1
25
31
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1323/20244/PSeaggerA16010080.1.jpg
945d01d9df57592c256fa68a90d723ce
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1323/20244/PSeaggerA16010081.1.jpg
784dfa68b73706f7060cb030c3d88dae
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
Seagger, Alan. Album 01 General
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Seagger, A
Description
An account of the resource
89 photographs of scenery, aircraft and service life taken in Italy and the Middle East.
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
11 men on a Crusader tank
Captured German [sic] Tank. near Tobruk
Description
An account of the resource
11 men in desert uniform arranged on a tank. On the reverse 'Captured German [sic] Tank. near Tobruk'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PSeaggerA16010080, PSeaggerA16010081
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
North Africa
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
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.
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1246/16776/MNealeETH1395951-150731-096.1.jpg
9acaf92c3b098433ec6d5f9c53c08321
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
Neale, Ted
E T H Neale
Description
An account of the resource
123 items. The collection concerns Edward Thomas Henry Neale (b. 1922, 1395951 Royal Air Force) who served as a navigator with 37 Squadron in North Africa, the Middle East and Italy. The collection contains his training notebooks from South Africa as well as propaganda leaflets dropped by the allies in the Mediterranean theatre.
The collection also contains a photograph album, navigation logs and target photographs.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Alison Neale and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-07-31
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. 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
Neale, ETH
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
[crest] 205 GROUP ROYAL AIR FORCE [crest]
Albania, Jugoslavia, Bulgaria, Syria, Iraq, Rhodes, Crete, Piraeus, Corinth, Leros, Daba, Capuzzo, Fuka, Halfaya, El Adem, Martuba, Tobruk, Benghazi, Tripoli, Mareth, Gabes, Cape Bon, Tunis
[map]
Palermo, Pantellaria, Syracuse, Messina, Salerno, Anzio, Viterbo, Guilianova, Verona, Turin, Pisa, Leghorn, Trieste, Milan, Sofia, Budapest, Steyr, Valence, Munich, Fiume, Bucharest, Ploesti, Danube
In the 1939 – 1945 World War
205 Group provided the only mobile force of heavy night bombers in the Mediterranean theatre. During the North African and Italian campaigns the Wellingtons, Halifaxes and Liberators of the Group, operating as a tactical force, attacked communications and concentrations of Rommel’s Africa Korps and of the Italian armies during their advance to the Quattara Depression, the Battle of El Alamein and during their retreat until their final capitulation in Tunisia. Without respite they operated against Kesselring’s army during the invasions of Sicily, Italy and the South of France. As a strategical force their targets – ports, airfields, marshalling yards, oil refineries and factories-ranged over the Mediterranean area and Europe. Aid was given to patriots in France, supplies and arms’ were dropped to Partizans in the Balkans and to the patriots in Warsaw. The Danube was mined persistently.
Shining courage is the epitaph of those who died.
We will remember them.
JUNE 1940 MAY 1945
[indecipherable word] A.B. Rud
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
205 Group Royal Air Force
Description
An account of the resource
A commemorative poster with a map of Southern Europe and North Africa. Around the outside is a list of locations where operations were carried out. There is a paragraph with details of the operations.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
205 Group Royal Air Force
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One printed sheet
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
MNealeETH1395951-150731-096
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
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.
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Albania
Austria
Austria--Steyr
Bulgaria
Bulgaria--Sofia
Croatia
Croatia--Rijeka
Danube River
France
France--Valence (Drôme)
Germany
Germany--Munich
Greece
Greece--Corinth Canal
Greece--Crete
Greece--Piraeus
Greece--Rhodes (Island)
Hungary
Hungary--Budapest
Iraq
Italy
Italy--Anzio
Italy--Giulianova
Italy--Livorno
Italy--Messina
Italy--Milan
Italy--Palermo
Italy--Pantelleria Island
Italy--Pisa
Italy--Salerno
Italy--Syracuse
Italy--Trieste
Italy--Turin
Italy--Verona
Italy--Viterbo
Libya
Libya--Banghāzī
Libya--Martuba
Libya--Tobruk
Libya--Tripoli
North Africa
Romania
Romania--Bucharest
Romania--Ploiești
Syria
Tunisia
Tunisia--Mareth Line
Tunisia--Qābis
Tunisia--Sharīk Peninsula
Tunisia--Tunis
Egypt--Fukah
Greece--Leros (Municipality)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Steve Baldwin
bombing
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1826/33147/MScottEW188329-170406-05.2.jpg
8d339628d989d4029271af63a73ee7c5
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
Scott, Eric William
E W Scott
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
2017-04-06
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
Scott, EW
Description
An account of the resource
139 items. The collection concerns Flying Officer Eric Scott (1425952, 188329 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, a memoir, correspondence, documents, newspaper cuttings, a flying course handbook and photographs. He flew operations in North Africa as a bomb aimer with 142 Squadron and then after an instructional tour in Palestine started a second tour on 37 Squadron in Italy where he was shot down and finished the war as a prisoner. <br /><br />The collection includes three albums.<br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2040"><span>Album 1</span></a> <span>Photographs of Jerusalem, Bethlehem. Tel Aviv, Haifa and friends.</span><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2041">Album 2</a> <span>Photographs taken during training in the United States and England and during his service in North Africa and Italy.<br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2046">Album 3</a> Correspondence, newspaper cuttings, documents and the last issue of the Prisoner of war Journal.<br /></span><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Jacqui Holman and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
205 GROUP ROYAL AIR FORCE
[map]
ALBANIA
JUGOSLAVIA
BULGARIA
SYRIA
IRAQ
RHODES
CRETE
PIRAEUS
CORINTH
LEROS
DABA
CAPUZZO
FUKA
HALFAYA
EL ADEM
MARTUBA
TOBRUK
BENGHAZI
TRIPOLI
MARETH
GABES
CAPE BON
TUNIS
JUNE 1940
PALERMO
PANTELLARIA
SYRACUSE
MESSINA
ANZIO
VITERBO
GUILIANOVA
VERONA
TURIN
PISA
LEGHORN
TRIESTE
MILAN
SOFIA
BUDAPEST
STEYR
VALENCE
MUNICH
FIUME
BUCHAREST
PLOESTI
DANUBE
MAY 1945
[indecipherable name] A.B. Read.
In the 1939 – 1945 World War 205 Group provided the only mobile force of heavy night bombers in the Mediterranean theatre. During the North African and Italian campaigns the Wellingtons, Halifaxes and Liberators of the Group operating as a tactical force, attacked communications and concentrations of Rommel’s Afrika Korps and of the Italian armies during their advance to the Quattara Depression, the Battle of El Alamein and during their retreat until their final capitulation in Tunisia. Without respite they operated against Kesselring’s army during the invasions of Sicily, Italy and the South of France. As a strategical force their targets – ports, airfields, marshalling yards, oil refineries and factories – ranged over the Mediterranean area and Europe. Aid was given to patriots in France, supplies and arms were dropped to Partizans in the Balkans and to the patriots in Warsaw. The Danube was mined persistently. Shining courage is the epitaph of those who died.
We will remember them.
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
205 Group Royal Air Force Battle Honours
Description
An account of the resource
Map showing Mediterranean Sea and surrounding countries. Provides a history of of the group who provided the only mobile force of heavy bombers in the Mediterranean theatre. Wellington, Halifax and B-24 acted as a tactical force attacking communications and Italian and German forces throughout the North African campaign. Continued to support operations in Sicily, Italy, The Balkans and South of France. On the sides the locations of many of the targets attacked by the groups aircraft.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One page coloured map and printed text
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Map
Artwork
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
MScottEW188329-170406-05
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Albania
Yugoslavia
Syria
Iraq
Greece
Greece--Rhodes (Island)
Greece--Crete
Greece--Piraeus
Greece--Corinth Canal
Italy
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
Libya--Banghāzī
Libya--Tripoli
Tunisia
Tunisia--Mareth Line
Tunisia--Qābis
Tunisia--Sharīk Peninsula
Tunisia--Tunis
Italy--Palermo
Italy--Pantelleria Island
Italy--Syracuse
Italy--Messina
Italy--Salerno
Italy--Anzio
Italy--Viterbo
Italy--Giulianova
Italy--Verona
Italy--Turin
Italy--Pisa
Italy--Livorno
Italy--Trieste
Italy--Milan
Bulgaria
Bulgaria--Sofia
Hungary
Hungary--Budapest
Austria
Austria--Steyr
France
France--Valence (Drôme)
Germany
Germany--Munich
Croatia
Croatia--Rijeka
Romania
Romania--Bucharest
Romania--Ploiești
Danube River
North Africa
Libya--Martuba
Egypt--Fukah
Greece--Leros (Municipality)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940-06
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1945-05
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
Steve Baldwin
B-24
bombing
Halifax
Warsaw airlift (4 August - 28 September 1944)
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2294/41605/NKellettR191219-010001.2.jpg
07e19a6cf1084db4b1e954f9867acf92
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2294/41605/NKellettR191219-010002.2.jpg
932d2e11368b3d8a844ddef10f3e52e7
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
Kellett, Richard
Kellett, R
Description
An account of the resource
31 items. The collection concerns Air Commodore Richard Kellett (Royal Air Force) and contains correspondence, photographs and prisoner of war diaries. In 1938 he flew a Wellesley from Egypt to Australia and later flew operations as a pilot and the commanding officer of 149 Squadron. He was captured near Tobruk in 1942 and was Senior British Officer at Stalag Luft 3 at the time of the Wooden Horse escape.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Rachel Kellett and catalogued by Barry Hunter.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-12-19
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Kellett, R
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Air Commodore Richard Kellet's Obituary
Description
An account of the resource
An obituary published in the Times with a second cutting with a correction from an air vice-marshal.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1990-01-20
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Egypt
Australia
Northern Territory--Darwin
Germany
Iraq
Japan
Germany
Germany--Helgoland
Germany--Wilhelmshaven
Libya--Tobruk
Africa--Rhodesia and Nyasaland
North Africa
Egypt--Ismailia (Province)
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two newspaper cuttings
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
NKellettR191219-010001, NKellettR191219-010002
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1938
1939-09-04
1939-12-18
1942
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.
149 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
Distinguished Flying Cross
pilot
prisoner of war
Stalag Luft 3
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1172/26601/LSouthwellBR402261v1.1.pdf
a2c03b7c6160c890aef8c60668774910
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
Southwell, Brian Robert
B R Southwell
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. An oral history interview with Brian Robert Southwell (b. 1916, 402261 Royal Australian Air Force), his log books, documents and photographs. He flew operations as a pilot with 148 and 178 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016-09-03
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
Southwell, BR
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
Brian Southwell's log book. One
Description
An account of the resource
Pilot’s flying log book covering the period from 21 October 1940 to 7 June 1943. Detailing his flying training and operations flown as pilot. He was stationed at RAAF Mascot (4 EFTS), RAAF Amberley (3 SFTS), RAF Bassingbourn/Steeple Morden (11 OTU), RAF Harwell (15 OTU), RAF Portreath (1 0ADU), RAF Gibraltar (1 OADU), RAF Luqa (1 OADU), RAF Burn (1653 Flight), RAF Lyneham (1445 Flight), RAF Gibraltar, RAF Aqir (159 Squadron), RAF Shandur (159, 178 Squadrons and Special Liberator Flight), RAF Gambut (Special Liberator Flight), RAF Derna (148 Squadron), thence Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, Portugal to UK, RAF Lichfield (27 OTU). Aircraft flown in were Tiger Moth, Anson, Wellington and Liberator. Targets were Benghazi, Tobruk, shipping strikes, Maleme, Tunis and Tripoli. He flew a total of 22 operations with 159 and 148 Squadrons. His first or second pilots on operations were Flight Lieutenant Willatt, Wing Commander MacNair, Sergeant Carrigan, Flight Sergeant Russell and Warrant Officer Carter.<br /><br /><span>This item was sent to the IBCC Digital Archive already in digital form: no better quality copies are available.</span>
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Terry Hancock
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
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LSouthwellBR402261v1
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940
1941
1942
1943
1942-09-22
1942-09-23
1942-09-25
1942-09-26
1942-10-01
1942-10-11
1942-10-16
1942-10-21
1942-10-22
1942-10-25
1942-10-27
1942-10-28
1942-10-29
1942-10-30
1942-10-31
1942-11-01
1942-11-04
1942-11-05
1943-01-06
1943-01-10
1943-01-11
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
North Africa
Egypt
Sudan
Nigeria
Portugal
Gibraltar
Greece
Libya
Tunisia
Greece--Maleme
Libya--Banghāzī
Libya--Tobruk
Libya--Tripoli
Tunisia--Tunis
Mediterranean Sea
11 OTU
148 Squadron
15 OTU
1653 HCU
23 OTU
27 OTU
aircrew
Anson
B-24
Flying Training School
Heavy Conversion Unit
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Aqir
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Burn
RAF Harwell
RAF Lichfield
RAF Lyneham
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1339/20880/SValentineJRM1251404v10020.2.jpg
038c1cc253a1904c4d67f466d96c9f4c
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
Valentine, John. Ursula Valentine's newspaper cutting scrapbook
Description
An account of the resource
131 items contained in a scrapbook. Mainly newspaper cuttings of events from May 1942 to 1945.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
THE TIMES SATURDAY OCTOBER 10 1942
MORE BRITISH TO BE CHAINED
FIERCER GERMAN THREATS
ITALIANS JOIN IN PLOT
The German High Command have gone on to make fiercer threats of “reprisals” against British prisoners, declaring that if the British authorities fetter German prisoners they will fetter three times the number of British prisoners. The Italians announce that they have begun, or will shortly begin, harsh measures against British prisoners.
The German announcement, issued yesterday afternoon, stated:-
Following the declaration of October 7, 1942, that reprisals will be instituted against the chaining of German prisoners taken by the British on the beaches of Dieppe and on the Island of Sark, the British reply contained only subterfuges and referred to statements by prisoners who had not been tied up. The reply states further that the British authorities do not and will not approve the chaining. The German High Command declared itself not satisfied with this hypocritical statement, and as a consequence on October 8, at noon, 107 British officers and 1,269 n.c.o.s and men were manacled after they had been told the reason.
Army padres, hospital personnel, wounded and sick prisoners have not been manacled.
On October 8 the British announced that as from October 10, at 12 o’clock, the same number of German prisoners in British hands will be manacled. If this measure comes into force the German High Command will issue orders that on October 10, as from 12 o’clock, three times as many British prisoners in German hands will be manacled.
ITALIAN ALLEGATIONS
The Italian broadcast announcement alleged that four British fighters had machine-gunned some first-aid units of the Folgare Division on October 7; that on September 30 an Italian officer and six airmen went out into the desert in a lorry to recover lost material and were shot in the act of surrendering to a larger force of Australians, who were accompanied by a British officer and a Frenchman; and that the following discovery was made at Tobruk:-
A document which fell into our hands, issued on the occasion of the attack on Tobruk, said that the 10th platoon would detach a section to attack dug-out No. 1,082, and that those who were found there should be completely liquidated without discrimination.
This behaviour, with which one must link previous attacks on hospital ships and ambulance seaplanes, contracts sharply with the action of Italians when they learn of the presence of an ambulance column in the desert engaged in picking up enemy wounded abandoned by their own detachments, or when they order their troops to save numerous enemy crews, as has happened in the Bay of Tobruk.
Our more than justified reprisals will thus be rendered inevitable.
REASONS FOR AXIS “REPRISALS”
MEGALOMANIA AND SPITE
FROM OUR DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENT
From the first it was clear that the German High Command had ulterior motives in chaining British prisoners on the flimsiest of pretexts. The Italian announcement strongly suggests that the measures were prepared well in advance, and were concerted between the senior and junior partners of the Axis. It is true that Mussolini usually hastens to copy Hitler in all things, believing that his prestige demands it; but there appears to be more than simple copying in this case.
To manufacture a pretext, the Italians go back to a document allegedly discovered during the British raid made on Tobruk nearly a month ago, on the night of September 13-14. If the imagined incident were so bad, why have the Italians not described it before now? As it is, the enemy which has so often boasted of “wiping out hostile units,” now declares that he will ill-treat prisoners because – on his word, and his alone – the British were ordered to wipe out an Italian unit. To this charge he adds allegations of a later date, which again lack substance.
GERMAN “HONOUR”
The enemy’s attitude in the whole barbarous affair defies normal standards of analysis. It arises, first and foremost, from the megalomania of the German High Command. According to them, the German army’s honour is sustained when German soldiers hang and shoot civilians; these excesses are declared to be necessary acts of war. But that same “honour” is insulted as soon as a German soldier makes allegations about what happened among soldiers struggling together; and the insult has to be avenged on 1,376 officers and men captive in their hands. Prisoners of war become hostages.
The German High Command are acting in the knowledge that they hold more British prisoners than we hold German – 90,000 British to 23,000 German. With the Italians the balance is heavily on the other side; we hold 262,000 Italians and Italy holds 25,000 British. But the Germans care nothing for what happens to Italians. They only reckon that they themselves have the whip hand against the British.
The outstanding question is why, out of their abiding megalomania, they should decide that this is the moment to try the whip. Having no public opinion in Germany likely to speak in protest, they think purely in military-political terms. In Germany itself, the leaders are inflaming hatred against Britain, and are at the same time declaring their power against Britain: the allegations of British cruelty and the savage “reprisals” fit in to this propaganda.
Beyond this is the anger of the German High Command at the frequent and, to us, highly valuable raids on the Continent. They are therefore suggesting that when British soldiers “behave like bandits,” the prisoners of war in their hands will be made to suffer. Seldom has the ruthless and evil force against which we fight more clearly shown its face.
GETTING SHACKLES READY IN CANADA
FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT
OTTAWA, Oct. 9
Preparations are being made for shackling early to-morrow afternoon of 107 German officers and 1,269 men in Canadian prison camps unless the Germans, by noon to-morrow, remove the fetters from Canadian and British prisoners captured in the Dieppe raid.
[inserted] October 19th 1942 [/inserted]
Imperial and Foreign
PRISONERS IN CHAINS
NO REPLY FROM GERMANY
From Our Diplomatic Correspondent
The German Government have not yet replied to the British statement that we should unfetter the German prisoners of war if they would unfetter the British prisoners. The statement was communicated to the Swiss Government, the Protecting Power, early last week, and was passed on by Switzerland to Berlin last Thursday.
All that has come from Germany is a “comprehensive survey of British brutalities” issued by the German High Command; a document of 15 closely type-written pages which produces more allegations about the treatment of prisoners and then goes on to still wilder and wider charges against British methods of warfare by land, sea, and air. The British Government are disregarding this outburst, although it reveals more clearly than before the ulterior motives which led the Germans to undermine the privileged position of prisoners of war.
TWO PURPOSES
The document has two main purposes – to fan hatred against Britain, and to use the allegations for a wider threat against prisoners of war of all allied countries. It announces that all these prisoners will have reprisals brought upon them.
“Inhuman treatment of German prisoners, or treatment violating international law, on any front, which includes Soviet Russia, will from now on have to be paid for by the whole body of prisoners taken by Germany without distinction of nationality.”
The allegations against Britain are presented in terms of the most virulent hatred. The British Government are accused of making statements “as stupid as they are incredible,” “deliberate falsifications of facts,” “lies,” “untruthful and carefully invented,” and so on. Long statements by German soldiers are inserted. For example: “Corporal Albert Doerr said concerning the Dieppe raid, ‘On the field to which we were led lay several men of the Todt organization, all fettered. The people I saw all had their hands tied behind their backs. Before me was a man of the Todt organization with his thumbs tied together behind his back and the cord was around his neck so that when his hands were tired the cord dragged down his back, making it difficult for him to breathe.’”
After more allegations of that kind, the German High Command declares that these men can be questioned afresh by the Protecting Power.
Then come violent denunciations against Britain for arming civilians in Crete and for shelling a ship after German soldiers had been ordered below. When the German soldiers jumped overboard, “they were machine-gunned until all were hit.” The document comes back to Crete for the complaint that British troops, from the United Kingdom as well as from Australia and New Zealand, “behaved not like soldiers but like convicts.” “The details, proved by sworn statements, were so ghastly that they could not be published before now.” The fighting in Libya provides a further field for similar outcries.
The document is instructive in only one sense. It is designed as the background, and the excuse, for any further German measures against prisoners of war.
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
British prisoners in chains
Description
An account of the resource
Three articles about reprisals against British prisoners of war if German prisoners are fettered. Claims that Germans captured at Dieppe were chained. First: More British prisoners to be chained, fiercer German threats, Italians join the plot, Italian allegations were that British fighters had machine-gunned Italian first aid units and other allegations. Second article: reasons for axis reprisals, megalomania and spite, German honour, getting shackles ready in Canada. The last was in reprisal for German threats. Third article: prisoners in chains, no reply from Germany after British statement that they should unfetter German prisoners if they would unfetter British prisoners.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
The Times
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942-10-10
1942-10-09
Format
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Three newspaper cuttings mounted on a scrapbook page
Language
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eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Identifier
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SValentineJRM1251404v10020
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
British Army
Wehrmacht
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
France
France--Dieppe
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
Canada
Ontario--Ottawa
North Africa
Ontario
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-10
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.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Bloomfield
Steve Baldwin
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
Workflow A completed
prisoner of war
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/81/7914/LGodfreyCR1281391v10001.2.pdf
2bb4feee369606f050f7e0e0563b6922
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
Godfrey, Charles Randall
Subject
The topic of the resource
World War (1939-1945)
Description
An account of the resource
64 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Charles Randall Godfrey DFC (b. 1921, 146099, Royal Air Force) and consists of his logbook and operational notes, items of memorabilia, association memberships, personnel documentation, medals and photographs. He completed 37 operations with 37 Squadron in North Africa and the Mediterranean and 59 operations with 635 Squadron. He flew as a wireless operator in the crew of Squadron Leader Ian Willoughby Bazalgette VC.
The collection has has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by David Charles Godfrey and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Godfrey, CR
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-11-18
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
Charles Godfey's observer's and air gunner's flying 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
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
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LGodfreyCR1281391v10001
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Belgium
Egypt
France
Libya
Greece
Germany
Gibraltar
Great Britain
Netherlands
Scotland
Atlantic Ocean--Baltic Sea
Belgium--Haine-Saint-Pierre
Egypt--Alexandria
Egypt--Cairo
Egypt--Ismailia (Province)
Egypt--Marsá Maṭrūḥ
Egypt--Tall al-Ḍabʻah
England--Berkshire
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Cumbria
England--Devon
England--Gloucestershire
England--Hampshire
England--Kent
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Norfolk
England--Northumberland
England--Oxfordshire
England--Rutland
England--Shropshire
England--Suffolk
England--Wiltshire
England--Worcestershire
England--Yorkshire
France--Angers
France--Caen
France--Creil
France--Mantes-la-Jolie
France--Nucourt
France--Rennes
Germany--Wiesbaden
Germany--Berchtesgaden
Germany--Bottrop
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dorsten
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Düren (Cologne)
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Essen
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Kleve (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Merseburg
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Germany--Munich
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Osterfeld
Germany--Stuttgart
Germany--Troisdorf
Germany--Wanne-Eickel
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Wesseling
Greece--Ērakleion
Greece--Piraeus
Libya--Darnah
Libya--Tobruk
Netherlands--Hasselt
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Scotland--Moray
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
England--Cornwall (County)
North Africa
Libya--Banghāzī
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Libya--Gazala
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1942-03-23
1942-06-10
1942-06-11
1942-06-12
1942-06-13
1942-06-14
1942-06-15
1942-06-16
1942-06-17
1942-06-18
1942-06-19
1942-06-20
1942-06-22
1942-06-23
1942-06-24
1942-06-25
1942-06-26
1942-06-28
1942-06-29
1942-07-02
1942-07-03
1942-07-05
1942-07-08
1942-07-09
1942-07-10
1942-07-12
1942-07-13
1942-07-15
1942-07-16
1942-07-17
1942-07-19
1942-07-20
1942-07-25
1942-07-26
1942-07-28
1942-07-29
1942-07-31
1942-08-01
1942-08-06
1942-08-07
1942-08-08
1942-08-09
1942-08-14
1942-08-15
1942-08-16
1942-08-17
1942-08-18
1942-08-19
1942-08-21
1942-08-22
1942-08-23
1942-08-24
1942-08-25
1942-08-26
1942-08-27
1942-08-28
1942-08-29
1942-08-30
1942-08-31
1942-09-01
1942-09-03
1942-09-05
1942-09-06
1942-09-08
1942-09-09
1944-05-06
1944-05-08
1944-05-12
1944-05-13
1944-05-27
1944-05-28
1944-05-29
1944-06-05
1944-06-07
1944-06-08
1944-06-09
1944-06-12
1944-06-13
1944-06-15
1944-06-16
1944-06-23
1944-06-24
1944-07-07
1944-07-09
1944-07-10
1944-07-14
1944-07-15
1944-07-16
1944-07-18
1944-07-19
1944-07-20
1944-07-23
1944-07-24
1944-07-25
1944-07-26
1944-07-28
1944-07-29
1944-07-30
1944-08-01
1944-08-04
1944-11-17
1944-11-18
1944-12-04
1944-12-06
1944-12-07
1944-12-12
1944-12-15
1944-12-18
1944-12-24
1944-12-28
1944-12-29
1945-01-01
1945-01-02
1945-01-05
1945-01-07
1945-01-08
1945-01-23
1945-02-01
1945-02-02
1945-02-03
1945-02-04
1945-02-07
1945-02-08
1945-02-09
1945-02-14
1945-02-15
1945-02-18
1945-02-20
1945-02-21
1945-03-07
1945-03-08
1945-03-22
1945-03-24
1945-03-25
1945-03-31
1945-04-11
1945-04-13
1945-04-14
1945-04-25
1945-04-30
1945-05-05
1945-05-07
1945-05-15
1945-05-22
1945-06-08
1945-06-18
1945-08-03
1945-08-05
1944-06-06
1944-08-03
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.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Description
An account of the resource
Observer's and air gunner's flying log book for Pilot Officer Godfrey from 3 of February 1941 to 25 of September 1945 detailing training schedule, instructional duties and operations flown. Aircraft flown were Dominie, Proctor, Wellington, Hampden, Anson, Defiant, Martinet, Stirling, Lancaster, C-47 and Oxford. He was stationed at RAF Manby, RAF Bassingbourn, RAF Harwell, RAF Lossiemouth, RAF Downham Market, RAF Hemswell, RAF Wittering, RAF Abingdon, RAF Upper- Heyford, RAF Upwood, RAF Gillingham, RAF Cranwell, RAF Melton Mowbray, RAF Church Fenton, RAF Market Drayton, RAF Waddington, RAF Upavon, RAF Sywell, RAF Carlisle, RAF Linton-On-Ouse, RAF Newbury, RAF Cottesmore, RAF Brize Norton, RAF Exeter, RAF Andover, RAF Hampstead Norris, RAF Hythe, RAF Gibraltar, RAF St Eval, RAF El Dabba, RAF Shaluffa, RAF Abu Sueir, RAF Almaza, RAF Blyton, RAF Ingham, RAF Marston Moor, RAF Leeming, RAF Acklington, RAF Middleton St. George, RAF Newmarket, RAF Moreton-in-Marsh, RAF Leconfield, RAF Skipton-on-Swale, RAF Wyton, RAF Warboys, RAF Westcott, RAF Gravely and RAF Worcester. He completed 37 operations with 37 Squadron in North Africa and the Mediterranean and 59 operations with 635 Squadron to targets in Belgium, France and Germany. Targets included: Heraklion, Piraeus, Derna, Tamimi, Benghazi Harbour, Gazala, Mersa Matruh, Ras El Shaqiq, El Daba, Tobruk, Fuqa, Quatafiya, Düren, Munster, Mantes- Gassicourt rail yards, Haine St. Pierre rail yards, Hasselt rail yards, Rennes, Angers rail yards, Caen, Ravigny rail yards, Nucourt, Wesseling oil refineries, L’Hey, Kiel, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Notre Dame, Trossy St. Maximin, Karlsruhe, Merseburg, Essen, Ludwigshafen, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Mönchengladbach, Troisdorf, Dortmund, Nuremberg, Hannover, Munich, Gelsenkirchen, Mainz, Wiesbaden, Osterfeld, Kleve, Wanne- Eickel, Chemnitz, Wesel, Worms, Hemmingstedt, Dorsten, Bottrop, Osnabruck, Berchtesgaden, Ypenburg and Rotterdam. Notable events are that Charles Godfrey undertook a search and rescue operation in a Defiant and during the operation to Trossy St Maximin 4 August 1944 his aircraft, Lancaster ND811, was brought down by anti-aircraft fire. Whilst he survived and evaded, his pilot, Ian Willoughby Bazalgette was awarded the Posthumous Victoria Cross. The hand written notes added to the end of the log book give a description to the crash, and his attempts to evade capture. Pilot Officer Godfrey also took part in Operation Manna, Operation Exodus and Operation Dodge.
