her rent was also ten shillings a week so she was compelled to take in lodgers. The Railways in the 1920s made extensive use of lodging houses for workers such as guards and drivers who needed to stay overnight before returning home with another train the next day to London or Birmingham for example. To make room for lodgers Muriel had to go and live in a Railway Servant’s Orphanage in Derby and at the age of six Eric joined her. Their mother visited them once a month and they spent four weeks in August at home for a summer holiday. Eric had a tough but practical schooling at the orphanage which was home to around three hundred children. On arrival at the age of six his first lesson was if you want something doing do it yourself. The boy’s warden was an ex-Navy chief petty officer called Joe Peach who divided the boys in to four teams. Nelson, Raleigh, Drake and Collingwood. I was in Nelson. You had to work your way up within the team. Joe Peach was strict but fair. By the age of ten Eric was working in the school’s kitchen garden where they grew all their own vegetables. He learned to mend his own shoes and attend boxing classes. He was told, ‘Don’t start a fight but never walk away from one. And don’t strike the first blow but make sure your first blow counts.’ Sundays were fully devoted to religious activities. The Collect with breakfast which the children were expected to learn. Then morning service. I went to the Congregational Church because my mother was a non-conformist. We were just a small group and I enjoyed it because they made a fuss of us. Sunday School occupied the afternoon and then bible stories and choruses in the evening such as, “And the Burden of My Heart Rolled Away,” And, “I Lost It On Calvary’s Hill.” And I can still remember every word. Eric was a bright pupil and was top of the class but by fourteen was itching to leave and get a job. He went for an interview for a job on the Railway. You had to be five foot tall so Eric was measured. He was told to stand on tiptoes and then, ‘You’ll do lad,’ said the man. So, in early 1936 Eric started working in the signal box at Altofts Junction. He worked a twenty four hour shift system and forty eight hours a week. Sunday was my day off and nights and any hours worked on a Sunday were paid as overtime on top of the basic wage of sixteen shilling a week. He worked as a train recorder who assisted the signalman and logged the handovers of the trains from one box to the next. The signal box at Altofts was complex. There were three up lines, slow freight, fast freight and main, and three similar down lines plus a junction where lines spurred off towards York. The signals and points were managed by ninety interlocking levers which had to be set in the correct sequence for each train. A proud moment came when Eric was fifteen. He was earning enough money to rent his own house in Altofts. He went to see his mother telling her, ‘I’ve rented us a house and it’s got a garden at the front and one at the back as well.’ Eric settled with his mother in the new house but was soon seeking promotion with the railways. He passed exams to become a permanent pensionable LMS staff and then worked in the booking office, again on a twenty four hour shifts system selling tickets during the day and balancing the books at night. War with Germany was declared in September 1939. Eric was seventeen, and a year later he volunteered to fight. He didn’t fancy the Army or Navy so he volunteered to become Royal Air Force aircrew in January 1941. He completed the then tortuous Service bureaucracy and in April was summoned to attend an aircrew selection board at Padgate in Cheshire. On the first day there there was a prolonged searching medical. And on the second day intelligence, aptitude and spatial awareness tests followed by an interview board. Eric was then told that he had been accepted for training as an observer. Later called NavB. I was given a RAF Volunteer Reserve badge which could be worn though I was not officially in the RAF. Official enrolment happened in August when Eric was summoned to the RAF Reception Centre located at Lords Cricket Ground in St Johns Wood. He was enrolled, kitted out and then spent three to four weeks attending time filling useless lectures before his observer training started in earnest. The observer role covered navigation, bomb aiming and gunnery and in September ’41 Eric embarked on a lengthy series of training courses. Thirteen weeks initial training in Paignton. Basic military training. Survival. Followed by thirteen weeks elementary training in Eastbourne where all the basics of navigation and meteorology were taught. Navigation in those days was based on dead reckoning and astrological plotting. Dead reckoning is the most basic form of air navigation but is still a requirement for pilots today. The principle is based on knowledge of a fixed position. First the departure airfield and then any accurate way points along the route. For example, a landmark. And then current position is regularly recalculated based on heading, speed and time flown adjusted using wind calculations and other variables. Various instruments and forms of slide computers assist in the task. It took us around fifteen minutes to make an accurate star plot using a sextant. Therefore, this was of limited use in a moving aircraft. About this time Britain secretly developed Gee, a form of radio navigation based on measuring the time delay between two radio signals to establish a fix. It was susceptible to jamming by the Germans but its accuracy was just a few hundred metres over a range of up to three hundred and fifty miles and it was still in use up until the 1960s. The next stage of training took place in South Africa away from enemy aircraft and in better weather. Several weeks were spent hanging around until we sailed on a convoy from Avonmouth on the first leg of what he refers to as his Cook’s Tour. He sailed in the Highland Chieftain, one of about twenty one troop and freight ships escorted by seven to ten destroyers and cruisers. Eric slept on deck for most of the long slow voyage due to the cramped conditions, heat and sea sickness experienced below decks. Avoiding U-boat attack they refuelled in Freetown, Sierra Leone finally disembarking in Durban and then on to Johannesburg where there was more waiting before arriving at Grahamstown Airfield in June 1942. At Grahamstown, Eric could put into practice all that he had learned flying navigational sorties in Avro Ansons and bombing training in Airspeed Oxfords. He came third on the course and the top three were interviewed for a possible permanent commission by a squadron leader. Questions included, ‘Did you go to Grammar School?’ And, ‘Do you sail?’ At the end of the interview the squadron leader’s closing remark was, ‘I am not sure you’re officer material yet, Coling.’ ‘I quite agree sir,’ replied Eric. ‘I’m just a lad with a hole in his jersey.’ At the end of the year Eric set sail on the next leg of his tour on board the Empress of Scotland renamed from Empress of Japan when Japan entered the war. Just two hundred RAF personnel were transported from Durban to New York on this luxurious cruise liner at twenty six knots. A speed at which escorts were not required. The ship was defended by a single three inch gun turret fitted to the aft deck. After a layover of five weeks in the USA Empress of Scotland sadly dry for this voyage brought Eric back to the UK with two hundred GIs. Now, some two years since he volunteered Warrant Officer Coling was soon to go in to operational service. When you get up in a morning you don’t know what fate may have in store for you. I ended up in Harrogate where most of the big hotels were being used to house RAF aircrew while they waited for their next posting. I was billeted in the Grand Hotel on Cornwall Road overlooking the Valley Gardens. In the middle of January we went on two weeks leave to visit mother in Altofts and on the way walked along the line of carriages looking for a suitable seat. Finally came to a compartment which was occupied by two young ladies in corner seats and an airman in a third corner. He entered the compartment with the intention of sitting in the fourth corner but instead found himself sitting next to a most attractive young lady. Getting in to conversation Eric discovered that the girls had been to the Mecca dancing that evening. He asked his new companion, ‘Did you meet anybody that you would like to meet again?’ It turned out that she hadn’t. Shortly before the train arrived in Harrogate Eric said, ‘Well, you didn’t meet anybody that you’d like to meet again on this trip which is a pity. So would you like to meet me again?’ She immediately replied, I don’t know why but, ‘I’d love to.’ ‘Alright. Name the place and the time,’ said Eric. ‘Tomorrow night. 7 o’clock in the station concourse,’ came the reply, quick as a flash. The concourse was dimly lit whereas everywhere else was unlit due to the blackout. Eric and Winifred went for a drink and the following evening she took Eric to meet her parents. Winifred Scott would eventually become Mrs Coling so as Eric says this only goes to show that when you wake up in a morning you don’t know what fate may have in store for you. Winifred was upset when Eric was then posted to the Operational Training Unit at Upper Heyford in early March 1943 because they both knew that now he would face real danger. The OTU brought together pilots, navigators, bomb aimers and gunners. Eric had been trained as an air observer which included both navigation and bomb aiming so it was not unusual to see two observers in a crew. Eric was posted as a bomb aimer and explains, I wanted to be able to see outside. The navigator was cooped up behind a curtain which was not for me although some quite liked it. The crewing up process was done by natural selection. I met another observer, Bunny Ridsdale who was posted as a navigator. I found out he came from Castleford three miles from where I lived so we formed a team of two. I then met a wireless operator called Alex Noble who told me he was booked to meet a Canadian pilot, Ron Code and a rear gunner Ray Moad so I arranged for us to join the meeting. This took place in a pub over a few pints. We all got on so well so a mutual agreement was arrived at. Eric was now part of a crew. Training at the OTU on Vickers Wellington aircraft was intense. Lots of bombing practice both high level and low level. Long cross-country flights both by night and day. Accidents were common. During the twelve weeks Eric was at Upper Heyford four aircraft crashed with the loss of twenty three lives. One of Eric’s final flights at OTU was a night flight to Nantes in occupied France to drop leaflets designed to counter Nazi propaganda. OTU ended on the 6th of May followed by a period of leave. Eric’s next posting was to 1660 Conversion Unit at RAF Swinderby in Lincolnshire. We arrived there in early June 1943 and added a mid-upper gunner Johnny Boyton and a flight engineer Spike Langford to our crew. Both had been regular ground crew and had volunteered for aircrew. Our crew was typical of Bomber Command. Two Canadians, one Scotsman, two from Yorkshire, one from Lincolnshire and a Londoner. It was a happy and united crew living together, playing together and fighting together. We had a friendship and loyalty to each other. We first flew the twin engine Avro Manchester for six hours and moved on to the four-engined Avro Lancaster completing forty hours almost entirely at night. In early July we went down the road to 50 Squadron which was at RAF Skellingthorpe where we were welcomed by Wing Commander Robert McFarlane. He gave us a brief history of the squadron and then handed us over to a ground officer who took us to a Nissen hut which was to be our home. It had seven beds but no toilet. There was a choice of a five or six minute walk to one or there was plenty of grass outside. Of all the wartime airfields in Lincolnshire and there were a great many none can claim a closer affinity with Lincoln than Skellingthorpe. Although it was named after the nearby village it was actually within the city’s boundary. Walking distance from the centre if you missed the last bus. 50 Squadron had been in action since the early days of the war and remembered, and remained at Skellingthorpe until the end of the war. It was credited with taking part in more raids than any other heavy Bomber Command squadron. More intensive training followed before Eric’s first operational bombing raid on Hamburg on the night of 24th of July 1943. Seven hundred and forty six RAF bombers took part in the operation which was the first in which Window was used. This involved dropping thousands of tiny pieces of metal foil which jammed the enemy radar and confused the night fighters. Thanks to this only twelve aircraft were lost. They bombed Hamburg again on the 27th and 29th of July and after ten days leave Mannheim on August the 9th followed by Nuremberg the day after. They then participated in the mass bombings of Milan on the 12th and 14th of August which contributed to the surrender of Italy a few weeks later. In the spring of 1943 intelligence sources had confirmed Germany was developing long range rockets at a research and experimental centre at Peenemunde on the Baltic coast. Operation Hydra on the night of the 17th of August 1943 was a massive bombing operation against Peenemunde carried out under a full moon. Five hundred and ninety five bombers and Pathfinder aircraft were involved which marks the targets with flares. Eight Mosquitoes carried out a spoof raid on Berlin to divert enemy night fighters. We weren’t told the exact nature of the target except that it was very important and that if we didn’t do a good job we’d have to go back again tomorrow and again and again. We hoped that bright moonlight would enable the different aiming points to be visually marked by the Pathfinder force. In case it was overcast and the target obscured number 5 Group, of which 50 Squadron was part would approach using the time and distance technique in which bombs would be dropped at a set time after passing a landmark. Lancaster Pathfinder aircraft carried the H2S radar system which was the first ground mapping radar able to show areas of water and built-up areas. This aided both navigation and bomb aiming although by sending out a radar signal the aircraft gave away its location to the enemy. The story of that night we took off at 21.30, passed over Lincoln Cathedral and climbed up to eight thousand before setting course. At 22.00 hours we crossed the east coast near Mablethorpe and climbed up to eighteen thousand feet. It was important not to stray south of track and overfly the guns on the German island of Sylt close to the Danish border. We were the third wave of bombers to head for a concentration point at 05 degrees east 55.25 north. From there we set course to Rügen Island and descended to eight thousand feet ready to start our time and distance run on the target. The night was clear and I could see Peenemunde in the moonlight with the second wave already making their attack ten minutes ahead. We arrived over the target area on time and heard the master of ceremonies, Group Captain Searby on the radio telling us to aim right of the centre. Don’t aim short. Hit the centre of the greens. He was actually on board a Mosquito near the target. I then took over. Bomb doors open. Bombs fused and selected. Right a little. Steady. Bombs gone. Close bomb doors. Keep it straight and level. Wait for the photo flash. Twenty seconds later it was finished and we turned homeward on a course of two hundred and ninety degrees. German night fighters had now arrived in force but Eric and his crew luckily escaped detection. We could clearly see them attacking the other aircraft in the third wave and many were going down. The Germans now had Schrage Musik, upward firing guns on their twin engine night fighters which attack the undefended underbellies of the Allied bombers. We lost forty aircraft and two hundred and fifteen crew. This was bad enough but it would have been double without the diversionary raid on Berlin. During August 1943 Eric’s sister Muriel got married. With our father having died when we were young I was needed to give Muriel away. We’d been trying to get rid of her for a long time laughs Eric. I asked the wing commander if I could have twenty four hours leave to attend the wedding. ‘No. You can have forty eight hours leave and I’ll try to keep your crew off operations if there are any whilst you’re away,’ he replied. He was a good man recalls Eric. Muriel worked for the Ministry of Information and a few weeks earlier had been posted to the now famous Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park as a teleprinter operator.
