2
25
616
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/155/2172/PWhitworthJ1515.2.jpg
94ca0c4cccfa51b0db5a611ca72acd47
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/155/2172/PWhitworthJ1516.2.jpg
71465727745c8701bda2400c06efabaf
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
Whitworth, John
J Whitworth
John Leslie Whitworth
J L Whitworth
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. The collection consists of an oral history interview with Flying Officer John L Whitworth (b. 1921), one photocopy, seven pilot’s navigation charts and eight photographs which include seven target photographs. John Whitworth was a pilot and flew Mosquitos with 162 Squadron Pathfinders from RAF Bourn in 1944 and 1945.
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
2016-06-22
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
Whitworth, JL
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
Berlin
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PWhitworthJ1515, PWhitworthJ1516
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1945-03-22
1945-03-23
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
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
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1945-03-22
1945-03-23
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Description
An account of the resource
Target photograph taken on an operation to Berlin. Several streaks of light are clustered toward the top left of the photograph and others are across the centre and lower half. No ground features are visible. One small flare is visible to the right of centre and the photograph seems to have been annotated with an arrow pointing towards this. The photograph is also annotated '5B' in the upper left corner and is captioned:
'4403. BRN 22/23.3.45//NT8" 25000 357 2340 Berlin C
4MC500DT C42secs F/L WHITWORTH C162'
On the reverse is written 'GROUND MARKERS AND SKY MARKERS'. Further information has been redacted to protect the privacy of the lender.
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.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Andy Fitter
162 Squadron
aerial photograph
bombing
Pathfinders
target indicator
target photograph
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/87/2205/LWoolgarRLA139398v1.2.pdf
35b154fb1d680686ee063c2241368776
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
Woolgar, Reg
Reg Woolgar
R L A Woolgar
Jimmy Woolgar
Subject
The topic of the resource
World War (1939-1945)
Bombing, Aerial
Description
An account of the resource
<a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/browse?collection=87">17 items</a>. The collection consists of an oral history <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/2148">interview</a> with air gunner Reginald Woolgar DFC (139398 Royal Air Force), correspondence to his father about him being missing in action and subsequently rescued from the sea, his <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/2205">log book</a>, <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/854">service and release book</a> and nine photographs.<br /><br /> He flew operations as an air gunner with 49 and 192 Squadrons.<br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Reg Woolgar and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle. <br /><br />This collection also contains items concerning John William Wilkinson. Additional information on John William Wilkinson is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/125319/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Woolgar, R
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-04
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.
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
Please scroll down to see all X items in this collection.
Reg ‘Jimmy’ Woolgar was born and schooled in Hove. He began working life as a valuations assistant and was training to be a surveyor, which was interrupted when, in December 1939, he joined the RAF. Although he had aspirations to become a pilot, he trained as a wireless operator/air gunner instead. His wireless operator training was carried out at the wireless training school, RAF Yatesbury. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/87/849/PWoolgarRLA1609.2.jpg His air gunnery training on Fairy Battle aircraft was conducted at RAF West Freugh. On 15 November 1940 he was promoted to sergeant and posted to No 10 OTU at RAF Upper Heyford. https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/87/845/PWoolgarRLA1601.2.jpg Initially flying Anson aircraft and then Hampdens with C Flight, he had his first ‘Lucky Jim’ moment, on 6 February 1941, when his Hampden aircraft was forced to crash land in a field near Cottesmore, in Lincolnshire. The aircraft was written off, but he and the pilot survived with minor injuries. At the end of operational training, instead of going directly onto operasations, he spent the next 5 months as a screen operator instructor. Eventually, on 1 September 1941, he was posted to 49 Squadron, Hampdens, at RAF Scampton https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/852 where his very first operational trip (described as a baptism of fire) was to Berlin. With headwinds going out and coming back, and nil visibility, it was likely the crew would have to bail out. Fortunately, the skipper found a break in the clouds and the aircraft landed wheels down in a field near Louth. The aircraft had to be recovered back to base, transported by road, on a low loader. On another occasion, on a mine laying operation to Oslo Fjord, his aircraft was peppered with anti-aircraft fire, it returned to base with 36 bullet holes in the fuselage and mainplane. A bullet had also passed through the upright of his gun sight while he was looking through it, whilst another tore through his flying suit. The nickname ‘Lucky Jim’ was beginning to stick.
In February 1942, on an operation to Manheim, the port engine, hit by flak, cut dead. Despite jettisoning all superfluous weight, which unfortunately included all the navigation equipment, the aircraft rapidly lost height, and the pilot ditched the aircraft in the English Channel. Whilst the crew had struggled to keep the aircraft airborne, (on a single engine), it had steered on a massive curve and unbeknown to them was headed down the English Channel, before it ditched. The crew scrambled out onto the wing and managed to inflate the dingy, then had to cut the cord attaching the dingy to the aircraft using a pair of nail scissors, moments before it sunk. In the water for hours, the crew thought they were drifting near the Yorkshire coast, but were rescued by a motor anti-submarine boat, much to their surprise, near the Isle of Wight.
Operational flying was intense, Reg would feel wound up before take-off and there was much apprehension on the way out to the target. Often, they flew through intense flak that was sometimes so close they could smell it. There was always a sense of sense of relief once they came away from the target. In between operations, each day was treated as it came along with many off-duty hours spent socialising in the local hostelries https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/853
After his first operational tour (he completed two) he was commissioned and became gunnery leader with 192 Squadron in 100 Group.
After the war ended, he signed on for an extra two years and was posted to Palestine as an air movements staff officer. Luck was again on his side when, one day, he was on his way to an Air Priorities Board Meeting at the King David Hotel when the hotel was bombed, resulting in many army and civilian casualties.
After a short tour in Kenya, as Senior Movements Staff Officer, he returned to Palestine flying with 38 Squadron until August 1947. In his flying career he amassed over 1000 flying hours. For services to his country Reg was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/858
He was released from the RAF in September 1947. Initially employed as an assistant valuations officer, he studied to become a Chartered Surveyor and secured a job as a senior valuer with the City of London. He later became the planning valuer of the city. After 14 years he was made a partner at the firm St Quintin Son and Stanley. Reg retired in 1971.
08 December 1939: Joined RAF as a wireless operator/air gunner
28 August 1940: 145, 3 Wing, RAF Yatesbury - Wireless Operator training
29 October 1940 - 15 November 1940: RAF West Freugh, No 4 Bombing and Gunnery School, flying Battle aircraft
November 1940: Promoted to Sergeant
15 November 1940 - 20 August 1941: RAF Upper Heyford, No 10 Operational Training Unit flying Anson and Hampden aircraft
02 September 1941 - 24 March 1942: RAF Scampton, 49 Squadron, flying Hampden aircraft
28 April 1942 - 24 June 1942: 1485 Target Towing and Gunnery Flight flying Whitley and Wellington aircraft
02 July 1942 – 3 July 1942: RAF Manby, Air Gunnery Instructor Course
4 July – 10 July 1942: RAF Scampton, Air Gunnery Instructor flying Manchester and Oxford aircraft
25 July 1942 – 10 August 1942: RAF Wigsley, Air Gunnery Instructor flying Lancaster aircraft
3 October – 27 October 1942: RAF Sutton Bridge flying Wellington and Hampden aircraft
28 October 1942: RAF Sutton Bridge, Gunnery Leader Course
End of 1942: Awarded RAF Commission
09 Nov 1942 – 18 March 1943: RAF Fulbeck flying Manchester aircraft
14 May 1943 – 11 June 1944: RAF Sutton Bridge flying Wellington aircraft
20 June 1944 – 27 July 1945 RAF Foulsham, 192 Squadron flying Halifax and Wellington aircraft
29 April 1946 – 30 August 1946: Palestine, Air Movements Staff Officer
01 September 1946 – 21 January 1947: Kenya, Senior Movements Staff Officer
30 January1947 – 10 June 1947: Ein Shemer, Palestine, 38 Squadron flying Lancaster aircraft
13 July 1947 139398 Flt Lt RLA Woolgar released from Service.
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
Reg Woolgar's observer's and air gunner's flying log book
Description
An account of the resource
Observer's and air gunner's flying log book for Flight Lieutenant Reg Woolgar from 29 November 1940 to 21 July 1947. Detailing training schedule, instructional duties and operations flown. Served at RAF Yatesbury, RAF West Freugh, RAF Upper Heyford, RAF Weston, RAF Peterborough, RAF Scampton, RAF Barrow, RAF Manby, RAF Wigsley, RAF Sutton Bridge, RAF Fulbeck, RAF Catfoss, RAF Foulsham, Levant AHQ, Nairobi AHQ and RAF Ein Shemer. Aircraft flown were Dominie I, Fairey Battle, Anson, Hampden, Hereford, Whitley, Wellington, Manchester, Lancaster Mk 1, Mk 3, Mk 7, Oxford, B17, Master, Martinet, Halifax Mk 3, Tiger Moth, York, Dakota, Lodestar, Hudson and Argus. He carried out a total of 43 operations on two tours with 49 and 192 Squadrons as a wireless operator / air gunner on the following targets in France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Sweden: Aachen, battleships in Channel, Berlin, Bremen, Brest, Cologne, Emden, Essen, Frankfurt, Fresians, Halse, Hamburg, Kassel, Kiel Bay, Le Havre, Lorient, Mannheim, Helsingborg, Oslo Fjord, Rostock, Wilhelmshaven, Flensburg, Frankfurt, Gdynia, Mainz, Munster, S.D. operations, S.D. patrol, St Leu, Stade, Stuttgart, Walcheren and Wiesbaden. His pilots on operations were Pilot Officer Falconer, Pilot Officer Allsebrook, Sergeant Davis, Pilot Officer Ellis, Pilot Officer Hazelhurst, Pilot Officer Thomsett, Wing Commander David Donaldson, Flight Lieutenant Hayter-Preston, Flight Lieutenant Stephens, Flight Lieutenant Ford and Squadron Leader Fawkes. Includes notes on crash landings and forced landings, ditching off the Isle of Wight, infra-red trials and a Cook’s tour in the Ruhr Hamburg area. Reg was assessed as having exceptional night vision, had proficiency record above average and received air officer commanding commendation on second tour.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
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.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Kenya
Norway
Poland
Scotland
Sweden
Middle East--Palestine
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--Oslofjorden
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Oxfordshire
Europe--Frisian Islands
France--Brest
France--Creil
France--Le Havre
France--Lorient
Germany--Aachen
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Essen
Germany--Flensburg
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kassel
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Rostock
Germany--Stade (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Wiesbaden
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Netherlands--Walcheren
Norway--Halse
Poland--Gdynia
Scotland--Wigtownshire
Sweden--Helsingborg
Netherlands
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Atlantic Ocean--Kiel Bay
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-09-02
1941-09-03
1941-09-06
1941-09-07
1941-09-08
1941-09-09
1941-09-12
1941-09-13
1941-09-16
1941-09-17
1941-09-28
1941-09-29
1941-09-30
1941-10-01
1941-01-13
1941-01-14
1941-11-07
1941-11-08
1941-11-09
1941-11-10
1941-11-23
1941-11-23
1941-11-26
1941-11-27
1941-11-30
1941-12-01
1941-12-07
1941-12-08
1941-12-16
1941-12-17
1942-01-14
1942-01-15
1942-01-17
1942-01-18
1942-01-25
1942-01-26
1942-02-07
1942-02-10
1942-02-11
1942-02-12
1942-02-14
1942-02-15
1942-03-10
1942-03-11
1944-06-30
1942-03-31
1944-07-04
1942-03-05
1944-08-07
1944-08-20
1944-09-13
1944-09-15
1944-09-17
1944-09-19
1944-10-03
1944-11-18
1944-12-12
1944-12-13
1944-12-15
1944-12-16
1944-12-18
1944-12-19
1945-01-16
1945-01-17
1945-01-22
1945-01-28
1945-01-29
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-03-30
1945-03-31
1945-05-02
1945-05-03
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
LWoolgarRLA139398v1
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
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
16 OTU
192 Squadron
49 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
B-17
Battle
bombing
bombing of the Creil/St Leu d’Esserent V-1 storage areas (4/5 July 1944)
C-47
Cook’s tour
crash
ditching
Dominie
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Hampden
Hudson
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Manchester
Martinet
mine laying
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Barrow in Furness
RAF Foulsham
RAF Fulbeck
RAF Manby
RAF Peterborough
RAF Scampton
RAF Sutton Bridge
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF West Freugh
RAF Wigsley
RAF Yatesbury
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
Whitley
wireless operator / air gunner
York
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/178/2341/PBriggsR1613.2.jpg
21d447364bbb0c33d44abf36914a71a4
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/178/2341/ABriggsR160128.1.mp3
03beb9ecd0a2c80b649bf4291792a9a5
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
Briggs, Roy
R Briggs
Description
An account of the resource
24 items. One oral history interview with Roy Briggs (1893726 Royal Air Force), his logbook, service material, training material, official documents and 12 photographs. Roy Briggs trained as a wireless operator and flew four operations with 576 Squadron from RAF Fiskerton. He also took took part in Operation Manna and Operation Exodus as well as Cook’s tours over Germany.
The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Roy Briggs 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
2016-01-28
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Briggs, R
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.
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and I am in Hemel Hempstead with Roy Briggs who was a wireless operator in the war and we’re going to start talking about his earliest days and right through to his working life as a civilian. So, Roy, where did it all start?
RB: In Battersea. I was lucky but we lived in a London terrace which was by the side of Clapham Junction Station, and Mac in number 3, my dad in number 5 married two girls from 17. There was still a girl and a boy left there. One, one aunt was married and one of the sons was married but they only lived locally so when I was born we moved to Balmoral [?] Street opposite Price’s Candle Factory alongside the Thames. We lived in a downstairs flat. This, what I’m saying now I’ve got vague remembrance but it’s mainly from the family talking. When the Thames got high the water come up the manholes and come down in the basement where we were and the police knocked us up and we, we went upstairs. We weren’t there long. My grandmother on my father’s side had diabetes and lost both her legs so mum, dad and me moved back to help grandad with nan so from then on I saw my two grandfathers and my grandmother every day. My grandad, who had come from the country, had rabbits, chickens and racing pigeons and I was very involved with him with the racing pigeons from an early age. He died by the time I was ten and I used to put rings on the, on the young birds. They used, he also got fairly bed ridden and he instructed me from the bed on what to do. I matched them up, pairing them up for mating and so I rung them. I took them up to Clapham Common and released them. We had a friend who used to race our pigeons so I was down there most days. My aunts, on Saturday afternoon, used to go to Battersea High Street and Northrop Road shopping and they used to come in to see grandad and grandad so on a Saturday afternoon it was, in the summer, it was the men playing darts in the garden and the girls chatting with nan and drinking tea indoors. [mild laughter] The only time that I went away I think I went to Westward Ho! I think it was only for a week, what they called in those days school journeys. We had an undertaker’s opposite us on the corner and horses. The Chapel of Rest was opposite us and the horses used to be there in those days when they went I went and picked up the manure and put it in buckets of water for grandad for watering his flowers and stuff. And in Battersea in those days that was sort of the life. My father worked at South Kensington Museum. The highlights in the summer used to be when he used to cycle home and come in to Battersea Park and mum used to take us down and we met in the park and had a picnic and played games before we came home. When I got bigger we used to go as far as Clapham Common and Wandsworth Common during the summer holidays but that was about it. I went to Shillington Street School at first until I was, till I was ten and then I went to Latchmere, Latchmere Road. I broke me thigh when I was ten, I didn’t realise it, playing football. On a Sunday morning going down to get the chicken food and the pigeon food I took the dog with me and on the way home I collapsed and got up and didn’t realise at the time but when I got up I shot the bones up. Somebody come to help me and that they hopped home and told me dad and he came down and got an ambulance and took me in to Battersea General Hospital where I was, where I was put on traction for weeks, for some weeks to pull me leg down and then when they took me down to plaster me they measured both my legs and the one that they hadn’t pulled down had grown so they put me up again to pull the other, the leg that had broken down to get it to the same length. My uncle worked for Battersea Borough Council, driving. Used to come and look over the wall, get on the back of the van and wave to me [laughs]. My grandad looked after the horses for Battersea Borough Council and he used to go in early of a morning and feed them and clean them, get them ready to take the dustcarts and that out so he used to come home about half past nine to have his breakfast. So, he, he was around during the day. He used to then go back in the evening to feed them and look after them in the evening. [pause] Yeah. That —
CB: What about school?
RB: Pardon?
CB: What about school? So, when did you leave school?
RB: 1939. I was, I’d put in for going to the, be a telegraph boy but went and had tests and that but there was people at sixteen who’d left Grammar School going for the same job because it was thought to be a fairly good job [laughs] in those days and I did not get accepted so I then started at Quickflows [?] it was supposed to be a good little engineering firm. So the Labour Exchange told me. They did Spitfire cockpits and also the sliding windows on London Transport buses. I got the job of cleaning the Bostik off round the glass that went in the frames to slide and as there was somebody there about nineteen and had been there since he was fourteen and he was still cleaning Bostik off the glass I did not [laughs] think it was a very good job. Luckily my mum had worked with somebody in the 14/18 war and her son worked for Benham and Sons, a catering company, and she had a word and he’d just finished his apprenticeship and he had a word and got me a job there. I think, I think it was somewhere about May ’45, er ‘39 I started there. They were starting to expand because they were getting contracts for the Ministry for cooking equipment and that because they’d started re-arming with cooking equipment if not the aircraft [laughs]. They were in, in Garratt Lane and they went over the River Wandle and they were having an extension built. They, they dug down and took half the Wandle up and built an air raid shelter in level with, in the Wandle [laughs] really and then built on top of it more workshops which were finished probably late, late ’39. Yeah. ‘39/’40. Yeah. I, first of all, started building dish washers and then I got in with Jimmy Thurgood who was a good all-rounder in his, in his thirties and he was the odd job man and with him I got a lot of experience and when I did sinks and drainers and boiling pans with him but, yeah he, if there was maintenance trouble quite often he used to get involved in it. Getting on in to, in to 1940 and Dunkirk our first Ministry contract was for hold fasts. It was one about half inch six steel plate and one about three quarters and they were somewhere about four foot square and they had, I believe, thirteen holes in them with thirteen tie rods about three foot long I believe. We made the tie rods and the nuts and one went either side. Being a catering firm we didn’t really have big lifting gear and somehow or other we got permission to use the Wandsworth Greyhound Stadium car park and Jimmy Thurgood and me went down there and we met a low loader with sixteen foot by eight foot sheets of steel. We took some crowbars with us and we crowbarred these sheets off the low loader on to the ground and at the same time, all very organised the [laughs] British Oxygen Lead [?] came with Oxy Acetylene boards which they unloaded there for us. We went back I suppose about a quarter of a mile away to the works and we picked up gauges and hoses and cutting equipment and went back down there and connected up and we cut these sheets into eight pieces, four foot square which was still not really handable [?] but a lot better. We, we put these on a trolley and pulled them along Garratt Lane to the works. They went in and they, they flame cut them to the shapes on the outside and then they went to the machine shop where there was only one machine. It cut, it drilled the thirteen holes which I think were somewhere about three quarters. As soon as they were done they were assembled and taken to Clapham Junction Railway Station and put on, in the guards van and they went straight down to the south coast but they were set in concrete for coastal guns to be connected to. The first contract was done in about seventeen days. A manager or director of the firm afterwards said to me said to me when I said about this ‘oh it didn’t matter what it cost’, but cost wasn’t in it. People just worked on it. They drilled the holes. If somebody went for a break then somebody else stepped in. The drills. There was a stock of them. When they needed re-sharpening they went to the tool room and re-sharpened and it it it just kept going all the time. After the first contract we got lots more and then we started, which was something very new, rocket [emphasis] launchers and Jimmy Thurgood and me were on, on the first of the rocket launchers. They, we had the sheets come in and there was lots of holes punched in them so that the heat could go through and, but they were made in to a half round with rolled edges either side and the rockets were just placed on them and fired. Fired. There was the back of it rested on the ground and there was two, like a tripod, fixed half way up. After the first ones other people started getting involved and Jimmy Thurgood and me we got involved in the firing gear, because the heat that came out of the end of the rocket melted [emphasis] the first firing gears [laughs] and [background laugh] we, we devised a, a nose which we did an [abrasion?] at the end which touched the contacts and it went back down on to a spindle with a, with a, a spring on it, and, I worked or we worked till about 1 o’clock the first time we were on this and there was a despatch rider waiting there and he took it down, I believe, to Aldershot where the rest was already down there and they fixed it on to try it out. The night superintendent came along and said, ‘What are doing here?’ We said, ‘We’ve been working here.’ Well he said, ‘Are you Roy Briggs?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Your dad’s been on wanting to know if you were still working and I told him no.’ Of course there’d been an air raid and I wasn’t home [laughs]. So he said, ‘You’d better go.’ So, [laughing] as we’d finished I went home and dad was on the doorstep waiting for me. Yeah. We went in about 10 o’clock in the morning and by then we’d found out that it had been partly successful but not successful. We made a little bit of alteration to the shape but the main trouble was the springs. Anyway, we got, we’d, they’d got on to the spring manufacturers and we, we made two of these contacts during the day with the U shaped and in the evening the springs came and we fitted them and once again it went down to Aldershot. I think this lasted three or four days, three or four nights by which time we had a successful job and it went in to mass production. Yeah. But in ‘39 in the summer they had started calling people up and, to do I think it was six months National Service but because the war started before they got out and they were still in the services but after Dunkirk these people came back out of the forces because as they’d all sort of finished their apprenticeships it was easier to train soldiers to fire a gun than it did to make engineers which took much longer. Yeah, what, in fact one of them he come out and he got the chief, he was the chief Ministry inspector. A couple of others. We then started building rocket, anti-aircraft rocket launchers. I don’t know whether they have a name. When they were, they went into parks they were known as Z batteries. There was, they started off as singles and then there was four, doubles. The doubles were long tubes with about five holes drilled in them which had studs go through them and they were welded and cleaned off on the top and those studs held them on the framework. The base was, was round and went down and then these went on and we, we took over a printing works at Colliers Wood and they were made, all made over there. They went into the parks. Wormwood Scrubs there was no and I think, I think it was about sixty odd in a battery which fired about a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty rockets. They weren’t very accurate but they put a barrage up [background ‘Hmm’]. They carried on until 1943, when the army was getting short of people they took the people off these guns and ATS went on there and the Home Guard which were not really needed, they thought, then. There wasn’t much chance of invasion. They, they took over at nights as well. I do know one or two of the Home Guards who, who fired them. This, this time probably because I could, I could make simple tool jobs and we had half a dozen fly presses with ladies on them and I was more or less looking after them. It was, it was of a range. We had everybody from an actress to a lady whose father was a doctor and had never been out to work. Quite a shock for her to see what life was like. We had a prostitute. We had Kath whose husband had been killed at Dunkirk and yeah I more or less looked after them. Made sure the parts that they were putting through the fly presses were there and cleared away afterwards and if anything went wrong sorted it out. When I went to, yeah, the same time we’d taken over cheaper garages at northside, Wandsworth Common which we were, we were producing cooking equipment in. At Clapham Junction the milk depot closed down just before the war and we took over the milk depot at Clapham Junction and there ovens and stuff was made. There was, round Wandsworth High Street there was a dump or you could call it [laughs] you had a bit of a shelter, and not much but people worked in there doing sinks and drainers and by that time we were involved with the City and Guilds and their training rooms and that, professors and that were actually producing for us mass produced parts and that. Well there was one of the theatres. They took that over and that. It was a general office for getting war work done and we had gone from somewhere about five hundred people to, I think, about sixteen hundred people in that time. Colin. Colin Benham was quite well educated in engineering. His cousin, who was a commander in the navy, came out to help with us in the war work. There again, thought he had, with his, he had an engineering background I think, but, it was more useful. Miss Benham came and she, she looked after people who, who’d been bombed out and that and did things what she could for them and generally did work for them. Yeah. They had, they did their own ventilation stuff and sterilising. Big sterilisers. When it come to register I can’t remember which it was now. If you registered as a sheet metal worker you weren’t, you weren’t reserved occupation. If you were registered as a sheet arm worker you were. Or it was the other way around. Anyway, as I wanted to go in the air force, I’d been in the ATC, I registered as the one that went. I didn’t tell them that I’d put it down. And yeah while I was in the ATC we were attached to the Home Guard. We went down to Bisley throwing hand grenades and firing. We actually, in the ATC we actually had 1914/18 Lewis guns which they’d got out the dungeons from somewhere. I started off as number three but by the time I was going in the air force I got up to number one. Number three was, as they fired up to six hundred rounds or more a minute you know, you had to have a supply going. One fired and the other one fed it through I think and I, I got it up and then gradually we went up. Yeah. There was talk at the time that if we were invaded there was holes in the ground on Wimbledon common and that and some of us would go up there and come out to try and kill Germans. I thought afterwards that when, after Dunkirk, a little while afterwards there used to be reports come in that in villages in France somebody had come out and killed a German and they had killed all the, all the men and that over fourteen and things like that and then there were reports that they’d killed everybody in the villages, you know, I thought if I’d have come out and killed somebody how many of English and Londoners might have been wiped out by it. I had that in my mind all my life and glad it never happened. Yeah. We, we, we had a stick of bombs dropped around our road in October ’45. We’d had brick air raid shelters built in our back gardens. We had one and next door had one and there was just a three foot square hole which we could have got in to them or them in to us. I think there was about nine bombs came down. One of them had blown up and dad and me ran out and we went down the road and as I passed the house with somebody I used to go to school with he said, ‘Roy we’ve got a great big hole in our passage’ and I said, possibly a bomb by the side of it, probably a bomb had gone down so I said, ‘You’d better, better grab some clothes and get out in case it goes up.’ Before the war I used to help a green grocer setting up his stall before, before I went to school and on the way back home to get washed I used to take the vegetables into the fire station, Este [?] Road fire station which was in the next road to us. It was only half a dozen houses down so I did know the firemen in there. The fire engine from there came, came around and somebody I knew said, ‘Roy we’re here now. You go back home.’ So dad and me went back home, I was in the shelter and dad was in the doorway. We were talking to mum and there was a big bang and the bomb which was in this house had gone off. Dad and me raced down there. The fire engine was more or less wrecked and I couldn’t see the firemen I knew but anyway the other, other people were coming then. As we walked back home the moon was out and we saw a hole in the Flatt’s house. Jean, my sister was friendly with Jean, the daughter, and dad and me went and started banging on the door and couldn’t get any reply and next door come and said, ‘What are you banging on there for?’ We said, ‘The Flatt’s have got a hole in it, in their roof. Probably a bomb’s gone through it.’ So she said, ‘Oh. We’ll, we’ll go and tell them.’ They were in the shelter at the back and they went and told them and they came out and they grabbed some stuff and we helped them take it over outside in the car park at Clapham Station. They’d built an air raid shelter and we took it over but they went in the shelter and then we went back home. The, what we didn’t know that one of the bombs was on the shelter at the other end and later on it went off and killed, I think it killed two people in the shelter but [unclear] Jean and that. Yeah this must have been on the Friday night. On the Saturday morning I cycled over to the Beverly at North Cheam and my mum had had a friend over there who she’d worked with during the war and I said, said to ‘em, ‘Any chance of mum and my sister and me coming over?’ And they said, ‘Yeah come over.’ Her son was in the marines. ‘We got a four foot bed.’ So mum, me and my sister went over there and we slept together in the four foot bed [mild laughter] but dad stopped at home more or less. Dad patched up the windows and that that had gone, to look after the house really during the night. We had some old [unclear] but they didn’t bother to put, they didn’t bother to replace the windows. They put like a muslin over it, there was just the downstairs in the front that had a window in because people could have broken the, got through the muslin quite easy. The glass was a bit more difficult. Yeah and I cycled from North Cheam to Wandsworth in the morning. The raids were still on sometimes and the guns on Cannon Common were blazing away, shrapnel was coming down and when we went home of a night it was still, they were still firing and the shrapnel was still coming down. I’ve got a feeling that I did that for three or four months before we went back home. Yeah. March ‘43 I went for the first medical at North Cheam. I think some, early April, went to Euston House for the aircrew medical and selection board which I passed and got me number and the, and the King’s shillin’ and got deferred for two or three months but there was a great demand to get in as pilots but I think some of them were deferred for about a year there was, they had that many. Yeah. And in fact I was called up for going to Lord’s Cricket Ground on the 21st of June 1943. As I, as I went there I met Len Spratt who I spent the day with at, at Euston House and we went in and we, we got our injections at the same time in the long room. We dropped our trousers in the long room. W G Grace was on the, a picture of him was on the wall. [phone rings in background] I don’t remember but they, they said that they used to turn W G Grace’s around.
[phone ringing and then phone conversation]
CB: So we —
RB: It’s a bit —
CB: We’re just on W G Grace and when you were at um when —
RB: Yeah.
CB: You went to Lords and he was looking down on you.
RB: Yeah but they do say that they used to, used to turn him around when we dropped our trousers but in all of it I don’t remember that [laughs]. Yeah. We, we were in flats opposite Regents Park Zoo. Len and me were in the same room and, in fact, I can cut it short, we were always in the same room or the same hut for the next year. We, we went in to the zoo four times a day to eat. In the restaurants not in, not in the cages. Along by our flats were Stockleigh Hall and another posh one. I must be getting old I can’t remember their names. Yeah, and they had a garage underneath and they did put a canteen in there but we still we were talking to people afterwards who were at Lords they that they were still using the zoo for quite some time. We went to Seymour Hall for lectures and swimming. You could march down there and have a lecture in the morning and go in the afternoon and they’d removed the flooring and you were in, in for swimming. There was a garage at the roundabout at St Johns Wood and they took that over and that’s where we got kitted out. In, in the park was [pause] anyway I can’t remember at the moment. They used that as the hospital. The normal run was to stop at Lords for nineteen days. Some, some things were, activities took place in Lords. They had the gas mask room built there and you went in and tested your gas mask. You got paid there, sat on the seats in Lords till you got called out for your pay. We did our first marching in Regents Park and in the back streets there. First four, three nights were spent putting your names on all your clothes and that. After that you were allowed out where most of the Londoners took their civvy kit home and sort of saw their parents. Unless you were on guard most evenings were free. Yeah, after the nineteen days we went to the railway at Olympia. I think it was called Olympia and there was another name for it where there was a troop train in there and it was just the one train and all the different trades went on and they dropped off a couple of carriages every, every here and there going along. We used to then, got taken to, either pilots or navigators, where they were going. We went to Bridgenorth which was up on the high level. There was a lift to go down to get on the street level down by the river. Yeah. Yeah. We went out to, there was 18 and 19 ITWs which was mainly wireless operators and air gunners. I, I had actually gone in as wireless operator/air gunner and at that stage I was still a wireless operator/air gunner. Probably jumping the gun a bit. Early in oh probably the decision had already been made and hadn’t got through that to stop training wireless operators as WOPAGS for Bomber Command. The, the thought was that if your gunner got killed or anything and you had to go back, by the time you got back, operated the dead man’s handle which lined the turret up with the fuselage, opened the doors at the back, disconnected his oxygen, his intercom and got that out of the way. Got hold of him and pulled him in and if he needed first aid badly to stop it and then we’d have got in to the turret we would probably have been shot down anyway so after that ruling come out we stopped doing the full air gunner’s course although we did enough that we could have got in and fired them. If the wireless operators were going to Coastal Command they then went on and did the air gunner’s course because all the gunners I believe and wireless operators operated air gunners and they did a swap around on sixteen hour flights that they all had a break from whatever they were doing. Yeah. I, I stopped with Len for all that time and then they said he had webbed feet and got to go to Coastal Command. We don’t believe it [laughs] and I’ve still kept in touch till today. Yeah. We, at, at Madley after ITW we went to Madley where we flew on Dominies where you could have an instructor and a number of you went in there and you had the one set and went through it, after that you went into Percival Proctors which is just well, [?] you and the pilot in the main although there were some three seaters if anybody was having trouble and they needed an instructor up with them. Most of the, most of the flights were about fifty five minutes but the most dangerous part was coming back to land because they used to see the NAAFI van leaving the site and they had Lyons fruit pies which were delicious but there was a very limited number and they all wanted to get in to get their pies. There were one or two collisions when the airfield controller fired Very cartridges to tell people not to land. They always thought he was firing at somebody else I think. Yeah. It was, it was pretty hard work on, on training. You, we had Morse. At the same time we did things which health and safety and things because I suppose they thought we were all going to end up as officers and NCOs. We did things like setting up camps by a river and taking the water for cooking from the top and washing and using the ablutions down the way the water was lying. [laughs] Yes. We had to do fault finding on, on the radios, coding and things and you used to get a test on these. Some were about every fortnight or so. If you did not do very well then you went to evening classes and I believe a week was eight days so that the schools were used every day. You had a different day off every week. If you went on evening school and then on the next time you hadn’t picked up or perhaps it was a couple of times you then went to FT which was Further Training and you didn’t want to do that ‘cause you lost all your mates. You went back a few courses. I, I was nearly always on extra training but I never went to FT. The people who went to FT if they went back a few courses and then didn’t succeed they were then ceased training and well the only place for them really was to go as air gunners. We had people who, who joined us at Madley who had been to America and failed as pilots and then go on the training as navigators and had failed at, failed as navigators. I believe some of them after that went, went as bomb aimers. Yeah, in fact we had one chap who reckoned he’d worked it that he’d fail his pilot’s and failed as a navigator. I don’t know whether the air force had caught, caught on to him but when he took his wireless operator’s exams he just scraped through and I don’t know whether the air force had done that deliberately and he was the first one that had to bale out [laughs]. Yes, well I got me, got my sergeant’s stripes about a fortnight before I was nineteen, went on leave and then we went back and then we still did another about three months wireless operator’s training. After that we went to Llandwrog, North Wales. Number 9 OAFU I think it was. They were flying Ansons and we got bearings for the navigators who were really having more, more experience of flying and training where they were going but I believe sometimes we used to fly two or three times a day with different crews. I think we were only there about a month. After that we went to 30 OTU at Hixon and we got crewed up. We, we got Reg, Reg Featherstone as a pilot, Johnny Smale as the navigator, Roy Briggs as wireless operator, Benny Benson as a rear gunner and me and the navigator disagreed afterwards about whether we got Taffy Jones as a mid-upper. He seems to think that we didn’t get a mid-upper until we went to Heavy Conversion Unit but I’m sure he’s wrong. Oh and we got a bomb aimer. This is bad [laughs]. He was an Indian civil servant. I can’t, I can’t believe I can’t remember his name. [laughs].
[pause]
Right. We’ll have to come back to that. After doing ground training we started flying. Reg was struggling rather and he, we soon sort of always had another pilot in with us and I think it was probably only after a couple of weeks we had the chief flying instructor in with us for a couple of times and Reg got grounded. Unfit for heavy aircraft. So, we become a headless crew. Robbie Roberts had, had joined the air force before the war. He had been seconded to the Royal Navy and had spent some time on the Ark Royal. He then re-mustered for pilot training and went to South Africa, and I believe South Africa and Rhodesia for pilot training and ended up, I can’t remember what the, what aircraft he flew but he did a tour in the Middle East before coming back to England. He was then at Hixon as a headless crew and we got together and luckily because he’d got this mass experience it didn’t lose us too much time because he had twin engine experience. So we, we swapped between Hixon and Seighford. Spent some of the time over at Seighford for OTU. When we were at Hixon they were a rotten lot. They said as we got in the plane, we were on circuits and bumps at Seighford and they said, ‘Roy take us back to Hixon will you?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ full of confidence and I got in and we took off and I worked like mad to get Hixon to recognise my call sign amongst the other three hundred who were trying to get it. Eventually I got through and I got a bearing and all proud I said fly so, so and so and so and they were all looking at me and laughing and they went like that and we were about two foot off the ground [laughs]. Yeah talking about like that when we were on Lancs the navigator used to call the sign out for the, to get the speed out for the pilot. Of course the pilots didn’t do anything. Only drive. I mean the engineer used to push the throttles up with him. He used to do what I told him. He used to do what the navigator told him and the gunners if they wanted him to do something he had to do what they told him. Yeah and Johnny was calling out the speeds and I, it was getting slower and slower and I was looking at him and he looked at me with panic in his eyes because we shouldn’t be up in the air and we weren’t. Rob had made that good a landing we were on the ground. We were all looking at the, on the other hand Rob did a rotten landing and we bounced and Len said, ‘Oxygen going on skipper.’ [laughs, including background laugh] They were a few of the, yeah, from, we were, we were actually in a field at Hixon by the side of the railway. I don’t know whether you remember but in the, in the ‘40s after Hixon packed up English Electrics took over the hangers and they were taking one of their big transformers and it got stuck on the level crossing and a train hit it. There was a loss of life but that was actually at that level crossing in the field that we used to stop in. Yeah.
[pause]
Yes. We then went on to a holding unit I think, for a couple of weeks before going to Swinderby. We started heavy conversion on, on Stirlings. After Stirlings and when you were used to four engines you used to then go to Lancaster Finishing School if you were going on Lancasters but a couple of weeks into our course there was enough Lancs available and they phased, the courses in front of us carried on on the Stirlings but we were the first at Lancaster course to go right through on, on Lancasters. Yeah, we picked up Len Piddington as the, he was a pilot flight engineer. In 1944 they had trained that many pilots they didn’t know what to do with them so they sent a complete courses of flight engineers from St Athans to the army ‘cause the army was shorter, short of people and these pilots went to St Athans and did an engineer’s course on the promise that if they completed a tour on Lancs on Bomber Command they could then go back and re-muster and finish and carry on as a pilot for Lancs then but of course the war finished and none of them had finished a course by the time, I don’t think, a tour by then. I have met one person who carried on flying on Lancasters and finished his tour and went back and then trained as a pilot and he went into Lancs. We then, I think we went to a holding unit, Balderton I believe, because there wasn’t all that much flying. There was a lot of snow around in Lincolnshire but it wasn’t, it wasn’t too long because we went to Fiskerton. The pilot and I think the navigator, some of the crews went second [?] dicky on tour with an experienced crew, they never entrusted me with anybody [laughs]. They, on the day after me twentieth, yeah my twentieth birthday because I was the only teenager in the crew by this time, Benny who was a teenager when we first crewed up had had his twentieth birthday. I, [pause] we, I don’t think I went out drinking because we were on an air test of N-Nan which had completed a hundred ops so we flew around N for Nan. I think it was an air test. Afterwards we flew, N-Nan did a hundred and thirteen ops and we took it on its hundred and tenth and the hundred and eleventh. Yeah. We then had a week’s leave to, which they used to say to go and say goodbye to your family and before starting ops and went back. We got called for an op which I think they called us about midnight which got cancelled and then we, we got called back to the briefing room for an attack at Plauen on the German Czech border. This was one of the targets that the, Churchill and Stalin had agreed needed bombing. It was er, we took off just after 6 o’clock and got back something like I think it was nine hours. Nine hours trip, which seeing we’d been up for an op the day before and we then had to go in for the debriefing and a meal. Carried on for quite a while and I think it was four days later we got called to do a daylight on Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin. We were all briefed and ready to go and the Met Flight said that the weather was too bad over there so it got cancelled. We got called back to the briefing room later on and the stream was told us it was still Potsdam but there was still one going around Germany. They told us that the Potsdam raid was still on. This was the first time Berlin had been bombed for about a year. The last time by Lancasters. The last time they’d lost about forty two I think. Mosquitos had carried on bombing Berlin of the night, light night bomber force. They used to bomb regular with their one four thousand pounder. In fact in the darkest days Mosquitos used to do two flights a night. A crew would take off in light over here, bomb Berlin, come back, a new crew, new bomb and another crew would take off and it would be light by the time they got back. Anyway, we were told we weren’t going to Potsdam. We were going on a daylight training aircraft were going to have OTUs and heavy conversions were going to fly towards Germany to pick up the fighters like this was just going to be our squadron. I’m not sure if we had one or two Mosquitos and we were going to fly around Germany and bomb Cuxhaven on the way back and I don’t know whether it was because we had an experienced captain we could then go back in and see what we could see on fires and that and then I could send a message which I didn’t want to do because the German fighters could pick up on your radio. But they, we felt that they were risking our lives unnecessarily because if there had have been fires we were going to be home in an hour and a half. We could have told them. [laughs] Anyway, we went back in, didn’t really see anything. I mean we didn’t have enough aircraft really to get any fires going and I did code a message up and send it, send it back. Oh yes and on the nine hours to Plauen it was an extra long night because somebody had a puncture in front of us and we couldn’t get back to, to our dispersal and had to stop and wait there until they organised somebody to come and pick us up and a ground crew to come and take over the aircraft because we had to sign to say that any faults and that was on it. Yeah so yes so that was it. After that we had, yeah on the 18th of April we, we were briefed to bomb Heligoland. The main reason for this was that the Royal Navy were going along the North German coast supporting the army and Heligoland had U-boats and E-boats and submarines which they felt could come back and attack the navy by the rear. Yeah. There was approximately eight hundred Lancasters and two hundred Halifaxes on the raid. We, I think we bombed Sylt. It was an island by the side of, with a little airfield on it or an airfield on it. I don’t think they’d been using the aircraft from there for some time. Somebody hit the oil storage tanks and the master bomber didn’t have much, a chance of directing bomber. I think he said, ‘Bomb the smoke, under bomb the smoke as you get in and then over bomb the centre of the smoke and port and starboard of the smoke’ you know so yeah there was only a couple of Halifaxes lost I think. It’s probably the only time I saw the thousand aircraft ‘cause we bombed and we went over we turned around to come back and we either saw the aircraft that bombed in front of us or those that were still going in to bomb you know because normally on nights you didn’t see them anyway and on other daylights if they went and bombed and carried on you didn’t see them. After that we started, mixed up with a briefing for the 20th for Hitler’s birthday to bomb Berchtesgaden, we were also being briefed and I believe we had something like twenty briefings for Bremen. Bremen, the army was having trouble in some places to advance and in other places were going easy and we kept going back to the briefing room and eventually we got, we got briefed for Berchtesgaden and we, I think we got out to the aircraft and the Met Flight said the weather over the Alps was too bad so it got cancelled. I’m not sure if the next day or the day after, yeah, the 22nd I think we went to Bremen. Yeah, in the end we went to the briefing room and they said that they were gonna withdraw troops to a certain line for, in the evening and they were ordered to come back to that line and we were going to bomb in front of it. As it was I think when we got there and we were going in as we got along there, there was some cloud and the master bomber said, ‘Apple Tart,’ which was don’t bomb. So we went there and we didn’t bomb. I think whether some aircraft earlier or after went and bombed but we didn’t bomb. The, a couple of days afterwards I think it was about eleven thousand garrison surrendered. [pause] And, oh yeah and then the squadron, we didn’t go, I think about the 25th they bombed Berchtesgaden but as we bombed, as we’d done four or five we were on a stand down and the Berchtesgaden one, that was the last one on the squadron. We, we somewhere amongst then we got a cross country looking for [pause] windmills [laughs] sorry. Sorry I had a job to remember the word. Yeah. We went around Norfolk looking for windmills not knowing what it was but on the 29th we got called to the briefing room to say that we weren’t going to drop bombs. We were going to drop food over Holland. And that was the first of our six trips over, over Holland. When we come they said that we, they hadn’t got permission for us to drop the food and they weren’t sure how the Germans were going to take it. They were going to tell them we were going to go and were hoping they were going to get away with it. Nobody got fired on although there were reports that some of the Germans were still with their guns and that but so we, so we came back and we got called to the briefing room on the 30th and were told that as we had got away with it the day before they were going to do it again and send some more aircraft in the hopes that the Germans wouldn’t think that we would do that and then they would open fire. We did it on the second and then the next, the next, the next day we got called and were more or less told the same although I believe later on that day that the, they did agree that we could go over and do it so, yeah. So we did another three we did six drops to I think, the Hague, Rotterdam, Delft and Valkenburg airfield. Amongst the children there was a girl who now works in our charity shop up the shops and we’ve got chatting and I’ve, I’ve taken her to an aircrew buffet and told her that I was feeding her sixty nine years ago. I didn’t still think I’d be feeding her sixty nine years afterwards. We’re great, we’re great friends.
CB: What height were you flying when you dropped —
RB: Oh I should think about two fifty foot or something like that wasn’t it? About two hundred miles an hour I think.
CB: And was the food in the bomb bay or how was it released?
RB: It was in the bomb bay. It was in nets. Yeah.
CB: So how did they, how were they released?
RB: By the bomb aimer on, as though he was dropping —
CB: In a sequence was it?
RB: He just dropped the lot you know and they, but they, you know, you could see the targets anyway but they had pathfinders had put targets, targets down. Yeah,
CB: Could you see the locals?
RB: Pardon?
CB: Could you see the local?
RB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah you could see, you were close enough to see them. Yeah.
CB: What were they doing?
RB: Pardon?
CB: What were they doing?
RB: Waving and, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah and they by the end they had put in flowers “Thank you RAF” Yeah. Because they, it was about nineteen thousand extra people died during that winter which they take it was you know the starvation and that. They were eating bulbs and things. The, the Germans weren’t really feeding them and the Dutch had gone on strike to help for their bit for the war effort. Yeah. I think this lady I talked to I think she was fairly well off and they had a maid and they, they, they took some of their valuables. They got her to take them in a pram out in to the country where people were a bit well off to try and sell it, you know.
CB: What’s her name?
RB: Ellen, Ellen.
[pause]
CB: I think we’ll take a break there.
RB: Right.
CB: Thank you.
[pause]
CB: We’ve just had a break for one or two things. By the way this is the 28th of January and we’re now going to carry on with Roy. We’re close to the end of the war, right at the end of the war but we’re talking about Operation Manna. So Roy how did you get briefed about this and what were your reactions as a crew?
RB: Well we went to the briefing room and were told that we weren’t going to drop bombs we were going to drop food. I don’t, I think it was a shock really that there was, they’d said that they’d tried to get permission from the Germans but they weren’t playing you know and that the Dutch were in such a state that they’d offered to let a ship go in but the, I believe but the Germans had said no. Yeah, it was a bit of shock yeah that I, I know that I’ve read that a CO wasn’t pleased that he was telling his crews to go in at about two hundred miles an hour and two hundred and fifty feet or something like that and there was no, no agreement and that they were going to tell the Germans that we were coming, you know, over the radio yeah. But as, I mean I could never really have imagined myself dropping bombs over Germany. In fact, as a little titbit, you know when we got, I think it was over Bremen or somewhere. I thought, is this me? A boy from Battersea doing this, you know. There wasn’t much flying before the war. It was a different world. And everything it’s just when it all starts it’s all far away and it just goes one step at a time, you know and then all of a sudden you’re on a squadron and then all of a sudden your skipper goes on a second dicky and that and it’s getting nearer and you’ve been trained for it for twenty one months you know and it’s, it is all, it is all a case of doing one step and somehow thinking that what, if anything bad is going to happen it’s going to happen to somebody else. Not you. Yeah. No. I mean even the second day there was a thought of oh when they said they were going to send more we thought are they going to let us build up you know, to, before they fired at us. They just, I think when we got over there glad that those in front of us if they, well if they’d have been firing on them we’d have no doubt turned around and come back. Yeah. Because you know I mean they could have virtually fired at you with rifles couldn’t they, I mean. Because the Dutch people had been good to aircrew that had come down over their land. They were good ‘cause the Manna Association went over there for years after the war and took part in their, I think it’s their Freedom Day or something isn’t it?
CB: And when you got back from the sorties what discussions did you have as a crew?
RB: Well, we, we’d got away, you know. They hadn’t fired on us, you know and we sort of accepted it. That we had got away with it. But there was, there was that thought that the next day was, was going to be a build up but no. That was—
CB: So you’d done two. Now you get to number three. What are you feeling now?
RB: Yeah well after that we did, I think it was after the third that we were told when we come back from our third that they had agreed that we could —
CB: No.
RB: Go on dropping there. Yeah.
CB: So you stopped at six.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So what was the reason for that?
RB: VE day I think.
CB: Right. OK
RB: Yeah.
CB: Ok. So in the beginning you’ got the apprehension. What was the briefing about? If the Germans did fire on any of the aircraft ahead what were you going to do?
RB: I don’t know that there was much, you know, that they were just hoping that they wouldn’t.
CB: Just go in —
RB: I think we were about the third squadron in you know so we were in the early stages of it.
CB: Right.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Ok. So fast forward now to the last raid and we’ve got the end of the war. So can we carry on the narrative there? What happened then?
RB: We, Bomber Command brought, I think, something like seventy two thousand released prisoners of war back in twenty seven days. We took Uncle over to B58 at Rotterdam. No. Was it Rotter?
CB: Melsbroek?
RB: What?
CB: Melsboek?
RB: No, B58 at, Holland anyway. We took a service aircraft over. We had a spare wheel and a ground crew and we went over and landed there. It was no air traffic control. I think from, from, from H hour to twenty five past aircraft landed. From H30 to 55, aircraft took off and that’s how it was. You know, there was discipline and it went, and they they came in and they landed and loaded them up with troops and away they went.
CB: So this was Operation Exodus. Where did you fly into with these POWs?
[pause]
CB: Because Westcott here —
RB: Pardon?
CB: Westcott up the road here?
RB: No. No, we didn’t bring any back. Although they say we did we didn’t bring anybody back, in my actual log I’ve got them asking me whether flight sergeant somebody of, did we have him on board.
CB: Ah.
RB: He was on compassionate leave.
CB: Oh right.
RB: And we brought him home but the squadron records say that we didn’t bring anybody home.
CB: Right.
RB: We one of the other aircraft brought some Red Cross.
CB: So as such you weren’t part of Operation Exodus.
RB: Pardon?
CB: As such —
RB: No. No.
CB: The squadron wasn’t part of Operation Exodus.
RB: No. No. No.
CB: Ok. Well don’t worry about that. So we’ve got to the end of the war. Then what?
RB: We took, I think we took some people around Germany. Some ground crew. To see. And then we went to Bari and Naples bringing troops home.
CB: Oh you did.
RB: Yeah. We, yeah.
CB: So just on the round robins, the Cooks tours they called them. What height did you fly over the cities? Cause that’s what you were doing.
RB: Not very high so people could see. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: And what was your relationship with your ground crew during the, during hostilities anyway.
RB: Yeah we got on alright with them all but seeing as we flew a number of different aircraft you know you didn’t get the same ground crew all the time.
CB: Oh right.
RB: I mean some, some people seemed to do twenty, twenty trips in the same aircraft.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and more.
RB: No. All I got here is Exodus. Service aircraft to B58
CB: Right. Anyway, on the Cooks tours where did you fly then?
RB: Essen, Cologne, Aachen and Antwerp.
CB: Right.
RB: I think that might have been the only one we did. Yeah ‘cause in, in May ‘45 by the end of the month all Australians, Canadians and foreign people had gone out of the, out the crews, you know.
CB: Oh right.
CB: They went home immediately.
RB: Yeah they yeah they got out. So, I mean, I know a pilot, he was the only Englishman. He was on leave and went back and they’d all gone. [laughs]
CB: Didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.
RB: No. No. No. No.
CB: I bet he, yeah, what was the relationship in your crew like?
RB: Yeah alright there was only one snag was the mid upper gunner.
CB: Oh go on. What about him.
RB: He had a girlfriend in Leicester.
CB: Taffy Jones.
RB: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: So he went there a lot.
RB: Yeah and you know we covered for him when we were more or less in briefings and he didn’t get back till the last minute and things. Yeah.
CB: So what, so did the crew socialise a lot.
RB: Yeah well you really had to because other crews were doing things at the time.
CB: Yeah.
RB: We basically knew our crew and then I knew wireless operators, the navigator knew navigators because they had —
CB: Yeah.
RB: Sessions together, you know. I might, if you got friendly with another wireless operator there was a, chances are that you might get sort of a bit friendly with the other crew but they would be flying other times so you know other than being in the mess —
CB: So how did the crew feel about Taffy Jones going off all the time?
RB: Yeah [laughs] We’d know that there was, there was —
CB: What did the crew say to him?
RB: Well at times we felt as we should dump him, you know.
CB: Did you?
RB: Yeah. Yeah. The rest of us were, were alright you know.
CB: Commonly known as pee’d off.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Because the flight engineers didn’t join till after OTU how was Len Piddington selected? Or did he just appear?
RB: I think, I think he just appeared. I can’t remember now, you know but yeah.
CB: Yeah and how, how did he get on?
RB: Yeah he was a Londoner you know and we had, yeah.
CB: So now we are at the end of the war what happened then?
RB: We went down to Wyton. No we went down to Upwood. Upwood was due for a clean up after the war so we went, we got transferred to Wyton. By the end of August 576 and 156 were being disbanded. Alan Craig was CO of 35 err 156. He was ex- Halton he’d done a number of master bomber trips and they, they did six Lancasters with Lincoln engines in to try them out and he did master bomber trips on them trying them out. I suppose because he had an engineering background because of Halton.
CB: What was his name?
RB: Alan Craig.
CB: Oh Alan Craig. Ok.
RB: He was well known and he got picked to take 35 Squadron around America in 1946. He, as the squadron was being disbanded he went over there to Graveley. He grounded some of their crews and they not very, they weren’t very pleased with him and he sent over to 156. My skipper was in line for going but he, his, he got married in ‘44. Joan who lived in Stratford on Avon and I take it there were a lot pilots around there she had been engaged twice and both got killed and when they got married she thought flying was dangerous and when the war finished he was to give up flying. As he’d been in before the war he was due for demob by the time they were going to America so he would have had to sign on and he wouldn’t sign on so that wiped our crew out. Flight Lieutenant Jenkinson DFM he, I don’t know how, he didn’t have a wireless operator and I’d kept me nose clean. Nothing special but you know just did as I should do. The signals officer, we got on alright but he got on alright with lots of them you know and him and Jenkinson asked whether I would like to go with them so I said yes because my crew had well I think a couple of them had already been posted to other places. Me navigator was on his way out to the Middle East. He was an accountant and he was going on ground crew in the accounts somewhere. The bomb aimer’s going. Len they sent over to, to another squadron. I mean why they, why they took him and put on another squadron. Benny, the rear gunner he went to another squadron. Yeah. So I went over to Graveley. We got our white Lancs and started flying and we were going to be Alan Craig’s crew. We spent hours in the crew room waiting for him to take us up to fly but he never did because he had other things to do and then a signal came through from High Wycombe that it was all pathfinder crews and it had got, been remade with crews from each of the bomber groups so you’ve heard of Sir Mike Beetham have you?
CB: Absolutely.
RB: He come from East Kirkby down to Graveley and swapped with a crew. We swapped with a crew from 138 at Tuddenham and, I was, I was torn. When he come he didn’t have a wireless operator and I said did I [?] want to stop with him and you know I didn’t want to lose my crew so I said no. It was the worst thing I ever did really because when they got us over there to Tuddenham we were a new crew and they were grounding crews left, right and centre. They sent. They us on leave. I got recalled the next day and got posted so I never saw any of Jenks crew. The day after I left the two gunners come back and got posted. So I found out. By the time the pilot come back he didn’t have a crew. They’d all gone, you know [laughs]. So yeah at Tuddenham we were doing photographic work for town and country planning. We didn’t do much because we were making maps over bombed areas but quite often you know with cloud and that we didn’t get all that much photographic work done. And anyway I don’t know whether I would have gone because Flight Lieutenant Koreen [?] had a mid-air crash. He had a nose and he went into somebody’s tail and the wireless operator had frostbite and I never did find out whether he went around America.
CB: So they took their Lancasters with them did they?
RB: Yeah they did.
CB: To America.
RB: Yeah they went around. Sixteen —
CB: Good Lord.
RB: Sixteen went around America. Yeah. Yeah. I did, I did have all the cuttings and that.
CB: Yeah.
RB: And um —
CB: But you never went.
RB: No. I didn’t go but I knew the people, a lot of the people, and I thought of, and when I saw Mark Beetham up at Hendon once I said ‘I got them’ and he said ‘I didn’t ‘ave it cause I was there’ so I handed over to him all the photos and that that I had. Yeah. Yeah it’s like. How far are we going to go on?
CB: No, we’re just, it’s just a question of what you did at the end of the war.
RB: Yeah.
CB: ‘Cause you came out in ’47.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So what did you do between the end of the war and when you were demobbed?
RB: I went to Cranwell on a, on a course for VHF Homer. Do you know?
CB: Yeah.
RB: VHF Homers? I operated a VHF Homer at Wyton. Only for a day or two. I was on air traffic control as an RT operator giving aircraft permission to take off and land. I, I was on duty now, now, now I’m going to do a bit of a shine [?] I was on darkie watch. Darkie watch. Anybody know darkie watch?
CB: That’s, no. No
Other: No. No.
RB: It was on channel 4. The transmission was I think was ten to twelve miles maximum so if you were in trouble during the war you could use plain language.
CB: Yeah.
RB: And you could say —
CB: Oh it could only go twelve miles.
RB: Eh?
CB: Yeah.
RB: You could say Lancaster of 576 squadron I’m lost.
CB: Right.
RB: They could put searchlights up and things like that.
CB: Oh right.
RB: If you had trouble they could get somebody to talk if he was injured or in trouble and things like that. Anyway, I was the only one, there was no flying so I was the only one on air traffic control for the night. I took a —
[pause]
CB: We’re just pausing to look at documents.
RB: I took a call from Group in the night that the Americans had lost a Dakota in the Alps. Oh I’ve already told you every, every three weeks we were duty Air Sea Rescue [?] Squadron and had to have an aircraft standing by all the time. I think we had airborne life boats which had come in. We had one of those. We never used it as far as I know and I switched on the tannoy and said, ‘Emergency air sea rescue. Emergency air sea rescue. Emergency air sea rescue. All air and ground crews report immediately. All duty air and ground crew should report immediately.’ I rung up the crash crew to make sure they’d heard me. The Met girl had come up before she’d gone off. I knew the winds. I’d put the runway lights on, I’d put the perimeter lights on and by the time the, I can’t believe it now but I believe it only took somewhere, something about just over a quarter of an hour for a crew to come ready to take off and by that time ‘cause I wasn’t supposed to give the aircraft permission the flying control officer was supposed to be there. I mean when I was on an airfield by meself overnight I wondered whether if it had ever happened you know if someone had said, ‘I’m in trouble.’ I had to [?] switch the lights on for them to land. What would have happened —
CB: Yeah.
RB: You know, but officially?
CB: What rank —
RB: So —
CB: What rank are you now for authority?
RB: I’m warrant officer.
CB: You are. Right.
RB: Yeah. Yeah the, anyway we got them off and they went to the Alps and they did find the Lanc but I think they —
CB: The Dakota.
RB: Pardon?
CB: The Dakota.
RB: Yeah, they found the Dakota. They saw it a number of times. In fact I can probably tell you how many times they found it. [pause] Anyway, in the Alps, flying, they’d saw it a number of times and there was a crash crew from Milan sent to find them and I think they went across to Castel Benito for the night and then went back the next day.
CB: Right.
RB: I suppose being the nearest —
CB: Yeah.
RB: Anyway they went over and —
CB: This was a daylight operation?
RB: This is looking for daylight in the Alps, yeah. I have got the cuttings here.
CB: So why didn’t the Americans send a plane to search?
RB: I don’t know. I don’t know. In fact, in fact I think afterwards they did sort of say that —
CB: Can we look at those in a minute?
RB: Yeah. Yeah well yeah well that —
CB: Yeah.
RB: That is the paper reports.
CB: Yeah.
RB: And it’s in focus and we diverted the Lanc to what is now London Airport to be interviewed by the BBC.
CB: Right. Amazing.
RB: And I’ve here got the signal from the American air force. Message received as follows from the USA Air Force in Europe, ‘Please convey our deep appreciation for the efforts in finding our aircraft and the hard work put in.’
CB: Brilliant.
RB: And when we were clearing up they said, ‘Roy you did most of it. You’d better take that with you.’
CB: Very gratifying.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So when are we talking about? 1946 is this?
RB: This is ‘46.
CB: Ok. And you were at Cranwell.
RB: No. No, I’d come from Cranwell. I’d done the course at Cranwell.
CB: Oh right.
RB: I’m back at Upwood.
CB: Back at Upwood. Ok.
RB: Yeah.
CB: So you’ve done, you’re still flying intermittently.
RB: No. No.
CB: Not at all.
RB: No. No.
CB: Ok so how did you come so we’re in ‘46 but you didn’t leave till ‘47 so what did you do in the rest of the time?
RB: RT at Upwood.
CB: Ok and how did your demob come about?
RB: You got a demob number. Your age and when you went in and mine was 45 and that was due out but it varied on trades because believe it or not in some trades they were short. Trades which had been built up at the beginning of the war were due for demobbing and if they hadn’t, if they didn’t need more along the line yeah and I did while I was at Upwood the only other highlight was I went over to Wyton because they were short of an RT operator over there and somebody on the VHF Homer and I did, I did a day or two on the VHF Homer over there. Yeah.
CB: So your demob date was actually 1945 but you didn’t take it till ’46?
RB: No, no, no that was 45 was the number.
CB: Oh sorry.
RB: But it came up —
CB: Beg your pardon.
RB: It came up. Wireless operators. It was due March ’47.
CB: Right.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Ok so then you knew that in advance.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Where did you go for demob?
RB: Lytham St Anne’s at Blackpool.
CB: Ok and what happened then?
RB: They said did I want to go back in? [laughs]
CB: Yeah. And you said —
RB: No. Well those, at that time well pre-war the air force spent a lot of time overseas. In actual fact about that time squadrons of Lancs used to go to the Middle East and that for a month and come back, you know so it would have been a whole different ball game then if, from the —
CB: So when did you meet your wife Joyce? What was she doing?
RB: 1943.
CB: Right. Where was she?
RB: Um she was in Battersea. Yeah, she worked for the Red Cross and St Johns Joint Organisation [?]
CB: And so you saw her intermittently or how did you —
RB: It was intermittently, yeah. Yeah, yeah I mean I was only coming home once every three months for leave sort of thing or —
CB: Yeah.
RB: An odd weekend.
CB: So that was another motivation for leaving the RAF was it?
RB: Yeah and to really I suppose to start doing something for, for me life you know.
CB: Yeah. So what had you chosen to do when leaving the RAF?
RB: I didn’t choose it. I got a job in engineering didn’t I?
CB: And you went back to it.
RB: I went back to it yeah.
CB: Ok. And they had to, it was a reserved —
RB: Pardon?
CB: Place? They had to take you back.
RB: Well yeah when I went back in there he said, ‘I’m not taking you back. I didn’t want you to go and you went.’ He was joking he was. [laughs]
CB: Oh right.
RB: Yeah. I I didn’t really have any young life, you know, even social life ‘cause I went to evening school for three years and evening school was evening school. There was no day release in those days you know. I used to work till 6 o’clock and race home and drink a cup of tea and race to be at Wandsworth Tech by quarter to seven, you know.
CB: And what was the course?
RB: Sheet metal plate work.
CB: Right.
RB: And after I passed it I went back in to work and said I passed my course and they said, ‘Right, Roy, we will give you a rise. We will put you up from one and seven pence farthing to one and seven pence three [emphasis] farthings.’
CB: Fantastic.
RB: And a little while later they said we’ve got a contract for Kirkup [?] Oil Pipeline and their cooking equipment as they’ve got so much oil they want it oil [?] fired so the boiling pans if we give you a half a dozen people to work with you you control it [laughs] ‘cause you’re getting the extra money. I’m getting the extra ha’penny an hour. So you know thinking back on it that probably they’d charge on [?] it got ten bob a week extra so you know yeah so I I organised it that the iron framework had to be, go and be hot dipped and galvanised so I sort of got that organised. The outer panels were going to be vitreous enamelled but we didn’t have a plant in those days we had to send it out to get it vitreoused [?] so the bits that had to go you got done in the hopes that when they come back all the in-house bits, the pans in stainless steel and the tops and that and the bits and pieces you were making you kept it going and it all ended up, yeah.
CB: So you spent the rest of your working life with that company did you?
RB: No. No I well we couldn’t get a house, you know. We were, we were in the mother in laws front room and then we managed to get two rooms and there was no chance of getting a place in London, I mean and Bartlett’s were in the same line but they, they were moving from Bell Steet because they thought they were going to be pulled down for the Harrow Road Flyover and they were having a place built out here so I applied for a job there and got it.
CB: In Aylesbury.
RB: No Hemel.
CB: In Hemel.
RB: Hemel, yeah, yeah and in fact we got a house and were down here before the factory. We had to travel up every day you know to, the next job I got when I was at Benham’s they got the contract for the ventilation for the House of Lords and the Commons what had been bombed during the war and they were used to galvanised and aluminium but underneath the fancy plasterwork they wanted stainless steel because they didn’t want it to rot and after all the cost of all the plasterwork so I got the job of the stainless steel because it all had to be welded and I could weld stainless steel when it was all curves and that. Yeah.
CB: So you know the House of Commons backwards.
RB: No. No, I didn’t, I didn’t go up there at all. I just made it and it all fitted so I didn’t have to go up there. Yeah. I got, I got in with the, the gang that places in London, the restaurants and that hadn’t been, hadn’t had any building work done on them during the war and we went to places like Derry and Toms to, to update their service counters. We used to, at this time we were working eight to eight because we were busy and we used to go up there Friday dinnertime and the counters were red hot. The counters in the pre-war used to be galvanised pipes going back with steam going through them and they would be red hot and we’d start stripping down from as soon as they’d finished serving dinnertime and we’d carry on stripping down and the stainless steel tops and that in the early days there wasn’t welding on stainless steel. It was riveting and various means and er but we used to put that on the lorry which used to go back to the works. We used to go home and then go in at 8 o’clock on Saturday morning. Our outside fitters used to be pulling out the pipes because at this time copper pipes were going in to replace the galvanised which were some had like rusted and that you know so we used to go in to the works and replace the tops and anything that needed to be. Sometime during Saturday night we’d load it on to the wagon and we’d go back and we’d go straight in and we’d start putting it up but there was no break because you didn’t know what snags you were going to come. Until it was finished you just kept so you worked from Saturday morning all the way through Saturday night round and it usually used to be sometime Sunday afternoon that used to get finished and you’d say ‘right we think we’re there’ you know, we ‘ave to, we used to have to make sure there were no leaks or nothing so there wasn’t too many of them but there was one. Barclays bank had a terrific long counter and it was decided that it was hopeless to try and do it all in one weekend so we did it in three weekends all running on so for four weekends I didn’t have a weekend off. I was out working eight till eight. Luckily it was, it was during the summer so I wasn’t at evening school. My son was born and I daren’t, my wife went into hospital. I daren’t say I’m not going because you were in that gang and if you didn’t go you were frightened that they wouldn’t have you next time you know but er
CB: When were you married?
RB: 1950.
CB: And how old are, well who are your children?
RB: Roger.
CB: Yeah and how old is he?
RB: He’s about sixty —
CB: No. He was born when?
RB: Er ’52.
CB: 19, and the next one?
RB: Peter ’53.
CB: Yep.
RB: Trevor ’56.
CB: Yeah.
RB: Andrew about ’59, I think.
CB: And then you adopted.
RB: Yeah.
CB: Who? What’s her name?
RB: Elizabeth.
CB: And how old is she? When was she born?
RB: About ‘69 I think.
CB: Right. So you needed to get over the others a bit before you took her on [laughs]
RB: Yeah. Well [laughs] Roger was working, you know.
CB: Oh was he?
RB: Bringing money in.
CB: Yeah. Right. Ok. We’ve done amazingly well. Thank you.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Roy Briggs
Description
An account of the resource
Roy Briggs was born in Battersea, London. After leaving school he undertook an engineering apprenticeship with Benham and Sons, producing equipment for the war. He describes his life during the Blitz. When he joined the Royal Air Force he trained as a wireless operator and served at RAF Fiskerton. He was on operations to Plauen, Cuxhaven and Potsdam. He also took part in Operation Manna and Operation Exodus as well as Cook’s tours over Germany. Until he was demobilised in 1947, he served at RAF Upwood. After the war he returned to a career in engineering.
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2016-01-28
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Janet McGreevy
Format
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01:58:03 audio recording
Language
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eng
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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ABriggsR160128
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Germany
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany--Plauen
Germany--Cuxhaven
Germany--Berlin
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
30 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
air sea rescue
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing of Helgoland (18 April 1945)
Cook’s tour
demobilisation
Dominie
Goodwill tour of the United States (1946)
Initial Training Wing
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Proctor
RAF Bridgnorth
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Hixon
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Madley
RAF Swinderby
RAF Upwood
training
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/109/2425/LGreenLC1318527v.1.pdf
b5e686d98ddbb0320085b55c6d541553
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
Green, Leonard
Len Green
L C Green
Description
An account of the resource
Twelve items. The collection relates to the service of Warrant Officer Leonard C Green (1318527 Royal Air Force) and consists of his log book, correspondence, a newspaper cuttings, four photographs and a foreign languages phrase book. Leonard Green flew Lancasters with 50 and 61 Squadrons from RAF Skellingthorpe and completed 19 daylight and night time operations.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Mark Boother and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-06-01
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Green, LC
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
Leonard Green’s navigator’s, air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log 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.
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
LGreenLC1318527v1
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
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Description
An account of the resource
Navigator's air bomber’s and air gunner’s flying log book for Flight Sergeant Leonard Green, wireless operator, covering the period from 15 December 1942 to 20 January 1946. He was stationed at RAF Manby, RAF Wigtown, RAF Bitteswell, RAF Bruntingthorpe, RAF Swinderby, RAF Syerston, RAF Skellingthorpe and RAF Coningsby. Aircraft flown in were, Dominie, Proctor, Anson, Wellington, Manchester and Lancaster. He flew a total of 23 operations, 13 night with 50 Squadron and 3 day and 7 night with 61 Squadron. He also flew operations Exodus with 61 Squadron and Dodge to Bari, Italy with 83 Squadron. Targets were, Hannover, Dusseldorf, Modane, Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Brunswick, Magdeburg, Bohlen, Gravenhorst, Dortmund-Emms Canal, Lutzkendorf, Wurzburg, Bremen, Wesel, Nordhausen and Molbis. His pilots on operations were Pilot Officer Lundy and Flight Lieutenant Phillips. The log book also contains many newspaper clippings relating to the targets attacked, aircraft flown in and events of the war and post war. It also contains pictures of the crew positions of Navigator, Bomb Aimer and Wireless Operator.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Scotland
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
France--Modane
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Würzburg
Italy--Bari
Scotland--Dumfries and Galloway
Germany--Böhlen
Germany--Braunschweig
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Nordhausen (Thuringia)
France
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1943-10-18
1943-11-03
1943-11-10
1943-11-11
1943-11-18
1943-11-19
1943-11-22
1943-11-26
1943-11-27
1943-12-02
1943-12-03
1943-12-20
1943-12-21
1943-12-29
1943-12-30
1944-01-02
1944-01-03
1944-01-14
1944-01-15
1944-01-20
1944-01-21
1944-01-21
1944-01-22
1945-02-19
1945-02-20
1945-02-21
1945-02-24
1945-03-14
1945-03-15
1945-03-16
1945-03-17
1945-03-22
1945-03-23
1945-04-04
1945-04-05
1945-04-06
1945-04-08
1945-04-09
1945-04-26
1945-05-06
1945-05-12
1945-05-14
1945-07-17
1945-09-09
1945-10-16
1945-10-20
1945-12-14
1945-12-20
1660 HCU
29 OTU
50 Squadron
61 Squadron
83 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
bombing up
Cook’s tour
Dominie
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Manchester
military service conditions
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
perception of bombing war
Proctor
RAF Bitteswell
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Coningsby
RAF Manby
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Swinderby
RAF Syerston
RAF Wigtown
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/187/2467/SMarshallS1594781v10031.1.jpg
127f75d875563164a3ceb15110f8de91
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. Album
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Marshall, S
Description
An account of the resource
77 items. The album contains wartime and post-war photographs, newspaper cuttings, and memorabilia assembled by Warrant Officer Sidney Charles Marshall (1924 - 2017, 1594781 Royal Air Force). 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
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.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-05-08
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
ELSHAM WOLDS’ GREAT PART IN BOMBING CAMPAIGN
Four Years of Magnificent Effort
ELSHAM Wolds began to operate with R.A.F. Bomber Command in July, 1941. The airfield was not quite completed when No. 103 Squadron arrived from Newton on July 11, but the Squadron soon settled in and has remained there ever since.
In nearly four years Elsham has built up a high reputation in the Royal Air Force. There was little delay before the airfield was placed on an operational basis and the Wellingtons were out on July 24, from 11 a.m. to 6.45 pm., attacking the battle cruiser “Gneisenau” at Brest.
Before long the Germans knew of the new bomber station, and in August, 1941, enemy aircraft attacked it. They did no serious damage. They tried again several times in later years, though never in strength.
The “Wimpeys” held the fort while the factories got busy with the production of the new four-engined bombers.
On September 10, 1941, Wellingtons flew to Turin for the loss of only one aircraft. By the end of December, Elsham was able to record as many as 17 Wellingtons airborne on a single night.
On one occasion two sergeants brought back their aircraft after four of the crew had baled out; a flare had caught alight in the rear fuselage.
AMONG THE 1,000
After taking part in the May and June 1,000 bomber raids in 1942, there was a lull.
Halifaxes began to arrive and in August made their first sorties from the station, against Dusseldorf. Hardly had the engineering staff accustomed themselves to these aircraft when there was another change, this time to Lancasters. By November 21 the Lancasters had replaced the Halifaxes and were doing excellently.
On the night of May 23-24, 1943, No. 103 Squadron put up 27 Lancasters, which at that time was a Command record.
The Commander-in-Chief, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, G.C.B., O.B.E., A.F.C., visited the station in September and addressed the crews.
One of the flights of No. 103 Squadron was transferred to No. 576 Squadron, which was being formed at Elsham. This left 103 a two-flight squadron. The two squadrons were together in close association and friendly rivalry until October, 1944.
OVER BERLIN
No. 103 Squadron had 30 aircraft over Berlin on the night of November 26-27. Elsham became a base station from December 1 and controlled the airfields at Kirmington and North Killingholme.
The wild weather of January, 1944, made life at Elsham what the R.A.F. call “pretty raw,” but the ground staff worked wonders in clearing blocked roads, and runways.
During the spring the Base Commander, Air Commodore Ivelaw Chapman, O.B.E., D.F.C., A.F.C., was shot down over France and taken prisoner. He has recently returned to this country. Air Commodore F.R.D. Swain, O.B.E., A.F.C., who broke the altitude record some years ago, took over from Air Commodore Chapman.
In June both squadrons at Elsham dropped a thousand tons in a month for the first time, and kept this up for some time. In the summer people in the neighbourhood were able to realise the full power of Bomber Command. Daylight operations against V sites, railway centres, and in close support of the Army enabled them to see the sky full of four-engined aircraft day after day.
In October, No. 103 Squadron dropped 1,277 tons, and 86 aircraft of both squadrons operated against Duisburg within 24 hours. On October 31, No. 576 Squadron left Elsham for Fiskerton. With 103 Squadron they had dropped 5,748 tons in the previous five months.
BOMBER COMMAND’S PRIDE
Elsham was the home of Lancaster “M.2,” the pride of Bomber Command. Its long life showed what a high standard of maintenance had been kept up. “M.2.” first flew on operations on May 4, 1943, to Dortmund, with 103 Squadron. It was later transferred to 576 Squadron, and had been on 103 operations by the beginning of 1944. It was retired with 144 trips to its credit, 97 of them to Germany and 15 to Berlin.
During the last winter everyone at Elsham was working at full stretch, and the Lancasters were fully employed on targets like the Ruhr, Ludwigshafen, Nuremburg, Munich, Chemnitz, and Dresden. Many mines were laid in enemy waters.
For the last month of operations No. 103 Squadron was joined by No. 100 Squadron from Waltham (Grimsby), and both were in the attack on Berchtesgaden on April 25.
When there was no more bombing to be done, large convoys of Army vehicles began to drive up to the station. They carried food for the Lancasters to take to Holland. Another task was to bring back hundreds of freed prisoners of war from the Continent.
Many Elsham names will go down in history for acts of heroism. On May 4, 1944, an aircraft of No. 576 Squadron, captained by Pilot-Officer Reed, of Wellingborough, Northants, landed with the flight engineer helping Reed to hold the control column and the air bomber clinging to the rudder pedals. The Lancaster looked a total wreck. It had been shot up by a fighter over Mailly-le-Camp; it had caught fire, a large hole was knocked in the floor, electrical and navigational instruments were smashed, the rudders and elevators were damaged, and the rear-turret was hanging by a threat.
Two Lancaster from 103 Squadron were each attacked by two fighters on July 29, 1944, when bombing Stuttgart. All four of the enemy were destroyed in a couple of minutes.
Another 103 crew shot down a Ju. 88 over Karlsruhe on April 25, 1944, but sustained serious damage. The pilot had to ditch, and the crew were on the Goodwin Sands for seven hours before being picked up.
Just before the end of the war one of Elsham’s aircraft came back with a 250lb. bomb embedded in a wing. The pilot told the crew to bale out, and the baled out himself near base.
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
Elsham Wolds' Great Part in Bombing Campaign
Four years of Magnificent Effort
Description
An account of the resource
A history of 103 Squadron's operations at RAF Elsham Wolds.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One newspaper cutting on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SMarshallS1594781v10031
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.
France--Brest
Italy--Turin
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Munich
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dresden
Netherlands
France--Mailly-le-Camp
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Karlsruhe
France
Italy
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
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.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Govert J. van Lienden
100 Squadron
103 Squadron
576 Squadron
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
Bombing of Mailly-le-Camp (3/4 May 1944)
ditching
Gneisenau
Halifax
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Ju 88
Lancaster
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
RAF Elsham Wolds
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Kirmington
RAF North Killingholme
rivalry
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/196/3329/AAn01134-170717.2.mp3
aec7073168ada9cb3517eca4b855dca9
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
A Survivor of the bombing of Berlin
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with a survivor of the bombing of Berlin, who wishes to remain anonymous.
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
2017-07-17
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
An01134
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 17th of July 2017 and I’m in Great Horwood in Buckinghamshire [deleted] who normally lives in Berlin and I’m going to talk to her about her experiences as a child in Germany, particularly in Berlin, during the war. So [deleted] what is the earliest thing you remember in your life?
ANON: [laughs] Switch off that. I can’t think.
CB: Ok. So where did you live?
ANON: Where did I live? I lived in Berlin. I was born in Berlin and I’m back there.
CB: You said, in a small flat.
ANON: Yeah. My grandparents lived not far away and we would go there most days and play cards or family games. My father died when I was nine. My mother had to go to work then in order to keep her and me. It was hard. It was hard for her.
CB: How did your father die? Did he have an accident or was he ill?
ANON: It was an accident. Yeah.
CB: Pardon?
[pause]
CB: Right. We’ll stop there for a mo.
ANON: You’ve been telling —
[Recording paused]
CB: You lived in a block of flats. Which floor?
ANON: Fourth.
CB: Ok.
ANON: No lift.
CB: No lift. Right.
ANON: So, everything had, even fuel, had to be carried upstairs.
CB: What did you burn as fuel?
ANON: Pressed coals they called them. Black. Black.
CB: Sort of nuggets.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: I had a happy childhood. We were poor but I was happy. My parents could not afford a bike. I can’t —
CB: So, when you went your grandparents you played cards. What else did you do? Did you have meals there?
ANON: On the opposite side was a big sports place. In winter you could skate on there.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And in the summer we would kick a ball or have one of those —
Other: Skipping rope.
ANON: Skipping ropes. Yeah.
CB: Yes. And was there plenty of food when you were very young?
ANON: Yeah. Yeah. We had. We weren’t hungry. Yeah.
CB: What was your favourite food? Children tend to have favourites.
ANON: Yeah. I can’t remember. My mother would do eintopft.
Other: Thick soups.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Thick soups.
ANON: What?
CB: Thick soup was it?
ANON: Thick soup? Well everything in one pot. Cabbage and meat.
CB: Yes. Yeah.
ANON: And potatoes. You know.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And I was very very blonde and by looks typical German. What’s the name?
CB: Aryan.
ANON: Yeah. But I didn’t do anything. I just looked that way. My blonde hair. And two, two steps below. Oh my English.
CB: Two floors. Yeah.
ANON: My English.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: I’ve been back so long.
CB: That’s alright. Two floors below.
ANON: Yeah. There was a lady and she always called me in and gave me pudding.
Other: Blancmange.
ANON: What?
Other: Blancmange.
ANON: And she would ask my mother could she take me along because she thought I was a gorgeous little girl. I didn’t think so but she did.
CB: Right.
ANON: [unclear]
CB: What about — what about schoolfriends?
ANON: Schoolfriends. Yeah well. I remember one and her hair was jet black and we were the best singers in class. Her and me. And whenever we had biology, which we didn’t like, we persuaded to let us sing the latest song or something. Henie her name was. She was a Jew. We were the best of friends in those days.
CB: So you were born in 1930.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: And the war started in September 1939.
ANON: That’s right.
CB: What do you remember about that, aged nine?
ANON: I don’t remember much. I went to school and in those days they weren’t bombing Berlin.
CB: But did the school explain that the war had started?
ANON: I bet they did. I can’t remember though. I bet they did. Yeah. It was an ordinary school. It wasn’t a gymnasium. It was an ordinary school. You should, you should go there from six to fourteen.
CB: Right.
ANON: Eight years.
CB: Berlin is a big place so which part of Berlin did you live in?
ANON: Right in the middle.
CB: Right in the middle.
ANON: [unclear]
CB: Right. And then when you, the war had started. As time went on then bombing started did it?
ANON: No. Hitler, HItler said collect all the children. Or as many children as you can and they sent them off to Austria. Near Osterreich. Is it?
Other: You said Austria.
ANON: It might have been southern Germany. And I was there nine or ten months. My mother came to see me and when I go back to Berlin, back to, yeah Berlin, they started bombing us. That day or the next day. I can’t remember.
CB: Oh really. Yes.
ANON: They sent us away and nothing happened and then when we got back it did.
CB: Yes. Well the evacuees had the same experience in Britain. Some of them. Yes. So, when you got back to Berlin then what? Did you stay there?
ANON: I went back to Berlin. Yeah. Had to. Nowhere else to go. And I remember it’s said and, they started bombing us. The British and French would come at night and the Americans during the daytime. And they used to say on the radio schwer kampf bringer.
Other: Heavy party.
ANON: Meaning, meaning bombers are coming.
CB: Yes.
ANON: Flying in over Hanover, Braunsweig. That meant we would be bombed in seven minutes from now. And we grabbed everything we could and took it with us in the cellar. Can we listen to it for a minute?
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[recording paused]
CB: Her father died from an accident at work when she was aged nine.
[recording paused]
ANON: Anybody who, who didn’t have running water in Germany. I can’t —
CB: No.
ANON: And we all had electricity.
CB: Yes.
ANON: And we all, we would cook on this. It was made of tiles. This machine. Machine. It’s not a bloody machine.
CB: Cooker.
ANON: It’s an oven.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: It’s an oven.
CB: An oven. Right.
ANON: And put your pots on there and I’m totally out of — its not like me stuttering about like this here but —
CB: No.
ANON: I wasn’t prepared for this.
CB: No. But you see where I live. A village near here. It wasn’t until 1946, after the war, that they had piped water.
ANON: You’re joking.
CB: Or electricity. No.
ANON: What?
CB: No. And the mains drains didn’t come until we joined. We came to the village thirty eight years ago. So, 1979 was when they put the mains drains in so the point that I’m making is in Britain lots of people didn’t have these things and it’s interesting to know what it was like in Germany in the war. How were you getting on? So, you’ve just talked about the cooking. So, it was coal fired cooking.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And heating.
CB: Yeah.
Other: Momma, say things like —
CB: I’ll stop for a mo.
ANON: Sorry, I didn’t realise.
[Recording paused]
ANON: We would share the toilet with our neighbours.
CB: Oh right.
ANON: But it was, it was a proper water toilet with window and water and and God knows what. They had a key. We had a key. No problem. We never met them. We never saw them.
CB: Right.
ANON: On the toilet I mean.
CB: So, this was on the landing.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: A shared toilet.
ANON: Yeah. Where we lived on the fourth floor it was between. It was three and a half.
CB: What about the bath? Where was that?
ANON: Oh, we would bath in our flats.
CB: It was in the flat. Right.
ANON: My mother would bring a big sink runner.
Other: Tin. Tin.
CB: Tin bath.
ANON: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So the water was heated separately and then poured into the bath.
ANON: And this Kochmachine.
Other: For boiling. Kettle.
ANON: No. She had — oh God how can I explain this? The oven.
CB: Yes. The oven.
ANON: The stove. It was about as big as this. Half a table.
CB: Yes.
ANON: And there were some rings here.
CB: Four foot square.
ANON: And you could hang the cooking pot in. And if you had a cooking bigger pot you could take out the other ring. The next ring. You know what I mean?
CB: Yes.
ANON: There were about four or five rings. And also here we had [pause] sugar.
CB: Did you have a hot plate?
ANON: Yeah. Two.
CB: Two hot plates.
ANON: They were gas and it was near an open fire and it was gas.
CB: Right. And it had an oven. Was the oven powered by the gas or —
ANON: No, the oven was powered by —
CB: The coal.
ANON: By — yeah. Coal.
CB: Right.
ANON: We fetched from the cellar. Up the stairs.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: It was lovely.
CB: And you had electricity.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: But did you have power all the time?
ANON: All the time.
CB: Or did you have power cuts?
ANON: All the time. We had power all the time. Oh, during the war?
CB: Yes.
ANON: Oh, well, I can’t remember but I know that before the war we always, well as far as I remember we always had.
CB: You always had supplies.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: So, in the war when the raids came you had a quarter of an hour or something notice.
ANON: Less.
CB: Less than that. Then you went in to the cellar.
ANON: We went into the cellar.
CB: Everybody was there.
ANON: Yeah. Except two ladies. They weren’t allowed in any more. And my mother asked, ‘Why not?’ And they said, ‘They’re Jews.’
CB: Oh.
ANON: And my mother said, ‘They’re human beings like you and me. They want protection. Let them come down.’ Nein. Nein. Had she been reported she would have been taken away.
CB: Right.
ANON: Anyway, this fellow wasn’t all bad. He let them come down but apart from other people so other people wouldn’t be offended. A load of rubbish.
CB: And how did you know that the danger had passed when you were in there?
ANON: Oh, there would be a siren going.
CB: Right. So, there would have been a siren to begin with. To warn you.
ANON: Yes. Sure. Yeah.
CB: And then —
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Another one to say the all clear.
ANON: And I remember if it happened three times in a night which it did sometimes then we didn’t have to go to school the next morning.
CB: Right.
ANON: Meanwhile they bombed our school and I remember at one time at one time we had sixty two children in one class. I also remember one thing. I told you I went to see my grandma almost every day. All of us. And we were coming back towards our flat and on the other side of the street there was this terrible noise. They were breaking shop windows. And it was a jeweller and he had a big star on his shop window. Jew. The word “Jew” written in it and this night they came and demolished shop, pinched, took all the, well I should imagine SS men. My father saw that and he wanted to go across and help those people and my mother knew if he goes across there he’s going to be dead in two minutes. I’ve never before or since seen a woman fight as hard. My father couldn’t make it across the street. She was too strong for him. I’ve never seen anything like it. She was stronger than him and he was a strong man. It was she was frightened. So, we went home but it was a terrible experience. Switch that off.
CB: So, it said on the window, “Juden.”
ANON: Yeah. “Jude.”
CB: “Jude.” Right.
ANON: They all had to wear, they had to wear it here or here.
CB: Yeah. So, what happened to them?
ANON: No idea. We know that sometimes a car would go by, a van would go by and there was people on it but we thought they were sent to work camps. You know. When they had to work for the Nazis. But we had no — people weren’t, we had no idea. We had no idea. The first time I saw or heard about the concentration camp was when the war was over and the allies were showing us a film. And I said, ‘Yeah. Now we’ve lost the war they can tell us anything.’ It took weeks and month ‘til we could, ‘til we could believe that they killed those people. But nobody believes it today — that we didn’t know. Well we didn’t know. We did not know.
CB: Well the camps weren’t near Berlin were they?
ANON: No. They were out in the wilds somewhere. [unclear] There were several in Germany but I thought they were just sending them to work.
CB: How did you get that impression?
ANON: How did I get—?
CB: How did you get that impression? Was it put on the radio or in the ‘paper? Or —
ANON: No. They sent us, they showed us films.
CB: No. no. I’m talking about in the war you thought they were going to work camps.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: How did you get that idea?
ANON: I didn’t get any idea. I saw those vans going by with people on it.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And I thought they’d taken them to camps. That’s all.
CB: Yeah. Right.
ANON: Today everybody says that. We didn’t know. We did not know.
CB: And the radio was working all the time. What sort of messages were coming out on that that you, as a child, would appreciate?
ANON: I can’t remember that. I can’t remember that.
CB: Did the — did the German radio have children’s programmes that you remember?
ANON: I can’t remember.
CB: Right.
ANON: We would, we would mostly have listened to news to find out where the allies were. We wanted them to get to Berlin before the Russians [pause] but they had an agreement with Stalin. And he said he lost the most men and he wanted the right to take Berlin and so the French and the British waited. Waited and waited and let them come. Oh, it was, that was when I was frightened most.
CB: Were you? Yeah.
ANON: During the war I wasn’t so frightened. When the Russians came that frightened me.
CB: So, the Battle of Berlin was the middle of April 1945 to the 2nd of May.
ANON: They fought for every house. They fought for every house. They fought for every street. Hitler — Hitler destroyed most bridges. Berlin, I found out since, had more bridges than Venice and he destroyed most bridges. And I remember going somewhere and there were this bridge was gone but there was a big pipe like this and people would walk across it. I forced myself. In the middle of it, I couldn’t, I couldn’t go forwards or backwards. They had to come from both sides and guide me because if your feet had fell down it would have gone in to the water you’d have been — because the bridge were [expedien?] destroyed. All the iron pieces were sticking up. You know.
CB: Oh right.
ANON: So if you had fallen you would have been a dead one.
CB: You’d be impaled on it.
ANON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I went to work. I left school when I was thirteen and a half and I got a job straightaway in an office.
CB: So that’s 1943.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Yes.
ANON: No. The war was finished.
CB: Ah.
ANON: The war was finished. And that’s when we got hungry. We had nothing to eat. Bloody hell. It was terrible. Hunger is terrible.
CB: How did you get food?
ANON: How did we get food? We got cards, tickets and it says five hundred grams of something and something else. I remember once my mother sending me to the baker and fetch our last bread or whatever it was and I ate it all the way coming home. A whole loaf. And there was nothing left for my mother. Oh I felt — but the hunger was bigger than the — God.
CB: So, who was distributing the food. Was it the Russians? Or was it done —
ANON: Yeah.
CB: By the German authorities.
ANON: It must have been the Russians at first. Some were even so kind they — it didn’t happen very often but some would killed a horse so people could eat. And others were not so nice. You know. But I remember as a child we’d go finding splitter.
Other: Shrapnel.
ANON: Pardon?
Other: Shrapnel.
ANON: Yeah. Shrapnel.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And we could distinguish whether it was from a bomb, from a roof.
CB: A shell.
ANON: Flak.
CB: Anti-aircraft. Yeah.
ANON: Or wherever.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And we did know that you mustn’t touch the greenish ones. That’s phosphor. It burns your skin through the bone you know.
CB: Yes. Yeah.
ANON: We survived. We survived. Kids. We made a game of that somehow.
CB: So, you collected the scrap metal. What did you do with that?
ANON: Exchanged it. Give me two of those and you get one of these.
CB: Yeah. Exchange it for what? Food or for —
ANON: No. We exchanged it for another shrapnel amongst the children.
CB: Yeah. ‘Cause you were getting a collection together.
ANON: Sort of. Yeah. And then when we were so hungry and the war had finished we’d [unclear] On a train outside. It would take us in to Brandenburg. To a farmer. And I’d have our best. Our best silver. Knives and forks. Give to the farmer. We got a few potatoes. Walk back to the station and the police would take the potatoes off us.
CB: The police took the potatoes off you. Right.
ANON: And back we went to the train. Hung out. And you were so tired. You were so tired and you couldn’t let go. You’ d have been dead. Those farmers. The people used to see all they need is carpet for the cow shed. They got everything else. Yeah. The hunger was terrible. And then bit by bit it got better and better. Oh, and in the meanwhile we had the luftbrucke.
Other: What’s the luftbrucke?
ANON: Can you remember when the —
CB: Well there was the Berlin Airlift in 1948.
ANON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Is that what you mean? Luftflight. Yes.
ANON: Yeah. Can’t remember what I was going to say about it.
CB: Ok. So the Berlin Airlift.
ANON: Why was I mentioning that? Why.
CB: You were talking about food. Is that what you were thinking of?
ANON: Well anyway I saw this article in the paper where they wanted German girls to come to Berlin er to England they could either go as a nurse, in a textile factory or child minding. Child minding was not for me. Nursing was not for me. So, I went in the factory. I’m not telling you — what’s the reason? Oh, I was going to say that the day, the day I left Berlin for England the what’s the name was stopped. It was open for — luftbrucke had finished.
CB: The Berlin Airlift had finished.
ANON: Yeah. Yeah. And I went to England and here, here they’d got, they’re doing this you know like we used to have to buy bread.
Other: Ration card.
ANON: Yeah. Rations. Yes.
CB: Yes. Where did you land in England? You came by ship.
ANON: Yeah. Yes.
Yes. [unclear] Not Preston.
Other: Harwich.
ANON: Not Harwich. No.
CB: It wasn’t Dover.
ANON: No.
CB: Anyway, you came across.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Yes. And then what did you do? You knew where you were going to go did you?
ANON: Well.
CB: In advance?
ANON: It was, it was governmental, you know. So, we got there and they gave us one pound a week. I think it was a week. And I still smoked in those days and I went to buy some cigarettes and came back. No idea about the money. Couldn’t speak English. Not a single word. And somebody was counting my money and said, ‘You’ve been diddled. You’ve been done.’ And I thought right, I’m going to learn this.
CB: Learn English.
ANON: The very first day in English I learned the English money.
CB: Right.
ANON: I thought nobody else is going to. But on the whole the British were — to me they were good.
CB: So where was your first job?
ANON: My first job. I don’t know but I remember the first landlord. We did three turns around the bed and then, yeah. And my —
Other: You were in Derby.
ANON: What?
Other: Were you in Derby? Derby.
ANON: Yeah, I know. I worked in Derby but when this landlord was turning funny we went to the Labour Exchange, my friend and I. She spoke English. And they sort of viewed us a bit funny but then they decided they believed us. He’d been there previously saying he wants us out because we’re so filthy. That’s why they viewed us the way they did, you know. That was in Derby. So I got away from that job and I finished up at Midland Dyers. Midland Dyers, Derby. And I was there for two years earning quite a bit of money because it was a special job.
CB: Dyeing clothes.
ANON: No.
CB: Dyeing.
ANON: No.
CB: Oh.
ANON: Warping. Warping. A new fibre had just come out. It could have been nylon. I can’t remember. And it went through, it was on a reel and it had to go through some — you see the thing was that two threads had to be like this. Side by side.
Yes.
ANON: It was a fine silky thread. If it was like this it was no good. If it was like this it was no good. It had to be side by side. If we could manage that one of those things were worth about two thousand pounds in those days. So, it was a qualified job, you know. What was your question?
CB: No. Where, what — what was the —
ANON: Midland Dyers.
CB: It was dyeing. Midland Dyers. Dyeing fabric.
ANON: No.
CB: Material.
ANON: No.
CB: Right.
ANON: Warping is it? Warping?
Other: I don’t know.
ANON: What do you call it? What do you call it?
CB: But they were, they were producing this thread.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Which was a man-made fibre.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Right.
ANON: We got that.
CB: And then you had to dye the colour into it.
ANON: You put it on to a beam.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: Beam. God. If I’d have known.
CB: But you were putting a colour on it were you?
ANON: No. We weren’t putting a colour on to it. We were putting it on to a beam.
CB: Right.
ANON: On to a beam. It had to be side by side.
CB: Yes. Ok. And when it was on the beam what did they do with it?
ANON: God knows. They took it away then.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And we got another new creel and then through the combs. And then on to the —
CB: On to the reel.
ANON: Hmmn.
CB: Right. How much did they pay you for that?
ANON: I can’t remember but it was well, it was well paid. Very well paid. They were saying only as good as miners in those days, you know.
CB: Oh really. Right. And where did you live then? You changed your accommodation.
ANON: I lived with, I can’t remember what she, what her name was but she was ever such a nice lady and she was frightened to let me out at night. She was ever so frightened to let me out. Oh [deleted] no. You mustn’t go out. No. It’s dark. But anyway I lived with her for — I don’t know how long. I can’t remember after that what happened.
CB: Did you come over with your friend from Germany?
ANON: Yeah.
CB: And then how long did you stay together?
ANON: We became friends on the —
CB: On the ship.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Right.
ANON: Yeah. She went off to see her boyfriend. She met this English soldier in Berlin and she came across to see him and she didn’t know he was married with children. Yeah.
CB: So that didn’t work.
ANON: She didn’t like that. He didn’t like that.
CB: What was the attitude of the British people to you as a German, after the war, in England?
ANON: I would, I would say to them, ‘I’ll let you know I’m German.’ One said, ‘Oh well. I speak to everybody.’ And others would sort of turn away but to me I can’t complain. I couldn’t speak English as I said. It came, you know, by and by. And I ask her to write down my name and address. My address. It was [deleted] Chester Green. And she write that down and she sent me for chicken food. The performance I gave in that shop was A1 [laughs] making noises and flapping the wings and all sorts. They fetched out everything they had in this bloody shop. Live chickens. Dead chickens. Cut up chickens. All sorts. No. That wasn’t right. In the end I got what I wanted. Chicken food. We often laughed about that.
CB: So, did you take classes in English to help you?
ANON: No. No. No, I didn’t. My English used to be pretty good. I’ve been back in Germany now for forty years. No. ’77. That’s twenty three.
CB: Yeah. Forty years.
ANON: Forty years. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: And Sharon. I usually speak fifty fifty and now it’s gone to mostly German. So, she will have lost it.
CB: A bit of practice. You’re ok. So, after the dyers then where did you go?
ANON: Home.
CB: The next job?
ANON: Back to Germany.
CB: Oh, did you? Right.
ANON: I stayed there. The, the not the boss but he was the meistergrade — he would he would be the fellow going around the machines. Oiling them and making sure they were all in order and what have you.
CB: The maintenance man.
ANON: Yeah. And my friend and I, she was a keen cyclist. Bike. Not motorcyclist.
CB: Cyclist. Yeah.
ANON: And my landlady was going to Cornwall on holiday and we said, ‘We’ll come and see you.’ [laughs] ‘You can’t. You can’t.’ I couldn’t even, I’d never even ridden a bike before ‘cause I hadn’t got one. My parents couldn’t afford one. Anyway, we went to buy this bike and she says, ‘Have a go.’ And a bus came towards me and I panicked and the wheel was buckled. The front wheel. So, we had to have that repaired or bought a new one. I don’t know. And we managed to get to Devonshire. My landlady couldn’t believe it. She could not believe it. On the way back we accepted lorries that would take us, you know. But going down we didn’t. We slept on the side of the bloody road.
CB: This was summertime was it?
ANON: Yeah. ‘Cause my landlady went on holiday down there. Yeah.
CB: It was.
ANON: Yeah. When I think about that today. When I went home to Germany I had two suitcases. After these two years went back home. I had two suitcases and one was packed with coffee. Pounds and pounds. And we had to sit on the suitcase to close it, you know. Pounds of coffee. And the other one was just clothing. When we got to the Customs they said, ‘Open your suitcase.’ I said, ‘Oh please don’t make me open my suitcase. Three girls sat on it for me to close it, you know.’ We can’t get. Anyway, I talked them into opening just one. ‘Ok then. Which one should I open?’ Which one has the coffee got? This is the one with the coffee. ‘Open that one.’ He says, ‘And what’s in that one? My clothing?’ I said, ‘That’s the one with the coffee.’ I was telling him the bloody truth and he didn’t believe me and he let me go through. He opened the other one because I pointed to the coffee one. They could have had me. I said the truth all the time but the way I did it they get the — yeah.
CB: Was coffee a banned substance?
ANON: Yeah. We could swap that for other foods you know.
CB: It was worth a lot of money.
ANON: We didn’t sell it. We swapped it for other foods.
CB: Oh I see. Right.
ANON: God knows what. I remember. As I say when I was thirteen I started work. Thirteen and three quarters. My mother sending me to the [unclear] for two slices of bread and a little bit of salt. Two slices of bread all day. Hunger is terrible.
CB: Did the food supply, during the war, did the food supply get worse as time went on?
ANON: I should imagine. I can’t remember. But we were never so hungry as just after the war.
CB: After the war.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: In Britain there was rationing throughout the war and until 1954.
ANON: Yeah. I came in ’53. I tell you.
CB: Right.
ANON: That day — Germany — we upped it all and came to Britain.
CB: Came abroad.
ANON: Yeah
CB: Yeah. I remember my parents had a German girl working for them for a while. In Germany though, in the war there was food rationing was there?
ANON: Yeah. But it was sort of, you could get by. You wouldn’t be awake nights because you were so hungry. They did supply us with food. Yeah.
CB: Now, what happened to the family flat during the war? Were you, was your mother in there with you all the time or did it get damaged?
ANON: Yeah, we went to the cellar, down to the cellar in the siren.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: We went to the cellar and in winter or anytime at all we would put on two jackets and two of everything. Except shoes. We put on everything. Two. Carried it all four and half, five, four and a half stairs in to the cellar. Siren. Up again. Second time. The things people can stick to when —
CB: To what extent was the block of flats damaged in the bombing?
ANON: Full of every, you could see the holes where it had been hit. I lived at number 19 and number 18 was burned down and it came through the — in the, [pause] in the cellar the builders have to leave a wall that’s called the fire wall. And that’s easily to break through. That’s where they came from number 18. They came into our cellar. It was so full. It was so crowded and overloaded. I don’t know where the other people finished up but —
CB: But your mother was there with you throughout the war, was she?
ANON: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Right. So, what was the general attitude of the population to the bombing? Being bombed. What was their reaction?
ANON: We used to say not very nice words but we couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t do anything. We didn’t want the war. We couldn’t stop it. So, you know.
CB: What did the authorities keep telling you about being bombed?
ANON: At first, they swore blind that no bomb would ever touch Berlin. Yeah. He swallowed his words then. Goering.
CB: You mentioned earlier about picking up the debris some of which was flak.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Some of which was bombs.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: What was the reaction to the incendiaries because a large amount of the ordnance dropped was incendiary so —
ANON: What is that?
CB: Fire bombs.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: You said they were the green ones.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: The shrapnel was green.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: So how did the population react to the firebombing?
ANON: Oh. They didn’t do to us like they did, Berlin never stood in — where was it? In Dresden or somewhere.
CB: Dresden. Yeah.
ANON: They created something specially.
CB: A fire.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Fire storms. Yes. And Hamburg.
ANON: We didn’t have that. We just got bombs and ordinary fires. And, God, when I see pictures today of how Berlin looked in ‘45 I still, to this day, drive through Berlin and think how come, how come they could rebuild it so quickly. It looks as if nothing’s ever happened. I can’t understand that. The first thing that happened after the war women would make themselves a little table of something and find a hammer or something and knock all, grab the bricks and knock all the cement off so the brick could be re-used.
CB: That was their job.
ANON: Yeah. Well that’s, that’s what everybody did. There was nobody to give you a job.
CB: To rebuild.
ANON: Yeah. It was better than sitting about.
CB: How tall was your block of flats? How many floors?
ANON: Four.
CB: You were at the top floor.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Right.
ANON: As I said, no lift. Sugar. And then every night, sometimes three times carrying everything you were able to. Down the cellar and up again. Bloody hell.
CB: So, there was huge destruction. Your block of flats survived.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: What was the view around there? Were there other flats still standing or were they demolished?
ANON: No. They were just, just [pause] no — only number 18 was totally demolished. The others, the others I don’t know. They just had big holes from, from shrapnel, you know. And the Americans — the cheeky devils. They would fly in ever so low during the day and take pictures because they did area bombing, you know. One day they do it from twelve to fifteen or the next day they do it from sixteen to twenty one. They were making sure everybody gets some.
CB: Which areas had the greatest destruction in Berlin?
ANON: I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know. I only know when I looked around there was nothing. There was nothing. How? I don’t know where people went. It was terrible.
CB: You talked about, in the beginning of the war, children being evacuated. Were they evacuated later or did they just leave families with their children in Berlin?
ANON: Were they what?
CB: Did they evacuate children again later?
ANON: No.
CB: They didn’t.
ANON: There was nothing. No. No. Only this once but I was gone nine months. My mother came to see me.
CB: Yes.
ANON: And when I came back they started bombing Berlin so, you know, they were going to get me somehow.
CB: Yeah. So, you were back after the war. You returned to Berlin. How did you come to meet your husband?
ANON: I met him about six weeks before I went home.
CB: In England.
ANON: In England.
CB: Oh right.
ANON: I didn’t like him all that much.
CB: Why not?
ANON: I didn’t like him all that much at all. As a friend, ok but not as a boyfriend and then I went back to Berlin. God knows when it happened. I don’t know. I was engaged to an American and I said to him, ‘I’ll just go England and say goodbye. It will be ages before I get back to Europe.’ And I saw him again at a dance and six days later we were married. Six or seven days.
CB: So, he had a pretty convincing patter to give to you did he?
ANON: There was nothing. We just saw each other and that was it.
CB: Oh.
ANON: He was engaged. I was engaged. And we met at this dance and that was it.
CB: Where was that?
ANON: Derby. There was live music Rita Rosa and Ted Heath.
CB: Oh.
ANON: Derby, Paris. I can’t remember the name.
CB: Was he in the army? Or was —
ANON: No.
CB: What did he do?
ANON: He went down the mine that year because my father in law had an ice cream business and he needed one at home so he said, ‘Go down the mine and then you can stay at home,’ which he did.
CB: So, what did he do in the mine?
ANON: Coal mining. He didn’t, he didn’t [pause] God my English. Let me explain [unclear]
Other: Dynamite.
ANON: What?
Other: He used dynamite.
CB: He used to do the blasting.
ANON: No. He didn’t. No. He didn’t do the blasting.
CB: But he put in the dynamite did he?
ANON: God knows. I don’t know. I don’t know but I do know he didn’t do blasting.
CB: Right. So how long did he work there when you were married?
ANON: I can’t remember. He should have had to work the two years but he stayed longer because the pay was so good but he did, he did come out and he took over — he had the ice cream in the summer. In the winter they were delivering coal. The miners are entitled to, you know. So, you see there’s nothing, nothing thrilling to tell you.
CB: But then you had your children.
ANON: Yeah. ’55, ’58,’ 65.
CB: By which time your husband was running the ice cream business was he?
ANON: As well as the coal job in the winter. Yeah.
CB: He was still working in the coal mine.
ANON: Yeah.
CB: Right.
ANON: No. Just delivering.
CB: Just delivering. Right.
ANON: Just delivering it to miners.
CB: Right.
ANON: And one day, God knows, he had flu or something and he said, ‘Go and take Mr Jenkins’ and, ‘What do you mean, am I taking him?’ He wanted me to drive the lorry with the coal on. I only did about five customers. Then I went home shaking.
CB: No power steering.
ANON: Power steering in those days. You must be joking. No power steering and a heavy lorry. God. When we got back we got a real rollicking for only doing five customers. Yes. Mr Jenkins said I couldn’t work any faster.
CB: So, when you got back when did you go back to Germany?
ANON: After the two years. I went over in ‘49. I went back in ‘51.
CB: Yes.
ANON: Stayed in Germany for two and a half years.
CB: Yes.