11 OTU
15 OTU
20 OTU
37 Squadron
635 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
bombing of the Normandy coastal batteries (5/6 June 1944)
Bombing of Trossy St Maximin (3 August 1944)
C-47
Cook’s tour
Defiant
Dominie
evading
Hampden
killed in action
Lancaster
Martinet
missing in action
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operation Dodge (1945)
Operation Exodus (1945)
Operation Manna (29 Apr – 8 May 1945)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
Proctor
RAF Abingdon
RAF Andover
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Blyton
RAF Brize Norton
RAF Carlisle
RAF Church Fenton
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Cranwell
RAF Downham Market
RAF Graveley
RAF Hampstead Norris
RAF Harwell
RAF Hemswell
RAF Ingham
RAF Leconfield
RAF Leeming
RAF Linton on Ouse
RAF Lossiemouth
RAF Manby
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Melton Mowbray
RAF Middleton St George
RAF Moreton in the Marsh
RAF Newmarket
RAF Skipton on Swale
RAF St Eval
RAF Sywell
RAF Upavon
RAF Upper Heyford
RAF Upwood
RAF Waddington
RAF Warboys
RAF Westcott
RAF Wittering
RAF Wyton
shot down
Stirling
tactical support for Normandy troops
training
Victoria Cross
Wellington
wireless operator
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1628/25544/PSaundersEJ20010097.1.jpg
c53c03de88120ce0df7fcdef47fee88b
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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
Saunders, Ernest John. Album 2
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
2020-02-13
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Saunders, EJ
Description
An account of the resource
Album containing photographs of his training and service in North Africa and with Bomber Command.
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Enemy Vessel near Tobruk
Description
An account of the resource
A vertical aerial photograph of an enemy ship captioned 'BA.40.NT.20/21/10/42. 8" -->7000.3203.N.2445.E'.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942-10-20
1942-10-21
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph on an album page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PSaundersEJ20010097
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
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
North Africa
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
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
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-10-20
1942-10-21
40 Squadron
aerial photograph
bombing
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1339/20870/SValentineJRM1251404v10010.2.jpg
6bb11a2f1399710b12e1051b8c077075
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
Valentine, John. Ursula Valentine's newspaper cutting scrapbook
Description
An account of the resource
131 items contained in a scrapbook. Mainly newspaper cuttings of events from May 1942 to 1945.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
THE TIMES MONDAY JUNE 22 1942
FALL OF TOBRUK
PERIMETER BREACHED BY AIR AND TANK ATTACK
DEFENDERS’ DETERMINED RESISTANCE
BARDIA REPORTED IN ENEMY HANDS
The War Office confirmed early this morning that Tobruk has fallen.
The German and Italian High Commands claim that the fortress was captured yesterday morning. Earlier British announcement said that the enemy, attacking in great strength, had penetrated the defences on Saturday, and, in spite of determined resistance, had occupied a large area within the perimeter.
The Axis reports stated that 25,000 prisoners and much booty had been taken and that Rommel’s forces had pressed eastward and occupied Bardia and Bir el Gobi.
SHEER WEIGHT OF METAL
DEFENCE LINES CRUSHED
From Our Special Correspondent
LIBYAN FRONT, June 21
The Libyan battle suddenly took a new turn yesterday. After a pause of two or three days the enemy attacked Tobruk in full force and achieved such successes as to render it impossible to hold that port Attacking in a north-easterly direction the enemy penetrated the outer perimete[missing letter] defences to a considerable depth.
The assault started soon after the firs[missing letter] light yesterday, when enemy aircraft fle[missing letter] over in large numbers and opened a concentrated bombing attack as the gun stationed round the defences rained in [missing word] hail of shells. When this barrage die[missing letter] down, tanks, believed to be the bulk o[missing letter] the enemy’s armoured strength, comin[missing letter] up from the El Adem and Ed Duda directions, drove through the defences, crushing down the gallant and determined resistance by sheer weight of metal. Following the tanks, infantry in lorries, with machine-guns, consolidated the gains while tanks drew off to refuel and replenish their ammunition; the tanks then went in again and made further advances.
By nightfall great gaps had been made in our defences and the enemy troops were preparing their dispositions to renew the attack to-day. Round the western side of the perimeter, it is believed, the Italian troops were formed up, not so much to join in the attack as to prevent a break-out in that direction and also to hold any positions taken. Undoubtedly Rommel threw all his forces into this attack.
ROMMEL’S MANOEUVRE
The attack on Tobruk came suddenly after two or three days in which there had been relatively little fighting but a considerable movement of troops. The Eighth Army was regrouping, taking up new positions, and gathering together the units scattered in the confusion of the battle last week-end. Rommel, the morning after the Free French forces had withdrawn from Bir Hakeim, dispatched his armoured units to the north-east, with the intention of resuming the drive against El Adem, Acroma, and then Tobruk. Greater success greeted his arms than had been the case in the opening days of the campaign, and after bitter fighting the first objectives were taken.
It might then have been expected that he would go “all out” for Tobruk. By an exceedingly dashing and skilfully executed manoeuvre the threatened allied garrisons of the Gazala sector – the South Africans and the 50th Division – had been withdrawn safely eastwards, leaving the enemy no opposition along the western perimeter of Tobruk; our two strong points south of Tobruk had fallen; and the bulk of the Eighth Army had moved in the direction of the Egyptian frontier. There seemed to be nothing to hold up the immediate attack on Tobruk.
Instead the enemy columns advanced towards the frontier, as if to attack our new positions there, and came within striking distance of our forward troops. Not till then did he turn his attention to Tobruk, withdrawing his advanced columns from the frontier. What his losses were in yesterday’s attack is not yet known but they may have been considerable.
VICTORY OF PRESTIGE
The capture of Tobruk is not only a victory of prestige for the enemy, of which the most will be made, but it will also give him clear lines of communication along the coastal road.
There are many well-informed people who consider that our defence of Tobruk last year, glorious though it was, was a mistaken policy, on the ground that the cost in various directions of keeping the garrison supplied far outweighed any advantages gained. This time no decision had been taken whether or not Tobruk would be defended. If there seemed a good prospect that we could be ready to counter-attack within a short space of time, it was thought that steps would be taken to reinforce the garrison and hold Tobruk. On the other hand there was no inclination to embark again upon a lengthy and costly defence.
Rommel forced our hand and made up our minds for us by striking with all his strength before the defences were perfected. The presence in this area of new heavy American bombers and of units of the American Navy, combined with the probability that our Mediterranean Fleet will before long be reinforced by the return to service of ships damaged in last year’s engagements give ground for hope that Tobruk will not be of much use to the enemy as a port.
Whether Rommel is in a position to follow up this latest success by marching on to Egypt is a matter for speculation. Exactly what his present strength may be is difficult to tell; but it is clear that we inflicted considerable damage in the earlier engagements, and these have now been increased by losses before Tobruk.
As the enemy is in possession of the battlefield, he will be able to recover a number of his own damaged tanks and some of ours. This will help him to build up his armoured strength; but in the meantime we shall be able to get up reserves from our bases and also to bring back to the field tanks which were too badly damaged for repair in the forward areas and had been sent back to the workshops.
The fall of Tobruk constitutes the crowning disappointment of a campaign which, after giving rise to high hopes that at last a decision would be reached in Libya, has now gone against us. The disappointment may be tempered by the consideration that in this see-saw of desert warfare the only way in which a lasting victory can be won is by the possession of overwhelming armoured and mobile superiority, sufficient not only to beat the enemy on the battlefield but to follow him up and destroy him. In the vast desert spaces, with few facilities for maintenance and supply, it is always the most mobile and most hard-hitting force that wins. Its tanks armed with a considerably heavier gun than ours and also equipped with much thicker armour, the Afrika Korps was able to recover from what was nearly a knock-out blow, delivered solely by the skill and dash of our tank commanders.
It might have been a vastly different story if after the third day of the battle all our remaining armour had been thrown in to administer the [italics] coup de grâce [/italics] to the enemy, who was visibly reeling, whose supplies were running short, and whose transport columns had suffered heavy losse[missing letter] and were utterly disorganized.
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
Fall of Tobruk
Description
An account of the resource
Sub headlines: perimeter breached by air and tank attack, defenders determined resistance, Bardia reported in enemy hands. Article contains account of fall of Tobruk to German forces on 21 June 1942. States 25000 prisoners and German forces in Bardia and Bir El Gobi. Sections: Sheer weight of metal, defence lines crushed, Rommel's manoeuvre, victory of prestige.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
The Times
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942-06-22
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One newspaper cutting mounted on a scrapbook 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
SValentineJRM1251404v10010
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Wehrmacht
British Army
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
North Africa
Libya--Bardiyah
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-06-21
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.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Bloomfield
Steve Baldwin
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
Workflow A completed
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1339/20871/SValentineJRM1251404v10011.1.jpg
d7b648ce3c17eb4839e256ee9db54c6a
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Valentine, John. Ursula Valentine's newspaper cutting scrapbook
Description
An account of the resource
131 items contained in a scrapbook. Mainly newspaper cuttings of events from May 1942 to 1945.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
AFTER BIR HAKEIM
Although Rommel recovered after his definite reverse in the early days of the campaign, the tide of battle still seemed to run our way until after the evacuation of Bir Hakeim. From that moment the German armour, sweeping up northwards, called the tune and we paid the piper. Our armoured strength was such that the general impression was that we wished to join battle, and to that end manoeuvred our forces to bring the enemy to combat. Rommel gave orders that on no account was battle to be joined, and his tanks cleverly avoided engagements except on a minor scale.
Then suddenly last Saturday, in a period variably reported as from three to six hours, we threw away our chances of victory. One fundamental of German tank tactics is to use tanks not so much for actual combat but more in conjunction with anti-tank guns as a species of supplementary artillery.
The last campaign was full of instances when our armour was lured into anti-tank traps. In spite of such warnings, last Saturday the bulk of our armoured force ran into such a trap. The Afrika Korps, well equipped with anti-tank guns, particularly the most effective – 88-millimetre – and also the five and four centimetre gun, and these used with tanks armed with 75s and 50s as a support, shattered our armoured might on the bloody field west of Knightsbridge.
27-MILE PERIMETER
It must be emphasized that Tobruk was practically indefensible against a really determined and heavy attack. During the whole eight months when it stood out so gallantly last year it was never attacked by an overwhelming force. The mere fact that the outer perimeter of the defences – the town’s main defences that is to say – are no less than 27 1/2 miles long shows how impossible it would be to defend it if a sufficiently large and heavy force were sent in to the attack. Once a deep penetration has been made in this ring there is little else to keep out the enemy.
Our frontier force is large, well equipped, and strongly dug in. Our infantry, which is a liability after the armour has been defeated unless behind strong defences, has been got out cleverly to just such a position, sufficiently far away from the enemy to make any attack difficult.
Our commanders, who take the long view, are not despondent. They are convinced that the next time the pendulum swings it will go in our favour, and the swing will be deeper. All that is required is to bring our armaments up to the necessary strength, and to profit by the mistakes made in this campaign.
Our fighting men were splendid throughout, whether tank men, infantry, or artillery. Our air support, too, was excellent, and better directed than ever before.
BRITISH LOSSES IN ARMOUR
ROMMEL’S TACTICAL SUPERIORITY
USE OF DIVE-BOMBERS
From Our Military Correspondent
The disaster which has occurred at Tobruk is not as great as some others we have suffered, but its suddenness makes the shock heavier than that of almost any of them. It is all the worse because the signs point to an error of judgement, a miscalculation, as the cause, unless, of course, it was humanly impossible to evacuate the place before it became beleaguered.
The last time Rommel reached Tobruk he was almost at the end of his tether. This
[map]
time it has been only too evident from recent events that he was in possession of great tactical superiority. There has been more than a suggestion that he had gained air superiority.
Dive-bombing seems to have largely decided the issue at Bir Hakeim, and it is probably that it has been to a great extent responsible for the fate of Tobruk. The other big factor has been the losses in our armour, and perhaps in our repair machinery, suffered just over a week ago in the battle near Knightsbridge, and the reinforcements presumably received by the enemy.
The only justification for locking up a large force in Tobruk, supposing that there was a possibility of extricating it, would seem to have been if a prompt counter-offensive were intended; and the time available was to be measured in days rather than weeks. If such were our plan, we have been anticipated.
AXIS FORCES STRETCHED
Even those who were most deeply alarmed by the decision to hold Tobruk on this occasion had expected nothing so sudden as this. In the light of what has happened confidence in our ability to hold the frontier must necessarily be tempered with caution. But speculation on that point is useless. It is a matter of equipment and communications. On the face of it, in view of the season and the extent to which the enemy’s force has been stretched, it would be premature at least to describe the situation as grave.
The enemy will derive advantage from the possession of Tobruk, but that is a minor matter by comparison with the loss of invaluable trained troops and of equipment brought to the scene of action at the cost of great sacrifice. If it will take him some little time to get any benefit from Tobruk, it will take us much longer to replace what has been lost.
Once more we have to begin all over again, but because there has been a landslide that is no reason to expect an avalanche.
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
Fall of Tobruk
Description
An account of the resource
First partial article: after Bir Hakem account of recent activity in desert campaign mentioning German tank tactics. 27-mile perimeter, mentioning that Tobruk was indefensible against really determined attack, Second article. British losses in armour, Rommel's tactical superiority, use of dive bombers. Includes sketch map of area. Sub- headline: Axis forces stretched.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942-06
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two newspaper cuttings mounted on a scrapbook 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
SValentineJRM1251404v10011
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Wehrmacht
British Army
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
North Africa
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-06
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Bloomfield
Steve Baldwin
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
Workflow A completed
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1323/20240/PSeaggerA16010075.2.jpg
5e7a699e1336c6156413ca248b2d7cbd
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1323/20240/PSeaggerA16010076.2.jpg
6986d0a4d349589220fce5399cbefe20
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Seagger, Alan. Album 01 General
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Seagger, A
Description
An account of the resource
89 photographs of scenery, aircraft and service life taken in Italy and the Middle East.
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Fieseler Storch
Description
An account of the resource
Damaged Luftwaffe observation aircraft. On the reverse 'Jerry craft captured near Tobruk'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One b/w photograph
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PSeaggerA16010075, PSeaggerA16010076
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
North Africa
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
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.
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2243/40792/LWickhamHW124631v2.2.pdf
9f21eb8138116fe364fc4cff2cdc9bb9
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
Wickham, Harry William
Wickham, HW
Description
An account of the resource
23 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Harry William Wickham (b. 1919, 124631 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, a biography, service records and photographs. He flew operations as a pilot with 102 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Lynne Parry and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-06-29
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Wickham, HW
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Harry Wickham's pilot's flying log book. Two
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LWickhamHW124631v2
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
Description
An account of the resource
H W Wickham’s Pilot’s Flying Log Book covering the period 10 July 1942 to 23 May 1943. Detailing his operations flown as pilot. He was stationed at RAF Fayid and RAF Aqir (462 Squadron) and RAF Castle Coombe (3 Flying Instructor’s School).
Aircraft flown in were Halifax, Wellington, Bombay, DC-3, B-24 and Oxford. He flew 17 night operations with 462 Squadron. Targets were Tobruk, Maleme, Fuka, Halfaya Pass, Dernia and Heraklion.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Terry Hancock
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Egypt
Great Britain
Greece
Libya
North Africa
Egypt--Halfaya Pass
England--Wiltshire
Greece--Ērakleion
Greece--Maleme
Libya--Tobruk
Libya--Darnah
Egypt--Fukah
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-07-15
1942-07-19
1942-07-25
1942-07-27
1942-07-31
1942-08-19
1942-08-21
1942-09-03
1942-10-05
1942-10-19
1942-10-26
1942-11-02
1942-11-05
1942-11-07
1942-11-08
1942-11-12
1942-12-12
462 Squadron
76 Squadron
aircrew
B-24
bombing
C-47
forced landing
Halifax
Halifax Mk 2
Oxford
pilot
RAF Aqir
RAF Castle Combe
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2243/40790/BGardnerM-ManuelRWickhamHWv1.1.pdf
a8d29d7ecebbfcb5b1213488b502426a
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
Wickham, Harry William
Wickham, HW
Description
An account of the resource
23 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Harry William Wickham (b. 1919, 124631 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, a biography, service records and photographs. He flew operations as a pilot with 102 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Lynne Parry and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-06-29
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Wickham, HW
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
Harry William Wickham
Description
An account of the resource
Recalls Harry's joining the RAF and describes his initial, then basic and advanced aircrew training. Follows move to operational training unit, and joining 102 Squadron flying Whitley. Mentions operations to Berlin, Stettin and Duisburg. Converted to Halifax in 1942. Continues with a list of some flights up to completing 44 operations on 25 June 1942. Includes operations to Ostend and Cologne and final sortie to Essen. Mentions some of his crew. Continues with history of 102 Squadron during world war one. Continues history for the war starting in 1941. Harry was then assigned to the middle east (462 Squadron). Mentions operation to Tobruk 31 July 1942. Provides short account of desert operations and award of Distinguished Flying Cross (includes citation) including forced landing in the desert. Continues with history of 102 Squadron with mention of losses. Harry returned to UK in 1943 and account mention his marriage. Story continues with mention of Harry's flying and losses on 102 Squadron though 1943 and 1944. Harry during this period was test flying Halifax. Account of 102 Squadron losses continues until last operation on 18 March 1945. Concludes with some post war 102 Squadron history and overall statistics for the war.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mary Gardner
Roger Manuel
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940-10-17
1940-09-20
1940-11-05
1940-10-28
1941-04-27
1942-04-22
1943-05-15
1943-06
1943-08
1943-09
1943-10
1943-12
1944
1944-02
1944-04
1944-06-10
1944-09
1945-03-18
1945-04-25
1945-10
1954-10
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Devon
England--Torquay
Wales--Aberystwyth
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Cambridge
England--Gloucestershire
England--Cirencester
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Poland
Poland--Szczecin
Germany--Cologne
Belgium
Belgium--Ostend
England--Yorkshire
England--Worcestershire
France
France--Calais
Atlantic Ocean--English Channel
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Essen
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
Germany--Wangerooge Island
Wales--Treforest
Germany--Magdeburg
Czech Republic
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Personal research
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Twelve page printed document
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BGardnerM-ManuelRWickhamHWv1
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
102 Squadron
462 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
air sea rescue
aircrew
B-17
bombing of Cologne (30/31 May 1942)
Distinguished Flying Cross
Flying Training School
forced landing
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Halifax Mk 2
Initial Training Wing
killed in action
mine laying
missing in action
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Finningley
RAF Topcliffe
RAF Torquay
Tiger Moth
training
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/934/36457/BLovattPHastieRv2.1.pdf
295406378e70aa4d2aeb43baeaddc085
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
Lovatt, Peter
Dr Peter Lovatt
P Lovatt
Description
An account of the resource
117 items. An oral history interview with Peter Lovatt (b.1924, 1821369 Royal Air Force), his log book, documents, and photographs. The collection also contains two photograph albums. He flew 42 operations as an air gunner on 223 Squadron flying B-24s. <br /><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/1338">Album One</a><br /><a href="https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/show/2135">Album Two</a><br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Nina and Peter Lovatt 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
2017-09-27
2019-09-03
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
Lovatt, P
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Hastie DFC: The Life and Times of a Wartime Pilot
Description
An account of the resource
A biography of Roy Hastie.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Peter Lovatt
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2003-10
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
United States
Rhode Island--Quonset Point Naval Air Station
Bahamas--Nassau
New York (State)--New York
Bahamas--New Providence Island
Great Britain
England--Harrogate
Scotland--Perth
Scotland--Glasgow
England--Warrington
England--Blackpool
Luxembourg
France
Belgium
Netherlands
France--Dunkerque
England--Dover
England--Grantham
England--Torquay
Wales--Aberystwyth
Iceland
Greenland
Sierra Leone
Russia (Federation)--Murmansk
Singapore
France--Saint-Malo
Denmark
Sweden
Germany--Lübeck
Netherlands--Ameland Island
England--Grimsby
Germany--Helgoland
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Atlantic Ocean--Bay of Biscay
England--Lundy Island
Germany--Cologne
North Carolina
North Carolina--Cape Hatteras
Aruba
Curaçao
Iceland--Reykjavík
Greenland--Narsarssuak
Canada
Québec--Montréal
Rhode Island
New York (State)--Buffalo
Gulf of Mexico
Caribbean Sea
Virginia
Florida--Miami
Cuba--Guantánamo Bay Naval Base
Puerto Rico--San Juan
Cuba
Florida--West Palm Beach
Cuba--Caimanera
India
Sierra Leone--Freetown
Jamaica
Jamaica--Kingston
Jamaica--Montego Bay
Virginia--Norfolk
Washington (D.C.)
Newfoundland and Labrador
Northern Ireland--Limavady
England--Chatham (Kent)
Newfoundland and Labrador--Gander
Gibraltar
England--Leicester
Massachusetts--Boston
Egypt--Alamayn
Algeria--Algiers
Algeria--Oran
Algeria--Bejaïa
Algeria--Annaba
Italy--Sicily
England--Milton Keynes
Germany--Essen
England--Dunwich
Europe--Scheldt River
England--Sizewell
Germany--Hamburg
England--Kent
Germany--Stuttgart
England--Crowborough
Netherlands--Hague
England--Peterborough
England--Bristol
Germany--Homburg (Saarland)
Belgium--Brussels
Germany--Bochum
Germany--Dortmund-Ems Canal
Germany--Wanne-Eickel
Belgium--Liège
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Aschaffenburg
Germany--Castrop-Rauxel
Germany--Mittelland Canal
Germany--Aachen
Germany--Karlsruhe
Germany--Neuss
Germany--Nuremberg
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Hagen (Arnsberg)
Germany--Leuna
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Germany--Ulm
Germany--Munich
Poland--Szczecin
France--Ardennes
Germany--Bonn
Belgium--Houffalize
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Grevenbroich
Germany--Dülmen
France--Metz
Germany--Magdeburg
Germany--Zeitz
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
England--Dungeness
Germany--Mainz (Rhineland-Palatinate)
Germany--Wiesbaden
Germany--Dresden
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Koblenz
Germany--Chemnitz
Germany--Dortmund
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Germany--Worms
Germany--Pforzheim
Germany--Darmstadt
Europe--Lake Constance
Germany--Bergkamen
Germany--Dessau (Dessau)
Germany--Wesel (North Rhine-Westphalia)
France--Aube
Germany--Augsburg
England--Feltwell
England--Croydon
Norway--Oslo
Sweden--Stockholm
Czech Republic--Prague
Italy--Florence
Portugal--Lisbon
Monaco--Monte-Carlo
France--Boulogne-sur-Mer
Netherlands--Venlo
Netherlands--Amsterdam
France--Paris
France--Lyon
France--Digne
France--Nevers
France--Lille
Norway--Ålesund
France--Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais)
France--Bailleul (Nord)
Belgium--Ieper
Belgium--Mesen
France--Cambrai
France--Somme
France--Arras
France--Lens
France--Calais
Germany--Emden (Lower Saxony)
Netherlands--Vlissingen
France--Brest
France--Lorient
France--La Pallice
Egypt--Suez
Germany--Berlin
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
Cyprus
Turkey--Gallipoli
Black Sea--Dardanelles Strait
Turkey--İmroz Island
Turkey--İzmir
Greece--Lesbos (Municipality)
Greece--Thasos Island
Greece--Chios (Municipality)
Greece--Thasos
Bulgaria
Turkey--Istanbul
Europe--Macedonia
Greece--Kavala
Kenya--Nairobi
Africa--Rhodesia and Nyasaland
Tanzania
Sudan
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Sudan--Kassalā
Eritrea--Asmara
Yemen (Republic)--Perim Island
Ethiopia--Addis Ababa
Sudan--Khartoum
Ghana--Takoradi
Libya--Cyrenaica
Libya--Tobruk
Egypt--Cairo
Iraq
Greece--Crete
Libya--Tripolitania
Tunisia--Mareth Line
Libya--Tripoli
Tunisia--Qaṣrayn
Tunisia--Medenine
Italy--Pantelleria Island
Malta
Italy--Licata
Italy--Brindisi
Italy--Foggia
Italy--Cassino
Italy--Sangro River
Italy--Termoli
Yugoslavia
Croatia--Split
Croatia--Vis Island
Italy--Loreto
Italy--Pescara
Trinidad and Tobago--Trinidad
North America--Saint Lawrence River
Newfoundland and Labrador--Happy Valley-Goose Bay
Bahamas
Florida
Italy
Poland
Massachusetts
New York (State)
Algeria
Tunisia
Libya
Egypt
North Africa
Ontario
Québec
Germany
Croatia
Czech Republic
Ghana
Greece
Kenya
Norway
Russia (Federation)
Turkey
Yemen (Republic)
Portugal
Trinidad and Tobago
North America--Niagara Falls
France--Reims
Europe--Frisian Islands
Germany--Monheim (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lancashire
England--Leicestershire
England--Lincolnshire
Germany--Oberhausen (Düsseldorf)
Greece--Thessalonikē
Germany--Herne (Arnsberg)
Atlantic Ocean--Kattegat (Baltic Sea)
Libya--Banghāzī
Russia (Federation)--Arkhangelʹskai︠a︡ oblastʹ
Great Britain Miscellaneous Island Dependencies--Jersey
Virginia--Hampton Roads (Region)
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
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
142 printed sheets
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BLovattPHastieRv2
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending text-based transcription
1 Group
100 Group
101 Squadron
157 Squadron
2 Group
214 Squadron
223 Squadron
3 Group
4 Group
6 Group
8 Group
85 Squadron
88 Squadron
air gunner
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
B-17
B-24
B-25
bale out
Beaufighter
Bismarck
Botha
C-47
Chamberlain, Neville (1869-1940)
Churchill, Winston (1874-1965)
crash
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
entertainment
evacuation
Flying Training School
Gee
Gneisenau
Goldfish Club
ground personnel
H2S
Halifax
Harris, Arthur Travers (1892-1984)
Harvard
He 111
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Hudson
Hurricane
Initial Training Wing
Ju 88
Lancaster
love and romance
Martinet
Me 109
Me 110
mine laying
Mosquito
Mussolini, Benito (1883-1945)
navigator
Nissen hut
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
pilot
Proctor
radar
RAF Banff
RAF Catfoss
RAF Catterick
RAF Chedburgh
RAF Cranwell
RAF Dishforth
RAF Farnborough
RAF Horsham St Faith
RAF Kinloss
RAF Leuchars
RAF Lichfield
RAF Lyneham
RAF Manston
RAF North Coates
RAF Oulton
RAF Padgate
RAF Prestwick
RAF Riccall
RAF Silloth
RAF South Cerney
RAF St Eval
RAF Thornaby
RAF Thorney Island
RAF Windrush
RAF Woodbridge
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882-1945)
Scharnhorst
Spitfire
sport
Stirling
Swordfish
Tiger Moth
Tirpitz
training
V-1
V-2
V-weapon
Whitley
Window
wireless operator
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2330/43393/LClarkHA532059v2.1.pdf
5b3fb05ff0650d27a3ac2e68c5cf300c
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
Clark, Herbert Ashton
Description
An account of the resource
Two items. The collection concerns Wing Commander Herbert Ashton Clark (b. 1911, 532059, 43414 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books. He flew operations as a pilot with 37 Squadron from the UK and North Africa.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Wayne Clark and catalogued by Nick Cornwell-Smith.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021-12-02
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
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Clark, HA
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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LClarkHA532059v2
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Title
A name given to the resource
Herbert Ashton Clark's pilots flying log book. Two
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
Description
An account of the resource
Pilot’s flying log book for Flight Sergeant Herbert Ashton Clark from 8 March 1937 to 20 August 1956. Detailing operational posting in Iraq with 70 Squadron. On return to England further training with 215 Squadron. Conversion to the Wellington at 11 OTU followed by posting to 37 Squadron in August 1940. Posted to the Middle East in November 1940. Promoted to Squadron Leader and then Wing Commander during this posting. Awarded DSO and DFC.