[telephone ringing – recording paused]
The wedding of Muriel Coling to Jack Flutter took place on the 27th of August. The wedding was at St Mary Magdalen Church, Altofts whose benefactor was Lord Halifax. It was a very high church and having been brought up as a non-conformist I was getting up when everyone else was sitting down. On the same day Eric became engaged to Winifred Marjorie Scott but had to return almost immediately to RAF Skellingthorpe. Eric was now twenty one and was lucky to have survived the war so far in which so many of his colleagues had died. There is a memorial in Skellingthorpe village which reads, “My sweet brief life is over. My eyes no longer see. No Christmas trees, no summer walks, no pretty girls for me. I’ve got the chop. I’ve had it. My nightly ops are done. Yet in another hundred years I’ll still be twenty one.” After the attacks on Hamburg and Peenemunde RAF Bomber Command began to feel that it was at last becoming a truly effective way damaging both German industry and also morale. There remained a hope that bombing alone might win the war. That devastating raids might undermine the Nazi regime to such an extent that the German government would collapse. Maintaining the momentum meant taking the offensive to the heart of Germany. To Berlin. On the 23rd of August over seven hundred bombers, mainly Lancs and Halifaxes plus one hundred Pathfinder aircraft attacked the city centre of Berlin. This was the prelude to what would be known as the Battle of Berlin. The raids on Berlin were unforgettable. The route was almost direct. A seven hour twelve hundred mile round trip. After crossing the Dutch coast we made slight detours to, detours to avoid the defences of Bremen, Hanover, Brunswick and Magdeburg. All our bombers remained unmolested on the way to the target which was the Nazi High Command buildings in the centre of the city. Any illusion of peace were shattered when the fires already burning in the city first came in to view about sixty miles out. The German controllers had ordered their regular night fighters as well as free lancing single engine fighters to concentrate on Berlin. Hundreds of searchlights and flares were picking out our aircraft aiding the eighty eight millimetre anti-aircraft guns and German night fighters. I saw at least nine of our aircraft going down in flames. We weaved and corkscrewed but on the bombing run we had to stay straight and level for at least four minutes. This is where luck plays a big part and many aircraft were shot down at this stage but we escaped safely and set course for home. The battle was so furious that some German fighters were downed by their own anti-aircraft fire. By the end of the night fifty six bombers had been shot down, Bomber Command’s greatest loss in a single night up to this time and more crashed on landing. The Battle of Berlin lasted for a further eighteen raids until March 1944. In all six hundred and twenty five aircraft and their crews were lost and a further eighty crashed on landing in Britain with a further loss of life. It was like visiting the fires of hell. None of the bomber boys who went to Berlin and lived will ever forget. After the Berlin raid, which was Eric’s tenth, pilot Ron Code and radio operator Alex Noble were awarded commissions and the crew were rewarded with a new Lancaster aircraft. The crew of L for love were pleased to have her. They had been with 50 Squadron since early July and had used a number of different aircraft during their operations. L for Love was immediately pressed into service for Eric’s second raid on Berlin on August the 31st which was a smaller scale operation than the first. Although fifty aircraft were lost on the second raid to Berlin L for Love escaped unscathed. Eric explains how he and the rest of the crew were feeling at the time. Now faces that had been familiar had disappeared as though they had caught a bus or train to some unknown destination one could not help wondering if we would also be doing likewise. Flying was no longer exciting. It was just a grim job from which there was no longer an honourable discharge. September 1943 started with ten days leave followed by a week of intense training missions including formation and low flying. Bombing operations for the crew of L for Love restarted on the 22nd of September with less eventful raids on Hanover and Mannheim. On the 27th of September we took off for Hanover again and whilst crossing the Dutch coast they were hit by flak and again hit over the target, this time badly. The radio, radar and rear gun turret were put out of action but fortunately none of the crew were hit and the engines remained serviceable. The journey back over the North Sea was made at low level below cloud and purely by dead reckoning. Landfall was made near Hull which was not the best of places to be as it was protected by barrage balloons. Fuel was low so a diversion was made to Kirmington which is now Humberside Airport. Next morning we returned to Skellingthorpe where our aircraft was made serviceable and ready for its next operation. On the 29th of September, St Michael’s Day we were one of twelve aircraft from 5 Group selected to go mine laying outside Gdynia harbour in Poland where a German Naval force was expected to arrive during the next day. Each aircraft carried six two thousand pound mines and was detailed to lay it’s mines in precise positions outside the entrance to the harbour. We were warned that we would be low on fuel on return because of the very heavy payload and would probably have to land in Scotland. The flight out was uneventful and we looked with envy at the lights of Sweden on the port side. There was bright moonlight and we could pinpoint the town of Hel at the end of the long offshore Hel peninsula quite easily. We made our run at five thousand feet dropping the mines in the target area and though there was some flak from ships in the harbour it didn’t cause us any problems. However, real trouble overtook us just after crossing the Danish coast on course towards Scotland. Ray Moad, the rear gunner reported that two JU88s were trailing us and as they attacked he gave evasive action and opened fire. After a one second burst though his guns jammed and Johnny Boyton the mid-upper gunner could not get his guns on the target. Seconds later cannon shells fired from below us damaged the tail plane and set fire to both our port engines. We dived and escaped into cloud but the aircraft was almost uncontrollable. For fifteen minutes Ron Code fought to keep his aircraft airborne before we jettisoned the escape hatches and ditching, ditching stations were taken. The Lancaster was with two escape hatches on the upper surface of the fuselage along with one in the canopy over the pilot and flight engineer. When the aircraft ditched it was like hitting a brick wall and seawater rushed in through the open hatches. An immersion switch should have automatically released the dinghy from its storage bay in the upper starboard wing. However, this failed. I pulled a cord to release it manually but this also failed. Carrying an axe and an emergency pack navigator Bunny Ridsdale and I climbed out on to the starboard wing and I managed to release the dinghy cover with an axe blow. The dinghy, attached to its lanyard burst out and lodged against the tailplane. By this time the rest of the crew were on the fuselage and rushed towards the dinghy. Ron Code dived in and released the dinghy from where it was stuck under the tailplane and pushed it forward so the other crew could board it without having to dive in. By this time the Lancaster was low in the water and I shouted to Bunny to dive in. However, he couldn’t swim and he attempted to walk back along the fuselage but in the process was swept away by a wave. I dived in losing a boot in the process and reached the side of the dinghy just before the lanyard had to be cut. I was helped in as the aircraft disappeared beneath the waves. It was a black night with rain and a rough sea. We could see the red light on Bunny’s Mae West and hear his whistle but could do nothing to help him. There was about ten inches of water in the open dinghy which was enough to cover our legs. We had ditched around midnight and baled all night trying to get the water out but it was a rough sea and an uphill task. When day broke we flew our kite radio aerial and operated the hand wound generator which sent out SOS signals but to no avail. We rationed the cans of water we had and estimated we had enough for about three days. The weather improved slightly by the fourth day but we saw nothing and by now we were becoming very weak. On the fifth day, October the 4th the weather worsened and again most of us were slipping in and out of consciousness. At about 10 am the dinghy crested away and I spotted a small fishing vessel before the dinghy dropped down again. I had the signal pistol and I fired a red cartridge. Cartridge which was seen by the crew of the Danish fishing boat who rescued us. It turned out that we were in [Scrarrag?] and we, and we pleaded with them to take us to Sweden. However, the Danes were from Aalborg where there was a Luftwaffe base and their families were being held hostage so they had no choice but to return. It took about two and a half hours to reach Aalborg where a German Naval officer who was definitely hostile to us detained us. Thirty minutes later two Luftwaffe officers arrived one of whom was the pilot who had shot us down. They were friendly and shook hands all around. At the Luftwaffe camp we were given a meal and were supplied with suitable footwear. We were told that we would stay the night and in the morning would be transferred to Dulag Luft, the Luftwaffe interrogation camp near Frankfurt. Back home in England Erics mother and his fiancé Winifred were told that Eric was missing but that he may have baled out safely. Eric’s personal belongings were to be returned to his mother and she was asked what should be done with Eric’s bicycle? ‘Please can it be returned to me,’ she replied. ‘He’ll need it when he gets back.’ Her faith in Eric’s survival would be rewarded eventually. On the night of the 4th of October Eric and the rest of the surviving crew had their first decent night’s sleep since the 28th of September. Breakfast next day was their first proper meal since leaving Skellingthorpe and after which they were taken to the railway station. Ron Code could hardly walk because his feet were so swollen with trench foot which had developed in the intense cold and damp of the dingy. At the station some Danish women gave them apples. Their three Luftwaffe guards who spoke little or no English did not interfere. We shared our apples with our guards and they gave us some of their food and cigarettes. They were friendly but vigilant. Our destination was Dulag Luft, the Luftwaffe Interrogation Centre near Frankfurt. The journey involved a stop in Hamburg where there was noticeable hostility from other passengers towards them. We were pleased to have the protection of the three German guards. The journey continued. The journey continued overnight and they reached Frankfurt around noon. By now Ron Code couldn’t walk and was taken to hospital. Eric and the others were taken by road to Dulag Luft, strip searched and all possessions other than clothes were taken away. After this they were incarcerated in small solitary confinement cells which Eric, Eric learned could be heated to over forty five degrees as a way of softening up prisoners although he personally didn’t have to experience this. The guards never spoke and Eric feels that this was intentional. Solitary confinement in such conditions especially following a traumatic experiences created a sense of intense tension and loneliness. After four days of solitary Eric was taken to the room of an interrogating officer. Eric takes up the story when he says he spoke fluent English and adopted a friendly and sympathetic attitude but played idly with an automatic pistol. When I congratulated him on his English he told me that he had lived in Barnsley for several years. He asked me what squadron I belonged to and I replied that I wasn’t allowed to say so. He smiled and turned over a thick file on the desk. He turned it around towards me and I could read the title, “50 Squadron.” He showed me a photograph of the control tower at Skellingthorpe and read out details of the wing commanders and some squadron leaders who had served there. I told him that it appeared that he knew more about 50 Squadron than I did. He asked me what I knew about Gdynia and why we had gone there. I replied that I didn’t know the reason for the visit and hadn’t stayed long enough to have much idea of what was happening other than the flak thrown up by ships in the harbour. He said, ‘Of course, you were mining the harbour. What kind of mines were they?’ I replied that they were just mines and that I’d never been taught about them other than they explode when hit by a ship. He just smiled and said, ‘I will tell you. They were two thousand pound mines and you would not have been carrying more than five. Even a Lancaster could not carry any more in that distance.’ In fact, we had carried six but knew we would have been very short of fuel on the return to Lossiemouth. I smiled and attempted to look interested but said nothing. He did however trap me into admitting I’d been on the Peenemunde raid when he asked me why we had fired on men in the sea when they were trying to get away from the fires. I said, without thinking, ‘We didn’t fire on anybody. We were in too much of a hurry to get away.’ I was aware that as a POW all I had to give was my name, number and rank. If I had have stuck to that I’d have been in solitary for another four days. I honestly believe that I didn’t disclose any information my interrogator was unaware of. I believe that interrogating officers rarely learned much from POWs. Most information came from listening devices, stool pigeons and aircraft wreckage. Eric’s interrogation ended after forty minutes with his interrogator telling him that no POW camp would be comfortable but the less trouble he caused the less uncomfortable it would be. Eric had some experience and found he was right but without a bit of trouble life would have been more boring than it was. Next day Eric rejoined the other crew members, Ray, Johnnie and Spike and they were taken by cattle truck along with twenty other POWs to Stalag 4b near Muhlberg. Despite the search Eric still had a button compass and a handkerchief map of Germany in his pocket. The two officers in the crew, Ron Code and Alex Noble were transferred to Stalag Luft 3 at Sagan housing mainly aircrew officers, famous for being the camp from which the Great Escape took place. Luft 3 was built on sandy soil to prevent tunnelling and was designed to house habitual escapers but the guards were Luftwaffe personnel too old to fight or younger injured men so the regime was less tough than at other camps. Stalag 4b located in eastern Germany between Dresden and Leipzig was a rectangle of electrified and barbed wire with guard towers complete with searchlights and armed guards at strategic points around the camp perimeter. A road ran through the centre of the camp at the ends of which were the main gates and guard rooms. Along each side of the road were compounds containing huts filled with three tiered bunks and palliasses. Straw mattresses for about two hundred men. Each man was given a dirty blanket and the palliasses were little more than a bag of dirt. This resulted in Eric developing impetigo across all of his face which for many months was treated with German gentian violet paint. The camp was split into different compounds and the RAF kept more or less to themselves. Other compounds held several thousand Army POWs many of whom departed on working parties. A variety of French, Dutch and eventually Italian prisoners and many thousands of Russians. The majority of Russians were housed in a sub-camp, Zeithain and endured deplorable conditions in which was partly designated a hospital camp. Thousands died from malnutrition, typhus and tuberculosis. For Eric in the main camp at Muhlberg the lasting memory was the cold. Most aircrew had only the clothes they had been wearing when they were shot down which were totally inadequate for the harsh winters in eastern Germany. Each hut was fitted with a small stove and there was a ration of coal briquettes totally insufficient to warm the hut. Until the winter of 1944/45 the Germans would not allow working parties outside to collect firewood. As a result the coal store was frequently raided resulting in at least two POWs being shot and killed. Bed boards were used as fuel leaving gaps in every bed risking that the top or middle bunk occupant would fall through on to the man below. The rations were meagre. From our arrival in October and up to Christmas 1943 Red Cross parcels arrived fairly regular from Britain, USA or Canada. The Canadian ones were considered to contain the best food. Each parcel was usually shared between two prisoners. They also included fifty cigarettes, the currency of the camp with which a huge variety of things could be bought from either fellow POW or the guards. As Allied bombing disrupted communications in 1944 they became less frequent and following the Normandy invasion they more or less ceased completely. Then we were dependent on the meagre German rations and for many months lived with hunger. The POWs were aware of the progress of the war. There were several clandestine radios in the camp and newspapers were published. Single copies that were handed around. By the beginning of the 1945 it was known that the Russian Army was not far away and the excitement was intense. On the 23rd of April 1945 the camp awoke to find all the German guards had departed in the night. Shortly afterwards a few Russian troops with an officer arrived but they only remained a short time. The senior Allied officers gave orders that the POWs were to remain in the camp and await events. Despite this quite a few had already decided that they would make their own way to Allied lines. This included the bomb aimer, rear gunner and mid-upper gunner of Lancaster L for Love. The flight engineer Spike Langford decided that he would stay behind. Eric never saw him again. Outside the camp there was anarchy, explains Eric. Russians were killing Germans out of hand and devastating houses just to satisfy their hatred of the Germans. There was looting of food and goods everywhere. Most farms were desolate with the animals taken away for food. Dead bodies of Germans were to be seen in deserted houses quite a few having committed suicide. There was a mass of humanity of all descriptions some going west others travelling east. The Germans who had remained in their houses and were still unmolested welcomed RAF POWs easily recognisable by the distinctive uniforms as a safeguard against Russian intruders and Eric and his colleagues could usually find accommodation for the night. They more or less followed in the path of the Russian front-line troops who treated them with respect. By the 8th of May ‘45 they had joined up with them and were invited to celebrate VE Day with a supper of rabbit stew and a few too many glasses of vodka. Over the next few days, the following day we continued westward and soon reached the River Mulde where the railway bridge across the river had been blown up. We were able to scramble down and up the girders and then meet up with the American forces on the other side. From there we were taken to [Halle?] where some, after some four or five days we were flown to Brussels in a Dakota. We were transferred to a Stirling aircraft and landed in south east England at a flag bedecked airfield to be met by a band of ladies with tea and cakes. I finally arrived home in Altofts on the 18th of May 1945 and soon my fiancé Winifred arrived from London advising me that there was a lot to do in a very short time. Of course, this related to our wedding which took place in St Peter’s Church, Harrogate on the 22nd of June 1945. Eric and Winifred went on honeymoon to the Lake District to start a marriage that would endure sixty six years until Winifred’s death in 2011. Eric returned to the railways working for the London Midland Scottish Railway while remaining an RAF Reservist. However, in 1955 with a family that now included two small daughters Eric moved to Tanganyika now Tanzania to start a new life working for the East African Railways but that is another story. Thank you, Eric.