ANON: Never heard from my husband. Never saw him. I wrote him twice. And then his sister wrote and said he’s engaged. And I thought yeah. Ok. So why not? And then I still came to England in ’53 and as I say within six days, special licence, we were married.
CB: Yeah. What was the reaction of German people in Germany to your marrying an Englishman?
ANON: No idea. I was in England.
CB: The family. The extended family.
ANON: The family. I have no idea. I know my mother. My mother. She was all by herself. No sister, no brother, no husband. She had a sister but God knows what they said. I don’t know. I know my mother was heartbroken for a while.
CB: Why was she heartbroken?
ANON: My mother? Because I wasn’t coming back.
CB: Right.
ANON: And she was all by herself.
CB: Right. We’ll stop there for a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: When the war ended [deleted] you had only Russians immediately but then you were in the British zone were you? In the British Zone?
ANON: It wasn’t then in the British zone.
CB: No. Right. So, what was the reaction to the Russians and how did they treat you?
ANON: Everybody was scared and wished the British and the French would come. The Americans. But as I say they had this agreement with Stalin with Churchill.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: To let the Russians in first.
CB: Well it was the result of the Yalta conference that they knew that Berlin was going to be in the eastern zone.
ANON: Have you ever [pause], have you got schnipsel papier.
CB: Yeah.
ANON: [unclear]
CB: A piece of paper yeah.
ANON: I can’t draw.
CB: Oh right.
ANON: Imagine. Imagine this is Germany.
CB: Yes.
ANON: Berlin is here.
CB: Yes.
ANON: That is the east.
CB: Yes.
ANON: And these three are French.
CB: In the west.
ANON: The west. Yeah.
CB: The British, French and American.
ANON: English and — yeah.
CB: American.
ANON: Isn’t that brilliant.
CB: Yes.
ANON: And I, and I live in the British part.
CB: Right. Ok.
ANON: The British part is in the middle. The top is French. Then English and Americans are the south west. [unclear].
CB: Right.
ANON: So, what was the public reaction—
CB: Tell him about the what?
CB: The fear.
Other: The fear.
ANON: [unclear]
CB: Your fear of the Russians.
ANON: I know. I don’t like, I don’t like doing that. I think, it think it’s dangerous talk. [Unclear]
Other: She doesn’t want to.
CB: That’s Ok. But in the general population was concerned about the Russians.
ANON: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: Because of what they did. Yeah. I mean they flattened Berlin in taking it didn’t they?
ANON: That’s not the worst. The worst thing was that the women were all scared to death.
CB: So how did you, how did your mother defend you against —
ANON: My mother said, ‘Stop shaking.’ She said, ‘I will go for you if they come and fetch you.’ And the Polish woman, she nearly had the [unclear], ‘They don’t take a forty year old if they can have a fifteen year old. Or a thirteen.’ So the, this Polish woman had a big korbsessel.
Other: Whicker chair.
ANON: Yeah. And she said, ‘Now crouch down under this and she put a blanket over me and she sort of sat on it. She didn’t sit but it looked as if she did so the Russians didn’t see me.
CB: Right.
ANON: But as I say another one would kill a horse and, you know, give it to the people so —
Ok. Thank you.
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AAn01134-170717
Title
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Interview with a survivor of the bombing of Berlin
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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Sound
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eng
Format
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00:55:36 audio recording
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Pending review
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2017-07-17
Description
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She tells of her life in Berlin before, during and after the war. She lived with her mother in a block of flats close to the home of her grandparents. Her father died when she was nine years old. During the war she collected shrapnel as souvenirs to swap with her school friends. During the allied bombing she sheltered in the cellar of her block. After the war she suffered the pangs of hunger, and she describes taking silverware to farmers in exchange for a few potatoes. As part of a government scheme, she travelled to the UK to work at a textile factory. She then returned to Germany. She came back to the UK for what she thought would be a final visit but she met and married her husband.
Coverage
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Civilian
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1943
1945
Contributor
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Julie Williams
anti-Semitism
bombing
childhood in wartime
civil defence
fear
home front
incendiary device
round-up
shelter
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/200/3335/PBaconSG1601.1.jpg
70945e1921ef54e6d100ad826375db35
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/200/3335/ABaconSG160216.2.mp3
b7fb370705e8e6280c2275db97ad276e
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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Bacon, Stephen Granville
Stephen Bacon
Stephen Granville Bacon
Stephen G Bacon
S Bacon
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Stephen Granville Bacon (1921 - 2023, 1351298 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as an air gunner with 12 Squadron before he was shot down and became a prisoner of war.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-02-19
2016-02-16
2016-01-18
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Bacon, SG
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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BW: This is Brian Wright interviewing Sergeant Stephen Granville Bacon at his home in Burnley on Tuesday 16th of February at twenty past two. Start us off -
SB: Err, excuse me a minute -
BW: Go on.
SB: Warrant Officer Bacon.
BW: I beg your pardon.
BW: Warrant Officer Bacon.
Other: Is that different?
BW: They only gave me your rank as sergeant.
SB: That’s what I finished up as. A -
BW: That’s fine.
SB: Warrant officer
Other: Is that higher than a sergeant? I don’t know.
BW: It is. Yes.
Other: Oh right. Warrant Officer
BW: That that was all they gave me, sergeant. So, Warrant Officer Stephen Granville Bacon can you just confirm for me please your service number and your date of birth.
SB: 1351298 as I already told you. That’s my service number and my date of birth is 2 3 21. 2nd of the 3rd 21.
BW: 2nd of March 1921.
SB: Yeah.
BW: And you were born in Barton on Humberside. Is that right?
SB: Yes.
BW: And what was your, you say you were from, your family was you had eight siblings. Is that right? You were one of eight.
SB: I’m one of eight.
BW: I see and -
SB: I had five brothers and two sisters.
BW: And were you the eldest?
SB: No.
BW: Eldest brother?
SB: I was the youngest bar one.
BW: And what was your home life like in the 20s and 30s? What would you describe it as?
SB: Strict. And that’s all I can say. I mean we used to have a time to be in at night before dark. Anything like that. We strictly adhered to that. So it was really strict.
BW: And where did you go to school?
SB: Pardon?
BW: Where did you go to school?
SB: I went to school at Queen Street School, Barton upon Humber which was a church school in actual fact.
BW: Were you a religious family?
SB: Pardon?
BW: Were you a religious family?
SB: No.
Other: You were quite poor I think. Am I right?
SB: Mind your own business.
BW: And so what age did you leave school?
SB: Fourteen.
BW: Which was I think standard at that that time wasn’t it?
SB: It was standard age at that time. And that was -
BW: Did you leave with qualifications or anything or not?
SB: No. I finished up in a class of my own x7 and WH Aubrey was the headmaster and I’d go to school and there was only me in this x7 and he’d just say Stephen just pop along and see if Mrs Aubrey wants anything. Any errands running or anything. And that was my last year at school.
BW: Yeah. Just running errands for -
SB: Oh yeah. There was no point in me being there on my own. It just wasn’t the class, the only one in the class I think and it was quite pointless. I did go to school as soon as I joined the air force.
BW: And what, what age were you when you joined up?
SB: Eighteen I think. Eighteen. Nineteen. I forget which. Eighteen I think. Was I?
BW: And what, what prompted your decision to join the RAF? Why? Why the RAF and not the other services?
SB: I had an ambition to fly but it didn’t work out that way. I joined when I went to enlist in Hull at Kingston I, ‘What do you want to be?’ I said, ‘I’d like to be flying in the air force.’ ‘Very good. But you can’t. You’ll have to join up as a AC plonk’ as they called it. AC2. ‘and then you’ll, you’ll have to put a remuster application in.’ Well, after several remuster applications I eventually was accepted to go to Weston Super Mare in front of a selection board and I think there was eight of us at that time. I didn’t see any more but I got a recall after seeing, being in front of this selection board to tell me I’d been accepted. From there I had to go to St Johns Wood in London for a deep medical.
BW: Ahum.
SB: And then from there I went to Craven Hill and then I went to Dalcross and that’s when I started flying.
BW: Whereabouts is Dalcross?
SB: Scotland. And there were Boulton Paul Defiant aircraft, we, which was a single engine plane with a turret on and the pilots, I think the majority of them were Polish. Quite nice chaps. A bit haywire when they got in the air. In fact, I remember the pilot who was flying, I was flying with we landed and he said, ‘I can’t give this in Steve.’ That was the, there were drogue, drogues towed and we used to fire at the drogues. He said, ‘You’ve got too many bloody holes in this drogue.’ I said, ‘Well you took me too bloody near’ and that was the attitude. Free and easy. Aye. But enjoyable. Oh aye.
BW: And so while you were there you were training as a gunner. Is that right?
SB: Yeah. That was all we did we used to fly over the North Sea, follow the drogue and fire at the drogues and that was our training.
BW: How successful do you think you were at that?
SB: I seemed to be fairly successful. I finished up with taking ten of us down into England and dropping them off here and there and I think it was because my name was first on the alphabet. More or less B. I seem to get all these things and in actual fact I was posted to India when I was stationed in Blackpool. The only fault was I wasn’t in Blackpool. I was in Burnley [laughs] and of course I had to go for the high jump and another, in front of another board and I explained what was going on and funnily enough I got in charge of the party going to Mold, I think, in North Wales and this party was eventually India on the, and though we didn’t fly we sailed on the Mauritania.
BW: On the Mauritania?
SB: Ahum I think it was its last trip.
BW: I see.
SB: In actual fact and the largest boat to go through the Suez Canal but they were quite pleasant at being a warrant officer. I had advantages. We’d waiter service at the table. We were on A deck and we used to look down at the motley crew on the other deck. Oh aye. My job was check the armoury so I used to go down into the bowels of the ship every morning, casually check and that was my day. The rest of it was deck quoits and all sorts of entertainment. Oh aye.
BW: You say you were already a warrant officer at that point.
SB: No. I was only a sergeant.
No. Are you -
SB: Oh at that point, going to India
BW: Yes.
Other: That was after the war isn’t it?
BW: Yeah.
SB: Yes. Aye
BW: So that was some time after your service in the war then when you went to India. Is that right?
SB: Yeah.
BW: Ok.
SB: There was no vacancies for flying. So -
BW: Ok.
SB: I took going to India which was quite an education.
BW: So coming back then to the early part of the war and your career. You said you went to school in the RAF and so you -
SB: Yeah.
BW: Was this before your gunnery training or after or part of it?
SB: It was before. I passed flying exams on Thorney Island which is not far from Portsmouth and the flying officer there he said, ‘I’ll set you an exam Steve. The equivalent to the flying job.’ And he did and that’s how I come to go to Weston Super Mare. He recommended me and I finished up in front of this board at, selection board in Super Mare.
BW: And was your intention when you joined up to be air crew air gunner or did you actually want to fly or navigate? Was your ambition higher than to be gunner or were you -
SB: My ambition was to fly. I remustered for a pilot but I didn’t get, it didn’t happen while I was vacant. I was otherwise engaged in Germany. [laughs]
BW: I see. I see.
SB: I was there two years in Germany.
BW: Ok. So you had your initial time in England as, as sergeant and you were trained on Boulton Paul Defiants as air gunner.
SB: Yeah.
BW: What happened after that? What was the next stage of training for you?
SB: That was it.
BW: Did you go to a conversion unit or an operational training unit?
SB: I went from Dalcross which was Boulton Paul Defiants. I went from there to Wickenby which was 12 squadron.
BW: And what period in the war was this? What sort of year was this?
SB: 1942.
BW: Ok so you finished training at Dalcross which I’m guessing would be summer ‘42. And you went to Wickenby to continue flying as a gunner. On, on what aircraft? What were you posted on to?
SB: Lancasters.
BW: Lancaster. So this would be a new squadron for you and a new squadron entirely because 12 squadron was only formed in September ‘42.
SB: [?]
BW: Or thereabouts.
SB: It was a very basic place were Wickenby. Very basic. Nissen huts.
BW: And did you live in the nissen huts with all your crew or was there another crew with you?
SB: No. We, in the nissen hut I was in we were all gunners.
BW: So you were all on different aircraft but you were all the same trade.
SB: Yeah.
BW: Ok. That’s interesting. Some, some huts were occupied by crews and so there’d be two crews in there but in your case you were just billeted with other gunners -
SB: Oh yeah.
BW: Entirely.
SB: Oh yes. In actual fact during my stay in Germany I, at the, where was it? I don’t know where it was somewhere down in the interrogation place it was and they give me papers to look at and I noticed one of the chaps who was with me in this nissen hut he’d drowned. It was at the side of his name - drowned. It was all propaganda them showing us these things.
BW: So when you were at Wickenby and you joined this new squadron how did you meet the rest of your crew?
SB: I haven’t a ruddy clue [laughs]. I’ve no idea whatsoever. My crew was three Australians, two Canadians, and myself and a fellow from Tadcaster and I was the youngest.
BW: Do you recall their names and what they did?
SB: Now then. Now then.
BW: I believe your pilot was Featherstone. Is that right?
SB: Bob Featherstone. The -
Other: There was the piece of paper that we thought were your crew but we weren’t sure. Have you got your glasses?
SB: Oh aye. Well I’ll tell you what they were.
Other: Oh right.
SB: There was Bob Featherstone the pilot. Laurie. Laurie Hickson, navigator. No, Laurie was the radio operator. Jack [Ebblestone?] was the navigator. Tommy Fouracres was the bomb aimer. My friend, the other gunner, I’ve no idea what his name was. All I knew him as was Robbie.
BW: And would he be Canadian?
SB: Robbie was a Canadian. And he wasn’t in the billet with me, with the other -
BW: What-
SB: With the other gunners. Robbie.
BW: Was he a mid-upper gunner or a front?
SB: Who?
BW: Robbie.
SB: Robbie was rear gunner.
Other: Yeah. Steve wasn’t a rear gunner.
BW: Ok and there was one other. A guy called Cooper.
SB: Engineer. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know because I couldn’t see him climbing on the bloody wings if anything went wrong with an engine. Quite surplus to requirements in my opinion was the engineer but we had to put up with it.
BW: And his name was Freddie you say?
SB: Harry.
BW: Harry, beg your pardon.
SB: Harry Cooper
Other: F H Cooper.
SB: He was a director of John Smith’s. Not John. There’s two of them. John -
Other: Sam Smith’s.
SB: John Smith’s
Other: John Smith’s Brewery.
BW: I see. And how did you all get on as a crew?
SB: Very well. Bob. Bob Featherstone, he was a very reserved sort of a person. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t drink. I remember being in the mess one time and I said, ‘Would you like a drink Bob?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘What would you like?’ He said, ‘A glass of milk.’ And I got him a glass of milk. [laughs] but the rest of the crew were, me being from Barton on Humber I didn’t spend much spare time other than Barton on Humber like according to what the Germans told me the aerodrome was eighteen kilometres northeast of Lincoln. I didn’t know that.
BW: That’s right. That’s absolutely right.
SB: They like, we used to get before flight we used to have a briefing all the crews all together and we used to get lectured and what have you and one of the things was, ‘Now if you have the misfortune to be shot down and captured during your interrogation a little old fellow will come and he’s a member of the International Red Cross. He isn’t.’ And lo and behold I think it was in Frankfurt where this interrogation camp was and lo and behold eventually this little old chap came and he said, ‘I’m from the International Red Cross,’ and I said, ‘Don’t kid me.’ I said, ‘You’re not. I got that told that before I left England.’ ‘Oh. Oh.’ And that finished that and he give up trying to convince me he was the International Red Cross fella.
BW: So coming back just to Wickenby itself you were quite a mixed crew as you say two Canadians and three Australians and two British.
SB: Yeah.
BW: But you didn’t mix a lot on the base. You said you went back to Barton on Humber quite a bit.
SB: Well I -
BW: Is that right? To see your family.
SB: They used to be workmen and there was a workman’s bus went from Wickenby to Barton upon Humber which was rather convenient when, when I was available.
BW: And so you spent your free time mainly at home.
SB: More or less. Yeah.
BW: Did you get to socialise on the base with the crew before missions or after missions
SB: No not to any degree I think. No. I remember after the war I was on a course in Tadcaster and I found out my engineer’s telephone number was and I rang him and I said, ‘Hello Harry.’ I said, ‘This is Steve. I’d like to ask you and your wife to lunch with me. I’m at John Smith’s.’ ‘Oh. Oh well, well I’m helping my son to do some decorating.’ I thought oh. So I didn’t hear any more of it.
BW: But you still had to fly together in the -
SB: Oh yeah.
BW: In the aircraft.
SB: Oh yes. Oh yeah well I mean you don’t fly together. I mean, I was very remote on top of it. Robbie was remote at the tail of it and the others were at the front.
BW: So -
SB: We were two isolated persons other than RT.
BW: So your position in the Lancaster was a mid upper then was it?
SB: Yeah.
BW: I see,
SB: Three hundred and sixty degrees viewing. In actual fact I was walking, I’d been cleaning my guns and I’m walking along the aerodrome and I saw a fella on top of a Lancaster and I thought, ‘What the bloody hell is he doing?’ So I give a shout and I said, ‘What the hell are you doing up there?’ ‘I’m cleaning guns.’ I said, ‘You what?’ He said, ‘I’m cleaning my guns.’ I said, ‘Hold it. Hold it’ I said, ‘Stay where you are,’ and I went in the plane and through the main there was a cover some, behind the turret or front of the turret I don’t know which it was and he didn’t know you could rotate your guns manually and always park them over the tail and he was trying to climb over the bloody turret to clean his guns and he was a commissioned air gunner. He was a pilot officer. I couldn’t, I couldn’t believe a pilot officer didn’t even know how to rotate the bloody turret and was going to climb over it. I mean if he’d fallen off I mean it’s quite high up is a turret gun when it’s on the deck. Aye a pilot officer. How the hell he became a [governor/gunner?] I don’t know.
Other: [You’ve only told this to protect the innocent?]
SB: Oh yes it, another incident I might recall was, I don’t know why we were on [Denham?] Golf Course and we were intermingled with the army on dive bombing. This was not flying and there were, what was the popular twin engine plane? I forget. Anyway, they were dive bombing and this plane’s coming down and there’s four people walking across the aerodrome. They should not have been there and as the plane took off knocked a fellas head off.
BW: Wow.
SB: There was just a red flash and he was gone.
Other: I didn’t know they got that close to the ground.
SB: And as far as I can remember it was Sir Christopher de Bath. I think that was his name but he shouldn’t have been where he was. They just let the pilot fly a bit and then they brought him back and he was ok but that was not in my agenda as a -
BW: No.
SB: As a gunner. I mean we all gunners were all trained on the same things. Turrets and guns and that’s it.
Other: What was the golf course?
SB: Hmm?
Other: Was the golf course, did the golf course go across the aerodrome or something?
SB: No. I don’t, no. No. I don’t know during the war I don’t know if it was permissible the golf course no it was -
Other: [It was…?]
SB: They were using the golf course obviously for, to be a plane without any obstruction. No buildings or anything.
Other: Oh I see. He was probably looking for his ball.
SB: But I do remember that fella getting his head knocked off.
Other: Oh God. I didn’t realise they flew that close to the ground.
BW: So you’re on operations now at Wickenby and what sort of routine would you follow for missions? What sort of preparations would you make for a mission if you were on roster to -
SB: Well obviously -
BW: Conduct a raid?
SB: We had to look to our guns to start with. Then we all who were flying collected together for a briefing on where we were going, what height we were flying, what we expected to come across. Other than that we just clambered into the aircraft and away but it was very boring I should think just sitting there and not many, I mean, I never fired my guns in anger and neither did Robbie and as I say it was rather boring sitting there and no, no fighter aircraft or anything.
Other: Not much fun.
SB: Like Ruhr Valley. Well that was rather lively anti-aircraft gun and Berlin when we crashed and whatever the hell happened to us I don’t know. That was different. I can’t remember much anti-aircraft so whether there was flying, planes flying, fighters I don’t know but according to information I got from someone in Lincoln there was also another three -
Other: Oh yes.
SB: Lancasters went with no survivors.
Other: Yeah that’s right.
SB: So whether it was because of that I didn’t recognise any anti-aircraft fire and they were shot down by aircraft I don’t I don’t know but we were fortunate we were straight down and very, I only met Bob Featherstone, I only met him for a few minutes because we were separated. We were stripped naked and separated, put into different, separate cells and he said, ‘We just touched over five hundred mile an hour, Steve. In a Lancaster bomber.’ And I remember I sat there and I thought, ‘Bloody hell this is it.’ And nothing I could do. I just sat there. Initially I thought he’d put the nose down to get out and home but it wasn’t. They pulled the plane out of this dive and I thought I was going to go straight through the ruddy bottom with the pressure and and that’s what Bob said. He said we reached over five hundred mile and hour and then after we pulled out we seemed to be flying straight and level and Bob came on the RT, ‘Bale out. Bale out.’ So I said, ‘Just a minute, Bob.’ He said, ‘What’s that.’ I said, ‘Can’t we reach Sweden?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh that’s just too bad then,’ and we, course getting in and out of a mid-upper wasn’t very easy and by the time I got to the back door Robbie, the rear gunner at that time, he was sat on the doorstep. The door had gone. He’d got an axe to it and opened it with an axe and he was sat there and as I got there he climbed back in and I said, ‘What’s to do Robbie?’ ‘I can’t get out.’ And I said, ‘Have another try.’ I thought I had to do something here and he got back sitting on the doorstep and I gave him a bit of encouragement and he went. But I sat on the doorstep and I rolled out and I didn’t find any problems whatsoever. Why, whether he’d lost his nerve or what I don’t know.
Other: He probably didn’t fancy landing in Germany.
BW: And you don’t recall how the aircraft was hit.
SB: No I don’t know whether it was hit-
BW: Whether it was fighters or flak.
SB: Gun whether it had been hit with a fighter or anti-aircraft I’ve no idea whatever. All I know is the plane crashed. I know it crashed because I saw the ruddy thing crash. I was hanging about up there. And but I’ve no idea and I’ve only heard that our plane crashed. I’ve no idea why it crashed or what caused it to crash but -
BW: And do you recall this was on your fourth sortie. There were two previous trips to Essen and one to Berlin. This was a second trip to Berlin.
SB: Ahum.
BW: And it seems this was the last time that the squadron visited Berlin through the rest of their tour but do you recall what it was like on the approach to the target. You say as a mid- upper you had a good view. Were you looking around -
SB: No problems whatsoever.
BW: For fighters? Could you see the target ahead?
SB: As we, I don’t know which it, whether it was so but you’re talking about the target. Towards the end of, or when I was flying the Mosquitos came into action and the Mosquitos used to drop flares and we used to bomb the flares but the Mosquitos used to pick the target, drop these flares and we’d bomb on the flares.
BW: You didn’t see much of Berlin at this stage below. Sometimes crews report seeing targets on fire or explosions on the ground.
SB: No. No. I can’t recollect seeing anything. No. I mean as we were approaching targets Bob used to corkscrew to upset the ground crews and that sort of thing.
BW: And were you picked out by searchlights at all?
SB: Only once. We got searchlight and went straight, Bob went straight down it and pulled out. Other than that we weren’t bothered with searchlights. Not like the pilots are today. Have you read in the papers about this -
Other: Laser.
SB: Oh dear.
BW: Yeah ridiculous isn’t it? Do you, do you recall the earlier trips at all over Essen?
SB: No. I mean I remember one time we were on low level practice and old Bell , Squadron Leader Bell got in touch with, ‘Mr Featherstone. You’re on low level not a bloody altitude.’ Well that upset Bob and of course I can see all this. We went down, we went down and we went down and there was as I say there was workmen on the Wickenby and there was a steamroller there and our, the people on that steam roller had never moved so bloody fast [laughs] when Bob went down and they must have thought he was going to hit it. I did as well. [laughs]
BW: And in general how did you find it? Flying in a Lancaster?
Other: [What did you call it?]
SB: It was what I’d always wanted. I mean going like a cross country over this country, Ireland very nice oh very oh yes very exciting. Not exciting. No. It wasn’t exciting but it was what I always had wanted.
Other: Cold.
SB: Oh we had four pairs of gloves on. A pair of silk, a pair of woollen, gauntlets and electric and we’d an electric waistcoat and electric slippers. Course at the back of the plane there was no heating whatsoever. Forty degrees wasn’t abnormal. You couldn’t touch your guns with bare hands or you just stuck to them. Oh it was very cold but [I had?] my fun here. I enjoyed it.
BW: And did you take hot drinks with you or anything like that?
SB: Pardon?
BW: Did you take hot drinks with you during the flights to keep warm?
SB: All we got flying was chewing gum and a small can of orange juice. A small can of orange juice by ten thousand feet was solid ice so were not much help really. Oh no it’s, I mean, I couldn’t move anyway. I mean I was just stuck in a turret on the top of the ruddy plane and that was it.
BW: Up there in the cold.
SB: Oh yeah.
BW: And this time of the year is the end of ‘42 and the squadron only became operational on the 27th of December so your early trips were in January ‘43 so it would be particularly -
SB: New.
BW: Cold at that time.
SB: It was cold. Damned cold. Oh yeah.
BW: It was cold at the best of times.
SB: In actual fact –
BW: At altitude.
SB: I landed in a field with several inches of snow and of course being in air force dark, darkish coloured I’m burying my chute and I looked up and there’s two fellas there. Both with guns. I suppose they were kind of home guard and we weren’t allowed to, we were advised not to take guns because if you did like the position I’d been, I was in they would have shot me because they thought I had a gun but we didn’t and these two chaps took me to a house and they must have rung the police or something. Anyhow, a guy, I remember he had a brown uniform which I don’t know what that was and he interrogated me. He says, ‘What, what, how many were in your aircraft?’ I said, ‘Only me.’ ‘Oh.’ I thought he doesn’t know much about this. He says, ‘What do you mean only you? I said, ‘We jettisoned tanks on the aircraft.’ I said, ‘There was only me.’ ‘Ah gudt gudt gudt. Here you are,’ and he gave me a twenty packet of Gold Flake cigarettes. I light up and he toddles off. A few minutes later he dashes in to the room, ‘You lied to me.’ [laughs] ‘I find another man.’ Well he found seven eventually but it was funny being given Gold Flake cigarettes but I lost them of course. When he found the second man he took my cigarettes off me but it was a bit of a comic. But we went to, I think it was an air force camp and that’s when they stripped us completely, put us in separate cells and eventually they transported us down south to, I think it was Frankfurt, I’m not sure about, that to an interrogation camp. There were quite a lot of people in it. Mostly air force of course and that’s when the little chap from the International Red Cross came up but and then of course we were taken to a Stalag 8b. Because of something happening with the Canadians who raided Dieppe, something about them tying prisoners of war hands handcuffed and the Germans wanted to have reprisals but they hadn’t enough Canadians to suit their purposes so they drafted the air force. There was about three hundred of us and we were in handcuffs. They were put on. They were decent about it. They put them on in the morning and took them off at night and of course it’s amazing what people get up to. They soon found out how to manipulate the locks on them and if the guards had been decent we’d just throw them in the box. If they hadn’t they had to undo every, every one. And, and they used to be radio reports put up in the billet. In the billet I say they were proper huts. No windows in. There were windows but they’d no glass. Very little water, just a dribble. No chance of getting washed. We were dirty. We stunk. Must have done. And lousy. Me and Harry Cooper the engineer who was, there were three high bunks in this place and er and initially they’d started with boards but the prisoners found a better use for the boards which was making a fire to get a brew and as time went on we got Red Cross parcels that usually a parcel between two but they were all tied with string and we collected this string and we made nets to replace the boards on the beds. At the finish I shouldn’t think there was a bed with boards on it. Only Red Cross string. And [pause] you must excuse me I’m looking for a handkerchief. I’ve just found one. Oh yes and we used to get tenth of a loaf a day which were about that much.
BW: About an inch and a half.
SB: Aye. Identity disc was just a tenth of a loaf and some used to, you could cut it. The bread was so like a solid mass and you could cut it so ruddy thin and some of the chaps used to cut and spread it out over the day. I used to do the same but I used to eat it and hope for the best and we used to get, they used to bring a dustbin thing in occasionally and that was supposed to be soup. I remember one soup what we called bedboard soup. It just tasted like sawdust. We were hungry but nobody could eat it. The toilets were forty seaters. Four banks of ten so you could have a chat while you were [laughs] aye. Four banks of ten and during the summertime if we got Red Cross parcels they used to stab all the tins so we couldn’t save them for making escape purposes. So, if we couldn’t consume them we used to throw them over to the next compound which was the Russians and they were very grateful to a point. I remember when they decided to move us from Lamsdorf which was on the Polish border and they set off, sent us all off marching, hundreds of us. I don’t know how many was in the camp at the time but I think it was, there was twenty five thousand in and attached. Most of them were on working parties. There were, ‘cause it was an army camp. They decided that they were going to move us away from the Russians. I don’t know why. And this was in January. A little bit of snow and what not and we started marching and I remember the first stop was at a brick works and I got bedded down on some blocks of clay and we’d, we’d all got a [?] blanket and eventually the blanket became too heavy and too much of a damned nuisance but we just, we were like bloody zombies walking in the snow and very little or nothing to eat. I remember one time that we were walking along and there was a potato clamp. Are you with me? You should be.
BW: Ahum.
SB: One of the lads took a dive for the potato clamp and he was shot through his shot through his face and that’s how desperate we were. I mean sometimes we were just laid in an open field. A derelict factory. Course no bedding. No cloth. No -
BW: No provisions of any kind.
SB: We’d no washing facilities whatsoever so we never got undressed for about three months and we must have smelled a bit ripe [laughs] but it was all part of it and it was war.
BW: And this period of time would have been January ‘45 is that right? This would have been January ‘45 or thereabouts when you were marched out of the camp.
SB: ‘44 ‘45 I forget which.
Other: [It would be towards the end of the war wouldn’t it?]
SB: Like another point as I said we used to get Red Cross, Red Cross parcels. Maybe two. Occasionally and they used to stab it and we used to throw it to the Russians and of course the Russians they were marched with us on this walk and they were separated from us in so far as we were in a compound and they were in the next compound and we were in a huge marquee and on the floor was small branches off fir trees and that was it and we’d no water but the Russians had a tap and when we went to the Russians and asked for water. ‘Cigarette’ and ‘cigarettes.’ Well, they knew damn well we’d no cigarettes. We didn’t get no water. That was the gratitude for giving them the parcels.
BW: I was going to say yet you’d been throwing parcels over the wire to them.
SB: Yeah and er -
BW: And they wouldn’t let you have water.
SB: Eventually we got, the Germans left us. The guards left us. We were in a camp with nothing and me, and I got friendly with an Australian soldier and we decided to have a walk and we were walking around the countryside. We saw a house with a light in it and we went and knocked on the door and there were a lot of mumbling and grumbling and I said, ‘What’s to do, Joe?’ He says, ‘I don’t know.’ Anyhow, Joe could speak French. He started talking in French. Eventually we got in this house. There was eight Madagascans and they’d got a set boiler, you know, a boiler with a fire underneath it full of meat and they give us as much as we wanted but nothing else but meat. No bread, no veg, no, just meat but by heck that meat was good and that was, I never met Joe again. The Americans came and at that point my legs were tight in my trousers. Beri beri I think they said it was and I went and found a medical, an American medical chap and he said, ‘Sorry I can’t give you anything.’ He said. ‘All I have is two or three aspirins,’ he says. ‘I’ve used everything I had.’ He says, ‘It’ll wear off eventually when you start eating.’ [laughs] And then we got in some clapped out Dakotas aeroplanes and they flew us back to Cosford which is near Wolverhampton I think.
BW: That’s right
SB: And there we were stripped again and deloused and treated like royalty. Oh yeah. They couldn’t do enough for us and then we were despatched home and then after I think I had four weeks leave and then I got sent to India and that was the end of the war for me. I I in actual fact I was in India in Delhi and I thought there’s all these bloody people getting relieved and they were conscripts. They’d completed their two years [and they would be ?]. So I got in touch with the officers and I said, ‘What’s my position?’ I said, ‘I’m an RAF volunteer reserve I suppose,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Oh we’ll see what we can do with you,’ and the next day I was on a train to Bombay. And there they were very obliging again, ‘Well we haven’t a place cabin-wise for you. You can go on this ship or you can wait till there’s a cabin available on another ship.’ Oh I said we’ll get the [excuse ?] let me get on it and I think it was the Scythia if I can remember right and I came back home and I, I was in a bit of a state. I’d no qualifications. I was a machinist before the war in a cycle works and I daren’t say I was a machinist or I would have been reserved occupation so I just said I’m a labourer. Anyhow, as I say I came back here and I got sent to Blackpool. I spent a lot of time in Blackpool and I met my wife. [back then?] as she was a young woman and we got married and I’d no qualifications whatsoever and of course going to Burnley it was either went to Burnley or Barton. Well, naturally I’d no, no say in the matter. It was Burton and I thought well I had to find something. I went as a coal miner. Had a few months in a coal mine and I got dermatitis and so I had to come out and my wife said, I used to see these in the paper, situations vacant and there used to be overlookers wanted. Overlookers wanted. I said to me wife, ‘What’s this overlookers?’ She said, ‘Oh you’ve no need to bother about that. You won’t be one.’ I said, ‘Its hard luck then.’ Anyhow, I took a job at just over three pound a week. Three pound a week and I thought well it’ll keep me going cash wise and I got in to the, this job three pound a week was at the end of the war and before the war the mills used to get large amount of coal on the canals but after the war it was delivered in three ton trucks and my job was wheeling it over the ruddy boiler and tipping over for the fire beater and I’m shovelling this coal one day and a fellow walking down the yard and he stopped. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I politely told him [laughs] it was running off my nose was the sweat and ‘Aye all right.’ And he toddled off and a couple of hours later, ‘You’re wanted in the office, Steve.’ Oh I’ve got set for being rude with that fella and it was this same fella wanted to see me. He said, ‘How about coming working for me?’ ‘And who are you?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I look after this mill. I look after four in Blackburn, one in Morecambe, outside Morecambe, Whiteland. ’ I said, ‘Right. What’s the reward?’ He said, ‘Oh you’ll be a lot better than what you are now,’ he said ‘And I’ve a van you can use,’ And I got into the textile trade then through this fellow Harry [Makenson] I’ll always remember his name. He looked after me. He made me an overlooker as they called it, was a maintenance engineer on looms and I I seemed to cotton on to it and I finished up manager of a weaving mill. I mean initially I didn’t know one end of a bloody shuttle to another and that’s how I finished. George Street Mill closed down and it’s gone now. It’s been knocked down. I retired and I’ve been retired thirty odd year.
BW: Ahum.
SB: But er no my war experiences was, this march oh that was grim was that. Oh bloody hell. I I ate raw chicken and raw rabbit what they if the people had left them, forgotten them, we didn’t forget them. Oh I think I weighed seven stone something when I and they sent me on four weeks holiday. I went back and, ‘Right. Get on the scales,’ and I did. ‘Get on the scales again.’ I did. ‘Something wrong here.’ I says, ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘You’ve put on thirty odd pound in forty eight days. What have you been doing?’ ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I must confess.’ I says, ‘I’ve been drinking Guinness.’ I said, ‘I’ve been drinking about an average of about fifteen bottles of Guinness a day. ‘
Other: Good grief.
SB: He says, ‘You what?’ I said, ‘Oh yes.’ That’s where my money went and I got back to my ten and a half stone and now I languish at twelve stone. [And you must excuse me ‘cause I must go to the toilet.]
BW: No problem.
[pause]
SB: My escaping [laughs].
BW: I was going, I was going to ask you actually -
SB: Which was rather farcical.
BW: I believe you made a number of escape attempts.
SB: I er, in actual fact I never escaped. I was always someone else. The first effort was I swapped identities with a fella. An old, well to me an old fella. He would be about forty He was a member of the Pioneer Corp which was a non-combatant unit and I swapped identities with him and eventually I got drafted to a working party on an aerodrome and our job was looking after the grounds but it didn’t work out very well. It was alleged that someone had managed to dodge the guards, got in an aeroplane, couldn’t read the ruddy things and jettisoned the petrol out of it. We were straight back to the camp. All lot of us. That was number one. I reverted back to my position in the air force and its surprising there wasn’t a lot more people doing the same as me but anyhow, eventually I got another one. I got friendly with one in the army camp and he was fed up of working. I mean they’d no option. They had to work.
BW: So you were, rather than being, let’s say, given protection because of your rank and aircrew you were actually put to work. You were in labour gangs were you?
SB: At my rank no. My rank I couldn’t go to work. I wasn’t allowed to work. The soldiers were compelled to work so the only thing we had to, well I had to do was change my identity and as I say I changed with this guy. He was a Pioneer Corp and we got drafted back to the camp because of this misdemeanour, this alleged ditching the juice from the aircraft but whether that was true or not I don’t know but that was the reason I heard and eventually I got fed up and I got this other fella. I can’t remember his name. I know we were doing some work in [Gliwice] and I decided I’d had enough and I got hidden away and the guards were a bit slop happy and I was left and I had a couple of three days and that was it. I had nothing to eat so I got picked up.
BW: So you manged to give them the slip and spend three days away.
SB: Oh yeah.
BW: Two or three days.
SB: Oh yeah. Course I used to walk at night and hide in bushes and whatever during the day and oh that was the second time I think there was a field with a kind of a basin in it full of bushes. Ideal for sleeping. Only trouble was I was prodded in the ribs and it was a fella with a rifle. He could speak, he spoke very good English. And he says, ‘Come on. Come with me.’ And he was a farmer and he took me to his house, rung the local police and he was talking and he said, ‘I’ve come from America.’ He says, ‘It’s the worse bloody days’ work I ever did. He says, ‘Coming back here’ he said, ‘But you know the feeling. It’s your country. Well come and,’ he said ‘It’s the worse bloody thing I ever did in my life.’ He says, ‘I daren’t do anything but ring the police.’ And a policeman came on a two stroke motorbike. He made me push his motorbike and he walked on and I had a night in jail and the guards came from the camp to take me back and I settled back again and then I got the urge again so I picked on a fella going as an air force man. Aye, I often remember his name. They called him Bill Major from Liverpool. Only fault was Bill got fed up with being in the bloody camp. He was so used to going out to work so he changed his identity so when I eventually, where was it oh I was at a brick works and I was there one day working and I saw a spanner and I thought bloody hell that looks like the bolts on windows. It was a little, it had been a little school where we were billeted in, on this brickwork and this spanner it fitted the nuts so I got, pulled them out one side and got out and I was a gentleman I put them back and screwed them back and the lads who I’d got friendly with they came back and they said, ‘You left us in the real bloody muck,’ he said. ‘They didn’t know how you’d escaped.’ He said, ‘How did you escape?’ I said, ‘I found a spanner and I opened the bars and I walked out.’ There again I got caught again and of course every time I got caught I used to be sentenced to solitary confinement and it was solitary. 5 o’clock in the morning, fill a pail with water, scrub your deck out, stand your bed up. The bed was a few pieces of wood with rope across but you had to stand it up so you couldn’t sit on it and if you didn’t do it in their time they just used to kick the bloody bucket over and your cell was swimming in water but we put up with it. And there was one fella there one time I was in solitary and the padre used to come every day to see him. He was a New Zealander and it seems he’d been on a working party and he’d seen a chain on the ground and so he just picked it up and threw it into a machine and it was dodgy whether he was going to be shot or not and this padre used to come every day to see him and after the war I saw his photograph in the paper. He’d been awarded the BME is it?
BW: Um could be MBE.
SB: MBE aye. And so obviously he didn’t get shot and he got back home. Oh yeah. Aye. But I’m surprised there wasn’t a lot more of them swapping identities with soldiers who, well some of them had done four years. I’d a brother. My brother, he was a marine. He was taken prisoner on, [pause] where?
Other: Crete.
SB: Island.
Other: Crete.
SB: Crete. Oh Crete aye and one time I’m in in solitary and they used to take us out. Geneva Conventions again. They used to take us out and we used to walk around in a little circle. We had to get this exercise in and one day one, the fella said, ‘How long have you been here?’ I said, ‘I’m just doing fourteen days.’ ‘Well how did you get from Crete er from Germany er Italy?’ I said, ‘What you are talking about?’ He says, ‘Haven’t you just left Italy?’ I said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Were you a marine?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘That’s my brother.’ What happened he’d met my brother in Italy. But no there was some comical things happened. Oh yeah. Oh aye.
Other: [Not?] very comical.
BW: But you didn’t have to have your escape attempts approved as might be the case with others in some camps. You acted on your own initiative to try and escape.
SB: Oh I just went. I just went. Oh I wouldn’t. No. No I knew I couldn’t go anywhere because I couldn’t speak German but I thought well I’ve got to do something and as I say it became something of a, like I changed the third one Bill Major who got fed up of being in the camp because he’d always been used to working so he swapped identities with another fella so when I got back I had to find out who Steve Bacon was. [laughs] Quite funny really but oh no they -
BW: How were you picked up each time? I know you mentioned a farmer found you sleeping under a bush at one point. How were you picked up other times? Were you, when you were out of the camp were you not afraid of being picked up by the army or handed over to the Gestapo or something like that?
SB: I can’t remember to be quite honest. I’m just trying to think. I had that farmer and then we were sent back because of someone ditching the ruddy petrol out the aeroplane and then the third time I went Bill Major, Bill Major, Bill Major. I can’t remember how I got caught that time but I got caught and that time it was a bit of a nuisance. I got caught and of course I got sentenced to fourteen days, well it was twenty one days then. It had gone up. But I had to go to a straflager which was a part of the camp reserved for potential what not, isolation and in there, there were mostly soldiers messing about there because of the women and I remember one chap he was, he had to go to civilian court and he went and he came back and he said, ‘Right.’ He said, ‘Right, here you are.’ He’d taken all the lightbulbs out the ruddy waiting room of the court he’d been to. Oh there was some humorous ruddy things. Oh yeah aye oh aye but as I say I never escaped because I was never me. I was this Pioneer Corp chap. I belonged, I belonged the Pioneer Corp and I was a gunner and then I was an ordinary soldier with Bill Major and I’m talking I got back I’d done my solitary and I got back to the camp and back to the air force compound and I’m walking around one day. ‘How are you going on mate?’ I looked around, ‘I’m alright. Why?’ ‘You don’t know me do you?’ No it’s surprising what they got up to. I said, ‘No. I don’t know you.’ And he said, ‘I was in straflager with you,’ he said, ‘But I’ve escaped.’ He’d escaped into the camp. [laughs] what happened to him I don’t know but they used to get up to all sorts of ruddy tricks. They used to put this radio bulletin up every morning and of course the Germans, ‘They must have a radio.’ They cleared all everybody out. The camp was on a moor, moorland in actual fact as I previously said with a forty seater toilet where they used to pump it out and they used to spread it around the camp to stop digging tunnels and what not and, what was I going to say? I’ve forgotten. But they emptied the camp completely. They’d dogs in and all sorts in looking for the radios that wasn’t there but we had bitterly cold on this moor but we, we did it and, oh aye. And another time they used to, we used to have roll calls of course in fives and one day we were out nearly eight hours. They couldn’t figure out how we’d missed, they’d missed somebody and every time they went five, ten, fifteen. There were three hundred of us and somebody had bent down to tie, reckon to tie their shoelace. One missing. And they’d go again and they’d get it right. That’s right. And they were so bloody stupid. That’s right. Aye aye. ‘We’d better have another check,’ and so they’d check again and somebody had bent down and it would be the same again. One missing. And they’d dogs and they’d officers of all bloody sorts in the camp that day in our compound and they never found the one who was missing but it was our discomfort but we used to put up with it and that was it. It was part of the gang kind of thing but as I say I never escaped because I as never me.
BW: What were relations like with the guards? If people are managing to build rudimentary radio sets they must get the components from somewhere. What were relations like with the guards? Did you, were you able to bribe them or -
SB: Oh, no. They, they -
BW: Persuade them to do things for you?
SB: They didn’t like it. No, no. I know there was one, I did see one fella shot. He was being marched through the camp, past our compound with a guard, a guard with a rifle and all of a sudden he had his coat over his arm and he just threw it over the guard’s head and galloped. He didn’t gallop fast enough. They shot him. They shot him and he was dead. Aye.
BW: Just coming back to, I’m interested in the point where you talked about getting out of the aircraft and you took to your parachute. How were you then picked up? You landed in a field of snow and then -
SB: Picked up with two, two like home guard. I don’t know -
BW: Ok.
SB: They’d guns. That’s all I know and they took us to a house and there was a young boy in this house in actual fact and I had my escape kit with me. I thought, well there was chocolate in it. He wouldn’t eat it. He wouldn’t touch it. No. We had an escape kit. The chocolate and vitamin tablets and what have you and money but not German money. I don’t know. I think it was franks. I don’t know but -
Other: I think you thought it was the home guard didn’t you?
BW: And so they reported to the police that they’d picked you up and presumably the police came for you.
SB: Oh yeah.
BW: What, were you taken to a civilian jail? Or were you -
SB: Oh yes.
BW: Passed to the Gestapo? Or were you -
SB: Oh yes I had a night in the jail and the guards came from the camp, a couple of guards take me back. Kept them occupied. But oh no it had its humorous side.
BW: And news of your aircraft being lost must have reached home. There’s a letter here which is a reply from the wing commander at 12 squadron to your mum, ‘In response to your letter.’ She was asking about getting your personal effects sent back. When you got back to your family do you recall what had happened from their point of view? Were they told by the squadron you’d been lost? Did they know you were in a prison camp or what was their take on events?
SB: Well they initially telegram.
Other: Yeah that’s the other one Brian. That’s the telegram from to say he was missing in action or something.
SB: Your son is reported missing and then another one was something about Lord Haw Haw. You wouldn’t know that would you?
BW: William Joyce yeah.
SB: William Joyce, yeah. He broadcast my name as a prisoner of war and they sent my mother another telegram stating that take it with a pinch of salt.
BW: Yeah there’s an official telegram here that says, ‘Regret to inform you that your son Sergeant Stephen Granville Bacon is missing as a result of air operation 17th, 18th Jan 1943. Letter follows. Any further information will be immediately communicated to you. And that’s from, that would be air ministry I think but it’s, it’s er named from, I think Wickenby but so they’ve been informed by telegram. How, how did you end up on Haw Haw’s broadcast? Was this a regular thing to name POWs? Or was it -
SB: I’ve no idea. I haven’t a clue. I didn’t know until after I got back.
BW: Yeah.
SB: That it had happened.
Other: Yeah. I think they’d already had a memorial service for him in the [Barton?] church I believe.
SB: Oh aye. It was a long after the war I, my nephew sent me a paper cutting and it was from the local paper, Hull Times I think it was. And there was a list of names, ‘Would anyone who knew these people get in touch with us.’ They’re all, these people who had been killed during the war and Stephen Granville Bacon was one of them. I’m still here [laughs]
BW: Well it’s like when you were in the prison camp. You didn’t escape. That was somebody else. Somebody else was killed, it wasn’t you.
SB: Yeah it was. I was amazed when I got that paper cutting. I think I have it somewhere.
Other: That’s quite recent isn’t it?
SB: Yeah.
Other: Yeah.
SB: Aye.
Other: Yeah.
SB: Anyone know anything about these people who were killed during the war.
Other: Well I think it was something like -
SB: I knew a lot about him [laughs]
Other: Something like six months or so after that initial letter and Lord Haw Haw and his mother had to go around the village then apologising to everybody for -
BW: Right.
SB: Oh aye. Well er -
Other: Having a service for him.
SB: Like what was it now?
Other: I don’t know if she was more embarrassed [?] or what [laughs]
SB: Oh it was old Tom Everett. He was one of our neighbours. He must have been listening to Haw Haw and he heard this and of course he dashed out and went out to my mother’s, knocked on the door, ‘Your Steve’s a prisoner of war.’ [laughs] It must have been a shock for the old lady but aye that was Tom Everett.
BW: So you, just coming back to the point when you’re first captured were you in, did you meet up with the other members of the crew. Were you fairly close together when you were picked up? Or, I mean, was there any chance of escaping? Or making your own -
SB: We were all picked up at separate times.
BW: Right.
SB: And they must have got in touch with these, this I’m sure it was an air force camp that we were taken to where they stripped us and I mean they were looking for compasses and such like things and compasses used to be all over the ruddy place. I had it in the lapel of my coat. Bob Featherstone, I know he had one in his pipe. He didn’t smoke but he had a compass in the bottom if this pipe but the Germans knew all, all these things. They knew where to look. When we got our clothes back they were torn where they’d looked in the seams and what have you but oh no it’s surprising how much they knew about us as we knew about them aye.
BW: And you were handed over from civilian police straight to the camp. So there was, was there any formal interrogation that took place?
SB: No, not at that point. No, no, it was, as I say I think it was Frankfurt this camp we went to which was just an interrogation centre and it was very populated but they used to be in separate cells and they’d turn the heat up, heat up on us in the cell and it used to get bloody hot and then they’d switch it off altogether and it would just go just the opposite just to cool, just to loosen you off a bit. Aye. Oh aye.
BW: How long were in the interrogation camp at Frankfurt?
SB: I’ve no idea.
BW: Roughly.
SB: Eventually we were put on a train with no shoes. Nobody had any shoes on and we were taken to Lamsdorf on the Polish border. I remember the train it was it was luxury I mean there were seats in it but they were wooden seats but er and that’s how I got to Lamsdorf by train.
BW: Were there guards on the train?
SB: Oh yes. Oh aye. Aye, there were plenty of guards on the train and of course when you’ve no shoes it’s a big handicap.
BW: Did you get your shoes back or any shoes when you got to Lamsdorf?
SB: Any shoes, clogs, all sorts, wooden clogs. Not, not like what we used to wear. Not the proper clogs, wooden clogs. Most bloody uncomfortable.
BW: Lamsdorf had a reputation for being a tough camp. It was apparently notorious for poor conditions of construction, sanitation and overcrowding and had the highest number of British POWs there by the time of 1944 but you mentioned the sanitation conditions. Were the barracks that you were kept in were they, were they overcrowded at all or did you feel like you had enough room?
SB: Well I suppose we were overcrowded but it was all three tier, three tier bunk things and sanitation oh we’d, we’d as I say we had this forty seater, four banks of ten which used to be pumped out regularly and spread around the area to give it a bit -
Other: Pleasant.
SB: Of perfume but other than that there was no bathing facilities whatsoever. Oh no. As I say we were, we were lousy. Me and Harry, our engineer, I got friendly with him and we used to put out a blanket each and we used to have a bit of a line and we used to go and we used to stop at forty bugs.
Other: [?]
SB: I remember my mother must have had a brainstorm. She sent me a pair of pyjamas. Now, how the hell I got them I don’t know but I put them on and on the first night I’d, or the first morning when I took them off they were just polka dotted where I’d been bitten. I didn’t use them anymore. Oh no the sanitation was nil other than toilets but there was no, no shower. We’d a big trough thing with a pipe on top and water used to dribble out of it but you couldn’t have a wash. No.
BW: I’d just like to show you some pictures of a camp and just see if you think they reflect conditions or construction similar. The first, the first set show open type huts if you like. Purpose built long barracks and these aren’t the same camp as yours but do they -
Other: I think we took some pictures. There’s some stuff on the internet somewhere cause my son typed in Stalag 8b one day and came up with, oh and he instantly recognised the latrines I think. ‘Oh I remember that.’
BW: Yeah.
SB: I can’t recognise these at all. What is it?
BW: They’re, it’s a different camp but -
SB: Ah. Oh no.
BW: It’s -
SB: Totally different. That’s more like -
BW: It’s shown close to a town.
SB: I was going to say that’s more like ours. They were -
BW: Yeah.
SB: Proper barracks.
BW: Yeah.
SB: But they’d no windows ‘cause I suppose the previous tenants had bashed the bloody things out. Oh no. That, that is Stalag 8b of course. I mean, Bob -
BW: Were you -
SB: Bob Featherstone, our pilot, I mean we never saw him. He was a commissioned officer. He went to an Offlag.
BW: Ahum
Other: [?]
SB: So we didn’t see Bob again until, well I did see him again after the war. He was a, he was on the immigration situation going to Australia. Persuading people to go to Australia and persuaded me but my wife said no and that was it. Oh yes. Oh aye
BW: Were you close to a town or was, you said Lamsdorf was up on a moor.
SB: Oh it was isolated.
BW: Were you in reach of a town or just -
SB: Oh no, no it was -
BW: Middle of the country.
SB: Completely isolated. There was, what it doesn’t indicate there used to be turrets on stilts kind of thing on each corner of the camp.
BW: Similar to that.
SB: Oh there we are. Yes. There we are.
BW: These are pictures of guard towers and –
SB: Oh aye
BW: Barbed wire.
SB: And there used to be barbed wire and about six or ten feet from the barbed wire there used to be a single wire and if you went past that you were asking for trouble from that.
BW: You would be shot presumably.
SB: Oh yeah.
BW: It was like, like a trip wire I guess. And so there was plenty of barbed wire on the outer fences shown there. Were there two or three layers of barbed wire?
SB: Oh it was a fair depth of barbed wire. Oh yes. I never fancied this tunnelling business. Oh no. That didn’t appeal to me at all. I took it that changing identities was a lot easier.
BW: What put you off digging?
SB: Hmmn?
BW: What put you off digging or tunnelling?
SB: Well a bit claustrophobic I should think. And that Dulag Luft that’s an air force camp.
BW: Ahum.
SB: Well they didn’t have the opportunities like we had for swapping identities with soldiers going out to work because they were all senior NCOs and they weren’t allowed to go to work so they had an advantage but it was a disadvantage as well.
BW: It’s interesting that you took the opportunity to join a working party and go outside the camp. Was it the opportunity to get away from the camp a little bit that appealed or was it the idea of just having something to do?
SB: I think it was something to do. As I say I’d no ambitions about escaping completely because I couldn’t speak ruddy German and it was keeping the Germans occupied as well as anything else but er -
Other: If it’s alright I’m going to leave you to it.
BW: Do you want to, sorry?
SB: A grand lad. He looks after me with bills and -
BW: Yeah.
SB: He explains what, my heating, I haven’t a clue about it. I just had him on it this morning. He used to be in charge of a soft drinks factory and he used to drink like a fish but not soft drinks. It used to be beer.
BW: And this was your dad who was in charge. So, and that would, he would have died only shortly after you joined up then, presumably.
SB: In actual fact I didn’t get my first leave and I got a telegram to say he was dangerously ill and so I put an application in and I got a weekend and I always remember I was in, where was I? Duxford. And I went to see the station warrant officer and explained to him and he just calmly said, ‘And how many times is this your father’s died?’ I said, ‘As far as I know it’s only the first time.’ And I had a fortnight, a weekend, and he died before I got there. And when I went back I made an appointment to see the station warrant officer, ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Now then. What can I do for you?’ I said, ‘You can’t do anything for me.’ I said, ‘I’m going to give you some information.’ He said, ‘What’s that? I said, ‘My father died for the first bloody time,’ I said, ‘And you remember what your remarks you made.’ He didn’t say anything. Oh aye. I had a brother in the navy for twenty years. One of my brothers was on mine sweepers. One of my brothers was a fireman and the other one, who was taken prisoner on Crete, he was a steeplejack and that’s the thing I can’t stand is bloody heights.
BW: And yet there you were in the mid upper position on a Lancaster.
SB: Oh that didn’t seem not the same feeling. I don’t know. It’s something different. I mean I had no qualms about jumping out. Well you don’t jump out. Well I didn’t. I rolled out but I never thought about it but Stan, my brother, who was a steeplejack I was talking to one of his workmen and they said, ‘Well he’s a bit of a son of a bitch.’ I said, ‘Is he?’ Hey said, ‘Yeah but there’s one thing about him. He wouldn’t ask you to so anything he wouldn’t do.’ But I said, ‘He’s different to me. I would be scared to bloody death.’ Oh yes. He died. Stanley died. He wasn’t ill. In fact Stuart came and knocked at my door. I answered it. ‘Yes Stuart. What’s the matter then?’ He says, ‘Stan’s died’. I said, ‘You what?’ He said, ‘Stan’s died.’ ‘My brother?’ he said, ‘Yeah.’ He was three years older than me and we used to fight like bloody hell as kids. I remember oh aye. He used to collect birds eggs. And I, and the brother in the navy he brought us a football and a pair of football boots each and of course we used to fight like hell who was going to have the ball. Is it your gang or is it mine? And he used to keep his eggs I think with a bowl on top in the bedroom and he, we’d had an argument about who was going to have the ball and I thought, ‘Right.’ So I went and took the drawer out and boom boom boom broke all of his eggs up and we used to have gangs of us and if they thought about it they’d just get us upset and say, ‘Who broke Stanley’s eggs?’ [laughs] And we, in those days we used to make our own enjoyment. I mean we had a three valve tel, three valve radio but for that we’d no nothing and we used to split up a couple of gangs and, Fox and Hounds and we’d have limits of where we could go. We’d go hide in trees and all. It was a totally different world to now. We never used to be in the house. No. And if we were, if I went home with my shoes wet. [Boing.] So I used to, I used to have socks on of course so I’d rub my bloody shoes up my socks so I wouldn’t get that bloody slap back from my mother. My father never touched us but my mother made up for it. Oh aye. Those were the days oh yes. And as I say I was, I was starting work at fourteen because well the money was seven and six a week then.
BW: And so you were working from the age of about fourteen when you left school up until the point, as you say you joined the RAF and you were a machinist at that point.
SB: Yeah. Like I, Elswick Hopper Cycle Works and I used to be in the machine shop. I was foreman’s stooge I think. The stooge was a fella called Tup Franklin and he said, ‘You’ve no need to mess about with turning Steve. Just do whatever wants doing. Put belts on and sharpen tools,’ and he says ‘Just sharpen drills’ he says and I got on very well with him and not being tied to a bench or anything like that it was just the job I wanted. And er -
BW: And then when war broke out you say you felt -
SB: Oh well.
BW: It was your duty to join up.
SB: Oh me and a fella called Donald Cook who was a pal of mine we were sat on, there used to be a drain goes past our houses and into the country and there used to be a [form sitting ?] where the road went over it and we were sitting one day and I said to Donald Cook, I said, ‘Right, Don. I’m going to join up.’ He said, ‘Right, Steve. I’ll join up with you.’ So we got on the train and the ferry. I think it was six pence and we joined up in Kingston upon Hull. Aye the old paddle steamer and the bar, of course we weren’t old enough really for drinking we didn’t drink but the bar opened up as soon as they cast the ropes off the pier. The bar opened and it used to close as soon as it got to the other side. Twenty, twenty minutes normally but as I was reading somewhere, I don’t know where, something about the estuary the Humber being very dangerous. Sandbanks. And I remember the sandbanks. If you got the ferry at low tide oh it’d take ages to get back. Only a, you could spit across nearly from Hull to New Holland and I had a friend, Noel, Noel Stamp. He was a shop assistant in Hull and the times he used to be late coming home. Two or three hours oh aye oh yeah but were no worse for it. We, we did very well. All my family did fair. As I say I met my wife in Blackpool. She was on a fortnight’s holiday when there used to be wakes weeks and Burnley used to have a fortnight followed immediately by Blackburn and there were her and a couple of cousins and I’m stood outside a pub waiting for it to open. A shortage of beer at that time and I got talking to a sergeant and an Irishman, a soldier, in, while I were in the queue and when the pub opened we dashed in and we got sat at the same table as three young ladies. One of them of course happened to be my wife. And she died though. She’s been dead forty odd years. A grand lass but it had to be, but it’s funny how things work out. I mean no one would have expected me to be finish up a manager of a ruddy weaving mill. I couldn’t, I never, I was never a weaver but I had to be a weaver to be an overlooker but Harry [Makenson], this guy who stopped and asked me what I was doing when I was shovelling bloody coal, he, he put me in to be an apprentice overlooker in [Burnley] and my wife was correct. They turned me down. I wasn’t local. My family didn’t work in the mills or anything like that so as my wife forecast they turned me down. So I saw old [Makenson] and I said, ‘Oh Harry I got turned down.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I know. Don’t worry about it. Come to Blackburn.’ He said, ‘I’ll get you in.’ I went to Blackburn. I went to the front of the committee and oh yes, oh yes and I was in and I was an apprentice. Harry [Makenson], he looked after me. He was a bit crude at times. I was his apprentice overlooker which I’d never been a weaver yet. Totally foreign to me and he said, ‘Right, Steve,’ he says, ‘Them boxes there.’ He says, ‘There’s machines in them, I want them running.’ He says, ‘You’ve got a bricklayer there to do anything you want him to.’ I opened these boxes and they were automatic [widening?] frames in them and with faults and mistakes I got them all running. He said, ‘Right, you’re coming up to [Longsham?] Mill.’ He said, ‘You’re going to be an overlooker.’ I said, ‘At last?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’ I was there about six months and I got called into the office and me and a fellow called Jack Sowerby, he was in the same position as me and Harry [Makenson’s] there. He says, ‘Now then,’ he says, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ He said, ‘I’m asking,’ I forget his name, Jimmy or Harry or whatever. He says, ‘I’m going to ask you do you want to go down to Highfield Mill and it’s shift work and this Harry said no. ‘Right. Steve, you’re going.’ [laughs] I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He says, ‘You’re going to be an overlooker.’ I said, ‘I know I am. I’m an apprentice.’ He says, ‘You’re not. Not anymore.’ He said, ‘I’ve one finished. A foreigner.’ He said, ‘He’s finished down at Highfield Mill. You’re going there’ And they were Japanese looms and I used to spend the first few days looking to see what happened and I got on very well. I had maybe good luck and good judgement I don’t know but I was immediately an overlooker and then he opened another mill. He said, ‘I’m opening a mill Steve. You’re going to look after it.’ ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘Christ almighty what next?’ But that mill it closed down through slump and then I came back to Burnley. I was in Blackburn for twelve years and I came back to Burnley and that’s where I still am. I don’t regret anything.
BW: No.
SB: No. I’ve had a, I’ve been a coal miner, I’ve been a ironstone miner at Stanton at Scunthorpe, I’ve been an industrial painter. I’ve, I’ve tried everything until I got settled in textiles. Aye.
BW: Interesting that you had a couple of jobs as a miner and yet when you were in the prison camp you didn’t fancy tunnelling.
SB: No.
BW: Did you ever feel claustrophobic as a miner?
SB: No but I, that, that, that totally different. A coal mine is six to eight feet high.
BW: Ahum.
SB: Other than the actual face and as they move the face along they move this passageway and rails so it was a different atmosphere. In the ironstone mine that was what they called room and pillar system and they’d go that way and go that way and leave a diamond shape to support the roof. That was the room and pillar and I was a a pipe fitter strangely enough but the, I forget, I think they called them eggs. I’m not sure only the pipes were made with a lip on and you put this adaptor in and it was airtight. It was all compressed air was the machinery fans and drills and everything and so I finished up as a pipe fitter but that was thirty foot high and it’s all, I think it’s closed now. Not, not because I left it but [laughs] it’s amazing what you can do when you have to do, oh aye.
BW: And were you aware of other tunnellers in the, in the camp? Were other activities going on like that?
SB: No. I don’t know of any. No but I did hear say that if they found any they’d, instead of pumping the toilet on the field they’d pump it into the tunnel. That would be a deterrent of course [laughs] but I never heard of any but as I say I was surprised I didn’t know any air force fella do the same as I did but I don’t know why. I mean to sit there and play bloody cards all day long there, Oh no it’s, you’ve got to get moving and of course there was always the chance of being shot I suppose. I don’t know.
BW: Some of the other activities here that went on in some of the other camps I’ll just show you were there similar things going on in other in Lamsdorf at all or not. They show a meal at one Christmas and they show a sports team -
SB: Oh yes.
BW: And amateur dramatics.
SB: There was. Oh we’d ladies. [pause] Oh yeah. Oh yes there used to be baseball and as I say ladies. They were fellas dressed as ladies and I knew one and the last time I heard of him he’d died on the isle of Ibiza. What did he die of? Aids. He was a queer. Denholm Elliot. And the first time I I saw him after the war I was, we were in the Odean cinema in Burnley and before the programme there used to be a screen come down with adverts on and lo and behold Denny, Denny Elliot was there advertising cocoa. But it didn’t, he was, he was definitely feminine. Oh his attitude and he was one of the main actors or actresses whatever you might call them and they used get organised and they would give a concert occasionally, oh yes.
BW: Did you sense any of that with the other guys who maybe dressed up?
SB: I didn’t meet any. Denny was the only one I met. Oh no he was a nice, nice lad. Very inclined to be a bit delicate but nature’s a queer thing. I never criticised Denny. I mean he lived his own life. He was seventy odd I think when he died but he died of aids on Ibiza.
BW: And was he in, he was in the same camp as you then.
SB: Yes.
BW: At that point.
SB: Oh yes.
BW: That’s where you met him first.
SB: Aye. No, I mean, in between times I mean we used to play cards. We knew cards inside out. Bridge. Bridge was the main game of cards and I used to, we used to cheat like hell. Like not really cheating but you might, I don’t know if you know bridge at all.
BW: I don’t know the rules of bridge to be honest.
SB: Well, it’s a case you make bids. I’ll bid one club. Well I’ll be the diamond which was over a club and then bid the heart and then the spade was the top card and we’d, we used to have, we had two packs of cards and we used to use we used to get thirteen cards each if I remember right and we’d start bidding. Well me and my partner we worked it out that I’ll bid a diamond or a diamond you missed the [?] out and of course that told your partner something about we were about a real system of cheating but there was nothing at stake. I mean it was just friendly. Well to a point it was friendly. But oh no but I suppose it was a hard life.
BW: Were there opportunities for sport?
SB: Pardon?
BW: Were there opportunities for sport?
SB: Oh, no. You were, you were pinned into your own compound. They were kicking the ball about but as a team no there wasn’t ‘cause I mean it was a transit camp. Here today and gone tomorrow working parties.
BW: Did you get to see much of the commandant?
SB: No. Oh no.
BW: Did you ever see him when you were brought back to camp having tried to escape? Were you taken to him?
SB: No. I went -
BW: For punishment or -
SB: I only saw his underlings. Aye. But no it was a fixed effort. You got seven days, you got fourteen days, you got twenty one days depending on how often you went there. I got to twenty one but er -
BW: Twenty one days in solitary.
SB: Yeah and it was solitary. They, they, you could figure out you could sit somehow and get comfortable and the guards would creep down but it was a concrete floor and they had jackboots on and it used to crackle so they gave themselves away. We’d stand up then immediately we heard this crackling. Oh yeah.
BW: And what sort of size of cell were you in?
SB: Pardon?
BW: What sort of size of cell were you in in solitary? What sort of size of room were you in?
SB: Oh only a little room. A width of a bed and another bed. About that maybe.
BW: So maybe six foot across most.
SB: Yeah six or eight foot maybe. We’d a high window and we’d hear a frog [croakus?] at night. Oh aye, the frogs kept us company at night. Oh yeah.
BW: And so was the window high up. Was it open?
SB: No. No it wouldn’t open.
BW: Oh.
SB: No.
BW: But even then you could hear the frogs outside.
SB: Oh yes. oh yes there was twelve solitary confinement cells but as I say it was solitary apart from this quarter of an hour we used to have walking around this circle which was one of the Geneva Convention rules that they had to have exercise.
BW: And do you think they treated you fairly in the camp in respect of the Geneva Convention or were there things that they should have done that they didn’t or -
SB: I think they were fair in so far as it wasn’t everybody who could have white bread. It was the sick and infirm who got white bread and this brown bread that we got which soldiers got as well it was bloody awful. It was so packed it was like clay and you could cut it as thin as a newspaper but we only got a tenth of a loaf so it didn’t really trouble us a lot [laughs] Oh yes. Yeah.
BW: And you mentioned getting the Red Cross parcels. Were they regular or did you -
SB: Oh no -
BW: Sense that they had kept -
SB: Intermittent.
BW: They were intermittent. Did you sense -
SB: Now and again and as I say two to one parcel.
BW: Do you think they were keeping those parcels behind for their own good?
SB: I don’t know. I’ve no idea. No. I never give it a thought.
BW: Yeah.
SB: No. But no I can’t say we were ill-treated they just hadn’t anything to give us. I mean, as I say, white bread was very unusual. You had to be ill or something. That was for ordinary people not us prisoners of war. No. I think, like they say, the Germans prisoners of war who we took got a lot better treatment. They got better treatment ‘cause it was available.
BW: Did you feel that you were treated differently to the Russians? You say they were in the compound next to them. The Germans had quite a different view of the Russians. Do you feel that or did you get an idea that -
SB: No I -
BW: They were treated more harshly than you?
SB: I didn’t, I didn’t have any idea to compare. I’ve no idea how they treated them. I mean funnily enough I was on the, oh Ibiza and I used to go drinking and my, I was favourite in a bar run by Germans.
BW: So many years after the war you went to a bar in Ibiza that was run by Germans.
SB: Yeah. Oh yeah. I got on very well with the Germans and they got on very well with me I suppose but no it was all over and done with and hope it never happens again.
BW: And in the years following how, how has it been when you’ve seen public response to Bomber Command and the, let’s say the commemoration of them? How have you, have you seen a change over the years that people from Bomber Command have been treated?
SB: Pardon?
BW: How do you feel the veterans of Bomber Command have been treated after the war? They’re, do you feel there’s been a change in attitudes since.
SB: Well I think just a nucleus of people forgotten. It’s one of those things that happened and that was it. I mean Bob Featherstone, an Australian. I mean he came from Australia. He was a school master and then he finished as a rep for the immigration authorities persuading people to go to Australia and I’d been mean I was working in Blackburn at the time and I went home, and my wife said ‘There’s been a man to see you Steve.’ I said, ‘Who was it?’ She said, ‘I don’t know.’ I thought. ‘You’ve to go down to the Labour Exchange at 8 o’clock tonight.’ I says, ‘Why? I don’t know that I applied for any position in anywhere.’ Anyway I went down and there’s Bob Featherstone sat. ‘Come and sit at the side of me Steve.’ And he was talking to people and he was telling them the truth. He said well, the whole point is you’ll get accommodation and you’ll have to, after three months you’ll have to find your own accommodation and different things and I was talking to him afterwards and I says, ‘What about me going Bob?’ ‘Oh you can go anytime’ He said, ‘I can find you a job. I’ve two houses. I’ve one in Geelong and I’ve one in Sydney.’ He says, ‘You can one for as long as you want.’ Oh I thought, ‘Bloody good.’ Anyhow, of course he was only in Burnley for a day and he came to our house and had a meal with us and then he went of course on his travels. He said, ‘Keep in touch, Steve.’ He says, ‘You can fly or you can go by sea.’ He says, ‘Let me know.’ And I was talking to the wife and I said, ‘Alice,’ I said, ‘You’ve got to think one thing.’ I said, ‘You might never see your parents again.’ I said, ‘It’s twelve thousand mile away, ‘I said and you won’t be able to pop over at weekends.’ ‘I don’t want to go Steve.’ I said ‘Ok.’ So I rung Bob and I said, ‘Bob,’ I said ‘it’s off. The wife says no.’ I often wonder what I would have done in Australia.
BW: Yeah.
SB: And Laurie. He was, he was another Australian. He worked on the railways. And Tommy Fouracre. He died. He was the first to die I think. He were a farmer in [?] or some such ruddy place. And the Canadians I don’t know what the Canadians were. I have no idea.
BW: It’s interesting that on that raid as you said before all of you escaped from the Lancaster as it was shot down and yet the three other aircraft that were lost on the same raid over Berlin all the crews were killed.
SB: That’s amazing. I’m wondering if it was as I say I didn’t think or I couldn’t remember ackack. I wonder if the ackack was kept off and the air fighters came in. I mean -
BW: And none of the other crew in your aircraft indicated to you what had happened even when you met up with them afterwards.
SB: No. All I know the plane crashed. Whether it, what it was hit, where it was hit, if it was hit I don’t know and as I say Bob only a few minutes with us and then he was off to an Offlag so I couldn’t get to know off Bob.
BW: And were you all, I don’t recall this being mentioned before and it’s only just occurred to me were you all kept together in the same camp apart from Bob who was taken off to an Offlag were the other six of you kept together? Or did you -
SB: In Stalag 8b?
BW: Yeah.
SB: We were. Oh yes we were held together. We used to play cards with one another and we used to, but nobody wanted to do what I did. I don’t know why. We all have our own funny ways.
BW: So the other guys although they’d all been taken prisoner and all detained in the same camp didn’t try to escape like you did.
SB: No. I mean the, to get out of the camp itself was impossible because there was such a depth of barbed wire and these towers on corners with machine guns. I mean it was hopeless. So there was only one way. Changing identities with somebody who got fed up with working.
BW: And when the camp was emptied and you were walking presumably westwards at what stage were you technically liberated? I mean were you taken to another camp and held there or were you -
SB: We were, I don’t know how long we were on the march. We were like bloody zombies and we finished up in this camp. There was Frenchmen in it in actual fact. There was four Frenchmen killed by a French aeroplane who mistook the camp and and we went to this camp and as I say there was a bloody great big marquee and branches on the floor for us to sleep on and in actual fact there was a young fella younger than me he got frostbite and it had -
BW: Infected his leg.
SB: Aye. He died. He died. He was only twenty one and we were there for maybe a couple of days and then the Americans came. The Germans had gone. There was nobody in the camp only us prisoners and then as I say the old Dakota came along and took us to Cosford and -
BW: And then you were back in this country.
SB: Yep. I was back to work. [laughs] Aye. I enjoyed being in India. I was in Bombay. I was in Madras and I was in Delhi and of course being a warrant officer I had a bit of a [sway?] and some of the lads they all, they always called me Red. I had red hair. If anybody was around it was sir but otherwise it was, ‘Hey Red, just a minute.’ ‘Oh Red. How about getting us on to the race, Guindi racecourse.’ I said, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ And I’d get the big, I forget what they called them, bloody thing, the big van thing with windows and we’d go to the races at the weekend. Oh aye. It was useful being a warrant officer [laughs].
BW: Rank has its privileges.
SB: Oh yes. And like if I put my raincoat on and the cap badge or the same as officers and they’d salute me and I’d salute them back the silly buggers. I remember going, going to, oh I was going from Blackpool to Barton. I changed, I was travelling by coach and I changed coach at Leeds and as I got on the coach, ‘Oh very good. Right. Ok now.’ They’d been waiting for an air force officer and mistook me for him and the ruddy coach had been waiting for this fellow and it was convenient. It took me to Hull.
BW: Very good. I think that is all the questions I have for you. So -
SB: Well it is nice talking about it again.
BW: Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much. It’s been great talking to you.
SB: It was an experience.
BW: It was a good one I hope. It was for me.
SB: Oh yeah.
BW: So thank you very much for your time Mr Bacon. Thank you.
SB: It’s been a pleasure.
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ABaconSG160216
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Interview with Stephen Granville Bacon
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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eng
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02:21:47 audio recording
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Brian Wright
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2016-02-16
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Stephen joined the Royal Air Force in Kingston upon Hull. He wanted to be a pilot but became a mid-air gunner instead. He started at RAF Dalcross where he trained on Boulton Paul Defiant aircraft and went to 12 Squadron at Wickenby on Lancasters.
Stephen describes the preparations for missions, the cold and how the pilot would corkscrew as he approached targets. Following two trips to Essen and on his second trip to Berlin, his aircraft crashed. Another three Lancasters went down with no survivors. Upon landing in the snow he was captured by the German home guard and sent to an interrogation camp at Frankfurt. A person, claiming to be from the Red Cross tried to interview him but Stephen had been warned of this ruse and refused to answer any questions.
He and the other crew members were taken to Stalag VIII-B in Lamsdorf, near the Polish border. The conditions were very difficult with very little water and food. They burnt bed boards from their three-tier bunks to make tea and replaced them with string from Red Cross food parcels. The sanitary conditions were poor. Stephen, however, felt they were treated fairly.
He describes in detail the deplorable conditions in the camp. During his stay he escaped three times by exchanging identities with a member of a working party but was recaptured every time and punished by solitary confinement. He knew he had little chance of escaping as he couldn't speak German but wanted to keep the Germans occupied. He discusses some of the amusing incidents which occurred and outlines the entertainment activities in the camp. Stephen’s mother was informed he was missing, and his name read out as a prisoner of war by Lord Haw-Haw [William Joyce].
In 1945, he embarked on a gruelling march to escape from the approaching Russian army, often resorting to eating raw chicken and rabbit. Eventually the guards disappeared and he was picked up and looked after by the Americans and flown back to England for medical treatment. Stephen developed beriberi, weighing only seven stone. He was flown back to RAF Cosford in a C-47. After treatment he was sent to India as there were no flying post available in England. After the war ended, he was sent home to Blackpool for demob and worked in the coal mines, as a coal handler in the mills, a maintenance engineer and finally as a mill manager.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Poland
England--Lincolnshire
Poland--Łambinowice
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Contributor
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Julie Williams
Terry Holmes
Sally Coulter
12 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
bale out
bombing
Defiant
Dulag Luft
escaping
military service conditions
Nissen hut
prisoner of war
RAF Dalcross
RAF Wickenby
sanitation
shot down
Stalag 8B
the long march
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/205/3340/ABatesP151009.1.mp3
f5fd2ef009e496cfc1da092a451f6c89
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Title
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Bates, Philip
Philip Bates
P Bates
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Philip Bates (1307447 Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a flight engineer with 149 Squadron until his aircraft was shot down and he became a prisoner of war.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-10-09
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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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Bates, P
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
BW: This is Brian Wright interviewing Mr Philip Bates at home in Urmston, Greater Manchester on Friday 9th of October at 2pm. Mr Bates could you please confirm your full name?
PB: Yes. Phillip Bates.
BW: And your rank.
PB: Sergeant when I was shot down but warrant officer when I returned back from being a prisoner of war.
BW: Ok. And do you recall your service number at all?
PB: Yes 1307447.
BW: It’s surprising how that -
PB: And I can tell you my prisoner of war number as well
BW: Ok.
PB: 222803
BW: 222803
PB: Stalag 4b.
BW: Ok. And what squadron were you on, sir?
PB: 149 at Lakenheath.
BW: Ok. So if you could just give us an idea of what your life was like prior to joining the air force so where you grew up and any sort of significant movements before joining the RAF and what prompted you to join.
PB: Yeah. Well I’m a native of Burnley, Lancashire, a cotton weaving town, until I was employed as a junior clerk with a local manufacturer but once the war started I was keen to get in and immediately after the fall of France I volunteered for the air force. And -
BW: So this would be May 1940.
PB: This would be May 1940 and went to Blackpool for a fortnight square bashing.
BW: Ok.
PB: Those of us who were on that particular course were then posted to Cosford and -
BW: Ok.
PB: Nobody thought about anything in those days except the imminent invasion of Britain and we who’d been in the air force a fortnight were given the job of defending Cosford against German paratroopers which was the most farcical thing you could ever imagine so a friend and I very quickly sneaked away to the orderly room and volunteered for training as flight mechanics and we both -
BW: Ok.
PB: Trained as flight mechanics and then as fitter 2E’s and my friend was posted to 149 squadron where I met up with him in 1943. I went to 86 squadron, Coastal Command flying the Beaufort torpedo bombers and moved from there to Scotland and eventually I was sent to Sealand to a huge maintenance depot on a six month potential NCO course with the intention that when I returned back to my unit I’d be made a corporal but whilst I was at Sealand a Manchester landed and this was June 1942 and I went to look at this Manchester. I’d never seen anything bigger than a, than a Wellington before and this thing was stood there with its bomb doors open and this was a few months after Butch Harris had taken charge and I looked up into that bomb bay and I said to myself. ‘Bomber Command is no longer a joke. It’s big. It’s getting bigger. I’ve got to be part of it,’ and so the next day I volunteered for training as a flight engineer.
BW: Ok.
PB: And I trained early in 1943. Posted to a Heavy Conversion Unit at Waterbeach where I was crewed up with a crew who had just finished their OTU on Wellingtons and we went from there.
BW: And so just thinking back to your decision to join Bomber Command. You’d already had some technical training -
PB: Yes.
BW: At that stage.
PB: Yes.
BW: And so you wanted to further that as a flight engineer.
PB: Well the obvious job for a fitter 2E was to be, was to be a flight engineer.
BW: Ok.
PB: And it didn’t require a great deal of training to bridge the gap of course.
BW: And there were a number of guys who went through Halton. Did you do any training for flight engineering at Halton or not? With [?]
PB: No. St Athan.
BW: Right.
PB: St Athan.
BW: So you weren’t one of Trenchard’s brats or anything?
PB: Oh no I wasn’t a brat. I was too old to be a brat [laughs].
BW: And so it was the sight of the Manchester that prompted you to join.
PB: Yes.
BW: Properly Bomber Command.
PB: Yes, yes.
BW: Were you able, at that stage, to volunteer for flying duties or did that come later? Did you foresee that as being part of that trade as a flight engineer?
PB: Once I became a flight, once I became a flight engineer obviously I was going to go into Bomber Command.
BW: Ok. And -
PB: When I arrived at St Athan I was given choices I could train to be. I could train to be on Stirlings or Halifaxes or Lancasters or Sunderland Flying Boats or Catalina Flying Boats. Now, as a fitter I’d always worked on radial engines and so I chose this, I chose the Stirling for the reason that it was Bomber Command and it had radial engines. It perhaps wasn’t the wisest choice. I’d have been better off on Lancasters probably but I I I liked the radial engine so that’s why I chose Stirlings.
BW: Speaking as an engineer how did you find the radials then? Were there, were there particular properties about them that you liked?
PB: Yes. They, they, they were more powerful than the Merlin for starters and they were more dependable and they could take more, they could take more damage.
BW: That’s er that -
PB: When I when I was a boy very keen on aircraft now to me the inline liquid cooled engine was just a big motor car engine. The radial was a proper aeroplane engine.
BW: Ok.
PB: That’s what it was all about for me. The radial was a proper aeroplane engine. The other was just a big motor car engine.
BW: I’m sensing there there’s a difference between the aerial engine and flying. Did you have a wish to fly at an early age?
PB: Well as a fitter whenever I worked on an aircraft and a pilot came along to do a test flight I invariably asked if I could go up with him so I flew on, I flew on Lysanders, Blenheims and Oxfords as a passenger.
BW: And which of those was your favourite? Which was -
PB: Oh the Lysander.
BW: Really?
PB: Oh gorgeous. You’re going, you’re going along and there’s a slow, you heard a terrible creaking noise and the slots and slats worked and the flaps come down.
BW: Ahum.
PB: And you could practically stand still. Wonderful aeroplane. Wonderful.
BW: They used that -
PB: Aeroplane.
BW: On special duties -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Squadrons.
PB: Short take off, short landings.
BW: Yeah.
PB: Yeah.
BW: But they were, they were a lovely aircraft to be a passenger in.
PB: Oh yes.
BW: Was it?
PB: It was a marvellous aeroplane was the Lysander. I loved it.
BW: Did you get many flights in those?
PB: Yes quite a few. Yes. I was on, I was on an ackack calibration unit. We worked in concert with the defences of Edinburgh the Forth Bridge and the Rosyth dockyard and I was once in a Lysander where we did dive bombing exercises on the Forth Bridge which was fantastic.
BW: Brilliant.
PB: Absolutely fantastic. It was like being in a JU87 almost.
BW: And this was just to calibrate the ackack guns as you say.
PB: Yes.
BW: To make sure they had the right sort of -
PB: Yes.
BW: Ranging or -
PB: Yes. Yes.
BW: Distance. There were no rounds fired in these -
PB: No. No. No just -
BW: Just to make sure.
PB: Calibration yeah.
BW: Right but either way the pilot imitated a dive bombing manoeuvre on a
PB: Yeah but we had a real clapped out aircraft.
BW: So having had some experience of Lysanders, a single engine aircraft and Oxfords the twin engine.
PB: Yeah.
BW: You then -
PB: All radial engines of course.
BW: And radial engines yeah you then opted while you were at St Athan to go forward for Stirlings.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And what was the course that lead you from St Athan to your squadron? How, how did you go about getting that?
PB: Well, we, we completed our course and we got our brevies and were posted to, to Waterbeach Heavy Conversion Unit and I was introduced to a pilot, a Pilot Officer Cotterill and he was my skipper and I then met the rest of the crew and we took it from there. Did our heavy conversion training.
BW: And how long did that take? Roughly.
PB: Not very long. Maybe about eight weeks I suppose. Something like that.
BW: And was most of that or all of it daylight sorties or were there night time -
PB: No.
BW: Ops involved as well?
PB: We did, we did two four hour sessions of daylight take offs and landings, circuits and bumps. Take of twenty minutes to take off and land for four hours. And having done eight hours of that in daytime we did another eight hours at night and then after that we did, we did cross country flights.
BW: And when you met your crew at this point did you stay together from the conversion unit through to, on operational squadron as the same crew or were the members interchanged?
PB: We lost two members. We lost two members shortly after we joined the squadron.
BW: And was there a reason behind that at all?
PB: Yes. Our first, our first navigator, Geoff was a regular soldier stationed in India when the war broke out. Browned off. To escape he volunteered for training as air crew. He had a stammer which didn’t help and he was a useless navigator and we knew he was useless and our first trip was a very simple mine laying in the North Sea and he flew us straight through the balloon barrage at Norwich coming back and the next day he packed his kit bags and left us.
BW: And was that his choice or -
PB: No. No, that was forced upon him.
BW: Right ok so it wasn’t something there like a moment of self-awareness. He decided to leave.
PB: No. No, he told, he told us he said, ‘They decided I’m not suitable for Bomber Command. I’m being posted to a Coastal Command station.’ Well I think that was just a face saver on his part. I can’t imagine what happened to him but he couldn’t navigate for toffee. Even, even, even with a Gee set he was useless.
BW: Ahum.
PB: And then we did two mine laying trips. We did a lot of fighter affiliation exercises and our mid upper gunner [Bolivar?] a Londoner was brilliant during, during fighter affiliation. Now, Len, Len the wireless operator was always sick. He spewed up everywhere and I sat there and think, ‘Why don’t you crash the bloody thing and get it over with.’ That’s how bad I felt and Bob was as happy as could be but we did two mine laying trips. One in the North Sea -
BW: Ahum.
PB: And one in the river estuary at Bordeaux and then our first target was the opening night of the Battle of Hamburg. 24th of July.
BW: This would be 24th of July 1943.
PB: Yeah. The next night we went to Essen. The next day our mid upper gunner reported sick with air sickness. Now, how he suddenly became air sick overnight I do not know but that was the end of him. So we had a new navigator and a new mid upper gunner.
BW: Sometimes after raids like that men would be removed if they were felt to perhaps have broken at some stage. Do you -
PB: Oh yes.
BW: Do you think that might have been an impact?
PB: Yes. He was still, he was still on the station when we were shot down and I’ve often wondered what he made of it that morning when he woke up and found five empty beds.
BW: And so if I can just touch again on the fighter affiliation. What kind of exercises were carried out there?
PB: Well either, either a Spitfire or a, or a Hurricane would make mock attacks on us and the gunners would give instructions to the skipper as to what evasive action to take and it was quite, it was quite, because our bomb aimer was a failed pilot who could fly, fly a Stirling perfectly well and the Stirling had dual controls so him and the pilot used to work together and we could really throw it about. Really throw it about. You could never have done that on a Lancaster what we did with a Stirling,
BW: No. There was only a single set of controls.
PB: Yeah. Oh it was a wonderful aircraft. Wonderful manoeuvrability aircraft. Couldn’t get very high but by George it could, it could manoeuvre.
BW: And so you mentioned about the raid on Hamburg. That was pretty close to being your first operational sortie.
PB: That was our first target yes after two mine laying trips.
BW: And what, what do you recall about that at all because it was Operation Gomorrah, the raid on Hamburg was pretty significant.
PB: It was operational. What, what, what was most fascinated me most was the colours. The colours of the lights. Reds, greens, yellows. Searchlights, blue searchlights, tracer shells, flak it was an incredible sight. An incredible sight and when you see, when you looked down and someone had just released a string of four pound incendiaries you’d get this brilliant white light like that and then it slowly turns red as the fire gets going. An incredible sight.
BW: So you’d see a sort of a line of white which would -
PB: Yes.
BW: Presumably be the magnesium -
PB: Yeah.
BW: In the incendiaries -
PB: Yes.
BW: Setting fire to the building which was then of course -
PB: Yes.
BW: Catch turn orange and burn.
PB: Yes it was quite remarkable.
BW: And did you only make the one raid on Hamburg or did you return because there was -
PB: We, we, we -
BW: Four days I think.
PB: In ten days this was our introduction to the target. In ten days we did four Hamburgs, an Essen and a [Remshite]
BW: Wow so you flew right through the raid on, or the operation against Hamburg -
PB: Yeah.
BW: In that case.
PB: And the second night of course. The night of the firestorm oh, deary deary me, that was terrible.
BW: Were you aware at all of what was, what was going on? It seems a lot of information has come out subsequently. What were you sort of aware of the damage at that time?
PB: Well where -
BW: While flying.
PB: On the second night when we were back over the sea I went up into the astrodome and looked back and there was only one fire in Hamburg that night. It looked to be about three miles across and it came straight up white, red and black smoke thousands of feet above us and I said over the intercom, ‘those poor bastards down there.’ I couldn’t help myself. It was a terrible, terrible sight. I’ve never seen anything like it on any other target.
BW: At once it’s a spectacular sight but it’s also when you see that sort of thing -
PB: We, we, we killed forty thousand people that night.
BW: When did that, when was that made aware to you? When did you become aware of that sort of statistic? Was it pretty soon after or was it -
PB: Well the newspapers reported it a couple of days later and gave the number of dead.
BW: Right.
PB: And quite honestly I was disappointed. I thought from I saw it must have killed more than that.
BW: It sounds like they might have underestimated.
PB: Yeah. But forty thousand people were killed that night.
BW: Ahum.
PB: Compare that to how many were killed in London in the entire period of the war. There was no comparison.
BW: No. It’s different isn’t it?
PB: But we never, we never, we never achieved anything like Hamburg again until Dresden of course and in Dresden it only killed twenty odd thousand.
BW: And so Hamburg has obviously made quite an impression for that reason.
PB: Hamburg, I think was undoubtedly Bomber Command’s greatest success of the war. I’ve just, I’ve just read a book by Adolf Galland who was in charge of the German night fighters and the things he says about what the consequences of Hamburg and what it meant to the High Command and the changes it was, it shattered them. Completely shattered them.
BW: So it had, it had certainly had ramifications on the ground but it had more ramifications for the Luftwaffe High Command is what you’re saying.
PB: Yes. Yes. It terrified the German fighter defence to pieces. Terrified them.
BW: And did you see many night fighters at this stage over Hamburg? Were they active?
PB: No because it was it was the first, it was just the introduction of Window and everything was at odds.
BW: And so Window was the anti-radar -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Jamming mechanism.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Where they chucked out strips of aluminium.
PB: But they recovered, they recovered from, from Window very very quickly and they got, they got a new form of defence which was more effective they forced it out before, before Window and I’ve read the German view that Window did more harm than good for Bomber Command in the long run because it completely organised their defences.
BW: But at least on that night or on those nights that you were flying over Hamburg the fighters were ineffective because -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Of the use of Window.
PB: The first night there were eight hundred aircraft and we lost twelve.
BW: Wow.
PB: And most of those were lost because they were off course. Separated away from the protection of Window.
BW: Were there any hits from the ackack below? German anti-aircraft fire was renowned as being very accurate. Did you feel that as you were flying over there?
PB: The one thing, the one thing that fascinated me about ackack was that the smell of cordite filled the aircraft. You were flying through clouds of the stuff but when we landed the bomb aimer and I always got our torches and we searched underneath the aircraft and if there was no damage we were disappointed. We expected to have been hit.
BW: So that, that, sort of, I suppose summarises or encompasses your first few trips on operations. What happened after Hamburg? What were the next -
PB: Well we flew on -
BW: Significant raids for you.
PB: We flew on the last two raids ever carried out on Northern Italy and we flew twice to Nuremberg which we always regarded as a particularly important Nazi target and we did a few other various towns in the Ruhr and then on the 31st of August we went to Berlin and that was something else. That was an absolute complete fiasco.
BW: And this was still 1943?
PB: Yeah. Yeah.
BW: In August ’43.
PB: Yeah. The raid on Berlin on the 31st of August. Well the trouble was we’d been, we’d been to Monchengladbach the night before and we quite often did two nights, two consecutive nights. Well, you do Monchengladbach you get very little sleep, you go for briefing and you’re told its Berlin. There were howls of rage from all the air crews and that manifested itself later because that night about eighty aircraft ditched their bombs in the North Sea and returned early. Biggest number ever ‘cause people weren’t prepared to go.
BW: That, that almost sounds a bit like a mutiny in a way doesn’t it?
PB: It’s not far off.
BW: Down tools.
PB: It’s not far off really but the raid was also badly planned. All the damage to Berlin had been in the west and it was intended that this raid should do damage in the east and so we were sent to a point south of Berlin. There was Berlin on our left. We expected to fly seventy miles east. Split-arsed turn, fly seventy miles back and approach Berlin from, from the east. Now, nobody did it. The pathfinders put their markers down two miles south of where they should have been and we all approached from the south so the creepback extended miles and miles and miles. We killed less than a hundred people in Berlin. We lost over two hundred airmen killed and over a hundred prisoners of war. It was a complete and utter fiasco.
BW: Wow and that simply stemmed from, as you say, the pathfinder markers being dropped two miles south.
PB: And we’re coming from the south.
BW: Yeah.
PB: You can imagine it, practically no bombs and the Germans that night for the first time put down these parachute flares. It was like driving down the Mall with all the lights on. It was an incredible sight and it’s such a big place to get through. It takes forever.
BW: And so the gunners clearly with those parachute flares they could have a clear sight presumably of the bomber stream.
PB: And you’ve got day fighters looking down.
BW: Wow.
PB: As well as the night fighters looking up and you’ve got the schragemusik by this time as well.
BW: Which are the cannons in the back of an ME110 to fire vertically underneath the bomber yeah.
PB: Yeah or a JU88.
BW: Yeah.
PB: Or a Messerschmitt 110.
BW: Yeah.
PB: Seventy degree angle, in between the inborn engine and the fuselage hit the main tanks. All you’d see is a great big flash in the sky and that’s it. It was gone.
BW: The crews often said they didn’t know they were there.
PB: No.
BW: Those who survived didn’t see them.
PB: You could see an aircraft flying peacefully and then the next second it’s a ball of fire and you’ll see no tracer and a myth arose and the myth was that the Germans were firing a new type of bomb, a new type of shell which we called a scarecrow and it was designed not to shoot aircraft down but to explode and give the impression of an aircraft blowing up and for months navigators would log these and they weren’t scarecrows. The Germans never had a scarecrow. They were aircraft blowing up.
BW: Actually the aircraft themselves.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And -
PB: And the irony of that is that in the First World War the British had upward firing guns to attack zeppelins.
BW: Ahum Yeah.
PB: [laughs] They never learn.
BW: Because they were difficult to shoot down as well. But so ok from, from there that’s two operations on the trot really. Monchengladbach and Berlin.
PB: Yeah.
BW: You mentioned those airmen killed. Were any of those from the squadron? Did you know any of those guys at all? Were there Stirlings in that lot that were shot down?
PB: Er we there was a raid on Berlin on the 24th of August as well but we were on leave but a crew that we trained with went missing that night and a friend of mine got shot down on the night we were on. A fella called Lew Parsons. He was shot down on the 31st .
BW: Luke Parsons?
PB: Yeah. L E W, short for Lewis.
BW: Oh I see. Lew Parsons.
PB: He was a flight engineer.
BW: And he was shot down on the 31st of August.
PB: Yeah. Yeah. But it, it was a dreadful night. Anyway, the next day our skipper and our navigator were commissioned officers and so the next day we met up with the skipper and he said Johnny’s reported sick and Johnny was our navigator. Flying Officer Johnny [Turton ]. A fantastic navigator. Absolutely fantastic and he’d gone sick and later in the day we were given a replacement. Another flying officer but a New Zealander by the name of McLean and he was the exact opposite from Johnny. Johnny was a big outgoing personality who radiated confidence. This chap had no, no, no personality whatsoever. He was with us five days. We scarcely ever saw him. We scarcely ever spoke to him. We never even learned his Christian name. And he got us shot down.
BW: And that was, of course then going to be your last -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Last flight.
PB: Yeah 5th 5th of September. Mannheim.
BW: Ok. I was just going to ask a question there and it’s just gone from my memory but I’ll probably come back to it. So, oh yes how far into your tour were you at that point? It sounds -
PB: That was our fifteenth trip.
BW: So exactly halfway through.
PB: Exactly halfway. We knew with Johnny we could do, we could do the tour because he was so brilliant but without him we were lost and he finished his tour. He joined another crew, finished his tour got his DFC, survived the war. He was brilliant.
BW: It’s strange how fate goes isn’t it?
PB: Yeah. Yeah.
BW: Before we move on to your experience of being shot down I would just like to ask about what it was like for you as a flight engineer in the sort of preparation and flying out. What sort of things you would do? Perhaps if you could give us a sense of preparation you would go through to -
PB: Yes.
BW: To board the aircraft.
PB: Yes.
BW: What it was like to then go up in a Stirling.
PB: Well to begin with once we got out the aircraft there were a great many pre-flight checks to do. One of them was to go up onto the main plane with a member of the ground crew. Now, we had fourteen petrol tanks on a Stirling. Sometimes we only had the four main ones. Sometimes we had fourteen. Sometimes we had a mixture but my job was to go up on to the main plane with a member of the ground crew and he would open up the filler caps on all the tanks that were supposed to be full and I had to check visually that they were full to the, to the brim. Now, every night I’m stood on the leading edge of a Stirling. I’m twenty feet above the ground. I think when he moves to the next one and I follow, if I slip I’ll roll down the main plane I’ll fall fifteen feet to the tarmac and at the very least I’ll break an ankle and I’ll be alive tomorrow morning and I always, always considered that thought. I never did it of course. The thought was always there. It was in our own power to be alive tomorrow morning [laughs]. But once, once in the air my two main jobs was one to monitoring engine performance making sure the pressures, temperature etcetera were as they should be and that we were flying at the right airspeed and the right revs and the other was calculating every twenty minutes I had to calculate the amount of petrol used from whichever tank doing the past every twenty minutes recorded so that I always knew how much petrol remained in each tank because they weren’t over generous with their petrol allowance and people did run short very often. So that was, that was important, to keep, to know exactly how much petrol you had and where it was.
BW: So even though you’d done inspections and the ground crew had correctly filled the tanks presumably you could encounter unknown winds and like a headwind.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And use your fuel more quickly.
PB: As I understand it the calculation was made. This is your track. It’s so many miles. You’ve so much petrol. We’ll give you so much and we’ll give you another three hundred and twenty gallons as a, as a reserve.
BW: Reserve.
PB: But of course you get off track, winds are against you, anything can happen. You can’t hold height, you’ve got to get into rich mixture to climb again. All sorts of things could happen to make you use more fuel.
BW: And that would include of course having to take evasive action over the target or anything like that.
PB: Yes, evasive, any time when you had to open up the engines and go into full fuel. We were using a gallon a minute.
BW: That’s pretty significant and that’s just through one engine. A gallon a minute through an engine.
PB: No. It’s, that’s the aircraft.
BW: Oh, the aircraft. Ok.
PB: A gallon a mile through the aircraft.
BW: Oh right.
PB: A gallon a minute through each engine yes.
BW: And I think you said the Stirling was a, was a lovely aircraft to fly. What was your experience generally of the environment in which you were having to work? Was it cramped or was there enough room to do your job?
PB: I’ve only been in a Lancaster once and it horrified me. There’s no space to breathe. You could hold a dance in a Stirling. It was huge and because of the short wingspan it was so highly manoeuvrable. It was a beautiful aeroplane but it couldn’t get any height. Couldn’t get any height.
BW: A limited ceiling.
PB: We had to fight to fly at thirteen thousand. On the last night at Hamburg. The night of the big storm we did two runs over Hamburg at eight thousand feet with the bomb doors frozen up.
BW: Wow.
PB: That was a terrible night.
BW: Just out of interest the air supply gets pretty thin around ten thousand feet. Did you ever have to use oxygen?
PB: It goes on automatically at ten thousand feet.
BW: Right.
PB: Ten thousand feet, oxygen on and skipper charges into S gear.
BW: Into S gear.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And does that give you extra boost through the engines?
PB: Yeah. Yeah.
BW: Ok and were you able, in some cases crews had to stow their parachutes. Were you able to move around with your parachutes on or did you stow it?
PB: No it was always stowed. Always stowed away.
BW: How did it feel when you were actually bombed and fuelled up ready to go and you’re at the threshold of the runway and you’d got the green light. Could you just talk us through that?
PB: Well -
BW: What you were feeling there and what you were doing?
PB: I experienced three feelings. Between briefing and going out to the aircraft, absolute terror. Once we delivered the bombs and the photoflash had gone off, wonderful. Once back eating bacon and eggs very, very satisfied. Those were the three emotions that I suffered.
BW: How did it feel when you were given that that green light? Presumably as a flight engineer you followed the pilot through on the throttles.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And you feel this surge of power of the engines going.
PB: Yeah all all the while was concentrating on getting the thing up because the Stirling had a violent swing. It had this ridiculous undercarriage and because of the torque of the engines it swung to starboard and you had to correct that swing either on the throttles or the stick. Now, if you got a cross wind as well that swing could be quite dramatic and it went like that and then like that.
BW: So a violent swerve either way.
PB: The undercarriage just collapsed you don’t want an undercarriage collapsing when you’ve got a thousand -
BW: No.
PB: Incendiary bombs stuck in the belly [laughs].
BW: Were there any incidents where aircraft were unable to take off because of that? They perhaps didn’t control the swing or there was a cross wind.
PB: Oh yeah. The very first Stirling on its very first flight in the hands of a very skilled test pilot on its very first landing wrote its undercarriage off.
BW: Simply because of the swing due the power in the engines.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And the imbalance.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And yet it looks from, as you say, the size of it -
PB: Yeah.
BW: It looks a very stable beast to fly.
PB: It’s incredibly strong that way. It’s not very strong that way.
BW: So longitudinally strength.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And laterally not so good.
PB: It was a very strong undercarriage but it’s so tall it [put a side strain on it] like that.
BW: Yeah.
PB: It goes. Time and time again.
BW: And of course these are pure manual controls. They’re not power assisted in any way.
PB: Oh no. No.
BW: So, but it was generally very smooth to fly and very easy to fly once you were airborne.
PB: Oh it was a beautiful aeroplane to fly. Beautiful. It really was. It was like a [? ] You could do anything with it.
BW: How many were, were in your crew? There were normally seven in a Lancaster.
PB: Seven yeah.
BW: The same in the Stirling.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And you had initially for your first part of your tour you had Johnnie [Turton] as your navigator.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And your pilot. Who was your pilot?
PB: Pilot. When I joined him in May it was Pilot Officer Bernard Cotterell.
BW: That’s right.
PB: By the time we were shot down he was Acting Flight Lieutenant Bernard Cotterell.
BW: Is that C O T T E R -
PB: Yeah.
BW: I L L?
PB: Yeah. E L L.
BW: E L L. And so who are the, you mentioned your wireless op.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Um, who was Len -
PB: Len Smith. Bomb aimer was Alan Crowther.
BW: Alan Crowther.
PB: Yeah the rear gunner was John [Carp?] a Scotsman.
BW: John [Carp?]
PB: He was always known as Jock rather than John.
BW: Jock.
PB: And the new, the new mid upper gunner was a Newcastle lad called Ray Wall.
BW: Ray Wall.
PB: Yeah, Ray Wall. There were only five of us, as I say, left from the original crew and of those five I was the only survivor. The mid upper, the mid upper survived and this new navigator survived?
BW: And so from there we’ve looked at sort of the raids and the preparation for them. What sort of things would happen on the return to base? You’d obviously be debriefed but what form would that take?
PB: Well, we, we, we always flew at the recommended airspeeds which got you the most miles per gallon. A lot of people just simply flew back as fast as they could regardless of wasting petrol so we were invariably the last aircraft to land which meant we always had to queue up to wait to be de debriefed which was a nuisance but then of course it was the bacon and egg lark. Bacon and egg time and off to bed.
BW: And what, what was the accommodation like? You were all crewed up. Were they in nissen huts. Was there a crews either side or was it -
PB: We, we, we were in a nissen -
BW: Different.
PB: Hut and I think we shared it with two other crews and one morning, one morning you would find that half the beds are made up and all everything’s gone because they had disappeared but the thing is you never, you never associated with anybody outside your crew. There was no point to it.
BW: Really.
PB: No point to it at all. A crew was a very. very tight little, little group. We did everything together.
BW: And so even though there would be two other crews in the, in the nissen hut with you you would still socialise only with your own crew.
PB: Oh yeah we never bothered with anybody else. Very rarely spoke to anybody else even.
BW: And where did you go during your off-duty hours? Where did you socialise?
PB: Oh the village pub in Lakenheath.
BW: Do you recall the name?
PB: No, I don’t actually. No.
BW: Ah.
PB: But I do remember there was a Mrs Philips who used to provide us with suppers some times. Just across the road. She used to put on bacon and egg suppers. I don’t know where she got the bacon and eggs from but she used to put on bacon and egg suppers.
BW: Just as a special treat for you.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And the rest of the crew.
PB: But you know you sit in the village pub at night and you were surrounded by farmers and butchers and bakers and all the rest of it. People for whom the war was just something they read about in the newspapers and you were just so happy, you’re so happy. It’s wonderful. There’s nothing like a crew. Nothing. Incredible relationship. Incredible.
BW: And did you have opportunity to mix with other locals? Not just the, the tradesman there, if you like, the farmers and the bakers or whatever?
PB: No. The only time we went out, off the camp was to go in to the little pub. On the nights we weren’t flying. We were in there every night we weren’t flying.
BW: Were there station dances at all or anything like that?
PB: No. There was no station. You’d the airfield there, you’ve the mess here and your billet over there and something else over there. If you didn’t have a bicycle you couldn’t exist in Lakenheath.
BW: So quite a distance between -
PB: Distances are immense. And I’ve visited it since the war. It’s an American town now.
BW: Yeah. It’s, it’s a huge place.
PB: Oh it’s a big place and when I, when I was there talking to them they produced some information about the wartime use and they spelt Stirling as if, as if it was the bloody currency [laughs].
BW: Were there, just out of interest, were there other crews in the pub where you went or was it pretty much just you guys?
PB: Well no doubt there were.
BW: Right.
PB: But we just sat in our corner and nothing else existed.
BW: Right.
PB: Nothing else existed.
BW: So tucked away in your own -
PB: Yeah.
BW: In your own little world.
PB: And there my skipper named my first daughter.
BW: Right.
PB: My skipper. I don’t know how we got on, how the conversation got around to that actually but one evening for some reason the skipper said if my wife and I were to ever have a daughter we were going to call her Penelope. I never forgot that and so very many years later when my first daughter was born she simply had to be Penelope. I had no choice.
BW: Well. As you say it obviously comes from being a tight crew.
PB: Yes.
BW: And that connection.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Ok. You mention then about your trip to Mannheim and this New Zealand navigator.
PB: Yeah.
BW: About your, of your crew.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Who, who got you shot down?
PB: Yeah.
BW: Just talk us through that if you would, please.
PB: Well we had a full petrol load which means a minimum bomb load of course. We were briefed for Munich and when briefing had been completed the CO said there’s a Mosquito on its way to Munich at the moment because it’s feared the weather may break down there so we’re going brief you for a possible alternative for Mannheim. So we had a second briefing then. Now, we’d no idea where we were going which meant of course the navigators had two flight plans to prepare. They’d doubled the work in the limited amount of time so they were under stress from the start. So we, we, we retire to our aircraft. Do all our pre-flight checks and the CO comes around in his van and says Munich is scrubbed. You’re going to Mannheim. So off we go. Immediately we cross enemy coast we were hit by flack. Now this had never ever happened to us before. He’d taken us straight over a, straight over a gun batt. I was shocked and I thought I’m going to spend, I’m going to spend the next hour checking the fuel in the hope we were losing fuel and we could turn back. And I went and did a meticulous check on the fuel but we weren’t losing fuel of course. Now, the raid was cleverly designed. You’ve got Ludwigshafen, the Rhine, Mannheim. If you fly over Ludwigshafen into Mannheim a creepback occurs. You get two targets for the price of one. And so that was the way we were to enter. So, to make sure we got it right for each wave of the attack the pathfinders was putting down a red marker. Now if you turn on a red marker on to the right course you flew straight over Ludwigshafen straight to Mannheim. So as we, as we were approaching the point where we could expect to see the flare the navigator says, ‘Keep your eyes open now. You should be seeing a red flare any time now.’ And suddenly there’s a red flare there and another red flare over there.