Stationed at RAF Hinaidi, RAF Driffield, RAF Manston, RAF Honington, RAF Bramcote, RAF Bassingbourn, RAF Feltwell, RAF Shallufa. Returned to England post-war staying in the RAF. Aircraft flown were Valentia, Harrow, Wellington, Magister, Lysander, Maryland, Fiat CR42, B26, Harvard, Auster, Proctor, Anson, and Prentice.
He flew 1 propaganda leaflet drop with 11 OTU, 1 day and 21 night operations with 37 Squadron in Europe. Targets were St Omer, Eindhoven, Soest, Osnabruck, Frankfurt, Stockum, Bottrop, Hannover, the Black Forest, Gelsenkirchen, Hamm, Flushing, Bitterfeld, Rotterdam, Mannheim, Leipzig, Kiel, Hamburg, Berlin.
12 day and 18 night operations with 37 Squadron and 257 Wing in the Middle East. Targets were Benina, El Adem, Derna, Berca, Bardia, Tobruk, Benghazi, Rhodes, Brindisi, Halfaya, Marble Arch landing ground, Heraklion, Misurata, Homs, Palermo, Gabes, the Mareth Line, El Hamma, Kourba, Pantelleria, Villa San Giovanni, Vibo Valentia, Adrano, Cape Peloro. Posted to HQ RAF Middle East where carried out 28 day supply dropping operations.
Post war career included postings to Air Division Control Commission Germany, Flying Training Command, 41 Group, 22 Maintenance Unit and RAF Negombo, Sri Lanka.
Log book also contains Form 3921 – Aircrew Qualification Record, a 1949 calendar and Form 2745 Record of Service, Educational and Professional Qualifications.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1940-08-09
1940-08-10
1940-08-15
1940-08-16
1940-08-17
1940-08-18
1940-08-19
1940-08-20
1940-08-24
1940-08-25
1940-08-26
1940-08-27
1940-08-29
1940-08-30
1940-09-01
1940-09-02
1940-09-04
1940-09-05
1940-09-07
1940-09-08
1940-09-12
1940-09-13
1940-09-14
1940-09-15
1940-09-20
1940-09-21
1940-09-29
1940-09-30
1940-10-02
1940-10-03
1940-10-05
1940-10-08
1940-10-09
1940-10-10
1940-10-11
1940-10-14
1940-10-15
1940-10-16
1940-10-17
1940-10-21
1940-10-22
1940-10-23
1940-10-24
1940-10-25
1940-10-26
1940-12-08
1940-12-10
1940-12-11
1940-12-13
1940-12-14
1940-12-17
1940-12-18
1940-12-20
1940-12-21
1941-01-02
1941-01-05
1941-01-13
1941-01-14
1941-01-20
1941-01-22
1941-02-16
1942-11-07
1942-11-08
1942-11-25
1942-11-26
1942-12-02
1942-12-03
1942-12-22
1942-12-23
1943-01-08
1943-01-16
1943-01-17
1943-02-03
1943-02-04
1943-02-24
1943-02-25
1943-03-17
1943-03-19
1943-03-20
1943-03-25
1943-03-26
1943-04-13
1943-04-14
1943-06-10
1943-06-27
1943-06-28
1943-07-15
1943-07-16
1943-08-01
1943-08-08
1943-08-09
1944-02-29
1944-03-02
1944-03-25
1944-05-05
1944-05-15
1944-05-31
1944-06-01
1944-06-02
1944-06-09
1944-06-10
1944-06-16
1944-06-27
1944-07-03
1944-07-12
1944-07-25
1944-07-27
1944-08-03
1944-08-15
1944-08-17
1944-08-19
1944-08-22
1944-08-25
1944-08-29
1944-09-07
1944-09-12
1944-09-16
1944-10-13
1944-10-21
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
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Yorkshire
England--Kent
England--Norfolk
England--Suffolk
England--Warwickshire
France
France--Saint-Omer (Pas-de-Calais)
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bitterfeld-Wolfen
Germany--Black Forest
Germany--Bottrop
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Gelsenkirchen
Germany--Hamburg
Germany--Hamm (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Germany--Hannover
Germany--Kiel
Germany--Leipzig
Germany--Mannheim
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Soest
Greece
Greece--Ērakleion
Greece--Rhodes (Island)
Iraq
Italy
Italy--Adrano
Italy--Brindisi
Italy--Palermo
Italy--Pantelleria Island
Italy--Vibo Valentia
Italy--Villa San Giovanni
Libya
Libya--Al Adm
Libya--Banghāzī
Libya--Bardiyah
Libya--Darnah
Libya--Miṣrātah
Libya--Ra's Lanuf
Libya--Tobruk
Netherlands
Netherlands--Eindhoven
Netherlands--Rotterdam
Netherlands--Vlissingen
Syria
Syria--Homs
Tunisia
Tunisia--Mareth Line
Tunisia--Qābis
North Africa
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Nick Cornwell-Smith
11 OTU
215 Squadron
37 Squadron
70 Squadron
9 Squadron
aircrew
Anson
B-26
bombing
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Service Order
Harrow
Harvard
Lysander
Magister
Operational Training Unit
pilot
Proctor
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Bramcote
RAF Digby
RAF Driffield
RAF Feltwell
RAF Honington
RAF Leconfield
RAF Manston
RAF Shallufa
RAF Silloth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/942/11301/AMacraeWM161116.1.mp3
84f04c8bc5c17a43471fbbf8d7624df3
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
Macrae, Bill
W M Macrae
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Bill Macrae (1913 - 2019, 3031774, Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 104 Squadron in North Africa and Italy.
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
2016-11-16
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
Macrae, WM
Transcribed audio recording
A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
JH: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincolnshire, UK and it’s part of the Oral History Programme. I’m the interviewer. I’m John Horsburgh and today I’m interviewing Bill Macrae. Bill was a pilot and he served with 104 Squadron RAF and he was flying Wellington bombers. And he was part of the Desert Air Force. North Africa and Italy campaigns. So, it’s a very interesting story. The interview is at Bill’s home in Chatswood in New South Wales and today is the 16th of November 2016. So, good afternoon Bill. I’m very pleased to be interviewing you for this. Why don’t we start at the start? The, your date of birth and where you were born and we’ll take it from there.
BM: I was born on the 14th of January 1913 at a place called Coraki which is up the far north coast near Lismore. On a farm. And my earliest memory was of the end of the First World War when late one evening a man came galloping down the main road singing out, “The war is over. The war is over.” And I remember very well also when all the soldiers came back where they put on a big return party at the local showground. And I remember there one of them picked me up and threw me up in the air and I boasted about that ever since. That’s the first time I was ever airborne. After that I went to a local school. About ten pupils in it I think, and teaching was rather elementary I suppose but we got the basics. And from there we moved to another farm up at Kyogle which is about, a town about thirty miles further north. And I was there until we came to Sydney in about 1923 and I went to school in Sydney. And at that time in 1926 or ‘7 the Depression came along and that’s one of my main regrets in life that my father lost his money and he had to go back to the bush and start again. And I had to get a job which I was very fortunate. I had an old uncle who had been in the Bank of New South Wales and he got me a job there. And none of my friends had a job. And people don’t realise how dire the straits of everyone else was in the workforce. I think unemployment was about twenty, twenty five percent. And in those day there were very few women working. But I remember the, I started work in Sydney in March 1929 in a two storey building in George Street with a wooden wire cage lift with a bit of rope used as a thing to lower it up and down. And I worked there for about three or four or five years and in 1937 the bank decided to send me to London for three years. Which was one of the greatest breaks I’ve had in life. And the general manager of the bank was Sir Alfred Davidson and he had the idea I think that the, a lot of young fellows in the bank were hillbillies. It would be a good thing if they had a bit of overseas experience. So he sent quite a few of us over there which I think was a very expensive exercise and which rather got him out of favour with the directors. He was wasting money on us really because we went over there completely unsupervised and we sort of had a tourist time. Not having to do much hard work.
JH: Meanwhile Bill was there a sense that there was trouble? When you went over there there was trouble brewing in Germany?
BM: Oh yes. Yes. Yes. I realised that the, there would be a war and I decided at that stage to learn a bit of German. So I went along at night to learn German. And I got to the stage I could understood Hitler’s ravings. And I also went over to Germany on holidays in 1939 and lived with a German family in Munich. And I gathered there that the Germans were right behind Hitler because he gave them hope. As the lady of the house where I was boarding said, ‘Well, he gave us hope,’ and said, ‘Otherwise we were completely —’ the biggest mistake of the war was the Germans were treated very harshly in the Treaty of Versailles. And they were a very proud race and they had no future. And she said, ‘Hitler gave us a future,’ she said, ‘We didn’t agree with him. And we didn’t like Goering. We thought he was a joke. But he gave our kids Hitler Youth ideology.’ Which was very, very good. The young Germans really impressed me. I mean as a tourist they’d see, if you asked them anywhere they’d not only point it out to you but they’d go with you. And very, very well mannered. And the Hitler Youth I think were completely mislead and indoctrinated by Hitler which was very, very unfortunate. But I liked the young Germans and I loved their singing. I loved their music. And I loved their general method of morality which was very high. Which I’m afraid at that time in England you had the shocker yobbos and the young people there didn’t impress you as opposed to the young Germans. At any rate I backed the wrong horse. I got back to England and a bit later on of course war broke out in September ’39. And I was very sympathetic to the German cause and I very easily could have become indoctrinated by the German ideals I think. At any rate. I decided that war might be over by Christmas so I thought I’d better sort of do something about it. I went along to Australia House and I was very fortunate there to have met a military man. Captain Pollard. He later became quite a good, he later got a knighthood and he later became a general but at that stage he was just a captain in the army.
JH: An Australian.
BM: And he said to me —
JH: Australian army or British army?
BM: Australian army.
JH: Australian army. Yeah.
BM: He was attached temporarily on a course with the British army.
JH: Yes.
BM: At any rate he said there was no Australian army starting up in London, ‘You’ll have to go back to Australia.’ And he said, ‘But I can get you into the, New Zealand has started a little army. Either that or the British army.’ At any rate I said, ‘You’d better make it the British army,’ because New Zealanders didn’t like Australians very much in those days. And, I don’t know. I don’t think that persists but then I think they regarded us as the descendants of convicts [laughs] They thought they were a bit superior to Australians I think. So, I decided not to join the New Zealand Army. They started an anti-tank regiment there and I saw them in training later on. But I was very amazed then within a matter of two weeks I suddenly got a notice, call up notice to report to Woolwich. The headquarters of the artillery and to join an officer training course for the artillery which, back to when I’d left Australia as I said if I’d ever join the British army and become an officer was completely out of my mind. But at any rate I joined the British Army. Trained with them at Aldershot. South of London there. And graduated as a lieutenant, Royal Artillery in March 1940 and was posted back to Woolwich to go to France. And at that stage we sat at Woolwich for about a month and that was when the Germans attacked in France. And that’s when the Germans sort of over ran the British Army in France.
JH: So you could have ended up on the beach.
BM: Yeah. So I never —
JH: Yeah.
BM: I never got to France. Which was a bit fortunate. But I got posted to a British artillery regiment between Canterbury and Dover. And I was down there during the Battle of Britain and wonderful front line seats of the battles that raged overhead in the air. And that gave me a yearning to get into the air force I’m afraid. And a notice came around in the artillery regiment. They’d decided to start up a thing called a flying OP. Operational Post training for directing gunfire from the air. Then I put my name in and as a result of that I got posted to an air force station at Woodley.
JH: Woodley.
BM: Which was west of London. I remember —
JH: Was that an —
BM: On the day that I —
JH: Yeah.
BM: That day up there it took me all day to get through London. It had been damaged by bombing. But I got to Woodley about dusk. And as I was walking across the aerodrome to go to the mess hut there which was an inn on the edge of the aerodrome a Hurricane was circling around at zero feet. And it finally landed and almost ran into a hedge. And I hurried across and the pilot clambered out and a very strange language, ‘Where am I? Where am I?’ And he was a Pole. He’d been up fighting the Germans and got lost. And as a result of that he stayed with us that night.
JH: Yes.
BM: You can imagine. We heard his whole life story.
JH: Yes.
BM: And he was really angry with the Germans. Really, really angry. And his history was that he’d been in the Polish Air Force and they were knocked out of the war more or less overnight. First when war was first declared.
JH: Well they had cavalry charges, didn’t they?
BM: And he went down. Got out through Italy.
JH: Yes.
BM: To Gibraltar. Then got up back to England. And he trained then with the RAF. And I might say they were a gallant mob the Polish aircrew. Very gallant.
JH: Yes.
BM: They were I’d say better lot of aeroplanes and I remember my rear gunner who had earlier on been posted to a Polish fighter squadron as a gunner in a Boulton Paul Defiant, that was a single engine fighter with a turret just behind the pilot. And he said the pilot there said, ‘If you don’t shoot them down I’ll ram them.’ And he said, ‘He meant it.’ At any rate the rear gunner was very happy to train with a timid pilot like me, I think.
JH: So, Bill, just, just run me through the type of aircraft you flew during training. Did you start with the, for example Tiger Moth?
BM: I trained on a single engine Miles Magister. I remember the first couple of flights very well because it was December then and there was a frost on the ground. You could see the River Thames below. You could see a village there with smoke coming up and you could see Windsor Castle in the background. I said to the, I was flying at the time, he was sitting in front and you communicated by a speaking tube.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I said to him, ‘What a marvellous sight this is.’ I was completely wrapped up in the view. He said, ‘I’ve got it,’ he took over the ruddy plane and put into a dive. Straight down to the village below and said, he said, ‘Do you see that church down there? Do you see the graveyard? If you don’t watch your airspeed that’s where you’ll finish up.’ [laughs] That’s when I found the number one in flying is your airspeed. You’ve got to watch it. Watch it. Watch it. Coming in to land. Taking off. All the time.
JH: Yeah. Yeah.
BM: That was my first. And that was the approach I used when I was instructing people flying. That’s the approach I used with them too later on.
JH: It sounds like a very good tip you got there. It stood you in good stead.
BM: At any rate I didn’t, didn’t, wasn’t posted back then to my original place. I was posted back to Woolwich. And I sat there for a couple of weeks. At that stage there were quite a few air raids on London.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I remember there was an unexploded bomb landed on the Woolwich College. We were all evacuated while they dealt with it. They dealt with it by boring a hole in it both sides with a drill clamped to the thing. And then they squirted water in to sort of do the — get rid of the explosive. I remember that quite well.
JH: Yes.
BM: But then I got a posted from there down to the mouth of the Thames to Shoeburyness which was a medium and heavy artillery training regiment. And I trained people there.
JH: Yes.
BM: And got very friendly with the colonel in charge of the place and I told him how I’d love to get in to the bloody air force. I’d already done some flying.
JH: Yes.
BM: And he said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend at the war house.’
JH: Yeah.
BM: And he said, ‘If you like I’ll give you a letter of introduction to him.’ And he gave me a couple of days off to go up to the war house which had been evacuated to Cheltenham.
JH: Yes.
BM: And he was there. A series of big huts. They kept all the army records there.
JH: Yes.
BM: But at any rate I went up there and I went out and I met the major man. His friend. And as a result of that I got a transfer to the air force.
JH: That’s marvellous. So did you then —
BM: I must say —
JH: Go to an OTU? Officer training unit in the air force.
BM: No. That was [pause] they sent me to another Elementary Flying Course.
JH: Oh yes. Of course.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
BM: But I might say the reason I was popular with the man at Shoeburyness was, well it was on the shore there it was set right the tide would go out over the sand and mud flats as far as the eye could see and then the tide would come in lapping. And I realised no one had been fishing there for years. And there was a boat shed there with a little rowing boat.
JH: Yes.
BM: I got the rowing boat out at the right tide. I went out and I caught flounder by the dozen.
JH: Good Lord.
BM: I was feeding the bloody mess with fish. Rationing was on but not very severe.
JH: Yeah.
BM: I was very popular with the CO as a result of it. That’s how I got into the air force [laughs]
JH: That’s an amazing —
BM: That’s when I got posted to a —
JH: Amazing story. Yeah.
BM: Posted from the place by the sea to, to a college at Cambridge.
JH: Cambridge.
BM: Another. Yes.
JH: In Cambridge or —
BM: In Cambridge. Yeah.
JH: Oh right. Yeah.
BM: Not the airfield.
JH: Yeah.
BM: It was an initial training place where they were marching people around who had just joined the air force.
JH: Yes. A bit of square bashing.
BM: I explained to the man in charge and as a result of that he got me moved from there after a couple of weeks.
JH: Yeah.
BM: But it was a very pleasant interlude. I joined with the elders at the dining mess and I had a very pleasant couple of weeks at Cambridge.
JH: Yes.
BM: Went punting on the Backs and it was very pleasant. At any rate I got posted then to another Elementary Flying School at Peterborough.
JH: Yes.
BM: I went there for another couple of months and from there I was posted to the next stage which was Flying Training School. Elementary to begin with. Then you went to a flying training. If you were going in to bombers you went over, the training place was twin engine planes which — that’s where I got posted.
JH: Yes.
BM: Cranwell had twin-engined Oxfords.
JH: Yes.
BM: Airspeed Oxfords. Which is a very pleasant aeroplane to fly.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I trained on that and a couple of things there that come to mind. When I arrived in 1941, about a week before Whittle’s jet had been flying there for the first time. It was the talk of the station. Highly secret of course. You were told not on any account to mention this but I heard all about it but I actually didn’t see it flying. But that’s where it first flew. It was housed in a hangar away at the far end of the aerodrome and guarded by civilian police apparently. They wouldn’t trust the air force guards for the secrecy angle.
JH: Yes.
BM: But at any rate it took a couple of years for that to be developed. If you read Whittle’s book I think they got the Rover people to start trying to develop it. They didn’t do much and then they handed it over to Rolls Royce and it got going within about twelve months after that. But of course the Germans had a jet flying in 1938 and they had the same experience. They realised that it would take a couple of years to develop and Hitler decided to adapt the scientific wing when it was flying because it would take a couple of years before it could. But as it turned out it took about three years before the Germans were able to develop it. And it took the British about three years too.
JH: So it became operational during.
BM: Before they got [unclear] Yes. Yes.
JH: I didn’t know that. It’s interesting.
BM: But that was one of the highlights of my flying training. Another highlight was I wore the King’s uniform there. The main building at Cranwell, a very long building with a big tower in the middle and a small tower on the two wings either side. We were in the cinema one night and suddenly the whole building shook. Someone said, ‘Oh, we’ve been bombed,’ but we hadn’t been bombed. An old Whitley on night flying had landed and hit one of the little towers at the end of the long building. And the building was on fire. And we all raced out of course and they said, ‘Get the pictures out.’ In the corridors there they had a lot of very valuable pictures which had been evacuated from the National Gallery in London.
JH: Some old Masters.
BM: Yes. Priceless pictures. We carted the pictures from that wing of the building and in the main entrance to the building was the King’s uniform in a glass case. Well, the glass case, we got that open and after the fire was put out we each wore the King’s uniform and saluted each other [laughs]
JH: Well deserved.
BM: But the only survivor of the crash was the rear gunner. The rest of the crew bought it. And the Whitley of course was completely burned out.
JH: Yes. So, Bill, at this stage were you earmarked as a pilot or —
BM: Yes.
JH: Could have been a navigator.
BM: You were earmarked when you went to Cranwell as a bomber pilot. Twin engine training.
JH: Yeah. So you passed all the aptitude and —
BM: Oh yes. Yes. Yes.
JH: You were heading in that direction.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And you did a bit of night flying there but you more or less did about fifty or sixty hour a day flying.
JH: Yes.
BM: Instructing. And then you did about ten hours night flying.
JH: Yes.
BM: Which wasn’t a lot.
JH: Yes.
BM: And you didn’t know much about night flying really. And another thing at Cranwell when I was there when they were experimenting with a flare path called sodium flares. Which were a flare path for these I don’t know what sodium meant but there was a thing where you put on goggles and you could see the flares, but you had dark glasses. You couldn’t see anything else. But they never, I had a couple of hours trying to learn night flying on that.
JH: Yes.
BM: But it was abandoned because the main problem as I saw it your goggles fogged up.
JH: Yes.
BM: You were sweating with. And if you tried to land looking —
JH: Yes.
BM: Seeing the flarepath ready for, you were sweating profusely and your goggles fogged up very quickly.
JH: Yes.
BM: But at any rate —
JH: Yes.
BM: I got passed out of that without much trouble.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I was still then in the army. Still wearing the army uniform.
JH: Really.
BM: And I had the job of marching the bloody cadet trainees around. But as a result I was, dined with the officers.
JH: Yes.
BM: And got to know the chief flying instructor very well. And he was going to get me posted on to Stirlings. They were the buzz thing then. An enormous aircraft.
JH: Yes.
BM: Just coming in to service and everyone thought that, you know the war winner. As it turned out the Stirlings were a dead loss.
JH: They were short lived weren’t they?
BM: Short lived.
JH: Yeah.
BM: They took them off operations.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Put them on glider towing and on training. And as an operational plane they had no height. I think they could only get above about twelve thousand feet.
JH: Yes.
BM: They were slow and cumbersome and the losses were very heavy.
JH: Yes. Yes.
BM: At any rate from there I got posted to an operational training place. Fortunately it wasn’t a Stirling one.
JH: Where was that?
BM: It was a Wellington one.
JH: Where was that?
BM: At Harwell.
JH: Harwell. Yes. In Essex.
BM: About fifty miles west of London I suppose.
JH: Yes. Harwell.
BM: Very pleasant. It was a grass. No fixed firm runway. It had been a peacetime station. And very pleasant place.
JH: Yeah.
BM: A very pleasant place to live.
JH: Yes.
BM: And the countryside was very pleasant indeed. From there you crewed up. You got your crew there.
JH: You crewed. Tell me about your, your crewing up. How did that happen?
BM: Just put in a big assembly room. They put about a half dozen pilots, about a dozen front gunners, a dozen rear gunners and a dozen navigators, a dozen wireless operators. They let you sort yourselves out and you formed your own crew. I don’t know how. But it wasn’t a very efficient system I think. But I got lumbered — no I wasn’t lumbered. But we got together with a very good navigator. Had been a student, a university student. He was good. We’d got a very good wireless operator. He’d been a boy apprentice in the air force. He was the only sort of skilled member of our crew I’d say. And the two gunners. Front gunner, he was a lorry driver but very little education. But the rear gunner was a very decent English chap. He was well educated and had been working as a welder and his family were, and a reserved occupation but he’d joined up and his family were very annoyed with him for joining the air force. He’d joined up and he’d got posted as a gunner to a Polish squadron where he served for a while and then he got posted to our crowd. That was our crew. They were all English.
JH: Yes.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Would I, would I be right in thinking you were the most senior?
BM: I was the most senior.
JH: In terms of age.
BM: Yes.
JH: Yeah
BM: Both in age. They were all about nineteen or twenty.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I was known as the old man. And we had a second pilot too but —
JH: Yeah.
BM: He was a bit dumb I’m afraid.
JH: Yes.
BM: He was the only chap in the crew that I was a bit worried about. The second pilot.
JH: Your co-pilot. Yeah.
BM: Yes. Yes. Yes.
JH: Was he also the flight engineer in a, on a Wellington?
BM: No. That was later.
JH: Yes. Ok.
BM: That happened when you went to four engines.
JH: Right. Yeah.
BM: But —
JH: Yes.
BM: We trained there and as I say we did day flying. Day flying was very pleasant.
JH: Yeah.
BM: The syllabus was you did five day cross-country flights.
JH: Yes.
BM: And the first one you went with an instructor. The next —
JH: Yes.
BM: Four you did on your own. But you flew across to Northern Ireland, up the west of England. Up the coast.
JH: Yes.
BM: Up around the top of Scotland and down the east coast of England.
JH: Yes.
BM: When the weather was good — very pleasant.
JH: Yes.
BM: And at that early stage of the war you weren’t that well supervised. Later on you had to fly strictly according to time and had to log everything in.
JH: Yes.
BM: You couldn’t deviate or fly low as you could in the days we did.
JH: Yes.
BM: I remember I got a very, very bad sort of introduction to flying with the first cross-country. I went with an operational pilot. He’d just come off operations.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And I remember we flew across the north of Wales there at Northfleet and I remember horses bolting sheds and he said, ‘Make sure if you’re low flying,’ the advice he gave me, ‘Reel in your trailing aerial.’ The wireless op had let out a trailing aerial which was trailing behind about fifty or a hundred feet of wire with lead weights on it to keep it below.
JH: Yes.
BM: He said, ‘If you fly low and you break tiles on a roof with your trailing aerial,’ he said, ‘You’re gone,’ he said, ‘You’re court martialled.’ Low flying was a court martial offence.
JH: Yes.
BM: Quite rightly. It was completely stupid.
JH: Yes.
BM: That was a very, very bad example to give the crew.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Because I’m very sure we saw the result of that at night when you came off the day flying and had a drink with the rest of the crew who’d been flying. I remember one crew reckoned, ‘Oh our pilot flew that low over the sea he was able to stir up the water with his prop tips.’ And a couple of days later they were never heard of again. I’m very sure he hit the water. I don’t know.
JH: Yes.
BM: But that —
JH: Yeah.
BM: A very very bad example.
JH: Yeah.
BM: But quite rightly low flying was a court martial offence.
JH: Yes.
BM: And if you got court martialled and got sent to the Glasshouse it was very hard.
JH: Yeah. You —
BM: Very hard.
JH: Yes. You obviously paid heed to that.
BM: Yeah. Yeah.
JH: Part of your training operations, of your training flights did you do any of these nickel raids?
BM: No. We didn’t do. We didn’t do any nickels.
JH: In Europe where they were dropping pamphlets and that kind of thing
BM: Almost did. I think the weather was bad.
JH: Yes.
BM: That’s why we didn’t get sent on it.
JH: Yes.
BM: But I remember we, we dropped live bombs at that early stage of the war.
JH: Yes.
BM: Later on you only dropped twelve and a half pound practice bombs.
JH: Yes.
BM: We dropped about half a dozen fifty pound bombs.
JH: Yes.
BM: Out in the Bristol Channel.
JH: Yes.
BM: Now, I remember well the take off with that. It was very calm day and they said, grass aerodrome and they were doubtful whether we should go.
JH: Yes.
BM: And the engines were de-rated a bit on the Wellingtons and there was a line of trees at the other end of the aerodrome. At any rate they finally said, ‘Make sure you get off, lift off early and run up your aircraft back to the hedge at the far end of the field.’ At any rate we had no trouble in getting off the ground.
JH: Yes.
BM: No trouble clearing the tree.
JH: Yes.