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Interview with Eric Coling
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Gary Rushbrooke
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2018-01-10
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AColingE180110, PCollingE1801
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:44:06 audio recording
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Description
An account of the resource
Eric Coling’s father died when Eric was a child which left his mother to cope on her own economically. Eric and his sister were sent to live in an orphanage but their mother was able to visit monthly. When Eric left the orphanage he began working for the railway and was proudly eventually able to own his own home and reunite his family. Eric volunteered for aircrew and trained as an observer. During his weeks at the Occupational Training Unit four aircraft crashed with the loss of twenty three lives. He was posted as a bomb aimer to 50 Squadron based at RAF Skellingthorpe. On his final operation Eric’s plane was shot down and after managing to eventually inflate the dinghy the crew scrambled on board with the exception of the navigator Bernard Ridsdale who was swept away. The crew managed to survive several days at sea until they were rescued by Danish fisherman who returned with them to Denmark. Eric and his crewmates became prisoners of war.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Germany
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Oberursel
Germany--Peenemünde
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
1660 HCU
50 Squadron
aircrew
bomb aimer
crash
ditching
Dulag Luft
Heavy Conversion Unit
military service conditions
observer
Operational Training Unit
prisoner of war
RAF Skellingthorpe
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/787/9358/LMaltbyDJH60335v1.2.pdf
b23af7b66c08924d51d2b516d0b72ec7
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
Maltby, David John Hatfeild
D J H Maltby
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. The collection concerns Squadron Leader David John Hatfeild Maltby DSO, DFC (1920 - 1943, 60335 Royal Air Force) and consists of his pilot's flying log book and documents. David Maltby completed a tour operations as a pilot in Hampdens, Manchester and Lancasters with 106 and 97 Squadrons at RAF Coningsby before being posted to 617 Squadron at RAF Scampton. He successfully attacked the Möhne Dam in May 1943. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by the Maltby Family and catalogued by Barry Hunter.<br /><br />Additional information on David John Hatfeild Maltby is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/114788/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-09-20
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Maltby, DJH
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
David Maltby's pilot's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Royal Air Force pilot's flying log book for Squadron Leader David Maltby covering the period from 20 August 1940 to 13 September 1943. Detailing his flying training and operations flown and instructor duties. He was stationed at RAF Uxbridge, RAF Paignton, RAF Anstey, RAF Grantham, RAF Cranage, RAF Upper Heyford, RAF Coningsby, RAF Wigsley, RAF Dunholme, RAF Fulbeck and RAF Scampton. Aircraft flown were, Tiger Moth, Anson, Oxford, Hampden, Manchester and Lancaster. He flew a total of 32 night operations, 5 with 106 Squadron, 23 with 97 Squadron and 4 with 617 Squadron. Targets in Denmark, Germany, and Italy and Norway were Duisberg, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Kiel, Karlsruhe, Essen, Magdeberg, Hamburg, Heligoland, Trondheim, Stuttgart, Warnermund, Copenhagen, Mannheim, Sassnitz, Möhne Dam, San Polo D’Enza, Leghorn and Milan. He flew as a second pilot on operations with Flight Lieutenant Coton. He was killed returning from an aborted operation to the Dortmund Ems Canal 14/15 September 1943.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
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One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Identifier
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LMaltbyDJH60335v1
Contributor
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Mike Connock
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
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
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1943
1941-06-11
1941-06-12
1941-06-15
1941-06-16
1941-06-18
1941-06-19
1941-06-21
1941-06-22
1941-06-24
1941-06-25
1941-08-02
1941-08-03
1941-08-05
1941-08-06
1941-08-07
1941-08-08
1941-08-12
1941-08-13
1941-08-16
1941-08-17
1941-08-18
1941-08-19
1941-10-23
1941-10-24
1941-10-26
1941-10-27
1941-10-31
1941-11-01
1941-11-07
1941-11-08
1941-11-15
1941-11-16
1942-04-08
1942-04-09
1942-04-27
1942-04-28
1942-04-29
1942-05-04
1942-05-05
1942-05-07
1942-05-08
1942-05-09
1942-05-16
1942-05-17
1942-05-19
1942-05-20
1942-05-22
1942-05-23
1942-05-26
1942-05-27
1942-06-08
1942-06-09
1943-05-16
1943-05-17
1943-07-15
1943-07-16
1943-07-24
1943-07-25
1943-07-29
1943-07-30
1943-09-15
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Norway
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Denmark--Copenhagen
England--Cheshire
England--Devon
England--Lincolnshire
England--London
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
England--Shropshire
England--Warwickshire
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Sassnitz
Italy--Livorno
Italy--Milan
Italy--San Polo d'Enza
Norway--Trondheim
Italy--Po River Valley
Germany--Möhne River Dam
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
106 Squadron
16 OTU
1654 HCU
617 Squadron
97 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Eder Möhne and Sorpe operation (16–17 May 1943)
Flying Training School
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
Hampden
Heavy Conversion Unit
Initial Training Wing
killed in action
Lancaster
Manchester
mine laying
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Ansty
RAF Coningsby
RAF Cranage
RAF Dunholme Lodge
RAF Fulbeck
RAF Grantham
RAF Paignton
RAF Scampton
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Uxbridge
RAF Wigsley
Tiger Moth
Tirpitz
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/716/10111/ABolesKM180212.2.mp3
4e6a9c0d8cfebbf06b6789683fe7fd69
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Boles, Keith M
K M Boles
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Squadron Leader Keith Boles DFC (b. 1921, 413017 Royal New Zealand Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 109 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-12
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Boles, KM
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JB: Ok. We’ll make a start. Ok, this is Jennifer Barraclough interviewing Squadron Leader Keith Boles on the date, what’s the date [laughs] the 12th of February, thereabouts, at his home at [ buzz] Howick, Auckland. Ok, Mr Bowles. Thank you very much for talking to me. Could you tell me a little bit about your early life and how you came to join up with, with the RAF, please?
KB: My early life? Well, it was difficult because I ran straight in to the Depression as a youngster and thereafter it made life not funny at all or not even pleasant. And as a consequence to that it was find yourself in employment when you can leave school which I left when I was fourteen. And I took an apprenticeship in engineering as they used to have in New Zealand in those days and that was a five year duration and I completed that with a little bit of makeup time because of the, a few items of no help particularly during those five years. And just before I finished this period our big worry started and it was all sorts of things and, ‘What are you going to do? You’re in the Army, Navy, Air Force.’ Well, with all the words of, ‘Don’t join the Army, son,’ from my father with a lot of expletives to illustrate it, no way did I want to join the Navy. Couldn’t see that at all. And Air Force? I’ll see if they want a technical tradesman which, so, I asked and they came back and said, ‘No vacancies for the qualifications you appear to possess.’ Of course, at that time I’d just passed the first examination of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London and they came back and said, ‘No vacancies for the qualifications you appear to possess.’ Would I like to be aircrew? Well, aircrew was the thing for wee lads and I didn’t think I was qualified but however I was accepted with the provision from my parents that I wouldn’t be called up ‘til the latter end of next year. The latter end of ’41. It seemed to be perfectly ok. I’d finish my apprenticeship and I’d get called up then and, end of ’41. Well, it didn’t quite happen that way. By the end of ’41 I’d been called up with permission of my employer because I’d just finished my apprenticeship as I said, and I decided to go in to the camp. And by the end of ’41 I’d finished my twenty four weeks training in the RNZAF and in December 1941 I was in Singapore which became rather peculiar to say the least. And my stay in Singapore lasted ‘til about the 9th of February and if it hadn’t been for, how shall we say? [pause] Wondering what on earth was happening because nobody was talking to me, telling me, and people were disappearing so I went to see our new CO. Our previous one had created a big mistake and shot himself so that was most. So, the new CO, I said to him, ‘What am I supposed to be doing, sir?’ And in a voice that you could hear from here to there, he said, ‘I don’t know. What’s your trade?’ And I said, ‘Oh, pilot sir.’ Well, when he said, ‘What?’ I thought he’d spoken loudly before but when he said, ‘What?’ You could hear it [laughs] ‘All aircrew, you’re not supposed to be here. All aircrew are supposed to be evacuated.’ So, in due course I was told to go and catch a boat. I went down to go down 62 and the one and only gangplank was guarded by a major, an Army major complete with arms and he said, ‘You’re not on the list, Skedaddle. You’re not getting on board here.’ So, the traffic from that time on meant and this was just at dusk and my driver managed to get me back to Tengah Air Force at 4 o’clock the following morning. It was hellish. And then, I’ve not repeated it so often I’m almost forgetting it. I was sent to catch another boat on Sunday morning. Well, that was all right. I was let on board and there was about a hundred and fifty New Zealand aerodrome construction personnel also evacuating plus I understand a certain number of Asiatics in the far end of the boat and we set sail. But not for long. We sat all night out on the stream as it’s called, listened to the shelling going on and the following morning we disembarked for whatever reason. That evening we were re-embarked and sailed without stop there. But halfway to Batavia we halted, allegedly for wait for Naval escort. It didn’t turn up but the Jap’s bombers did so we got a shower of their contribution. So from there on we just went on to Batavia. I was there for about a week and then I was told to get on board a very large boat which I found out had about five thousand Australian troops from the Middle East, plus other civilian personnel and we sailed to Columbo. And we were there about forty eight hours if I remember rightly and then it turned out the boat I was on was one of a batch of four. They were cruise ships immediately pe-war and had bags of accommodation because as I said there were five thousand Aussie boys because the Australian government said, ‘Bring them home and we will to defend Australia from here from the Japs.’ And yes, Columbo. Left there one afternoon. We, the rumour was we were going to Australia because the troops were there. The rumour was one of those silly things that you hear. Everybody said, ‘What the devil are they talking about?’ And I happened to feel something funny about the boat movement two or three nights later. So, I dashed up on deck and sure enough the boat had done a a right-angled turn. The others that I could have seen in daylight I picked up one. He had done a right-hand turn going the other way and it turned out the convoy had come of four troopers and the Naval people, everybody separated. We got down to Adelaide and we disembarked for a day. Catch another boat down to Lyttelton and then what? Oh yes. We were granted three weeks survivor’s leave they called it because what had happened Iin Singapore was apparently very nasty and we were lucky. Very lucky to get out. I was anyway. From hearing of others my case was get off your bottom and go and ask. Find out. And at the end of that period we were called back to camp for a refresher course because virtually none of our, the people that came back from Singapore had done any flying because ninety nine percent of the aircraft had been sent to the Middle East as you can imagine because there was a lot of stuff going on there. And [pause] hence our refresher course. Well, about ten days later I’m in the link trainer and the sergeant in charge says, ‘Please sir, you’re wanted on the phone.’ I said, ‘By whom?’ And he said, ‘A flight lieutenant.’ And I said, ‘What does he want?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’ So, I answered this chappie and he said, ‘Ah, Boles. We want two volunteers to go to the UK.’ I said, ‘Oh, come off it, sir. We’ve just come back.’ He said, ‘I know. So has everybody else.’ And I said, ‘Who have you got?’ I said, ‘What do you want them for anyway?’ ‘Oh, to take charge of a draft of LAC trainees who you will take to Canada for this further on training. And [pause] you will go on to the UK.’ I said, ‘Well, who else have you got?’ He said, ‘Oh, nobody yet.’ And I said, ‘What are you going to do about that?’ He said, ‘I haven’t asked them yet. You’re at the top of the alphabet.’ I said, ‘Alright. Count me in.’ I asked him what he’d do if there were two or three or four of us and he said, ‘Oh, the usual thing. Draw for it.’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah. Count me in as I said.’ Didn’t need to count me in. I was the only one. So off I go to Canada with ninety nine LACs and we picked up another pilot, sergeant pilot who had, had for some reason missed his earlier despatch and we dropped the LACs off in Edmonton I think it was and the sergeant and I went on to Ottawa. They gave us a week’s leave which we spent in New York because there was a New Zealander providing entertainment and looking after New Zealanders as they, if and when they went through there. And they were quite pleasant. In fact, very pleasant. A week down there. Up to Halifax. Catch a convoy and we were lucky. It was a convoy and we didn’t hear a thing. Well, if we did I must have been very deaf because we go to Glasgow and arrived in double British summertime and sunshine about ten or 11 o’clock at night up in, as I say in Glasgow. Train down to Bournemouth. Bournemouth. I’ve forgotten how long we were there and then we were sent on leave and I could tell you funnies about him too but he was a good, good chappie that. Manor house, manor you could call it and his manor house was very nice as well. And any rate, normal training took place then which was in the, I know it as the AFU which is the Advanced Flying Unit which was purely to make people trained elsewhere from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, you name it to become acquainted with all the thises and thats of English weather and English map reading which even when I began to learn it I still got lost a couple of times and had to find myself out again of course. But so that was of some six weeks I think. I can’t recall. And they asked us what were we going to do next. I said, ‘I don’t know. What can we do?’ And somebody suggested that we should take an instructor’s course around something I never thought of but because of what I’d just had I said now if I learn to instruct that means I’m a better flyer. Now, that would do me a lot of good when I go operating. I think that was my line of thinks. So, I went on the instructor’s course and, of some weeks and, and then went instructing on Tiger Moths first and then, and that was cold in Scotland in an open-air aircraft and [laughs] I can still remember it. It was over Christmas, New Year. January. And then we went in to Oxfords. A twin-engined aircraft and just normal, I went to an AFU and did unto others what I had had done unto me. And though apparently I scared the proverbials out of one bloke his mate said, Jimmy or whatever his name was hadn’t have told me I would have been scared too. One of my silly exaggerations apparently and oh, this went on to the beginning of ’44 and then I got transferred in to a beam approach flight. That being a beam approach batt flight and the idea was there to teach people to learn how to do it yourself and then teach people how to do an approach and landing in ten tenths fog or similar. And enjoyable too. I quite enjoyed that and, but while so doing I’d still got to analyse my attitude, my thoughts because I said to me, ‘I’m in a nice Training Command job. This is not what I was supposed to be doing I don’t think.’ Shouldn’t we fear some operations with the other lads, a lot of whom I knew had been killed and after much I tried to analyse my thinking. I just couldn’t and, however I went off to London and went to see the adj and told him I should go on to ops and he said, ‘Oh, no way. We’re short of flight lieutenants in Training Command.’ And I said my usual expression. ‘Bulldust.’ And I said, ‘We’ve got —’ so and so, ‘On our station alone.’ And I said, ‘Any rate, have you any idea how I happen to be here?’ He said, ‘The same as everybody else.’ And I told him about my volunteering business when I took the lads to Canada and he said, ‘Oh, that’s different. Go and see the liaison officer at RAF.’ So off I went to see squadron leader somebody or other and related to him that I’d been to the adj seeking transfer to bomber groups, or Bomber Command and he said no. And I said, I told him the story. ‘He said come and see you sir.’ He said, ‘Alright Boles. What’s your story?’ And I told him. He said, ‘Right. Bomber Command Mosquitoes do?’ Well. That was, as far as we knew, number one job. So I said yes and duly went to the Mosquito Training Unit, MTU and whilst there I found that they used Mosquito pilots particularly most of them for a large area in 8 Group which was, turned out to be the, I didn’t know all about it then as much as I learned obviously Pathfinder Group and that was the Light Night Strikers. And the balance, I think the balance went on a task called Oboe and Oboe was a controlled flight to target and controlled dropping point of the target indicators. Now, up to [pause] August, I think it was ’42 they were happy, or unhappy because the ordinary Bomber Command if they got within five miles of the target they were, at least they’d been to Germany. But with this Oboe stuff we could get, could get, had to get, supposed to get a zero error. Well, the Oboe was a matter of a ground station sending out a radar, you can call it a radar beam or just a beam which was picked up by the special equipment in the Oboe aircraft. It was relayed back to base and from that relay they could tell whether we were flying on the exact distance that they required. If you went too far you got dots or if you didn’t go far enough you were getting dashes depending whether you were going north or south. I’ve forgotten. And of course, the dot was, shall we say one long, the dash was nine long. So, if you marry nine and one you get ten and that gave you a steady note which meant you were then flying right on the beam. Now, I’ve read and I’ve heard figures of how wide that beam is. We always understood it was roughly about fifty three feet which happened to be about the same width as a Mosquito. But I’ve read since that the width of the dot and the width of the dash were the fifty three feet so the whole thing was a hundred odd feet wide. Well, a bit late to tell me now that, and from that you would go and we were employed to drop markers for the bombers and we were supposed to be, our accu errors I always understood was supposed to be within three hundred yards. Well, the size of the bombing and everybody wasn’t going to be that accurate even if they could see our marking and so it was far better than five miles and [pause] we initially, when we went to squadron we went and dropped bombs anything up to a four thousand pounder on the target selected by somebody and it gave us training, experience, call it what you will and it also enabled the people back in the base to gauge how good or bad we were. And I must have been enough to stay in the group because I then went on to marking and in the extent of my tour and a bit I virtually had one third bombing things and one, two thirds target marking with target indicators. And I wish, I wish I’d taken more notice of, of my efforts but I happened to have heard [coughs] excuse me, that one night I got a zero error. And many years later post-war I’d always wondered how good everybody else was and I got in to conversation with one of the squadron people, obviously at a reunion who had been looked upon as one of the best on the squadron. And I said to Charles, ‘You know all those trips I did I only once got a zero. Once got a zero error.’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s alright Keith. I only got once one zero error.’ So it must have been fairly rare. And as an illustration of how this error was [pause] on, and I don’t know the target. I didn’t bother then. I wish I had. I said to my navigator who was, I think was the about the best on the squadron, he was good anyway thank goodness. And I said to him this night, ‘Haven’t seen a sausage. I’m going to turn around and we’ll have a look. See what the target looks like.’ So, I did a hundred and eighty degree turn. I should have said we were on our way home when I made this decision hence the hundred and eighty degree, took us back towards the target and there was a large diameter of target indicators which are little flare things that burn for I think three minutes or something. I wish I could remember all that and I don’t seem to be able to get the data nowadays at [pause] however they were relatively short burning because they were backed up by other aircraft so that the bomber boys didn’t lose sight of where the target was because they could have been still approaching and some of the target indicators were before they were due to land. Before the heavy bombers actually got there and that is to say to lead them to the right place without them leading themselves astray. And as I looked at this large circle of target indicators burning there was another clump appeared in the sky gradually spread into a large diameter and appeared to me to land right on top of my lot. I said, ‘Blow me down,’ or words to that effect and turned round and came home. The following day I went to the radar section and I said, ‘What was my error last night please?’ And, ‘Oh, hang on. We’ll look it up.’ Dah dah dah and they came back and this I do remember, ‘Two hundred degrees. A hundred and ten yards.’ So, a hundred and ten yards nearly due south of the target point. And I said, ‘And who was following me?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ And I said, ‘I’d love to know because he appeared to be on top.’ And they said, ‘Oh, ok. We’ll find out.’ And he must have been from another, the other Oboe squadron because as I said they were falling right on top and they said, they were a bit surprised, not as much as me, ‘Two hundred degrees, a hundred and ten yards.’ Same error as my lot [laughs] And so we turned around. We kept on going home. What else? The [pause] this business of speaking glibly about it and doing that as though we were then competent but, and I think I was a good average. To get there was quite a headache and you worried if you were doing it rightly. You were apprehensive and hoped there wouldn’t be too much flak or anybody else to worry about and our casualty rates were very low. So we might have worried more than we should have done as emphasised by when in briefing one night in the crew room. Well, at the briefing the crew room was [pause] other people came in and they had just been to the target that we were going to the following occasion and they had had all whatnots shot at them. And here we were. Going. We, about five of us I suppose because we were all just small groups. It depends how long the bombing raid was. And so with a degree of apprehension shall we say we took off and headed for this place where the the wingco, as it happened had been shot at like the devil the night before. And we had a lovely cross-country flight. We didn’t see a thing. So, there’s no telling what you’re going to meet up with. Other nights are a bit different. What can I say? I think we got very keen to help. Help. To get complimented I think would be from what we heard about the heavies afterwards. They were doing marvellous jobs of work and we had heard reports of large areas and the one that we heard about first were the Ruhr which was the engineering centre of Germany. All that was, I think it just became, I’m pleased I’m doing something proper. If they can call it proper. And there was that certain amount of apprehension all the way from various aspects and you, as I had a nasty bit of five minutes one night when Geoff my navigator said, ‘Where’s the spare helmet?’ I said, ‘Oh, behind me. Usual place. Why?’ He said, ‘I’m not getting any oxygen.’ I looked and I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I must have the helmet.’ He turned in his seat which in a Mosquito was sort of one body thickness back and to the pilot’s right and so, and it was a bit lower than a pilot’s seat. And as he turned to reach for the helmet he passed out and fell more or less across my upper legs and thighs and I tried to lift him up to try and find out what bit of the tubing had come undone. I didn’t have any strength. He was about five ton and apparently this is what happens. You lose your strength. Of course, it was an awkward lift in any case so, I took my safety harness off to help me with freedom for lift. No better. I took my parachute off so I’d got freedom and I squirmed around in the seat on the parachute to try and lift Geoff up. No. No good. So, hell. What do I do now? Well, I was told by the throat noises coming from Geoff’s microphone, I’d heard of such a thing as a death rattle. I didn’t know whether it existed or not but that rattle that Geoff had developed it sounded very throaty. Very throaty indeed. I said, ‘Well, I’ve only got one thing to do.’ And the one and only time I rolled the aircraft over and down we went. I think we exceeded maximum permissible. I’ve got no idea but I know it was bloody fast any rate. And I knew from experience that, and we’d exercised at fifteen thousand feet without oxygen with no trouble. So I, with the aid of my trimming tabs on I pulled the aircraft out in to the straight and level and it was just seventeen thousand feet. So, from the breathing noises that ceased I knew Geoff was coming round and he came to and it just shows you what the human brain is. I don’t know how to put this. Geoff said, ‘Have we been called in yet?’ And I said, I was astounded. He'd been right out but his brain was still ticking and I said, ‘No. We’re down to seventeen. We’ll have to go up again.’ So, I climbed as rapidly as I could and we weren’t far from the target. Sorry. Say that again. We weren’t far from the start of the Oboe beam which I forgot to mention was fifty miles long and we got to roughly, according to Geoff and his, oh incidentally he found out where his oxygen was all awry. He got it all together again and he was quite ok and he got us to near to turning off point but lapse time we got beyond that. What they thought I can’t remember but they knew we weren’t going to operate. So, I decided, right. Off we go home, and a bit frightening with Geoff though and we were at thirty four thousand when that happened so there’s not much oxygen floating around at that height [laughs] And that and the funny noise in the throat I didn’t like. So however, what else happened? Oh, we lost an engine one night too. And I thought that that would, oh the COs came to me the following day and said do you know so and so and so and so that had broken. Come unclasped or something, and I said, ‘But that’s supposed to be wired in.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but the wiring had broke.’ Well, as far as I knew the ground staff, that was part of their daily duties so you never know when things break which means I’d lost an engine at thirty thou or something and I couldn’t maintain height on one engine so I had to turn around and come home on one fan and [pause] which I managed all right. And I think my previous experience when I was at MTU when we did a total of about four hours Mossie flying before we moved on because all we were learning about was not how to fly but just understand the Mosquito before we went to squadron on the MTU. But I lost an engine there because the plug in the propeller spiller, spinner came out and the oil in the spinner end just let all the oil out and I could see it drifting back over. The engine was sailing over the wing. So, I looked, initially looked and it was the pressure was sixty PSI. I said, ‘Ok, but I’m going home.’ And found out where I was because I’d been enjoying summer flying over Cambridge and I looked back in and looked at my pressure was only thirty PSI so I feathered. That is to say turned the engine off completely and feathered the propeller so it was the least resistance and went back to station. Landed at MTU because I couldn’t find the VHF controller and, and as we had been flying, I was flying a, an aircraft modified for dual instruction the VHF controller was not near the, the pilot was near the instructor but if he’s not there it’s still a long way away. But however, I landed safely and ran off the end of the airfield, of the runway on to the airfield proper to get out of the way of anybody else and then called up. And I said, ‘Could I have somebody to turn me home please? Turn me in.’ And they said, ‘What’s the matter, x-ray?’ And they said, ‘Have you burst a tyre?’ I said, ‘Oh, no. I just lost an engine.’ Well, pupil pilots aren’t supposed to lose an engine so there was a great kafuffle of cars and things coming around and they towed me back. So, I knew a little bit about single engine flying so when I lost it when I was on the squadron I didn’t worry too much. I knew I could do it and as I say did. The difference being when I was on squadron it was at night and whereas the Training Command MTU was daylight you could say it was a subtle difference. But I liked night flying so [pause] Always had. Bomber Command was a pleasure to have served there and I think we did a good job for the war effort. Shall we put it that way because it enabled the bomber boys to improve their abilities and when you, I saw parts of Germany some months after the war finished. I couldn’t believe my eyes of how much damage mile after mile and this was, in particular I was in Hamburg. I’d also seen memory, a town from two thousand feet because we did a Cook’s Tour in the Mossies to see what we’d done to various targets and the places I saw were, and we didn’t go too far into Germany then for some reason but we could see the damage. And, but when I went to, later on I’d taken a, I was taking an Oxford to Denmark and called in Hamburg at Fuhlsbüttel, the airfield there, and we stayed overnight in Hamburg. But the, and the, had a transport from there back to Hamburg proper where the one and only hotel they told us that hadn’t been ruined the RAF had taken over as [pause] nothing permanent or was permanently for the RAF but people who were passing through like ourselves. And then we went on to Denmark and oh, don’t mention that. That trip home [laughs]. They’d were supposed to send an aircraft and pick us up. Went on day after day and we drank the Danish mess out of beer, we smoked the Danish mess out of cigarettes and one Friday afternoon I think it was, one of the thirty two of us, sixteen aircraft had been over there, sixteen pilots, sixteen navigators were waiting a trip home and the bloke comes in to our bunch and said, ‘Any of you blokes heard anything about —' so and so, ‘Coming to pick us up?’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No. No. Where did you hear this?’ ‘Oh, the CO just mentioned it. He thought he’d heard something about it.’ And I said, ‘Well, did you question him?’ ‘No.’ I was out of my seat in two seconds flat and I went to see the Danish CO and I said, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’ And such and such and about I don’t know how it was thought of but they whistled me up again and said, ‘Can you go down to, would you go down to Copenhagen? Copenhagen, and see your people down there?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ And I was flown down there by a chap and his mate. The Danish pilot was a chap named Paul [Schilling] and we talked about this and that and one of his comments was if I ever met a Dane that couldn’t speak English don’t bother about him. So, I went in to see the air attaché and we had a a funny conversation about what was I going to do about the thirty one people because I had in effect established myself as CO of them. And he mucked about. He said this, he said that, he said the next thing. And I said, ‘They haven’t got any money, they haven’t got this beer, they haven’t got cigarettes.’ Dah dah dah. ‘And they haven’t got any change of clothing.’ Not funny at all. I’ve forgotten how I empathised that now. And so and so and so. And I said, ‘But sir you said —' such and such, ‘A minute ago.’ Out went his arm with a finger pointing and he says, ‘Get out.’ So as a group captain I got out and he had a liaison sort of officer, a flight lieutenant who was the biggest scrounger I think I’ve ever come across. He was not doing anything for the Air Force. He was enjoying himself no end. He said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do —' so and so, ‘This morning. I’ll see you later.’ And all this sort of this thing and so, he was useless but any rate I got a summons from him later. ‘We’ve got thirty two hundred krona for your people and we’ve arranged for them to come down and they’ll go from here, or come down from a place called Viborg.’ Which was on the [pause] A Danish peninsula but I can’t remember the name of it, but a place called Viborg. And so, they came down by road and then they were duly monied. Given their tickets to catch the train to somewhere and they got, half of them got as full as the proverbial and spent all their money. And I didn’t bother about them. I just let them be and I went from, oh there were two or three of us together but there, was there a train first and then boat, then so and so something or other or it was a boat to a train and then we got to the, a German port where we caught a boat and travelled overnight to Hull. And that was our delivery of the Oxford to Denmark. That wasn’t the end of my delivery services because I then brought a Mosquito out from the UK to Ohakea. That was, there were twelve due that all took off on Friday the 13th. No. Six on the Thursday, six on the Friday the 13th of December. I was one of the six however and we were the first of about eighty that the New Zealand governor had purchased for post-war establishment and we had fun and games. UK to Sardinia I think it was. Sardinia to Cairo. Cairo to somewhere in the, I’ve forgotten. Then Allahabad. [unclear] And I might have missed somebody out. Or did I go in to Karachi on that trip? Yes. I think I did. Karachi, Allahabad, Calcutta [pause] And the big town up northern Malaya. I can’t think. Then down to [pause] I think. Oh no. Any rate, down to Singapore. Singapore to Dutch East Indies. Sumatra. Or was it Java? Java, that’s right. And Java to Darwin. Darwin to Townsville. Townsville to [pause] Sydney, I think. Must have been. Then Sydney to Ohakea. Took us six weeks would you believe. However, everybody was ready for us and no hold ups at all much and hence the six weeks. So, I went back as a passenger to UK and was offered the job of bringing another Mossie up and I said, ‘No. Thank you.’ So, I came home by boat and that was the end of my Air Force career. Whether that’s enough of Bomber Command for you dear I don’t know.
JB: That’s splendid. Just tell me briefly what you’ve been doing since.
KB: Hmmn?
JB: What you’ve been doing since then.
KB: Oh.
JB: Back in New Zealand.
KB: The New Zealand government
[pause]
You’ll have to excuse me.
JB: Yes.
KB: I don’t know but I’ve got to go [laughs]
KB: Alright.
[unclear]
JB: That’s ok.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Keith Boles
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Jennifer Barraclough
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-02-12
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ABolesKM180212
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
01:03:30 audio recording
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 New Zealand Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Description
An account of the resource
Keith Boles left school at the age of fourteen and took an apprenticeship in engineering. He was called up to the Air Force at the end of 1941 and was in Singapore when the Japanese invaded. He arrived in UK via Australia and Canada and after a refresher course he trained to be an instructor. He decided he wanted to go on ops and joined the Mosquito Training Flight and flew Mosquitoes on OBOE operations as a Pathfinder. On one occasion his navigator lost consciousness through lack of oxygen so he flew his aircraft at low level so he could recover. He also lost an engine on one operation, returning to base safely. At the end of the war he flew a Cook’s Tour to see for himself the bomb damaged cities. He also took part in the ferrying of Mosquitoes to New Zealand for the RNZAF.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942-02
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Germany
Great Britain
New Zealand
Singapore
Germany--Hamburg
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
109 Squadron
8 Group
aircrew
Cook’s tour
military service conditions
Mosquito
Oboe
Pathfinders
pilot
target indicator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/552/10402/LMaddockLyonR2205669v1.2.pdf
1dcb206504c9fe86e71aeb2f698cef0e
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy
R Maddock-Lyon
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MaddockLyon, R
Description
An account of the resource
Seven items. An oral history interview with Roy Maddock-Lyon (- 2023, 2205669 Royal Air Force), his log book, service material, silk escape map and an album. He served as a flight engineer with 10 Squadron from RAF Melbourne until he was shot down on his 18th operation over Denmark 14 February 1945. Two of his crew were killed but he evaded with the help of the Danish resistance.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Roy Maddock-Lyon and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. 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.
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
Roy Maddock-Lyon's flying log book for navigators, air bombers, air gunners and flight engineers
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LMaddockLyonR2205669v1
Description
An account of the resource
Flying log book for navigators, air bombers, air gunners, flight engineers for Roy Maddock-Lyon, flight engineer, covering the period from 12 June 1944 to 2 May 1946. Detailing his flying training, operations flown and post war flying duties. He was stationed at, RAF St Athan, RAF Rufforth, RAF Melbourne, RAF Linton-on-Ouse and RAF Wethersfield. Aircraft flown in were, Halifax, C-47 and Oxford. He flew a total of 18 operations with 10 squadron, 2 daylight and 16 night. Targets were, Essen, Cologne, Gelsenkirchen, Munster, Sterkrade, Duisburg, Hagen, Osnabruck, Bingen, Hannover, Bohlen and baling out over Denmark on operation 18 on 14 February 1945, gardening. His pilot on operations was Flying Officer Grayshan. He evaded and returned to duty on 27 February from Sweden.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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
One booklet
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
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
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Germany
Great Britain
Sweden
England--Essex
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Bingen (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Essen
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hagen (Arnsberg)
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Saxony
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1944
1945
1946
1944-10-23
1944-10-24
1944-10-25
1944-10-28
1944-10-30
1944-10-31
1944-11-06
1944-11-18
1944-11-21
1944-11-28
1944-11-29
1944-11-30
1944-12-02
1944-12-03
1944-12-06
1944-12-22
1944-12-30
1945-01-05
1945-01-12
1945-01-14
1945-01-15
1945-02-13
1945-02-14
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
10 Squadron
1663 HCU
1665 HCU
aircrew
bale out
bombing
C-47
Cook’s tour
evading
flight engineer
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
killed in action
mine laying
Oxford
prisoner of war
RAF Carnaby
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Melbourne
RAF Rufforth
RAF St Athan
shot down
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10411/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10005.2.jpg
0c7d42817ad73eeb8211efd15750f665
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
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
The remains of Halifax Mk 3 ZA-X
Description
An account of the resource
Five photographs of a Halifax Mk III 'ZA-X'.
Photograph 1 is a modern side view of a Halifax, captioned ' Halifax Mk III 'ZA-X''.
Photograph 2 is a Halifax on fire, captioned ' The plane coming down on fire.'
Photograph 3 is the rear of its fuselage, captioned 'Rear section of the Halifax fuselage'.
Photograph 4 is a section of the fuselage, captioned 'Fuselage of the plane'.
Photograph 5 is heavily damaged and captioned 'Remains of the pilot and engineers' area'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One colour and four b/w photographs on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10005
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
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
1945-02-14
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.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-02-14
10 Squadron
crash
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
shot down
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10412/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10006.2.jpg
821cf4ecb64bfc52ce07e27283790317
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
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
The remains of Halifax Mk 3 ZA-X
Description
An account of the resource
Five photographs of the crashed Halifax Mk 3 'ZA-X'.
Photograph 1 is captioned 'Remains of Mid-Upper Gun Turret'.
Photograph 2 is captioned 'A Propeller'.
Photograph 3 is captioned 'Remains of Rear Gun Turret'.
Photograph 4 is captioned 'Engine, Propeller and shaft aft'.