BW: So one to your left and one to your right.
PB: Yeah. So which, which is, which is the correct one? Only the navigator knows which is the correct one. ‘That one,’ he says.
BW: On the left.
PB: Nearer to the target. We get to the target five minutes early. The skipper makes what I still think was the right decision. He said we’d been hit by a bomb once at Nuremberg so we knew that. You’re either the only one over the target or the bombs are coming down from Lancasters. The skipper did an orbit but unfortunately the radar picked us up and as soon as we start to go in a blue searchlight comes straight on.
BW: Which is the radar guided one.
PB: Yeah and then then the column builds up and we’re flying straight over with the bomb doors open. So we continued like that until the bomb aimer got a sight and then you let the lot go in one go and we didn’t wait for a photograph. And over a target I always went up in to the astrodome facing backwards to help the gunner search for fighters and I was up there [ and we slowly began to pull away? ] and there were only a couple of searchlights on us and I thought I’d better check on my engines cause they’re getting a terrible thrashing. You’re only allowed a few minutes on full power so I get down, I get down from the pyramid and have a very long, I have a very long lead on my intercom so I can, don’t have to keep plugging and unplugging and I get down and I’m just going over to the instrument panel and suddenly there’s a terrible screaming and Len, Len the wireless operator had been just behind the main spar pushing out pushing out the window came running up through the main spar screaming, tripped over the pyramid, fell across my lead, pulled it out so I lost all communication and he fell at my feet and then this huge fire broke out in the fuselage and I’m steeling myself to stand and step over Leonard’s body to get to the fire extinguisher and out of the corner of my eye I see the mid upper gunner get out and put his chute on. I turn around. The navigator’s already on his way down the steps so instead of going for the extinguisher I go for my parachute and follow the navigator. I get to the top of the steps, the hatch is open. The navigator’s gone. I slide down. I get my feet through. The bomb aimer had gone up in to the second pilot’s seat to help the skipper. He started to clamber down from the, from the seat as I go past. I get my legs through. I feel a pressure on my back. I turn. Alan’s got his knees pressing in my back, tap him on the knee and go and as I go I feel the aircraft break in two and Alan never got out. So the rear gunner and Len were killed by the fighter. The skipper was wounded by flak that also set the port inner on fire and the skipper and Alan never had a chance of getting out because the aircraft had broken in two. The tail unit with the rear gunner’s body in it landed a considerable distance away. The main wreck landed right on the German Grand Prix racing track at Hockenheim.
BW: Wow.
PB: I have the map. I have a map showing the exact position and I saw the fire. It was a huge. We’d over a thousand gallons of petrol on board. We had enough petrol for Munich and the three in the aircraft were completely destroyed. Only, only fragments of bone left. The air gunners body was complete and so in the cemetery now at [Bad Tolz?] there’s a, there’s the rear gunners grave there, then there’s a headstone for Len, a headstone for the skipper, a headstone for Alan but what bits of fragments of bone there were are all buried in front of the skipper I’m sure. It was just symbolic. Never, never let the relatives know that of course. Never mention fire to the relatives but those two graves were empty and what bits there were were in front of the skipper which is right and proper.
BW: And you, you must have been pretty close to the ground when you baled out yourself.
PB: No. Oh, no. I was about ten thousand feet.
BW: Oh right. It was, it was the sense I was getting that it was almost a last minute sort of thing where you were able to escape.
PB: No. No, the aircraft broke in two very quickly. It was a tremendous. What happened I think the JU88 killed the rear gunner and then from, there’s a pump on the starboard engine, and dual pipelines to the rear turret that power the turret. Now I think it hit those pipelines. You’ve got hydraulic oil pressure, high pressure, high temperature came out and that’s what caught fire. The fire then came underneath the mid upper gunner, hit Len when he was doing the window in and stopped before it reached me but it was, it was a terror, it certainly was a fire and although I didn’t know till much later virtually simultaneously flak knocked out the port engine and the port inner engine and wounded the skipper and Ray, Ray told me later that when the skipper gave the order to bail out he [signed to say] as if he was badly hurt.
BW: And then at that point, the stricken aircraft, it must be almost I guess vertical if it’s broken up at that point.
PB: It didn’t, it didn’t go like that when it hit the ground it was it just come straight down like that.
BW: Yeah.
PB: I dare say some of it is still there buried under that racetrack. Some of the engine. But later I had a friend in Germany who was, who was in Ludwigshafen. He lived in Ludwigshafen. He was a schoolboy in Ludwigshofen. He may well have been on the flak gun that night for all I know.
BW: That would have been a coincidence wouldn’t it?
PB: Well after, he worked for the postal service after the war and when he retired he set himself up as what he called an air historian and he excavated a lot of shot down bombers and he was very keen on Bomber Command and he provided me with a lot of information and he produced a woman who’d been a schoolgirl in Hockenheim and on the morning after we crashed, after we were shot down, a neighbouring woman knocked on her door and she had what they described as a Canadian airman with them. It was in fact a New Zealander and the girl’s mother gave him a drink of water and later in the day the girl’s interest was aroused and she and a girlfriend went out to look at the crash and she provided me with a map of the actual crash site just by the, so whenever the German Grand Prix comes on I always, always watch it for a few minutes. I don’t like grand prix racing but I always watch it for a few minutes.
BW: Just that particular one.
PB: Yeah. That’s where it crashed.
BW: And have you been back to Hockenheim at all?
PB: No. No, I’ve not. No, I’ve not.
BW: But the information’s come through to you.
PB: Yeah.
BW: As to what’s happened.
PB: Peter provided me with a lot of information.
BW: What’s the air historian’s name? Do you recall?
PB: Peter Mengas M E N Mengas G A S.
BW: G A S.
PB: Peter.
BW: And is he still around?
PB: I don’t know. I’ve not, I’ve not heard from him for a year or two now.
BW: So you’ve managed to get out of the aircraft yourself.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And this is night-time. About ten thousand feet over Germany.
PB: Yeah 1 o’clock. It was just about midnight on my watch. It was 1 o’clock in the morning German time.
BW: And you pulled the rip cord and -
PB: Well, no. This was the problem when I, when I first joined the squadron I got a harness which could be adjusted. Now, I moved about a lot in the Stirling. I’ve controls there, there, there and there.
BW: All around the -
PB: And I used to [bend down?] around number seven tank and the shoulder strap would fall off and I thought I’ll get this fixed but I never did of course so when I baled out I was terrified of falling out of my parachute so I daren’t open it until I got myself you know [? ] as I could.
BW: Sort of braced against the straps were they?
PB: And when I opened it and I felt oh that’s it but it wasn’t that was just the parachute pulling the pack off my chest and then bang.
BW: The snap of the canopy.
PB: And I took all the weight there. The shoulder straps were up here. I came down in agony. I don’t know why it didn’t castrate me.
BW: Because of the tight grip around the -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Groin area where the -
PB: And then when I eventually I saw the ground rushing up and I rolled myself into a ball as I’d been taught and this buckle took two ribs with it.
BW: On the left hip.
PB: Yeah. Broke, broke two, broke two of my ribs and so I, it was, it was very painful. Very painful. And this is funny really by the next day my left side had seized up and I’m walking in a westerly direction trying to get to France [laughs] and, I don’t know and there was just one house which I had to pass and I thought, I thought a girl stood in the window had spotted me. I wasn’t certain but I thought she had. Anyway, I kept going and suddenly I hear a shout and I turn around and there’s this chappy running towards me and running behind him is a woman, presumably his wife and the two things I didn’t believe. I didn’t believe that fighting men put their hands above their heads like the baddies in the cowboy films and I didn’t believe the Germans went around saying. ‘Heil Hitler,’ to each other but as this chappy approached without any conscious effort on my part my hands went up. This one went up. This one wouldn’t.
BW: Your right one.
PB: He saw me like. He stopped running [?]and, ‘Heil Hitler.’
BW: So because you can’t raise your left arm you can only raise your right arm he thinks you’re doing the salute.
PB: He thought I was a Luftwaffe chappy. ‘Heil Hitler,’ he said [laughs] Well, I just I was in a pretty perilous state by this time. I just collapsed in to hysterical laughter. I just stood there and laughed and laughed and laughed and his wife came along and she sized up the situation immediately. She put her arm around me, took my weight on her shoulder and led me towards the town and the very first house we came to she made a very, very cross old woman let me into her kitchen, sit me down and made me a cup of coffee. So this woman very unwillingly gave me a cup of coffee. I hadn’t drunk anything for twenty four hours and I took a sip and I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I can’t drink this. It’s absolutely disgusting,’ and I thought, ‘Well if I don’t drink it it’s a great insult to this woman who’s been so incredibly kind to me,’ so I had to drink it. That was my introduction to the German diet oooph [laughs].
BW: And so you managed from a rough landing in a loose parachute in God knows where -
PB: Yeah.
BW: To get yourself together. You didn’t meet any of the other crew at this point because you obviously talked about -
PB: The -
BW: Yourself.
PB: The mid upper gunner landed right next to a railway signal box and was arrested within seconds. The navigator landed in a tree and had to be rescued. So they were captured very quickly. Both of them.
BW: So there was just you on your own at this point.
PB: I was on my own.
BW: Were you knocked unconscious or, or did it take some time to come around? I mean you’ve obviously had to get rid of your chute and -
PB: No I, I, I was shocked. I was shocked obviously and I was in pain from these ribs but I said I’ve a duty to the RAF and that was to get to Gibraltar. [Laughs] It’s a long way away.
BW: Yeah.
PB: I’d got the Rhine to cross for one thing. That’s not, that’s not easy. [laughs].
BW: And so the, the people that, that met you I mean you talk about heading west towards France and Mannheim is, is quite deep in western Germany.
PB: Yeah.
BW: So you’re actually being met by Germans at this point.
PB: Yeah.
BW: But they assist you.
PB: Yeah.
BW: So what then happened? Did they, they pass you on? Or -
PB: Well this couple took me to the police station where the other two were already held although I didn’t know it and we were kept there for about three days and a couple of Luftwaffe chappies arrived to take us up to Frankfurt to Dulag Luft interrogation camp and when we left we were given a bundle of the rear gunner’s clothing and his flying suit had hundreds of holes in it. The cannon shells must have hit the turret and exploded, it was absolutely riddled and his helmet and his, his oxygen mask was soaked in blood and there were the four guns from the rear turret as well. So we had that to carry. And we had, we had an adventurous journey. We couldn’t, it, this was the most successful raid on Mannheim Ludwigshafen at that time and it was complete chaos and we had to go by train in to a big detour so we travelled that day and went to a Luftwaffe camp and stayed the night in the guard room there and the next day we go back to the railway station and it was a, it’s a station something like Victoria in Manchester. A long corridor with steps going up to the various platforms. We were on the platform and what I call a typical Daily Express German came along, feather in his hat and oh he was furious he was furious and Hitler had issued an order to all military and police units that if civilians get hold of airmen before the authorities do the authorities were not to interfere. They must leave it to the discretion of the civilians what to do with them and this one was stark raving, oh he was angry. And in the air force there’s an offence known as silent contempt. You don’t do anything but you look at an officer who’s ticking you off and look at him and make it obvious you think he’s [lowly?] and it’s a serious crime in the air force. Well Ray and I were giving this chappy the silent cont and the navigator said, ‘Stop being a bloody fool.’ He was a good deal older than we were and eventually this chap storms off and we thought, ‘Oh that’s shown him.’ A few minutes later he’s back at the head, the head of a posse and they’re obviously, obviously intent on doing us serious bodily harm but fortunately there was, there was a train on the other side of the platform. Now, whether it was a troop train or not I don’t know but half a dozen soldiers got out and ranged themselves between us and the, and this crowd and our two Luftwaffe chappies whipped us down the stairs, along the corridor and up another platform and hid us in a room that was obviously used by guards full of red and green lamps and flags and so on and we hid in there until our train arrived and then ran back as fast as we could and got put on the train. But it was, when we thought about it later we were very nearly hanged or beaten to death or kicked to death or something very near but it was only, it was only those soldiers who saved us and that was contrary to Hitler’s orders.
BW: Because the RAF crews at this time presumably were being christened terror flieger.
PB: Yeah. Oh yeah.
BW: And so the civilians were -
PB: Yeah. Yeah.
BW: Properly against them.
PB: Well there were a hundred Bomber Command people were killed by Germans and more than two hundred Americans because Americans, there were a lot more Americans. They had ten to a crew.
BW: And at this point in a station as you mention they’ve reunited you with the navigator and -
PB: Yeah. Well they were in the police station. Unknown to me at the time.
BW: Yeah.
PB: I met them when we got out of the police station. But before I left they gave me a shave. A fierce little barber came in and then he got out this razor and I thought, ‘I hope to God the air raid sirens don’t go off.’ [laughs]
BW: Yeah ‘cause he might, he might stop shaving you and decide to use the razor for something else.
[laughs]That’s the only time I’ve been shaved with a cut throat razor. I don’t want to ever experience it again. [laughs]
BW: So they’ve tidied you up and reunited you as a crew.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Presumably they didn’t interrogate you at this point even though you were in a police station. The Luftwaffe officers took you over and put you in a transport. Is that right?
PB: Yeah. We were taken, we were taken to Dulag Luft at Frankfurt and there I was put in a cell there. Quite a big cell really. It had, it had, it had a very long radiator attached to one wall and there was a bed attached to the floor alongside a radiator and there was a table and two chairs and there’s a bucket in the corner and two windows with shutters on from outside and a very dim light. No ventilation and all I could do was lie flat on my back with these ribs and although it was mid-September the heat on the radiator was turned up full. So I lay there for three days getting hotter and dirtier and stickier and the air getting fouler and fouler and then suddenly somebody opened the shutters. A very smart Luftwaffe officer walked in with a couple of files under his arm, put them on the table opened the windows wide and motioned for me to join him, poured two cups of English tea, a plate of English biscuits, a packet of English cigarettes and then the interrogation started.
BW: And at this point is there just you and this Luftwaffe officer?
PB: Yeah.
BW: In this cell?
PB: Yeah.
BW: And so he’s expected you to get up from the floor to the chair to sit in front of him. Nobody has assisted you at this point?
PB: No. No. No.
BW: So presumably your body’s quite stiff as well.
PB: Very very stiff indeed. Very stiff. I never -
BW: Well -
PB: I never had any medical attention at all. Never. I’ve got a great knob of bone there that will never heal.
BW: And so the interrogation begins and presumably, from what you’re staying, this is daytime at this point.
PB: Yeah. When he put these files down on the table there were two of them and the top one said Royal Air Force Bomber Command 149 squadron. I thought, ‘How the hell does he know 149?’ I said, ‘I wonder if the others had been forced to talk,’ and I had pictures of Humphrey Bogart being tortured by [laughs] but it was obvious the rear part of the fuselage wasn’t burned and the letters OJ. So, he gave me, he have me a great deal of information. First, generally about the air force and then specifically about 149 squadron.
BW: And because the letters on the aircraft had not burned through.
PB: No the -
BW: So the squadron’s code OJ were still visible.
PB: OJ means 149. They knew that so as I understood it he was trying to do two things. He was giving me a lot of information most of it factual but some which he picked up and he hadn’t had checked yet [or someone had corrected] and from my reaction [he got?] and then he picked up bits from me that he could put. That was the whole purpose of it. I don’t know what did affect the war effort. I don’t think very much. Anyway, eventually he finished and this was the middle of September and he said, ‘Are there any questions you want to ask me?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘What’s been happening in the war in the last few days?’ He said, ‘Italy has surrendered.’ I said, ‘Oh good. One down, one to go.’ [laughs] Well he didn’t like that [laughs] so he picked up his files and he left.
BW: You weren’t tempted to salute him either.
PB: But when we, when we were being transferred by cattle truck from Dulag Luft to Saxony to Stalag 4b we were in these cattle trucks and we had a German guard in with us and we had with us at one stage the only German I ever felt sorry for. He’d been born in Germany and when he was a very small child his people had gone to America. He’d been brought up in Brooklyn. He had a tremendous Brooklyn accent and he’d, they’d never taken American nationality and early in ‘39 or late in ‘38 they’d come to Germany on holiday and he was immediately conscripted and there he was [laughs]. Oh dear. So I’d never known anybody feel as sorry for himself as that poor fella. He said, he described his comrades, he said, ‘Bloody mother f***ing, c**k s***ng krauts,’ and those were his comrades [laughs].
BW: And they didn’t speak American -
PB: Deary, deary me,
BW: So he got away with it.
PB: Oh he did feel sorry for himself. And I’ve often wondered what happened to him because when the Ardennes offensive took place Hitler put a lot of American speaking Germans into American uniforms and of course they were shot immediately if they were captured. He was an absolutely perfect candidate for that job.
BW: Yeah. Quite possible.
PB: So I don’t know what happened to him but oh deary me he did feel sorry for himself
BW: And so it seems a fairly, alright it’s uncomfortable but it seems a fairly civil interrogation from the Luftwaffe officer before you -
PB: Oh it was very friendly. Very friendly very friendly. I mean I’d been lying in there for three days thinking about Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart and it was nothing like that [laughs]. No, he was charming. Really charming.
BW: And how soon after the interrogation ended and he stormed out did you then leave for er -
PB: Well I left the cell then went to the main part of the camp and stayed there for about a week until there was enough of us to make up a wagon load.
BW: And this was still at Dulag Luft.
PB: Yeah.
BW: In Frankfurt.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And so you’re there a little while longer transferred to Saxony.
PB: Yeah and we were lucky and we were unlucky. We were unlucky in the fact that all the luft camps run by the Luftwaffe were full and so we were sent to the biggest prison camp in Germany which was run by the army. It contained about ten thousand permanently and it had scores of working parties attached to it so that prisoners used to come in and get recorded and then sent out to work in mines or factories or quarries or whatever so there was a regular turnover. There was about ten thousand of us there permanently but a tremendous lot of Frenchmen, a couple of thousand Russians who were starving to death and various other nationalities and of course the German army didn’t have the same relationship with us that the Luftwaffe personnel would have had. In fact they hated us.
BW: Was there any, any ill will directed towards you because you were air force?
PB: They didn’t like us. They told us, they said, ‘When Germany wins the war you’ll spend the rest of your lives building the cities that you’ve destroyed but if Germany lose the war you’re soon to be shot.’ That was their attitude.
BW: And even though this was an army camp they, it sounds as though they weren’t just, were they just military personnel? The ten thousand French and Russians were they soldiers that were captured?
PB: Well I don’t know what they were.
BW: So they could have been.
PB: They were dressed in civilian, some in civilian clothes,
BW: Yeah.
PB: Some in bits of clothes. Some were in military uniform but we were lucky too because this was September. Italy had retired from the war. The Germans had taken over the Italian prison camps and they set up two new compounds in 4b. An RAF compound and an army compound. Now, a couple of thousand Desert Rats who’d been prisoners in Italy came in just as we did. Now, without them we’d have been in a right mess because the Germans gave us nothing.
BW: So you were on low rations and you were, were you made to work at this stage as well?
PB: No. No. They couldn’t make us work. Not with our ranks.
BW: Right.
PB: But you know we were put into a hut which has three tier bunks to sleep a hundred and eighty men. They gave us a sack which contained something or other which was supposed to be a mattress, two pre- First World War blankets and that was, that was all they gave us. No knife, fork, spoon, no cup, no plate. Nothing. And yet the food comes up, a great big vat of soup and all you’ve got’s your bare hands. So the army helped us a lot there.
BW: Presumably because they were allowed or brought with them their kit and they shared it.
PB: They brought with all their kit, yeah. Yeah. I mean they’d been prisoners years some of them.
BW: So they knew, they knew how it worked.
PB: They knew the ropes so yeah they knew the ropes alright but the difference between the army and the air force was, was, was incredible. The army compound was run like a barracks. There was a sergeant major in charge of each hut. Total control. And each morning at 7 o’clock there was roll calls outside in decent weather. The roll call in the army compound took fifteen minutes. The roll call in the RAF compound could take two hours. That was the difference in our attitudes. The army would say, ‘We’ll show them what real soldiers look like.’ and we’d say, ‘We’ll cause them so much bloody trouble they’ll wish they’d never been born.’ Different attitude of mind altogether.
BW: And so this is the, the British army in their compound.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Organising themselves to do their roll calls -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Like that.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And the RAF took the view well we’re there to -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Make a nuisance of ourselves.
PB: That’s it exactly. One day the Germans got so exasperated they brought the senior sergeant major and they stood him there and we’re all lined up in fives and he starts telling us we’re a disgrace to the bloody nation, we’re a disgrace to the air force and the replies he got. He’d never been spoken to like that in his life before. Never, ever, ever. He just went redder and redder and redder. Eventually, he turned on his heel and went and we never saw him again.
BW: Gave that one up as well.
PB: I know we really, we really did everything we could and we tamed the Germans eventually and it went whenever a German entered our hut whoever saw him first would shout, ‘Jerry up’ and whatever you were doing you could get away. At the end of the war the German would walk in to the hut, he’d stand at the door and shout, ‘Jerry up’ and wait two minutes before he walked in.
BW: It’s interesting you, you made a comment just before that although the Germans gave you nothing they didn’t make you work either because of your rank.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And the thinking was in the, in the early days with the RAF aircrew was that if they were all sergeants they would be treated better in prisoner of war camps.
PB: Not treated better, just treated differently in that they didn’t work.
BW: Right. So it was a case of you’re not made to work you were just -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Well you were just there and you exist, sort of thing.
PB: Yeah and the food of course was disgusting. The flour was ten percent what the Germans optimistically called wood flour. Which was sawdust. We, we, we had soup at lunchtime. A great vat of soup. We had [minute?] soup which was disgusting. We had [mara?] soup which was even more disgusting and most disgusting of all we had a soup that apparently was made from what was left of sugar beet after the beet er after the sugar had been extracted and we got a handful of boiled potatoes, usually rotten. That was the midday meal and then in the late afternoon you got a piece of bread to be divided between five people and a blob of white stuff which was supposed to be butter, it was about ninety percent water, and a spoonful of jam apparently made from beetroot or swede or some such and you’d get this piece of bread and it’s not a big piece of bread and it’s got to be shared between five people and every, every one of the five pieces had to be absolutely identical with the other four so we picked the man with the best irons and steadiest hand and he cuts the bread up and he gets last choice and the five pieces and he gets the last choice.
BW: And it went on like that for days.
PB: But we had the Red Cross parcels fortunately.
BW: How often were they delivered? Were they regular?
PB: Every Monday we got a Red Cross parcel.
BW: And were they delivered intact or were they interfered and inspected by the Germans.
PB: They were delivered intact until it was decided that they were being used in escapes and so after that they were all opened and every tin was punctured so that it had a limited lifespan. You couldn’t, you couldn’t store it up.
BW: And you see in war films, popular war films, the sort of black market operating in a prison camp and trading and bartering. Does that, did that ever happen?
PB: Oh yes, it was all, with cigarettes you could buy anything. Now in the RAF compound we had two people. We had an English and an Italian name. A chappy called [Gargini]
BW: [Gargini]
PB: Now he was, he was a skilled technician in British, in BBC television and he was an absolute wizard with the electricity. He built at least two radio sets and he also made a succession of heaters, immersion heaters, which you could put in a cup of cold water and fire up in no time at all. And we had another chap who was in fact was a civilian. Terry Hunt his name was. He worked for British Movietone news or some similar company and if you went to the cinema in England during the war from time to time to time on the newsreel you’d see shots taken from the nose of a light bomber during attacks on France. Now Terry was one of the men who took those photographs. He was given a degree of training. He was given an RAF uniform, he was given a RAF number, an RAF rank just in case he was shot down and captured and he had a camera. He had it inside a hollowed out bible with a little hole in the spine through which he took his photographs. Two quite remarkable men there.
BW: And that, that bible with the camera in he used in the aircraft and he kept with him in the prison camp did he?
PB: No. He got it whilst he was in the prisoner.
BW: Oh made it in the prison right.
PB: How he got through well cigarettes you could get anything with cigarettes. You could buy a woman for three cigarettes but there were no women.
BW: And in that case there must have been some sort of interaction with the German guards at that point -
PB: Oh yes.
BW: To be able to bribe.
PB: You waited. You waited until after dark and then you went out and found a guard and said [?] ‘Yah yah yah,’ out it came from a bag in his gas mask case gave him this bit of bread ‘[?] cigarettes?’ ‘Nein. [?]Nein. Deutschland caput’ [laughs]
BW: A piece of bread for twenty cigarettes.
PB: But you could buy anything with cigarettes.
BW: And did you partake in that yourself, did you?
PB: Oh yeah I was out most nights if I had cigarettes buying bread. It was, it was much better bread than we had. It was rotten bread but it was much better bread than we had.
BW: And did you, did you feel able to strike up a rapport or even an element of trust with some of these guards. Were you always meeting the same one or did you have to interact with others?
PB: No, whoever happened to be walking around the compound at the time. Some relationships must have been, must have been formed because big items were bought and of course if there were ever workmen in the camp all their tools were raided. They soon [? ] their tools.
BW: So there were, there were guys in the camp who were raiding the Germans’ tool sets.
PB: Yeah you see we, we had, you know, you got hundreds of air crew. You’ve got a couple of thousand senior NCOs in the army. You’ve got every talent. You’ve got architects, musicians, dancers, journalists. You got all sorts of people and it was amazing what could be done.
BW: And I believe they had classes in the prisoner of war camps as well to keep the men occupied.
PB: Oh yes. We, we had a little library in each hut. Some of them manned by professional librarians, we had lecturers. We had, we had a theatre group and a radio theatre group. We had people who went around individually giving lectures. The most popular lecturer was a chappy, an army man, who’d worked for a very prestigious London undertaking firm and the stories he had. Oh deary me. Deary, deary me. He was a popular lecturer he was.
BW: And so was your days, were your days regulated in any sense? Was there a structure put to you?
PB: No. You had a roll call in the morning, a roll call in the evening. That was it. And then you had the food arriving at mid-day and again about tea time and other than that you were on your own.
BW: So would you have about two meals a day then? Your main midday meal and a meal in the evening?
PB: I don’t think we ever had a meal at all really [laughs].
BW: Well, yeah.
PB: But yeah that’s the way it worked.
BW: Yeah.
PB: On Fridays, on Fridays, Friday was a big day. On Friday you got pea soup and pea soup was so good we didn’t get any potatoes on Friday. Well pea soup was the only soup we ever really ate. The pea soup was quite good.
BW: And do you still like it to this day or does that remind you?
PB: I like pea soup. Yes.
BW: Yeah.
PB: But we Lancastrians had a Red Rose Society. The Yorkists had a White Rose Society and there was a motoring club for people interested in cars or motorbikes. There were all sorts, all sorts of things set up. Every hut was given the name of a British football team. My hut was Wolverhampton Wanderers and a league was set up and matches were played and points scored and then in the RAF compound we formed the rugby pitch as well, I played a lot of rugby.
BW: Even, even though you’d had a bad injury from parachuting you were still able to play rugby.
PB: Eventually. It took, it took, it took about six months until I felt really free but -
BW: Did you manage to get any medical treatment from the British -
PB: No.
BW: While you were in the camp?
PB: Never. Never. I never bothered the British. By then it was healing. They even, even tried to play cricket but that didn’t work. The ground was too soft.
BW: What sort of ground was it? Was it sandy?
PB: It was sort of sandy soil, yeah.
BW: So and we’ve probably all have an image here of Sagan and the Great Escape -
PB: Yeah.
BW: And the sandy -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Sort of soil
PB: Yeah.
BW: And it was pretty much like that was it?
PB: When I played rugby every time I I got a graze and there was any blood it always went, always went rotten. I always had to go and get it, get it drugged up always, always went rotten.
BW: And what sort of drugs could they give you? Was there penicillin?
PB: Red Cross. Red Cross I don’t know what they were but the Red Cross provided drugs and we had, we had certain medical. We had a couple of army doctors as well. We had an English woman in the camp.
BW: Do you recall her name at all?
PB: Well we knew her as Mrs Barrington. She was an English woman. I don’t know whether she was divorced or widowed but sometime in the 20s or very early 30s she had a son called Winston and they had a holiday in Switzerland and met a German who got on very well with and they went back again a few months later and she married him and she and her son went to live in Germany. And then when, when 1938, ‘39 came along and war was obviously imminent she sent her son back to England to live with her parents and in due course he joined the air force in Bomber Command, got shot down, wrote to her where she was living in Vienna and she wrote back and eventually she decided she wanted to be nearer to him then that so she left Vienna and went to live in Muhlburg which was about five kilometres from the camp.
BW: Muhlberg.
PB: Muhlberg yeah and by this time her husband was a very high ranking Luftwaffe officer and when she moved to Muhlberg her husband came with her and we know that he visited the camp and we know that he met the commandant but we don’t know what happened there of course. We don’t know whether some informal arrangement was agreed between them or whatever but it was a fact that airmen were never allowed outside the camp because they’d just disappear but Barrington got outside the camp with French working parties several times, met his mother in Muhlberg and by early 1945 she was getting worried about what her fate would be when the Russians arrived and he reported that to the, to the escape committee and they decided she should be brought into the camp and the next time he went out he took some spare clothes [and met her] she came in to the camp, put in to RAF battledress and was hidden away under the stage in the theatre and stayed there for a few weeks till the end of the war. Not only until the end of the war but until we got away from the Russians but it took us a month to get away from the Russians.
BW: So you mention there about hiding her under the stage in the theatre -
PB: Yeah.
BW: In RAF battle dress uniform.
PB: Yeah.
BW: How did the, the tide of war affect you because many prisoners were forced on the long march but presumably if you were in Saxony in sort of lower -
PB: Yeah.
BW: South eastern Germany. Were you part of that of that -
PB: No.
BW: To evacuate the camps.
PB: No we weren’t in Poland. We were in Germany. Now, by this time the air was full of British and American fighter bombers. Everything that moved was attacked and the commandant gave us the opportunity, ‘If you want to be marched west across the Elbe we’ll take you,’ and the Poles of course jumped at that chance. They didn’t want to be with the Russians. And we said, ‘No. We’ll stay where we are until our allies arrive.’ [Laughs] Our allies.
BW: So you all managed to stay in the camp without being evacuated.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And so this Mrs Barrington stayed in the -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Theatre at this time.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Under your protection.
PB: Yeah she kept hidden. Eventually, when the, when the Russians arrived they made no arrangements whatever for us and so all we could do was break down this perimeter fence and stream out into the countryside to search for food and that went on for about three days and then the Russians got themselves organised and clamped down on it. We came and got a bargaining counter. They held thousands of British and Americans and there were tens of hundreds of thousands of Russians in the west and the Russians wanted them back. Many, many of them even wore German uniforms and they knew if they went back they knew what their fate would be so they didn’t want to go back so there was a lot of bargaining and we were part of the Russians strong hand and then they marched us out of the camp, marched quite a considerable distance and they put us into what was obviously a big maintenance depot full of huge workshops and we were billeted there and still nothing was happening so we began to drift off in twos and threes and tried to make our way across the river on our own which eventually we did. We, we were relieved by the Russians on St George’s Day, the 23rd of April and I reached the American lines on my 24th birthday. The 23rd of May. Exactly one month later. And then it was like moving from hell in to heaven. I lived for a week on steak and ice cream.
BW: You didn’t, you’d been on such bad rations there was no problem moving to that sort of -
PB: No. No. Never had any -
BW: High protein diet.
PB: A lot of people spent a lot of time sat down with their trousers around their ankles [laughs]
BW: You obviously had a tougher constitution.
PB: Yeah -
BW: So it didn’t affect you.
PB: It didn’t affect me. But oh it was great with the Americans. Even went to the cinema. They had a mobile cinema. I saw a film about a book which I’d read whilst in Germany. And then, then we were flown by Dakota to Brussels and handed over to the British. We arrived in Brussels on a Saturday afternoon. The British gave us a ten shilling note and a handful of Belgian coins and turned us loose on Brussels for a Saturday night [laughs]. And the next day we climbed on board a Stirling and flew back to Kent and from Kent we went up to Cosford which was a receiving centre and Cosford had been my first station in 1940.
BW: So this was almost a reverse of your trip out there because you’d gone out on a Stirling.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And then you were flown back from Brussels to Kent in a Stirling.
PB: In a Stirling.
BW: How did it feel to be back on your old sort of type of plane again?
PB: Oh it was funny really. About, about four Stirlings and one Lancaster landed and everybody but me and two other fellas ran for the one Lancaster. [laughs] I was more than happy to get into a Stirling.
BW: And that, that night in Brussels when you’d got a ten shilling note in your hand.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And a few Belgian pennies that must have been pretty memorable. How did it, how did it feel?
PB: I had a terrible emotional shock. There was a great big underground convenience and I was stood in there weeing away and in walked two women cleaners [laughs] and that rather set me back. I don’t remember much about what happened that night actually. I know I’d no money left at the end of it.
BW: Justifiably lost in celebration I think.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And so you were only twenty four at that stage.
PB: I’d just had my twenty fourth birthday, yes.
BW: And you, I guess you got, in retrospect, you got back to the UK pretty quick. I mean the war had only been over sort of three weeks when you were then passed over to the, to the British.
PB: Yeah.
BW: In May.
PB: Yeah.
BW: ‘Cause obviously some guys in service had to wait a long time to be repatriated.
PB: Oh some didn’t get back until well after the September.
BW: And so when you get back to Cosford.
PB: Yeah.
BW: What happened then? Were you able to, I mean, were you still in touch with your other crewmates at this point in your -
PB: No. No. Long lost them somewhere along the way. We were, first of all we were made to give a written description of how we were shot down which seemed to me to be to be a waste of time and then we were medically examined and bathed and haircuts and kitted out with new uniform and then we were sent on six weeks leave on double rations and by this time of course I’d been, I’d been qualified long enough to have become a warrant officer. And I had a lot of back pay. Got paid all the time.
BW: And how, how did they pay you? ‘Cause now it goes straight into your bank account but then did they give you cash?
PB: Cash.
BW: Or did they give you a cheque?
PB: I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I didn’t have a bank account so I don’t, I don’t really know. I know I had a lot of money to come. Several hundred pounds. I’d earned it. [laughs]
BW: Absolutely.
PB: I’d done more damage to German morale as a prisoner than I ever did as - [laughs]
BW: If I can, if I can just hop back to a point you made in the camp. You said there was an escape committee.
PB: Yes.
BW: And as I say they’re sort of impressions of, of “The Great Escape” come to mind. Were there any escape attempts made there?
PB: Oh yes there were people escaping all the time.
BW: Successfully?
PB: A couple of hours, two days. Maybe a week if you were lucky.
BW: So there was quite an active escape -
PB: Oh yes, yes.
BW: Committee from the RAF there.
PB: Oh yes there was a lot of escaping. What, what, what was a popular thing from time to time a British soldiers would come through the camp to be registered and recorded and photographed etcetera and then sent out on working parties and some airmen got the idea it would be easier to escape from a working party then from the camp and so they exchanged identities and this in the end caused tremendous confusion to the Germans because there was a New Zealand soldier, a Desert Rat who’d been captured and held in prison in Italy and he’d escaped and got in with a with a group of partisans and as he was the only professional as it were amongst the partisans he soon became their leader and he carried out minor acts of sabotage and he became a sort of Robin Hood and rumours were circulated about this new Zealander who was doing this, that and the other and the Germans got to learn of this and eventually they captured him and they decided to send him to Germany for trial but it wasn’t known whether he was to go to Berlin or to Leipzig so as 4b was about halfway between the two he came to 4b and was locked up in the [straflagge] and there he made contact with French working parties. French used to work in there regularly and the French notified the British and it was known that if he went to either Berlin or Leipzig and was put on trial he’d be found guilty and he’d be shot and so they decided that he had to be rescued and a plot was formed and the French removed a window from the room where the showers were in the [straflagge] and put it back in a temporary position and he was briefed that when it was known that he was going to leave he was to insist upon having a shower and he was to go in to the shower room and escape from this window and be smuggled in to the camp and one day quite out of the blue we were all told to get over to the French compound as quickly as we could and to start a riot and we all got there and started fighting and jostling and messing and shouting and all the German cars were rushing to the French compound and this chappie escaped and he was hidden above a ceiling in a hut up in the dark, in the rafters and remained hidden until the end of the war. And the gestapo arrived and they made our lives hell for a week and they tore the camp to pieces and eventually we put about the rumour that he’d now left the camp and was on a train going to Switzerland so they all moved out to Switzerland [laughs] to the railway lines then and we were left in peace but he remained in the camp until the end of the war and eventually got back to New Zealand.
BW: Wow.
PB: Remarkable story.
BW: I mean yeah he was -
PB: I’ve got his name somewhere in a book but I can’t remember it off hand.
BW: It would be interesting to, to find his name and look him up.
PB: Well I can get it for you.
BW: Doesn’t, doesn’t need to be straightaway. We can get that afterwards.
PB: I can get it for you in a flash.
BW: Ok well just pause the recording for a moment.
PB: So we’re just looking at a book here called “Survival In Stalag Luft 4b”
BW: Yeah.
PB: And his name is Tony Hunt.
BW: Terry.
PB: Terry.
BW: Terry Hunt.
[pause]
PB: 136
[pause]
PB: Frederick William Ward he’s called.
BW: Frederick William Ward.
PB: Yeah. Born in February 1912. Captured in North Africa in July ‘42. [pause] That will tell you about him there.
BW: Yeah.
PB: Fred Ward and this is, this is in the book by Tony Vercoe um which I’ll look up.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Um it says that he, he was captured and then interrogated and then will go into more detail about the activities with the French workers as you say. There’s a description there.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And then this lady you mentioned is called Florence Barrington.
PB: That’s right. Mrs Barrington.
BW: With a thirteen year old son, married a German photographer and that also gives us the correct name of, just so that I’ve got it right, Muhlberg M U H L B E R G so that helps identify -
PB: Yeah. Muhlberg.
BW: The camp.
PB: Muhlberg on the Elbe.
BW: Yeah. What I’ll do if you don’t mind I’ll have a look at this separately and sort of off air of the recording.
PB: Yeah.
BW: But that, that’s great that is good information.
PB: Yes. You’ve got the full story there.
BW: So we were talking just briefly before about some of the escape attempts and how you’d helped to rescue this New Zealander from, from being shot.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Were there any other memorable attempts at all?
PB: Yes. Yes, there was one other memorable one. I had a friend, Fred Heathfield, who was a Halifax pilot with 51 squadron. He’d been shot, he’d crashed landed a Halifax on three engines in the pitch dark in Belgium and lived to tell the tale and I think the only thing that kept him alive was that he had his parachute on his chest and that took the main force of the impact. He got two black eyes and a broken nose. He was eventually captured in an hotel in Paris but he was, he was a pilot. I was a flight engineer. There was a Luftwaffe field a few kilometres away from the camp and Fred and I decided that if we could steal a JU88 we could fly at low level to Sweden and we, we started to try to get some information about German aircraft but by this time the Germans had issued a warning to all prison camps saying that because of the seriousness of the war situation there were certain areas of Germany which could not be identified but which were of importance to the, to the safety of the country and anybody caught in such an area without authority would be shot out of hand so we decided not to bother and we gave what information we had to an Australian pilot. What was his name? I’ve got a book by him in there. Anyway, this Australian pilot had a Canadian bomb aimer in his crew and I think he’d been brought up in the French speaking part of Canada because he spoke French like a native and also had quite a good knowledge of German and they decided that they would put this plan into operation but instead of flying to Sweden they would fly east and land behind Russian lines and give themselves over which to me sounded like a suicide note. And they left the camp. They went they went out with a work, we agreed to provide cover for three days so for three days the Germans wouldn’t know they were missing and they went out with a working party and disappeared and it was the night of Dresden. The night they went out was the night of Dresden and they, they, they walked. They were stopped several times and were able to convince whoever stopped them that they were French volunteers who were being moved from one job to another job and were on their way there and they got to this airfield and they lay up in the woods surrounding the airfield to watch what was going on and a JU88 landed and it was refuelled and they thought that’s it. So they find a log of wood and they picked it up and put it on their shoulders and marched to the edge of the airfield, put it down, got inside the JU and, what was his name? Anyway, he sat in the cockpit looking at the instruments and the controls and sorting out what’s what and the ground crew come back and said, ‘What are you doing in here? Foreign workers aren’t allowed in German aircraft. Clear off.’ And they got out, they picked up their log of wood. They walked back to the camp and I remember it plainly I was stood at one end of the hut and the door was at the far end and suddenly, Geoff his name was, Geoff and his bomb aimer Smith come walking down the hut and the Germans never knew they’d been away. Never knew they’d been away. And they’d been sat in a JU88.
BW: And they’d nearly got away with it.
PB: If they’d landed. I mean the Russians didn’t ask questions. If you got out of a German aircraft they shot you.
BW: Yeah.
PB: It was the daftest idea I’ve ever come across in my life but that’s what they’d decided on. Geoff Taylor. He was, he was, he was a journalist in Australia and he wrote a book called “Piece of Cake” which had a forward by Butch Harris of all people. I’ve got a copy in there and that was the most audacious escape but of course like all other escapes it came to nothing in the end.
BW: And were there quite a few others who tried and -
PB: Oh yes. It was sport.
BW: Captured.
PB: It was sport. This notice that the Germans issued said escaping is no longer a sport but that’s what it had been. When you read about people who spend all their time organising an escape they’re just a bloody nuisance to everybody. They ruin life in the camp. Everybody has to give way to them. They’re not going anywhere. They might be out for a week but they’re back.
BW: And in the meantime everybody else is perhaps suffering.
PB: Everybody’s inconvenienced, yeah.
BW: Yeah but they’re getting more inspections presumably.
PB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To have a fella like Bader in your camp must have been hell. Absolute hell.
BW: That’s why they decided to put him in Colditz.
[pause]
BW: And you hadn’t been tempted to try yourself. You were making yourself a nuisance in the camp you made life -
PB: Only this -
BW: Miserable for the Germans.
PB: Mad plan we had to fly to Sweden which we gave up on. It was impossible. But we had an Australian pilot killed in the camp in a flying accident. This Luftwaffe camp was only a few kilometres away and once the airmen there realised that there were now airmen in 4b occasionally they’d come over and give us a bit of a, a bit of a thrill. They did and they’d come across in a JU86 which was an obsolete bomber based on a, on a civil aircraft. It was a bit like a Hudson it was and it were coming over the camp in a shallow dive right along the full length of the French compound which was the biggest and climb away and all the airmen in the compound would be going like this.
BW: Waving.
PB: And the army went mad. The army said, ‘You’re going to kill us all the way you’re going.’ You know, these lads know what they’re doing. Anyway, one came over one day and it wasn’t an 86 it was an 88 a powerful, big, powerful machine and he came perhaps a bit steeper than usual and when he pulled up his tail mushed in and his tail went into a wire fence and it dragged about twenty feet of wire and two or three fence posts with it. The tail plane hit this, hit this Canadian pilot who was walking around the compound. Killed him instantly. One of the posts hit his companion and badly injured him and I was in our own compound and I could see through the French huts and I saw this thing. It was no higher than that. I don’t know why the airstream wasn’t tucked in the ground and eventually it climbed away with all this wire streaming behind him and the Luftwaffe gave a splendid funeral to this Australian and we were told that the pilot had been stripped of his brevvy, stripped of his rank, and posted to the eastern front as a common foot soldier. I think, it think they just told us that to pacify us. I can’t believe for a moment that that’s what happened but that’s the story they gave us but to be killed in a flying accident walking around a prison compound it’s a bit much isn’t it?
BW: Yeah and as you say there’s got to be some for the tail wheel to be that close to the ground that there’s got to be the plane itself has got to be very, very low.
PB: It was no higher -
BW: Ten feet or less
PB: Than that. I don’t know why the airstream wasn’t hitting the ground.
BW: And that you’re indicating’s about two foot -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Three foot.
PB: Yeah I just saw it go I could see it between the huts.
BW: Wow.
PB: And then it just climbed away with all the stuff just trailing behind it. Beautiful piece of flying. Wonderful skilled bit of flying.
BW: Just unfortunate consequence.
PB: Yeah. So we did get excitement from time to time.
BW: How did it feel when the Russians came to liberate? I mean -
PB: Oh -
BW: You must have had a pretty limited amount of information getting through and an impression of what the Russian forces were like. How did it feel when they -
PB: Well -
BW: Came into the camp?
PB: Well the first thing on the newsreels I’d seen pictures of refugees in France and suddenly early in April we got German refugees going past the camp and it was, it was an incredible sightseeing German refugees like that and they were streaming past the camp to get over the Elbe. And then we could -
BW: The Elbe must have been quite close to the camp
PB: Oh it was only about five kilometres and then we heard gunfire and then on St George ’s day early in the morning someone rushed into our hut shouting, ‘The Cossacks are here,’ and we went out and on the main road there were four of the scruffiest most dreadful looking men I’ve ever seen in my life. On horseback. Oh they did, they looked murderous, every one and they were loaded down with sandbags full of food and ammunition and God knows what and they just sat there and later in the day the infantry arrived and they made no provision for us whatsoever. Nothing. So we just broke out of the camp to steal food and steal drink as well and steal women as well no doubt but the Russians clamped on that and then they started to register us and they were going to send us to a Black Sea port, Odessa or some sort of place, and sail us home from there they said. When the Americans are only five miles away. The other side of the river. And they started to register us and they had great big women, great big fat women, tables outside, taking the records, and they got some funny ones. There was a Micky Mouse and James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and it became chaotic and eventually we just said oh blow this and they packed it in and then they moved us, as I say, out of the camp and up into this maintenance depot.
BW: So they realised you were giving them some spoof names -
PB: Yeah.
BW: And not helping at all
PB: We sat in this maintenance depot about five of us who were all together and suddenly the most horrible screaming and I said the Russians have either got a woman or they’ve got a pig let’s go and to find out which it is. So we followed the noise and we came to a place and there were two Russians. There was one dead pig lying down and there’s another Russian with a pig like a cello with his hand way inside of it and the pig screaming away and we sit and we watch all this and we’re thinking they’ll give us something and we watch and we wait and eventually they killed it and they cut off the ears and gave us the ears. They took two pigs and gave us the bloody ears off one of pig.
BW: And kept the rest for themselves. And in general when they, as you put it, got their act together in terms of organising the camp presumably they re-erected the fence post that had been torn down.
PB: It became a far, far, far worse place than it had ever been.
BW: Yeah.
PB: They turned it into a punishment camp for German civilians. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of Germans died in that camp over the next five years and so the natives at Muelburg are attached to us really. We both suffered in that camp. It was a dreadful place. What it must have been like when it was dreadful when we were there. What it must have been like.
BW: And they weren’t bringing the civilians in while you were there?
PB: No, no.
BW: They presumably -
PB: No. It was after, after they’d repaired it and repaired all the damage we’d done.
BW: Yeah.
PB: And I think it was about five years they had it as a punishment camp. Must have been hell on earth. Hell on earth. Hundreds if not thousands died and this was just because of complaining about some regulation or other that the Russians had imposed. Anything at all, straight in there. Shocking that.
BW: But they didn’t, did they impose a regime on you as RAF crew waiting to be repatriated during that sort of interim period of April, May.
PB: Well it was all chaos. It was all chaos. I had quite an experience on VE day. They had their VE day a day later than ours because apparently they weren’t satisfied with the arrangements that the west had made so they decided to have their own, their own VE day the next day and I was, I was walking in the German town. Why I was alone and not with any of my friends I don’t know but I was alone and I was walking through this town and suddenly two Russian officers grabbed me and took me to their mess and gave me a huge meal. All, all looted German property of course. Animals, vegetables. The lot. And a particular sweet which I learned later was made from sour milk and it was absolutely gorgeous and after the meal they took me to a public hall where there was to be an address by a general followed by a concert and it was full of full of Russian soldiers, men and women, in all sorts of different uniforms and this general came onto the stage and I got, I got an example of what it was it was like being in a totalitarian state. He made a speech and the only words I heard were Churchill and Roosevelt every now and again he’d pause and somewhere at the very back of the, of the gallery [clapping sound] and immediately everybody’s clapping and immediately they all stopped like that.
BW: As if somebody was coordinating it.
PB: Someone’s coordinating. The whole thing was coordinated and eventually the speech finishes and we had this concert and it was absolutely fantastic. Oh the music and the dancing and the singing unbelievable. Unbelievable concert. It was terrific. Now what happened when it finished I’ve no idea. I haven’t a clue what happened to me that night. Not a clue. Not the slightest idea. I know I joined up with my friends the next day but what happened that night I don’t, I’ve no idea but I’ve never seen anything like the performance that these women who seemed to just move like that.
BW: Gracefully across -
PB: No, no leg movement at all.
BW: The stage yeah.
PB: And the Cossacks down on their heels kicking. Oh it was a fantastic concert and the singing and the balalaika playing. A night to remember that was. And that was VE day. VE day Russian version.
BW: How had you managed to celebrate it in the camp at all? You mentioned it was quite different to our celebration were there any –
PB: Well we didn’t know. We didn’t know it was VE day.
BW: So the only indication you got was from the Russians when they -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Held their celebrations.
PB: And as I say by this time we weren’t in the camp and in fact we’d broken and were trying to get across to the Americans on our own.
BW: And you mention you were in the town at this stage in Muhlberg.
PB: Ahum.
BW: What, what was it like what was your sense of being in the town? Were there, firstly, was it damaged but also were there German civilians who might be hostile.
PB: No.
BW: To the RAF at all.
PB: The civilians couldn’t get us in to their houses fast enough. We were never we were never short of somewhere to sleep or somewhere to wash.
BW: Right.
PB: Because I think the theory was if ten drunken Russians hammered on the door at midnight looking for women we would go to the door and say it was under British occupation you’ll have to go next door. It never worked out in practice [thank God] but that was the theory I think. They couldn’t get us into their houses fast enough.
BW: So a bit I suppose a bit of a protection there for them if the -
PB: Yeah.
BW: If the Russians had seen western RAF aircrew in a house -
PB: Yeah.
BW: They would be less likely -
PB: Yeah. Yeah.
BW: To interfere with it.
PB: And we slept we slept on a feather bed with a feather bed on top of us with a great big bed oh it was wonderful.
BW: And the Germans managed to put you up in the sense that they would feed you as well.
PB: Yes. Yes,
BW: Even though they would have probably been rationed at this stage and -
PB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they couldn’t do enough for us.
BW: And did you get to go back to Muhlberg in the intervening years?
PB: No, because I don’t know where we were. I don’t know where the Russians had moved us to.
BW: Right.
PB: The, the Stalag 4b Association organised trips to Muhlberg later and they became very popular because the Muhlberg people themselves were in the same boat but I never went. In fact they had a trip this year starting off in Berlin and moving down to Muhlberg.
BW: And when you came back to the UK we picked up the story at Cosford and we picked up the extra pay that you’d been awarded.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And you were washed and brushed up. What then happened to you sort of post war from Cosford?
PB: Well I was given three options. I could come out immediately or I could go to oh what’s the Yorkshire town, the spa town?
BW: Harrogate.
PB: Harrogate. On a rehabilitation course and then come out or I could opt to stay in until my normal release date. Well I thought there was still a chance of getting back on flying and getting out east and bombing Japan so I opted to stay in and I got posted to a, to a Mosquito squadron near, near Newcastle and there, there I became in effect the squadron warrant officer. I sat in an office all day doing nothing but we had a very, very good rugby team. Our sports, our sports officer was a first class scrub half and we had a very good rugby team and we won the group cup without any difficulty and we got drawn in for the semi-final of the national cup and we got drawn away against Ringway and we came down to Ringway and we found that although paratroopers are army the people who trained them were airmen and practically every one of them was a rugby league professional. So, we turned out on a rugby pitch at Ringway about six hundred red cap paratroopers lying around the pitch cheering their side on. We were up against these great hulking fellas who were fit like butchers dogs. Oh they murdered us. Absolutely murdered us.
BW: And do you still retain an interest in rugby league despite that? Do you follow -
PB: Not rugby league. I don’t like rugby league but we were, they were playing rugby union but they were rugby league professionals.
BW: Right.
PB: But when we got back, when we got back to Acklington I thought that’s it. There’s nothing, nothing doing for me now so I asked to be released and I was released within days.
BW: And was that in 1945?
PB: That would, no, it would be 1946.
BW: ’46.
PB: Yeah.
BW: From Acklington and from then on what happened in your civilian life?
PB: Well, I couldn’t settle.
BW: Your post war life.
PB: I couldn’t settle. I got I got a job as a clerk with a, with a big chemical manufacturing company and I was in this office with about six other people who were as dull as ditchwater, been there forever and all I was doing was calculating lorry loads [eight car loads used to go there and six car loads to go there?] making up that and oh it was absolutely soul destroying. I stuck it I think for three months and then I thought I can’t, I can’t, I can’t settle to this so I then decided I thought the only way to get some companionship again, get some comradeship again was if I joined the police force so I went to, I went to the police station in Burnley and they said, ‘We’ve no, we’ve no vacancies but we can put you in touch with our central organisation.’ So they did and I was called for interview at Wallasey and got into the Wallasey force with three other people and when we went to the police training school we found that three people on the course were Burnley recruits. Burnley. But this gave me my first insight into the police they were recruiting people but they wouldn’t recruit Burnley people. They wouldn’t have anybody who lived in the town going into the police force. So that was the first lie from the police. I worked hard. I came out top of the class and we got to Wallasey and for the first fortnight I was sent out on patrol with another policeman who’d been on patrol for years and I learned how to, I learned which cafes you could sit in the back rooms of and drink coffee and I learned all sort of tricks that really you shouldn’t be doing and it was a complete and utter waste of time and in a small force like Wallasey the opportunity for promotion were very, very few and far between. You had people who had been pounding the beat for fifteen years. They’d passed their sergeants examinations, they passed their inspectors examinations and they were still pounding the beat and the only way you could get on was to curry favour. Start oozing up to some officers and telling tales. It was the exact opposite of comradeship. Everybody’s telling tales about everybody. I thought I can’t stick this so I resigned from that and I was playing rugby in Burnley then and one of the team was a cotton mill owner and he said, ‘If you ever want a proper job I’ll give you a job in a cotton mill,’ so I went to work in his cotton mill and that was no good. And all the time I’m in touch with my bomb aimer’s father. Had regular correspondence and I said to him, ‘I can’t settle I’m going to go back into the air force.’ And he said, ‘Well don’t do anything for the next fortnight,’ and I received a letter -
[interview transmission interrupted]
BW: Alright, so we’re only, we’re only a couple of minutes from the end and I was just asking Mr Phillip Bates that after the end of the war in conclusion he’d said that he’d had a good war but it had had its moments um that were not entirely enjoyable but that overall he’d enjoyed it, his service in the RAF but I was asking just about the commemorations and the national, now centre, at Lincoln and you mentioned that you’d been down to London for the unveiling of the memorial there.
PB: Yeah.
BW: At Green Park.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And you got to meet Camilla as well did you say?
PB: Yes Camilla and the Prince of Wales. I got to shake both their hands. The Prince of Wales surprised me really. It was probably, it was probably the hottest day of the year and everybody had taken his blazer off and I was wearing my Raf Ex-Pow Association tie and the Prince of Wales came along and immediately recognised my tie which surprised me. And as he shook my hand he said, ‘Where did they keep you?’ I said, ‘Stalag 4b, sir.’ He said, ‘Were you a digger?’ I said, ‘Oh no I wasn’t a digger, sir. No. I left that to other people,’ and he was quite jovial and then of course he moved on and made his way down the line but I was amazed that he recognised my tie instantly.
BW: That’s a very nice point that, you know, he’s identified you by that.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And spoke to you particularly because of it.
PB: And part of the Royal Air Force. I’ve got photographs of it all.
BW: And how about now that there’s a centre for Bomber Command in Lincoln?
PB: Well yes he’s lost his football again. I was due to go there and a friend of mine, Dominic was taking me but when it came to it I wasn’t fit to go. I couldn’t have sat in a car for three hours. I just couldn’t. And then another three hours coming back. And Dominic also had a cold so we were ashamed to admit it and then again it’s Lincoln. It’s Lancasters. Bugger the Lancasters I say.
BW: Well perhaps it didn’t prove as reliable as the Stirling because it didn’t fly. They were trying to get the Lancaster flying for the Friday unveiling but they didn’t and I think it may have flown -
PB: Yeah.
BW: The day after but -
PB: What annoys me they chopped up every Stirling. Now, you think they could, it was the first four engine aircraft we had. You’d think they could have had two or three for museums wouldn’t you?
BW: Ahum.
PB: But no they chopped up the lot and that really does grieve me.
BW: And even now they’ve got a Halifax in Elvington.
PB: Oh I’ve seen that.
BW: Which is nicely renovated and so on.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Doesn’t fly.
PB: And it’s got, it’s got the Stirling’s engines in it as well. It hasn’t got Rolls Royce in it it’s got Hercules. It’s a mark iii. It’s that one. The mark iii.
BW: That’s the picture on the wall yeah. And there is a Halifax that they dug out or pulled out of a Norwegian fjord in 1973.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And that is in the Royal Air Force Museum in London.
PB: Yeah. Well for years we hoped that they’d would find a Stirling somewhere but er somewhere in Holland but they never did.
BW: Ahum ahum.
PB: A great shame because it was a beautiful aeroplane.
BW: Could take, from what you were saying, could take a fair bit of punishment and keep flying.
PB: Yeah it was a lot bigger than a Lancaster of course but it had some disadvantages you see. It couldn’t fly high and it couldn’t carry big bombs. It didn’t have a bomb bay. It had three separate ones which gave immense strength to the fuselage because you had these girders running the full length but you could only get a two thousand pound bomb in it so we mostly carried incendiaries.
BW: So just thinking in brief terms about the structure of a bomber formation in that case because you’d see that the pathfinders were going first to mark the target.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Presumably the Stirlings would then go in with the incendiaries.
PB: No. No, we were our main raid was either five or sometimes six waves.
BW: Right.
PB: And the Stirlings were always in the third wave. We got some protection from the first two waves going out and some protection from the last two waves coming back because we were a bit slower than they were. So we were always in the third wave.
BW: Right.
PB: Except, except Peenemunde. Now, that, that’s a terrible story. The night before Peenemunde we went to, we went to Turin and somewhere our radio packed in and we didn’t get the message telling us that East Anglia was fogged up and we had to land in Kent or Sussex. Wherever we could. We didn’t get that message so we arrived back at Lakenheath and asked for instructions to land and they said. ‘You can’t land here. It’s totally fogbound but if you get over to Oakington you might just get down.’ Well, we got over to Oakington, the other side of Cambridge and we just landed. They closed the, closed the airfield immediately we landed and they debriefed us and fed us and provided us with beds and in the early afternoon we went down to the airfield and the Lancasters of seven group were being bombed up and we knew we were on again that night and we were going on leave the so next day so we weren’t anxious to go bombing that night. Anyway, we’d no choice we started the port outer. Come to the port inner, nothing. The starter motor was dead. The starter motors they had in Oakington would fit a Lancaster, it wouldn’t have fit us so we rang Lakenheath to tell them. Eventually a lorry arrives with some fitters and a new starter motor and we landed at Lakenheath just as the squadron is taxiing out for take-off and we were very, very happy because we were going on leave the next day and then I discover we’d missed bloody Peenemunde and at Peenemunde the Stirlings went in first at five thousand feet in brilliant moonlight and all the fighters were circling in Berlin because Mosquitos were dropping target indicators on Berlin. The Germans got away scot free. Eventually the Germans twigged what was happening and got the fighters over and shoot down forty Lancasters and Halifaxes. Stirlings, scot free.
BW: And because you, they’d have been in the first wave.
PB: Yeah.
BW: They got away with it.
PB: There were three, there were three targets. The first one was at the very southern end was all the housing and the Stirlings destroyed that and then the next waves destroyed the science laboratories and then the assembly works and we missed it and it’s grieved me the rest of my life. I’d have given anything to have been on that raid and we were so happy that we weren’t. Oh, a friend of mine got shot down that night. No. I’d have loved to have been on Peenemunde.
BW: I mean that was, that was announced at fairly short notice. It was, you know sometimes a raid has to be planned quite well in advance.
PB: Yeah.
BW: But this was because of the intelligence about the weapons.
PB: Yeah.
BW: They were developing their short notice.
PB: The crews weren’t told, they were told that they were attacking an experimental place for new radar [and the better job of the radar they’d better defend themselves because they destroy all the latest airborne radar] that was the story that was given to aircrews.
BW: Interesting.
PB: Oh I’d have given anything to have been on that raid. Anything. Five thousand feet, brilliant moonlight and you were the first in.
BW: As you say it’s how fate goes isn’t it?
PB: Yeah.
BW: But -
PB: I’ve just been to the funeral of a friend of mine. George. He trained in Canada as a navigator. As a Mosquito navigator which is a specialised navigation job. He qualifies, he gets his brevvy, he’s ready to join the squadron and the war stops. They never even, he never even saw a Mosquito. Oh what a terrible thing to have happen to you. Terrible.
BW: Gone through all that. Well, I was reading in the prep really that they launched a raid on Peenemunde.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And just looking here at some of this um yeah it says here that 149 squadron took part in the early offensive against Germany.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And took part in the first thousand bomber raids with Stirlings.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Made a significant contribution to the battle of the Ruhr, Battle of Hamburg and the raid against the V weapons experimental station at Peenemunde.
PB: Yeah.
BW: And then between February and July ‘44 and in addition to dropping high explosives on the enemy the squadron helped supply the French maquis with supplies, arms and ammunition by parachute.
PB: Yeah.
BW: Of course that would be after you’d been shot down.
PB: About eight weeks after we were shot down Stirlings were taken off German targets completely. Some of them converted to Lancasters. Those that kept their Stirlings were used to drop supplies in France and to do mine laying and later to tow, to tow gliders but they never went to Germany again. The loss rate was unsustainable. I’d been on raids where we lost one in every five Stirlings. You can’t, you can’t keep that up for very long.
BW: No. No. Not at all. Do you think there was a particular weakness perhaps in the Stirling that the losses were so high or was it just good -
PB: You couldn’t get any altitude.
BW: Just because they were restricted to -
PB: Yeah, yeah.
BW: Low ceiling.
PB: Altitude. I mean, I had friends who flew at twenty two thousand feet. On a good night we would get thirteen. On a poor night we would get eleven. Everything that was thrown up reached the Stirlings and everything that was coming down reached the Stirling as well [laughs].
BW: I think you mentioned at one point a bomb hit your aircraft. A bomb -
PB: Yeah.
BW: Dropped from the aircraft above.
PB: This was the Nuremberg. I think it must have been a thirty pound incendiary because it went straight through. If it had been a four pound I think it would have stayed in the wing and burned. If it had been [eighty] it would have taken the wing off. Left quite a sizable hole.
BW: I would just like to show you this. There’s a photo here of a Stirling crew of 149 squadron based at Lakenheath.
PB: Oh.
BW: And I just wonder whether you might recognise any of the names. It’s only a longshot.
PB: Oh.
BW: But there’s -
PB: As I say we never bothered with other crews really.
BW: No.
PB: Except the ones we trained with at -
BW: But it looks like it’s outside the mess at Lakenheath that picture.
PB: Yeah I don’t recognise the photograph. Crowe, that’s a familiar name, Crowe. Oh he was a POW that’s why I know him. Was he a flight engineer? I knew a Tweedy in prison but he was a soldier. I don’t recognise the faces at all. Don’t know why their wearing uniform instead of battledress but there we are. Battledress were far more comfortable. That’s interesting. 27th of September. Oh well they would have been newcomers on the squadron when we were there. The average life expectancy was only six weeks. I had two friends, both on Halifaxes -
BW: Thank you.
PB: Both shot down on their first trip and my friend who were in training, a flight engineer on 15 squadron did four operations and got shot down twice.
BW: Right. I think that sort of brings us to the end as I say unless there is anything else you want to say.
PB: Well I hope I haven’t bored you.
BW: Not at all sir. No not at all there’s plenty of information. Some really interesting and diverse experiences. It’s been very kind of you to share those with me.
PB: It’s a pleasure.
BW: So thank you very much -
PB: A pleasure.
BW: For your time um what I’ll do is I’ll come to the signing of the release form now and a couple of photos so I’ll end the recording there and we’ll sort out the paperwork.
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/.
Identifier
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ABatesP151009
Title
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Interview with Philip Bates
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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02:13:03 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Pending OH summary. Allocated S Coulter
Creator
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Brian Wright
Date
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2015-10-09
Description
An account of the resource
Philip Bates grew up in Lancashire and joined the Royal Air Force in 1940. He served as ground crew with Coastal Command before remustering as aircrew. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 149 Squadron until his aircraft was shot down and he became a prisoner of war.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Coastal Command
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
Poland
England--Lancashire
England--Suffolk
Poland--Tychowo
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Nuremberg
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
149 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bomb struck
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
displaced person
Dulag Luft
entertainment
fear
final resting place
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Heavy Conversion Unit
home front
incendiary device
Ju 88
Lysander
Manchester
Me 110
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
Nissen hut
prisoner of war
RAF Lakenheath
RAF St Athan
RAF Waterbeach
Resistance
Scarecrow
searchlight
shot down
Stirling
training
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/117/3379/PCookKHH1601.1.jpg
14944c26aa827cd2423b233d4d2ac572
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/117/3379/ACookKHH160725.2.mp3
199eff75afa2921f7b1278169d2c5ec3
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
Cook, Kenneth
Kenneth Cook
Kenneth H Cook
Ken Cook
K H Cook
K Cook
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Wing Commander Kenneth Howell Cook DFC (b. 1923, 151017 Royal Air Force). Kenneth Cook flew 45 operations with 97 Squadron, Pathfinders.
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
2016-08-04
2016-07-25
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Cook, KHH
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PJ: Right. Interviewers Peter Jones and Sandra Jones. Name of the interviewee Wing Commander, Wing Commander Kenneth Cook DFC. Attending with him is his son Jonathan Cook. The date is the 25th of the 7th 2016 and it’s just 5 o’clock pm. The place is Chadlington, Oxfordshire. Thank you, Ken for agreeing to be interviewed for the IBCC. Ken, tell me about what you did before the war?
KC: Okay. Well I attended grammar school at -
JC: Marling.
KC: Marling Grammar School near Stroud in Gloucestershire and I was one of the first to join the Air Training Corps Squadron that was set up in Stroud, number 1329 Squadron and that helped to focus my attention on joining the Royal Air Force and while I waited until I was old enough to apply and a couple of years later I found myself on the train going from Stroud up to Paddington with an appointment to go to Lords Cricket Ground to be a part of what turned out to be over five thousand budding air crew that were joining the RAF on the same day that I was and after a few weeks staying in local accommodation in that area I was then posted up to Scarborough to the ITW [name number?]. That was at Scarborough Grammar School. So I did my ITW and then I was posted up, back up to the north west of England to wait for a boat because I was going across to America to learn to fly in America as a pilot and going across the Atlantic we were chased by a U-boat which gave us a bit of a turn and we got away from it and got to the other side alright and then got on a train that took us three days to go along through Canada right down through the centre of America to Georgia. And so my opening days were down there in very high temperatures erm which I enjoyed very much and we were flying an aircraft called a Stearman, the biplane, and I’d gone solo but they decided that I and one or two others needed a lot more time than they could afford so they asked me to go back to Canada to carry on my training there which I did but when I got to Canada I was told the pilot training schools were all totally full so I’d have to hang around. So they then asked me if I wanted to be an air gunner and I said no. And they made me hang around a bit longer and then eventually they said, ‘We’re opening up a new air crew job called an air bomber. Would you be interested in that?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ I’d have a go at that and so I went on through a couple of courses spread over three or four months and I came out as the two guys that, I was commissioned as a young pilot officer off the course. There was two of us commissioned. I was one of them and so I came back home having gone out as an erk I came back to England as a pilot officer. Then having got back to England I found myself, believe it or not, posted to, what’s that airfield near High Wycombe, the grass over?
JC: Booker.
KC: Booker. Booker airfield, to fly Tiger Moths and so I carried on. Started my pilot training or continued my pilot training there and I’m lost now from where I go from there.
JC: Do you want to stop for a second Dad? Shall we stop for a sec? Can we just stop for a sec?
KC: Hmmn?
JC: Do you want to stop for a little break?
KC: Yeah.
JC: For a second.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So you -
[Pause]
SJ: Okay.
KC: So I was posted to the northwest England to fly. Can you stop it for a minute? I can’t think.
[Pause]
JC: Botha?
KC: Botha, yeah.
JC: Botha.
KC: Yeah. That was it.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Up there in Scotland. In the northwest. And then on to er what was I saying? Which one the -
JC?: Cottesmore.
KC: Cottesmore. That was the Wellingtons. Starting to learn night bombing and all that techniques. And from there I was posted to -
JC: Winthorpe.
KC: Winthorpe, was it? Yes.
JC: Heavy Conversation Unit.
KC: Yeah. HCU.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And then -
JC: And then Bardney after that for five [weeks?]
KC: And then to 9 Squadron at Bardney.
JC: Yeah.
KC: On Lancasters, yeah. Yeah. I did ten ops with 9 Squadron and a crew there and then we were invited to join them, they had just set up the Pathfinder force in Bomber Command and we were recommended as a crew that could join the Pathfinder force which I went on a course at Bourne in Cambridgeshire and then graduated on, as a Pathfinder crew in Lancasters [pause] and I did another thirty five ops with a Pathfinder crew. Altogether, I did forty five ops and I came out of that. Just after finishing ops I got awarded the DFC. And where did I go after ops?
JC: You went off to, where did you go then? You went off to Fiskerton didn’t you? To be the station radar nav officer. Was that right?
KC: Yes, I did. I was posted to RAF Fiskerton near Lincoln.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Having, I completed altogether forty five ops so I was now screened from any more ops but I then flew at Fiskerton. There were two Lancaster squadrons there and my job was to, as new crews came in from training I had to fly with each new crew to check them out, that they, that their navigators could operate the radar properly before they were allowed to go on ops. That was hairy because some of the pilots were new and they couldn’t land the Lancaster at night and we used to do what we called a few, what we called a few cannon balls going down the runway at night. Anyway, went through that period. The squadron then moved from, they closed the airfield and moved us to Fulbeck and so I went along although I was on the station and not with the squadrons I was instructed by Group Headquarters to go with them to Syerston on the Fosse Way and I stayed with them for about two years at Syerston flying with new crews when they came in. Checking them out on the radar and so on. Then what happened after Syerston?
JC: Okay. So you were getting ready for the Tiger Force. Is that right?
KC: Um.
JC: You went to back to the, posted back to Coningsby. Station radar nav officer.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were part of the build-up for the Tiger Force when you were due to head out to the Far East weren’t you?
KC: They were going, they were going out there. Yeah.
JC: Yes but obviously it was cancelled because the Japanese surrendered. Didn’t they?
KC: Yeah. That’s it.
JC: Okay.
KC: [?]
JC: So that took you to the end of the war. Right?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so what was your first posting post war was at HQ1 Group at Bawtry.
KC: Bawtry yes. I was the group radar nav, group navigation officer.
JC: Yeah.
KC: At headquarters of 1 Group at Bawtry.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then in 194 –
KC: I was a wingco then.
JC: That’s, okay, well you were then offered a permanent commission in, that was 1948.
KC: Yeah.
JC: You were offered permanent commission?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then you went on to Thirsk. Okay.
KC: Well, ‘cause I went to Topcliffe.
JC: Yes.
KC: ‘Cause that was, had been set up to, to train all wartime people like me in to being proper peacetime navigators [laughs].
JC: That’s right.
KC: And I was one of them. How to use Astro and all that stuff and to navigate the aeroplanes.
JC: What’s Astro?
KC: Astro and also with the radar, of course. All the latest stuff.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah. What happened after Topcliffe?
JC: And then you went to a conversion course on night all weather fighters and you then moved to Coltishall flying in Mosquitos.
KC: Yeah. I had to go on to learn the latest air borne radar for night fighter navigator radar people and then I was posted to Coltishall.
JC: That’s it.
KC: Where there was a night fighter squadron and I joined the squadron. I can’t remember how long. About a year or more and then I was posted – when? I took command.
JC: That squadron, that squadron converted didn’t it? To –
KC: To Javelins.
JC: That’s, no, to Meteors I think it was.
KC: Meteor night fighters. That’s right.
JC: That’s right. Yeah.
KC: Yeah. From Mosquito to Meteor night fighters.
JC: Yes.
KC: When did I take command?
JC: You, so that was, I don’t know when you took command but in 1953 you were group navigation officer at that point and in 1956/57 you went to West Malling didn’t you? And you were appointed as a flight commander. Is that right?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Which was unusual for a navigator wasn’t it?
KC: I was one of the first navigators to be a -
JC: Yes.
KC: A flight commander.
JC: Yes. Okay. And then in 1957 you went to 153 in West Malling.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were appointed commanding officer there.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And given the rank of Wing Commander at that point.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yeah. And the aircraft you moved to then were Meteor.
KC: Meteor and, and yeah Meteor night fighters.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: They were 12s and 14s I think.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Were they?
KC: Yeah. Mark 12s and Mark 14s. Yeah.
JC: And later you converted to another aircraft.
KC: Yeah. Javelin.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: That’s right. Okay.
KC: Javelin. Night, all weather fighters.
JC: Okay. And then after that you were posted, you had an opportunity to improve your, your shocking education.
KC: Yeah. They sent me to the Staff College.
JC: That’s right.
KC: I went to the RAF Staff College for a year and they were obviously teaching me to read and write again you know.
JC: That’s right.
KC: I was at Bracknell in Berkshire.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Do you want to take another quick break? Just take a quick break dad?
KC: Yeah. Shall we do that? Yeah.
[Pause]
JC: So where did you go? You went off to the Middle East.
KC: Yeah. I went to Iran.
JC: No. No.
KC: No.
JC: That was post air force. You went to somewhere else. You went to Aden didn’t you?
KC: Oh I went to Aden, yes.
JC: That’s right.
KC: In the Middle East. Aden. And I used to have to tramp up in to the Persian Gulf from Aden.
JC: Yes.
KC: Visiting the air force bases and that all along the Gulf.
JC: Yes.
KC: And I was out there about two years wasn’t I?
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Until 1963.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then you were posted back to a training command I think. Is that right? For a couple of years. And then you moved on to Signals Command at Medmenham near Marlow.
KC: Yeah, it was, it was, was it a Group Headquarters or a Command Headquarters?
JC: It was, it was HQ Signals Command it says.
KC: Oh the Command Headquarters then.
JC: Yes.
KC: As a staff officer I was there.
JC: Yeah. And what was your role there?
KC: Signals Command, Medmenham.
JC: Is it related to personnel? Wasn’t it? It says here you were a senior personnel staff officer.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah. I think I was involved, yeah, in staffing matters there.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes you were. And then you took retirement in January 1968.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then started your civilian career.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah
JC: So is that as far as you want to take it? There we go. That’s that bit. Now, shall we start again and I’ll, I’ll ask you some questions around this different things that you just want to give me there as well.
SJ: Those.
JC: Okay alright. So dad, so going back to so when were you, first of all just give your birthdate, dad. When you were born.
KC: 9th of April 1923.
JC: 1923. Okay and where were you born?
KC: Randwick.
JC: Randwick in Gloucestershire.
KC: Near Stroud.
JC: Yeah. Near Stroud in Gloucestershire.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And just kind of describe what sort of a place Randwick was back in those, those days?
KC: Well, Randwick was a small Cotswold village. Everybody knew everybody.
JC: Yeah.
KC: I went to Randwick village school.
JC: How many kids were there in that school? Roughly. Can you remember?
KC: There was about a hundred and fifty altogether.
JC: Was there? Okay.
KC: There were about three or, yeah, three classes total.
JC: Yeah.
KC: In the school.
JC: Okay.
KC: And I passed the eleven plus.
JC: And you also had, did some things in the village as well didn’t you? Weren’t you sort of active in the choir as I remember? Is that right?
KC: I was in the church choir.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah. The C of E church choir.
JC: Yeah.
KC: I became the head choir boy ‘cause I was the guy that would always get pushed in the back by the choir master saying, ‘Sing up Ken.’
JC: Fantastic. Okay. Alright. And so then you went, you passed your exam and went to Randwick School and where was Randwick School?
KC: Well it -
JC: Sorry not Randwick School. You went to Marling School.
KC: Marling. Marling School.
JC: And where was Marling School?
KC: Marling School was on the outskirts of Stroud.
JC: Which was how far away from -
KC: About four miles.
JC: Right.
KC: I used to cycle there on a bike every morning.
JC: Right. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so you stayed there for a number of years until you were what? About sixteen were you?
KC: Yeah sixteen.
JC: Yeah. And then you left the -
KC: I then, I got a job with a company called Erinoid. It was in the early days when plastics were first being made in this country.
JC: Yes.
KC: And Erinoid were one of the early companies and I was invited to join their lab, their laboratory.
JC: Right.
KC: Where all the experiments was being done on the latest type of plastics.
JC: And so -
KC: I was an office boy if you like.
JC: Right.
KC: But in fact they made me look at everything that was going on with a view to picking it up.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So you were almost like an apprentice there?
KC: An apprentice. Yes.
JC: That’s what you were kind of doing.
KC: Yes.
JC: Doing. Okay. And, and so you did that job. So we were now in 1939 so there would have, that would have been presumably you were working there at the outbreak of the war. Were you?
KC: Yes I was. Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And what was, how did you feel about the outbreak of the war? What was, you know your initial thinking?
KC: Well one of the first things I did was to join the Air Training Corps in Stroud.
JC: Right okay.
KC: And from there -
JC: And what made you join that as opposed to joining the army or the navy? What was it about the Air Training Corps?
KC: It was about flying and I wanted to learn to fly.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: It seemed like a better option. Did it? Fair enough.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Fair enough. Okay. So you got to the age, I guess, of eighteen where you could potentially signup.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So were you conscripted or did you volunteer?
KC: I volunteered.
JC: You volunteered.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And where did you go to volunteer? At somewhere -
KC: I went to Weston Super Mare.
JC: Did you? Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Why did you have to go down there ‘cause that’s a bit of a way from Stroud?
KC: That was the sort of a holding centre.
JC: Right.
KC: Where you went down there and you’d find you were there with all sorts of guys and so on.
JC: Right I bet. Did any, did you go down there with anybody. Any friends go with you? Or?
KC: No.
JC: No you went off on your own did you?
KC: On my own. Yeah.
JC: And did you have to do anything before you went down there? Was there anything more local in Stroud that you had to do to -?
KC: Only that I was now an active member of the Air Training Corps in Stroud.
JC: So it was the Air Training Corps that helped you -
KC: That helped me.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Very much. Yeah.
JC: I see.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. And so what happened when you went to Weston Super Mare? What happened when you went down there?
KC: Oh crikey. What happened at Weston Super Mare? I think we were, we were every day marched out on to the top of the cliffs.
JC: Yes.
KC: And made to parade up and down doing all sorts of, learning to drill, you know -
JC: Right.
KC: All the drill stuff.
JC: That’s where your drill stuff happened?
KC: Yes.
JC: Right. Okay. Good. And, and of course you had your mum and dad were back at home.
KC: Yes.
JC: What was their reaction to your having signed up and volunteered? Do you remember?
KC: My dad was almost, sort of well, ‘I expected you to do something like that Ken.’
JC: Right.
KC: Sort of thing, you know.
JC: Yes.
KC: My mum said, ‘I don’t want you to go.’
JC: No. I bet.
KC: 'I don’t want you to go.’
JC: As mums do.
KC: But I did. But I used to, you know come home on breaks and -
JC: Yes.
KC: See them.
JC: And you had, you had several older brothers and a sister. What were they doing during all of this?
KC: Yeah. Harry was the eld– , well Mabel was the eldest wasn’t she?
JC: Your sister. Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: That’s right.
KC: And she’s the one who kept, if you like, the family running.
JC: Right.
KC: Although she lived a few miles away.
JC: Yeah.
KC: She kept an eye on my mum and dad.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And really kept the family running -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Smoothly. And I had brothers like Harry.
JC: Yes.
KC: He was –
JC: Did he sign up for any, any of the services?
KC: Sorry?
JC: Did he sign up for any of the services? Or was he a bit, he was a bit older wasn’t he?
KC: A bit older. Yeah. Walter. Walter did.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yes. He did.
JC: What did he sign up for? Did he sign up for, was one of them merchant navy? I can’t quite remember what he was.
KC: It was something like that.
JC: Yeah.
KC: I think it was. Yes.
JC: Yes.
KC: Merchant navy. Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: What about your nearest brother?
KC: Charlie.
JC: Charlie. What did he do?
KC: Well Charlie was in a reserved occupation ‘cause he worked for Newman Henders and he was a draughtsman.
JC: Right.
KC: And they were working on munitions and stuff.
JC: Oh right.
KC: And so he was screened. They wouldn’t let him go.
JC: Right.
KC: He had to get on with the war stuff that he was working on.
JC: Fine. Okay.
KC: On drawing boards and things.
JC: Okay. Alright. So -
KC: Yeah.
JC: So that’s what the family were doing and what they were thinking and you were off at Weston Super Mare and coming home at weekend, occasional weekends and things like that were you?
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: Okay. And how, and so you did that for a bit and then you said before that you had to go up to, to Lord’s to kind of muster up there did you? Is that, is that right?
KC: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I had to report to Lord’s.
JC: Yes.
KC: ‘Cause I wanted to fly aircrew.
JC: Yes. So that was where aircrew were sent.
KC: Aircrew. We all, literally I was absolutely shattered. Walked into the Lord’s Cricket Ground ‘cause I’d never been, even to London like that in my life.
JC: Right.
KC: And walked in and there with thousands -
JC: Yes.
KC: Guys like me and -
JC: And what was -
KC: We were there. They took over the expensive housing from, I’m not anti-Jews but a certain part near there a lot of Jew families, rich Jew families.
JC: That was St John’s Wood wasn’t it? Around the St John’s Wood.
KC: St John’s Wood.
JC: Yes.
KC: And the government kicked them all out.
JC: Yes.
KC: And took over all their sumptuous houses, I mean for me as village kid coming up there, going into their bathrooms and seeing all the ornate stuff they had in their bathrooms, you know.
JC: Quite something was it?
KC: It was. It was unbelievable, you know.
JC: And were you so you were sort of put into these, these kind of houses and apartments I guess in -
KC: Yeah.
JC: In London. And you were sharing with people from your part of the country or from around the country?
KC: All over the country. There were guys that could hardly add up to five.
JC: Right.
KC: Sort of thing.
JC: Yes.
KC: And there was, not cockneys but they had accents that you couldn’t understand half the things they said, you know.
JC: Right. I bet, I bet there were people that you hadn’t been exposed to many of those kinds of accents, had you?
KC: No. I hadn’t. No.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Fantastic. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so okay so you did, so you did that and then from there that’s where they sent you I think to Booker wasn’t it? To start the -
KC: Yeah.
JC: The training.
KC: FTS Booker.
JC: Yes.
KC: To start pilot training.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah. Yeah. That Booker was near High Wycombe.
JC: That’s it and that was for air experience wasn’t it? On, on -
KC: Yeah.
JC: What sort of aircraft? Those were on -
KC: Seeing if you were going to be airsick all the time.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Which, they would chuck you out of aircrew. Yeah.
JC: And that on what sort of planes were those you were flying?
KC: That was Tiger Moths.
JC: Tiger Moths.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Gosh.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. And how did you take to the flying? What was your sort of initial memories of doing that?
KC: I felt quite comfortable about it. I think, I mean I wasn’t eliminated or anything like that.
JC: Right and could you have been eliminated at that point?
KC: You could have, yeah.
JC: Right.
KC: If you didn’t cope reasonably well they’d chuck you off the course.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay and so, so that was sort of April May 1942 and then in June 1942 they put you on board this ship the SS Leticia.
KC: Leticia.
JC: Leticia that’s right. And that was -
KC: And we went across the Atlantic -
JC: And that was from up in Scotland. You had to go up to Scotland to catch -
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: That didn’t you? From the Clyde.
KC: The Clyde.
JC: To go over to Halifax in Nova Scotia.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And –
KC: We were chased by U-boats going across the Atlantic.
JC: That’s right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then, and then from there you travelled down on the trains through to Georgia to -
KC: Albany, Georgia.
JC: Albany, Georgia. That’s right.
KC: Took about three days and nights on the train.
JC: That’s it.
KC: Thousand, hundreds of miles. It was a distance train trip.
JC: Okay. But you were flying from a place called Turner Field.
KC: Turner Field.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Albany, Georgia.
JC: That’s it. Okay. And then you were, what sort of planes were you flying down there? This was -
KC: PT17s. Stearman.
JC: Okay.
KC: A biplane.
JC: And this -
KC: The American version of the Tiger Moth sort of thing.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But it was a heavier airplane than the Tiger Moth.
JC: And why were you sent over to the States to do, to do this?
KC: Because they wanted air crew quickly.
JC: Right. But why not train them up here?
KC: The only schools we had were absolutely jam packed full.
JC: I see. Okay.
KC: And to, they needed to, they needed hundreds more.
JC: Right.
KC: So we were sent. I mean some were sent to South Africa.
JC: Yes.
KC: I was sent to Canada and America.
JC: Right. And America was still neutral at this time wasn’t it?
KC: Yes. Yeah.
JC: So, so, so but they were still happy for, for aircrew to be trained up in America on this -
KC: Yeah.
JC: There was -
KC: I don’t know how we got away with that but we did.
JC: Yeah. Okay and this was something called, there was a name for this scheme wasn’t it? What was it called?
KC: The Arnold Scheme.
JC: The Arnold Scheme. Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Alright. Alright. So, so you did some training on these Stearmans and then they decided that you needed to do more flying and they sent you back up to Canada.
KC: Yeah.
JC: But the -
KC: They said they hadn’t got enough hours.
JC: Yes.
KC: To keep me down there because it was such a concentrated course down in America.
JC: Yeah.
KC: So they sent me back to Canada and they said I could carry on up there. All the lot of guys had got up there at this holding unit and I found I was there with about five hundred other guys who were also were waiting to carry on with their training.
JC: Right.
KC: And so I was there, I can’t remember how long I was there.
JC: So this was in, this was Trenton.
KC: Trenton, Ontario.
JC: Trenton, Ontario.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. So -
KC: Yeah.
JC: This was in September 1942.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And I think you were there for some months by the looks of it.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Through until about January, I think.
KC: Yeah.
JC: In 1943.
KC: In the process they’d come every so often and say, ‘would you like to become an air gunner?’ And I’d say no.
JC: Why didn’t you want to be an air gunner?
KC: Well I didn’t, I thought that was an unskilled job.
JC: Right. Okay, Fair enough. Okay. And so, so then they offered you this thing called an air bomber.
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: And what, what was that?
KC: Well, the air bomber, that was coinciding with the four engined bombers coming in to the RAF.
JC: Right.
KC: And -
JC: Like what sort of, examples of those, like what?
KC: The aircrew in the Lancaster.
JC: Yes.
KC: You had the pilot and the flight engineer.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Then you had two navigators. One was what they called the navigator plotter.
JC: Yes.
KC: His job was to work out time, course and so on and the other one was a navigator observer which was me.
JC: Right.
KC: My job was to do all the, operate the radar that we carried to drop our bomb loads using my radar. If we had to do visual bombing I had to also operate the bomb site down in the nose.
JC: Right.
KC: Of the Lancaster and I also was trained to use guns in the turrets in case we were attacked and the gunners were killed.
JC: Yes.
KC: My job was to get them out of the, out of the turret and take his place.
JC: Right.
KC: That sort of thing, you see.
JC: And wasn’t there some forward guns as well that you were supposed -
KC: Yes. In the, right in the nose.
JC: Yes.
KC: There was a turret.
JC: Yes.
KC: Right at the front and the gun protruded out the front.
JC: Yes.
KC: And down the tail end there were four guns in the tail end turret.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And the mid-upper turret -
JC: Yes.
KC: Were two guns.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Good okay. So you trained on this new job of air bomber for a period of several months. You came off and you were commissioned.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And coming out of the course. What rank was it again?
KC: I was a flight lieutenant.
JC: No. I think you were a pilot officer.
KC: Oh pilot officer, sorry.
JC: I think.
KC: Pilot officer. That’s right.
JC: That’s what you came out as didn’t you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then you were sent back to the UK at that time.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you went up to Wigtown to fly these Bothas. Bothas. What sort of aircraft was that?
KC: Botha was a twin engine.
JC: Yes.
KC: Aircraft, it had been an operational aircraft but they reckoned it was underpowered so they took it off ops.
JC: Right.
KC: And used it as advanced training for people like me going on to ops.
JC: And had you formed a crew at that time or were you just randomly -
KC: No.
JC: Assigned to -
KC: I was a random guy at that time.
JC: Right.
KC: Didn’t -
JC: Okay.
KC: Didn’t, get a crew until you got to the OTU.
JC: Okay so that was the next thing. You went to the OTU.
KC: Yeah.
JC: At Cottesmore.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were flying Wellingtons.
KC: Wellingtons.
JC: So you got a crew there.
KC: There, yeah.
JC: And how did you, what was the process of choosing a crew. How did you -
KC: [Laugh] That’s a good question. We were -
JC: Were you carefully selected and matched up?
KC: We were a lump, a lump of aircrew there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: All sorts and sizes gunners and wireless operators and bomb aimers and navigators and pilots and so on and we used to wander around in a, you literally used to go up and say, ‘Have you got a crew yet mate?’ And whoever it was would say, ‘No I haven’t. Would you like to join with me? I’m a navigator.’ He’d say, ‘What are you?’ ‘I’m an air bomber.’ He’d say, ‘Yeah fine.’ And then we’d keep together and we’d go to somebody else, ‘Would you like to come in our crew.’
JC: So it was -
KC: And that’s how it was done.
JC: So obviously it was a scientific and carefully managed process so –
KC: Yeah.
JC: So that was good. So tell me a bit about the crew that you, that you ended up with. What was the skipper’s name?
KC: Jim Kermans[?] He was much older. I mean, we were, I was twenty one, twenty two and he was twenty nine. He was the dad of the crew.
JC: Right.
KC: Twenty nine.
JC: And where was he from?
KC: He was an Australian.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Very staid sort of person. Not much sense of humour.
JC: Yeah.
KC: On thinking back he must have been worried to hell on every flight he did. That sort of impression.
JC: Did he give you that impression while you were there or did you think he kind of took it in his stride quite a bit?
KC: He did it a bit when I was there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: ‘Cause I had to get very close to him.
JC: Yeah.
KC: The pilot. With some of the things I had to do -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Was directly on behalf of the pilot.
JC: Right.
KC: So I had to get to know him.
JC: Yes.
KC: I mean he had a flight engineer.
JC: Yes.
KC: But er -
JC: What was the flight engineer’s name?
KC: Ken Randall.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And where was he from?
KC: The other navigator, what was called the navigator plotter was Don Bowes.
JC: Where was he -
KC: Who was an out and out Yorkshireman.
JC: Oh was he?
KC: He could hardly speak English. It was all Yorkshire stuff [laughs].
JC: Alright. What about, what about Ken Randall. Where was he from?
KC: Ken Randall, he was a Birmingham, brummy.
JC: Was he? Right Okay.
KC: Yeah. Yes.
JC: So you were meeting people from around the country that you’d probably never met people from that part of the world before.
KC: Yeah. It’s amazing how we welded into such a good crew.
JC: Yeah and what so what made a good crew do you think? What was -
KC: I think -
JC: How’d that work?
KC: You were individuals. In a crew of seven you’d find two or three of you were buddies and then suddenly a fourth one in the crew would sort of latch on to us ‘cause we’d go to a pub and he’d be there on his own.
JC: Right.
KC: And you’d say, ‘Come on. Have a drink,’ Sort of thing, you know.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And that helped to bring them in, you know.
JC: Right. So the pub was important then?
KC: Yeah. Oh yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: The village pub.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And where was the village pub? So you were -
KC: Bourne. Well when doing ops from Bourne -
JC: Yeah.
KC: We used to go down in the village pub, literally was in the village of Bourne.
JC: Right. Yeah.
KC: And we used to brews[?] in there and have a few.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And then get back and get to bed ‘cause we probably had to get up early morning to do some flying the next day.
JC: So, so on a so you obviously with Wellingtons you found your crew now.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Who else on the crew? So let’s just finish the crew off. So you’ve got your flight engineer, you’ve got your navigator, you’ve got your skipper who’s the pilot.
KC: Yeah.
JC: What about the, so you’ve got two gunners haven’t you?
KC: Yeah. We had, the mid upper gunner was a Canadian.
JC: Yes.
KC: And the tail gunner was an out and out broad Scotsman.
JC: Right.
KC: He used to get excited when we were on ops and he’d talk about this thing coming in and he used to shout and scream but it was in broad Scots and none of us could understand [laughs].
JC: [laughs] Brilliant. Okay. Good. So, Okay, so you’ve got your crew and you’ve moved over to the, to Winthorpe and then on to Bardney where you started operations in Bardney.
KC: I did ten ops at Bardney, 9 Squadron.
JC: And that was on Lancasters.
KC: Yes.
JC: On number 9 Squadron.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay and, and what sort of place, what was, what was Bardney like as a place to kind of work from?
KC: Bardney was very much a new airfield with Nissen huts.
JC: Yes.
KC: Everything was Nissen hutted accommodation.
JC: Right.
KC: And it seemed that, you know, everything was sparse there but it was just about enough for human people to live and be fed.
JC: Right.
KC: And then, but you were going off on ops and that from there and you used to think coming back oh I’ve got to come back to that bloody den downstairs again sort of thing, you know.
JC: Right. Right. And what so if you had an op, when did you know when you were flying on an operation. Did you -
KC: We were all, all the aircrew had to go for the briefing which was always held on the night of ops. The briefing was at two o’clock in the afternoon.
JC: Right.
KC: So all the aircrew that were about on the station would go straight towards the briefing room which was -
JC: Yes.
KC: Quite a huge room.
JC: Right.
KC: And they had table after table in there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And they could pack a couple of hundred or three hundred aircrew -
JC: Right.
KC: In there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And you’d walk in and then the far you came always came in at the back door. You walked in and you looked straight ahead because there were the maps of Germany and the continent ahead of you and there was the route you were going to fly that night and [?] we’d say, ‘Oh not bloody Berlin again.’ This was after I’d done about eight ops to Berlin, you know.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: And so, you know, we used to talk to one another, ‘Oh bloody Berlin again,’ you know.
JC: Yeah. Alright. So, so had the briefing room there. And who ran the briefings?
KC: The squadron commander.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And his flight commanders.
JC: Right. Okay.
KC: And of course they had specialists. I mean they had the guy who looked after the wireless operator guys.
JC: Yes. Yeah.
KC: And he was the radio wireless op king sort of thing.
JC: Yes. Yeah.
KC: And I think that was about it. What other trade was there? Oh the engineer.
JC: Right.
KC: Station engineer.
JC: Yes.
KC: Was always there.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And he would say something about what had happened to some of the aircraft. They had to do some modifications or.
JC: Right.
KC: And he also would cover anything wrong with the radar gear that we carried on board that had -
JC: Yes.
KC: Been modifications to it dadedadeda.
JC: Right.
KC: And all that stuff.
JC: Right. What other things came out of the briefings? I guess you would have some intelligence. There would be an intelligence officer there.
KC: They showed the route and they had a large scale map on the wall, the big wall at the end of briefing room but all they had shading areas showing where all the searchlight belts were -
JC: Yes.
KC: Over Germany.
JC: Yes.
KC: And where the night fighter air fields were -
JC: Yeah.
KC: In Germany.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And heavily populated areas. They were brought out to show you that -
JC: Yeah.
KC: You know don’t go flying over these on the way because they’ll shoot you down.
JC: Right.
KC: If you get mixed up with some of these other cities.
JC: Yes.
KC: On the way in to, in to your target in Germany.
JC: Yeah. Okay and so how long would a briefing typically take, would you say?
KC: Sorry.
JC: How long would a briefing typically take?
KC: I should say minimum of two hours.
JC: About two hours.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And then would there be a break and you could go off or did you then go straight to -
KC: They would tell you what time briefing was going to be.
JC: Yeah.
KC: For the raid.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They would announce what time the night flying meal was arranged for.
JC: Right.
KC: So you had a good cooked meal before you went.
JC: What sort of things would you have before you go up?
KC: Eggs and bacon ‘cause eggs were rationed. Eggs and bacon and you know tomato and things like that.
JC: Right.
KC: Lovely.
JC: Lovely, yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. There’s got to be some pros to it I suppose. So, that’s good. Okay and so you have your meal and then what happens? You go to your dispersal do you?
KC: You went back to your room in dispersal and if it –
JC: How did you travel around the base did you –?
KC: Bike.
JC: On bike.
KC: [We were drove?] or bike.
JC: Right. Okay. So you would ride out and it could be a half a mile away or that kind of distance.
KC: Yeah.
JC: To your -
KC: A couple of miles.
JC: A couple of miles.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: Could be. Yeah.
JC: So it could be getting dark by this point and you’d be cycling off to –
KC: Yeah.
JC: And the plane would be there and there would be a building next to the plane that you would, you would sit in prior to -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Going off would you?
KC: Well remember we had to go back to briefing.
JC: Yes.
KC: For the raid.
JC: Yes. Okay. So that’s in addition to that. So you had a second meeting then -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Do you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay and what was, what was the purpose of that? That second meeting.
KC: Sorry?
JC: Have a drink. Have a drink, dad.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Sorry. I’m getting you to do too much talking.
[pause]
JC: And what would, what would the purpose of that second meeting be dad? The briefing. What was different from that from the first, the first briefing in the afternoon?
KC: Any changes of timing.
JC: Ah I see. Okay.
KC: Something might come through from group head or command headquarters.
JC: Yeah.
KC: That they’d found out something about Jerry tactics or something was going to happen.
JC: Yes.
KC: So that might modify the way you were going in. They may even change the route.
JC: Right.
KC: ‘Cause they were ‘cause your original route would take you right into the middle where all the German night fighters were.
JC: I see.
KC: So they would re-route you.
JC: Right. So they’d have updates on intelligence.
KC: To try to avoid that.
JC: Okay. So they’d have updated information. Alright. So you’d have that second briefing and then you’d go off to your dispersal area. Right? Is that -
KC: Yes. Yeah.
JC: Yes. Okay and then would you go straight in to the plane or sit around in the dispersal area for a bit or how, how long a -
KC: We used to sit in our room.
JC: Yes.
KC: You know, I mean it was Nissen huts where I was. I probably had about four or five guys on beds in the same Nissen huts -
JC: Yes.
KC: That I was.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: So I we’d have a chinwag or you know you’d, you may have wanted to go and have a bath or something like that.
JC: Right.
KC: You know.
JC: What else did you do to kind of while away the time ‘cause obviously there was lots of sitting around waiting isn’t there? So -
KC: Yeah if this lady wasn’t here I’d tell you exactly what we were doing [laughs].
JC: Right okay fine I think we’ll leave that to the imagination there, dad. That’s fine. Okay. [laughs].
KC: Yeah.
JC: What about things, did you play cards or anything like that or -
KC: Some of the guys did. Yes.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And -
JC: Yeah.
KC: And card games or poker and things like that.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Well, you know, poker’s a card game.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Things like that.
JC: Chess and things like that?
KC: Chess, yeah.
JC: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, alright so then the time came and you had to get in, get in to the plane.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Presumably you had to suit up. Just describe what you had to wear before you -
KC: Well, you’d, you obviously would put your flying overalls on.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But we used to have odd pockets in these flying overalls and so each chap would decide whether he wanted to take a knife, bars of chocolate stuffed down the leg or something like that.
JC: Yeah.
KC: In case you bailed out and -
JC: Sure.
KC: You wanted, you know. That was the idea was to take something like bars of chocolate.
JC: Didn’t you have ration packs as well?
KC: Oh yes.
JC: Did you have emergency rations?
KC: Yeah. Had a -
JC: Or something.
KC: Ration pack, yes.
JC: Yeah. Yeah that you carried with you.
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay. So you had your overalls on and what else? What other things did you have to put on before you climbed in to the plane?
KC: Well, obviously the Mae West.
JC: Yes. What’s a Mae West for those that wouldn’t know?
KC: The Mae West was, was the, if you came down in the sea you wore it. You had your flying suit on and also your underclothing and anything like that and then this Mae West went over the top and it had a system of buoyancy.
JC: Right.
KC: But also you could inflate air. The little bottle -
JC: Right.
KC: With air and you could pull a plug plunger and that would shoot air and this thing would, from being close to you would suddenly you were in the middle of a floatation -
JC: Right.
KC: Gadget.
JC: Yes.
KC: Sort of thing, you see.
JC: Yes. So like a lifejacket almost. Yes.
KC: So if your aircraft came down in the sea and you had to get out of it whatever happened ‘cause it was going down with you on board –
JC: Yes.
KC: This was how you made your thing work so at least you.
[phone ringing]
JC: Yes. Yes. Okay so we’ve got that. And then what else? You presumably have a flying jacket would you, as well? That you would need to, to wear.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes.
KC: During the war they changed those quite a bit. I had one that was very woolly and fluffy.
JC: Yes.
KC: But it was also a nuisance ‘cause it was all padded in the wrong places and things like that for wear.
JC: Oh really.
KC: So it wasn’t, it wasn’t sensible.
JC: Oh right.
KC: So we chose not to wear that. We wore them in the middle of winter of course.
JC: Right. Yeah.
KC: But if we could get away without it we’d put an extra jumper on.
JC: Yes. Okay. Okay, alright so you put, put all that clothing. What about a parachute? Did you have to wear one of those?
KC: We all wore harness.
JC: Yes.
KC: What they called parachute harness.
JC: Yeah.
KC: With clips on the front and your parachute was a pack about that wide.
JC: Yes.
KC: Which was stored somewhere handy for where you sat.
JC: Right.
KC: In the aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: And the idea was that if you had to get out the first thing you don’t enquire, ‘Where’s my bloody chute?’
JC: Yeah.
KC: You took it with you and as you went out of the aircraft you clipped it on.
JC: Yes.
KC: You pulled the thing so you come down alright, you know.
JC: I see. Okay.
KC: That was the drill that you were taught.
JC: That was the idea was it okay. And this was all -
KC: And I was pleased not to have to do that.
JC: Yes that’s good. Leaving a perfectly good plane. Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay so that’s how you dressed. So you climb into the plane and then presumably what happens then the kind of engines on and you’ve got sort of checks that you have to do before -
KC: Yeah and you had checks to do and you got in to the aircraft. Each of us had our pre-flight checks to do.
JC: Yeah.
KC: You know, I had to get all my equipment, bits of equipment that I carried.
JC: Yes.
KC: To do my job. And if I was using radar which I was had to set up the radar sets. [ ?]
JC: Have a drink. You’re not used to talking this much are you dad? Actually, you are used to talking this much. Yeah.
[Pause]
JC: So you’re getting your radar sets ready. Yes.
KC: Yeah. Getting it all set up and you know you’d obviously plug in your leads to make sure you were on the air with everybody else in the aircraft.
JC: Yes.
KC: And just check that out.
JC: What about oxygen and stuff like that?
KC: Oxygen. Yeah.
JC: Pre-test that?
KC: You each had your oxygen point where you sat.
JC: Yes.
KC: [Excuse me] and plug that in.
JC: Yes and did you have if you needed to move around the aircraft you had presumably a kind of mobile -
KC: Yes. A portable bottle that you could -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Pick up. They were stowed in two or three places in the aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: So if you I mean for instance if you wanted to use the loo in the Lanc.
JC: Yes.
KC: You had to go right to the back of the bloody aircraft.
JC: Was that presumably where the rear gunner was, was it?
KC: You went right near to the rear.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Gunner.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But to get there you had to climb over what we called the main spar.
JC: Yes.
KC: Which went right through the middle of the main wing.
JC: Yes.
KC: But also went through the cockpit bit where we were.
JC: The fuselage. Yeah.
KC: So to get to that you had to literally climb over this thing.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: With all your garb on you know.
JC: Yeah. Yes. And -
KC: Not popular that.
JC: Yes and a slightly personal question but what was it like going to the loo on a Lancaster?
KC: Shall I tell you?
JC: Go on. Yes.
KC: Well on one occasion my bottom froze to the, to the pan.
JC: Did it? ‘Cause it was a metal toilet seat.
KC: We moaned about these things and then they changed this seat from metal to plastic because of that. Because not only me but some of the other guys had gone to the toilet and found they couldn’t get their bottom of the toilet. It was frozen on. It‘s absolutely true.
JC: Oh right okay. Alright.
KC: And -
JC: Yes. So -
KC: Yeah. I don’t think I’d better say any more about that.
JC: Okay dad. There’s enough detail there. Thank you dad. That’s good. Alright. So, so you’ve done your pre-flight checks, you’re in the plane and then you’re kind of taking off. Now that must have been quite a spectacle being there with lots of aircraft taking off at one time.
KC: Oh yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: What was that like? ‘Cause I guess you were able to, where you were sitting, look out and see -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Other aircraft around were you?
KC: See. Yeah, all the aircraft encroaching towards the beginning of the runway.
JC: Right.
KC: So they might have come right across the other side of the airfield. The airfields were pretty big.
JC: Yes.
KC: So they were taxiing around the peri track, they were.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: And suddenly all converge and all these aircraft were coming from all directions to -
JC: Yes.
KC: That one point.
JC: Yes.
KC: To get to the end of the runway.
JC: Right.
KC: That used to be a bit nightmarish at times because -
JC: You could have crashed into each other.
KC: Some of the guys used to get too bloody close and -
JC: Yeah.
KC: Bang the tips of their wings and things like that.
JC: Right okay so alright so can you, have a drink dad.
KC: Yeah.
JC: I was just going to ask you what your memories are of your early operations because that must have been quite, quite, you know, scary as a new crew.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Relatively new crew. Can you -
KC: It was, it was horrific.
JC: Yes.
KC: Is the fair way. In terms of there were these guys on the ground shooting up and trying to get you and you were flying along and suddenly there was a bloody great explosion out to the right and somebody’s been hit by ack ack and he’s exploded with all his bombs on board. The first time you see that is quite an eye opener I can tell you.
JC: I bet.
KC: And I used to see, we used to see it on almost every raid we went on. Some poor sod would get a direct hit from -
JC: Yeah.
KC: German ground ack ack stuff and what they, of course they had their night fighters up as well.
JC: And what sort of planes were those. Those were -
KC: They were –
JC: Messerschmitts, were they? Messerschmitt 109s.
KC: Messerschmitt and they were twin engine Messerschmitts.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And they had a tactic.
KC: The ME109 was single.
JC: Right.
KC: But they had ME110s.
JC: Right.
KC: Which was a two man crew.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah. And they were deadly.
JC: Yes. On what –
KC: ‘Cause they had the latest radar as we had the latest radar.
JC: Right.
KC: So they could pick us up.
JC: Right. And what was their tactic? You said about them using to try and fly up underneath.
KC: Yeah.
JC: I remember you saying about that.
KC: Their main tactic was to get A, to get themselves into the bomber stream.
JC: Yes.
KC: Our bomber stream.
JC: Yes.
KC: And then they had to use their own radar to pick us up.
JC: Yes.
KC: Bearing in mind we were going across twenty or twenty five thousand feet across coming up from the ground.
JC: Yes.