BM: Then we weren’t climbing. I suddenly realised I hadn’t raised the bloody undercarriage. That’s when I found out — I thought the second pilot should have picked that up.
JH: Yes.
BM: He should have known that.
JH: Ok. Yeah.
BM: And he should have been checking on everything.
JH: Yeah.
BM: But a couple of other things like that happened without, I never really trusted him.
JH: Yes. Ok. Shall we talk about how you were posted to, to Malta.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Would that fit in now?
BM: Well, then we were —
JH: Yeah.
BM: Finished our training there after our night flying.
JH: Yeah.
BM: We just missed out on that thousand bomber raid. We were only half way through our night flying. And that thousand bomber, about a third of the planes there were Training Command. About four or five went from our place.
JH: Yes.
BM: Flown by an operational pilot and instructor with a pupil crew. But the pupil crew were almost finished their night flying.
JH: Yes.
BM: Which we hadn’t done.
JH: Yeah.
BM: So as a result of that I missed that raid.
JH: Can you remember the — I’ll note the date of that? Can you remember the year and date of that bomber, thousand bomber raid?
BM: It was [pause] April. April or May. 1942.
JH: ’42.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Very good propaganda value.
Other: Hitler’s birthday.
JH: Yes.
BM: But then when we finished our training we expected to be posted then to an operational squadron in England. But at that stage Rommel had broken through and was hammering on the gates of Cairo. And they suddenly decided to send a couple of Wellington squadrons out to Cairo. And they gave us a brand new aircraft. And that was the most pleasant flying I’ve ever had. The aircraft was a highly secret one with radar aerials all over it.
JH: Are they the Stickleback?
BM: Stickleback ones.
JH: That’s it. I’ve read about them.
BM: The Mark 8s.
JH: Mark 8.
BM: Mark 8. It was to pick up submarines. Or ships at night. We didn’t know how to operate the radar but at any rate they —
JH: Yeah.
BM: We spent twelve hours flying in the new aircraft. We flew all around England in the brand new aircraft. Very pleasant.
JH: Yes.
BM: And then we got the final word to go to Malta. And we flew down to Portreath down near the south, South West area of London there. The station right on the coast.
JH: In Cornwall.
BM: Cornwall. Yes.
JH: Cornwall. Yes.
BM: Yes.
JH: Yeah.
BM: We took off from there and they told us to keep well out to sea. Not to get anywhere near the French coast. And to come in late in the day. We took off about seven in the morning I think.
JH: Yes.
BM: And we had no trouble at all. We didn’t sight anything. We kept relatively low. About the best cruising height was about six thousand feet.
JH: Yes.
BM: Which we were at. And the only danger would have been to run into a German aircraft patrol which was very very remote.
JH: Yes. Did you have any fighter escort going out?
BM: No. No. No.
JH: For a while?
BM: We just kept out to sea.
JH: Yeah. So what was the flying time to — it was —
BM: We got there about —
JH: To Malta wasn’t it?
BM: About, yeah about ten hours.
JH: Ten hours. Yeah.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
BM: We came in close to the coast of Portugal about three in the afternoon.
JH: Yes.
BM: And we hugged the coast there down to the big bay there where the Battle of Trafalgar took place.
JH: Yes.
BM: And from there suddenly we saw the Rock of Gibraltar looming out of the afternoon sun.
JH: Yes.
BM: And there we had a, a very frightening incident happened.
JH: Really?
BM: I called up the pilots to, ‘Come up and have a look and see the result of your labour,’ and called up the navigator.
JH: Yes.
BM: He came out of his office. And he came up and he was leaning over my shoulder looking out at the Rock of Gibraltar. He put his hand down and turned on the full bloody flaps. Which I didn’t realise.
JH: By mistake.
BM: Suddenly the aircraft’s speed fell away. I didn’t know what had happened. And I had to put the bloody nose down and open the throttles. And I was thinking about getting the, I thought something had gone wrong with the engines or —
JH: Yeah.
BM: I didn’t understand.
JH: Yeah. Loss of airspeed.
BM: I had to tell the wireless operator to send out an SOS. So I was getting prepared to land in the bloody sea and I don’t know how but it occurred to me that the flaps were down. I didn’t realise. I put them up.
JH: Yes. Yeah
BM: Came around and landed [laughs]
JH: Exchanged a few pleasantries no doubt.
BM: So I had a complete sweat. Yeah.
JH: So —
BM: At any rate we spent the night in Gibraltar. Very pleasant. And didn’t get any sleep that night.
JH: Yes.
BM: Didn’t get much sleep the night before in England of course either. And we spent the night there they were blasting into the rock. We were in a Nissen hut at the base of the rock and the blasting was going on all night. And they were also practicing deck landings next door.
JH: Yeah.
BM: So we didn’t get a lot of sleep that night either.
JH: Yeah.
BM: But we took off for Malta the next day at 4 o’clock. Four in the afternoon.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And another aircraft. We decided, a friend of mine had also landed and two of us flew together in formation for a while.
JH: Yes.
BM: On the way to Malta. And suddenly he turned and went back and I didn’t find out ‘til much later in the war.
JH: Yeah.
BM: What had happened. Someone had opened the hatch above the pilot which opened it. You couldn’t close it in flight.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Someone apparently had. I don’t know the second pilot had grabbed the lever there.
JH: Yeah.
BM: The hatch had come open to he had to go back and start afresh. And he didn’t arrive in Malta until we’d left the next day.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I found out later the big danger with landing at Malta too was that the man in charge in Malta was, could keep you there and he could hand your aircraft over to someone else.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And he could keep you there to do operations from Malta which were very unfriendly of course.
JH: Yes.
BM: So Malta was a place you didn’t want to stay at. At any rate we got to Malta about ten or eleven at night and they’d warned us that, before we left that, be careful. You’re not very far from Sicily there.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Which was German controlled. And the wireless operator would have to contact Malta and get a thing called a QDM. That’s a direction.
JH: Yeah.
BM: To fly to Malta. So we’d check up. It was just about a thousand miles journey.
JH: Yeah.
BM: He had to, that wireless operator had to check up that you were at Malta. And they said be careful the Germans could send you a message directing you to Sicily.
JH: Yes.
BM: At any right the flight there was very pleasant. We were flying at about six thousand feet.
JH: Yes.
BM: And my heart sank when we were about half an hour from Malta and the whole of the sea below clouded over. And they’d told us when we got to Malta they’d put a couple of searchlights when we got there about ten or eleven at night. And when we got to Malta the whole place was clouded over and I was circling around for about five minutes ‘til I finally saw the searchlights through the cloud. And I came down and the, there was high ground in Malta. About eight hundred feet I think.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And got under the cloud at about a thousand feet and there was the runway. I came around and landed there and very gratefully. And the landing wasn’t bad which I was very much afraid of. And we taxied around. We were met by the ground crew. They were in military uniform. Not the air force blue. I thought, God we’re at the wrong [laughs] we’re at the German aerodrome but it wasn’t of course. But they were mainly interested if we had any sandwiches left which we had, and any, or and any cigarettes. I’d taken the trouble of buying a thousand cigarettes when I left to hand out when we got to Malta. And I told them that in Gibraltar, would I take more cigarettes? They said no the crew that takes those generally doesn’t get to Malta. Apparently there was a bit of a hoodoo about anyone carting stuff to Malta.
JH: Yes.
BM: Bad luck evidently.
JH: Bad luck.
BM: So, I only took about a thousand cigarettes to give to the mess when we got there.
JH: Yes. Yeah.
BM: There’s a, we got to the air, they told us, ‘When we get there on no account,’ they said, ‘Your path on the aerodrome is at daybreak but don’t leave the aerodrome unattended err your aircraft unattended. You might find all your parachutes have disappeared if you do.’ They said, ‘We haven’t got guards on the aerodrome.’ Guards were on, they had bay, sort of shelters for the aeroplanes off the aerodrome. Horse shoe shaped construction of sandbags. Well, you taxied your aeroplane off and they pushed it into these shelters. And they said, ‘Stay with the aircraft. Get someone to stay with the aerodrome err the aeroplane until daybreak and then they’ll come out and you’ll have to taxi into a shelter.’ But navigator and I then went in to have a bit to eat at the mess there and when we got there, there was a bloody party going on. Incredible thing. And all the pilots and we were welcomed in because we’d just arrived in our flying suits. They came around. The pilots were all fighter pilots and the reason they were there was a crew in a Beaufort that day had been shot down and been taken prisoner on a Greek island and it had been there for about a week and the Germans, an Italian seaplane called to pick them up to fly them back to Italy. And when they were in the air the three people from, the captives overcame the bloody guards in the aeroplane and made it fly to Malta. And we saw it in the harbour the next day. A float plane. And that was the party.
JH: What a story.
BM: Yeah. I think the pilot, the captive pilot was a South African. And there was an Australian among them. And there were two or three others. But they were having this party. And the story goes with one of them said, evidently when they were captives the food there was much better at Malta. One said, ‘The food there was good. We must do this again.’
JH: Yeah. I like that.
BM: But we saw the plane the next day.
JH: Yeah.
BM: In the harbour there. But it was pure bloody Hollywood. The whole thing.
JH: Yeah. So, what, what was it like on, on Malta? Was Malta, was the feeling of this is an outpost. Heavily defended.
BM: Yeah. We were only there. We stayed the night then. We went back to the aeroplane and slept in it. In the plane. At daybreak then taxied in to the shelter.
JH: Because you were heading for Egypt wasn’t it?
BM: We were heading for Egypt.
JH: Yes.
BM: We were only there a stop off. For a refuel stop. So they came and collected us at daybreak and very foolishly we spent the bloody day bloody sightseeing around the Malta instead of having a sleep.
JH: Yes.
BM: Bloody crazy.
JH: Yes.
BM: But it was too good an opportunity. We actually got a taxi there which was a horse drawn vehicle. And there were two or three air raids during the day. You could hear the machine guns going up in the air and this fellow driving around in this horse drawn taxi. But at any rate we reported back to the aerodrome about 4 o’clock and they briefed us then and said, ‘Well, the weather’s good. Nothing to worry about there. The only danger is units of the Italian fleet might be somewhere on your route when you fly from here to Cairo.’ And it was just as we get a thousand miles from Cairo, a thousand from Gib. At any rate we, they said come back, and just get aboard the aircraft and taxi it out.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Wait at the end of the runway. Just before dark. And on, if there’s an air raid comes along get off the ground straight away but otherwise stand by waiting there. And if you see us flash a green get on the runway and take off straight away. We sat on the plane there and suddenly three people turned up and said, ‘We’re your passengers.’ Two of them were two Dutch seamen.
JH: Yes.
BM: And a lieutenant from submarines which were based in Malta.
JH: Yes.
BM: They were passengers to go back with us to Cairo.
JH: Yes.
BM: At any rate we were sitting there waiting and suddenly the bloody air raid siren went. And people in the control place flashed green at us to get going and —
JH: And you were on the tarmac.
BM: I was waiting at the edge of the, the edge of the runway there.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And I taxied on. At that moment two Beaufighters which had been in sandbagged shelters nearby they came out at high speed and turned on to the runway, took off and climbed at about forty five degrees
JH: Yeah.
BM: They were night fighters apparently. But any rate I got on the runway and I thought I’d do a thing that I tried to, I opened up too quickly and if you’re not careful you swing on take-off.
JH: Yeah.
BM: You’ve got to often open one throttle before the others.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I swung right off the bloody runway and I had to turn back, taxi back and start again. In the meantime the fellow was flashing a green light at me to get going. I got off the next time without any trouble. We flew out to sea. They said, ‘Fly out to sea at five hundred feet before you set course.’ You could see that air raid in progress. Quite a sight. Cannons firing and searchlights and —
JH: Yes.
BM: Oh dear.
JH: What were they targeting? The Germans.
BM: We then set course for Malta and the main problem was keeping awake.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And part of the time I had the second pilot flying. Him I was, I didn’t trust him much. So I had to try and stay awake. I remember standing up a lot of the time. And with hindsight what I should have done, bloody crazy was called up this flight lieutenant fellow to stand by to see we didn’t go to sleep.
JH: Yeah.
BM: We had a bit of a scare once when we, there was a bit of moon and there was some shadows on the ocean. We thought this is the Italian fleet.
JH: Yes.
BM: But it wasn’t.
JH: Yes.
BM: But then we didn’t have, there was no wind apparently the whole journey. I think the navigator said he was on the one course the whole way.
JH: Yes. So that air space between Malta and Egypt. Was that controlled by the Germans to a large extent?
BM: Yes. It was. The Italians.
JH: Yeah. The Italians. Yeah.
BM: The Italian fleet were in charge more or less. But they weren’t. It wasn’t the Italian fleet. They were knocked out largely by the Swordfish aircraft in that air raid.
JH: Yes.
BM: They knocked out half the bloody Italian fleet. I’ve forgotten the name of the place. The Italian port they raided. But that was the old Swordfish from an aircraft carrier. At any rate nothing happened then until we were about just at daybreak. We were about a hundred miles from Cairo and I spotted a submarine on the ocean ahead of us. You could see it in the path of light from the sun which was just appearing then and I suddenly thought it might be a bloody submarine —
JH: Friendly or otherwise.
BM: In trouble or something. It shouldn’t be on the surface. Why was it on the surface? And as we dropped near it started flashing a very fast Morse code as the Naval people did then. Flashing a message at us. I couldn’t, it was too fast for me so I called the wireless operator up, ‘Better come up and read their message they’re flashing.’ And I had visions of this crippled submarine wanting help and I thought well we’ll send a distress beacon. Tell them they’re here. But the message they sent us was, ‘Good morning.’ [laughs] From that we went on and landed in Cairo. And at that stage I was completely half drunk with fatigue. I remember when I got out of the aircraft I sat down on the ground and went to sleep. I woke up and on the ground you see beside me a fellow with a revolver around his waist, a cowboy hat on and flying boots on. It was an American fighter pilot who’d been ferrying an aircraft across Africa from the west coast of Africa. That’s the only way they got aircraft there. They took it by plane to the west of Africa then.
JH: Yes.
BM: And they flew them across Africa.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And he’d flown a, I think a, oh a fighter plane across. They flew across in formation.
JH: Yes.
BM: With an escort. But any rate from there we got down to. They woke me up and said, ‘Would you fly the aircraft down to the Suez Canal,’ which very foolishly I said yes. And I took off again and flew down to, down to the squadron. 148 Squadron. Based on the Canal.
JH: Yes.
BM: And that’s where we began operations.
JH: 104
BM: No. 148.
JH: Oh 148.
BM: 148.
JH: Yeah. Ok. Yeah. 148.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Yeah. So that’s, that’s where you started off.
BM: Yes. Yes. Yes.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And the target then was Tobruk. Tobruk was the only sort of port on the African coast which was giving supplies to the Germans who were on the outskirts of Cairo by then. At Alemein. And we were, our main target was Tobruk.
JH: Yes
BM: So far as they —
JH: Which was in German hands at that time
BM: The Germans were —
JH: Yeah
BM: Bringing in to Tobruk. Yeah.
JH: Yes. Yes. So you were targeting the supply ships coming in.
BM: Coming into Tobruk. Yeah.
JH: All the defences.
BM: The war was there too.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Yes.
BM: To begin with I think we did about eight trips to Tobruk.
JH: Yes.
BM: Which was quite a distance. It was about six or seven hours flight.
JH: So your, tell me about your first operation. Was that one of these Tobruk raids?
BM: Yes. I remember that very well. Went as a second pilot to an experienced pilot. Flight Lieutenant Moore was our pilot.
JH: Yeah. You were the dickie.
BM: An experienced pilot.
JH: You say the dickie is it? You were the dickie.
BM: Yeah. I was second pilot. Yes.
JH: Yes. Ok.
BM: Very pleasant. You had no responsibility. You just sat there and watched everything. And when we got to Tobruk they had quite a few — they had about a dozen anti-aircraft guns there.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Which started firing at you when you got near there.
JH: Bill, tell me was this a daylight raid or night raid.
BM: Night raid. All night.
JH: All night.
BM: All night.
JH: Yeah. Yeah.
BM: At any rate I remember he was the fella who, he did the bombing run. The navigator was the bomb aimer then in those days. Navigator bomb aimer. He was down in the bomb bay to drop the bombs but the, this second, this instructor pilot he directed the run in. You know, ‘Right. Right. Left. Left. Centre.’ And then he said to the bomb aimer —
[telephone ringing]
BM: Hello. Hello. Hello. Just hold on a minute. Just tell them it’s my phone. See what they want. I can’t. I’ve got hearing aids in.
JH: Oh. Hello. This is John Horsburgh here. I’m actually interviewing Bill at the moment. Can I take a message? Yes. Yes. I’m interviewing him now. Yeah. Can I take your number and he’ll call you back? [delete] ok I’ll get, I’ll get Mr McRae to call you back.
BM: Tell him I’ll call him back
JH: Ok. Thank you, Justin.
BM: Thanks.
JH: We were, we were talking about your first operation.
BM: My first bombing run.
JH: Yeah. Your first bombing run. Yeah
BM: He called up the pilot and said, ‘I’ve done this trip three or four few times. Let me. Let me drop the bombs.’ So instead of letting the bloody navigator direct us onto the target he put the plane into a dive and roared across Tobruk at high speed, pulled the bomb toggle and dropped all the bombs in one thing.
JH: The whole lot. The whole string.
BM: The whole lot. Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Which was completely against all our instruction in training. And that sort of thing you never thought of doing. But at any rate when we got back we got debriefed at the debriefing we didn’t mention this. Had we done so he might have been in big trouble I think.
JH: Yes. Yes.
BM: But you were graded LMF if you did that sort of thing.
JH: Yes.
BM: But the navigator was very upset about it. So was I [laughs] But that was my first bombing. I did another trip with another crew another night but they did the right thing.
JH: Yes.
BM: We got caught in the searchlights that night too which was very unpleasant. But that was my first experience of a bombing raid. Which we didn’t report to the authorities.
JH: Just between you and I this is [laughs] Ok.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Yes.
BM: Yeah. Don’t mention it [laughs]
JH: No. We won’t [laughs] Tell me about the first operation when you were actually in control of the plane on the bomb run.
[phone ringing]
JH: Shall I? Hello, Bill McRae’s phone. John Horsborough. I’m actually interviewing Bill at the moment. Yeah. Yes. Will do. Ok. Righto. Ok. Bye.
BM: Who’s that?
JH: Jeannie.
BM: Oh right.
JH: Coffee tomorrow.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Anyway, back to your first operation. You’re in control.
BM: Oh yes. Yes.
JH: Yeah.
BM: I remember that quite well because we were based on the Suez Canal and one of the things you had to be careful of you could see a ship almost at the end of the runway going across the desert. The Canal was at the far end of the runway. And you’d just see a ship there sailing across the desert. You had to be careful taking off that there weren’t any ships going through the canal because when you took off you didn’t get any height. You’d be flying for about two or three miles I’d say. You climbed very slowly. And you climbed towards, turned towards Tobruk and you climbed up as high as you could get which in those with those, planes it was about ten or twelve thousand feet. And I remember we, getting up along the coast of North Africa the navigator went down below to check the position, map reading the coast and he called me up and said, ‘Mac,’ he said, ‘We’re flying over a convoy. There are balloons down below.’ I said, ‘This is bloody crazy. There are no balloons here.’ I banked around and had a look and there were four things that looked like balloons. They were puffs of anti-aircraft fire.
JH: Heading your way.
BM: They were firing at us but about a thousand feet below us [laughs] So we immediately changed course. At any rate the, quite a lot of flak. Quite a lot of searchlights at Tobruk. The thing I remember about the searchlights they would all go out and there would be one would suddenly come on alone. A blue searchlight. And about five seconds later all the searchlights would concentrate on one plane and they’d hold that plane for quite a while.
JH: It’s coning it isn’t it? Yeah.
BM: But it didn’t come on to us. We rode it out. Do a normal bombing run. And you took photographs when you dropped your bombs too.
JH: Yes.
BM: You held course for about, I think ten or fifteen seconds till the bombs exploded and the camera took a photograph of where your bombs went.
JH: Yes.
BM: But we were bombing the wharves mainly.
JH: Yes.
BM: I don’t know whether. I don’t know whether there was anything there to bomb really.
JH: I think you told me. I think it was you told me you actually took part in the battle of El Alemein.
BM: Yes.
JH: Targeting German supply ships.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Would that be right?
BM: Well, after we were on the Canal we moved up to Kilo Forty which was forty kilos on the road from Cairo to Alexandria. Just a desert aerodrome. And from there we more or less supported the army.
JH: Yes.
BM: Bombing German airfields behind the lines.
JH: Yes.
BM: And bombing army targets which were marked by aircraft from Alexandria. Fleet Air Arm aircraft dropping flares. I don’t know how they got they got in on the act.
JH: Yes.
BM: But they’d dropped flares for us to bomb on.
JH: Yes.
BM: We did half a dozen trips on that before El Alemein.
JH: Yes.
BM: And on El Alemein night we did two bombing runs. One at about eleven at night and one about two in the morning because we were not that far from the battle front. You could hear the barrage start up at about 10 o’clock. On the 23rd of October I think it was.
JH: It’s —
BM: After El Alemein of course old Montgomery was successful but I always thought he, he was too cautious by half because he knew all the German plans because Rommel had been sending messages back to Hitler. He was short of petrol. He was short of reinforcements and pleading with Hitler to send reinforcements by way of aircraft or I think the Germans were supplying their fighters, called JU52s bringing aircraft fuel in. That’s how short of fuel they were.
JH: Yes.
BM: But Hitler of course said, ‘Don’t surrender. Fight to the last man.’ But Rommel fortunately decided that was bloody silly because he got quite a few Germans out of Africa. He retreated. Very skilfully retreated. And I think Montgomery should have thrown everything at the Germans because he had a couple of people from that Enigma machine with him relaying messages that Rommel was sending to Hitler. How desperate he was for supplies.
JH: Yes.
BM: And how desperate he was to sort of get reinforcements. But Rommel didn’t move. He had sort of absolute overpowering authority.
JH: Yes.
BM: We had about seven to one air superiority.
JH: Yes
BM: I reckon Rommel should have thrown us during the daytime. He could have had about three or four to one fighter superiority and he had about three to one, he had about seven to one bomber superiority.
JH: So, that was the feeling among the squadron that the 8th Army didn’t follow through enough.
BM: Yes. I reckon he should have. He should have thrown everything into the battle.
JH: Yes.
BM: And he would have knocked Rommel out and he would have captured an awful lot of Germans.
JH: Yes.
BM: Anyway, he was successful so —
JH: Yes. I, I read somewhere that the Desert Air Force got involved in this concept of close air support. The actual air force involving with the infantry. In fact they were forward.
BM: Ah yes.
JH: Forward scouts passing on information to, to the air force.
BM: Yeah.
JH: And I read that the desert was where the, this close air support was really initiated.
BM: Yeah. Yeah.
JH: Did you have any experience of that?
BM: No. I was a bit disappointed there. I thought we should have been kept in touch with what was going on with the army. We never were.
JH: Yeah That’s interesting with your army background.
BM: I think —
JH: Artillery background.
BM: Yes.
JH: Yeah.
BM: I thought there was a bit of, probably ill feeling between the air force and the army. I don’t know. I could be wrong there. But they sort of fought their own war as it were.
JH: Yes.
BM: At any rate we followed up the army there when the army retreated. The Germans retreated. We followed up and we got as far as Tobruk. And we were dropping bombs on the retreating Germans and then we suddenly got a move to. I think — six planes will proceed forthwith to Halfway House. By that stage we were up behind Tobruk.
JH: So you were leap frogging.
BM: Leap frogging. Yes
JH: The base as, as the front moved
BM: When the Germans were retreating we were following. Yeah.
JH: Westwards. Yeah.
BM: And there wasn’t, when the message came to have six planes would proceed to Halfway House no one knew and I had to send a message back to find Halfway House from Malta. This was about a thousand miles from Gibraltar and a thousand miles from Cairo. It was known to the Navy as Halfway House.
JH: Yes.
BM: So the middle of the afternoon we got the message we were, had to take off at dark with two ground, two supplies of ground crew. Half a dozen ground crew staff.
JH: Yes.
BM: As passengers. So we, immediately we were headed for Malta.
JH: And how long were you based in Malta then?
BM: Well, it took about four hours to get there.
JH: Yeah.
BM: I remember well when we were nearing Malta there was a bloody line of lights appeared.
JH: Yes.
BM: I thought, God, we’ve gone to Italy or Sicily or somewhere. I called up the wireless, I said get an QDM. That’s a course to steer [unclear] and it was correct. We were. A convoy had gotten in a couple of ships and all the lights were on on the wharves. That’s the lights we were seeing. And we got to Malta and one of our planes landing hit a, one of the sand bagged bays near the beginning of the runway and went up in flames. We landed with this bloody thing flaming beside us. And we taxied in and found out that I think the pilot got out of it, I think. I think he lost his legs. But he was about the only one that survived, I think. But at any rate we operated from Malta then for a couple of months. That was early December then.
JH: Yes.
BM: 1942
JH: And were you operating from Malta as far as Sicily from there?
BM: Yes. Sicily was, Sicily was a main target. And North Africa. Retreating Germans. Tripoli.
JH: Yes.
BM: And Sfax and Sous. They were in Tunisia.
JH: Yes.
BM: The Germans were retreating there.
JH: Yes.
BM: Sending ships to pick them up. Yeah.
JH: Yes. So, yeah so Tunisia I believe you were on some important raids to Tunisia and Palermo. Is that correct?
BM: That’s correct. Yes, yeah.
JH: Yes. Do you want to mention a couple of those?
BM: Yes. I remember Palermo quite well because we didn’t take off at a scheduled time. Take off was delayed because there was bad weather and the trouble at Malta they had no weather reporting process so they could never predict the weather. You know the weather was a bit doubtful. Anyway we took off. We found the target all right. I was amazed at the, the, not much flak went up as we were coming out. Normally —
JH: Yeah.
BM: When you come up to a target. You see the guns firing.
JH: Yes.
BM: But there were no guns firing as we got up to the target.
JH: Yeah.
BM: When they started shooting. And we found out later there were only two aircraft got there. The rest got a recall. The others were all recalled because of bad weather. So we were the only two aircraft that got to the target.
JH: You didn’t get the message.
BM: We didn’t get the message. No [laughs] At any rate we were flying back we had trouble with the bad weather getting back.
JH: Yeah.
BM: I remember that well. Went into a storm or something.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Because they couldn’t forecast the weather then.
JH: Yeah.
BM: That was the trouble. And apparently the weather was very changeable because the Alps weather and the desert weather meet —
JH: Yes.
BM: Over the Mediterranean there.
JH: Yes.
BM: And you got very very severe turbulence.
JH: Yes.
BM: And you got a lot of static electricity.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Laying on the guns.
JH: Really?
BM: Yeah. Well, we survived Malta.
JH: Yes. Was it that raid to Palermo, I think you told me before both engines cut out for some reason. You lost your engines.
BM: Ah yes. Yes. Yeah.
JH: What happened there?
BM: There we were, actually it was another raid on Sicily that we had trouble with. Engine trouble. Had a thing with when we were bombing Sicily it was after we got, we came back to Cairo and they gave us one last raid. We suddenly got a message in Cairo. Take off at midnight. Return to Cairo. Which we did. And when we were there I found I’d done my tour of operations but a couple of the crew hadn’t finished and needed one more raid. And we were a bit lucky because we got the last raid was dropping supplies to people in Crete. At the western end of Crete a lot of people had escaped during the German invasion and there was a rebel force there fighting the Germans in the mountains. Very mountainous country and they came out at mid-day and loaded our aircraft with big metal containers about six feet long in the bomb bay and gave us a place to drop them at the western end of Crete. And we took off about dusk and got to Crete and they also gave us bundles of newspapers and said, ‘When you’ve dropped the bombs fly to the other side of Crete. The northern side where all the towns are.’ There were no towns in the western end.