Photograph 5 is captioned 'Fuselage seen from the end. Source: Holback Museum, photo by Christian Melgaard. Fuselage viewing towards the Pilots Engineers area. Mid Upper Turret was at the Top'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Five b/w photographs on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10006
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-02-14
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-02-14
10 Squadron
crash
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10413/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10007.2.jpg
6ebea4df400caa59a1d50ffc1a7490be
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[map]
Places where the crew landed
1. Site of crash
1 “Red” Berry’s body here
2 Jimmy landed here
4 Roy landed here
4 Johnny’s body here
6 Stan landed here
6 Andy landed here
10 Jim landed here
Map of the site of the crash:
0. Hjortholmsgaarden, the site of the air dual.
1. Old people’s home ‘Sogaard’, the site of the crash.
2. The blacksmithy belonging to Karl Petersen, Sonder Asmindrup.
3. The vicarage of Rev. Paul With Johannesen, Sonder Asmindrup.
4. Smallholder Ejner Næsholt Sorensen, Soby.
5. Smallholder Johannes Helms, Havremarken.
6. Doctor Vilhelm Schlippe, Sonder Jernlose.
7. The grocer’s shop, Vinstrup.
8. German antenna mast, Morkemosebjerg, and farm occupied by G[missing letters] man air defence warning service, Græsmarken.
9. The spot in Magleso, where the female informer was dumped on 2 Febr. ’45.
10. Marup Enge, where Jim landed in his parachute.
11. Smallholder Lars Peter Larsen, Skovager, Rye.
12. Count F.C.R. Scheel’s estate, Ryegaard.
Source: N.H.R. Scheel’s archive.
Where the crew and plane landed south of Holbaek.
[page break]
No. 10 Squadron,
Royal Air Force,
Melbourne,
E. Yorks.
15th February, 1945.
Ref: 10S/502/2004/P.2
Dear Maddock-Lyon
It is with the greatest regret that I have to confirm the sad news already contained in my telegram that your son Sergeant Roy Maddock-Lyon failed to return last night from an operational flight over enemy territory.
The aircraft in which he was the Flight Engineer left base last night, and no further messages were received from it after that time.
I do not wish to raise false hopes, but there is every possibility that the crew had to abandon their aircraft and land in enemy territory, and are prisoners of war. In this event, he will, in due course, be permitted to communicate with you.
It is desired to explain that the request in the telegram notifying you of the casualty to your son was included with the object of avoiding his chance of escape being prejudiced by undue publicity in case he was still at large. This is not to say that any information about him is available, but is a precaution adopted in the case of all personnel reported missing.
May I offer you my deepest sympathy during this time of anxious waiting, and express on behalf of all members of his Squadron the fervent hope that we may soon have good news of him.
Yours Sincerely
[signature]
Wing Commander, Commanding
[underlined] No. 10 Squadron. R.A.F. [/underlined]
Mr. S. Maddock-Lyon,
18, Victoria Road,
Runcorn,
Chester.
RAF letter notifying Roy’s parents of him being missing.
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
Map of Holbaek and letter to Roy Maddock-Lyon's father reporting him missing
Description
An account of the resource
Item 1 is a map of Holbaek with the crash site and the location of two bodies and five survivors. It is captioned 'Where the crew and plane landed south of Holbaek.'
Item 2 is a letter to Roy Maddock-Lyon's father confirming that his son is missing. It is signed by the Wing Commander of 10 Squadron.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-02-15
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One printed map and one typewritten letter on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Map
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10007
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Denmark--Holbæk
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-02-14
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Steve Baldwin
10 Squadron
crash
evading
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
missing in action
RAF Melbourne
shot down
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10415/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10009.2.jpg
8a3e44f0bd4b8624259a8837a18fd4dd
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
John Grayshan's body and the Sorensen's farmhouse
Description
An account of the resource
Photograph 1 is of three German soldiers standing over John Grayshan's body. Behind is another body, marked by an ink arrow. It is captioned 'German Soldiers looking at Johnny'.
Photograph 2 is a close up of Johnny, captioned 'Johnny'.
Photograph 3 is Roy looking out of an upstairs window, captioned 'The bedroom window where Roy saw the German Soldiers'.
Photograph 4 is a ground level view of the Sorensen's House, captioned 'Sorensen's House'.
Photograph 5 is an oblique aerial view of the house, barn and fields. It is captioned 'Sorensen's House The barn is in the centre looking into the Courtyard'.
Photograph 6 is Roy standing in a ruined building, captioned 'Roy visiting the barn where he has hidden'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Four b/w and two colour photographs on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10009
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Civilian
Wehrmacht
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
1945-02-15
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.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-02-15
aircrew
crash
evading
killed in action
pilot
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10416/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10010.2.jpg
b2c826b3ac817b03af30ef159d133faa
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
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
Johannes Helms and family, his house and Tollosse Railway Station
Description
An account of the resource
Photograph 1 is of 13 members of a family standing outside their house. It is captioned 'Hr. Johannes Helms and Family (Agnete in Centre)' and 'Johannes Helms and family'.
Photograph 2 is a house, trees, fields and a telegraph pole captioned 'Johannes Helms House'.
Photograph 3 is Roy standing on the platform of a railway station. Above his head is a clock at 6:19. It is captioned 'Tollosse Railway Station where Roy Joined the train to Copenhagen and Where the SS also joined the train.'
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w and one colour photographs on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10010
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
evading
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10465/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10011.2.jpg
e50f4daa81d7cbc5399ac0fef91ff6f9
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
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
Dr Syrach Larsen, Peter Bredsdorff and S/W Carl of Nesko
Description
An account of the resource
Photograph 1 is a half length portrait of a man wearing shirt and tie, seated in a chair, captioned ' Dr Syrach Larsen - Lisa's Father'.
Photograph 2 is a street scene with a curved road, lamp posts and trees, captioned 'The road outside Dr Larsen's House'.
Photograph 3 is a a modern photograph of a man with his arm round a woman, captioned 'Roy and Lisa outside the Summer House'.
Photograph 4 is three men seated on a bench. They are in uniform and are wearing steel helmets. It is captioned 'Peter Bredsorss who was a Freedom Fighter. He was also an architect from 1942 and became World famous as an 'Urban planning authority' and 'Three freedom fighters from the architect group of 'Frit Danmark' outside Randersgade Skole, 5th May '45. Peter Bredsdorff in the middle, Mogens Boertmann to the left, and Esben Klint to the right. Source: private archive.'
Photograph 5 is a small passenger ship with a single funnel. It is parked at the quayside with office buildings behind. It is captioned 'S/S Carl of Nekso, Bornholm', originally 'Carl von Linne', built 1884 in Norrkoping, Sweden, since '38 owned by A/S Det ostbornholmske Dampskibsselskab, at full steam, at the quay at Havnegade. Please note the lifeboats on the top deck. Source: S.R. No 93:93, Handels-og Sofartsmuseet pa Kronberg, Elsinore' and underneath 'The [undecipherable]'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Four b/w and one colour photographs on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10011
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
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
1945-05-05
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.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-05-05
evading
Resistance
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10466/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10012.1.jpg
7ceb4875921b76a1bd8d858e99035479
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
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
Roy Maddock-Lyon's escape Route to Sweden and a ticket from Malmo to Stockholm
Description
An account of the resource
Item 1 - A map of Eastern Denmark annotated with the site of the crash, Charluttenlund and Falsterbo Canal.
Item 2 is a ticket from Malmo to Stockhol issued to Roy Maddock-Lyon.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-02-20
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One coloured map and one printed ticket on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
dan
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Map
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10012
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Sweden
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-02-20
crash
evading
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10467/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10013.1.jpg
8d6348b1b26c5ab0398f412fcfd73f9a
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
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
Roy Maddock-Lyon's Danish Identity Card and a map of Blockade Runners Flight Path
Description
An account of the resource
Item 1 is a Danish Identity card issued to Roy Maddock-Lyon under the name Peter Jensen. It includes a head and shoulders photograph.
Item 2 is a sketch map of Scandanavia and Great Britain with four routes described as 'Blockade Runners'. Captioned 'The map shows the various routes chosen for the courier flights'. and 'Copied from "Blockade Runners", Sweden's Lifeline in the Second World War.' and 'Blockade Runners Flight Path'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One printed card and a sketch map on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
dan
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Map
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10013
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Civilian
Royal Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Great Britain
Sweden
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
evading
Resistance
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10468/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10014.2.jpg
bb3d3741c59ff98367455614395b67d3
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
From: Sgt. F. Maddock-Lyon (2205669), No 10 Squadron, R.A.F..
To: [indecipherable word] Air Attache, Stockholm.
Date: 22nd February, 1945.
[Underline] Report on crash of 10 Squadron in Denmark on the night of the 14th/15th February, 1945, and subsequent escape of certain members of the crew to Sweden.[/underlined]
Sir,
I have the honour to submit the following report.
2. On the night of the 14th/15th February we were detailed for a special operation which entailed crossing Denmark. The crew consisted of:-
P/O. J. GRAYSHAN (Pilot)
F/S. A.J. BERRY (navigator)
P/O. S. [indecipherable] (Bomb aimer)
F/S. P.F. ANDREWS (W/T. operator)
F/S. N.L. MILLS (Mid upper gunner)
Sgt. R. MADDOCK-LYON (Engineer)
F/S. J. PAYNE (Rear gunner)
3. We set course from base (10 Squadron) at 1010 hrs. for Flamborough Head at 1000 ft.. This height we maintained until 0060N was reached and we then climbed to 15,000 ft. to the Danish Coast, when we again climbed to 16,000 ft., which we maintained over Denmark to Point ‘A’. At the time I was making my log out when suddenly there was blinding flash, followed by a terrible bang. I immediately looked through the astrodome to see what damage had been done and I saw a fire begin on the port wing in the centre and rear behind the inboard engine. Before [deleted][indecipherable word][/deleted] I could feather the inboard engine the flames had enveloped the whole wing, so the pilot gave the order to “Prepare to bale out”. I put the pilot his parachute on and put my own on. Then he gave the order “Bale out”. During this time he had put the plane into an almost vertical descent. I
Roy’s initial interrogation report (a,b,c.) from Malmo.
[page break]
went down to the front escape hatch (under the navigator’s table) and found that the door was jammed or frozen. Then there was a tearing of metal and the next I remember is floating down to earth with my parachute open, [underline] minus [/underlined] flying boots, gloves and helmet. On landing in about 6” of mud I collected my parachute and Mae West and harness and covered them with mud as best I could as I was very dazed and headed for the road which was about 160 yards away. I went to Point ‘B’, where they washed and fed me and put me to bed.
4. Next morning I awoke and outside the house were about 12 German soldiers studying parts of the plane, especially [underline] Article ‘N’ [/underlined]. At 1600 hrs. person ‘Z’ arrived and told me he would come for me at 2000 hrs. to take me to point ‘C’. I told him about article ‘N’ and next morning he told me it had been taken care of. (During this or future time I did not see any of the crew except one body which was carried on a stretcher covered up, so I could not see his face.) ‘Z’ then told me we were going to point ‘D’ and I was to go in civilian clothes, which I did. At ‘D’ I was shown by [sic] room (16th February) and taken care of by person ‘Y’.
5. Next day, 17th February, person ‘X’ came for me and I was taken to contact ‘N’ at point ‘E’, where I got article ‘N’. Person ‘Y’ came for me and took me to ‘F’, where I remained until 1715 hrs. on 19th February. During this time ‘V’ took me round and showed me various places taken over by the Gestapo and military authorities and told me of sabotage done by the Resistance Movement. Details of these places will be given when required.
6. At 1715 on the 19th February I left ‘F’ and returned to point ‘E’ where at 1815 I was taken to point ‘G’. ‘U’ then took me to point ‘N’, where I remained until 2115, when I was taken for some food by ‘T’ as ‘U’ had left. The boat was going from ‘E’ to point ‘J’ but I left at point ‘K’, which is in Sweden,
7. I promise the statement here is the truth of my activities in Demark from 2030 on the night of the 14th February to the morning of the 20th February 1945.
(Sd.).. Maddock-Lyon (R.A.F.)
[signature]
Sergeant.
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
Report on crash of aircraft of 10 Squadron in Denmark on the night of 14th/15th February 1945, and subsequent escape of certain members of the crew to Sweden
Description
An account of the resource
A detailed report on the flight over Denmark, the explosion on the aircraft and evacuating the damaged aeroplane. The subsequent evasion to Sweden is also described.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Roy Maddock-Lyon
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-02-22
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two typewritten sheets on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Diary
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10014
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Sweden
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-02-14
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Georgie Donaldson
Steve Baldwin
10 Squadron
aircrew
crash
evading
flight engineer
Resistance
shot down
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10469/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10015.2.jpg
2c77b5f212abe72d5aa04b4525f421ef
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined] EVADING CAPTURE IN DENMARK [/underlined]
The information contained in this report is to be treated as
[deleted word]
STATEMENT BY
2205669 Sgt. MADDOCK-LYON. Roy. 10 Sqn. Bomber Command, R.A.F.
Left : STOCKHOLM, 27 Feb 45. Arrived: U.K. , 28 Feb 45.
Date of Birth : 31 Aug 24. Peacetime Profession: Student.
R.A.F. Service : Since 3 Sep 43. Private Address: 18 Vicroria Road, RUNCORN, Cheshire.
Post in crew : Flight engineer.
[underlined] Other members of the Crew [/underlined]:
P/O. GRAYSHAN (pilot) (believed killed).
F/Sgt. BERRY (navigator) (believed K/W).
P/O. CHADERTON (bomb aimer) (fate unknown).
F/Sgt. ANDREWS (wireless operator) (fate unknown).
F/Sgt. MILLS (mid upper gunner) (safe in SWEDEN).
F/Sgt. PETRE (rear gunner) (safe in DENMARK).
14 Feb 45, Baled out near HOLBAEK.
We took off from MELBOURNE in a Halifax aircraft at 1745 hrs on 14 Feb 45. On the way to the target the aircraft was hit, possibly by cannon fire from a fighter, and set on fire. The pilot gave the order to abandon aircraft and while I was trying to open the forward escape hatch I heard a tearing, grinding noise. I began to fall through space and I pulled the ripcord of my parachute.
I landed in a field about 3 k. South of HOLBAEK (DENMARK 1:100,000, [underlined] Sheet 40 [/underlined]. Y 8177) at 2015 hrs. I lost my flying boots on the way down. I hid my parachute, harness and [indecipherable words] in the field where I landed. I then walked to a house, where I was given help. The remainder of my journey was arranged for me.
[underlinerd] INTERVIEWED BY: [underlined] I.S.9 (W) 1 hour 45.
Q.R.S. Bomber Command. R.A.F.
[underlined] Distribution of this report by [missing letter].S.9: [/underlined]
D.D.H.I.(P/W). N.I.9. I.S.9. I.S.9(E).
[missing letter].S.9(E). I.S.9([indecipherable letter].3.). I.S.9(D).
[missing letter].S.9(A.B.A.)(2 copies). E.I.19.
[missing letter]. I.5 (Lt.-Col. Seymor. M.O.1(S.P.)
Lt.-Col. Dittors). A.I.1([indecipherable letter]) F/V.
[missing letter]I.O. M.I.9. P.T. [indecipherable word] Dot.MIS.ETOUSA (2 copies).
[missing letters]-Col. H.B.A. de BRUIMS (3 copies).
[missing letter]I.O., H.Q. Bomber Command, R.A.F. (7copies).
Fighter Command, R.A.F.
Tactical Air Force, R.A.F.
38 Group R.A.F.
[indecipherable word] Section, Air Ministry (Mr. J.C. Noracy).
[missing number]2 Div. S.H.A.E.F.
[missing letter]I.O. Air Staff, S.H.A.E.F. Recr.
[underlined] APPENDIX C. [/underlined]
[underlined] Distribution: [/underlined]
D.D.H.I.(P.W). I.S.9.
I.S.9(X). M.I.5 (Lt.-Col. Seymor). I.D.9(D).
I.S.9([indecipherable letters] (2 copies).
I.S.9(A.B.). P.W. [indecipherable letters]
Dot.MIS.ETOUSA. (2 copies).
I.S.9([indecipherable letter]) (file).
[underlined] APPENDIX D. [/underlined]
[underlined] Distribution: [/underlined]
I.S.9. I.S.9([indecipherable letter]).
A.L.O., M.I.9.