KC: From Germany and across the North Sea and so on.
JC: Yes.
KC: So they would suddenly find they were up among us.
JC: Right.
KC: And we soon knew they were there because suddenly, you’d be going along all nice and dark and suddenly boom an aircraft blew up just in front of you.
JC: Right.
KC: ‘Cause they, if they attacked us on the way to the target we all still had all our bombs on board.
JC: And was that the tactic that they used to try and shoot up into the bomb bays as well.
KC: Yes they used to fly. If that was me flying along with my crew along there they used to come up there.
JC: Yes.
KC: And they’d open up because they knew all your bombs were in the bomb bay.
JC: Yes.
KC: On the bottom side of the aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: So their idea was to explode our bombs.
JC: Yes.
KC: To blow us up.
JC: Right. Right. I see.
KC: And the nearest I ever had in my crew was when they did that ‘cause they did it several times but this particular occasion the, they were so close they were too close when they opened fire.
JC: Right.
KC: So the cannon shells came through the bottom of the aircraft, missed all our bombs but they ended up some of them in the front cockpit just missing me and the pilot and the other navigator.
JC: Right.
KC: But it was so close, bearing in mind we were wearing oxygen masks, the bomber crew.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But it was the cordite when the shells exploded in the aircraft.
JC: Yes.
KC: Was so strong even with oxygen mask I could smell, smell the cordite.
JC: Right.
KC: From the cannon shells exploding -
JC: Right.
KC: Inside the aircraft.
JC: That’s amazing.
KC: But also of course they came through and didn’t just stop. They kept flying through and this particular case of the attack they broke our plexiglass nose.
JC: Right.
KC: It shattered.
JC: Yes.
KC: So we had a gale blowing in the front didn’t we ‘cause there was no blooming plexiglass to protect us.
JC: Right.
KC: I’ve never forgotten that one. Yeah.
JC: Because didn’t you have to go down there as well to do the bombing?
KC: Visual. If the radar didn’t work.
JC: Yes.
KC: You didn’t bring your bombs back. You went down. I had to be able to use the visual bomb sight.
JC: Yes.
KC: The Mark 14 bomb sight.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: Lying prone and looking through the actual bomb site and directing the pilot verbally over the intercom telling him which, to go left, right, up or down whatever the case might be.
JC: Yes.
KC: Because I was using my bomb sight.
JC: Yes.
KC: To aim at what I thought was the target we were going for.
JC: And, and so what stopped you from just dumping the bombs and heading off home? Why, why would that, you know.
KC: Well we weren’t going to do that. Fly all that bloody way and not drop our bombs were we?
JC: Yeah I know but why, why was it so important to, to kind of, you know, get, get them on target. Would you have been required -
KC: Well -
JC: To come back again if you -
KC: Because when you operated the bomb release.
JC: Yes.
KC: You set in motion a line overlap camera.
JC: Right.
KC: There was a camera built up in the bomb bay.
JC: Yes.
KC: And when your bomb doors was open and you pressed the bomb button to release the bombs, it operated this camera.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Which then took a line overlap the ground that you were flying over so when you got over that back to base the station photographic officer came in and took the camera thing out of the camera, whatever they called it, you know.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Part of the camera away.
JC: Yes.
KC: And developed it and could, they could plot and decide whether you’d bombed your target or you’d bombed ploughed fields or something.
JC: Yes and so if you hadn’t hit the target they’d send you back there again the next night basically.
KC: That wouldn’t have counted as an op.
JC: And wouldn’t counted it as an op. So you would have -
KC: And your crew would kill you.
JC: Yeah. Yes.
KC: ‘You didn’t do it properly Ken. You made us do another bloody op Ken.’
JC: So but I guess on the other side of that there would be occasions where you were over a target being shot at.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And searchlights going everywhere weren’t there?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And you were trying to make sure you hit it and they probably wanted you to leave quick sharp didn’t they?
KC: The rest of the crew.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They’d say, ‘Ken drop the bloody thing. Drop it.’ [laughs]
JC: Yeah. Yeah okay. Alright.
KC: And I didn’t.
JC: No. No. No.
KC: And so when we came back I knew I had a good photograph of what we’d actually, where we’d bombed.
JC: Yeah.
KC: We had bombed the proper target.
JC: Okay so you did those early, those early operations in 9 Squadron and then you were moved to 97 Squadron as part of the Pathfinder force.
KC: Yes.
JC: Why, why were you selected to go to the Pathfinder force?
KC: I think we discussed as a crew because if you went there you got a promotion.
JC: Right.
KC: You got another rank.
JC: I see.
KC: Okay.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah. And we felt that we’d done ten ops on main force.
JC: Yeah.
KC: What we called main force. We felt we were ready to upgrade ourselves.
JC: Right.
KC: And so we volunteered and went through the, of course we had to learn all the latest radar which the main force -
JC: Did you automatically get put on to Pathfinders if you volunteered or is there a selection process that you had to go through. Did they, because presumably they wanted?
KC: There was a selection process.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay.
KC: But they knew your record if you’d already done ten ops on. As I had.
JC: Yes.
KC: As we had on 9 Squadron.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They knew that you knew what was going on.
JC: Yes.
KC: Sort of thing.
JC: Yes.
KC: And they still put us through this course to learn the latest radar.
JC: Right.
KC: That the Pathfinders had that the main force didn’t have.
JC: So tell, what was the role of the Pathfinder force? What was that really about?
KC: The role of the Pathfinder force was obviously to find the target and mark it with pyrotech markers or whatever –
JC: Yeah.
KC: You were, had been told to use. It was also part of our job was to put down route markers because some of the main force would lose their radar on the way.
JC: Right.
KC: So we’d put markers down which were at their briefings they would be told that route markers would be dropped and look out for a red/yellow or whatever pyrotechnic coming down. That’s the one you aim for going towards the target and things like that you know.
JC: So it was like breadcrumbs was it?
KC: Yeah. Yeah.
JC: Laid for you and you did they breadcrumbs.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Right. Okay. Okay and why, why did they need you to put markers down? Why couldn’t every, every crew just - what, what was the purpose of marking?
KC: They were not highly trained like we were.
JC: Right.
KC: We had been put through these special courses when we joined the Pathfinder force. We had special courses to try to get us to work to the odd minute.
JC: Yes.
KC: Of time.
JC: Yes.
KC: Bearing in mind we were going on a twelve to fifteen hour flight and to talk about getting within the minute or two or whatever was quite a tall order.
JC: Right.
KC: But we did it.
JC: Yeah.
KC: The guys who were, like me who were Pathfinders. That’s what we had to be able to do.
JC: Okay.
KC: That’s why I got a DFC at the end of it.
JC: Good. Yeah. Your timekeeping. That’s good.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Good. So you, so you did this role and you, you marked the targets. Were you also dropping live munitions as well or was it just markers that you were dropping?
KC: Oh every time we dropped bombs.
JC: Yeah. You dropped bombs as well.
KC: Well when I pressed the button to let go the markers.
JC: Yeah.
KC: On that stick of bombing that I was using.
JC: Yeah.
KC: We were getting rid of incendiaries, sometimes incendiaries.
JC: Yes.
KC: Would go down.
JC: Yeah.
KC: A shower of them or it could be incendiaries plus five hundred pound bombs were going down.
JC: Right.
KC: It could be a whole stick of all that stuff.
JC: Yes.
KC: And then in the middle of that we were dropping stuff called Window.
JC: And what is Window?
KC: Window was the code name given to stuff that we used to throw out, disperse out of the aircraft to try to muck about with the ground radar system so it would instead of just getting, picking up our aircraft this was a massive metalised thing that dropped out of our aircraft and it caused consternation to the Jerries on the ground because instead of getting one clear blip of a bomber suddenly there was a bloody great cloud of stuff and you couldn’t pick out the bombers.
JC: Right.
KC: Because of our, the stuff we dropped out of the aircraft.
JC: It sort of confused.
KC: One of the tactics we were doing things against them and they were doing things against us.
JC: Right.
KC: But this was the sort of thing that we were trained to do.
JC: Right. Right. Okay. Okay and so were the Pathfinders always ahead of the main force or did they, ‘cause they had to mark the target.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Or did they have to -
KC: They were always the primary markers.
JC: Yes.
KC: They were Pathfinder primary markers.
JC: Yes.
KC: And you did that when you were, had become very -
JC: Yes.
KC: Experienced Pathfinders.
JC: Right.
KC: But then because some of the raids we had seven or eight hundred aircraft on.
JC: Yes.
KC: There had to be marker crews coming in towards the end.
JC: Yes.
KC: To drop markers for the last lot of ordinary bomber boys that were coming in.
JC: Yes.
KC: They still needed to find and put their bombs down on the target.
JC: Right.
KC: So the Pathfinder guys, believe it or not, we used to hate that. If you were one of the unlucky sods to come at the end you know you would get everything shot out of you because -
JC: Yeah.
KC: By the time you got there the Jerries knew you were coming anyway.
JC: Right.
KC: And their night fighters were up amongst you.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But usually very experienced Pathfinder crews that came in towards the end.
JC: Right.
KC: To make sure that the rest of the main force had some markers to aim at.
JC: Right. Okay. Okay that’s good. Alright. So, any particular, so you obviously did quite a few operations. You did forty five in total didn’t you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And any, any, any of them stand out in your mind at all for any reason?
KC: Um -
JC: You mentioned Berlin as a difficult place to go to.
KC: I did ten ops to Berlin.
JC: Yes.
KC: I think what was the, there was, also we did trips to the Ruhr area.
JC: Yes.
KC: Which was full of anti-aircraft. That was a terrible lot to go over because they used to try to knock you out of the sky straight away. There were some trips. I’m trying to think. I’ll think of it in a minute.
JC: Well just while you’re thinking about that the other thing is obviously during your operational time was the, of, was preparations for D-Day wasn’t it? Going in to -
KC: Yeah.
JC: 1944.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And so you started to intersperse operations over Germany with operations over France.
KC: Absolutely.
JC: And so what was your role really in the kind of run up to D-Day?
KC: We, we were given targets, German targets on the beaches.
JC: Yes.
KC: The Normandy beaches.
JC: Yes.
KC: We were given targets for about three nights in a row.
JC: Yes.
KC: To cover the Germans.
JC: Yes.
KC: They had built quite hefty defence systems behind the beaches of Normandy and we went over, and we came down lowish to do it. We didn’t do it at twenty odd thousand. I think we were dropping stuff over, over the French coast about ten thousand feet.
JC: Right.
KC: And so the idea was to make sure that you clobbered all the German ‘cause they had tanks on the beaches.
JC: Yes.
KC: And they’d built in gun systems.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Into the rocks and so on the beaches and so we used to go and drop sticks of flares to have a look and then when we could see them we’d turn around and do a visual run over them and clobber them.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. So that was a, was a slightly different role then from what you’d been -
KC: From normal.
JC: Normal operations.
KC: The normal mass bombing.
JC: Yes. Yes.
KC: We did in places. The big cities in Germany.
JC: Yes. Okay. Alright. So you, so you did all that and that took you up to, to around the time of D-Day which is when I think you had your, your last operation. July 1944 in fact was your, no, sorry, April 1944 was your final operation I think.
KC: Where was that too?
JC: I don’t know. I haven’t got a note of that but your, certainly your latter ones you did, I think, ten or twelve operations over France.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Various parts of France.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Including the Normandy, the sort of, the immediate environment of the beaches.
KC: That’s why I got that gong.
JC: That’s right. Yeah so that was why you got the Legion d’honneur.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So yes you did that. Then you moved on to do sort of training type roles didn’t you? After -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Preparing other crews to go up.
KC: Yeah. That was one of the worrying things in my life.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Whenever I flew with people I’d say, I’d say to, when I got down I’d say that bloody Pardew[?] he can’t land it.
JC: Yes.
KC: He was doing what we called a kangaroo landing every time he landed.
JC: Oh really. Bouncing down the runway.
KC: Yeah.
JC: With inexperienced crews.
KC: Yeah.
JC: And your role with them was to prepare them on the radars and that sort of thing.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Okay and how were you feeling at this kind of time? What was the sort of, ‘cause you’d done forty five operations so an experienced hand at doing all this so what was your sort of feeling about things? Do you recall how, how that was?
KC: Yes. I felt that I was due for a rest.
JC: Right.
KC: I felt I was happy to come back again.
JC: Yeah.
KC: But I felt we’d had some real tough ops.
JC: Yes.
KC: We’d been on Pathfinders.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And I thought enough is enough for a while.
JC: Yes.
KC: And that’s the way it went.
JC: Yes and you had, I think at least one or two operations where you come back and you’d lost engines.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yes and so -
KC: Yes, that’s, yeah at its believe it or not I was never terribly worried about that as long as –
JC: Yeah.
KC: We had two or three engines left.
JC: Yes.
KC: The Lanc would fly on it alright.
JC: Yes.
KC: But if you lost two engines -
JC: Yes.
KC: Particularly on one side.
JC: Yes.
KC: That could be, that meant that meant the pilot really, it was it was really critical because he had to operate the pedals to offset the fact he hadn’t have any power on one side.
JC: Yes.
KC: He’s got all the power on the left side.
JC: Yes.
KC: Or the right side.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And it needed quite a bit of physical effort to control that.
JC: Right. Right. Okay -
KC: But we had this chap Jim Kermans [?] who was a bloody good pilot.
JC: Yes.
KC: He was mature. He was twenty nine years old and we were all about twenty one.
JC: Right.
KC: The rest of the crew.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And he was mature, he was a trained lawyer in Australia.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And you know he was, he was a great guy really.
JC: Right.
KC: I didn’t like him too much as a man.
JC: Right.
KC: ‘Cause he hadn’t got any sense of humour.
JC: Right.
KC: But as, as an aviator he was tops.
JC: Yes. Got you back safely all those -
KC: Yes.
JC: All those times.
KC: Yes.
JC: Yes. Yeah, so that’s good and what happened to the crew after you finished your forty five operations. Did you stay in touch with them or did you all disperse to do other things?
KC: We soon dispersed off.
JC: Yes.
KC: To do, you know, different members of the crew, whatever their job was, they were sent to training schools.
JC: Yes.
KC: To, like the wireless operator guy would go -
JC: Yeah.
KC: To help train new boys and so on and that sort of thing. Yeah.
JC: Yeah. Okay, alright. And at the end of the war you were you did this goodwill tour as well which we hadn’t spoken about so -
KC: To America.
JC: Yes. So, tell, tell us about that. That was with quite a famous squadron wasn’t it?
KC: 617.
JC: Yes with 617.
KC: The one that Guy Gibson when they did the -
JC: Yes.
KC: Eder dams and all that.
JC: Yes that’s right. The Dambusters.
KC: They were based at that time at Binbrook.
JC: Right.
KC: And the AOC asked me would I like to go along -
JC: Yes.
KC: And fly on that trip to America with 617.
JC: And what was the purpose of the trip? You said it was a goodwill tour.
KC: Goodwill.
JC: So it was to -
KC: We were going to first of all flew across the Atlantic to Washington DC.
JC: Yes.
KC: And whilst we there of course we, the public were invited to come and look at our aircraft because you know we had, we had operational bomber aircraft.
JC: Right.
KC: So the public were invited in, in their droves.
JC: Yeah.
KC: To see our Lancasters.
JC: Yeah.
KC: You know, and it was quite a sight.
JC: Yeah.
KC: To have the whole squadron of Lancaster lined up on their airfields.
JC: Yeah.
KC: And the crowds would come in literally in their hundreds and thousands.
JC: Right.
KC: To see them.
JC: Right.
KC: You know.
JC: And what’s your memories of America having gone from wartime Britain. You know, immediately after the war to what was your lasting memory of America?
KC: I thought they were lucky sods.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah because -
JC: I guess the food was slightly different wasn’t it?
KC: Oh yeah. Yeah, that was lovely you know ‘cause we were still on rationing back home.
JC: Yes.
KC: But there we had the best of everything.
JC: Yes.
KC: That we could lay our hands on.
JC: Yes.
KC: You know.
JC: Fantastic.
KC: Sorry that sounds awful but you know what I mean.
JC: Fantastic. Okay and, alright so, and so you toured around the States with this -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Good-will tour. Okay. Right -
KC: We were on Lincolns by the way.
JC: You flew on Lincolns. Not on -
KC: Not Lancasters.
JC: Right.
KC: They’d just brought the Lincoln in and we were, we took, was it twelve or fourteen Lincolns across to America? And of course everywhere we went, the first thing we would arrive we would do a flypast.
JC: Yes.
KC: Bloody great Lancs flying over the town.
JC: Or Lincolns, yeah.
KC: Or Lincolns rather.
JC: Yeah. Yeah.
KC: Flying over their towns.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Which they seemed to enjoy and we went right across. I mean we started off in Washington DC was our first port of call and then to Detroit. Across America to Detroit and from Detroit across to Kansas and Kansas to LA and from LA coming back more south. What was the place in the south? I’ve forgotten the big cities across the south.
JC: Was it Dallas or somewhere like that?
KC: Dallas, yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Dallas was one of them.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah and then back up to Washington eventually.
JC: Right.
KC: And from there and then we took off and flew back to England.
JC: Right. Right.
KC: It was, to me it was an absolute education ‘cause I mean we saw the states you know all the time.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Seeing places we’d read about and never been to.
JC: Yes, fantastic alright. Good. Okay so you came back and then you had your post war career and you carried on flying Mosquitos and then you converted to some of the early jets didn’t you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: And what was that like? Going from a sort of a propeller-driven plane to a, to a jet.
KC: That was an education.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yeah. So that was, that was the early Meteors and then on to Javelins wasn’t it?
KC: Javelins. Yeah.
JC: Yes. Yes, okay.
KC: Yeah.
JC: So, good -
KC: Super planes they were. I thought anyway.
JC: Okay and you took and you took some of these planes on overseas didn’t you? I remember seeing pictures of you in places like Cyprus.
KC: Yeah.
JC: You went on training.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Operations didn’t you? Down -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Down there.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Were you involved in any of the sort of post war, so there was obviously problems in Cyprus and then there was -
KC: Yeah, we were there.
JC: In Suez and things like that were you?
KC: What aircraft did we have to go there?
JC: It would have been either Meteors or, or Javelins I’m assuming. Was it?
KC: I think it was Javelins.
JC: Yes.
KC: Yeah ‘cause when we were there we were the air commander of Cyprus [billed us?] we were told quickly, ‘You are now part of my defence force.’
JC: Right.
KC: Sort of thing and I was going off at night in the dark. My crew and other members of the crew and so on ‘cause they were having problems with the, what are they called? The Jews. You know the -
JC: The Israelis.
KC: Israelis. Yeah.
JC: Yeah.
KC: They were being a nuisance and coming over Cyprus and things like that.
JC: Right.
KC: And into the Cyprus airspace.
JC: Yeah.
KC: So we’d get scrambled to go and chase them off.
JC: Yeah.
KC: At night.
JC: Okay.
KC: But they were also Turkey were reinforcing their own people because there were a lot of Turks on the island of Cyprus.
JC: Yes.
KC: And the Turks were bringing in, we found out through flying -
JC: Yeah.
KC: They were bringing it, dropping in at night on parachutes.
JC: Right.
KC: Down to their own people in the villages.
JC: Yes.
KC: So we, more than once I’d been up the backside of one of these guys dropping stuff to the Turks from Turkey.
JC: What? Transport planes -
KC: Yeah.
JC: Coming over.
KC: Yeah I used to hone in on them I used to tell our control downstairs, ‘Got one, I’m locked on to him. I’ve got one.’
JC: Right.
KC: And they used to say 'Monitor him. Keep an eye on him.'
JC: Yeah.
KC: For the -
JC: Right okay fantastic. And then you say you carried on and you actually moved. Did a permanent stint out in Aden. What was going on in Aden? Why, why was there an air force base in Aden?
KC: I’m trying to think what made me, what made us go there.
JC: It was a British protectorate really wasn’t it?
KC: It was a British protectorate and I think that, I can’t remember how I ended up going there, what made me go there but that was a very interesting part of my life because you know we were the forerunner of what later was going to be problems up in the Persian Gulf.
JC: Right.
KC: From Aden I used to jump on aeroplanes and go up to some of these towns, biggish towns and so on the Persian Gulf which later became real trouble spots.
JC: Right.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Okay. Okay so that was that and then you came back and I think you did sort of some MOD type roles until the end of your air force career in 1968. Moving around. Non-flying duties. Yes. Yeah, okay.
KC: I’d had my innings.
JC: You’d had your innings at that point. Had your innings at that point. Okay. Good.
KC: I was very lucky to get away with it, with what I did when I think when I look back at what I did and what could have gone wrong, you know things like that. Amazing.
JC: Amazing. Yeah absolutely.
KC: Yeah.
JC: Good. Alright.
KC: You’ve got a history book now.
SJ: We have [laughs]. So did you have any lucky charms or superstitions?
KC: No. I honestly didn’t. I didn’t believe in it.
SJ: Yeah.
KC: No. No.
PJ: They say a lot of crews are superstitious or they were weren’t they, you know and there was always this little teddy bear in their -
KC: Yeah. I don’t think I had anything like that.
PJ: Coat or something.
KC: No. No. No.
JC: No. You didn’t believe in all of that.
KC: No.
JC: Just a good square meal.
KC: That’s right.
JC: What happened, what happened when you got back from flying, as well? Presumably you got another, there was a debriefing.
KC: No.
JC: Was it a debriefing?
KC: We got a night flying supper.
JC: You got a – did you?
KC: That’s what it was called. The night flying supper.
JC: Oh right. So you had a good meal before you went and a good meal when you came back did you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Oh right.
KC: When we came back there would be plates of eggs and bacon.
JC: Again.
KC: Beans and things like that again you know.
JC: Yeah.
KC: We, well we’d been flying for the last ten hours.
PJ: Yeah.
KC: Things like that and we were a bit, bit ravenous.
JC: Yeah. Did you take presumably in addition to your kit could you take things up in the plane with you?
KC: Yeah.
JC: A flask of coffee and things like that, did you?
KC: Yeah Mars bars and things like that. Stick it down there.
JC: Yes.
KC: There was a zip pocket in your trouser leg.
JC: Yes.
KC: And so on to stick a couple of Mars bars in there and things like that.
JC: Keep you going yeah?
KC: Just in case you had to bail out.
JC: Yes.
KC: People used to try and think ahead and think well at least I’ve got a couple of Mars bars I can have something to eat for the next couple of hours or so.
JC: Yes. Yeah, okay.
PJ: Did you all used to go out for a drink together? ‘Cause there was always this thing isn’t there, they say, that good crews -
JC: Well I -
PJ: All stuck together, and they all went out together like family.
KC: Well we did a lot of it. The strange thing was that some of my crew were not terribly social. Only one or two of them and we were seven in the crew of course and there was probably three or four of us that did that and there were a couple who always had a reason for not coming. Yeah. But you know we used to get on and let them do with what they wanted to do.
JC: Was there anybody out of the crew you felt particularly friendly with compared to the others?
KC: Em, Ken Randall, our flight engineer was a lovely chap. Brummy. You know, Birmingham. He was almost naïve but he was absolutely a totally professional flight engineer. He knew everything about all the engines. He could hear noises nobody else could hear coming from the engines and things like that and nice boy, nice fella.
JC: Yeah.
KC: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Our tail gunner was absolutely, absolutely, absolutely broad Scotch so if we were being shot at, being chased he would shout but he was shouting in Scot and we couldn’t understand [laughs].
JC: Okay was, he was from Glasgow or somewhere wasn’t he?
KC: Yeah.
JC: Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, yes. Fantastic. Good. Any other questions? I think I’ve got most of the ones from here.
SJ: Yeah. How do you feel that Bomber Command has been treated since the war?
KC: Pretty grim I think. Politicians I think are absolutely shysters. They want, you know they want things their own way and, but they don’t realise how people are doing trying to please them and I always felt that some of the things I’ve read that were going on around me were absolutely terrible. Politicians, on the whole, I have no time for them. They’re just there for the moment and they get what they can at the time and that’s it. But then that’s me. I could be quite different from anybody else on that.
PJ: What about a medal? A campaign medal?
KC: Yeah.
PJ: Do you think it’s, that you should have had a medal because they never had a medal did they? They had the bomber clasp they just brought in. A campaign medal.
KC: Well, I had medals.
PJ: Yeah but a campaign medal for, you know like for actual the bombing duties and -
JC: You had, you had a war medal.
KC: Yeah.
JC: You have an Aircrew Europe Medal, you had a defence medal and a Pathfinder Eagle.
KC: Yeah. And I got a DFC.
JC: And you got your DFC as well.
KC: Yeah.
JC: But yes there was, there were campaign medals for others weren’t there but not for Bomber Command?
KC: Bomber. We didn’t get anything special campaign for the -
JC: No.
KC: All the raids we did. No.
JC: No.
KC: You know we were going off night after night in the Lancasters with a bomb load. Not just bombs. We had bloody great loads of incendiaries we were taking to cart and drop down. It was, when you think back on it was a dirty war really but we did what the Germans tried to do to us didn’t we? I think we were a bit more successful.
PJ: Well, thank you Ken for letting us interview you for the IBCC.
KC: Okay.
PJ: It’s been a pleasure to hear your stories.
KC: You’ve got some notes.
PJ: Thank you.
KC: Yeah. Good.
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/.
Identifier
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ACookKHH160725, PCookKHH1601
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Kenneth Cook
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:20:59 audio recording
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter and Sandra Jones
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-07-25
Description
An account of the resource
Wing Commander Kenneth Cook was born in Randwick in Gloucestershire. At Marlings grammar school, he joined the Air Training Corps. On the outbreak of war he joined the Royal Air Force and went to America under the Arnold Scheme for pilot training. He continued training in Canada as a navigator/bomb aimer. He returned to Great Britain and continued training at RAF Cottesmore and the Heavy Conversion Unit at RAF Winthorpe. His crew were posted to 9 Squadron at RAF Bardney. After ten operations, they joined 97 Squadron Pathfinders. Altogether he flew 45 operations, including several to Berlin. At the end of his tours, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Thereafter, he served at 1 Group Headquarters, and then RAF Fiskerton, RAF Fulbeck and RAF Syerston, tasked with checking the readiness of new crews, specifically the navigators. For a time he engaged in preparations for Tiger force. At the end of the war, he accompanied 617 Squadron on a goodwill tour of the United States. After the war, he remained in the Royal Air Force and was stationed in Aden and Cyprus. He was awarded the Legion d’honneur and rose to be a wing commander. He retired in 1968 and thereafter pursued a civilian career.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Janet McGreevy
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.
Canada
Cyprus
Great Britain
United States
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
Germany--Berlin
Yemen (Republic)
Germany
1 Group
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
97 Squadron
Botha
crewing up
dispersal
Distinguished Flying Cross
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lincoln
Meteor
military living conditions
military service conditions
Mosquito
Nissen hut
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Pathfinders
RAF Bardney
RAF Bawtry
RAF Coltishall
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Fiskerton
RAF Fulbeck
RAF Syerston
RAF Winthorpe
sanitation
Stearman
Tiger force
training
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/277/3430/PIronsH1501.2.jpg
62e8999adc6227a8e1dcf9d08e401fbc
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/277/3430/AIronsH160730.1.mp3
85d919719d33d75444cec9637cafc6f9
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
Irons, Harry
Harry Irons
H Irons
Description
An account of the resource
Two oral history interviews with Harry Irons (1924 - 2018). He was an apprentice tailor in London, but lied about his age and joined the RAF aged 16. He flew operations as a rear gunner with 158, 462 and 9 Squadrons.
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IBCC Digital Archive
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2015-07-23
2016-07-30
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Irons, H
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TO: I just have to do a short introduction first as well.
HI: Yeah.
TO: Good morning. Good afternoon. Or good evening. Whatever the case is. This interview is being filmed for the International Bomber Command Centre and the gentleman I’m interviewing is Mr Harry Irons. My name’s Thomas Ozel and we’re recording this interview on the 30th of July. Could you please tell me what year you were born?
HI: 1924.
TO: And –
HI: January ’24.
TO: And where — were you interested in aircraft as a child?
HI: No. Not really. No. You never see no aircraft anyway [laughs] in those days. The reason why I joined the air force because we lived in a place called Stamford Hill which was on a hill in London. And we had a grandstand view of the bombing of the City of London which was well alight. And four or five of us said we’ll go and join the air force. I was only sixteen. I told them I was seventeen and a half and they, and they didn’t even query me age. And they said, ‘Alright. You’re in the air force.’ And that was it. I was just sixteen. They assessed me and they said, ‘What do you want to be?’ I said, ‘I want to be a pilot.’ And they said, ‘We’ve got a hell of a load of applications for pilots but we’ve got vacancies for wireless operator/air gunners.’ So I said, ‘Alright. I’ll have that,’ and I became a wireless operator/air gunner. And I joined the air force in nineteen — the end of 1940. And the following year — I had to wait for an application to become a wireless operator. Well, I was in the RAF and I went to Blackpool in August 1941 and while we was there we got to twelve words a minute and they got us out on a squadron and said, ‘You’re not going to be wireless operators you’re going to be what they call straight AG’s. Rear gunners. So that’s how I became a rear gunner. So I waited a few more months and then I was posted for gunnery school. A place called Manby. RAF Manby in Lincoln. And I done six weeks training there and we should do another three or four months training at OTU which I’d never done. They sent me straight from the six weeks gunnery school straight onto a squadron. Number 9 Squadron at Waddington. And when I arrived there I was sitting in the mess, because I was a sergeant then, I was sitting in the mess and when I came out the mess there was a flight lieutenant pilot there and he said, ‘You’re going to fly with me as a mid-upper gunner.’ Because what had happened the squadron had converted from Wellingtons on to Lancasters and Lancasters carried an extra gunner and a flight engineer. So there I was at 9 Squadron in May, no, June 1942 and we were just converting, just finished converting from Wellingtons, the twin engine bomber on to Lancasters. And that’s how it started and what we had to do was get used to flying a four engine bomber which we did do, and in September we were sitting in the crew room and they said, ‘Ops tomorrow night.’ And that was in September the 9th 1942. I got that right. And so what you have to do is take the aircraft up for half an hour. Test the engines, make sure they’re running right. The bomb bay opens and closes. The bomb sight’s working. The guns are working. The ailerons are working and the undercarriage is working. You do that in half hours flight. When we landed the bomb aimer had already done about seventeen trips on Wellingtons so he was an old sweat. To do seventeen bombing trips he was really a real veteran. And as we landed there was a big tractor come along pulling up a four thousand pounder and fourteen hundred incendiaries. So the bomb aimer said to me, ‘That load means that we’re going to Happy Valley.’ And I was pretty, well I didn’t know a lot anyway. So I thought well that doesn’t sound too bad. Happy Valley. And there you are. We got briefed. We went, we always had bacon and eggs before we went to the briefing. We had the briefing and that and when we went into the briefing room there was a huge curtain over the map and we were waiting there. The CO comes in, immediately pulls the curtain down and it shows you exactly what bombing raid was on. There’s a red tape running from England to the — and the town was Dusseldorf. So I still didn’t twig on a lot so the bomb aimer was there. He said, ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘We’re going to Happy Valley.’ And I thought well it don’t sound too bad. Happy Valley. And we went down to the crew room. Got dressed. And being gunners we have to be heavily heavily dressed. There was pure silk long johns and a vest. And your shirt, uniform and a huge fisherman’s pullover we used to put on. Then we put the electrically heated suit on. Is that alright?
TO: Do you mind if I just put this light on? Sorry.
HI: Put that light on.
TO: Yes. I’m very sorry but — sorry about that.
HI: How’s that?
TO: Yes. That’s better — sorry half your face is in shadow. Sorry. Ok. Sorry you were.
HI: Oh that’s only the, I’ll switch that one on as well.
TO: Switch that on.
HI: Yeah. Switch that on as well.
TO: Ok sorry about that.
HI: So we got dressed and then we had huge heavy furs. Fur jacket and fur trousers on top. The temperatures in those days was about thirty five, forty below zero. We had no heating whatsoever. And we went out to the aircraft and the ritual was we always pissed on the rear wheel for good luck. Anyway, we got in the aircraft and we was at Waddington. And they had no runways there. All they had was grass. And even on my first trip with this bomb load on we just managed to lift off over the, over the hedges to take off. And then we got, we, we flew around the aerodrome until we got up to six or seven thousand feet and then we headed east. We crossed the North Sea and then the bomb aimer who lays in the front, lays flat down at the front said, ‘Enemy coast ahead. Flak.’ So we was up about sixteen thousand feet then. Mind you this pilot was a very seasoned pilot. He was on his second tour so he knew all the tricks and he knew that to get over Holland you had to be above twelve thousand feet because of the light flak. There was hundreds of these light flak guns on the Frisian Islands what we had to pass over. Anyway, we was well above it and I looked down. I see these beautiful colours. Blues, greens, reds. Tracer coming up and dropping down and I thought to myself if that’s flak we’ve got nothing at all to worry about. We was well above it. We flew across Holland. We was up to about nineteen, twenty thousand feet then. We flew across Holland. We never see a lot. Only a few star shells and a few lights on the ground for the night fighters who used to circle around waiting to come after us. Anyway, we crossed over Holland into Germany and then the bomb aimer said, ‘Target ahead skipper.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, I’ll have a little see what this target’s like. And being the mid-upper you could swing the turret a hundred and twenty degrees all the way around. So I swung it around facing the forward position and I had a shock of my life. In front of us was one huge massive explosion of shells. And I thought to myself, ‘Cor blimey, surely we haven’t got to go through that.’ There was hundreds of shells exploding. You’d see aircraft blowing up in the sky, some on fire. And the skipper said to me, being on me first trip, he said, ‘Mid-upper make sure you look above you and there’s no aircraft flying above you ready to drop its bombs.’ Which did happen. And a lot of our aircraft were badly damaged through aircraft dropping their incendiaries and bombs from a different height. Anyway, we, I said to the skipper, as I looked up there was a Lancaster above us with its bomb bay open. The bomb bay was enormous. It’s about from that there to about here. That’s the length of the bomb bay. It was enormous. And I said to the skipper, ‘There’s a Lanc above us with its bomb bay open. Dive port.’ He dived port, straightened out and started flying again towards the huge barrage and the bomb aimer said, ‘We’re on the wrong course.’ He said, ‘We’ve got to go around again and make another approach to the target.’ Because the most important thing on a bombing raid was to bring back a photograph. If you didn’t bring a photograph back they never counted for it as a raid. The camera was enormous. Like that. Huge thing it was. Anyway, we run. We went right through that lot with our bomb bays shut. Turned around, made what they called a dog leg and come back on the rear of the formations that were flying in and by that time Jerry had cottoned on to us. And don’t forget, another terror of bombing was the searchlights. If one of those searchlights hit you it completely blinded you. They were so powerful. They had what they called a radar operated searchlight and that was blue. It wasn’t white like the ordinary searchlights. It was blue. And it never missed. It went bang, like that and it hit you straight away and once that hit you about ten or fifteen searchlights would come and cone you. And then all the guns would open up and the fighter would come straight in on top of you. So you had to very very wary of a searchlight. Anyway, we made the dogleg around. Came and we was at the back of the bomber formation then and we could see, I could see from where I was the town was getting a real hammering. At that time, that period, there was no Pathfinders. That’s why we had to go around again — because we had to select our own target and bring a photograph back, more or less on that area. It did, when the Pathfinders was formed it did make bombing, not easier, but we could get in and all we had to then with the Pathfinders was bomb the flare. We didn’t have to look for a specified target. We just bombed the flare. Go in, bomb the flare, slam your door shut, dive and get out quick. And you had to get out quick believe me. And we made our approach around and we made the bombing run and, once ‘cause this was my first trip and I was amazed. Directly we dropped the bombs we went up like a lift because the weight, the huge weight of the bombs being dropped suddenly the aircraft went up four or five hundred feet. Anyway, we slammed the, we slammed the bomb bay doors shut and then we, what we used to do was either go port or starboard, dive down and get enough speed as we could to get away from the target. Anyway, as we’re coming home, and this was on my first trip, as we were coming home the bomb aimer and the wireless operator said, ‘We can’t breathe. We’ve got no oxygen.’ Apparently the shrapnel had come through, which it always did and cut the leads from the oxygen bottles to the line to where they were breathing. Anyway, so we had to go to below ten thousand feet and then we could take our oxygen masks off and breathe normal. And as we passed over the Dutch coast which we’d seen coming in, beautiful coloured lights. I had the shock of my life. These shells were whipping past us. I’ve never seen anything like it. How they never hit us I don’t know. There was hundreds of them. All coming up. Anyway, we got over the Dutch coast, the Frisian Islands it was and made our way home, and landed. Had a look at the aircraft which always had shrapnel holes in the aircraft. Always. And we landed and I thought, that’s it, that’s one trip. I’ve got another twenty nine to do. And I mean by twenty nine means you had to bring back a picture. If you didn’t bring back a picture it didn’t count as a trip so you did it again. So instead of doing thirty you had to do did thirty one, thirty two or whatever. How many pictures you missed. And that was my first. First raid and it shook the life out of me. I never realised what it was to go all that way and the fantastic bombardment of German guns was incredible. And you had to be careful even then, coming home, because they had what they called radar operated guns on the way and they were so accurate. They never missed. Even at twenty thousand feet they could hit you as easy as anything. So you just used to do a little gentle weave to keep, well to help you to keep out of the radar. That was my first trip. We went down. We had the usual bacon and eggs, cup of coffee. Told them what we’d seen and went to kip. And the next morning we woke up and we was on bombing raid again. I should bring, I’d better bring my logbook down I think.
TO: If you want. Yeah.
HI: Yeah. Two seconds. How’s it going?
TO: Can you just sit back down again sorry. The lighting seems ok actually. Yeah. I think you’ll be alright.
HI: Alright.
TO: Yeah. Sure. You sure you don’t want me to help you get it?
HI: No. I’ll go and get it. Don’t worry.
[recording paused]
HI: I should have put exactly what was happening in my logbook but the reason why I never done that as you see. That was my first trip.
TO: Dusseldorf.
HI: Dusseldorf. And I put target found and bombed.
TO: Yeah.
HI: And the officer, he said, ‘Don’t start putting down what you done and what you didn’t.’ Just put down the target.
TO: Wilhelmshaven.
HI: Yeah. See.
TO: Bremen.
HI: And then two days later, which was the following day we went to Bremen. That was where they was building the submarines. How’s that? Is that alright?
TO: That’s a lot better. Thank you.
HI: Yeah. They was building the submarines there and we gave them the right goings. Mind the flak was absolutely horrendous there in Bremen. And believe it or not the following night we went to Wilhelmshaven. The other submarine base where they was building the submarines. And the biggest, the biggest thing at all about bombing was the flak. It was absolutely, and it was terrifying. I’ll tell you that. It was absolutely terrifying. The night fighters you never see until they hit you and we was useless really. We had only 303 calibre machine guns and the Germans had twenty millimetre cannons and we didn’t stand a chance. Never stood a chance. And the thing that done us, that the Germans brought out a simple, unique thing of placing two cannons behind the pilot on the JU88 and the M10 and all they used to do was pick you up on the radar. Drop down two or three hundred feet. Then come up underneath and go straight for the petrol tank. At first they used to go for the actual aircraft but a lot of those aircraft had bombs on board and they’d line up the fighter as well. So what they had done they used to come up underneath and they could see from the fire from the exhaust, the engines and they had a beautiful view of the petrol tank. They used to give it one quick squirt and the bomber would just used to literally blow up in the sky. I mean literally. Literally blow right up in the sky. That’s why we got thirty thousand names at Runnymede. We don’t know what happened to them.
TO: Did you ever actually see that happen on a Lancaster?
HI: I see it, yes. I see, well actually, didn’t actually see the fighter hitting the Lanc but we used to see the, see the bombers blowing up and we didn’t know why. There was no flak. All you used to see was a huge explosion and up it went. And that went on. We lost hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bombers. But the thing that annoyed me the RAF knew what was going on. They knew what was going on and not once did they ever warn us about this method of attack. Never. ‘Cause before all we expected was them to attack the rear. The rear turret. They always went for the rear turret and before they got this idea of coming up underneath. And they literally shot down hundreds and hundreds of our bombers and not once at any briefing did they warn us that we were being attacked from underneath and it went right on ‘til the end of the war when the Air Ministry admitted that’s what the Germans were doing. They never warned us. And the only reason that I think why they never warned us is because they wanted us to fly straight and level because if we’d had known what was happening we’d have weaved our way right the way through. We could have at least seen what was coming up underneath us. But we never knew. And we lost thousands of bombers over there, and that went right on till the end of the war. All those boys were lost. Yeah.
TO: Do you mind if we talk for a bit about your time before joining the RAF?
HI: Well I didn’t have a lot of time really. I was only a kid. I told you I joined when I was sixteen and I was an apprenticed tailor because living in the East End you had two jobs. You either became a tailor or a cabinet maker. You done your apprentice and that was the two main employers in the East End was tailoring and cabinet making. And I was just, I worked for a firm called Polikoff’s. A huge firm. I was apprentice there ‘til I got, till I was called up. Well, ‘til I joined the air force. And the reason I joined the air force really as well the firm I worked for got badly bombed. And one morning we went to work and there was hardly any bloody factory left. But it’s, it was a terrible, terrible time. When you think that in 1943 the average, average length of time for a bomber crew was five trips. But I carried on. I don’t know why I carried on. Why I seemed to miss it all but there you are. But I know that the RAF knew about this underneath attack because I finished my first tour. I done about, thirty — actually I done thirty nine trips on my first tour. That was because we couldn’t bring back the photograph on nine trips. So they didn’t count. And I went as an instructor instructing air crew coming back from Canada and America and Rhodesia. They was raw. Raw kids and they, you know, they had the shock of their life when they came back to England and had to fly on these terrible misty days and nights. We lost a lot of blokes killed through lack of experience. And we had to bloody well fly with them as well. Anyway, after a while they said you’re being posted back to operations and they posted me to 77 Squadron at Full Sutton in Yorkshire and when I arrived there the CO, when I arrived they said, ‘The CO wants to see you.’ So I thought, hello. I was a warrant officer then. And I went down to the office and he asked me to come in the car. We went out to the Halifax and the Halifax had a big hole in the fuselage underneath and there was a .5 been placed there. And the CO said, ‘When you go on the bombing raid you’ll be sitting there and if any aircraft come up underneath you’ll have a good view of the aircraft coming up underneath you. So therefore they knew what was going on. And we took it to a [pause] I think it was Duisburg I think.
[pause]
Yeah. Took it too Duisburg on a daylight. That was on the 14th. That was on my second tour. And I took it to Duisberg and it was so bloody cold. They made a great big hole in the bottom of the aircraft and the cold air was coming through. Not only us but the pilot, the navigator. They was frozen and they never used it no more. What they should have done was put a proper turret, enclosed turret underneath. All they had was a bloody big hole. All the slipstream used to come through the aircraft and it was impossible really enough to fly with it. Anyway, they never used it no more. Just carried on as we did. Anyway, that was on my second tour on Halifaxes. But where were we? Some very interesting raids here. Right. Went to Dusseldorf on the 13th of the 9th I think it was.
TO: Yeah.
HI: The 13th of the 9th and then on the 13th of the 9th we went to Bremen after submarines. And that was very heavily defended. And when we got back we went in bed. They said, ‘You’ve got to get up early because they’re a night flying test for tonight’s raid,’ which was on the 14th. We’d already been. We’d already just come back from Bremen. On the 14th we went to a place called Wilhelmshaven. And it was the same thing. They was producing all the submarines. And it was very important at that time because the submarines were sinking most of our ships. So they had to blast. And they did blast it. And on the 16th we went to the worst, worst place you could possibly go to. Essen. Essen was the worst place in Germany for flak and fighters and we lost literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bombers over Essen. There was a major Krupps factory there and that’s what we was after. We destroyed it eventually but it took a while. And we lost a hell of a hell of a lot of men.
[phone ringing]
TO: You can answer the phone. That’s fine.
HI: Ok. I won’t be –
[recording paused]
HI: That Memorial is exactly where we took off at Waddington. That was at the end of the runway but that Memorial was right bang in the middle where we took off from our aircraft’s runways. As we took off, right in front of us was the — right in front of us was the Cathedral and that is where the Memorial is now. Yeah.
TO: Sorry, you mentioned you’d been on raids to Bremen and Wilhelmshaven.
HI: Yeah.
TO: Did you actually find out the damage to the submarines you were causing?
HI: Yeah. We actually, we’d done a hell of a lot of damage there. Especially at Bremen. Apparently they really wrecked the submarine bays, well not the bases, where they was actually producing the submarines. And that’s why we went back the following night to hit Wilhelmshaven because they were sinking so many of our ships. It did slow them down a bit. How much I don’t know. But we did make two successful raids there. Because we could tell that by the photographs we brought back. Of the actual bombing. As the bombs went the camera ticks over and the photoflash was in the fuselage. It was a huge, like a huge drainpipe and that was released exactly the same time as the camera clicks over. And it was a big white burst of light that lit up the area where the camera was pointing. And you could see all these photoflashes going off on your bombing run. Apart from all the bloody aircraft that was on fire going down. Yeah. Which was many many many. Yeah. The thing that they used to kid us. They did used to kid us. We used to say we seen so many bombers going down. They said, ‘No you never.’ This was a bloke who’s never flown in his life said, ‘No, you never. What you see was Scarecrows.’ The Germans were firing up shells to mimic a bomber blowing up. And after the war they admitted there was no such thing as a Scarecrow. All those explosions were actually aircraft blowing up in the sky. And they did used to blow up as well. Yeah. Especially with a bomb load on. I think I was very very very fortunate to, to do one tour instead. And then I went on another tour. And I never, never really got myself in any trouble at all. We used to see them going down. And anyway we went to Essen and that was the worst. That is the worst place ever to go. Essen.
TO: Worse than Berlin?
HI: I think it was worse than Berlin. Yeah. Worse than Berlin. Yeah. The amount of guns there was incredible. And the amount of fighters. But that Berlin, when they done the Berlin raid they’d done, they lost nine hundred. Nine hundred bombers, didn’t they? In that period of about six weeks. They didn’t care. Anyway, on the 14th of the 9th we went to Munich. And what actually happened — on my squadron we was losing a lot of aircraft. Even at that period it was a hell of a lot of aircraft. And two fellas come down from Cambridge. They said they were scientists and said, ‘We’ve got a new device we’re going to put in the turret. And when a German night fighter approaches you from about six hundred yards away you’ll get a red light come up in your turret warning you there’s a fighter in the vicinity.’ Which was brilliant because what we could then was start weaving and not fly straight and level. Anyway, but what happened, the squadron on the raid previous to Munich two of our boys were shot down and apparently the Germans, they went for all these aircraft and must have found this instrument in the rear turret and they probably got the wavelength of it. And this is what happened. We went to Munich and we flew, ten tenths cloud all the way so we flew on top of the cloud. If a fighter came we just went straight in the cloud. We was pretty much safe. Not from flak but from the fighter. Anyway, we got to Munich and the cloud broke and there was Munich wide open. Beautiful moon and we did give it an hiding. Apparently Hitler was there giving a little talk. That’s why we went there. On the way back the skipper said, ‘We know our course back home so we’re going to fly ten tenths through the cloud all the way home so we won’t be interrupted by fighters.’ We went for about three quarters of an hour, an hour through ten tenths cloud and all of a sudden the cloud broke and I looked through the, I was in the rear turret then, I looked through the turret and there, from just where my car is was a JU88 had been following us through that cloud. And it must have been through their radar. And he opened fired and we was going, when you say flying straight and level you’re like going up and down as well. You know. Anyway, as we went down he opened fired and he just, his cannon shells went just over the top of us. We never hesitated and we couldn’t miss him. He was right bang — you could see his face even. We just opened fire. Me and the mid-upper opened fired. He swung over and down he went. That was one of my luckiest occasions I’d ever known. I’d only done about six trips and then we came back and that was it. But that’s how lucky you had to be. How he never, how he missed us I still don’t know. It was point blank range and his cannon shells went just over the top of us. Yeah.
TO: Do you think maybe he might have been low on fuel?
HI: No. I don’t think he was low on fuel. He was — I should imagine, when you say you’re flying straight and level you do but you’re going like that. Up and down like that sort of with the turbulence of the slipstream. And probably as we went down he opened fire and missed us. But we never missed. We hit him. We couldn’t miss him. He was right bang — oh he couldn’t have been no closer.
TO: So was he shot down?
HI: He went down, yeah. Yeah. We couldn’t claim it because we couldn’t verify whether he, whether he exploded on the ground or not because we went back in cloud again then. The cloud broke, we went back in to it again and came home.
TO: So you were in the mid-upper turret at this point.
HI: No. I was in the rear turret. And me and the mid-upper open fired. Yeah. I was only in the mid-upper for the first trip. Just to get used to the, to the, what the bombing raid was. The rear turret was manned by an Australian but he was very very tall and he had a bit of difficulty in the rear turret so he went into the mid-upper after the second raid and I took over in the rear turret. I wasn’t this size. I was only about nine stone then. And but he was a big tall Australian. He was too big for them. And that’s how we carried on. And after Munich we went to a place called Wismar. Am I alright?
TO: No. It’s just there’s a fly buzzing around. That’s all.
HI: A fly. I must have no flies in here, you know [pause] We went to a place called Wismar. They had a big Condor factory there and it was our job to attack this factory which was specified that it was a factory we had to bomb. There was still, you must remember there was no Pathfinders then. And we went in and I think we made a direct hit but unfortunately two of our aircraft that was with us were shot down over Wismar. So that was unfortunate. And then from Wismar there was September. 23rd of September [pause] The thing was with Bomber Command life was expendable. They didn’t care what the losses were. They’d just sent us out and sent us out and sent us out. Well, strangely enough this Wismar was a seven twenty hour trip. So we went there on the 23rd of the 9th and we had a little rest. And then on then on the 1st of the 10th we went back to Wismar again. They said go back and make sure it’s flattened. Which we did do. And then the following night, believe it or not, we’d already done a seven twenty hour trip. The following night we went to Essen. And on the way to Essen two of the engines on the starboard side shut off so, yeah the flight engineer changed the petrol tanks over to the outer tanks and immediately the two engines on the starboard side packed up. So he changed the petrol tanks over to the outer tanks and we were still flying and all of a sudden the four engines just cut. Just like that. And we just fell like that. Luckily enough the flight engineer was right on top of it all and managed to change the tanks over to the right. To the wing tip tanks and the four engines started off. And we couldn’t go to Essen because we didn’t have enough fuel. We couldn’t use all the tanks. So we turned back and we just managed to land at Waddington before all bloody four engines packed up through lack of fuel. So that’s how lucky I was. But what it was in the petrol tanks they had what they called the immersion pumps, electric immersion pumps and what was happening they was packing up on all the aircraft. So what they done they changed the immersion pumps to gravity fuel. So there was no pump there. The petrol was just dropped in gravity. And it solved a problem but before that we lost a lot of aircraft through these petrol pumps packing up. And then we went to — I think we had, I think we went on, yeah we must have gone on leave because [pause] yeah. Yeah we had, yeah we had NFT. We never done anything and then we, on the 15th of the 10th, in October we went to Cologne. And I always remember Cologne because the thing that always struck me in Cologne was the Cathedral. The huge Cathedral. And every time we went there we see that Cathedral. It never got bombed. The whole of Cologne got flattened apart from the Cathedral. There was damage but not too bad. But I don’t think through we were going to miss the Cathedral. It was just sheer luck that we did miss it. But we did hammer Cologne. It really took a terrible hiding. That was on the 15th of the 10th ‘42. October.
TO: Sorry.
HI: Yeah. Go on.
TO: Did you hear about the, what did you think of the thousand bomber raid on Cologne?
HI: That was just before we started. Actually speaking, all it was was a propaganda raid. They got every single aircraft. All from OTU and that’s where the losses were. They lost more bombers from the Operational Training Units on Wellingtons than what they did the main bomber force. They got every aircraft that could fly to make up the thousand. It was only a propaganda rout anyway because we’d done much much more damage with about two or three hundred Lancs then what that thousand bomber raid made. And most of the losses were with OTUs. The inexperienced crews training. And it was only, it was only a propaganda raid I think. They wanted, he’d only just come into office hadn’t he? Harris. And that was his first big raid and he got every bomber from OTU, Conversion Units. Anywhere he could find a bomber and as I say made up his total. But the big bombing raids started really when the Pathfinders moved in. Because what we was doing then we was bombing, not the target, we was bombing the flare. And if those flares were accurate a whole town got wiped out. Which happened quite often. At Hamburg, Dresden, Essen. The towns were open. Once they got the Pathfinders right. Perfect. All those towns were completely open. And I don’t think, I personally think this country would never have stood the bombing like the Germans did. When you think five or six hundred Lancasters each carrying one four thousand pounder and fourteen hundred incendiaries. Going over the target and out again within fifteen minutes. You imagine the hell that must have been there. Anyway, that was war. And then — this is a very interesting raid. On the 17th of the 10th — no, before that we was told. What actually happened was when we arrived at Waddington 44 Squadron was the first squadron to be issued with the Lancaster. What they called the Rhodesian squadron. It was all Rhodesians on it. So they decided to test out this Lancaster and they sent it to, on a bombing raid to Germany. Right into, six Lancasters and they sent right into Germany to bomb. What was the target? Anyway, on the way there the Messerschmitts jumped them and out of the six they shot five down. And only one returned. Nettleton. He got the VC. So when we was in the mess talking to the aircrew that, the one crew that come back they said never, no more will we do daylight, low level raids because it’s suicide. So in September [pause] October. Yeah — October. About the 15th they said we’re going to do some low level daylight flying and we was flying over Lincoln. Nineteen Lancasters. That’s all there was at the time at thirty or forty feet above ground. And we wondered. Surely they’re not going to have another daylight raid which did happen. On the 17th of October. The target was Le Creusot. The time, the time in the air was ten and a half hours. So you can see it was a big schlep. We went right across the North Sea. Right across France at a height of about the height of this house. Ninety Lancasters. Each carrying six one thousand pounders. We flew right across France. All the French people were out waving to us and throwing us kisses and whatnot. We were still looking for the fighters. We never see no fighters. We went right to Le Creusot. And the reason for the bombing of Le Creusot in daylight was that the whole factory was surrounded by workers dwellings and they were frightened if we bombed of a night time there’d be a heavy casualties amongst the civilians. So they decided to do it on daylight and we went right across France. Ninety two of us at about thirty feet off the ground carrying, each carrying six one thousand pounders. What actually happened at the briefing we had to — six aircraft, six Lancasters, had to break off as we reached the Le Creusot and bomb the power station just outside Le Creusot. And on our port side was the Dambuster — Gibson. And he took a picture of us, of our aircraft as we were going in to attack. And as we were going to attack this power station an aircraft on my starboard side just went straight in the deck and blew up. So there was only five of us left attacking the power station which we did attack. And we flattened, literally flatted it. And last year me and my friend was in France. I said, ‘Let’s go to Le Creusot and see what the damage was.’ And we went to the Le Creusot. There’s a huge factory there even now. And my friend approached the manager and said, ‘This bloke. I’ve a bloke out here who bombed you during the war.’ He said, ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘We want to see him.’ So they invited us in and they gave us lunch and we went around the factory and we explained what we’d done. I said, ‘But we didn’t bomb your factory. We bombed the power station,’ I said, ‘One of the aircraft was blown up on the on the approach to the power station.’ He said, ‘Yeah they’re buried. Not in a military airfield but just outside, in an ordinary field where they crashed.’ So I said, ‘Can we go and see?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ So we went out there and there were six graves and I said to the Frenchman, I said, ‘No There were seven men in the aircraft. There’s only six graves.’ He said, ‘Oh, no.’ He said, ‘The rear gunner survived and was taken.’ How? I don’t know. I’d seen the aircraft literally blowing up in the sky, no, blowing up as it hit the ground. And he survived and was taken prisoner of war. But we actually flattened the place. If you imagine ninety Lancs. Daylight. No opposition. So we come back and we were very relieved that we went all the way there and all the way back and never seen a night, never seen a day fighter. And there must have been hundreds of them there. So we were very relieved and we thought well that’s it. So we started having night flying tests to follow all that week. And then on the 22nd of October we went to Genoa. We went to Genoa in Italy which is a long long long schlep and we wondered why we went there. Because, you know, what was there? I know there was the big battle was going on in the Middle East — El Alemein, at the time because all the supplies were going from Germany through Italy. Anyway, on the Saturday, to our surprise, on Saturday morning said there’s a briefing. This was Saturday morning. So we thought that’s strange. When we went down to the briefing the biggest surprise of the lot. We was going to a do a daylight. A low level daylight raid on Milan in Italy. And that was on the, that was on the 24th of, 24th of October. Operation Milan. Ten and three quarter hours. A long schlep. And we went all the way to Italy at low level, you know, just like that until the Alps. We couldn’t go over the Alps because we were so low so we weaved our way through the Alps. Came out at Lake Como and went straight down to Milan. And I always to this day I think about it. As we approached Milan they never had no idea that there was going to be an air raid. There was no air raid siren. Nothing. So a beautiful Saturday afternoon and as we flew over Milan and made our approach to the target all the people were out in the streets walking about. In the restaurants. And then we opened up and if you imagine ninety Lancs with six one thousand pounders. We just dropped them in the town and we came home. We lost about four that day to German fighters on the way back. But I don’t know how we went all the way to Milan in daylight and come all the way back again. Incredible. And that raid was, that was a ten and three quarter hour trip. I tell you my arse was sore when I got out of that plane [laughs] We never flew no higher than about thirty or forty feet off the ground until we got to the Alps. We had to go a bit higher and then down on Lake Como right into Milan. And then there was no air raids sirens and no guns. We just literally took the whole town by surprise.
TO: Do you remember what the target was? Specifically. In Milan?
HI: No. We just, well there was no target really. We just bombed Milan. We just went in. From what I could see we just bombed the centre of the city. There was an aircraft factory that I think they were supposed to been after but they didn’t bother. They just, and actually I did see a few Lancs opening up their machine guns over the town. Yeah. I did see that. There you are. That was war. And I was, I was a veteran then. I was. We was the only crew left out the squadron. The original squadron. And then we had a little break for about [pause] that was on the 24th of the 10th . Yeah. We had about a week. Must have gone on leave. And then when we come back on the 18th of the 11th we went to Turin again just to liven them up. And believe it or not that was a seven, eight hour trip. And the following day we went back again. To Turin, and done the same again. It was a long long time. We only had about seven hour break between the two raids. And then we went to Stuttgart. Stuttgart. We never made it. You know, we had trouble with the engines and we had to come back. So it didn’t count as a raid. And then this is what happened there. Then we went to Mannheim. That was in the, oh look, you’ve got the bomb load here. One thousand, one four thousand pounder, nine hundred and eighty incendiaries and nickels. Nickels were pamphlets. You know. Propaganda. What we used to do was over the North Sea we used to throw the bleeding lot out. We didn’t want the bother of throwing them out when we got over [laughs] we were supposed to throw them out over the target. We just used to throw them in the sea. Then this, this was when the battle of Alemein was on so we went back to Turin. Nine hours. Next time we was iced up terrible with engine trouble as well. We only done three hours for that one but that didn’t count as a trip. And that was it. And then we went to — this. This, see this raid here.
TO: Is it Hasselunne?
HI: Yeah. What actually happened was we went for the briefing and we said, ‘Where the bleeding hell is Hasselunne.’ It was just a small town just outside the Ruhr valley. Even to this day I remember the briefing. He said, ‘Look’ he said, ‘You’re bombing in the Ruhr valley and none of the workers –’ am I alright?
TO: Yeah. You’re fine.
HI: ‘None of the workers are getting any rest.’ So what they’re doing is they’re sending all the workers out to the small towns so they can get a good night’s rest. You know, the factory workers. So he said, ‘What we’re going to do is liven them up.’ I couldn’t believe it. They said, ‘We’re going to liven them up.’ But they said the reason why there was no bombing that night — it was a full moon. And the full moon when you’re flying is like daylight. There was no cloud so there was going to be no bombing that night but this nuisance raid. There was seventeen Lancasters ok’d at this nuisance raid. That means we had to go in at, this is night time mind you, as low as we could and bomb, bomb the, each was given a small town, a village or small town just outside the Ruhr Valley. Seventeen of us and bomb these small towns and come back home. Just to disrupt the German workers night’s kip. Anyway, in the bomb bay was sixteen one thousand pounders. Delayed action. And then we went to Hasselunne. And it was a beautiful night. Beautiful moon. It was clear as day. We went in about four or five hundred feet with our delayed action bombs. Sixteen of them. And we dropped them right plump right down the middle of the High Street. And I still wonder today if, you know, there was about a fifty minute half hour delay action on the bombs and when we got back we thought it was an easy trip. We went there. Came all the way back at low level and landed. And, but the thing was out of the seventeen Lancasters only seven come back. And we lost ten that night. Well it was fifty percent. Over fifty percent. And that was what I call a terror raid. It was an ordinary open town sitting there like there was, as we flew over, we could see the town. The bombs went and that was it. But then again that was war. And then we went back to our old faithful — Duisburg. And I tell you what — it was getting a bit warm. It was getting a bit warm at Happy Valley. And we went there six hours fifteen minutes. I’ve got the bomb load here. We went one thousand, we went with one thousand one hundred and seventy four incendiaries and nickel. Plus nickels. Six hours fifteen. And then the following day, after we’d been there, as we came back they woke us up in the morning and said, ‘You’re on ops again.’ Munich. So all we had was about five or six hours trip, sleep and was back on the 21st. The 20th and the 21st was at Munich.
TO: Could you please elaborate on this. About training machine guns please.
HI: Yes. We did machine gun a train that night. In the station. It was puffing away in the station and the pilot said, ‘Give it a liven up,’ and we went right along the train. Me and the mid-upper. Blasting it. We see the bullets, the tracer bouncing off the train. Yeah. That was war I suppose. What happened then —
TO: Sorry, if you don’t mind, sir would be ok if you sit back so your head isn’t in the shade. Sorry.
HI: So what happened then? The pilot I was with — Stubbs — had finished his tour. And the crew and they’d finished their tour and I was left without a crew. I was sitting in the mess waiting for new crew and a bloke I knew named Doolan, Sergeant Doolan came up to me and said Harry our rear gunner’s just been killed. We’ve just brought him back dead. Would you like to take his place? So [laughs] I was rather. I knew the rear gunner because I’d have been called up with him in 1940. And his name was Robinson and he came from the other side of London. Brixton. And a night fighter got on their tail. Blasted him out the turret. Literally blasted the whole turret and the tail off. So he said, The aeroplane is being repaired,’ [laughs] Repaired. ‘In the maintenance unit. We’re going to pick it up now. It’s got a new turret on it. A new tail plane. Ready to fly again.’ He said, ‘Would you come as a rear gunner?’ I said, ‘I haven’t got a pilot. I’ll come.’ So, so I flew with this crew. They was all NCOs, and we finished. We finished a whole tour. And we was the only crew that finished a tour all the time I was at Waddington. The nine months I was at Waddington we was the only crew that finished a tour. And we was all NCOs. Where were we? So my first trip with Sergeant Doolan was Dusseldorf again. Look. Went there a few times didn’t we? Dusseldorf. And this was, this was a shaky one. Hamburg. We got to Hamburg and we was prepared to go in for the bombing raid. The flak was crashing about all over us and the plane started going like that. Literally dropping like a stone. So the pilot said, ‘We’re so iced up that we can’t fly the bloody aircraft.’ And I could hear somebody say, ‘Oh it’s coming off.’ Great big lumps of ice crashing against the aircraft. Anyway, he said we’ll have to abandon. So we dropped our bombs where we were. Just outside Hamburg and went down as low as we could and the ice started breaking away and we managed to fly again properly. But when I got back and told them that was a really dicey trip they said, ‘You didn’t you get no photograph then?’ We said, ‘No. We just approached Hamburg, we see Hamburg being bombed but we just couldn’t make it,’ They said, ‘Well, it’s unfortunate. That don’t count. That was another trip that didn’t count [laughs] You know, it was hard in those days I’m telling you. And us all being NCOs and the briefing officer probably being a flight lieutenant or a squadron leader we couldn’t argue with it. We was only bleeding poor old NCOs. And then this is a new year. No. This is the 13th of the 2nd 1943. This was in February ‘43. We went to Laurent in France which wasn’t bad. It was an easy trip that was. And then back to Milan which was a long, long. long slog. And then our favourite. As a rear gunner our favourite was operations to Wilhelmshaven. Back to Wilhelmshaven. And then again to Bremen. Which was unusual I started off there didn’t I? Wilhelmshaven and went the other way around. Bremen and Wilhelmshaven. This time it was Wilhelmshaven and Bremen and I tell you what. There was some flak there. There was some flak. We got badly damaged coming back from Bremen so we had to land at a place called Croft. And then we returned the next morning in another aircraft. And then we went to Nuremberg and that night, believe it or not, we lost fifty that night. Flying to Nuremberg. The next time they went there they lost a hundred and twenty. Yeah. They lost a hundred and twenty. They went back there again a couple of months later and lost a hundred and twenty Lancs in one night.
TO: Out of how many?
HI: About four hundred. Yeah. It was slaughter. And then again on the 26th of February I went to Cologne. Do you want to see it in here?
TO: Yeah.
HI: Have you seen Cologne?
TO: Yes. I’ve seen it. Thank you. Sorry. Is it ok if I ask what did you think of Arthur Harris?
HI: Well, to me personally speaking the man had plenty of guts because after the Nuremberg raid we’d lost a hundred and twenty bombers that night. The following night he sent out another huge force. Now, a man has got to have, you’ve got to have some guts in you to do that. You know. After that terrible loss. But he was the man to do the job. Nobody else could do it. He, only took orders from Churchill. Churchill was the governor and what Churchill said went. Unless it was a diabolical raid and Harris said, ‘No. I can’t manage that.’ But there was, he had an aide de camp, Harris. I forget his name now. And we was going on a bombing raid and the aide de camp said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘It’s too much. It’s too many losses. We’re losing too many people there. We shouldn’t go.’ And he resigned. But Harris still went and we still had the losses. So there was somebody you know up the top knew what was going on. Our losses were, well you can’t, you cannot believe it. You could say you’d go on leave, you’d go on leave and come back in the mess — there was all strangers in there. All the old crews had gone. Within a week. Had a heavy week all had gone. All new crews. Yeah. And the faces got younger and younger and younger.
TO: Did you look young for your age?
HI: Do you think so?
TO: No, did you? Did you look young for your age? Or did you look older?
HI: Here. There I am there. On the wall. You see me. There. Picture on the wall.
TO: Thank you.
HI: Can you see it?
TO: Yeah. I see it. Do you think, did anyone ever find out that you’d lied about your age?
HI: Yeah. They did after I’d — I went, I went in the air force under the name of my mother’s maiden name because I didn’t want — I was stupid. I went in the name of, the name of Galloway. And then when I’d been on 9 Squadron about two months the CO called me in and said, ‘We found out your name isn’t Galloway. It’s Irons.’ He said, ‘We’ve changed,’ he never said nothing, he said, ‘Your name’s been changed now to Irons.’ And I went from Galloway to Irons and nothing was said about it. But it was all kids, all joined . Loads and loads of sixteen and seventeen year olds. There’s me there. When I got married.
TO: Was that, was that during the war?
HI: Yeah. That was just before I went and bombed Dresden. That was about two weeks before I bombed Dresden. 1944. I don’t know what made me get married then. I don’t know. And this here [pause] this, they used to kid us, they used to kid us that was an easy trip.
TO: Gardening.
HI: And it was the most dangerous trip we ever been. Mining. We used to have six one thousand pound mines on parachutes. And the thing was you had to fly over the Baltic and drop these mines at about five hundred feet. Jerry knew this and he had loads of these little fast boats with light flak on them and they shot down loads and loads of our boys. On these mining trips. And they used to call it an easy trip. That’s because it wasn’t the Ruhr valley.
TO: Did they call it gardening?
HI: They called it. Yeah. That was the code name for it. Gardening, yeah. Because you was planting. Instead of fruit you were planting mines. Called it gardening. Yeah. Oh you know. And then believe it or not I was back, back on my old favourite. Oh I went to Munich on the 3rd. And on the 9th we had this gardening and on the 12th back on my old favourite. Essen. I went to the Ruhr valley twenty seven times and I survived. How I done it I don’t know. And then we went to St Nazaire. Went to St Nazaire and that was a dodgy trip. They had a hell of a load of flak. We was in France and had a lot of flak. The thing was we had a, we had a wireless operator and on one of our trips he wasn’t well and he couldn’t fly that night. So he, he was one trip behind us. Say we was on twenty eight he was on twenty seven so he had to make up a trip so what they used to do they used to find another crew who wanted a spare wireless operator and he’d go and make up his trip. He was one behind. Unfortunately, he went on this trip and he never come back. A bloke named Chapel. He was on about his twenty seventh trip. He only had three or four trips to do. And he went on this trip and never came back. Which happened all the time. And then [pause] we ended our tour. My last trip was Kiel Canal which is a shocking place that was. Shocking. Well they was all bad. And then I survived. I survived thirty seven trips and I’m still a sergeant. And they sent me to a OTU. Sent me to OTU as an instructor. And I done that for about six months and was in the mess one night and we’d had a load, I used to drink then. I don’t drink now. And we were already sozzled and we caused a little bit of damage. A little bit of mayhem in the mess. We went in front of the CO the next morning and he said, ‘I’m bloody fed up with you gunners.’ And he said, ‘I’m posting you.’ And I thought where the bloody hell are you going to post me? The two postings he’d already got out was to Scotland. I thought sod that. I’ve got to go up all way to Scotland. And my posting come up. Southend. Just down the road. How lucky could I be? And what I was doing I was flying in Martinets towing a drogue for the flak. And we used to go right from Dover, Ramsgate, Margate, Clacton, not Clacton. All the way along the south coast towing this drogue. And the British ack ack used to fire, but they were so bloody accurate they used to keep blowing the bloody drogues off. So they told the gunners to fire a couple of degrees further back. And you used to watch the flak. I used to watch the flak in a straight line, right coming right along, right. I hoped they’d stop firing before the [laughs] and you could see the puffs of smoke trailing the white, trailing the big white drogue we had. And I’d done that went on for a few months and they said you’re going to back on ops again. And that’s when I went back on Halifaxes. And that was in [pause] that was in — there was a little bit of a rest and I never expected to go back on ops again. These are all towing drogues. The co-op yeah.
TO: So how many ops did you do in total during the war?
HI: Sixty.
TO: Sixty.
HI: Yeah. And then this is when I was telling you about. The beginning, the beginning of my second tour.
TO: [unclear]. Another daylight one.
HI: Yeah. Well that’s when I, when the CO told me they’d put a .5. It was a big hole. A huge hole cut around underneath the belly of the Halifax. And they had the .5 there. And we went all the way to Duisburg. The flak was, the flak was just as bad as when, well it was worse than when I’d been there previous. In the previous months. And I never seen no fighters. And it was in daylight. When we come back the pilot was screaming his head off. He said, ‘I’m not going to fly any more planes with a bloody great hole in the bottom of the aircraft.’ He said, ‘It’s too cold.’ So they, they put a block on it. But the funny thing was as we were going in to Duisburg we was, we was approaching Duisburg the someone, the ones in front had already bombed Duisburg and they were coming back. Like in a U. Coming back. There was about a quarter of a mile. As we was going in like that they was coming out. And one of our aircrafts, I don’t know why he done it, he decided he wasn’t going to bomb Duisburg. He was going to join those that was already coming out. And as he went across from our, from our flight as he went across, right across to join those that were coming out, the flak — because we was on the protection of the silver paper. We was all dumping the silver paper out and the radar couldn’t do nothing about it. But he broke the protection of the silver paper to cut across to join the blokes that was coming out. The flak opened up. It went one — one, two, three. The third one hit him. Right dead centre. Just went like that. It’s a shame. And I’ve seen it at night time. But during the day I’d seen it. I couldn’t believe it. Just went in smithereens. He still had his bomb load on. He must have had. Yeah. Why he cut across I don’t know but he just blew up. Yeah.
TO: Could you please explain how the silver paper or Window worked?
HI: Well, what it was, each piece of silver paper made a blimp on their radar screen. Each piece. So if you imagine millions of pieces dropping down — the whole screen was absolutely flooded. And the guns just stood still because they didn’t know which, which blimp to follow. Instead of one blimp on the screen there was thousands of them and they didn’t — so the guns just stood like that. The searchlights stood like that. The fighters didn’t know what to do, and the fighters — what they’d done they’d put a separate radar in the fighters. Night fighters. Independently. And they could still attack us which they did do. But the silver paper definitely helped us. Really helped us with the flak and the searchlights. They couldn’t do anything. The searchlights just used to stand still like that. But one thing they used to do which let’s say there was cloud cover most of the way to the target. The searchlights used to light up under the cloud and the bombers that were flying above it were silhouetted out against the light of the cloud and the fighters used to go straight in there. You know. Loads and loads of fighters. You had to watch them all the time and directly you see one you went straight into a dive to try to get out of its way. But as you know we never flew in a formation and there was a lot of crashes with our bombers criss-crossing and diving about.
TO: Did you participate in the large raid on Hamburg in July 1943?
HI: No. I missed that one. I went to the one previous. The one previous what I went to. That one was the fire one wasn’t it? That was the first time they used silver paper. That was exactly the first time they used it. We’d never used it.
TO: Did people call it silver paper or did most people call it Window?
HI: Window. Window. It was called Window. Yeah. Yeah. They had that right from the war. They had it but they wouldn’t use in case. They were frightened the Jerries were going to use it.
TO: And ironically Germany had developed it at the same time and didn’t want to use it.
HI: They did. Yeah.
TO: In case Britain used it.
HI: Yeah. Yeah. We used it because we were getting very strong in the air at that time. And they had to use it because the night fighters were getting the upper. And do you know at one period they was going to pack up night bombing? Yeah. They were going to stop it because the losses were so heavy. Yeah.
TO: And what’s your opinion on the Halifax bomber?
HI: Good. The Halifax Mark 3 was a good bomber. It never got the credit it deserved. It was a very very good bomber. They changed the engines and the tail plane and it became a very very good bomber. It was reliable. Got a good speed. Good height. The Mark 2 was rubbish. I think the Germans shot most of them down, like the Stirling. But the Mark 3 Halifax was a good plane. They changed the engines to Bristol, Bristols, and it made a lot of difference. Yeah.
TO: And what did you think of the Wellington?
HI: The Wellington was a good plane but it wasn’t up to it when the war started. It was alright for a few months of the war. My first squadron, number 9, they made the first bombing raid of the war and they lost, I think they lost two or three on their first bombing raid. The Wellington was a good plane but it wasn’t up to the capability of bombing. Night bombing. It was too slow. Didn’t get the height. They did go up to the Mark 10 and we used to see them now and again but they didn’t use them a lot at the end of the war. The Stirling was useless. The Stirling one was a useless bomber. Couldn’t get no height. It was big. It was clumsy. Some of the blokes used to like it but not many.
TO: And the Lancaster. What did you think?
HI: The Lancaster was a good plane. Yeah. Was a good plane. Yeah. And they churned them out. The way they churned them out was unbelievable. Do you know what we’re going to do now? We’re going to stop for a bit. I’m going to make you a cup of tea.
TO: Yeah. Sure. Are we on course?
HI: Yeah.
TO: Yeah. Ok.
TO: Yeah. Are you ok? Yeah.
[pause] [doorbell rings]
TO: Ok.
HI: Right. What do you want? The second tour?
TO: Yes. Start on the second tour I think.
HI: What happened I was doing drogue towing with my Martinets and the CO called us in and said, ‘You’re back on ops.’ And they sent me to 77 Squadron, Full Sutton. October 1944. And when I arrived they said, ‘The CO wants to see you. So I said what’s he want to see me about.’ I bet he wants to borrow a few [laughs] Anyway, he came out to us and he said, ‘We’re just, this is a special Halifax,’ and he said, ‘It’s got a big hole been cut in the bottom of the Halifax.’ It was a big hole as well. And it was a .5. and they put a sort of, I don’t how they expected me to sit on that bloody seat all those hours. And it was a manual. It was a manual .5 and they said, ‘If a fighter, a night fighter comes up underneath you’ll be able to spot it and protect the aircraft.’ So I said, ‘Alright. Fair enough.’ And the strange thing was it wasn’t on a night bombing trip. They sent me on a day trip to Duisburg. And I never see no fighters come up. And we come back. But the crew, the crew was complaining terrible about the hole in the aircraft and the cold air coming through. Anyway, on the 22nd of the 10th ’44 I went up again in this Halifax with a .5 and done a little bit of air firing with it. And I come down. I said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be very successful because it’s too bloody cold.’ So, so the CO said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with you then. We’ve don’t need any gunners here.’ And they posted me to 462 Squadron at Driffield, Australian squadron. And there I started my, on the 29th of the 10th. 29th of the 10th [pause] where was I there. Yeah. On the 22nd I was at Full Sutton. On the 29th of the 10th I was on ops in 462 Squadron, Driffield. 1942. The pilot apparently had been shot down over France and he made this because it was occupied by the British troops then. And they managed to get back to England and of course he was looking for a new crew and I joined him. And believe it or not as a mid-upper. I don’t know why they put me as a mid-upper. Anyway, they put me as a mid-upper and we went to Happy Valley. A place called Dornburg It was a daylight on Dornburg. That was just outside Happy Valley. On the following day we went to Cologne. Operations — Cologne. That was as a night time. And I couldn’t see them I was beginning to find it was getting a bit easier. The ops were getting easier. The flak was just as bad but the fighters didn’t seem, the fighters didn’t seem such a pest like they used to be. And the thing was every trip I went on. Every trip I went on my second tour. Near enough every one, near every one, was to Happy Valley. The next trip was with Hourigan, an Australian, was to Dusseldorf. And on the 4th we went to Bochum. Bochum. That’s in the Ruhr valley as well. And then [pause] and then we went on a daylight raid. It just shows you. A daylight raid to Gelsenkirchen and — which was unbelievable. You’d never, the year before they would never have dared gone over the Ruhr valley in the daylight. And then we done a bit of air firing in a Halifax. And then we went back to Essen. Hourigan again. I was with Hourigan again and we went to Essen on the 29th of ‘44. And on the 30th believe it or not we was back in Duisburg. And every one of those trips was to the Ruhr Valley. And on the 21st of the 12th ‘44 I went to Cologne. And I was posted from there to the other Australian squadron 466 Squadron. Total operations — I thought it was nine. Then I was posted to the other Australian squadron at Driffield — 466. And I carried, and I went with, wait a minute, I carried on with Hourigan and we went to Saarbrucken in daylight. Which was unbelievable. And then we went to Magdeburg in the, in the Ruhr Valley. And then back to Gelsenkirchen again as a mid-upper. I went as a mid-upper then in a Halifax. But I found that things were a bit easier in the second tour. Wasn’t really because we were still losing a hell of a load of bloody aircraft but it seemed to me a bit, seemed to me to be a bit lighter. And then on the 2nd of the 2nd ‘45 I went to Wanne-Eickel. It’s another — I missed out a page here.
[pause]
And then I was posted to 158 Squadron at Lissett in Yorkshire. And the first trip we went to was to Dresden. That was on the 13th of the 2nd ‘44. We, we never actually bombed Dresden. We bombed the place just outside Dresden called [unclear ] or [unclear] or Bohlem or whatever. B O H L E M. We was told to go in before the 5. We were in 4 Group and were told to go in just before 5 Group and draw the fighters away from Dresden which we did do. We had bleeding swarms of bleeding fighters around us. And the Lancs went into Dresden unopposed and that’s why Dresden took such a hiding. There was no opposition whatsoever there. And then 5 Group just done what they liked. And we could see, well we was right next door to it. We could see the huge blaze at Dresden burning merrily away. And we was at, from this place just outside Dresden. We landed. We had trouble. I think we got hit that night and we landed back at Manston for a couple of hours. Then we went to, then funnily enough I started flying with a Canadian. A Canadian named Cooperman. And strangely enough that was, that was back, back at the Ruhr Valley again. Rohrsheim. And then the following, the following day I was with Cooperman and we was bombing a place called Worms in the Ruhr valley. And I always remember to this day, this Canadian, who was a Jew, was a Jewish bloke and he’d left Germany with his parents before the war. And he was, he was a flying officer in the Canadian Air Force. And as we approached Worms he said, ‘Chaps,’ he said, ‘This is where I was born.’ He said, ‘And now I’m going to bomb the bastards.’ And those were the exact words he said. And we did. We went and bombed it. And the next thing we knew and on the 23rd of the 2nd we went to Essen again and, the times I went to Essen, and the following day on the 24th of the 2nd I went back to the Ruhr Valley and done close quarter — Kamen. And then the following on the 27th — That was our last trip of the war we went to Mainz. And most of those trips were in the Ruhr valley. And unscathed. Unbelievable. And of course the war, the war finished soon after that didn’t it? 27th of the 2nd.
TO: And what are your thoughts on the bombing of Dresden?
HI: Well to be honest with you it was just well after all those trips it just came normal. You know. You just looked down and saw a huge huge fire below you which you normally see and that was it. Dresden was the same. We was, the place we bombed was more or less on the outskirts of Dresden. The idea of us was to draw the fighters away. Just go in about five or six minutes before the main force. Bring the fighters away and of course that’s what happened. And the Lancs from 5 Group went in and done their business. They did do the business. There was no flak there. No opposition whatsoever. There was no flak and no fighters. They just went in, done their bombing and went home. And of course it caught well alight.
TO: Did the fire that you could see at Dresden — did it look any bigger than what you had seen before?
HI: It looked big, yeah. We could see. All the crew said, ‘Blimey that’s a big one down there.’ But then again most, most bombing trips we always had looked down, those targets were well alight. Well alight. The amount of incendiaries we dropped was unbelievable. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them. Yeah.
TO: This is going to be an odd question and I don’t think you may even be able to answer it, but when you were flying over areas that were on fire could you, was there any noticeable change in the temperature when you were flying above it?
HI: No. I wouldn’t have thought so. You was only over the target, it looked like a lifetime but you was only over there minutes. Really minutes. Oh, you’re talking about the hot air coming up?
TO: Yeah. The [unclear] rising up.
HI: I don’t think — they never noticed. It didn’t seem no bloody warmer in the turret anyway [laughs] but all you was, I’d known from my personal opinion was we wanted to get in. Get out. Quick as possible. That’s what we done. But the thing that we never realised but the German fighters told us afterwards, the worst thing we ever done was after we’d dropped our bombs was to go into a dive. We should never have done that because that gave the advantage to the night fighters. They was above you then. Well above you to come in. What we should have done is kept the same height coming out of the target. But we all used to dive. Pick up speed to get away from the target. Yeah. But you used to see on the way home you always see bombers blowing up in the sky. All the time. Yeah. Over the target, yeah. And the thing was to get in and get out quick.
TO: Right. How do you feel about Churchill’s decision when he ordered the bombing of cities?
HI: Well, we never knew it was. We knew it was somebody higher up than Harris but of course it was, was Churchill. He demanded that we bombed the cities and Harris just took his word for it and he made sure we did bomb them. And of course he had the backing of a huge bomber force didn’t he? Lancs, Halifaxes. Probably, if we’d had them a year earlier the war would have finished earlier. But the bomb load was enormous. One four thousand pounder and fourteen hundred incendiaries. Imagine that lot dropping. Four or five hundred bombers dropping that lot on a small town. Yeah.
TO: When you went on missions were you part of a bomber stream?
HI: Well a stream. It was, literally was a stream. There was no formation flying or nothing. You just went over and you had to be in a certain point. More or less rendezvous at a certain point on the map. So that you were more or less was all collected together so you could make one rush to the target. Get in and get out quick. You never doodled about over the target. You went in and especially with the Pathfinders. You just, you just went for the flare. You’d see the flares. Went straight for the flares.
Other: Sorry to disturb you again Harry.
HI: Yes sir.
[recording paused]
TO: You think, you just mentioned to me something about the evasive manoeuvres. The night fighters said the wrong thing to do was to dive.
HI: Yeah. Leaving the target. We found out, well after the night fighters said it was the wrong thing to do was to dive away from the target because it gave them the advantage of height to come in after you. Which, when you think about it, was right. But what actually caused the much trouble for Bomber Command was the up and under. The Schrage musik. That was one that caused all the trouble. The flak you couldn’t, couldn’t avoid. The flak was there. If it hit you it hit you and if it didn’t hit you you was lucky. It was just sheer luck. You couldn’t avoid it. You had to go through it and if one of those shells hit you that was it. Yeah. We used to get huge lumps of shrapnel come through the aircraft. That was the danger. And if that hit you it caused terrible damage. So there you are.
TO: Could you see much on the ground other than fires and explosions?
HI: No. All you could see from about twenty thousand feet you didn’t keep looking at the target because you had to keep active with the fighters. Because they was all around you. All waiting for you. They was like sharks and you had to watch. You had to really watch the sky for fighters. They were the biggest danger. And when they come in they showed no mercy. They went straight in.
TO: Yeah.
HI: Yeah.
TO: Did night fighters take out more bombers than flak?
HI: Yeah. Definitely. Much much more. Especially with the up and under. That’s what done it. Yeah. I think they — I reckon — I don’t know, I’ve got no idea but I reckon seventy five per cent, eighty percent of the shot down were done by fighters. And you know when you think some had forty or fifty bombers to their credit. It was so easy for them. You could come and all they had to do was get underneath the aircraft, press the trigger, press the button, fire the guns and they wouldn’t, the shells that were explosive shells go into the petrol tank. Bang. Up it went. Just like that.
TO: And when you, can you explain to me a bit more how the briefings worked for the missions?
HI: Well, what it actually was we were two squadrons. We were told at the briefing in the briefing room was near enough down to your HQ you know where all the office buildings were. And with a crowd in the room there was always a military policeman on the, on the gate and we went in and sat down. A bit noisy. Everybody was noisy. Laughing and joking. Then all of a sudden — bang. The CO would come in with his adjutant and his armament officer, gunnery officer, bomb aimer officer and navigation officer used to follow the CO in. And they’d go on the platform and we’d wait for the curtain. There was a big curtain over the map. That was pulled down and then you’d see. And that’s when you used to get the ohs and ahs. See the Ruhr. See the Ruhr Valley up and say, ‘Oh blimey.’ But they didn’t, they used to love Italy. Going to Italy. But Munich was a bad target, Nuremburg was, Berlin was. But the Ruhr valley was the place where most of the flak was. The reason for it was because you didn’t have one town. You had about ten or fifteen towns near enough on top of each other. And if you missed one, one town, if you missed one town you had to go over another town and they’d give you a pasting as well. That’s why they used to call it Happy Valley. Yeah. You got a good reception going in and a better reception coming out. You used to see the bombs blowing upwards and the huge explosions down below. You still had to keep one eye out for the fighters. Especially the single engine fighters. They used to come in and they used to go right through the flak after you. Yeah. Messerschmitt. Used to come straight at you. And they had four cannons and if one of those hit you mate it was good night nurse.
TO: What kind of targets were you generally given at the briefings?
HI: Well, we was told an area where to bomb. We were never given an actual target. We was given an area to bomb because very very difficult of a night time picking out a target from twenty thousand feet. You got an area and we would bomb that area. If we could. If it was a clear moonlight night and at that time we were dropping our own flares. There was no Pathfinding at the beginning. And we used to drop our own flares to see where, you know, where the target was. And it got easier when they got the Pathfinders. Because all that meant there was — get to the target and see the flare. Bomb the flare. But the trouble was Jerry knew this was going on and so he used to concentrate all his, all his artillery on where the flares were. And a lot of places were literally burned to pieces. Because I didn’t realise how many houses in Germany were made of wood. It was amazing. Dresden was nearly all wood wasn’t it? Yeah. And there was another place. I forget where it was. Completely burned down. Near the Baltic. I can’t remember the name.
TO: Hamburg.
HI: No. Smaller place than that. They burned the whole town down. That was in about 1942.
TO: Lubeck.
HI: Ah, Lubeck. Yeah. Yeah. They burned Lubeck down completely. Yeah. Raised it to the ground. Incendiaries. They were fearsome things those incendiaries. I think they was about eighteen inches long. Shaped like a twenty piece coin. About four, I think it had four or five sides to it but they were pretty deadly. Imagine that. I mean we used to carry fourteen or fifteen hundred. You imagine a hundred Lancs all carrying that amount load. How many incendiaries were dropped in one night. And then we had the other incendiary with oil. That was a terrible one as well.
TO: And were you ever given, did you ever win any awards during the war?
HI: Yeah. I got the DFC. The reason I think I got that because after, as the war was finishing they asked me how many trips I’d done. I wrote them down. They took no notice of it and then a couple of weeks later they said, ‘Oh. You’ve been awarded the DFC.’ So that’s what I got, the DFC. It was a bit unique because I was a warrant officer. I wasn’t an officer and that’s an officer’s medal the DFC but being a warrant officer they gave it to the, gave us the DFC as well.
TO: Did it go to the rest of the crew as well?
HI: That I don’t know. The war had finished and most of the crews had dispersed, you know. What was left of them. Most of the blokes during the war was awarded the DFCs and DFMs. A lot of them got killed. A hell of a lot of them. Usually and this is what I don’t understand — when I finished my first tour everybody got the DFM except me. That I don’t understand. Then I realised what it might have been. Because I changed my name from Irons to Galloway when I was halfway through me tour. And I think they might have looked at it and just seen Galloway. And Irons was just so many trips. And Irons was so many trips and they never connected the two together. But all the crew got the DFM except me. Pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator, mid-upper except me.
TO: And what was your favourite aircraft of the war?
HI: Well, I think, myself the Halifax. I thought the Halifax Mark 3 was a better aircraft than the Lanc. It was a good bomber. It done its job. Same as the Lanc. I don’t think it carried the same heavy bomb load as a Lanc. It was a good plane. Had no problems with it. We had four machine guns in the mid-upper and four in the back so it was a bit better armed than the, than the Lanc. And right at the end of the war of course they brought out the other turret with the .5s in them. It was a bit late though. The war was more or less finished. We should have had them in ‘42. They made a hell of a lot of difference.
TO: And I know we mentioned this earlier but could you explain again what happened to people who refused to go on bombing missions?
HI: Well I know it happened. I know it happened. I’ve heard, you know, stories of what happened. I never come across it myself but it did happen. And especially not the officers so much which I still don’t understand that. But the NCOs were stripped. Stripped down to AC2 and put in the prison. I think it was in the Isle of Sheppey and they done about two or three months here. And when they came out on their record books, you know the big card box, book thing you all had was right at the top in red letters that they’d refuse to fly. LMF. Yeah. Which was wrong. Some blokes couldn’t take it. Just couldn’t take it. Probably had a couple of bad trips and that was it. And they were bad trips. Yeah. And after the war they just treated us like mud. Didn’t care. Gave us all the menial jobs there were about and that was it. We had to wait twelve months before we got demobbed. A lot of them got, a lot of them had their ranks cut right down to AC1 and AC2. I don’t know why. I never, but a lot of them did. Which was all wrong.
TO: And what’s your best memory of the war?
HI: My best memory of the war was my first bombing trip. To Duisburg. Not Duisburg.
TO: Dusseldorf.
HI: Dusseldorf. That was my first trip and that was the most frightening. It wasn’t the worst one I done but it was my first one and I never expected what I’d see. Never knew. And when we come back after a bombing raid we never discussed, never discussed a bombing trip anyway. We never said it was bad or anything like that. We just, just more or less kept quiet. Because we was all frightened what was going to be the next one I think. Which near enough always happened. The crews. You’d go on leave, you’d come back — all different faces. Yeah. And that went on time and time again. I think they could have treated bomber crews a little bit better than what they did for what they’d done but there you are.
TO: And what was probably the most difficult mission you ever had? If you don’t want to discuss don’t talk about it.
HI: No. The most difficult place to go to was Essen. It was terrible. The flak there was unbelievable. It was all difficult. Every one. You never knew. You never knew your luck. Some went on easy trips. They thought was an easy trip. Like the one who got the VC for the first daylight raid. Low level raid of the war in a Lancaster. He got the VC and he stayed on the squadron but he never done no trips until one came up for Italy which we used to say it was easy. He went on an Italian one and got shot down. So you never knew your luck. Nettleton. That was the VC. Yeah. He went on one of the easy Italian trips and got shot down.
TO: So you mentioned earlier that guy Gibson was with you on that one low level mission.
HI: Oh yeah. Yeah.
TO: Was he with a different squadron number at that time?
HI: Yeah. He was, he was 106 squadron. He was the CO of 106 Squadron. 106 Squadron. He was definitely on our port side. And he took the photograph of us and another crew as we were just going into Le Creusot and that is, and the actual picture now is in the big museum at Hendon. The big photograph of it. Yeah. Because he went on to become the Dambuster didn’t he?
TO: What do you think of Operation Chastise?
HI: Operation?
TO: Chastise. It was the Dambusters raid.
HI: Well I reckon myself, personally speaking they could have got near enough any crew could have done that. It was only just more or less flying low and dropping the bomb at the right height. But they just, they just picked the crews, he picked the crews he wanted. They were all his mates mostly from 106 Squadron. But it was a good raid that weren’t it? A good raid. There was worse ones than that but there you are. You can fly to Essen or on the Ruhr Valley was a much more dangerous target than the — than that.
TO: Did you ever have to attack railway yards?
HI: They did but we never attacked, I never attacked a railway yard. Only in Italy, Genoa. But we attacked the whole town and the railway yard was amongst it, you know. We attacked that because they was having a big huge battle at Alemain and the Germans were bringing supplies through to Genoa down to the Middle East. And we attacked it. The railway yards there. Yeah.
TO: And what do you think was the most important campaign of the war?
HI: Well actually — what? From the whole of —
TO: From the whole of the war.
HI: Bomber Command. I think if it hadn’t been for Bomber Command the war would have gone on for much much much longer. Much longer. So we — so you’ve been to Germany haven’t you? Seen the, did you see the state of the bombing? Oh you never did you?
TO: I saw, I saw the church that they left.
HI: Yeah. Yeah. But the flak, but the bombing terrorised Germany. Definitely. I don’t think we would have stood it anyway. I know we wouldn’t have done.
TO: And did you hear at all — when did you hear about the Holocaust?
HI: Nobody heard about that ‘til after the war. They must have known. They must have had, they must have had reports coming through from the Resistance about what was happening but we never heard about it. We never knew it was going on. The funny thing was I read after the war that the Jewish community in England asked us, asked Bomber Harris to bomb Auschwitz. Bomb it completely. And he refused. Good job he did because can you imagine what would have happened after the war when they found out that they said the RAF had bombed a concentration camp? The thing was the Jews reckon that it was better for them to be killed with a bomb than the suffering like they were. [pause – fly buzzing on recording] Got some flies in here haven’t we? Have you got it all written down have you?
TO: I have my questions on here. See which ones I’ve asked and which I haven’t because a lot of them you’ve answered already in your — in your —
HI: Yeah.
TO: Were clouds over the target ever a major problem?
HI: It was a big problem. Once, well once the cloud was over the target you couldn’t see it so you either had to bring your bombs back or drop them on a near enough target what you see. And once you, if you went over the target we shouldn’t have gone, we shouldn’t have gone on the raid. If the Met officer told us that there was full cloud over the target we shouldn’t go. We had a few cancellations like that. We were all ready to go sitting in the aircraft and then the red light would come up. No ops through, through bad weather. Icing was one of the worst most dangerous things. Flying through cloud with the ice.
TO: And before you joined the RAF can you, do you remember much about seeing the bombing of London?
HI: Oh I seen London. I was, I told you. We lived at Stamford Hill. It was a high, quite a high part of the ground and you had a first class picture of what was happening in the City of London. It was well alright. Really well alight. They caught the whole of the city alight. It was blazing. And that’s when we decided to join the RAF. A lot of the bombs were dropped scattered in London anyway. A hell of a lot of the bombs were dropped everywhere. Not in one area. Just dropped their bombs and went away. You know. It was over London. That was it.
TO: And do you remember seeing much of the Battle of Britain?
HI: Yeah we see a little bit of it. We were about fifteen sixteen then. Sixteen. And we was over the Lea. The big open open field by the River Lea and we had a grandstand view of the RAF Spitfires attacking the bombers and the fighters. We see them going down. Yeah. It was quite a battle. Yeah. And as I say they had a terrific disadvantage. The Germans. Because they had to come all the way over France before they got to England, and our Spitfires were waiting for them when they come here. They didn’t have that huge journey. They were more or less local. At Hendon they were at. Hornchurch. Yeah. Good job we beat them. But the Battle of Britain was no comparison. I’ll tell you now, no comparison to the Battle for the Ruhr. No comparison whatsoever. In terms of casualties anyway.
TO: And can you tell me a bit about the gunnery school course you went on?
HI: Yeah. When we arrived there we was told it was a six weeks course. I think we flew about — I’ve got it here. I know it wasn’t a lot.
[pause]
HI: In all I done nineteen hours flying. Nineteen hours. It’s frightening. And it was all firing at drogues. Two hundred rounds fired. All usual firing at a drogue being towed by an aircraft.
TO: Yes.
HI: Done six weeks there and I was straight on ops which was frightening really. You didn’t know what was happening [laughs] till, till you got there. Yeah.
TO: Is it ok if I close the door to the lounge? There seems to be a bit of birdsong coming through.
HI: Pardon?
TO: Is it ok if I close the door to the lounge?
HI: Yeah
TO: Sorry. It’s just a bit of —
HI: What? A bit of a reflection.
TO: No. There’s a bit of birdsong coming through. That’s all.
HI: Birdsong.
TO: Yeah.
HI: Yeah. Go on. Yeah. You don’t like birds.
TO: No. It’s just it might interfere on the film. That’s all. Sorry.
[pause]
TO: Nothing to do with birds it’s just it might be interfering in the background noise that’s all. I haven’t got a problem with birds. Sorry what was that. I couldn’t remember, what were saying earlier about the propaganda leaflets that you had with you?
HI: Nickel. Every time we took off there was a pack. A big parcel of nickels. Not on every raid but a lot of the raids and it was up to the engineer mostly to throw them through the bomb bay. He had a window at the side of him and he could open up and could throw the nickels into the bomb bay. So when the bomb bay, when the bomb doors opened all the nickels floated out. That was the idea of it. But our skipper say sod it and just used to ask one of the crew to go back and throw them out the bleeding aircraft. We don’t want to — ‘We’ve got enough on our plate without throwing out bloody leaflets.’ And it was a load of rubbish that the Jerry never took notice of. Just a waste of time.
TO: Harris said after the war he never engaged in pamphlet dropping for two reasons. One — it gave the defenders plenty of practice in getting ready for it.
HI: Yeah.
TO: And two it supplied a considerable quantity of toilet paper to the Germans.
HI: That’s right. Yeah [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Nickels they called them.
TO: And did you hear about Hitler’s invasion of Russia?
HI: Oh we heard about it. It was on the news. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It didn’t make no difference to us. We were still building our forces. That was in nineteen forty — in the nineteen forty wasn’t it? Russia.
TO: I think it was ’41. Or around that time.
HI: Yeah. It didn’t bother us but my squadron, number 9 and 617 went to Russia before they bombed the Tirpitz because it’s such a long distance they had to refuel and on the way back they bombed the Tirpitz. And they were successful. They sunk that anyway.
TO: Were your, did you ever see the Tallboy bombs they were using?
HI: No. I never see it. No. Because by the time I was on Halifaxes then. There was only two squadrons that had the tall bomb. There was 617 and my squadron — number 9. They didn’t started bombing, didn’t start using the tall boy until the end probably the end of ’43. They caused a lot of damage. Caused a hell of a lot of damage. But there was only two squadrons that dropped it anyway.
TO: And what were conditions like in general aboard a Halifax?
HI: Just the same as a Lanc I suppose. Bloody cold. And that was it. A little bit more room. You could get out the turret and get yourself, escape a bit quicker than the Lanc. It was a bit easier. You could open the doors and just more or less crouch down and get out. With the Lanc you had to slide yourself out about eight or nine feet before you could get to your feet. You had to slide down and slide out. Of course you know you was locked in the turret. You locked yourself with a clip at the back and just clipped it and that. And if you were probably badly wounded — if you couldn’t undo it you was buggered. You couldn’t get out the turret.
TO: Can you please explain to me the procedure for boarding the bomber and taking off for a mission?
HI: Well it wasn’t a lot in it actually. The crew. The WAAF driver used to drop you at your aircraft. And then the ground crew would be there. And all you would do was. It all depends how long you’ve got before take-off. If you had, if you were on one of the early crews you’d be on the outside of the aircraft. I think nearly everybody smoked them days. They was all puffing, puffing on fags until they got in. And set the fags out and climbed in the aircraft. And the bomb aimer would start checking the — yeah. The flight engineer would start checking his stuff. The two gunners would be make sure the guns are working well and the ammunition was coming up. And then we was just wait for the signal. I’d pull up the ladder. Slam the door and then trundle down to the starting point which was a big cabin. And you used to wait for the yellow light. The green light to go on and off you went. You’d circle the aerodrome till you got to a nice height and then off you went. You was on your own, on your Jack-Jones. We had to keep looking out for other aircraft in case they came too close to you. But there was never never never any formation flying of a night time. Never. Never.
TO: Did you ever do formation flying during the day?
HI: Never. Well, I told you we’d done two daylights. All we were — one big group of ninety Lancs just flying along at thirty foot. There was no formation flying or nothing. There were just one gaggle, what we called a gaggle. And if the fighters had got amongst us we’d have had it. But we were so lucky with that Le Creusot raid. To go all the way there and back without seeing a fighter was incredible. We were right across France. And there must have been hundreds of fighters there.
TO: Was there, I know you mentioned that you didn’t talk about missions but was there anyone who ever said that they thought that the bombing wasn’t - the bombing or the tactics weren’t working?
HI: No. I never heard that ever. Never. All I ever heard was we were going over to bomb the target and that was it. There was never any mention of tactics not working. Never. Only until after the war. And now they realise that bombing was very very important. It was through the bombing that really stopped the Germans. Stopped all their, stopped all their production. All their production.
TO: And what was the procedure for coming in to land at the end of a mission?
HI: That was, that was difficult because you was tired , you were bloody cold, and you were wanting to get down. You’d seen everything. You’d seen some terrible things happening in the air and the trouble was you’d all rush back to try to try to get, try to be the first to land. And the trouble was there would be about fifteen of you all circling the ‘drome at different heights waiting to come in and it was bloody tiring. Because you were tired anyway especially with an eight or nine hour flight. It’s not only the eight or nine hours flight it was the hours before preparing before you went. It could be a long long long day and when you come back everybody was trying to get back first. The first one back landed first and all the others had to queue up. Flying round and round and round until it was their turn. What we called pancake. And you just came down. Once you landed oh, take your mask off and just relax. Yeah. Some of those raids were terrible I’ll tell you. You never knew if you was coming back or not. Never.
TO: And were you ever scared?
HI: Always scared. You had to be. You weren’t human if you weren’t. With that amount of flak that was coming up. You can’t explain to people the amount of artilleries shells that were coming up. Hundreds of them over the target. Hundreds of them. And on top of that you had to watch out for the night fighters. You had to watch out for blokes dropping bombs on you. You had to watch out for collisions. And on top of that you had to find your way home [laughs] and that was a bit difficult sometimes. We’d be flying. Where the bloody hell are we? ‘Skipper I don’t know where we are.’
TO: Did you talk much with each other during a mission?
HI: No. No. All we talked about was the business. Nobody, there was no — I don’t know about other crews but most crews I suppose, everybody kept quiet until they had something to say. Which is most, which is most important. You don’t want a lot of chat in the aircraft while you’re flying on ops. You want to be as quiet as possible. You never know.
TO: And did you socialise a lot outside of missions?
HI: Only with, with the crew. We always went out. If we went out anywhere it was always with the crew on the beer. We was always drinking. Always. Most of the aircrew were drinkers. Except my pilot. Stubbs. He never drank, never smoked and he never went out with women. But by God could he swear when we was on ops. His language [laughs] his language was absolutely vile. What he didn’t call the bomb aimer. The flight engineer. He never swore at me though. And you couldn’t swear back at him — he was a flight lieu [laughs] yeah.
TO: Slight digression here. Bernie Harris the chap I mentioned to you earlier.
HI: Yeah.
TO: He said, I think he said there was a member of his crew who could swear for about thirty minutes without repeating the same word and once accidentally there was some kind of radio error.
HI: Yeah.
TO: Started swearing for thirty minutes straight in to it. When there was some senior officers on the radio or something. And apparently there was, oh sorry, also some young WAAF with them at the time. He nearly fainted when she made the call. Yeah. That’s —
HI: Yeah.
TO: And, sorry you mentioned on the first mission you had to make a second bomb run.
HI: Yeah.
TO: Was that common?
HI: Not really. But this pilot, he was a good pilot and he liked to, liked to have everything right. It had to be straight. And if we’d have gone in and he hadn’t got the aiming point and he took the photograph. We come back with no aiming point. The raid wouldn’t have counted anyway. That’s why we went around again. Second run. It was dangerous but there you are. I always said it was like doing two trips in one.
TO: This is more a speculative question but do you think anything could have been done during the war to reduce the losses Bomber Command were suffering?
HI: Yeah. Had the turret. Had the turret underneath the aircraft. If they’d had the turret underneath the aircraft they would have saved a hell of a lot of aircraft. A hell of a lot. Then again I don’t know where they could have put a turret underneath a Lanc. You had your bomb bay which took up say eight tenths of the area underneath. And then you had your H2S. There was no room for a turret. No room at all unless you took the H2S out or you made the bomb bay smaller. The Yanks had it because their bomb bay was — they never carried hardly any bombs anyway. They only had a small area for their bombs. And we had a huge, well you know, they had the huge room underneath. It was enormous.
TO: And what did you think of German aircraft of the war?
HI: The what?
TO: The German aircraft of the war.
HI: Well they were good. Yeah. They were very good. Yeah. The only thing is the Germans never had a heavy bomber did they? They never had a heavy bomber. The bombers, the JU88 and the Messerschmitt 110 they turned into night fighters because they could stay up in the air, you know. About six or seven hours cruising about. But they never had no, and actually there was only the two bombers they had, the JU88 and the 110. And they couldn’t carry no bomb load. They carried a thousand pounder and that was it. Not like the Lanc.
TO: And how was morale in general in the air force?
HI: It was alright. Yeah. It was alright. Yeah. No one ever moaned. They knew that they’d, most of them knew that they wasn’t going to come back. That’s the most amazing thing of the war I think. They all knew. Most of them knew they wasn’t going to come back. Which was incredible. Incredible. To prove that everyone used to write a last letter. I never. But most of them did. Used to write a last letter home. They knew they wasn’t going to survive. They had to do thirty trips. It wanted some doing and come back every time. Wanted some doing. Yeah.
TO: Did people ever talk about friends that they’d lost?
HI: No. Not really. No. No. I’ll tell you the word they used to use. I’ll tell you now, was, ‘Gone for a shit.’ That was it. Nothing else was said. ‘Oh, where’s so and so today?’ ‘Oh they went for a shit last night.’ And that was it. Or got the chop. That was it. Never discussed no more. Another crew would come in. Same thing.
TO: Did you ever go to the cinema much during the war?
HI: No. Very rarely went. Very rarely. The thing for bomber crews was going up the pub and getting drunk. I suppose a few went — oh I think I went once or twice but mostly we used to end up in the pub. In the pubs in Lincoln. Mostly Lincoln. The Saracens Head. It was packed. Packed with bomber crews. Packed every night.
TO: And the newspapers that you had during the war. Did you ever read what they were saying about bomber crews?
HI: No. There wasn’t much spoken about the bomber crews. Not a lot. Not a lot. There wasn’t a lot of information about them. There was no publicity about them anyway. Only now and again when one of them won the VC but that not a lot. The bombing just carried on quietly. The government knew what was going on that was it. They public didn’t know. Only around Lincoln when they used to see about three or four hundred Lancs circling Lincoln ready to go.