JH: Yeah.
BM: It’s all mountainous, ‘And drop out these newspapers.’ Propaganda. German propaganda. Against the Germans for the Cretian, the Cretian people. At any rate we dropped the bombs, flew around Crete and flying along the northern side couldn’t see any land for a while and it was there that we found that we’d gone too far north.
JH: Yes.
BM: We saw a lot of bloody islands below and we knew that Crete was somewhere to the south so we went there and when we suddenly hit Crete they started firing guns at us. So you can imagine the newspapers were delivered very rapidly [laughs]
JH: Yeah.
BM: And we climbed straight away to ten thousand feet.
JH: Yeah.
BM: There were mountains in Crete up to eight thousand feet.
JH: Yes.
BM: At the western end. But we dropped the newspapers and went home. And that was our last operation.
JH: Yes. So at that stage it was the operations were coming to an end there. Did you have any idea what lay ahead of, of you and your crew? Was it going back to the UK or —
BM: No. We didn’t know.
JH: Or Italy.
BM: We went back and sat in Cairo for a couple of weeks.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And they suddenly told us to get aboard an aircraft and flew us down to Khartoum. Flying boat. And then we got another DC3 from there across the whole of Africa to the west coast of Africa.
JH: So where were you going? What was the plan?
BM: Back to England.
JH: Back to England.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Ok. Yeah.
BM: We got to —
JH: Yeah
BM: I think Takoradi, that was the place on the west coast of Africa. We sat there for about a week.
JH: That’s in Ghana I think.
BM: It was a small.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Coastal vehicle took us up to Freetown which is a main port in West Africa there.
JH: Yes.
BM: Where we got aboard [pause] what was the name of the boat? The Mauritania. An ocean liner.
JH: Yes.
BM: Bound for Liverpool. We went back unescorted. It went at high speed.
JH: Yes.
BM: It went about thirty eight knots I think. And went out in to the mid-Atlantic.
JH: With a convoy? Or —
BM: No. Alone.
JH: Solo.
BM: Just travelling at high speed. And altering course apparently every five minutes. Yeah. Zig-zagging.
JH: Zig-zagging.
BM: Went to Liverpool. So, and from there got a plane back to London.
JH: Yes. And some well-earned leave. Did you have any leave time?
BM: Went on leave there. Yes.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Yes.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Yeah. And from there got posted. Got a posting on to Training Command up in Lossiemouth. To an Operational Training Unit to instruct bomber crews.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I sat there until the, more or less the end of the war instructing people.
JH: What — is this 1944?
BM: This would be —
JH: Coming into Lossiemouth.
BM: 1943.
JH: 1943.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Yeah.
BM: It was there I found that I’d been awarded a DFC for flying in Africa and Alemein and so on.
JH: So you completed a tour.
BM: Completed a tour.
JH: And the DFC.
BM: DFC. Yes
JH: Yeah. Yeah. And your rank at that stage. Flight.
BM: I was a flight lieutenant.
JH: Yeah. Yeah.
BM: By that stage.
JH: Yes. So —
BM: And then, I was instructing there. I got posted down to the Empire Central Flying School at Hullavington in England.
JH: At where? Sorry?
BM: Empire Central Flying School.
JH: Yes.
BM: At Hullavington. Which was the main training place for bomber crews. I got trained to instruct bomber crews there. Then I went back and got on very well with the man in charge of the place at Lossiemouth wasn’t it?
JH: Yes.
BM: The instructing place. And he was the man I think that got me the Air Force Cross. I got an Air Force Cross for my instructing.
JH: Oh really. Yeah.
BM: We were the operational training instructing French crews.
JH: Yes.
BM: And as a result of that I got the French Legion d’honneur from there.
JH: Yes. I was there. I saw you. I was there when you were awarded.
BM: I tell the story how I got the AFC. When we were at Lossiemouth a bit of a surf would come in there at the right time of year. In Midsummer. The water was reasonably warm but we boys would get down for a swim in the river like this here.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And there’s a couple of reefs nearby. And I was able to catch a few waves. I’m no expert surfer but I was outstanding apparently. There were three or four English blokes. I was the talk of bloody the station, ‘You should have seen him.’ I could do a slow roll on a wave as it was coming. I could do a roll and come down right side up.
JH: Yeah.
BM: But they thought this was incredible. And the news of this got to the group captain in charge of the place and he said, ‘Well I believe that the reefs along the shore there, I believe there are lobsters there which are ready to be caught and no one has been near the place for years because mines had been laid thereabouts.’ He said, ‘We’ll go along one afternoon and might be able to get a lobster.’ So a crowd of us went along. The group captain in his car with three other fellas and myself wading around these reefs. And I was the only one that caught a bloody lobster. I moved down and threw it up on the shore. And after we got out and were drying ourselves the boys said, ‘What do you do with a lobster?’ We’ll cook it —? I said, ‘Oh no.’ I knew the group captain lived off the station. I said, ‘You have it sir.’ And the boys said, ‘You’ll get on. You’ll get on.’ And I reckon that’s how I might have got my bloody AFC [laughs]
JH: How you got your gong. Yeah. Well, what a change from operations.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Being up there.
BM: Yes.
JH: So, what happened to the rest of the crew Bill?
BM: Eh
JH: What happened to the rest of your crew?
BM: The rest of the crew. I kept in touch with the navigator. He got posted up instructing to Lossiemouth too. Lossiemouth there were three stations there. They had the main station and there were two satellite stations. I was in charge of one of the satellite stations.
JH: Yes.
BM: For a while.
JH: Yes.
BM: He was with the main station instructing other navigators.
JH: Yes.
BM: And by that time in England Gee, an operational aid had come into being.
JH: Yes.
BM: Which had more or less done away with the old plotting thing.
JH: Yes.
BM: Navigators could get a fix by operating a Gee set. Well, he was instructing on that.
JH: Yes. And was it Lancasters phasing in?
BM: No. No.
JH: And the Wellingtons phasing out at that stage?
BM: Still Wellingtons.
JH: Still Wellingtons.
BM: After they’d finished their training with us crews were posted down to England to a Conversion Unit.
JH: Conversion.
BM: On four engines.
JH: Yes.
BM: Where they spent about twelve hours I think.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And there they would pick up a mid-upper gunner and an engineer.
JH: Crew. A crew of seven. Yeah.
BM: Yeah. They had a four engine aircraft then.
JH: Yeah
BM: A four engine bomber. But with us they were still on twin engines. Which was a bit not the base.
JH: Yes. Yes. So that was, that was for you an enjoyable period.
BM: No. It wasn’t enjoyable.
JH: Or not. Or were you wanting to get back into action?
BM: It was really trying, instructing. You didn’t get a lot of sleep. You were either instructing or you were in charge of night flying. And I’ve got a good after dinner story when instructing the French. The early French were really magnificent pilots. They’d been in the French Air Force.
JH: Yes.
BM: One of them in particular had been flying with the French civil lines. And they at that stage had an airline over to, I think West Africa where they landed somewhere in mid-Atlantic. Well, one of the pilots they were training had been on that cross bloody Atlantic flight. But you couldn’t teach him anything of course. I was very —
JH: So he knew a bit about navigation obviously.
BM: I was very sort of hesitant about correcting him. He could have taught me a lot. I’m sure of that.
JH: Yeah.
BM: But the French crews. I remember the, there was an intelligence officer at every station.
JH: Yes.
BM: And there was a head of intelligence man. I suppose based at Edinburgh who would tour around visiting the stations and he came around to visit our stations. And French crews on the station would receive every couple of weeks a cask of wine sent up by General de Gaulle from London which could be issued gratis to the French aircrews. At any rate this head navigation intelligence man came visiting us and called in for lunch. And he was a First World War man. Allegedly related to the Queen. First World War medals. He liked his whisky which we gave him for lunch.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And the bloody French crews [unclear] insisted he have some French wine too. After dinner you went and got your own coffee at the coffee thing at the entrance and he was getting his cup of coffee and he tripped over and fell and sat on the coffee cup. And he had to have half a dozen stitches put in his backside
Other: Dear. Dinnertime.
BM: It’s time. I’d better not have dinner.
Other: You don’t want to go down for dinner?
BM: No. I won’t worry about it.
JH: Bill, we can, we can probably start winding it up a bit and if so you can have your dinner.
BM: Yes. Yes.
JH: Would you —
Other: You can have [unclear] as well I think.
BM: Give me five minutes.
Other: Ok darling.
BM: Can I have five minutes?
Other: Yeah darling.
JH: Yes. Ok.
Other: Sure.
JH: Yeah.
BM: This man’s interviewing me. How I won the war [laughs]
Other: Yeah darling. Yeah.
JH: Yeah. Yeah. But you read about the training squadrons. There were quite a few casualties.
BM: Yes. Yes.
JH: Did you have experience of that at Lossiemouth?
BM: Oh yeah. We had the, we had the odd crash.
JH: Yes.
BM: And we found in the, at the station there we were the people who found that something was happening with the Wellingtons. They were developing cracks in the main spar. And we had three mysterious crashes. Now remember I was the man who discovered one of the French aircrews who crashed when they, just after they left at night. They left the east coast of Scotland and disappeared. I found the crash the next day. Cracks developed in the main spar due to heavy landings. And they were all ex-operational aircraft which in avoiding fighters and anti-aircraft fire they’d far exceed authorised speed limits. Every aircraft had a mark on the altimeter not to exceed. Well —
JH: Yeah.
BM: You’d bloody well exceed that if you got into trouble
JH: Yeah.
BM: Instead going down at three hundred miles an hour they’d be going down at three fifty and that cracked the main spar.
JH: Yes.
BM: And they developed with heavy landings. And when the training crews were doing fighter affiliation you taught them to do very steep manoeuvres.
JH: Yes.
BM: To avoid fighters. You had an aircraft acting as a fighter chasing you. That was part of your training. And we had a couple of mysterious crashes. There was nothing left when they hit the ground. But one fell into the sea and they were able to get the wreckage.
JH: Yeah.
BM: And there they discovered the cracks. I think that was one of the main reasons —
JH: Yeah.
BM: That I got a bit of a notoriety through one of the people who was discovered this crack. They grounded the Wellingtons for two or three days and strengthened the main spars.
JH: That sounds like quite a breakthrough finding that problem.
BM: Yes. It was. Yes.
JH: No doubt saved no end of lives.
BM: That would have been the reason. Heavy landings by pupils.
JH: Yes.
BM: And giving them this manoeuvre. The corkscrew manoeuvre we taught them.
JH: Yes. Yes.
BM: But after that that more or less ended my career.
JH: Yes. So, just, just to finish off. What about you were there for VE day in the UK.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Then you went back to the bank?
BM: Yeah.
JH: Or did you continue with the air force after the war for a while.
BM: I continued for about six months.
JH: Yes.
BM: The bank had no staff.
JH: Yes.
BM: They all waited to be called up.
JH: Yes.
BM: As a result they didn’t get the — I got released straight away.
JH: Yes.
BM: Having joined early. But the bank staff — we had no bloody staff
JH: Yes.
BM: And I went. I was working all sorts of bloody hours.
JH: Yes.
BM: 10 o’clock at night. I was one of the few bloody staff in London office.
JH: My father, after the war left, left the RAF. In to Barclays working long hours like you did.
BM: Yes. Yes.
JH: But there were no staff.
BM: That’s right.
JH: Now, what about family? Family life.
BM: I married my wife halfway through the war.
JH: Yes. Yes.
BM: I didn’t shoot my line about how I got my DFC. In Edinburgh.
JH: Yes.
BM: I went along to get it at the Holyrood House.
JH: Yeah.
BM: The palace there, with the [pause] And when I went I asked the girl at the desk, ‘How do I get to the Palace?’ She said, ‘You can catch a tram.’ A tram or — I got a tram and the girl came up and said, ‘There’s the Palace sir.’ It was a picture show. That’s my afternoon story.
JH: Yes.
BM: How I got my medal.
JH: Ok.
BM: I went back to Holyrood and got my medal.
JH: Yes.
BM: And that was it.
JH: Yes. Yeah. So, so you continue with the bank.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Until you retired. Did you retire?
BM: Till I retired. I retired early.
JH: Yes.
BM: Banking never pleased me anymore.
JH: Yes. Yeah.
BM: I retired as soon as I could. Aged fifty five.
JH: Yeah. Now, you could have stayed in the UK but what brought you back here?
BM: I think mainly [pause] I don’t know really. I had to retire somewhere.
JH: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
BM: And this was one of the good places to retire.
JH: Yes. Yeah. Did you go back to New England or you came back to Sydney?
BM: I came back to Sydney.
JH: Yes. Yeah.
BM: And I went around. I finished up managing all of Sydney.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I retired from there more or less.
JH: Yes. Yeah. And I know you’ve kept in touch with veterans. You’re involved in the —
BM: Oh yeah. Yeah.
JH: Bomber Command Association and I saw you in London.
BM: Yeah.
JH: For the opening of the Memorial by the Queen.
BM: That’s right.
JH: That very hot day. You remember.
BM: Yeah. Yeah.
JH: And I’ve seen you at lots of functions.
BM: But I’m not a great medal man. I don’t believe in medals. I’ve got a couple of medals but I think I’ve always said people who got medals, should have got them are no longer with us.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I knew, during my training at Lossiemouth I knew there, fellow pilots, two VCs, very well.
JH: Yes.
BM: They went back on their second tour. Bazalgette and Palmer.
JH: Yes.
BM: Both won VCs. Posthumous of course.
JH: Yes. Yeah.
BM: But I, when I went to London for the 2012 thing I met Sir Peter Squire.
JH: Yes.
BM: I’ve got his picture over there.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Have a look at it. And that —
JH: Yeah.
BM: And that friend advising about the Legion d’honneur. I had a long talk with him when I met him at the meeting after the celebration for the monument thing. And someone wrote him a letter. I had a long talk to him. And I flattered myself he might have remembered me. I told a friend, they sent him a message I got a Legion d’Honneur and he wrote me a response. Have a look at his picture and the letter he wrote me over there.
JH: I’ll have a look afterwards.
BM: Yeah. Have a look.
JH: Yeah. Yeah.
BM: At any rate don’t mention my medals [laughs]
JH: Well, Bill —
BM: I told, I think I must have struck a sympathetic ear because he got the same medals as I have.
JH: Yes.
BM: And he got his through Falklands. His DFC. And I think he had a bit of, he thought a bloody World War Two bomber pilot was you know big time.
JH: Yes.
BM: I think he had a bit of an inferiority about his Falklands DFC.
JH: Yes.
BM: I don’t know. But I think that’s why we had a very very long talk.
JH: Yes.
BM: About — and he agreed with me about the medals.
JH: Yes.
BM: I said well I don’t know why they worried about it. I just went where I was told.
JH: Yeah.
BM: Nothing very special about it. We did what we had to do.
JH: Yes.
BM: But no reason to give us medals. And the fellas who should have got them of course got killed.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I don’t like capitalising on that.
JH: Yes.
BM: But at any rate see the letter he wrote me at the back.
JH: I’m going to have a look at that.
BM: I was quite, quite frazzled by it. Quite frazzled.
JH: Yes.
BM: And I think it might have been he might have remembered. I don’t know. But he would have met thousands of people.
JH: Bill —
BM: He was a very friendly gentleman.
JH: Yes.
BM: As I say we sort of had empathy together.
JH: I’ll have a look at that.
BM: Yeah.
JH: Bill, why don’t we wind it up. Thank you very much for the time and I feel really privileged to be the one interviewing you today. It’s a great story. It really is.
BM: Oh no.
JH: It is a good story. And so —
BM: Sheer luck.
JH: Thank you very much.
BM: Bomber Command was luck.
JH: Yes.
BM: I realised early on you were expendable. You realised that. After training you were very keen.
JH: Yes.
BM: Training you wanted to dash into it. When you got into it you realised you were bloody well expendable. You’ve only got someone to say, ‘There’s the target. Go for it.’ And you were gone.
JH: But your airspeed lesson. Dive bombing the church graveyard probably stood you in good stead.
BM: Training it did. You taught people that. Taught it.
JH: Thank you very much, Bill.
BM: Oh no. My pleasure. Sorry to have bored you.
JH: Not at all.
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Bill Macrae
Creator
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John Horsburgh
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2016-11-16
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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AMacraeWM161116
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Pending review
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01:26:12 audio recording
Language
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eng
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Royal Air Force
British Army
Description
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Bill McRae’s earliest memories were of the end of the First World War. He worked for a major bank during the Depression and was fortunate to be amongst a group of Australians who were sent to work in London. He volunteered at Australia House and was posted to the British Army for officer training during the summer of 1940. He later transferred to the RAF and after training as a pilot at RAF Cranwell was posted on to Malta and Cairo for the Middle East campaign. He later returned to the UK as an instructor at RAF Lossiemouth.
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Julie Williams
Spatial Coverage
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Australia
New South Wales
Egypt
Egypt--Cairo
Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
Scotland--Lossiemouth
Greece
Greece--Crete
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
Italy
Italy--Sicily
Malta
North Africa
Temporal Coverage
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1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
148 Squadron
aircrew
crash
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
fear
Flying Training School
Gee
Initial Training Wing
Magister
Operational Training Unit
pilot
RAF Cranwell
RAF Harwell
RAF Lossiemouth
searchlight
training
Wellington
Whitley
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1062/11457/APayneJB150608.2.mp3
d15cef4ebe65bbad4bec4356ee9b1cbb
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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Payne, Brian
John Brian Payne
J B Payne
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Brian Payne (b. 1932, 2530371, Royal Air Force). He served on Canberas 1951-1959.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-08
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Payne, JB
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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MH: Good morning to anybody that’s listening to the recording of this morning. I have the pleasure of interviewing Mr John Payne at his home address xxxx xxxx. The date today is Monday the 8th of June 2015. The time by my watch now is 11:41 and basically, I’ve got the purpose here to interview Mr Payne regarding reflections and memories of his time with the Royal Air Force, dating between 1951 and 1959. He will also be touching on a very interesting subject also about his father, who was potentially one of the first people to join the combined service back in 1918, in the formative year of the Royal Air Force having moved over from the Royal Flying Corps. There may be other points that Mr Payne wishes to touch on. I may or may not be taking notes during this and there may or may not be some direct questions at the end, but I’m now going to hand this recording over to Mr Payne and I’ll get him to run through his story.
JBP: My Christian name is Brian. This was the name of a close friend of my father’s, who was two years older than him. In 1916, he was called up in Bradford to join the Bradford pals, trained as an infantryman, went over to France in January of 1917 and was killed on the 22nd of February 1917, on the Ancre River, which is not far from Rheims. In 1940, things were looking difficult. The evacuation of Dunkirk was taking place, Hitler’s armed forces seemed to look unstoppable, we lost most of our equipment left in France. Churchill had just taken over and formed his first war cabinet and everything looked black, but as a seven year old boy, these things were not in my mind at all. One day, my father left his bureau open and I had a look inside, and I saw the usual kinds of things, and in one corner, there was a little portion set aside for technical notes. I didn’t know what they meant but what I did know was, that there were three photographs, and they were photographs of biplanes in front of a hangar. So that evening when dad came home, I said to him, ‘What are these photographs, Dad?’ And he said, ‘Well, when, in 1918 when the First World War ended, I was flying one of those aeroplanes and I was training to be pilot, but I didn’t finish my training because the armistice stopped all the flying so I never got my wings’. Well, as a little boy going to school with other little boys, this was a goldmine. This was a wonderful thing to find out. That my father had been a pilot in the Air Force, even if he didn’t go flying and dropping bombs and things on Germany. He was there, he did his bit, as far as he could and from then on, I dreamed of going into the Air Force and flying. I didn’t mind whether it was flying as a pilot or a navigator. I just wanted to be able to say, ‘I’m aircrew in the Air Force.’ Times passed. I got myself seven credits at school certificate, which was very unusual because mostly, I just worked for other people I enjoyed and looked forward to having as my teachers. And I got one A level. Not enough to go to university but plenty to go into the Air Force to fly, and I was called up as a national serviceman. Started off by going to Padgate and learned to dislike drill corporals who hazed us from day, dawn to dusk. 6 o’clock in the morning reveille till bed time, and got the uniformity that they wanted in terms of what we were wearing and how we cleaned equipment, and then off to a grey Hornchurch to be graded as a potential aircrew, and when I finished the grading, they said, ‘You’re a grade three pilot, but you’re a grade one navigator’. So I said, ‘I’d like to try being a pilot first’. So that October, I was sent up to RAF Digby, where they had Tiger Moths, and I had a marvellous time. The only snag is, the twelve hours that I flew, I always had an instructor with me. Never went solo. Never, never did landings on my own. And that really meant that I could only look forward to being a navigator, but I consoled myself that if I was a navigator, I might not kill myself as easily as if I was a pilot, and with that thought, I went on. Now, the Air Force was in a phase of expansion when I joined them but the majority of the aircraft were World War Two aircraft, propeller driven, and by that time the speed of aircraft meant that propellers couldn’t be used to power aeroplanes because they couldn’t go fast enough. They came up against a problem called the speed of sound, which didn’t do anything good for propellers, and jet engines were coming in, witness the Meteor and the Vampire, which were our front line defence but when it came to Korea, and the North Koreans invading the South Koreans then the, one of the few occasions when the United Nations Council sent troops somewhere to fight, and we were one of the sixteen nations that answered the call of the UN, sent people out to Korea, but of course, we found that the Koreans had jet aircraft from Russia, MIG15, and these MIG15s could play havoc with our slower piston engine aircraft, the bombers, and the fighters weren’t very good against them either, but I was going in on this wave of enthusiasm about the first jet bomber in the country, which was the Canberra. The B2 Canberra. Oh, and I did want to fly that aeroplane. I was hoping I could get on to that aeroplane, to fly a jet bomber. My father had been enrolled in the Air Force a fortnight after it became the RAF from being the RFC and the Royal Naval Air Service, so he started something new and here was I with a chance perhaps of flying in a Canberra. Well off we went for our training. They opened up some temporary camps. First at RAF Usworth near Newcastle, which was a dump. We were in wooden huts. Fortunately, it was February when we went there, when it was bitterly cold, and by the time we finished it was August and it was nice and warm, but we couldn’t get anywhere from the camp very easily, because the buses didn’t run very frequently to Sunderland or Newcastle, and certainly, there was no Sunday morning service to either place from Usworth, so we were out there, trapped on an airfield with nothing to do, but I passed that. Had some adventures, like a compass being wrong in the aircraft and me flying over cloud for an hour, an hour and a quarter and finding us miles away from where we should have been, because the compass was in error by five degrees, which is a lot of miles if you’re flying at two hundred miles an hour. From there, I went down to Lichfield, which again was another temporary, it was a wartime training base where they had Wellington B10s. My course went through successfully, most of them anyway, but a couple of, four of the lads were involved in crashes. The first was a Wellington that was doing a let- down, and the trainee navigator set the coordinates wrong for his Gee set. Instead of letting down to the airfield, he let down in the side of a hill, but they all three survived it because the pilot pulled the nose up as soon as he saw the hillside, and he kind of, was climbing, and the hillside was climbing a bit faster, so eventually, the hillside hit him underneath and he was going on alright until he hit a wall and then it broke into pieces. The other accident happened when they were in the circuit, coming in for final landing. The pilot made an error, the co-pilot was killed, one of the navigators was trapped in the wreckage and the pilot went off to find help and the other navigator stayed with his mate. The fog came down. It took them four hours to find the aircraft. Having got through that, we had a joyful occasion when I got my navigator’s brevvy, and I was confirmed as a pilot officer in the royal service, and incidentally, my initial commission as acting pilot officer was signed on the first day of the current Queens reign. What a long time ago that was. It’s like having a first, first cover stamp isn’t it? Well then, the moment of truth. Hardly anybody from our course at Lichfield went on to jets, just me and two others. We were told we were going to Bomber Command Bombing School at Lindholme, now notorious as a prison, where we did the practice with the Mark 14 bombsight that the Lancasters and Lincolns used, which was called the T2 bombsight for the Canberra. Unfortunately, the bombsight was only an area bombsight in the Second World War and they could have an accuracy of up to four hundred yards with the bombsight. In jet aircraft, the areas were even bigger. It was not a successful bombsight. The work hadn’t been done sufficiently in advance, but we were grappling with flying near the speed of sound at high altitudes, and the problem with the visual bombsight is, you couldn’t see the target when you want to release the bomb, because it was too far ahead to allow for forward propulsion, before the bomb eventually went down vertically, and our experience with a jet bomber dropping inert bombs, just cast metal with explosive inside and a fuse was never very successful. But the time came when we went to 231 Operational Conversion Unit at Bassingbourne, and this was the big time. I was very lucky because the first pilot that I crewed up with, with a Scottish navigator that we had under, Pilot Officer Ford was sent off one day to do circuits and bumps, part of his training before he could fly with his crew, and he took off and got lost and landed downwind at RAF Duxford, which was an inactive fighter station. We never saw him again. And then we got crewed up with a Flight Lieutenant John Garstin, and he was a major influence in my life. We flew together for two years. He was a career officer on a regular commission, destined to go a long way. He’d already served as a aide-de-camp to the governor of one of the Caribbean islands, and he’d instructed at the Initial Training Unit at RAF Cranwell, which is a prestigious post too, so he’d obviously destined for future roles. Anyway, I got him for two years flying in our Canberra which was Willie Howe 725. We got it brand new from the makers via RAF Binbrook where they fitted the particularly RAF equipment in to the aircraft and made it ready for operational use. As flight commanders Terry Geddoe was A Flight commander and John Garstin was B Flight commanders. Flight commanders had their own aircraft. Terry’s was 724 and ours was 725. 