I.S.9(indecipherable letters]) (2 copies).
P.F. [indecipherable letters] Dot.MIS.ETOUSA (2 copies). File.
Roy’s interrogation report from Stockholm.
[page break]
[Air Ministry letterhead]
Your Ref. P.425527/6/N.5.N. 23rd. February 1945.
[underlined] CONFIDENTIAL [/underlined]
Sir,
I am directed to convey to you the good news that your son, Sergeant Roy Maddock-Lyon previously reported missing, is now safe.
A report has been received from a reliable source through the Air Attache Stockholm which states that your son will be arriving in Sweden shortly.
In the interests of your son you are asked to keep this good news to yourself and not attempt to communicate with him in any way. This information should not be released to the press.
I am to assure you that any further news received will be passed to you immediately.
I am, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
[signature]
For Director of Personal Services.
D. Maddock-Lyon, Esq.,
15, Victoria Road,
Runcorn,
Cheshire.
[crest]
RAF Letter notifying Roy was in Sweden.
[Post Office Telegram letterhead]
[inserted] hop [/inserted]
No. IR1413 [date stamp]
[inserted] 9/31 TRA [/inserted]
597 8.16 LONDON TO 21
MRS S MADDOCKLYON 18 VICTORIA RD RUNCORN CHE[missing letters]
ARRIVED IN THIS COUNTRY SAFELY AND WELL HOPE TO SEE YOU SHORTLY WRITING ROY +
+18
Roy’s Telegram concerning his return to the UK.
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
Evaded Capture in Denmark and letter and telegram to Roy Maddock-Lyon's parents advising him he was safe
Description
An account of the resource
Item 1 is a statement by Roy Maddock-Lyon on the events leading to the loss of the aircraft and his evasion and return to the UK.
Item 2 is a letter from the Air Ministry advising his parents that he is safe in Sweden. It is captioned 'RAF Letter notifying Roy was in Sweden'.
Item 3 is a telegram to his mother advising that he has returned safely to the UK. It is captioned' Roy's Telegram concerning his return to the UK.'
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Roy Maddock-Lyon
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-02-27
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two typewritten sheets and a printed telegram on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10015
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Sweden
Denmark--Holbæk
Sweden--Stockholm
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-02-14
1945-02-28
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Steve Baldwin
10 Squadron
bale out
evading
Halifax
RAF Melbourne
shot down
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10471/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10017.1.jpg
50cb10a39d9e75e826fa26117add0532
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[photograph]
The graves of Jonny and Red Berry
[page break]
[photograph]
Caterpillar Club Membership Card.
[newspaper cutting]
Over 20,000 ‘Escapers’
MEMBERSHIP of the Caterpillar Club, Britain’s most famous “escapers” organisation, has topped the 20,000 mark after six years of war.
Membership is confined to those who have made forced descents by parachutes. Nearly 10,000 men have had their claims ratified within the last nine months. Among them are a large number of P.o.W.
Among the members are Wing Commander Bader, two V.C.s – Squadron Leader J. B. Nicholson and Flight-Lieutenant Reid – and Air Vice-Marshall Bennett, the Pathfinder chief who landed in Sweden.
Members are planning a big V-celebration when the war prisoners return home.
Over 20,000 Escapers.
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
The graves of Johnny and Red Berry. Roy Maddock-Lyon's Caterpillar Club membership card and a newspaper cutting
Description
An account of the resource
Item 1 is an image of the graves of F/O Grayshan and Serg Berry, captioned 'The graves of Jonny and Red Berry'.
Item 2 is a Caterpillar Club membership card issued to Sgt Roy Maddock-Lyon, captioned 'Caterpillar Club Membership Card.'
Item 3 is a newspaper cutting referring to 20,000 'Escapers' belonging to the Caterpillar Club, captioned 'Over 20000 Escapers.'
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One photograph, one printed card and one newspaper cutting on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10017
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Georgie Donaldson
aircrew
bale out
Bennett, Donald Clifford Tyndall (1910-1986)
Caterpillar Club
final resting place
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10472/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10018.2.jpg
f2ae64d6603a60e1fa60096065cd4219
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
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
10 Squadron Crest and Service Sheet for the Memorial stone unveiling for Flying Officer John Grayshan and Sergeant Albert Berry
Description
An account of the resource
Item 1 is a colour crest of 10 Squadron, captioned '10 Squadron Insignia'.
Item 2 is an order of service to mark the unveiling of the Memorial Stones for Flying Officer John Grayshan and Sergeant Alber Berry.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-08-26
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One colour print and one printed sheet on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
lat
dan
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Artwork
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10018
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Denmark--Holbæk
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-08-26
10 Squadron
aircrew
memorial
navigator
pilot
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/997/10473/SMaddockLyonR2205669v10019.1.jpg
757b8df2cb5345432043409adf36c699
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
Maddock-Lyon, Roy. Scrap book
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Maddock-Lyon, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-03-21
Description
An account of the resource
20 pages. The scrap book contains items about Roy Maddock-Lyon's aircraft being shot down over Holbæk in Denmark 14 February 1945 and his subsequent evasion. It contains correspondence, photographs of the wreckage of his aircraft ZA-X, and what happened to his crew.<br />
<p>This collection also contains items concerning John Grayshan and Albert Berry. Additional information on <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/211033/">John Grayshan</a> and <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202051/">Albert Berry</a> is available via the IBCC Losses Database.</p>
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
Memorial service for Flying Officer John Grayshan and Sergeant Albert Berry
Description
An account of the resource
Item 1 is a photograph taken during the service.
Item 2 is a photograph of the unveiling of the Union and RAF Flags.
Item 3 is a photograph of the graves of Flying Officer John Grayshan and Sergeant Albert Berry with J Petre, P Andrews and S Chaderton standing alongside.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-08-26
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two b/w and one colour photograph on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMaddockLyonR2205669v10019
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Denmark
Denmark--Holbæk
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-08-26
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
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.
aircrew
final resting place
killed in action
navigator
pilot
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1060/11454/PBowmanFA1801.1.jpg
1d7624307c14646291928d3f0ff29a34
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1060/11454/ABowmanFA181121.2.mp3
f07920709970bb07c32383225c44434c
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
Bowman, Frederick Arthur
F A Bowman
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Fred Bowman (1924 - 2020, 429212 Royal Australian Air Force). He flew operations as a wireless operator with 138 Squadron.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-11-21
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bowman, FA
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JH: This is John Horsburgh and this afternoon I’m interviewing Fred Bowman and we’re at [buzz] in Sydney, New South Wales. This is part of the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincolnshire. The Oral History Project. Today is the 21st of November 2018. So, good afternoon, Fred.
FB: Good afternoon. How are you? Lovely to meet you.
JH: Likewise. So, a very interesting interview we’ve, we’ve got coming up I’m sure. Fred was a wireless operator with 138 Squadron and Fred, maybe we can start with, right from the beginning. Your date of birth and where were you born.
FB: 17th of June 1924. Born in Paddington in Sydney.
JH: And you went to school in Sydney.
FB: Yeah. Sydney Boys High.
JH: A Sydney boy.
FB: Yeah.
JH: All through.
FB: And I made up my mind. I just didn’t, this business of running around sticking bayonets into people didn’t appeal to me. So I made up my mind that I was going to join the Air Force when I turned eighteen [laughs] and so I did.
JH: And was that because you were in the —
FB: ATC.
JH: ATC.
FB: Yes. Yes.
JH: When you were growing up.
FB: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. That’s that was.
JH: Yeah.
FB: I had this interest in it, you know. Like most boys of that age, nineteen, twenty, they all imagined themselves to be Paddy Finnucane or somebody, you know. He was a fighter ace. I don’t know whether you remember the name, do you? Paddy Finucane.
JH: No. I don’t. I have heard about it.
FB: Yeah.
JH: But I can’t remember any details to be quite honest.
FB: So that’s where it all started.
JH: So, you were following the progress of the war. So what made you join up and when did you do that?
FB: Well, I knew after I joined the ATC and everything. Of course, when you turn eighteen, if you don’t join up in the Air Force or the Navy or something they conscript you in to the Army and I couldn’t imagine myself in the Army sticking bayonets in people so [laughs] So I, for my eighteenth birthday I went down to Bourke Street or somewhere. Somewhere in Sydney and signed on the dotted line. And most of the call ups were on a, for a Saturday and I got this one for the Thursday and they said my name had been accepted and so the next move is that you’ll be sent up to Kingaroy in Queensland to do your ATS, and the train leaves at, sets off at half past seven tonight and you’re on it.
JH: That’s unusual, going to to Kingaroy rather than —
FB: Yes.
JH: New South Wales.
FB: They must have been short of numbers you know to make up the intake. So I finished up in Kingaroy in November and the dirt and the red mud and the red dust. Shocking climate.
JH: And what sort of training were you doing at Kingaroy?
FB: You don’t do any flying at Kingaroy. It’s all ground stuff, you know, medical stuff and discipline and all that sort of thing.
JH: Some square bashing.
FB: Square bashing. That’s right. There was no flying at all until we went to Maryborough to do the wireless course, and they, you get flying instruction in the, in a Wackett trainer. A little single engine thing. Used to be a sort of a, do a competition amongst the crews there to see which of the first one that would have to do a crash landing because these things [laughs] they wouldn’t last. They were always sort of having to have a forced landing somewhere. These little CAC trainers there.
JH: So this would have been, correct me if I’m, if I’m wrong, in 1943.
FB: Yeah.
JH: This second training. And —
FB: The end of 1942 I went.
JH: ’42.
FB: Went to —
JH: Kingaroy.
FB: Kingaroy.
JH: Yes. Yes. And I presume you would have been hearing some of the stories of the Bomber Command effort.
FB: Oh yes.
JH: In Europe.
FB: Yes.
JH: Did that put any second thoughts in your mind?
FB: Well, it didn’t put any negative thoughts in there because you thought you’d, you know, ‘I’m here to win the war.’
JH: Invincible. Yeah. Yes.
FB: Personally.
JH: Yes. And —
FB: You just think you were [pause] you were just quite sure that you were going to survive it all and that’s it.
JH: Yes. But tell me a little bit about the final training. Maybe you did some gunnery training as well.
FB: Yes. We finished up. We did our wireless course and [pause] at Maryborough in Queensland and then we went on to Evans Head. That was the Bombing and Gunnery School there and they were flying Fairey Battles. One plane would have a drogue, dragging a drogue and then the guns that we were using were from the First World War. A Vickers GO Gun. GO meaning gas operated and two, two gunners went up in this plane and they used to, your bullets were in a round canister sort of thing with the tips exposed and I dipped mine. Two of us went up. They dipped the tips of these things in red for you and blue for me, and they could then work out how many hits you’d got with this Vickers GO gun thing. And that was our gunnery course at Evans Head.
JH: So it sounds like you passed that ok.
FB: Oh yeah.
JH: Main colours as they say.
FB: The worst part of it was the smell of that glycol. It’s a sort of a, like a burnt oil smell. Boy, it makes you feel a little bit ill just smelling it.
JH: Fred, at what point did you learn that you were being posted in, in Europe rather than the Pacific campaign?
FB: Well, when, when you finished up at Evans Head that was your last training post. And I think they told us right then that we were going to get leave and we’d be issued with another uniform I think and, and said, ‘You’re going to be posted to the UK.’ Joining Bomber Command over there. We didn’t think that was terrible. ‘We’ll fix Hitler,’ you know [laughs] ‘We’ll, fix Hitler.’
JH: Sure. So I assume an adventurous trip to the UK.
FB: Yeah.
JH: By steamer.
FB: Yeah. Straight across. We went across the Atlantic. Not the Atlantic. We went across the Pacific on the Matsonia which was a cruise ship. American cruise ship. No escort. It just did a few sort of zigzags as it went across. Went across. Went across the Pacific to San Francisco and then they put us on a train in San Francisco and we went across America by train in a sleeper. Lovely.
JH: And how many of you were there in the group?
FB: I think that course there was fifty of us I think in that course. Fifty Australians. And we went across to leave and had a week’s leave in New York. Spent every penny we had plus drew some of the next week’s pay and [laughs]
JH: Yes.
FB: Really whooped it up.
JH: Then you had to run the gauntlet crossing the Atlantic.
FB: That’s right. That’s right. The first thing we saw when we got, took us to the, in the, whatever the docks are in New York I just forget what they are there was the Lusitania that was scuttled or something in in, in the harbour. And as you get on to the boat the Queen, we went across on the Queen Elizabeth at that point and you get on there, you look straight down and here’s the remains of the Lusitania on its side. A very nice welcome, you know. This could happen to you.
JH: Back to reality. Yeah. Yes.
FB: This went across the Pacific, across the Atlantic on its own, just zigzagging.
JH: Zigzagging. Yeah.
FB: But no, no escort. We never saw any allied planes or allied —
JH: Yes.
FB: Boats or anything. Just should be alright mate.
JH: Yeah. So was that to Liverpool?
FB: No.
JH: Or up to Scotland?
FB: Greenock.
JH: Greenock. Yes.
FB: Greenock in Scotland. Yes.
JH: Yes. And still you had no idea exactly where you were going to be posted or what squadron at that stage.
FB: Not at that stage. Then you were sent, the Australians had a holding camp over there. Listen to this. A holding camp over there called 11 PDRC. Personnel Dispatch and Reception Centre, and do you know where this camp was? Where the, where the 11 PDRC was?
JH: No.
FB: It was in the, in fact it was in two hotels. Two of the best hotels in Brighton [laughs] Right on the sea front. You could look out your window and there was the sea front and all that. You weren’t allowed on to the seafront of course but that was the 11 PDRC. We thought how long has this been going on? And then, and the town was not open to civilians so we had all the town to our, to our own self. The town of Brighton. And we had a ball there.
JH: And then the Nissen huts was it?
FB: No. No. We were staying in these two hotels.
JH: Yeah.
FB: The Grand and the Metropole.
JH: Yes.
FB: But then after the war, well first of all we’d been there a few weeks, they said, ‘Listen, you blokes need a bit of toughening up.’ So they sent us up to a toughening up course at Whitley Bay that was run by the RAF Regiment. The RAF Regiment was a sort of a semi-army unit.
JH: Yeah.
FB: Operated by the RAF, and it was a toughening up school. You know, running up and down on the seaside.
JH: Sergeant majors. Yeah.
FB: With your signet on.
JH: Yes.
FB: Yeah. 11 PDRC.
JH: Yeah. So, so from there did you go to an OTU?
FB: Well, the first one you go to is an AFU.
JH: AFU. Yeah.
FB: That was at Millom. You go up there and just flying in an Avro Anson and getting accustomed to British radio expertise and so on and that. So that was about adjusting to English sort of operational —
JH: Yes.
FB: Conditions.
JH: And at what stage did you crew up? Was that after that?
FB: Yes. From OTU. No. Not OTU. From AFU they sent you to an OTU.
JH: Yeah.
FB: And that was down in Bed, yes in Bedfordshire and the CO came straight out when we got there. He said, ‘Now, look,’ he said, ‘The way we do this — ’ he said, is we all, you sort of get together at the White Angel Hotel or something in Aylesbury.
JH: Yeah.
FB: And you, you know talk around the blokes and you say, you know, you’re a wireless operator or I’m a navigator and how about crewing up? And so you crew up.
JH: Yeah.
FB: And they said, ‘It’s not binding. When you wake up the next morning and say, ‘I couldn’t possibly fly for that bastard, [laughs] So what?’ The raids were just cancelled. You were, you crew up again with somebody else.
JH: I wonder where it was in Bedfordshire.
FB: Oakley. Oakley and Westcott.
JH: Oh, ok. Yes. Yeah.
FB: Westcott was the holding —
JH: Yes.
FB: Station.
JH: Yeah. And was this not just Australians. This was British and —
FB: British and —
JH: Commonwealth.
FB: New Zealanders. Yeah.
JH: Yes. Yeah. Ok.
FB: South Africans. We had South Africans on the squadron.
JH: Yes. Yes.
FB: All on the OTU.
JH: Yes. And, and then how did you end up at, in Tempsford with the squadron?
FB: Well —
JH: How did that happen?