TO: Was it very cramped aboard the aircraft?
HI: Well in the rear turret it was yeah. In the rear turret. And the mid-upper was very cramped, very very cramped. No room. No room for movement at all — the time you got your clothing on. And you had a seat a hard seat. I think it was armour plated seat we had and it was as hard as anything. Apart from that it was only because we were so young that we took it. But the oxygen used to make your throat and mouth terrible dry. You was breathing through a rubber oxygen mask — the smell of the bloody rubber. Yeah. Yeah. How I managed it I don’t know but I did. Incredible.
TO: If you want to take another break we can.
HI: No. I think I’ll have another drink. You’re making me bloody thirsty. Do you want another tea? Yeah?
[recording paused]
TO: So where did you keep the parachutes aboard the planes?
HI: It was on a piece of elastic outside the rear turret. About six foot back. There was a holder there and you put it in there and put a elastic, a piece of elastic held it. Sometimes it held and sometimes it didn’t.
TO: And did you hear much about what the Germans were doing in Europe during the war?
HI: No. Nothing at all. Nothing at all. Never heard about the atrocities or anything. Never. There was never no publicity about it. None at all. Only after the war we realised that a few of them ended up in Auschwitz. A few of our prisoners of war ended up in Auschwitz. That’s about all I know.
TO: Have you ever visited any concentration camps?
HI: Yeah. I’ve been to Auschwitz. And after I’d come out from there I had a clear conscience. Honestly, I did. I had a bit of a conscience before about the bombing but when I went there and see what actually happened that was it. Last year I went there. Yeah.
TO: And were they, was it a 303 guns you were on?
HI: They were all 303s.
TO: And were they very effective?
HI: Useless. Bloody useless. Unless you got them like I did. About thirty — about twenty or thirty yards away. But apart from that they were useless. I think the gunners shot down a few but not a lot. They didn’t have to come in anyway. They had 20 millimetre cannon. And they could stand off and belt away at you and you just had to look at them.
TO: And did your plane ever actually get lost?
HI: Yeah. A couple of times we got lost. We sort of circled around and looked around until we see a, some sort of point that we could lock on to you know. The favourite point was a river or a, or the coastline. But you did get lost. A few times you did got lost. Especially after coming out the target you was bloody lost anyway. You had to set your course again from, from the target. And you were jumping and diving about. We had a good navigator. He was alright. And of course once we got H2S that helped us tremendously but they never, they never got that ‘til the later part of that war. It was brilliant. That showed you right, the outline of all the towns, coastline and rivers through dense fog. It was brilliant.
TO: And was that with equipment like Gee?
HI: Gee we had and that took us to the Dutch coast. And then the Germans blocked it. It was useless after that. We had to make our own way. And of course all we hoped for we could see the Ruhr Valley. When you got to the Dutch coast how far was the Ruhr Valley? Half an hour away by plane. It wasn’t far. And we just headed out on that direction and you were soon over the Ruhr Valley. And you knew when you was over the Ruhr Valley with the bleeding guns firing at you. But they never opened up properly until you started dropping the bombs on the target. They kept quiet. And of course they used to have the — I don’t know if you know it. They used to light huge fires outside the town. Huge fires. To make out it was a town burning so we’d bomb that. Which a few of them did.
TO: I didn’t know about that.
HI: It was open fields in the country. But it was mainly —
[Phone ringing]
HI: Is that me again?
TO: Yeah.
[recording paused
TO: Sorry, could you just —
HI: It’s five to two.
TO: I mean what time do you leave?
HI: Oh I’ve got to leave here at 4 o’clock.
TO: Ok. I’ll definitely be done long before that.
HI: Pardon?
TO: I’ll definitely be finished long before that.
HI: I hope so because I’ve got to get ready as well.
TO: Ok. Sorry. And did the accuracy of bombing improve during the war?
HI: Immensely. When we got radar and H2S and Pathfinding it improved immensely. Accurately. Yeah. Yeah. And there was no problem with — the targets always used to be well alight when we got there anyway. And it was just a matter of dropping your bombs and getting out without being shot down. That was the problem. Getting away without being shot down. Yeah.
TO: What, what missions specifically do you remember the most of the war?
HI: Well the, the most vivid mission of all was the daylight raid on Le Creusot. Which was fantastic. To go right across France in ’42. Bomb. Bomb the target and come all the way back without seeing a fighter was incredible. That’s the most impressive one I know, and the bombing was very very accurate.
TO: Did you ever bomb German ships in ports?
HI: Well only Wilhelmshaven and Bremen and the Kiel. We don’t know. We just bombed the ports. I don’t know. I don’t say we hit a ship or not. I know 9 Squadron sank the Tirpitz. I know that. But I wasn’t there at the time.
TO: So, can you tell me which squadrons were you in during the war?
HI: Number 9 Squadron. Still flying now. They’re out in Syria. Number 9. 466. 158 Squadron.
TO: And did you hear about the invasion of Normandy?
HI: Well I don’t know about heard about. We see it was, we knew it was happening because the amount of aircraft in the air. Huge armadas of aircraft going over. So we knew, we knew the war was on. I was in Kent at the moment. At the time. Flying drogues. And we see it all happening there yeah. But I wasn’t involved in it anyway. Not ‘til later on. When I went back on my second tour.
TO: Sorry what — can you tell me again? What was your rank in the air force?
HI: I was a warrant officer. I was offered a commission but I wouldn’t take it. I don’t know why. I was silly. I should have taken it. I’d have ended up at least a flight lieu. But I, I didn’t refuse it. I just didn’t — all my mates took it and they all became commissioned but I didn’t take it. I don’t know why. I was happy as I was so that was it. I should have done though.
TO: And what was probably the most dangerous of the German fighters?
HI: The night fighter? The most dangerous was the JU88. Definitely. That was equipped especially for night fighting. It had all the radar on it. Heavy cannons. They had the Messerschmitt 110. That was a good night fighter. And the Messerschitt 109 they used. And the Focke-Wulf 190. Single engine. They used that mostly over the target especially if a bloke was caught in the searchlights. They’d just go straight for him. Bang. Yeah.
TO: If you got caught in a searchlight was it possible to get out of it?
HI: Very very difficult. Very very difficult. The only way to get out of the searchlights which we’d done several times was put the nose down like that and go starboard or port and hoping you could clear it. Sometimes, sometimes you did and sometimes you couldn’t. We used to see them captured you know with about fifteen searchlights on one aircraft. And then all the guns would open up and all you’d see was a great big puff of explosion and the smoke and that was another one gone. Simple as that. So, best to keep away from it if you could. But the one radar, the one that was run by radar you couldn’t get away from. It just went bang like that. Straight on an aircraft. No messing about. And once that got you five or six of the ordinary searchlights would come — because the radar one was blue and all the searchlight ones were white. And they just used to group you like that. The flak would come up. An enormous amount of flak. Bang. You didn’t stand a chance.
TO: Did, was your aircraft ever caught in searchlights?
HI: Yeah. We was caught a couple of times but lucky enough we done the dive and the turn and got away with it. But sometimes that was very difficult because sometimes you had your bomb load on and you fell. You fell like a stone and you hoped it would bloody well pull out at the end.
TO: And do you remember what you were doing on the day that the war ended?
HI: Yeah. I’d finished flying and I was, they’d posted me up to, after I had done me second tour they posted me up to, up to Scotland as an instructor. And I didn’t fancy it and then they posted me down to Blackpool. I was at Blackpool when the war finished. Being trained. Being changed to another duty because they didn’t want us no more in Bomber Command and we had to do ground staff duties. And they said to me, ‘What was you?’ I said, ‘I’m a tailor.’ They said, ‘We’ve got a job for you.’ And they put in charge of about twenty WAAFs on sewing machines down at Newmarket. That’s how I finished the war. And they treated the aircrew, they treated bomber crews diabolical. Absolutely. A lot of them lost their rank. They just said you’re not a flight sergeant no more. You’re an AC2 or an LAC. I thought it was shocking. Anyhow. But it didn’t, they couldn’t do that with me because I had the DFC up and I couldn’t walk about with a DFC as an odd, as a flight sergeant. So I was left. I was left as a warrant officer.
TO: Why do you think Bomber Command were treated the way they were?
HI: That I don’t know. That I do not know. I’ll never, I can never understand it and I never will. We won the war. We definitely won the war for bomber, for Britain. With our losses were horrendous and yet after the war they absolutely [clap] on us. Yeah. I think it was terrible. They treated us terrible. All the bomber crews were walking about after the war doing menial jobs. Sweeping up. Driving vans. Anything. They didn’t know what to do with us. What they should have done was demobilise us straight away. Said, ‘Alright. You’re finished. Go home.’ No. They had to wait another year doing menial jobs. There you are. And they wouldn’t give us a medal. Can you understand it?
TO: Can I understand it?
HI: Pardon?
TO: Can I understand why they were treated that way?
HI: Yeah. Can you understand why they never gave us a medal?
TO: No.
HI: The barbers got medals. The man that swept the roads got medals. The one that cleaned the toilet got medals. Bomber Command got nothing. Never. I don’t understand it. I don’t know. We should have got a campaign medal. We never got one. Which was terrible when you think of the men we lost. The men we lost. So all them men we lost in the war — all they’ve given them is a thin brass bar. That’s all they got. No medal. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.
TO: And what do you think of the Memorial we’ve got in Green Park?
HI: Oh that’s brilliant. We made that ourselves. We made it. Not the government. We got no help at all from the government. I’ll tell you what happened. I was in the office and we got six and a half million pound collected easy. And who should walk in the office was two geezers from the VAT. They said, ‘We understand you’ve got six and a half million pound voluntary contributions.’ We said, ‘Yeah.’ They said, ‘A million of that is VAT,’ and they took it. There and then. And said, ‘We demand that you pay,’ and we made such a fuss of it and we got on to The Telegraph and we got the million pound back off the government — as a gift. They gave us our own money back as a gift. I think it’s disgraceful. All the money was for was for a Memorial. Nothing else. And they took a million pound off us. There you are. That’s the story.
TO: But what do you think of the Memorial itself?
HI: Oh it’s beautiful isn’t it? Fantastic. Yeah. And, and the Westminster Council said nobody will ever visit that memorial. It’s the most sought after memorial in the whole of London. More people visit that than any other memorial or, or museum. And the council said nobody — they didn’t want it. Didn’t want no memorial for Bomber Command. Can you understand it? Yeah. So that’s why I was so bitter.
TO: Did you ever — during the war did you ever feel any animosity towards Germany itself?
HI: No. Not really. No. No. Not really. No. No. We just went over. We knew what we were doing. We knew what we were doing. No. Not really. We couldn’t could we really? We were over there and back. We had nothing against the Germans. But after the war when we realised what they had got up to yeah but not before. Not during the war because we didn’t know anything about the camps. We felt sorry for the Germans being bombed like they were. Which we knew we was bombing. But we just carried on. Carried on ‘til the war finished and that was it.
TO: And how do you feel today about Germany?
HI: Well, they’re the same as us now aren’t they? No problem. They’re not going to be aggressive no more are they? We hope [laughs] What I’ve seen of the Germans they’re quite nice people. But there you are.
TO: What do you think of the atomic bombs being used against Japan?
HI: A good thing. A very good thing. In fact, in the long term — long and short term they saved millions and millions of lives. Because if they’d have invaded Japan there would have been millions of Japanese killed and many many thousands of Americans and British. They would have been slaughtered in an invasion. The bomb stopped it like that. Clear as that. Bang. Two bombs and the war was over. And the thing was what a lot of people don’t seem to realise — the Germans were on the verge of atomic bomb. And that’s why all the industrial places in Germany were being bombed. Because this government knew that they was on the doorstep of making the bombs themselves. They were nearly there. And they would have used it. Because they was desperate. They would have had one on Moscow and one on London. Definitely. Yeah.
[pause]
HI: You’re not killing the flies very well. I’m not having you around here no more.
TO: No. I got one. One.
HI: You got one. Yeah.
TO: Sorry. Now, how do you feel today about your wartime service?
HI: Not all that. All I know is I killed many many many people but as soon as I went to Auschwitz and that changed my view. Before that I had a guilty conscience of it because I knew I’d killed many many people but then I went to Auschwitz and seeing what was going on myself that was it. Finished. It was terrible. Have you been to Auschwitz aint you?
TO: No. No.
HI: You want to go there. You come out a different man I’ll tell you.
TO: I have however watched plenty of footage of all the camps when they were liberated.
HI: Yeah but you want to go there. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. What they done to those poor Jews. Babies, children, women. And we would have been the next ones on the list if they had got over the here. The Dutch suffered enough. I’ll tell you. They really suffered. The Dutch. And they’re more or less German and they suffered terrible.
TO: And did you — sorry, just keeping an eye on the time. Did you lose quite a few friends during the war?
HI: Pardon?
TO: I’m sorry to ask this but did you lose quite a few friends during the war?
HI: All of them. Yeah. All my friends. Yeah. All the people you knew on your squadron. By the time I’d left they’d all gone. All been killed or were prisoner of war. Mostly killed. We, we took off one night. I think we was going to Essen and we was up to six thousand feet and above us — no underneath us there was a huge explosion. Two Lancasters. One from our squadron — one from 44 Squadron hit head on with a full bomb load. And we was just above it and we went up like a bleeding lift with our bomb load. Right up we went. Enormous explosion. Yeah. And the thing was, the most amazing thing, the pilot said, ‘Alright. Set course for Essen.’ Just like that. And we could see what was happening below us yeah. But it happened a lot over Germany. Collisions. Can you imagine pitch darkness? Five or six hundred bombers in an area of about ten minutes. All ducking and diving about in pitch darkness. It had to happen didn’t it? Yeah.
TO: Did night fighters ever make head on attacks on a bomber?
HI: Never. Never made that. That’s why I don’t understand why they put a front turret in the Lancaster because it was useless. They never made a head on attack. Because the two speeds together was too fast. So won’t stretch at night time as well. They always come from, they used to come from port quarter, starboard quarter or dead astern. And of course once they got the up and under that was it. The up and under. The up and under. Schrage musik.
TO: And how do you feel today about Britain’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan?
HI: I think we ought to get out and leave them to it. Let them shoot their bloody selves because there’s going to be a problem. A big problem. Especially if they allow them all over here. I think so anyway. We shouldn’t allow them in this country. We should let them get on with it. They’re Moslems. Let them fight it out amongst themselves because they won’t give no thanks to the Christians for intervening. I can tell you that.
TO: And what do you think of the films that have been made about the war?
HI: Well, what I see of the films today they’re all American. That’s all you see is American films. What they done. The British never made many films. They should have made more films about Bomber Command which they never. Have you ever seen a film about Bomber Command ?
TO: I’ve seen one. The Dambusters.
HI: Well, I mean the actual bombing of Germany. No. They never made a film and they won’t because they’re gutless. The government will not accept what Bomber Command done. That’s why we are in so much trouble. They’re embarrassed. They was embarrassed with Bomber Command and yet they told us to go there. It wasn’t us. It was the government told us to go. Well they told Harris what to do anyway.
TO: As a matter of interest I do know there are, there is a team of people, though they are struggling to get funding, of independent film makers who are, they aren’t even paying the actors, who are making a film about a Lancaster bomber crew.
HI: Are they?
TO: Yeah. But they’re struggling with funding at the moment I think.
HI: Pardon?
TO: I think they’re struggling to get the money through although they are filming it.
HI: As I say what have they got? Old men. There’s no young men is there? Have Are they going to have veterans making it?
TO: Apparently I think but it might be stuck in the planning stage that they do plan to make a remake of The Dambusters.
HI: Well, that wasn’t, that wasn’t the bombing war was it? The Dambusters. That was just a one off wasn’t it and I’ll tell there there was far far more dangerous raids than the Dambusters. Berlin for instance you know what I mean. In six weeks I think we lost over nine hundred bombers over Berlin. Yeah. Essen. Dusseldorf, Duisburg, Mannheim. Hamburg. And we lost thousands.
TO: And have you visited Germany recently?
HI: Yeah. I was there last week, last year. Went to Essen. And in Essen there’s a building there. There’s a huge, what do you call it? A big huge photograph about as long as this room on a building and it shows you Essen after the war. Every building was flat. As far as you could see was flat. Except one building. The synagogue. Never got touched. And it’s still there now. It’s a museum now. Wasn’t touched. But every building in Essen was blown down except that one. Incredible.
TO: How did you actually feel when you heard the war was over?
HI: It didn’t make no difference to me. I was a youngster. I was only twenty. Twenty one when the war finished. Didn’t make no difference to me. Just the war was over and that was it. Let’s get out. And of course when I got out I had a wife and a kid and nowhere to live. Nowhere to live. I had to go and live with the in-laws for a year or so which was bleeding terrible. There you are. And the few bob they gave us and the terrible demob suits they gave us were shocking. I was a tailor and I said, ‘What’s this bloody rubbish they’ve given us?’ Yeah. I know I’m a bit cynical but there you are.
TO: Is there anything else that you want to add about your time in Bomber Command which you feel is very important?
HI: Yeah. There’s one very important thing. I survived [laughs] I survived and I mean I survived. The amount of blokes I see get the chop was unbelievable. A whole squadron. You’d lose a whole squadron in about three or four weeks. Complete squadron. It would be renewed. New Lancs. New crews. The faces got younger and we, we carried on. In fact, people, they used to come in, in the crew room and see us, and look at us, and say, ‘Have you done all those amount of trips?’ And we’d say, ‘Yeah.’ Yeah. And we survived. And I took the place of a rear gunner who got killed. And I took his place and I carried on. He was only twenty. Robinson his name was. I took his place and survived. But we lost — I’ll tell you what. That squadron I was on. Number 9 Squadron — we lost eleven hundred men killed. Eleven hundred men. And that was just one squadron. And there was only seven men in a crew. Fourteen aircraft on a squadron. Can you imagine the slaughter? Yeah.
TO: That’s almost all my questions. I’m just scanning through now. Sorry. This is going right back to the start of the war now. What did you think of Chamberlain and him appeasing Hitler?
HI: Weak man. A weak man. He was a weak man yeah. He come back with all his crappy bits of paper. Hitler was laughing his head off. We should have had a man like Hitler on our side. We could have stopped him before the war started. All the socialists and labour all they wanted to do was disarm. Don’t have no armaments. And Germany was building itself up incredibly. We had nothing. All we had was the territorial army when the war started. We just started conscription, yeah, for the twenties. We had nothing. Germany had a huge air force. Tanks. We had nothing. Anyway, we survived though didn’t we? We did survive.
TO: What did you think of Churchill?
HI: Well he done a job. He did do the job. No doubt about that. He done the job. He was the man for the job. Nobody else. But he was the man for it. But he’s — people would never forget his politics before the war when we had two or three million people unemployed. Everybody was bloody hungry. Everybody was half starving. And the rich people were living and he was one of them. But during the war he had Hitler like that. Yeah.
TO: You know the people who, I know I keep coming back to this but you know the people who refused to go on bombing missions? How do you think they should have been treated?
HI: Well personally speaking I think they should have gone to psychotic hospitals and find out exactly what was wrong with them. It was definitely a lot of them couldn’t help it. I’m telling you that the bombing raids were horrendous. I’m telling you. It was absolutely frightening. And some, as you know not everybody can take it. A few of them couldn’t take it and what they done was they stripped them down and put them in prison. Which was all wrong. LMF they called it. And when they came out of prison they put a great big stamp on their record papers — LMF. And the whole station where they was posted to knew what he was. And they couldn’t help it. They couldn’t help it. It’s a shame. So –
TO: This is going to be an odd question now. Is there anyone you know during the war who you think seemed to be losing their mind from the stress of the bombing?
HI: No. I don’t think so. I think what might have happened — some of them were very very very heavy drinkers and I think that was what was stopping them from saying they didn’t want to fly no more. There were some very very heavy drinkers. I mean heavy drinkers. If they weren’t flying they was knocking it back. But that was a thing that. They should never have punished them. They should have just said alright you don’t want to fly no more. Take you wings from you. Put you down to a lower rank. Finished. They had to humiliate them and make them as if they were a disgrace which they weren’t. They just, it was just that they couldn’t take it. They couldn’t take it. That was all there was to it. Went on a couple of raids and they see what was happening. Probably lost a few mates beforehand. That was it. Some were married with children. They said, ‘I don’t want to go over there and get killed I’ve got a wife and a kid,’ you know. There you are. But they punished them severely for it. in fact if it had been in the First World War they would have been shot. Yeah.
TO: Another slightly [pause] question from early on. Did you ever have to go in an air raid shelters during the bombing?
HI: Yeah before I — no. I never went. I never went in an air raid shelter. We lived in a block of flats. We was on the ground floor. And my mother and father said, ‘We’re alright there. We’re on the bottom floor of the flats.’ Which was ridiculous because some of the flats we blew up during the war during the war they blew the whole bleeding lot up. The time they went in an air raid shelter. A lot of people went in the air raid shelters. But the German bombing was nothing compared with what the British done. No comparison. No comparison whatsoever. We was dropping four thousand pound bombs. You know the cookie. Blast bombs. A blast bomb — it dropped. As it hit the ground it exploded. The reason for it was to blow the rooves off the houses so that the incendiaries had an easy entrance into the building which did happen. That’s why there was such huge fires. The rooves come off and then we dropped the incendiaries. And they went right through the buildings. It was a terrible war. The Germans suffered terrible. How many women and children were killed I do not know? Do not know. Shame. There you are. There you are. We had to do it. We was told to do it and that was it and we got punished after the war for it. Right. I’m afraid I’ve got to stop you because –
TO: You’re quite right because I’ve quite literally run out of questions.
HI: I’m pleased. Really pleased about that [laughs] yeah I’ll have to go.
TO: Thank you very much about your plain speaking.
HI: We’re going to drop you off at the station.
TO: Thank you.
HI: Alright.
TO: Thank you.
HI: I’ll drop you off at Romford Station. And all you do is go on the station and then take the train. I think it’s platform four. I’m not quite sure. I think it’s platform four. And that’ll take you right down to Stratford and you get out at Stratford and you get on the Tube there.
TO: Thank you. And thank you so much for your wartime service as well.
HI: That’s alright. Yeah. Pleased to help you. I’m sorry we’ve got to rush.
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AIronsH160730
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Interview with Harry Irons. Two
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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eng
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02:44:50 audio recording
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Tom Ozel
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2016-07-30
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Harry Irons lied about his age and joined the RAF aged 16. He flew two tours of operations as a rear gunner and mid-under gunner.
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
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Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Italy--Milan
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
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Julie Williams
158 Squadron
462 Squadron
466 Squadron
77 Squadron
9 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Dresden (13 - 15 February 1945)
briefing
coping mechanism
Distinguished Flying Cross
fear
final resting place
Gee
Gibson, Guy Penrose (1918-1944)
H2S
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Martinet
memorial
military living conditions
military service conditions
mine laying
perception of bombing war
RAF Driffield
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Lissett
RAF Waddington
Scarecrow
searchlight
Stirling
superstition
Wellington
Window
wireless operator / air gunner
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/283/3439/AJonesPWA171207.2.mp3
b1161008fdc7ccbc2058d73a7d2e684d
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Title
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Jones, Thomas John
Tom Jones
T Jones
Description
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62 items. An oral history interview with Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force), his log book, photographs, correspondence, service documents, aircraft recognition manuals, medals and a memoir. He flew operations as a flight engineer on 622 Squadron Stirling and 7 Squadron on Lancaster. <br /><br />The collection also contains an <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2566">Album</a> of 129 types of aircraft. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Peter Jones and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2014-12-04
2017-12-07
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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Jones, PW
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: My name is Chris Brockbank and today is the 7th of December 2017 and we’re in Lincoln talking with Peter Jones about the career and life of his father Thomas John Jones DFC. I think just first of all it’s interesting to reflect that in this case Peter didn’t elicit much information from his father, which is exactly the same with my father, and also Jan’s, in that they might have touched on trivialities, but they didn’t talk about what actually happened.
PJ: That’s very true.
CB: So Peter, how does that fit with your feeling of the background?
PJ: [Sigh] I feel very sad, that he, that he didn’t talk to me about it, about what he actually did and had to put up with, and when I did find out, I was immensely proud.
CB: I can imagine.
PJ: But also, as I only found out twenty four hours after he had died, it was an absolute maelstrom of emotions, of reading the memoir that he’d written fifty years after the war, secretly late at night, when my mother had gone to bed - I wasn’t living there at the time - and he’d put all his memories in a WH Smith notebook.
CB: Had he, really.
PJ: And when he’d finished them, he just hid them with all his personal papers I guess knowing I would eventually find it, after his death.
CB: What do you think prompted him to write it? What age was he when he wrote it?
PJ: He was in his eighties when he wrote that; he died in 2004. I don’t know, was he trying to exorcise his demons? Was he conscious that he hadn’t been able to tell me what he’d done and how he actually felt about what he’d done? I really don’t know.
CB: He was awarded the DFC.
PJ: He was.
CB: So clearly he’d had some really horrendous experiences which were rewarded. Do you think that it, to some extent, he felt he didn’t want to look as though he was in any way building on the background?
PJ: Yes, I think he did. He was a very modest man; he was a very modest, self-effacing gentleman. He was a lovely dad.
CB: But never got on to anything to do with wartime.
PJ: Only the very light-hearted stuff. [Microphone noise] He would talk about that, I mean he relates various stories of some of the capers the crew got up to, but when it went to operational, no. No details.
CB: What were the most dramatic capers they got up to would you say?
PJ: Um, I’ve got a lovely photograph taken at Mildenhall when he was flying with 622 Squadron and it shows my dad and three or four of the other crewmen dangling one of their colleagues out of a first floor window. By his legs. [Much laughter] I think that would probably be one of many stunts like that in the day, you know, it, obviously it would be quite a safety valve, and they would thrive on the black humour, but it was a lovely photograph.
CB: This is out of context in the sequence, but I think it’s worth just talking about – how do you think they dealt with the stress?
PJ: Certainly black humour. I think everyone deals with stress differently. So, I don’t know. My father was a smoker. When you, I’ve noticed that a lot, so many photographs of airmen back in the day, and airwomen, of course, they’re nearly all smoking. I think they enjoyed going down the pub as well.
CB: I mean we’ll get on to your father in a minute, but you, as the archivist here, are covering a huge range of different situations and they, there are two things that come out of that in a way, one is the release from the stress, and the other is, we’ll touch on later, is the LMF, the lacking moral fibre bit, which comes up but is largely buried, but the release of the stress is a broad one and in practical terms, what was the main safety valve would you say?
PJ: High jinks. I think that it was the high jinks. We at the archive have got so many photographs of, wonderful photographs of crew, both aircrew, ground crew, WAAFs, having a really good time, it was an adventure. They were young people. And when you look at the photographs of them having a good time, and then just look at the, look at the face, and then look at the rank, they really don’t go together. You’ve got a very, very young man or woman, with a very senior rank and again that must have, must have really weighed heavy on their shoulders.
CB: There was a notion, there is still I suppose a notion, that what the war did to people in the RAF, but particularly Bomber Command, was make them grow up really quickly. Do you reckon you see that in some of the pictures that have been submitted?
PJ: Definitely. Yeah. Certainly some of the more senior officers, you can see it in their faces: they’ve aged. They’ve aged. I mean my father when he, in 1944, he was twenty three. He looks older. And I think they did go through the mill, and I think it did age them, certainly mentally and probably physically as well with some, particularly the rear gunners who had to endure such cold. It must have been pretty dreadful.
CB: And constant flight, fright.
PJ: Yes. Of which they never spoke.
CB: No. I mean my CO in the Reserve had a mental breakdown after being chased by a Ju88 and then shot down, and so the stress there was huge. But what would you put down to the fact that almost, very largely, people in all of the Forces failed to talk about their experiences in the war? What do you think was the background of that?
PJ: We’re looking at a different decade, aren’t we. It was the stiff upper lip decade. It was the decade where men feared to shed tears, other than in private. I think that’s got a lot to do with it. I don’t, would they share it with the rest of the crew? I don’t know whether they would. In fact I don’t think they would, share their fears with the rest of the crew.
CB: No. I just get a feeling, having talked to people, that the LMF bit actually destabilised the crew so there was a very good reason for getting rid of them quickly, but if, and if they spoke about it, the crew was destabilised.
PJ: Yup. I think it was a fear of letting the crew down.
CB: That’s it.
PJ: Definitely.
CB: And that’s bombers, so we’ve got wider scopes than that, which is difficult to fathom.
PJ: [Pause] Mm. One of the things that my dad talks about, is a particular incident where, I can’t quite remember the details of it now, the nearest he actually came to being killed, and he actually quotes - this is in a, in his notes that he wrote fifty years after the event - he actually writes in there and describes this event and he describes himself saying, saying aloud, ‘don’t cry when you get the letter, mum’, and then he suddenly realises that he may be on an open mike, and thinks oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that, but he wasn’t. You know, so I think that’s an example of again, fear of letting the crew down.
CB: Well I think we know, don’t we, that it’s clear from the four engined bombers but also from the, [throat clear] excuse me, two engined bombers, that the crew was the family.
PJ: They were. My dad describes them as being like brothers, rank didn’t matter.
CB: And they superseded all other relationships.
PJ: Indeed. Yeah, yeah. And because of the nature of the role that they were dealing with, they never made friends with other crews. They felt unable to, because they didn’t know how long they would know them for, and no thought was given to who had been in your bunk before you got in it. That must have been quite difficult to deal with.
CB: So in the Nissen huts there were two or three crews, and when one was lost then everything was picked up quickly, for replacement with another crew. Who they didn’t know either.
PJ: No. It must have been a terrible time for the ground crew, who saw so many come and go.
CB: Yes, and on ground crew, there are two aspects to that. One is losing their crew and their aeroplane, the other one is when the aeroplanes come back bent, or with horrors in. So what’s your perception of the ground crew reaction to that?
PJ: Well of course the ground crew always thought that the aircraft was theirs [emphasis], and they loaned it nightly to the aircrew and lo, you know, god help anyone that bent it, you know. But there was a lovely relationship between the flight crew and the ground crew, and I would imagine there was great banter. I know that my father thought the world of the ground crew. I mean they worked on his aircraft in the most appalling [emphasis] conditions sometimes, to keep it in tiptop condition and to keep the aircrew as safe as possible, or as safe as they could possibly be. But the ground crew must have gone through such terrible times, when their aircraft didn’t come back, you know. And it must have been there in the back of their mind that was it something that we missed? It’s terrible times.
CB: And the link between the aircrew and the ground crew would be the pilot and the engineer would it? Or what would be the main link – just the engineer?
PJ: I think pilot and engineer, yeah, but there would be camaraderie with the whole crew. I don’t know whether the ground crew actually were involved with trying to install the rear gunner in his turret because of course they struggled to get in there on their own.
CB: Yes, ‘cause moving on from there is the aftermath of an attack and removing crew who were injured, or dead. What was your perception of that?
PJ: Pretty grisly business. Very often it, I mean the rear gunners’ odds of survival were so few, so low, and it was quite common that the rear turret just had to be hosed out. Pretty unpleasant job.
CB: And the bits taken out as well.
PJ: Yes. One of the early things that my father talks about in his notes was when they first went to Mildenhall and they saw their first operational aircraft, and it was a, if I remember rightly, it was a Stirling, outside the Flying Control and it was absolutely riddled with holes. And as they walked round, round this aircraft, they got to the rear gunner’s turret and it was just a shattered mess of just shattered Perspex and bent metal, with lots of blood in it, and uniform, bits of uniform and hair, it was at this point my father actually quotes in his notes, ‘it was this point we realised we’d got to pay back the cost of our training,’ and it all became very real.
CB: Yes. Let’s just. That’s a good phrase, I think, that’s appeared in many cases, probably, which is the payback, so how did you perceive the crews’ attitude to that?
PJ: They were professionals: they were dedicated. They were airmen, trained. They were young men, it was an adventure, it was a job and they were young men under orders and they would obey those orders.
CB: Hm. And in a way they were completely detached, if they were at twenty thousand feet, that’s four miles above [throat clearing] where the effect of their ammunition, their bombs, is felt.
PJ: Yes, they’re kind of divorced from it.
CB: Detached.
PJ: Yes, all they see is fires, and explosions and then of course the flak, the searchlights, et cetera and the ever-present fear of fighters.
CB: On a slightly lighter note then, there’s if they make a mess inside the aeroplane, there’s a fine attached to this.
PJ: There was. My father actually flew three hundred hours, three hundred flying hours, before he got rid of his air sickness and squadron lore had it, that if you threw up in the aircraft you had to pay a fine to the ground crew and clear it up yourself. He actually, he mentions that his bank account was saved by a member of the ground crew who gave him any empty biscuit tin. [Chortle] I think that’s another reason why he liked ground crew!
CB: Then there’s the other aspect which is the filling of the Elsan, [clears throat] or not. [Laughter]
PJ: Exactly, or not! Yes, I would think so, or not. A filthy piece of kit, back of the aircraft, just near the rear turret which must have been pretty unpleasant for the gunner. They’d use anything rather than have to use the Elsan, including milk bottles or peeing down the flare chute or even into the bomb bay. But you know, it was desperate measures to have to go and use the Elsan.
CB: See how long it was before it froze!
PJ: Not long, at eighteen thousand feet! [Laughter]
CB: Now [throat clear] what about the interpersonal relationships of the crew? How did that work?
PJ: They were, as I’ve said, they were like brothers; rank didn’t matter. However, once they were operational, on an operational flight, it came into play. The rank did matter then and the skipper’s order was to be acted on, there was no messing about, when they were on ops, there was no, there was no overuse of the communications at all. Everything was spot on. They were professionals.
CB: I think one of the interesting things, looking at the log book and your details of the crew, is that they, the pilot was Royal Australian Air Force.
PJ: He was.
CB: And you also had a wireless operator who was the same, but you had two, he had two Royal New Zealand Air Force and two RAF, three RAF Reserve, RAF Volunteer Reserve. So how did that interaction go?
PJ: It seemed, looking at my dad’s notes, it seemed to work really well. There was no, they were a crew and it didn’t matter where they were from or what their backgrounds were. They were a crew.
CB: I’m going to stop just a mo. Now your father did a lot of ops, but we’ve talked about the aircrew, what about the hierarchy? So, there was a Flight Commander and a Squadron Commander, did you get much out of the notes on that, the relationships?
PJ: No, he does, it’s humour, in some of it. He doesn’t talk much about the squadron commanders although he does talk about when he joined 7 Squadron, that they’d just lost their CO on operational flying. He was replaced and within a fortnight the replacement had gone; had been killed as well.
CB: This is a Pathfinder Squadron.
PJ: This is 7 Squadron at RAF Oakington, yeah. Thinking that, looking back you think was the policy of the squadron CO flying ops a good one? You have to question it really, don’t you. It can’t have done the morale any good, when the boss cops it.
CB: Well presumably the Flight Commanders were Squadron Leaders and the Squadron Commander, ‘cause there’d be thirty aircraft, would be a Wing Commander, would that be right?
PJ: Yes. The quote that my father gives it was three Wing Commanders that were lost.
CB: Oh was it? Oh, I see. In sequence.
PJ: In sequence, yes.
CB: Any indication of whether the Station Commander flew with them occasionally, because Group Captains did sometimes.
PJ: Um, in his logbook there is one: Lockhart. He was, he flew, my father was Lockhart’s flight engineer for one op, other than that it was Fred Philips, DFC and Bar, who was my father’s pilot.
CB: I mentioned earlier the topic of LMF – the lacking moral fibre - did he, in his notes in any way refer to that, either by experience or hearsay?
PJ: He did. And he speaks, and he speaks with warmth about those that just had reached the end of their tether and couldn’t do it any more, and he says he felt sorry for them, but they were still airmen; they weren’t to be ridiculed.
CB: Any indication of their fate, fates?
PJ: Nope. No.
CB: Just stop a mo. I think, in restarting, it’s worth just exploring a couple of things and putting it into context. A lot of these things are written up and in this case there’s a lot from Thomas’ recollections, but the key is the being able to listen to the narrative that you’re delivering. And there are two topics: one’s LMF and the other is the Guinea Pigs. So on LMF, what’s he say there in his report? Notes.
PJ: In his notes he writes a paragraph about LMF in it and he writes: ‘some unfortunates, through no fault of their own, reach the point where they can no longer carry on. Irrespective of how many ops they’d completed, they were deemed lacking in moral fibre. I never knew or heard of any member of aircrew that had anything but sympathy for them.’ And I think, I would like to hope that was a general feeling amongst the airmen, they had reached a point where they couldn’t go on.
CB: Yeah. For whatever reason.
PJ: For whatever reason, yeah.
CB: What do you know about their fate, after they were removed?
PJ: He doesn’t mention a fate at all, he doesn’t mention it.
CB: Okay. And then the people who were badly injured, burned or amputees, what’s he got on that?
PJ: He says, ‘I remember some of the lads who had a tough time: the empty sleeves and trouser legs of the amputees, there were lads with no faces, noses and ears no more than shrivelled buttons, and heavy, newly grafted eyelids, their mouths were little more than slits in a face rebuilt with shining tightly stretched skin grafts, some had hands shrivelled and clawed like eagles talons. They sought no sympathy or favours, but carried on doing a job they could manage. When they went drinking with us, their laughter was as hearty as ever, their spirits unbroken,’ I’m sorry.
CB: It’s all right, we’ll stop. They carried on doing the job they were trained to do.
PJ: Yeah. And he goes on to say when they went drinking with us, their laughter was as hearty as ever, their spirits unbroken and no sign of bitterness. I do find it very difficult to read some of my father’s notes. Even though it’s now, what, thirteen years since he died.
CB: But it’s intensely personal for you.
PJ: Very.
CB: Which it was for all these individuals.
PJ: The notes that he wrote, he wrote in the first person, so it is as though he’s actually speaking to me from the page. Which he is.
CB: Of course, yes.
PJ: That was his idea.
CB: Well the Guinea Pigs, we’re talking about partly there, of course, we’ve interviewed as a group of people, I’m sure we’ve interviewed a number of those, and seen the effects of them and even these years later, some of them brilliantly mended shall we say, but always obvious that they’ve been injured in one way or the other, and McIndoe did an amazing job.
PJ: Fabulous man. And his team.
CB: And of course, there is now, indeed, not just him. There is actually a museum, isn’t there, down in East Grinstead now.
PJ: Yes, I really must go.
CB: In the County Museum, in the Town Museum, and there’s a memorial as well of course. There aren’t many left, but there were six hundred and fifty, in total.
PJ: Yes, it’s sad that we are losing so many of our ladies and gents now.
CB: Shall we now go specifically on to your father’s situation. Here, if we start with earliest information about him. So, he was born in 1921.
PJ: He was.
CB: In Birmingham, is that right?
PJ: Yeah. He was born on the 19th of April, 1921, at 35 Wrentham Street in Birmingham 1, right in the very city centre of Birmingham. The house that he was born in was a back-to-back property on three floors, and a cellar. I think now we would class these properties as slums; they were dreadful places. On the ground floor was a living room and a small scullery, the bedroom above was where his parents slept and then the bedroom above that was where the children were. My dad was one of three. They were, Edna was his, his older sister, and she had a bed of her own, whereas Dad and Ron, his brother, shared a bed. He would talk to me about these sort of things, and he always said that it was cold, bitterly cold, in winter, and they would snuggle up together and there were times when they actually had to sleep under coats. Another thing he would talk about was the fact that it was shared facilities for houses and I think it was six families shared two toilets, which would have made mornings rather interesting, I think.
CB: Out in the garden this is.
PJ: Out in the yard. Yes.
CB: In the yard.
PJ: My father’s parents were William Jones, and Amy Jones, neé Roberts. His father had served with, in the trenches in the First World War, but after the war he became a metal presser. His mother, obviously my grandmother, was a housewife. The family before my dad was of school age, thankfully moved south to Hall Green, which is quite a nice, leafy suburb, and certainly things got better for them down there and he went to, I think it was Pitmaston Road School, and he actually says in his notes that he rather liked school and, but I don’t know what age he was when he left school. I know certainly that he, when he left school he started an apprenticeship with the BSA, in Small Heath, in Birmingham.
CB: Well school leaving age in those days was fourteen wasn’t it, so apprenticeships tended to pick up from there.
PJ: Yeah. When war broke out he was too young to enlist, really. He joined the Home Guard, but I don’t know a lot about that, and I think he was determined to serve, because he was just fed up with sitting at night in the air raid shelter and watching his city burn. He describes in his notes how Edna would sob in, at the very back end of the shelter, frightened as, frightened stiff, as the bombs whistled down. But he was always the boy in the doorway, watching what was going on. Eventually he applied for service, and he applied for service in the Royal Air Force. Why he chose the Royal Air Force I don’t know. Was it the nice uniform? Was it the chance of flying? Why didn’t he choose the army? I think possibly why he didn’t fancy the army was because his father and his grandfather had both served in the army. His dad had served in the trenches and Walter, his, my father’s grandfather, had been out in the Boer War so maybe he’d heard grisly stories about life in the army, on the front line. One memory that I have of my dad when I was growing up, was that he wasn’t a good sailor. In the 1950s and 60s we would go on holiday to the East Yorkshire coast, or the East Riding coast as it was then, and we’d go to Bridlington, and during the holiday it would always, there would always be a cruise on the Yorkshire Bell or whatever the other ones were called, in Flamborough Bay, and I remember my father was always very quiet and rather green around the gills, [chuckle] so I think that was probably the reason he didn’t volunteer for naval duties. Um, I think, I need to go through his log book, but I’m pretty sure he went to Cardington first, in September ‘42 for aircrew selection. And interestingly, when I got hold of his service record, he was turned down - for aircrew - and I think he must have been pretty, pretty brassed off about that. What changed their mind, I really don’t know, because he ended up as aircrew and successfully carried out sixty four ops with main force and Pathfinder Force, so something must have impressed them. I think I have a very vague memory of my dad talking about the flight engineer’s position on Stirlings, which is the aircraft that he started on, as being very poky. My dad was five foot one, so maybe they changed their mind because they wanted small flight engineers! I’d rather think that they saw his potential rather than his size [laughter]. But I guess, like all of the trades, they needed engineers and here was an enthusiastic young feller who wanted to fly. Anyway, from Cardington he was posted to Padgate for his induction and that’s where he was issued with his service number, and like all servicemen it was a number he would never, ever forget. From Padgate he went to the Initial Training Wing, 42 ITW, at Redcar up on Teesside, and there he was billeted with Mrs Thatcher on Richmond Road, Redcar for six weeks and he talks about the capers he got up to with Ken Battersby and Chaz Curle, but most of all he remembers how icy cold it was doing drill on the sea front with the howling north, north wind and the spray from the North Sea. Must be pretty unpleasant. But anyway, he got through that. In December ’42 he then went to RAF Cosford, and there he, a quote from RAF Cosford, he actually said, ‘everything involved muck and mud down there.’ He says that in the first week of every entry it was spent on fatigues, peeling four foot high piles of vegetables and after every meal the floors and tables of the huge dining hall had to be cleared and polished. There was also guard duty but they didn’t mind it because everybody else had to do it. I suppose they’d all gripe but it had to be done, it’s just how it was. From there he went to start his engineering course at St Athan, by this time he was what, twenty two. I’ve got a lovely photograph of him at the age of twenty two, taken at St Athan, where he looks like a very, very young sergeant. He was a natural engineer. It never left him, he was a perfectionist in everything he did in later life. He drove my mother batty because he was plan, plan and then do, whereas my mother wanted plan – do, or just do. [Laughter] But he was a great planner. He was a perfectionist in everything he did. I think that comes from his RAF training and it was instilled in him how important it was. A lot of the people that he’d been at Redcar with were also at St Athan and he writes, most of the lads that had been on the ITW were at St Athan. He records in his memoir lots of names, Tommy Meehan, MacMeehan, John Mullins, Jimmy Cruickshank, Albert Stocker, Arnold Hurn, Jack Walker and John Gartland. And that they would be killed. Taffy Lightfoot and Roy Eames would go down over Bremen and that Billy Currie was shot down whilst still training. It was pretty terrible, and it was a relatively small group to start with, at the ITW, that so many would be killed, and so quickly. From there he went to 1657 Heavy Conversion Unit at Stradishall, and it was here that he experienced his first flight in a Stirling. He’d never been higher than a first floor window in his life and he really didn’t know how he was going to cope with it. And his description, I think, of his first flight is fabulous. It’s just something that you don’t think about unless you’ve done it yourself, in an aircraft of that generation, which sadly I haven’t but would love to. And he describes taxying to the runway and, ‘hesitating for a few seconds before beginning the mad dash to the other end and how the aircraft’s thirty tons lifted off the runway and it promptly began to sway from side to side and up and down. Looking back down the fuse, the wings actually flapped, the huge engine appeared to be nodding in unison, looking back down the fuselage the whole structure was twisting back and forth,’ and he says that the height didn’t bother him but after ten minutes the motion caused him to be sick and here he says it took three hundred flying hours before the airsickness settled down. Quite remarkable. I can’t imagine flying in an aircraft that’s doing that, but. It was at Stradishall that he was crewed up, and it was the same process that they all went through: all met up bumbling around in a hangar and sort of someone would come up and say fancy being my flight engineer or I need a rear gunner, and it’s a kind of odd way of doing things; but it worked! You know. I think it’s quite remarkable that a skipper could have, I don’t know, almost a special sense of who he’s choosing and certainly with Fred Philips’ crew, they gelled straight away. I mean the crew was Fred Philips who would become, was awarded DFC before he was twenty one and was awarded Bar before he was twenty two. He was an insurance clerk from Punchbowl, Sydney. Dave Goodwin was a New Zealander, he was the navigator, another Kiwi was Clive Thurstan who was initially bomb aimer, and he had an interesting nickname: he was known as Thirsty Thurston - I wonder why! The wireless operator was an Australian, called Stan Williamson. Ron Wynn who was RAFVR was the mid upper gunner, he was from Stockport. Joe Naylor, again RAFVR was the rear gunner, and interesting he was known by everyone, sorry, it was John Naylor, and he was known by everyone as Joe, or maybe I’ve got that the wrong way round and they did their first flight together on the 29th of September 1943. I can’t imagine what it was, what it would feel like, I really can’t. But having read the memoir, they became instantly, a crew, and gelled as a crew, immediately. And it was after thirty four flying hours at Stradishall that they were declared fit for operations and as I said earlier, that was when it suddenly became very real. On the 2nd of September ’43 they joined 622 Squadron at Mildenhall. They were flying Stirlings. The squadron converted to Lancasters in November ‘43. That’s where his log book starts to get very interesting. Whereas he’d logged his operations in quite detail with additional information added after the op, I think later on. He’s quite detailed, he notes targets and also notes the, sometimes notes, tonnage of bombs and the aircraft that took place and the losses. Having looked through a lot of log books they are all very different. They’re all of the same format, but every airman had his own way of putting things in. I love the fact that you rarely, rarely see a scrappy log book: the writing is almost identical in them all. Whether it was something that was taught at school, or whether it was something that was taught during their training, that they all seemed to have the same handwriting. They’re beautifully readable and they are fascinating books to look through. His first op was a gardening op, a minelaying op, on Skaggerat and he mentions that they had an extra man, for gardening ops, they had a naval, a member of the Royal Navy that would arm the mines before they were dropped and then it just goes on with I think, next we’ve got two ops to Hanover, the first of which they had to turn back due to engine failure, and then it was gardening again, but this time at Kattegat. And just, it’s not intense, the flying, really, right, having said that, I’ve just turned the page, [paper shuffling] and I’ve gone the wrong way round. Er, yup. He’s going to Ludwigshafen, Berlin, Berlin, Stuttgart, Schweinfurt, Stuttgart again. His last op with 622 was on the 1st of March, the Stuttgart. And it was there that they, went, after that they went to Warboys and this is where they each learned a little bit of each other’s role so that should anything happen someone else would be able to carry out your role and not let the crew down and hopefully get home.
CB: Now Warboys was the night flying unit, so what were they there to do?
PJ: A lot of it was circuits and landings, obviously like the initial training but they were learning night navigation I believe as well, using a bubble sextant and things like that and that was the second sort of hat that my father wore. That he, he learned to do the, now what is it called, the navigating via the stars?
CB: The star shots.
PJ: Star shots, thank you. Yes. It was after that, that on the 4th of April 1944 they transferred to 7 Squadron, Pathfinder Force, at RAF Oakington in Cambridgeshire. Their ops started on the 9th of April with an attack on the railway yards in Lisle. This was ’44, so a lot of the ops here are French. This was running up to D-Day, and interspersed with German ops as well, but there’s an awful lot of operational flying on Normandy. [Paper shuffling]. Get these the right way round. On the 1st of July they start doing day ops, or daylight operations again it’s all French and they’re hitting communications, flying bomb sites, railway yards, oil plants and then he goes night flying again, over Germany, and then it’s back to France. Interestingly some of these ops they were flying two ops a day. On the 18th of July ’44 they did a French op, a flying bomb site, flying three hours fifteen minutes in the morning, then at night they were up again for three hours thirty five minutes attacking an oil plant in France. A lot of these French ops now in July, Fred Philips had been promoted to Master Bomber with 7 Squadron, so I guess it would have been even more intense with the crew than it had been in the past because I guess they weren’t dropping bombs and markers then scarpering: they had to hang around. Must have been pretty stressful. Going on to again, July. On the 30th of July, my dad’s log book shows that they were bombing the Normandy battle area. That’s followed by more flying bomb sites. On the 6th of August they were observing the artillery firing, 7th of August it was the Normandy battle area again, and it was the enemy strong points were being bombed, back to oil depots and then fuel dumps. The 12th of August 1944 there were two ops: in the day it was a fuel dump, four hours five minutes, and then in the evening they were stemming the enemy retreat. Then it’s back to flying bomb sites on a daytime raid. 29th of August 1944 was the longest flight that they ever did, and that was to Stettin in Poland, a total of nine hours and ten minutes, and my dad refers to this op in his notes by saying that it was the coldest he had ever been on an op and he felt so sorry for the rear gunner, because my father was in a heated cockpit and of course there was little heating for the rear gunner and of course many of them had a clear vision panel although they punched the panel out to see, so he must have been incredibly [emphasis] cold on that raid.
CB: Just before you go on from there, in his notes, what does he say about the bombing of the V1 and V2 sites, because they were difficult a to find and b to actually hit?
PJ: He doesn’t actually mention them, he doesn’t say much about them. It’s all in his log book with just a little note, he doesn’t actually describe physically attacking the V1 and V2 sites, and most of his descriptions are of Berlin and the Ruhr, which were of course the bread and butter targets, and nasty targets as well.
CB: Yes, so how did he feel, in his notes, about Berlin?
PJ: Like them all, he hated it. It was the big city. It was the place that Hitler did not [emphasis] want hit, but.
CB: So what was the significance of them being an unpleasant place to go? Was it more flak, was it fighters or combination of both?
PJ: It was a combination of both. I mean Berlin had massive, massive flak towers didn’t they, and the flak was intense. Um, he describes the noise when the curtain went back, in the briefing, when they followed the red line and at the end of the red line was Berlin and he just describes it was a loud groan. Really, no one wanted to go to the big city.
CB: So as the Pathfinder, now on 7 Squadron, the most accomplished ones would drop the reds, the newer ones would drop the greens, if Fred Phillips became the Master Bomber did that mean they ended up dropping reds?
PJ: Er, I don’t know, he doesn’t describe that. He does remember graphically being extremely uncomfortable circling the target for so long, on an open radio, you know, and he was very aware that they were the sitting duck, the aircraft that had to be shot down.
CB: And what height would they be flying then? Does he give any indication of that?
PJ: He talks about eighteen thousand feet. Whether they dropped for the target, I don’t know. He does describe flying over enemy territory at ten thousand feet, when they were, they’d been severely shot up over the target and they experienced severe [emphasis] airframe icing and the only way that they could gain height was to make the, was to jettison anything and they ended up throwing out all of the ammunition and the guns and they flew back to the UK at ten thousand feet, over enemy territory. Eventually, there was no way they were going to get back to Cambridgeshire, so they diverted to the first airfield available which was West Malling in Kent, fighter station, and ran out of fuel and piled into the runway. They wrote the aircraft off completely. And he describes having to get back to Oakington, from Kent to Cambridgeshire, on the train, in flying gear. [Laughter] There was no taxi in those days. No, but that was just one of the dodgy moments he had.
CB: Did the aircraft become unserviceable or a write off because he landed without undercarriage, or what happened exactly?
PJ: He doesn’t go into great detail, but it was written off, completely written off. I don’t know at the time whether West Malling had a concrete runway or whether it was still grass, I don’t know. But I can’t imagine the CO of West Malling being impressed as a Lancaster drops in very heavily. But they got away with it. They were, at Oakington, Fred Philips’ crew were known as the lucky crew. They’d been flying on a lot of ops by then and they were probably seen as one of the more senior crews on station and they were invariably late back, and usually peppered with holes and my dad describes in his notes, once, the fact that they were so late back that he later discovered they’d been written off and marked up as missing and he describes how they eventually landed and they were debriefed and then they went into the dining hall for their post-operational bacon and eggs and he said there was one of the, there was a WAAF in there and soon as they walked there in she burst into tears.
CB: And the relationship with the WAAFs, was that regular or how did it pan out?
PJ: I think it was, yeah, again, they had great respect for the WAAFs and many a young amorous airman could be put down by just one stare from them [chuckle].
CB: Does he make any comment, it’s an interesting point though I think, about the experience of the WAAFS who had relationships with the aircrew and constantly losing that person?
PJ: He doesn’t mention it, but I’m aware that it must have been very difficult. And I mean some of the poor girls got the reputation as being the chop girl because they’d lost so many boyfriends, or well, airmen who they’d had relationships with, and they got this dreadful reputation and that must have been really hard to live with.
CB: Absolutely.
PJ: And yet there are so many lovely stories about the relationship between the aircrew and the WAAFs. Stevie Stevens’ story is absolutely fantastic, in that, I can’t remember where he was flying from, he, he really enjoyed, loved the sound of the WAAF controller’s voice and then she suddenly just disappeared off the radio and she was never heard of again at that station. I think it was Scampton that he moved to and lo and behold, there it was, the same voice as he was requesting permission to land and he was so intrigued by this WAAF’s voice that he actually went to the Control Tower to see who she was and of course the upshot of that was that they married!
CB: Never looked back.
PJ: Never looked back and are still happily married to this day. Yeah. Some lovely stories.
CB: I think one of the interesting ones that emerged from interviews is the occasions where the WAAFs lined up at the end of the runway to wave off. Does he refer to that in any way?
PJ: He does. Yeah, he does, he said there would be a row of them, or a row of people on the Control Tower balcony and there would be, and he said invariably there would be, I think he calls it a gaggle of WAAFs, that would wave their handkerchiefs to them, but another person that he talks about was a little girl and he talks about this, a family that lived next to the perimeter track in a farm cottage, and he describes how the squadron would taxi round the perimeter tracks from their various dispersals, describing, and he described the aircraft as being like a row of ducks and he said just this roar and spit and hiss of brakes and he said there was this little blonde girl would appear at the back, at the garden gate, every time there was an aircraft on the perimeter track and she would wave to them, every evening. And he said without fail each aircraft that passed this little girl, the crew would wave back and the gunners would dip their guns at this little girl and he said he would love to know who she was, and after my father died I was researching his notes and I found out who she was.
CB: Did you?
PJ: Her name was Clara Doggert, if my memory serves me right, but sadly she died, but it would have been so nice to have met this lady.
CB: Yes. On a lighter note, looking at the log book, [bump on microphone] I think it’s quite interesting to see the entry that says NFT – Night Flying Test - and the timing. What do you know about the choice of timing?
PJ: Um, I hadn’t spotted that one.
CB: So the idea is that you take off at twenty three hundred hours, and you do your night flying test which takes an hour and ten minutes and why is that?
PJ: I think it would be because they would get their breakfast?
CB: They would get their fry up! [Laughter]
PJ: Good for them!
CB: After midnight! And I think this is one of the intriguing things there. I mean on ops obviously they were coming back because they were flying at night, but to do the night flying test.
PJ: They had a cunning plan!
CB: Yeah! Some of them had to be in the day so that didn’t work. Same title, but different time.
PJ: Yes. I think they’d become a pretty savvy crew by then, knew how things worked.
CB: So how many ops had they done when the crew left 7 Squadron?
PJ: Sixty four.
CB: Oh, right.
PJ: They had, by then they had an extra crew member because Fred was Master Bomber so they had a specialist map reader, of course H2S had come along by then so they were an eight man crew. The eighth man was a guy called Steve Harper who hadn’t done as many ops as the rest of them, so when the crew split up he wasn’t tour expired, and Steve kept on flying with 7 Squadron for a bit longer and he was very, very seriously injured by flak on an op. He survived, but he was seriously injured. Their favourite aircraft was PA964 and in less than a month after them, the crew splitting up, the aircraft was shot down and the entire crew were held then, as POWs. So the name ‘Lucky Crew’ was pretty apt. They got away with it. They never saw each other again.
CB: Didn’t they?
PJ: A couple of the Australians and the New Zealanders did, but the RAFVR chaps didn’t. And in my dad’s notes he does actually mention that and he asks the question, would I want to meet them again, and he actually makes the point of saying no. And the reason he wouldn’t want to meet them again, because he wants to remember them as being young men. He doesn’t want to see a load of old men, he wants to remember them as, how they were.
CB: I think that’s a really telling sentiment, as to why some people don’t want to open up about what they’ve done: it’s a memory that’s hurtful, in some ways, it’s pleasurable in others. But there’s a mixture of emotions, isn’t there.
PJ: But there is, and again in his notes, he hints [emphasis] at the, the difficulty he had with the number of civilians and children that were killed. I think he took comfort from being, with his role as a Pathfinder, that he was marking targets as accurately as possible to cut down on the losses, but he was, I think one of the reasons he couldn’t talk about it, were the civilian losses.
CB: Any reflection on the British civilian losses being on the opposite, receiving end?
PJ: No. The only thing he mentions in his notes is the, when he was a teenager in the air raid shelter and he also mentions walking from Hall Green to Small Heath one morning after an op the night before, after a raid the night before on Birmingham, and he actually mentions being fascinated by the effect of the bombing: that one house was a shell and yet the house next door was perfectly okay. One had no windows, the other one was intact, with an alarm clock still ticking in the window, and he describes a double decker bus, sitting on its nose, in the middle of the road. And he just describes this as being absolutely fascinating in an horrific way, and he couldn’t, just couldn’t work out why it wasn’t all flat and yet why would one building remain intact, as though it’d not been touched at all and yet the one next door was completely devastated.
CB: Just on that tack, what do we know about the composition of the German bomb load, in dropping bombs on Britain.
PJ: Well they were using twin-engined aircraft and certainly the bomb load that was dropped on this country was far less than was delivered to Germany.
CB: I was thinking of the composition of the load itself. So they’ve got high explosive and they’ve got incendiary. Because the RAF learned from that.
PJ: Yes, um, it was the incendiary that would cause the, the devastating fires, then you had also, certainly from an RAF perspective, specialist bombs for, that were used on specific targets. Like the Grand Slams, et cetera.
CB: Had father got to the stage of dropping those as well?
PJ: No. No, by the end, by the time he was on Pathfinders he was mostly dropping markers with a basic payload as well.
CB: ‘Cause his job was to make a mark, marking.
PJ: Yes. Primary job was to mark, mark turning points and targets for main force.
CB: So at the end of the tour, tours, two tours, effectively.
PJ: Two tours.
CB: What did he do then?
PJ: When he left, when he left Oakington, I think, I’m sure he went to Northern Ireland to, er, looking at.
CB: To Nutts Corner.
PJ: To Nutts Corner, 1332 Heavy Conversion Unit, and he was there from the 28th of December ’44 to April ’45. One of the things that he talks about is the warmth of the people of Northern Ireland. And he describes that when he arrived in Belfast he was kind of adopted by a family and given a late Christmas lunch by this family because he was a young lad; you know, sort of, he wasn’t that young by then, but he was so far from home, from his, from Birmingham. 1332 Heavy Conversion Unit moved to Riccall in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It was an airfield to the south of York and just sort of north of Selby, and as a teenager I used to cycle out there and it was all still there, which was wonderful, knowing that my dad had served there, but that’s, I digress, and it was whilst he was serving at Riccall – he was the adjutant of the Engineering School there - he went to a dance in Selby, which was a little market town, and the dance was at Christy’s Ballroom, above a shirt factory, of all things, which I think was how they were in the day, and he met the girl who would become my mother. And she was a farm worker’s daughter, who was at the time working in service, as a maid for a quite a wealthy timber family that ran a wealthy timber business and actually where she was living at the time, working, was on the perimeter track of RAF Burn and later my mother would tell me how, as a young working maid, she would also go to the bottom of the garden, in the evenings. But anyway, my dad would cycle to Burn or to Hamilton, where my mother’s home was, and that’s four miles south of Selby, on his service bicycle. That wasn’t too bad, but then 1332 HCU moved to Dishforth and his weekly trips then were a hundred and twelve miles, on a service bicycle, in all weathers. I guess he was in love! [Laugh] Mad fool!
CB: Amazing what motivation there can be in that! What were they flying, 1332, that was a Heavy Conversion Unit, but.
PJ: Initially, they were on, at the time they had a mixture, I think, of Lancasters B24s, certainly the last aircraft my father flew in was B24.
CB: But what was their role? It wasn’t bombing.
PJ: I think, I think they’d gone over to transport by then, or certainly they were heading that way. But when his time was up at Riccall he went to Bramcoats, and there he was the Station Armaments Officer, and this is where his RAF career is kind of taking a spiral because he’s not flying, he hates it. He really [emphasis] wanted to stay in the RAF and pursue a flying career but my mother wasn’t having any of it, so that was the end of his dream of serving round the world and spending his days flying. From Bramcoats he ended up going to Uxbridge and after a medical and signing lots of papers he was given a cardboard box with a suit and hat in it. And he was demobbed.
CB: When was that?
PJ: Oh, I think ’46, I think. I’d need to look at the log book. But my parents married in February ‘46.
CB: And he was still in the RAF then.
PJ: Yes. His wedding photograph is in uniform.
CB: How did he feel about moving from operations, which were very intense and specific, in terms of being a Pathfinder Force, to an OC, to an HCU? What did he feel about that in his notes?
PJ: Um, I wouldn’t say he was bored. But -
CB: Frustrated?
PJ: Yes, frustrated probably. He did have the odd bit of excitement. I mean he talks about [bumps on microphone] one particular incident at Nutts Corner where he was a flight engineer for a young Canadian pilot. He said that this young Canadian was a flying boat pilot and he said lovely chap, really eager, and loved it, he said they were on final approach to Nutts Corner and my father kept looking at this pilot and the pilot kept nodding excitedly much as ‘I’m doing all right aren’t I’, and my father looked at him again and then looked down at the switch gear and looked at him again, and my father just gently leaned over and pushed the full throttles wide open to force an overshoot because he’d forgotten to put the undercarriage down! So the eager Canadian airman was having too much of a good time. Apparently his expression was one of hang dog!
CB: This was on a Stirling?
PJ: Yes, er no, it was a Lancaster actually. Because of course he wouldn’t have been on flight deck for a, with a Stirling. Yes, I can imagine the poor Canadian’s face. He thought he was doing really, really well.
CB: Amazing!
PJ: But I think he was disillusioned, my father was disillusioned: he didn’t want to be on the ground, he wanted to be in the air.
CB: So when he left the RAF, what did he do?
PJ: I really don’t know. As I say, my parents married in February ‘46 and initially they moved to Birmingham and also to Bath because my grandparents, my maternal grandparents lived in Bath for a very short time and then moved back to Birmingham, and then my parents ended up settling down in Selby and my father started working for John Roster and Son which was a paper mill. They were a Manchester based paper company and they had a satellite factory in Selby, and he worked there for years [emphasis]. I came along in 1954 and as I was growing up I remember that my dad was hardly ever at home. He, for years and years and years he worked six and a half days a week and he would always cycle to work and he cycled to work in all weathers, and I can still see him in winter with his RAF greatcoat with plastic buttons on it, he’d taken the brass buttons off, and he used his old gas mask, service gas mask bag, for his backup and there’s a really endearing image I have of him, cycling off in his greatcoat. Um, having said that he was never there, when he was there, he was a great dad. He always had time to read stories to me, and we would read things like the usual 1960s classics that every little boy read: Moby Dick and Treasure Island et cetera, and I have lovely memories of him reading those. Again, going back to his practicality, he used to build me all sorts. He made stations and tunnels. He made the tunnels out of paper pulp, from the paper factory, from the paper mill. So I always had a really good train set.
CB: A type of papier maché.
PJ: An early type of papier maché. Yes. It was very smelly as well!
CB: He worked as an engineer, presumably, at the paper mill.
PJ: He did, he did. Yeah, and he was there until I was in my teens and of course I changed from junior school. He was brilliantly supportive with my homework and he would spend hours helping me with homework and I remember one for some reason I was struggling with the coffee trade in Kenya and I now can’t forget it and he just sat down and we just went over it. He was an incredibly skilled artist - self taught - and sadly I never inherited those genes, although my daughter has. He produced some fabulous sketches.
CB: Amazing!
PJ: And watercolour paintings. [Paper shuffling]
CB: [Indecipherable] in 1979. Amazing, yes.
PJ: He started from nothing with his art, you know. He just used to doodle and then he just got better and better and better. An example I’ve got here today is the, this, his lionesses head and it’s incredibly [emphasis] detailed isn’t it, you can almost see every hair.
CB: Yes. As an engineer did he go into design engineering as well do you think?
PJ: I don’t think so, I don’t think so. I think he was possibly a bit of an innovator, when problems arose, which of course he would have had to have been back in the war, he would have had to have been very self reliant and that carried on with him. He became a model maker as well, and he produced a model that I still have at home that sits in my sitting room and it’s a twin engined compound engine. Stationary steam engine.
CB: Oh really!
PJ: And it works. It probably, well it worked. It probably doesn’t any more because I haven’t kept it serviced. But it has pride of place.
CB: Brilliant.
PJ: Yeah, it’s a lovely thing.
CB: So, you were a teenager when he left the paper mill. What did he do then?
PJ: He got a job as a maintenance fitter at Danepak Bacon, in Selby, and it was then that he actually started to only work five days a week, which you know, I suppose was luxury, really, but sadly he didn’t work there for a very long time because he was, the company got into difficulties and he was eventually made redundant. I think that [emphasis] had a big effect on him [pause] and after his redundancy he never had a job again, and he was made redundant before [emphasis] retirement age.
CB: So what messages did you get from his [emphasis] experiences and advice as to what career you would follow?
PJ: He wanted me to go in the RAF, and follow his footsteps, but I didn’t. [Laugh] My mother didn’t want me to. So I headed off in a different direction altogether.
CB: What did you do?
PJ: I went into acute healthcare. Well after a while, I went into acute healthcare. I had numerous, numerous sort of jobs first. Nothing too serious.
CB: Did you have some kind of vision of what your career was to be?
PJ: Initially no, not at all and then I met up with a few people who were working in healthcare and I thought yeah, that sounds interesting.
CB: So what did that involve?
PJ: It involved a thirty four year career working with anaesthetics and airway management.
CB: Tell us more.
PJ: I trained as an operating department practitioner and specialised in anaesthetic support and ended up working mostly with emergency patients. I specialised in emergency work in the end.
CB: Doing what exactly?
PJ: It was airway management. I used to work in, I was based in operating theatres but I worked in Intensive Care Units and then the resus rooms in A and E departments. It was the A and E work that I really did love. I worked all over the country. I started in Kettering and from Kettering I went to, um, where did I go from Kettering? To East Surrey Hospital in Redhill, then I went up to London and worked at Moorfields Eye Hospital, the Western Ophthalmic Hospital, Great Ormond Street. Then I worked in the St Mary’s Group, which was St Mary’s in Paddington, Mary’s West 2, St Giles West 10, Samaritan Hospital for Women, and then I got a little bit disillusioned with living in London, or maybe it was my then girlfriend who got disillusioned and wanted to move. So I got a job in Lincoln and a month later my then girlfriend who would be my wife and now my ex-wife [laugh] followed and I moved up here to Lincoln in 1987 and I’ve been here ever since. I took early retirement in June, July 2012 because I was just so disillusioned with how the NHS management worked, messing things up, and I really didn’t want to be part of it any more. I had two years where I didn’t do anything, really, and I saw a post, I think it was on the internet or something like that, about the International Bomber Command Centre and I read this post and thought that sounds really interesting. And lo and behold it was based in Lincolnshire, and so they were looking out for volunteers. So I thought well, I spent two years sitting on my bottom doing next to nothing, or once a week walking up the pub and I could be doing something a little bit more worthwhile and something that would reflect what my late father had been doing and I started on the project as a data checker. I was working with the, with Dave Gilbert who was doing a fabulous job recording at the losses and it was one of my jobs to check the accuracy of the information against the data and make sure that what was going to be put on the IBCC records was accurate. And it was fascinating but shocking, as well, going through the losses and looking at the ages of those that had been lost and also looking at the fact that an awful lot of those aircrew that had been lost were lost in training before they’d even got on the squadrons, and I was really shocked because I was, at the time, I’d been given a whole load of Canadian names, I’d been given about a hundred and fifty Canadian names, and the losses in training were higher that the loss, operational losses, for this particular group of airmen, and I thought, and I’m thinking where are these poor sods remembered. They’re not. Not really. There’s the odd little memorial in a hedge bottom, somewhere, which I think are wonderful, but there were so many lost in training that aren’t recorded. They’re not in Chorley. Mind you, Chorley was the record of the aircraft not the crew, wasn’t it.
CB: Absolutely.
PJ: And this is one of the reasons why I got so hooked on the project, and I think it was in January 2015 I had a phone call from the Bourne office asking me if I’d like to come on board as a paid member of staff, to work on the archive, and I bit their hand off. We were based initially at Witham House on the University of Lincoln’s campus. We were in a portacabin which I think my colleague describes as the nearest thing the university had to a Nissen hut, at the time.
CB: We remember.
PJ: You remember it well, [laugh] with the flexi floor, but in August 2015 we moved off the main university campus out to University of Lincoln’s Riseholme Campus, which is where we are today, and we work in the most beautiful country house and I think it just lends itself so, so nicely to the project. It looks, I [emphasis] think it looks like a Group Headquarters and when I first saw it I thought, yeah, I want to work there. But there are two things missing on that house: it doesn’t have a flagpole and it doesn’t have an RAF Ensign fluttering from the top of it. But um, beautiful house. Beautiful grounds and I am very fortunate that I’m now working with a fabulous group of people. Working with some amazing [emphasis] facts, figures, and dealing with amazing stories and artefacts and literally every day is like Christmas Day, when I open the post I have no idea what’s going to come through the door. But it’s also every day is an emotional rollercoaster, you go from the Christmas Day of opening a parcel and seeing these amazing artefacts and these wonderful memories that are sent in, or I’m listening to other recordings of fabulous stories, or heartbreaking stories that come through and it’s those stories and reading the letters, that a young airman wrote, hoping that no one would ever have to read it and of course I’m reading it because his parents did. And I remember reading one of those, it was from a young Canadian airman from Vancouver who had just started operational flying and he’d written the [emphasis] most beautiful letter. I found it remarkable that a nineteen year old could write such a mature letter. I was, I read this letter late on a Friday afternoon and I couldn’t get rid of it, and it haunted me all weekend. I mean, those letters were wonderful. But also we deal with the other side of it, in that I got into the archive about two hundred letters from a young airman who, before he joined up, had worked at Park Royal, in a printing works, and the letters that he was writing weren’t to his family, they were to his workmates, and so they weren’t sanitised and they were laugh out loud funny. My colleagues here will tell you that I was laughing, out loud, at some of these letters, and this particular airman was the Eric Morecombe of his day and I got inside his head and I got to know this man and reading these letters and he’s describing one where there’d been an influx of two hundred WAAFs on station and he actually says ‘the chaps are getting choosy’, with the WAAFs [chuckles] and you know, these were lovely letters and then I got to the last letter in this pile and I rang this chap up and the donor, the owner of this collection was from Bridgewater in Somerset, and I rang him up and said ‘I’ve just read the last of Peter’s letters’ [banging] and I said ‘what happened to him? Have you got any more letters?’ [Steps] And he just says, ‘well you’ve read his last letter.’ He didn’t come back. And that really hurt, because having read all his letters I thought you know, I’d got to know this man, he was a very funny man, and he must have been fabulous to serve with. But the project’s going really well. I’m in receipt of some amazing [emphasis] stuff and I do it in my dad’s honour.
[Other]: Yes.
PJ: Well, I hope he’s smiling down on me.
[Other]: I’m sure he is. You’ve given us a fantastic insight into your father’s experiences. Absolutely.
PJ: He was a remarkable man. He was a lovely man.
[Other]: Yes.
PJ: As I say, it’s been thirteen years since he died and, [pause] I still miss him.
[Other]: Course you do. I’m going to the loo. [Whisper] [Laughter] I’ll turn this off.
CB: It’s running. So Peter, thank you for what you’ve done so far. I think, in summing up we could cover a few other things, but what was your parents’ reactions to your career choices after the experiences of their parents, and your father in particular, in the war?
PJ: As I said, my father, I think, rather fancied the idea of me joining the RAF, as I did, but my mother put me off that. I don’t think my father was disappointed at all, in fact he was quite proud of the career path I chose, but interestingly, another career path that my mother put me off: I gained a Deck Officer Scholarship with Shell and my mother put the kybosh on that as well. [Laughter] She was quite, quite, um, she tended to get her own way.,
CB: What worried her about going to sea?
PJ: It was being away from home I think. Actually she was probably right because of course the British Merchant Fleet has gone. So I’d probably be redundant.
CB: As a Captain! [Laugh]
PJ: I doubt it! [Laughter] More like Pugwash! But no, my dad was proud of where I ended up.
CB: Of course. Well I mean it’s a very good thing to do.
PJ: And I really think he would be very proud of what I’m doing now.
CB: I bet, yes.
PJ: It’s a great project. I think that we are trying to turn back history, because Bomber Command and particularly those that flew were demonised and we want to tell the story of the whole of the bombing war, not just from British perspective, but we were an umbrella over the whole of the war. We want to hear the experiences of people on all sides and we are getting remarkable stories: we’ve got fabulous inroads into Italy with amazing stories from there. And, you know, going back to Bomber Command, I can’t, I really can’t imagine what it was like in 1945 when everyone was huddled around the wireless, waiting for Churchill’s victory speech and everybody was mentioned. Except Bomber Command. And I think that must have been a terrible blow to everyone that served with Bomber Command; a body blow. So many had been killed and what recognition had the government given them? None. What is a life worth? What was a life worth to them? You know, I think it was a terrible thing to miss them out.
CB: Did your father ever mention this matter?
PJ: I think he did once. I can’t, I wasn’t that old, and I’m pretty sure it was a conversation he was having with someone else, but he was pretty hacked off about it, he’s, I think his opinion of Churchill had gone from being very high to being very low. He was hurt by it, very hurt. Because he’d lost so many, many friends.
CB: Yes, you mentioned them.
PJ: Well that was just a few I think.
CB: Yes, that was just from his early days.
PJ: Exactly, it wasn’t from the later days.
CB: What was do you think his overriding memory was, of his service during the war?
PJ: I can tell you – it’s in his memoir, if you -
CB: I’ll pause while you look it up. Right, we’re re-starting now.
PJ: I can quote from my father, I remember him saying that all in all he felt he’d had a good war, he’d had a relatively easy war, he’d come out unscathed and that in a way I think he felt guilty because he had survived and so many hadn’t, but he then, in his notes, he reflects and he reflects asking what made them do it? What made them go on ops, over and over and over again, and he says was it the patriotism, was it the pride of volunteering being greater than the butterflies in the stomach, was it the fear of letting down the crew, or of the lifelong stigma of lack of moral fibre? And he says perhaps it was one or all of them, who knows? And then he follows that with what I think a lovely sentence.: ‘And what do I have to show for it? My discharge papers and identity discs, my flying log book and a few medal ribbons – and a thousand memories.’
CB: I think that’s extremely touching, it, it in a way, glosses over an important point which is not unusual for him, people like him to miss, which is: he got a DFC and nobody crowed about that but why did he get a DFC, what was the origin of the award?
PJ: I’ve never found the citation. I think possibly, of course, he was on a crew that carried out a lot of ops. I’ve found Fred Philips’ citations for both of his DFCs, for his DFC and his Bar.
CB: Which were earlier.
PJ: Which were earlier. Of course by 1945 they were dishing out quite a lot by then, weren’t they.
CB: What was the date of your father’s DFC?
PJ: I can’t remember.
CB: But it, was it a similar time to his pilot, his second one?
PJ: No, it was later.
CB: Later, exactly.
PJ: Which makes me think possibly the number of ops, or -
CB: Nothing specific. Could have been the end of the tour, the second tour.
PJ: Yes. That’s what I think.
CB: Would be nice to be able to get the citation though.
PJ: It would. I would like to see that.
CB: Right, we’ll pause there for a mo. Now we’ve already talked about the DFC and also the crew gelling together, but what sort of conversations did they have, in these circumstances?
PJ: One of the conversations that my dad did tell me about, and that was a conversation he would have with the mid upper gunner, Ron Wynn, when they were coming back, leaving the target on every op as flight engineer it was my dad’s role to walk the length of the fuselage doing a damage control walk, to see how badly damaged, or if [emphasis] they were damaged. And my dad would always use a shielded torch and Ron Wynn would always say, ‘Oi, you’re lighting me up like a bloody lightbulb up here, turn that torch out!’ And my dad would always reply, ‘If there’s a hole in this bloody fuselage I’m not falling out of it for you!’ [Laughter] And it would be the same conversation, every op, but there must have been more, there must have been more. Even in the, even in the sort of, the terrible times of the operations the humour was still there. Like in the breakfast before the op there was always somebody who’d say if you don’t come back, can I have your breakfast, wasn’t there, you know. There was always that, that lovely, lovely dark humour.
CB: Yes, it’s a trait where you deal with the danger, at the threat, and the horror of it, with humour.
PJ: Yes, but since my father’s death, I’ve spent over eleven years researching his notes and of researching his crew, or the crew that he served with, and I was fortunate enough to have made contact with Fred Philips in, who was living, still living in Sydney, and interestingly, when his flying career with the Royal Australian Aircraft, Air Force came to an end he joined Qantas and he eventually became the Chief, the Senior Training Captain, with Qantas and he was the first Qantas pilot to fly a 747 to Heathrow. Now sadly Fred died in October last year. The other one I managed to get in touch with was the mid upper gunner, Ron Wynn, still living in Stockport. After the war he’d been an instructor at Cranwell and I managed to speak to him on the phone and it was quite an emotional encounter I think, for him, talking to the son of someone he hadn’t seen for so long, but after the initial emotion he was very chatty. And after the conversation I had an email from one of his sons, saying how much his dad had enjoyed talking to me and hearing what my father had gone on to do, but then he said that the conversation had brought back a lot of memories and he wouldn’t want to talk again. I do hope that wasn’t too upsetting for him. But you know, I’ve gone through the crew and I now know what all but two of them did, after the war.
CB: One of the reasons was it, the link between the mid upper and the flight engineer was both were acting as lookouts, during this, but what was father actually doing as a flight engineer in his role?
PJ: In his role?
CB: So, start with take off.
PJ: At take off he would take over throttles so that the pilot could use both hands on the stick, for take off. During flight he would be constantly making fuel calculations et cetera, trimming the engines, shifting fuel between tanks et cetera, just to keep the stability and also keeping records, and as I say doing calculations because they didn’t rely on instrumentation for fuel, it was the engineer’s calculations, and woe betide if he got them wrong. My father could, could fly, he, it was again, going back to the Warboys experience where they did a bit of each other but I think it would have been straight and level flying, it wouldn’t have been landing, take off and landing, that sort of thing. Looking back at his, reading his memoirs, I think he did have a good time. I once went to the 7 Squadron reunion in Longstanton and when my, when his tour was up and they were going their separate ways they took their ground crew out, to the pub, The Hoops, in Longstanton, where they wouldn’t let the ground crew spend a penny. In his notes, my dad said it was worth the twenty four hours of hangover. And I dearly wanted to go and have a pint in The Hoops but it’s been knocked down.
CB: Oh dear.
PJ: But I did walk the streets of Longstanton, in the rain. One of the things that he talks about as well, is once on an aborted op they were returning to Oakington in a really vicious side wind and they had a sudden gust of wind and bounced badly on touchdown and went round again, and as they were roaring off, off the runway, the wind had sent them across the village at very low height and he can vividly remember seeing people staring up and people running away and he can clearly remember a lady running out of a house and grabbing a little girl, or her child, and pulling her into the house, out of the way. My father describes how they, they very narrowly missed All Saints Church in Longstanton and that when they touched down, got out of the aircraft, the rear gunner came, wandered around, and said to Fred Phillips, ‘if you’d have told me you were going to pull that stunt I could have taken that weather vane off as a souvenir!’ [laughter] But thinking as I was driving into Longstanton, it’s a long straight road into the village, the hair almost stood up on the back of my neck when I saw that, the spire of the church and realised that’s it! That’s it.
CB: In conclusion, because this is fascinating and it’s covered so many aspects of your experiences, and your father’s experiences. But thinking of father’s experiences with the research that you’ve been doing, and what he had written, what’s your overriding feeling about the story?
PJ: My father’s story or the story of Bomber Command.
CB: Your father’s story.
PJ: My father’s story. [Sigh] The little lad from, [pause] from the slums of Birmingham did all right.
CB: Can I translate that into a feeling of great pride?
PJ: Indeed.
CB: Thank you, Peter Jones.
PJ: You’re welcome
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/.
Identifier
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AJonesPWA171207
Title
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Interview with Peter Jones
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:49:58 audio recording
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-12-07
Description
An account of the resource
Peter William Arthur Jones (b. 1954) speaks about his father Thomas John Jones DFC (b. 1921, 1640434 and 184141 Royal Air Force). Peter Jones discovered a memoir written by his father, Thomas Jones, a flight engineer, just after he passed away. Peter talks about his father’s life and service during and post-war, some of the details in the memoir and memories of their time as a family after the war. There is much discussion about operations and post-flight details, how emotions, injuries and fears are dealt with, including non-flying personnel as well as those who flew. Peter’s own life and work, particularly on the IBCC Digital Archive is also talked about, and the way the stories of others are so emotive.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-09-23
1944-04-04
1944-08-12
1944-08-29
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
England--Birmingham
England--Cambridgeshire
Germany--Berlin
Northern Ireland--Antrim (County)
Wales--Glamorgan
England--Warwickshire
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
Second generation
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Anne-Marie Watson
Carolyn Emery
1657 HCU
622 Squadron
7 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
flight engineer
ground crew
ground personnel
Heavy Conversion Unit
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
McIndoe, Archibald (1900-1960)
Pathfinders
RAF Mildenhall
RAF Nutts Corner
RAF Oakington
RAF St Athan
RAF Warboys
Stirling
training
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/306/3463/AMooreR160727.1.mp3
6916342becb8f2ec899823178f5b9e73
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
Moore, Raymond
R Moore
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Raymond Moore (1609170 and 179383 Royal Air Force).
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
2016-07-27
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
Moore, R
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
IL: Ian Locker. I’m interviewing Ray Moore at his home in Sowerby, Thirsk. Right, so Ray, um, tell us a little bit about your early life.
RM: Early life — where, where from?
IL: From you, you, you were born in Sussex?
RM: Yes.
IL: Tell us a little bit about your family and how, how you came to join the RAF.
RM: Well, I’ll only repeat what I said.
IL: Absolutely.
RM: Exactly what — again, I wasn’t thrilled by the war. I remember it very distinctly because my father and two brothers — my two brothers were in the — they called it the —
Sarah: Home Guard? No?
RM: Well, my father got — had been recalled for the covers [?] in other words, he’d done about fourteen years’ service in India and then he went to, he was posted to Gallipoli. He was wounded in 1915 and came back to England and he was in hospital, hospital in Esher, in Esher. That’s in Surrey and that’s where he me my mother but that was just at the beginning. And then he went in the Territorials. They joined in 1938 so they were the first up and the last picture, the last thing I remember of them, I was — they were all at home this particular day, and the last thing I remember I went into the dining room and they were all stood with their arms around one other. It was very moving, was that. And, um, then — so that passed and you didn’t — there was no reality to it even then. And then on the Sunday morning at 11 o’clock on — when Chamberlain said — it still didn’t ring a bell. I still wasn’t — it, it didn’t mean anything. I remember that Sunday morning and hearing Chamberlain and my mother was sat weeping, as they did in them days I suppose, I don’t know, but she was, I remember she was, she was crying and I thought, ‘Well, it’s a war.’ You know and, and honestly at that age, and I was fifteen, at that age you didn’t, you didn’t say, ‘Oh, there’s a war.’ It’s Hitler. It’s Germany. It’s Nazi Germany and I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that we were at war but my father and brothers had already gone but it didn’t ring a bell until about, let’s see that’s 1940. I’m trying to think of the dates. In 1941 there were three of them gone and in 1941 my, er, brother that was older than me — no. A sister that was older than me, Joan, she decided to join the WAAFS. Because at some period of time, you know, women had to sign on as well and she was eligible. She was about twenty-two, twenty-three and so she was the next one to go and to me it was, ‘Ta-ta Joan.’ You know, that was — and then life set again. You started to — some of the things that happened. Because we never had a daily paper because I think the Daily Herald was on the go in those days and so, um, and being a mixed family of, of politics — my father was a conservative and my brothers when they came out, two of them had turned and flying the red flag. That was hilarious was that after the war. But — and so, er, and then it went on and then a brother went and I sort of looked round and instead of eleven of us sat down at that, in that, you know — and it was a fairly big dining room Sarah, wasn’t it? And the dining table, instead of there on a Sunday it was suddenly, suddenly empty and that was when it struck me that something was wrong and that was the time when I really thought about joining up but the age was eighteen and I was damn sure I wasn’t going in the Army or the Navy and I, I’d made up my mind. But as I say there was something by the Government that if you had — you know, there were a lot of big families but if you had so many in that were in the Services you, you were exempt and I should have been exempt. And that rattled my mother more than anything and so that was, you know, I joined up like and that’s when it started. All of it started. I have to admit I was leaving home and the Army didn’t appeal to me in as much as that I’d lost brothers and sisters and my father were all in the services. Because we had a good family life.
Sarah: None of them were killed.
RM: Never lost one of them, no.
IL: Remarkable isn’t it. So had you left school?
RM: Oh, I’d left school.
IL: So did you leave school at fifteen or —
RM: Fourteen.
IL: Right. So, so were you working on the family farm? Or —
RM: No, no, no. I did that, er, I did —
Sarah: What was your first job?
RM: First job, riding a bicycle, pushing — I worked for a butcher, just delivering, just an ordinary menial job. And that was the first, yeah, that was the first year and going to work then nine to five. [cough] I’m trying to think how old I was as well. And about a year or it might have been —
IL: I’m going to move that a little bit nearer to you.
RM: Sorry.
IL: No, it’s OK. [unclear]
RM: It might have been, um, [unclear] I think with there being, when the war was on, 1939, and there was, er, Joan was at home and Frank and so there were those at home so really I hadn’t much care, no idea. I was a good scholar as well. I was a good scholar, even if I say myself.
Sarah: And that’s where your engineering background —
RM: It was. It was really because, um, when I was in, when I joined up, and I was mixing with engines and airframes and things it seemed to — it was something that I wanted to do, wasn’t it? And to come top of the class at the end of thirty-six weeks I thought it was pretty good going. Anyway, er, fifteen and I got to know one or two. I, in that respect I was a bit of a loner, in respect of mixing and things like that and not bothering to look for the future, and I say I couldn’t have cared less and my father was in the Army so he couldn’t boot my backside and tell me to get a job. There, was there and then I went to a Jim Feasts [?]. I even remember his name and they were a greengrocers and all I was doing there was delivering green groceries, groceries and whatever you’re talking about. No, it was greengrocery wasn’t it? That was Jim Feast and that was awful but I suppose I was mixing with different people and Worthing’s a very snobbish place, you know.
IL: I’ve been.
RM: Pardon?
IL: I’ve been.
RM: Oh, you know Worthing.
IL: Not well.
RM: I finished there. I shouldn’t be — and then I worked for Jim Feast until, well, I think he told me to beggar off and, um, they were menial things, weren’t they? And then across The Broadway there was, they called them Fletchers [sound of aircraft]. Now that can go down. They called them Fletchers, the butcher, and so I was riding around then. And I became very friendly with a chap and he was the same as I was. We were the same age and doing the same jobs, riding around and delivering errands, and he said to me one day, he said — and it was time to come up when we were coming up to seventeen and then around that area and he said, ‘By the way.’ He said, ‘I’m going to join, I’m going to join the Navy.’ He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t join the Navy if you paid me.’ I said, I said, ‘I don’t want to go.’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m going to join the Navy.’ And just up here they call it Teville Road. He said, ‘Up here are the Naval Cadets.’ But it’s ridiculous isn’t it? Because when he said Naval Cadets I thought to myself, ‘What do you do?’ He said, ‘Well, we learn the Morse code and with your arms and hands.’ And I thought — ‘And march and do things like that.’ And bearing in mind there was also a junior Air Cadets but I didn’t even think about the Air Cadets because — and then he was telling me, he said, ‘Why don’t you come up?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to join the Navy.’ He said, ‘Oh, come on.’ He said, ‘It will just be a bit of fun.’ So, I said, ‘Oh, right.’ So, I went up this particular time and went into this hall and I saw these, er, do you know what I mean? There was all these things to learn the Morse code, with di, di, di, da, dat. And I looked at them and I thought — because a friend of mine had joined the air crew and he’d gone as a wireless op and I thought, ‘That’s not a bad thing. There’s a place here I can learn the Morse code and be one in front.’ So, he said — anyway, I thought it would be interesting, sat down and they had about six in a line. I sat down and I got interested, listening to it, and I thought, ‘This will do.’ But this mate of mine, he kept saying, ‘Join.’ He wanted me to join the Naval Cadets and I didn’t want to join and that was when really that I made up my mind. That was about the time that I’d gone down to the recruiting office to join the, to join the Air Force and that was really at the beginning where I made up my mind that I wanted to be air crew and that, that was the last job I think, driving around. They called him Fletcher, that butcher, and that’s, that’s all I did but I think if my dad had been home he would have pushed me because, as I say, I was fairly good, I was fairly good at school. I was. I can wrap anything up, you know, and it seems a shame really. You know, I don’t I mean that I was wasted or anything like that but I know that had I’d gone on I would have gone on to Worthing High School but nothing appealed to me. There was a war on and honestly, that’s the honest truth, there was nothing appealed to me. Nothing at all appealed to me in — accept when it came for the service time to join the Services. That’s all it was.
IL: OK. So when you joined you were seventeen but there was problems because you had to have your mother’s permission I understand.
RM: That’s right.
IL: So, what happened?
RM: What happened?
IL: Yeah. What happened?
RM: Well, I did tell you.
Sarah: But you’re being recorded now dad.
RM: Oh, I see. Oh, well. Well, we didn’t fall out of course not. You can look at that. That’s my family. Oh well, we had a few words of course but nothing, there was nothing dramatic. There was nothing dramatic about it because my mother was a loving woman wasn’t she? I mean, it was her family, her life, but to — but I don’t think even to this day, looking back, that she ever thought that, um, it would come to me signing up. I don’t think she ever thought that I would join up until I left and I got on the train from West Worthing to Victoria. I mean, to be out of, to get out, to go out of Worthing was when I played football. I used to play schoolboy international, um, yeah, I played schoolboy international. We lost —
Sarah: Where did you do your final?
RM: West Ham. No, we didn’t play. We got knocked out, Sarah. West Ham beat us in the semis at — where? What’s the name of their ground?
IL: Upton Park.
RM: Yes. That’s it and it was an absolute sensation because to play schoolboy international was actually a very good thing because when you ran on the pitch and there was six thousand boys there and we ran on the pitch at Upton Park and these boys — you get six thousand boys, six thousand boys there and I can understand — it was absolutely wonderful. Anyway I was thirteen at the time. But going on to where, talking about my mother, it was, it was very disturbing but on, not from my point of view because I knew what I was going to do. It was something. It was something. There was a blooming war on but the papers and you could hear them give the news out. It, it didn’t strike me as being anything. All I wanted to do then was be in the Air Force and to fly. That was my only ambition was to fly and I failed the first time. What did they call it? I failed. I put in for a pilot and I failed as a pilot. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t just good enough. That was all there was to it. I know that looking back. I think if I’d genned up on it a bit more and waited maybe a couple of months.
Sarah: How did they sort out who was going to be a flight engineer and who was going to be a wireless operator?
RM: By what I had to do. By what you had to do. And you talk about square pegs and round holes, Sarah, and that was what you had to do. I went up to, ah, North London. It’s where they, where the Lord’s Cricket Ground is, somewhere up there, and you go before the — oh, I forgot to tell you that. That’s what happened when I was called up, before I was called up rather, that’s what happened, and you sit down. You go into this classroom and that as well, I had a medical, of course. I mustn’t miss that out, of course you did, and you sat down and it was sort of noughts and crosses, you know. I can’t remember a lot, but you sat down and with a — now I’ve got to just try and think. Anyway I failed as a pilot and so the next best thing —
IL: But at this time you were still only seventeen? This was —
RM: Pardon?
IL: This was between signing up and being called up you had this, like, kind of selection.
RM: That’s right, exactly. I’d forgotten, yeah, of course I did. And as far as I think now I was just put down as air crew. I can’t seem to think that I was classified then because as an air gunner — I knew I wasn’t going to be an air gunner because the air gunners were in and out. They had a six month course. They were up in — they had a very short course, did an air gunner, a rear gunner and a mid-upper gunner. They had a very short — you know, it was awful really. They just learned how to shoot and they put them in, put them in a bomber. And honestly, it was as simple as that.
IL: You also, you also had this thing with your mother, um, she had to sign something, I understand?
RM: Oh yes, yes. She did, oh yeah. Well, I got this paper from — I went down to the recruiting office — and I thought — there again, I knew nothing about it. And I thought you could just sign on the line and they took you but when they came to the ages bit, um, it struck me as not being right, but you, you could not get into the Services. You could get in [emphasis] into the Services, before you were eighteen, but not flying. You could not get into air crew unless you signed up. That’s what it was with me anyway. And to get her to — she just said, ‘You’re not going.’ And that was it. And in practice she’d made her mind up that I wasn’t going to join the aircrew. But my mother then at that time I don’t really think that she knew what air crew was. Honestly I do. I believe that. She didn’t know what air crew was in that respect.
IL: So, how did you get round your mum not signing?
RM: Um, oh, oh well, I waited for a bit, oh yeah, when she wouldn’t sign it. I mean, she was my mother and what could I do? I can’t, even in those days, I mean, well, in those days you had to do what your mother and father said, as far as I was concerned anyway, and she was, um, she was up in arms. I knew she held it — she sort of realised that I’d made my mind up. That’s, that’s what it was all about. And I wanted to, I wanted to join and I she — I can’t tell you what the paper was. It was a sheet of paper with — that you had to sign and I, I forged her signature. Yeah, I did. I practiced writing Clare Moore and, um, I don’t think to this day that she knew what I’d done except when my papers came. I mean, I don’t think she was aware that, I don’t think she was aware because I didn’t turn round to her and say I’d done it. I wouldn’t have done that. Well, I wouldn’t Sarah. And, er, as I say I took it back to that, down Chapel Road, that recruiting office there and just handed it in and, ‘We’ll let you know.’ Sort of thing.
IL: So, what happened when you eventually got called up and had to leave?
RM: And had to leave?
IL: Had, had to leave home. What did your mum do?
RM: Oh, well, that — well, my sister Dorothy, we were good friends, as brother and sister, and she still does to this day. She thinks I’m marvellous. You know, that sort of, her brother, and, um, well, I packed a little suitcase and all I packed in was probably a razor and whatever, you know, things you need, I suppose. I know at that time my mother was very reluctant to pack anything in. You didn’t need anything. You just had, I just had this little case and I guess she packed in soap, a flannel and things like that. That’s all there was, you know. Said, ‘Cheerio.’ And she said, ‘You can beggar off home.’ I remember that. And then when I got to the bottom of the road I looked back. Waving. And I got on a train and went to Victoria, Victoria across to — no, the RTO met us at, um, at Victoria Station. You went into the, what they called, the RTO, that’s the Railroad Transport Offices, the RTO, and I went in there and told them, like, and they took us by coach then to Cardington. And from Cardington — was there two days. That was awful really at Cardington because there were thou— there seemed hundreds, hundreds of airmen milling around in civvies, you know, and it was a funny carry on and it really surprised me, in as much as, over the Tannoy (they had a Tannoy) and it was like a homing thing and it called out on, on the microphone, ‘Is there a,’ and I’ll never forget this, ‘Is there a Raymond Moore here?’ And amongst all the hubbub, you know, I didn’t take a lot of notice and I hadn’t met anybody but I heard it again and again and I thought, ‘That’s me.’ Anyway, er, I found out where it was coming from and what it was — I can’t explain to you how they found out — but what it was somebody more knowledgeable than me and up to date and what it was you could go to and find, there was a list of some sort you, you could go and find and look down this list, like, anybody from Worthing? With their names on it and my name was on it and what — and they called in — oh, I can’t think of it. No good, can’t think, and what happened was, he called in. He was calling, ‘Raymond Moore.’ And I found him and found him and of course he came up and he said, ‘Oh, good. Thank God. There’s somebody here from Worthing.’ And he was a horror. I never liked him because, well, because it weren’t so much — I’d met him through the football and he came from a school called Sussex Road and I came from St Andrews and so there was a bit of competition of the boys from St Andrews and the boys from Sussex Road and I never liked him. And he said, oh, he said, ‘Oh, what school?’ I said, ‘I was at St Andrews.’ And, you know, St Andrews was a bit of a snobbish school. Well, it was a bit of a snobbish school, it was honestly. St Andrews it was. We thought we were a cut above Sussex Road and it was true and, um, but I didn’t want to be with him somehow and I sort of edged away from him and I never met him again. He was posted somewhere else you see. I was posted to Skegness to do — I was there about eight weeks — square bashing and that was good. There again, it was something new wasn’t it, you know? Marching up and down. I even remember the corporal’s name, Corporal Passant, P A S S A N T, Corporal Passant. And we were billeted in houses on the seafront. It was marvellous, weren’t it? Home from home. And he was a very nice corporal, marched us up and down then and I then — we was just thrilled. We didn’t — there was no rifle drill or anything like that. We just had to learn. Well, I knew how to march but he was a professional and he taught us how to march properly. I’ll tell you this instance. I don’t know whether it matters, whether it goes on there or not, but it’s an incident and it struck me because, being brought up Church of England and fairly religious, church parade on a Sunday morning. There was a great big, seemed to me dozens of us, and each one was a platoon with thirty two men in and so this corporal then, as it come down the line, and you had to stand to attention but he’d call out then, ‘Fall out all Roman, fall out all Roman Catholics and Jews and other denominations.’ [slight laugh] Honestly, that’s the gospel truth, as true as I sit here. So I’m stood there and I thought — and of course, all those that were Roman Catholics and Jews and other denominations (what the other denomination was would be Methodist I suppose or something like that) and I’m stood there like and one or two — I saw one or two — falling out and I thought, ‘What’s goes on here?’ I thought there was only one religion, or two at the most. That would be Roman Catholics and Church of England.’ And that’s the honest truth. That’s how, that’s how I was educated, although that the school I went to, St Andrews, they called it a higher — there’s a name for it.
Sarah: Church School? Or a —
RM: Yes, they called it — and it was high church. It was between Roman Catholic and Jews [?]. It was in between but that didn’t make any difference to religion but you know what puzzled me? Every Sunday morning that corporal used to say — and it was a common thing and it caught on. Suddenly all the Church of England suddenly became Roman Catholics or Jews, whatever. It was a peculiar carry on and that is the truth.
Sarah: So they could fall out.
IL: Yes. So, they didn’t have to go to church parade?
RM: Yeah and they just wandered off and that, that is true that, and from — of course when I finished at square bashing I was sent to Cosford and that was eighteen months’ course on engines and that was hard. That was really hard. That was a hard course because when you’re — it’s like, taking maths. If you take maths at school it’s hard if you don’t concentrate and, taking the course on Merlin engines and Hercules engines, it struck me as being — seeing a massive engine there — and you had to learn the theory of it. I knew nothing. I didn’t even know what it looked like and to be thrown into something like that it was hard and I had to work hard if I wanted to — I did. I worked very hard, very, very hard.
IL: So, was that classroom and practical based?
RM: Yes, it was. It’s true. The practice, I was absolutely useless. Even now, right throughout my married life, and I was married for sixty-six years, and I’m telling you, I couldn’t knock a nail in without hitting my thumb. Now, it’s a standing joke in the family. Sarah knows. Don’t you Sarah?
Sarah: My mum was very good at decorating.
RM: The girls decorated and the lads. I could never ever learn anything in the house. It didn’t matter. Now, I don’t, I think it wasn’t, I think I lacked the knowledge of even knocking a nail in. I could never and of course my wife was the opposite. She was marvellous, you know. She had to be.
IL: I have a similar arrangement. [slight laugh]
Sarah: Very capable, was my mum.
RM: Yes, she was. And then from Cosford, I did eighteen weeks there and was posted to Halton, which was, it was the — from going from a lower form of AC1, AC2, LAC you went up then a bit higher because at Halton you had to finish off what you did at Cosford, you know, you know what I mean? It was a bit higher class if you got through and Halton’s in Buckinghamshire and Halton was the sound, it was the grounding for the regular Air Force. RAF Halton it was and that was nice there. We got marched about to a band there. They had their own band. Marched up for our dinners, from classrooms, marched back down again. It was quite good actually.
IL: How long were you there for?
RM: How long? So that was eighteen weeks, so four and a half months. How long was I? Oh, sixteen weeks.
IL: Right.
RM: Sixteen weeks at Halton, yeah, and that was another grind. It was, because, as I say it was a bit, it was harder.
IL: And did you get any leisure time in these places?
RM: No. It was just — well, only if you put in — well, just as an example was, we were billeted in huts and the — it was quite good really. It kept you on your toes. I was never lazy in doing them things but there was about — how many would there be? About fourteen beds in the hut and every Friday night it was bull [?] night and you had to dust your, all around your bed, and I seemed to get a lot of fluff round my bed [slight laugh] you know and then you had to polish the floor and that [emphasis] was the main thing. And you had to polish the floor because you got marks and the sergeant, the flight sergeant, would come round and he’d come round and look and if your, if your hut was good you got a mark of, I don’t know how they worked it, nine out of ten or something, and so after a couple of months your hut — and you worked hard and polished and all the bull you put in to it, and if you came top of the class you could put in for a weekend pass but they weren’t daft were they? You imagine thirty-six hours. Forty-eight hours from Friday until 23.00 hours on the Sunday night and they called that forty-eight hours. In the meantime — and you had to pay your own fare. So, I was living in Worthing and to get to Wolverhampton you had to do an awful lot. It was awfully quick because when my dad used to come home on leave and my mother would say, in a letter, she’d say your father will be coming on leave on such and such a day and he was billeted not far away up at Balcombe Tunnel [?] and, um, he was — so, I got information then so the idea was then if our hut was up on the list and a lot of them, bearing in mind, they lived farther away than that and so you couldn’t afford it. You couldn’t afford it. Your, your pay, you got three shillings a day or something like that, and so if you wanted to go on a weekend you had to save up to get your train fare. And so I would then write a letter and it was a dodge with me because when I wrote a letter to, to which you just had to write a note, ‘Dear Sir.’ Your commanding officer, ‘Dear Sir, I may request, can I request a pass because my father is coming home?’ It was a, it was a squid [?] wasn’t it? And put it in and to put a letter into the orderly room, ‘Dear Sir.’ I, I used to have it off pat saying that I was, um, how did I put it? Dear, Sir, Dear Sir. Oh, it was, it was a mushy letter and I always used to put in as my father is coming home on leave, and that was it, and because if you had a relative like that, you know what I mean? And so, any, any leave that I got that was the letter that I used to put in to the commanding officer, ‘Dear Sir, please may I put forward an application for a forty-eight hour pass to see my father who’s home on leave.’ And I used to put he’s a sergeant major in the eighth battalion of the Royal Fusiliers or something and I it went off pat, of course you did, and I got a forty-eight hour pass and it was the only time I screwed them [laugh] well, I did, you know. It was that little bit that — it was good was that.
IL: It’s not bad to get some time off.
RM: And then — but after I finished a Halton, that course there, I went down to St Athan and that was my final course and of course that was, that was a hard one there because for six weeks or eight weeks you had to write down the theory. It got down to the theory part of flying, the theory of flight, your engine power, and you didn’t even know what you were going to fly actually in them days. And there was another interesting thing that is worth putting down that I, I came top, or we’ll say I came nearly top. I know I was, I know, but at that time of course I was going to be a flight engineer and that was all there was to it. I was going to fly and that meant to finish it off I was going to be good and I intended, that was what I intended. Anyway, we were waiting, I’d got my tapes and braiding [?] that was good sewed it on and it came through then, we were in the billets one night and a corporal it was, the corporal came round and he said, he read four names out and my name was among them and where, where I was at St Athan, um, he said, he read four names out and he said, ‘Now then.’ He said, ‘This is optional.’ Have you ever heard of a Sunderland Flying Boat? No? Have you?
IL: I have, yes.
RM: Well, you know, well — and four of us were picked out then and this was a bit of excitement and they took us down to the, er, Solent on the Southampton waters to give us a trip in a Sunderland Flying Boat to see whether we liked it or not. And, oh boy that, you know, and to fly for the first time. But they were massive. To me they were massive. To be inside one of these things and they carried a crew of thirteen, you know. And, anyway they ferried us out to this Sunderland and, um, we climbed aboard and all the time, you know, I was very nearly messing myself because of the size of it and going up the ladder to get inside it and it was sort of going — it was a lovely gentle — on the Solent, you know, and I thought, ‘There’s something wrong. I don’t know what I’m doing here.’ And I could have refused. It was just something that being in the first four that it was a little present for those that were doing it and, er, I admit, I must admit I didn’t want to go then. And anyway we get inside and it was massive. I’ll never forget it. I mean, where they cooked they had a stove and everything and where they cooked it was as wide as this was. It was massive inside it. I was lost. I remember sitting there. We didn’t have a harness. They didn’t give us a harness. I was just sitting there and I was looking round. And they started the engines up. They were Hercules, no, no, Pegasus, they were Pegasus 16s and, er, then they started up and we were rolling forward and, do you know? I’m not kidding you, bump, bump, bump, and, and I couldn’t see out. All I could see, like, the pilot was up here but the, the feeling of going on, on the water in this blooming great flying boat. And, er anyway there were four of us there and none of us were very — I think all of us looking a bit green. Anyway, we took off and we just circled Southampton and Portsmouth, down there, and we come into land. Well, coming into land was the same as taking off virtually that was but, of course, if you got used to it like everything else — and we landed, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. Anyway when we went, they took us back to, um, we got back to St Athan and well, straight away, like, and we had to sort of say in front of those that were in charge of us down there, they had to say then, ‘Did you like it?’ And I said, I remember saying like, I said, ‘Is that what we’ve got to fly on?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to fly.’ Because honestly the take-off and landing on a Sunderland, honestly you could not understand, and when you look at Southampton, you know, when you look at the, look at the water. It all looks lovely and calm, you know, and you think — but by Jove I’ll tell you it did frighten me. Anyway, we got back and then we got back we were posted and posted then up to Yorkshire. That’s the first I saw of it. Posted to Eastmoor and there we landed at York and we got a truck there and there was thirteen of us. Thirteen flight engineers. And that was the hard bit. Do you know, out of those thirteen there was only about four of us finished. That was, that was hard.