724 ended up in a fire dump and was written off, 725 ended up at RAF Duxford, now the Imperial War Museum, Duxford, where it stands as an example of the B2 bomber. The training was interesting but when we finished the course, I had done roughly two hundred and fifty six hours flying since joining the Air Force and there I was, a navigator observer, in the first jet bomber to be flown by the RAF and was I proud? My word I was. From Bassingbourne it wasn’t a long haul up to RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire. We got there on the 26th of May 1953. A date engraved in my mind because the first four crews to go to flying on 15 squadron in the Canberra era, or the Canberra chapter as well call it in the [pause], oh never mind. There were five squadrons building up their strength. There was 15, 10, 10, 10 squadron, 15 squadron, 44 squadron, 56 squadron and 149 squadron and we were all training to become operational in the first eighteen months of our stay at Coningsby, but in the following August, we were sent, we’d been there fifteen months or so, we were told we were going to go to Cottesmore, because they wanted to lay a three thousand yard runway at Coningsby for the V force when it finally arrived. So off we went to Cottesmore, which was a very happy time. Nine months there and off we went again. This time to RAF Honington, which had just had a three thousand yard runway installed for the V force, and there we stuck until the Canberra squadron was dissolved in 1957, but a lot went on before then. For example, the first serious detachment that we did from one of these bases, was from Honington to El Adem. This is in North Africa, near Tobruk famous for the battles between Bernard Montgomery and Rommel in the 1941 and ‘42 years of the Second World War. So it was exciting to go to such a historic place. We were there to fly a week’s intruder exercise over Greece, where they had the ancient Meteors and the ancient Vampires, so we had to fly at a low speed so they could catch us. We cruise normally at .72 Mach, but for those exercises, we had to cruise at .66/67 Mach so they could catch us, so that was quite fun. But I remember about that is the gritty wind, all day and all night - blowing, blowing, blowing - and as dusk fell, you could hear the explosions of mines that had been laid in the Second World War and not cleared, just lying there corroding. Expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting, until all of a sudden, they went off. We did make one visit, we went forty miles along the road from Tobruk, to a famous area where the forces really clashed. I can’t remember the name of the area but there was a peninsula, and on it was a German war memorial. We went up to this war memorial. Everybody started going quiet and whispering, and we looked at the ages of the people on this war memorial, and it was covered. All the granite was covered with names hundreds of young men, and I guess we all had the same thought. Eh up, this could be us. We were a very subdued bunch going back to the officer’s mess at El Adem that evening. When we got there, the local paper was in. They’d discovered the body of a Second World War soldier who’d died in 1942 in the Africa Korps and they found him, twenty yards off the main highway between Tobruk and Benghazi. Twenty yards, in a bit of a scrub, sitting behind a machine gun. Again, it brought it down to earth. And when we got back to England after our attachment, people were beginning to write about Suez and Egypt, and the possibility of confrontation, because Nasser, in July of ’56, nationalised the Suez Canal. Now it’s perfectly logical why he did it, which I can say now in hindsight, ‘cause I can’t remember very much about my attitude at the time except that, oh dear, this is what I got paid flying pay for. It started off with Nasser wanting to build the Aswan Dam. He wanted to build the Aswan Dam because he wanted to control the waters of the Nile, to make them more useful agriculturally, but also as a source of power to power electricity stations and improve the infrastructure. All very laudable, but for that he needed loans, and at the time that the Aswan Dam was starting, or was waiting looking for funds, first the Americans, then the British said, oh, we’ll lend you some money, but after that, Abdul Gamal Nasser made the mistake of buying his weapons of war from the Russians. Not from America and not from England, which upset the politicians. So they said, ‘Well, if we can’t have your orders for aircraft, you can’t have our, we’re going to nationalise the Suez canal, because if we can’t have your loans, we’ve got to pay for it somehow and we’re ongoing with the work’. Now, Anthony Eden had been one of the leading pacifists in the run up to the First World War, and had accompanied Baldwin when he went with that paper peace in our time. He was a sick man, but he wasn’t going to make the same mistake with a dictator again as he’d made with Herr Hitler, and he decided that the, the legal side of international lawyers should tell him whether the nationalisation of the canal was legal, and much to his chagrin, the lawyers said, providing he pays a reasonable compensation to the shareholders, he’s quite within his rights, and it’s quite legal for him to nationalise the Suez canal. This wasn’t what Anthony Eden wanted to hear, but Mr Anthony Eden decided that he was going to teach this fellow a lesson, and he thought of gunboats, which was his age, and he thought the Canberras would do the job. It just showed how little he knew. We knew what we were being prepared for. We were told not to talk to our wives and girlfriends, which we didn’t. We were confined to camp and it all got very tense. Then we were ordered out to Nicosia in Cyprus. At the time there was the EOKA shooting British officers in the back, so we didn’t fancy really, going to Nicosia but when we got there, we found we were alright, because they wouldn’t let us out of camp anyway. Every square foot of the airfield was occupied. There were no permanent accommodation for junior officers, they just slept in tents. The food, with all the people on board, was atrocious, and to cap it all, it was my twenty fourth birthday, and two days after my twenty fourth birthday, my pilot Dennis Wheatley and I were in the briefing room, preparing for our first raid over Egypt, because war had been declared. When they told us that, I just wanted to get on my own for a bit and think out what it could be like. It was a bit scary, but we’d been sent out there in our lovely Canberras. There’s only two problems. The first problem was, we had no way of navigating the aircraft accurately, because the system that was used over Europe was called the Gee system and this was two, two, a master station, two slave stations and they sent out signals. The master sent it out direct to the aircraft and sent one to the, same signals at the same time, and then the two slaves retransmitted the signal to the aircraft, so the aircraft had three readings, and from that, could fix their position by use of a special chart overprinted with Gee values, so we could look at the Oscilloscope and take the C readings and plot the aircraft’s, and that was how we were trained. But there was no Gee station over in Cyprus, nor could they build one in time, but we hadn’t any other aids. We hadn’t even got an astro compass or a bubble sextant. That didn’t do, that didn’t work very well in a fast flying aircraft anyway so we were without navigation aids. And the first raid we went on, was at Kibrit airfield, and we had, we couldn’t, the straightforward way, would have been go due south from Cyprus to the mouth of the Suez canal, go up the Suez canal, and bomb Kibrit airfield, but we thought that, or the powers that be thought, well even the Egyptians will have anti-aircraft gun going up the canal, so if we go up the canal, we’re liable to get shot at so we’d be clever, we’ll fly a series of three courses, and come around like a big question mark. Based on Cyprus, we went down the arm, then round, round, round and at the third turning point, the Valiants would come from Malta, and they would drop markers on the turning point, so we would know where to go to start our bombing run, and then some Canberras of 138 Squadron would mark the target with different target indicators so we’d know what to bomb. Well, nobody had thought that flying three legs without any nav aids is easy to do, because a slight mistake in terms of piloting the aircraft could put you miles off course. And so it was. When I came to the time when we should have been at the last turning point, there were no TI’s from the Vulcans that I could see. I couldn’t see anybody attacking any airfields within visual range of our aircraft. I’d not seen the canal, but it should stand out on a, on a dark night. In fact, there we were, with six one thousand pound armed bombs, going back to an airfield we didn’t know, very close to a large mountain. So Dennis said, ‘We’d better jettison our bombs’, so we went out to sea and dropped the bombs in the water, and hope nobody was swimming underneath. So ingloriously, we went back to base, not having even seen the target. The fact of the matter is, that until that flight, I’d never seen TI’s anyway, ‘cause they were economical during peacetime. They didn’t use everything there so TI’s didn’t get dropped. The next airfield to be attacked was Luxor, which is down to the south of Egypt, and the reason we were attacking Luxor was that Nasser had put his IL28 bombers, the Russian jet bombers, down there out of sight, he hoped. They lined them up on a runway and the air, the photo reconnaissance people saw the aircraft, so that was our target. So we were sent there, in the dark again, but that’s a maximum flight for a Canberra. We have one bombing run, one bombing run only. Well, after our first incident, we were very unhappy, me and Dennis, because we’d not even found the target. On this occasion, the TI’s were dropped and we saw them. A lovely sight. It was November the 5th again. But because of the limitations of our bombsight, built as it was during the war for Lancasters and Halifaxes and Stirlings, flying at two hundred knots, the maximum speed you could fly was three fifty knots, which was way below our maximum speed, and the maximum height you could bomb was twenty five thousand feet, because that was all, we liked to fly at forty thousand feet so going, flying over at high level, coming down to a bombing level, dropping the bomb then climbing up again. We did a cruise climb from the Luxor target, on the first occasion, to conserve fuel, it’s a way of flying a long way. We got to forty eight thousand feet and I have never been as cold as I was that day. Neither had Dennis. It was freezing at forty eight thousand feet, but we got back and joined the queue of aircraft waiting to land, but this time, we had dropped our bombs, and you know how big an airfield is. We missed it. So our bombs fell just outside the perimeter, as did a lot of bombs, but the interesting thing about the debriefing was, the intelligence officer debriefing us was trying to put our bomb burst closer to the target than we wanted to, and I said to him, I said, ‘Look’, I said, ‘I dropped the bloody bombs. I know where they went. You put them where I said, not on the runway, I didn’t hit the runway’. Well when we got back home, it was agreed that it had been a failure. It had been a complete waste of time sending the Canberras, because we didn’t have an accurate wind to put on the bombsight, we had blind navigation, just dead reckoning and that’s anybody’s guess, dead reckoning, so they sent us back the next day to the same airfield, but they had us take off half an hour earlier, so we’d have the last of the light to bomb by, which was intelligent, but didn’t help the results much because we still had no accurate wind over the bomb, over the airfield. Nobody transmitted one to us. So we’d flown all that way by dead reckoning and again, this time I could see the bombs drop, and they did drop inside the airfield, but they dropped on a place which was neither good nor useful. It didn’t disable the airfield and it didn’t disable the IL28s. As it happened, the following day, the French sent in a low level attack force and destroyed them all, but what a waste of time. And then the fourth raid I did, at Suez, was with our squadron commander, Squadron Leader Scott, and I was flying as nav plotter instead of single navigator, so the nav observer went down in the nose and he map read from the coast to the target, and from the target back to the coast, so I didn’t have anything to do except sit there and listen to the conversation, but the final attack was a place called El Marsa barracks, and by this stage, we were supporting the Army in, just out of Port Said. But the nice thing was that, a few days later, they sent us back home to England. That was, that was marvellous, that was the good news, because it got us into our own beds, and good meals and things like that, but they wouldn’t let us off camp. We were still restricted and we were told that although we’d come back in early November, that beginning of, end of December, we were going to go out to Malta, Exercise Goldflake was a kind of surveillance from Malta of the area when it had all calmed down and has a wing of Canberras out there, so we had another month to serve so it was coming up to three and a half months before we’d see our loved ones again [pause]. But when I started doing research on the internet, and the National Archives, it was interesting because so much was glossed over, but I understand that Sir Anthony Eden didn’t have a war cabinet for this particular operation, he just worked with one single senior civil servant, but the planning of the whole exercise made you feel that it was a kind of a mismatch. Senior officers were keeping their stiff upper lip type faces, but I think they were fuming inside because of the way that the arms had been used, or not used properly and all the embarrassing things that could be said, perhaps weren’t said by those in authority at the time [pause]. It was strange drawing up all of a sudden. I had a feeling of how people were when they were going to war, in a real war, not an adventure like this one, and I wrote a little song about it. Have you heard that song “Flying In a Jet Plane,” John Denver?
MH: Ahum
JBP: Well, just right on the top. I won’t, that’s it, that’s it. I won’t, I won’t, I’ll just say it to you rather than sing it. I can sing it but I’m all flat. This is, “Flying In a Jet plane” by me. I pay full tribute to, certainly to John Denver, because it was his thing that started it off -
All my kit is packed
I’m ready to go.
The moon is full, the coach is slow.
I’ve a three hour trip to base, my weekend’s done
Tomorrow is a flying day. I’m 536 we’re on our way.
Flying east, towards the rising sun.
So kiss me and smile for me.
Tell me that you’ll wait for me.
Hold me like you’ll never let me go,
Because I’m flying in a jet plane. I don’t know when I’ll be back again.
Oh Anne, I hate to go.
All leave is cancelled. Weekends too.
The future’s bleak, but I love you.
You fill my waking thoughts the livelong day.
Every place I go, I think of you.
In my sleep at night, I dream of you.
Pray for peace to hold. Not all outright war.
So kiss me and smile for me. Tell me that you’ll wait for me.
Hold me like you’ll never let me go.
‘Cause I’m flying in a jet plane. I don’t know when I’ll be back again.
Oh Anne, I hate to go.
The die is cast. Now the war’s begun.
We fly by night till the bombings done.
Then we fly back to England once again.
A month in Malta, for our crews,
Then we are told the welcome news, of leave for every other man.
So kiss me and smile for me.
Tell me that you’ll wait for me.
Hold me like you’ll never let me go.
‘Cause I’m working in a jet plane. Navigating back to you again.
Landing gently in your arms. Landing gently in your arms.
That’s my poem. A better singer than me can sing it to you [laughs]. Well we got back to England, after our stay in Malta, which was quite pleasant, it’s just that we weren’t seeing our girlfriends and wives, you know, but when we got back, we found that the Canberra squadron, 15 Squadron was being disbanded and this would take place on the 17th of April 1957. This would mean that the Canberras would all go back to the maintenance units and be handed out to other squadrons that were being formed. We’d be, we’d all go our different ways, but the squadron would reform with the Handley Page Victor in 1989, so it wasn’t going to be disbanded for very long, and it could become a Victor squadron, but I’d got to decide what to do. I went home for my first leave in February, and I discussed seriously with my father whether to resign my commission immediately and come out of the Air Force, but he said, ‘Don’t be so precipitous, it’s been a big shock and you are a Christian, but let’s look at the options’. So we went through the options. I didn’t want to fly in the V bombers, ‘cause I didn’t, I didn’t want to drop a hydrogen bomb or atom bomb on anybody and we eventually decided that the best use I could make of my time, would be a navigation instructor, so I went back to the squadron and discussed it with our friends, and the CO got me some forms to apply and I was taken in number 46 staff nav course, which was a course designed for two things. The first was to broaden your experience of the way that navigation was conducted in each of the commands flying, you know, Fighter, Bomber, Coastal and Transport Command. I think that’s all. If I’ve forgotten one, put it in, and the second purpose is to learn how to write staff papers and appreciations, which was very, very useful in my future life, as an insurance consultant. I enjoyed the course, I came out second, and then a guy called Polly Parrot, who was in the Air Ministry on his ground tour, he rang me up one day. He did junior officer postings. He said, ‘Brian’, he said, ‘I’ve got some good news for you. You’ve got a posting to 231 OCU at Bassingbourne. How does it feel?’ I said, ‘That’s great’. I said, ‘When are you getting out of your ground job?’ He said, ‘Oh next year. I’m coming out and I’m hoping to get on the V force’. I said, ‘I’ve got a girlfriend in Sheffield that I think I want to marry’. But I went off to OCU and I got some very good helping from the chief instructor, who took me under his wing and got me working properly. He gave me confidence, and then the Indian Air Force started coming through Bassingbourne, as part of a deal for them to buy our Canberras, we’d train their pilots, navigators, and I got friendly with a Flight Lieutenant Nath. I couldn’t pronounce his Christian name, so he said, ‘Oh call me Juggy’. So Juggy Nath he was and we got on like a house on fire. He came up one November the 5th to our home at Sheffield and met my parents, met my girlfriend, only she was close to being my fiancé then and my young brother who was setting off fireworks, and he really enjoyed himself, and then years later, I got a telephone call out of the blue and we were in here, about 1985, and he was flying with Indian Airways as a captain, and he’d just got married for the first time. He was in his fifties then, at fifty five then, a wing commander in the Indian Air Force he was, and he phoned on spec, and tried some Payne’s in the address book and got hold of me, so we were delighted, and he brought his wife up and came. The first time he was up, he talked to my parents and enjoyed that, so he talked in the evening to my parents. A thoroughly wonderful occasion. Doing research for this about eighteen months ago, discovered that a Wing Commander Nath, N A T H, was the most decorated Indian Air Force pilot in the history of the Indian Air Force, and my friend Juggy, who was a bit of a playboy. He didn’t like flying desks, he loved flying. He loved anything to do with sport. Very keen sportsman and good fun as well. And then the following, I’d been at Bassingbourne six months and just settled in nicely, I made the one major mistake of my career. Polly Parrot rang up and said, ‘I need a station navigation officer at RAF Finningley’, which is very close to Sheffield. ‘Are you interested?’ Of course I was interested. Oh great. So I went up there and the, not that the group captain I didn’t know, but the wing commander was a navigator in charge of the operations room, and he was security cleared to deal with V bomber crews and his deputy, Pete Harle, squadron leader, he was an H bomb specialist and he was cleared to work with these crews, but I’m a flight lieutenant, station navigation officer, the squadron’s navigation officers outranked me. I was only a flight lieutenant, they were squadron leaders. Wing Commander Dawson kept all the interesting stuff about navigation so I began to wonder why I was there, ‘cause I’d got nothing to do. Nothing to do. No security clearance to help with the V bombers or anything in any shape or form. I once tried marking the log, a chap on the squadrons, and the wing commander came and tore me off a strip, the group captain, no, the squadron leader on the squadron, ‘You shouldn’t be marking my men. Give over’. And then they made the post a squadron leader post. Well, two months before, the corporal in charge of the map store had left after doing two years national service, and the only job I could see I could do was the map store CO. So I was flight lieutenant in charge of the map store for the last four months of my service and then came out in civilian life, where I had a totally different career and married Anne. And that’s the story of my life in the Air fFrce. I rest my case.
MH: You’ve had quite an extended career there. Well, extended in what you’ve done but squeezed into a short period of time with the RAF. I’ll go back, take you all the way back if I may to your father, and what his experience was and the way that, did he infer on you any, any, the way that he was trained or was that something you found out afterwards from him? Did he give you any stories regarding his training in the early, early years of the RAF?
JBP: The most infuriating part about it is, that my father had one photograph of three trainees on his course at Old Sarum airfield, but he’d sent home many letters and many photographs to his parents, and they hadn’t kept any of them. We have one letter dated the 1st, the 2nd of January 1919 when he’s trying to impress his mother by what he’s doing, and he calls himself the second in command of the navigation empire. He says, ‘It’s the officer here’, and he says, ‘ and I’m there to do the odd jobs that need doing when he’s making a presentation, but as we’re not doing presentations at the moment, you can see I’ve not much to do, but we discovered the other day that the coke burning stove in the hut causes an upward draft. We had a brilliant idea that we would make hot air balloons and fly them, but they didn’t work so we made a windmill, and the windmill went round on the current so we painted it in RAF colours and had it suspended, so that it would go around all the time. If brass hats came in we would just say we’re checking that the draft, that the stove doesn’t need filling up at all’, and he went on like this, pulling his mother’s leg and, ‘Look at the headed notepaper’. Old Sarum. It’s embossed, not just your printed stuff, yeah. Because my grandmother was a bit of a social climber. Victorian governess type. No, the research I’d done about my father’s training and the training of pilots in the First World War threw up some very startling facts. Fourteen thousand four hundred aircrew were killed in the First World War. Eight thousand of those aircrew were killed in training accidents before they ever got to the front. In other words, our training system killed more of our aviators than the enemy. After the war, when they looked at the records, the German Air Force had twenty five percent of the casualties as the British Air Force up to 1917. It’s shocking. Ok, it was a new world, aviation. The Germans and the French were the major aviators before the First World War. Our generals were, they could only see as far as the cavalry, and they didn’t show any enthusiasm for anything to do with flying. They found out very quickly in the First World War that flying was very important, because the French and the Germans had them, and the English didn’t, so until they got themselves sorted out, which took a year or so, they were under represented and the reconnaissance done by the British was good. It convinced the commanders in the field that they were worth having. Particularly when they had these big pushes like the Somme, and then the pilots had to fly contact patrols, otherwise they had to keep in contact with the front line to be able to see how close the Germans were and whether they could machine gun them out of their positions, but of course, when you’re flying that close to the front line and somebody’s lobbing shells from your side and from their side, the chances of a shell hitting you is not remote so many of the aviators killed. The figures don’t match up to the Army, but then the number of flyers engaged compared with the number of the Army soldiers engaged was quite different as well, but the losses were very high. And the training of aircrew was a problem, because when the war started, we only had, I think it was a hundred and eighty qualified pilots in the whole of Britain, and training was hit and miss. It started off with, in about 1909 that if you wanted to learn how to be a pilot, you got on to this kind of flimsy box kite thing. There was one seat and that was for the pilot. So, the pilot would sit on the seat with the controls in front of him. No dual controls, just one set of controls. Then the trainee would get in through the barrage of spars and things that are holding the aircraft together, and he would be invited to sit behind the pilot so his knees were touching the pilot’s sides and his hands were touching his shoulders, and then to feel the movements the pilot was making, and then the pilot, the instructor, would get out and say, ‘Now you try. I don’t want you to make any turns. Just go up forwards and down forwards’, and it’s surprising how many people crashed like that. You see, the engines of the aircraft weren’t powerful enough. They just take the aircraft up off the ground, but the flying speed forwards and the stalling speeds when they dropped out of the ground were probably three or four miles an hour different, and they didn’t have a kind of speedo to see how fast they were flying. They had very primitive instruments. Couldn’t fly in a wind over five miles an hour ‘cause they’d go backwards. It slowly improved but we were totally reliant on the French. We had to buy, for the bulk of the war, we bought French engines, French aircraft until we started developing our own in 1915 but the war had been going on a year then and it was a very slow progress, and there were great periods when the Germans had the upper, they had the control over the air over the front lines and that was horrible for the soldiers, and they, they found a way of firing through the propeller. That was the big thing. So you aimed the aircraft and fire through the propeller and shoot down the enemy aircraft. And the Germans had an aircraft which wasn’t very successful but it was a good gun platform, and it was called an Eindecker, and these Eindeckers used to go up and our pilots didn’t think they could shoot at anybody, you know, nobody couldn’t shoot anybody down, certainly not through the propeller, and then the Eindecker got into the position where it could shoot the British aircraft down and shot them down in droves. We eventually found an aircraft that could fight the Eindecker. It had three guns facing forwards, called a Pusher biplane, and it had three, three guns facing forwards but the observer had to take great risks with his own life to fire one of the guns, ‘cause he had to balance on the edge of the cockpit to stand up to this gun to fire at the back of the aircraft and there were no training manuals. People were posted to be instructors like the Army does, you know. ‘Right boy, you’re not volunteering but you’ll be an instructor now. You’re now posted as an instructor to ‘blah blah blah’. Go and instruct’. You don’t tell them how. So that you’d think you had just come out of flying training. Hopefully, he had a good pilot to instruct him but many of them weren’t. A lot of the pilots came out of the front line with shattered nerves. Do I fly at all? So when they were made into instructors, unfortunately they used to send people off far too early in their training, so many of them got killed because they shouldn’t have been flying alone, but one of the, the reason was that the instructor was trying to avoid flying, and then you got pilots sent back from the front who were a threat to the squadron if they were going out on a reconnaissance, and they got sent back and made into instructors. In fact, they’d make anyone into instructors if they could, and the instructors privately called their pupils Huns, because they were as liable to kill them as much as the Germans. And then, in 1917, a chap who’d been in the, been flying as a pilot and then as a squadron commander, he went to Trenchard and said, ‘I think we can organise flying training so it’s more useful’. The kind of flying training that we were giving to people was basic training, but it had nothing to do with flying in war. So, we didn’t teach people manoeuvres that are dangerous. Many of the instructors wouldn’t know how to do it anyway. The ones who were straight to instructing from training school and this chap had the novel idea of training people to fly and fight at the same time, so all the training was to do that, if there were any risky manoeuvres, then people had to go through these over again and again with the instructor until he had mastered it, because shying away from not mastering something wasn’t on. And fortunately, he’d been in the post a year at Gosport when my father joined the Air Force, and by that time it was organised along the lines that he pioneered. Great man. So my father got proper training. The aircraft were equipped with dual controls. They had a tube that they could blow the whistle by the other pilot’s ear and you could talk through the tube, and that was called a Gosport Tube, and altogether more time was given to training people before they were sent out, because in periods when the Germans had the control of the skies, they were shooting down our aircraft and we were losing pilots like mad, so the front line commanders were asking for more pilots and the training programme couldn’t produce them, and it wasn’t until 1917 that Trenchard wrote a letter, which Haig signed, sent to the cabinet, war cabinet and they increased the aircraft squadrons from forty to a hundred, and specialist units were created. But a lot of the pilots, a lot of the instructors, had to be trained to instruct in this new way. So you started by training, nobody had been training instructors to instruct until that point, and everything happened in the final year, and I was glad that my father went into the Air Force when he did, ‘cause if he hadn’t have done I might not be here. That’s a long answer to a short question.
MH: What did your father do when he came out of the RAF?
JBP: Well the first thing he did was to be diagnosed with tuberculosis in his left leg, and he required six months treatment for that, and fortunately they were able to cure it but he always had a weakness in his left leg. Then he had another eighteen months looking for a job because, when he went, went in the Air Force, he’d been apprenticed to be an engineer, engineering draughtsman but he’d not finished his course, so he applied for something like that, but he’d not finished and other people had and they got the job. But eventually, in 1921, he got a job and he worked for the same firm from the age of twenty one to the age of seventy four. Same firm. It changed ownership three times. Each time the business was failing and somebody bought it out, but it was a good record. He saw good times and bad times. One of the good times was, he went with a friend, Jack Webster, on holiday at Towyn in Wales, and Jack had married a girl called Mary Haye, who was the elder sister of Florence Haye who was a zoology and botany graduate from the Liverpool University, and she was the only female taking that degree, all the rest were fellas. So she was kind of in advance of her time but she’d not had a boyfriend even though she was twenty six by now, because if you got married between the wars, you had to give up teaching and she liked teaching so she gave up men, until she met my father and they got married in 1929, but there were one or two moments. Mother’s family was a working class family. Did all the shopping, Gibbet Street in Halifax, and Florence’s dad who was a thimble maker by trade, but it was mechanised in the war years so they weren’t made by hand any more so he was unemployed at the end of the war, and had a very rich great uncle called Uncle Joe Allen and he had a posh house at Maidenhead, and he had the franchise for importing into Africa the products of a certain Mr Ford for the whole of Africa, and he gave my grandfather a job in the Gold Coast, Lagos, importing Ford vehicles, and my granddad told us of an occasion when the local chieftain decided he wanted a Ford car so he went along and explained it all to him, and couldn’t help noticing that the chief was looking very disappointed and very upset. So he asked him what the matter was and he said, ‘Well you sent me a picture of this car and where’s the lady that goes with it?’[laughs] Anyway, the Haye family didn’t drive cars at all so my mother was out with my father in his Austin 7 and they were having a row as they were driving along. She didn’t, not knowing what she was doing, she switched off the ignition. The only time he hit her.
[Ringtone tune. Reminder for medication]
JBP: My pills. I hope they appreciate the nice music [pause]. There was a pause while he took his pills.
MH: Yeah. Yeah.
JBP: Who has not put his pills out this morning?
MH: What we’ll do is, we’ll temporary pause the interview at this time so Mr Payne can have his pills because they’re more important to be honest. So we’ll pause this for a second.
[machine paused]
MH: Welcome back, this is a continuation of the interview with Mr Payne. The time now is 13:04. Mr Payne had some medication to take so we decided to pause at that time to give him due time to do that and he’s happy to continue, which I’m very grateful to him for. We were just finding out about your father and what he had done after his days with the newly combined Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Flying Corps, a bit about his training that he’d done and then subsequent to that that he’d stayed with the same company for a phenomenal amount of time. What was it that he was doing for that company?
JBP: He was an engineering draughtsman, which was what he was being trained for, been training, but he was joining a company called Hall and Sons in Rotherham who were struggling with the changing conditions in industry and commerce, because it was about that time that the big recession started in about 1925 or so and they were having to multitask, so my father found himself the only draughtsman but also expected to go out and make calls on people as a salesman, but in doing that he found he’d got a capacity for being a salesman and by the time the company, Hall’s, was sold to British Automatic Refrigerators Limited, my father was a full time salesman in Bradford for them, and as the recession deepened, so he had to give up his car, and he was walking around selling freezer units to butchers because they had to install freezer equipment in their shops in order to keep the meat fresh. About 1932, 1929 they got married, in 1930, my mother gave birth to a still born child at six months, simply because of an infection she caught, and in 1932 I came along and brightened their lives and my father sent a card to my mother a month before I was born, ‘Whoops mum, soon be hitting the high spots with you. John Payne’, with a little ditty on the back of it as well. He’d got a nice quiet sense of humour. My mother was one of six girls and they all liked Raymond, as he was called, and he got on well with his mother-in-law as well. In fact, he got on with most people, he was very even tempered. He’d got a nice sense of humour and was very reliable. Everybody found him very reliable which was one of the reasons for his success as a salesman because as I found it certain, if you were honest with people, it’s very highly valued and so it should be.
MH: So you come along in 1932.