FB: I really don’t know whether we were asked to do it or not but we had a very conscientious bomb aimer and bomb aiming was very [pause], good bomb aiming was very necessary because we did a lot of map reading. But we were doing mostly low level trips into the occupied countries. Very low level. And so the bomb aimer used to go down in to the nose and then he’d actually map read.
JH: Yes.
FB: Map read.
JH: Not the navigator. The bomb aimer.
FB: The bomb aimer. Yeah. The navigator would keep the overall —
JH: Yes.
FB: Navigation but the bomb aimer would be specific. He’d be sitting in the nose.
JH: Yes.
FB: And he’d be directing the pilot.
JH: Yes.
FB: ‘Left. Left. Right. Right.’ And so on.
JH: So, I mean the reason I asked about that is that you ended up with a very unusual almost top secret.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Squadron.
FB: We were.
JH: And maybe that was one of the factors in the, in the selection of your crew.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Do you think it was?
FB: I’m sure. I’m sure our bomb aimer, our bomb aimer was one of those conscientious blokes. He wanted to be, he wanted to be involved and he was very very capable of map reading and so forth. He had all the attributes. So I’m sure he had something to do with it.
JH: Yes.
FB: And so we were just, when that finished we were posted to Tempsford.
JH: Yes. So, so what was it? How did you get there? You ended up in Bedford or Cambridge and then across to Tempsford.
FB: Well, I don’t know what, what trains or anything.
JH: Yes.
FB: If we couldn’t make it, find you somewhere to sleep for the night and they tell you nothing and it’s not until the next day that they get you assigned and tell you exactly what’s going on at Tempsford and the secret work they’re doing and all very hush hush, and hush hush and don’t say a word to anybody. So whether, I’ve got an idea our bomb aimer might have sort of asked a few questions as to whether we could go on this special duties squadron. He was that sort of a guy. So that’s where we finished.
JH: How different was it to other bases do you think? Presumably there wasn’t a signpost, “SOE —“
FB: No. No.
JH: “This way.”
FB: Well, I suppose the main difference was that it was all single flights. You’d be in a different crew to me and you’d be in a target to Norway. I might be out that night and I might be on a target up to Denmark and you didn’t know. But I didn’t tell you where I was going and you didn’t tell me where you were going. It was all terribly secret stuff.
JH: So —
FB: Say nothing.
JH: Yes.
FB: Don’t tell anybody sort of thing.
JH: Yes. So what, what sort of aircraft were used for these operations?
FB: Well, at that stage we had our first, the first operational aircraft we went on to were Stirlings because they were doing all low levels to the Resistance movements. We were only flying at a few hundred feet.
JH: Yes.
FB: And we used the treetops and so —
JH: Is it true you only went out on, you know like full moon?
FB: Yeah.
JH: Or moonlight.
FB: Yeah. That’s right.
JH: Yes.
FB: Well, you had to you see. Which was more important? You did your [pause] going, go out on a moonlit night so as you can see where you’re going and low level. You know, you had no accompanying, no accompanying planes with you. You were on your own, low level and there was no fighter escort or anything. You was just low level from here. It’s a long haul from Tempsford up to somewhere in Norway and you burst. You, well it’s hard to believe but when you leave Tempsford it’s all low level from then on ‘til you get to the drop zone, and it’s, you know, you actually, your objective is a field no bigger than a paddy field. And that’s where the drop zone is and that’s where the Resistance guys are. And you, if you think you’ve got to the drop zone they can hear you coming. The Resistance group can hear you coming and they’ll come out and flash a torch. A signal. And you, you just opened your bomb doors and let the stuff go and wave them goodbye and off they go and get rid of it the best way they can.
JH: I would guess the Germans on full moon or moonlit nights would be —
FB: Watching.
JH: On full alert.
FB: Watching for it. Yeah.
JH: And would, did they ever try and decoy these signals?
FB: Yes. They would. Yeah. They would. Yeah.
JH: Yes.
FB: We never struck it.
JH: Yes. So this was dropping off agents I presume.
FB: And supplies.
JH: Parachuting. And supplies.
FB: And supplies. Yeah.
JH: Were you on operations? I guess a smaller aircraft where you actually land and picked up people?
FB: Well that’s, that was, we were 138 Squadron based at Tempsford.
JH: Yeah.
FB: And there was 161 Squadron based at Tempsford and they were flying Hudsons.
JH: Hudsons. Yeah.
FB: Which was a twin engine —
JH: Yes.
FB: Plane. They wouldn’t land unless it was, it would have to have the proper provisions for them to land.
JH: Yeah.
FB: The main planes they were flying in, these were mainly operations in to France was a, was a Lysander.
JH: Single engine is that?
FB: Yeah. It was a single engine.
JH: Yes.
FB: And that would actually land and drop off these Joes in a field. Or pick them up and take them back to Tempsford. They would actually land on the —
JH: Yes. So, that was 161 also.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Not 138. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
FB: 138 was confined to the Stirlings, and 161 had the Hudsons and the —
JH: Yes.
FB: The Hudsons and Lysanders there.
JH: I would guess the problem for the Lysander if they’re landing and get stuck in the, in the field.
FB: Well —
JH: Did that ever happen?
FB: Not that I know of.
JH: No.
FB: I suppose they could have picked a muddy field.
JH: Yeah.
FB: You had to put in a report when you got back from these operations as to what, what you thought of the landing site that they’d given you. Whether you thought it was suitable for future. For use.
JH: Yes.
FB: Or whether it was a little bit dickie or so on so —
JH: Yes.
FB: There was full cooperation with, with the Army and the other [unclear] concerned —
JH: Yes.
FB: As to whether it was going to work or not.
JH: Yes.
FB: There’s some funny stories come out of it. I don’t know whether you’ve heard this one or not but [laughs] they had one where, I could go back to the start. Yes.
JH: Tell me a bit about the agents. I I would think that you didn’t know their names, for example.
FB: No. You —
JH: You couldn’t really talk to them too much.
FB: Yeah. You could talk to them. You could talk to them. We spent the night with one in particular. We took him over to Denmark and we came back, heading back to England across the North Sea and we had a radio message to say, ‘Don’t go back to Tempsford. Go to Lossiemouth.’ Up in the north of Scotland. So we went to Lossiemouth and just put us all, the whole seven crew plus this agent, they put us all into one hut and we had a great old talk to this bloke about it. We said to him, ‘Well, what happens when you, when you, if they catch you.’ He said, ‘Well, first of all— ’ he opened up his coat and he had this great big Luger pistol in his, in his coat and he said, he said, but he said, ‘They’ll interrogate me,’ he said, ‘They’ll torture me to find out more.’ He said, ‘Then when they are finally satisfied they’ll shoot me.’ He said, ‘I am not covered by the Geneva Convention in regard to prisoners of war.’
JH: Yeah.
FB: Because it’s not a, it’s not a wartime project that that they’re on. So I don’t know what the Germans would have categorised them as but they would just shoot them when they’d finished with them.
JH: Yes. Well, what about you and the crew, Fred? If you were shot down and captured by the Germans if, if they had any inkling that you were involved in special operations was there a feeling that you could get, could get harsher treatment from the Germans?
FB: I don’t know what happened. Some of my friends were taken POW but I don’t know. I’ll say this for the Germans they stuck by the rules of warfare, you know. They stuck by the, whatever the Geneva Convention said about that. The Germans stuck by it. They were very, well, they were a military nation and if that’s the way it should be done that was the way it was going to be done but —
Other: Mr Bowman.
FB: Yes.
Other: Oh, hi John.
JH: Hello.
Other: Happy hour upstairs Mr Bowman.
FB: Oh, I wouldn’t mind.
Other: You can bring your friend upstairs.
JH: Yeah. We’re just doing an interview then we’ll come up.
Other: You can carry on drinking as well while you’re interviewing.
FB: You’re trying to lead me astray aren’t you?
Other: Or maybe the other way around.
JH: [laughs] Thank you.
FB: Oh, deary me.
JH: Ok, I’ll leave that in there Fred. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we were talking about you had some friends that were captured and you know in general the Germans were, were pretty good.
FB: Yes. They were.
JH: Yeah. Yeah.
FB: They stuck to the rules of the game.
JH: Yeah. One thing I’d like to ask you. I think you’ve touched on it is, is the number of countries that you went out to on these operations. You mentioned Norway.
FB: Norway. Denmark. Norway.
JH: And France would have featured quite a bit —
FB: Denmark, France, Holland mainly.
JH: Holland and Belgium. Yeah. Yeah.
FB: But I didn’t become operational until July 1944.
JH: Yeah.
FB: Of course, in July 1944 it was all France.
JH: Yes.
FB: But then as, as the British Army swept across France the operations converted then up to Norway and Denmark.
JH: Yes.
FB: Which was a long way away.
JH: So were you kind of following the lines? Keeping ahead of the, the front lines in operations to some extent.
FB: Yes. Yes. Yes. There was no point in getting behind them. You had to be in front. We had to be in front of them all the time and they had a special identification. They had armbands. I’ve got one sat in the window frame there. You’ll see it. The Cross of Lorraine. And there were armbands that we dropped to the Resistance movements and they had the Cross of Lorraine and when they decided that they would come out and surrender. Well, not surrender but join up with the advancing —
JH: Yeah.
FB: British and American armies. That they would wear these armbands to say that they were friends and —
JH: Yes. So the nature of the operations sounds like it was changing. The Resistance. As the front lines were going east they became more open.
FB: Yeah.
JH: More overt. The Resistance.
FB: Well, towards the end of that stage the only two German occupied countries left were Norway and Denmark, the others had all been liberated.
JH: Yes.
FB: And that’s when they, that’s when they said to us, ‘Oh, listen fellas. You’ve been [bludging] around for too long. We’re going to stick you on main force.’ [laughs]. So we finished up at a Lancaster Finishing School.
JH: That’s interesting. Just before we get on to that I read somewhere that the peak effort with the SOE work was about June, July ’44 which is —
FB: Yeah.
JH: Which was when you arrived there.
FB: Started there. Yeah.
JH: So it was full on then.
FB: Yes. Yeah.
JH: And so these operations were there occasions where you go out to say some, some target field in France and you couldn’t find the target area? Or you know, did you hit the target area every time?
FB: Not every time. No. No. You see, it could be any number of reasons. The whole drop area, drop zone might have been taken over by the Germans. They might have found them and no doubt they shot them and so that was one reason. They [pause] but —
JH: So a pretty good success rate to your, your missions.
FB: Well, I think we did. Yes.
JH: Yeah.
FB: I mean we didn’t have any of this flash blooming navigational equipment that they’ve got today.
JH: Yes.
FB: And we actually had to find, say in Norway an actual paddock. And in the bushes around that paddock was the Resistance group waiting. Waiting to hear an aeroplane.
JH: Yes.
FB: A Stirling coming. And then when they were identified as being a Stirling they’d come out and start waving to you. We’d make the drop and off we’d go. So —
JH: Was there radio contact with the people on the ground?
FB: There could have been. There was what they called S phones I think they called them.
JH: Yeah.
FB: But we never used it.
JH: Yeah.
FB: But, but we did carry this sort of portable phone to contact them but we never saw any reason to have to use it so —
JH: It would be quite dangerous I should think, communicating with the ground crew with the Germans trying to vector in.
FB: Yeah. No thanks.
JH: Yeah. Yeah.
FB: It opens up too many avenues.
JH: Yeah. So, of all those operations, Fred maybe give me one or two examples of ones that really stick out for whatever reason.
FB: Well, I think at that time when we dropped those two Norwegians in to Norway stands out in my mind.
JH: Just finding them. Finding the place to start with.
FB: And they did.
JH: And that’s a long, one long trip.
FB: Normally there’s somebody to meet them but they said, ‘No. Nobody will meet us. You get to the drop zone, where you think the drop zone is and kick us out.’ You know, out you go. ‘And we’ll find our destination from there.’ They carried their skis with them. They were sent out when they were shot out of the aircraft and they just teamed up with somebody that they would have gone to. So we had to be a hundred percent accurate when we were dropping so as they knew where they were.
JH: Yes.
FB: And knew which way to go to meet up with their, with their mates.
JH: Yes.
FB: And the next day SOE contacted us and said that the drop was successful.
JH: Yes.
FB: They were landed safely. You got them in the right place and everything else.
JH: Yes.
FB: So we were rather pleased with that. And that, that same people that I made contact with after the war.
JH: Yes.
FB: Mr and Mrs, well he was Mr Fosse.
JH: Yeah.
FB: I just, through the Norwegian Embassy in Canberra and they told, told me that yes they had got in touch with Mr Fosse. First of all to see whether he was happy to talk to me and he said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He said, ‘But I’m deaf. I’m not very good but my wife could take all the messages.’ And so I got on the phone to Norway and this voice answered the phone. A woman. And I said like a couple of, you know. She only speaks Norwegian so this is going to be a bit of a problem [laughs] So, I said, ‘Oh, are you Mrs Fosse?’ ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Well, look, Bowman’s my name.’ I said, ‘You’ve probably been expecting a call from me.’ She said, ‘Yes. Yes.’ I said, ‘Oh, I can’t speak Norwegian,’ I said and so, you know, ‘What do we do? Speak English?’ She said, ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ she said, ‘I’m a Scot.’ [laughs] So, I said, ‘Look, that’s great. That’s great,’ I said, ‘So my name’s Fred. What’s your name?’ Whatever it was. And we had a great old conversation and he was sitting down beside her and I asked about the drop and she said it was spot on.’ She said, ‘They landed in the snow and it sloped down towards a lake.’
JH: Yeah.
FB: She said they would have rolled down that snow in to the lake, she said only they came up against a tree which saved them from [laughs] saved them from freezing to death. Honestly, I had a great conversation with her.
JH: Yeah. Did you ever meet up face to face?
FB: Not meet up.
JH: No.
FB: But I had a lot of, a lot off the telephone conversations.
JH: Yeah. How marvellous.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Gosh. Yeah.
FB: That’s why. So she was the one I said that, I said that sort of Mr Fosse went up to the north of England to do his training to become an agent and he met this girl and he went back after the war.
JH: Yes.
FB: And married her.
JH: What a story.
FB: They got married.
JH: What a story.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Yeah. Well, Fred, why don’t we move on to when you went on to heavy bomber conversion. Lancaster conversion. What, what happened there?
FB: Well, the [pause] at that stage when we did that all the other work, the other type of work was, was finished, you know. I mean virtually the whole of occupied Europe except Norway and Denmark had been relieved or released or whatever the word is.
JH: Liberated. Yeah.
FB: Liberated. Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
FB: And they said to us, well look, you know, over you go to Main Force Bomber Command. So we went and did a conversion course up at Blyton I think it was.
JH: Yes. Was this the end of ’44 or 1945 now?
FB: No. 1945.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
FB: And so we went up there and did this conversion course on to, on to Lancasters and joined Main Force which was an entirely different thing because on this special duties thing that we were doing with the drop zones in to the Resistance movements was all low level and of course the other Bomber Command is all twenty thousand feet.
JH: In formation. Yeah.
FB: Oh no. Not formation. When I say not form, not the strict formation that the Americans used to do.
JH: Yes.
FB: You [pause] it’s a sort of a loose formation. You sort of congregate up around the Wash somewhere and you don’t fly in formation but you leave there in a group.
JH: Yes.
FB: And they used to divide at least, suppose there were six hundred planes on a job
JH: A stream. Yeah.
FB: There might be four meeting up times.
JH: Yeah.
FB: You say, you know when there was one group and then another ten minutes later the next group of that group sort of —
JH: Yes.
FB: Come to the fore and —
JH: Yeah. So, so were you assigned to a new squadron or was it your squadron en masse?
FB: No. No. It was our squadron there.
JH: Yeah. Ok.
FB: Which of course, it was, it was our squadron and they sent us to a new base. [unclear] Anyway, it was, it was a new base.
JH: Was it Lincolnshire or in Cambridgeshire?
FB: No. No. East Anglia. We had Cambridge groups.
JH: Yes.
FB: Bury St Edmunds. That sort of area.
JH: Was this Number 3 Group.
FB: Yes. All Number 3.
JH: Yeah. Still Number 3.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Yeah. Yeah.
FB: But as I say all the operations were initiated by SOE but Bomber Command —
JH: Yes.
FB: As such didn’t come into it.