IL: So, did you get to know those people?
RM: Well, when we went to the squadron we — well, Eastmoor was where they put all the crews in a hangar and there was a pilot, and he’d have his navigator, and the pilot would walk round and if you liked, er, like, if, if you liked a fella or you saw him and he saw [unclear] the pilot would go up to them and he’d say, ‘Have you got a crew?’ And this is gospel truth. They were — and some of the Canadians of course they knew one another from school, coming from Canada and things, so they weren’t so bad and I — and of course, when I was, went there it was awful. Well, those billets up there, the blankets were wet. We broke a table up to light the fire. It, it was about midnight when we got there from York and we spilt up and there was about six of us into this hut. It was awful. There, there was no fire. The blankets were wet. Anyway, um, it was awful to move in there. Well, in the daytime, as I say, we went into this big hangar where we were crewed up. And I remember I was sat there and I thought, ‘Nobody wants me.’ And it’s true. I was sat on a table. I was just sat there swinging my legs like. I was looking round, and I thought, I was hoping somebody would come up to me and say, ‘Have you got a crew?’ Or something. Anyway, I sat there and I saw them keep disappearing and I felt very lonely and I thought ‘Nobody wants me.’ Anyway, this, this pilot officer comes up to me and he tapped me on the shoulder and he said, ‘Have you got a crew?’ And I thought — I could have embraced him. I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ He said, ‘Would you like to join my crew?’ I said, ‘Yes, I would.’ Well, he said, ‘I’m Pilot Officer Bryson.’ And he said, ‘Come with me and I’ll introduce you.’ And he introduced me. And I was the last one in the crew and he said, ‘This is Peter Lewinsky, navigator, Alex Trench was the bomb aimer (he was the Yank that did that book), Peter Lewinsky, er, Alex Trench was the bomb aimer, er, Reg Galloway was the wireless operator. Mid-upper gunner was Ralph Revlin [?] and the rear gunner was Harold Bowles.’ And that was how I was introduced to them.
IL: And so were they all, were they all, were they all British or —
RM: No, they were Canadian.
IL: They were all Canadian? Were you the only non-Canadian?
RM: Yes.
IL: Right.
RM: Yeah, they, they sort of — well, I was the youngest in the crew. The rest were twenty-one. The navigator was twenty-five and the wireless op was twenty-five. They were two of the eldest. The rest of them were twenty-one and I was just nineteen but they, they were marvellous really. They very nearly fostered me, you know. It was true. It was. Well, it was marvellous really accept I wasn’t their friend. When we were coming back they all smoked and so, when we were coming back and when I —
Sarah: Do you mean when you were setting out, when you were doing a, a return flight when you dropped bombs? When you say when you were coming back —
RM: Oh, we were coming back from — yeah, well that’s another story. They — what is was I was in charge of the oxygen and I didn’t smoke at the time (I did on occasion) and the skipper didn’t smoke but all the rest of them, it was like being in a factory. When we were flying, when we were — funnily enough they used to shout out. The rear gunner used to shout out and we’d be at eleven thousand feet and I used to take — and so I’d turn the oxygen off at ten thousand feet, you see, but I was in charge. But we’d be coming down, coming back, that was the worst bit because those that smoked needed a fag. That’s all there was so all they needed was a cig and so, we’d be at eleven thousand feet and then it started, the rear gunner, ‘Ray, Ray. How about turning the oxygen off.’ And we’d be at eleven thousand feet and it was the law but a flying law that you didn’t turn the oxygen off until you were down to ten thousand feet. That was the oxygen height, about twelve thousand feet, ten thousand feet, and so I used to turn to the skipper and I used to tap him because he would hear on, you see, and I used to tap him on the shoulder and he just used to sit there and he used to do just this and so I never answered them because, well, it was silly and then you would hear another one and the wireless operator, he was real — he was like a father, and he used to say, a bit subtler, ’Ray.’ [sound of aircraft] You know, and we’d be down then, coming down then, ‘Ray, Raymond, Raymond.’ And more sympathetic, ‘Turn the oxygen off Ray, Raymond. Turn the oxygen off.’ And so I used, used to turn to the skipper and I used tap him on the shoulder, and he was a bugger was old Bryson, the skipper. He was really stuck to it. At ten thousand feet turn the oxygen off, like, and they can — and it was like a furnace in there, you know, the cigarette smoke. They all smoked.
Sarah: Did they not swear at you occasionally?
RM: Oh, oh yeah. Yeah, it come to being not being pleasant, you know, ‘Turn that — turn that oxygen off. Turn.’ And, er, yeah, it was good fun.
IL: So, once you were crewed up you went to Linton?
RM: Yes.
IL: OK. So was this — so what was Linton?
RM: Linton was the — there were two squadrons at Linton: 408 and 426. That’s about it. There was sixteen to a squadron there so there was about thirty, thirty-two, thirty-two bombers all to take off and land.
Sarah: And you used to stay at Beningbrough didn’t you?
RM: Ah, well we were, we were billeted. We weren’t billeted at Linton. We were billeted at Beningham.
Sarah: Beningham.
IL: Oh, Beningham Hall. Very posh.
RM: Ah, well —
Sarah: We went there a couple of years ago didn’t we? Had a re-visit.
RM: Yes. Sarah took me there. There it is, look. That was when we were — yeah, there were six of us there. That was when we were old. 1987.
Sarah: It was a reunion.
RM: And it was a reunion, yes. They came all the way from Canada. 1987 that was. Oh yeah, they came over two or three times didn’t they, Sarah?
IL: So, when you, so you when you moved, when you first went to — so what, what year was it and what, when did you first start operations?
RM: Linton, we were at Linton in the November ‘43. I did my first trip on — to Berlin. That was a Berlin and I did my first trip to Berlin with Flight Lieutenant Brice. I flew spare. One of the — his engineer — on the 28th of January. That was my first trip to Berlin. That was one of the most unpleasant I had because they all the crew were new, weren’t they? And his engineer, he’d gone, you know, LMF. You know what I’m saying?
IL: Yep.
RM: And his engineer was Australian and poor chap he’d gone. He’d done seven trips and he just, he just packed it in, like, and so me, being clever, I had more flying hours in than any other flight engineer, being clever and the CO, Squadron — no, er, Jacobs at that time, said, Wing Commander Jacobs and said (you didn’t have a choice), ‘You’re flying tonight with Flight Lieutenant Brice.’ And that was my first trip.
IL: So, between November and January what were you actually — was this sort of — you were training as a crew?
RM: Yes. Oh, yes. We did a lot of flying. Well, we only flew if weather was on. I mean, between November and December that year, um, we didn’t do a lot of flying. It wasn’t until after Christmas, into January, that we concentrated on flying. Flying — I don’t mean operational because well, we weren’t, just weren’t on the list to operate and then that was January the 28th. That was my first Berlin with a new crew. That was not very pleasant because I was new to the crew. Mind, he give me a good recommendation. He told my skipper that I was a very good flight engineer and that, that meant a lot to me, er, and so, and then a couple of days later, couple of nights later, all the crew went. That was their — it was my second but their first. It was the 30th of January and we all flew as a crew. That was our first and that was another Berlin, another biggie, the big city, and from then on, you know, every other night, whenever they decided to fly us operationally, you know.
IL: So, so how many, how many operations? Was it a tour of thirty or —
RM: Thirty-one. I did thirty one because I put in that — I should have been screened at thirty but the rest of the crew had to do an extra one so I flew, I, I said I would fly the last one. That was to Cannes I think it was. That was —
IL: Did you have any, um, did you have any, um, interesting experiences or narrow escapes when you were over Germany on, on operations?
RM: Did we ever?
IL: Did you have any, um, narrow escapes? Did you have any, anything you’d like to tell us?
RM: Oh, I’d have to look in there because when you — like the first op I did with Flight Lieutenant Brice. We were both strangers to one another but every movement in that cockpit he relied on me. I’m not bragging. Every movement that that pilot had to do to that plane he had to do it through me, operationally, whatever it was. I don’t mean flying. To do appertaining to the air force, aircraft but flying, when we were flying, and you’re cruising along and you have to be prepared, especially when you fly, you get over the coast and you’re flying to France, flying over France. And the first Berlin that we did, I could never understand it because when you went into briefing there was a map that big, and then the CO used to come in, and there was a curtain and he used to pull the curtain, and you knew by the tone of the crew — there’d be all the crews in the briefing room — and you could hear them, ‘Oh, God. Another, another big city.’ You know. And of course, I was still a sprog wasn’t I? Going in with the crew, this new crew, and so when the curtain was drawn back all you heard was the moans, you know, ‘Oh, God. The big city.’ And I was sat there. I remember sitting there with the crew that I was with and they’d had seven operations between them so I was just a sprog but and so — but I knew my job. That’s what I was going to say. I knew my job as a flight engineer. I knew that I knew my job. That’s what I’m trying to say. I did know so that when we were, when we first started up and things like that I knew how to start everything up, I knew what tanks to be on before take-off, I knew what flaps to put down, the undercarriage and everything like that before we took off and, and so all he did was fly. But don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that with any belittling sense because they were, they were magnificent machines and they needed good men to fly. That’s what I’m saying and they did and that’s how the crew, that’s how, that’s how you, that’s where the camaraderie came from, no doubt about that. And so when we, we taxied round the perimeter and then we were ready for take-off and you had to do pre-flight preparations before he opened the throttle and the take-off the same. He never said a word, didn’t the pilot, because I did everything for him in that respect accept he flew it. He was, he was the man. He flew it and he was a blooming good pilot as well.
Sarah: Were you excited on your first trip?
RM: Pardon?
Sarah: Were you excited on your first trip?
RM: Yes, I was [cough]. Well, there’s not much you can do, you know. We took off and at a thousand feet the pilot would say to the navigator, ‘Can you give me a course?’ That was just first course out and the first course — and what puzzled me was, what I was going to say was, what puzzled me was, looking at the map, I thought, ‘That’s funny. We’re going to Germany. We should be going to Germany.’ And Berlin is, Berlin was down there and I thought, ‘That’s funny. We’re going up here.’ And we flew over Norway and Den— and, and Sweden. That was how we went, up there, went up there like that and across there, and I thought, ‘What the hell are we flying up there? Why can’t we fly straight to Berlin and back again.’ But you’d blooming soon find out why they did it because you avoided all these little — I can show them to you on there, like, um, Bremen, one or two hot spots just, just inside there, all the big German ports there, and they were hot. They could shoot you down like a, you know, if — so the idea was to take us across to Norway and Sweden and you went, we went across like that and we turned, we took a turn to starboard. So, I suppose we’d be flying east, 2.40 or something like that, and then come down to Berlin, come down like that, and bomb Berlin and then another. All the routes are in there, you know, going to and from the target, and — but that first trip, the first excitement I got really that was excitement because you were looking out for fighters weren’t you and things like that. You were, and the fire over Berlin that fascinated you, there’s no doubt about it. You couldn’t, you weren’t supposed to look, you see. All the aircrew, once you got used to it you weren’t, you weren’t, you weren’t forced to, you couldn’t help, you saw this massive area that was alight and you couldn’t — in my blister (there was a blister in the Lanc) and I used to — I was looking down like that and my skipper give me a punch on the shoulder. He said, ‘You don’t really want to be looking down there.’ He said, ‘You ought to be looking up there for fighters.’ And just, just, the fire in the front of us, it could have been — I could never estimate up there how near we were and all of a sudden there was a massive explosion and a Lancaster or Halifax I think, I don’t know what it was, had been blown up in front of us. Now that brought me to realise that I was we were in the middle of the war, you know what I mean? There was nothing on the way and all of a sudden before the target this, this aircraft blew up and I knew, I realised then, you know, that that was war and we lost thirty-five aircraft that night. And so we lost four on the way so when you got back to briefing, um, that was the hardest part, when you got back to briefing. I’m not saying so much on that trip. And then there was a big board up and it said ‘late’ er, whoever it was, name Frank or any, any one of them down there, ‘late’, ‘arrival’, ‘depart’, ‘arrival’ and, and the time to put down and if you knew who your mate, we’d call him, was flying with you you looked for his pilot. His pilot’s name would be on the board, missing, and so you’d wait. If, if one of them, they called him Rodman [?] and he was — Harry Gilbert was his flight engineer and he should never have been flying because this is what happens and when he used, he used to come up to me because we were good friends. And I’d been through a course with him and I’m not saying I wasn’t frightened, it was ridiculous, but when I met him and he come in and his skipper was Flight Lieutenant Rodman and he used to come up to me and he used to say, ‘How are you Ray?’ And he’d light a fag and he was like this and I thought to myself — and he did, he got the chop, after he done about ten, but he was like this and, ‘How are you Ray?’ You know, ‘You alright?’ And I said, ‘For Christ’s sake Harry, give up.’ And I, I used to do, ‘For Christ’s sake.’ I said, ‘I did have a rough trip but I’m here and so are you.’ And it was the only way you could talk to Harry. He should never have flown, never have flown. Every time he come back and he used to make for me in the briefing room and, I mean it wasn’t as I was brave or anything, but I knew him and he was like this. He come from — he was a Lancashire lad, old Harry Gilbert but he was like this, lighting a fag.
IL: So what’s your definition of a rough trip?
RM: A rough trip?
IL: Yeah. A rough trip. What would have happened on a rough trip?
RM: Right. It was called “The Tale of Strong Winds”. I can go right through that with you because it was the worst trip I ever, it was [emphasis] the worst trip that was. I can talk to you right from there until we came back. Berlin, it was the last one, 24th of March 1944, and the take-off time would be in there. It might have been 4 o’clock in the afternoon. [sound of aircraft] Yeah, it would have been about 4 o’clock. It was March so, yeah, so we go to briefing [sound of aircraft] and, as I say, look at the map and hear the groans, big city again, and it’s a long way. It was an eight hour trip there and back and that’s a long time.
Sarah: Eight hours there?
RM: No, eight hours. Oh, no Sarah. There and back. And we took off, and Met, Met hadn’t said anything about anything. It was just an ordinary. We took off and on that route up there, we went over, going over the North Sea, and it was fine but we had a tail wind going over the North Sea and we did nothing. At that time of the year you did often get what they call a, a southern wind. It was like a south wind and the, the way we were taking off on that runway, we had nearly a tail wind. It was north and south runway as we called it and we took off. It was all fine. Settled down. What I noticed was we were going over Norway and Sweden again but that meant to say it was fairly — and we had a nice tail wind and our ground speed was about hundred and fifty which was pretty fast when you’re on climbing power and it was pretty fast was that and I thought, ‘That’s funny.’ And the skipper said to me, he said, ‘Jesus. We’ve got a tail wind.’ Well, the wireless operator had what they called an aerial and you let out an aerial and it gave us the wind. [background noise] It was like a wind sock and it told you the wind and he, he come back and he said, ‘That’s funny.’ He said, ‘The wind was about fifty or sixty.’ Which was a bit above average. When we got up to the top and turned to Norway, turned over to Norway — I mean, they were all, all these clever fellas in the crew, were talking about winds. You know, I wasn’t a bit interested to be honest. All I was only interested in was the aircraft we were flying [loud background noise] and so, you know, the winds increased, the wireless operator called, ‘The winds increased up to eighty.’ And, oh Jeez, you know, I heard them go round, the pilot, it was [emphasis] fast at eighty miles an hour and as we turned round and, and come down to Berlin I heard the navigator shout in that funny language, ‘Jesus Christ.’ The winds had blown on a what they called a reciprocal so that when we’d reached there and all of a sudden — you can see them on the maps — and the wind had blown literally where we were right up in the north there and turned down to Berlin and the wind had blown us, so instead of — and we had a tail wind. We had a tail wind to take-off and a tail wind going down to the target, Berlin. Our, our ground speed was something like three hundred and odd miles an hour. That was what our ground speed was and that, believe you me — and we had that tail wind up our backside — and what had happened was it blew us past Berlin, about fifty miles. We’d no control. And winds, as I heard some of them bragging about winds being a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and I, I think ours was, we recorded about a hundred and twenty-five, hundred and thirty and it blew us straight past Berlin. So, you can imagine, nearly all the bomber force being blown past Berlin and we had to turn round then, in the face of all these aircraft coming down, and we had to turn round then to go back and bomb Berlin. In other words, it, it sounds ridiculous, but that’s what happened and so when we turned round — and we lost seventy-five that night — and so when we turned round and, and air ground speed had dropped down to forty. That’s how heavy the wind was and it was horrendous really, because when you come to think, you turned round and you had a head wind and it was like standing still, and the pilot kept saying to me — now as an engineer I did know that much, that we were flying [ringing sound] we were flying at engine speeds of climbing speeds and, and flying into a wind, so I knew then — and our maximum power, we could only put maximum power on at about twenty-eight fifty revs plus eight and a quarter pounds of boost so we could only put that power on. I knew that and he kept saying to me, ‘We want more power.’ And it’s a wonder he didn’t strike me and I wouldn’t do it because at that power you could only do it for five minutes otherwise you’d have burnt, you’d have burnt — you know what I’m saying and it was elementary that. But — and air ground speed had been reduced to about forty miles an hour but that wasn’t the point doing that job. Can you imagine half the bomber force coming up and half of it coming down? I mean the aircraft, you could see them. You didn’t know what to do. It was horrendous, it really was, and you just stood there, and poor old Brice, the skipper, he just had to fly straight and level unless you saw something coming towards you. To turn round — well, we would have been blown down and so, and us flying back up and we bombed Berlin. Right, we bombed Berlin and glad to get away and we turned — the navigator gave us a course and it would be, well, I’ll make a figure. I think it was about 090, which was west, flying west, and was fine. We turned round and came back. Now, briefing, they said keep away from Roscos, Roscop —
Sarah: Rostock.
RM: Rostock, Rostock and Bremen, which were — we knew you had to miss them on the way out so you had to miss them on the way down. But with all the excitement that had gone on, and it wasn’t the navigator’s fault because all the wind up there, and we got a bit blown a bit off course. But we were cruising along nicely and all of a sudden bang! And they had then, they were clever you know, were Jerry, they knew we were bombing and they had their defences [clears throat] and it was, what they called a ‘blue searchlight’, and it was a master searchlight, and it hit us like that and what had happened was we had drifted to Rostock and Bremen and that nasty bit of an area down in that quarter there, and that searchlight, he cooked us and he hit us, and it was a blue, it was a blue, and within five minutes, maybe less than that, and there was about twenty searchlights coned us like that. Now, it, it was one of those experiences where you couldn’t see, you couldn’t see nothing, you just had to — he was there and all of a sudden he, he started to what we called ‘corkscrew’ and he shoved it, shoved the nose down, of course as he did it, he didn’t tell anybody he was doing it. He was the pilot and he stuck the nose down and, of course, gravity and as he stuck the nose down like that we went down about five thousand feet in a flash and he stuck the nose down. He screwed it round and stuck the nose down. I went straight up. I went straight up and the, and the bombardier, like, in front he was laid down. He was laid on his back and he was laid down and the language because he wondered what was up because he was in mid-air and that was the first time and navigator was cursing. He was on, he had one of those wheelie seats, he could move around in that little bit of space and, of course, he had his knees underneath the, his desk and his papers, er, as I say, as I went up and all of his nav papers and bits of his machinery was, was flying up in the air. The wireless operator was the only one of us who had any sense. Of course, poor rear gun— gunners, you know, were really thrown about because you can imagine what it was like to be thrown about like that and not knowing where you were and, and the audio was over the intercom, bad language and what was happening? And where are we? And that went on. I mean, for a pilot, and we, we both weighed the same. He weighed nine and a half stone and so did I so you imagine he was skinny, he wasn’t very big. Did you ever meet him Sarah?
Sarah: No. I didn’t.
RM: He wasn’t very big. He was about nine stone and he was five seven and a half in height so there was nothing and that was a big aircraft to throw about, something like twenty-two tonnes, even though it was tear [?] weight and, and anyway that was on the way down. On the way back that was when you felt G. Come back up from five thousand feet, pulling up, and he shouted out to me and I was all scattered brained and he shouted out to me, ‘Ray, Ray, Ray. Give us a hand.’ And so I went and got hold of the stick with him and we were like this and put me feet against that to pull. There was two of us pulling, pulled it out, but that wasn’t it. The searchlights were still on us. They would not let go and we were like that and then down the other side. I bet we were like that. He was flying up and down and trying to get loose from them, lose, lose them, and they were there. But they were there, that master searchlight, and it was an awful experience. It was a dreadful, dreadful experience and, anyway, just in the distance our, our rear gunner called out — they’d, what they done was, as we’d been flying and corkscrewing all over they copped onto another Lancaster and you could see it in the distance, this Lancaster. But they, they’d turned, they’d got hold of him. We just managed to get out of that because what happened after that was fighters. As soon as they, as soon as they — what used to happen was they would suddenly stop and so you were in complete darkness and that’s when the fighter boys used to come in. I think it says there we were attacked by fighters and anyway that wasn’t the end of the story. We were just levelled out and, and he grabbed hold of me, did the pilot, and he got hold of my intercom and he pulled out my intercom and he plugged my intercom into his intercom and he said, and he, he stood up and he said, you know, ‘Get into my seat.’ And, er, he sort of half dragged me, plugged it in. Well, as I passed him, as we were passing the seats, I saw him and he looked, even in the light that there was there, the sweat was literally pouring out of him. I never realised and never thinking like what he’d done and he’d been doing this for about twenty minutes, and that’s a lot in a Lancaster, going up and down and trying to — and, and so there I am, I’m sat in the cockpit. Well, bloody Lancaster, halfway across Germany and I’m sat there and the navigator said, ‘Alter course.’ And I just leaned forward and set the compass [cough] the old — and just set it and just set a bit of rudder, that was all, just to turn it on to whatever it was (I’ve forgotten) and flew it and not a sound, nobody spoke, nobody said anything and poor old Brice, he’d literally had it. And there I am, all quiet there, flying along there. Nothing to flying an aircraft, you know, it’s like driving a car up the M1. You just have to just sit there and hope that there’s no fighters and then it occurred to me I thought, ‘Christ what happens if, if we get attacked? What am I going to do? How am I going to corkscrew out of this?’ And Brice was just stood at the side of me and he kept patting me on the shoulder [slight laugh] and I thought, ‘There’s no good patting me on the shoulder if anything happens brother.’ Anyway, we was flying along. We must have been flying for about half an hour and nothing happened and that is — you, you couldn’t believe really, honestly, after all those experiences that I should be allowed to fly and I flew halfway across Germany. We weren’t far off the French coast and that’s how far I — I didn’t fly the thing. It just flew on its own. All I did was steering it. That’s the honest truth but nobody spoke and the only thing that upset me was nobody else in the crew knew what had happened, that I flew that aircraft. I thought he would have mentioned it, that when we sat down at briefing, ‘My flight engineer did this.’ And he never said, he never told none of those crew and from that day to this that I flew that aircraft back except when we were— well, they didn’t know and when we were coming up you know and the navigator, I think it was the navigator at that time, he tapped me on the shoulder and I got out. But I’d flown but that was the worst experience, one of the worst, and we hadn’t see anything really but —
IL: And that was your last —
RM: No, no.
IL: Sorry, I thought you said it was your last, sorry.
RM: No, no, no, no, no, that was Berlin. That was 24th of March and they called that the “Night of the Winds”. We lost seventy-five that night.
IL: My goodness.
Sarah: On, on a little lighter note do I, do I remember something about bomb doors not opening?
RM: No, I can’t — not bomb doors.
Sarah: No?
RM: No. Oh, we were attacked by night fighters, we got hit by flak, attacked by night fighters. That was the things that happened.
Sarah: Did you not have to come back once because you couldn’t drop some bombs? On a lighter note.
RM: Oh, right. This trip was Dortmund. Dortmund – Emms Canal they called it.
Sarah: There. We got it there.
RM: Dortmund, Dortmund Emms Canal. Right, and that was another, that was a hot spot, Dortmund but, um, experience, yes. We got into B-Baker and I started, I started the engines up, routine, er, before we left, before we left — what do you call it? Well, before we left where they were parked, like, we got in. The idea was to start the engines up, rev them up a bit, and I started the, the starboard engine up, one of them, and I just checked them, what they called a mag drop because, er, luckily it had two mag and what you had to do was run them up to a fifteen hundred and switch one of these mag drops. If you got a mag drop over three or four hundred revs there’s something wrong, you got a — anyway, I was testing them and called, I said to the skipper, I said, ‘It’s not right.’ I said, ‘This starboard inner. There’s too big a mag drop.’ And he said, ‘Oh.’ I said, ‘I’ll open it up again.’ Anyway, I reckoned to open it up to clear anything and give it a good boost, like, and, and no, it didn’t work. So, we stopped the engines, called up control, starboard inner US. Fine, we thought. Every— everybody in the crew thought we’re going to have a night off. Come over from control, um, ‘Bryson, Flight Lieutenant, Flying Officer Bryson there’ll be transport. They’re going to take, they’ll take you to C-Charlie.’ Oh, so we’ll have to go after all. Transport comes along. And imagine having to getting in and out of a Lancaster, across the old spar there and it was hard work. You’d have to take off all your, your, um, parachute like and your harness and things like that. So the transport comes, broom, broom, across to C-Charlie and it was cold and it didn’t feel like your aircraft and straight away there’s a bit of, ‘Who did this aircraft belong to?’ ‘Oh. It belongs to —.’ ‘Oh Christ, its cold.’ And you heard them moaning like and as to what each department they got into, they’d say, ‘Oh, it’s a dirty place.’ You know, the gunners were saying. And anyway we get in, starts the engines up, everything’s fine and navigator — and this is navigation equipment I’m going to tell you and it was called GEE and H2S. Anyway, he’s fiddling about and there’s Bryson and I up front giving it some boost to clear the oil and do all this sort of thing before take-off. We hadn’t left dispersal and navigator calls up, ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says. He said, ‘The GEE’s not working and H2S.’ So we sat there waiting. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Oh.’ We knew then we were going to have a night off. That was the second aircraft. Not on your Nelly. So, they send somebody over and well, to repair anything like that — they were fantastic machines, you know, you’re able to navigate a lot easier, let’s put it that way, with these machines, like, they were operating. Called up control. We thought for sure we were going to have a night off, um, ‘Flying Officer Bryson within C-Charlie. We’re sending out transport that’s going take you to Z-Zebra.’ So, you can imagine us, like, us and that belonged to Flight Lieutenant Franklin. So, transport comes along. What date was that Sarah? Dortmund?
Sarah: Dortmund? 22nd of Feb ’44.
RM: Feb? February?
Sarah: Oh, It says at the side, ‘abort, ice’.
RM: Right, so, we then had to be carted, miserable, returned to miserable then, the crew, ‘Jesus. What the — what are we doing? We should be in York by now.’ Gets into Z-Zebra, same procedure, and we knew the skipper of this aircraft. He wasn’t flying that night. Get into it. This is the third time and tempers were really flaring because, because they were all taking off. Didn’t wait for us, and so they were all taking off, and so I was following to see if we could get in and Bryson, my skipper, and me we never had a wrong word. I did everything he said. All he had to do was fly. And I mean, that’s the way we were. You had to work like that. And anyway, everything was fine and we starts off, and by that time we had to get a move on. It was half an hour since the rest of them had gone and that was bad. That was bad. That was really bad because you wanted to be with the main group, you see. You get over Germany and there’s one of you, you’ve had it. You’ve had it. There’s no doubt about that. [sound of aircraft] Anyway, we took off and we had to get a move on. There was a front, what they called a ‘front’, moving over the North Sea and I was giving him all the power that we could and we weren’t climbing, we were climbing about a hundred and sixty, I suppose, hundred and seventy or something, and the old Hercules engines there, they powered us up there. We were climbing and this front. We got a, what was it? A QDM or QFE saying this front was in and we had to climb above it because it was, excuse me, we was up at ten thousand feet and we had to climb above it. It was forty miles into the North Sea and he knew, did the skipper that I wasn’t going to push it anymore, because there’s always something at the other end of it, in my opinion. That’s how I worked it out. If we’d had pushed it we would have gone up to maximum power and it wouldn’t have done the engines any good. And we were trying to climb and all of a sudden I looked out and there was ice on the main plane like this and you could hear it, the props, straining again the plane, you know, and I looked out and I thought, ‘Oh dear.’ I really thought that we’d had it because we were struggling to move and I, I think our air speed, our air speed [emphasis] had been reduced to hundred and thirty, hundred and forty, and stalling was about ninety, ninety-five, something like that, and — but we plodded on and he called up did Bryson and he said, ‘Well, what are we going to do fellas? Are we going to turn back or are we going to press on, press on regardless?’ And all of a sudden as he said that the old Lanc give, gave a lurch because the ice on the, on the main plane, I’m not kidding, it was about six inches. It was that thick and we could never — we were struggling and all of a sudden it gave a lurch and he had the common sense did Bryson (well, he was a good pilot) and he, he all of a sudden, he stuffed the nose down and give it some starboard twists and we were going straight down. And all, then all of a sudden, as we got down a bit normal, like we were going down, and our air speed is about three hundred and fifty I think going down, but we were at ten thousand feet, eleven thousand feet, and, as I say, stuck the nose down and we just had to hope and all of a sudden as we hit warmer air, warm, warmer air, it flew off and it was a marvellous sight to see, because it flew off the plane did the ice and rubbish, you know, and also you couldn’t see because all the windows had, had, er, snowed-up. We couldn’t see out, couldn’t see where we going, and — but fortunately I had a little bit of knowledge and I remembered that in all those — never had to experience it — and there was a little what they called an alca— what did it contain? That fluid that we used to, they put in engines to stop them — coolant.
IL: Anti-freeze?
RM: Pardon?
IL: Anti-freeze.
RM: Anti-freeze.
IL: Ethylene glycol.
RM: And I was fiddling down as we were going down and I was fiddling down, around. It was down near his bloody rudder, and I remember I said, ‘Get your leg out of the way.’ Because it wasn’t a pump like that and what had happened was if you released the spring it pumped as it came up, not as you went down, and all of a sudden it cleared. The windows went just like that and it cleared but it didn’t make any difference. We were going down and then it started and then of course the weight. We had — it will tell you in there how much, how many bombs we, what we had and we’d have about fourteen thousand pounds of bombs on going straight down. I think we had a cookie that night. It will tell you there somewhere Sarah. Dortmund. Look down the left hand side.
Sarah: Yeah. I’ve got Dortmund there.
RM: And look across. No.
Sarah: I’m not sure. You know where to look. I don’t, dad.
RM: Well, here look. Where’s Dortmund?
Sarah: There.
RM: Right.
Sarah: There.
RM: Right, here look. What number is it? Seventeen.
Sarah: Yeah. Oh, there. Sorry, I’m with you.
RM: Eleven one hundred pounders and five five hundreds. And that’s a lot of bombs.
IL: A big load, yeah.
RM: That’s a lot of bombs. We could carry fifteen one thousand pounders, eight thousand pounders, twelve, twenty-two. Anyway, he says, as we were going down, he called out to the — he said to the bomb aimer, he said, ‘I’m opening the bomb doors.’ Talking to the bomb aimer, he said, ‘Trench. Drop the, drop the bombs.’ Now, protocol. You weren’t allowed to drop your bombs less than forty miles out to sea in the North Sea. Now that was law [emphasis]. That was what they told you to do and you had to be forty miles. Well, can you imagine? We’re out in the North Sea and I remember he called up and he said to the navigator, ‘Where are we nav?’ Or something like that and the navigator says, ‘How the bloody hell do I know if we’re forty miles out to sea.’ Because we’d gone through all this procedure and he called out to the bomb aimer, ‘Trench, I’m opening the bomb doors.’ And when he — well, that’s what I must have said to you Sarah about the bomb doors and he, he selected the bomb doors to be opened and they, with all the frost and they jammed and we were still going down you see and, and he kept pumping up and he said to me, ‘What do I do Ray?’ I said, ‘I haven’t a clue. I have nothing to do with the bomb doors.’ And he’s here, this side like, and all of a sudden they opened and we were going down and that was a nasty [emphasis] experience because you didn’t know what was going to happen. You were hoping then, and a wing and a prayer, and all of a sudden the bomb doors opened. You felt them jar because of the drag and all of a sudden we slowed down a bit, down to — I don’t know and old Trench called out, ‘Bombs gone.’ And we dropped all those [slight laugh] dropped all those bombs into the North Sea and that was a great relief. And so, back to base. When we got back to base, instead of taking us back to briefing, there was no debriefing, and instead the CO told us that he had to see the CO did the skipper so we drove round in this, er, in the wagon. We were inside the wagon and he stopped outside flight control, where the skipper was, where the CO was, and you wouldn’t believe it but our skipper got a rocket because we, we’d, um —
Sarah: You returned safely but you’d not done —
IL: Jettisoned.
Sarah: You’d not done your job.
RM: What did we call it? You wrote it out.
IL: Aborted.
Sarah: Aborted.
RM: Aborted, yes, and we’d aborted, and he got a right rocket did our skipper. He should have done this. He should have done that. And we couldn’t fly. You were literally came to a standstill. I mean, I was up there with him and it was impossible. You know, I really thought we’d had it. When I looked out and saw I really did. I thought — and you know he give it up as a bad job because you, he couldn’t do anything. There was no control. We were just flying forward, like, as slow as we could possibly could and fancy, and so out of spite, and if you look in there, out of spite the following night they sent us to Stuttgart and that, that was another eight hours and we always said he’d taken it out on us, the skipper, because we’d gone, we’d aborted, and that was an awful experience. There’d be, there’d be another one. There were lots of things that happened. I dare say, apart from three or four, you know, do you want me to go on talking? Because I could tell you of an experience, it wouldn’t take long, but of an experience more spiritual.
IL: Please.
RM: It’s interesting but it’s something, this, I’d done twenty-eight trips and that was coming to the end of it, this tour, and I’d done twenty-eight, and we were all a happy crew except this particular morning. I was always the first up in Beningbrough Hall. I was always the first up. There was only one wash basin, out of all those men there, wasn’t there Sarah? There was, well, there may have been more like but there was one on our floor and I was always first up. I was one of those who was embarrassed because I only shaved about twice a week [laugh] I did and so I was always first there and washed and this particular morning, and this is true, this particular morning I woke up and I laid there and it was always half past seven and I laid there and laid there and old Bowles, the rear gunner, he always followed me and he came over and he’d been to the ablutions, ablutions and he come and stood by the bed and he said, ‘Come on Ray.’ He said, ‘What’s up?’ And I looked up at him and said, ‘Oh, I’m alright.’ He said, ‘Well, what’s up?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ And he said, ‘Oh.’ In between times, the while crew was billeted in this one room (they’d lock us in) Beningbrough Hall. And he said, ‘What’s up?’ Anyway, by the time I’d I just closed my eyes and all I wanted to do was — I can’t tell you what it was like. It was awful. I felt awful and I thought, ‘This is it. We’re going to get the chop.’ That’s all that went through my mind. It was — I was so desperate. I thought, ‘We’re, we’re going, we’re going to get the chop.’ And it was 8 o’clock when I got up and I thought — and these buses used to come, you see, and take us to Linton for breakfast to the sergeants’ mess and they came at regular intervals and I remember and I thought, ‘Oh, I feel awful.’ I felt dreadful and I knew that night if we were flying at some time we were going to get the chop. I had that feeling and it was an awful feeling. Anyway they’d all gone and I caught a bus, caught the bus and ended up — and, er, but I couldn’t, I still couldn’t do anything. I didn’t even go to breakfast and I went down to the hangar where the engineers were and I couldn’t, I didn’t seem to want to do anything. All I wanted to do — and I thought, ‘Shall I tell the crew?’ This is true, Ian, it’s true what I’m telling you. I didn’t know whether to tell the crew that not to fly that night. I hadn’t — I wanted to tell them that this was going to be our last trip. That was the feeling I had in me and, oh it must have been getting on, and I thought, ‘I’ll have to get something to eat.’ And I went down to the mess and I had my breakfast and then, from then, I had a walk. I walked, I started to walk to flights and on the way down we passed their chapel (we had a chapel at Linton) and we were going — I’ve got to stop [pause] I had a job. I’ll stop.
Sarah: You want to stop?
RM: Well, it’s a story, so I’ll have to carry on and tell you what happened. I’ll have to carry on.
IL: It’s up to you. I don’t want to make you —
RM: No, no, no. It’s alright. I’ll get over it.
IL: I don’t want to upset you.
RM: No, I’ll get over it. I promise you. I went into church and I said the Lord’s Prayer. It came out and I thought I’d feel better. That’s what I’d done it for, hadn’t I? And I thought I’d feel better and I went back to the, the crewing room, and it was all better then. It did seem better but at the back of my mind there was still this thing and, anyway, the skipper came round and he said, ‘We’re flying tonight.’ And he said, ‘I’ll pick you up Ray.’ As he did every time. He said, ‘I’ll pick you up Ray.’ And he came round with the jeep and, of course, that was what we did every morn— every morning before a flight and we went out to the aircraft and it seemed alright. You know, you run it, I did the checks, you went round and checked everything, and run the engines up, and it was in the back of my mind and it seemed to — it was there and I still I couldn’t tell you why but it was there and, um, anyway — but I still wanted to tell the crew that it was going to be our last one. I had it. Anyway, er, and we got out to flights and we get into the aircraft, and pilot always went first and I followed him, and I was going up the ladder and our old Bowles, he bumped me up the backside going up the ladder. He said, ‘Come on Ray.’ And as I got to the steps my knees gave way and they were trembling, they was literally shaking, and I thought, ‘I’m mad. Why don’t I tell them I’m not going?’ And I thought that, that was there on the twenty-ninth, Sarah. Look on twenty-nine. You’ll see. It was a duff target. I don’t think we lost any of them.
Sarah: Was it Criel?
RM: That’s it. Criel. And, er, he bumped me up the backside. He said, ‘Come on Ray. What’s up?’ And with that I thought, ‘That’s it. Got to go. Got to go now. I’m inside and it’s everything.’ And as, as we were walking up, even the last minute, I was touching things, the old dinghy, the dinghy handle, and I looking round and I knew I’d done it before in the morning and, anyway, we gets off like but all the time I couldn’t — it was there whatever I did, you know. I set the petrol pumps and turned on the right tanks to be on and I had to do something to be — and I remember getting my log, my log, my log card and sort of wanting to do something. Anyway, we took off and everything but I was waiting all the time. I was waiting, waiting for something to happen and anyway we flew out. It was Criel and it was, it was nothing. So we flew out there and I don’t, I don’t think — we didn’t see a fighter, there was hardly any ak-ak fire, I don’t think there was hardly — there was nothing. We turned round and come back and do you know all the time we were coming back I had it in my mind, landing, when we were landing I was waiting [pause] waiting. We landed. Nothing happened and it were really interesting, looking back, it was the best trip I’ve ever been on. I wouldn’t have got back and I thought that I’d been, and what I’m trying to say is had I not been to church, do you understand that?
IL: I do.
RM: Had I not been to church or what would have happened? Was the good Lord on, on our side? But, believe it or not, I would sooner have gone on a trip and been shot at than gone through that experience again. You can’t understand. I couldn’t describe to anybody really and that was on my 29th trip and that was — and I never mentioned it to anybody but I do remember coming out of briefing, um, old, our Bowles, the rear gunner, he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, ‘We done it Ray.’ I don’t think — I think it was about the thirtieth wasn’t it Sarah, Criel?
Sarah: It was your twenty-ninth.
RM: That, that’s what I say, it was the twenty-ninth.
Sarah: How did you feel for your thirtieth then?
RM: Pardon?
Sarah: How did you feel going for your thirtieth?
RM: Nothing.
Sarah: No?
RM: It had gone Sarah. No, no. I was happy as Larry. No, that didn’t even occur to me. All, all of it suddenly when old Bowles came out of the briefing and old Bowles he put his arm on my shoulder and said, ‘You know Ray we done it.’ But what he meant was we were so near to completing and, I mean, one trip there and it says losses and we didn’t lose an aircraft. I mean, it was probably an easy target but that, but that particular time it was awful. It was awful. I had this feeling. But the other thing, of course, you had to have faith. You had to have faith in the rest of your crew and they were a wonderful crew, they really were, and you had to have faith in what they did and, and it was being selfish, thinking of myself, thinking it was me I was worried about and not thinking about them, except I wanted to tell them, and didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to go. And that was awful. I would have been LMF. No I wouldn’t. They wouldn’t chance me going. They would screen me. But it was awful you know, I can’t — so I say, I’d rather go to Berlin any time than go through that experience again. It was dreadful and, I mean, you can think what you like about it.
Sarah: How old were you then?
RM: Twenty, nineteen, nineteen.
Sarah: Nineteen. Wow.
RM: Yeah, I was nineteen Sarah, yeah.
Sarah: I think you had every right to have a wobble in your knees. [slight laugh]
IL: Absolutely. So, you finished your, you finished your thirty, thirty-one in your case, and then you — did you keep in touch with your crew after that?
RM: No. That was another thing, um, because something happened when I was at Lindholme. Here, I’ll tell you who I flew — I flew with Pat Moore, you know, the astronomer.
IL: Oh, right.
RM: Yeah. I was billeted with him.
IL: And where was that?
RM: At Lindholme.
IL: Right.
RM: I’ll have to tell you this. This is, this is the brighter side. I was posted to Lindholme. This was from Transport Command.
IL: Right.
RM: And, er, this is a little bit in between. Patrick Moore, tell ‘em, Patrick Moore posted to, er, Lindholme and we formed — what it was I was at it again. We formed a squadron, 716 Squadron, and we were to fly to Manila to bomb Japan. I never heard such rubbish, rubbish. That was what it was but of course Ray Moore put his name down in the orderly room, oh, I’ll volunteer. Yes, I’ll volunteer. Where’s Milan? Where’s —
Sarah: Manila.
RM: Manila. I didn’t even know where it was. My geography wasn’t that bad but I didn’t know where Manila was. It’s true. So we get posted there and the—
Sarah: A bit south of Worthing?
RM: Pardon?
Sarah: A bit south of Worthing.
RM: yeah. So the jeep drops me off and there was houses at Lindholme and all the pilot officers and flying officers were upstairs and all the flight lieutenants were downstairs. That was snobbery wasn’t it? Honestly, truthfully. That’s how it was. Anyway, I get my kit bag and walking up the stairs, and they were big houses, and the front room, there was two of us in the front room upstairs and two in the back room. Anyway, ‘The one on the left is yours.’ Right, and the door was part open, and I walked in, and there was this chap sat on his bed, and I walked in and I turned round and I said, ‘Oh, hello.’ I was feeling good I suppose and I said, ‘Oh, hello.’ And he, he stood up and he said, um, ‘Flying Officer Patrick Moore.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Flying Officer Raymond Moore.’ And do you know and he had a quizzical look, you know, his eyebrows.
IL: He was famous for those.
RM: Pardon?
IL: He was famous for those.
RM: Yes, that’s it? Well, he gave me this look and he said, and he thought I was pulling, pulling his leg. I know that when I looked at him and I said, ‘Oh, hello.’ Especially when I said, ‘Flying Officer Raymond Moore.’ And I went and slung my kit bag on my bed. And he stood up and he said, ‘Are you from, areyou Irish?’ I said, ‘No I’m not.’ I thought, ‘I’ve got a queer one here.’ You know. I said, ‘No. My parents came from Norwich, Norfolk.’ ‘Oh. Oh, righto.’ And we came very good friends and we visited him down at the Farthings down at —
Sarah: Billericay.
RM: Pardon?
Sarah: Was it Billericay?
RM: No, no. Down on the south coast, um, down on the south coast, Sarah. That lovely big house. Oh yeah, we visited him and he was, he was quite an eccentric, you know, but —
IL: He did have a bit of a reputation.
RM: He did and, um, he did, but we got on fine, famous, we did really. We went and visited him and he was always angry at me because when he started to talk about astronomy — and all I knew was there was a lot of stars up there, and there was the sun and the moon, and I wasn’t a bit interested. He taught me how to use the, um, what did they call it? Sextant. He taught me how to use that on the road that was, at Lindholme. Hehe showed me how to — and afterwards he was absolutely disgusted because after he’d shown me how to use it and I wasn’t a bit interested and he said to me after he, he’d worked out his shot he called it, after he worked out the shot, I was about a hundred miles off target, and he didn’t like it one bit. And that’s a letter, look, he wrote to me after we’d got, after I’d — I wasn’t really a bit interested in. We had family and family life, that’s all, that’s all I wanted was family life so anything in between. And we finished, we retired at sixty, June 28th it was, and he says, ‘Great to hear from you.’ Now, this is all those years after, this was 1987, but, um, we used to play, Bet and myself and another girl called Joan Walters (she was our bridesmaid) and we used to play a foursome at badminton, and he was a keen sportsman, and we got on well together, and I could have kicked his backside because we were stood outside Flying Control after the war was over and he said to me, well we were talking, and he said — but I still had a year’s service to do and after I finished flying — I packed in flying. I did that for moral reasons. That was another thing. I said, ‘I don’t know I’m going to do.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what you should do Raymond.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you go in Flying Control?’ He said, ‘It would suit you down to the ground.’ I said, ‘Flying Control?’ I said, ‘No. I don’t want to be [clears throat] associated with aircraft Pat.’ He said, ‘Well what about as— what about —.’ What do they call weather, you know?
IL: Metrologist.
RM: Metrology. He said, ‘Why don’t you take up metrology?’ I said, ‘I never thought much about it.’ I said, ‘No.’ And I took admin and I became an adjutant, for Christ’s sake, after all that. Worst thing I ever did. They were what I call — I’ll repeat it on there — I called them, ‘Hooray Henrys.’ Because that’s what they were, ground crew, what I considered they were. It was an armaments depot and I’ve never had such twelve miserable months in all my life in the service, with all the fact that I’d been aircrew, I was a — they treated me like dirt. They never even thought — and I’m not — it’s the honest truth. I know where they put me, right at the bottom of the list, and I could have fought them. I know I could in the mess, in the officers’ mess. I could have had many a row with them when they talked about air crew and how they — they snubbed me. I was the only member of the air crew there, you see, and I was the assistant adjutant and I couldn’t have cared less. I lost a lot of interest but, er, but I always said that old Pat Moore, although he was trying to do — and I should have done what he did. I should have gone in Flying Control or, er, he says, ‘It’s great to hear from you.’ You can read it.
IL: I’d love to.
RM: Yes. He did. Yes.
IL: Just, just because I’m conscious of that we actually and I don’t want to tire you out but I would like to hear what, what you were telling me earlier about when you went to Dalton and you had sort of an interesting time leaving Dalton. [slight laugh]
RM: Oh that. Oh yeah. Well, I mean, first and foremost, what I must tell you is, when I was sent there as an instructor, I mean, I remember there with old Scot. He finished a tour. Squadron Leader was his skipper, Hailes [?] I think it was, and but we were, we were like buddy buddies you know all the time we were flying and, you know, what are they called? Those two comedians. They’ve both died. The other one —
Sarah: Morecambe and Wise.
RM: No, the other, one was fat and the other a little chubby fella. They died.
Sarah: Oh Oliver Hardy and —
RM: No, no.
Sarah: No?
RM: No. It’s goodnight to him and it’s goodnight to him.
IL: Oh, the two Ronnies.
RM: Two Ronnies.
IL: Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbet.
RM: Well, Ronnie, the shortest one and he looked, he was his twin brother and he was, he was, um, well, Scottie to me. I called him Scottie, but he was very short and when he wore his cap, when he wore his cap he was only about five foot six and he was, he didn’t look right, you know, somehow. He was thin and didn’t look right and [clears throat] we both got posted to Dalton as instructors. Well, you know, it was a joke, I mean for me to be an instructor and when I went into this hut it was about twenty-eight foot long it was. I remember it distinctly and there were two engines in there and they’d been cut in half and all the component parts had been painted different colours. And anyway when I looked in through the door old scot, old scot, he took the air frames and I took the engines. So he was in another part of the building. But we were sent there to be in charge. They’d been opened up as a depot, you know, for training purposes to teach pilots. The airframe and engine of a Lancaster, that was what it was and we’d both been sent there to be in charge to open it up as a training centre, you know, and I’ll never forget I walked inside the door there and I saw this Lanc there, and this Lanc, you can imagine the size of it. It’s a massive thing like this, and all of its components, like red — I can’t tell you, the different colours they painted it, and all you had to do really, apart from the instructing part, which was a major part, you know, what happened to this and what happened to that but I was good. I knew every part of the engine, er, originally but when it came to standing up there and there was a blackboard at the back there and I thought, ‘This is not for me. This is not for me.’ And I hadn’t a clue and what it meant was that I was saying this, that and the other, blackboard, a bit of this, a bit of that. There were six of them, six pilots. Anyway, I got to know them and I told them exactly I was useless as an instructor. I was useless because — and I couldn’t really have cared less. I’d finished flying. I’d done my bit. Anyway Scottie got on fine. He was a crawler, like. He wanted to be in charge and I couldn’t have cared less. He could have run it for me. They could have promoted him. They did do but — and so that’s how it was and so what happened was there was a bit of friction between us. He wanted to, he wanted to be in charge and if he’d have said to me, you know, if he’d have shook his fists and said to me, ‘I’m going to be in charge.’ I would have said to him, ‘Help yourself.’ Anyway, it started off with me instructing, um, and I wasn’t very good. I wasn’t very good at conveying anything. I knew everything that was there, every part of the engine and what it did but when it came to what I — the theory and what happened — so, of a morning, this was my idea, found out that this little café in Topcliffe, you see, which is — you know where Topcliffe is?
IL: I do.
RM: Right, and up one of the sideways there, where it says no entry coming down, and on the right hand side there in them days there was a little old bicycle shop. And they were a lovely couple. They were elderly and we got to know of it and we all had bikes. Everybody had a bike there and every morning I got to find out and just across, as you went through the gates, just across there, there was a NAAFI wagon, er, for a wad and a cup of tea as they called it, a wad and a cup of tea, and it was just across there and all you had to do was walk across there and it used to be there half past nine every morning but I thought, ‘A cup of tea and a wad.’ It was alright but it didn’t seem — it wasn’t up my street. I was a bit more adventurous. We found out this little café in Topcliffe, you see, so the idea was — there was just four of us (there was a couple of them who didn’t go) — and the idea was to get through the gate and I knew them couple on the gate, those red caps, you know, and they in them days — I wasn’t an official man. I was one of them and so I got to know these. There were two of them and [clears throat] go through the gate, pedal to Topcliffe. True, they used to have it very nearly ready for us, a lovely cup or mug of sweet tea and gobble your old spam sandwich. They were beautiful those spam because that spam used to come from America and it was the best spam I’ve ever tasted. So, anyway, then bike back again and Scottie didn’t like this. It wasn’t to his liking because I should have been instructing, you see, and when it struck 10 o’clock I should have been back there. Well, we only, we had half an hour to get there and half an hour back again. It didn’t seem far to me but we used to be late going or late coming back. It never used to bother me. This particular morning, gets the old bike ready, going out, and all of a sudden Scottie appears and he stood in front of this bike. He, he’s just stood in front of me with, with my bike in and grabbed me and, ‘Morning Scott. Morning Scottie, how are you?’ He said, ‘Mr Moore, Mr Moore.’ He said, ‘I’m forbidding you to go.’ He was only a pilot officer same as me but he was trying to throw rank, and he said, ‘Mr Moore.’ He said, ‘I forbid you to go.’ I looked and said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I forbid you to go.’ He knew that we were going you see. He said, ‘It isn’t right.’ He said, ‘You’re not. It’s not right.’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t be going out.’ All this stuff and I said, ‘Get out of the way Scottie.’ He said, ‘I forbid you to go.’ So, and all I did was, I had the handle bars, and I was like this with the handle bars, I said, ‘Get out of the way.’ And he was stood there and what happened was he, he sort of, the bike wheel as it was, and he sort of stumbled on his back-side. I wasn’t even bothered. I just said, ‘Come on fellers. We’ll go back to Topcliffe.’ And I get back. I still, well, that’s how it was. Went back in to the instructing part of it and all of a sudden over the Tannoy, ‘Will Flying officer, would pilot officer Moore report to the orderly office at 12 o’clock.’ I thought, ‘What the hell do they want me for?’ And anyway I didn’t bother. I went on like. At 12 o’clock I wandered over to the orderly room just up the road inside the camp and I went in and there were two, two MPs there, red caps ‘Hello.’ I thought what’s up. Anyway, they stood to one side and, er, I never thought any more about it. I went inside and in fact the squadron leader, I knew him, not as a friend but I knew him as, you know, sort of, not so much this but, um, squadron leader and in the mess and anyway when I went inside like he had a stern looking face on and he had all my folders in front of him with all, all my bumph. ‘Now then.’ He said, ‘You’re in real trouble.’ I said, ‘Why? What have I done?’ He said, ‘You struck a fellow officer.’ I said, ‘I didn’t strike anybody.’ He said, ‘Oh, yes you did.’ He said, ‘You were seen by two members of the military police.’ I said, ‘I didn’t strike him.’ I said, ‘I pushed him.’ I said, ‘I pushed him.’ I said, ‘That’s all I did and said ‘Get out of the way.’’ He said, ‘What? What was it all about?’ [cough] ‘What was it all about?’ I said. ‘You must know, Sir, that bicycles were disappearing of a morning and biking up to Topcliffe.’ I said — he said, ‘Well, you must have known you were in the wrong. You were breaking out of camp.’ I thought, ‘Oh dear.’ And I thought what? The first thing that went through my mind was, what would my dad say if I’m, um, if I’m —
Sarah: Discharged.
RM: Discharged. Well, what it meant was I wouldn’t be discharged. They would have stripped me —
Sarah: Well, yeah.
RM: And put me on — anyway he said, ‘What did you think you were doing?’ He said, ‘Look at your record.’ I said, ‘Honestly.’ I said. He said, ‘I believe you.’ You see on record he said you did strike a fellow officer I said, ‘Sire, there’s no, there’s nothing?’ He said, ‘I’m sorry.’ So, I said, ‘What’s the score?’ He said like, ‘I wanted him to go down to see the MO.’ And I thought, you know, ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ All I did was a friendly get out of the way, you know. If I’d — I couldn’t have hit him. He was about two inches shorter. He was only a little chap and a breath of wind like me, he was — and anyway, he said, ‘I want you to go down to the MO.’ And a very friendly chap, a Flight Lewie [?] and I went down to see him and he said, ‘I’ve just had a phone call from the squadron leader CO.’ And he said, he said, ‘What it is, you’re being posted to Brackla.’ I said, ‘Brackla.’ He said, ‘It’s a joke.’ He said, ‘It’s, they call it the ‘demented air crew’ of Brackla.’ And he said, ‘That is where you’re going.’ He said, ‘I’m going to put you on venal barbital.’ And he said, ‘You have to take these. Here’s a packet.’ And I don’t know if it was in a bottle or what it was and he said, ‘I want you to take one of these in the morning.’ And I thought — I couldn’t believe it. I might have been a bit screwy if you know what I mean, finishing ops. I’m not saying I wasn’t — I’m not saying I was perfect or anything like that. I, I was a bit erratic. I do remember that. I remember getting drunk at the Jim Crack in York, you know, and that was after we’d I finished flying, and where I went — years ago Sarah.
Sarah: Betty’s?
RM: It was something Arms.
Sarah: Oh, I don’t know.
RM: And I remember getting drunk there like but —
Sarah: I know you used to go to Betty’s when —
RM: Oh, Betty’s Bar in York. Oh, well. Betty’s dive. Oh, yeah. A few times back —
Sarah: My, how things have changed.
IL: Yeah.
RM: Where what?
IL: I said ‘My. How things have changed.’ It’s not Betty’s dive any more is it?
RM: Oh, no.
Sarah: No. You pay twenty pounds for afternoon tea.
IL: It’s very up market, Betty’s.
RM: When you went downstairs there you couldn’t see above the smoke. But, um, yes.
Sarah: That’s where you scratched your name.
RM: [cough] The — oh, down inside there. If ever you go inside you want to go downstairs and as you just look round the corner there’s mirrors there and all of — my name’s on there.
IL: Oh, I’ll look.
RM: Scratched, scratched with a diamond ring and there there’s book there with all the names that’s on the glass, on the mirrors.
IL: Oh right.
RM: Yeah. And if you want to and actually if you wanted to see it and you, you’re met at the top of the stairs where they queue for their tea and cakes. If you met up the top of the stairs and you met any one of those girls they would take you down there and they — and you say, ‘Excuse me. I don’t want anything to eat. I just want to look at the glass and the mirrors.’ There’s hundreds of them down there and then there’s a little book. There used to be a little book. Yeah, my name’s on there. The whole crew’s on there, yeah.
IL: Fantastic. So —
RM: Anyway, going back to Brackla, demented air crew, and he said — and it, and was a joke but I thought, ‘Oh to hell with it. I’ve finished flying. They can do what they like with me.’ And it didn’t bother me. It honestly didn’t bother me. I didn’t say — I wasn’t belligerent or anything and I accepted it and he said — our billet’s were further down — he said, ‘Be outside your billet.’ And, yeah, in the morning he said — now I could have gone — there was a station at Dalton and he said — this jeep. That was the beauty of it, wasn’t it? ‘This jeep and it will take you to York, like, and from York you change for Edinburgh, Edinburgh to Inverness, Inverness.’ And look at that, look what I did then. I stayed at that big hotel at Inverness. It’s a beautiful hotel, you know, attached to the station and that’s where I spent the night there. It was marvellous and after the war [cough] there was a cheap trip going up to inverness by train and I took my wife there. And I said to Bet, I said, I said, er, ‘We’ll go to Inverness.’ It was a two day or three day trip to Inverness and it was a cheap one or whatever. [background noise] And — oh, it’s her phone and I think she’ll get fed up with it — and I said, ‘We’ll go back up there Bet and it’ll be an experience. We’ll go up all the way up by train and we’ll stay at this hotel.’ Anyway, fair enough, we get up there, carrying our suitcase, I went up to the desk all — I was feeling on top of the world to treat my wife, to go back to recovery, to this spot. [cough] I went up to the desk and I said, ‘I’d like to book a double room for two, three nights.’ Whatever, and she said, ‘Oh right.’ And I said, ‘How much is it?’ She said, ‘It’s a hundred pound a night.’ This was in 1960, 1975. [clears throat] I’d retired but it was one of those retirement things, wasn’t it? You know, to treat my wife and I said, ‘How much?’ She said, ‘A hundred pound a night.’ I said, ‘I was here in 1944.’ I thought I was going to flannel her, you know, try to get a bit out of it, like, try to get it a bit cheaper, and I said, ‘Excuse me.’ I said, ‘Is there? Haven’t you got any?’ I said, ‘I’ve seen brochures. My wife—.’ She said, ‘It’s a hundred pounds a night.’ I can’t mimic, and she said, she says, ‘It’s a hundred pounds a night.’ I said, ‘So, a hundred pound a night.’ So, I said, ‘From Monday to Wednesday.’ She said, ‘It’s a hundred pound a night.’ I said, ‘Forget it.’ I didn’t know what I was saying because we’d, we’d gone up there by train. It was a cheap train ride up there. So we went outside the hotel and, of course, in them days, like, [unclear] there was always a policeman — did you know that? — at a railway station, nine times out of ten. Are you alright Sarah?
Sarah: Yes. I’m fine dad. Yeah.
RM: Have you got to go?
Sarah: No. It’s alright. Don’t worry.
So went outside and there’s this policeman there. He says, ‘Are you alright?’ Nice and friendly. He says, ‘Are you alright?’ I said, ‘No.’ I explained to him what happened. ‘We’ve come up here.’ He said, ‘Oh, [unclear].’ I said, ‘We can’t afford it.’ I guess we could have if we’d pushed it, don’t you?
Sarah: I think you could have, father.
RM: And, er, anyway I went outside and your mum was outside and I said, ‘It’s a hundred.’ She said, ‘We aren’t staying here.’ So, this policeman, he said, ‘Oh, don’t worry.’ And there was a taxi rank outside and this he said, like, ‘Fred, here.’ So this chap come over and he said, ‘I’ve two wanderers here.’ He said, ‘Can you find them digs for the night?’ ‘Oh, aye.’ He said, ‘Get in the car.’ He drove, we went straight round to this, this lady, bed and breakfast. We went in and it was marvellous. Three night’s bed and breakfast. I, I don’t know how much it was but it was marvellous and we had a lovely three days up there and I didn’t have to spend a hundred pound a night. It was a colossal amount. But it is a beautiful hotel, it is honestly, it is a beautiful hotel.
IL: I don’t know if it’s still there actually.
RM: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I know somebody that — yes it is. And so that was it. That was the hotel I was posted to and I thought it’s be nice to go back. And the following morning there was a jeep. What the devil did they call it that place? It was Brackla. Anyway he knew where to go. It was an RAF jeep and we drove across country and it’s all, all cross country, you know, from Inverness to the other side. I wish I could remember the name. It, it’s fairly popular but, um, that was on the coast and then gets sent to this demented aircrew. It was a joke. I wasn’t, I was no more demented — I might have been, I might have been scratching the door, as I say, I might have been [unclear].
Sarah: Who wouldn’t have been?
RM: I might have been — I was under a psychiatrist when I come out. Pardon?
Sarah: Who wouldn’t have been after that?
RM: What?
Sarah: Scratching the door. I said, ‘Who wouldn’t have been?’
RM: Oh, yes Sarah. Yeah, I realise that.
IL: And all the time and you were there for six months and just sort of —
RM: Oh no, no, no. After I’d seen what was going on and I saw the sergeants’ mess —
IL: Oh, I see. Sorry. I was getting a bit confused, sorry.
Sarah: [unclear] six months.
RM: I tend to go from one thing to another. No, no. I should have gone there for six months. It was a rest camp for demented aircrew. It was very popular. Nobody thought anything about it.
IL: How long were you there for?
RM: No more than two months.
IL: A couple for months.
RM: It might have been — do you what Sarah?
Sarah: You asked to leave didn’t you?
RM: Oh yeah, yeah. I saw the, as I say, I laid in bed and watched the sergeant’s mess burn, watched it burn. Well, I couldn’t understand. I laid in bed and saw these flames and I took no notice until the following day. They burnt it down to the ground. It was burnt to the ground. They were wooden you see.
IL: And all the time you were there you were taking the venal barbital, so did you have to have medical clearance to leave or did you —
RM: Now you’re asking me a question. I would say [clears throat] don’t forget when I went — when you got posted to another station I would say that my medical records would have followed me. That’s what I, I — I shall be honest, I cannot put it to mind. I don’t think, I think I stopped taking them when I got to Ireland. I think I thought what do I — I’m sure I did, I don’t want to take these things any more. I didn’t feel like taking them. That was, that was probably what I thought, you know, but I couldn’t help thinking about them. It was —
IL: Because it would have been an interesting, you know, as a doctor, um, you would think you wouldn’t want people flying who were taking them. But if there was no, if there was no, you know, medical, you know — I think people thought they weren’t particularly — I think people thought they were fairly innocuous drugs in those days, barbiturates.
RM: No. When I came out and we came back to you, we came back to Yo—, we came back to York, came back to Thirsk, came back to live at my mother in laws. Now then —
Sarah: Were you married to my mum then?
RM: Where?
Sarah: When you were in Scotland?
RM: Yeah. Oh no, not during the war.
Sarah: I didn’t think so.
RM: Oh, no, no, no.
Sarah: Then you went to Ireland.
RM: I went to Ireland on Transport Command via — oh gosh, I hated it.
Sarah: But then what, where did you go from Ireland?
RM: I went back on Bomber Command. I told him — well, I won’t tell you about that. That was really truly self-inflicted. Something happened. I went without leave. I buggered off with old Darkie Thorne, my very dear friend, and we went down to Belfast and stayed at the — it wasn’t very — this friend of mine, he got shot down and he walked back, and I met him in Ireland. We were like brothers. We were, and he was a beggar, and he come back and I remember him. And he saw me and we ran to one another. Oh, he said, ‘We’ll have a good time.’ And of course, it was Darkie Thorne and me and it was on the squadron. He said, ‘Look at this.’ And in those days, of course, you got paid in cash and he’d been a prisoner. He had been a prisoner of war and he’d been shot down but he’d was rescued by a French family and he, what we called, walked back. He’d got the caterpillar and it was what we called — he’d walked back. And we met him in Northern Ireland and he said [laugh], and, ‘Look.’ He said, ‘We’re going to spend this.’ I mean he’d been gone about six months and when come back like he’d been to get paid and they didn’t have a bank. You took your money as you were paid and he said, ‘Look. We’re going to have some fun. We’re going to have some fun with this in Belfast.’ And we were, it was about ten miles from Belfast, isn’t it? That international airport?
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. It will be.
RM: Yeah, and, er, I thought, ‘Well, I daren’t get into any more trouble.’ I’d been de-commissioned once. I’d lost six months seniority with, you know, getting into a bit of trouble like and I said, I thought, ‘I’d better slow down here.’ Anyway, we were snowbound over there. It snowed from — I was over there in the October I suppose and it snowed and snowed and snowed. We didn’t do a lot of flying and so we were grounded. And when you were grounded you were at school. You went to school. And, anyway, it was one of those times when you got — you couldn’t get bored on the squadron but being there with all this snow and this time he come at me and said, ‘Do you fancy a trip down to Dublin?’ And I said, ‘We can’t Darkie. We can’t. We’ll be interned.’ And, he said, ‘I’ll fix it all up.’ He was a wide boy. He was a Cockney [laugh] and his mum and dad and his sister had been killed in an air raid in London so he was one of those. He, he didn’t just hate the Germans, he detested them. He would have shot every one of them if he could have done and that was his attitude. But he was, he was a Cockney, he says, ‘Would you like to go down to Dublin?’ I said, ‘We can’t Darkie.’ I said, ‘We can’t. We’ll be interned.’ He said, ‘Leave it with me.’ He said, ‘I’ve been looking around.’ He said, ‘There’s a second hand shop in Belfast and we’ll get some civvy suits and we’ll have a rag round and I’ll get, I’ll get two passports.’ And he was going on and I said, ‘Forget it.’ I said, ‘I haven’t got a very good name Darkie.’ And he said, ‘Well you’re alright. You’ve got a commission.’ And poor old Darkie hadn’t even got his flight sergeant. He was still a sergeant he said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll fix it up.’ And I wasn’t really keen to go to Dublin because the Irish are a different people and there was a lot of, as you know as I do, the IRA were still floating around at that time. [clears throat] Anyway, time went by [clears throat] he said, ‘I’ve got your suit.’ I said, ‘You’re joking.’ He said, ‘No. I’ve got your suit.’ He says, ‘A nice brown suit.’ [laugh] He said, ‘I’ve got your suit.’ He said, ‘A nice brown suit.’ I said, ‘What about passports?’ ‘I got them.’ He said, ‘Yes. There’s a place in Belfast where I’ve gone.’ I said, ‘You must be joking.’ ‘No.’ He said, ‘Money and I’ve plenty of it.’ And he has I’m not kidding you. He had a roll. And he said, ‘You don’t pay for a thing so don’t question it.’ [unclear] and the snow in them days, it seemed to stay. We seemed to get snow over there from October right through to February and we did. Very rarely we take off and so you seemed to be in the same spot. Anyway, went to Belfast, got on a train, about halfway down — I don’t know how far we were — and the gendarmes got on, whatever you called them, checked out passports. Have you been to Dublin, Sarah?
Sarah: I have.
RM: Have you? You know the big bridge there then and, and the hotel Ma— it has a Canadian name, Ma—
IL: Montreal?
RM: [unclear] So we go, go and stays at this hotel, books in at this hotel. Well, for four days I can hardly remember, honestly, and I’m not a, I was never an alcoholic, but we drank Guinness chasers. That was Guinness and whisky. And we were drunk from — the only thing we thought about was an evening meal and that’s the honest true. We’d have breakfast. Anyway, it comes to about four days and I says, ‘We’ll have to be back.’ The weather seemed to be lifting and I said, ‘We’ll have to be back Darkie.’ ‘No, no, no, no.’ He said, ‘We’re all right.’ And I gave in and said, ‘Just one more night then.’ He said, ‘Yeah. It will be alright. Went back to camp, walks into the camp, first thing, ‘Flying Officer Moore report to the orderly room. I thought, ‘Oh Jesus.’ I said, ‘This is it, Darkie.’ He said, ‘Oh, tell them to — off.’ But I was commissioned and I respected that commission. Don’t get me wrong, I did, I respected it and, anyway, I went down to the orderly room. I thought they were going to put me in irons, honestly. Went before the CO. There again, the old documents come out and he says, ‘I don’t understand it. I’ve been looking at your documents.’ And he said, ‘How do you feel?’ And I thought ‘Christ. I’m not going back to — no way am I ever going back to — no way am I going back to that camp.’ I said, ‘I feel fine.’ And he said, ‘What are you doing?’ And what had happened was, my crew had crewed up and flown to Karachi with Transport Command and he said, ‘Well, your crew went without you. We had to find another flight engineer, didn’t we?’ And I said, ‘Oh.’ You know, I expected it. No good saying I didn’t and he said, ‘I don’t really know.’ He said, ‘But you see we don’t want fellas like you in Transport Command.’ He said, ‘We don’t want officers like you in Transport Command.’ And all of a sudden I thought, ‘Bugger yer.’ And I turned round to him and I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you something. I don’t want to be in Transport Command.’ And he stood back and I said, ‘I don’t want to be in Transport Command.’ And he got hold of my papers and hit the desk and he said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to go back to Bomber Command.’ He said, ‘Idiot.’ I said, ‘I want to go back.’ I said, ‘That’s where the camaraderie is.’ And he said, ‘Right.’ He said, ‘Be outside your billet at eight.’ Again, you know, he said, ‘Be outside your billet.’ And he said, ‘There’ll be a jeep to take you to Belfast.’ He said, ‘You’ll get on a train.’ He said, ‘You’ll get on a train.’ He said, ‘You’re posted to Lindholme.’ So that’s when I got back to Lindholme to Bomber Command.
IL: So, did you fly any more operations from Lindholme?
RM: Not from Lindholme. We were non-operational. Well, we weren’t non-operational because we were flying and we — they flew the backsides off us. I told your mum. She was always playing hell because my wife was a WAAF on the same station and I was courting her, you know, and fortunately I caught her, didn’t it? And what happened was the — as I say I put my name down, 617, 67, 76 Squadron and that was where I went back. And I said to him, I said, ‘I don’t want to be with Transport Command.’ And he stood back, you know, one of those stiff upper lip chaps and he said, ‘Be outside your billet at 8 or 9 o’clock.’ And said, ‘They’ll take you to Belfast Station and you’re posted to Lindholme. Idiot.’ And I just walked out. I didn’t even turn round and salute him. I thought, ‘Beggar yer.’ But it was another experience wasn’t it, you know?
IL: Oh, absolutely.
RM: Yeah, it was. Another court martial. Dear, oh dear, but —
IL: Were you actually court martialled for that?
RM: Pardon?
IL: Were you court martialled for that?
RM: Oh, no, no, no.
IL: No?
RM: Oh, no, no, no. That’s was how, really and truthfully, I’ll be honest with you, I know I got away with it because I’d done thirty-one trips. I was a hero and they knew it. I’d done my bit, hadn’t I? That was it in a nutshell, I can tell you that now. That was why when he turned to me and, you know, he said that, and I knew he meant it, but at that time I thought, ‘Why should I lick his backside and pretend?’ It was no good pretending. I hated Transport Command. I hated it while I was there and for him to turn round to me and tell me he didn’t want my type. He didn’t want my type in Transport Command and I was as good as any of them. In fact, I was better than them because I’d come from Bomber Command.
IL: Absolutely, absolutely. I’m going to switch this off now, Ray.
Dublin Core
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AMooreR160727
Title
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Interview with Raymond Moore
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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02:49:26 audio recording
Conforms To
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Pending review
Creator
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Ian Locker
Date
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2016-07-27
Description
An account of the resource
Raymond Moore flew 31 operations as a flight engineer with 408 Squadron. He describes initial training at Skegness and then further training at Cosford, Halton and St Athan. He describes the crewing-up procedure at Eastmoor and describes the accommodation at various RAF stations including Linton, where he was billeted at Beningbrough Hall, and at Lindholme. He also gives vivid accounts of difficult trips, including high winds on a Berlin operation on the 24th of March 1944 and being coned by searchlights in the Rostock and Bremen areas and being thrown about as the pilot did a corkscrew manoeuvre.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bremen
Germany--Rostock
Wales--Vale of Glamorgan
Contributor
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Christine Kavanagh
Temporal Coverage
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1943
1944
408 Squadron
426 Squadron
aircrew
bombing
crewing up
faith
fear
flight engineer
lack of moral fibre
military ethos
military living conditions
military service conditions
RAF Brackla
RAF Cosford
RAF East Moor
RAF Halton
RAF Lindholme
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF St Athan
recruitment
searchlight
sport
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/307/3464/PMooreWT1506.2.jpg
ba450a2587f7d4bdd809b39eda3c5fa9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/307/3464/AMooreWT160703.2.mp3
6fa0b673061052f9a9f442da1a4176b2
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Moore, Bill
William Tait Moore
William T Moore
William Moore
W T Moore
W Moore
Description
An account of the resource
Eight items. Three oral history interviews with William Tait "Bill" Moore (1924 - 2019, 1823072 Royal Air Force) and five photographs. He served as a navigator with 138 Squadron.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-28
2016-03-18
2016-07-06
Rights
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Interview Agreement Form - Moore, WT, William Moore-03
Identifier
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Moore, WT
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
TO: Right, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, whatever the case may be. This interview is being filmed for the International Bomber Command Centre. The gentleman I’m interviewing is Mr Bill Moore. My name is Thomas Ozel and we’re recording this interview on the 3rd of July 2016. Now, could you please tell me what year you were born?
WM: 1924.
TO: Mhm. And when you were a child, were you interested in aircraft?
WM: The first time I was introduced to the aircraft was when I was taken to Guyun [?] Southern Highlander’s annual camp and that was when I came in contact with my, my first aircraft. And at that time, I was a drummer [?] boy in a band [?], and at that time my father had made me eighteen month older and I was supposed to be because otherwise I would have been too young to have went to the camp with men. As a matter of fact, that eighteen months stood by me for the rest of my life.
TO: And whereabouts did you grow up?
WM: I grew up in a town called Dunoon which is on the Firth of Clyde in Argyllshire in Scotland.
TO: And were your parents involved in the First World War?
WM: My father was, yes. As a matter of fact I just told somebody the other day, that I knew where my father was a hundred years ago. In other words, he was right through the whole of the First World War. He was a great battles, the Battles of Boulogne [?], first and the second one, and also the one that was also celebrated this week. And then he was actually taken prisoner by German forces and he was taken to Poland, and he worked in Poland there and that was, and that was until the armistice came along. In other words, he had about, he about between six and nine months as a prisoner of war, mm.
TO: And what was your first job?
WM: My first job, all depends how you mean your first job. If you mean your first job when you started doing [emphasis] something and getting paid for it, well I was delivering milk and newspapers in the morning. Later on I delivered butcher, butcher meats and I delivered the evening papers, and among one of the most famous characters I delivered to was Sir Harry Lauder, who was a very famous Scottish singer and comedian. And every time I went there I got a farthing [emphasis] each time, which meant that I got a fully penny in one day, but that was four farthings. And I did that from, from Monday to Saturday. And anyway, after that of course I left school, but I left school when I was thirteen. The reason I left school when I was thirteen was because it was during the Great Depression years and every penny my family could earn was to be encouraged because people needed it to survive [emphasis], although my father was always in work, but that was about it because I used to come in. And that was what my mother saved the money so that I could have my school books paid for, instead of, instead of waiting for someone to pass on second hand books to me.
TO: And in the 1930s, did you hear about Hitler’s aggressive behaviour?
WM: Well yes. As a matter of fact, of course I did, but it was quite, quite strange. Go back further than that, when I was a young boy, I was in what we called the Boys Brigade, which was just an organisation but it was started, it started way back in 1883 by a chap called William Smith, and the uniform they had then [emphasis] was, was taken more or less from the Third Lanark Rifle Volunteers in Scotland. It wasn’t military but the idea was for discipline, because in those days Scotland, Scotland and discipline was two things that people wanted, although with me, that was many years later. I did not meet Sir William Smith himself but I knew both of his sons who carried on the Boys Brigade after him, and also I met Mrs McVicker in Belfast in Northern Ireland when I used to take the Boys Brigade myself [emphasis] over there, and that, that was, she was the, she was the wife of the founder of the Boys Brigade in Northern Ireland. When I joined the Boys Brigade it was through the Life Boys, which was a genuine organisation. I went through there and I went right through the Boys Brigade, and at my age, I’m still a member of the Boys Brigade Greater World Fellowship.
TO: Would you mind if I just closed the window?
WM: No, carry on, yeah.
TO: Is that okay?
WM: Oh, you might get the traffic, yeah.
TO: Yeah, is that okay?
WM: Yeah, carry on [pause while window is closed]. That’s okay.
TO: Okay, thank you. And what did you think, what did you think of Chamberlain?
WM: Well first of all, going back before Chamberlain’s time and before he was making speeches, what I was saying is we used to look at news reels and we used to see about all the equipment that the German boys and girls were getting, and at times we were quite envious of it, because there was gymnastics, there was gymnastics, I was swimming, I was hiking, I was doing all these same things as, as a, the German Youth were there. Maybe not so severely [emphasis], but that was where the Boys Brigade, as I’ve just said.
TO: Mhm. Sorry, there’s a noise coming from the kitchen. Is it okay if I shut the door to there as well?
WM: Yes, yes, yes –
TO: Sorry [door closes].
WM: Can you stick that through?
TO: Sorry.
WM: You could get a nickel [?].
TO: Yeah [pause during continued background noise]. Sorry about this, sorry. And what did you think of the Munich Agreement?
WM: Well, put it, put it this way. What did happen was that I think growing up at that particular time, we weren’t really interested too much in politics, but then we began to gather that things were getting rather serious. And the big thing that was going around at that time was, was people sincere? And there’d been so many promises broken that, and I’m talking about Scotland now, was the people in Scotland at that time just said, ‘well if, if these people keep on breaking promises, what’s, what’s the Prime Minister going to do? Is he going to be leaving it [could be believing it].’ And of course, it seems, it seemed to us at that particular time that he was being foreborstered [?], brainwashed and as if he was being used as, as they all were in those days was, is a patsy.
TO: And what did you think of Churchill?
WM: Well, Churchill in the early days was quite a hero [emphasis] because he was a type of fellow who had been through the Boer War, he’d been through the, through the First World War and of course he was still a fiery rebel as far as politics were going as, at that time in the UK.
TO: And do you remember the preparations that were being made for war?
WM: Well, it all depends on who’s side you mean, because the big thing that we noticed, and that was that where, where the German forces were going over [?], taking over different places. Some of them were, were considered to be German lands of former times, but, but even when they came to Austria and they were welcomed into Austria, at times we wondered whether there were other people there who weren’t quite happy about it, with this, you know? But it wasn’t ‘til, it wasn’t ‘til as we say, clouds [?] are going that, and horizon, as if the, all the promises that were given, made were just null and void. The reason we said that was at that particular time was because the fact was that even, even being with Chamberlain, trying to negotiate [emphasis], and of course France as well were negotiations to see if they could actually bring about a more sensible [emphasis] approach, ‘cause people like my father said that the terms of various things that had been laid in after [emphasis] the First World War were so severe that it was almost impossible for the, for the German people not [emphasis] to revolt against these conditions, and of course this is what people were thinking in the UK at that particular time, was that that’s what they were trying to do was just to regain what had been lost. But of course later on when it came into the, these negotiations that they had, nobody was very sure [emphasis] whether that Chamberlain was playing for time or not. It could have been, it could have been a great strategy on his [emphasis] part. Many people think it was, many people think that he was quite gullible. But if one reads on the history of the Royal Air Force, well the Royal Air Force was starting an amalgamation between the, the Fleet Air Arm, or the Naval Services. The Naval Service became the Royal Air Force and that was 1918. Now, with that coming on, we noticed as young people, we noticed that there was different things happening [emphasis], and also, I remember at one time I noticed that the, the talk was about different types of aircraft, ‘cause that was through the magazine I used to subscribe to. And then of course what happened, I was in the school cadets in my grammar school in Dunoon and we, we were the Army cadets, and of course we wore the kilt et cetera, the same as the local Hern [?] Division, and the Guyun [?] Southern Highlanders. Anyway, I, I started thinking about aeroplanes and there was an organisation just started up which was called the Air Defence Cadet Corps. Well this Air Defence Corps, Cadet Corps, the nearest place to Dunoon where I was, was at what is now Glasgow Airport, and I had to find a handout, to find the money for to go in the boat and train and go up there and attend the lectures et cetera what was necessary to do to be a member of the Air Defence Cadet Corps. Anyway, of course along came different aircraft that we saw, and the, the first of the new [emphasis] ones that I saw and touched was the Wellington Bombers, and that Wellington Bomber came up to me, to Abbotsinch, which is, as I said, Glasgow Airport. Abbotsinch I managed to walk through it and I was absolutely taken with it. As a matter of fact I felt as if I’d fallen in love with it. And then of course what happened, things went from one to another, and then of course along came, along came the Polish incident and with that Polish incident of course it was followed very closely in Scotland because the people of Scotland, people of Poland were always very close [emphasis]. A lot of people don’t realise [emphasis] that but it was a fact, because I always remember that they used to send boxes of eggs from Poland and what we used to do, we used to buy these boxes, these crates, and we’d turn them into canoes that we, that we lined with canvas, and we used to sail in the Clyde. But that, you know, that was, that was our knowledge of in Poland on that day, apart from what I’d been told by my father. Anyway, what happened was along came, along came, as I say, with the trouble in Poland, and of course, then of course the First World, the Second World War started and at that time, being in the Boys Brigade and being in the Air Cadet Defence Corps, I was nominated as a member of the ARP, the Air Raids Precautions people, as a messenger. Then that was fine, that was alright but I still had to go to my lessons with the Cadets, but that was alright, everybody carried on. That carried on and then of course along came, along came 1941 [emphasis] and that was when the Air Training Corps started, and I, I went along. I had to say I was finished with the Air Defence Cadet Corps which everybody else [emphasis] was, and we signed up for the Air Training Corps. That was quite strange, that was on a Monday night, and I went back along on the Friday [emphasis] night at the first official meeting, and we fell in and we fell in ranks according to sizes et cetera, et cetera, and I was made a flight sergeant. And the reason was that, I asked them and said ‘oh no, you’ve had training [emphasis] in the Air Defence Cadet Corps, so you know probably more about it than instructors do,’ because they were all school teachers who had volunteered to do that cadet work, and of course being made a flight sergeant, without uniform of course, it took a wee while to get uniforms, but that was it, and that was, that was me well and truly a part of the Royal Air Force. Anyway, that went down very well and I passed all the examinations. My aim was to become a member of aircrew. I fancied that, not just the glamour of it but there was a practical side. Anyway the, along came a day when I went along to Edinburgh and I took all my papers, exam papers and everything else, and bearing in mind that I was a year and a half older than I was on paper than I was supposed to be, and when I got into Edinburgh the chap says to me, ‘are you sure [emphasis]?’ I said ‘yes.’ He said ‘what you were doing?’ So I told him, he says ‘oh, that seems alright,’ he says ‘alright,’ he says ‘we want you to go along to this hotel and you stay there and you come back here in the morning, and you go there and you find that you’ll be registered and et cetera, et cetera.’ So I did that, go back there the next day and there were one or two other chaps around that I knew, and we, we went in again [emphasis] and we had exams to take and tests to take and, a by the time the day was finished I was a member of the Royal Air Force, and what they did to us was that they gave us a little silver badge that we, we had to wear at all times. And that was to show that we were a fully fledged member of the Royal Air Force, and all we had to do then was just wait until they were ready to take us in [emphasis]. And it wasn’t, it wasn’t being called up for National Service, we were all volunteers of course, which is a big difference because we were already members, voluntary members, and of course the, joining the Air Force like that you volunteered. But as I say, after that, once you’re in, you didn’t get to volunteer again [laughs]. You, you’re then volunteered [emphasis, laughs].
TO: And do you remember what you were doing on the day the war started?
WM: The day the war started, yes [tape beeps]. It was a Sunday morning and I was at a bible class in Dunoon, and shortly after that the sirens went and we all had to go to a post. And with us at that particular time, as I say, I was with the ARP. So we had to go there and be ready for to, for to be messengers. That was what, that was what my job was then, to be a messenger [emphasis], so I had to go to my post, which we all knew where we had to go to, and that was it. But after the all clear went then we stood down again, no, mm. But of course there was, was times when there were raids on the Clyde and all the rest of it later on, and my compatriots had a lot of hair raising activities. Most of that by that time I was, I was in the Royal Air Force.
TO: And was there much bomb damage or bombing around where you lived?
WM: Well, not so much on my [emphasis] side of the Clyde but across the water on the Firth, right from Greenock and Glasgow, Greenock and Port Glasgow, right up the Clyde, right up to Clydebank into Glasgow itself. Oh yes, all the industrial areas. There was quite a lot of very heavy damage, yes.
TO: And when the war started, were you, were you expecting that German bombers would be coming on the first day?
WM: Oh yes, well that was, that was it. It wasn’t, it wasn’t long after that there was a couple of raids that was, that was, that came across Scotland before there was even, even them in England, yes.
TO: And how did you actually feel when you heard the war had started?
WM: Well, put it this way, with having quite a knowledge from my father about his experiences, and what we had, what we had actually seen on the news reels about Poland, and I really mean about Poland, that was when we realised what could happen, yeah.
TO: And did you watch news reels a lot at the cinema?
WM: Oh yes, oh yes. Yeah, when you went to the, when you went to the cinemas there was always, always a portion for the news reels at the beginning of every performance, and that was very good. The news reels were very good, they, they brought everything to you, mm [papers shuffle].
TO: And so when you volunteered for aircrew, what kind of medical tests did they give you?
WM: Well, you had, you had a full medical. You know, you had blood, heart, you had all sorts of things done and then, you even had a type, a place where it was called up [?] on night vision. We never knew about night vision in those days and we were told, told about that and you had a test to see whether you could, you could see and come back again and your vision – you had, you were taken into a darkened room and they had various sort of tests they gave you in there, including different things and different numbers and the results was in different colours [emphasis], and if you, if you, if you could identify these things through these different colours then that meant that your, that your night vision was quite good, and you passed and you could identify then, then you’re dropped out. ‘Cause that was one of the main things at that particular time, was night vision.
TO: And what role did you train for aboard, in aircrew?
WM: Sorry?
TO: What, what position, as in, were you trained for?
WM: Well you see, when I went to Edinburgh I was classified PNB, pilot, navigator, bomb aimer, you know, the idea being that you selected for that term [?]. Anyway, what happened then was that I was called, called to the colours, not called up, I was called to the colours which once again, as I say, was different from being called up for National Service, very proud of that of course. Anyway, I, I got a notification to go to London and there I went to, to Lords Cricket Ground and, with many other people. There was one or two people that I’d met on the train, met down there before, went inside and some of these fellows I still know today, which is quite amazing. Anyway, what happened there in, in, at Lourdes, you – and there is a big plaque there today, big black plaque indicating that was where the aircrew was at that particular time. Going back to that, we had further [emphasis] tests and, I suppose to see whether anything had happened in between times, and then we, we got all the usual jabs for left and right, two arms up together and that one and that one going along r at the same time and, and then you had FFIs and things like that, and then of course you came along to another [emphasis] big room and that’s where you started getting your uniform. And there was a system [?] what you’re gonna get, when you’re gonna get, and by the time you got to the end you wonder if you’re able to carry everything, you know. Anyway, we all managed to get there, and at the end of that we were introduced to a corporal, two stripes. Now, we thought that was a high rank [phone rings], oh –
TO: Is that a phone call?
WM: I’d better take it. Sorry about that [tape beeps]. It’s a bummer [?] –
TO: Hmm, anyway –
WM: Anyway.
TO: So you spoke to her [unclear] –
WM: So anyway, as I was saying, we, we were then under this corporal [laughs]. He, he told us that he would be looking after us in more ways than one [emphasis] for the, for the next few days. Anyway, we went along in London to a place called Avenue Close which was a new block of flats in St. John’s Wood which had been built and never been occupied, and the Royal Air Force used that for all their new recruits, and, but there’s no, there’s no canteen facilities there, no mess hall, and we went across to Regent Park’s zoo where we dined. The animals had been evacuated and we were there in place of the animals [laughs].
TO: And did you train to be a navigator?
WM: Put it, put it this way, what happens, all depends how deep you want me to go into this, I don’t know. Anyway, what happened was that we had to, we had to pass more, several tests there. They were very strenuous, very strenuous, extremely strenuous, you know. And then of course we were there for about a week, and we were all setting off to different places and the group that I went with was up into the north east of England, to a town called Scarborough where they had quite a number of initial training wings. And what they were, they were just like boarding schools [laughs], certainly a little bit different but that’s what we took them to be. It was just like going back to school or college and starting all over again, and my one was number seventeen, and I was in what we called the Odelpha [?] Hotel, which is a hotel right opposite the Italian gardens in Scarborough. Now, there we studied navigation, theories of flight, engines, just about everything, even how to use a knife and fork in the mess, and that is quite true [laughs]. That seems quite a thing but that was quite true [laughs]. But that was a little on the side [?] there. But we actually studied all of these things, and at the same time we had to do guard duties and various other things like that, and there was two or three times when we were there, there were air raids go on and even a time when there was suspected that we might have had a German couple of U-boats in, about eight boats coming along and they expected them to come up and be looking for certain people that were there on that shore [?] there, people who had been at a conference and we were all turned out for that. They didn’t tell us very much about it but later on we heard it was Churchill and the cabinet members in the Retreat as they call it nowadays. Anyway, but that was, we didn’t know anything, why it was [unclear]. Anyway, what happened was that we had to sit the final exams and everybody in there was doing the same exams, you know? Anyway, what happened after, I passed, I pass through that quite successfully and I was waiting a posting. My posting then was a place called Scone [pronounced Scun], not Scone, Scone [pronounce Scun, emphasis], which is just, just outside of Perth in Scotland and that was where you got to learn to fly on Tiger Moths. Now, when you flew in Tiger Moths up there, we had already been classified from ACs to AC1s and when we, we went up to Scone, actually passed Scone in the Tiger Moths and we thought we could be trusted to do a couple of circuits and you came back down. They didn’t give you wings in those days, they gave you a propeller, always a propeller on your left sleeve, and then we became a leading aircraftsman, which was your first step up. Anyway, what happened after that, I, I was sent from there all the, all the kit bags and everything, and I was sent to a place called Broughton-in-Furness. Broughton-in-Furness, it was like a commander course, only the Royal Air Force calls it an escape course, and you did everything on there that you could possibly do if you were trying to escape. It was always put down to you in the Air Force that you had to try and escape if you were taken prisoner. That was, that was a thing. It was always drilled into you, if you could get back, so much the better. Anyway, that was, that was all about. When that was finished I went to a place called Heaton Park in Manchester. Now, Heaton Park in Manchester, it was mostly Nissan huts, the old corrugated iron ones, you know? And sometimes you also got billeted out with the local people, sometimes you’re lucky and you did both. Well we, we were quite lucky. We were billeted out, and just within a stone’s throw off Heaton Park [laughs], and we, we were with a landlady whose husband was in the Middle East at that time, and we used to pay her half a crown, was two shillings and sixpence in those days and that was for, to leave the snub [?] off the window so that we could lift the window sash up and crawl in after half past ten at night. Well she used to make, she used to make a cup of bronzer [?] up for that [laughs], because she had let out two rooms and that was eight of us in her house, yeah. Anyway, the, everybody knew it happened, but you’re [unclear] to be in by eleven. It was just in case you had trouble getting back you know. Anyway, if you were in the main camp, you had to make sure you were in at half ten at night [laughs]. Anyway, after that we were, we were taken back into the camp, and this was a big camp. There was hundreds of people in there and guesses – we didn’t do a lot of paperwork there but we did a lot of physical training, marching, all that sort of thing, and every time the, every time the Royal Air Force tunes went up you had to march to attention. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing, you had to march to attention. Anyway, what happened after that, you got your uniform. Now, if you were going to, to South Africa, we, we began to learn these things, you went to South Africa you get tropical kit but long [emphasis] trousers. If you were going to Rhodesia, you get tropical kits with short [emphasis] trousers. If you’re going to America, you more or less get issued with civvies, as we called them, and if you were going to Canada then you were alright. Anyway, what happened to us was that we got issued with short trousers and we said ‘oh no, we know what we are [?], we’re going to Rhodesia. That’s pilot training,’ et cetera, et cetera. Good, anyway, we got shipped out, we were on a ship called The Andes [emphasis]. You’ll see a little thing there –
TO: Oh yes.
WM: Andes, you know, ship.
TO: Oh right.
WM: And I’ll show you it afterwards.
TO: Yeah, show me it afterwards.
WM: But what it was, was this ship, The Andes was brand new in the Clyde in nineteen, 1939, and it disappeared then came back again all painted grey, but where we [emphasis] met it, we met her in Liverpool. And this friend of mine, Alec Care, we must have joined up, helped each other, and we were on the ship and we said ‘bye-bye’ to Liverpool. There’s the – ‘bye-bye, bye-bye,’ you know, and we sailed down the Mersey. Anyway, a while after that we, I judged that we had been round the head of Northern Ireland, go down the west coast, and now they could, well according to roughly the speed of the ship and that, and we’d be near the Bay of Biscay. All of a sudden night fell and I said to my friend, ‘Alec, this boat’s going the wrong way.’ He said ‘you and your Clyde navigation.’ I said, ‘this boat’s going the wrong way [emphasis], we’re now going back north.’ So we ended back up in the Mersey again. Then what happened, we got in there because I suppose they got word there was a pack of U-boats around, you know, and that’s why they changed us. Anyway, we got up into the Mersey and looked across and I said to Alec, I said, ‘there’s the five-three-four over there.’ He says, ‘what’s a five-three-four?’ I say, ‘I’m not telling you, you might be a spy.’ He says, ‘euch.’ I says ‘oh, that’s a five-three-four.’ He says, ‘come on Bill, what is it?’ And I say, ‘that’s the Queen Mary.’ ‘Oh.’ Anyway, we admired this big ship because, well I knew her from the Clyde right from when one of my great uncles was helping to build here. Anyway, there she was. Anyway, we, we had a meal there, and the next thing we heard was the whistle went, ‘all RAF personnel so and so and so and so,’ went ‘oh that’s us, what’s happened now? Oh.’ ‘Get all your kit together, assemble here in, in fifteen minutes.’ ‘Oh boy that was, that was quick.’ ‘Cause you hadn’t, hadn’t taken in any kit bag, was just us, you stood up so it was just a matter of taking your kit bags and going to deck. We were then taken across onto the Queen Mary, and we were weighed [?] down so far in I thought we were going to go to New Zealand or somewhere, and [laughs] – anyway, the Queen Mary set off and a few days later we were in New York [emphasis]. We didn’t see a lot of New York, we had a bit of leave time on the promise that we wouldn’t be late coming back, so that was good, and we got on a train and we went up to Moncton, New Brunswick. All the way up to Canada by train which was a great experience for us, ‘cause the first thing we noticed was the food. Now, there was nothing rationed, this was American trains and we were getting the best of everything. Anyway, we got to Moncton, New Brunswick and the, and we were not given any winter clothing because we were still in this kit that we thought we were going to Rhodesia, so anyway [laughs], for two or three days we walked about up there and they used to call us ‘Scors’ because we were walking around with blankets on us to keep us warm, mm [laughs]. Anyway, that was, that was all part of the trials and tribulations. Then of course was, we were told to fall in and you, you, you’re told that you’re now going to a training station. They didn’t tell you where you were going, they just told you’re going to a training station. So we got on a train, and this was the Canadian national railways and we said, ‘well, Canadian pacific goes that side and nation [?] is that side, mm, oh well, fair enough.’ So we landed up in Winnipeg, went all the way through to Winnipeg, then we got off that [emphasis] train and we went up to another [emphasis] one, up past Portage la Prairie and then the railway finished so we got, we got on we’ll call it a bus [emphasis], and this took us up to Dauphin, Manitoba and then we, we were at Paulson and Dauphin and there we did bombing and gunnery training. We did all these sort of elements again that, that everyone had to go through the same things, and then the next round of course we did, we did flying training and, and then of course we did the navigation, another step up. That was fine and we were still all together, no deviations. Then of course we passed all that and I had a, I had an excellent, I had an excellent bombing record, really excellent one if I say so myself, you know. Anyway, next thing we knew, we graduated from there. You had to pass, it was a hundred percent pass, you know, there was always people dropping out and, but we carried on and we went, we went down, down [emphasis] the line to Portage la Prairie. Portage on the Prairie, that was – now that there [emphasis] was the school for air observers, you know? That was number seventeen air observer school, Portage la Prairie, and there of course we, we got changed around a bit. I was told that I was a good candidate for, to be air observer. I said, ‘how about piloting?’ ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘if you’re an observer you’ll get to fly as well. You’ll get to pilot as well,’ you know. I said ‘well that’s okay.’ He did really ‘cause you were told [emphasis], you know? Anyway, I graduated from there. I got my wings there, and eventually, eventually ‘cause we [coughs], we went back to Moncton, New Brunswick and we got on a ship to come back to the UK and that ship I recognised as [laughs] the Empress of Japan. I said to my friend, I said ‘I don’t like that name, Empress of Japan,’ you know. We got up beside it and it’s now called the Empress of Scotland [laughs]. They had changed its name. Now this was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, so we come back, we come back across the Atlantic, the North Atlantic, and we sailed up the Clyde and eventually we went to a place called Harrogate. So Harrogate we were more or less brought back to earth again. Rations of course still, instead of the food we’d been having in Canada and that, you know, America. And we, we then – well the [laughs]. It was quite strange, they gave us another FFI to see if we’re alright and we’re okay that way, and another medicals to see if we’re alright, you know? And the next thing I knew, I was, I was in a detour [?], so my friend went that way and I went that way, so that was it. Anyway, I landed up at a place which is just outside of Wolverhampton, and this was an advanced navigation and low flying school called Halfpenny Green. Now, quite a number of years ago they made a film there and then called it “Halfpenny Field,” but it was Halfpenny Green [emphasis], and today it’s been nominated to be Wolverhampton Airport. Anyway, what we were doing there is that we were taught low lying pass flying, landing on beaches, landing on small areas and we wondered why this was all about, you know? But anyway, we didn’t ask any questions, you just did as you’re told and [laughs], ‘cause you’ve already volunteered [laughs]. Anyway, that was it and we [unclear] was successful, it was, it was excellent. We [tape beeps] treetops. We were making bomb, making, making bomb attacks on the railway bridges across the Severn and even, even the RAF stations that knew we were coming but of course they weren’t open up at us ‘cause they knew it was an exercise, and all various target like that. And also as I say, we were learning to land on short, short runways or grass and beaches and all sorts of fancy things like that. Anyway, this was all preparation because what you didn’t realise that you were, you were being selected there, and that was, that was when I was, I felt as if there was something, something strange [emphasis] about all of this because everybody was going to do different things, and that was where, where, where we were taken aside one day and told out where we were going to, you know? And some of the, some of the chaps went one way and I went another way and I landed up in this aerodrome which the first thing I had to do was sign the Secrets Act all over [emphasis] again, because you’d always, everybody signed it but this was what they called a double one, extremely secret, you know? Now, with that all I could see around this place was a multitude of different types of aircraft [laughs]. So we wondered what this was all about. Normally you went to an air station there would be two different types or something like that but on this particular one there was several, you know? And, and of course [laughs, pause] what we, erm, I’ll bring it back [pause], hmm.
TO: Was this for the SOE?
WM: Yeah, this is, this is, this is really the beginning of the training for that, you know? Well the, we had been doing the training, you know, and of course, as I say, when we were, what we were doing this sort of thing, you see, the secrecy that was coming up, we really wondered what we were, what we were doing [emphasis], you know? Anyway, we were told then that we had joined 138 Squadron, you know? Now, just like everything else, nobody ever knew what 138 Squadron was doing or any other squadron, but we soon began to find out what it was. And it always seemed strange at the beginning that no one would tell us much and we began to wonder what we were doing there, and we were, we were confined to the station. We were confined to the station for at least two weeks [laughs]. Anyway, that’s what we, what we were doing then was we were, we were learning to fly once again low level at night time. We had to do all sorts of things and [pause] we just – oh we were introduced, we were introduced to people who were pilots and, and aircrew and to us, you know, they were a bit rag tag and bob tailed by the looks of them, they were, they weren’t exactly all spick and span like we expected us to be, you know [laughs]. Anyway, excuse me a minute.
TO: It’s okay [tape paused and restarted].
WM: We were introduced to groups of people and we were told that ‘you’ll fly with this one and fly with that one, but you might fly in two different ones on the same night.’ ‘Oh, that’s alright.’ ‘So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to introduce everybody, but just remember that when you do get introduced is that, remember what you’re signed [?].’ ‘Cause there was a secret come out, we were at Tempsford. That was the home of the flights for the SOE, and of course there again that was the reason why all these different odd aircraft was lined [?] up, was that they were used for different purposes. Later on what we used to say, we used to say that Bomber Harris used to send over there all the old junk that he didn’t want on Bomber Command [laughs]. Anyway, what happened then was as I say, you got to know the different colours ‘cause by that time, as I, as I, as I say, I was, I was classified and reclassified into what I was doing and this was observer, and that was what I graduated as, and of course I still kept up my flying skills. That’s another story, I’ll come back to that. But anyway, there we were and we, we had one or two short flights with different pilots [phone rings] and we got to know – [tape beeps].
TO: No problem.
WM: No, when we, when we flew with these different chaps, they got to know us, we got to know them and each had their own specialities, and what used to happen then was once, once the powers that be realised that you could do [emphasis] what you’re supposed to be able to do on paper, then they would trust you with an operation. The reason being was that we were using the fields or pieces of, strips of roads or even, even old glider fields, we had to land, and it wasn’t always the best of territory ‘cause we did this with Lysanders which was the single engine one, you know? I got lots of pictures of Lysanders over there somewhere, mm, and the idea being there’s, is that when – you were given a map reference, and you had to study that map reference very carefully. And we never [emphasis] tried to find out how our passengers were, and they didn’t try and find out who we were. There was no communication. The reason being is if we got shot down, or either of us got taken prisoners you couldn’t, you couldn’t tell them about the other ones, alright? ‘Cause the ACA [?] people were considered to be a different category from what, even what we were, and we were a different category from them entirely, and we were a different category from normal aircrew, and even – that was known in Germany, that was known. Don’t tell me how they got to know but that’s another story. Anyway, we did, we did several of these operations. We were taking people out and sometimes it was a matter of taking two people or three people about. Squash, it was a bit of a squeeze in the, in the Lysander but we weren’t [?] gonna enjoy the ride, and all I could say was all the trips that I made was very successful, and I flew with certainly [?] different pilots from time to time on that. Then of course likewise they had different observers, you know? But we had great faith in each other, and the navigation aids that we had was elementary map reading, night flying et cetera. We didn’t have the joy of T and all the other things that came up later on. We were actually doing it like the old time pilot, many, many years before.
TO: I don’t know how much detail you can tell me about this, but when you brought these agents over from Britain to Europe, did you have a certain, were you, did you have an arranged landing field?
WM: Oh yes, when we, you know, same thing [?] we left, we left Tempsford. Well, I knew where we were going [emphasis], I had to know where we were going, and the pilot knew where he was going but I took him there, you know? I took him there, passengers there. Well these passengers were known to be coming. There would be a reception committee ready for them to whisk them away as soon as they were on the ground, oh yes. There was a good communications, yes.
TO: And did you ever see any German aircraft when you were flying on these missions?
WM: Oh yes, yes. There’s – oh we, well, put it this way. In those days we were flying low [emphasis], very low, and we weren’t too bothered about it. Now and again you run into a bit of trouble, but the night fighters was mostly come to different bits, I’ll tell you more about that, alright? But the, even, even by all the secrets that we had, there was a terrible tragedy that happened through the London office where somebody infiltrated into the London office SOE, and they, they gave away people on the ground, and they were just massacred. But you know, that was one of those terrible things about that, and that was country man to country man, and I’m sorry to say that was in Holland, mm. But we, we, we never knew exactly how our people got on, alright, or if we were picking somebody up and taking them back to the UK, as soon as we landed back at Tempsford they were taken away and we never saw them again, but they were taken away to their different places like that. Quite strange to say there was a big house just quite near here where, where they used to go back you, you know? Did –
TO: Did you, sorry.
WM: No.
TO: Did you – it’s an odd question, but did you get a sense of pride knowing you were helping secret agents?
WM: Oh yes [emphasis], yes. Well as a matter of fact, we, we felt we were doing a good job that way, because the thing was nobody, nobody heard about it, but we knew what was going on, sometimes by results. We got, you know, we got to know back, back on the station how well the people that we had delivered had reacted to what was going on, ‘cause there was just a matter of them infiltrating back into populations and we never heard anything, but if it was a special operation they were going to do, someone would say well, ‘well done chaps,’ or something like that, you know?
TO: So what, what, do you know what year it was that you started helping SOE with this?
WM: 1942.
TO: And was it just western Europe you went to?
WM: Well, well put it this way, what happened after, after a while, we started getting different aircraft, ‘cause in our station we used all the old stuff, Whitleys and things like that and various other ones like that, vintage. Then of course we got, we got one or two of the American ones come in, you know? And there was one time that we were delivering stuff to the Maquis. Now the Maquis was different from SOE, Maquis’s French. So what we were doing, we were delivering guns and ammunition, there was a full load in a Hudson. Now the Hudson was an American aircraft that was designed to land in the prairies, naturally [?] on good tarmac runways, but anywhere a farmer would put up a windsock, that’s where they were designed to for, and one particular time we, we had this load of stuff, full load, and we had to land on this area and it turned out to be, it was an old glider drone where people used to learn to fly gliders [emphasis] in France, you know? ‘Cause where we were [?] about a hundred and eighty kilometres north east of Colonia [?], you know? As near as I can tell you about that one, ‘cause a lot of stuff’s still secret. Now that is fact.
TO: Mm.
WM: Anyway, what happened was that we, we landed safely, we turned around and as we turned around to face to go out again, we began to sink. Anyway, I said to Nobby who was the skipper, I said ‘Nobby I don’t like this.’ He said ‘aye, you’ll be alright Bill, we’ll get rid of all this rubbish, we’ll be alright.’ So anyway, the Maquis came out the bush, as I call it, took all this stuff away. They disappeared and then the, the lady who’s in charge of that section, she came and she says, ‘what’s troubling you?’ I says ‘I don’t think we’re going to get out of here.’ So we got the sticky bombs ready for, to stick it to the aircraft and blow it up, and she said ‘ah, I’ll see if I can get the villagers up, push you out,’ you know, just like that. Anyway, she went back to the village. Now, normally we were aware on the ground about fifteen, twenty minutes at the most ‘cause anything after than that was dangerous, yeah, you know? She went down and she got the villagers up and it was quite a way away, but anyway, I asked [?] too many questions about that. Up she comes with the villagers, but on their way back they met the general sergeant who was in charge of the village, and he turns round and says to them, ‘now, all you people, you’ll be in trouble. You’re out here, it’s after curfew, you’re supposed to be in the village.’ And of course the idea was that she turned round and said to them, ‘but your big black aircraft is stuck in the mud and we’ve got to push it out, and the Gestapo says if we don’t push it out they’re going to shoot us all and you.’ So he says, ‘I’ll go and look after the village, you go and push the aircraft out.’ So in the end they got us out. We didn’t need to blow it up.
TO: So just to clarify, were you stuck in the mud [emphasis]?
WM: Aye, just going down, like that.
TO: And how big was this aircraft?
WM: Hudson.
TO: And how –
WM: Twin engine aircraft, hmm.
TO: Were you ever scared during these missions?