JBP: Yeah. My sister Anne came along in 1935. my sister Margaret in ’38, but my brother Robert decided to wait out the festivities of the war and came along when peace was declared. The only trouble was that my mother, who had gone back to teaching during the war as her war work on the Monday, she had an interview with the headmaster who said, ‘I’m delighted to tell you, Mrs Payne, that the teacher who went to the war from here, the biology teacher, is not coming back to Sheffield, so you can work full time at the job you love’. She was very pleased, went out and rang my father to tell him the news, went to the doctor’s on Friday and guess what. ‘We’ve done some tests Mrs Payne, and you’re having a baby in August’. So she, you know, she’d done her bit and my father called the baby ARP, because he didn’t taken any air raid precautions. So he was called Anthony Robert Payne [laughs]. Now Robert was a common name in the family, Robert. But like my father, another thing about my father, he couldn’t go into military service because of his deafness and his TB hip so he joined the air raid wardens, known as the ARP, and he went to the first meeting with the group. What do we call you? Now my dad hated Raymond, because it was a family name, and he hated Henry which was his other name, so he says, ‘Call me George’, so ever after, whenever it suited dad, ‘Hello George,’ we knew he was an air raid warden in the war. He also, not a religious man but a very, very sincere Christian. In the time when the evacuation of Dunkirk was taking place, he was in hospital having been diagnosed with having gallstones, and in those days, it meant an operation and the aftercare was botched and he got an abscess on his wound, and the surgeon came in and told mum and dad that if it burst inwards, that was it. End of story. If it burst outwards, there was a good chance of recovery, so they had three weeks with this hanging over their head, and dad, being a regular church goer anyway, he and mum were praying about it, and so was the extended family on both sides, and one day dad was by himself in the, in his cubicle in the ward and he had a sense of a presence with him, and he got the sense of words kind of appearing in his mind, ‘You’re going to be alright. Don’t worry’. And he didn’t, but the impact it had on him afterwards, he started regular bible study, he became a preacher in the Plymouth Brethren, and he was a very popular preacher. He did an awful lot of appointments by request. Took a number of weddings in their tradition and funerals. He preferred the weddings. They had adult baptisms, you had to be converted and then baptised, so as a sixteen year old, I had to get into this water with this old man. The only consolation was the girls had to do that and they looked lovely with their dresses clinging to them [laughs]. But he used to bring people home from the morning service, and he’d bring people home who were on their own and he called the lame ducks. And my mother had a spell in a psychiatric hospital in her fifties and she went to Middlewood, and she met a couple of ladies there and there were nothing wrong with them. They’d just been put in a mental hospital and left and become institutionalised. So my mum, when she got discharged from hospital, she said to the psychiatrist, would it be possible to take these two ladies out occasionally. Just they seem very subdued. So he said yeah, and later, about four months later, he said, ‘Mrs Payne you’ve made a tremendous difference to these ladies. They’re coming alive’, and mother always said, they kept coming to her house till they died, but she said isn’t it awful that people can be locked away in our civilised society and, of course, after that the legislation they brought in to close mental hospitals, because so many people were put in there, you know, put in there for having a baby out of wedlock, or because their father was wealthy and didn’t want them around. Shocking it was. So he really lived out his life of faith and I wouldn’t say there were any of us who are as good as he was. I’d like to be but I wouldn’t, I’m not.
MH: Did he, or did he carry on any sort of passion towards flying? Did he fly much after?
JBP: On the -
MH: Did he have the opportunity to?
JBP: On his eightieth birthday I took him down to Old Sarum airfield where the Shuttleworth Collection is based. Have you heard of them? Of course you have, yeah. And they were flying the Avro 504K which was the training aircraft he used, and I took him down there because that was the day when the flying displays were being done by the Avro, and he really liked that. And then we saw an oil painting in the shop, and I bought it, and he had it in his bedroom till he died and then it went to my grandson, who has got it over his bed now. So the link’s being continued although Nicholas has just got a degree in geology, so I can’t see him going to fly.
MH: But your passion came alive when you went into your father’s bureau.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: It touched you then.
JBP: That’s right.
MH: The bug, as such. As some people call it.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: From a photograph.
JBP: We all get touched by bugs, don’t we?
MH: We do.
JBP: Passion.
MH: Passions.
JBP: Passion. Yes.
MH: But your passion, then, continued through.
JBP: Yes. I didn’t, my long term aim was to fly. I tell you what were a hell of a culture shock and that was going on my honeymoon. Not, not the interesting bit, but the first time that Anne had flown, and we were taking off at three in the morning, in the pitch dark, and we came across the Mediterranean coast on our way to Rome. at first light, and that was magic. The only thing that wasn’t magic was buying some bloody tickets when I’d been paid for flying [unclear]. I did feel that. [laughs]
MH: So you joined the RAF in ‘51.
JBP: Yeah. National serviceman. The number of 2530371, and I was an aircrew Cadet.
MH: Just to make sure that I’ve written that, 2530371.
JBP: Yes.
MH: And that service number made -
JBP: National service number.
MH: National service.
JBP: The regulars were 414, first three letters.
MH: Ok. Did that then go, that also then picked up your national service number or did it become completely different? Your regular service number.
JBP: No. I kept the national service number.
MH: But it had a prefix then of 414.
JBP: No 414 was the one that was issued at Padgate.
MH: Ok.
JBP: Other access camps might have had different numbers, I don’t know, I only know Padgate. I was a national service man until the 14th of November 1951 when I applied for a permanent commission, a four year commission with four years on the reserve, which I extended when the direct commission system came in which, I think, they extended to a twelve year commission with an option of coming out after eight years. I went on to the direct commission before Suez and I took the four, the eight year option after Suez.
MH: What recollections, or what impressions when you were at RAF Digby learning first, learning first how to fly on Tiger Moths?
JBP: Oh, that was magic. Without a doubt the best flights I ever did, even though I was a Canberra navigator, the most exciting flights were Tiger Moth flights. There was the Chipmunk came in to replace the Tiger Moth. I used to love flying the Chipmunk, but flying in an open cockpit is something, something else. Something completely wonderful. And you can do so much over a small area because you’re flying quite slow relative to jets. You can hover almost. You can keep inside the airfield perimeter and just do your -
MH: Yeah.
JBP: Your stuff. I liked everything about the Air Force till Suez.
MH: Suez was the turning point.
JBP: Yeah [pause]. It was the start of this book I suppose. If I go back I could, I could tenuously link it to get it out of my system. By the time it was happening I wanted to go, and if we’re going to, I didn’t want the war to start. I wanted it to be done diplomatically like I said in the song, but I was quite committed to go into action if necessary. I wasn’t suddenly questioning whether I should go or not. My attitude was, well I’ve been paid flying pay for five years, they’re entitled to my service up front, and once it started, you just wanted to get it finished as soon as possible [laughs]. But I think there is a report on the bombing. I’ve been trying to get to the National Archives, I’ve been trying to get a report on the, there was a survey done of the bombing results on the airfields, and I’ve read fragments of other people’s books on the subject, which makes me believe that this does exist, but I couldn’t find a way of getting to it ‘cause I’m not very good at those websites. I’m sure there was a report done and they took nine major airfields and we didn’t close one of them. In all the bombs, we dropped and we didn’t close one of them. An enormous number of bombs and a lot of them dropped outside the airfield perimeter and that’s the shocking thing.
MH: You can reflect in some ways looking back just over a decade back to when Bomber Command first started out. The bombing missions to Germany and such like.
JBP: Yes.
MH: The accuracy there that was portrayed.
JBP: In 1941 a report came out and it showed that aircraft bombing with direct reckoning and star sights, which were the only two things they had at night, nine out of ten bombs dropped were more than five miles away from their target. Only one bomb out of ten was within five miles of the target and these were five hundred pound bombs. They weren’t a thousand pounders. And the area of devastation was only about a hundred yards. So the safest place to be was the target.
MH: Yeah. It’s strange to think of it like that, but that is, that’s a correct statement.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: Yeah. But it’s interesting, though, that, as you said in part one, that the bombsight that was used by the World War Two Bomber Command bomb aimers was the same then, just over a decade later, in the jet era, in the Canberra.
JBP: Yeah. And the forces against, the forces acting on the bomb and on the aircraft had greater, one of the examples is astral, astral navigation, using the stars. Now it all started with ships at ground level or at sea level, and bringing down the star sight on to the horizon to get the elevation of the star, to then be able to draw a great circle line, which on a short distance is a straight line to get a fix but you don’t have an actual horizon in an aircraft so you’ve got to put something in, so they found with low speeds, you could put a bubble in, and the bubble is acted on by the forces of gravity and where as a sea, seafarers could take two or three sights and that would be enough, we used the bubble sextant we had to take sixty sights, all automatic and they averaged out sixty sights of this star and then you got on the tables, and plotted this on your chart and you looked for three stars so that they crossed at a hundred and twenty degrees, a hundred and twenty degrees, a hundred and twenty degrees and your probable position was inside this ‘cocked hat’ as they called it. I was taught that in basic air navigation training. I used it once when I was at Lichfield on a night exercise, and I used it once on the staff navigator’s course when we were looking at Coastal Command and Transport Command and the way they navigated. Never used it otherwise. And I went to, from St Mawgan to Gibraltar on a staff nav course and I was navigating by lines of pressure, with the aircraft being steered by the gyro not a compass. I tried to understand that because I’ve got the notes down there and I tried to understand it now, and at eighty three, I just can’t understand it [laughs], at twenty four I was navigating by it and got there. Yes. The equipment lagged way behind the aircraft. That was the problem we had, we always had. Nowadays, the way they take modern star sights I’ve not been trained so I don’t know them, but the early ‘50s was, 1952 was the biggest size of the Air Force in war or in peace. That was the most resources there but a lot of those the jet engines made everything redundant, and we had a lot of other aircraft.
MH: It’s my understanding that, yeah, because I think Bomber Command still had things like the, well the Americans called the Superfortress, but we called it the Washington.
JBP: Yeah. That’s right.
MH: Which was still around -
JBP: Well 15 Squadron had Washingtons before it had Canberras.
MH: So, I mean, if you think of the size of the Superfortress, you know, the Washington compared with the Canberra, quite a fundamental change.
JBP: It is.
MH: In aircraft type, etcetera.
JBP: And when the yfirst displayed at Farnborough by Beamont, on behalf of English Electric, the way that he flew it was like a fighter, and some old fuddy duddies in the air ministry said, ‘You don’t fly a bomber like that. It’s a light bomber not a heavy bomber’, and of course, the heavy bombers did spectacularly well. The Vulcan, the Valiant and the Victor. They really were agile aircraft, but when you got to those speeds, the G forces that you can vector a G force into the horizontal and vertical. The G forces were far greater on equipment in the aircraft, and the T2 bombsight we used in the Canberra was a modification of the Mark 14, which as you rightly said was designed and built in 1940, after the Bomber Command said you don’t want to lose any more crews, but if you wanted an accurate bombsight, you had to fly straight and level for so long and you can get shot down while you’re doing it. You go for a bit of evasion and then you accept an average error of four hundred yards, so what blanket bombing was, was seeking to knock out the factories, seeking to kill the workers who worked in those factories, because they were in the zone. Just pass the zone with enough bombers to allow for breakages on the way there and a certain number of bombs, the probability is, you covered every point of the carpet, but you kill civilians and that was a deliberate policy before Bomber Harris took charge of Bomber Command. He just carried it out. He gets blamed for it but it was Churchill that was the prime instigator.
MH: I’ll step you back in time if I may.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: Back to your favourite aircraft being the Canberra. Could you take me through, or take the people that are going to listen to this later on, through right the way from mission start to mission end? What would have been your role and what you did, what you wore, because I remember you saying when you got up to a very high level of forty eight thousand feet, you found yourself very cold.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: And reflecting upon that bombers during the World War Two, of course, had problems with freezing guns and that sort of thing, that they couldn’t then operate to defend themselves, so it’s the similar sort of scenario there, with the freezing element.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: But then the crews in World War Two, of course, wore the sheepskin clothing, etcetera, that was designed to keep them warm and the leather helmet, etcetera. If you could take us through what your, how you, your day would have gone from mission start to mission end.
JBP: Right. Yes, I can do that. I’ll think of a particular mission. I was flying an exercise, a Bomber Command exercise, testing out capabilities of ships at sea and aircraft finding them. I’m stationed at Honington, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, a member of 15 Squadron. My pilot is Flight Lieutenant John Garstin. The nav plotter is Flying Officer Jock Logan and the navigator observer is myself [pause]. We have a meal and then we’re taken by RAF vehicle lorry or bus or Land Rover to the briefing room, collecting on our way, the parachutes which are the type which you sit on [pause]. We go to the, entering the briefing room we go to get our equipment out of the store, which is where we keep it. The first thing that I put on is some thermal underpants, stretching down to just below my knee and a thermal top. The next item of clothing I put on, if its winter, it’s a woollen cover for the body and the arms. If it’s summer, probably nothing particularly special. A thick pair of socks, because it’s amazing how cold you get in your feet and extremities, so you need a thick pair of socks, woolly socks and flying boots which are designed so that if you get shot down over enemy territory you can cut off the, the bit of a boot that looks like a flying boot and you’re left with a pair of reasonably serviceable shoes, which look a bit like shoes for escape and evasion. Having got yourself dressed in that gear, you then put on your flying overall. In my day they weren’t the colours they are today, it was a kind of grey blue with the squadron badge on the pocket and the rank on the shoulders, on little bits of material that can be slid on and off and used elsewhere. The next item of clothing is a pressure vest. Now a pressure vest, the function of the pressure vest is if the, what do they call it, we were pressurised down to a certain level for operational work. If we were flying at forty thousand feet, then the cabin pressure is pressurised to make the inside of the cabin twenty five thousand feet, so flying at twenty five thousand feet, if you’ve got an explosive decompression at that artificial height, you quickly go to forty thousand and this is where the pressure vest kicks in. The moment there’s any change of pressure, the pressure vest inflates and the inflation is to guard against damage being done to your breathing. It’s connected up with the oxygen system which is fed to you under pressure anyway, and there’s a clip on here, the oxygen mask attaches it to there, attaches to your helmet. Your helmet, strangely enough is not made of thick material, it’s made of a cotton. It’s washable cotton with the earpieces in and the, the nose I say, the nose of the thing fitting over you like that. You couldn’t operate at high levels without oxygen. You’re flying at forty thousand feet, there’s no way you can do without your oxygen. You’ve got to be taking your oxygen in otherwise you will start hallucinating, and as an observer, I had a little bottle of oxygen for when I went forward to the nose, or came back from the nose, I wasn’t on the mains supply system I had my own bottle, so I had to make sure I got that. Over the pressure vest I’d got what is popularly known as the Mae West, which is the bright yellow jacket with inflatable front like the famous actress. When you’re flying, you fly encased in your pressure vest, and on top of the pressure vest, no, your flying suit is underneath your pressure vest. That’s right. Switch on to the oxygen. I’ve got to look at the bomb bay and check that the bombs that we are going to drop are the ones that have been specified at the briefing, and I check that any settings that have to be made before take-off are made. I can set the bomb pattern inside the aircraft. It’s next to where I sit. It’s just here. And if you’re down in the nose, and you’ve got to suddenly set a pattern to come back, crawl back, set it, crawl forward. In other words, the aircraft was very cluttered as you saw. Because of the extra navigator and the extra bank seat on the original plans, all the space that would be available to a single nav isn’t available, because that’s put aside for the observer, and because of the observer the pilot seat instead of being centred under that plastic dome is to one side, so tall pilots kind of get a bit bent. They’re flying this way and this is crushing their head over like that, and they often have a bone dome on up on their helmet, so that the result is flying like that and not being able to see very well that way, and you can’t see behind anyway. No mirrors. There should have been a radar called yellow putter, but yellow putter proved to be unworkable in anything like operational conditions. It just didn’t work, so they scrapped it. We never had it on my squadron. We weren’t experimental, we were just routine main force. Dogsbodies. Having got all our equipment and our helmets, making sure that we have the right oxygen mask because we fly T2 bombers, we fly T4 dual control training aircraft and they provide one T4 training aircraft per squadron, so that we always have something to do CO’s checks and things like that in. But when you fly in the T4, you don’t have a pressure vest ‘cause the aircraft doesn’t go to that height. It only goes to twenty five thousand. You don’t do long trips so there’s only room for one navigator, because the two pilots have to have got to have bank seats. You’re mainly flying local simulations so you don’t have wing tip tanks, so you can do high speed runs in one of those, which is rather fun. Go to maximum four hundred and fifty knots, liked doing those, and occasionally we’d do full load take off, when we’d put six one thousand pound bombs on board and the pilot could feel the change in the trim, both taking off and landing. That was important that we did those regularly, ‘cause you’d be flying with twenty five pound practice bombs, they don’t make much difference to the handling of the aircraft, but six thousand pounds of bombs makes a big difference. You don’t do fancy aerobatics with six thousand pounds bombs on either. We then go into briefing. The briefing would be in terms of first of all, telling us what our target is and how we are to approach the target, what formation we are going to fly, the turning points and the times we’ve got to be at the various turning points. The emergency alternatives to our own airfield if we come back and we’re clamped up with fog or things like that. They would tell us where the enemy, for the purpose of the exercise, where the enemy are. That’s reported. Where they were steaming, which part of the North Sea we should be looking for and generally giving us data about the meteorological conditions, both on the way to the target and at the target. We always treat winds given to us by Met offices as a bit sceptical because they were seldom rarely right, and one of the jobs of the plotter is the navigator observer, he works the radar and gets the fixes every four minutes and then the plotter takes those fixes off my chart, and puts it on his chart and uses it to calculate variations in wind, which would call for a variation in course, and then you [unclear] travel at that time, at the back point, the pin point. You’ve got to hit it at the right time and we prided ourselves of getting there within six seconds, whereas the standard that was set which was easy with Gee. Now, when it came to dropping bombs, there were two briefings. The first briefing is if we were dropping twenty five pound practice bombs, one at a time, on the target. We could drop eight of those in two hours. The reason being that there is more than one aircraft using the bombing range at the same time. People on the ground have receivers so they can hear what the pilot says, so if you’re on your bombing run, your pilot switched on to transmit at the end of the bombing run, and you can hear the nav observer saying, ‘Steady. Steady. Steady Right. Right. Steady. Steady. Steady. Steady. Bombs gone’. And the pilot would echo, ‘Bombs gone’. And the people on the ground would then know, in so many seconds, a puff of smoke would show and we’d know where the bomb landed, and it was up to the people in the bomb proof shelters to get these bearings, pass them to a central control point by telephone. They would plot the three positions and get the fix of where the bomb actually hit and its relation to the target, so it could be 2 o’clock, a hundred yards. Mine laying was five hundred yards. That was visual bombing. GH bombing. I told you about Gee to get fixes, say where the aircraft position is, well GH uses the same equipment and the oscilloscope in the aircraft, but in this case, the master station, not the one that transmits the original signal, it’s the aircraft that puts the signal and it gets two replies and one gives you a course to steer to go over the target, pre-computers on the ground and the other gives you four points that you would check off one, two, three, four and when you tick off number four, you drop your bomb, so flying along in an arc, like that, and these lines have changed at right angles to that line, so you can navigate saying, ‘Right. Steady. Steady. Steady’, like you can with a visual bombing, but radar bombing at forty thousand feet is a lot more accurate, because with radar, you don’t have to see the target with your eyes. Visual bombing you’ve got to see the target with your eyes and often, if you are that high, the target is over the hill so you can’t see it. There are practical limitations with the visual bombsights.
MH: You mentioned Gee.
JBP: Yeah.
MH: Was it the same sort of Gee system that the navigators would have had to rely on during Bomber Command in World War Two?
JBP: Definitely.
MH: The same, the same system, it hadn’t changed or had it been -
JBP: No, Gee had had its life, because the nice thing about Gee was that you kept the security of the aircraft, your own aircraft. An aircraft that transmits signals can be homed on to. The Germans could create a radar which could home on to the transmitters from, say, with aircraft with H2S, H2S bombing system was a radar bombing system where the sea was black, the land was light green and built up areas are bottle green. Now that was transmitting a signal ever millisecond or so and an enemy fighter could home in on that signal and blast it. And missiles, of course, are even more effective at homing into signals like that. So what was nice about Gee was that it was a passive system. The aircraft didn’t transmit anything. It just took a signal from a master station and then when they came in, two signals from the slave station and with the oscilloscope it could be a calculated reading, and you go to the chart, plot those two readings and that gives the position of the aircraft. Now you could, we practiced a thing called GH homings, Gee homings [unclear], and that was used extensively in Bomber Command when we were using the Gee systems in the mid-40s, because you could pre-determine from your chart what signals you needed to see to be in a certain position at a certain time.
MH: Right.
JBP: So you’d put these points that you wanted to put down and then you’d go back on the arc of the signals to where you wanted to start tracking on to that. So say you were, went to Berlin, massive big target so it doesn’t really matter where you hit, but if you got a line going through the target, another line telling you when you got to the target, like a homing back to base, you can actually fly a course using Gee, a bit more complicated than GH but you could do that from 1942 onwards, ‘cause GH came in in 1944 and there was no doubt that, by the time I joined the Air Force, visual bombing was in decline, except for the Canberra, because they couldn’t miniaturise the H2S radar enough to fit into the Canberras size of aircraft, and what advantage we had and this, for many years, people don’t realise this the Canberra was a wonderful high altitude aircraft. You’re talking about it going, it had world records for fifty seven thousand feet at one stage, but an aircraft that could fly at that height and manoeuvre is very rare and the fighters with swept back wings couldn’t do that. The MIG15s found, always found Canberras a headache because when you tried to formate on it, you couldn’t get near it and if you tried to outmanoeuvre it, the Canberra was far better because of the big wing section between the engines but I felt very happy flying in Canberras. It was a good aircraft, just as the Mosquito had been before it because it was a replacement for the Mosquito.
MH: And did as many roles.
JBP: Yeah. And it was the only aircraft that served fifty six years operationally in the RAF. No other aircraft has gone beyond fifty years. I’d like to say it was because of myself you know [laughs]
MH: What would you say was your happiest time or your happiest moment or your happiest reflection in the RAF?
JBP: It sounds silly. We were only at Cottesmore for nine months, but there was a couple from Sheffield who joined the squadron two months after I did, and the husband was called Alf. Alf Bentley and his wife was Joan Bentley and they were quite a bit younger than me. In fact, they were the youngest married couple on the squadron. I think he was just, Alf was just on his twenty, just over twenty when he came to the squadron, and they had a son in ‘54 and twins in 1956. No. They were both born the same. Yes, Steve was born in January and the twins came in Christmas of the following year. They had three in ten months and I’m godfather to the eldest, and at the time that Steven was born, they had a sixteen foot caravan on the caravan site, and we had the main gate for RAF Cottesmore and next to that was the wooden huts for junior officers, ‘cause they didn’t have a properly built mess and we were all close together and the station similar, so there’s three groups. So the pattern we got into was that myself and Harry Tomkinson and Bob Haines, Bob flew as a navigation plotter in Pete Dyson and Alf Bentley’s crew, and we’d go up in the evenings to their caravan, and sometimes we go to the station cinema, and sometimes just play card games and board games, and of all my moments in the Air Force, the best moments were eating soft biscuits that Joan were trying to get rid of, and playing, playing monopoly and laughing like anything with Steven sleeping away. The day I came out of the cinema, I got a post here playing cricket at Usworth, and knocked a tooth out -
Dublin Core
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Title
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Interview with Brian Payne
Creator
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Mark Hunt
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
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2015-06-08
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Type
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Sound
Identifier
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APayneJB150608
Format
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01:51:04 audio recording
Language
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eng
Coverage
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Royal Air Force
Second generation
Spatial Coverage
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Great Britain
England--Lincolnshire
England--Cambridgeshire
Cyprus
Greece
North Africa
Egypt
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
England--Duxford (Cambridgeshire)
Description
An account of the resource
John Payne was born in 1932 and went into the Royal Air Force as part of his National Service, becoming a Navigator on the Canberra aircraft with 15 Squadron. His father went into the combined service in the First World War, and was training to be a pilot when the war ended in 1918. This prompted his desire to fly. John tells of his enjoyment of flying the Tiger Moth aircraft during his training at RAF Digby, and his experiences of his many travels to RAF stations.
He spent some time in Greece, taking part in intruder exercises, and also recalls his time spent near Tobruk and tells of his experiences including visiting a German war memorial. John participated in the Suez Canal crisis, and details his operations in Cyprus and Egypt, and the problems that this created from a navigational point of view. He tells about his meetings with Flight Lieutenant John Garstin and also Wing Commander Nath, the most decorated pilot of the Indian Air Force and the part they played in his life. John flew the T2 Canberra named Willie Howe 725 now on display at Duxford.
Contributor
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Vivienne Tincombe
Temporal Coverage
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1956
1957
15 Squadron
aircrew
faith
Gee
memorial
navigator
RAF Bassingbourn
RAF Digby
Tiger Moth
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/881/11122/AHooperH151117.1.mp3
5e7a6420f296f4085886ac13cf4b3e54
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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Hooper, Harry
H Hooper
Description
An account of the resource
An oral history interview with Flight Lieutenant Harry Hooper (Royal Air Force). He flew operations as a pilot with 115, 178, 70, and 38 Squadrons.
The collection was catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff.
Publisher
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IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-11-17
Rights
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This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
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Hooper, H
Transcribed audio recording
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Transcription
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HH: My name is Harry Hooper and I’m saying these few words as I have been asked to about my life in the, probably in the Royal Air Force. But the reason I joined the Royal Air Force was that I’ve always been interested, since a very young person, in aviation. I was born on the north side of Heston Airfield. We had an old farm on the north side of the airfield and so I grew up watching planes, private planes, come in and land. Heston was the airfield that in 1938 Mr Attlee, I think it was Attlee, then prime minister, came back from meeting Hitler in Germany with a piece of paper which he proudly showed. And which proved to be useless because in the next year the Germans went to war. I was seventeen and one month when I actually joined the air force which was November 1941. I wasn’t actually called up. I was attested, by the way at Oxford University. I wasn’t called up ‘til the beginning of the following year. I flew Tiger Moths in what they called grading school which graded applicants for pilot positions in to, well, pilots. And the others went on to become, as it was then, observers or bomb aimers later. Wireless operators or air gunners. I was fortunate. I went to Canada. I flew the Fleet Finch. No one’s ever heard of it but I flew the Fleet Finch biplane. And then went on to the Harvard. And I gradulated, graduated. I came back to England. I was sent to Harrogate which was a holding depot for aircrew returning from abroad awaiting posting. But I was there for quite a while because at the time Fighter Command were losing so few pilots, relatively that is, whereas Bomber Command were losing very many. So it was decided that myself and others like me would convert onto multi-engine aircraft. And I went to Babdown Farm in the West Country and converted on to the Airspeed Oxford. After that I went on to OTU just outside Banbury and I flew the Wellington from there, which was where I picked up most of my crew. And then I went to a Heavy Conversion Unit where I converted from Wellingtons to Lancaster. Which is where I picked up the last member of my crew — the engineer. By this time, because of the long waits I’d had early on it was getting near the end of the war and I joined 115 Squadron, or we joined 115 Squadron when they were operating daylight raids over Northern France and Germany. Mainly the Ruhr area and they were using a very new system then which was called GH bombing. It was a GH system which was a form of navigation. It was further developed in to a system of bombing where the navigator guided the pilot along a certain line. And provided you kept at the exact height, at the time sixteen thousand six hundred feet and the correct airspeed of a hundred and sixty five miles per hour when he got a further indication or blip on his radar set he would just tell me to press the button. Which I did, having previously opened the bomb doors and the bomb load would fall away. Hopefully on to its target. We flew then, as they were daylights, in formation and it was mainly flying from south to north in the Ruhr Valley. And because of the accuracy of this system of bombing we were charged with taking out the very small refineries that the Germans had built as their main refineries had been bombed to pieces by both the RAF but mainly the US Air Force. And, but there were these very small units dotted along the Ruhr Valley utilising coal and turn it into Benzene and fuel which could be used. Either high octane fuel for aircraft or the lower octane for trans, motor transport. It was a great job. They usually tasked us at this job when there was cloud cover so that as we dropped our Window which was strips of foil we were above cloud and heading north. The westerly breeze would float the Window away from under us but we could see as we went along that the German gunners, radar directed gunners were picking up the chaff as we called it or the Window and directing their fire. So as we went north, sitting up there quietly at sixteen thousand five hundred feet about two or three miles to the east of us there were a line of ack-ack bursts as the German ack-ack, radar directed ack-ack followed our course but at about two miles away. However, if the cloud dispersed the Germans then went over to optical sighting and they were through the gap and on top of us within seconds. And very accurate they were. Fortunately, we didn’t get hit or sent down. And that was basically it. That was my war coming to an end. I enjoyed every minute of it. I shouldn’t say that I know. Not politically correct. But it was a gorgeous time. I made so many friends. My crew and I were then scheduled to go out to the Middle East. Take Lancasters out and convert the Middle East squadrons in 205 Group onto Lancasters from Liberators which were being returned to the US as they were under lease lend. We did that and I enjoyed another year in the Canal Zone. Basically then we were converted into trooping and we had small metal seats fixed either side of the fuselage above, on the top of the bomb bay. And we could carry up to sixteen passengers and freight in panniers. And we flew all across North Africa. Dropping off at all the old names — Tobruk, Benghazi, El Adem for Tobruk, Benghazi, Castel Benito and on to Algiers. We also flew up to Greece to, into Italy. All carrying passenger, mail, freight and various things until I was then posted to Palestine during the troubles in 1947 there. The troubles were that the then Israelis didn’t want the British there so they were actively engaged in guerilla warfare against the British. Which was quite interesting. That basically is it. That was my life. I had intended to sign on and carry on in the Royal Air Force but owing to the odd misdemeanours like stealing a, well not stealing but borrowing an army radar truck to get home one night from the Malcolm Club which was an officer’s club on the Bitter Lake. Along the Suez Canal. The Military Police thought otherwise and managed to stop us and I spent the night in a military jail. The next morning the wing commander came and got me out but that finished any thoughts I had of applying for a permanent commission. So that was about it and I left the Royal Air Force. And that’s me. Will that do you?