JH: Yes. What the hardened bomber, Bomber Command crews what did, what did they make of you guys coming out of the blue?
FB: There was a little bit of a [laughs] there was what you might call a settling in period [laughs]
JH: Yes.
FB: Because we went over. Oh, I forget where we were based then, and of course this bomber crew was already, you know was already there and we were the sort of new boys on it.
JH: Yeah.
FB: The new boys. A lot of bloody skites you are.
JH: Yes.
FB: The usual story.
JH: So, was it sorted out in the pub?
FB: Yeah.
JH: On the dartboard.
FB: Oh yeah. It doesn’t take long. The old, the old pub solves a lot of problem. You probably asked me that question, I think. How you crewed up? Did you?
JH: Yes, I did. Yes. You went to the pub.
FB: Went to the pub.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. Not a bad place to start.
FB: I mean the CO told you to do that. He said, ‘Go to the pub. Meet up, crew up and if you wake up the next morning and say, ‘I couldn’t possibly fly with that so and so, just tell them you can’t. You won’t be joining the crew.’ And find somebody else.
JH: These, these days you’d do psychological profiling and see who matches up.
FB: Oh yes. There would be a lot of, a lot of tests.
JH: Yes. Yes. So, so, so you got on to some operations from there.
FB: Yes, we did. We did. Funny, I think we only did three or four bombing operations.
JH: Yes.
FB: It, it was right at the finish of the war.
JH: Yes.
FB: And, but we, we did one that was probably worth recording.
JH: Yes.
FB: And it was to Kiel.
JH: Submarines. Yeah. Submarine pens.
FB: Kiel. Kiel Harbour.
JH: Yeah.
FB: They said, they said —
JH: Yeah.
FB: We were bombing dock installations and so on.
JH: Docks. Yes.
FB: So we went to Kiel and we were making our run in and the Pathfinders had been there ahead of us and so forth and the, all of a sudden we had this terrific explosion or something go underneath us because we were about twenty thousand feet.
JH: Yes.
FB: And this explosion would have been on the ground. Anyway, we got back and reported it to intelligence at the interrogation and they said, ‘Oh, all the crews are talking about this.’ Anyway, so a day or so later the headlines, “RAF sink the German pocket battleship the Admiral von Scheer in Kiel Harbour.” Somebody, some plan ahead of us must have dropped the bomb down the funnel.
JH: Down the funnel. Yeah.
FB: And up she blew in Kiel Harbour.
JH: Yes.
FB: Boy. Yeah.
JH: Yeah. And in those operations I’m, I’m guessing that the fighters and the flak were manageable at that stage.
FB: Oh yes. It had eased off considerable. I mean, I’d have hated to have been doing the same operation in 1943 as what we were doing in early 1945. Early 1945 the Germans were —
Other 2: Sorry Fred.
FB: That’s alright.
Other 2: Come up for a drink you two if you like.
FB: Pardon?
JH: Yes. So, so then it was all over I guess pretty soon after that. Were you in any operations bringing the POWs back?
FB: Yeah.
JH: Or Operation Manna.
FB: Yeah. Manna.
JH: For example. Yeah.
FB: Yeah. We were in the one, the one bringing the POWs back was called Exodus, wasn’t it?
JH: Yes.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Exodus. That’s it.
FB: That we flew them back from Juvencourt.
JH: You might, you might have flown my father back.
FB: Oh, for goodness sake.
JH: He was a POW. Yeah.
FB: We flew a lot of Sikhs back.
JH: Yes.
FB: And they were very very disciplined too and I, one came up to me with a little box brownie which was quite illegal [laughs] And I said, ‘You line up. You line up there and I’ll take a photograph of you.’ Oh, he yelled out two few commands and this whole group, twenty four I think we took, yes so they all lined up outside the aircraft.
JH: Yes.
FB: And —
JH: And what about Operation Manna in Holland.
FB: Manna. Yes. That was, that was very interesting. That was —
JH: Yeah.
FB: That was dropping the food into, into Holland.
JH: Yes.
FB: And it was all dropped. Mostly it was either in sacks.
JH: Yes.
FB: Where they had just, we dropped them on to a muddy football oval or something and something went falling into the mud didn’t do any damage to them.
JH: Yes.
FB: And then we just dropped them there and, and went on our way. But the thing that struck me was the first one we did the war hadn’t finished. It was a couple of days before the war finished.
JH: Yes.
FB: But the Dutch people arranged with the German High Command or something to allow us to go ahead and drop this food.
JH: Yeah.
FB: To the Dutch people and the Germans said, ‘Yes, we’ll let you go in but you’ve got to keep at a certain height.
JH: Yes.
FB: You’ve got to have your guns pointing northwards.
JH: Yeah.
FB: And do this. Do this.
JH: Yes.
FB: You get one warning signal otherwise bang bang.
JH: I’ve read about this. I’ve read about this.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
FB: And, and the thing I that always remember the first time we went and the war hadn’t finished. They had to, before the war officially finished over there and the Germans were in command and it was all done very Germanic, you know. Disciplined. The next day we went after that the Germans had gone. They’d said, let’s get back to Germany and the Dutch people had taken over.
JH: Yes.
FB: And along an embankment as we flew in on the starboard side on an embankment they’d put, they’d got old sheets of paper or just sheets of —
JH: Yes.
FB: Bedding sheets or something and they had this sign up, “Thanks RAF.” And, and honestly that sort of brought tears to your eyes to think of it, you know.
JH: Yes.
FB: One of the very few decent jobs of Bomber Command, I think.
JH: Yes. Well, my wife and I used to live in Holland in the ‘70s and we met people that still talked about Operation Manna.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Because there was absolutely no food.
FB: That’s right.
JH: They were eating, they were eating tulip bulbs, and they were very thankful of this Operation Manna. These people we talked to.
FB: But I’ve never forgotten that sign. It was quite big letters.
JH: That would have —
FB: “Thanks RAF,” you know.
JH: Yeah.
FB: That’s the first time any, anybody’s thanked us for what we’d been doing [laughs]
JH: That’s as good as a campaign medal.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Well, tell me a little about what happened then. I know, I know a lot of Bomber Command air crew especially the Aussies all went down to Brighton at some stage.
FB: That’s right.
JH: And my, my father went down. He was there on his honeymoon.
FB: Yeah.
JH: And he met up with his mates from prison camp.
FB: Oh, for goodness sake.
JH: So my mother wasn’t that impressed because they were down the pub.
FB: Yeah.
JH: On their honeymoon.
FB: I agree with your mother [laughs] Yeah. N [pause] Yes they were, they sent us to a place called Gamston I think it was. Gamston, somewhere. It was a holding unit and we just, they said to us, ‘You can go on leave. You can go on leave for as long as you like as long as you keep us informed where you’re going.’ So we had free rail travel and —
JH: Marvellous. Yeah.
FB: Yeah.
JH: And then, and then you were allotted a berth in a, on a ship.
FB: On the Andes. Yeah.
JH: Yes.
FB: Yeah. Boy.
JH: Was that through the Suez Canal?
FB: Yeah.
JH: That way.
FB: Yeah. Through the Suez Canal.
JH: Yes. Yeah. You weren’t on the same ship as Don Browning, our friend.
FB: Well, I could have been.
JH: Yeah. Yeah.
FB: I could have been. You wouldn’t know. There was —
JH: Yes. Yes.
FB: I mean as I say we were packed on. Goodness me.
JH: Yeah.
FB: I don’t know how many people were on a ship.
JH: Yes.
FB: Yeah.
JH: So what was the feeling? So where did you arrive? Was it in Sydney?
FB: No.
JH: Your landfall. In Melbourne?
FB: We went to Melbourne and then it was going on to New Zealand. It had a lot of New Zealand —
JH: Yes.
FB: Airmen. So it was going on to New Zealand and we had to change ship on to the Stratheden.
JH: Yes.
FB: To come up to Sydney.
JH: Yeah. So you came in through the Heads and —
FB: Beautiful day. Beautiful.
JH: Yeah, and family waiting.
FB: Yeah. At Bradfield Park.
JH: Yes.
FB: Yeah. So [unclear]
JH: Yes.
FB: It didn’t take long to find them.
JH: Yeah. So, so what happened? I suppose you had to get a life. Get a career.
FB: Oh, no. I’d started in the accountancy business and I’d passed.
JH: Oh, yes. Yeah.
FB: One or two intermediate examinations and —
JH: So you took off where you left off.
FB: Thank goodness I had enough sense at that stage to say well I must persevere with this and get, get qualified.
JH: Yes.
FB: And I did in that sense to do that.
JH: Yeah.
FB: I didn’t have much sense to do anything else.
JH: Yes. Yeah. So then you started a family. You married.
FB: Yeah. All those things. Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
FB: But I really didn’t have many troubles settling down I don’t think.
JH: Yes.
FB: You did get your odd outbursts, you know.
JH: Yes. Yeah. One I was going to ask you whether the kind of very secretive operation you did, did you have to sign a secrecy form, you know.
FB: No.
JH: Thirty years or something.
FB: No, didn’t have to sign anything.
JH: Yeah.
FB: You were told. You were told that was top secret.
JH: Yes.
FB: And don’t you dare infringe it.
JH: Yes. Yes.
FB: Or else.
JH: Yeah. Yes. Because I know my father didn’t talk about hardly anything.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Until later on in life.
FB: No.
JH: Yeah.
FB: No. All the stuff at Tempsford in those days was top, top secret, you know.
JH: Yes. Have you been back to Tempsford?
FB: No. I’m not able to travel like I used to.
JH: Ok.
FB: It’s a bit of a problem.
JH: Well, I’ll tell you what. Because I go back there to right there where, every so often where I was born and I’ll visit it for you and I’ll have a look.
FB: Well, thank you.
JH: There’s probably not much there.
FB: They, they have a yearly get together. I’ve probably got —
JH: Yes. Yeah.
FB: Some of them there.
JH: Yeah.
FB: So do you want to make yourself known?
JH: Yes. And is there a pub there? Well, maybe you weren’t allowed to go to pubs in Tempsford. Did, was there a local pub?
FB: Sandy. At Sandy. Sandy is in —
JH: Sandy. Yeah. Yes.
FB: There was a pub at Sandy.
JH: Yes.
FB: We used to call it the Sandy Battle.
JH: Well, I can’t believe it. My, my people used to farm all around Sandy and, yeah.
FB: For goodness sake.
JH: So I’ll do that. So —
FB: I just wish I could travel.
JH: Yes.
FB: And go back to Tempsford and have a, because they do have a big reunion there once a year.
JH: Yes.
FB: It’s amazing really how many people will —
JH: Yes.
FB: Must have got together to preserve the story of Tempsford.
JH: Yes.
FB: Incredible. And prince what’s his name? Prince Charles is a great supporter of them.
JH: Yes.
FB: He goes to their functions, of course.
JH: Yeah.
FB: So, I don’t suppose, I suppose the other squadrons, Australian squadrons, and they probably have much the same thing. 460 Squadron.
JH: Yeah. I don’t think you hear so much about Tempsford as the other bases.
FB: No.
JH: Mainly because it was probably, you know very secretive.
FB: Yeah.
JH: In the war.
FB: It sort of got something to do with royalty too because the commanding officer of Tempsford was the King’s pilot, Group Captain Fielden.
JH: Oh right.
FB: And he was, he was station commander.
JH: Was he the station commander?
FB: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
FB: Group Captain Fielden.
JH: Fielden. That’s interesting. So there’s a special interest from Prince Charles. Yeah.
FB: So he became, he was knighted so I don’t know whether they call him sir now. Like they did with me [laughs] Yeah.
JH: Well, Fred this has been very interesting. I was going to ask you, you participate in veteran’s activities?
FB: Oh yes. I do, and I’ve had quite a bit to do with them because I don’t know where it all started but a lot of people have been writing books and writing articles on, on the special duty squadrons and Tempsford squadrons, and I guess I’m probably one of the very few still above the ground.
JH: Yes.
FB: And so I well get involved.
JH: Yes.
FB: Tell them what was is.
JH: So is there an Association here in Australia or are you linked up with a UK Association?
FB: Well, no. I think that was, what did they call them? ATVA. The Australian Tempsford Veterans Association, I think. ATV.
JH: Ok. I didn’t know there was one quite to be quite honest.
FB: Yeah. There is one. Yes.
JH: Yeah.
FB: But I haven’t, physically speaking I haven’t been able to travel.
JH: Yes.
FB: So, that’s my only regret. That I haven’t been able to go. Because they are big events. Once a year they have it at Tempsford.
JH: Yes.
FB: They come from near and far.
JH: Yes.
FB: I don’t think there’s too many of us left who served on the squadron operationally.
JH: Yeah. Yes.
FB: But Prince Charles is a great supporter of it. He, he goes to all the functions and of course his, he, he would know Group Captain Fielden of course.
JH: Yes. Yes. Well, Fred I’ve really enjoyed this interviewing you today and learning about this special duties.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Type of operations that you were on.
FB: It is very interesting, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve had some very interesting discussions with these agents at times, you know saying, ‘What happens if this happens? What will you do?’
JH: And I believe you had a word for them.
FB: Joes.
JH: Joes. Yeah. Yes. That’s it. I’d read that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
FB: I, I did write a book on it as a matter of fact.
JH: Oh, you have. Show it to me and I’ll mention it in the interview here. Yeah.
FB: Look, if you promise to give it back to me.
JH: Yes.
FB: Having said that where is it? Deary deary me where is it? [pause]
JH: Is it in these shelves here?
FB: Yeah.
JH: Let me see.
FB: Yes. Joes.
JH: What’s it called? The book.
FB: Oh, there’s been quite a few books written on it really. See what a shambles this is. Oh blimey. That’s, I don’t know whether you saw this or not. That’s the book that’s for me.
JH: Yes.
FB: Yeah.
JH: Yeah. I I had a copy the other day for you but you’ve got it. Yes. Is it up here? Is that it?
FB: No.
JH: SOE.
FB: Yeah. Look. SOE. Oh, that’s one of them. I’ve probably got all sorts of books on it.
JH: Yes.
FB: Oh, deary me. What’s over here? [pause] That’s the book.
JH: Oh, thank you. Yeah. For the interview Fred has shown me a book he has written. It’s called, “You’ll Be Too Young.” And it’s his memoirs and —
FB: If you promise to return it you can take it and read it if you want.
JH: Well, thank you very much. Yes. So, it was published in 2005 in Sydney.
FB: And it’s all true.
JH: Well, thank you very much.
FB: No bulldust [laughs] Now, if you —
JH: Thank you Fred.
FB: If you promise to return it.
JH: We’ll sign off now. Thank you very much for the interview.
FB: Oh, you’re welcome.
JH: So, I’ll stop the tape here.
FB: That’s all I ask is that it gets returned because —
JH: I will for sure.
FB: I’m going to have to approach them any day now to see if they can give me a reprint on all this.
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 Frederick Arthur Bowman
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
John Horsburgh
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-11-21
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ABowmanFA181121, PBowmanFA1801
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending revision of OH transcription
Format
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00:59:00 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Australian Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Australia
Denmark
France
Germany
Great Britain
Norway
England--Bedfordshire
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Cumbria
Germany--Kiel
New South Wales
Description
An account of the resource
Frederick Bowman was born in Sydney in 1924. He was a member of the Air Training Corps, and when he was eighteen he joined the Air Force. He went to Kingaroy for basic training, and did his wireless course at Maryborough, and Evans Head for bombing and gunnery training. He arrived in UK at No. 11 Personnel Despatch & Receiving Centre RAAF in Brighton, and was posted to RAF Millom to the Advanced Flying Unit flying in Avro Ansons. He was posted to RAF Westcott where he crewed up, and was posted to 138 Special Duties Squadron based at RAF Tempsford where he flew on operations to Scandinavia. Close to the end of the war he joined Bomber Command on bombing operations flying in Lancasters, notably to attack the docks at Kiel which resulted in the sinking of the German Pocket Battleship the Admiral Scheer. He published his memoirs in a book titled, “You Will Be Too Young to Die.”
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944-07
1945
138 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
Bombing and Gunnery School
crewing up
Lancaster
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
RAF Millom
RAF Tempsford
training
wireless operator