WM: Of course, yeah. But they, you don’t go like that you, you, gung ho, you know what I mean by gung ho? We weren’t gung ho. We prided ourselves on being professional.
TO: And is there, are there any other occasions from your time with SOE that you are allowed to tell me about which you recall, a lot?
WM: Oh yes, lots of things that we – as a matter of fact, during, we didn’t bring them all [emphasis] back, but during the time that we were there [emphasis] we brought back four chaps, four men, Frenchmen, who actually in later years turned out to become prime ministers, prime ministers of France, hmm.
TO: And sorry, did – when you, what happened when you left SOE and started back on standard bombing missions?
WM: Well anyway, what, what happened was we were always alternately from time to rime on different missions. It wasn’t as if we, we just jumped from one back into that one, but we were always, was always in the, always doing the missions. Sometimes it was only a few aircraft going out for a special mission, or sometimes, sometimes we joined up with the, a bomber stream. It all depends on how, how we were required, and we, a lot of our chaps became leading lights on the Pathfinders, because of our highly successful rates in navigating to targets.
TO: And do you remember your first bombing mission?
WM: Yeah, first, my first bombing mission was to Kiel, Kiel Canal, mm. And that, that, that was also for – the idea there was to try to block the canal from time to time. We, in the early days there wasn’t anything that we had big enough that could do [emphasis] it, but the idea used to be that if you could bomb something, you know, bomb ships or something like that, that would make traps in the canal, you know, then of course that, that would be a help on keeping stuff from going through it, you know, hmm. But, no we covered a high variety of trips, you know, oh yes.
TO: And what aircraft were you in for these bombing missions?
WM: Well first of all I was in, I was in Wellingtons, you know? We did a lot of Wellingtons and then of course we were onto Lancasters. We converted [?] onto Lancasters, mm.
TO: And could you please describe the conditions inside a Wellington?
WM: Well in the Wellington there was, it was rather cramped but we still considered it a good aircraft. And by that time we had six in the crew, and we, we had crewed up and we were flying together, but you know, it was just, it was just, there was no comfort, there was no comfort. Each person had their own little cubby hole or section [coughs] but that was all. But once you got up over ten thousand feet, then of course, then it gets a bit uncomfortable, you know? You’re always [?] trying to keep warm was the thing, you know? Then of course you’d all sorts of wires for – you had your air com [?], you had your oxygen masks, you had all these sorts of things, you know? And as I, as I say, it was, it was a lot, a lot colder than it was later on in the Lancasters and even the Halifaxes and Stirlings, mm.
TO: And as an observer, what were you duties for the mission?
WM: My duties – we were highly skilled navigators then. We were, we were a step above the, we were a step above the normal navigators, mm, yeah, because we did, we did everything. We did the whole job. It was the same thing as – at one time, what happened was that the, every aircraft had two pilots. Anyway, there came a time when they took one pilot away and then it was the observer that was the backup pilot, you know? Anyway, after that, after that when the big four engine jobs come out, the, they brought in the role of flight engineer, and the flight engineer was supposed to be able to fly, but the way I’d seen it right from very beginning was that I reckoned that I knew enough about flying, and I told people ‘as long as I can take her home and land it, that’s good enough for me’ [laughs].
TO: Slight side story, a few weeks ago I interviewed a man who was a flight engineer for Lancasters, and he said he was taught how to fly the plane but not how to land it.
WM: Yeah well [laughs], well that’s the – my, my big thing was I was taught how to land them, yeah. And I had a good, had a good background in flying and piloting in the lighter aircraft, but then of course between the Wellingtons and the Lancasters and the, we had a – well we did it quite often. We did it as part of an air, sometimes, sometimes you went up for, to test your engines. You did that, you did that pretty often, or to see the rest of the aircraft, and I always took the opportunity to be able to land the aircraft.
TO: And can you tell me a bit about Halifaxes?
WM: Not a great deal. I didn’t do a lot of trips on Halifaxes but you know, she was also a good aircraft, but I know there’s, there’s friends of mine who, if you have an argument they say ‘ooh, it’s far better than a Lancaster’ and blah, blah, blah, but that’s only, the Halifax was a good aircraft. It couldn’t fly as high [emphasis] as a Lancaster and it wasn’t as fast as Lancaster but that was just about it, mm.
TO: And what’s your take on Halifax versus Lancaster?
WM: Oh [laughs] to me it was the Lancaster [laughs].
TO: And was the interior of a Lancaster different from that of a Halifax?
WM: No, much the same, mm, much the same. It’s just the skin.
TO: Mhm.
WM: Just the skin, you know? You know, you know, everything was for bomb loads.
TO: Mhm. And you mentioned something about Stirlings earlier.
WM: Yeah.
TO: What’s your take on them?
WM: The Stirling was, she was the first of the heavies, and she was, she was quite slow [emphasis] and didn’t have a high ceiling rate, you know, but she did a good job in her day [?], oh yes. There was many, many a crew that did great work in Stirlings, oh.
TO: There’s a D-Day veteran I spoke to a couple of years ago, his glider for D-Day was towed by a Stirling.
WM: Oh yes [emphasis]. Well there was a lot of that. Halifaxes and Stirlings did a lot of glider towing, yeah, oh yes.
TO: And what bombing mission of the war do you remember the most?
WM: Er [pause]. Just, just before, just before the war finished we [tape beeps] there were two big ones, and that particular night our wing commander, Wing Commander Murray, who I’d known from Tempsford days, you know? He, he came along and he said he wanted to fly with us that night and be the captain, and he said, and I said ‘no, you can bugger off.’ It’s not we wanted [?] coming into aircrew, you know, taking over. ‘Cause I could say that to him because we’d flown together a lot. Anyway, he says ‘what happens if I don’t sit in the pilot’s seat.’ I said ‘alright then you can come along, that’s my seat’ [laughs]. I mean it was my seat when I was needed, yeah. I said ‘no you can come along and be second pilot,’ you know? But it was, it was, it was quite a thing. It was a place called Magdeburg, it was of the big ones that we were on, but several other big ones as well of course. I could, just hold that a minute? [Pause, tape beeps]. Now there was several big ones but the last, the last big one was Potsdam. That was a real big one, yeah. As a matter, matter of fact, that one was in the, in the fourteenth, fourteenth, 14th of April, so that was one of the last big ones, you know? And that was a night one, and there was another was on the 13th [emphasis] of April was another time we went to Kiel, and what had happened was the night before we went to Kiel, and we put this battleship and we sunk it, we turned it over, mm. And it came back but they wanted us to go back again, but one of the retorts was that night, one of the crews was, ‘I hear you don’t want us to put it back up again’ [laughs]. But that was a, and that actually blocked a canal, that actually blocked a canal, you know, ‘cause then of course one of the, one of the last of the big ones we did was to Bremen on the 20th and 22nd of April, you know, yeah. And course there was places like Merseburg and various other ones like that, you know? But this is something I keep to myself.
TO: Okay.
WM: You know? Because I got, you know, I’ve got – the way I look at it is, it’s not, not a thing we brag about, you know? It’s, it was wartime and that was it. And today I’ve got, I’ve got, I’ve got many friends across Europe and across Africa and they come from all sorts of walks of life and all sorts of countries.
TO: Sorry, can I ask what happened to the wing commander who wanted to be on the flight?
WM: Oh yes, oh well he came in the flight with us there and that was it, Wing Commander Murray. We were flying F for Freddie, yeah, and of course, well anyway, he was in charge of the squadron, you know?
TO: Mhm.
WM: And he stayed on the Air Force for a while, you know, and I lost touch with him, you know?
TO: Mhm.
WM: Because we’d been, we’d been quite good friends there, mm. But after the war, after the war was, you didn’t really go out of your way [emphasis] to keep in touch, although with my own crew [emphasis] in the Lancaster we have done. As a matter of fact even, even now [emphasis] one of my chaps in aircrew, a fellow called Jimmy Dagg, a New Zealander, his great grandson plays rugby for the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team. His name is Israel Dagg, mm.
TO: And are, just in raids in Germany in general, how much anti-aircraft fire was there?
WM: Oh plenty. As a, as a matter of fact, what a lot of people don’t realise was that the amount, the amount of German troops, and specialised German troops that had to be contained within Germany because of what the, the Bomber Command was doing. Now as a matter of fact, that was, it was, it was a surprising, there must have thousands upon thousands had to be retrained in Germany who could have been going somewhere else, and they were all very highly trained people, mm.
TO: And did you ever encounter night fighters?
WM: Oh yes a couple of times, but we were quite lucky. We, we managed to corkscrew away, but the night fighters, what you had to watch even more carefully than over, over a target area or on the way back was just before you landed, because there used to be quite a few of them that used to prowl round about aerodromes and airfields in this country, and waiting for people to come in ‘cause that’s when you’re, you’re, you’re most vulnerable, when everything was shut down. And there was quite a number of people that got shot down just before they landed.
TO: And could you please tell me how this corkscrew evasive manoeuvre worked?
WM: Well that’s, that’s just what it was, a corkscrew. You might have been flying more or less level or up and down a bit, and then the corkscrew was like that. That was a corkscrew, yeah. They got away, yeah, mm.
TO: Did anyone in the crew ever get sick when that happened?
WM: Oh yeah [emphasis], my mid upper gunner used to get sick as soon as he put his foot inside the aircraft [laughs]. Once we were still fly, still take off he was alright.
TO: Mm. And did you ever, during the, did you ever find out how much, whether you’d hit the targets during the raids?
WM: I know we did [emphasis]. As I say, one of my specialities was, was bombing.
TO: But could you see photographs of it later?
WM: Oh yes, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, mm, yeah.
TO: And were you ever on raids to Berlin?
WM: Yeah, mm. Oh yes, as I say, that was, that was, that was one that would come up quite often, mm [pause]. Hell [?], mm.
TO: Sorry, you still okay for me to ask questions?
WM: What?
TO: Are you okay for me to ask questions?
WM: Yes, yes.
TO: ‘Cause just let me know if you want to stop.
WM: No, no.
TO: Okay. And what did you think of the German aircraft of the war?
WM: Oh very good, excellent, yeah, excellent yeah. As a matter, as a matter, as a matter of fact, at the end of the war there was one, one German one, you know? And I thought, I thought at first it was a shooting star, you know? And it wasn’t, it was a jet, and it flew past me just as if it was a shooting star and when I went back to report on this, and they said ‘ah, it probably was a shooting star you saw.’ I said ‘no, no, no, no, this is an aeroplane.’ That was one of the areas [?] ones that we’d seen [?] and spotted, yeah, ‘cause, you know, you got debriefed after every, every trip.
TO: Was there any ever occasions where you had to turn back from the target because of bad weather?
WM: No, I was, we were alright. No, we didn’t, we never, we never turned back. Ground crew were every bit as good as our aircrew.
TO: Mm.
WM: They kept our aircraft in excellent [emphasis] condition. We never had any [emphasis] complaints about our ground crew, mm.
TO: And you explain to me how the briefings worked for the missions?
WM: Right, well what, what happened was that when, when you landed, when you landed you’re taken from the aircraft back into wing on, it was trucks, we used to call them crew trucks. So in other words you didn’t split up, you’re taken in, in a crew truck, and there you’re integrated and say how the trip went. And of course you had your version of what went on and then of course your cameras that you had in your aircraft also their versions, and we always seemed to marry, marry up on tours exactly the same, no. But we had a, we had an excellent [emphasis] crew. We had two New Zealanders, two Scotsmen, two Englishmen and one Londoner [laughs].
TO: And what about the briefings that you had before [emphasis] you went on a mission?
WM: Well the briefing was, what happened, they assembled. Now first of all they had an all-in briefing where the, every member of the aircrew was there, and then after that was, that briefing was done and that was more or less told you where you were going and et cetera, et cetera, and you split off into different sections. The gunners was going to see about their guns and talk to their gunnery officers and the flight engineers, they went to see the air officers. The air observers and navigators would go in together and the pilots and the, and the observers were together, you know? That’s, that’s how it went ‘cause you know, we, we had to make sure we were exactly correct at all times between the pilots and observer, the pilot and the navigator, mm.
TO: And when you, were you sitting in the cockpit during the mission?
WM: Yeah.
TO: Could you, could you actually see anything below you during the mission?
WM: From time to time you could, yes, mm. From time to time you could, yes, mm.
TO: And what sort of things could you see?
WM: Well it all depends. The more water about the place the better it was, better reflections and things like that.
TO: And could you see what the Pathfinders had left?
WM: Oh yes, it all depends – well that was to be able to recognise, make sure that you had taken the right targets.
TO: Mhm.
WM: Because the Germans were, were quite sophisticated because they could try to imitate your Pathfinder’s TIs, what they put down, no.
TO: And were you involved in raids to other cities like Hamburg?
WM: Oh yes, mm.
TO: And what do you remember from those missions?
WM: Well a lot of them, well the big, the big one in Hamburg was a big fire raiser. But that happened to be that the wind conditions, everything was just right or wrong [emphasis] as regards which way you’re looking at it. As far as we concerned that was right, as far as the Germans were concerned, it was a big disaster because at that time a lot of the buildings in Hamburg were wooden, mm.
TO: And were you surprised when you heard how successful the raid had been?
WM: Not surprised, ‘cause that’s what we went for. Most successful it was, well, the better the raid was, mm.
TO: And was, were you involved in the raid on Dresden?
WM: No I wasn’t, but we were on standby, but I wasn’t involved in that one, no.
TO: Mhm.
WM: The, some, some people on the 90 Squadron were, ‘cause at Tuddenham 90 Squadron and 138 Squadron ran alongside each other, you know?
TO: Mhm.
WM: No.
TO: And when did you, when did you react, or how did you feel when Churchill announced that they would start bombing Germany?
WM: Start [emphasis] bombing?
TO: Yeah.
WM: Oh that was right at the beginning.
TO: Yes but how did you feel?
WM: That was [sigh], well put it this way, we had already had casualties our side, so it was just war, no. It was war, yeah.
TO: Mhm. And was your aircraft ever damaged by anti-aircraft flak?
WM: Oh we had, we had, but we had nothing really serious, mm. No, we had holes all over the place from time to time. Some very close to the occupants was [laughs] but –
TO: Mhm.
WM: No, we always managed to get back.
TO: And were you ever given, did you get new bombs as the war went on?
WM: Oh yes, yes. We, we dropped just about everything that was going, yes. Oh yes, no.
TO: Did you ever, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. Did you ever get any of the massive bombs that Barnes Wallis had developed?
WM: Well, there were different ones yes, yeah we did. We went on a couple of trips to Bordeaux and things like that, yes –
TO: Might be –
WM: But, I know for a fact that even Barnes Wallis’ bombs, and the big ones, big ones that were dropping there, the German’s fortification of the submarine pens was, was terrific. Now they even today you can have a walk through them and see what it’s like, oh yes. But there [emphasis] is what I say, is that the – sorry I, there’s what happens is what – the amount of German personnel that had to be employed because [emphasis] of the Bomber Command raids was tremendous, tremendous [emphasis]. It wasn’t just one or two round the village or something like that. The number of people they kept back within Germany itself was properly, oh it must have been millions.
TO: And what do you think was the most important battle of the war?
WM: Well it all depends what you mean battle. Do you mean aircrew or land or –
TO: Any, anything.
WM: Or the ships.
TO: Well most important campaign then.
WM: Well, they’re all different, all different. You know it all depends, you know, if you say that – well the thing that lead up to the retention and taking back over Europe, and that was D-Day.
TO: Mm. And were you involved in that?
WM: Oh yes, yes.
TO: Can you tell me about any of the missions you went on?
WM: What, what we were doing, we were, we were, we were on the mock, one of the mock raids further up the coast. And a lot of the stuff that we were dropping that night was, was like aluminium foil, and that was showing them, well came up on the radar where there was massive amount of aircraft flying around, you know? And [laughs] of course at the same time we carried a lot of bombs, but we tried as much as possible to use them away, away from where we’d be flying over, as if it was again going further afield in. But at that time what we were trying to do was trying to keep away from human habitation because that was, that was just something that we were asked to do, because keep it away from the towns and cities and northern France, mm.
TO: Mm. And on, in bombing missions in general, what kind of targets were you actually given at the briefings?
WM: Well it all depends, you know, because no two briefings were the same, no. Yeah, you had factory towns, all sorts of things that you’re going after. You know even, I wasn’t, as I say, I wasn’t in on Dresden but there is a book called “Dresden,” and if you want to know anything about Dresden, get hold of that book. Now, it’s about that thick, and it goes back into the old days of Saxony, and it goes all the way through from the different things all the way, right through, right up until modern times. But that explains exactly what happened in that city. It’s very [emphasis], very complicated. It’s, but it tells the whole story of Dresden, not just one side of the, it’s the whole story, mm.
TO: And, I’m sorry to ask this but did you suffer heavy losses on your missions?
WM: Oh, well, from time to time we had losses, but we never, we never had what we considered a heavy loss, mm.
TO: And what did you think of Arthur Harris?
WM: Oh, we supported him. He was, he was our, our chief. We looked up to [could be after] him, yeah, we did.
TO: And what do you think of his tactics and strategy?
WM: Well I thought they were alright, because if you go back, go back in time that was his instructions that he was getting from the Air Ministry. That, that what a lot of people forget about, was that he [emphasis] was getting told by the Air Ministry what they wanted [emphasis], and that came from the cabinet meetings.
TO: Mhm. And do you think Bomber Command was treated unfairly after the war?
WM: No [emphasis]. They were not treated fairly. It was completely unfairly. As far as I’m concerned, even, even it took, it took for recognition, it took over seventy years [emphasis]. Now, on my, my medal bar, I’ve got the ‘39-‘45 Star, but also I wear [tape beeps] a little brass mounting [?] which says ‘Bomber Command,’ you know? That took seventy years for them to give it to us. Have you seen it?
TO: I think I saw it briefly when I met you last Sunday.
WM: It was in the middle.
TO: Yeah [paper shuffles]. And could you ever see fires below you on the ground?
WM: Oh yes, oh yes, definitely.
TO: Mhm, were they large or small?
WM: All depends, all depends what area and what you were doing. Some time you knew, you knew, you know, you had raging fires. Sometimes, sometime, see it all depends what the target was.
TO: And do you remember seeing fires when Hamburg was bombed in 1943?
WM: Well that’s what I said to you, I said to you already that that was a big one, you know.
TO: Mhm.
WM: But that was – then again, you’ve got to read the story about Hamburg, because what happened was that all the conditions for a bombing raid was right. The wind and the target and the structures of the building and everything, it all came into it.
TO: Mhm. And what did you think of the thousand bomber raid on Cologne?
WM: Well that, that was one of the best adverts that Harris could have. I won’t tell you what the thousand bombers were because nobody knows, but what he did was he got all the aircraft that could fly and return from there and used that. You know, right down to, there were some of the Blenheims [emphasis] that were in there to make up a thousand bombers, you know? That was a big propaganda one. And not only that, you say something about Harris and doing that, but there again, all of these things came from the War Cabinet. You know, this is what people forget or don’t know, there’s War Cabinet and then you come down to the Air Ministry, and the Air Ministry would then passed it onto Harris. And Harris was, alright at times Harris was dogmatic about what we were doing, but you think of Dresden. The Russians were fighting like hell coming our way, and at the same time the amount of German troops and everything else that was passing through, through Dresden, and what was happening in Dresden, what they were actually manufacturing [emphasis] for the, for the German, erm –
TO: War effort?
WM: Well, the German war effort [emphasis] was terrific. There was everything from stuff for the U-boats and aircraft and everything like that, it was all over the place. And this is admitted in this book, this book is, is called “Dresden” and it tells you street by street what they were doing, mm.
TO: And do you remember hearing about the attack on the Ruhr damns?
WM: Oh yes. Oh we were also, we were also on standby for that mission. We were sat, you know – the idea was that if it didn’t work that night, we were going to go the next night. There was, there was another three squadrons ready to go the next night –
TO: And –
WM: But it actually came through.
TO: And did that improve morale a lot?
WM: Oh yes, definitely.
TO: This is going to be –
WM: Scampton, were the, were the, were the Dambusters squadron was, we were also stationed at Scampton for a while, mm.
TO: This is probably going to be an odd question, but what was your least favourite aircraft to fly in?
WM: A Bolingbroke.
TO: Mm.
WM: A Bolingbroke was the American Canadian version of a Blenheim. She was underpowered and if you lost one engine, you had trouble trying to make it back to your base. But in Canada, a lot of chaps were lost over the lakes in the wintertime when they lost one engine, they went down through the ice.
TO: Mm.
WM: But that was, that was my one, a Bolingbroke. But as I say, I flew them and we were alright.
TO: And what was your favourite aircraft?
WM: Well I started off, I had a love for the Wellington but of course, later on it was the, it was the Lancaster. But old Lizzy, she never let us down and Lizzy was the Lysander. But the other thing, there’s one that’s hardly ever mentioned and that was the Anson, and of course the, the amount trainees that was through on the Lysanders was amazing. Everybody praises the Lysander, the Anson, mm.
TO: Mm. We’re actually out of battery on the camera, so is it okay if we have a break while I charge it up?
WM: Yeah, yeah, sure [tape paused and restarted].
TO: Okay so, can you tell me a bit about how you came to be involved in Operation Manna?
WM: We, we were stationed at RAF Tuddenham and we, we’d actually been on ops and we were called forward to stay and we thought ‘oh, well it’s another op,’ and this was on a Sunday.
TO: Mhm.
WM: And we were told that we were going to have stuff loaded on and we were to drop it, but it wasn’t bombs. It was in our containers, the containers that we’d used for dropping the stuff into the, into the Maquis as well, when we used to drop stuff. And that, that was alright. And when we got in the air, of course we didn’t know the whole [emphasis] story but it’s like a very good friend of mine says, her grandmother told her to hide under the table because she thought this was a message [?] they were gonna come and do some bombing [emphasis] round about there. Instead of that of course we were dropping the food. Well that was, that was the plus the operation started, but I suppose you know the story about that, about the two Canadians who went – can I tell you that one? Well what happened was Operation Manna came about because there was two young Canadian officers who had permission to go over to the German lines and speak to the German commander if it was possible and advise them that they could arrange for, to have food dropped into Holland because all the people there were starving, and that included the German troops that was there. Anyway, after negotiations, they had managed to get to them and they managed through the negotiations, the fact that we would be flying in Lancasters [emphasis] and dropping the food and we would not be dropping bombs. And of course the Germans advised that their anti-aircraft guns wouldn’t be firing at us, but they forgot to tell a lot of people with a rifle that what was happening, so it wasn’t impossible for us to get a few pot shots aimed at us with people on the ground with rifle fire. But anyway, we landed, we didn’t land [emphasis] of course, we just went in and we dropped it and certain food dropped and that was it, but later on, on the second or third day, by that time they’d got a bit organised and we were dropping food into, into football grounds. And what had happened, they got the local people to put big white crosses on the football grounds and that’s where we had to drop into. And one of the, one of the trips we were doing was at, we were flying in, and this, all the Lancasters said ‘ooh, a sprog crew.’ And this came, become across us and we had to veer quickly and let him come in, and when we were dropping our stuff, one of them went outside and landed on the railway line. Anyway, I could see lots of people round about it ‘cause it was taking quite a while to get into it of course, but by this time they’d realised it was, it was food in it and not bombs. Anyway, many years later in Africa when we were reopening a new rugby field, and in the pavilion later on I was telling the story, and I said ‘yes, it was, we were dropping the food to Holland’ and there was one of these things, a fellow, and I said ‘it was just like a lot of little ants round a sugar lump.’ And all of a sudden, somebody put his hand on my shoulder and I looked round, there’s this big fellow, a youngster, must have been in his early twenties, and he said to me, ‘you nearly killed me.’ And I said, ‘what do you mean I nearly killed you, I’ve never seen you in my life before.’ He says, ‘I was the first of these little black ants to get there’ he says, ‘because I saw it falling outside and I rushed to it, and all the other people came and dived on top of me’ [laughs]. So you see, it’s a small world there. But also I’ve got, I’ve got a large number of friends in this area, Dutch people, who actually received the food and they also still have services where, where they bless Manna, and there’s one particular family who come here into our court here, our Debbie’s [?] court and one, one Wednesday a month, and she was five years old when we dropped our first lot of food, and she’s always been thankful, thankful all the time, and she does tell people that ‘oh, Mr Moore, Uncle Bill here, he saved my country from starvation’ [laughs]. So you see that that was a real pleasure to do that, and I was actually awarded the Dutch Medal on that one, and very earnestly I consider that one of the finest medals and for the finest properties [?] that I received during the war.
TO: So would you say that’s the mission you’re most proud of?
WM: Yes.
TO: And when you first learned about Operation Manna, were you surprised that you’d be dropping food and not bombs?
WM: Oh yes, no, no.
TO: And could you, what do you remember most about Operation Manna?
WM: Well, the amount of aircraft. Well after, after the first Sunday, after the first Sunday it was well organised, ‘cause the first Sunday and Monday it was a trial run to see what happened really, but after that we, we had several squadrons that was dropping the food, and of course even, even some of the Americans were dropping food as well. But there were dropping food further afield than what we were, you know.
TO: And –
WM: At the beginning the war was still, the fighting was go on. It wasn’t, you know, it carried on afterwards but the first, the first few days of it that was still when the war was going on, you know.
TO: And what about, could you see if any Dutch civilians on the ground were waving British flags?
WM: Oh yes, well you could see them waving [emphasis]. You’re not always sure what they were waving but they were waving and clothes and waving anything at all when I realised on the second wave what we were doing, ‘cause it wasn’t, wasn’t bombs we were dropping.
TO: Mm. Well Bernie, the veteran, other Manna veteran whose number I gave you, he told me that flying so low he could see a Dutch boy waving a Union Jack.
WM: Yeah well, he must, he must have been very lucky to have – ‘cause it maybe that someone dropped the Union flag –
TO: Mhm.
WM: And then he got it, but not a Union Jack [emphasis].
TO: Mhm.
WM: It’s a Union flag. Do you know the difference?
TO: No, please explain.
WM: Well the Union Jack [emphasis] is flown in the brow of a ship –
TO: Mhm.
WM: The Union Jack is the one that’s – Union flag [emphasis] is the one that’s flown everywhere else.
TO: Oh right, I didn’t know that. Thank you.
WM: Mm, the Union Jack is the small staff in the front of a ship.
TO: Mhm [pause]. What kind of, when you were sat in the cockpit, what kind of equipment did you have in front of you?
WM: I know, I know that this is [?] navigational equipment that we could use. We had, we had G, we had Oboe, we had all sorts of different ones, yeah, mm.
TO: And how did G work?
WM: Well G was, G was in two, two, two beams, and where these two beams crossed, that’s where you were. It’s as simple as that.
TO: And did that improve navigation?
WM: Oh yes, yeah, mm. Well the H2S was a different story entirely. The H2S was you were beaming down and the more [?] water that was around the clearer the river [?] became, but your only trouble about that was the German fighters used to vector onto the, what we were, we were projecting. Sometimes that could become a hazard.
TO: And how many occasions do you think you deployed Window?
WM: Oh quite a number, even, even when we were doing training operations we were dropping Window, which we never counted, it didn’t count as operations as such. But we, we were dropping Window many a time, yeah, during training flights, mm.
TO: And when bombs were dropped from an aircraft, did the plane become noticeably lighter?
WM: Oh it came, you rose, you rose slightly yes, mm. All depends on how much, how much stuff you’re actually carrying or dropping.
TO: And could you please explain what the procedure would be for, in terms of what the crew would do, each crew member would do and say when you got over the target?
WM: Well each person had their own to do. The pilot, he was taking instructions from whoever was doing the, the lead onto the target. Sometimes we did that with myself, quite a number of times of course, and sometimes, sometimes it was the wireless operator, sometimes it was another, we had a radar operator as well, they used to use that over the targets ‘cause as I say, we were, we were still on special duties. Of course your gunners were always on the left and as I say, engineer, he had to be very careful then making sure everything was alright on his side, yeah. But everybody was active.
TO: Mhm. And were there ever any times on a mission when you could more or less relax?
WM: No [emphasis]. If you relaxed you, it was wrong. There’s many, many a time, many a time – what happened with us was that, and I’ve said this before, we never really relaxed until we were home. Can we give that a break for a minute? I’ll show you something.
TO: Yes, certainly [tape beeps]. Mhm. And did you or anyone else in the crew have a special name for your own aircraft?
WM: Yes, well we, we called our one after the Loch Ness Monster, that was it, yeah, mm [laughs]. It was, it was a favourite of ours you know, especially with two Scottish men was there [?] and we adopted, we adopted the rest of them, you know? Mm.
TO: [Paper turns] and when you were on missions, could you, or rather night missions, were there other British planes flying near you?
WM: All depends, all depends on what type of mission you were on.
TO: Mhm.
WM: Now, if you’re in the stream, well – at the beginning the squadron took off but you had a rendezvous point. A lot of rendezvous points were like Beachy Head, you know, and they used to assemble in that area and then they took off. And of course the thing about that was that the Germans also knew we were assembling at different places, and they could actually send out their night fighters if, if they did, you know? But there was, there were umpteen different places and they couldn’t, they couldn’t get to them all [emphasis] because often there was more than one raid on one night, on the same night. And that was deviations to keep away from maybe the real big one of that occasion, you know.
TO: And how many times a week would you go on a mission?
WM: Well sometimes it was night after night, three nights in one week [emphasis]. Sometimes according to the weather, it might be about eight days, maybe a week.
TO: Mhm.
WM: The weather had a lot to do with it you know?
TO: And were you ever escorted by fighters?
WM: We, well we, we were escorted ‘cause we did quite a few daytime raids, yes, we were. But we, we were quite, we were quite happy with that, mm. ‘Cause we used to see them, we used to see them on the verges of the, of the streams, you know, mm.
TO: And do you remember what kind of fighters they were?
WM: Well the ones that we saw was Mustangs, mm. All depends on how far in you were going. If you were going a long way in that was, that was a Mustang. Sometimes, sometimes it was a Hurricane, sometimes it was a Spitfire, mm. But they were only used as short flights, mm, whereas a Mustang was built for long range, mm.
TO: And was it cold aboard the planes?
WM: Oh it was never pleasant [laughs]. At one time everyone used to have a different [?] suit. It was like a fur jacket and things like that. But once we got onto the heavies they took all that stuff away from us, saying we didn’t need it. Well that was alright for these [emphasis] people, they weren’t flying [laughs], mm.
TO: And did you ever carry food with you aboard the plane?
WM: Ever carry?
TO: Food with you?
WM: No, all I carried, used to carry was five, five barley sugars, sweets.
TO: And what sort of entertainment did you have back at the airfields?
WM: Well all depends on what the, if it was, if it was one of the pre war stations there was generally a building that was used for dances and things like that, and concerts. If it was the war time ones then sometimes all you did was make sure there, there was an empty hangar and you had something in there. But, you know, that was how it was done, no. But that, that, that was the main thing of entertainment, you know, ‘cause the picture shows and things like that within the camp always started off as I say with propaganda [laughs], mm.
TO: When you saw those propaganda things, did you ever wonder whether they were being truthful?
WM: Well, the things we used to say ‘woah, woah, woah, woah’ [emphasis] and things like that, you know, the British sense of humour, you know, mm. And that’s a fact, mm.
TO: And were there any particularly popular songs?
WM: Oh yes there was all the, all the, I’ve got, I’ve still got all the tapes here of all the popular songs, mm, oh yes, I have all them, yeah. All of the artists at that time, yeah, and these artists I have, I have run [?] many a concert here and had the same ones come performing for me.
TO: And was there anyone that you knew of who refused to go on bombing missions?
WM: I never met anybody who refused to go on a mission, but I always remember there was two people who graduated and got their wings and then they, then they refused to go on ops. But that’s the nearest I ever came to it. But they never did any ops, they never were in, they weren’t even on a bombing station. And I’m sorry to say that we heard later on that they’d transferred to the Pioneer Corps and both of them got killed [pause].
TO: You mentioned that there was a raid where you had to attack a German warship in Kiel.
WM: That’s right.
TO: Do you remember its name?
WM: Not off hand, no.
TO: Would it be the Hipper?
WM: Oh it’s quite possible, it’s quite possible it was, yeah. I’ve got the date there, I told you the dates of it the other –
TO: Mhm.
WM: Yeah.
TO: I think I remember, I remember the sinking of the Hipper though because it was sunk on the 9th of April which coincidently is my birthday.
WM: Oh [emphasis].
TO: So –
WM: Oh [emphasis], 9th of April?
TO: I think I kind of have a selfish reason for remembering that if you see what I mean. Or maybe it was the Cher [WM laughs], I’m not sure. I do know though that –
WM: No, no, no. 9th of April [pause], 13th, 13th of April.
TO: What does it say was the target, or –
WM: That was in Kiel, mm, yeah. That was the 13 of April.
TO: Mhm.
WM: That’s what that was, that was the target.
TO: Mhm.
WM: That was the one that I told you that we, that we we bombed it that night and knocked it down and we had to go back again and make sure, one of [?] the chaps said ‘are you sure you don’t want us to put it back up again?’ [TO laughs]. ‘Cause you’d obviously got somebody –
TO: Mhm.
WM: Who [laughs] would give you an answer for something [laughs], mm.
TO: And were there ever any occasions were you could, where you ever flew over neutral territory and could see the cities all illuminated?
WM: There was one night we were, we were coming back from a trip, and the next thing I saw was these lights, and I thought ‘well what the hell is going on?’ And what had happened was that the [laughs], we were almost sent to Dublin, and what that was, was that the wind speed was ferocious and what we thought we’d found out was that we were nothing near [emphasis], we were nothing near the wind speed, what the actual wind speed was, and of course as soon as we saw that we turned round and we were on the way back.
TO: Mm.
WM: But that was the nearest I’ve been to being on neutral territory, you know.
TO: Mm.
WM: From that point of view, mm.
TO: Mm, and were there ever any occasions where you were accidently fired at by allied anti-aircraft guns?
WM: Well, what we, what we had was that we had the Junkers 52-53 aircraft, and we used to do special missions on that and we used to fly low [emphasis]. And what had happened was that that one had been liberated in the desert and we were using it on special duties, but there was no esigners [?], painted black, and going out was fine. Coming back [emphasis], it wasn’t until we got into our own territory that we used to get a few pot-shots at us, you know? Probably because [laughs] we were flying without the proper identification and things like that, that’s why we get into trouble. But we never actually, never actually had anything serious happen to us.
TO: Mhm.
WM: But that was under secret risk [?].
TO: Mhm. So was it, so you were trying to use, you were using German aircraft for the missions over France?
WM: Yeah.
TO: For the SOE.
WM: Yeah, SOE, yeah.
TO: So it wasn’t always Lysanders then?
WM: No we, we used many, you know, the Lysander was for the agents.
TO: Mhm.
WM: But as I said before we used to use other aircraft for taking other stuff in, for Maquis and things like that, you know.
TO: Mhm.
WM: Oh yes, mm.
TO: And did you ever meet any senior commanders during the war?
WM: Well every now and again you had a parade where we didn’t actually, we didn’t actually get to meet [emphasis] them as such. Not like, not like last Sunday, no.
TO: Mm. And were some missions much more dangerous than others or were they more or less the same?
WM: Well, what we used to do, we used to classify every mission as dangerous, because if you didn’t and you dropped your guard, that’s when you would have been in trouble. I don’t say they weren’t, but we never loaded [?] to be.
TO: And were there ever any times where you, where your missions were just taking photographs of areas?
WM: Oh yes, we had that [emphasis] from time to time, yes, mm.
TO: Could you tell me about any of those?
WM: Well they were, they were done by 138 Squadron and that was, you know, the idea behind that was sometimes it was targets, that they had been bombed, and sometimes they might have been targets that we flew past. We passed them as if we were going somewhere else and we might have been taking them then. But we got a lot of practice in that, because that’s another story I can give you, mm.
TO: And did you hear how other events of the war were going?
WM: Oh yes, we were kept up to date, we were kept up to date. As I say, between the news reels and bulletins, you were kept up to date, mm.
TO: Were you ever worried that Germany might win?
WM: Well, we, I would never say that, that I was frightened of them winning [?][emphasis], but we always worried every now and again where it might have been something that was going the wrong way, but not, not for an all out win no. No, no, no.
TO: And what was the most feared German night fighter?
WM: The Junkers-88, ‘cause she’d a cannon on her, and she, she actually fitted onto her guns that would fly, fire upwards and try and get under the bellies of the Lancasters. And that’s where we lost quite a number of Lancasters, firing guns from the, from the JU28, JU88s, yeah, mhm [pause].
TO: And did you ever feel any animosity towards Germany?
WM: Well, that’s a difficult one because, you know, there was people who lost friends, relations and all the rest of it. Some of them got quite bitter but on the whole people just took it as war.
TO: And how do you feel today?
WM: Ah, what I can say is that I have been involved in promoting rugby, football all over Europe and all over Africa, that’s my answer to that.
TO: And how do you feel today about your wartime service?
WM: It was something – when I had to something and that’s what I did, mm.
TO: And do you think the war was worth the price?
WM: I think yes. I think yes, because that’s another story I can tell you, that you haven’t asked me about.
TO: Yes, tell me, yeah.
WM: Well after, after the war finished, we still had special duties to do, and one of the first was to bring, bring back prisoners of war which were British, well there was all sorts involved but most of the ones we brought back were British, and a lot of the stories that they related to me including two of my uncles who were prisoners of war since 1940. Some of the stories they had to say was horrific. Anyway, when we finished that job bringing back the prisoners of war, we, we then went onto ferrying people from parts of Germany down into a place called Eastridge [?] in France and we had camps there where we took the refugees into, and a lot of these people thought that we were going to lock them up, same as they’d been before. But it was trying to tell them that it was to help them and that the, the camp was just secured so that the local people wouldn’t be coming in to try and get what they were getting, ‘cause this was to try and build them up again, you know. But then of course after that, the next big thing after that, we, we were put on photograph and the whole of Europe. We started off with photographing the likes of London from about two thousand feet, and then towns like [unclear] Woking here, from about four thousand feet and then the countryside was from, anything from ten to twenty thousand feet. We did that for the whole of Europe, mm. And that was 138, 138 Squadron again, because what we did, we’d started doing it at Tuddenham and then when they realised that we were quite successful, they transferred us over to RAF Benson and we did that over at Benson. And then of course we, we had several substations, substations in Norway, substations in France, we had substations around the country here at different places where we would load [?] to land and fuel up, and we had special signal recognition that we could, we could use and that went on for quite some, quite some time, ‘cause that photographing Europe was one of Churchill’s ideas that he left behind after he was out of office.
TO: And during those photography missions, could you see the damage from the bombing?
WM: Oh yes that was the idea, mm. Anyway you done it at two thousand feet you could see right down, no [unclear] of course, mhm, mm. That’s where we, well that’s where we started [emphasis] photographing, mm, but it was the while, the whole area was done, mm.
TO: Are there any other missions of the war that stand out a lot to you which you’d like to tell me about?
WM: Personal ones?
TO: Well any, any ones you were on from, that were missions that, but only if you’re willing to talk about, don’t if you –
WM: No.
TO: If you don’t want to talk about it it’s fine.
WM: No, as I say in general, in general we, we carried out what we had to do, and as I say, 138 Squadron of special duties, we were doing all sorts of things and there’s lots of things that, that we still should not talk about, because we are sworn to secrecy about them, because that was in conjecture [?] with SOE, ‘cause there was lots of people who maybe still, maybe not in favour of some of these operations.
TO: Mhm. What about some of the other bombing missions? Are there any others that you’d like, any others that stand out that you’d like to tell me about?
WM: You know, you know, the big, a big, a big thing was that there was missions we knew [emphasis] –about and there was other missions that people were on that we got to know about and [tape beeps] I can assure you that once the reason, these missions – people said ‘oh that could have been us,’ you know? ‘Cause even the Dambusters, ones we were a back up squadron for that. It wasn’t a method, it wasn’t just a method of a few fellows doing that, there was back up squadrons as well.
TO: And when did you hear about the Holocaust?
WM: Well that, that’s hard to say because we, we, we got, we got to know in bits and pieces. As I say, I started to learn a lot of that from our own prisoners of war that we were bringing home, and then of course we found out from other people who, who had been there in the camps. And, course the big thing about it was you didn’t realise just how widespread it was. I don’t think anybody did at that particular time. I know there was some friends of mine who visited Belson and visited the other ones in person and as I say, they were horrified how the treatment that people was getting. But that’s a different category all together you know, that was someone away from, away from a normal war. That was, that wasn’t the same.
TO: Were there ever any times when you were tasked with dropping leaflets?
WM: Oh yes we had that from time to time, mm, we had that, mm. We were never sure whether the leaflets were doing any good or not.
TO: Arthur Harris said after the war that never engaged in those leaflet dropping exercises because it only accomplished two things. One, it gave the German defenders practice in getting ready for the real thing and two, it supplied a substantial quantity of toilet paper for –
WM: That’s right.
TO: The Germans.
WM: That’s more or less correct, yes, mm.
TO: Mm [page turns]. Did you ever wish you’d been in something other than the Royal Air Force?
WM: I had been in the Guyun [?] Southern Highlanders –
TO: Mhm.
WM: But not, not an active service, no. But I never, never felt as if I should have been there, no.
TO: And did you ever wish that you hadn’t been an observer or a navigator? Did you ever wish that you’d been a different position on board the aircraft?
WM: Well we did, on aircrew we went around the different jobs in case anything happened to one of us up there. We actually flew in different positions [emphasis] from time to time [emphasis].
TO: So did you ever fly the Lancaster yourself?
WM: Oh yes, yes. Oh yes.
TO: But the pilot would always do the takeoff and landing?
WM: Well that was the idea, although we had to do, I had to be able to land the aircraft.
TO: Mhm. So would you consider yourself a flight engineer as well as an observer?
WM: No, observer, my observer, my observer – I covered all these courses –
TO: Mhm.
WM: As an observer, mm. The flight engineer came into his own with the four engine bombers, mm.
TO: And you mentioned you were on Wellingtons for a while.
WM: Mm.
TO: Were they generally reliable?
WM: Oh course [emphasis]. They were the most reliable bomber that we had.
TO: And did you hear about the, how the early bombing of the war was progressing?
WM: Well the thing is, everybody hoped that it was for the best because there’s everything else. There’s, the accuracy improved. Obviously the saturation bombing was started by the Germans. They started saturation bombing. Our people tried to go for individual targets and alright, after that there was [emphasis] saturation bombing, you know.
TO: And were your airfields ever attacked by German fighters?
WM: Not to my knowledge no.
TO: Mm. And I’m sorry to ask this, but were any of your friends killed during the war?
WM: Yes. A lot of school friends, school friends and friends from the Boys Brigade, oh yes, mm. School friends were the younger ones but the older friends were the ones I’d made through the Boys Brigade, and they were, most of them was on aircrew [emphasis], different categories.
TO: How, how was morale in Bomber Command throughout the war would you say?
WM: Good, it was good. It was excellent.
TO: And why do you think it stayed so high despite the losses?
WM: It was the camaraderie of sticking together, yeah, oh yes, mm. We were all volunteers, and we’re still volunteers [laughs].
TO: And you know after Dunkirk, was there a general fear of invasion?
WM: Not fear [emphasis] of invasion. There was, what did I say, there was – people didn’t think it was imminent but [phone rings] it could happen, you know? Hello?
Caller on the phone: Hello.
WM: Hello dear.
Caller on the phone: How are you?
WM: I’m very, very [tape beeps].
TO: And what did you think of the atomic bombs that were used against Japan?
WM: Well the big thing about that is that it could have happened to us, because as we know from hindsight, that the Germans had been working on that, and that could have been us. And of course, if the development of the V2s had come, could have come, come all the way across the Atlantic into America [emphasis]. As far as I’m concerned it’s, it’s one of these weapons that it could, it could obliterate mankind if it went on too long. And of course we noticed what happened with the aftermath of these things, but our war was nothing compared with that. I also, also think that if it hadn’t been for the, for the ones dropped in Japan that millions of troops would have been massacred, and it doesn’t say how far on everything else would have went if they hadn’t been dropped because that may have gone on for years and years and years, so it may have been at the time was a good thing.
TO: And, just going back to the crew that you were good friends with –
WM: Mm.
TO: Did, did they talk much about their lives before they joined the Air Force?
WM: Yeah, we all had that, but yeah. The pilot, pilot was a sheep farmer in New Zealand, our radar [?] man was an accountant in New Zealand, our wireless operator, his father had a joinery business across in Lanes [?] Bay, across the water from where I come from. The, the rear gunner was an, a surveyor for the [unclear] down the water here and the mid upper gunner his, his family had got a hotel in Canterbury in Kent, and that’s quite strange was that I got married on a Friday night in Scotland, and we had another party in the Fleur-de-Lis Hotel in Canterbury on the Wednesday following, because the crew was all going home to New Zealand and places like that. But no, we did, and as I say, Jimmy Dagg, his great-grandson is playing rugby as Israel Dagg for the All Blacks, [unclear] rugby, mm.
TO: And did you ever actually, I know you could see them from the sky, but after the war did you ever go through any of the cities like Berlin or?
WM: No I didn’t. All I did was flew, flew over them you know, mm.
TO: Mhm. And what’s your opinion on Britain’s involvement in recent wars like Afghanistan?
WM: Well there, there again the – that’s an entirely different thing. It all depends how far back you get. It’s always been said that, that nobody ever wins a war in Afghanistan, ‘cause even going back to even before Christ [emphasis] there’s been, been wars and people trying to take over and trying to settle Afghanistan region. But some, some of the other, some of the other wars that goes on, you just wonder why, no, because – on the other hand you don’t really get down to it, you know. The likes of Korea was quite a war, and also the McArthur at the time, he was right up to the Chinese border and he was, he wasn’t defeated or anything but the American government told him to come back, and of course that was reintruded when the, when the two states were formed, Northern and South of Korea. Now, if you talk about Sing, Malaysia. Now in Malaysia there was thousands of troops and everything in there, and where I was from in Africa, there was African regiments in there from, from Rhodesia, from Kenya, from Tanganyika. They were called the King’s African Rifles and they Rhodesians, the Rhodesian regiment, they were all involved in there, no. And then of course you got these other skirmishes up, was up in Europe and there again, they all seemed to arise from either petty politics or religions. If you, if you go into some of these other ones where there’s still fighting today, and you turn around and you say to Syria, but what is it? It’s one against one, it’s a civil war. That’s really what it is, but why can’t they get together on it? You know, there was a civil war in Spain pre-1938. Now that was a vicious war as well, but 1938, thirty-nine it came to a close and a person who took over Franco and the nation was brought together again. Before Franco died, he brought back the king and that was, that was brought back and that settled both people, both lots of the people in Spain. Now you see all these other ones that’s gone on, skirmishes and even in the South American countries, that’s all about drugs, that’s not really about people, it’s about drugs and things like that which is entirely [emphasis] different thing entirely [emphasis]. Now holy wars as I call them can never be settled, ‘cause one, one against the other they will never, never change [emphasis]. What happens with these things is they just goes on and on and on, and that, and that’s been going on for centuries, or one country wants to take over the other one and it’s through, it’s though their, their type of religions it happens, which is wrong.
TO: And one of my last questions now, what’s your best memory of your time in the war?
WM: When I met my wife [both laugh]. I came, I came back from a raid, a raid on Bordeaux and I was given three days leave. Instead of that I got it made up to ten days and I, I went home and I got a lift in fish truck. I was never sure if it was real fish or scrap fish for [laughs] for to go for manures or something like that. But anyway, I got there and the first thing my mother did was put all my clothes in the boiler and she’d have put me into the boiler if I hadn’t got into the bath. Anyway, that night I, I went along to the local dance, the big pavilion, the big high balcony and all the people up there spectating, and I was dancing with this young lady, and my friend wanted to dance with her. ‘Come on, come on, this is my one, you go and pinch your own lady,’ you know, ‘your own girl,’ you know? Anyway, what I didn’t know was that her mother and father, two sisters and sister-in-law and some kids were all up on the balcony, and every time I danced, being in the Air Force they were shouting ‘hooray,’ because their son Walter was in the Air Force in India, and my friend Vann Muir [?] was in the Navy, so I was winning according to them, and I did [laughs]. That was my happiest [emphasis] that was my happiest [emphasis] occasion in the whole war, mm.
TO: Mhm. Well that’s all of my questions –
WM: Alright.
TO: Do you have anything at all that you want to add?
WM: No, it’s just [unclear] want to say this, I’ve had another two of these interviews, there might be a little discrepancies or differences but –
TO: That’s fine.
WM: It’s all going from in here you know.
TO: That’s fine, your memory’s been great –
WM: Oh.
TO: And I’ve really enjoyed what you’ve told me.
WM: Oh, no.
TO: So thank you so much for telling me.
WM: Oh okay, thank you, welcome, thank you very much.
TO: Thank you so much for your wartime service as well.
WM: I must see you from time to time somewhere –
TO: Yeah.
WM: Along the line. You come to some of these gatherings from the Royal Air Force, I’ll be there.
TO: Mhm, thank you.
WM: Yeah.
TO: It would be great to see you.
WM: Thank you very much indeed.
TO: Thank you.
WM: Anyway –
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Interview with Bill Moore. Three
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02:50:38 audio recording
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Bill Moore grew up in Scotland and volunteered for the Royal Air Force. He completed 36 operations as a navigator with 138 and 161 Squadrons.
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138 Squadron
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Bolingbroke
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military service conditions
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Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
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https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/315/3472/APayneAJ150811.2.mp3
ee6769cc020c59ef42f4867ae1c03636
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Payne, Alan
Alan John Payne
Alan J Payne
Alan Payne
A J Payne
A Payne
Description
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Two items. An oral history interview with Alan John Payne DFC (1315369 and 173299 Royal Air Force) and his log book. He completed 18 operations as a bomb aimer with 630 Squadron.
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2015-08-11
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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Payne, AJ
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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CB: Right. My name is Chris Brockbank and I’m conducting an interview with Alan Payne in Wendover, Buckinghamshire along with his grandson, Aaron Payne. And we’re going to talk about his life and keep the tape running until we need to have a break. So, Alan could I ask you to talk about your life from the earliest days please and then your childhood and how you came to join the RAF and then your experiences. And then after the RAF what you did. So over to you —
AP: Well, I was born here in Wendover. My father was a coal merchant. He had his own business. He even had, he even had his own coal trucks. Coal trucks. And I attended a local junior school until I passed to go to the Wycombe Technical Institute where I did technical studies. I had quite a happy childhood. I had one brother who unfortunately now has dementia. He’s younger than me but he does suffer with dementia. But then as I say, I had a childhood in Wendover. Local school. Then went to High Wycombe Technical College. The war was on then. I didn’t want to join the army or the navy so I volunteered for the Royal Air Force. I was seventeen when I volunteered. So, volunteering for the air force meant I was safe from being recruited in to the army which I did not want. And I had about a year to wait until I was called up and I got notice to report to Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. That was the recruiting place. Lord’s Cricket Ground. Just basic stuff there. Lots of inoculations. We were put up at Abbey Wood and then from there we were sent out to Torquay first of all for basic training. Drill. Law. This type of thing. Then from there I went to Brighton for a time. There again it was basic training. They were, they housed us in the hotels along the front. One thing I do remember about that time was Richard Tauber who was appearing in the, in The Pier Concert Hall and I saw him and thought what a wonderful chap he was. He was an Austrian Jew of course and he got out of Germany before the trouble started. But that’s one thing I do remember about that time there. This is all basic stuff.
[pause]
CB: So, after Brighton what did you do?
AP: After Brighton.
CB: What did you do in Brighton?
AP: Well, after Brighton — I did mention Torquay didn’t I?
CB: Yes.
AP: And then Brighton. Then from Brighton we were sent, we were sent out to South Africa. I was quite lucky really because I was sent to train with the South African Air Force and we were — we had to transport up to Liverpool. Got on a boat called the Volendam. A Dutch boat. The Volendam. And we departed for South Africa in convoy and that journey took, I think, four or five weeks. We stopped at Freetown on the way to refuel and then into Durban. And from — Durban was just a holding centre. And then from Durban we were posted to East London. East London. Where we started our training in flying and I hadn’t really flown before then. But we started flying then on Avro Ansons and that was basic navigation. And at Queenstown — that was navigation and then, and then from there we were posted to the gunnery school where we did bomb aiming and air gunnery. Pause it just a minute Chris while I just make reference?
CB: Ok. So, your logbook will remind you.
AP: Port Alfred.
CB: Yeah.
AP: It was Port Alfred where we went to for gunnery.
CB: Ok.
AP: A very nice little seaside town not far from Queenstown. Went to Port Alfred. There we were on Airspeed Oxfords. And then whilst there for [pause] to get us used to the night time flying we were sent to a little place called Aliwal North. And the runways there were lit by flares. So there was no lighting there. Just these flares that we had to land on but that gave us our basic training for night flying. And it was at Port Alfred that we passed out and had a, we had a passing out parade in Queenstown. We had a very good do there and I do have the, a copy of the menu.
[pause]
So, having, having finished our training we, we were sent down to Cape Town and we sailed back from Cape Town in the old Queen Mary with no escort at all because she relied on speed to get us through. I think she did about thirty three, thirty five knots. So we sailed back in good time and on the way back too we were taking a whole load of Italian prisoners of war and we escorted them back to — Liverpool that we went in to. And then to finish our training I was posted to Dumfries in Scotland where we did basic training. Bombing, map reading, this type of thing. And from Dumfries we were sent to a holding station at Harrogate. And I always remember the CO there was Leslie Ames, the old Kent cricketer. He was the CO at this hotel. Had a very cushy job really, in the war, didn’t he? But we were there for a few weeks and then we were posted to Turweston — an Operational Training Unit where we were on Wellington bombers. And it was at Turweston and this, and this other station, Silverstone that we were crewed up. And it was rather strange — we were all let loose in a big hangar and we had to sort of had to find our pilot and navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator. We just got together and sorted ourselves out. That was the way it went in those days. I was lucky because my pilot, Geoff Probert, was an ex-guardsman. We called him grandfather because he was, he was thirty odd. He’d volunteered as a pilot and we were all in our early twenties so he looked after us really. And he was a jolly good captain. Anyway, we did our OTU training and we were all, we were all crewed up and ready to go and at Silverstone we also did some cross-country stuff. And then the next move was to Winthorpe. A Conversion Unit. And we converted then to Lancasters and that’s when the training really started. And I was there in October, November ‘43. And then at the end of November we were posted to East Kirkby. That was, that was the operational station. We were posted to 630 Squadron which was a wing of 57 Squadron. I always remember that part of my service well really because it was just like a builder’s site. There was mud everywhere. There was just basic, basic accommodation in Nissen huts. A central stove. Everything was running with condensation. The clothes were damp. Everything was damp. And it was a very cold winter then. In fact, we did our first op on the 2nd of December to Berlin. And everything was centred on getting the aircraft operational. The fact of our comfort didn’t really enter into things but we managed and, but as I say it was pretty rough at that time. There was no basic comforts. There was no basic comforts at all and the weather was so cold too. We started off with six trips to Berlin and the weather was so bad we hardly saw the target at all. We were bombing on Wanganui flares through cloud cover. During that time, we did Berlin, Stettin, Brunswick, Berlin, Magdeburg. As I say, six Berlin trips. But, at the same time although the weather was bad we did find time to get out to the Red Lion at Revesby which was our local pub. And we had a bit of relief there.
[pause]
The worst trip I had really was the one to Nuremberg. That was at the end of March. It was March 30th. We were attacked then by an ME109 but luckily, he missed us but he did fly pretty close. But we were lucky really. As I said we had some near squeaks. And one of the things that did, that I always found amazing was the fact that you’d be flying along in the dark and all of a sudden you got over the target and there were planes everywhere. And we had two, we had two narrow go’s where we nearly collided with another Lancaster. But as I say we were very lucky in many respects. Another op we did was the one to Mailly-le-Camp. That was, that was a military camp and that was a bit, that was being marked by Group Captain Cheshire. And everything went wrong that night. Everything was late. We had to circle and circle until we could get in to bomb on the flares that had been set by Cheshire. And then following on then, on the run up to D-Day we were more or less doing trips on marshalling yards, bridges, anything that would hamper the movement of the Germans. When D-Day approached [pause] when we finished our tour, just before D-Day in fact, although our last trip, the end of March 1944 was mine laying in Kiel Bay. And there we were hit by a — attacked and hit by a JU88. We caught fire but luckily the fire, for some good reason went out. We were jolly lucky then. But as I say we’d done twenty nine trips then and the CO came to us. He said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘You’ve had it now. You can finish.’ But on the social side there I did know a young WAAF girl called Pat who more or less adopted the crew. No. We adopted her. And she took a liking to me and we spent a lot of time together. I’ve got a little picture of her here. We used to go cycling together and went to the pub at Revesby. I got very fond of Pat but of course when it came to [unclear] to go to see her. I don’t know whether he has or not. As I say by the end, by the time we’d finished, the end of May, the weather was, the weather was better but it had been a pretty dreadful winter. Anyway, at the end of our tour we all broke up and we all went our different ways. First of all, I went out to Moreton Valence where we were doing instructing and doing compass swings and basic stuff. And from there to Llandwrog in North Wales. And then I was quite lucky then because we were sort of messing about doing not much in particular and then a posting came through. They wanted, they wanted a navigator to go out to Palestine. So, I was, in the first instance I was sent out to Saltby, a Conversion Unit. And then to Matching and I crewed-up then with a guy called Flying Officer Nichols. And we were, as I say on Halifaxes which was a better aircraft for transport work than the Lancaster. The Lanc had a very narrow fuselage whereas with a Halifax you could get two lines of chaps down either side of the aircraft. And we did container dropping, glider towing. Anything which would help the 6th Airborne. We were attached to the 6th Airborne Division then and we went out with them to Palestine which, in 1946, wasn’t very healthy really. Because the Irgum Zvai Leumi were — and Begin, they weren’t very happy with us then. They blew up the King David Hotel. They shot two of our sergeants in [unclear]. You may remember that. We always had to look at, mind our backs because the — at that time, I shouldn’t say this but the Jewish weren’t very friendly towards us. And we used to go out to, they used to, they were bringing their migrants in by boat and part of our duty was to fly over the Med to report boats coming in. At the same time we did exercises down to Bagdad with the Airborne division. We did quite a bit of flying up through, up through Italy and we helped then to bring some of the migrants back to Palestine. It was quite an interesting time really although we had to watch what we were doing. But as I say we used to fly to Bagdad.
CB: What were you doing when you flew to Bagdad? What was the main reason for that?
AP: It was an exercise for the 6th Airborne Division.
CB: So, you were moving troops.
AP: It was a very good camp at Bagdad actually. They had a, they had a very nice camp outside and we went there two or three times. There were lakes there and the flying boats used to come in there, you know. I quite enjoyed the time out there in a way had it not been for the fact that we were liable to be sort of potted at. We also went down to Khartoum which was one of the hottest places I’ve ever known. In fact, it was so hot there that we couldn’t run the engines up. We had to be towed to the end of the runway, start the engines and take off so they did not overheat, you see. That again was an exercise with the Airborne division and they would do, they would do parachute drops. That type of thing.
[pause]
AP: We did quite a few trips up too, from Aqir airbase in Palestine. We did quite a few trips up to Udine. Udine. By stopping at Malta to refuel and then flying up to the coast of Italy in to Udine. And there again, it was a case of exercising with the 6th Airborne Division.
CB: So, you weren’t doing any doing bombing. You were —
AP: Oh no. No bombing at all. No. It was all —
CB: Not even practice. It was moving people.
AP: Moving people about. Troops. Migrants. And then, come the end of August it was time for me to be demobbed and that’s the only time I’ve flown in a Dakota. I was flown down to Cairo with some other guys. Then we were flown back by Dakota to London via Malta into Heathrow. And Heathrow then, of course, was just a series of huts. There was nothing like there is today. But that’s the only time I’ve flown in a Dakota. Although, a few weeks ago, when I was up at East Kirkby I sat down at a bench with a colleague of mine. Got chatting. And the guy I spoke to owned the Dakota at East Kirkby. Maybe you know him. Do you know him?
CB: I don’t. No.
AP: Well, anyway, he happened to be there and it was his aircraft and we chatted away and he’s very fond of the Dakota. But that more or less tied up my time in, with the Royal Air Force and I didn’t know quite what to do for a time. But I had always wanted to go into building so I applied to become an architect and I was lucky enough to be accepted at the School of Architecture at Oxford. I had to wait a few months before there was a vacancy and our course at that time only consisted of thirty people. There were two girls and the rest of us were men and half of them were ex-service people. In fact Oxford in those days was full of ex-servicemen and we had to compete with the youngsters. But after five years I passed. That must have been in [pause] ’46 ’47 I went to Oxford. It must have been the early ‘50s. And in those days jobs were hard to find and luckily I had some contact in North Wales and I was found a position there to start my architectural career. And from there things just moved on. Do you want — is that?
CB: Married?
AP: Pardon?
CB: When you got married.
AP: Oh yeah. Well, back in, back at the end of the war.
CB: Ok.
AP: Sorry. I left that out.
CB: How did you come to meet your wife?
AP: Oh, at the ‘drome in Llandwrog in North Wales.
CB: That was an OTU was it? Training place.
AP: Yeah. It wasn’t an OTU. No. It was a training place. Actually, I was there on — it would be — not D-Day. VE day. VE day in Caernarfon and the whole town turned out. Do you know Caernarfon? Very nice little town.
CB: Yeah.
AP: We went into Carnarvon and I’d met Gwen then and we went out together and celebrated around the castle.
CB: Yeah.
AP: And that was before, before I went to Oxford of course.
CB: So were you able to earn money while you were at Oxford?
AP: Well, I’ll say one thing for the Labour government then they paid for our fees and gave us a living allowance. So that was one, that was one credit that we had, we had to bear. Not bear. To put up with.
CB: And Gwen was working as well.
AP: She was. Yes. Yes, she was working for a time. Then the children came along and that was it.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Housewives didn’t work in those days did they?
CB: They didn’t.
AP: They stayed home and stayed put.
CB: No. No. Going back to your early days. How were you actually selected first of all? How were you selected for aircrew because you might have done a ground job? So at what point —
AP: Well I remember going to Oxford. There was a recruiting centre there and I’d put down for, I’d passed as pilot, navigator, bomb aimer.
CB: Yeah.
AP: That was the categories. I passed for that and I had a medical at the same time there. That was in Oxford back in, when I was only seventeen. And then they selected you for aircrew training. Everybody wanted to be a pilot of course but it was a matter of luck when you, when the time came. If they wanted navigators you were a navigator. You know. Or pilot. As things turned out it’s just as well I did go as a navigator I suppose.
CB: In what way?
AP: Well, I survived.
CB: Right. Going then on to the training in South Africa. You wore the brevet of an observer. So how was the course structured and how did you have that brevet rather than a navigator brevet?
AP: We were the last course to do the observer. We were the last people to do the observer course. And after that it became NavB and bomb aimers. But we did the whole lot. We did the three. Bomb aiming, navigation, air gunnery. We did the lot. After that the NavB’s just did navigation.
Yeah.
But for that reason, when we got back to the UK the Lancs were coming in. They wanted bomb aimers. And having done the observer course we were, of course, selected to take on that job you see.
CB: But you did navigation. Oh you didn’t.
AP: I didn’t — well I did map reading of course in Bomber Command.
CB: Yeah. Right.
AP: Which was quite important in the run up to D-day because a lot of our targets then were marshalling yards, bridges, that type of thing and we had to do map reading and pin point bombing.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Because we daren’t drop the bombs on the French domestic.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Sites.
CB: Which was the problem with that Cheshire raid. Identifying the military camp which was close to a village.
AP: Mailly-le-Camp. Yeah. That was quite a tricky raid that was. In fact, that picture you’ve seen was done a day or two before or a day or two after.
CB: So, what was, what actually caused the holdup and why were so many planes circling? Waiting.
AP: There was a hold up. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. We never did find out but everything — we were late getting there. I mean, we got there too early or Cheshire was too — he was in a Mosquito and he went in after we did and marked the target. But it was a very successful raid. Although we did lose quite a few aircraft in collisions. We had to circle around waiting for these markers to go down.
CB: Yeah.
AP: And Nuremberg has been well documented by John Nicholl of course but that was a complete disaster because it was a beautiful moonlight night. A beautiful night and you could see for miles but the winds were, the winds were behind us and we got there far too early.
CB: Right.
AP: I believe Rusty was on that raid, wasn’t he?
CB: He was. Yes.
AP: Well he would tell you that. I suppose.
CB: Yes. So, in terms of bomb aiming you’ve got the markers sent down. What colour were they and how did you respond?
AP: Either red or green.
CB: Right.
AP: Well we were told, we were told by the Pathfinders which to bomb on, you see. I didn’t, I didn’t like that aspect of flying really because you didn’t know quite what you were going to hit. It could be a hospital, a school. You didn’t know. Whereas with the runup to D-day you had specified military targets and you knew that you weren’t affecting the civilian population. Because I wasn’t at all happy with bombing. I didn’t do the Dresden raid thank goodness but wearing my other cap it seemed so unnecessary to me to have bombed Dresden. It was a beautiful city. I have been back since and they’ve rebuilt it and even so it did seem a great shame to do that at that point in time.
CB: So, in the Nuremberg raid did you get any damage to your aircraft?
AP: No. Luckily, we had a very good run but all around us we saw aircraft going down. Ninety six went down that night. As you know.
CB: Yes.
AP: And we were told, you know, that the Germans were using scarecrows just to frighten us. They weren’t scarecrows they were Lancs blowing up. It’s a horrifying sight to see a Lancaster, you know, completely burning out.
CB: Did you know about Schrage Musik then?
AP: Hmm?
CB: Did you know about the German upward firing Schrage Musik?
AP: Oh yes. Yeah.
CB: At that time?
AP: Well, yes. We had H2S you know. H2S. And we were convinced that they were homing in on that. As soon as we got over the coast. Because that used to give us a picture of the ground on the, on the radar screen —
CB: Yes.
AP: But we were, we were convinced that the Germans were homing in on this. It may not have been the case but it was, it was one constant battle between the fighters and us, you know.
CB: Yes.
AP: We had Window as you know which was metallic strips. That used to help. No. In a way we were very lucky and of course having Geoff Probert, a very senior chap, he was thirty two. In fact, we called him grandad because we were all in our early twenties, you know and he used to keep us in order.
CB: He did.
AP: Yes. He was very good like that.
CB: Yes. What about other members of the crew? What were they like? So, navigator. Who was he?
AP: Tom Mackie. Tom Mackie was the navigator. He did the same sort of training that I did but he just missed out on the observer course and did the NavB and do you know after the war he set up a firm called [pause] and he became a millionaire with his own aircraft. I’ve forgotten the name now.
Other: City Electric.
AP: What?
Other: City Electric.
AP: City Electrical. Which is worldwide. He died about a year ago. Because I was very friendly with Tom. But he had, he had his own aircraft. In fact we flew — I did one or two flights with him after the war. He and it all started with his gratuity. He got in, he got into the motor trade just at the right time and sort of built, sort of built an empire.
CB: So, he was the navigator.
AP: Yeah.
CB: What about your wireless operator signal? Who was that?
AP: He was the one chap — we do know the others have passed on but our wireless operator was [pause] well we just lost, lost track of him. We tried to locate him. Tom, our navigator, used to go to Canada where we thought he was but he could never find him.
CB: What was his name?
AP: Lawrence. Vic Lawrence. He was the wireless operator. Nice guy but we just lost track of him so whether he’s alive or not we just do not know.
CB: What about the flight engineer? Who was that?
AP: Eric. Eric. [pause] the name’s gone. It’ll come back to me.
CB: Was he a busy man in the sorties?
AP: Oh yes. He was nearly a second pilot in a sense. He sat next to the pilot and he adjusted the, he sort of adjusted some of the instruments and on take-off he would hold the throttles open. How stupid, the names gone. When he, when he left the RAF he moved down to the coast near Bournemouth. I saw him a few times after. And he, I’ve got a picture of him up there. His wife was an ATA pilot.
CB: Oh.
AP: She flew aircraft from the factories to the squadrons. Mainly Spitfires of course.
CB: Yeah.
AP: I don’t think women ever flew Lancasters. Not to my knowledge.
CB: A couple of them did.
AP: Pardon?
CB: A couple of them did.
AP: Did they?
CB: Yeah.
AP: Well I don’t know. I was told that it was most unlikely but you say they did.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: It was a big, complicated aircraft to fly — the old Lanc.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. And then your mid-upper. Who was that?
AP: A guy called Bradd. B R A D D. Bradd. What happened was after two raids our original mid-upper gunner went LMF. He couldn’t take it any more after two raids. And I was sent to pick him up. It’s mentioned in this book by John Nicholl. The names are — I’m sorry I should have done more research before you turned up shouldn’t I?
CB: It’s ok. We can look it up. So, what exactly happened to him?
AP: He just didn’t like it. He thought, he thought he wouldn’t survive. Well we all thought we wouldn’t survive really but there we go. We pressed on.
CB: Was he the only one person you met who was an LMF victim as it were?
AP: Yeah. The only one. The only one I met. And then when he left we had a guy come along called Bradd. Dennis Bradd. B R A D D. And when I’d done, when we’d done the tour he hadn’t quite finished his. He had to do some more ops to make up his thirty and unfortunately, he went down two or three trips after which was most unfortunate because he was a nice guy.
CB: And what about the rear gunner?
AP: Yes. He was, he was a bit older than most of us. He was in his late twenties. He survived but he’s passed on now of course.
CB: What was his name?
AP: [pause] Dear me. It’ll come back to me. It’ll come back to me. I just cannot remember at the moment.
CB: Ok. When you were doing your training what sort of people were there in South Africa? Did they tend to be only British people or did people come from other of the Commonwealth countries?
AP: No. The people that trained us were mainly South Africans. South African Air Force
CB: Trained you.
AP: Trained us. And they were very good. I always say that. I think we had a good training in South Africa and of course the weather was good. There was no hold ups with the weather. You could get on with things whereas the guys that trained in this country and Canada had problems with the weather sometimes.
CB: Yeah.
AP: But you see the air gunners joined us on the squadrons. They didn’t have any training really. They were mainly basic. Perhaps with a low education rate — without being unkind. As you know.
CB: Well their role was to run the guns.
AP: Run the guns. Yes.
CB: What do you see their role as being in the aircraft as a crew member? What was their main role?
AP: Well mainly to look out for fighters coming in at us.
CB: So, because they had guns their job was to defend the aircraft. Was that right? How often, in your experience, did they use their guns?
AP: Very seldom. Very seldom.
CB: Why was that?
AP: Well maybe we were lucky. I don’t know. But I think the rear gunner used his guns once and the same with the mid-upper chap that came along.
CB: The one who went LMF, it wasn’t a bad experience of a fighter attack that caused him —
AP: Not at all. No. Not at all. I always remember I had to, I had to go along to a — I was trying to think — it was in the Midlands somewhere. He was being, he was being held at a police station. I can’t remember why. But I had to sign for a live body and I’d never done that before. A live body of the gunner. He was quite a nice guy. He just couldn’t take it. in fact, on the way back we went in to Nottingham to a dance hall and I had a few beers with him, you know and then brought him back to camp and of course as soon as he got back to camp he was whisked, whisked into the guardroom and then they used to tear off the brevets and the sergeant’s stripes and they really went through it you know.
CB: Did they do that in public? On a parade?
AP: Yeah, I did see it happen. There was a place at Coventry where they did that. It was done on parade. It was very dreadful really what they did. In my opinion.
CB: So why did they do that?
AP: Just to set an example really. I mean, in the First World War of course they used to shoot them didn’t they?
CB: Yeah.
AP: Anybody that —
CB: Yeah
AP: At least they didn’t do that. No. You were pretty tough after that training. Well the gunners never had much of a training. I don’t know why he ever became an aircrew member really.
CB: How did he fit? Before he went LMF how did he fit in the crew? Was it fairly obvious that he was —
AP: Well we never had him. You see we never had the gunners for long. We did the basic training with Con Unit, OTUs and then the gunners only came along later on.
CB: So normally the gunners would join at the OTU on the Wellington. Wouldn’t they?
AP: Not they didn’t in the case with myself. No.
CB: Right. Ok.
AP: They joined us later.
CB: Right. At the —
AP: It was just the basic members.
CB: At the Heavy Conversion Unit.
AP: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AP: They joined at the Conversion Unit. Yes.
CB: Yeah. Right.
AP: Yes.
CB: And so, the engineer joined you though at the OTU. Oh no there was no engineer at the OTU because they didn’t —
AP: No. There was no engineer then. No.
CB: The Wellington didn’t have them.
AP: No. They came along at Con Unit. It was just pilot, navigator, bomb aimer. They were the main ones. And the wireless. They were the main ones who joined. Who were there.
CB: Right.
AP: From the word go.
CB: Now, you started off as an AC2. How did your promotion go and why?
AP: Well it was the time. You become a sergeant after, when you pass out. Then after a year you became a flight sergeant.
CB: After a year.
AP: After a year.
CB: Right.
AP: Then you got recommended. Certain of us got recommended for commissions, you see.
AP: Do you know what the basis — what was the basis of the decision for making people —
AP: I don’t know exactly. The CO. The group captain in charge really. No. I never quite know. I got one and the navigator got one and the rear gunner got one. We all got commissions.
CB: So, what was the rear gunner’s strengths that made him suitable?
AP: Do you know I don’t quite know. It was just the fact that he was over thirty by that time I suppose and he was a fairly senior bod and they decided to give him a commission. I can’t think of his name, you know. And I saw him a few times after the war because he lived up in North London somewhere. We had a few meetings together. It’s stupid the way names go isn’t it?
CB: It’ll come back to you later.
AP: It will.
CB: But did you, did you do many things together as a complete crew when you were on 630?
AP: Oh yes. We went out a lot together.
CB: What did you do?
AP: Our favourite pub was the Red Lion at Revesby which was about a five mile cycle ride which we did no trouble at all. And I told you we had this little lady, Pat, who took a shine to me. And she used to sing you know. She used to get up in the pub and sing. She was good like that.
CB: She was the WAAF?
AP: She was a WAAF.
CB: What did she do in the RAF?
AP: Well she was on the reception committees. When you came back she would help make you comfortable. Bring you cups of tea and things. Plenty of cigarettes everywhere which was crazy really but they did. And that’s what she did. They sort of picked the ones who were outgoing types of girls, you know. She was quite outgoing in that respect.
CB: So at the end of a raid how did you feel?
AP: Relieved. Relieved.
CB: So you got down. What was the process? The plane lands. Then what?
AP: Well we had the —
CB: You taxied,
AP: Debriefing of course.
CB: You taxied to dispersal.
AP: Oh yeah.
CB: And then —?
AP: Emptied the, emptied the aircraft out and then we had to be debriefed.
CB: Each one individually?
AP: No. We all sat as a crew with the debriefing officer and one of the girls would be with us. Give us tea and things like that. That’s how I met up with Pat really. Because she used to be doing that sort of work you see. And then we went out together to places like Revesby. It’s not far from — do you know Revesby?
CB: Yeah.
AP: The Red Lion there. It’s still there you know.
CB: Yes.
AP: Just the same.
CB: Yes.
AP: I often called in there when going that way to renew acquaintances. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Yeah. I used to think nothing of cycling five miles then for a drink
CB: And how —
AP: Beer wasn’t easy to get hold up. Decent beer.
CB: Did it run out regularly?
AP: Yeah. And there was one pub we went to they were so short of glasses we drank out of jam jars. I forget which pub it was but I think that was The Plough at East Kirkby. No. The Red Lion at East Kirkby. We did use that very often. That got so crowded. It was so near the ‘drome. We preferred to go out to Revesby.
CB: Right.
AP: We went to Mareham too. That wasn’t too far away.
CB: Now, we’ve talked about the aircrew. We’ve talked about your debriefing. How did the link go with the ground crew? How? Did you liaise with them much or —?
AP: Oh yes, we went out to drinks together but on the whole not too much. No. They didn’t seem to want to be too involved but we did have one or two nights out with them certainly. And during the moon spells you could afford to have drinks. You knew you wouldn’t be called on. The exception being Nuremberg when they did call us out with a full moon but apart from that normally the moon was a quiet period.
CB: Right. And the crew chief. What would he be? Rank.
AP: Corporal or sergeant.
CB: And what was their attitude to the aircraft?
AP: Oh, they looked after their own aircraft. My word they did. They were very proud of it. You know. Keep it serviceable. There were so many, you know, became [pause] not de-serviceable. What’s the word?
CB: A wreck.
AP: Not a wreck exactly but, you know, they had to do a lot of work on them. They kept ours — they kept us flying all the time. That was one good thing. I feel sorry for this present Lanc. They’ve had this engine fire, haven’t they?
CB: Yeah.
AP: And it seems it’s quite a major problem. The air frame’s been affected around the engine mounting.
CB: Oh, has it? Yes.
AP: Yes. So, I’m told. So how long it will before it flies again I do not know. At the same time the Panton is hoping to get Just Jane flying but whether they will or not I don’t know. They say it’s going to cost a lot of money to get the airframe right and to get a certificate of air worthiness. That’s the problem.
CB: Going back to the war experience what was your worst experience on a raid?
AP: Well I wouldn’t say Nuremberg although Nuremberg was bad. I wouldn’t say it was the worst one. I think the worst one was Mailly-le-Camp where we seemed to be buzzing around for ages waiting for things to happen.
CB: This is the Cheshire raid.
AP: Yeah. I don’t blame Cheshire at all. He was a good, he was a good chap. In fact, we did a Munich raid some time afterwards where he took off about two, he took off two hours after we did [laughs] and we flew down to North Italy and then we headed north for Munich and bombed Munich and Cheshire had moved in in the meantime and dropped his flares with a Mosquito. Yes. He was good like that and of course [pause] the Dambuster fellow. He went down in a Mosquito didn’t he?
CB: Gibson. Yes.
AP: Guy Gibson. Couldn’t think of the name for a minute. I hope you’ll pardon me forgetting names.
CB: That’s ok.
AP: As I say these things are affecting me a bit. These.
CB: Could you talk us through your situation as an air bomber because you’re the person looking at the flak coming up. So, at what — so could you talk us through the point the pilot hands over to you. Could you just talk us through what you did? What it was like. How you dealt with it.
AP: Well the air bomber, the air bomber or bomb aimer as some say — the official title is air bomber by the way. His job really was to take over when the bombing site was coming up and to guide the pilot to the markers. And we were told what marker. It was either red or green normally. And of course, we had to, we had to man the guns. I never fired the front guns but they were there if necessary. But we always used to say, ‘Left. Left. Right.’ ‘Left. Left,’ you had to say. You didn’t say left or right. It had to be, ‘Left left.’ Or right. That was one — so that sort of did away with any sort of errors you see. But as I say the bomb aimer saw everything going on more than anybody else. The poor old navigator — he didn’t see a thing. He was behind closed curtains. Probably just as well. He didn’t see a thing. The wireless operator too. But the bomb aimer was there to see everything.
CB: So, what were you actually seeing? Because the run in takes how long?
AP: Oh, it could take anything from thirty minutes to two or three minutes. We were flying, I’ll say one thing about the old Lanc you could get up to about twenty three, twenty four thousand feet and it seemed like ages going in, you know. With flak all around you. It always seemed you could never get through the flak. It always seemed there was a hole in the flak and you were in that hole, you know. Just marching along. We got hit once or twice but only minor stuff.
CB: So, when you’re on the run in the pilot is effectively saying, ‘Over to you.’ Is he?
AP: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: You’re not actually controlling anything yourself but you’re telling him what to do.
AP: Oh no. He’s got the controls to guide the thing. We’re just saying either, ‘Left. Left,’ ‘Right,’ or so on. You know.
CB: And then —
AP: We had, of course, control of all the switch gear. You know, the bomb selector.
CB: Ok. So just talk us through the bomb selection because you had a wide range of ordnance on board so how did that work? There was a sequence.
AP: Well it was pretty much automatic really, you know. Our main bomb load used to be a four thousand pound cookie with incendiaries. And it was all automatic. Once you, once you got over the target you pressed the button and everything worked automatically. And the camera which was in the back of the aircraft which we didn’t like. That was phosphor bomb.
CB: So, there was a sequence that the bombs left.
AP: Yeah.
CB: What was the sequence?
AP: Well the cookie normally went first. The four thousand pounder. Followed by the incendiaries. We did have raids where we had fourteen one thousand pound bombs but normally on the mass bombing it was to cause fires which I didn’t go much on to be quite frank. But there again it was a, that was the way it was directed we should fight the war.
CB: Right. So, the cookie was non, it wasn’t aerodynamic. It was just a cylinder so —
AP: Like a big dustbin. Yeah.
CB: What did it do? It was a blast bomb.
AP: A blast bomb. Yeah. That blasted everything so the incendiaries would come along and set fire to the blasting but there were so many bombs being dropped I don’t think they made much difference really. And we were given a time to, we were given, different squadrons had different times to approach the target you see.
CB: Right.
AP: And the Pathfinders [pause] they would, you know, they would direct the bombers to what they thought was relevant at the time. Yeah.
CB: So, the Pathfinders were circling. Or the master bomber was circling. Giving instruction was he?
AP: They — I wouldn’t say they would. They used to go in first and mark the target but I don’t think they hung about. It wasn’t healthy to hang about.
CB: I meant the master bomber would stay and watch. Would he?
AP: In the mass raids — no. In the more selective raids like Munich and some of the other raids he’d be there all the time. But on the mass raids early on, the Berlins, it was just a question of the Pathfinders coming in, marking the target and then getting the hell out of it.
CB: So what heights were you normally, normally delivering your load?
AP: Twenty one, twenty three thousand. Yeah. Pretty high really. We were above the Halifaxes and Stirlings. I always felt sorry for the Stirlings. That’s why I quite liked meeting that friend of yours.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Because how he survived I do not know but he did didn’t he?
CB: Extraordinary.
AP: Did he do a full raid?
CB: He did. So I’ll cover that with you later. But the air bomber bit is interesting because we don’t necessarily have much detail on that and so that’s why I’m just asking you a bit more about it. And —
AP: Yeah. Well, as I say, it varied over the course of my time you see. First of all it was mass bombing, then more selective bombing and then pinpoint bombing as we approached D-day you see. The whole character of the thing was changing actually.
CB: So, when, when you did the pinpoint bombing. Was that with markers?
AP: No.
CB: ‘Cause a lot of it’s daylight isn’t it?
AP: No. No. Not daylight at all. No. No. We had to do it by map reading and —
CB: Ok.
AP: There were no markers then. No.
CB: No. ‘Cause we’re talking, for you we’re talking we’re talking pre-D-Day.
AP: On some day there were only two squadrons. Only twenty or thirty aircraft, you see.
CB: Yeah.
AP: That was, they were the interesting raids really. They were the raids I preferred because we knew then that we were bombing specific targets to the, for the good of the army. And we were trying to upset the German transport movements.
CB: Yeah. So, going back to you’ve released your bombs. You’ve got a camera and then there’s a flash that goes down.
AP: There’s a flash. Yeah.
CB: Does that, how does the timing work for that? Do you set it as the bomber aimer?
AP: That, again, is all automatic.
CB: So —
AP: We didn’t, we didn’t like the phosphor bombs because I mean, if they hang up they were deadly you know.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Did you have them at all?
CB: I know what you mean. Yeah.
AP: They were at the back of the aircraft.
CB: Yeah.
AP: By the toilet.
CB: Right.
AP: But as I say they would drop automatically and then they were timed to go off to take the photos as the bomb, as the bomb exploded.
CB: Because the time of their firing would depend on how high you were.
AP: Yes. It was all, it was all done automatically you know by the, by the experts shall we say.
CB: So, what was the purpose of the camera?
AP: I frankly don’t know. It seemed to me to be a bit unnecessary but at least it proved you’d been there. There was a danger you see, I suppose that some crews may not have even have bombed the target. And that was proof you’d been there. Oh, I got some good aiming point photographs. I think that’s why they awarded me the old DFC. We got some good aiming point photographs.
CB: At what point did you receive the award of DFC?
AP: After the, after the tour. They analysed things you know and we’d had a good record of aiming point photographs.
CB: Who else in the crew?
AP: The pilot did. And myself. I thought Tom MacKay, the navigator should have had one because he was very good chap. In fact, he flew, when Gwen was ill he flew her out to Switzerland twice you know to try and get her better treatment but it didn’t work. She had Parkinson’s. But he knew somebody in Switzerland, in Geneva who he thought might help her because he lived out there for a time. And he arranged, he had his own, as I say he had his own aircraft and we flew her out there a couple of times but it wasn’t to be.
CB: When you came off operations you now went on to training other people you said.
AP: Yeah.
CB: What was that like in contrast?
AP: A jaywalk really. There wasn’t a lot to do really, you know. We had to find, we had to find time. We had to sort of find jobs to do really because although we were helping to train other people we were doing compass swings and things like that. We were back on Ansons and it all seemed a bit airy fairy after Lancasters but it had to be. You know, we were training. We were sending out the new crews coming along.
CB: Was there a sense of relief doing it or was it just boring?
AP: A bit of both. A bit of both.
CB: So, when you came to be demobbed how did you feel about that?
AP: Well I was demobbed, of course, from Palestine. And that’s when I mentioned I was flown in a Dakota back to Heathrow which was just a series of huts in those days. We had a good long run. They paid us for a good long holiday. Two or three months I think. Then I went on to Oxford, you see.
CB: How did you come to meet your future wife, Gwen?
AP: I was in the Royal Air Force then.
CB: What was she?
AP: She wasn’t in the air force. No. She wasn’t Royal Air Force. The other girl I had, that I knew, was Pat. She was with me at the Operational Training Unit but I’d finished by the time I went to North Wales.
CB: By the time you finished your tour did you feel short changed for not doing thirty or was there a sense of relief?
AP: Well it was a sense of relief I think. We were quite badly quite shot up on that. We were mine laying you see in [pause] we were mine laying in — what’s the name of the port.
CB: Brest.
AP: We were attacked by a JU88.
CB: And what height would you be flying for mine laying?
AP: Oh we were quite low. We were quite low. I’m trying to think what [pause] what was the first question you asked me?
CB: What? The sense of relief? I asked you earlier what your worst experience was.
AP: Well that was one of the worst. Yes. [pause] Kiel Bay. I couldn’t think of the word. Kiel Bay.
CB: Where’s that.
AP: We were laying mines in Kiel Bay.
CB: Where’s that? Oh, outside Kiel.
AP: Kiel. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
AP: Kiel Bay. I couldn’t think of the words for a minute. You see, I mean, despite the ops we had one or two occasions where we boomeranged. You know, something went wrong with the aircraft and we had to return. It happened to the guy who died a few weeks ago. The New Zealand, the New Zealand Dambuster fellow.
CB: Yeah.
AP: He had to, he had come back because he had a hit and his compass was put out of action. And we had one or two cases like that.
CB: Les Munro.
AP: Yes, I couldn’t think. Len Munro. Yeah.
CB: Les. Yeah.
AP: Les Munro I meant. I met him a few times.
CB: Did you?
AP: A nice guy he was.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Did you ever meet him?
CB: He was over recently. I never met him but he was.
AP: I met him at Aces High two or three times. He had his girlfriend with him. He’d lost his wife but he had a lady companion who was very pleasant. She used to help him but he was pretty active right to the end. Well, I didn’t see him at the end of course. As I say there was cases too when you would get all ready to go. All the build-up and everything and then it would be cancelled. All that sort of getting ready. Nearly all, not all day but you had to do a night flying test before where everybody went up and flew for about half an hour and tested everything and then you’d come back and then go to briefing. So that was all part of the game but those didn’t count.
CB: Was that a frustration?
AP: Frustration really. Yes. Having spent the whole afternoon or a bit longer getting ready and then to find it was cancelled. That happened a few times and that didn’t count.
CB: So, what was the atmosphere before you went on the raid amongst the crew?
AP: The atmosphere. It’s a job to pinpoint it really Chris. We were all a bit apprehensive I suppose really. A bit apprehensive. Is it recording? But some of the crews used to have a pee on to the — on to — what was it now? There were different ways people had to let off steam. We all had our little [pause] I had a little St Christopher I always took with me. Geoff, the pilot, had a scarf. And I remember one raid, we were ready to take off and he’d forgotten his scarf. Luckily, he had his motorbike with him and he shot off to the billets, got his scarf and came back. It made us a bit late but he was determined he wouldn’t fly without his scarf. We all had these little [pause] what’s the word? Keepsakes.
CB: Did everybody do that?
AP: Lucky charms.
CB: Yeah. Lucky charms. Did everybody?
AP: Yeah most had. I had a little St Christopher which I’ve lost now but I did have one and I always made sure I had it.
CB: And when the tour was over was there a feeling that you would get together at some stage afterwards or was there just an acceptance that you were being disbursed?
AP: There was just an acceptance. That’s the problem really. You were sort of lived together for six months. You were living together, you know and then you suddenly break up and everybody goes their own way. And we didn’t all get together afterwards. We tried. Geoff Probert, my skipper, he went to Hatfield and I never did see him. We tried to meet up once or twice and we never did. Then he went up to Sheffield and he died fairly young. ‘Cause he was older than the rest of us. So getting together was a problem. I did reach some of the guys afterwards but you see after the war you really had to forget all about it and I did for about five or six years. Going to Oxford you had to get your head down and get down to studies and you more or less forgot all about the war. It’s only now, in latter years, that we begin to think about it again.
CB: But did, what did you feel the general public’s attitude was to people who had been effectively on the front line? After the war.
AP: Well, as I say I didn’t really think too much about it then. I think people were quite sympathetic to what we had done. Some people thought we were having, having it too cushy. At least one thing — we came back to white sheets. We didn’t sleep in dirty, muddy trenches which I would have hated. We came back to a decent bed after a raid and we were looked after.
CB: Yeah.
AP: With our eggs and bacon.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Which no one else could get.
CB: No.
AP: That was a great relief to have eggs and bacon and that type of thing. So some people thought that aircrew and submarine people had been molly coddled but we had a fairly dangerous job to do.
CB: A final question then. You’ve touched on it already. How did you feel about what you were doing in actually aiming — effectively aiming the aircraft and dropping the bombs?
AP: How did I feel?
CB: Each time.
AP: I didn’t like the area bombing because you never quite knew where your bombs were landing. I was always a bit perturbed about that. I had that in my mind you know but we had a job to do. And they started the bombing first so we had to sort of — they bombed Coventry and London didn’t they? But as I say towards the end of the war with the bombing — the run up to D-day it was a different cup of tea really.
CB: Yeah. And was your bomb sight — what was that like?
AP: The Mk 14.
CB: Yeah. Were you happy with that or —?
AP: Oh yes. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
AP: Of course they’ve improved no end now. In fact, if you when you’ve got time I’ll take you to the Trenchard Museum at Halton where they’ve got some of the old Mk 14 bomb sights. You want to go to go there, you know.
CB: We will. The Americans claimed that their bomb sights were so much better for accuracy. That’s why I ask the question.
AP: I think ours was pretty good. We got some good aiming point photographs. The Americans may have been better because they did their daylight stuff didn’t they? Mark you they did catch a pasting didn’t they? On some of these daylight raids. Didn’t they?
CB: Absolutely.
AP: Yeah.
CB: Well, we’ve done really well Alan. Thank you so much. I’m going to stop the tape now and we’ll have —
AP: I’m sorry. I should have done genned up with this. There are things I forgot didn’t I?
[Recording paused]
CB: Hang on. Just as an extra then Alan. We talked about Pat and I wonder first of all when you went on a raid what was the reaction of the WAAFs as you set off?
AP: Well there was a great deal of cooperation. I think they felt that, you know, most of the crews knew a WAAF somewhere down the line and they were invariably at the end of the runway to wave us as we went off. Without them we’d have missed it. They weren’t there when we came back of course. They were all in the debriefing huts waiting for us to come back. But no, they cooperated. I think they realised what we were doing and I felt that their presence helped a heck of a lot.
CB: So, in terms of Pat she clearly was a major factor in your life then.
AP: During that time. Yes. During that time, she was. Helped to take off the stress off the bombing ‘cause we used to go for cycle rides and things together, you know and she’d come out drinking with us. And she used to sing. She had quite a good voice. I don’t know where she learned to sing but she used to get up and sing. She was a bit, sort of outgoing in that respect. There aren’t many girls who would get up in the pub and sing are there?
CB: Probably not. But how did this break up in time?
AP: What?
CB: This relationship you had with her.
AP: Well we didn’t — when I got posted away of course, I mean, I couldn’t keep up with meeting all the time and I suppose we did write for a time of course and gradually I suppose the letters got less and less and it just faded away but I often wonder what happened. Even now I often wonder if she’s alive still.
CB: In your experience with 630 Squadron Association are there any people who were ground crew personnel who have been members or did it tend only to be aircrew?
AP: It’s funny that you should say that. I met a, we had a meeting at Aces High with Bomber Command and there was a WAAF there who was a driver at East Kirkby. She lives now in Bournemouth and she was there with her son. I didn’t know her at the time but she told me she was on transport. You know they used to drive the crews out to the aircraft and she was doing that. Well, she’s older than me. She was ninety three I think she told me. So that’s one case but there aren’t many of the old WAAFs turn up.
CB: No.
AP: We do see — now who was, who was the inventor of the bouncing bomb, now.
CB: Barnes Wallis.
AP: Her —
CB: His daughter.
AP: His daughter comes along. You’ve met her have you? She often comes along with — oh [pause] the last remaining bomb aimer. I saw him the other day. His name is gone now. He was up at East Kirkby. Johnny Johnson. He’s written a book. The farmer’s boy he was, wasn’t he? Have you read the book?
CB: I haven’t. no. But he —
AP: Oh, I’ve got it. I haven’t read it. I gave it to my other son because he was a farmer. Johnny Johnson.
CB: Ok. That’s really good. Thank you very much.
[recording paused]
CB: One more question now, Alan. People tend to have an affection not just for lucky charms but for aircraft so were you normally with the same plane? Or what was the situation?
AP: We were normally with the same plane. Yes. There were occasions of course when we didn’t have the same plane. But it was always nice to have the same plane. And LEY was ours. LEY.
CB: And if you flew in another one how did you feel?
AP: Oh, it didn’t really bother me too much but it was just nice to know you had your own aircraft.
CB: Because they tend to have specific characteristics.
AP: I suppose they do, really. Yes. Yeah.
CB: Ok. Thank you.
[recording paused]
CB: Ok.
AP: Well there was a survey party had got lost in the Sahara and they asked for volunteers to go and find it. Well, they had a sort of point where they thought he was and we had to make for that and then we started to do a square search based on the visibility. And we found it and they waved to us and we radio’d back where they were. But that’s just one little thing we did and we had to volunteer for that. We had this note that these people were lost in the desert.
CB: Yeah. A practical humanitarian task.
AP: Well yeah. Yeah.
CB: Let me just take you back to that JU88 encounter because that could have been fatal.
AP: Oh easy. So easy.
CB: So what happened? What height were you etcetera and how did he find you? And —
AP: Well it just happened. We were sailing along and all of a sudden these bursts burst of cannon fire all around us. I mean the rear gunner should have seen him really but he never saw him and I think he was — he wasn’t underneath us. He was behind us. Normally the idea was to come up from the underside.
CB: Yeah.
AP: And fire in to the petrol tanks.
CB: Yes. Yeah. So the, so the gunner — he was coming from behind and the gunner didn’t see.
AP: Didn’t see him. No.
CB: What was the — in the dark this was.
AP: In the dark, oh yes.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, he starts firing so the shells are exploding is that right?
AP: Yeah.
CB: Then — then what happened?
AP: Well there weren’t many shells actually. In fact, you know, we thought he would come back because the plane had caught fire. Luckily it went out. And we honestly thought he would come back for another go but he didn’t. I think he thought he’d got us and that was it. And old Geoff, the pilot put it into a steep dive and started to corkscrew and we lost the JU88.
CB: So, the corkscrew might have been the solution.
AP: Yeah. Yeah.
CB: But what happened to the strikes? Where were the strikes on the aircraft? On your plane.
AP: Well, as I say one was on the rear turret and the other side and one in the wing but apart from, it didn’t really do any sort of damage structurally. Although one caused a fire, you see. And one —
CB: Where was the fire?
AP: I’ve got a picture of this machine gun. The machine gun is all bent over where the shell hit it. And the rear gunner — he was jolly lucky to be alive. He really was.
CB: So, let me get this straight the shell hits the rear turret. In the gun.
AP: It hit the end of the gun. It was remarkable. It really was.
CB: And the gunner wasn’t injured.
AP: No. He wasn’t hurt. He was sort of knocked out, you know. He was semi, he was sort of, you know, the blast sort of knocked him out temporarily. He was sort of muttering away, you know, half in and half out but he came around and we still had the mines on board, you know. That was another thing. We didn’t jettison. We went on and dropped them afterwards ‘cause when he attacked we were still going in on to the target, you see. In to the bay, Kiel bay. And that was our twenty ninth raid. And I think the CO, Wing Commander [Dee?] saw we’d had enough. ‘Oh, you can stand down now,’ he said.
CB: After. After that. Yes. So, you dropped your mines successfully.
AP: Yeah, we dropped the mines.
CB: What height would you drop a mines from? ‘Cause you can’t do it from height ‘cause it’ll break.
AP: No. You can’t do it from height. No.
CB: So what height were you dropping?
AP: I think we must have been about twelve thousand feet. Something like that. Yeah. A long time ago now. You tend to forget these things don’t you?
CB: Sure. Yeah. Thanks.
Dublin Core
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Identifier
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APayneAJ150811
Title
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Interview with Alan Payne
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Type
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Sound
Language
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eng
Format
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01:21:03 audio recording
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Pending review
Creator
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Chris Brockbank
Date
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2015-08-11
Description
An account of the resource
Alan Payne was born in Wendover, Buckinghamshire. He volunteered for aircrew with the Royal Air Force and after initial training was sent to South Africa where he trained as an observer. When he returned to the UK, he was allocated the role of bomb aimer and after joining a crew he was posted to 630 Squadron at RAF East Kirkby. His first operation was to Berlin. He describes the operation to Mailly-le-Camp as one of his worst experiences with Bomber Command. Returning from an operation on Nuremberg his aircraft was attacked by an Me 109 and on their last operation mine laying off Kiel they were attacked by a Ju 88. After his tour Alan became an instructor before being posted to Palestine. When he was demobbed he undertook training at Oxford University to become an architect.
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
South African Air Force
Spatial Coverage
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Germany
Great Britain
South Africa
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Kiel
Temporal Coverage
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1944-05-03
1944-05-04
Contributor
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Julie Williams
630 Squadron
aerial photograph
aircrew
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing of Mailly-le-Camp (3/4 May 1944)
bombing of Nuremberg (30 / 31 March 1944)
coping mechanism
crewing up
debriefing
Distinguished Flying Cross
ground crew
ground personnel
H2S
Halifax
Ju 88
lack of moral fibre
Lancaster
Me 109
military living conditions
mine laying
Nissen hut
observer
RAF Dumfries
RAF East Kirkby
RAF Silverstone
RAF Torquay
RAF Turweston
RAF Winthorpe
Scarecrow
superstition
target photograph
training
Wellington
Window
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/337/3501/PTaylorEC1701.1.jpg
acbcb633c679d09f01c94a0f7e54d530
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/337/3501/ATaylorEC170928.2.mp3
9a15f4d3f4e54369b0747cf28be0b8eb
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Taylor, Eric
Eric Charles Taylor
Eric C Taylor
E C Taylor
E Taylor
Description
An account of the resource
One oral history interview with Squadron Leader Eric Charles Taylor.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Taylor, EC
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
DK: So this is David Kavanagh for the International Bomber Command Centre, interviewing Squadron Leader Eric Taylor at his home on the –
BT: Where are we?
DK: 28th of September 2017. So if I just put that there, put that that there –
ET: Yeah.
DK: Put that there. I’ll keep looking down, I’m just making sure that it’s working.
ET: Yes.
DK: That looks okay. So if we leave that, yeah that looks okay. Well, what I wanted to ask you first was what, what were you doing immediately before the war?
ET: School.
DK: Right, so you went straight from school to –
ET: I left school in the June forty-three –
DK: Mhm.
ET: Sorry, [pause] –
DK: It would be 1943 wouldn’t it?
ET: Yeah it is forty-three.
DK: Yeah, yeah. So you went straight from school, straight from school to the RAF?
ET: Yes.
DK: So what made you want to join the RAF then?
ET: Because I, I joined the, the LDV I think they called it –
DK: The Home Guard.
ET: The Local Defence Force.
DK: Mhm [BT laughs].
ET: And they put me through hours of drill [laughs], and I didn’t like that very much. I thought I’ll probably better join the Air Force, and you used to get all these magazines of course, you know, with all the things about the –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Battle of Britain and that type of thing. That’s what encouraged me to, to join. I went to Edinburgh for a testation [?] which was delayed for six months, so I actually went in, in the February –
DK: Is that on? Yeah, okay.
ET: Forty-three.
DK: Right. So –
ET: That was wrong, I told you –
DK: You’re right, it says forty-two in here.
ET: Must have been forty-two [emphasis].
DK: Right.
ET: Twenty, 1923 and something.
DK: That’s 1940 isn’t it? Okay, don’t worry, don’t worry.
ET: 1940.
DK: Yeah.
BT: 1940, you’d be seventeen.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Must have been forty-one then.
BT: Forty-one was it, okay.
ET: Left school.
BT: Yeah.
DK: So forty-one.
ET: Yeah, because it was forty-two –
DK: That you joined the Air Force.
ET: That I joined the Air Force.
DK: Yeah, yeah, okay.
ET: That’s right.
DK: You left school in 1941 and then joined the Air Force –
ET: Yeah.
DK: In 1942. So what, what was your first posting in the Air Force then? Where, where, can you remember where you went to?
ET: Well the first , well I went to London, and the – ooh we attended several lectures, you know, mainly about venereal disease [all laugh] and all the rest of the things.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And the, from then on I went up to, I trained at Staverton, Gloucestershire, Number Six AUS [?].
DK: Right.
ET: And that took about a year.
DK: So at this point you were already training as a navigator?
ET: Yeah, oh initially I did a small six hours course. I went in as a PNB.
DK: Right.
ET: Pilot, navigator or –
DK: Bomber aimer.
ET: Bomber aimer. Didn’t quite make the pilot stakes [?] so I became a navigator.
DK: Right.
ET: And then I went to the CUS [?]. That was the first straight navigator course, because before that they had the air observers, they called them.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Yeah, so we didn’t do any bombing aiming at that time. Course I went through them very quickly [emphasis], it only took about a year.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Then from there I went to Stratford-on-Avon to the OTU.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Operational training unit.
DK: Yeah. Just going, winding back a bit. What, what was the training as a, as a navigator? Were you actually flying [emphasis] at the time then?
ET: Yes, yes.
DK: So what sort of aircraft were you –
ET: Anson
DK: Ansons, right.
ET: Anson mainly. And then we came onto the Wellington when we came onto the OTU.
DK: The operational training unit.
ET: Yeah.
DK: Yeah, so that was Number 16 Operational Training Unit?
ET: That’s right.
DK: Yeah, and that was at RAF Upper Heyford?
ET: No.
DK: Oop, sorry.
ET: It’s at, it was at, it, just past Stratford-on-Avon.
DK: Stratford-on-Avon, right, okay.
ET: Yeah.
DK: So that’s 16 OTU at Stratford-on-Avon. And, and what aircraft were you training on there?
ET: Wellingtons.
DK: And is that where you met your, your crew then?
ET: Yeah. Well we all met [emphasis] –
DK: Mm.
ET: And just somebody would say, ‘would you like to fly with me?’ It was very, it wasn’t a rigid [?] thing at all, you know.
DK: No. So how did that work then? Were you all pushed into a hangar and you all had to work –
ET: Well we’re in a big hall, yeah, and the pilots were there and [laughs] –
DK: Right. How did you think that worked, ‘cause it’s quite unusual for the military. Normally you’re ordered to go somewhere.
ET: Well that’s right.
DK: This was quite an unusual way of where you –
ET: Yes.
DK: Picked your crew.
ET: Anyway, that’s how they did it and it seemed to work out there pretty well.
DK: And you found your, your pilot there then did you?
ET: Yes.
DK: And can you remember your pilot’s name?
ET: Yes, Cyril Pearce.
DK: Right.
ET: I think he’s no longer with us –
DK: Yeah.
ET: I don’t think any of the crew are with us now, you know.
DK: So you would have met your pilot?
ET: Yes.
DK: And –
ET: I met them all, the bomb aimer –
DK: Bomb aimer.
ET: And the wireless operator.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And the gunner.
DK: Mhm. And, and did you all get on well together when you –
ET: Yes, we seemed to, yeah.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Yeah. And I – the navigator didn’t do a lot of the pilot training on the aircraft, you know, the local flying circuits and mops and that.
DK: Yeah.
ET: But on the cross countries of course, we, we all went on those.
DK: Mm.
ET: Some had a dual instructor and others smaller [?].
DK: Yeah. What did you think of the Wellington as an aircraft?
ET: Actually quite good after the [laughs] – it was a bit bigger. The big thing I remember is – I think the model’s a 1-C that we trained on.
DK: Right.
ET: At the OTU, but then we got a mark three I think. ‘Cause we took an aeroplane out with us when we went to Tunisia.
DK: Right.
ET: And that was a long flight.
DK: Mm.
ET: We had to go miles out to sea to avoid the Bay of Biscay, you know, ‘cause all the Germans –
DK: Yeah, yeah.
ET: Were there, and we flew from Portreath to a place called Ras el Ma –
DK: Right.
ET: On the west coast of Africa. The big thing I remember there was there was always an enormous amount of flies [DK and ET laugh]. You had a plate of soup, had a quick swipe [DK laughs], put your spoon in quickly [laughs]. And from there we just, we went on through Blida and then ended up at the Kairouan.
DK: Right.
ET: With aircraft – 142 Squadron and 150 had both just gone there. There was nothing, there were no facilities at all. There wasn’t even a latrine initially [laughs].
DK: So, so out your training then, you’ve done the operational training unit and really cross country flights around England.
ET: That’s it.
DK: And then your posted to your squadron and you’re posted out to Africa.
ET: Yes [emphasis].
DK: Oh right.
ET: Actually we just cleared [?] Africa, North Africa. Well we arrived there –
DK: Right.
ET: And when I was, we were there, we had the invasion of Sicily of course.
DK: Mm.
ET: And Italy. And most of our bombing were, they were to, you know, targets in Sicily.
DK: Right.
ET: And several, going up the coast to Italy.
DK: Right, and this was with 142 Squadron?
ET: 142 Squadron.
DK: Yeah. So can you remember how many operations you did in the Middle East and Italy?
ET: Yes I, thirty.
DK: Thirty [emphasis]? Oh right.
ET: That was a tour then.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And I came back to UK. Oh I went with a journey from Tunis to Algiers –
DK: Mm.
ET: By train, and on the carriage I’ll always remember it said, ‘forty orm [?] or five [laughs], what were they, sivar [?] horses’ [ET and DK laugh]. Took five days, the journey, and then you got on a boat, came back to Liverpool.
DK: Right.
ET: This was at the end of forty-three –
DK: Uh-huh.
ET: And the – I thought I’d move to Scotland so I went all the way up to a place called Edsoff [?] where I used to live and the last bit I had to do by bus, you know, train then bus.
DK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ET: Then I met this girl on the bus and she said, ‘what are you doing?’ And I said, I said ‘I’m going home [emphasis], what did you think?’ She says ‘I think they’ve moved’ [laughs]. Ah, I had then to go and search where they’d gone to.
DK: And this was your family?
ET: That’s my family –
DK: They’d moved while you were away [laughs].
ET: My parents – well I didn’t get the letter of course to say they were moving.
DK: Oh of course.
ET: And they’d moved to Woodhall Spa would you believe.
DK: Oh right.
ET: In Lincolnshire.