[recording paused]
MJ: Yeah.
HH: After further chat with Mr Jeffery I thought there were a few items I ought to add on to the previous dialogue which mainly concerned things that I got up to. Or my crew and I got up to. Whilst I was on the squadron at 115 Squadron flying out of Witchford near Ely I bought a car. A Singer le Mans sports car which was up for sale because its previous owner had, well, got the chop as it were and his parents decided they didn’t want it. And I bought it for seventy pounds. I had sixty five in the bank and I borrowed five pounds from a chum and I bought this ivory and green Singer le Mans. Basically, a two seat in the front and a small seat at the back. And with that car I would go into Ely from Witchford with six of us in this two seater, four seater car which was a bit of fun. And the amazing thing was that there were so many in the back that the front wheels hardly touched the ground. So that when we came to a bend I used to have to ask them all to lean forward to get the front tyres to grip so that we could turn which was great fun. Then I volunteered to go to the Middle East because the war was coming to an end. Tiger Force, to which I’d been posted was disbanded because the Americans had dropped the atomic bomb and we didn’t have to go out to the Far East. That being so I eventually ended up at Dunkeswell flying Lancasters out to the Middle East. I flew one out to Egypt. This was to enable the Liberators operated by 205 Group at the time to be returned to the US because they were lease lend aircraft and replaced by Lancasters. Far Eastern as they were then known. FEs. Having done the one trip and came back I thought, well this, that looked a good place to go. So I volunteered to go out with some of my crew. Some were old enough, one was old enough to leave the air force fairly early. He had, my bomber aimer had a wife and two children and was thirty four. But the rest of us were young so off we went to the Middle East where we enjoyed a most fantastic time. We were originally based near the Great Bitter Lakes. And that was great fun because one of the fields I was based at, Kabrit, was right on the south, or south western tip of the Great Bitter Lake. My billet opened, well I opened the door of the billet and could step straight into the lake, have a swim, come back and go to breakfast. But I chummed up with a chap there who was a bit of a lad as it were and we got up to the odd tactics. One of which was we would go down to Suez and have some fun there and then try and get back by hitching rides. And we hitched so far and then we were walking. And as we still had a few miles to go we saw an army camp, or an army spot with, which I believe probably was Army Signals or something. But they had fifteen tonners in there and so we got in and funnily enough it didn’t have keys. You just pressed the starter and it went. So my colleague and I jumped into the back of this fifteen tonner and roared off down the Treaty Road to get home. But within a minute or two we were stopped by the Military Police who put us in what we called the clanger overnight until my wing commander came and released me. Prior to that episode I had hopes of staying in the RAF. I had applied for a permanent commission. But of course this put the kibosh as it were on my hopes of a permanent commission as the group captain tactfully said, ‘I don’t think it wise for you to carry on, Hooper.’ And I said, ‘No sir. I think you’re right.’ So, that was it and I eventually ended up in Palestine during the troubles in ’47. I joined 38 Squadron who were Coastal Reconnaissance. And our work was mainly involved in patrolling off the coast of Palestine. They divided the section between Southern Turkey and Egypt into three. And so three aircraft would go out and we would fly north south, gradually turning, creeping away from the Palestinian coast until we found some of the illegal immigrant ships or a illegal immigrant ship. In which case we would then wireless Jerusalem and they would send out a destroyer to apprehend it and take these poor chaps and put them in a camp in Cyprus. And then they were fed back under the quota into Palestine. And I ended my days in Palestine enjoying the climate. We didn’t have much freedom owing to the troubles. You know, sleeping with a revolver under our pillow and that sort of thing. Eventually I was posted home and I managed to convince all and sundry that I should go back by boat and I had a beautiful trip back home. We went to Liverpool. From there I collected my gear, or tried to but it hadn’t arrived because it went on a different track or something. So I went home for two days to see my mother and father who I hadn’t seen for a very long time. And my sister by, who was younger than me, at the time was eighteen went out with her boyfriend to the pictures. And at around about 10 o’clock in the evening my neighbour, our neighbour came in and said, ‘I think you’d better go to the top of the road.’ We lived off, in a little cul de sac off the Harlington High Street. And whereupon I did and found that my sister, who had just got off the bus with her boyfriend had been knocked down by a motorbike and sidecar and killed. Which was a great homecoming. But one got over it eventually and that was the end of my sort of story at the time. I then worked for the Quaker Oats Company. An American company. They had a large plant. Factory. Mill. In Southall. And I spent about twenty odd years with them. I started there in the materials handling department unloading trucks and I finished up as the UK managing director for them. So, I had a fairly pleasant life there. I retired early because my son, who had just come down from Cambridge was very very ill in Paris and I had to go over and see him. And my wife developed cancer at the time. So I had a pretty rough time, or my son and my wife did. I had to try and look after them so I retired at fifty seven and did manage to look after them and we’re all around now. Of my crew only Charlie Flint, my wireless operator is still alive. The rest gradually died away. And we still remain, the two of us, the last of the [pause] what were we? KO was our squadron number. We were KO Roger. I had a model Lancaster made for me. I was at the Harvard Business School for some time and whilst over there they, some of the chaps found out I’d been in Bomber Command and got some information from somewhere. Somewhere. And they bought a kit which they made into a model Lancaster and labelled it KO Roger. And actually they sent it home by surface mail whilst I came back on one of the, either, I think it was the Queen Mary with some thirty thousand I think it was [laughs] American soldiers going to the UK for the war in Europe. And that’s about it. I enjoyed every second of my time as I still do. So there ends my tale. That’ll do won’t it?
[recording paused]
HH: I’m just showing Michael Jeffery the sort of captain’s map as we called them from a particular daylight raid I did with 115 Squadron. What we’re looking at here is the small captain’s map. It’s on a Mercator, Mercator projection and on it I have drawn the outward and the inward routes we took to the, to and fro from the target. The target in this case happened to be Dortmund. We flew out on what is apparently the red route and we flew back on what is shown here as the green or greeny blue route. We also put, on that same map one would have the height at which we would be flying, the speeds we would be flying at. And this was a sort of aide memoire to the pilot of the trip whilst the navigator did the whole of the actual navigating using the Gee system. The pilot had this so that he could keep that on his lap or in his pocket and occasionally look at it so he would know that, well we’ve got about five or ten minutes and then we turn to port and on to that. So it was just an aide memoire, a visual aide memoire to the pilot on, for the whole of the trip and it had data such as height to fly, speed at which we flew and so forth on it.
MJ: Thank you for that.
HH: That should do it I should think.
MJ: Okay. Right. On behalf of the International Bomber Command I’d like to thank Harry Hooper, Flight Lieutenant for his recording on the 17th of November 2015 at his home near Hook. Thank you very much.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Interview with Harry Hooper
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Mick Jeffery
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2015-11-17
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.
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
AHooperH151117
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
00:21:31 audio recording
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Description
An account of the resource
Harry Hooper enjoyed watching the planes at Heston Airfield as a child. He volunteered for the RAF in 1939 and began training to be a pilot. He flew with 115 Squadron and undertook operations over Northern France and Germany using Gee, including precision targets in the Ruhr Valley, also dropping Window and encountering anti aircraft fire. After his tour was completed he volunteered to serve in the Middle East. One evening he and a friend were hitch hiking back to camp when they decided to ‘borrow’ an army vehicle. They were caught by the military police and this effectively put an end to his hopes of staying in the RAF.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Julie Williams
Carolyn Emery
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
Libya
Middle East
Libya--Tobruk
Middle East--Palestine
England--Cambridgeshire
North Africa
Egypt
Egypt--Suez Canal
Germany
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1941
1947
115 Squadron
aircrew
anti-aircraft fire
bombing
Gee
Lancaster
military discipline
pilot
RAF Witchford
training
Window
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1236/18295/PThompsonKG15010147.2.jpg
bdc89d91d8b4163c2191c96d53213499
Dublin Core
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Title
A name given to the resource
Thompson, Keith G
K G Thompson
Description
An account of the resource
95 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Keith Thompson DFC (1238603 Royal Air Force) and contains his log book, documents, photographs and training material as well as his navigation logs. He flew operations as a navigator with 101 and 199 Squadrons.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Mark S Thompson and catalogued by Trevor Hardcastle.
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
2015-09-07
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Thompson, KG
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/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Keith Thompson's time on 115 Squadron
Description
An account of the resource
115 Squadron badge.
Three colour postcards of Malta, two of Grand Harbour Valetta, one captioned Maltas stone buildings and one of a horse powered carriage.
A colour postcard of a military cemetery captioned 'Tobruk, Knight Bridge Cemetery near El Adam'.
Four postcards of Gibraltar, one of the Rock with Viscount on airfield captioned 'Rock from airfield, Gibraltar', one of street scene captioned 'Main street Gibraltar' and one of gates in town wall captioned 'South Port Gates, Gibraltar'.
A colour postcard of part of the Rock and a beach captioned 'Gibraltar's water catchment area'.
Page annotated 'No 115 Sqdn, Watton & Cottesmore. May '67-Sept 69. Made my first visit to Berlin & other places in Germany since the war. Went to Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus & El Adem, Libya'.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Five b/w photographs and three colour photographs on an album page
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.
Gibraltar
Libya
Malta
Libya--Tobruk
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PThompsonKG15010147
115 Squadron
final resting place
RAF Cottesmore
RAF Watton
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2052/42816/LSouterKP129001v1.1.pdf
cbe847749ea7ad0bea26e83052ee0656
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
Souter, Kenneth Place
K P Souter
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2021-07-10
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Souter, KP
Description
An account of the resource
30 items. An oral history interview with Kenneth Souter (b. 1919, 129001 Royal Air Force), his log books and photographs. He flew operations as a fighter pilot with 73 Squadron in North Africa and as a test pilot. After the war he flew Lancasters during the filming of The Dam Busters film in 1954.
The collection was catalogued by Barry Hunter.
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
Ken Souter's pilot's flying log book. One
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LSouterKP129001v1
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
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Description
An account of the resource
Pilot's flying log book. One, for Ken Souter. Covering the period from 5 July 1939 to 27 April 1945. Detailing his flying training, operational flying and instructor duties. He was stationed No.43 Elementary and Reserve flying traing School at RAF Woolsington, No.22 Elementary Flying Training School RAF Cambridge, No.9 Elementary Flying Training School RAF Ansty, No,5 Operational Training Unit RAF Aston Down, 43 Squadron RAF Acklington and RAF Ismalia, 73 Squadron RAF Gazala, RAF El Adam, RAF Abu Sueir, RAF Bu Amud and RAF El Gubbi, 102 maintenance Unit RAF Abu Sueir, 108 Maintenance Unit RAF El Firdan, No.1 Delivery Unit RAF Wadi Natrun, test Pilot RAF Port Sudan, RAF Summit and RAF Sidi Henish, No.8 Air Gunnery School RAF Evanton, 867 Squadron RAF Detling, 771 Squadron RNAS Twatt. Aircraft flown in were, Tiger Moth, Hart, Audax, Harvard, Hurricane, Blenheim, Wellington, Lysander, Valencia, Tomahawk, Bombay, Maryland, Vincent, Magister, Lockheed, DC2, Oxford, Kittyhawk, Hardy, Boston, Douglas, Lodestar, JU52, Gladiator, Sunderland, DC3, Clipper, Prefect, Master, Hind, Martinet, Anson, Dominie, DH86, Hind and Corsair. He flew 41 operational sorties with 43 and 73 squadrons, these are described as patrol, scramble, search, and reconnaissance.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Egypt
Great Britain
Libya
Sudan
Egypt--Ismailia (Province)
Egypt--Natrun Valley
England--Cambridgeshire
England--Gloucestershire
England--Kent
England--Northumberland
England--Warwickshire
Libya--Cyrenaica
Libya--Tobruk
Scotland--Orkney
Scotland--Ross and Cromarty
Sudan--Port Sudan
North Africa
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Mike Connock
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1939
1940-12-04
1941-02-04
1941-02-12
1941-02-18
1941-02-22
1941-02-27
1941-03-03
1941-03-05
1941-03-09
1941-03-10
1941-03-15
1941-03-16
1941-03-18
1941-03-24
1941-03-28
1941-04-01
1941-04-02
1941-04-04
1941-04-06
1941-04-07
1941-04-08
1941-04-09
1941-04-11
1941-04-12
1941-04-13
1941-05-03
1941-05-08
1941-05-12
1941-05-13
1941-05-16
1942
1943
1944
1945
43 Squadron
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Anson
Blenheim
Boston
C-47
Dominie
Flying Training School
Harvard
Hurricane
Ju 52
Lysander
Magister
Martinet
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
P-40
pilot
RAF Abu Sueir
RAF Ansty
RAF Aston Down
RAF Evanton
Sunderland
Tiger Moth
training
Wellington
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2243/40718/PWickhamHW19010010.2.jpg
410d822b5d3bb8d22bba9352adde14db
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
Wickham, Harry William
Wickham, HW
Description
An account of the resource
23 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Harry William Wickham (b. 1919, 124631 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, a biography, service records and photographs. He flew operations as a pilot with 102 Squadron.
The collection has been loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Lynne Parry and catalogued by Nigel Huckins.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2019-06-29
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Wickham, HW
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
Menu - 462, 76 and 10 Squadrons
Description
An account of the resource
Menu with bomber aircraft at top and three squadrons named - title 16 days middle east. Several named Mediterranean towns. Signatures on the reverse.
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
Greece
Mediterranean Sea--Suda Bay
Greece--Ērakleion
Greece--Maleme
Egypt
Egypt--Cairo
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
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Printed document with handwritten signatures
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending deciphering
Pending text-based transcription
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
PWickhamHW19010010
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
Wickham, Harry William. Album
10 Squadron
462 Squadron
76 Squadron
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/2363/42436/LGosneyG568331v1.2.pdf
000e64029fef9c4c9be87eb68fc0e97b
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
Gosney, Geoffrey
Description
An account of the resource
20 items. The collection concerns Flight Lieutenant Geoffrey Gosney (b. 1919, 568331, 54247 Royal Air Force) and contains his log books, service documents, and photographs. He flew operations as a flight engineer with 426, 462 and 428 Squadrons.
The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Susan Hassell and catalogued by Lynn Corrigan.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-04-18
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Gosney, G
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
Observer's and air gunner's flying log book for Geoffrey Gosney. One
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Great Britain. Royal Air Force
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-07-12
1942-07-13
1942-07-15
1942-07-16
1942-07-24
1942-07-25
1942-07-28
1942-07-29
1942-08-04
1942-08-05
1942-08-09
1942-08-10
1942-08-13
1942-08-14
1942-08-19
1942-08-20
1942-08-23
1942-08-24
1942-08-29
1942-08-30
1942-09-13
1942-09-14
1942-10-07
1942-10-08
1942-10-12
1942-10-21
1942-10-22
1942-10-29
1942-10-30
1942-11-02
1942-11-03
1942-11-05
1942-11-06
1942-11-07
1942-11-08
1942-11-09
1944-08-09
1944-08-10
1944-08-11
1944-09-26
1944-09-28
1944-09-29
1945-01-06
1945-01-07
1945-02-07
1945-02-08
1945-02-09
1945-02-10
1945-03-21
1945-03-22
1945-03-24
1945-03-25
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
North Africa
Egypt
Egypt--Marsá Maṭrūḥ
Egypt--Halfaya Pass
Egypt--Sallūm
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
Middle East--Palestine
Israel
Israel--Yavneh
France
France--Audinghen
France--Calais
France--Coulonvillers
France--La Pallice
Germany
Germany--Berlin
Germany--Bonn
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Goch
Germany--Hanau
Germany--Mönchengladbach
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Germany--Rheine
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
Germany--Dorsten
Germany--Leverkusen
Germany--Wanne-Eickel
Great Britain
England--Gloucestershire
England--Lincolnshire
England--Wiltshire
England--Yorkshire
Greece
Greece--Maleme
France--Cap Gris Nez
Description
An account of the resource
This log book covers the training, operational and post war flying career of Geoffrey Gosney from 2 July 1942 to 12 July 1951. It includes a cartoon of the 426 Squadron crest. Geoffrey flew 31 operations in two tours of duty, 23 of which were night operations with 10, 227, 426, 428 and 462 Squadrons. Targets in Egypt, Libya, France, Germany and Greece were Calais, Cap Gris Nez, Dorsten, Frankfurt, Goch, Hanau, Leverkusen, Maleme, Marsa Matruh, Mönchengladbach, Münster, Rheine, Sallum, Soda Bay, Tobruk and Wanne-Eickel. Pilots in operations were Squadron Leader Goldston, Sergeant Wyatt, Flight Officer McGregor, Flying Officer Kagna, Wing Commander Burgess, Flight Lieutenant Garratt, Flight Officer Brodie, Pilot Officer Fuller, Wing Commander Black and Flight Lieutenant Davies. During March, April and May Geoffrey’s duty in the Halifax VII is described in his log book as ‘’screening”. In 1946/47 he was involved in the transport of troops and the dropping of paratroopers and the transportation of freight and troops in the Middle East. Back in the UK he took part in a formation fly past over Banbury. In February 1948 his duties are again described as “screening’ in the Halifax but now with ‘Flying Wing’ at Fairford. Geoffrey remained in the Royal Air Force and served in Palestine. He took part in the Berlin Airlift, transporting coal to Berlin. Transferred to RAF Hemswell with 97 Squadron.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Royal Air Force
Royal Air Force. Bomber Command
Royal Air Force. Transport Command
Royal Canadian Air Force
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Log book and record book
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
One booklet
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
LGosneyG568331v10071
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
Conforms To
An established standard to which the described resource conforms.
Pending review
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Lynn Corrigan
10 Squadron
1652 HCU
1664 HCU
227 Squadron
425 Squadron
426 Squadron
428 Squadron
462 Squadron
620 Squadron
97 Squadron
air gunner
Air Gunnery School
aircrew
Battle
bombing
Defiant
forced landing
Halifax
Halifax Mk 1
Halifax Mk 2
Halifax Mk 3
Halifax Mk 5
Halifax Mk 7
Harrow
Heavy Conversion Unit
Lancaster
Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944)
RAF Aqir
RAF Barrow in Furness
RAF Dishforth
RAF Fairford
RAF Hemswell
RAF Lyneham
Stirling
training
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1339/20890/SValentineJRM1251404v10030.2.jpg
d23e49b72c6d9f92996d45ac5531b0d6
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
Valentine, John. Ursula Valentine's newspaper cutting scrapbook
Description
An account of the resource
131 items contained in a scrapbook. Mainly newspaper cuttings of events from May 1942 to 1945.
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
Parachute troops deep in Tunisia, German defeat in central Caucasus and Union Jack hoisted in Tobruk
Description
An account of the resource
Article 1. Headlines: parachute troops deep in Tunisia, clearing the way for first army, Mekili occupied by General Montgomery's forces, axis takes to open desert, Article 2. Headlines: German defeat in central Caucasus, many tanks abandoned, Russians remove threat to Grozny oilfields. Article 3. Photograph of Union Jack being hoisted in Tobruk.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
The Times
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942-11-18
1942-11-21
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Three newspaper cuttings mounted on a scrapbook page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Photograph
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SValentineJRM1251404v10030
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
British Army
Wehrmacht
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Tunisia
Libya--Tobruk
Caucasus
Russia (Federation)
Russia (Federation)--Groznyĭ
North Africa
Libya
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-11
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1400/27091/BWagnerHWWagnerHWv10001.1.jpg
85822213415fbbf7896f5339f05b9994
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
Jones, Hugh Brenton
H B Jones
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
2016-01-11
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Jones, HB
Description
An account of the resource
17 items. The collection concerns Flight Sergeant Hugh Brenton Jones (1925 - 1944, 1866363 Royal Air Force) and contains documents and photographs. He flew operations as an air gunner with 51 Squadron and was killed 18 December 1944. <br /><br />The collection has been donated to the IBCC Digital Archive by Rea Camus and catalogued by Barry Hunter. <br /><br />Additional information on Hugh Brenton Jones is available via the <a href="https://losses.internationalbcc.co.uk/loss/214965/">IBCC Losses Database.</a>
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
Pilot to Navigator - Where are we?
The Personal Account of a Wartime Navigator
Description
An account of the resource
Henry, volunteered for the RAF and learned to fly Tiger Moths at Brough. He then was transferred to South Africa on a troopship. His flying training came to an end after a poor solo flight. He was retrained as a navigator. On completion of his training he returned to the UK. After an inactive posting to Whitley Bay he was sent to West Freugh for further training. Next was an operational training unit at Abingdon, where he crewed up.
Training continued on Whitleys before a transfer to Acaster Malbis for yet more training, followed by the heavy conversion unit at Marston Moor, on Halifaxes.
His first operational posting was 51 Squadron at Snaith. He covers each operation in detail. Interspersed with the details are explanations of electronic systems and tactics used.
During one operation he was shot down and parachuted behind the German lines. Eventually he was taken prisoner, interrogated then transferred to Stalag Luft 7. As the Russians got nearer they were forced to walk west. Later they were transferred by train to Stalag IIIA.
The account then jumps to reunions in the 1980s, then returns to the last few days at the camp as the war ends.
He reached home on 15th May.
This item is available only at the International Bomber Command Centre / University of Lincoln.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Henry Wagner
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
73 page book
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Text. Memoir
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
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
Royal Navy
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Great Britain
England--Henley-on-Thames
England--Reading
England--London
England--Brighton
England--Hull
England--Manchester
England--Blackpool
England--Liverpool
South Africa--Durban
South Africa--East London
Yemen (Republic)--Aden
Egypt--Suez Canal
Egypt--Port Said
Libya--Tobruk
Italy--Sicily
Algeria--Algiers
England--Harrogate
England--Whitley Bay
England--Newquay
England--Falmouth
England--York
Northern Ireland--Belfast
Great Britain Miscellaneous Island Dependencies--Isle of Man
Germany--Jülich
Germany--Essen
England--Beachy Head
Germany--Neuss
Germany--Duisburg
Germany--Hamburg
England--Derby
Germany--Soest
England--Nottingham
Germany--Hildesheim
Belgium--Brussels
Germany--Frankfurt am Main
Germany--Münster in Westfalen
Alps
Germany--Düsseldorf
Germany--Hagen (Arnsberg)
Germany--Düren (Cologne)
Germany--Osnabrück
Germany--Giessen (Hesse)
Libya--Banghāzī
Yemen (Republic)
Italy
Algeria
Libya
Egypt
North Africa
Germany
Belgium
South Africa
Great Britain
Germany--Ruhr (Region)
England--Berkshire
England--Cornwall (County)
England--Derbyshire
England--Northumberland
England--Oxfordshire
England--Sussex
England--Lancashire
England--Nottinghamshire
England--Yorkshire
Germany--Schönebeck (Schönebeck)
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
IBCC Digital Archive
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
BWagnerHWWagnerHWv1
100 Group
4 Group
425 Squadron
51 Squadron
77 Squadron
Advanced Flying Unit
aerial photograph
air gunner
Air Observers School
aircrew
Anson
anti-aircraft fire
B-17
bale out
bomb aimer
C-47
Caterpillar Club
crewing up
Distinguished Flying Cross
Distinguished Service Order
entertainment
evading
flight engineer
Flying Training School
Gee
ground personnel
H2S
Halifax
Halifax Mk 3
Heavy Conversion Unit
Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)
Hurricane
Ju 88
Lancaster
Lancaster Finishing School
Me 109
Me 110
military service conditions
missing in action
Mosquito
navigator
Nissen hut
Oboe
Operational Training Unit
Oxford
Pathfinders
pilot
prisoner of war
RAF Abingdon
RAF Acaster Malbis
RAF Bottesford
RAF Cosford
RAF Full Sutton
RAF Manston
RAF Marston Moor
RAF Melbourne
RAF Snaith
RAF St Eval
RAF Stanton Harcourt
RAF Tholthorpe
RAF West Freugh
RAF Wing
Red Cross
Resistance
shot down
sport
Stalag 3A
Stalag Luft 7
Stirling
Sunderland
target indicator
the long march
Tiger Moth
training
V-1
V-weapon
Wellington
Whitley
Window
wireless operator / air gunner
Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
-
https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/files/original/1339/20887/SValentineJRM1251404v10027.1.jpg
ca25d3c9dbc4e94964e7c317e9dd0b19
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
Valentine, John. Ursula Valentine's newspaper cutting scrapbook
Description
An account of the resource
131 items contained in a scrapbook. Mainly newspaper cuttings of events from May 1942 to 1945.
Transcribed document
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading.
Transcription
Text transcribed from audio recording or document
THE TIMES SATURDAY NOVEMBER 14 1942
RECAPTURE OF TOBRUCK
SOLLUM AND BARDIA ALSO OCCUPIED BY EIGHTH ARMY
TROOP-CARRIERS FILLED WITH GERMANS SHOT DOWN IN SEA
Tobruk is again in the hands of the Eighth Army, and Sollum and Bardia have also fallen.
Six large Axis troop-carriers, filled with Germans, have been shot down into the Mediterranean while flying north from Tunisia.
PACE OF PURSUIT
130 MILES IN TWO DAYS
From Our Special Correspondent
21st Panzer division, 90th Light division, 164th Light division. Tenth Italian Corps. – Brescia division, Pavia division, Folgore division. Twentieth Italian Corps. –Ariete armoured division. Littorio armoured division, Trieste division, Twenty-first Italian Corps. – Trento division, Bologna division.
“Prisoners captured number 30,000, including nine generals. The amount of tanks, artillery, anti-tank guns, transport, aircraft &c., destroyed or captured.
[map]
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
Recapture of Tobruk
Description
An account of the resource
Article. Headlines: recapture of Tobruk, Sollum and Bardia also occupied by eighth army, troop-carriers filled with Germans shot down in sea mentions six large aircraft shot down flying north from Tunisa, pace of pursuit 130 miles in two days. Sketch map showing landings area in Morocco and Algeria.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
The Times
IBCC Digital Archive
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1942-11-14
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Two newspaper cuttings mounted on a scrapbook page
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Map
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SValentineJRM1251404v10027
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Wehrmacht
Wehrmacht. Luftwaffe
British Army
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
Libya
Libya--Tobruk
Tunisia
North Africa
Libya--Bardiyah
Temporal Coverage
Temporal characteristics of the resource.
1942-11
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
David Bloomfield
Claire Monk
Requires
A related resource that is required by the described resource to support its function, delivery, or coherence.
Workflow A completed