DK: Yeah, yeah, know it well [DK and ET laugh]. So when you were in Africa then, your parents moved from Scotland –
ET: Yes.
DK: To Woodhall Spa.
ET: Yeah.
DK: And you didn’t, you didn’t know [laughs].
ET: Didn’t know.
DK: No. If I could just go back a bit, your operations in the Middle East. Did you find navigating something that came to you easily or –
ET: Quite difficult.
DK: Difficult? Right, because –
ET: Actually, we did have one, one navigation error which a very lucky to get away with it in many respects because coming back from Italy, we hit this land [emphasis] and I thought it was the north coast of Africa –
DK: Right.
ET: It turned out to be the north coast of Sicily [emphasis], going along.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And, course there’s some very high mountains there. Our signaller, our wireless operator finally got a , what we’d call a QDM –
DK: Mm.
ET: You know, a course to steer.
DK: Yeah.
ET: So we turned on that. Of course we’re getting short of fuel and all sorts of things, and we threw out the guns onto the turret to make the aircraft lighter, and coasted at quite a low altitude –
DK: Mm.
ET: Thinking of the mountains there –
DK: Yeah.
ET: And landed , there was an emergency airfield right on the tip of, which we landed at.
DK: On Sicily?
ET: No, no, in North Africa.
DK: Oh North Africa was it, right.
ET: Right at the top there.
DK: Right, oh right.
ET: So that was a real bit of luck there.
DK: Did you, did you get into any trouble for navigating?
ET: Not really.
DK: No, good [DK and ET laugh].
ET: What I remember is my pilot got in trouble because there was a taxi accident.
DK: Right.
ET: That’s the worst thing that can be done, you know. I think the wing hit it [unclear] on one and knocked [?] it up and twice, and I remember the station [?] commander at briefing for an operational trip. He’d see [?] pilots in front of him and say, ‘look at these men, traitors to the cause.’ I always remember that.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Terrible thing to say really.
DK: Bit harsh isn’t it?
ET: They felt bad enough as it is.
DK: Yeah. And one of those, one of those was your pilot was it?
ET: Yes [emphasis].
DK: Stood up – so he had to stand in front of everybody and get told off?
ET: Well there was three of them.
DK: Three of them, right.
ET: Yes, two’s [?] being blamed for the trip, you know –
DK: Yeah.
ET: That night. And this came out.
DK: Oh dear. It’s not very good is it? [Laughs].
ET: Very unsympathetic.
DK: No. Were commanding officers like that then? Were they a bit tough?
ET: This is a copy, what’s it? [Papers shuffle]. Is there something in there called “Blida’s Bombers?” A book. Oh yeah, it’s about him.
DK: Oh right.
ET: There’s something in [papers shuffle, pause]. All this mail, that’s Kairouan [laughs].
DK: Right. Just for the recording, it’s a magazine or a pamphlet called “Blida’s Bombers.” B-L-I-D-A, Blida. That’s, that’s in Algiers isn’t it?
ET: That’s right.
DK: [Unclear].
ET: That was a big base, as the Army. We started going in with the first army –
DK: Right.
ET: [Unclear].
DK: I actually went there many years ago, to Blida in Algiers. And just for the recording, this is “Blida’s Bombers” by Eric M. Summers. Did you know Eric M. Summers?
ET: No.
DK: No, no.
ET: But there was a Group Captain Powel, his photograph was in there which I was trying to, to find.
DK: Right.
ET: He was a man that –
DK: Oh, Group Captain Powel –
ET: Yeah.
DK: Here he is.
ET: Yeah, but there’s a picture of him with his –
DK: That’s in there.
ET: Fly [?]. He always used to fly [laughs].
DK: So he was your commanding officer was he?
ET: He was the station commander actually –
DK: Station commander, right.
ET: Group captain, yeah.
DK: And was it him who told your –
ET: Yes.
DK: The three pilot off?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Well that’s for the recording then, Group Captain Powell [laughs]. Ah there he is, there is he is.
ET: That’s him.
DK: Yeah.
ET: That’s exactly with his – yeah.
DK: Oh, so just for the recording here. It’s Group Captain Powell, briefing for Radan Recina [?]. And it looks like he’s got a fly swat there.
ET: That’s right. He always used that as a pointer [DK and ET laugh].
DK: He looks like he must have been a bit of a character. Oh wow.
ET: Quite a forceful –
DK: Forceful, I can imagine [?].
ET: Yeah.
DK: So there’s the Wellingtons –
ET: Probably [unclear], that’s him, yeah.
DK: You were flying.
ET: Yes, yeah.
DK: So this is all – the book itself is about the Tunis campaign then?
ET: What I can remember is when we got later [?], the power, the whole, the whole instruments used to shake and [laughs].
DK: [Unclear] my phone’s on. Sorry about that. So you got Noel Coward’s poem [?] there, ‘lie in the dark and listen.’
ET: Yes.
DK: Yeah, ah. So while you were in North Africa then and you’re bombing targets in Italy, were you, was your aircraft ever hit at all or, can you recall?
ET: Er, not really. Should they call it sometimes [?], few peppered.
DK: Right.
ET: But nothing direct.
DK: Nothing serious.
ET: Direct hit.
DK: So you never got attacked by German aircraft –
ET: No.
DK: At all?
ET: No.
DK: Right. So what did you, what sort of targets were you hitting there in –
ET: Mostly airfields.
DK: Mostly airfields.
ET: There, [papers shuffle] here you are –
DK: Right.
ET: I don’t have the – oh [unclear]. That’s how we got there.
DK: Right okay, so that’s, for the recording here, that’s your logbook.
ET: That’s my logbook, yeah.
DK: So –
ET: Number one.
DK: Your pilot then is Pearce.
ET: Yes.
DK: Sergeant Pearce, and you’re the navigator down on here.
ET: We’re all sergeants –
DK: You’re all sergeants, right.
ET: At the time. There was very few, very few commissioned there on the squadron.
DK: Right, so the whole crew was sergeants then?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Yeah, so from the logbook then, so you’ve gone from Portreath to Ra –
ET: Ras el Ma.
DK: El Ma. Ras el Ma to Blida.
ET: That’s right.
DK: Then Blida to Kairouan.
ET: Kairouan.
DK: And I’ll spell that for the recording. It’s K-A-I-R-O-U-A-N. And so your base was Maison Blanche?
ET: No the base was Kairouan.
DK: Kairouan was it?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Right okay.
ET: It looks as though someone must have taken an aeroplane or something up there.
DK: Oh right [something pings in background].
ET: And I don’t know how we came back but it –
DK: Right. So you’ve done operations then to Nissena [?] –
ET: Yeah.
DK: And that’s in a Wellington, 19th of June 1943. So Nissena [?] seems to be a regular target, hmm. So Nissena [?], Italian airfield, Syracuse.
ET: Syracuse, yeah.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Masala [?].
DK: So quite a number of – so you said you did thirty operations there in North Africa?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Hmm, the Nissena beaches I noticed [page turns]. So what were the, what were the briefings like in North Africa? Were you sort of in a tent and – what were the facilities like?
ET: Yes, was all under canvas, the whole thing. The food was corned beef –
DK: Yeah.
ET: For everything. In fact, I got an attack of jaundice –
DK: Oh right.
ET: Through that. I went into hospital and they gave me tinned fruit –
DK: Rivht.
ET: And I thought this was a most wonderful thing to, to get. In fact, there was a big American camp near us and they – we used to trade whiskey [DK laughs] for tinned fruit –
DK: Yeah, yeah.
ET: You know, that they had.
DK: [Tape moved] I’m not sure that that’s such a good spot now [laughs].
BT: No.
ET: Not now [laughs].
DK: Not now, no. Oh right.
ET: I suppose thank goodness for corned beef otherwise the [laughs] –
DK: So at, at the briefings then, presumably you’re sort of sat down and told what the target – were you told what the targets were?
ET: Told what the target is, yes.
DK: Right. So in North Africa, were they mostly military targets, airfields and –
ET: Yes.
DK: I noticed here you’ve got here [reading from logbook]: ‘30th of September 1943, ops. Port engine caught fire on takeoff [emphasis].’ Do you remember that?
ET: Not really [both laugh].
DK: Well it says you landed okay after twenty-five minutes.
ET: Yeah we always – obviously we’d have just gone –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Round and there –
DK: And landed again.
ET: And landed again.
DK: So then you’ve had, got several places in Italy then. I noticed you’ve got Pisa is one, ops to Pisa.
ET: Yes.
DK: Yeah [paper turns].
ET: I remember the vehicles [?], I remember we were on that night, bobbing and the beaches, you know, before the army got in.
DK: So that’s 142 Squadron then, and you’ve done two hundred and forty-two hours, fifteen minutes operations then.
ET: Is that the end?
DK: Yeah that’s the end there, yeah.
ET: Yeah [page turns].
DK: So you’ve, you’ve come back to the UK then, you’ve come back to England. What, where –
ET: I was an instructor then.
DK: Right [laughs].
ET: Or so – we didn’t have half the instrumentation that the UK aircraft had.
DK: Right.
ET: So it was like an idiot teaching an idiot really [laughing], until we got used to –
DK: Right. So you, you went onto training then did you? You were –
ET: Yes.
DK: Right.
ET: It, I did a year –
DK: Right.
ET: Mainly at a place called Barford St. John –
DK: Right.
ET: Which is not far from Oxfordshire. Oh it’s about three miles away from, what’s the name of the town [pause], starts with a B I think.
DK: Bedford?
BT: Bicester?
DK: Bicester?
BT: Bicester, yeah?
ET: B – well down that way, yeah.
DK: Right. And that was in Oxfordshire was it?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Right.
ET: And then the –
DK: So what, what aircraft were you flying doing the training there?
ET: Wellingtons.
DK: Wellingtons again, and that, you said they were better equipped than the ones you were flying in the Middle East?
ET: Yes [DK laughs]. There’s a thing in navigation called G [emphasis] –
DK: Yes.
ET: Which we didn’t have out there, you know. It was a wonderful aid, very accurate –
DK: Mm.
ET: But I had to learn [laughs], I had to learn that, you see, when I came back .
DK: So although you were training people, you yourself didn’t know –
ET: Well [laughs].
DK: Oh right.
ET: You know radio, you know, out there, about thirty-five miles was the range of our radio. You know –
DK: Mm.
ET: If you did want to call our base [laughs] –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You had to be within thirty-five miles of it.
DK: So not very far then?
ET: Not very far at all, no.
BT: Banbury, it was.
DK: Banbury.
ET: Banbury [emphasis] was the place –
BT: I just looked it up.
ET: Yeah sorry, Banbury, Banbury’s where – it was just outside Banbury. And anyway, at the end of the year they changed from Wellingtons to Mosquitos.
DK: Right, okay.
ET: So I just stayed there and did the course, met the pilot. He was a very good pilot. He, when he finished training in Canada they kept him on as an instructor.
DK: Right. So you’ve come – I slightly misread this earlier and I want – for the benefit of the tape, your initial training was at Number Six Air Observation School at Staverton.
ET: That’s right.
DK: And then you went to 21 OTU, Morteon-in-the-Marsh.
ET: That’s correct.
DK: Then [emphasis] to North Africa.
ET: For operational training –
DK: Then to North Africa –
ET: North Africa.
DK: Sorry I misread this, with 142 Squadron.
ET: Yes.
DK: Which we’ve just covered.
ET: That’s correct.
DK: So you’ve come back then and you did a year’s training –
ET: Yes.
DK: Instructing, and that was at 16 OTU, Upper Heyford [?].
ET: Yes, that was the main base –
DK: Main base.
ET: But as I say, I spent it all at Barford –
DK: Right okay.
ET: St. John.
DK: Right. So then in early 1945 then, you’re now converted onto the Mosquito?
ET: That’s right.
DK: Can you remember your pilot’s name on the Mosquito?
ET: Yeah, Green, Dave Green.
DK: Dave Green.
ET: We didn’t have a – he was married, the chap in the, well obviously [unclear] he met a girl out there and married her, and so we didn’t spend a lot of social time together at all.
DK: Right.
ET: He didn’t drink at al so l [laughs].
DK: Was that quite unusual in the Air Force then? [Laughs].
ET: Well a bit. But yeah he was a good chap.
DK: Right. And would he have been a pilot officer or –
ET: He was a flight lieutenant.
DK: Flight lieutenant, right. So that’s Flight Lieutenant –
ET: I expect –
DK: Dave Green
ET: If you, if you finished top of your course –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You were normally commissioned, the top. So as he did well, kept him on as an instructor, I suspect he was –
DK: And you say he was an Australian?
ET: No, no, he was English.
DK: English, right okay. So, and you’re in the Mosquitos then. What did you think of the Mosquito as a aircraft?
ET: Oh it was great [laughs], with so much speed.
DK: Mm.
ET: Amazing aircraft because to carry that load, to carry one four thousand pound bomb, was like a big oil tank, you know.
DK: Mm, yeah.
ET: Oil drum, for the business. And course we’d overload tanks on the wings as well, so she was pretty heavy.
DK: Yeah.
ET: But it was wonderful. We used to bomb at twenty-five thousand feet.
DK: Right.
ET: And when the bomb went of course you shot up about three [DK and ET laugh], three hundred feet.
DK: And this was at 571 Squadron?
ET: 571, yeah.
DK: And –
ET: It was very short lived – each squadron, they were created [emphasis], you know, and of course the war, the war finished –
DK: Right.
ET: And they disappeared again.
DK: Can you remember, can you remember where you were based with 571?
ET: Yes, Oakington.
DK: Oakington, right okay.
ET: Which is a big –
DK: Housing estate now [BT laughs].
ET: Oh is it?
DK: Yeah, afraid so. It’s all been knocked down.
ET: But did it, did have all these refugee, I don’t know what they were, refugee centres?
DK: It was for while, yes.
ET: Yeah.
DK: It was a refugee centre –
ET: Yeah.
DK: After the war.
ET: Oh but, but I haven’t mentioned that I – when the war finished, they asked for volunteers to ferry the aircraft back from Canada.
DK: Oh right.
ET: SO I volunteered for that. I got out to Canada, went out by boat, and they said ‘oh you’re not wireless trained’ [laughs].
DK: Mm.
ET: ‘So you can’t do that.’ So I ended up doing about thirty hours in Dakotas.
DK: Oh right [DK and ET laugh].
ET: And I was there for about three months, and came back in a BUAC [?] Liberator.
DK: Right.
ET: [Laughs] to Prestwick, I remember that.
DK: Just, just going back a little bit to your time in the Mosquitos.
ET: Yes.
DK: Can you remember how many operations you did on Mosquitos?
ET: Yes, I did twenty.
DK: Right, so that was thirty operations, Wellingtons in North Africa –
ET: Yes.
DK: And another twenty –
ET: When we were operating on the Mosquito, we had sort of two nights on and one night off.
DK: So what was your role with the Mosquito, because you weren’t really flying with the main Bomber force were you? Were you separate to them?
ET: Well, it was diversionary [emphasis] normally. We went to targets to make them think that the –
DK: Right.
ET: Main force was going there. You had your sneaky little – I went to Berlin thirteen times [laughs].
DK: Right. What was it like flying over Berlin?
ET: Well it’s quite, quite intense. The flak was, you know, they had these predictions, the marshal [?] –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Predicting –
DK: Predicting flak –
ET: You’re very happy if you saw it bursting a bit beneath you, you know, thinking ‘oh they haven’t got it right.’
DK: Mm.
ET: And they had these incredible searchlights, and a marshal would come on you, and then all the sleeves [?] [unclear]. It’s a really lovely feeling [laughs] being all lit up at night.
DK: So when that happened, what did your pilot do? Did he –
ET: He couldn’t do much at all really –
DK: Right.
ET: For that. Because with that height, you know, it would take a long way to –
DK: To get out the searchlight. So you’re, you’re being fired on all the time while you’re in the searchlights?
ET: Well, you might be or you might not, you know. It didn’t – we had a little indicator on the aircraft, a light it was, which was supposed to switch on if you were being attacked.
DK: Yeah. So you, did you fly out with a number of other Mosquitos?
ET: Yes.
DK: And could you see them at night, or –
ET: Well that’s the amazing thing is, there’s all these aircraft together –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You suddenly see, if another one gets lit up by the searchlights you think, ‘I didn’t realise he was there,’ you know.
DK: Mm.
ET: You were like a loose formation I think, you weren’t in flying formation.
DK: Right, so you never saw other aircraft then?
ET: Not very often.
DK: So your role was then, the main force would go off to one target and you’d attack somewhere else to, to draw –
ET: Yes.
DK: Their defences there –
ET: Yes.
DK: Presumably.
ET: Of course, we had the Pathfinders.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Who would – now this, well a secret as it was at the time, called Oboe.
DK: Mhm.
ET: And they used to drop on that, and this thing was amazing. Two different aircraft flares go down, you go down one on top of the other. You’d think it was out of one aircraft, you know.
DK: Right.
ET: This was getting towards the end and –
DK: So when you saw these two flares go down, what was your, what did you have to do then?
ET: Well, I’d, it would tell you, or, if it was some apart [?] it would tell you which one to go for. Well, I had to get down into the bomb bay, and, well about ten, you had a ten minute run in when you had to stay rock steady, you know, and I had to get down into the front and set up the bomb, bomb site.
DK: Right.
ET: ‘Cause one night, an incident was that I got down there and I wasn’t making sense about it to my pilot, and he was very quick at knocking my oxygen off [laughs].
DK: Oh.
ET: And he quickly catched on what was wrong and put the switch –
DK: Right.
ET: Back on.
DK: So he switched the oxygen off then, right.
ET: Yeah just getting, getting down into the – I had a harness [?] on, you know –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Just to –
DK: So, so although you were navigating then, on the Mosquitos you actually acted as a bomb aimer as well then did you?
ET: Yes, I did both jobs.
DK: Right.
ET: Yes, I did a small bombing course with a Mosquito conversion. We did a course on –
DK: Right.
ET: With Oxfords [emphasis] it was this time, which was a training aircraft.
DK: Mm.
ET: Used to bomb in the Wash.
DK: Mm.
ET: You know, the target.
DK: Yeah.
ET: The Wash.
DK: Yeah, so, so you said you went to Berlin thirteen –
ET: I think it was about thirteen –
DK: Thirteen times.
ET: Times if you –
DK: So for the recording, I’m looking at the logbook again so, so 1st of March 1945, Mosquito. You’ve gone from ops to Erfurt, E-R-F-U-R-T.
ET: Erfurt, yeah.
DK: So you’ve got one four thousand pound bomb.
ET: That’s a bomb we carried, just one.
DK: And then 3rd of March forty-five, Wurzburg, one four thousand pound bomb again.
ET: Yeah.
DK: And then it says here Berlin on the 5th of March, the 7th of March, 9th of March, 11th of March, 13th of March. So every other day there for about a week, you were going to Berlin.
ET: Yeah.
DK: So each time it’s one four thousand pound bomb. So those trips to Berlin, can you recall, were those diversional then, or part of a, a main attack on Berlin?
ET: I, I don’t think it was a main attack because we didn’t see other aeroplanes there really.
DK: Right, so the main force has gone off somewhere else?
ET: It’s more a nuisance, you know, morale type thing I think –
DK: Right.
ET: On that.
DK: So you’re also going out there then to, not as diversions as such but to just keep the defences alert?
ET: Keep it going, yeah.
DK: So then 15th of March, Erfurt again [page turns]. [Laughs], and then here 21st of March, Berlin, 23rd of March, Berlin and the 24th of March, Berlin [page turns]. Think the people in Berlin must have got a bit fed up of you turning up [all laugh]. So your, and it says here, so the same pilot, Flight Lieutenant –
ET: Yes.
DK: Is it, was it Dave Green? Dave, Dave Green, was it? Green?
ET: Dave Green, yeah.
DK: Dave Green. And just reading for the recording here –
ET: Yes.
DK: So 4th of April, Magdeburg, and then 8th of April, Berlin, 10th of April, Berlin, 12th of April, Berlin [BT laughs], 13th of April, I’ll spell this out for the recording. It’s S-T-R-A-L-S-U-N-I, or S-U-N-D, Stralsund I think it is. 17th of April, Berlin, 20th of April, Berlin again, 23rd of April, Flensburg [page turns]. So the end must be coming to an end here then. And finally, 25th of April, a power station at Munich.
ET: That’s right, that was the last one.
DK: Mm.
ET: It, I had a son out there [laughs].
DK: Right.
ET: He worked with the, what’s it called, you know, the –
BT: Eurofighter.
ET: Eurofighter.
DK: Oh right, oh okay.
BT: After the war you want to add [DK and BT laugh].
ET: After the war, oh yes.
DK: Yes.
ET: But I said, ‘I probably passed this part,’ I said, ‘I probably bombed [emphasis] that part’ [all laugh].
BT: Yeah.
DK: So years later, your son was working on the Eurofighter in Europe?
ET: He was in the Eurofighter, yeah.
DK: So can I, if I just add those up [page turns]. Where are we, that’s Berlin. One, two, three, four, five [page turns], six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. Yes as you say, thirteen.
ET: That was –
DK: So out of those twenty operations in Mosquitos, thirteen of them were to Berlin.
ET: Yeah.
DK: And your trips to Berlin, it’s obviously quite a long way. I mean, are you fired on all the way or is it mostly quite dark and quiet?
ET: Bits and pieces.
DK: Mm.
ET: Sometimes flak would come up, you know, you could see it at – you just hoped they hadn’t predicted you, your height.
DK: Hmm. But in a Mosquito you’re a lot higher than another aircraft.
ET: Twenty-five.
DK: Mm, twenty-five thousand feet.
ET: We were, and sometimes we used to get to thirty coming back, you know.
DK: And can you recall, were you ever attacked by German aircraft at all?
ET: Not that I know of.
DK: No.
ET: No.
DK: So as you’re, as you’re approaching the target then, you’ve got down into the –
ET: I get down into the, the bomb bay –
DK: So –
ET: And set up the wind and that –
DK: Yeah.
ET: On the – in fact, so that we could keep together more of the navigation, you’re trying to navigation –
DK: Yeah, yeah.
ET: The leading aircraft might pass back the wind, so as we’re all using the same wind to, to part [?] with our drift and that –
DK: Right.
ET: So as we’d keep –
DK: ‘Cause presumably wind change can really affect your navigation?
ET: Oh yeah, well effects your drift and everything you see, so if you get different winds you could be offsetting differently.
DK: Right, what was it like, if I can ask – you’d obviously have a briefing beforehand –
ET: Yes.
DK: And, and this is in the building at Oakham. What were your feelings like when you saw what your target was going to be?
ET: Well you think –
DK: Presumably they have curtains and they put it back and –
ET: Well they tell you where it is. Oh, the routine was, you take the aircraft up for an air test –
DK: Right.
ET: Up there about fifteen minutes, see it’s alright in the morning, and then, this being the morning, then the afternoon you would go to briefing. Told you where it was, you had to make charts up, you know –
DK: What was your thoughts when you saw Berlin again? Were you –
ET: [Laughs] yeah, ‘can’t you find somewhere else to’ –
DK: So you now know the target, so you’re now doing your charts presumably as the navigator?
ET: Yeah.
DK: So you’re, you’re told the winds and –
ET: Got to put a tracking of where we’re going and that, all these sort of things. Oh yeah, you get briefed by the MET officer of the winds and the weather.
DK: Mhm.
ET: And after that, you had a meal, and then you went back. The worst thing I found was you went back to your billet and then you’d devour [?] away these hours –
DK: Right.
ET: Until, ‘cause it’s always at night of course, you know, until you’re ready for takeoff.
DK: So it came as a bit of a relief then, when you got to the aircraft to takeoff?
ET: Oh yeah, once you get going, you’re too busy really to think about anything else, provided you didn’t swing. It was quite a nasty aircraft to swing in on takeoff –
DK: Mm.
ET: Mosquito, you know, the propellers going the same direction –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Until they got the tail up for a bit of –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Control.
DK: And your pilot then, Dave Green, was he a good pilot?
ET: Yes [emphasis]. But just as I say, he was a quiet chap so I didn’t really see much of him –
DK: Right.
ET: Apart from work which, which was fine [laughs].
DK: But did you – I’m presuming you’d have to work well [emphasis] together then.
ET: Oh yes.
DK: So you worked well together?
ET: Yeah.
DK: We’ve covered what you did over the targets, so you’ve come back after the operation and your landing. How did you feel then as you got back?
ET: Relieved once you got down but of course you’re coming back, you’re all coming back together aren’t you? In these airfield, the seconds [?] they overlapped.
DK: Yeah.
ET: So it was a bit dodgy at times. We landed once at the wrong airport [laughs].
DK: Really?
ET: You know, the wrong way, direction was the same.
DK: Yeah.
ET: We ended up at Wyton [laughs].
DK: Right.
ET: Anyway, they just briefed us and, and that was it. I think we took off in the morning to get back to base [DK and ET laugh].
DK: So you, once you’ve landed then, what’s the procedures then?
ET: Oh you go for a briefing.
DK: Right, a debriefing [emphasis].
ET: De –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Debriefing.
DK: And, and who would take that?
ET: Intelligence.
DK: Mm.
ET: Officers.
DK: Mm, and what sort of questions did they ask?
ET: Did you hit the target, did you think you hit the target?
DK: Right.
ET: We used to take a, a film [emphasis]. Some were better than others, you know –
DK: Mm.
ET: Of the target area and when it happened.
DK: So a photo would be taken when you –
ET: A photo when you pressed the plunger for, to release the bomb a photograph would be taken –
DK: Oh right.
ET: A little later.
DK: Right. So you’ve got back then and you’ve got feelings of relief. What happened then, you just went to bed?
ET: No.
DK: Ah.
ET: Went for a meal.
DK: Right, okay [DK and ET laugh].
ET: And a beer.
DK: Mm.
ET: And a few beers [DK laughs], otherwise I never slept really, you know.
DK: Right.
ET: It’s all night [?], but oh, it was a relief [emphasis] –
DK: Mm.
ET: Really. I mean we were very lucky in the Mosquito, we didn’t have near the number of losses –
DK: Mm.
ET: That the – the loss that I saw, well, the loss that I saw was at – one aircraft completed [?], he was up on his air test and of course he came and tried to beat up the, what we called the flight hock [?] [emphasis], you know, where our ground crew were.
DK: Yep.
ET: And these, these overload tanks in the wing. He hit a tree and knocked one tank off, and the aircraft just [unclear].
DK: Cartwheeled.
ET: I watched this –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Just rolling [emphasis].
DK: Yeah.
ET: And it went straight in the front of the, the sick quarters.
DK: Mm.
ET: That was a complete waste of lives. Another accident we had was at the – one chap lost an engine and he came roaring in far too fast. Oh no sorry, he spun [emphasis] in and of course, they were killed. It happened a second time to another person, and he thought ‘I’m not going to stall’ [laughs], so he came rolling in too fast and [taps four times] wasn’t able to stop at the far end. And then the disciplinary thing at Sheffield, so they sent them to Sheffield. [Unclear] fly –
DK: Right.
ET: But just for discipline [laughs].
DK: But at least he survived that one.
ET: He survived that one, yeah.
DK: But got into trouble for it, yeah. Okay that’s, that’s great. Just ask you, after all these years how do you look back at your time in, in Bomber Command? How do you look back on that?
ET: I don’t really look back on it all that much nowadays.
DK: Mm.
ET: I think – well I was occupied, of course seeing an Air Force and getting in transport we had the Berlin Airlift –
DK: Right.
ET: For a year.
DK: So you got involved with the Berlin Airlift then did you?
ET: Yeah.
DK: Yeah, so –
ET: I did three hundred lifts on that.
DK: Oh right. So you’ve, let, you’ve – so just reading here, that’s three hundred and two lifts –
ET: Yeah.
DK: To Berlin.
ET: That took a year.
DK: And, and what aircraft were you flying?
ET: York.
DK: Right, the Avro York. So what, what was Berlin like when you, you went there after the war?
ET: Oh they were very, very grateful that we’re keeping away from the Russians I think was a big thing, you know, there.
DK: Mm. ‘Cause it’s, it’s kind of strange ‘cause one moment you’re dropping bombs [BT laughs] and then the next –
ET: Three years later, yeah.
DK: You’re giving them food.
ET: That’s right. It’s amazing when people have nothing, you know. If anybody had a bar of soap or something like that –
DK: Mm.
ET: It was like a gold [emphasis] to them, you know.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Things like that.
DK: So what kind of stuff were you carrying in the Avro Yorks then?
ET: Oh you name it, everything.
DK: Food and –
ET: There was coal.
DK: Right.
ET: Actually the aircraft – I forget they were a lot heavier when they finished, it was all this coal dust.
DK: Mm.
ET: They erm, hay for horses, all the natural stuff that people eat.
DK: Right.
ET: Anything like that.
DK: So flying into Berlin then, did you have to stick to certain routes or –
ET: Yes –
DK: ‘Cause you’re flying over –
ET: The Northern – we used to go up north and then go down from a northern corridor, and come back at a centre corridor.
DK: Right.
ET: ‘Cause basically, Onsturfrun [?]
DK: So you went to Onsturfrun Gateaux [?].
ET: Onsturfrun [?] to Gateaux [?] yeah, yeah that’s right.
DK: Right.
ET: And –
DK: So they’re just continuous flights then, going –
ET: Yeah.
DK: In the northern route and coming out the southern route.
ET: Oh it was a shambles in this case. We had lots of different speed aircraft, you know. There was, there was Yorks, there was the Dakotas –
DK: Mm.
ET: Valettas, and what was happening, supposed to go off on waves but one wave was [laughs] overtaking the other wave, you know –
DK: Right.
ET: And things like that. It’s amazing there weren’t more accidents than there were, but after they got it settled it worked very well. You just went along, you got in. If you missed, if you couldn’t get in you came straight back, you didn’t, you couldn’t go round again, you know –
DK: Right.
ET: To Gateaux [?]I mean.
DK: So you, you had to land first time?
ET: You had to land, that’s right.
DK: Yeah.
ET: But it worked very well. And we went down to two lifts. Initially we had to do three lifts. It was a tremendously long day ‘cause you had to wait for the aircraft to get ready and complete your three lifts.
DK: Mm.
ET: That was it, but they put it down to two [emphasis] so we did a night shift or a day –
DK: Yeah.
ET: Day shift. It was well organised towards the end.
DK: Was it easier for you as a navigator, doing that then, because they –
ET: Oh I didn’t do very – there wasn’t very much navigation at all.
DK: Right.
ET: For – you just, it was a corridor, you know –
DK: Right.
ET: And took me an hour coming back ‘cause you flew over quite a bit of Russian territory coming in.
DK: Mm.
ET: The only, the odd fighter used to come and have a look at you [laughs]. Think ‘I hope you go away again,’ you know.
DK: Oh right [ET laughs]. So after that then, you’ve remained with transport and –
ET: Yes.
DK: Yeah. Just looking, so you were in Valettas, Varsitys, the Beverlys?
ET: Yes.
DK: So that was, you went out to Aden then, and –
ET: Yes.
DK: And Iran? Yes.
ET: Yeah, did two years in Aden.
DK: Was that during the conflict out there or –
ET: There, there was a bit of conflict –
DK: Yeah.
ET: But [coughs] there was a lot of trouble in – what do you call that country?
DK: Yemen?
ET: Yemen.
DK: Yemen, yeah and Aden, Aden is Yemen I think, isn’t it? Oman?
ET: There’s another one I think, further east.
DK: Right. So, so what were you doing there? Was it supplying –
ET: Oh just loads of [?] – it was wonderful, a place called Macierz [?] –
DK: Mm.
ET: Which was about eight thousand feet high, and from Aden was very steamy, you know [laughs], and you get up there, your stockings fall down because it’s so dry up there.
DK: Yeah.
ET: Byt they’ve got stuff in there you didn’t know if you could get before, you know.
DK: No.
ET: Like quite big trucks and that type of thing.
DK: So what was, what was the Beverley [emphasis] like as an aircraft then? They’re quite big, quite bulky things aren’t they?
ET: Oh dear [DK laughs]. It was slow [emphasis], it was noisy [emphasis]. In fact the navigator’s table used to be on an angle, you had to, you had to [tapping] flatten it and you had to [tapping], they tried to [?] bounce on it, you know [DK laughs]. And that had a fixed undercarriage, and if you got into icy conditions, these legs used to ice up which meant you even go slower [emphasis] than [DK and ET laugh]. But it had this great capability of short landing in –
DK: Yeah.
ET: In getting into these airfields, you know.
DK: So then you’ve gone onto the Britannia.
ET: That’s right.
DK: So what, what was the Britannia like?
ET: Oh it was lovely.
DK: Yeah
ET: Yeah, I did five years on.
DK: And what was that, mostly trooping flights was it? So whereabouts did you use to go to?
ET: All over the place [coughs]. Did a lot to Norway because the commander was a not [?] – always went there from January to March –
DK: Mm.
ET: They go for their winter training –
DK: Right.
ET: So we’d lots of flights there and back. That was an adventure [?]. We had a lot of flights out to Woomera –
DK: Right.
ET: You know, the atomic –
DK: Oh right, the atomic bomb tests.
ET: It was a little box.
DK: Oh.
ET: Didn’t know what it was [DK and ET laugh]. But we used to go down to Adelaide.
DK: Probably best not to ask [all laugh].
ET: Well, quite a lot.
DK: Yeah.
ET: When all these tests were going on.
DK: Yeah.
ET: And just [coughs] –
DK: You, you didn’t witness any of the tests then did you?
ET: Oh no.
DK: No, no.
ET: We used to use an Edinburgh field recorder, it was a RAAF base. That went on quite a lot. We did trips to Singapore and back –
DK: Mhm.
ET: But when it first started, you know, there was no slipping [emphasis] crews –
DK: Yeah.
ET: You just had a – everyday it took five [emphasis] days to get to Singapore, you had two days off there and five days to come back. And I think what a waste of aircraft it was really [DK laughs]. I suppose we had so many we didn’t bother. That was on the Yorks [emphasis] then.
DK: Yeah [ET laughs]. So finally you’ve become ATS navigator instructor.
ET: That was on Belfasts.
DK: So you’re, you’ve – and then 53 Squadron on the Belfasts?
ET: That’s right.
DK: So, so what was the Belfast like as an aircraft?
ET: Oh it was nice, nice. Well lovely, very palatial for the crew.
DK: Mm.
ET: Just the pilots could get in from the outside of the aircraft into the seat, you know, being a big aircraft –
DK: Right.
ET: It was very palatial for the crew.
DK: So what sort of loads would you have on the Belfasts?
ET: All sorts, helicopters.
DK: Yeah?
ET: Tanks, just stuff like that.
BT: You took the Concord engines didn’t you as well? Concord engines.
ET: Oh I had a big, yeah. Oh my big flight was I went – we carried an engine for Concord once. It went on a world tour.
DK: Oh right.
ET: Well, went to Far East sales pitch. It never needed the engine [laughs].
DK: Right, so it was just a spare –
ET: But it was a few pictures somewhere of that. Is it in there [shuffling].
BT: Yeah that’s the one, that’s the Concord.
DK: Ah.
ET: There’s one with the tours [?] on.
BT: I’ll have a look [ET laughs].
DK: That’s the original prototype isn’t it?
ET: Yeah.
DK: DBSST.
ET: That’s right.
BT: Oh wow.
DK: Okay, so I’ll just finish this off. So you retired in 1978 as a squadron leader.
ET: That’s right.
DK: Ah.
ET: They eventually decided to promote me after [laughs] –
DK: So they promoted you just before you retired?
ET: Yes.
DK: Ah [laughs]. Okay, well I’ll stop that there because I’m conscious of you talking for a whole hour there, but thanks very much for that. I’ll switch that off now.
ET: Well –
Dublin Core
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/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ATaylorEC170928
PTaylorEC1701
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Eric Taylor
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.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:54:10 audio recording
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
David Kavanagh
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2017-09-28
Description
An account of the resource
Squadron Leader Eric Taylor joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 and served as a navigator. He served in North Africa and completed a tour of operations against targets in Italy before becoming an instructor in England. He describes the differences in instrumentation between the North African and English aircraft, such as the Gee navigational aid. He flew nuisance and diversion operations in Mosquitos over places such as Wurzburg, Erfurt and Berlin thirteen times. He was involved in the Berlin Airlift and then spent a couple of years serving in Aden and the Middle East, and remained in the Air Force until 1978 when he retired as a squadron leader.
Coverage
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Algeria
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Tunisia
England--Cambridgeshire
Algeria--Blida
Algeria--Râs el Ma
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Erfurt
Germany--Würzburg
Tunisia--Qayrawān
North Africa
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Katie Gilbert
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1943
1945
142 Squadron
16 OTU
571 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
civil defence
crewing up
Gee
Home Guard
Mosquito
navigator
Operational Training Unit
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Oakington
RAF Upper Heyford
training
Wellington
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/102/3571/MBooneRH1331310-150729-020003.2.jpg
ae8f0f1980371c91a5a28c7de1e9fb61
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/102/3571/MBooneRH1331310-150729-020004.2.jpg
d415c7180ea7b09373c8544df47861f9
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/102/3571/MBooneRH1331310-150729-020005.2.jpg
bd40b5bd980cf154d46b66ade38f410a
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
Boone, Ronald
Ronnie Boone
R Boone
R H Boone
Description
An account of the resource
The collection concerns Ronald Henry Boone (1331310, Royal Air Force). It includes five photographs, his personnel record and a record of his operations. Ronald Boone was an air gunner and flew operations with 77 Squadron at Royal Air Force Elvington and then 35 Squadron from RAF Graveley. He was killed when his Halifax was shot down by a night fighter on an operation to Münster 11/12 June 1943. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Sandra Jones and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.<br /><br />Additional information on Ronald Boone is available via the <a href="https://internationalbcc.co.uk/losses/202629/">IBCC Losses Database</a>.
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. Some items have not been published in order to protect the privacy of third parties, to comply with intellectual property regulations, or have been assessed as medium or low priority according to the IBCC Digital Archive collection policy and will therefore be published at a later stage. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collection-policy.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-10-01
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Boone, R
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[underlined] 18 Feb 1943 [/underlined]
Mine laying ops.
Route: [underlined] BASE [/underlined] ===[underlined] HORNSEA [/underlined]===[underlined] BALTRUM [/underlined]. Release point:54.08. N [underlined] FLAMBOROUGH [/underlined]===[underlined] BASE [/underlined]
Bomb Load: 1 MK IV B200 - NIL DELAY
1MK IVB 202 - NIL DELAY
NIL Cameras
NIL Nickels
Halifax 11 DT 685 “C”
F/SGT Goodwin found good visibility and his mines were laid in position as detailed from a height of 800ft. Moderate amount of light and heavy flak. A searchlight was observed at eastern side of [underlined] JUIST [/underlined] Aircraft landed safely.
[underlined] 26/7 Feb 1943 [/underlined]
Halifax DT 643 “A”
Target [underlined] COLOGNE [/underlined]
Route: BASE===SOUTHWOLD===NORDWYKE===TULICH===DUREEN===NORDWYKE===BASE.
Bomb loads 2 x 1000-37 pistol fuse 845
810 x 4lb incendiaries (ord)
32 x 30lb incendiaries (ord)
Nickels - Aircrafts A + J
Cameras - All aircraft.
Primary site located, dropped bombs on green TI Marker from 15000ft, whole area well carpeted from incendiaries, no distinctive fires. Nickels dropped 15 minutes after bombing. Enemy believed to be ME109 passed overhead 10ft above our aircraft and attacked from starboard quarter from 800 yards closing to 600 yards, evasive action taken, M109 [sic]broke away to port. Flak moderate heavy 2 searchlights cones seen. Returned safe.
[page break]
[underlined] 26/27 March 1943 [/underlined]
Halifax 11JB 842 “E”
Left base 19.51
Landed back 00.19.
Bombing [underlined] DUISBERG (SR) [/underlined]
Bombs dropped at 18000ft cloud over target 10/10ths and results of bombing not seen. Large explosion was seen as aircraft left target area, 4 packages of G10 nickels were dropped after bombing. Numerous ineffective searchlights. Landed safe.
[underlined] 27/28 March 1943 [/underlined]
Bombing [underlined] BERLIN [/underlined]
Left base 19.56
Landed back 22.13
Took off but found Constant Speed Unit on Port inner was fluctuating. Bombs jettisoned safely position 53.46 N 02.01 E. also nickels. Returned safe.
[underlined] 29/30 March 1943 [/underlined]
Bombing [underlined] BERLIN [/underlined]
Left base 21.50
Landed back 05.11
Bomb loads: 2 x 1000 GP TD 0 025
5 x SBC (90 x 4)
5 x SBC (8 x 30)
Bombs dropped onto cluster TI markers from 18000ft. Ground haze at target, 2 fires seemed to be developing. 3 G 14 nickels dropped after bombing. Fires were seen when our aircraft was 120 miles away on return journey, flak light and number of searchlights. Return safe.
[page break]
[underlined] 28/29 April 1943 [/underlined]
Halifax 11 JB 846 “L”
[underlined] DUISBO? [/underlined]
Left base 20.24
Landed back 03.12
Mine laying dropping point 56.51 N x 11.09 E
Mines 1 x G 708 IV
1 X B 200 IV
Dropped at 300ft in position. Ordered flak from 2 flak ships, encountered no damage to aircraft and 12 searchlights in operation. Operation completed.
[underlined] 30th April/1st May 1943 [/underlined]
Bombing [underlined] ESSEN [/underlined]
Crew briefed but aircraft didn’t take off.
[underlined] 4/5 May 1943 [/underlined]
Bombing [underlined] DORTMUND [/underlined]
Left base 22.41
Landed back 03.54
Target attacked from 16300ft release point being 3 or 4 red TI markers in bombsite. Whole target covered with fires. Red explosion followed by blue one then big white flash was observed. Heavy flak from 3 or 4 guns observed and appeared to be accurately predicted. Safe return.
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
Ronald Boone operations on 77 Squadron
Description
An account of the resource
Details of nine operations carried out between February and May 1943 from RAF Elvington on 77 Squadron flying Halifax. Targets include Cologne, Berlin and several in the Ruhr.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Three page typewritten document
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MBooneRH1331310-150729-020003, MBooneRH1331310-150729-020004, MBooneRH1331310-150729-020005
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.
Great Britain
England--Yorkshire
England--York
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1943-02
1943-03
1943-04
1943-05
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.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Jeremy Patton
77 Squadron
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
incendiary device
Me 109
mine laying
propaganda
RAF Elvington
searchlight
target indicator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/191/3591/LOHaraHF655736v1.1.pdf
557abec419df40658803dece8c9dfd75
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
O'Hara, Herbert
Paddy O'Hara
H F O'Hara
Description
An account of the resource
59 items. The collection concerns the wartime career of Flight Sergeant Herbert Frederick O'Hara (1917 – 1968, 655736, 195482 Royal Air Force). Herbert O'Hara served on 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby between February and May 1944. His aircraft was shot down over France in May 1944 and he evaded until he was liberated in September 1944. He was then commissioned. The collection contains service records and two logbooks, notification of him missing as well as correspondence from and photographs of French people who helped him evade. In addition there is an account of travelling across the Atlantic for flying training in Florida as well as notes from his aircrew officers course at RAF Credenhill. Finally there are a number of target and reconnaissance photographs and six paintings.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Brian O'Hara and catalogued by Nigel Huckins and IBCC 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
O'Hara, HF
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/.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
France
Germany
Poland
Wales
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
England--Lincolnshire
England--Staffordshire
England--Suffolk
France--Nord-Pas-de-Calais
France--Lyon
France--Mailly-le-Camp
Germany--Augsburg
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Friedrichshafen
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Stuttgart
Poland--Gdynia
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Title
A name given to the resource
Herbert O'Hara's South African Air Force observers or air gunners log book
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
LOHaraHF655736v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
South African Air Force
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.
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1944-02-25
1944-02-26
1944-03-01
1944-03-02
1944-03-15
1944-03-16
1944-03-18
1944-03-19
1944-04-09
1944-04-10
1944-04-11
1944-04-20
1944-04-21
1944-04-22
1944-04-23
1944-04-24
1944-04-25
1944-04-26
1944-04-27
1944-04-28
1944-04-30
1944-05-01
1944-05-02
1944-05-03
1944-05-04
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
Log book for Sergeant Herbert O'Hara from 7 November 1942 to 9 September 1962. He was stationed with 12 Squadron at RAF Wickenby, where he flew Lancasters as navigator. The log book shows 14 night operations over France and Germany, with one to Poland. Targets were: Augsburg, Aulnoye, Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Friedrichshafen, Gdynia, Karlsruhe, Lyon, Mailly-le-Camp, Mantenon, Stuttgart. His pilot on operations was Flying Officer Maxwell. The log book is noted DID NOT RETURN beside the last operational flight. It is subsequently noted in Sgt O'Hara's hand that his aircraft was shot down leaving the vicinity of Mailley-le-Camp on 3 May 1944, abandoned by the crew, and that he was in France for 4 months before being liberated and flown home by the Air Transport Auxillary on 3 September 1944. He was subsequently posted to Advanced Flying Units and Flying Schools until finishing in 1962.
12 Squadron
1657 HCU
26 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bombing
Bombing of Mailly-le-Camp (3/4 May 1944)
C-47
Dominie
evading
Heavy Conversion Unit
killed in action
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 3
Lincoln
missing in action
navigator
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
prisoner of war
RAF Binbrook
RAF Feltwell
RAF Halfpenny Green
RAF Llandwrog
RAF Penrhos
RAF St Mawgan
RAF Stradishall
RAF Wickenby
RAF Wing
shot down
Stirling
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/185/3629/LSayerT591744v1.1.pdf
83e258c6faf6ed7815681549299d9b06
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
Sayer, Tom
Tom Sayer
T Sayer
Description
An account of the resource
13 items. An oral history interview with Flying Officer Thomas Sayer DFM (1922 - 2021, 591744 54901 Royal Air Force), two log books, service material, newspaper cuttings and photographs. After training as a pilot in the United States of America, Tom Sayer flew Halifaxes with 102 Squadron at RAF Pocklington. He was commissioned in 1944 and became an instructor.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Tom Sayer 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
2016-02-17
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
Sayer, T
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
Tom Sayer's Royal Canadian Air Force pilot's flying log book. Book one
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LSayerT591744v1
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Coastal Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943-02-22
1943-02-25
1943-02-28
1943-03-03
1943-03-06
1943-03-09
1943-03-12
1943-03-15
1943-04-30
1943-05-25
1943-05-26
1943-05-27
1943-05-28
1943-05-29
1943-05-30
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-19
1943-06-20
1943-06-21
1943-06-22
1943-07-13
1943-07-14
1943-07-15
1943-07-16
1943-07-24
1943-07-25
1943-07-26
1943-07-30
1943-07-31
1943-08-09
1943-08-10
1943-08-11
1943-08-12
1943-08-13
1943-08-17
1943-08-18
1943-08-23
1943-08-24
1943-08-25
1943-08-27
1943-08-28
1943-08-30
1943-08-31
1943-09-01
1943-09-05
1943-09-06
1943-09-27
1943-09-28
1943-09-29
1943-09-30
1943-10-04
1943-10-05
1943-10-08
1943-10-09
1944-07-18
1944-07-19
1944-09-01
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Canada
France
Germany
Great Britain
United States
Alabama
Florida
England--Gloucestershire
England--Yorkshire
Georgia--Atlanta
France--Le Creusot
France--Montbéliard
Germany--Aachen
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Krefeld
Germany--Leverkusen
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Peenemünde
Germany--Wuppertal
Italy--Milan
Germany--Düsseldorf
England--Cornwall (County)
Italy
Georgia
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Description
An account of the resource
Royal Canadian Air Force pilot's flying log book for Sergeant Tom Sayer from 28 July 1941 to 17 December 1944. Detailing training and operations flown with Coastal Command and Bomber Command. After training in the United States and Canada he served at RAF Linton on Ouse, RAF Marston Moor, RAF Pocklington. Aircraft flown were Stearman, Vultee, Harvard, Oxford, Blenheim, Whitley, Halifax, Anson, Horsa and Stirling. He carried out a total of 35 complete operations as a pilot, eight antisubmarine patrols with 10 OTU from RAF St Eval, one with 76 Squadron from RAF Marston Moor and 25 with 102 Squadron from RAF Pocklington on the following targets in France, Germany and Italy: Aachen, Berlin, Bochum, Dusseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hannover, Krefeld, Le Creusot, Leverkusen, Mannheim, Milan, Montbeliard, Munich, Nuremberg, Peenemunde and Wuppertal. His first or second pilots on operations were Sergeant Carrie, Sergeant Hewlett, Sergeant Lewis, Pilot Officer Mann, Sergeant Green, Flying Officer Phillips, Sergeant Davis, Sergeant Henderson, Sergeant Thorpe, Sergeant Miller, Flight Sergeant Cummings and Flying Officer Kay. He then became an instructor and glider tug pilot. The log book is well annotated and contains printed training material. He completed one additional special operation 18 July 1944 with 620 Squadron from RAF Fairford ‘(SAS. 3 chutists, 24 containers 4 paniers [sic])’ and 1 September 1944 from RAF Ringway ‘parachute jump 600’ singly into lake.’
10 OTU
102 Squadron
1652 HCU
17 OTU
620 Squadron
76 Squadron
81 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
Blenheim
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Bombing of Peenemünde (17/18 August 1943)
Flying Training School
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Halifax Mk 5
Harvard
Heavy Conversion Unit
Horsa
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
RAF Fairford
RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor
RAF Leconfield
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Ossington
RAF Pocklington
RAF Ringway
RAF Sleap
RAF St Eval
RAF Stanton Harcourt
RAF Tilstock
RAF Upwood
Stearman
Stirling
submarine
training
Whitley
-
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/.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany--Berlin
Title
A name given to the resource
Berlin [place]
Description
An account of the resource
This page is an entry point for a place. This entry is also used for: Charlottenburg, Neukölln, Siemensstadt, Spandau and Tempelhof. Please use the links below to see all relevant documents available in the Archive.
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/360/5767/LFreethR1319543v10001.1.pdf
432d56a5d548ab9c682b4566db2f44e1
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
Freeth, Reg
Reg Freeth
R Freeth
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Sergeant Reginald Freeth (b. 1921, 1319543 Royal Air Force) his logbook and a squadron photograph. Reg Freeth trained in South Africa and served as a bomb aimer with 61 Squadron first at RAF Syerston then at RAF Skellingthorpe.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Reginald Freeth 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
2016-05-31
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
Freeth, R
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
Reg Freeth's South African Air Force observers or air gunners log book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LFreethR1319543v10001
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.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Description
An account of the resource
South African Air Force observers or air gunners log book for Warrant Officer Reg Freeth, bomb aimer, covering the period from 7 February 1942 to 8 October 1945. Detailing his flying training, operations and Instructor duties. He was stationed at SAAF Queenstown, SAAF Port Alfred, RAF Millom, RAF North Luffenham, RAF Winthorpe, RAF Syerston, RAF Skellingthorpe, RAF Harrington, RAF Bruntingthorpe, RAF Westcott, RAF Finningley, RAF Little Horwood and RAF Wing. Aircraft flown in were, Anson, Oxford MkI, Wellington MkIII, Manchester, Lancaster I & III, Martinet, Wellington MkX. He flew a total of 16 night operations with 61 Squadron to Dusseldorf, Bochum, Cologne, Dortmund, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Nuremburg, Munchen-Gladbach, Berlin, Hannover, Hagen, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. His pilots on operations were Sergeant Madgett, Flight Lieutenant Talbot, Pilot Officer Graham, Sergeant Strange and Flying Officer Turner.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
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
South African Air Force
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Germany
Great Britain
South Africa
England--Cumbria
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Stuttgart
South Africa--Port Alfred
South Africa--Queenstown
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Hagen (Arnsberg)
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1943-02-28
1943-03-01
1943-05-23
1943-05-24
1943-05-25
1943-05-26
1943-05-27
1943-05-28
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-13
1943-06-28
1943-06-29
1943-07-03
1943-07-04
1943-07-08
1943-07-09
1943-07-10
1943-08-27
1943-08-28
1943-08-30
1943-08-31
1943-09-01
1943-09-27
1943-09-28
1943-10-01
1943-10-02
1943-10-04
1943-10-05
1943-10-07
1943-10-08
11 OTU
1661 HCU
26 OTU
29 OTU
61 Squadron
84 OTU
Advanced Flying Unit
aircrew
Anson
bomb aimer
bombing
Bombing and Gunnery School
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Manchester
Martinet
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
RAF Bruntingthorpe
RAF Desborough
RAF Finningley
RAF Little Horwood
RAF Millom
RAF North Luffenham
RAF Skellingthorpe
RAF Syerston
RAF Westcott
RAF Wing
RAF Winthorpe
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/357/5770/LGrimesS1271597v1.1.pdf
f78de867933d06f442ab2845bafcbb34
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
Grimes, Syd
Syd Grimes
S V Grimes
Description
An account of the resource
Three items. An oral history interview with Pilot Officer Sydney Grimes (173865, 1271597 Royal Air Force) a photograph, and his logbook. After training as a wireless operator/ air gunner he completed a tour on 106 Squadron at RAF Syerston. After a period as an instructor he joined 617 Squadron for his second tour where he took part in the attacks on the Tirpitz.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Syd Grimes 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
2015-11-21
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. 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
Grimes, SV
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
Sydney Grimes' observer's and air gunner's flying log book
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LGrimesS1271597v1
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
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Description
An account of the resource
Royal Air Force observer's and air gunner's flying log book for Sydney Grimes, wireless operator, covering the period from 2 July 1942 to 22 August 1945. Detailing training, operations flown, instructional duties and post war flying. He was stationed at RAF Evanton, RAF Madley, RAF Cottesmore, RAF Wigsley, RAF Syerston, RAF Balderton, RAF Scampton, RAF Winthorpe, RAF Woodhall Spa, RAF Bardney and RAF Sturgate. Aircraft flown in were Dominie, Proctor, Botha, Wellington, Anson, Manchester, Halifax and Lancaster. He flew a total of 41 operations, 24 night operations with 106 squadron and 15 daylight and 2 night operations with 617 squadron. Targets were, Kiel, Frankfurt, Spezia, Pilsen, Stettin, Duisburg, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Essen, Wuppertal, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Turin, Hamburg, Berlin, Tromso, Urft Dam, Ijmuiden, Politz, Rotterdam, Oslo Fjord, Emden, Koln, Poortershaven, Viesleble [Bielefeld] viaduct and Ladbergen. His pilots on operations were Flight Lieutenant Stephens and Flight Lieutenant Gumbley.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Czech Republic
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Scotland
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Atlantic Ocean--North Sea
Czech Republic--Plzeň
England--Herefordshire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Rutland
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bielefeld
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Cologne
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Germany--Essen
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Ladbergen
Germany--Wuppertal
Italy--La Spezia
Italy--Turin
Netherlands--Ijmuiden
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Norway--Tromsø
Poland--Police (Województwo Zachodniopomorskie)
Germany--Düsseldorf
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Urft Dam
Atlantic Ocean--Oslofjorden
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942
1943
1944
1945
1943-04-04
1943-04-05
1943-04-10
1943-04-11
1943-04-13
1943-04-14
1943-04-16
1943-04-17
1943-04-18
1943-04-19
1943-04-20
1943-04-21
1943-05-12
1943-05-13
1943-05-14
1943-05-23
1943-05-24
1943-05-25
1943-05-26
1943-05-27
1943-05-28
1943-05-29
1943-05-30
1943-06-11
1943-06-12
1943-06-13
1943-06-24
1943-06-25
1943-06-26
1943-06-28
1943-06-29
1943-07-03
1943-07-04
1943-07-08
1943-07-09
1943-07-12
1943-07-13
1943-07-24
1943-07-25
1943-07-26
1943-07-27
1943-07-28
1943-07-29
1943-07-30
1943-08-23
1943-08-24
1944-10-29
1944-11-12
1944-12-08
1944-12-11
1944-12-15
1944-12-21
1944-12-22
1944-12-29
1944-12-30
1944-12-31
1945-01-01
1945-02-03
1945-02-06
1945-02-08
1945-02-14
1945-02-22
1945-02-24
1945-03-13
1945-03-14
1945-05-12
1945-06-25
1945-07-09
1945-08-07
1945-08-11
1945-08-20
1945-08-22
106 Squadron
14 OTU
1654 HCU
1661 HCU
1668 HCU
50 Squadron
617 Squadron
9 Squadron
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of Hamburg (24-31 July 1943)
Botha
Cook’s tour
Dominie
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 5
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Lancaster Mk 1
Lancaster Mk 3
Manchester
Operation Catechism (12 November 1944)
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operational Training Unit
Proctor
RAF Balderton
RAF Bardney
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Evanton
RAF Madley
RAF Scampton
RAF Sturgate
RAF Syerston
RAF Wigsley
RAF Winthorpe
RAF Woodhall Spa
Tallboy
Tirpitz
training
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/367/5782/PCavalierRG17010009.2.jpg
ed46ef7f03f228c75551a142afae6e21
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
Cavalier, Reginald George. Album one
Description
An account of the resource
57 items. Photograph album showing pictures taken during Reginald George Cavalier's service as a squadron photographer. It includes material from his photographic course training in 1940, and service with 76 Squadron at RAF Middleton St George, and with 88 Squadron and 226 Squadron with 2 Group and 2nd Tactical Air Force at RAF West Raynham. The album also includes target photographs, images of Christmas parties, visits by VIPs including Eisenhower and the King, as well as captured German ordnance and aircraft in France, the Netherlands and Germany.
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
2017-04-10
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
Cavalier, RG
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
Berlin and Brest
Halifax in flight
Description
An account of the resource
Photograph 1 shows a railway running left to right through an urban area. Captioned '1. J.D.S. 382.X.12782.76.N/T.7/8 -8-41 F.8. ➝'.
Photograph 2 shows a mostly rural area, much obscured by anti-aircraft fire and light flare. Captioned 'T.K.A. 073 Z 76 N/T 2/3 .8.41 F8 ➝'.
This photograph also captioned 'Night raid on Berlin Germany, Halifax A/C. 76 Sqd. Bomber Command, 4 Group. R.A.F. Middleton St. George, Yorks. 2/3 Aug 1941.'
Photograph 3 is of the port of Brest.
Photograph 4 is a vertical air-to-air photograph of a Halifax flying over a coastline. It is captioned 'A. 23 A(A) 76 30.12.41 F/8'. Captioned '18. Dec 1941.'
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1941-08-02
1941-08-03
1941-08-07
1941-08-08
1941-12-30
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Four b/w photographs on an album page
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PCavalierRG17010009
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.
Germany
Germany--Berlin
France
France--Brest
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941-08
1941-08-02
1941-08-03
1941-08-07
1941-08-08
1941-12-30
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.
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
4 Group
76 Squadron
aerial photograph
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Halifax
RAF Middleton St George
target photograph
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/369/6115/AHicksDK151103.2.mp3
8f3b62f9200c69a23551ea40528cc813
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
Hicks, Ken
Ken Hicks
D K Hicks
Description
An account of the resource
61 items. An oral history interview with Chief Technician David Kennedy Hicks (b. 1922, 0574954 Royal Air force), memories of the Battle of Britain, his Royal Air Force record, and photographs of his Halton entry, his time in Southern Rhodesia and 56 photographs, many of his time in Southern Africa. Ken Hicks joined the Royal Air Force in 1938 as a Halton apprentice. He served with 202 Squadron at RAF Hornchurch during the Battle of Britain as an aircraft rigger. Subsequently he served on training unit in Southern Rhodesia and then in Egypt, staying in the Royal Air Force after the war.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Ken Hicks and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
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
2015-11-03
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
Hicks, DK
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
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
CB: Right. My name is Chris Brockbank and I’m here to talk with Ken Hicks on the 3rd of November 2015 about his experiences in World War Two but if you’d like to start please Ken with your earliest recollections and then just go through your life in sequence please.
KH: To start with, my father, a coal miner down in Wales and when I was fifteen he said to me, ‘Lad you’re not going down the pit. I want you to learn a trade. I want you to go to see the headmaster and join the royal aircraft as an aircraft apprentice.’ I went and saw the headmaster and he said, ‘There’s no one been up from this school. The curriculum doesn’t cover it.’ But my old man went down and thumped the table. And he said ok and he sent for the exam paper and I sat in his office in his chair and I had one hour and I answered all the questions and he came in and he said, ‘Put your pen down.’ So I had just I just worked out the last answer so I jotted that down and he went bananas. ‘When I say put the pen down put the pen down.’ So he put it in a big brown envelope and he said, ‘Lick that,’ and I licked it. And he got hold of me by the ear and said, ‘Come on. I want to see you post it.’ So I posted it. I passed. He had me up in front of the school, tapping my head saying, ‘There’s a clever boy. I want all you boys to try this examination now.’ So I learned a lot about humanity [laughs]. So off I went to RAF Halton as a civilian lad of sixteen. Never been out of the Welsh valley even alone Wales on a train up to London. We got, we got to London and all the apprentices were sort of gathering there on the last train to Wendover and we all straggled up to, up to the camp. Not marched. And I was very impressed. I would, became a member of B Squadron. Two Wing Aircraft Apprentice RAF Halton. There was over a thousand boys in our entry and it was quite an eye opener but I adapted very well. My education wasn’t all that clever so I wasn’t one of the brainy blokes. I never became a snag — a corporal apprentice, or a sergeant apprentice [laughs]. I was still an AA. I got a three year training course but the war broke out 1939 and they cut it down to two years. Cut out a lot of sport and concentrated on teaching us. We marched down to schools, we marched down to the workshops and we marched down to the airfield for the aircraft training. We were training on Hawker Harts and Demons drilling, rigging. Stripping them down. Building them up. And an old Hampden there as the bomber side of it. I passed out in June 1940 and posted to 222 Squadron which was based at Kirton Lindsey, Lincoln at the time. And I’d only been there a week and beginning to settle down when we moved down to Hornchurch which moved straight into the Battle of Britain which commenced then and with two Spitfire squadrons at Hornchurch — 222 and I think it’s 603 City of Glasgow Spitfire squadron. I worked with a LAC 1GC who called me a sprog and I soon picked up we were repairing bullet holes in Spitfires. Filing around. If they, if they weren’t too bad we put a fabric patch on them. Anything to keep the aeroplane flying. Or we had to rivet two small riveting patches. I fitted in well with the, with the airman. We worked until the aircraft was serviceable. Sometimes gone midnight. We lost thirty seven pilots in that three months on my squadron and I wasn’t, I didn’t realise what was happening up there in the sky above us. The Germans were bombing our airfields and the Dorniers were coming across at about six thousand feet and mounds of earth — bombs were dropping and they were trying to – the grass airfields and they were trying to obliterate the RAF camps altogether. Bombs on the airfield. We had civilians out there with shovels filling in the bomb holes. They were bombing our hangars. And I was in the bath one night, 10 o’clock, when a bomb landed right outside the building and blew all the glass from the door into the bath with me and plaster. I reached over for my towel and that was covered in bits of glass. So I turned the duckboard upside down and stood on that. It was pitch dark. Half the block had been knocked down so the next night they moved us over to a round nissen hut the other side of the airfield and we were all in bed and about 1 o’clock in the morning a landmine which had come down went off and blew the roof right off our head. This corrugated roof. And we were all shouting at each other in our beds. Everybody. ‘Everybody alright.’ So we said we were alright and nobody hurt so we went back to sleep looking up at the stars. So that was a good opening. [pause] Where were we?
CB: We’re going to have a break for a mo.
[Recording paused]
CB: Ok. So you’ve lost the roof.
KH: Yeah.
CB: And what happened next day?
KH: The next day I had to go with the corporal. Corporal airframe fitter. I was, I was an airframe fitter. A land rover down, one of our Spitfires had landed down in Kent. In Manston. So we had to go down there and repair it. On the way down through the Kentish fields all the fields that were unharvested at that time of the year and they were all burning. Flames going across the road as we were driving along. I don’t know if that was a ploy to destroy the harvest or what but anyway we got to this Manston. Manston was a place heavily bombed. Anything left, any bombs left, any bombs left going back to Germany they picked Manston out and dropped them there. So there was no one on the station except a skeleton staff but we had a billet and there was, there was an emergency cook laid on for meals and we got to the Spitfire which had bent a prop and a pitot head and the corporal fitter in charge he changed the prop and I had to help him. There was no one on the station so we helped ourselves in the empty yard and anywhere else for equipment and stuff. We worked in the middle of the airfield. There was also a lorry there full of civilian workers. They were shovelling and filling in the bomb holes trying to put the airfield back in to some sort of serviceability state and one of them was binoculars scouring the skies. He was lookout and when he blew the whistle they all dropped their shovels, jumped in the truck and tore off the airfield. So we soon twigged it and when they went off the airfield we went off as well [laughs]. We dropped our tools and went off as well. So we fixed this Spitfire and the pilot came down in an Anson, dropped him off and he took off and flew it back to Hornchurch and then we got home and that was my first introduction to the war as it were. What was happening? Stop.
CB: Ok.
[Recording paused]
CB: Ok Ken can we just talk about what was your role as a rigger? What did you actually do in your job?
KH: As an airframe fitter I’d done the basic training and trained on older type of aircraft but now I was on a Spitfire which I’d never seen before in my life and didn’t know. Hadn’t done any training on it but I was given, I was told to work with an LAC 1GC airframe fitter who knew the ropes and he had to sort of teach me. So any riveting he was riveting that side and I held the block on this side sort of thing. So we were doing patches on the skins and things like that. Change undercart. Change the wheels. Tyre bay. How to use, how to use the tyre levers to change those, get those tyres off. Things like that. They were all practical work which I’d never done before and everything we did I learned. I learned more all the time. We had to learn the hydraulic system, the pneumatic system, the electrical system, anti-freeze system and even spraying. We had to spray and paint the camouflage back on the aircraft. And another role came out. We had to paint the underneath of the Spitfires a duck egg, duck egg blue, a light duck egg blue. So there we were lying on the hangar floor with a twelve inch, two inch paint brush painting the underside of a Spitfire. And we had to do the whole squadron. We’d got a mat to lie on on the hard concrete floor. That took us about a week to do the squadron. I can’t remember other things which I did because it was a long time ago.
CB: What about the flying controls which were wire operated?
KH: Well they were alright but I I had to do some splicing and I got a wire out and made a measurement and got a new wire from stores and spliced in the buckle on both ends. That’s seven and a half tucks on the splicing and then, and then fit it, wire, pull it back through with the string and connect it up. Tension the turn buckle to get it all right. And then the aircraft used to go out then on air test. On one occasion I was working in a hangar and apparently a Spitfire had come over from dispersal. They disbursed the Spits instead of having them in one place and be a target for a bomb they disbursed the other side of the airfield all over the place. Well this one came over and stopped in between the hangars and the chaps coming back from lunch, dinnertime thought it was the next Spitfire to be done so they pushed it into the hangar but this one was armed and nobody knew about it. They came back from dinner and I was down just about opening my toolbox underneath the wing of this aircraft when an instrument basher had got into this aircraft he’d shoved in to check his instruments and he pressed the firing button for some reason and all of a sudden four machine guns blasting. Blasting the hangar wall with the armour piercing tracer bullets flying around all over the place. Quite a long burst. And I was crouching down behind my tool box and I thought [laughs] well it’s a bit dodgy this is. [laughs] Lots of things happened when we were working there. Every now and again we had to drop — drop our tools and run for the air raid shelter and get down there fast. I was down the air raid shelter one day and I was about the last one in I think ‘cause I was near the entrance and I heard an aircraft taxiing off so I l had a look out and there was a Hurricane had come in. It was taxiing around. There was nobody about. We were all down the air raid shelter. And the pilot was waving so I ran out, crossed and jumped on to the wing and it was, it was a Polish pilot and he wanted to know what airfield he’d landed on. He had a map on his knee which showed him more or less the east coast so I turned it over and I pointed out where we were. Hornchurch. Hornchurch. And he had a look around and I knew the Poles were over at, over the other side of London so I said to him, ‘Balloon barrage. Fly over the top.’ ‘Oh yah yah,’ he said, you know and off he went. I hope he got back alright. There were quite a few instances but when you’re young and you’re new to the game you learn pretty fast. You make mates but the Air Ministry post you as numbers and you just get a serviceable team going nicely and you’re posted overseas invariably. Never to, never to see each other again. So you don’t make friends too long in the air force. They come and go fast. Some are posted to the desert. Some are posted to Iceland to the snow. Some are posted up the Far East. I was on the boat. Went down to Uxbridge got my KD and [torpee?] Up to Liverpool. Got on a troop ship RMS Scythia. Hammocks. No bunks. Out in a fifty two boat convoy. Left the Clyde, staggered course, escorted by destroyers and one battleship. Out in to the North Atlantic. I heard depth charges going off. The destroyers were chasing the subs which were after the convoy. Apparently, we heard that they did get one. One of our troop ships. We came down towards the equator and on the day we crossed the equator I had my nineteenth birthday. Crossing the equator going down south on a staggered course. Then we headed west, west again to Freetown. Out into the Atlantic and down the South Atlantic to Cape Town. Mostly army bods on board. They were going around, they were going around up to the Suez Canal, Cairo and they were tackling Rommel in North Africa. But the twenty eight names of the RAF were shouted out. ‘Get your kit off the boat. Get on that train.’ The train set off up for a day and a half and we knew there wasn’t a river line going all the way to Cairo which we thought we were going there. And we came to Salisbury Rhodesia and I was posted to mount, RAF Mount Hampden. There were three stations around Salisbury. One was Tiger Moths, one was Harvards for training fighters and one was Oxfords training bombers and I was posted to Mount Hampden — Tiger Moths. We got there. We were advanced party. Twenty eight men in an advanced party. All trades. And we were setting up, setting it up it. Getting it prepared. The entry arrived on a train from the [wool?] station. Corrugated sink, roofs. Billets with mosquito net windows and doors. Storm ditches. And we soon settled down. Guards. Guard duty. I don’t know what we were guarding from. The natives weren’t, we could hear their jungle drums going all night when they’d had some Kafa beer down them from the village and that was about all. We had no problems from the outside but we still had to do guards. We were assembling aircraft out of packing cases. Tiger Moths. And we kept doing that until we got, we got about forty and they were doing circuits and bumps training pilots and one time there were four prangs on the airfield at the same time. One had landed heavy. Busted his undercart. Another one had landed, watching him, landed on top of another one and they both turned over like that. Upside down. And then another one crash landed and we had a big sign on the hangar wall, “You bend them, we mend them.” When we finished in the aircraft I had to go flying with the pilot on a test flight to test the aircraft before they handed over on to flying training. Loops and rolls and spins. So I used to put my parachute on and pull the straps tight and practice grabbing the, grabbing the rip cord to open the ‘chute. I always wanted to bale out. We were up there flying one day doing aerobatics and the aircraft, the engine cut so I thought, ah. So I shouted down the tube, ‘Can I bale out? ’ He said, ‘No. I can see a clearing in the jungle down there. So I thought oh. So we landed in this clearing. It was about four foot high grass stuff and we hit a termite hill which whipped the undercart off, dug our nose in and slammed us over on our back upside down. So I undid slowly on to the back of my neck, wriggled out and it didn’t catch fire. And that was at half past six in the morning. When the sun got up there it gets up to a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty in the shade in the summertime. We had no food. No water. And the pilot said, ‘I can hear, I heard a lion roaring.’ Well there were lions around that area. I thought well we can’t leave the aircraft ‘cause they’ll never find us. So we were lumbered. We were stuck. Mid-day a Moth flew over, spotted us, waggled his wings and flew back and told them where we were. At about five o’clock a three tonner came through the jungle with Chiefy and a couple of bods and brought us food and water. Our Chiefy had a look at the aircraft. It had broken its back, it had broken its spruce bars and the wings had gone. This, that and the other. And I was watching him. He took his pipe out and he put his tobacco in. He struck a match and he took a couple of puffs and he went over and he threw the lit match down where the petrol was and up went the petrol and he said to the pilot, he said, ‘When you landed it burned didn’t it? ’ He said. He said it wasn’t worth taking back so (laughs] we went and left it. Yeah. Crumbs.
CB: Do you want a break?
KH: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: So the plane was a write off and caught fire so you went back but this was the sort of aeroplane you were trained on.
KH: Yes. That was no problem. They used to use me a lot because I was trained on aircraft and I could rig, I could rig the Tiger Moth so that there was no — it wasn’t flying left wing low, right wing low and all this that and the other and I used to do the trimming. I used to do any control work on it and I used to go up on air tests and make sure with the pilots that it was perfectly serviceable to hand over to flying training. That was primarily my job.
CB: What rank were you at this stage?
KH: I started off AC1, AC2, LAC.
CB: Right.
KH: I was stuck out in Rhodesia. No promotion for three years. I was doing an essential job training. Training pilots. I trained them in Rhodesia, South Africa and Canada so they were out of the way of the war. And that meant no promotion otherwise everybody would be flight sergeant [laughs] on the station [laughs]. Well there was no promotion at all for three years. One. One. He was a chippy carpenter. He got corporal stripes. He was the only one on the station that got promoted in that three years. The rest of the war was going on. That was more important. They were fighting out in Burma, they were fighting out in the Middle East and they were fighting out everywhere. They were moving around and getting places and getting promoted. They were on squadrons, my trade and the corporal would get killed and they thought they’d make an LAC up. There was promotion going on but not down there where we were on the training so I was still an LAC when I got home after three years. Six, six months I was only home in the UK six months and then I was posted overseas again. Egypt. A boat across the channel, a train down to [Touronne?] living in tents in the flooded water in the heavy rain until, for three days, until we got on a troop ship. Took us across the Med. Called in at Malta and I got rid of stuff there. And we didn’t know where we were going of course and then we saw the lovely blue Mediterranean Sea turning brown and we couldn’t see any land but that was the, that was the river coming down from North Africa.
CB: So this is the Nile Delta.
KH: The Nile. And that was coming out in to the Mediterranean and running and it was still brown full days sailing out from, you know. We came Alexandra. Dropped a few people off there and then we got on a train up to Cairo and we were nodding off on the train, with my head on the woodwork at the side and I started scratching and it was bugs come out of the woodwork and was biting me. I was lumps coming up [laughs] so I thought that’s our entrance to Egypt, you know. And this was the thing which we had to do. First of all it was a PGC Almaza in tents and before we left to go out in the evening into Cairo we used to put everything in our kit bag and lock it on to the tent pole because we’d heard that thieves used to get into the camp and pinch airmen’s equipment. When we came back, the rows of tents, there was a tent missing. They’d come in with a lorry and they’d picked the whole tent up pegs and all and put it in a lorry and drove out and nobody said anything. But ours was alright. Then we were waiting for our postings and we were posted everywhere. Down to, down the coast of Africa, down further down in to Egypt. They were posted up to Palestine. They were posted everywhere from there. Distribution place. And I got, I got Almaza Flying Station itself on Dakotas. So I soon picked that up then. We all had to move out of Egypt then so we all moved out of the Canal Zone. Two hundred mile across the desert to the Canal Zone. There was a great bit of lake half way down. It was Deversoir. Kibrit. Kibrit. Deversoir and 107MU and I was posted to 107MU repairing aircraft. But it was good in one thing. There was nothing to do. We had three yacht clubs on the station on the canal and I joined 107MU Sailing Club. I had put my name down first in a queue and then I was called up after about three weeks to join a club. The first thing I had to was allocate myself to a skipper who used to take me out and teach me how to use a jib. When I’d logged eight hours on the jib I was then free to be picked up by any skipper to go out on the main sail and give it dual instruction. And I found that I had a natural ability which I didn’t know I had and I could sail it pretty good. I learned. We’d got the rule book and I passed. Passed the B Helmsman Certificate and I became — I could take a boat out myself so I could book a boat out and take someone out. So, and every – we stopped – we finished, we started work at a quarter to six in the morning and we finished at one because it got too hot after that. So it was straight down the sailing club and I spent a lot of hours on the lake.
[Phone ringing. Recording paused]
KH: I’ve never done that before. [pause] Yeah. So I genned up on my racing rules and I passed my Helmsman Certificate. I could take a boat out and race. I could race. Compete. And I found I had the natural ability and I was, at the end of the year I was coming in first. I had three. The monthly race I was coming in first.
[Phone ringing. Recording paused]
CB: So, we’ve just paused for the phone. We’ve been talking about after the war in Egypt.
KH: Yeah.
CB: But you came back for six months.
KH: Yeah.
CB: What did you do in that six month period because this was at the end of ‘44?
KH: During that six months I was posted on to a squadron of [pause] of Hunters I think it was and I found out I knew nothing about modern aircraft and I asked and I got, I was away on aircraft instructional courses some lasting a month to various stations. I did three courses altogether and briefed up working on aircraft with the hydraulic systems and pneumatic systems, de-icer systems and all types of operational retraction handling and getting used to modern aircraft.
CB: Were these fighters or bombers or both?
KH: Everything.
CB: Right. And where were you stationed?
KH: Bombers. Transport. I was stationed actually at [paused] at — I don’t —
CB: Well we’ll pick up with it later.
KH: I can’t remember it.
CB: But you were getting up to date on modern aircraft systems.
KH: Yeah. Yeah. I did. You realise that I’d been out in the desert I hadn’t worked on them. But that developed rapidly during the war while I was out there.
CB: So after you finished at 107MU.
KH: Yeah.
CB: What did you do then? So you did sailing in the part time but after you left the MU in Egypt —
KH: Yeah.
CB: Where did you go?
KH: Well let’s see. I was posted to RAF [pause] as an instructor at Cosford. That’s right. RAF Cosford. As an instructor instructing air frames, hydraulic systems on the aircraft. From there the Berlin Airlift started and we were we were taken off to do a three month detachment on to the Berlin airlift so I was out of my first Berlin Airlift and straight into Berlin. Shift work. The aircraft. The Russians had surrounded Berlin and so we had to fly everything in. Food, coal, everything. So one aircraft landing every three minutes right around the clock. Avro Yorks, Hastings. Hastings were carrying fuel. But mainly Dakotas. American Dakotas flying right around the clock in shift work and we had the German labour to offload the aircraft and we had to – I was involved in seeing the aircraft in. Marshalling them, stopping them, putting the chocks there and getting them all in line and when they were emptied the pilot came back from having a cup of tea, got all back in the aircraft and started them up. I had a torch. That’s all. Start one, two, three, four engines or whatever what they were and the same all off. Right around the clock. If there was anything wrong we had to tackle it. We had to check, check the tyres, oil leaks, if there was a cut in the tyre we’d put it serviceable to fly back to base if we thought they wouldn’t make it. We didn’t want them stuck in Berlin. It was tough going and it was January. Snow. Three or four of inches of snow. We kept on flying and I was going from one aircraft to the other in the snow and there was a big pile of snow there. And I give it a kick. I thought, ‘What?’ And there was a dead man underneath it. It was a German labourer unloading the aircraft. He’d walked through a prop which was running under the wing and he didn’t see the prop and chopped him and covered with him snow as it taxied away. It was that bad but we kept it going. It was shift work and we were, we were shattered. The food we were having from the cookhouse was what we were flying in. Dehydrated. Everything was dehydrated potatoes dehydrated. Pomme. Dehydrated peas. Dehydrated powdered stuff and we weren’t getting good food at all. For Christmas Day we had one whole orange each. That was a treat. That was the toughest part I’ve ever been in I think. That Berlin Airlift. And the station commander wasn’t satisfied when he walked around our billets because we were doing shift work. We were piling out of bed and getting to work six o’clock in the morning. Leave our, leave our bed made down and that wasn’t good enough. All beds had to be made up. This that and the other. And everybody was put on a charge and we were all given a reprimand. A block punishment. [laughs] But I used to get time off. I was chatting up, my mate and I chatting up a couple of deutsche bints as we called them. [laughs] Yeah. It was alright. Anyway, we were back, back at Bassingbourn which was our base then. On Avro Yorks. Working on Yorks and they put me, when I got back to Bassingbourn, the warrant officer in charge says, ‘You’re a married man. I want you to go to the R&D section,’ receive and despatch section in charge of ten WAAFs. ‘I want a married man to look after them.’ So I went over to the edge of a hangar there was a section and they were sort of changing the white covers over the back of the seats in the aircraft and the airmen I had were doing the fitting of the seats. Taking them out and stacking them on a tractor and a trailer and we used to, an aircraft, a York used to come in, different rolls. Some had a roller. Some had lashing chains. Some had power seats. Some had VIP seats and all these had to be handled. And strip the aircraft and hand it over for it to do the servicing. Into maintenance and then fit them all back in afterwards so it was quite a busy operation and variation and they were all airmen and WAAFs and I was a corporal put in charge of them [laughs] and the first day I knocked off at 5 o’clock. They all left the section and I locked the hangar. Locked the section up which was a steel door. I was going to lock it and one of the WAAFs had come back, had got hold of me and pinned me against a wall. Grabbed a handful. So I thought, Jones, her name was. Bloody thing. So I talked her out of that one. I thought I’ve got to handle these buggers myself now [laughs]. So it was quite a struggle too because some of the airmen were a bit bolshie. They were, they all had demob numbers. They all wanted to get out, get out of the mob. That happened to start with down when I was down in Egypt. I had a, I had a team, servicing team. I was in charge of two aircraft servicing teams and every now and again a demob number would come up and I’d lose a man, lose another man, and lose a man – no replacements. Getting less and less and we had I was training two natives. Two Egyptian natives to do some of the work. Some of the rigging and fitting work. Just the donkey work stuff. And I thought well this is no good. We had fifteen Dakotas there servicing on the line. And then, and Chiefy says, ‘You’ll have to take that Dakota there he said, get in it, get somebody to start it up, pull the trolley acc away and taxi it yourself out into the desert as far as you can. Switch your engines off, get out and shut the door and walk back here.’ And that’s what I had to do. All these Dakotas. The war had finished. The Yanks didn’t want the Dakotas back. Nobody wanted them so took them out in the desert and left them there. And the third day I was going out, I taxied out and there was another one of them starting up so I went over. There was a truck there. It was Israelis there from Israel. They come down starting up to tax, taxiing to the runway and flying them back to Israel. [laughs]. So all I was doing was helping the bloody Israelis out [laughs] nicking all our Dakotas. Well they were supposed to be but they were perfectly alright. We were working all that time to get them serviceable. Cor flipping heck. But I soon adapted to that.
CB: So that was in your desert time. We were just having a reflection there. So back to Bassingbourn.
KH: Bassingbourn.
CB: Were you losing people to demob there as well?
KH: Yes. All the time.
CB: We’re on National Service now of course.
KH: Yeah.
CB: Because we’re on 1948.
KH: Yeah. Yeah it was. It got difficult then. What did I do? I went on courses. Bassingbourn. [pause] Cosford as instructor. Yeah. Married. Yeah Bassingbourn. Airlift.
CB: So Bassingbourn had Yorks.
KH: Yeah.
CB: And then did you keep on that aircraft or did you go to something quite different somewhere else?
KH: Oh no. I’m trying to think what happened then.
CB: We’ll take a —
KH: Oh yeah
CB: Sorry.
KH: I got quite fed up then and I was – what was it? I was at Abingdon. No. I was in digs in Reading. I was married. Digs in reading. I was on a motorbike back and forth to Abingdon. Working RAF Abingdon on Yorks and I was passing Benson and I was chatting to in bloke in Wallingford, a RAF chap from Benson. He said there’s a Queen’s Flight, Benson, King’s Flight at Benson then and he says, ‘Why don’t you come to Benson, you know, instead of going back and forth to Reading all the time.’ Reading to Abingdon. So I went to the orderly room and I I asked if I could be posted and I filled in a form and then I was posted to a Kings Flight. Well I was sent over there for interview. I arrived at a guardroom and I was escorted down to the hangar and up to the warrant officer in charge and I was interviewed and then he took me through to the flight lieutenant who happened to be in my entry. Thirty eighth entry at Halton. He was one of the brainy ones. He got, he got a technical commission and so he says, he says, ‘Right,’ you know, ‘We’ll have you.’ So I was posted to the Kings Flight. I applied for married quarters and I got it. 11 Spitfire Square and and everything was fine. Then it was the Queen’s Flight. The Queen’s Flight [pause]. Two children born there. Halton Hospital. Yeah. I enjoyed my stay there. I did so well when I left and yeah, I got the Royal Victoria Medal presented to me when I left. I was in Germany and I was sent, I was sent down to Bonn where a group captain was dishing out medals and I was presented with the RVM for being on the Queen’s Flight. For the good work I’d done there. I was working on Swift, Swift aircraft. There was only two squadrons of Swifts made. 2 Squadron down on Aden. I was on 79 Squadron and Chief Tech Airframe and nobody knew anything about these bloody aeroplanes. And I reckon I did some good work on them. The warrant officer relied on me for everything. Any snag that came up he used to come and ask me. There was one Swift sitting there. They couldn’t keep it in a hangar because it was running fuel all the time out of a pipe out of the back. Filled the drip trays so they kept it outside. They kept it out over a drain. The next thing the farmer down the road said his cows were getting ill. It was the fuel was going into the brook and drinking the oily, oily water so he asked me to do something about it. So I’ve got, I never seen Swift before in my life and I got, I went and got the one and only book on it and I took it home that night and read it. It was gone midnight when I finished reading that. And I studied all the circuits and this that and the other to where that fuel could come from. So then I went over and I undid a couple of panels and I got to the bottom of the tank, main front tank behind the pilot of this Swift and there was three pipes there and I traced them in the book and one was going up to a recuperator tank which was inside the main tank. It was pressurised from the engine. There was a rubber sock in the middle of that little tank. Pressure from the engine so that when you went into a G turn you was still getting full pressure from the engine on to his fuel to keep the fuel pressure up for his engine and that was the rubber sock in the middle of the front tank and that that pipe was the only one, I thought well there must be a pinhole in that rubber sock that’s getting through to the outside of that, but the air side of it and then coming out the drain at the back. And I told, I told the warrant officer this and he said, ‘Righto,’ and he took me onto another job then and he put a sergeant and a few riggers to work the tank out and put it on test to make sure what I said was true and it was. It was leaking. I’d pinpointed it alright. Then I was posted wasn’t I? Where was it? What do you call them? I can’t remember.
CB: So you were in Germany.
KH: In Germany.
CB: Where was that? Bruggen?
KH: Gutersloh.
CB: Oh Gutersloh. Right.
KH: Gutersloh [pause] Bassingbourn. Bassingbourn.
CB: Tell you what. We’ll have a break.
KH: Yeah.
[Recording paused]
CB: Ok Ken. So after Gutersloh where did you go? You came back to Benson did you?
KH: Came back to Benson and the flights, flight commander said, ‘All the technical jobs are occupied but I want somebody to sort out a pain in my neck,’ he says, ‘Which is the roll equipment. I want to put you in charge of roll equipment and I want you to sort it out.’ I didn’t know what roll equipment was and I got down there and I had three sergeants. They were store bashers in the office and I had been an LAC I had a few corporals and a lot of men out in the hangar and they had twenty five Avro Yorks on the station that they could drop the ramp down the back and they could fit it out with roller seats or any anything [barrow?] and all that equipment, the roll equipment is stacked up in the back hangar at Benson and it, and it had to be sorted out. So I I had them all, all in the hangar there together in a group and I told them what's got to be done. So first of all we got some, some of the roller equipment which is racks with roller, roller balls on them. You could put things on so you could move, move everything around on them easily and assembled racks in the hangar to store these things and you’ve got to go through a servicing and then a servicing bay. US that side, serviceable that side and get a gang on servicing that lot and when they finished put them back on the serviceable rack and there were racks for holding all the chains for lashing down. All the straps, all the buckles and rings you could screw into the floor. There was all the seating. There was all the para seating. There was, there was all kinds of rolls. Centre poles you could put down from the floor to ceiling and fit seats in. All that sort of thing which was quite complicated really and these aircraft was going down the route and there was trouble down in [Muharraq?] and I was told by the wing commander to go down the route to [Muharraq?] and sort it out. The roll equipment there. And I walked in to roll equipment there and the flight sergeant in charge there and he’d put there from somewhere else. He didn’t know a thing about it and he was overloaded with the stuff. It was building up and he didn’t know what to do with it. It was the AQMs were slinging stuff off. They were getting a job sheet to carry so much and drop it off to there and this that and the other and no one was taking into account what was in the aircraft and what wasn’t and if there was room or not and it was chaos and the stuff was piling up down the end of the route. And so I went back and I told the wing commander and he said well make out, make out, he made out sent a directive down the route that any aircraft coming back with room has got to put roll equipment on it to bring it back to roll equipment Benson. So they brought it all back slowly so we got it all back and we could work it, work better then. Sorted that one out. What happened from there? From Benson.
CB: What year are we talking about now? 1954.
KH: Oh crumbs yeah.
CB: ’54.
KH: Yeah.
[pause]
CB: Ok. We’ll stop there for a bit.
KH: Yeah. Stop.
[Recording paused]
CB: So Ken, you’re posted to Hornchurch which is on Spitfire’s and they’re much more sophisticated than you’d been trained at Halton.
KH: Yeah.
CB: So how did they get you, ‘cause it’s the height of the Battle of Britain. How did they get you in on the act as it were?
KH: Yes well as an airman. Aircraft fitter. Airframe fitter. Trained but with lack of experience I was told to work with a LAC 1GC airframe fitter which – and we went through all his normal work and I was his mate as it were and I picked up a lot about the Spitfire. I was always questioning. I was always trying to get hold of air publication books so that I could, but I couldn’t get hold of any to learn more about the aircraft. The aircraft was developing in such a pace that new things were happening to the Spitfire all the time. They were improving this, improving that, improving the other and I wasn’t in a position to go in the flight sergeants office and have a look at the, have a look at all the APs and things like that. In any case that wasn’t my main interest at all. It was just getting the overtime worked. Usually working until you got the aircraft serviceable even if you were working until the midnight. It’s got to be ready first thing in the morning. If not and you do a shift work on it until it is ready. Most of the air frame work was you could, you could do it within a couple of hours. Undercart checks, this that and the other I could do in a couple of hours and carry on with the next aircraft but as an AC you could be taken off that job and put on another job even if you were halfway through it to work with somebody else but you don’t make the decisions. They do and they tell you what to do and it was that state of affairs but the more I did of that the more experience I got and the more experience you got the more responsibility they gave you to do. If you got three men and one of them has some experience and the other two are not its experienced bloke that gets the job and he’s the chap they rely on. So I found out, you find out the hard way. Sometimes you’re given the dirty jobs all the time and other times you’re not. You’re given the good jobs. So it depends who the next rank above you is and what he decides. So you’re bobbing around your corporals and your sergeants. Your sergeants were up top. They were miles away.
CB: You mentioned having to check documents. The APs are air force publications aren’t they?
KH: Yes. Yeah.
CB: When an aeroplane lands what has to be done to it before it can fly again? There are some basic procedures are there?
KH: Yeah. The pilot, pilot signs the aircraft in and he puts his signature down and puts down anything he finds wrong with it and he puts it down. That goes down in to the technical section and they put a man on to rectify that fault. So the pilot’s signature’s always there and before he takes the aircraft up he has to do the last signature that it is serviceable is down and then he signs over the top before he takes over and flies the aeroplane. He’s not allowed to take it up unless he signs the 700 first ‘cause that is the bible.
CB: In the heat of the battle they didn’t have time to do that so what happened then?
KH: Oh they did. They did.
CB: Oh they did.
KH: Yeah. Chiefy used to stick the 700 and a pen in his hand and he used to sign that and run. He didn’t know what he’d signed. [laughs]
CB: Amazing. So you’re working long hours. You get to finish the task. Where are you living on the airfield?
KH: Well before I was married I was in a block with the airmen.
CB: Right.
KH: And it was a station then at Benson here. As an airman, before I got married, and was quartered we used to march down from the block, across the main road, down to the hangars and march back again in those days. But they packed that in because it got too difficult in the end.
CB: Because the war was on.
KH: Yeah. This that and the other. Yeah. They got rid of that lot.
CB: And in the, so in a barrack block there are a number of rooms on several floors. How many people in a room?
KH: There’s a ten, ten. Twenty in a room.
CB: Yeah.
KH: And a snag in a bunk.
CB: Yeah. That’s the corporal.
KH: Six, six rooms and there’s a, there’s a static order. Everybody takes a turn in doing certain jobs. Domestic jobs that’s got to be done.
CB: What would they be?
KH: Bumpering the floor. Everyone had got his own space to do. In the old days you used to make your kit up into blankets. They had biscuits. Three biscuits stacked and then the blankets and sheets folded and the last sheet folded right around the top. Put on the top there and they had to leave that before they went, left to go to work like that. But they eased off on that situation later on.
CB: So bumpering the floor meant polishing the floor with a big bumper.
KH: Yeah.
CB: What other jobs were there you had to do?
KH: Well the, when it was your turn, what was it? Now everybody had his own window to clean. His own floor space. Bed. Locker.
CB: And the communal areas.
KH: The room orderly. There were certain things he had to do.
CB: Who was the room orderly?
KH: Everybody took it in turns.
CB: For a week or a day?
KH: No. A week.
CB: Right.
KH: There was a drying room down the back and a wash. A shower room. The toilets.
CB: How did they get cleaned?
KH: They were, they were all on a roster. So they were all done, all covered. The corporal in the bunk was usually the man who run it so it was run very smooth.
CB: Yeah.
KH: You was directly in contact with him.
CB: So in each room there’s a corporal and twenty men.
KH: Yeah.
CB: And now about eating. What was the procedure for that?
KH: Oh well. You just – what was it? [pause] You just wander over to the cookhouse with your mug and irons and no problem. Yeah. Certain times there was times when we had to work overtime on this that and the other and go back to the cookhouse and it still, it still, you’d still get fed and all that. There was no problem. IF you were orderly corporal or a orderly sergeant. An orderly sergeant in the guardroom. He’s got his job laid down down down. He’s got to make sure the NAAFI’s shut at 9 o’clock and he’s got to make sure that this and the other is done. He’s got to go around. It’s all automatic and back to the guardroom. I went to the guardroom the other day and there was two sailors there running it [laughs].
CB: A bit different now.
KH: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So what were the mealtimes?
KH: Oh normal. Half past seven ‘til eight. Work at half past eight. Nine hours. Or 8 o’clock. Depends what what you’re doing. Some earlier than others. The pen pushers well they were static but the fitters and riggers they have to adapt their work time to suit the job. If there was early start aircraft in the morning they had to be there. They were knocking off early and it was all covered that way.
CB: How often did you sleep next to the aircraft?
KH: Never. No. Never got to that stage.
CB: Not even in the Battle of Britain.
KH: No. Well I don’t know what they did our in the flights but they were, we were the fitters in the hangar.
CB: Right.
KH: Working on the aircraft. There were airframe mechanics, engine mechanics out on the flights dealing with them first hand and they had a different system to cover all eventualities.
KH: And the armourers.
CB: And the same with all. All trades the same. Yeah. The armaments sections. Yeah. Instrument section. This that and the other and they all had their ICs and they were the chaps looking after them. It worked very well.
KH: Yeah. Ok. Stopping there for a mo.
[Recording paused]
JLE: [First days?] I’d find quite interesting to know about.
CB: Apprenticeship days. Right.
KH: Apprenticeship days. Well. You were in a billet. Twenty men and a corporal or the senior man in the bunk. Six rooms to a, six rooms to a block. You’re forming, when I first joined, you’re forming outside with your mug and irons in your hand. Marched to breakfast 8 o’clock. Quarter to eight. Something like that. After breakfast came back and you squared your bed up, rolls your overalls, put them under your arm, fall in outside and you marched on to the square. A Squadron, B Squadron, C Squadron. The man in charge. The band would start up and you’d all march behind the band out the guard room and down the hill. And some would go to workshops, some would go down to the airfield and some would go to the school. About twelve — march back. Dinner. Down again. Marched down again and you’re probably a different, different place the next time and you’d go down the airfield in the morning. You were probably in schools in the afternoon. The schools cover all the theories. Worked everything out there. You’d do practical jobs. You’d dismantle it and assemble it again and various components on the aircraft. Engine fitters would be running the engines and the airframe fitters would be doing this that and the other and instruments were all covered. It was training. We would manage to get a few extra aircraft. I started off with a, with a Hampden bomber and a Hawker Demon and we had all kinds of jobs on that. We had to go over and do fabric work. You know to strip a fabric wing and build it up and repair inside. The type of wood used, the glue used and there are pins and rivets. The balance of the aircraft had to be rigged properly with a, with a straight edge, straight edge and get a bubble right in the middle, on whatever you set it at. Wing incidents. Dihedral tail. The fin slightly offset perhaps. The hinges – no play in the hinges. No play in the aileron hinges. No slack in the controls. Even had to polish the glass in the windows. Make sure everything works properly. Sliding hoods. The tyres of course had to be checked. They’d be taken off. Brakes checked to see that they worked properly. Assembled on again, undercart jacked it up, undercarriage actions. Check the hydraulic pressures. When everything’s been signed up you sign up and the NCO would sign over the lot and that’s it. The aircraft’s serviceable and nothing was allowed out until the last signature was there and it wasn’t even flying unless the pilot signs it as well. So it’s all covered. If anything goes wrong pinpoint who did it, who did what and when and who checked it. So it was a double check. Treble check. The safety of the aircraft must come first.
CB: Ok.
[Recording paused]
KH: There wasn’t much.
CB: Wait. We’re just talking about what Ken and his colleagues did in their time off.
KH: Well we took part in sport. I myself played rugby and so I used to go with the rugby team. I also did, what was it? Had to go for long walks. There was walking gangs. There was PTI down on the, down on the airfield. The PTI instructor would have us all out, arms wide, touch your fingertips all along in a line — two lines, three lines, four lines and as he did the manoeuvre and everybody followed him. Jumping up and down, arms waving, legs doing this, that and the other. Running on the spot and all this sort of thing you know and then always march. March back and, invariably with the band. The band were a pain in the ass. They used to go down in the drying room there practicing and it was din and you’re trying to gen up on a book and there was the bloody noise of these blokes trying to play these instruments. Banging their bloody drums. [laughs]
CB: Nightmare.
KH: But you had to live with it, you know. You learned to live with it. Practicing the bagpipes. They used to go up in the woods with the pipes. That was a good thing.
CB: At Wendover.
KH: In fine weather. Up in Wendover. Yeah. Heard them wailing away out there. They’re terrible things when you can’t play. If you play it properly it sounds good but pipes are terrible when they can’t play.
CB: So when you are then on a squadron we are on the front line effectively. What, how did the time off come and what did you?
KH: Well I was young in those days on the squadron. During the Battle of Britain it was, I can’t remember what I did. I just can’t. Because it was all work. I didn’t have much time off. I never went on holiday that summer. Some blokes used to go because they had a death in the family or something. I felt sorry for them but we took no leave. I couldn’t. I didn’t take any leave to go all the way down to Wales. Took a day and a half to get home some times and down again with the old puffer trains and this that and the other so I never bothered. Just go with the lads down to the village, to a pub and have a game of darts and this that and the other. Whenever possible if there was an organisation or sport I used to put my name down to play rugby and I did very well at that. Although I was small I was scrum half. Put the ball in. Talking about rugby I got in the desert in Egypt and the scrum down and the sand was blowing up the dust and you had the ball to shove in to the scrum and you could hardly see the hole to put the ball in. And the dust would cake around your mouth and you were covered in it and it were — [laughs]. Then again in Berlin I played rugby in the Olympic Stadium, Hitler’s Olympic stadium and snow was on the deck there. On the grass. And we played in three inches of snow. We played rugby there. So there’s a contrast for you. Desert and snow. But mainly it’s a grotty old station camp, station field which had probably got a slope in it and probably a low end where there was a load of mud and a dry end up the top but you adapt yourself to all these conditions and sometimes to your advantage.
CB: Good. Thank you.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Ken Hicks
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHicksDK151103
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
2015-11-03
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Format
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01:21:54 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
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Sound
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. Transport Command
Royal Air Force. Fighter Command
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Pending OH summary
Description
An account of the resource
Ken Hicks grew up in Wales and joined the Royal Air Force as an Apprentice Mechanic at RAF Halton. He worked on Spitfires during the Battle of Britain. He was later posted to Rhodesia and survived a crash in the bush. After the war, He took part in the Berlin Airlift and found a civilian worker who had died and been buried under the snow.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Africa
Egypt
Germany
Great Britain
England--Buckinghamshire
England--Kent
Germany--Berlin
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940
1948
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
222 Squadron
C-47
fitter airframe
ground crew
ground personnel
RAF Abingdon
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Benson
RAF Halton
RAF Hornchurch
RAF Manston
Spitfire
Tiger Moth
York
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/372/6545/ELampreyPGuntonW[Date]-35.pdf
a28d09bce859aa0d2ca16722f4d2397a
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
Lamprey, Peter
Description
An account of the resource
122 items. The collection contains letters from Flight Sergeant Peter Lamprey (1384535 Royal Air Force) to 'Uncle Bill' W Gunton and his former colleagues at Waterlow Printers, Park Royal, London. The letters cover all his stages of training and operations at Royal Air Force Ludford Magna. A wireless operator / air gunner, he was killed, aged 36, on 14 January 1944 during an operation on Braunschweig when 101 Squadron Lancaster LM367 was attacked by a night fighter and crashed at Lautenthal. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Dereck Titchen and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.<br /><br /> A photograph of Peter and his final resting place appears in the Arthur Standivan collection <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/35884">here.</a><br /><br />Additional information onPeter Lamprey is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/113449/">IBCC Losses Database.</a>
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
2016-02-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lamprey, P
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
R.A.F. Ludford Magna
Market Rasen.
Lincolnshire.
Saturday
Dear Unk Others etc.
The usual thanks are extended for the packet of mail I have just received. I note with pleasure that Sam has broken out again, although by the number of times he refers to my propensity for playing cards, I should imagine he is not having his usual luck and is angling for a few hints in case he ever has to play without his marked pack. Even Mr. Harbour managed to borrow a pen and dictionary and compose an epistle. My dear friend Mr. Hunt also sent something that I have been giving consideration to but I am afraid it will have to go to the Cypher
[page break]
Officer before it is intelligible. The only the part I can make out says “I think” so knowing Mr. Hunt it must be a forgery.
Things have not gone with the flowing ease usually found in my progects [sic]. (I hope to Christ that is spelled right or I will never hear the end). We started out for Berlin the other night but had to return before we hit the enemy coast as the kite went U/S. The number of boys that got the chopper that night has led us to think that it wasn’t a bad idea at that: we have often thought we were wearing out our welcome that side of the world but it has now become a certainty.
However since starting the rough draft of this epistle to the Philistines we have paid a visit to the Big City. It was the most ferocious attack I have been mixed up in. Nearly four hundred heavies bombed inside fifteen minutes and the place was
[page break]
[underlined] 3. [/underlined]
going like a torch when we turned away. It has fulfilled one of my big ambitions at last. The other one is the same show on Rome. All I hope is that the Italians keep going until I manage a trip there. On the way back we came over Sweden and they started pooping off at us. Its [sic]coming to a sorry pass when bloody neutrals start firing on men about their lawful business. It was a good job we had left all our bombs on the target or someone would have had a suprise. [sic]
We should start our leave in about ten days time [sic] – if the chopper doesn’t swing too close one of these nights. I broached the subject of the boys coming to London but I don’t think it can be managed this time. You must realise that while on a squadron we only get an opportunity to get drunk when we know we have at least forty-eight hours before we fly
[page break]
again as beer does go with flying in dangerous places. In fact, from what the rest of the crew are saying, the only way to get them altogether will be in a really big can. You will however be seeing me and think of the pleasure that will bring into your drab lives.
We have a new squadron commander who has been in charge of a girls [sic] school before coming here I think. Anyway he has got two wars on his hands now, one with Jerry and a bigger and better one with the aircrews. He wants us – us mind you - to do P.T. every morning of the week, wants to kill us I suppose. So far he has had a remarkable lack of success as we have bribed the P.T.I’s to leave us alone. Still I suppose a show-down is inevitable and we shall all finish up in durance vile, well it will be a bit quieter at any rate and they don’t shoot at you.
[page break]
There before you, you have my last and most recent doings. The N.F.S. girls in the nearest town have had a week singularly free from molestation at the hands of our gallant airmen. This has caused a bit of sorrow on the camp – and among the N.F.S., but arrangements are now in hand to see that the usual programme is carried out in future.
I was on Mannheim last night so write your own letters I’m going to bed.
Love
Pete.
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
Letter from Peter Lamprey to W Gunton
Description
An account of the resource
Peter Lamprey reports that his crew turned back with an un-serviceable aircraft from operation to Berlin but that he was subsequently involved in a ferocious attack on Berlin with four hundred planes bombing inside 15 minutes. On their return they flew over Sweden and were fired at. He is looking forward to leave in ten days time. He mentions that they have a new squadron commander who is keen on physical training. Concludes with mention that there was an operation to Mannheim the night before.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Lamprey
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Five page handwritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ELampreyPGuntonW[Date]-35
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.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Mannheim
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.
101 Squadron
bombing
military service conditions
physical training
RAF Ludford Magna
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/372/6549/ELampreyPGuntonW[Date]-39.pdf
d7fe1f30c14340c0eac0b0391cf98144
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
Lamprey, Peter
Description
An account of the resource
122 items. The collection contains letters from Flight Sergeant Peter Lamprey (1384535 Royal Air Force) to 'Uncle Bill' W Gunton and his former colleagues at Waterlow Printers, Park Royal, London. The letters cover all his stages of training and operations at Royal Air Force Ludford Magna. A wireless operator / air gunner, he was killed, aged 36, on 14 January 1944 during an operation on Braunschweig when 101 Squadron Lancaster LM367 was attacked by a night fighter and crashed at Lautenthal. <br /><br />The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Dereck Titchen and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.<br /><br /> A photograph of Peter and his final resting place appears in the Arthur Standivan collection <a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/items/show/35884">here.</a><br /><br />Additional information onPeter Lamprey is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/113449/">IBCC Losses Database.</a>
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
2016-02-24
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Lamprey, P
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
R.A.F. Ludford Magna.
Market Rasen.
Lincolnshire.
[underlined] Sunday [/underlined]
Dear Unk one and all.
Yesterday as ever was I received [sic] a short sharp note from you and as usual I extend my thanks etc. for it. I hope and trust all my friends at Park Royal are in the very best of health. That part is only to fill up space by the way and should be ignored. Although I don’t suppose anyone cares a hoot, I can make the statement that I am in the best of health and not be accused of lying.
As you will have noticed by the headlines in somebody else’s paper we have been engaged in giving the great British public a return for their “Wings for Victory” weeks. The last
[page break]
four trips have been to the Big City where we have been engaged in moving a few cultural monuments and civic buildings. It seems however, as if the folk below were not too pleased with our methods, but I’m happy to state that although a certain amount of opposition was encountered the job was done to, seemingly, everybody’s satisfaction.
Last night, being given over to riot and revelry, I am at the moment suffering from a head that is a bit soft round the edges, and by the feel of it stretches upwards about six feet. I had more beer last night than the Eighth Army get in a month, and feel like it. If this letter should at any time begin to ramble you will therefore have to excuse me as I can hardly be considered to be my usual self.
[page break]
My next leave should see me spending Tuesday 14th with you. I think, at the moment, it will be about dinner time before I get there as I have a wedding to attend in the morning. However I will more than likely ‘phone you beforehand. I have a few nickels but will fetch them along with me when I turn up.
I don’t know what else I can write about. The only stuff I can say is uninteresting and the interesting stuff I cannot write about. Hope the rest of the boys are doing well. Remember me to all at home.
Love.
Pete.
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
Letter from Peter Lamprey to W Gunton
Description
An account of the resource
Peter Lamprey writes that the last four operations were to the ‘Big City’ and that he is suffering a hangover after previous night’s revelry.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Lamprey
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Three page handwritten letter
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Correspondence
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ELampreyPGuntonW[Date]-39
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.
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Germany
Germany--Berlin
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.
101 Squadron
bombing
military service conditions
RAF Ludford Magna